Category Archives: CL Tradition

The Socialist Critique of Private Property and Free Markets and the French Political Economists’ Response

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[The cartoonist “Cham” ridicules the plans of the French socialists like Ledru-Rollin who dreams of a new socialist Terror. See, Amédée de Noé, dit Cham, “Ce qu’on appelle des idées nouvelles en 1848” (Paris?: Imp. Aubert & Cie, 1848).]

Before turning to the criticism of socialism by the French political economists it is important to understand what the socialist critique of wage labour, private property, and the free market societies actually was.

During the 1830s and 1840s the basic socialist criticisms of the free market were first expressed at some length and with some coherence, and solutions proposed (usually involving state ownership, regulation of economic activity, and transfer payments to the poor and unemployed) which would remain essentially the same for the next hundred years or so. These criticisms can be summarized as economic, moral/philosophical, and political in nature, and were usually articulated in the various “Manifestos” which were issued by socialist groups, such as Victor Considerant’s “Manifesto” of 1847, Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” of February 1848, and Ledru-Rollin’s “Manifesto for the Mountain Party” of December 1848.

More extensive criticism of the free market can be found in their longer works such as

  1. Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail. Association universelle. Ouvriers (1841) in French HTML and English HTML ; and Le Socialisme. Droit au travail, réponse à M. Thiers (1848)
  2. Victor Considerant, Principes du Socialisme. Manifeste de la Démocratie au XIXe siècle (1847) in French HTML and English HTML ; and Droit de propriété et du droit au travail (1848)
  3. Joseph Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété? ou Recherches sur le principe du Droit et du Gouvernement (1840) in French HTML and English HTML ; Système des contradictions économiques, ou philosophy de la misère (1846); Le droit au travail et le droit de propriété (1850);


[Proudhon believes “property is theft”]

These criticisms can be summarized as follows:

  1. Economic Criticism
  • the free market and bourgeois society is based upon private property which is unjust; the exclusive ownership of things, especially land, was a form of “theft” against those who did not own property, such as the ordinary worker. Hence Proudhon’s famous dictum “la propriety, c’est le vol” (property is theft)
  • wage labour leads to the “exploitation” of workers because they do not receive the full value of their labour, since some of it is withheld as “profit” by the factory owner
  • wage labour (especially factory work) “alienates” the workers from both the things they create and their full potential (this objection was put forward most forcibly by Karl Marx)
  • profit, interest, and land rent are unjust because they are “unearned” as the factory owner, capitalist or bank, and landowner do not “labour” to produce anything of value (important because most socialists believed that only “labour” produces wealth, hence if one did not “labour” then one inevitably exploited those who did)
  • competition has disastrous consequences for the workers in that they compete for scarce jobs and thus drive down the level of wages, thus becoming poorer and poorer (immiseration) under capitalism
  • there is a tendency towards the formation of monopolies which ruthlessly exploit consumers by charging excess profits and driving their competitors (and their workers) out of business, hence Louis Blanc’s idea that competition was a form of “murder” of workers
  • there are periodic economic crises which adversely affect the poor working class who are least able to survive during periods of unemployment
  • the emergence of international capitalism leads to “free trade”, global competition, and the destruction of national industry
  1. Moral/Philosophical Criticism
  • there is increasing inequality between the wealthy capitalists and the “bourgeoisie” on the one hand, and ordinary working people on the other
  • capitalism is “heartless” as a result of the selfish behaviour of individuals and the drive to get profits
  • there is the destruction of traditional communities as people seek work in the large cities and industrial towns and leave the countryside and smaller towns
  1. Political Criticism
  • the growing power and wealth of the “capitalist class” (the bourgeoisie) within the political system allows them to further their own ends at the expense of the weaker or non-voting working class
  • there is an unequal relationship between employers and labor, especially when it comes to bargaining for wages and conditions
  • the traditional “nuclear family” perpetuates bourgeois thought and behaviour

