The French liberal tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries constitutes one of the richest, and most unjustly neglected, chapters of the Western intellectual heritage. The Institut Coppet, which developed this course, has devoted itself to rehabilitating the works of the great French liberal economists and philosophers: the complete works of Gustave de Molinari, the writings of Turgot, the friend of the Physiocrats, and many others.

Why does this tradition deserve our attention? For three reasons. First, ideas of liberty are making their return in contemporary debate, and it is about time. Second, this tradition is deeply rooted in French-speaking culture, in our own categories of thought, which makes it particularly accessible to the francophone world. Third, and most importantly, it is universalist in its vocation. From the 18th century onward, these thinkers conceived of human beings as human beings, not as citizens of a particular country or a particular epoch. The influence of a Frédéric Bastiat, for instance, extends far beyond France’s borders and remains strikingly relevant today.

There has always been a certain contempt for theorists. They are dismissed as inhabitants of a world apart, disconnected from reality, while practitioners are celebrated for their concrete, hands-on knowledge. But does this opposition hold up?

Consider: every one of our everyday actions rests on implicit theories. When we climb a staircase, when we pick up an object and hand it to someone, we are unconsciously applying the theory of gravitation. Without theories, even unspoken ones, we simply cannot act. The real question, then, is not whether to be a theorist or a practitioner, but whether we have good theories, grounded in observable facts, or bad ones, built on fallacies.

A particularly damaging version of this prejudice operates in the political realm. Freedom, as an abstract ideal, is almost universally accepted, it is one of the founding dogmas of modern democracies. And yet liberalism, the systematic theory of freedom, is rejected as too abstract, too conceptual. This leads to an arbitrary sorting of freedoms into "good" and "bad" categories: political freedom is valued; economic freedom is distrusted. But consider: the same principles that underpin religious tolerance and universal suffrage should logically lead to the recognition of economic freedom as well. If I am competent to choose between competing ideas in matters of conscience, and between competing candidates in matters of politics, why should I be declared incompetent when it comes to choosing what to buy, where to work, or whom to trade with?

Without this coherence, freedom is reduced to the simple faculty of periodically choosing a political master. In other words, the collective choice, temporary, infrequent, and imposed uniformly, eliminates the countless individual choices that would enable constant adaptation to circumstances, direct responsibility, and respect for the diversity of human preferences.

During the French Revolution and the First Empire, a remarkable group of intellectuals known as the Idéologues, Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Volney, sought to anchor the theory of liberty in the rigorous observation of facts. Far from being disconnected academics, they were themselves practitioners: Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) was a physician; Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), a former artillery officer turned agronomist and philosopher, devoted his later years to agriculture and the study of political economy.

It was Napoleon who gave them the pejorative label "ideologues", ironically, since it was Bonaparte himself who, at Saint Helena, confessed that when his ministers asked the purpose of all his conquests and ambitions, he did not know, and admitted that they were astonished by this confession. The so-called practitioner acted without direction; the so-called ideologues possessed a coherent understanding of human action.

What facts did the Ideologists identify? Let us begin where they began: with the human body itself.

The human being is, first and foremost, a body among other bodies, an entity necessarily occupying physical space. Consider the simple act of sleeping in a bed. Even in a collectivist society, the bed belongs to the sleeper de facto while he occupies it. One may imagine a system of communal ownership, but when one sleeps, one sleeps in one’s own bed, one occupies it by the mere fact of lying there. Property, in this most basic form, is not an arbitrary social construct. It is a direct and inescapable consequence of our bodily existence.

More fundamentally, appropriation is required by nature. To eat an apple is necessarily to appropriate it. To breathe is to appropriate the air. Every human action demands the appropriation of something. Property is therefore a reality rooted in our physical existence, like gravity, like the need to place one’s two feet on the ground, not a convention that can be decreed or abolished at will.

The finite nature of the world gives rise to a further consequence: competition. Apples must be appropriated precisely because they are not infinite in number. We can critique competition, we can deplore it, but we cannot eliminate it.

Collectivist systems do not abolish competition; they merely redirect it into political channels, queues, administrative privileges, factional struggles, often at a far greater cost in efficiency and justice. The real question is not whether competition will exist, but what rules should govern it.

When we turn from the external world to the human being himself, we encounter another foundational fact: the radical individuality of our sensations. I have hunger; I have thirst; I see, I, the individual, directly and personally. One cannot experience hunger through another person, nor see through another’s eyes.

This has profound implications for social organization. Decisions grounded in direct personal perception contain information that collective decisions cannot replicate. If I am hungry and I act to satisfy my hunger, the effects are immediate and precisely tailored to my situation. A collective decision about food, by contrast, must aggregate the perceptions of many individuals, each with different needs in terms of timing, intensity, and preference. Its outcomes will inevitably be less adapted to each person’s actual condition.

From this individuality of sensation there also arises what Adam Smith called sympathy, the capacity to feel, in an attenuated way, the sensations of others, and the need for human cooperation, since even the most self-sufficient individual depends on exchange and mutual aid.

Sensation leads to will, and will is the first form of liberty. While some of our actions are reflexive, automatic responses to stimuli, the great majority are the product of reflection and deliberate choice. I feel my own body, I can act through my own body, of my own will: this is the foundation of self-ownership.

Destutt de Tracy, in his Éléments d’idéologie (1815), expressed this insight with remarkable clarity:

In other words, property and liberty are not inventions of legislators. They are recognitions of facts as old as human consciousness itself.

Nature does not produce identical beings. From the earliest observations of newborns, we can detect great diversity in physical capacities, temperaments, and inclinations. Cabanis, the physician among the Ideologists, studied these physiological differences extensively: an individual of weak constitution will not have the same desires, the same recreations, the same ambitions as one endowed with great energy and physical vigor.

This natural diversity has direct consequences for freedom. Different individuals have different wills, and must therefore have the liberty to act according to their own inclinations. This applies to education, children must be educated according to their aptitudes and tastes, not uniformly. It applies to the freedom of work, one cannot simply inherit one’s father’s or grandfather’s trade by tradition if it does not match one’s own abilities. And it applies to freedom of choice in consumption, since the satisfaction derived from goods and services depends on this irreducible diversity.

Finally, a fact that Descartes brought to light and that the Physiocrats and the 19th-century French liberal economists developed to its fullest implications: the limits of human reason. Descartes used the example of the chiliogon, a polygon with a thousand sides, to show that the human mind cannot visualize it. Our reason is a powerful tool, but it has boundaries.

The Physiocrats of the 18th century drew from this the conclusion that central planning is impossible. No central authority, no bureau of ministers, however vast, could foresee, anticipate, organize, and coordinate the millions of individual human actions that constitute a society and a market economy. The impossibility of planning is already inscribed in the facts of humanity, and above all in the fact that our reason, however admirable, has its limits.

In the lessons that follow, we will return to these factual foundations of liberty and property. We will contrast them with the ideas and practices of unfreedom, to understand why systems of constraint are grounded not in facts but in sophisms, sophisms that we will have the opportunity to expose in a later part of this course.