This nation, like much of the world, owes an enormous debt to ancient Greece and Rome. Our political framework, our political philosophies, even our government buildings reflect theirs. Many of our noblest ideas descend from the thinking of Greek philosophers, and Latin words and concepts pervade our language. The epic and lyric poetry of the ancients, their public rhetoric, their art, their musings, their values, and their histories have shaped the way we think and write and govern.
That said, we tend to ignore an unpleasant fact: The ancients were almost constantly at war. To a large extent these societies were designed for war. (They also relied heavily on slavery, but that is a topic for another day.).
I was fortunate to spend a semester studying the work of Frédéric Bastiat, the great nineteenth-century French economic pamphleteer. Beloved by libertarians, he is unequalled in his ability to defend freedom and personal responsibility.
Even Frédéric Bastiat, an insightful libertarian thinker, could not imagine communism of the twentieth-century kind.
Much can be said about Bastiat, but here I’d like to mention his discussion of communism, for two reasons. First, it illustrates the fluidity of the terms socialism and communism in the mid-nineteenth century—something historians should not forget. For another, it illustrates how brilliant people can be both unusually perceptive about what is around them, but still blind about the future.
Warning: Like most writers about Bastiat, I find it hard not to quote him at length. He says things much better than most of us can.