The political economists gradually realized the threat the socialists posed, both intellectually and increasingly politically after 1845 and addressed them accordingly in an outpouring of books and pamphlets, which unfortunately having been largely forgotten today:

  • Charles Dunoyer, La Liberté du travail (1845): literally on “the liberty of working” as opposed to the socialist notion of “the right to work (or right to a job)” – in French in facs. PDF via this page
  • Adolphe Thiers, De la propriété (1848) – (en français) in HTML and facs. PDF ; and in English with a slightly different title, The Rights of Property: A Refutation of Communism & Socialism (1848) in HTML and facs. PDF
  • Léon Faucher, Du droit au travail (1848)
  • Michel Chevalier, Lettres sur l’Organisation du travail (1848) [in French facs. PDF ] and L’économie politique et le socialisme (1849) [in French facs. PDF ]
  • Frédéric Bastiat’s series of 12 anti-socialist pamphlets (1848-1850) – [these will be discussed in more detail in a future post]
  • Gustave de Molinari, Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare; entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété (1849) [ HTML and facs,. PDF in French; draft English trans. at the OLL]
  • Bastiat and Proudhon, Gratuité du crédit (Oct. 1849 – Feb. 1850) – in French [ HTML and facs. PDF ]
  • Dictionnaire de l’économie politique (1852-53): with many articles on socialism and socialist theorists which was designed to be a compendium of criticism of socialist and other forms of interventionism by the state – in French facs. PDF


[Molinari on the other hand believes socialists will inevitably fail because they ignore “economic laws”]

Their rebuttal of socialist criticisms of the free market and their concerns about why socialism would fail in practice were extensive and detailed. The economists argued that the socialists ignored or misunderstood the following problems:

  • the incentive problem: communally organised living and working arrangements destroy incentives for individuals to work hard when all “profits” go to the community to be equally distributed
  • the division of labour problem: people with key skills (managerial, financial, technical, organisational, entrepreneurial) need to be paid for their extra contribution to the productive process
  • the risk problem: all economic activity involves risks (loss, miscalculation, natural disaster) which needs to be rewarded
  • the injustice of expropriation: to create any socialist system of production existing justly owned property has to be confiscated and given to new communally organised groups
  • the individual liberty problem: many socialists modeled their proposed new communal organisations on the army or a government bureaucracy (like the post office); these organisations would be deliberately hierarchical, with command from above, communal eating and sleeping arrangements, and general loss of individual choice and liberty
  • the human nature problem: socialists assumed that human nature is not fixed but malleable, that it is possible to create a” new socialist man” who would not be selfish or acquisitive; the economists believed humans were social but not communist, self-interested (broadly understood) not willing to sacrifice their interests to the community’s; and that people had vastly different tastes, preferences, skills, and interests which would and not be taken into account under socialism
  • the public choice problem – rulers were not disinterested parties but had own agendas
  • the problem of ignoring economic laws – the economy is governed by economic “laws” (such as the law of supply and demand) which cannot be ignored or wished away by well meaning people

What is striking to the modern reader, are the similarities between both the socialist critique of free markets and the economists’ defense of them of the 1840s and those of today. It would seem that we collectively have remembered nothing of them and thus have learned nothing from them. The major differences in my view is the Hayekian notion that free market prices carry vital information about the relative scarcity of goods and services and the changing demands of both consumers and other producers which are all crucial factors in entrepreneurs knowing what to produce, when and where. This idea is only rudimentary at best or completely absent from the political economists’ understanding of the problems faced by socialist production. On the other hand, the modern day socialists have greatly expanded the Malthusian critique of the ability of free markets to feed and clothe the poorest members of society, and applied this to a critique of “capitalism’s” over-exploitation and thus depletion of resources, its pollution of the environment, and the problem of “global warming” (sorry, “climate change”). It would seem that the proposed “Green New Deal” is just another in the long list of attempts by socialists to centrally plan the economy and thus avoid the waste and destruction inherent in free markets.

