The action principle, the desire for improvement is not embedded in the science but in humanity.
Category: Constructivism
LETTER FROM AN ECONOMIST TO MR. DE LAMARTINE
We are not aware of any possible labour organisation in a free country other than that of freedom, compensating itself through competition, ability and morality.
LETTERS TO RICHARD COBDEN
Communism is fought with communist arguments.
LETTERS TO RICHARD COBDEN
Begone the laws that precede the progress of opinion!
LETTERS TO RICHARD COBDEN
Let progress come from dusk or dawn, what counts is that it comes.
LETTERS TO RICHARD COBDEN
By the way, I have not lost sight of what you told me one day, that the movement, which occurred in a bottom-up process in England, needs to be top-down in France.
LETTERS TO MR. FELIX COUDROY
Unfortunately, the ideas of the day are being taken to a frightening extreme in the opposite direction: Introducing the State to everything.
RELATIONS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY WITH ETHICS, POLITICS, LEGISLATION AND RELIGION
Any given phenomenon is always found set between two other phenomena. One of these is its efficient cause, and the other its final cause;
EVIL
I have never doubted that the socialists have led astray many generous hearts and sincere minds.
THE MOTIVE FORCE OF SOCIETY
It is true that self-interest is the cause of all the evils, as well as all the benefits, that can fall to the lot of man.
RESPONSIBILITY
Free will implies the possibility of error, and error in turn implies pain and suffering as its inevitable consequences.
RESPONSIBILITY
Now, progress toward perfection always implies some degree of imperfection in the future as well as in the past.
DISTURBING FACTORS
There is hardly any effect that does not, in its turn, become a cause.
PRIVATE AND PUBLIC SERVICES
How can individuals delegate rights that they do not possess?
POPULATION
Let me note that for this term, the means of subsistence, once universally accepted, J. B. Say has substituted another term that is much more accurate: the means of existence.
POPULATION
There is a fundamental difference between the physiological capacity for reproduction and actual reproduction.
THE TWO MOTTOES
Individualism, then, accomplishes the task that the sentimentalists of our day would entrust to brotherhood, to self-sacrifice, or to some other motive opposed to self-love.
COMPETITION.
The accusation that competition tends toward inequality is far from true. On the contrary, all artificial inequality is due to the absence of competition;
ON VALUE.
We cannot feel another persons’ wants; we cannot feel another person’s satisfactions; but we can render services to one another.
WANTS, EFFORTS, SATISFACTIONS.
And besides, am I betraying my trust when I reflect on the causes of the storm and strive to act accordingly?
NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL SOCIAL ORDER
It is a far cry from a social order founded on the general laws of humanity to an artificial, contrived, and invented order that does not take these laws into account or denies them or scorns them—an order, in a word, such as some of our modern schools of thought would, it seems, impose upon us.
PEACE AND FREEDOM
In the same way, the value of an industry is based only on the wealth of its customers.
FREE CREDIT
If there were no more thieves among us, we would all be upright and happy! This is socialism’s statement of principles!
FREE CREDIT
In a word, Mr. Bastiat is devoted body and soul to the Republic, to freedom, to equality, and to progress; he has proved this on many occasions brilliantly through the way he has voted in the National Assembly.