The Motive Force of Society; F. Bastiat

But whatever may have been God's plan, what we do know as a positive fact, what human knowl edge can take as a starting point, is that man was created a senti ent being endowed with free will. This unfinished manuscript, written in 1850 during the final months of his life, is part of Bastiat's effort to explain man's role in a har monious universe. It appears as Chapter 22 in Economic Harmonies, translated by W. Hayden Boyers, edited by George B. deHuszar, avail able in paperback from The Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y. 10533, $3.50. 228 The MotiveForce of Society FREDERIC BASTIAT This is so true that I defy any one who may be astonished at it to conceive of a living, thinking, desiring, loving, acting being of anything, in a word, resem bling man - yet lacking in sensi bility or free will. Could God have done different ly? Of course, our reason says yes, but our imagination will forever say no; so radically impossible is it· for us to think of man as being without this double attribute.

Now, to be sentient is to be cap able of receiving identifiable sen sations, that is, sensations that are pleasant or painful. Hence well-being and suffering. By the very fact of creating sensibility, God permitted evil or the possibil ity of evil.

1974 THE MOTIVE FORCE OF SOCIETY 229 In giving us free will, He has endowed us with the faculty, at least to a. certain extent, of. avoid ing what is evil and seeking after what is good. Free will presup poses .intelligence and is associ ated with it. What good would it be to have the power to choose, if the power to examine, to compare, and to judge were not joined to it? Thus, every man born into the world possesses a motive force and an intellect. The motive force is that inner, irresistible drive, the very essence of all our energy, which impels us to shun evil and to seek after the good. We call it the instinct of self-preservation, personal inter est, or selr-interest. This impulse has sometimes been decried, sometimes misun derstood, but there can be no question as to its existence. We seek indefeasibly everything that to our mind can improve our lot; we avoid everything that is likely to impair it. This fact is at least as certain as that every molecule of matter possesses centripetal and centrifugal force. And even as this double movement of attraction and repulsion is the great motive force of the physical universe, so the double impulse of human. attrac tion toward happiness and human aversion to pain is the great mo tive force of the social machine.

Intelligence But it is not enough that man should be irresistibly disposed. to prefer good to evil; it is also nec essary for him to distinguish be tween them. And, this God has provided for by giving man the complex and marvelous mechan ism called intelligence. To direct our attention, to compare, to judge, to reason, to relate cause and effect, to remember, to foresee - such are, if I may so express myself, the moving cogs of this wonderful machine. The driving force that is in each of us moves at the direction of our intellect. But our intellect is imperfect. It is subject to error. We compare, we judge, we act accordingly; but we can be wrong, make a bad choice, turn toward evil, mistaking it for the good, or we may shun the good, mistaking it for evil. This is the first source of social di'scord; it is inevitable for the very reason that the main spring of human nature, self interest, is not, like attraction in the material world, a. blind force, but one guided by an imperfect intellect. Let us therefore clearly realize ·that we shall find harmony only with this restriction attached to it. God has seen· fit to establish the social order, or harmony, not upon the basis of perfection, but upon that of man's perfectibility.

Yes, if our intellect is imperfect, 230 THE FREEMAN April it is also perfectible. It develops, enlarges, corrects its errors; it repeats_ and verifies its operations; at every instant experience sets it right, and responsibility holds over our heads a whole system of punishments and rewards. Every step that we take toward error plunges us more deeply into suf fering, so that the warning signal does not fail to make itself heard, and our decisions, and consequent ly our acts, are sooner or later in evitably set aright. Under the impulse that actuates him, man, eager to pursue happi ness, quick to seize hold of it, is quite likely to seek his own good in another's harm. This is a second and fertile source of discordant social relations. But their field is limited; they are inevitably elim inated by the law of solidarity. The activity of one individual thus misdirected provokes the op position of all other individuals, who, being hostile to evil by their nature, reject injustice and pun ish it.