The socialist challenge in the 1840s was eventually put down by brutal police action in 1849 and many, like Louis Blanc, were imprisoned or sent into exile. However, their ideas were not so easily defeated. Some of their ideas would be taken up by the soon to be (self-)appointed Emperor Napoleon III and imposed from above in what would become a newly invigorated form of French “dirigisme” or “state socialism”. “Socialism proper” (in the form of working class socialist or labour parties) would reemerge in the 1880s and 1890s and would be met again by the French political economists in another round of anti-socialist publishing activity. This will be the topic of a future post.

On Cham’s cartoon see my talk on “Unfortunately, Hardly Anyone Listens to the Economists”: The Battle against Socialism by the French Economists in the 1840s.

Socialism is Zombie Economics

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Zombie Economics

A couple of years ago (July 2018) I gave a talk at a Students for Liberty conference on “Zombie Economics” with particular reference to the Marxist “manifestation” of this intellectual beast which refuses to die, no matter how many times it has been “killed” (intellectually speaking of course). It has been the revolutionary Marxists who have done most of the killing once they have seized political power and find that their utopian economic schemes fail to work as planned). As of 1997, the total of deaths caused by the attempt to impose Marxist economic polices since the experiment began in 1917 in Russia is about 94 million and rising. It would be much more if one included other variants of socialism such as “national” socialism. [See, Stéphane Courtois, Andrzej Paczkowski, Nicolas Werth, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Harvard University Press, 1997)].

[See “ How to kill the Marxist zombie once and for all: or, how you can learn to stop worrying about S&M on campus ,” YAL Conference, Washington D.C. 26 July, 2018.]

Of course, Marxism is not the only variant of “zombie economics” which advocates of the free market have had to deal with. And economists from other schools of thought naturally have the opposite view. They, like the Keynesian economist from the University of Queensland, John Quiggen, think that free market ideas should also be described as “zombie economics”, or as he put it in the subtitle of his book of the same title, “how dead ideas still walk among us.” The specific examples of these ideas he gave prominence on the front cover were “privatized social security,” “trickle-down economics,” and “efficient financial markets.”1.

The most prevalent form of zombie economics until recently is “protectionism”, which is really a euphemism for special privileges granted to some domestic/national producers and their workers in order to shield or “protect” them from competitive forces and thus guarantee the continuation of their profits and wages, and to prevent by force other domestic consumers and producers and their workers from buying cheaper (usually foreign) alternatives. Or in other words, every act of “protection” for some must inevitably cause “harm” to others – which is a classic example of Frédéric Bastiat’s notion of “the seen” (protection of some) and “the unseen” (harm to others). [See my blogpost on Bastiat on the Seen and the Unseen (29 May, 2020) and my paper Bastiat on the Seen and the Unseen: An Intellectual History.]

However a second manifestation of zombie economics has appeared in recent years, that of a resurgence of interest in fully fledged “socialism”, even Marxism. This coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia which was very positively commented upon in papers like the New York Times; the acclaim for the French economist Thomas Picketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard, 2017) (which was intended to be an update to Marx’s volume of same name which appeared in 1867); and the appearance of the film “The Young Marx” (2017), funded by numerous state film and TV organizations in the European Union, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Marx’s birth in 1818; to cite only a few examples.

Socialist Economic Thought before it became Zombified

Given this revived interest in things Socialist or Marxist I want to revisit some of the key socialist and Marxist thinkers of the past, to see what they actually thought could and should replace the “chaos of the market” and the “immiseration of the working class” by “predatory capitalism,” and the response of classical liberals and political economists of the time to these ideas. I have prepared a summary of socialist criticisms of private property, and the free market; and a similar list of CL answers to these criticisms and their critique of socialism. I will detail these in future posts.

If one were feeling charitable towards the “ideal” of socialism (which I am not) one might take the view of J.S. Mill who argued that the ideal of classical liberalism can be compared with the ideal of socialism (which was possible at his time – the 1850s and 1860s); but the reality of the free market could not be compared to the reality of socialism, as the latter had not yet been put into practice. The 20th century would provide that “reality check” which was not available in Mill’s own lifetime. We now I think have all the evidence we need to make that comparison. By 1920, as Ludwig von Mises conclusively demonstrated in his essay on “Economic Calculation under Socialism”, the jury was in.

