The world has always needed this: a gigantic collection of Bastiat's greatest work in a single edition. All of the best essays by this giant of liberty are here — 1000-plus pages of it.
Claude Frédéric Bastiat was an economist and publicist of breathtaking intellectual energy and massive historical influence. He was born in Bayonne, France on June 29th, 1801. After the middle-class revolution of 1830, Bastiat became politically active and was elected justice of the peace in 1831 and to the Council General (county-level assembly) in 1832. He was elected to the national legislative assembly after the French Revolution of 1848.
Bastiat was inspired by and routinely corresponded with Richard Cobden and the English Anti–Corn Law League, and worked with free-trade associations in France. Bastiat wrote sporadically starting in the 1830s, but in 1844 he launched his amazing publishing career when his critically acclaimed article on the effects of protectionism on the French and English people was published in the Journal des Economistes.
The bulk of his remarkable writing career that so inspired the early generation of English translators — and so many others — is contained in this collection.
If we were to take the greatest economists from all ages and judge them on the basis of their theoretical rigor, their influence on economic education, and their impact in support of the free-market economy, then Frédéric Bastiat would be at the top of the list.
This book bring together his greatest works and represents the early generation of English translations. These translators were like Bastiat himself: people from the private sector who had a love of knowledge and truth and who altered their careers to vigorously pursue intellectual ventures, scholarly publishing, and advocacy of free trade.
Thus does this collection, totaling 1,000 pages plus extensive indexes, represent some of the best economics ever written. Bastiat was the first, and one of the very few, to be able to convincingly communicate the basic propositions of economics.
This collection — possibly more than anything ever written about economics — is the antidote for economic illiteracy regarding such things as the inadvisability of tariffs and price controls, and everyone from the novice to the PhD economist will benefit from reading it.