The Source of Progress In this way progress is achieved, and it is nonetheless progress for being dearly bought. It is the re sult of a natural, universal drive that is innate, directed by an in tellect that often errs, and sub j ect to a will that is often per verse. Halted in its course by error and injustice, it surmounts these obstacles with the all-power ful aid of responsibility and soli darity - a help that is ever present, since it stems from the obstacles themselves. This inner, indestructible, uni versal motive force that resides in every individual and makes of him an active being, this tendency of every man to seek happiness and to shun misery, this product, this effect, this necessary complement of sensibility, without which the latter would be merely a meaning less burden, this primordial phe nomenon which is the origin of all human action, this attracting and repelling force which we have called the mainspring of the so cial machine, has been disparaged by most social philosophers and political theorists; and this is certainly one of the strangest aberrations to be found in the annals of science.

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. This cannot fail to be the case, since self-interest determines all our actions. Certain political theorists, seeing this, have conceived of no better way to cut off evil at its roots than to stifle self-interest. But, since by this act they would also destroy the very motive force of our ac tivity, they thought it best to en1974 THE MOTIVE FORCE OF SOCIETY 231 dow us with a different motive force: devotion and self-sacrifice. They hoped that henceforth all so, cial transactions and arrange ments would be carried out, at their bidding, on the principle of self-abnegation. People are no lon ger to seek their own good but others'; the admonitions of pain and pleasure are no longer to count for anything, any more than the punishments and rewards of responsibility. All the laws of na·· ture are to be overturned; the spirit of self-sacrifice is to take the pla.ce of the instinct of self. preservation; in a word, no one i8 ever to consider his own personal ity except to hasten to sacrifice it to the common good. It is froni in their own hearts· so that it is this complete transformation of the human heart that certain po·· litica1 theorists, who believe them·· selves to be very religious, expect the coming of perfect social har,· mony. They forget to tell us ho~r they propose to carry out the in·· dispensable preliminary, the trans·· formation of the human heart.

Let Them Try It If they are mad enough to un·· dertake it, they will certainly not be strong enough to achieve it" Do they desire the proof? Let theml try the experiment on themselves;, let them try to stifle self-interest no longer evidenced in the most ordinary acts of their lives. They will not be long in admitting their own inability to do so. How, then, do they presume to impose upon all men, without exception, a doc trine to which they themselves cannot submit? I confess, that it is impossible for me to find anything religious, except in outward appearance and at the very most in intention, in these affected theories, these im practicable maxims, to which their authors give lip service while they continue to a.ct like the common run of humanity. Is it true reli gion that inspires in these Cath olic economists the presumptuous thought that God has done His work badly and that they must set it right? Bossuet 1 was not of this opinion when he said, "Man aspires to happiness; he cannot do otherwise."

Tirades against self-interest will 1 [Jacques Benigne Bossuet (1627 1704), bishop of Condom and of Meaux, was the outstanding pulpit orator of his day, his funeral orations for members of the royal family ranking as brilliant ex amples of French classical style and pow er. As tutor to the heir apparent, the son of Louis XIV, he wrote his Histoire uni verselle, one of the classics on which French school children were raised for generations. His vigorous stand against Protestantism and his successful leader ship of the Gallican movement, which brought increased independence to the Catholic Church in France, reveal him as an important ecclesiastical, as well as lit erary, figure.-TRANSLATOR.] 232 THE FREEMAN April never· have great scientific signifi cance; for by its very nature it is indestructible, or at least it can not be destroyed within man with out .destroying man himself ~ All that religion, morality, and polit ical economy can do is to enlighten us regarding this impulse, to show us not only the immediate but also the ultimate consequences of the acts that it prompts within us.

Greater and constantly increasing satisfaction following a momen tary sensation of pain; long and constantly aggravated· suffering following a momentary pleasure: this, in the last analysis, is moral good and evil. What determines man's choice in favor of virtue must be his higher, enlightened self-interest, but basically self interest it will always be. If it is strange that people have decried self-interest, not only in its immoral abuses, but also as the providential motive force of all human activity, it is even more strange that they have not taken it into account and have felt that they could work in the social sci ences without reference to it. With the unaccountable folly of self-pride, political theorists have, in· general, considered themselves the guardians and directors of this motive force. For everyone of them the point of departure is always the same: Assuming that humanity is a flock of sheep and that I am the shepherd, how shall I set about making humanity hap py? Or else: Given, on the one hand, a certain quantity of clay, and on the other, a potter, what must the potter do to make the best possible use of the clay?

