The Law

Summary

The Law (La Loi) is a pamphlet of about sixteen thousand words that Frédéric Bastiat published in Paris in 1850, during the Second Republic, when he sat in the Legislative Assembly and was dying of a disease of the throat and lungs. It is his most direct statement of the purpose and limits of law. Bastiat opens with an alarm: the law, which should check greed and injustice, has been turned into their instrument. He then builds from first principles. God has given each person life, together with faculties to sustain and perfect it; existence, faculties and assimilation, or personality, liberty and property, make up the human being, and they come before all legislation. Men make laws because these things already exist, not the reverse. Every individual has a natural right to defend his person, liberty and property, and law is the collective organization of that right to lawful defence. Since a group cannot rightly use force for any purpose that an individual could not, law may only secure justice. Bastiat next explains how law is perverted. Human beings may live either by labour or by plunder, and when lawmaking falls to one man or one class it is used to take from some to benefit others. He distinguishes extra-legal plunder, the theft the penal code punishes, from legal plunder, and offers a test: see whether the law takes from some what belongs to them to give to others what does not belong to them. He names as forms of legal plunder protective tariffs, subsidies, guaranteed profits, and the proposed rights to work and to public assistance, and he argues that once the law becomes a prize, every class fights to control it, which explains the bitterness of politics and the dispute over suffrage. He points to the United States as the country where law keeps most nearly to its domain, adding that slavery and tariffs, the two exceptions, are the two questions that have endangered its order. The longest section answers a common objection, that law must be philanthropic as well as just. Bastiat traces the opposing idea, that the legislator forms a passive people as a potter shapes clay, through quotations from Bossuet, Fénelon's Telemachus, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Raynal, Mably, Condillac and the Jacobins Saint-Just and Robespierre, to the socialists of 1848 such as Louis Blanc. He replies that fraternity must be voluntary, that justice is a fixed and limited quantity, and that the remedy for failed systems is to try liberty, which he calls an act of faith in God and in his work. The library text is the anonymous English version printed in Essays on Political Economy.

Top Lessons

• Rights come before law

  Bastiat argues that personality, liberty and property are not created by legislation but are its cause: people make laws to protect what they already have from God. Law therefore has a fixed purpose, the common defence of individual rights.

• A test for legal plunder

  Bastiat gives a simple question for judging any law: does it take from some what is theirs to give to others what is not, so that the law does for one citizen what the citizen could not do himself without crime? He applies it to tariffs, subsidies and the proposed rights of 1848.

• When law becomes a prize

  Bastiat explains the passion of politics by the scope of law: if law can give benefits to whoever controls it, every class will fight for control. He uses this to explain the quarrel over the suffrage in France and the two dangerous questions in the United States.

• Justice and voluntary fraternity

  Bastiat does not reject charity or brotherhood; he insists they must be voluntary to be what they are. His reply to Lamartine is the centre of his case that law should be just and leave generosity to free persons.

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Medical Lens

The Law contains no medical subject matter. Bastiat wrote it while seriously ill in the last year of his life, but the pamphlet does not refer to his illness.