The Utopia of Liberty

LETTERS TO THE SOCIALISTS

(L’Utopie de la Liberté: Lettres aux Socialistes – 1848)

by “A Dreamer”
[Gustave de Molinari, 1819-1912]
Translation by Roderick T. Long

I.
LTS-I.1 We are adversaries, and yet the goal which we both pursue is the same. What is the
common goal of economists and socialists? Is it not a society where the production of all
the goods necessary to the maintenance and embellishment of life shall be as abundant as
possible, and where the distribution of these same goods among those who have created
them through their labour shall be as just as possible? May not our common ideal, apart
from all distinction of schools, be summarised in these two words: abundance and justice?
LTS-I.2 Such, none among you can deny, is our common goal. Only we approach this goal by
different paths; you proceed along the obscure and hitherto unexplored defile of the
organisation of labour, while we proceed along the broad and well-known highway of
liberty. Each of us is attemping to lead in train a hesitating and groping society that scans
the horizon seeking, but in vain, the pillar of light that formerly guided the slaves of the
Pharaohs to the Promised Land.
LTS-I.3 Why do you refuse to follow the path of liberty alongside us? Because, you say, this
liberty which we so extol is fatal to the labourers; because it has thus far produced only
the oppression of the weak by the strong; because it has give birth to disastrous crises in
which millions of men have lost in some cases their fortunes and in other cases their lives;
because liberty unbridled, unregulated, unlimited – is anarchy!
LTS-I.4 Is this not the reason that you reject liberty? is this not the reason that you demand the
organisation of labour?
LTS-I.5 Well then, if we prove to you with sufficient clarity that all the evils which you attribute to
liberty – or, to make use of an absolutely equivalent expression, to free competition – have
their origin not in liberty but in the absence of liberty, in monopoly, in servitude; if we
further prove to you that a society of perfect freedom, a society disencumbered of every
 restriction, of every fetter, such as has never been seen in history, would be exempted
from the greatest part of the miseries of the present régime; if we prove to you that the
organisation of such a society would be the best, the most just, the most favourable to
advancement in the production and equality in the distribution of wealth; if we should
prove all this, I ask, what would be your response? Would you continue to proscribe the
freedom of labour and to inveigh against political economy, or would you, rather, rally
openly to our banner, and employ all the precious fund of intellectual and moral forces
with which nature has endowed you, to speed the triumph of our henceforth common
cause, the cause of liberty?
LTS-I.6 Ah! I would be willing to swear that you would not hesitate a moment. If you became
certain that you had been mistaken as to the true cause of the evils which afflict society
and the means of remedying them; if you became certain that the truth is on our side and
not on yours, no bonds of vanity, of ambition, or of stubborn partisanship would be strong
enough to keep you on the shore of error: your hearts would be saddened, no doubt; you
would bid with regret a last farewell to the dreams which have fed, enchanted, and misled
your imaginations; but in the end you would abandon these beloved chimeras, you would
overcome your repugnance, and you would come over to us. By God, we for our part
would do as much, if you should succeed in introducing into our feeble intellects a ray of
that light which converted St. Paul; if you should demonstrate, as clearly as the day, that
the truth lies with socialism and not with political economy. We hold to our system only
so far as we believe it true and just; we would burn tomorrow, with no inner rebellion,
what we have adored, and we would adore what we have burned, if it were proven to us
that our gods, Smith, Turgot, Quesnay, and J.-B. Say, are no more than wretched idols of
wood. [Online editor’s note: classical liberal economists Adam Smith (1723-1790), Anne-Robert-Jacques
Turgot (1727-1781), François Quesnay (1694-1774), and Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832). – RTL]
LTS-I.7 We and you, therefore, are alike free of all stubborn partisanship, taking this term in its
strict sense; our view rises to a higher sphere, our thoughts follow a more generous flight:
it is truth, justice, and utility that are our immortal guides through the hidden circles of
science; it is humanity that is our adored Beatrice! [Online editor’s note: a reference to Dante’s
guide through Paradise in the Divine Comedy. – RTL]
LTS-I.8 This being well understood between us, I pose plainly the question which separates us.
LTS-I.9 You maintain that society suffers from liberty; we maintain that it suffers from servitude.
LTS-I.10 You conclude that it is necessary to abolish liberty, and to put in its place the organisation
of labour; we conclude that it is necessary to abolish servitude, and to put in its place –
liberty, pure and simple.
LTS-I.11 Let us begin by specifying the facts. From what are does the freedom of labour date? It
was proclaimed for the first time by Turgot in an immortal edict [Online editor’s note: in 1776,
during Turgot’s tenure as finance minister. – RTL], and later sanctioned by the Constituent
Assembly.
LTS-I.12 I will tell later on how this sacred freedom has been newly fettered and chained; for the
moment I confine myself to noting that it was born only at the end of the eighteenth
century.
LTS-I.13 Now what, I ask you, was the condition of the labouring masses up to the end of the
eighteenth century? Were the workers happier before this time than they have been since?
LTS-I.14 If they were happier, oh! then I will agree with you that liberty has been a fatal gift for the
world, and you are right to call for an organisation of labour modeled on that of ancient
Egypt or mediæval Europe.
LTS-I.15 But if, on the contrary, the condition of the mass of people today is superior to what it was
before ’89 [Online editor’s note: 1789, inter alia the first year of the Constitutent Assembly, and thus for
Molinari the first year of (relative) freedom of labour. – RTL], will you not be obliged in good faith
to acknowledge that the freedom of labour has been a benefit for humanity?
LTS-I.16 Let us quickly run over together the history of the past, the history of those thirty centuries
of servitude which proceeded the arrival of the freedom of labour, and let us see what
