On February 24, 1848, after three days of riots in Paris, King Louis-Philippe I abdicated his power. This marked the birth of the Second Republic.

Bastiat was in Paris, witnessing the events firsthand. Later, he would write:

This passage is surprising. What do Greek and Roman antiquity have to do with it?

Bastiat refers to Plato's Republic and his theory of the philosopher-king, as well as to Sparta, which Rousseau admired, and to the Roman Empire, for which Napoleon felt a nostalgic affection. Unfortunately, according to Bastiat, these Greek and Roman ideas are based on a false premise: the idea of the omnipotence of the legislator, of the absolute sovereignty of the law.

It's enough to open almost any book on philosophy, politics, or history at random to find this idea, rooted in our culture, that humanity is an inert matter receiving life, organization, morality, and prosperity from political power. Left to its own devices, humanity would tend towards anarchy and would only be saved from this disaster by the mysterious and omnipotent hand of the Legislator. However, Bastiat says, this idea has long matured and been prepared by centuries of classical education.

Firstly, he says, the Romans regarded property as a purely conventional fact, as an artificial creation of written law. Why? Simply, Bastiat explains, because they lived off slavery and plunder. For them, all properties were the fruit of spoliation. Therefore, they could not introduce into legislation the idea that the foundation of legitimate property was labor without destroying the foundations of their society. They indeed had an empirical definition of property, "jus utendi et abutendi" (the right to use and abuse). However, this definition only concerned the effects and not the causes, in other words, the ethical origins of property. To properly establish property, one must go back to the very constitution of man and understand the relationship and necessary linkage that exists between needs, faculties, labor, and property. The Romans, who were slave owners, could they conceive the idea that "every man owns himself, and therefore his labor, and, consequently, the product of his labor"? Bastiat wonders.

Indeed, Rousseau shares this common legal idea of basing property on the law. Rousseau attributes absolute power to the law, and consequently to the people, over individuals and property. And in this conception, which constitutes the very idea of the republic since the French Revolution, the legislator must organize society, like a social architect, like a mechanic who invents a machine from inert matter, or like a potter who shapes clay. The legislator thus places himself outside of humanity, above it, to arrange it at will, according to plans conceived by his luminous intelligence.

On the contrary, for Bastiat, the right of property is prior to the law. This is what he calls the principle of economists, as opposed to the principle of jurists. While "the principle of jurists virtually contains slavery, says Bastiat, that of economists contains freedom.

What then is freedom? It is property, the right to enjoy the fruits of one's labor, the right to work, to develop, to exercise one's faculties, as one sees fit, without the State intervening otherwise than by its protective action.

It is disheartening to think that our social and political philosophy has remained entrenched in the notion that the solution to all our problems must come from above, from the law, or from the State. But this is explainable. These ideas are instilled in the youth every day in schools and universities through the monopoly of education.

an example of such a monopolistic agent could be a government institution

However, as Bastiat reminds us, monopoly excludes progress.