ABSTRACT
Summary Like many liberals, and for readily understandable reasons, Bastiat often looked to England as the embodiment of a kind of model. In methodological terms, however, what they saw there was a basis for comparison. Why was England so much less centralized politically than France? Why did the idea of free trade fare better there? In this chapter we discuss the responses that Bastiat offered to these questions. On the theoretical front we shall also examine the main features of his critique of Adam Smith’s theory of value and Malthus’s theory of population. In doing so we shall see that there were some importance differences between the English and French brands of liberalism.
