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Journal of Libertarian Studies, 5, no. 3 (1981)

The Intellectual Origins of Liberal Anti-statism

1. Edmund Burke, William Godwin and Benjamin Constant

The origins of liberal anti-statism go back at least to the radical dissent of the Levellers in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. Their efforts to defend themselves against the power of the state, which wanted to control of prohibit their religious practices, resulted in some of the earliest liberal defenses of property rights and the natural right of the individual to enjoy his liberty. One of the most thoroughgoing statements of the Leveller defense of natural rights in property and liberty is Richard Overton's "An Arrow Against All Tyrants," written from prison in 1646. In this tract, Overton was able to abstract the principles of natural rights from the more general question of religious liberty and was thus able to develop a secular theory of rights as a basis for political rights. He began his pamphlet with the following paragraph:

To every individuall in nature is given an individuall property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any: for every one as he is himselfe, so he hath a selfe propriety, else could he not be himselfe, and on this no second may presume to deprive any of, without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature, and of the Rules of equity and Justice between man and man; mine and thine cannot be, except this be: No man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man's; I may be but an lndividuall, enjoy my selfe and my selfe propriety, and may write my selfe no more [than] my selfe, or presume any further; if I doe, I am an encroacher and an invader upon another man's Right, to which I have no Right. For by naturall birth, all men are equally and alike borne to like propriety, liberty and freedome, and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a naturall, innate freedome and propriety (as it were writ in the table of every man's heart, never to be obliterated) even so are we to live, every one equally and alike to enjoy his Birthright and privilege; even all whereof God by nature hath made him free.

However, it was not until the eighteenth century that these liberal ideas of liberty and property were developed into a more comprehensive theory of the state. The young Edmund Burke, for example, in his Vindication of Natural Society written in 1756, extended the religious dissenter's criticism of "artificial," imposed religion to the institutions of government. In what is probably the first individualist, liberal anarchist tract ever written, Burke condemned all forms of political society for being the main cause of war, suffering and misfortune.

Making a distinction common to many anti-statist liberals, Burke divided society into two types. Natural society, "founded in natural appetites and instincts, and not in any positive institution," was not based on force and allowed individuals to freely exercise their God-given natural rights as their individual consciences directed. Artificial or political society, on the other hand, was based on the imposition of "artificial" laws and regulations, thus usurping the proper function of the individual to deter­mine his own peaceful behavior. Immediately, conflict arises from the divi­sion of society into two classes, the governed and the governors, the latter seeking to increase its power and wealth at the expense of the former. After cataloguing the political history of the world, a "history dyed in blood, and blotted and confounded by tumults, rebellions, massacres, assassinations, proscriptions," Burke squarely places the blame on political society of whatever kind. He accused all states of being essentially the same, in that they are based on force and exist for the benefit of those privileged minorities who are powerful or influential enough to control them. He wrote:

we have shown them [the three simple forms of artificial society: democ­racy, monarchy and aristocracy], however they may differ in name or in some slight circumstances, to be all alike in effect; in effect to be all tyrannies. ... ln vain you tell me that artificial government is good, but that I fall out only with the abuse. The thing! the thing itself is the abuse!

Burke recognized that even in "natural society" there would still exist the need for the protection of life, liberty and property because "[it] was ob­served that men had ungovernable passions, which made it necessary to guard against the violence they might offer to each other." As Molinari was to argue later, the "grand error" that men made in attempting to solve this problem of how to protect themselves from aggression was to establish or accept a monopoly government with the powers to provide this service. Men now found themselves worse off than when they were without the state because they now faced a nationally organized engine of oppression, whereas before they had faced only disorganized bandits or, at most, local feudal lords and their mercenaries. The perennial problem arose of who was to guard against the guardians.

Burke's failure was in not being able to provide a positive view of the form his "natural society" would. take. He limited himself to a brilliant criti­cism of the basis of all political institutions from a natural rights' perspec­tive and did not elaborate on "natural society" save for the assertion that "[in] a state of nature it is an inevitable law that a man's acquisitions are in proportion to his labours" and that each individual would have the right to defend his person and property as he saw fit. Burke did not have the tools at hand which were necessary to explain how an anarchist society would function. He lacked the Smithian free-market economics that Moli­nari later used to explain how society could provide itself with defense ser­vices without resorting to the coercive monopoly of the state.

A similar problem was faced by William Godwin. Like Burke, he defended individualism and the right to property, drawing considerably, in fact, from Burke's Vindication for his criticism of the state, and he concluded that the state was an evil which had to be reduced in power if not eliminated completely.

Above all we should not forget that government is, abstractly taken, an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgement and individual con­science of mankind; and that, however, we may be obliged to admit it as a necessary evil for the present, it behoves us, as the friends of reason and the human species, to admit as little of it as possible, and carefully to observe, whether, in the consequence of the gradual elimination of the human mind, that little may not hereafter be diminished.

Godwin looked forward to the day when the entire state could be done away with completely.

With what delight must every well-informed friend of mankind look forward to the auspicious period, the dissolution of political govern­ment, of that brute engine which has been the only perennial cause of the vices of mankind, and which, as has abundantly appeared in the present work, has mischiefs of various sorts incorporated with its sub­stance, and no otherwise removable than by its utter annihilation!

But he still faced the difficult problem of adequately explaining how the stateless society which he envisioned could work in practice. Godwin's state­less society presupposed a sudden change in the behavior of the individuals comprising that society. He was convinced of the essential goodness of uncorrupted men and believed that when political institutions disappeared men would become "reasonable and virtuous."

Simplify the social system in the manner which every motive but those of usurpation and ambition powerfully recommends; render the plain dictates of justice level to every capacity; remove the necessity of implicit faith; and we may expect the whole species to become reason­able and virtuous.