In short, I have noticed is two things about the early history of socialist thought: the general weakness (even naivety and absurdity) of the ideas put forward on behalf of socialism beginning largely in the 1820s and reaching a pinnacle in the 1840s on the eve of the 1848 Revolution, and the enduring strength of the CL critique which also began at this time. When Marx attempted to make socialism more “scientific” with his three volume book on Das Kapital (1869-96) things in my view did not improve, as Böhm-Bawerk demonstrated in his demolition of Marxist economic theory when Marx’s third and final volume appeared posthumously in print. It makes one wonder why these zombie economic ideas continue to be advocated today and why the liberal critique continues to be ignored.

Historically, I think we can identify the following different kinds of socialism which have been advocated at different times:

  1. Utopian socialism: “dropping out” or withdrawing from capitalist society in order to form socialist communities which would be a model for the future; the formation of voluntary socialist communities based upon the ideas of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier many of which were located in the United States
  2. Democratic socialism, or “socialism from below” where elected politicians work within capitalist society, to use their numbers to control parliament, and reform it from within; examples include
    1. Louis Blanc’s National Workshops – street activism & “direct action” (Feb.-May 1848) ; state ownership and/or funding of factories and “workshops” in order to guarantee a job for all (the so-called “le droit au travail” (the right to work, or right to a job) as advocated by Victory Considerant and Louis Blanc in the 1840s
    2. the rise of “Fabian Socialism” in the 1880s and the formation of the Labour Party in Britain (1900)
    3. “social democracy”: the formation of Socialist Parties in France (1879) and Germany (Social Democratic Party in 1875)
    4. the welfare state socialism wich emerged in the US (the “New Deal”) and Western Europe during the 1930s and late 1940s
    5. Green socialism (The Greens) in the late 20th century up unit the present, and their proposed “Green New Deal” which is explicitly based upon the comprehensive “socialist” (or “interventionist”) measures of FDR
  3. Bureaucratic socialism: “socialism from above” – imposed by a charismatic political leader who appeals to workers directly, thus by-passing parliament
    1. state socialism (Staatssozialismus, Socialisme d’état)
    2. the “Bonapartism” of Napoléon III 1852-1870
    3. Ferdinand Lassalle and perhaps also Otto von Bismarck in Germany, and
    4. Claudio Jennet in France
    5. war socialism (Kriegssozialismus) during WW1
    6. Adolph Hitler and “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei” (NSDAP) (the National Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazi Party) 1920-1945
    7. what Ludwig von Mises called ”Interventionism” and which in one manifestation came in the form of the hybrid welfare-warfare state
  4. Revolutionary socialism: a more extreme version of bureaucratic and war socialism where the state “owns” the means of production under the control of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” (die Diktatur des Proletariats) which has come to power by means of a revolution and the violent seizure of state power; this had two versions:
    1. Karl Marx – revolution & dictatorship of proletariat (failure of 1848 showed him need for “dictatorship” to prevent electoral backlash or coup d’état); had to happen in most advanced industrialized economies first; socialist would take over the economic system- as advocated by Marx in the Communist Manifesto (1848)
    2. Lenin – who broke with Marx’s vision as he believed communism could be created in a relatively backward, undeveloped country like Russia; became commonplace in 20thC
      1. Lenin and Bolsheviks in Russia 1917
      2. Mao Zedong in China 1949
      3. Fidel Castro in Cuba 1959

The Classical Liberal Response to the Rise of Socialism

Classical liberals and political economists responded to the challenge of socialism in the following periods when socialist ideas were seen as a growing threat:

