Frédéric Bastiat

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All About Frédéric Bastiat

Portrait de Frédéric Bastiat
Note: Si vous comprenez le français, vous lirez avantageusement la version française de cette page.

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His Life

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) is a French economist and politician, wrongfully ignored in France, though recognized as being an author of foremost importance in many other countries (in the United States in particular).

To know some more about him, I invite you to read his works, some of which is available online (see below). Other web pages listed below have biographical information in English, including the great ones hosted by The Library of Economics and Liberty, by Subir Grewal or by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. If you can read French, you can see the according french-speaking section of this site.

His Works

In the english language, your best reading is the works of Frederic Bastiat, as translated to english and excellently annotated by the FEE and published electronically by the Library of Economics and Liberty.

Many of Bastiat's works are available in French from the french version of his page. Below, I only list the works that have been translated into english and published on-line. I sorted them in a tentative chronological order. In parenthesis is the original french text, when electronically available. Within [brackets] are pointers to translations or versions of the same texts, that I found on the Internet, annotated by the ISO code of the target language. I am neither the author nor the editor of these translations, of which I cannot guarantee the quality (I did publish the french versions); I only host local copies of translations found on the web (credits given), with some reformatting, and bug-fixing when bugs were reported.

Works not (yet?) available from econlib.org:

Among the works available from econlib.org, some are so popular as to have been previously published on the internet:

A few other works by Bastiat have been published on the web, but not translated in english (yet?). See our french page for a more complete list.

PDA users (Palm, etc) may find versions of the most popular among these texts converted for use on their favorite handheld device on memoware.com.

Iconography

It seems that there are primarily two original portraits of Bastiat digitally available, whose various alternatives can be found on the Web. Below are sites proposing portraits of Bastiat (and local copies of some pictures):

Frédéric Bastiat on the Web

I am always in the search of good web pages on Frédéric Bastiat. The majority of the innumerable pages on Bastiat revealed by a web search either are devoid of any interest, or only contain a n-th copy of ``The Law´´ or another essay. However, some pages bring truly original information on Bastiat, or connect his work to the remainder of the classical liberal tradition. I have several times spent my time in resource-consuming researches, peeling the web to skim it before I compiled the following list. If you know a Bastiat-related e-document that isn't listed on this page, please tell me about it.

Some people spell Frédéric Bastiat's name without accents, as Frederic Bastiat, which is correct in english, although it is not faithful to the french original. Other people mispell his name as Frederick Bastiat, which is a plain mistake. This remark is meant as much so that the spelling be settled once and for all as it is so that your web searches can find mistaken people's pages and as it is so that these people's web searches can find this page.

The following pages are clearly superior to all the rest (apart from this very page, of course:), and contributes relevant information on Bastiat:

The following pages, although they do not bring much original information on Bastiat proper, are somehow interesting by the links they draw:

Frédéric Bastiat in other languages than English:

Dead Tree Publishing

If you like this author, you may also want to acquire a printed copy of his works.

For his original works in French, see the french version of this page.

For english translations, try your cheapest electronic book store (but Boycott Amazon). I can recommend the libertarian publisher laissezfaire.org. You can also order directly from the FEE that funded the modern translation of Bastiat.

You can also find a small a booklet of works by Bastiat from the IEDM.

There would be a lot of use for a larger electronic publication of the works of Bastiat, in French, in english, and in every language. I invite you to digitize original printed works of Bastiat, or send or let or pay me copies so I may digitize them. I also invite you to translate yet-to-be-translated works, to proof-read existing translations, and/or to convince publishers of existing translations to republish them freely on the web.

For the few who are willing to acquire a microfiche reader, John Zube sells cheap microfiches with the complete works of Bastiat, among many other things.

A few pointers

If you liked the works by Frédéric Bastiat, you might be interested by the following pages:

Bastiat.orgLiberty, as it isA site by François-René Rideau