Godwin's solution to the problem of aggression involved the use of juries which would act as advisory bodies in "adjusting controversies." These juries would reason with the offender, urging him to forsake his errors, and if this failed, could subject the offender to the criticism and ostracism of his peers. But it is difficult to see how these juries could exer­cise this function without using force to capture criminals and, as Molinari was at pains to argue in Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare, how they could recompense the victims for any losses caused by the crime. Godwin's unrea­sonable optimism about the unaggressive nature of man in a stateless society unfortunately was common to many other anarchists, especially communist anarchist thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It is quite probable that Molinari was well aware of William Godwin's and, through him, Edmund Burke's anti-statism. Godwin's ideas were brought to France by Benjamin Constant among others. Constant had studied at the University of Edinburgh from 1783 to 1784 and was aware of English political thinking of this entire period. He corresponded with God­win in 1795 and 1796 and expressed his desire to translate Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice into French. Godwin had even sent a copy to the French National Convention via John Fenwick on February 15, 1793, and his novel, Caleb Williams, had been reviewed in La Decade in January, 1796. In 1799, Constant announced his forthcoming translation of the En­quiry but it never appeared due to the "political events then and in the future" which "caused the indefinite postponement of its publication." However, Constant was able to popularize many of Godwin's anti-statist ideas through his writings and his speeches at the Tribunate. Only with the publication of Constant's Oeuvres manuscrites de 1810 did 576 pages of translation appear, along with an essay on Godwin and his ideas. Con­stant was influenced by Godwin to reject state intervention and coercion and to support all forms of voluntary and peaceful activity and he, in turn, influenced many of the laissez-faire liberals who worked with and influ­enced Molinari.

2. Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say

The other major intellectual current that influenced the anti-statism of the French laissez-faire liberals, and Molinari in particular, was the economic ideas of Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say. Both these theorists described how society would operate in the absence of government control and intervention in the economy. Smith argued that government interven­tion was immoral, because it violated individuals' natural rights to property, and that it was generally inefficient. The selfish actions of individuals in the unhampered market promoted the general interest in spite of having no explicit intention of doing so:

every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it ... and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he fre­quently promotes that of society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it.

In the stateless economy "the simple system of natural liberty" would pre­vail and this "spontaneous order" of the market, rather than the imposed order of the state, would maximize wealth and ensure the uninterrupted use of each individual's justly acquired (whether by first use or by peaceful exchange) property. Thus:

All systems of preference or restraint therefore being completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every map, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper per­formance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be suffi­cient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society.

Molinari was to use Smith's two concepts — the spontaneous order of the market and the system of natural liberty — to build his theory of extreme lib­eral anti-statism.

Jean-Baptiste Say popularized and extended Smith's ideas of the free market. He defended the right to property more rigorously than Smith and his conclusions had a greater influence on the anti-statism of Molinari. Say considered any barrier to the free use or abuse of property a violation of the individual's rights. He condemned slavery and military conscription and argued against taxes for the same reasons, especially if they were in excess of the "minimum" necessary to protect the public. In that case

it would be difficult indeed not to view this excess as a theft, a gratuitous sacrifice seized from individuals by force. I say "seized by force" even under representative governments, because even their authority may be so great as to brook no refusal.

To a liberal like Say, force could never legitimize the activity of the state, even in so important a matter as taxation. Say, like Molinari, went to great pains to denounce the use of force in all human affairs, especially when used by the state or the privileged political classes. The state was nothing more than a tool used by the politically privileged to maintain an "artificial order" which "endures only through force, and which can never be reestab­lished without injustice and violence." It was because the state was an arti­ficial body that it had to be limited in scope as much as possible. Say con­cluded that it must "never meddle in production" and, as a general prin­ciple, "[if] government intervention is an evil, a good government makes it­self as unobtrusive as possible" because government "can unfortunately always rely upon the negligence, incompetence and odious condescensions of its own agents."

The greatest enemies of the laissez-faire liberals were the monopolies, whether granted to privileged individuals or exercised by the state itself. Consistent with his defense of property rights and his general disdain for the state, Say made an initial attack on all government monopolies which Moli­nari was later to develop into his theory of free-market anarchism. Say argued:

The government violates the property of each in his own person and faculties when it monopolizes certain professions such as those of bankers and brokers and sells to privileged elites these exclusive rights. It violates property even more seriously when, under the pretext of public security or simply that of the security of the state, it prevents a man from traveling or authorizes an officer or commissioner of police or judge to arrest him, so that no man is ever completely certain of the disposition of his time and faculties or of his ability to complete any enterprise. Could the public safety be any more effectively threatened by a criminal whom everyone is against and who is always so quickly caught?

Not only was monopoly a violation of individual property rights but it was also inefficient. No central authority could know the needs of all consumers because this information was dispersed throughout the economy.

Say even made a tentative step towards Molinari's anarchism when he suggested that public services should be made competitive by having their coercive monopoly destroyed. His scheme was to "open all public services to free competition" in order to make them as cheap and efficient as other industries whose activities were regulated by the market.

While recognizing the extreme difficulty involved in allowing the pay­ment of public services to be regulated by the same principle of free competition which presides over the majority of all other social transac­tions, we must agree that the more this principle is applied to the admin­istration of States, the better managed will be their interests.