  1. 1840s France when organised socialism first made an appearance in the 1848 Revolution
    1. the ideas of Victor Considerant, Louis Blanc, and Joseph Proudhon were criticized by Frédéric Bastiat, Michel Chevalier, and Gustave de Molinari
  2. 1870s, 1880s and 1890s in western Europe when organised socialist parties began to emerge
    1. Germany: the ideas of Karl Marx were criticized by the economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk; those of Auguste Bebel by the politician Eugen Richter
    2. England: George Bernard Shaw and the “Fabian socialists” were criticized by Herbert Spencer, Thomas Mackay, Wordsworth Donisthorpe, and Auberon Herbert
    3. France: the economists Jennet and Gide were criticized by the economists and politicians Frédéric Passy, Yves Guyot, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu
  3. 1920s and 1930s: when the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises first exposed the serious economic weaknesses in Marxist/Bolshevik central planning
    1. Lenin and Stalin vs. Mises and Hayek
  4. 1980s and 1990s: a new younger generation of Austrian economists (Don Lavoie and Peter Boettke) examined weakness of planned economies on the eve of their collapse

I have begun to assemble a collection of works by socialist writers and their critics on my website to document the strengths/weaknesses of the socialist position and their enduring appeal; as well as the often devastating critique offered by classical liberals and the political economists. I will begin with “the French Connection” in another post, before moving on to late 19th century English, German, and French socialist thought.

  1. John Quiggin, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us. With a new chapter by the author (Princeton U.P., 2012). [↩]

One Volume Surveys of Classical Liberal Thought

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[Katsushika Hokusai, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” (c. 1829–1833)]

[Note: This post is part of a series on the History of the Classical Liberal Tradition]

When did classical liberals become self-conscious that they were advocating an entire worldview (Weltanschauung) of politics, economics, and social relationships in general which was a) consistent internally, b) was different from other worldviews (such as socialism),and c) which could be articulated in one volume? I have made an attempt to list some examples of this.

I begin with a collection of one volume surveys of the classical liberal position which have appeared over the past two centuries. The defining characteristic is that they are an attempt to provide the reader with a survey of the basic political and economic principles behind the classical liberal tradition as well as some concrete proposals for reform in order to bring about a freer society. The defining characteristic is that they are an attempt to provide the reader with a survey of the basic political and economic principles behind the classical liberal tradition as well as some concrete proposals for reform in order to bring about a freer society.

With the exception of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s The Limits of State Action which was written in 1792 but was not published in full until 1854, it seems that it was not until the mid-19th century before people began thinking of classical liberalism as a coherent body of thought which could be encapsulated in a one volume treatment. I include in this early group Gustave de Molinari, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill who published their books between 1849 and 1859. Molinari’s Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street (1849) is perhaps the first one volume, comprehensive statement of the classical liberal political and economic worldview designed to appeal to an educated reader rather than a specialist, ever written.

We can mark this group or “first wave” as part of the emergence of “classical liberalism” per se, which saw the dramatic liberal reforms of the Victorian period, such as the repeal of the Corn Laws which ushered in the period of free trade which lasted up until the First World War.

There is a second group which emerged in the 1970s when the modern libertarian movement appeared in the United States and include works by John Hospers, David Friedman, and Murray Rothbard, . Several of these were designed to be political “manifestos” for groups like the Libertarian Party (founded 1971).

One might also pinpoint the period of the last 10 years as the latest burst of activity with works by Eric Mack, Richard Ebeling, Deidre McCloskey, and perhaps George Will.

I have been putting online as many of the “first wave” of these books as I can find.

Here is my list ( a version of which is at my website in the section on “The Great Books of Liberty”:

First wave:

  • Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen (Ideas presented in an Attempt to determine the Limits of State Activity) (1792, 1854)
  • Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique, applicables à tous les gouvernemens représentatifs (The Principles of Politics which are applicable to all Representative Governments) (1815)
  • Gustave de Molinari, Les Soirées de la rue Saint-lazare (Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street) (1849)
  • Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (1851)
  • JS Mill, On Liberty (1859)
  • Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Ethics (1879)
  • Bruce Smith, Liberty and Liberalism (1888)

Second wave (20th century before the modern libertarian movement emerged)