Our political theorists may dif fer on how to decide who is the best potter, or who can mold the clay most effectively; but they agree on this point, that their function is to mold the human clay, just as it is the role of the clay to be molded by· them. They establish between themselves, in their capacity as the lawgivers, and the rest of mankind a relation ship analogous to that of guardian and ward. It never occurs to them that man is a living body, feeling, willing, acting in obedience to laws that it is not their province to invent, since these laws already exist, .even less to impose, but rather to· study. It does not occur to them that mankind is composed of a great host of beings in every way similar to themselves, in no way their inferiors or subject to them; that their fellow men are endowed both with an impulse to act and with intelligence to choose; that in everything men do they are affected by the prompt ings of responsibility and solidar ity; and that, finally, from all these phenomena there results a pattern of already existing rela1974 THE MOTIVE FORCE OF SOCIETY 233 tions that it is not the province of the social sciences to create, af~ these theorists imagine, but to ob·· serve.

Rousseau's Error Rousseau was, I believe, the po·· litical theorist who most naively exhumed from antiquity this idea, which. had already be,en resurrect·· ed by the Greeks, of the omnipo·· tence of the lawgiver. Convinced that the social order is·. a human invention, he compares it to a rna..· chine. Men are the cogs; the prince makes it ,run~ The •lawgiver invents. it at the bidding of the political theorist, who thus, in the last analysis, activates and con trols the human race. That is why the .political theorist never failH to address the lawgiver in the imperative mood; he orders hinl to give the orders: "Establish your nation on such and such a principle; .give it good manner8 and customs; make it bow to the authority of religion; orient it to, ward war or commerce or agricul ture or virtue, etc., etc." The more modest among them hide behind th,~ anonymity of the passive voice.

"Idlers w,ill not be tolerated in the republic; the population will be suitably distributed between the cities and the country; steps will be taken so that there will be nei ther rich nor poor; etc., etc." These formulas attest to the inordinate presumption of those who use them. Implicit in them is a conception of man that leaves the human race not one shred of self-respect. I know of no doctrine more false in theory or more disastrous in practice. On both scores it leads to lamentable consequences. It gives rise to the view that the social economy is an artificial arrangement that has sprung from the brain of an inventor. Every political theorist, therefore, con-· stitutes himself an inventor forth with. His greatest desire is to ,vin acceptance for the machine he has invented; his greatest preoccupa tion is to represent all other pro posed social orders as detestable and especially that which springs spontaneously from the nature of man and the nature of things.

Books conceived according to this plan are and can be only a long tirade against society. This false science does not study the concatenation of cause and effect. It does not investigate the good and the evil that acts produce, leaving it afterwards to the motive force of society to, se lect the course to be followed. No, it enjoins, it restrains, it imposes, and if it does not have the power to do these things, at least it gives advice; like a physicist who would say to a stone, "There is nothing to hold you up; therefore I order 234 THE FREEMAN April you to fall, or at least I advise you to fall." It is on this principle that M. Droz 2 has said, "The aim of political economy is to make prosperity as general as possible" ; a definition very favorably re ceived by the socialists because it opens the door to every utopian scheme and leads to regimenta tion. What would people think of M. Arago 3 if he began his course of lectures in this fashion: "The aim of astronomy is to make gra v itation as general as possible"? It is true that men are animate be ings, endowed with will power and enjoying freedom of choice.

