Produced by David Widger
ECONOMIC SOPHISMS
By Frédéric Bastiat
Translated From the Fifth Edition of the French, by Patrick James
Stirling, LLD., F.R.S.E.
Author Of "The Philosophy Of Trade," Etc.
Edinburgh: Oliver And Boyd, Tweeddale Court.
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
Bastiat's two great works on Political Economy--the Sophismes
Économiques, and the Harmonies Économiques--may be regarded as counterparts of each other. He himself so regarded them: "the one," he says, "pulls down, the other builds up." His object in the Sophismes was to refute the fallacies of the Protectionist school, then predominant in France, and so to clear the way for the establishment of what he maintained to be the true system of economic science, which he desired to found on a new and peculiar theory of value, afterwards fully developed by him in the _Harmonies_. Whatever difference of opinion may exist among economists as to the soundness of this theory, all must admire the irresistible logic of the _Sophismes_, and "the sallies of wit and humour," which, as Mr Cobden has said, make that work as
"amusing as a novel."
The system of Bastiat having thus a _destructive_ as well as a
_constructive_ object, a _negative_ as well as a _positive_ design, it is perhaps only doing justice to his great reputation as an economist to put the English reader in a position to judge of that system as a whole. Hence the…