Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”. Bastiat Frédéric
classe in four different ways in the sophisms. First, he uses it as a neutral term to mean any group which has some aspect in common, such as les classes riches (the rich classes), la classe moyenne (the middle class), or la classe des propriétaires (the landowning class). His second way of using the word is in the socialist sense of class warfare. Bastiat was fighting two intellectual battles in the late 1840s, the first against the established elites who controlled the Chamber and who benefited from agricultural and manufacturing protection and subsidies, and the second against the rising socialist movement. As the socialist movement became more influential he began to confront its supporters more directly in debate and used the same expressions they did, such as l’aristocratie (the aristocracy), la bourgeoisie (the bourgeoisie), and la classe des travailleurs or la classe ouvrière (the working class) or les prolétaires (the proletarian class). “The people” (le peuple) was also becoming a more common phrase in socialist critiques of the French political system, and Bastiat uses this on occasion as well. He uses the socialists’ language of class and turns it around in order to show the errors in their thinking about the nature of property rights and the free market and how they have mistaken the true nature of exploitation and class in French society.
Bastiat’s third use of the word “class” is a political one, as in the expressions la classe électorale (the electoral class) and la classe des protégés (the protected class). By la classe électorale, Bastiat means the very restricted group of people (who had an “electoral monopoly,” as he called it) who were entitled to vote during the July Monarchy. On the eve of the 1848 Revolution, which reintroduced universal male suffrage, the electoral class numbered about 240,000 taxpayers.13 By la classe des protégés Bastiat meant the class of favored people given special privileges by state legislation such as tariff protection, industrial subsidies, or monopolies of a particular market. Another example of the use of “class” in a political sense is his discussion of the struggle between the aristocratic class and democracy in Britain in “Anglomania, Anglophobia”
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(ES3 14), where he provides a lengthy analysis of the political power held by the English aristocracy.
The fourth use of the word is part of Bastiat’s own theory of class, which had its origins in the theory of “industrialism” developed by two thinkers who influenced Bastiat considerably in his intellectual development: Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. In their theory the terms l’industrie (productive economic activity), les industrieux, les classes d’industrieux, and l’industriel (those engaged in productive economic activity) had very specific meanings which are not the same as their modern meanings. It would be wrong therefore to translate them always in the more narrow modern meaning of “heavy industry” or “manufacturing” or “the result of some industrial process.” Bastiat sometimes does use these words in the modern sense, but he also uses them in the broader sense of Dunoyer’s theory of industrialism, and we have indicated when Bastiat does this in the footnotes.
According to the theory of industrialism, the class of industriels played a very important role in the economy because there were only two means of acquiring wealth: by productive activity and voluntary exchanges in the free market (i.e., l’industrie, which included agriculture, trade, and factory production, as well as services) or by coercive means, what Bastiat called la spoliation (plunder), which included conquest, slavery, theft, taxation, subsidies, protection, and transfer payments. Anybody who acquired wealth through voluntary exchange and productive activities belonged to a class of people collectively called les industrieux, in contrast to those individuals or groups who acquired their wealth by force, coercion, conquest, slavery, or government privileges, or what Bastiat called la classe spoliatrice or les spoliateurs (the plundering class or the plunderers). The latter group was seen as “parasites” who lived at the expense of les industrieux (the productive class) or les classes spoliées (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.
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