One of the many fascinating footnotes in Dr. Hulsmann’s Mises - Last Knight of Liberalism is this entry: “The uniqueness of Mises’s role was still recognized some twenty years later by one of the last surviving students of the French laissez faire school. Writing to Mises in September 1957, the professor A. Bastet said that Mises was the successor “to our master Yves Guyot” - who himself was the successor to Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912). And Molinari was successor to the great “proto-Austrian” Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850).” p. 737n.
Who was Yves Guyot (1843-1928)? Guyot was one of the leading French laissez-faire economists at the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century. He began his career as editor of several Republcian newspapers and journals in the late 1860s and early 1870s when France was wracked by the turmoil of the Paris Commune and Franco-Prussian War. In the Third Republic he was elected to the Paris Municipal Council and in 1885 to the national Chamber of Deputies. In 1889 he was appointed Minister of Public Works. He was active in classical liberal economic circles as editor of the Journal des Économistes, president of the Paris Société des Économistes, a member of the British Cobden Club and the Royal Statistical Society, and also a member of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. Among his many interests were taxation policy and opposition to socialism in all its forms. Wikipedia entry Wikiberal entry Works available at The Online Library of Liberty: The Tyranny of Socialism (1893) One of several books Guyot wrote attacking socialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In this volume, in the tradition of Bastiat, he criticises what he calls “socialistic sophisms,” socialistic legislation, strikes, subsidies to business, and the connection between militarism, protectionism, and socialism. Socialistic Fallacies (1910) In this volume he provides a brief history of socialist ideas and an extensive critique of Marxist socialism. Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed (1912) In this volume, drawing upon his experience as the French Minister for Public Works, Guyot discusses the differences between public and private trading, with reference to railways, trams, public housing, and various government monopolies, and examines the negative financial, administrative, political, and social consequeces, such as disorder, corruption, and waste. More works by Yves Guyot in French.
