(the plundered classes).
To give an idea of the importance Bastiat placed on his theory of plunder, the following frequencies of use should provide a clue: there are 55 instances of the term la spoliation (plunder), 12 of parasite, 10 of le spoliateur (the plunderer), 5 of spoliée (plundered), and 1 of spoliatrice (plunderous).
Bastiat’s Use of the Socialist Terms “Organization” and “Association”
As with the word classe, there are two other words which were widely used by socialists in the 1840s (such as Louis Blanc and Charles Fourier) and which became closely associated with their criticism of the free market and
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their demands for government regulation and even ownership of the means of production, namely l’organisation (organization of labor) and l’association (cooperative living and working arrangements). Bastiat frequently uses these words in the socialist sense, often with a capital O or A, in order to mock or criticize them, pointing out that supporters of the free market are also firm believers in “organization” and “association,” but only if they result from voluntary actions by individuals and are not the result of government coercion and legislation. A good example of this is Bastiat’s disparaging term la grande organization,14 by which he means the folly of believing that one individual or government could centrally plan or organize an entire economy, as many socialists of his day believed. We have indicated in the footnotes when Bastiat is using these words in this socialist sense.
The Difference between “Droit à” and “Droit de”
A third important socialist idea which emerged during the 1840s with which Bastiat had to contend was the idea of le droit au travail (the right to a job).15 In English one could well translate it as “the right to work” or “the right to a job,” which would miss the subtle distinction between the two. This idea of le droit au travail (the right to a job) came to the fore in the early days of the 1848 Revolution when the provisional government established a government unemployment relief program known as the National Workshops. It was based on the ideas of socialists like Louis Blanc and was an attempt by the government to guarantee every able-bodied French male a job paid for by the taxpayers. Bastiat warned about its economic unviability, and it eventually collapsed in June 1848, sparking rioting in Paris. In French, there is a distinction between le droit à quelque chose (the right to [have] something) and le droit de quelque chose (the right to [do] something). The Economists, including Bastiat, believed in le droit du travail (the right to engage in work) and not the socialist formulation. We indicate in the footnotes when this distinction is an issue.
Interestingly, Bastiat extends this distinction to the area of profits with his formulation of le droit au profit (the right to a [guaranteed] profit) and le droit de profiter (the right to seek profits). The protectionists wanted the former, meaning that the government should guarantee them a profitable
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return on their investments, whereas the Economists wanted the latter, that businesses should take their chances on the free market and make profits only if they adequately satisfied consumer demand.
Bastiat’s Translation of Adam Smith
In “Theft by Subsidy” (ES2 9), Bastiat translates a passage from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations on the tendency of businessmen to engage in conspiracies against the public whenever they get together.16 We have taken the unusual step of retranslating Bastiat’s translation back into English in order to show how much it differed from the original (which can be found in a footnote). Bastiat was often rather cavalier in his quoting from other texts, doing it from memory in many cases and sometimes getting it wrong or conflating different passages into one (as seems to have happened with the Smith quotation). We have checked as many of Bastiat’s quotations against the original texts as we could and indicate in the footnotes where he strays. Sometimes he is in error, other times he slightly changes the text to better make his point, for example, by changing the name of the king in order to bring the passage up to date.
French Names, Weights, Measures, and Currency; Use of English Words
We have retained the use of French names of people (like Jacques and Jean) instead of translating them into their English equivalents (Jack and John) because we wanted to keep a French flavor to the translation and believed that this would be readily understood by readers. We have also retained the use of French terms for land area (arpent), weight (kilogram), and currency (sou), as it seemed quite artificial to convert them into English or American terms. We have explained what they mean in the footnotes and several entries in the glossary.
Finally, now and again Bastiat uses English words in his essays, such as “cheapness,” “go on,” “meeting,” “free-trader,” “drawback,” and “budget.” We have indicated where this occurs in the footnotes.
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In addition to the longer discussion of economic terms in the Note on the Translation, we have added here a list of key terms most frequently encountered in the texts. We have provided a brief explanation of the different contexts in which Bastiat used these terms and how we translated them.
ASSOCIATION, ORGANIZATION. When used with lowercase, Bastiat means any voluntary association which free individuals might create; when used with uppercase (as in Association), he is using the word in its socialist meaning of cooperative living and working arrangements.
CLASSE. The word can be used in a descriptive fashion, as in la classe moyenne (the middle class), but Bastiat usually uses it to describe groups which had some kind of political privilege, such as la classe électorale (the electoral class, i.e., the very small group of taxpayers who were legally allowed to vote and stand for election), or la classe spoliatrice (the plundering class).
DUPE, DUPERIE, RUSE. Bastiat believed that individuals were deprived of their property directly by means of la force (coercion or force) or indirectly by means of la ruse (fraud or trickery) or la duperie (deception). The beneficiaries of this force and fraud used les sophismes (misleading and deceptive arguments) to deceive ordinary people, whom he referred to as les dupes (dupes).
ÉCONOMISTE. The Economists were the group of free-market and free-trade political economists, as in Le Journal des économistes, for which Bastiat wrote.
INDUSTRIE, INDUSTRIEUX. Sometimes used in the modern sense of manufacturing industry but also used to mean any productive activity which produced goods and services for exchange in the free market. Individuals who engaged in these productive activities were called les industrieux.
LAISSEZ-FAIRE. The policy prescription of laissez-faire favored by free-market economists like Bastiat requires no translation. However, Bastiat
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uses it in a number of ways which require careful translation, such as laissez-les faire (let them do these things), laissez-le entrer (let it freely enter), and laissez-passer (leave them free to move about).
LIBERTÉ, LIBÉRAL. Liberté is usually translated as “liberty” except in cases such as la liberté des échanges (free trade), where the word “free” is more commonly