But there is also a kind of inner force in them, a kind of gravita tion; the question is to know toward what they gravitate. If it is inevitably toward evil, then there is no remedy, and certainly none will come from the political theorist, who as a man is subject to the same unfortunate tendency as the rest of mankind. If it is toward the good, the motive force is ready-made; science has no need of replacing it with coer cion or advice. Its role is to en2 [Joseph Droz (1773-1850), French philosopher and economist, member of the French Academy.-TRANsLAToR.] 3 [Dominique Francois Arago (1786 1853), famous French scientist and statesman, member of the provisional government of 1848, and the Minister of War and the Navy.-TRANSLATOR.] lighten men's free will, to show the relation between cause and effect, confident that, under the influence of truth, "prosperity tends to become as general as possible."

A Crushing Responsibility In practice, the doctrine that places the motive force of society, not in all mankind and in the na ture of man, but in lawgivers and in governments, has even more unfortunate consequences. It tends to weigh down the govern ment with a crushing responsi bility that does not belong to it. If there is suffering, it is the fault of the government; if there is poverty, the government is to blame. For is not the government the universal motive force? If this motive force is not good, we must destroy it and choose another. Or else the blame is placed on politi cal economy itself, and in recent times we have heard it repeated ad nauseam: "All the suffering of society can be attributed to politi cal economy."4 Why not, when it is presented as having for its goal the securing of men's happiness 4 "Poverty is political economy's doing ... Political economy has to have death come to its aid ... It is the theory of in stability and theft." (Proudhon, Econom ic Contradictions, Vol. II, p. 214.) "If the people lack the means of sub sistence ... it is the fault of political economy." (Ibid., p. 430.) 1974 THE MOTIVE FORCE OF SOCIETY 235 without any effort on their part?

When such ideas· are current, the last thing that occurs to men is to turn their gaze upon thern selves, and to see whether the real cause of their woes is not their own ignorance and inj UH tice - their ignorance, which ex poses them to the law of respon sibility; their injustice, which brings down upon them the ae tion of the law of solidarity. Ho'w could men dream of blaming thenl selves for their woes when they have been persuaded that by na ture they are inert, that the source of all action, and consequently of all responsibility, lies outside themselves, in the will of the sovereign and of the lawgiver? If I had to point out the char acteristic trait that differentiates socialism from the science of eco nomics, I should find it here. So cialism includes a countless nUD1 ber of sects. Each one has its o'W'n utopia, and we may well say that they are so far from agreement that they wage bitter war upon one another. Between M. Blanc's organized social workshops and M.

Proudhon's ana,rchy, between Fourier's association and M. Cab et's communism, there is certain ly all the difference between night and day. What, then, is the corn mon denominator to which all forms of socialism are reducible, and what is the bond that unites them against natural society, or society as planned by Providence? There is none except this: They do not want natural society. What they do want is an artificial so ciety, which has come forth full grown from the brain of its in ventor. It is true that each one desires to play Jupiter to this Minerva; it is true that each one fondly caresses his own invention and dreams of his own social or der. But what they have in com mon is their refusal to recognize in mankind either the motive force that impels men toward the good or the self-healing power that delivers them from evil. They quarrel over who will mold the hu man clay, but they agree that there is human clay to mold.

Mankind is not in their eyes a living and harmonious being en dowed by God Himself with the power to progress and to survive, but an inert mass that has been waiting for them to give it feeling and life; human nature is not a subject to be studied, but matter on which to perform experiments. The Economic Approach Political economy, on the con trary, after first establishing the fa.ct that within every man are the forces of impulsion and repul sion that together constitute the motive power of society, after making certain that this motive 236 THE FREEMAN April force tends toward what is good, does not propose to destroy it and to replace it with another of its own creation. Political economy studies the highly varied and com plex social phenomena to which this motive force gives rise. Does this mean that political economy has no more to do with social progress than the study of astronomy has to do with the ac tual movement of the heavenly bod ies? Certainly not. Political econ omy deals with beings who possess intelligence and free will and as such - let us· never forget - are subject to error. Their tendency is toward the good; but they can be mistaken. The utilitarian function of science, therefore, is not to cre ate causes and effects, not to change man's natural bent,not to foist upon him social orders, in junctions, or even advice, but to show him the good and the evil that results from his own deci sions.

