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Bastiat on Harmony and Disharmony” a Paper Given to the American Institute for Economic Research, Great Barrington, Mass

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Bastiat on Harmony and Disharmony” a Paper Given to the American Institute for Economic Research, Great Barrington, Mass David M. Hart, “Bastiat on Harmony and Disharmony” A Paper given to the American Institute for Economic Research, Great Barrington, Mass. (Jan. 2020) Date: 5 Dec. 2019 Revised: 14 Dec. 2019 Page 1 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Website: http://www.davidmhart.com/liberty/. Email: [email protected] David M. Hart was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. He studied at Stanford University (M.A. 1983) and King’s College, Cambridge (PhD 1994) and was the founding Director of the Online Library of Liberty Project at Liberty Fund in Indianapolis, Indiana from 2001-2019 [oll.libertyfund.org](http://oll.libertyfund.org/). He is also the Academic Editor of Liberty Fund’s translation of the Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat (in 6 vols.) (Liberty Fund, 2011- ), and the editor and co-translator of Molinari’s Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street: Discussions on Economic Laws and the Defence of Property (1849) . He recently put online a seven volume collection of over 300 Leveller Tracts http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/leveller-tracts-summary in an attempt to rescue these proto-libertarians from the clutches of the Marxists. In March 2017 he gave the Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture, at the Austrian Economics Research Conference, Mises Institute on “Bastiat: the ‘Unseen’ Radical”. His areas of research is the history of classical liberal thought in general, and the French classical liberal tradition in particular. Recent publications include: • a chapter on “The Paris School of Liberal Political Economy” for the Cambridge History of French Thought, ed. Michael Moriarty and Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge U.P. , 2019), pp. 301-12. • co-editor of an anthology of classical liberal class analysis: Social Class and State Power: Exploring an Alternative Radical Tradition (Palgrave, 2018) • an article about and a translation of a speech by Yves Guyot on “The School of Liberty”: "For Whom the Bell Tolls: The School of Liberty and the Rise of Interventionism in French Political Economy in the Late 19thC," Journal of Markets and Morality, vol. 20, Number 2 (Fall 2017), pp. 383-412. • co-editor of L'âge d'or du libéralisme français. Anthologie XIXe siècle (The Golden Age of French Liberalism: A 19th Century Anthology) (Paris: Editions Ellipses, Page 2 2014). An English version of which is, French Liberalism in the 19th Century: An Anthology (Routledge, 2012). Since 2019 was the bicentennial year of the birth of Gustave de Molinari he has been working on a series of articles and anthologies of Molinari’s writings in order to commemorate this event: 1. an introduction to the life and work of Molinari: “Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912): A Survey of the Life and Work of an “économiste dure” (a hard- core economist)” 2. A lengthy introduction and critical apparatus to the Liberty Fund translation of Molinari’s Les Soirées 3. “Molinari’s Theory of the State”: a collection of 24 extracts from his writings (1846-1911) 4. “The Collected Articles in the Dictionnaire de l’économie politique (1852-53)”: an anthology of the 30 articles he wrote for the DEP 5. “Molinari’s Collected Writings on the Production of Security (1846-1901)” with a long introduction on the intellectual history of this important concept In 2018-19 he completed work on volumes 4 and 5 of the Collected Works of Bastiat for Liberty Fund: Vol. 4: Miscellaneous Works on Economics and Vol. 5: Economic Harmonies. The former contains many essays never before translated into English and several speeches he gave in the Chamber of Deputies which have never been published before. The latter is intended to be the definitive scholarly edition of his incomplete magnum opus and includes several draft chapters and sketches of chapters never before included in an edition of this important work. Both volumes contain an extensive scholarly apparatus of footnotes, glossaries, and short essays to help readers explore some of the complexities of his thinking about economic and social theory. He has also written a screenplay, “Broken Windows”, about the activities of Frédéric Bastiat during the 1848 Revolution in France: http://davidmhart.com/liberty/Bastiat/ BrokenWindows2.html (Aug. 2016). With an accompanying “illustrated essay” of the life and times of FB http://davidmhart.com/liberty/Bastiat/BrokenWindows.html. Page 3 Page 4 ABSTRACT The French economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) is best known for his witty and clever critiques of tariff protection and government subsidies in Economic Sophisms (1846, 1848), his marvelous short book on opportunity cost What is Seen and What is not Seen (1850), and his unfinished economic treatise Economic Harmonies (1850, 1851). Central to the latter was the idea that if individuals were left free to act upon their “rightly understood self-interest” and to engage in voluntary transactions with others this would “tend” to promote peace, prosperity, and “harmony” for society as a whole The flip side of the coin was that if individuals or governments engaged in coercion in order to control, regulate, or prohibit these voluntary transactions “disharmony” would inevitably be the result. Bastiat developed a sophisticated set of arguments over several years to explain the causes and the consequences of these polar opposite concepts. He died before he could finish this ambitious multi-volume project, only being able to see into print the first half of a book on “economic harmonies” at the beginning of 1850. He had planned to write another volume on “social harmonies” which would cover human relationships and institutions in a more general fashion, as well as a volume dealing with “The Disharmonies,” in particular the role that war, class exploitation, and plunder played in destroying the harmonies that had been created by free individuals going about their own business. Page 5 ABBREVIATIONS CW1 = Collected Works of Bastiat, vol. 1 DEP = Dictionnaire de l’économie politique EH1 = Economic Harmonies, 1st edition (1850) EH2 = Economic Harmonies, 2nd edition (1851) ES1 = Economic Sophisms, 1st edition (1846) ES2 = Economic Sophisms, 2nd edition (1848) FEE = Foundation for Economic Education JDE = Journal des Économistes JDD = Journal des Débats LE = Le Libre-Échange WSWNS = What is Seen and What is not Seen (1850) Page 6 Table of Contents Bastiat’s Theory of Harmony and Disharmony .............................9 Introduction and Summary ...............................................................................9 Harmony and Disharmony .............................................................................14 Appendix 1: Concept Maps of the Terms used by Bastiat ..............41 Introduction .....................................................................................................41 Class .................................................................................................................44 Disturbing Factors ...........................................................................................45 Harmony and Disharmony .............................................................................46 Human Action .................................................................................................47 Plunder ............................................................................................................48 Appendix 2: Factors which tend to promote Harmony ..................49 Introduction .....................................................................................................49 The “Apparatus” or Structure of Exchange ....................................................51 Community, Property, and Communism .........................................................55 The Great Laws of Economics ........................................................................68 Human Action .................................................................................................75 Liberties: “All Forms of Liberty” .....................................................................83 Perfectibility and Progress ................................................................................86 Responsibility: “The Law of Individual Responsibility and the Law of Human Solidarity” ........................................................................................................93 Self-Ownership and the Right to Property ....................................................106 Service for Service .........................................................................................120 The Social Mechanism and its Driving Force ...............................................127 Appendix 3: Factors which create Disharmony ...........................134 Introduction ...................................................................................................134 Class: Bastiat’s Theory of Class (short version for Glossary) .........................135 Class: Bastiat’s Theory of Class: The Plunderers vs. the Plundered (long version) 143 Page 7 Displacement: “Bastiat’s Theory of Displacement” ......................................185 Disturbing and Restorative Factors ...............................................................190 Functionaries: Functionaryism and Rule by Functionaries ...........................196 Mechanics and Organizers ............................................................................214 Plunder: Bastiat’s Theory of Plunder ............................................................221 Plunder: Theocratic Plunder .........................................................................238 Ricochet Effect: The
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