As he put it, perhaps not as clearly as one might hope, in chap. There is Bastiat's own notion that as the economy develops and expands there is increasingly 'a common availability of things' or an increase in 'what is common to all.' And for someone steeped in the Anglo-American tradition one could interpret 'la communauté' as a French way of describing what was known for centuries in the English speaking world as 'the Commons' or 'things that are commonly owned.'īastiat believed that the three domains of property lay on a continuum with the domain of commonly owned property at one end, the domain of private property in the middle, and the domain of plundered property at the other end. With reference to property, there is the communist notion of 'la communauté des biens' (the community or common ownership of goods) and even of 'a communauté des biens et des femmes' (the community of goods and women). 'La communauté' could be translated in several ways, as simply 'community' in the general sense of a group of people.

There is also the problem of how best to translated the rather abstract French words 'la communauté' and 'la propriété'. The complexity of his argument comes about from the way he constructed his terminology to describe how each domain functioned by pairing particular nouns and adjectives for each of the domains. They also had their own kinds of cost, utility, value, and wealth, and ways in which economic progress and equality were manifested. 1Įach domain also had its own specific forms of social and economic organization and ways in which plunder was undertaken. The latter domain's relationship to communism was that Bastiat considered it to be the most extreme and developed form of plunder imaginable. The three domains are 'le domaine de la communauté' (the domain of commonly owned property, or 'the Commons'), 'le domaine de la propriété' (the domain of private property), and 'le domaine de la spoliation' (the domain of plundered property). To begin with property, Bastiat thought there were three 'domains' or realms each with their own form of property and which were clearly separated from each other by a boundary or line of demarcation. His theory of community, private property, and communism is a complex one that is not helped by the confusing plethora of terms he used to describe it. He challenged the socialist understandings of 'organization' in chap I 'Natural and Artificial Organization', 'fraternity' in 'Individualism and Fraternity' (June 1848) (CW2, 82-92) and 'Justice and Fraternity' ( JDE, June 1848) (CW2, pp. On several occasions Bastiat tried to refute some of the key concepts put forward by socialists and communists during the Second Republic.

Self-Ownership and the Right to Property.

Self-Defense: The Right to Legitimate Self-Defense.

Responsibility: The Law of Individual Responsibility and the Law of Human Solidarity.

The Rediscovery of Bastiat in the United States.

Public Choice: Bastiat and Public Choice (to do).

Economic Stories: The Use of Economic Stories to explain Economic Ideas.To see the draft of CW4 'Miscellaneous Economic Writings.To see the draft of the main body of the text: CW5.5 of the Collected Works of Bastiat in 6 volumes, Economic Harmonies. This is a draft of 'Appendix 1: Further Aspects of Bastiat's Thought' which is part of vol.

Jeux de ricochet kills noir