Date: 14 April, 2015

“Literature IN Economics, and Economics AS Literature I: Bastiat’s use of Literature in Defense of Free Markets and his Rhetoric of Economic Liberty.”

A paper given at the Association of Private Enterprise Education International Conference (April 12-14, 2015), Cancún, Mexico. HTML and PDF.

The fountain dedicated to Molière on the rue de Richelieu, Paris where the publishing firm Guillaumin was located. They published all of Bastiat’s books.

Abstract: In this paper I will show how one economist used literature in creative and amusing ways to assist him in defending free trade and free markets from their intellectual and political opponents in France during the 1840s. The economic journalism which Frédéric Bastiat produced at this time is some of the best ever written and is still a model for economists today. His knowledge of both high and low French culture and literature was extensive, drawing upon the plays of Molière and the fables of La Fontaine at one end of the spectrum, as well as the political drinking songs and poems of Béranger at the other. These are all examples of Bastiat’s use of “literature in economics”.

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Date: 14 April, 2015

“Literature IN Economics, and Economics AS Literature II: The Economics of Robinson Crusoe from Defoe to Rothbard by way of Bastiat.”

A paper given at the Association of Private Enterprise Education International Conference (April 12-14, 2015), Cancún, Mexico. HTML and PDF. An earlier working title was “Robinson Crusoe and Praxeology: A History”.

Abstract: Daniel Dafoe’s novel The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Marriner (1719) has provided economists and social theorists with a rich and seemingly infinitely broad canvas on which they can paint whatever picture they like of the nature of economic activity. In addition to Dafoe’s own economically informed, English Protestant original story, there have been Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, neo-classical, as well as Austrian accounts of the activities of the man ship-wrecked on the Island of Despair. These have been termed “Robinsonades” or “Crusoe economics.”

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Date: 28 March, 2015

“The Liberal Roots of American Conservatism: Bastiat and the French Connection.” A paper given to the Philadelphia Society meeting March 27-29, 2015 on “The Roots of American Conservatism – and its Future”. HTML and PDF

Abstract: The paper discusses the contribution to American conservative thought of the economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) and a number of other French philosophes, classical liberals, and economists since the founding of the American Republic. In the first part of the paper I examine the influence the political theorist and economist Destutt de Tracy had on Thomas Jefferson, the impact the economist Jean-Baptiste Say had on the teaching of economics in America in the first half of the 19th century, and the influence of the free trade advocate and economic theorist Frédéric Bastiat had on the American free trade movement and the school of thought his ideas engendered in the second half of the century. The second part of the paper deals with the influence of Bastiat on the Conservative and Libertarian movements especially after the Second World War in Los Angeles and NYC, with the activities of R.C. Hoiles’ Freedom Newspapers, Leonard Read and the FEE, Ludwig von Mises and his graduate students at NYU, and Ronald Reagan for GE. The paper concludes with a discussion of the resurgence of interest in Bastiat’s idea in the first decade of the 21st century in both America and France.

Date: 1 Dec. 2014

A paper on “Seeing the ‘Unseen’ Bastiat: the changing Optics of Bastiat Studies. Or, what the Liberty Fund’s Translation Project is teaching us about Bastiat” given to the “Colloquium on Market Institutions & Economic Processes” at NYU

Abstract: The translation project being undertaken by Liberty Fund to translate the Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat provides us with an opportunity to reassess the work of this mid-19th century French political economist. This paper examines the changing perception of Bastiat’s work from the late 1840s until the conference held in Mugron in June 2001 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth when the decision was made to translate into English all of his available work for the first time. His contemporaries recognized his talents as a brilliant economic journalist, a free trade activist, and an elected politician who dabbled in economic theory but died in 1850 before he could complete his work. His reputation went into decline for the next 100 years as his approach to economics went against first the classical and then the neo-classical schools. Except for a very few economists like W.S. Jevons Bastiat was dismissed as a serious economic theorist. Joseph Schumpeter summed up the consensus view in 1954 describing him as not a theorist at all.

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