The Essential Frédéric Bastiat

By Frédéric Bastiat

Summary

In the rendered pages, this Liberty Institute anthology (Classics Revisited series, 2007) opens with its editorial apparatus rather than Bastiat’s own essays. Sauvik Chakraverti’s Editor’s Note recounts how he discovered Frédéric Bastiat in 1995 through Liberty Institute’s liberty workshops and through Bastiat’s The Law, an encounter that convinced him ‘economic journalism mattered’ and shaped his own career; Barun S. Mitra’s Publisher’s Note (September 2007) frames the volume as a revival of a thinker ‘almost forgotten in his native country,’ thanking the Foundation for Economic Education, Liberty Fund, Jacques de Guenin, and the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung. The bulk of the rendered text is Detmar Doering’s prefatory essay ‘On Frédéric Bastiat,’ which uses the famous candlemakers’ petition to introduce Bastiat as the supreme satirist of protectionism, then sketches his biography (Bayonne 1801, his turn to economics via Adam Smith and the British free-traders, the 1844 Journal des économistes article, his election to the 1848 National Assembly) and surveys his contested reputation among later economists. In the rendered pages the four-part body — Bastiat as believer in natural liberty, as free trader, his ‘genius’ (The Law, The State, What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen), and as candidate — appears only in the Table of Contents; none of the 21 numbered selections was rendered.

Key points

• In the rendered pages, the volume presents its front matter — Editor’s Note, Publisher’s Note, and Detmar Doering’s prefatory essay — not Bastiat’s selections themselves.

• Editor Sauvik Chakraverti recounts discovering Bastiat in 1995 via Liberty Institute workshops and The Law, crediting it with turning him to economic journalism.

• Barun S. Mitra’s Publisher’s Note (September 2007) frames the book as reviving a thinker ‘almost forgotten in his native country’ France.

• Doering’s essay opens with the candlemakers’ petition to present Bastiat as the master satirist of protectionism.

• Doering sketches Bastiat’s life: born Bayonne 1801, self-taught in economics via Adam Smith and British free-traders, famous after his 1844 Journal des économistes article, elected to the 1848 National Assembly.

• The essay surveys Bastiat’s mixed posthumous reputation, quoting Mises (‘brilliant stylist’) and Schumpeter (‘the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived’).

• The four-part body and 21 numbered Bastiat selections appear only in the Table of Contents in the rendered pages.

• Acknowledgements name FEE, Liberty Fund, Jacques de Guenin, and the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung as enabling the volume.

Generated by the v1.5 extraction pipeline. Awaiting editorial review.