  • Ludwig von Mises, Liberalismus (Liberalism) (1927)
  • Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960)
  • Milton Friedman (with the assistance of Rose D. Friedman), Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago, 1962)

Third wave (which coincided with the emergence of the modern libertarian movement):

  • John Hospers, Libertarianism – A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow (Los Angeles: Nash, 1971)
  • David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism (1973)
  • Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty (New York: Macmillan, 1973)
  • Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1980; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980)

And the current, perhaps “Fourth” wave:

  • Eric Mack, Libertarianism (Key Concepts in Political Theory. Polity, 2018)
  • Richard Ebeling, For a New Liberalism (American Institute for Economic Research, 2019)
  • George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility (Hachette Books, 2019).
  • Deirdre McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (Yale University Press, 2019)

Of course, in spite of this latest wave of libertarian activity, the world may nevertheless still end up in an ideological and political shipwreck for lovers of liberty.

[Théodore Géricault, “Scène de Naufrage” (Shipwreck Scene) or “The Raft of the Medusa” (1818–19)]

The Institut Coppet’s Collected Works of Molinari

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Institut Coppet, Oeuvres complètes

The Institut Coppet is a fabulous resource for material on the very rich and fascinating French classical liberal tradition. It was founded in 2010 by Damien Theillier, a philosophy teacher in Paris, its current president is Mathieu Laine, and its very active publishing program is headed by the indefatigable Benoît Malbranque. The Institute is named after the Chateau in Switzerland owned by Madame de Staël (Germaine Necker) which served as a place of refuge for French liberals fleeing the oppression of Napoleon. Thus today, the Institut Coppet serves as an intellectual refuge for those French liberals who wish to escape the oppression of the modern Gallic interventionist state, which is just as “Napoleonic” as anything created by either Napoleon I or Napoleon III.


Picture from the Canton of Vaud, Switzerland, website

As part of the celebrations in 2019 of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), the most radical of the French classical liberals, the Institut Coppet has launched a massive publishing program to publish the complete works of Molinari. To date they have published 4 volumes which takes us up to the year 1847.

I say “massive” because by my reckoning Molinari, since he lived to be 92, wrote an awful lot. In my revised bibliography of his works (2018) I counted 44 stand alone books, 9 books for which he wrote a preface or an introduction, and 18 pamphlets or reprints of articles he had written. Then there is his enormous output of articles he wrote, primarily for the Journal des Économistes and for his magazine L’Économiste belge in the 1850s and 1860s. What is harder to discover are the articles he wrote very early in his career for journals such as la Revue générale biographique, La Nation, and Le Courrier français, and also the material he wrote over many decades for the Journal des Débats. I stopped counting at 240 but Benoît Malbranque has uncovered another 400 just for the period of the 1840s.

I discovered the work of Molinari as an undergraduate at Macquarie University in Sydney in the 1970s, wrote my Honours History thesis on him in 1979 ( “Gustave de Molinari and the Anti-statist Liberal Tradition”, and have been working on him ever since. For the centennial of his death in 2012 I assembled an anthology of his writings on the state, “Molinari’s Theory of the State: from “The Production of Security” to Rule by the “Budget-eating Class”” (in French and PDF only unfortunately).

For the bicentennial of his birth in 2019 I did the following:

  1. updated my earlier anthology (now in French in HTML),
  2. wrote a new, long introduction to his thought , “Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912): A Survey of the Life and Work of an “Économiste Dure” (A Hard-Core Economist)” and introductions to each of the texts (in English)
  3. assembled “The Collected Articles by Gustave de Molinari from the Dictionnaire de l’économie politique (1852-53)” which would have constituted another book in their own right, with an introduction by me in English; the articles are in French.
  4. assembled another anthology of Molinari’s “Collected Writings on the Production of Security (1846-1901)” for which I wrote an introduction “Was Molinari a true Anarcho-Capitalist?: An Intellectual History of the Private and Competitive Production of Security” (Sept,. 2019).

