Belesbat, Boisguilbert, and the Natural Order of the Free Market

[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]

The Laissez-Faire Utilitarian: The Seigneur de Belesbat

One of the influential antimercantilist and pro-laissez-faire thinkers of the last decades of Louis XIV was Charles Paul Hurault de l’Hopital, Seigneur de Belesbat (d. 1706). The great-grandson of a chancellor of France, Belesbat was an influential member, during the 1690s, of an oppositional political salon in the Luxembourg palace in the Luxembourg gardens district of Paris. The salon met weekly at the home of Belesbat’s first cousin, François Thimoleon, the Abbé de Choisy.

In the autumn of 1692, Belesbat presented six memoirs to Louis XIV, copies and extracts of which were reproduced throughout France. Belesbat focused on the wars with the Dutch as being the key to the economic problems of France. States became wealthy, advised Belesbat, not by seizing or destroying the commerce of other nations, but by encouraging trade that conformed to the natural interest of the nation. Instead of the French government trying artificially to capture Dutch commerce, it should allow its own agriculture to flourish.

Belesbat emphasized that God had woven all peoples into an interdependent network of reciprocal advantage by means of trade and specialization: “There is nothing that one [country] lacks which the others do not produce.... God... having created men for society, has so well divided them that they cannot do without one another.” Restrictions on trade by government only crippled this natural interdependence; therefore, merchants should be free to pursue “the commerce of their choice.” The direction of economic activities in each country is usually determined by the natural resources and the type of capital investment in that area.

It is not the case, concluded Belesbat, that trade in one country benefits one party at the expense of others. Instead, the reverse is true. Moreover, freedom for merchants in domestic trade was as important as in foreign trade. The network of trade and exchange is internal as well as external. Furthermore, in a prefigurement of the Hayekian argument for the free market, Belesbat noted, as Professor Rothkrug points out, that

Every transaction, either domestic or foreign, required complete freedom because it was carried out in special circumstances by merchants whose fortunes depended partially upon the secret and unique procedures by which each conducted his business.1

State regulation, then, far from protecting the market, would cripple the liberty necessary to any prosperous trade. Natural resources, Belesbat explained, are worthless without people to cultivate them and to engage in trade and commerce. Belesbat then engaged in a sophisticated analysis of the elements necessary for successful market activity:

We call commerce an exchange between men of the things they mutually need... In both [domestic and foreign trade] the principles for success are the same. And despite the fact that there is an infinite number of ways in which to practice trade, all different, they are founded on a great liberty, large capital investment, a lot of good faith, much application, and a great secrecy. Each merchant, having his particular views, in such a way that he who profits from a sale of his products, does not prevent the one who buys them from profiting considerably by disposing of them... Thus the entire success of commerce, consisting as it does in liberty, large capital investment, application, and secrecy, prevents princes from ever intervening without destroying the principles.

Thus Belesbat, in addition to a sensitive appreciation of the role of individual entrepreneurship and energy by the merchant, and of the mutual profitability of exchange, sees, if only vaguely, that the great variety of individual trade can yet be analysed correctly in a small number of formal laws, laws or truths which apply to all entrepreneurship and exchange.

In one vital area, Belesbat advanced significantly beyond the laissez-faire views of Fenelon and others, who were so opposed to the luxury of the absolutist court and the nouveau riche bureaucracy that they wished the government to restrict luxury production and trade. Belesbat swept away such inconsistent exceptions to laissez-faire. The natural laws of trade, which for him encompassed considerations of utility, applied to luxury as well as to all other branches of production and trade.

Belesbat eloquently concluded from his analysis that “It must be taken as a principle that liberty is the soul of commerce, without which... good harbors, great rivers, and... fertile [lands] are of no use. When liberty is absent nothing is of any avail.”2 In short, the government should “let commerce go where it wishes” (laissant faire le commerce que l’on voudra).

The Seigneur de Belesbat made it clear that he grounded his hope of applying libertarianism in an extreme form of early utilitarianism, a utilitarianism that he expected would be applied by the king. The king was urged to channel people’s self-interest into free and harmonious activities by seeing to it that virtue is rewarded and evil (theft and other interference with trade) is punished. In that way, men would become accustomed to pursue virtue. Belesbat went very far in utilitarianism by maintaining that “justice” was always and only utility or self-interest. A fatal weakness in his theory was the confident view that the self-interest of the king, who was supposed to put all this into effect, was always identical to the harmonious self-interest of his subjects.

Belesbat also anticipated the later view that Montaigne-type scepticism about reason, rather than providing support for going along with state absolutism, teaches men humility so that they will accept liberty and the free market. Reason, however, is not the sole, and not even the main, motive for the drive for the exercise of power: acquisition of wealth and privilege would seem to be motive enough. And since there will always be people and groups who will seek to seize and aggrandize state power for their own purposes, scepticism towards reason and a rational political philosophy seems more likely to subvert any determined opposition to statism than to hinder any statist drive for power.

