Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”. Bastiat Frédéric
sophisms are used as the basis for the country’s administration.
A famous modern philosopher8 has added to the categories of Aristotle the sophism that consists in begging the question within a single word. He quotes several examples. He might have added the word tributary to his list. In effect, it is a question of knowing whether purchases made abroad are useful or harmful. They are harmful, you say. Why so? Because they make us tributaries of foreigners. This is certainly a word that begs the question under discussion.
How has this misleading trope slipped into the monopolists’ rhetoric?
Écus leave the country to satisfy the rapacity of a victorious enemy. Other écus also leave the country to pay for goods. The analogy between the two cases is established, taking account only of the circumstance that causes their resemblance and disregarding the one by which they differ.
Nevertheless this circumstance, that is to say, the nonreimbursement in the first case and the freely agreed reimbursement in the second, establishes between them a difference so great that it is actually not possible to classify them in the same category. To hand over 100 francs as a result of force to someone who has his hands around your neck or voluntarily to someone who is giving you the object of your desires are truly things that cannot be compared. It would be as true to say that throwing bread into the river is the same as eating it since the bread is in both cases destroyed. The fallacy of this reasoning, like that which is encompassed in the word tribute, would consist in establishing full similarity between two cases through their points of resemblance and disregarding what makes them differ.
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PUBLISHING HISTORY:
Original title: “Conclusion.”
Place and date of first publication: Dated Mugron, 2 November 1845. First published in book form.
First French edition as book or pamphlet: Economic Sophisms (First Series) (1846).
Location in Paillottet’s edition of OC: Vol. 4. Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets I, pp. 119–26.
Previous translations: 1st English ed., 1846; 1st American ed., 1848; FEE ed., 1964.
All the sophisms that I have combated up to now relate to a single matter, the protectionist system; even so, out of pity for the reader, I have left out some of the best:1 acquired rights, inconveniences, depletion of the currency, etc., etc.
But social economy is not limited to this narrow circle. Fourierist doctrine, Saint-Simonian doctrine, communism, mysticism, sentimentalism, bogus philanthropy, affected aspirations to illusionary equality and fraternity, questions relating to luxury, to wages, to machines, to the alleged tyranny of capital, to colonies, markets, conquests, population, association, emigration, taxes and loans: these have cluttered the field of science with a host of parasitic arguments, sophisms that call for the hoe and harrow of a diligent economist.
It is not that I do not acknowledge the flaw in this plan or rather the lack of a plan. To attack one by one so many incoherent sophisms that sometimes clash and most often are included in one another, is to condemn oneself to a disorganized and capricious struggle and to expose oneself to perpetual repetition.
How I would prefer to say quite simply what things are, without having to pay attention to a thousand aspects through which ignorance sees them! To present the laws according to which societies prosper or decline is virtually to destroy all sophisms at a stroke. When Laplace2 described what we are able
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to know of the movements of the heavenly bodies up to now, he dissipated without even mentioning them by name, all the astrological musings of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Hindus with greater surety than he could have done if he had refuted them directly in countless volumes. Truth is unitary; the book that provides an exposition of it is an imposing and durable edifice.
It defies greedy tyrants
bolder than the Pyramids
and more durable than brass.3
Error is multifarious and ephemeral by nature; the work that combats it does not carry within itself any principle signifying grandeur and longevity.
But if I have lacked the force and perhaps the opportunity to proceed in the same way as people such as Laplace and Say,4 I cannot help believing that the form I have adopted also has its modest uses.5 Above all, it seems to me to be well proportioned to the needs of the century and the fleeting moments it is able to devote to study.
A treatise doubtless has clear superiority but only on one condition, that it is to be read, reflected upon, and deepened. It addresses an elite audience only. Its mission is initially to set and then expand the circle of knowledge acquired.
The refutation of commonly held prejudices cannot have this elevated range. It aspires only to clear the way for the march of truth, to prepare men’s
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minds, redirect the public moral sense, and destroy dangerous weapons in impure hands.
It is above all in social economy that this constant struggle and these constantly reborn battles with popular error have genuine practical use.
The sciences can be divided into two categories.
Strictly speaking, the first can be known only by scholars. These are the ones whose application occupies some specialists. Ordinary people receive the fruit of these in spite of their ignorance; although they do not know about mechanics and astronomy, they still enjoy the use of a watch, they are still transported by locomotives or steamboats given their faith in engineers or pilots. We walk in accordance with the laws of equilibrium without knowing them, just as M. Jourdain6 spoke prose without knowing it.
But there are also sciences that exercise on the public an influence only in proportion to the enlightenment of the public itself, which draw their entire effectiveness not from the accumulated knowledge in a few exceptional heads but from the knowledge disseminated among the general public. They include morals, hygiene, social economy, and, in those countries in which men are their own masters, politics. It is of these sciences that Bentham might have said in particular: “What broadcasts them is more valuable than what advances them.”7 What does it matter that a great man, a God even, has promulgated the moral law, as long as men, imbued with false notions, take virtues for vices and vices for virtues? What does it matter if Smith, Say,8 and, according to M. de Saint-Chamans, the economists of all schools proclaim, with reference to commercial transactions, that freedom is superior to coercion, if those who make the laws and for whom laws are made are convinced of the contrary?
These sciences, which have been appropriately named social, also have the particular characteristic that for the very reason that they are in common use, nobody admits to knowing nothing about them. Do we need to solve a
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question of chemistry or geometry? We do not pretend to be steeped in the science; we are not ashamed to call upon M. Thénard; we have no problem in opening Legendre or Bezout.9 However, in social sciences, we acknowledge scarcely any authorities. As each of us every day acts in accordance with good or bad morals, hygiene, economy, or reasonable or absurd politics, each of us feels able to find fault with, discuss, decide, and lay down the law on these matters. Are you ill? There is no old woman who will not tell you from the outset what the cause and remedy of your ailment is: “It is because your fluids are out of sorts,” she states; “you must be purged.”10 But what are these fluids? And are there such things? This is something she does not trouble herself about. I involuntarily think of this dear old woman when I hear all the social ills being explained by these banal statements: It is the overabundance of products; it is the tyranny of capital; it is too many producers and other idiocies of which it cannot even be said verba et voces, praetereaque nihil,11 for they are just so many disastrous