The pinnacle of my celebrations of his life and thought was to have the publication by Liberty Fund (I had hoped in 2019) of the translation I had edited of his great work from 1849, Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare; entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété (Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street: Discussions on Economic Laws and the Defence of Property), for which I had written a long introduction. I posted the 2016 draft of the translation on the OLL website, and my introduction; and an updated draft in 2019. Unfortunately as a result of all the turmoil at Liberty Fund it is not clear when, or even if, this work will be published. This is a very great pity as a publication date of 2019 would have been the 200th anniversary of his birth and, for me at least, the 40th anniversary of my undergraduate honours thesis on him.

But the Institut Coppet were able to get their act together and 4 volumes of Molinari’s earliest work (1842-1847) has appeared in print and in PDF. Regrettably it is not all available in HTML (only the pieces from 1842) so it can be searched by scholars interested in Molinari’s life and thought.

The table of contents of the first 4 volumes is available in HTML and can be found here, as well as the introduction by the editor Benoît Malbranque, La jeunesse belge de Gustave de Molinari .

Plutology I: William Edward Hearn (1826-1888)

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I first came across the name William Hearn in Rothbard’s history of economic thought where he discusses some early precursors of Austrian economics.1

That he lived and worked in Australia at the University of Melbourne (1854-88) was an added bonus. Hearn’s book on Plutology (1864) should really have been the second volume in the series CIS Classics planned by the Centre for Independent Studies which only saw one volume published (2005) before it was aborted. That was Bruce Smith’s Liberty and Liberalism 1887) which I have resurrected and put online here.

I have put online four of Hearn’s books. He only wrote one on economics, the oddly named Plutology (1865)2 based on his lectures at the University of Melbourne. For decades it was the only economics book published in Australia until the 1920s, but since he was a laissez-faire free trader and, given the direction Australian economic policy went, nobody must have read it or taken any of its ideas to heart. The new Commonwealth of Australia which arose in 1901 was based on four sturdy pillars of statism, namely, protectionism, compulsory wage arbitration, the “White” Australia policy to prevent Asian immigration, and massive government ownership and control of infrastructure (or what was called at the time “state socialism”). Hearn would have been appalled.

Hearn’s contributions to economics have been dismissed by historians such as La Nauze as either superficial or plagiarised.3 Rothbard’s keen eye immediately saw that Hearns was moving in an entirely different direction to the mainstream “classical school” against which Hearns has been improperly judged and compared. In my own reading I was struck by how “Bastiat-like” his arguments were. Note especially this interesting chapter on the proper functions of the state: Chapter XXIII. “Of the Impediments Presented to Industry by Government”.

The Australia economist Greg Moore at the University of Notre Dame4 also takes Hearn’s ideas more seriously, seeing them as part of a much larger social theory about individual liberty and free societies, which he pursued in the volumes which followed Plutology which dealt with law, the sociology of the family and the clan, and the rise of the state. I have put all these books online (in facs. PDF) to begin with, but have made an initial attempt at putting Plutology in HTML as well.

David Kemp in his multi-volume history of Australian liberalism also has some positive things to say about Hearn: David Kemp, A Free Country: Australia’s Search for Utopia, 1861–1901 (Melbourne: The Miegunya Press, 2019). Section on Hearn in Chap. 10 “Liberalism and the New Economics.”

My collection of Hearn’s books can be found here. The HTML version of Plutology here.

  1. Volume II: Classical Economics (2006), “14.8 Plutology: Hearn and Donisthorpe,” pp. 463-65. See Hearn’s bio page for an extract from this here. [↩]
  2. From the Greek πλοῦτος, ploutos, ‘wealth’ , and λόγος logos , ‘speech’, ‘account’, ‘story’. [↩]
  3. J. A. La Nauze, “Hearn, William Edward (1826–1888)” Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 4, (Melbourne University Press, 1972). [↩]
  4. Gregory Moore, “The Anglo-Irish context for William Edward Hearn’s economic beliefs and the ultimate failure of his Plutology,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought (2009). [↩]