Thus, political economy is a sci ence concerned exclusively with the observation and description of phenomena. It does not say to men: "I urge you, I advise you, not to get too close to the fire"; or: "I have thought up a social order; the gods have inspired me to create institutions that will keep you far enough away from the fire." No; political economy notes that fire burns, announces the fact, proves it, and does the same for all similar phenomena of the moral or economic order, con vinced that this is all that is nec essary. It assumes that an unwill ingness to be burned to death is a basic, innate attitude that it did not create and that it cannot alter. Differences by which Men Grow Political economists cannot al ways be in agreement, but it is easy to see that their differences are of quite another kind from those that divide the socialists. Two men who devote themselves to observing the same phenome non and its effects, like. rent, for example, or exchange or competi tion, may not arrive at the same conclusion; but this proves noth ing except that one of the two, at least, has observed badly. The work will have to be done over.

With the help of other investi gators the chances are that the truth will finally be discovered. That is why - provided only that every economist, like every astron omer, keeps himself informed on the advances his predecessors have made - this science cannot fail to contribute to progress and conse quently to be ever more useful, constantly correcting past errors in observation, and continually adding new observations to those already made. But the socialists - isolating 1974 THE MOTIVE FORCE OF SOCIETY 237 themselves from one another, so that they may concoct, each one on his own, artificial contrivance,s out of their own imaginations-could go on pursuing their investi gations in this way through all eternity without ever. coming.· to an agreement and without one man's work ever in any way help ing another's. Say profited from Smith's investigations; Rossi, from Say's; Blanqui and Joseph Garnier, from those of all their predecessors. But Plato, Sir Thorn. as More, Harrington, 5 Fenelon, Fourier may. revel to their heart's delight in drawing up their Re: 'publics, their Utopias, their Oce anas, their Salentes, their Phalansteries, without there ever being any connection between anyone· of these flights of fancy and the others. These dreamers draw it all, men and things· alike, out of their own heads. They dream up a social order not connected with the human heart; then they invent a new human heart to go with their social order. . . . ~ o [James Harrington (1611-1677), English political philosopher, whose work on the ideal state, entitled Common wealth of Oceana (1656), advocating a written constitution, rotation of magis trates and legislators, indirect election of the presiden t, the secret ballot, and agrar ian reforms, is believed to have influ enced political thought in the United States and other democracies.-TRANS LATOR.] IDEAS ON LIBERTY Anlnteresting Question THE SOCIALIST does not trust in the goodness of humanity. He is convinced that the hungry will not be fed, the naked clothed, the aged cared for, the sick visited, unless the power of the state intervenes to confiscate from society the means necessary for the state to attend to thes,e needy. But this poses an interesting question. If the vast maj ority in our society· really share this powerful urge to help the needy, why do they fear for the fate of charity if left to the voluntary care of the people? It is a well-known fact that there is little or no administrative cost in the sort of family or neighborhood charity for which America was famous, whereas there is great administrative cost in the compulsory redistribution of wealth by government agencies. So what is there to lose in allowing the people to follow their avowed inclinations without recourse to the power of the state?

GLENN L. PEARSON, College of Religion, Brigham Young University MORRIS J. MARKOVITZ 1$ I~_ liON .•..". ····,"""""Wl'%llhiH,'":':"'l;:',",}:,:;;%}:,,,:,."".""",.,•.,.,. 'HERE TO $TAY? SOMEDAY, you will have to retire. How much money will you need to support a decent standard of living when that time comes? $7,000 for a single year? $10,000? $25,000? $100,000? There is no way to know, because there is no way to know exactly how much inflation there will be. But even without exact figures, we can know that it will take· many more dollars to support oneself in the future if inflation continues. A 35-year-old man now earning $20,000 a year may need $200,000 a year or more by the time he retires. How can he possibly save that much? Whatever he does save will be continually eroded by inflation, with the value of his dollars being stolen away gradu ally over the years. And the word "stolen" is used here in a very literal sense.