The Law

Written in 1850, two years after the French revolution of 1848, this short pamphlet asks what law is for. Frédéric Bastiat answers that law exists only to protect each person's life, liberty and property, and that when it is used instead to take from some and give to others, for the benefit of a class or a party, it becomes 'legal plunder'. It can be recognised, he says, whenever the law takes from some what belongs to them to give it to others to whom it does not belong.

Bastiat (1801–1850), a French economist and member of the National Assembly, published the pamphlet shortly before his death, and it remains a classic of classical liberal thought. Compare Proudhon's What Is Property?, written from the opposite side.