Book Club: The Law and The Humanitarian with the Guillotine
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident...it is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals...
This week, the Fighting for a Free Future Book Club discussed Frederic Bastiat's timeless essay “The Law” and Isabel Paterson’s “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine”. These writings were fascinating to read and discuss within the context of the modern world. I hope that you enjoy reading them as much as we did:
My speaking notes introducing the texts at the Book Club meeting are below.
The Law by Frederic Bastiat
Introductory note
Bastiat wrote The Law in a time of upheaval, with France confronting radical changes and the temptations of socialism. His conviction - that law must serve liberty and justice - resonates just as urgently today as it did in 1850 when it was published. He challenged his contemporaries, and he challenges us, to ask:
What is the true purpose of law? How should a free society organise itself?
Bastiat believed the law should be the “organisation of the Right of legitimate defence,” restricted to “protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties”. He warned that when the law is diverted from its true purpose, it becomes “the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check”.
Key quotes
“No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.”
“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”
“If law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organised combination of the individual's right to self-defence... Is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?”
Bastiat’s critique of ‘legal plunder’ remains as provocative and relevant now as ever:
“See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”
Questions for discussion:
When does law serve justice and liberty, and when does it become a means for oppression?
What does it mean for law to be “respectable”?
Is it possible for citizens to reconcile law and morality, or must one give way to the other?
The Humanitarian with the Guillotine by Isabel Paterson
Introductory note
Written in 1943 as a chapter in her book The God of the Machine, she wrote this piece in the shadow of cataclysmic twentieth-century upheavals. Paterson’s work challenges us to reconsider the role of benevolence, power, and unintended harm in society. With sharp wit and unsparing criticism, she reminds us that the greatest dangers to liberty often lurk in the hands of those intent on doing good.
Key Quotes
Paterson sets the tone with a startling observation:
“Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.”
What is the fatal error that leads well-meaning persons to support policies resulting in suffering, coercion, and destruction? Paterson is clear:
“Then there must be a very grave error in the means by which they seek to attain their ends. There must even be an error in their primary axioms, to permit them to continue using such means. Something is terribly wrong in the procedure, somewhere. What is it?”
She charts the path from well-intentioned collective policy to the most infamous horrors of history:
“Certainly the slaughter committed ... by barbarians ... or avowed tyrants, would not add up to one-tenth the horrors perpetrated by rulers with good intentions.”
Paterson insists that charity, when institutionalised as a collective force, loses its moral core:
“It is not decent to make a man strip his soul in return for bread. This is the real difference when charity is enjoined in the name of God, and not on humanitarian or philanthropic principles.”
With biting irony, she exposes the logic of collectivist “help”:
“The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God. ... It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.”
Paterson’s core lesson is that relief and charity, when transformed by centralised power, lead not to human flourishing but to dependence, oppression, and - ultimately -terror:
“The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.”
Questions for discussion
How can intentions be perverted by systems of collective force?
What is the difference between genuine charity and compulsory political redistribution?
How does society safeguard against the tyranny of “doing good”?
I hope you find these two pieces, separated by a century and written far before our modern world took shape, both interesting and relevant in thinking about how we got to today’s problems and how we can fix them.
“The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action”.
Isobel Paterson, like C.S. Lewis and others, show how moralists come to play God but with ego and false assumptions.
But we don’t want to be inhuman either.
We need balance and humility to be of most help.