Like Molinari, Say quotes the important passage from Smith's Wealth of Nations which argues that the reason justice was so cheap in England was that the separate courts competed for clients by offering them the speediest service at the lowest price. As a principle of justice, Say argued that those who consume a good or service should be the ones to pay for it. When the production of security is monopolized by the state, the purchaser's rights are violated because the range of choice has been artificially limited and he thus is forced to pay a monopoly price. The excess of the monopoly price over the "necessary" or free-market price is equivalent to the theft of that amount of property from the consumer. To overcome this problem, Say proposed to follow Smith's example in Wealth of Nations and allow compe­tition in the pricing of court services. Each litigant would be free to choose the court and judge that best suited him. Fees would be made up of three components: a levy set by the province, a premium paid to the particular judge, and an honorarium proportional to the "values under litigation" which would be payable after the judgment had been given. In some cases, for example in criminal trials, the costs would be borne by the losing party.

Anticipating Molinari by some twenty years, Say argued that only the competition provided by the free market could give the consumers of secur­ity a service that was "prompt, equitable and of reasonable cost." The mar­ket would encourage the courts and the judges to recognize the interests of the consumers since it would be their voluntary patronage that paid their salaries. In order to attract as many clients to their court as they could, the judges would be

interested in being honest in order to garner a wide reputation for equity and be frequently called to sit in judgment. They would be motivated to end trials promptly in order to expedite the greatest number. Finally, the cost of litigation would not be out of proportion to the interests in ques­tion and there would be no useless costs.

Molinari later added considerably to Say's early formulation of free-market anarchism by introducing the idea of paying for police services and protec­tion by contracting individually with insurance companies. He was even to argue that national defense could be better supplied by competing com­panies on the free market and that small proprietary communities would gradually replace the leviathan state. It was with Molinari that the two dif­ferent currents of anarchist thought converged: he combined the political anarchism of Burke and Godwin with the nascent economic anarchism of Adam Smith and Say to create a new form of anarchism that has been vari­ously described as individualist anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, or free­market anarchism.

3. The Ideologues: Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer

Both Comte and Dunoyer were influenced by the economic liberalism of Say. Together with Saint-Simon they developed the doctrine of Industrielisme based on their class analysis of society in which the warrior class, with political privilege, and the industrial class, the result of the unhampered market, were in constant conflict. In their economic theories Comte and Dunoyer argued that the market, with all the voluntary exchanges that took place in it, was the antithesis of force. Thus the market, identified with society, was completely separate from the state and antagonistic towards it. As the historian Albert Schatz argued:

Liberalism thus tends to create a fundamental antagonism between the individual and the State — an antagonism which does not exist in classi­cal doctrine, one which views the individual and the State as two forces inversely proportional to one another. Consequently, there is a tendency in liberalism, at first potential, later active, to strip the State of any role in the economy. We will see this originate in Dunoyer's extension of classical doctrine and later result in a more or less disguised form of anarchism.

There can be no question about the implicit anarchism of Comte's and Dunoyer's liberalism. Dunoyer, for example, thought that in the future the state would merely be an appendage of the market and would gradually wither and die as the market expanded. Perfection would be reached when "everyone works and no one governs," and "the maintenance of public safety would no longer demand the intervention of a permanent, special force, the government to this extent disappears." A colleague and fellow liberal, Augustin Thierry, echoed Dunoyer's sentiments when he wrote that "it was in losing their powers that the actions of governments [have] amelio­rate[d]" and that, if given a choice between an oppressive state apparatus and "anarchy," he believed that "the excesses of the police are 'far more fatal than the absence of the police." In Comte's words: "the less [government] makes itself felt, the more the people prosper."

The anarchism of Comte and Dunoyer was dependent on their view of the evolution of societies. Like Molinari, they believed that "as we become more civilized, there is less need for police and courts." The advance of industrielisme would dissolve the state until there was complete freedom to trade and move across national borders.

These monstrous aggregations were formed and made necessary by the spirit of domination. The spirit of industry will dissolve them. One of its last, greatest and most salutary effects will be to municipalize the world ... centers of actions will multiply and ultimately the vastest regions will contain but a single people composed of an infinite number of homogeneous groups bound together without confusion and without violence by the most complex and simplest of ties, the most peaceful and the most profitable of relationships.

J. L. Talmon described the final stage of this gradual evolution of the industrial society of the liberals as a community where

among themselves they would settle matters by way of contract, war­ranted by their own corporations and their laws and customs. Since the feudal-military-clerical State was in no position to render real assist­ance, but only to do harm, or worse — to extort ransom, the industrial classes developed almost a religion of non-interference by the State. Liberty became identified with the absence of government, individual freedom with isolationism. The experience of feudal-clerical rule was universalised into a philosophy teaching that government as such is a natural enemy. (Emphasis added)

Comte and Dunoyer contributed to the Journal des Économistes (Dunoyer was in fact one of the founders of the Société d'Économie Poli­tique in 1842), so the writings of these two theorists were well known in free­trade liberal circles. Molinari acknowledged his debt to Comte in the Dictionnaire biography and admitted that he owed his insights into the application of economic analysis of state functions to Dunoyer. A closer examination of Molinari's views will show how he adapted the insights of the political and economic anarchists to forge a new and ultimately more devastating critique of the state and its coercive monopolization of the pro­duction of security.

The above summary has attempted to show that Molinari was working within a tradition of liberal anti-statism that stretched back at least as far as the seventeenth century. The influence of Molinari's anti-statist ideas will be briefly examined in th·e discussion of the influence of Molinari's ideas, where it will be argued that a continuous thread of liberal anti-statist thought has existed until the present day, largely due to the pioneering work of Gustave de Molinari.

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912)

Man appropriates to himself the sum total of elements and powers, both physical and moral, which make up his being. This appropriation is the result of an effort in discovering and recognizing these elements and powers and in their application for the satisfaction of his needs, in other words their utilization. This is self-ownership. Man appropriates and possesses himself. He also appropriates, by another effort in discovering and occupying, transforming and adapting, the earth, the material and powers of his immediate surroundings, as much as they can be appropriated. This is real and personal property. Man continually acts, under the impetus of his self-interest, to conserve and increase these elements and agents which he has appropriated in his person and in his immediate surroundings and which constitute values. He fashions them, transforms them, modifies them or exchanges them at will, as he deems it beneficial. This is liberty. Property and liberty are the two factors or components of sovereignty.

