The Law, original French title La Loi, is a 1849 book by Frédéric Bastiat. It was published one year after the third French Revolution of 1848 and one year before his death of tuberculosis at age 49. The essay was influenced by John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government and in turn influenced Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. It is the work for which Bastiat is most famous along with The candlemaker’s petition and the Parable of the broken window. In The Law, Bastiat states that “each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property”. The State is a “substitution of a common force for individual forces” to defend this right. The law becomes perverted when it punishes one’s right to self-defense in favor of another’s acquired right to plunder. Claude Frédéric Bastiat (June 30, 1801 – December 24, 1850) was a French classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly. He is buried at San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome.
Should be required reading in Washington, D.C. What book is is important enough that I read it once a year? The Law by Frederic Bastiat. Written in 1848 as a response to socialism in France, this book essay is just as relevant today as it was then. “What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. Each of us has a natural right-from God-to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one…