or as “parasites” who lived at the expense of les industrieux.
Bastiat uses the French term la spoliation (plunder) many times in his writings. Following from his view of “industry” as defined above, Bastiat believed that there is a distinction between two ways in which wealth can be acquired,
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either through peaceful and voluntary exchange (i.e., the free market) or by theft, conquest, and coercion (i.e., using the power of the state to tax, repossess, or grant special privileges). The latter he described as “plunder.”
In Bastiat’s time, the word “liberal” had the same meaning in France and in the English-speaking worlds of England and America. In the United States, however, the meaning of the word has shifted progressively toward the left of the political spectrum. A precise translation of the French word would be either “classical liberal” or “libertarian,” depending upon the context, and indeed Bastiat is considered to be a classical liberal by present-day conservatives and a libertarian by present-day libertarians. To avoid the resulting awkwardness, we have decided to keep the word “liberal,” with its nineteenth-century meaning, in the translations as well as the notes and the glossaries.
TRANSLATION MATTERS SPECIFIC TO THIS VOLUME
More specific to this volume are the words and phrases which will be discussed below. In many cases we have found it very helpful to consult the earlier translation of the first two series of Economic Sophisms made by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 1964.1 Although we sometimes disagreed with their interpretation, we have found their notes and comments very informative and useful. We acknowledge in the footnotes when we have made use of their earlier work.
Sophism
The very title economic “sophisms” poses a problem. Sophisme can be translated directly as “sophism,” preferred by the FEE translator in 1964, or as “fallacy,” which is the term preferred by nineteenth-century translators. We have sided with the FEE translator here in most instances. Bastiat uses the word in a couple of different senses. The term can refer to an obvious error in economic theory; that is, a “fallacy.” It can also refer to an argument that has an element of truth in which this partial truth is used speciously to make a case for one particular economic interest in a debate; that is, a piece of “sophistry.” In this latter sense, which makes up the bulk of this book, the word “sophism” is the preferred translation. The word “sophism” is also
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used to refer to Bastiat’s essays in which he attacks these false or sophistical economic ideas, as in “In the sophism about the broken window Bastiat argues.… ” We hope the meaning is clear from the context.
Humor
Bastiat enjoyed creating neologisms in order to poke fun at his adversaries. These words were sometimes based on Latin words and sometimes on French words. We have tried to find English equivalents which capture the flavor of Bastiat’s originals and his intent. These are explained in the footnotes. Some examples are the two towns “Stulta” and “Puera” (“Stupidville” and “Childishtown”); the tax collector “M. Lasouche” (Mr. Blockhead); “M. Prohibant” (Mr. Prohibitor or Mr. Prohibitionist); and the two lobby groups the “Sinistrists” (the Left Handers) and the “Dexterists” (the Right Handers).
Another weapon in Bastiat’s lexical armory was parody. He liked to take government institutions or documents, or well-known works of literature, and write a parody of their structure and content. A good example of this is his creation of a “Lower Council of Labor” (for ordinary shopkeepers and workers) to make fun of the protectionist and establishment “Superior Council of Commerce.” Another is his mimicking of government “circulars” (or memoranda) issued in the early months of the Second Republic. As a deputy and vice president of the Finance Committee of the Chamber he would have seen many of these, and he is thus able to mimic their style wonderfully. But the supreme example of his skill as a writer is his parody of Molière’s parody of seventeenth-century doctors. He takes Molière’s acerbic commentary on the primitive medical practices of his day and turns it into a very sharp critique of the behavior of customs officers of his own day. These pose some difficulty for a modern translator; indeed, much has to be explained in the footnotes in order for these parodies to make sense, as he wrote his parody in “dog Latin” for which we have used the excellent translation made by FEE.2
Of all the challenges facing a translator, one of the hardest is explaining puns, which are usually unique to a given language. Bastiat liked to pun, as the footnotes will make clear. A good example is from the sophism “The Right Hand and the Left Hand” (ES2 16) in which the king is asked to expand the amount of work in the country (and thus increase “prosperity”) by forbidding people to use their right hands. Bastiat has a field day creating a
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new lobby group, the “Dexterists,” who campaign for the freedom to work with one’s right hand, and the “Sinistrists,” who lobby for the use of the left hand only. In Bastiat’s mind, all this is so much “gaucherie.” Another good example is the case of the customs barrier across the Bidassoa River, on the border with Spain, which legally permits trade (which is taxed) “over the river,” but which drives the black market in untaxed goods “under the river” (or “underground” as it were).3 He also puns on the names of the streets on which various lobby groups were located. For example, the main protectionist lobby group, the Association for the Defense of National Employment, had its headquarters on the rue de Hautville (Highville Street) and thus is an open target for puns on whether or not they are in favor of high prices or low prices.
Some of Bastiat’s funniest moments come with his frequent wordplay, which is especially hard for a translator to convey. We have attempted to do this without intruding too much on the reader’s patience. England was seen as both a real military enemy because of its role in the war against the French Republic and then Napoléon’s Empire, and as an economic enemy because of its advocacy of free trade. England was known as “Perfidious Albion” (Deceitful England), and so to show the absurdity of this idea Bastiat invents the notion of “Perfidious Normandy,”4 which threatens Paris because it can produce butter more cheaply.
French word order is also used to make a political point. In French an adjective can precede a noun or follow it without too much difference in meaning. In English this makes no sense. Bastiat has a protagonist argue with an opponent of free trade (libre-échange) who despises the very idea because it is English, but quite likes the idea of being free to buy and sell things because this is an example of échange libre (trade which is free).5
Plain Speaking
Bastiat was torn between using a more lighthearted style which used humor, puns, wordplay, and satire to make his important economic and political points, or using a more serious and sober style. He made a name for himself as a witty and clever economic journalist when he wrote for the free trade journal Le Libre-échange, which he edited between 1846 and early 1848, in
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which he pilloried his opponents.6 However, as the political and economic situation got worse in France, he seemed unable to make up his mind which was the best strategy and flip-flopped on the matter. A good example of this self-doubt appears in “Theft by Subsidy” (ES2 9), in which he called for an “explosion of plain speaking” and the avoidance of circumlocutions and euphemisms when describing government policies and their impact on ordinary taxpayers and consumers. We have tried to capture his outrage, anger, and sense of injustice at protectionism and government interventionism