What is the self-interest of the individual? It is to have absolute ownership of his person and the things that he has appropriated outside of his person, and to be able to dispose of them as he wishes. It is to be able to work alone or to freely combine his powers and other property, either wholly or in part, with that of others. It is to be able to exchange the products that he gets from the use of his private property, whether personal or real. or even to consume or conserve them. In one word, it is to possess in all its fullness "individual sovereignty." — Molinari

1. Early Years in Paris: Free Trade and Revolution

Of medium height, with abundant hair, short-sighted, but able to read without spectacles, wearing a moustache and impériale, with only a slight hardness of hearing, he [G. de Molinari] remained until quite lately physically fit and intellectually vigorous to such an extent as to ex­cite the admiration of all who saw him. Struck down by hemiplegia, he had retained all his lucidity of mind, and when death sought him out, he was still pondering over the great questions which had filled his life, and their relations to contemporaneous events.

With these words, a close friend and colleague marked the end of Gustave de Molinari's long and active life as a political economist, a life which had coincided with a broad and eventful period in French history from the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe to the mid-years of the Third Republic. Yet Molinari was not French by birth, for he was the son of Baron de Molinari, a former officier supérieur in Napoleon's Empire, who had subsequently settled in Liege as a physician. From the time of his birth on March 3, 1819, until he left Belgium for Paris in 1840, little is known of Molinari's life and upbringing. Like many others who wished to follow a carrière de lettres, he was attracted to Paris, the political and cultural center of the French-speaking world. As he hoped to establish himself in journal­ism, particularly in the new field of "economic propagandism," it is possible that he became associated with the Société d'Économie Politique which had been established in 1842 and included in its membership some of the most active political economists in France. Like Michel Chevalier, who had already established himself as a political economist as Rossi's successor at the Collège de France in 1840, Molinari took an early interest in the effect of railways on the industrialization which Europe was undergoing, and his first published essay dealt with that question. In 1846 he became involved in the Association pour la liberté des échanges following a meeting of distin­guished liberals in Paris at which he was invited to join the board of the newly formed association and be the secrétaire adjoint. Indeed, it is likely that Molinari had helped found the Paris free-trade association as it was only the second of its kind in France after Bordeaux. In addition, he became one of the editors of the association's journal, Libre-Échange.

In the mid-1840's, Molinari became increasingly active in the free-trade press in Paris, defending his ideas in the Courrier français (1846–47), the Revue nouvelle, Commerce (1848), the Journal des Économistes (of which he became an editor in 1847), and La Patrie (1849–51). He also published the first of his many books on economic and political themes. In 1846 appeared his Études économiques: sur l'Organisation de la Liberté industri­elle et l'abolition de l'esclavage and, in the following year, the Histoire du tarif: I. Les fers et les huiles; II. Les céréales. In 1848, he was commis­sioned to edit and annotate volume two of the Mélanges d'Économie poli­tique in the Collection des Principaux Économistes. Molinari's most famous work appeared in 1849, Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare, entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété, in which he pushed to its ulti­mate limits his opposition to all state invervention in the economy. Arguing that the market could better satisfy the public's need for security than could the compulsory monopoly of the state, Molinari became the most consistent of the French free-trade liberal school, with his insistence that all spheres of human activity could be described and explained by economic law.

Molinari continued his argument in the October 1849 issue of the Journal des Économistes in the essay "De la Production de la Securite" which sparked a lively debate in the Société d'Économie Politique. Although his colleagues could not agree with his foray into economic anarchism, Molinari continued to elaborate his thesis on free-market secur­ity for fifty years until old age and pessimism overtook him. Nevertheless, Molinari must be credited with being the first person to solve the anti­statists' problem of how to explain the functioning of a fully free society. Previously, anarchist or near-anarchist theorists had preferred to leave unexplained how their utopia would operate. They had simply asserted that the future society would not require a police force since mankind would no longer need protection; either there would no longer be property to steal or men would no longer want to steal, for public pressure would deter the criminal. Molinari was the first "free market proprietary anarchist" who, working within the tradition of Adam Smith and the early nineteenth­century French liberals Constant, Say, Comte and Dunoyer, combined anti­statism with the political economist's understanding of the market and how it operated to satisfy the needs of consumers.

During the 1848 revolution, Molinari had been active in trying to counter the propaganda of the socialists and the "conservatives of the status quo." He and some other "friends of economic freedom" had started the Club de la liberté du travail for that very purpose but failed because the provisional government did not or would not protect their right of freedom of associ­ation. The club was "invaded and dissolved by a mob of communists" and the members, not wishing to use violence, were dispersed by the crowd. After failing to get Charles Coquelin elected to the Constituent Assembly of April 1848, and after the collapse of their short-lived "popular journal," Jacques Bonhomme (edited by Molinari and Coquelin), the five "friends of liberty," Bastiat, Coquelin, Fonteyraud, Garnier and Molinari, could do little more in such an inhospitable climate.

