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    The Law
    The Law
    The Law
    Ebook60 pages1 hour

    The Law

    By Frédéric Bastiat

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    The Law, original French title La Loi, is a 1849 book by Frédéric Bastiat. It was published one year after the third French Revolution of 1848 and one year before his death of tuberculosis at age 49. The essay was influenced by John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and in turn influenced Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. It is the work for which Bastiat is most famous along with The candlemaker's petition and the Parable of the broken window.
    In The Law, Bastiat states that "each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property". The State is a "substitution of a common force for individual forces" to defend this right. The law becomes perverted when it punishes one's right to self-defense in favor of another's acquired right to plunder.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBooklassic
    Release dateJun 17, 2015
    ISBN9789635235414
    Author

    Frédéric Bastiat

    Claude Fréderic Bastiat (1801-1850) fue un escritor, periodista económico y legislador francés. Formó parte de la escuela liberal de economistas francesa, promotora del laissez faire y opuesta a las ideas colectivistas, intervencionistas y proteccionistas.  Fue diputado en la Asamblea Nacional de Francia, y su libro Sofismas económicos se convirtió en una de las obras de divulgación económica más populares de su época. Su temprana muerte y su breve carrera profesional no impidieron que Bastiat dejara un importante legado intelectual, que contribuyó a dar forma al pensamiento libertario desarrollado en el siglo XX, influyendo en autores como Ayn Rand. Sus ideas librecambistas y pacifistas fueron precursoras de la Escuela Austriaca de Economía.

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    • 5/5
      It is one of the essentials for any person to read in order to understand politics
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      An absolute must, especially in today's political climate where ideas such as 'state capitalism' and 'government intervention' dominate public discourse

    Book preview

    The Law - Frédéric Bastiat

    978-963-523-541-4

    The essay was published in French in 1850. This piece was published in English as part of Essays on Political Economy (G.P. Putnams & Sons, 1874) with authoritative translation by British economist Patrick James Stirling, with changes by David Wells. Spellings are American English.

    The law perverted! The law — and, in its wake, all the collective forces of the nation — the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law become the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish! Truly, this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow citizens.

    We hold from God the gift which, as far as we are concerned, contains all others, Life — physical, intellectual, and moral life.

    But life cannot support itself. He who has bestowed it, has entrusted us with the care of supporting it, of developing it, and of perfecting it. To that end, He has provided us with a collection of wonderful faculties; He has plunged us into the midst of a variety of elements. It is by the application of our faculties to these elements, that the phenomena of assimilation and of appropriation, by which life pursues the circle which has been assigned to it, are realized.

    Existence, faculties, assimilation — in other words, personality, liberty, property — this is man.

    It is of these three things that it may be said, apart from all demagogue subtlety, that they are anterior and superior to all human legislation.

    It is not because men have made laws, that personality, liberty, and property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property exist beforehand, that men make laws. What, then, is law? As I have said elsewhere, it is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.

    Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life; elements, each of which is rendered complete by the others, and cannot be understood without them. For what are our faculties, but the extension of our personality? and what is property, but an extension of our faculties?

    If every man has the right of defending, even by force, his person, his liberty, and his property, a number of men have the right to combine together, to extend, to organize a common force, to provide regularly for this defense.

    Collective right, then, has its principle, its reason for existing, its lawfulness, in individual right; and the common force cannot rationally have any other end, or any other mission, than that of the isolated forces for which it is substituted. Thus, as the force of an individual cannot lawfully touch the person, the liberty, or the property of another individual — for the same reason, the common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or the property of individuals or of classes.

    For this perversion of force would be, in one case as in the other, in contradiction to our premises. For who will dare to say that force has been given to us, not to defend our rights, but to annihilate the equal rights of our brethren? And if this be not true of every individual force, acting independently, how can it be true of the collective force, which is only the organized union of isolated forces?

    Nothing, therefore, can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense; it is the substitution of collective for individual forces, for the purpose of acting in the sphere in which they have a right to act, of doing what they have a right to do, to secure persons, liberties, and properties, and to maintain each in its right, so as to cause justice to reign over all.

    And if a people established upon this basis were to exist, it seems to me that order would prevail among them in their acts as well as in their ideas. It seems to me that such a people would have the most simple, the most economical, the least oppressive, the least to be felt, the least responsible, the most just, and, consequently, the most solid Government which could be imagined, whatever its political form might be.

    For, under such an administration, every one would feel that he possessed all the fullness, as well as all the responsibility of his existence. So long as personal safety was ensured, so long as labor was free, and the fruits of labor secured against all unjust attacks, no one would have any difficulties to contend with in the State. When prosperous, we should not, it is true, have to thank the State for our success;

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