Hands up who knows that a major source of Tea Party ideological fervour is a long-forgotten 19th-century French economist - French no less (it wasn't so long ago that John Kerry was derided for being 'a bit French'). Indeed, hands up who has even heard of Frédéric Bastiat. The name, canonical and talismanic in Tea Party circles, means nothing to most British economists. Nineteenth-century France produced some eccentric social and political thinkers: Fourier and assorted crackpot illuminés on the left, for example, and several on the conservative right, among them the fiercely polemical Bastiat. Bastiat was a hard-core radical liberal in the tradition of Locke and Benjamin Constant, with a strong overlay of Cobden's free-trade beliefs. Born in 1801, in Bayonne, orphaned at the age of nine and raised by his grandparents, at 17 he was taken into the family export business, where he acquired both his lifelong hatred of protectionism and the wherewithal to sustain nearly 20 years of private study.

LRB 2 December 2010 | PDF Download