The club and the magazine were not the only casualties of the revolu­tion. The Association pour la liberté des échanges was dissolved in April or May of 1848, because "the association finally despaired of making itself heard amidst the political tumult" and the events of the revolution had dis­persed the principal members so that they could no longer meet. Soon afterwards, three of the five "friends" died. Fonteyraud, "that lively and charming intellect, one of the dearest hopes of political economy" died in 1849. Bastiat, "the most able popularizer of economic truths" followed in December 1850, as did Charles Coquelin, "one of the ablest pens, one of the most eloquent voices," in August 1852. Molinari summed up the period with considerable understatement when he described it as a time when "lib­eral doctrines were decidedly not in favor." One can imagine the disappoint­ment that Molinari must have felt with the failure of all his attempts to popularize his free-trade liberal ideas. It must have been with a feeling of despair that Molinari ended the obituary of his friend Coquelin with the plea that "some day, when this noble cause has triumphed for the happiness of the human race" someone might remember them.

Despite the fact that Bastiat had been elected to both the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies during the period 1848 to 1850 and had been appointed Acting President of the Finance Committee, the 1848 revolution was ultimately a serious setback to the free-trade liberal cause. The Provisional government had been severely criticized by the économistes: Léon Faucher in the Revue de Deux Mondes, Blanqui and Wolowski at the Conservatoire, and Michel Chevalier in Les Débats and in his lectures at the Collège de France. The result was the resolution of April 7, 1848, which suppressed five chairs (one of which was the Chair of Political Economy held by Chevalier) and reorganized the Collège to remove the source of criti­cism. This maneuver was countered by the Société d'Économie Politique, which sent a delegation to talk to Lamartine. Headed by Léon Faucher and comprising de Tracy, Horace Say, Dussard, Garnier, Renouard and Moli­nari, the delegation was able to influence the Assembly to reverse the law of April 7th, and the Chairs were reestablished by a law of December 24th. It was also during the period of the provisional government that the Club de la liberté du travail was both begun by Garnier and then suppressed by vio­lence. It is no wonder that the liberals felt that "socialism declared war on political economy."

Another result of the 1848 revolution in France was the publication of the famous Dictionnaire de l'économie politique in 1852. The liberals asso­ciated with the Journal des Économistes and the Société d'Économie Politique were concerned that the ideas of the économistes were not more widely known. With the industrial revolution beginning in earnest and promising to be "far more vast and more profound than any political revolution," the government's and the working people's ignorance of the operation of the market threatened to "derail" the engine of progress. The revolution had proved to the économistes what "chasms of ignorance both people and gov­ernments have placed in the path of social progress." Because they mis­understood the market, the workers formed "coalitions, riots and revolu­tions to improve their lot." They had been fooled by the false claims of the utopian socialists and their actions could only lead to a worsening of their condition. The liberals felt compelled to popularize their theories to prevent this from happening and to apply pressure on governments to reform their outmoded and restrictive laws. The remnants of the old regime were just as harmful as the attempts of the socialists to "remake society." Since the time of the French Revolution, wrote Molinari, the governments of Europe,

whose resources the progress of production and credit continually in­creased, have decided finally that these resources are without limit and they have increased their expenditures in ever greater proportion. For half a century they have used and abused their borrowing powers. They have exhausted the blood of the living and borrowed against the resources of the unborn to satisfy their evil appetites for conquest and domination.

The liberals were convinced that the teaching of the principles of political economy was more necessary then, than at any other period in history. Taking their example from the success of the English free-traders and their Anti-Corn Law League, the French économistes planned to distribute elementary treatises, catechisms, pamphlets, tracts, and journals to as many people as would listen to them. In addition, societies and associations would be created to discuss the finer points of economic theory and to lobby the legislature to repeal or reform the custom and tariff laws.

The Dictionnaire was a valiant effort to condense the theory of political economy into a simplified encyclopaedic form which would enable the intel­igent layman to apprise himself of the latest theories and publications in vir­tually every field of economics and politics. The Dictionnaire was conceived by Ambroise Clément in 1850 and continued by Charles Coquelin until his death. Guillaumin took over the project after Coquelin's death and, with the assistance of Horace Say, Courcelle-Seneuil, Molinari and Garnier, was able to complete the dictionary in I 852 after two years' preparation. This "bazaar of political economy" aimed at combining the theory of political economy with its practical application by using academics, journalists, gov­ernment inspectors, industrialists and politicians as its contributors. Moli­nari's contribution was considerable, comprising twenty-five articles — some with considerable bibliographies — and five biographical sketches. It is likely that this was the last activity of the Paris liberal movement in which Moli­nari was engaged before he left for Belgium.

2. Refuge in Belgium

After the coup d'etat of December 1851, Molinari returned to Belgium because, as Guyot put it, "The dictatorial regime ... offended the liberal opinions of M. De Molinari." There he published a small volume on revo­lution entitled, Les Révolutions et le despotisme envisagés au point de vue des intérêts matériels (1852), in which he condemned both revolution and despotism as being destructive of life and property. Molinari extended his dislike of the 1848 revolution to the French Revolution, and a theme to which he constantly returned was the massive expansion in the size and power of the state which had followed the revolution. Although he associ­ated demagogy with revolution and reaction with despotism, he did not con­demn the French Revolution out of hand. He admired the "generous spirit which gave birth to it" and the "noble principles of tolerance and liberty which it proclaimed to the world." But these noble principles were betrayed by the revolutionary excesses which had resulted in an increase in state power rather than its much needed reduction which liberals such as Turgot had tried to achieve fully two decades before the Revolution. The inevitable result was the "scaffold at home and bayonets abroad"; barbarism rather than progress.

Molinari was fortunate enough to have been appointed professor of political economy at the Musée royal de l'industrie belge and also at the Institute supérieur du commerce in Antwerp. He was thus able to escape the stifling atmosphere of Paris under Napoleon III and devoted himself to a serious study of the theory of political economy and to the propagation of those ideas through the press. The result of his lectures at the Musée royal was his major theoretical economic treatise, Cours d'économie politique. The lectures upon which this work was based had been started at the Athénée royal de Paris in 1847 but were interrupted by the revolution. Thanks to the intervention of Charles de Brouckere, Burgomaster of Brussels and president of the Association belge pour la liberté des échanges, Molinari had been able to secure the position at the Musée royal and complete his theoretical work by 1854.

