The Opponents

Rousseau

Bastiat Economic Thought

Rousseau

Frédéric Bastiat, who expressed himself in the 1840s, is the heir to a generation of Enlightenment philosophers who fought against censorship and for the freedom to debate. Think of Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, Condorcet, but also Rousseau.

For them, the idea was simple: the more ideas are allowed to be expressed, the more truth progresses and the more easily errors are refuted. Science always progresses in this way.

(Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, Condorcet, Rousseau)

On the contrary, few have understood that what was true for ideas was also true for goods and services. The freedom to trade with others indeed has two virtues: it is efficient and leads to a fairer distribution. Not only did Rousseau fail to understand this, but he also opposed this freedom in the name of a misguided notion of law and right. One of the major sources of socialism, Bastiat notes, is Rousseau's opinion that the entire social order stems from the law.

Bastiat indeed considers Rousseau to be the true precursor of socialism and collectivism. In the author of The Social Contract, there's a phrase that quite well summarizes his philosophy: "we only begin to become men after having been citizens."

Initially, man is merely a bourgeois. But the bourgeois is a calculator; he wants his immediate pleasure, he is enslaved to his senses, to his desires, to his particular interest. In short, he is not rational; therefore, he is not free. He needs to be educated, to understand that his true interest is the general interest. This is why Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract:

Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the entire body, which means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free.
(Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

According to this doctrine, man has two wills within him: a will that tends towards personal interest, that of the bourgeois, and a will that tends towards the general interest, that of the citizen. Leading men, even by force, to want a rational end, the general interest, is leading men to become free. What they truly want is a rational outcome, even if they are not aware of it.

It is therefore perfectly legitimate, according to Rousseau, to constrain men in the name of an end that they themselves, had they been more enlightened, would have pursued, but which they do not pursue because they are blind, ignorant, or corrupt. Society is founded to force them to do what they should spontaneously desire if they were enlightened. And by doing so, one does not do violence to them, since one leads them to be "free," that is, to make the right choices; choices that are in line with their true self.

Convinced that the good society is a creation of the law, Rousseau thus grants unlimited power to the legislator. It is up to him to transform individuals into accomplished men, into citizens. However, it is also up to the law to establish property. According to Rousseau, property can only be legitimate if it is regulated by the legislator. Indeed, the evil lies in inequality and servitude, both of which stem from the ownership of property. It is an invention of the strong that has led to a bad society, to bourgeois society, to relations of domination. In his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, he writes this famous passage:

The first person who, having fenced in a piece of land, said: This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how much misery and horror would have been spared the human race by the one who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his fellows: "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all and the earth belongs to no one!"

Therefore, natural property is the source of evil. And Marx, a great reader of Rousseau, would remember this. How to combat this evil? Through the social contract, Rousseau replies. Indeed, a good society is one that results from a contract stipulating the alienation of the individual's rights to the community. From then on, it is up to the community to grant rights to the individual through the law.

Contrary to Rousseau, Frédéric Bastiat says that "man is born a property owner." For him, property is a necessary consequence of the nature of man, of his constitution. He writes that "man is born a property owner, because he is born with needs whose satisfaction is indispensable to life, with organs and faculties whose exercise is indispensable to the satisfaction of these needs". But faculties are only the extension of the person, and property is only the extension of the faculties. In other words, it is the use of our faculties in work that legitimizes property.

According to Bastiat, society, people, and properties exist before laws, and he has a famous phrase: "It is not because there are laws that there are properties, but because there are properties that there are laws." That is why the law must be negative: it must prevent encroachment on people and their goods. Property is the raison d'être of the law and not the other way around.

Quiz

eco2033.1

1/5

According to Rousseau, where does evil in society come from?