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Liberty Fund's new six-volume The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat series, of which The Man and the Statesman is the first volume, may be considered the most complete edition of Bastiat's works published to date, in any country, and in any language. The main source for this translation is the seven-volume Oeuvres complètes de Frédéric Bastiat, published in the 1850s and 1860s.

The present volume, most of which has never before been translated into English, includes Bastiat's complete correspondence: 207 letters Bastiat wrote between 1819, when he was only 18 years old, until just a few days before his untimely death in 1850 at the age of 49. For contemporary classical liberals, Bastiat's correspondence will provide a unique window into a long-forgotten world where opposition to war and colonialism went hand-in-hand with support for free trade and deregulation. Bastiat's numerous letters to Richard Cobden, a Member of Parliament and best known today as the leader of the British Anti-Corn Law League, chronicle the profound effect the Anti-Corn League had on Bastiat. The League's success in mobilizing a popular movement in England to pressure the British government into abolishing the very protectionist ""corn laws,"" in 1846, inspired Bastiat to emulate the League's success in France by starting his own free-trade movement.

The Man and the Statesman also includes articles and other writings on politics and current events that showcase Bastiat's talent as a theoretician, a pamphleteer, a journalist, and a deputy (Member of Parliament) of the nascent French Second Republic. Together with the correspondence, the writings in this volume fill an important gap in our understanding of the lesser-known Bastiat, who, in just a few short years, made a profound impact on French intellectual and political life in Paris.

"Bastiats correspondence was never published in full, and many of his letters have no doubt been lost. But the sizeable fragments that have survived teach us some essential things about his intellectual development and about the times in which he lived. Important themes flow surreptitiously from his pen; his first letters are brimming with thoughts that are often portentous if barely sketched out, dealing in particular with centralization, France, England, free trade, socialism, statism, the press, and many other subjects which are developed in length in many articles such as Anglomanie, anglophobie (1847), and many political manifestos written in the 1830s and in the 1840s. Overall, this scholarly volume reveals many unknown aspects of Bastiats work." - Robert Leroux, University of Ottawa, History of Economic Thought and Policy/2-2012

Frédéric Bastiat

Frédéric Bastiat was born in Bayonne in 1801, and died in Rome in 1850. He spent the better part of his last years in Paris, as the editor of "Le Journal des Economistes", and from 1848, as a member of Parliament. As an economist, gifted with a very clear mind and a devastating sense of humor, he renewed the Economic science of his time by developing it from the standpoint of the consumer, i.e. the people. He was the tireless apostle of freedom of exchange and freedom of choice by individuals, without constraints or subsidies. His works are as fresh and relevant today as they were 150 years ago, and his numerous predictions about the evolution of Institutions and Societies have invariably come true. As a philosopher, he was the precursor of many present day Libertarians, building normative ethics on the foundations of individual liberty and responsibility.  As a local judge, he was a paragon of efficiency and equity.  As a politician with a great foresight, he was an advocate of minimum government, and fought against the indefinite extension of public expenditure. He criticized colonial expeditions and slavery. He argued for the separation of powers, for preventing MPs from being ministers at the same time, and for limiting the number of civil servants in the Assembly. He was for a greater participation of women in politics. His major writings are “The Law”, “The State”, “Economic Sophisms”, “What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen”, “Economic Harmonies”. They have been translated into many languages. 

Личен сайт: http://bastiat.net/en/; http://bastiat.org/