The Cours aimed at filling a lacuna which Molinari felt existed in the main body of political economic scholarship, viz.:

the absence of a sufficiently clear demonstration of the general law which, by establishing a just and necessary balance among the various branches of production as well as among the various remunerations of productive agents, creates order in the economic world.

The founders of the science of political economy had only to fight "the privileges of corporations and castes and the abuses of monopolies and pro­hibitions." By mid-century, however, the socialists' "anti-liberal and neo­mercantilist reaction" had turned the working classes, who would have benefited most from the "demolition of the old established regime," against the political economists, and the liberals now had to fight against the "beneficiaries of the abuses of the old regime" from above as well as the socialists from below. It was also necessary to defend the market system from the socialists' criticism that the market was "anarchic." Molinari was to spend his life attempting to show how the market, by the operation of known natural laws, established an ORDER which was just and necessary and that any attempt to interfere created the very "anarchy" that so con­cerned the socialists. This "regulatory principle" worked automatically and thus did not require an overseer to direct it or tinker with it. The Revolution of 1848 had affected Molinari personally and he feared the consequences of the socialists' "futile utopian vision of social reconstruction" which would disrupt the market order and bring about the "anarchy" or chaos resulting from an imposed order and which imprisoned society in an "artificial organization."

Molinari continued to write articles and reviews for the Journal des Économistes (JDE) while in Belgium as part of his "strategy" of popular­izing the ideas of political economy by means of journalism. For this reason, he began the Économiste belge on January 1, 1855, and remained with it until 1868. An interesting statement in the JDE, which often reprinted extracts from Molinari's contributions to the Économiste belge, reveals that he had in no way compromised his anti-statist indictment of government intervention. He described it as "abusive intervention of government into the domain of private activity." When offered a position in the Belgian branch of the Société d'Économie Politique he had refused because, as a commentator in the JDE put it,

he feared that his name might alienate from the Société those who re­jected the radicalism of the Économiste belge on the subject of govern­ment intervention; and, also, he wanted the journal and the Société to remain independent while lending each other mutual support.

During the fifties, Molinari continued to oppose protectionism, and he published a series of popular essays on the grain trade: "Le Commerce des Grains: Dialogues entre un émeutier, un économiste et un prohibitioniste." He then turned to the problem of war, a question which was to dominate his thought in the latter part of the century as the European powers drifted steadily towards some form of military confrontation. He had written a bio­graphical sketch of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, an eighteenth-century advo­cate of "Perpetual Peace," for the Dictionnaire and was to write a fuller biography in 1857 which included extracts on peace by Saint-Pierre, Eméric de Lacroix (Crucé), Rousseau, Necker, Kant, Bentham, de Maistre and the several Congresses of Peace.

Another issue which attracted Molinari's attention was that of state education. He argued that the state had no business providing education, which could be left to private enterprise, but that it should compel parents to provide some kind of education for their children. Molinari viewed this obligation of parents as a form of debt which the state was forced to collect on behalf of the children. He was severely criticized by Frederic Passy for letting the state get a foot in the door by admitting that the state had any role whatsoever to play in education. As far as Passy was concerned, if state intervention was harmful in the form of trade regulation, then it would be equally harmful in the case of education. The reason for Molinari's conces­sion to the state, in his otherwise thoroughly anti-statist philosophy, was his concept of "tutelage," a form of benign paternalism which he reserved for those who had not yet developed the capacity to look after themselves in the rigors of a free society (children, slaves, imprudent workers, women and prisoners).

3. Paris in Revolution

In 1860, Molinari returned to Paris, for reasons that are not clear, and in 1867 joined the Journal des Débats, becoming chief editor under the direc­tion of M. Bapst from 1871 to 1876. Molinari was present in Paris during the siege and attended many public meetings, the proceedings of which he recorded in two volumes, Les Clubs rouges pendant le siège de Paris and Le Mouvement socialiste et les réunions publiques avant le révolution du 4 septembre 1870. His aim in doing so was to show that "freedom of speech and free assembly are not so well established in France that it is superfluous to demonstrate their utility," and he defended the clubs from the charge that they had fomented the Commune by saying that they had helped main­tain morale during the siege. Rather, he claimed, the suppression of the clubs and free speech had done much to bring on the Commune. "The com­munist insurrection was organized in secret cabals. I might add that this revolution had twice failed under the regime of unlimited free speech and assembly, and that it succeeded only after the revolutionary clubs and jour­nals had been suppressed." The government had made a terrible mistake by trying to forestall the possibility of revolution by muzzling the press and banning the clubs. Freedom of speech was a "necessary freedom" and the government had no right to prevent the expression of new ideas and any attempt to experiment with new forms of business organization. Even if the government had had the competence to determine which ideas were right and which were wrong, "it ought in the very interest of science and progress avoid using it." The individual had to decide for himself whether a new idea or social organization should be adopted

[Intelligence] must be left unencumbered to sort through and refine things by its own unique devices, examination, discussion and experi­ence. It must be free if it is to preserve all of its power and productivity. No domain open to it should be closed off in advance on the pretext that its researches would be in vain, that there is nothing more to be dis­covered or that any discoveries would not be worth the effort. Who knows? Who could know? Ultimately we must resign ourselves to the upheavals brought about by the new discoveries of intellect. lt is an evil perhaps, but it is the price of progress!

