The Law

An analysis that grounds the law in the personality, liberty, and property of the individual from “the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived” (Joseph Schumpeter, twentieth-century political economist).

The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense; it is the substitution of collective for individual forces, for the purpose of acting in the sphere in which they have a right to act, of doing what they have a right to do, to secure persons, liberties, and properties, and to maintain each in its right, so as to cause justice to reign over all.

It is with these words that the nineteenth-century French economist and statesman Frédéric Bastiat describes his theory of the individual rights of man in a classic refutation of the communist ideas that were sweeping across France at the time. In these pages, Bastiat affirms that the non-intervention of the State in private affairs gives rise to our wants and their satisfactions developing in their natural order. Problems arise when the law leaves its proper sphere and is employed in annihilating that justice which it should have established. He describes the threat of socialism as “philanthropic tyranny,” the enemy to his revered principles of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. In clear, concise prose, Bastiat reveals the dangers of government overreach, a philosophy that still inspires libertarian ideology today.