Bastiat for the Ages

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The Law By Frederic Bastiat

is read in the 7th grade of the Robinson Self Taught Homeschool Curriculum

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"This is the way an opinion gains acceptance in France," Bastiat wrote.:

"Fifty ignoramuses repeat in chorus some absurd libel that has been thought up by an even bigger ignoramus; and, if only it happens to coincide to some slight degree with prevailing attitudes and passions, it becomes a self-evident truth."

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It was back in 1962, as I recall, when I was 15 years old and a junior in high school, that I first read something by a French writer on free trade whose name, my friends and I thought at first, would probably be pronounced "Frederick BAHS-tee-aht." Since several of us were enrolled in Madame Wall's beginning French class that semester, it didn't take us too long to discover that his name was probably closer to "Frayed-air-EEK Bah-STYAH." But his ideas fascinated us all the same, as did the organization whose free pamphlets included Bastiat's arguments against tariffs and other government-imposed impediments to commerce — an organization called the Foundation for Economic Education.

The Foundation for Economic Education — FEE, usually pronounced like the word "fee" — had been founded just after the end of World War II, by a radicalized former Chamber of Commerce executive named Leonard Read. The late George Roche III, who spent the last three decades of the last century as president of Hillsdale College in Michigan, published a very readable and useful biography of Bastiat back in 1971, in which he writes, "Leonard Read … rescued Bastiat from the historical ash-heap." Read, according to Roche's account, "was among the first to realize the enormous importance of Frédéric Bastiat."

My friends and I, back in 1962, thought Bastiat seemed pretty important. He was certainly a remarkable writer — uncommonly lucid, extraordinarily clever, a real find. But we were unable, in that pre-Internet age, to locate much of anything in the way of biographical information about him. And the problem wasn't just that there was no Internet in 1962. Nothing much had been published on Bastiat in any form in 1962. It would be seven more years until 1969, when Dean Russell would publish his book Frédéric Bastiat: Ideas & Influence, the first book-length treatment of Bastiat ever published in English — and it was published, unsurprisingly, by FEE. Roche's book, Frédéric Bastiat: A Man Alone, came two years later, in 1971.

Bastiat, as it turned out, was born 210 years ago. Some accounts give his birthdate as June 29, 1801, but Russell and Roche, the most authoritative sources on Bastiat for an English-speaking audience, both report that his actual date of birth was the last day of the month, June 30, 1801.

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