Boisguilbert and Laissez-Faire

The best known of the late seventeenth-century French advocates of laissez-faire is Pierre le Pesant, Sieur de Boisguilbert (1646–1714). Born in Rouen into a high-born Norman family of judicial officers, and a cousin of the poet-dramatist Corneille brothers, Boisguilbert was educated by the Jesuits, and eventually purchased two judicial offices at Rouen. He served there as lieutenant-general of the court from 1690 until his death. Boisguilbert was also a large landowner, businessman, litterateur, translator, attorney and historian.

Boisguilbert was a combination of genius and crank. His first and most important work, Le Detail de la France (A Detailed Account of France), published in 1695, was revealingly subtitled La France ruinée sous le règne de Louis XIV (France Ruined Under the Rule of Louis XIV).3 Boisguilbert penned innumerable letters to successive controllers-general of France on the virtues of free trade and laissez-faire, and on the evils of government intervention. After 1699, Boisguilbert kept hammering away at controller-general Michel Chamillart for years, but to no effect. Chamillart kept refusing him permission to print his tomes, but Boisguilbert published them anyway, finally printing his collected works under the title Le Detail de la France in 1707. In that year, the same year that Vauban’s Dixme Royale was censored, Boisguilbert’s work was also outlawed, and its author sent into brief exile. He returned under promise of silence, but promptly reprinted his book four times between 1708 and 1712.

Arguing for laissez-faire, Boisguilbert denounced the mercantilist preoccupation with amassing specie, pointing out that the essence of wealth is in goods not coin. Money, Boisguilbert explained, is just a convenience. Thus the influx of bullion from the New World in the sixteenth century only served to raise prices. If nature were left to herself, all men would enjoy plenty and the government’s attempts to improve upon nature only caused havoc. The simple remedy for the manifold evils under which France was suffering was, as Professor Keohane puts it: “for the government to stop interfering with natural patterns of trade and commerce, and laissez faire la nature. No superhuman effort for reform was needed, only the cessation of ill-considered effort.”4

Collective or social harmony, Boisguilbert wrote, arises from the efforts of innumerable individuals to advance their self-interest and their happiness. If the government removed all artificial restrictions upon trade, all participants would have incentive to produce and exchange, and self-interest would then be free to do its constructive work. Only the use of coercion or state privilege pits one self-interest against another, whereas submission to the wise natural order would ensure harmony between individual greed and universal benefit. As Keohane summarizes Boisguilbert, “So long as we do not interfere with her [Nature’s] workings, our attempts to get as much as we can for ourselves will maximize everybody’s happiness in the long run.”5

It is not, then, that individuals aim at the general good while pursuing their own self-interest. On the contrary, it is the glory of the natural order that, while individuals aim at their own “private utility,” they will also promote the interests of all. Although individuals may try to subvert the laws and gain at the expense of their neighbours, the natural order of liberty and laissez-faire will maintain peace, harmony, and universal benefit. As Boisguilbert declares, “But nature alone can introduce that order and maintain the peace. Any other authority spoils everything by trying to interfere, no matter how well-intentioned it may be.” In the free market established by the natural order, “the pure desire for profit will be the soul of every market for buyer and seller alike; and it is with the aid of that equilibrium or balance that each partner to the transaction is equally required to listen to reason, and submit to it.”

The natural order of the free market prevents any exploitation from taking place. Thus: “Nature or Providence [had]... so ordered the business of life that, provided it is left alone (on le laisse faire) it is not within the power of the most powerful in buying goods from some poor wretch to prevent the sale from providing the subsistence of the latter.” Everything works out all right “provided that nature is left alone (on laisse faire la nature)… [i.e.,] provided that it is left free and that no one meddles with this business save to grant protection in it to all and to prevent violence.”6

Boisguilbert also specifically demonstrated the counterproductive results of government intervention. Thus, when the French government tried to alleviate hunger by lowering grain prices and controlling trade, all it accomplished was to diminish the cultivation and production of grain, and hence to intensify the very hunger that the government was trying to relieve. Such intervention, in the summary of Professor Keohane,

would make sense only if grain, like manna or mushrooms, sprang up without human effort, since it ignores the effects of low prices on the habits of cultivators. If government simply ceased tampering, the French economy, like a city from which a siege is lifted, would regain its health. Free to set their own price for grain, and to import grain freely throughout the land, Frenchmen would be plentifully supplied with bread.7

In illustrating the nature and advantages of specialization and trade, Boisguilbert is one of the first economists to begin with the simplest hypothetical exchange: two workers, one producing wheat and the other wool, and then to extend the analysis to a small town, and finally to the entire world. This method of “successive approximation,” of beginning with the simplest, and then extending the analysis step by step, would eventually prove to be the most fruitful way of developing an economic theory to analyse the economic world.

