Gustave de Molinari, First Anarcho-Capitalist
Of all the leading libertarian French economists of the mid- and late nineteenth centuries, the most unusual was the Belgian-born Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912). Born in Liege, the son of a Belgian physician and a baron who had been an officer in the Napoleonic army, Molinari spent most of his life in France, where he became a prolific and indefatigable author and editor in lifelong support of pure laissez-faire, of international peace, and in determined and intrasigent opposition to all forms of statism, governmental control and militarism. In contrast to British soft-core utilitarianism on public policy, Molinari was an unflinching champion of freedom and natural law.
Coming to Paris, the cultural and political centre of the French-speaking world, at the age of 21 in 1840, Molinari joined the Societe d’Economie Politique on its inception in 1842, and became the secretary of Bastiat’s association for free trade when it was formed in Paris in 1846. He soon became one of the editors of the association’s periodical, Libre-Echange. Molinari quickly began to publish widely in the free trade and free market press in Paris, becoming an editor of the Journal des Economistes in 1847. He published his first of many books in 1846, Etudes Economiques: sur I’Organisation de la Liberte industrielle et I’abolition de I’esclavage (Economic Studies: on the Organizaton of Liberty and the Abolition of Slavery).
The young Molinari, however, hit the laissez-faire-oriented Societe d’Economie Politique like a thunderclap in 1849, with his most famous and original work. He delivered a paper expounding, for the first time in history, a pure and consistent laissez-faire, to the point of calling for free and unhampered competition in what are generally called uniquely ‘public’ services: in particular, the sphere of police and judicial protection of person and private property. If free competition is better and more efficient in supplying all other goods and services, Molinari reasoned, why not for this last bastion, police and judicial protection—a view that over a century later would come to be called ‘anarcho-capitalism’.
Molinari first set forth his view in the Journal des Economistes, the periodical of the Societe, in February 1849.18 This article was quickly expanded into book form, Les Soirees de la Rue Saint-Lazare, a series of fictional dialogues between three protagonists: the conservative (advocate of high tariffs and state monopoly privilege); the socialist; and the economist (clearly himself). The final, or eleventh, Soiree elaborated further on how his concept of free market protective services could work in practice.19
A meeting of the Societe d’Economie Politique in the Autumn of 1849 was devoted to Molinari’s radically new theory as expounded in the Soirees. After Molinari had presented the essence of his proposal in a paper, the assembled libertarian dignitaries engaged in a discussion. Apparently the new theory threw them, because unfortunately no one dealt with the essence of the new doctrine. Charles Coquelin and Frederic Bastiat could only fulminate that no competition anywhere can exist without a back-up by the supreme authority of the state (Coquelin), and that the force needed to guarantee justice and security can only be imposed by a ‘supreme power’, (Bastiat). Both engaged in pure assertion without argument, and both here chose to ignore what they knew full well in all other contexts: that this ‘supreme power’ had scarcely proved to be a reliable guarantor of private property in the past or present (to say nothing, alas, of the future).
Of all the leading libertarian minds assembled, only Charles Dunoyer deigned to try to rebut Molinari’s argument. He deplored that Molinari had been carried away by the ‘illusions of logic’, and maintained that ‘competition between governmental companies is chimerical, because it leads to violent battles’. Apart from ignoring the truly violent battles that have always occurred between states in our existing ‘international anarchy’, Dunoyer failed to grapple with the very real incentives that would exist in an anarcho-c
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