Molinari realized that it had been the challenge of socialism which had awakened political economy out of its lethargy in 1848 and had prompted it to defend itself against socialist attacks on the rights of property, capital and wage labor. More importantly, it had encouraged the économistes to popularize their doctrines and, as a result, in the three years from 1848 to 1851 there had been "more done to popularize these doctrines than in the last fifty years." But the coup d'etat of 1851 had put an end to the social­ists' agitation and, in spite of the fact that their intellectual opposition had been crippled, the économistes had not been able to "win away the fol­lowers" of the socialists. They could not "substitute their ideas for those of socialism and protectionism — which is the socialism of the great industrial­ists," because the economistes had become complacent after the forced re­moval of their opponents. Molinari described the period between 1851 and 1868 as

the most sterile and vacuous period since the repression of socialist agi­tation. Alas! monopoly is as fatal to science as it is to industry. Compe­tition is as necessary a stimulant to economists as it is to the spinners of wool and cotton. In a word, socialist agitation must be given free reign if the French are to learn political economy.

In addition, the actions of Napoleon Ill's government had provided ammunition for the socialist cause by regulating industry so that new and better forms of "the organization of the production and distribution of products" could not be tried, and by severely controlling workers' organi­zations in a clumsy effort to prevent workers from improving their conditions.

The law on commercial organization has protected existing enterprises against the competition of new forms, while the laws on the registration of workers and against unions and "combinations" aim to control the price of labor and to render permanent the present means of recruiting labor and the present level of its remuneration. It is thought that this is the way to assure forever the security of industry and the peace and dis­cipline of the workshop.

The result of the regulation had been to achieve the direct opposite. The injustices that were frozen into the existing structure of industry were rightly criticized by the socialists, and the workers who chaffed under the regulations were ready to accept the remedies of the socialists as a viable solution. The tragedy was that, in looking for the causes of the evils, the socialists had not distinguished between industrialization and its regulation. Capital had been criticized instead of political privileges, and the wage system had been condemned along with the unjust regulations that prevented the workers from organizing peacefully to improve their conditions.

We have provoked a violent reaction against the very organization of industry we had hoped to fortify. Inevitably, this reaction has attributed to those economic organizations protected by the law far more vices than they actually have and to other forms virtues which they do not possess. Businesses have been held responsible for all of the evils of industry and society while the organization of labor has been exalted without measure. Because the legal regulation of the relationship between entrepreneurs and workers has locked in a vicious and inequitable situ­ation, it has fomented a civil war between capital and labor in each workshop and has rendered odious the regime of salaried labor.

To counter the privileges of the politically powerful and the misplaced criticism by the workers, Molinari and the free-trade liberals wanted complete freedom for all to think and act as they saw fit provided, of course, that the right of others to life, liberty and property was respected. Thus they defended the right of the socialists, their mortal intellectual enemies, to agitate, publish and organize to promote their own interests and ideas in the Clubs. Molinari clearly recognized the harmful effect of the socialists' ideas and their propensity to engage in violent action; but he felt that the benefits of allowing them the freedom to protest outweighed the possible harmful effects of their activity.

Despite the disorders which their agitation engenders, despite the tem­porary damage which they cause, despite the concern which they cause the government, they ought to be left entirely free, for that is a precondition of the necessary progress of ideas and facts.

Excuses for limiting the press have been invoked by every govern­ment, often to defend the most hideous institutions. Without denying the disturbances caused by liberty, we declare that this necessary evil is a small thing compared to the good which results. And no exception to this rule is made for public or socialist agitation which, apparently in the interests of public order, the government is often requested to restrain.

4. Molinari and the Journal des Économistes

Between 1878 and 1883, Molinari published in the Journal des Écono­mistes, in serial form, two of his major works of historical synthesis: L'Évolution économique du dix-neuvième siecle: Thèorie du progrès (1880) and L'Évolution politique et la révolution (1884). Like Marx, Molinari devel­oped a systematic theory to account for the rise of modern industrial soci­ety. He examined the economic and political developments that had taken place in ancient and feudal societies, the beginnings of the market economy and the rise of the state and organized warfare. He then turned to the French revolution and its effects on the course of industrial development and the increase in liberty caused by the market as it broke down the restric­tions of the old regime. One of Molinari's major themes in these two works was the gradual evolution from slavery to the "self-government" of the indi­vidual, with "tutelage" being an intermediary stage between them. He con­cluded the Évolution politique with an examination of the possible forms future society might assume under a "regime of full liberty." Molinari's theory of the evolution of free society will be dealt with in great detail in Part II of this paper, but it is perhaps worth noting here that he still main­tained that a free society would dissolve the state's monopoly over the "pro­duction of security" and that an era of "freedom of government" would then begin.

In 1881, after the death of Joseph Garnier, Molinari was appointed edi­tor of the prestigious Journal des Économistes. It was a fitting tribute to one of the leaders of the free-trade liberal school to be given editorship of the main organ for the dissemination of laissez-faire ideas in the French­-speaking world. The Journal des Économistes had been preceded by the short-lived Revue mensuelle d'Économie politique, edited by Theodore Fix from July 1833 to 1836, and by a dinner club which had met in the "Jardin turc" during the years 1843–37. Both the Journal des Économistes and the Société d'Économie Politique had their origins there and were supported by the same small group of dedicated individuals. The Journal had been founded by the indefatigable publisher Guillaumin and the first issue appeared on December 15, 1841. Its aim was summarized by Garnier in 1848 as,

[to make] war on ignorance, monopoly, regimentation, protectionism, exaggerated centralization, bureaucracy, militarism, artificial systems, unintelligent laws, privilege, and abuses. Later, they [the economists] resolved to continue the fight against all obstacles, old and new, which hindered the production, circulation, distribution and consumption of both public and private wealth.

