The Error of the Socialist Writers

by Frédéric Bastiat

　　Actually, it is not strange that during the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter,ready to receive everything -- form, face, energy, movement, life --from a great prince or a great legislator or a great genius. Thesecenturies were nourished on the study of antiquity. And antiquitypresents everywhere -- in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome -- the spectacleof a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to theprestige of force and of fraud. But this does not prove that thissituation is desirable. It proves only that since men and society arecapable of improvement, it is naturally to be expected that error,ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition should be greatesttowards the origins of history. The writers quoted above were not inerror when they found ancient institutions to be such, but they werein error when they offered them for the admiration and imitation offuture generations. Uncritical and childish conformists, they tookfor granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of theartificial societies of the ancient world. They did not understandthat knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that inproportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right,and society regains possession of itself.