About the author
French economist, essayist, and member of the National Assembly (1801–1850). Bastiat was the great popularizer of free-market and classical-liberal ideas in nineteenth-century France, famous for witty polemics like the satirical 'Candlemakers' Petition' against the 'unfair competition' of the sun. The Law, written in the last year of his life as he was dying of tuberculosis, is his most enduring work and a touchstone of the modern libertarian movement.
Synopsis
An 1850 pamphlet written in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution. Bastiat argues that each person has a natural right to defend their life, liberty, and property, and that law is simply the collective organisation of that individual right of defence. When law instead becomes an instrument for one group to live at the expense of another — through tariffs, subsidies, or redistribution — it is perverted into 'legal plunder,' and turns the state into a tool of injustice dressed in the authority of justice.
Quote to notice
Direct quote · Public domain“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”
Bastiat reverses the usual order: rights are not granted by the state but precede it, and the state's only legitimate job is to secure rights that already exist. From this single premise the entire libertarian suspicion of redistributive and regulatory government follows — anything beyond protecting prior rights is, on his account, a form of theft.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with Rawls or any theory of social or distributive justice for the rival view that a just society requires the state to do far more than protect property, and with Polanyi for the argument that 'free' markets are themselves political creations.
Reading note
Read it for the clarity of the core argument, but read it critically: Bastiat treats the pre-political existence of property rights as obvious, which is exactly what his critics (from socialists to Rawlsians) deny. Holding that assumption up to the light is the most productive way to engage the book.
Best paired with
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation.