Austro-Athenian Empire » Industriels

Gide on Molinari

Roderick — Sun, 20 May 2012 05:24:40 +0000

According to Charles Gide’s 1899 review (now posted), the problem with Molinari’s proposed Society of the Future is that it is both too hopelessly utopian – and too similar to the society we’re already living in.

There’s no satisfying some people ….

Those That Leave Their Valiant Bones In France

Roderick — Sat, 05 May 2012 15:48:28 +0000

Graves of Gustave de Molinari and Benjamin Constant in Paris

David Hart and Robert Leroux have released an amazing-looking anthology of French Liberalism in the 19th Century, including several works not previously translated. Check out the table of contents:

Introduction

Part I: The Empire (up to 1815)
1. Pierre-Louis Roederer: Property Rights (1800)
2. Jean-Baptiste Say: The Division of Labour (1803)
3. Destutt de Tracy: The Laws and Public Liberty (1811)
4. Charles Comte: Foreword to Le Censeur (1814)

Part II: The Restoration (1815-1830)
5. Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer: Foreword to Le Censeur Européen (1817)
6. Destutt de Tracy: Society (1817)
7. Germaine de Staël: The Love of Liberty (1818)
8. Benjamin Constant: The Liberty of the Ancients and the Moderns
9. Pierre Daunou: Freedom of Opinion (1819)

Part III: The July Monarchy (1830-1848)
10. Alexis de Tocqueville: The Liberty of the Press (1830)
11. Pierre-Jean de Béranger on his Songs and Liberty (1833)
12. Gustave de Beaumont: The Abolition of the Aristocracy in Ireland (1839)
13. Pierre-Jean de Béranger: Selected Poems (1800-1840)

Part IV: The Second Republic (1848-1852)
14. Frédéric Bastiat: Disarmament and Taxes (1849)
15. Gustave de Molinari: The Private Production of Security (1849)
16. Michel Chevalier: The Protectionist System (1852)
17. Léon Faucher: Property (1852)
18. Courcelle-Seneuil: Sumptuary Laws (1852)
19. Joseph Garnier: The Cost of Collection of Taxes (1852)
20. Joseph Garnier: Laissez Faire — Laissez Passer (1852)
21. Ambroise Clément: Private Charity (1852)

Part V: The Second Empire (1852-1870)
22. Henri Baudrillart: Political Economy (1852)
23. Augustin Thierry: The Rise of the Bourgeoisie (1859)
24. Louis Wolowski and Émile Levasseur: Property (1863)
25. Horace Say: The Division of Labour (1863)
26. Maurice Block: Decentralization (1863)
27. Édouard Laboulaye: Individual Liberties (1865)

Part VI: The Third Republic (1871 onwards)
28. Hippolyte Taine: Abusive Government Intervention (1890)
29. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu: The Definition of the State (1890)
30. Yves Guyot: The Tyranny of Socialism (1893)
31. Gustave de Molinari: Governments of the Future (1899)

Unfortunately, the pricetag is currently $130, so I’ll be waiting until after my summer salary hiatus to pick it up.

Cordial and Sanguine, Part 22: War Among the Bleeding Hearts Continued

Roderick — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:44:09 +0000

Greetings from Seattle! My entry in the aforementioned Cato Unbound symposium is now up. It’s titled “In Praise of Bleeding Heart Absolutism.”

Molinari/C4SS/ALL Wild West Tour Dates

Roderick — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:28:06 +0000

Next week I’m off to Las Vegas for the APEE (Harrah’s, 1-3 April), and then to Seattle for the Pacific APA (Westin, 4-7 April). Our sessions are as follows:

APEE, Monday, 2 April:

FMAC Session 1: 1:35-2:50 p.m. [M3.9, Parlor F]:
“Topics in Free-Market Anti-Capitalism”

chair: Sheldon Richman (The Freeman)

presenters:
Gary Chartier (La Sierra U.), “Fairness and Possession”
Darian Worden (Center for a Stateless Society), “State-Capitalist Plutocracy or Free-Market Progress: Which Way Will We Go?”
Roderick T. Long (Auburn U.), “Enforceability of Interest Under a Title-Transfer Theory of Contract”

commentator: Keith Taylor (U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

FMAC session 2: 4:15-5:30 p.m. [M5.11, Laughlin room]:
“Explorations in Libertarian Class Theory”

chair: Roderick T. Long (Auburn U.)

presenters:
Sheldon Richman (The Freeman), “Seeing Like a Ruling Class”
Steven Horwitz (St. Lawrence U.), “Punishing the Poor: The Redistributive Effects of Inflation”
Gary Chartier (La Sierra U.), “Jasay and Libertarian Class Theory”

commentator: David Friedman (Santa Clara U.)

Pacific APA, Saturday, 7 April:

Molinari Society, 7:00-10:00 p.m. (or so) [G9G, location TBA]:
“Explorations in Philosophical Anarchy”

presenters:
David M. Hart (Liberty Fund), “Bastiat’s Distinction Between Legal and Illegal Plunder”
Kurt Gerry (Independent Scholar), “On Political Obligation and the Nature of Law”

commentators:
Daniel Silvermint (U. Arizona)
Charles Johnson (Molinari Institute)
Roderick T. Long (Auburn U.)

Where Minarchists Fear to Tread, Part 2

Roderick — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:17:44 +0000

As previously mentioned, the Society of Political Economy met in 1849 to critique Molinari’s market anarchist ideas. A month later, one of the participants in that discussion, free-banking theorist Charles Coquelin, developed his objections further in a book review of Molinari’s Soirées on the Rue Saint-Lazare for the Journal des Économistes. I have now translated and posted Coquelin’s review also.

These two pieces are especially important as the first critiques ever published (AFAIK) of the idea that the legitimate functions of government could and should be turned over to market mechanisms.

Where Minarchists Fear to Tread

Roderick — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:13:09 +0000

In 1849, the members of the Society of Political Economy – the chief organisation for classical liberalism in France at the time – met to discuss Molinari’s proposal for the competitive provision of security. The meeting included some of the foremost liberal thinkers of the day, such as Bastiat, Dunoyer, Coquelin, Wolowski, and Horace Say (son of J.-B.). Without exception they agreed that Molinari’s ideas were unworkable, offering much the same objections to market anarchism as those that are prevalent today. (Although, oddly, nobody raised the objection that would later lead Molinari himself to moderate his position, namely the problem of so-called “public goods.”) Even Dunoyer, who in his earlier work had come close to Molinari’s position, now held that it was best to leave coercive force “where civilisation has placed it – in the State.”

As Rothbard notes, this is an odd claim coming from “one of the great founders of the conquest theory of the State.” Dunoyer’s suggestion that democratic elections provide all the competition that’s needed in the market for security also sits oddly with his earlier interest-group analysis of electoral politics.

A summary of this meeting was published in a subsequent issue of the Society’s organ, the Journal des Économistes. I have now translated and posted this summary, which bears the title “Question of the Limits of State Action and Individual Action  Discussed at the Society of Political Economy.”

Dissolving the State

Roderick — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:55:07 +0000

I'm dissolving in the economic organism!

Newly translated and added to the Molinari Institute online library: an excerpt from chapter 10 of Gustave de Molinari’s 1888 Political Evolution and the Revolution. This extract includes the following passage, whose wording – despite its dismissive reference to “anarchists” – is clearly inspired by Proudhon’s call for the “absorption” and “dissolution” of the state “in the economic organism”:

Thus it is that, instead of absorbing the organism of society according to the revolutionary and communist conception, the municipality and the State are dissolved into this organism. … The future thus belongs neither to the absorption of society by the State, as the communists and collectivists suppose, nor to the suppression of the State, as the anarchists and nihilists dream, but to the diffusion of the State within society.

But if Molinari in 1888 was borrowing without acknowledgment from Proudhon’s 1851 General Idea of the Revolution, Proudhon’s provisions for private police and courts in that work may in turn be borrowing without acknowledgment from Molinari’s 1849 Soirées and “The Production of Security.” Once again, the so-called “capitalist” and “socialist” wings of individualist anarchism prove to be intertwined.

One Big Union

Roderick — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 02:57:42 +0000

Newly translated and added to the Molinari Institute online library: Gustave de Molinari’s “What Advances Must Be Made to Expand and Unify Labour Markets” (chapter 8 of his 1893 Les Bourses du Travail).

The Use of Knowledge In Society

Roderick — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 01:01:52 +0000

I recently came across two interesting articles by Rabah Benkemoune. Unfortunately, they’re not accessible for free unless you have university access – in which case you can read “Charles Dunoyer and the Emergence of the Idea of an Economic Cycle” and “Gustave de Molinari’s Bourse Network Theory: A Liberal Response to Sismondi’s Informational Problem.”

Benkemoune’s thesis is that Dunoyer and Molinari were among the few 19th-century French liberal theorists to take seriously Sismondi’s argument that governmental regulation is needed because informational problems pose an insuperable obstacle to the market’s ability to equilibrate. While most liberals in the Say tradition dismissed Sismondi by insisting that markets would equilibrate just fine were it not for government intervention, Dunoyer and Molinari agreed with Sismondi that there are genuine informational problems (including, for Dunoyer, a business cycle) inherent in even the freest market, but rejected Sismondi’s proposed legislative solution.

Instead, Dunoyer and Molinari argued that: a) the informational problems were in large part remediable by non-governmental means, whether education or institutional innovation (the latter including, for Molinari, informational networks such as his idea of labour-exchanges); b) to the extent that such problems are not remediable, they can be expected to be fairly mild in a genuinely free market; c) any attempted governmental solutions would face even greater informational problems.

Benkemoune also includes some discussion of Dunoyer’s and Molinari’s relationship to the Austrian school.

In related news, Annelien de Dijn’s recent book French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society? includes a fair bit of discussion of Dunoyer and the Censeur group. (Amazon offers the book at a hefty price, but it’s not hard to find the entire text for free online if you poke about a bit.)

It’s nice to see the industriels getting more scholarly attention.

French Liberalism Links Reborn

Roderick — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 03:57:38 +0000

The old links to David Hart’s theses on Comte, Dunoyer, and Molinari are tragically dead. But they have gloriously regenerated into new links, here and here.