It also printed the minutes of the meetings on the Société d'Économie Politique, official documents and laws, essays on nearly every topic of interest concerned with economics, politics, and social issues, and sum­maries of the sessions of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques. Many free-trade liberals wrote for the Journal at one time or another, among them being: Frédéric Bastiat, Cherbuliez, Adolphe Blaise, Blanqui, Michel Chevalier, Ambroise Clément, Charles Coquelin, Eugène Daire, Charles Dunoyer, Dussard, Léon Faucher, Fix, Garnier, Molinari, Mon­jean, H. Passy, Reybaud, Rossi, Horace Say, V. de Tracy, Wolowski and Richard Cobden. From 1881 until November 1909, Molinari devoted himself to the Journal des Économistes, bringing to it his considerable talent as a writer and his experience and widespread knowledge of economic and political affairs. Around him he gathered a group of contributors "whom he animated with his own zeal and enthusiasm, and of whom he made real friends." He also continued to publish a considerable amount of his own, and this period was in fact his most prolific.

Soon after he became editor, he continued his work on the evolution of industrial societies and on labor exchanges for workers. Just as industry had its exchanges to assist in the movement of capital and the dissemination of price information, so the working classes needed to pool their resources to confront big business. The Bourse du Travail (Labor Exchange) would be the meeting ground for buyers and sellers of labor, to the advantage of both parties. In 1857 Molinari and his brother Eugène had founded a journal, La Bourse du Travail, in Brussels, in an attempt to reconcile what they regarded as the false antagonisms that existed between workers and employers. Although the magazine did not last more than a few months, Molinari did not lose interest in the problem. In June 1882 the Société d'Économie Politique devoted one of its sessions to the Bourse and its pos­sible influence on strikes and Molinari continued to write on this question for the next decade. Although, as Guyot claimed, Molinari invented the term and the concept of the labor exchange, the exchanges that appeared in France in the last decades of the century were corrupted forms since the buyers of labor were excluded and the exchanges were used as a weapon in the class war rather than as a means of eliminating it.

The other major works of his which appeared in this period dealt with the very intimate connection between morality and the market system. Property, peace and freedom were all defended on moral, and not just on utilitarian grounds, and the natural laws which governed the operation of the market had their origin, Molinari argued, in the divine law that gov­erned human behavior.

In July 1887 the Times had published his scheme to eliminate war by or­ganizing a "Ligue des neutres" (League of Neutrals). This league had as its aim the combination of the armies of the smaller, neutral nations of Europe in order to discourage the larger, more warlike nations from threatening them with invasion or attack. His hope was that "the more aggressive powers would ultimately disarm if, every time they menaced the peace, they were confronted by a greater force determined to defend it," but he was under no illusion that this utopian scheme had much chance of being real­ized. He knew too much about the "interests" who benefited from war and the threat of war to expect them to act in the interests of the people whose lives they threatened. Thus, the seed of his later pessimism was sown when he admitted of his peace plan "which I hoped to sketch out in this project without otherwise deceiving myself that there was any chance of realizing it in the present intellecutal climate." It was later, in his Ultima Verba, that he revealed that

My final work concerned those principles which had absorbed my life: free trade and peace. ... These fundamental ideas were its basis... ,

and again in his Théorie de l'évolution:

We may hope that one day public opinion will be intelligent enough to understand that the existence of society can be guaranteed at a cheaper cost, and powerful enough to liberate the State from the special interests which now fight to control it — not to simplify and lighten its ancient and heavy apparatus. but to complicate and expand it evermore.

Gone was the certainty of two decades earlier that the ever-advancing market would inevitably bring to an end all the government intervention which hampered its progress. Neither politicians, nor businessmen, nor workers had given up their faith in the power of the government to improve their standard of living, in spite of the free-trade liberals' arguments to the contrary. Molinari had well understood the fact that these groups which controlled or had access to the state, comprised a class which would not willingly give up the privileges that power bestowed. Unfortunately, he had badly over-estimated the readiness of the exploited classes, the workers, the consumers and the industrialists who did not seek state privileges, to iden­tify government intervention as the enemy of progress. Ultimately, his efforts at popularizing free-trade ideas had failed to win a large enough audience to influence the course of events. The result was a growing sense of pessimism in the last decades of his life as he observed the rise of statism, socialism, militarism and colonialism — forces which he had opposed throughout his long and active life. Consequently, from 1893 onwards, he began to compromise his anti-statist views, gradually abandoning his belief that competition amongst defense agencies is the best and most moral method of defending property rights. Molinari came to adopt the position of his opponents, that a single defense agency, the state, should have a monopoly on defense services within a given geographical area. In spite of this compromise in his later years, Molinari had made a major contribution to the development of anti-statist liberal ideas, being the first free-trade liberal to argue for the complete dismantling of the state, even including the "night watchman" functions that most other classical liberals defended.

Molinari retired at the end of 1909 at the age of ninety after having spent twenty-eight years as the editor of the Journal des Économistes. He was highly regarded by Guyot for "the elegance of his literary style, his strength and delicacy of expression, the appositeness of all terms employed ... [and as] one of the masters of the French language." A close family friend, A. Raffalovich, revealed to Guyot after Molinari's death that he had often given to charity. Such acts of kindness had gone unnoticed by his critics who persisted in describing him as one of "the group of the intransigents, stalwarts, and the orthodox."

Molinari died at Adinkerque on January 28, 1912, leaving behind no school of eager followers to develop his economic and political ideas. He had been the last of the great nineteenth-century French laissez-faire liberals and when he died, so did that tradition, an anachronism in the rampant stat­ism of the twentieth century. The development of the extreme antistatism which made Molinari's liberalism so unique will be examined in Part II.