ABSTRACT
The economic formula of free enterprise has the same character and origin as the political formula of liberalism and, like it, results from the immanent and historical concept of life already explained. An economic parallel to the authoritarian claim to determine beforehand how men should think and act politically would be the claim to determine similarly the “just” price of anything. This morality erects as the criterion of good the greatest satisfaction of desires as such; that is, of course, in spite of the apparent plural, the satisfaction of the pleasure of the individual or of society, taken as an aggregate and average of individuals. This tying of free enterprise to ethical utilitarianism is well known, just as it is known that utilitarianism, in one of its forms as made popular by Bastiat, tried to idealize itself as a general cosmic harmony, as a law of Nature or of Divine Providence.