Graphically illustrating the respective workings of power and market, Boisguilbert supposes a tyrant who tortures his subjects by tying them up within sight of each other, each surrounded by an abundance of the particular good that he produces: food, clothing, liquor, water, etc. They would be made instantly happy if the tyrant were to remove their chains and allow them to exchange their surplus goods for those of one another. But if the tyrant says, no he can only remove the chains of his people when some war or other is settled, or at some future time, he is only adding ridicule and mockery to their grievous torture. Here, Boisguilbert was bitterly mocking the reply that Louis XIV and his ministers habitually made to the pleas of reformers and oppositionists: “We must wait for the peace.” Again, like the other oppositionists, war was exposed as the standard excuse for maintaining the crippling interventions of government.

Like Belesbat, Boisguilbert had no patience with inconsistent reformers who tried to make an exception to laissez-faire in luxury products. To Boisguilbert, natural wealth was not just biological necessities; rather “true wealth consists of a full enjoyment, not only of the necessaries of life, but even of all the superfluities and all that which can give pleasure to the senses.”

In addition, Boisguilbert was perhaps the first to integrate discussion of fiscal policy with his general economic doctrines. Adopting Vauban’s proposal for the elimination of all taxes and their substitution by a single direct tax of 10 per cent on all incomes, Boisguilbert analysed and bitterly denounced the effects of indirect taxes on agriculture. Heavy taxes on grain, he pointed out, have raised costs and crippled grain production and trade. For four decades, he argued, the French government had virtually declared war on consumption and trade by its monstrous taxation, resulting in severe depression in every area of the economy.

On the free market, in contrast, everyone benefits, for “trade is nothing but reciprocal utility; and all parties, buyers and sellers, must have an equal interest or necessity to buy or to sell.”

Hence, with Belesbat and Boisguilbert, the focus of the classical liberal attack on statism shifted from moralistic denunciation of luxury or pernicious Machiavellism to meeting mercantilist doctrine on its own utilitarian grounds. Even setting aside classical morality, then, utility and general happiness require the private property and laissez-faire of the natural order. In a sense, old-fashioned natural law had been extended to the economic sphere and to the meshing of individual utility and self-interest through the working of the free market.

In contrast to devout mystics like Fenelon, Belesbat and Boisguilbert were in harmony with the new mechanistic cosmologies of Isaac Newton and others of the late seventeenth century. God had created a set of natural laws of the world and of society; it was the task of man’s reason, a reason universal to all, regardless of nation or custom, to understand those laws and to achieve their self-interest and happiness within them.

In the economy, free trade and free markets, through the harmony of reciprocal benefits, advanced the interest and happiness of all by each seeking his own personal utility and self-interest. The Golden Rule, and absence of violence, was the natural moral law that uncovered the key to social harmony and economic prosperity. While such analysis was not in itself anti-Christian, it certainly replaced the ascetic aspects of Christianity with an optimistic, more man-centred creed; and also it was consistent with the rising religion of deism, in which God was the creator, or clock-winder, who created the mechanism of the universe and its self-subsistent natural laws, and then retired from the scene.

As Professor Spengler has pointed out,

the eighteenth century conceptualized the economic (or social) universe. It made the hidden processes of the social order visible even as the seventeenth had become aware of those of the physical order and made them visible; it generalized to the realm of man the notion of the “frame” hidden behind “the most common Phenomena” and the “Invisible Hand” by which “Nature works” in “all things.”

As for Boisguilbert, his contribution was to be

among the first, if not the first, to conceive, albeit imperfectly, of the system of relations that underlies the economic order.… His contribution consisted in his sequestering (however imperfectly) the economic order from the total societal system, in becoming aware of the comparatively autonomous character of this order, in discovering the essentially mechanical and psychological connections binding men together in an economic order and in drawing attention to the manner in which the economic order was subject to disturbances by impulses originating in the political order.8

It should also be mentioned that it surely seemed easier to convince the king and his ruling elite of the general utility of private property and the free market, than to convince them that they were behaving as the heads of an immoral and criminal system of organized theft. So the basic strategy of trying to convert the king led inexorably to at least a broadly utilitarian approach to the problems of freedom and government intervention.

• 1Rothkrug, op. cit, note 1, p. 333.
• 2See Rothkrug, op. cit., note 1, pp. 333–4.
• 3Under the circumstances, the title of the English translation two years later, The Desolation of France, does not seem inaccurate.
• 4N.O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 352.
• 5Ibid., p. 353.
• 6Quoted in Cole, op. cit., note 2, p. 266. Or, in another place: “il est seulement nécessaire de laisser agir la nature.” (It is only necessary to let nature act.) See Joseph J. Spengler, “Boisguilbert’s Economic Views Vis-à-vis those of Contemporary Reformateurs,”History of Political Economy, 16 (Spring 1984), p. 81n.
• 7Keohane, op. cit., note 11, pp. 354–5.
• 8Spengler, op. cit., note 13, pp. 73–4. Spengler adds that the term “invisible hand” was first used by the English writer Joseph Glanville, in his The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), a century before Adam Smith used the concept similarly. In his philosophical essays, Smith treated philosophy as “representing the invisible chains which bind together” seemingly unconnected phenomena. Ibid., p. 73n.