Introduction

Economist, journalist and politician, Frédéric Bastiat was one of the towering intellectual figures of nineteenth-century France. More than anyone of his time, he personified the struggle of liberalism and science against socialism and utopia. For more than half a decade, between 1844 and 1850, his campaign for the idea of liberty and his commitment to the discipline of political economy made him one of the most vigorous champions of economic liberalism in France. Determined, opinionated and sometimes isolated, he was unrelenting in his attacks on the leading doctrinaire socialists of his time, whom he wryly described as those who sought to “mould the human clay”. He was stern in his indictment of intellectuals of the day: Louis Blanc, Victor Considérant,Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Charles Fourier, Pierre Leroux,Étienne Cabet, to name just a few, were tarred by his brush as enemies of freedom and adversaries of political economy. Opposed to the systems instituted by these authors, who were in fact a fairly disparate group, Bastiat defended a method that was essentially comparativist in nature. With this method, which was also that of Adam Smith, JeanBaptiste Say and Charles Dunoyer, one could explain, for example, why free trade encountered so much hostility in France while it was favourably received in England. It could also be used to identify the reasons, schemes and motivations that steer individuals in their voting behaviour. Finally, it could reveal the intellectual mechanisms by which sophisms were distilled into received ideas. Bastiat did not confine himself, then, to studying the phenomena normally reserved to economists, such as production and the circulation, distribution and consumption of wealth: like the greatest thinkers, he considered political economy to be of much broader scope, to the point where, in reading his work, it can be difficult to discern its boundaries. Far from a failing, this breadth of vision constitutes a remarkable quality that testifies to the deliberately interdisciplinary nature of his approach. It becomes immediately apparent that Bastiat was not an

orthodox economist: the weight he accorded to ideas and beliefs made him something of an outsider within his own scientific community. Bastiat dreamed of liberty, a society founded on individual responsibility and autonomy. The statism that prevailed after 1848 was in his eyes a denial of liberty, and with a few loyal allies he threw himself into the fight for an authentically liberal regime. This inevitably brought him into conflict with the intellectual elites and decision-makers of the day. It is true that he was sometimes carried away by his lyricism, his aspiration, and his deeply held convictions. In the minds of some economists this zeal casts a shadow over his scientific contribution. Legitimate though that may be, such criticism overlooks the essence of Bastiat’s work, which was in general based on sound scientific argumentation. Bastiat was fully convinced, in fact, that political economy could yield a body of scientific knowledge comparable to that of the natural sciences. A constant refrain of his work was that social science must be a matter of observation and not of experimentation. In his own way, Bastiat was certainly a positivist, but his approach was very different from that of Auguste Comte and his disciples. Significantly, he refused to believe – and this is important – that the social sciences and the natural sciences should embrace common methodological principles. He maintained, rather, that the explanation of social phenomena lay essentially in individual psychology. Far from being a simple abstraction, much less a “passive molecule”, the individual was first and foremost a concrete object for Bastiat, a “thinking” and “rational” being which the social sciences must take as their basis. This point is important, for it reveals in and of itself a method and a research programme. Yet Bastiat has been given scant recognition as a man of science; he has more often been portrayed as a “man of good sense”,1 a polemicist or a seasoned pamphleteer. Numerous French economic historians have rated his contribution quite highly, while complaining about major methodological gaps. Some have also questioned the originality of his analyses. Louis Baudin, for example, insists that the “least satisfactory” aspect of Bastiat’s work is the theoretical one, hastening to add that our author was on the other hand a pamphleteer “without equal”.2 Bastiat himself must shoulder part of the blame for the radical judgements and persistent prejudices that his work aroused, and indeed he was fully aware of them. His flamboyant style, his humour, his verve, his taste for polemics no doubt helped for a significant period to exclude him from the pantheon of economics. It is not so long ago that Bastiat was dismissed as “the man of parables and harangues”.3