works published to date, in any country or in any language. The main source for this translation is the Œuvres complètes de Frédéric Bastiat, published by Guillaumin in the 1850s and 1860s.1
Although the Guillaumin edition was generally chronological, the volumes in this series have been arranged thematically:
The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics
“The Law,” “The State,” and Other Political Writings, 1843–1850
Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”
Miscellaneous Works on Economics: From “Jacques Bonhomme” to Le Journal des Économistes
Economic Harmonies
The Struggle against Protectionism: The English and French Free-Trade Movements
There are three kinds of notes in this edition: footnotes by the editor of the Guillaumin edition (Prosper Paillottet), which are preceded by “(Paillottet’s note)”; footnotes by Bastiat, which are preceded by “(Bastiat’s note)”; and new editorial footnotes to this edition, which stand alone (unless they are commenting on Paillottet’s notes, in which case they are in square brackets following Paillottet’s note). Each sophism is preceded by a detailed publishing history which consists of (1) the original title, (2) the place and date of first publication, (3) the date of the first French edition as a book or a pamphlet, (4) the location in Paillottet’s edition of the Œuvres complètes (1st ed. 1854–55), and (5) the dates of the following English translations: the first
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English (England) translation, the first American translation, and the FEE translation.
In the text, Bastiat (and Paillottet in the notes) makes many passing references to his works, for which we have provided an internal cross-reference if the work is in this volume. For those works not in this volume, we have provided the location of the orignal French version in the Œuvres complètes (indicated in a footnote by “OC,” followed by the Guillaumin volume number, beginning page number, and French title of the work).
In addition, we have made available two online sources2 for the reader to consult. The first source is a table of contents of the seven-volume Œuvres complètes with links to PDF facsimiles of each volume. The second source is our “Comparative Table of Contents of the Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat,” which is a table of contents of the complete Liberty Fund series. Here the reader can find the location of the English translation of the work in its future Liberty Fund volume. These contents will be filled in and updated as the volumes come out and will eventually be the most complete comparative listing of Bastiat’s works.
In order to avoid multiple footnotes and cross-references, we have provided a glossary of persons, a glossary of places, a glossary of newspapers and journals, and a glossary of subjects and terms to identify those persons, places, historical events, and terms mentioned in the text. The glossaries will also provide historical context and background for the reader as well as a greater understanding of Bastiat’s work. If a name as it appears in the text is ambiguous or is in the glossary under a different name, a brief footnote has been added to identify the name as it is listed in the glossary.
Finally, original italics as they appear in the Guillaumin edition have been retained.
Jacques de Guenin Saint-Loubouer, France
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Below we discuss some of the problems faced by translating a French work on political economy from the mid-nineteenth century into English. We begin with some general observations which are applicable to all the volumes in the Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. These are followed by some remarks which are specific to the matters covered in this particular volume.
TRANSLATION MATTERS OF A GENERAL NATURE IN THE COLLECTED WORKS
Throughout the translation of this series, we have made a deliberate decision not to translate Bastiat’s French into modern, colloquial American English. Wherever possible we have tried to retain a flavor of the more florid, Latinate forms of expression which were common among the literate class in mid-nineteenth-century France. Bastiat liked long, flowing sentences, where idea followed upon idea in an apparently endless succession of dependent clauses. We have broken up many but not all of these thickets of expression for the sake of clarity. In those that remain, you, dear reader, will have to navigate.
Concerning the problematic issue of how to translate the French term la liberté—whether to use the more archaic-sounding English word “liberty” or the more modern word “freedom”—we have let the context have the final say. Bastiat was much involved with establishing a free-trade movement in France and to that end founded the Free Trade Association (L’Association pour la liberté des échanges) and its journal Le Libre-échange (Free Trade). In this context the word choice is clear: we must use the word “freedom,” because this is intimately linked to the idea of “free trade.” The English phrase “liberty of trade” would sound awkward. Another word is pouvoir, which we have variously translated as “power,” “government,” or “authority,” again depending on the context.
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A third example consists of the words économie politique and économiste. Throughout the eighteenth and for most of the nineteenth century, in both French and English, the term “political economy” was used to describe what we now call “economics.” Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as economics became more mathematical, the adjective “political” was dropped and not replaced. We have preferred to keep the term “political economy” both because it was still current when Bastiat was writing and because it better describes the state of the discipline which proudly mixed an interest in moral philosophy, history, and political theory with the main dish, which was economic analysis. In Bastiat’s day it was assumed that any économiste was a free-market economist, and so the noun needed no adjectival qualifier. Today one can be a free-market economist, a Marxist economist, a Keynesian economist, a mathematical economist, or an Austrian economist, to name a few. The qualifier before the noun is therefore quite important. This was not the case in Bastiat’s time.
A particularly difficult word to translate is l’industrie, as is its related term industriel. In some respects it is a “false friend,” as one is tempted to translate it as “industry” or “industrious” or “industrial,” but this would be wrong because these terms have the more narrow modern meaning of “heavy industry” or “manufacturing” or “the result of some industrial process.” The meaning in Bastiat’s time was both more general and more specific to a particular social and economic theory current in his day. The word “industry” had a specific meaning which was tied to a social and economic theory developed by Jean-Baptiste Say and his followers Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer in the 1810s and 1820s, as well as by other theorists such as the historian Augustin Thierry. According to these theorists, there were only two means of acquiring wealth, by productive activity and voluntary exchanges in the free market (i.e., industrie—which included agriculture, trade, factory production, services, and so on) or by coercive means (conquest, theft, taxation, subsidies, protection, transfer payments, or slavery). Anybody who acquired wealth through voluntary exchange and productive activities belonged to a class of people collectively called les industrieux,