spectacle it offers to our view.
LTS-I.17 Is it truly the spectacle of universal ease and equality? Would God that it were! but no. It
is on the contrary the tableau of a wretchedness more intense and of an inequality more
profound than those which afflict our sight today. And the further back into the past we
plunge, setting at ever greater distance the day when liberty finally shone forth upon the
earth, the darker and more hideous this tableau of misery and social inequality appears to
us.
LTS-I.18 If we go back as far as India and Egypt, what will we behold? two powerful castes, the
caste of priests and that of the warriors, oppressing and exploiting without mercy the
wretched multitude. At the pinnacle of these primitive societies, constructed in layers
piled one above another like blocks of granite, we find the sages, garbed in purple,
discussing the essence of divinity or the course of the stars, and the warriors intoxicating
themselves with perfumes in the recesses of their harems; while below there vegetate the
pariahs, covered in ignominy, or the slaves, moulding with their sweat and their tears the
rude, gigantic edifice of the pyramids. Did the evil of these primitive societies, we ask, lie
in liberty or in servitude?
LTS-I.19 Let us consider the Roman world. What do we find at the heart of this society, though it
was the richest and most powerful of antiquity? On one side, a patriciate composed of a
very small number of men enriched by the spoils of the universe. The life of these men, as
you know, was a succession of bloody battles and foul orgies! Beside this all-powerful
caste, gorging itself on the substance of an entire world as the vultures were seen to gorge
themselves on the corpses of those vanquished by Marius [Online editor’s note: the Roman
general Gaius Marius was said to have carried two pet vultures on his sanguinary campaigns. – RTL] –
beside this engorged and satiated caste, what do we see? the impoverished multitude of
proletarians and the debased multitude of slaves! You speak of the miseries of our
working class; good God! as painful and pitiable as these miseries may be, you can hardly
compare them with those of the Roman proletarians. At least our working class works; it
does not beg! The people of our gloomy suburbs are not to be seen lining up at the gates
of the splendid mansions of our moneyed aristocracy to beg alms! They are not to be seen
hurling themselves like dogs upon the crumbs which the rich brush from their tables with
a bored and disdainful hand! Nor yet are they to be raising daily riots to obtain free
distribution of food. No! today’s worker undeniably leads a poor life; but he earns this
life, he is able to earn it. The Roman proletarian was not in a position to earn his own life.
The wealthy patricians had monopolised all the industries and all the soil, which they
exploited by means of their slaves. Victims of this unequal competition, the proletarians’
only choice was between begging, exile, and death. They begged. And yet the lot of these
 degraded proletarians was still a thousand times preferable to that of the slaves. The
proletarian, at least, was a man; the slave, for his part, was only one more species of beast
of burden, a thing! The slave possessed nothing, not even a name. Admittedly the poor
workers of our own countryside deserve our commiseration, they who pass their lives
stooped to the ground, most often obtaining in exchange for their hard labour nothing
better than a morsel of black bread to eat, a coarse cloth to wear, and a mud hut to sleep
in; but however painful this existence, how many Roman slaves would have envied it!
Recall the accounts of Pliny and Columella.[Online editor’s note: Gaius Plinius Secundus (or Pliny
the Elder) and Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, Roman writers on agriculture. – RTL] At the heart of
the smiling countryside of Italy were to be found, at periodic intervals, those dark and
noisome dwellings which were called ergastula. These were prisons, or to speak more
accurately stables, of slaves. In the morning they filed out in bands, generally chained;
they spread out across the countryside, driven by overseers armed with whips, and each
furrow was watered with their sweat and their blood together. In the evening they were led
back to the ergastulum, where like base animals they were tied up beside their mangers.
For them no family, but a filthy promiscuity! no God, but an inexorable fate which robbed
them of their humanity while leaving them not even the hope of a life to come! Such, as
you know, was the condition of the labouring masses in antiquity. And yet the world had
not yet been subjected to the law of laissez-faire!
LTS-I.20 Later on, what further do we see? Is the situation of the people much improved with the
fall of the monstrous edifice of the Roman Empire? Morally, yes, no doubt, insofar as
Christianity affords them sublime consolations; materially, no! Throughout the Middle
Ages, the life of the people, whether serfs to the soil in the countryside or serfs to the
corporations in the cities, is but a long train of anguish. The Middle Ages are a period of
pain and sorrow, and among the groaning voices may be distinguished throughout the
great and melancholy voice of the people. Still later, after so many and such fertile
discoveries, after gunpowder had brought to justice the tyranny of the feudal lords, after
printing had dispelled the deepest darkness of ignorance, after the compass gave us a new
world, did the people cease to suffer? Under Louis XIV – under the reign of that king who
is said to have carried to such heights the glory and power of France – what was the
condition of the people? Was it superior to that of the people today? Everybody knows the
celebrated passage in Vauban’s Royal Tithe [Online editor’s note: French economist Sébastien Le
Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707). – RTL], in which that illustrious man of good will characterised
France’s situation in heart-breaking terms:
LTS-I.21 “It is certain,” he wrote, “that the evil has been pressed to the extreme, and if it is not
remedied, the humble people will fall into an extremity from which they will never rise
again; the highways of the countryside and the streets of the cities and towns are filled
with beggars driven from their homes by hunger and nakedness.
LTS-I.22 “From all the research which I have been able to make during the several years that I have
devoted myself to it, I have become very much aware that in recent times nearly one-tenth
of the people is reduced to begging, and begs indeed; as for the other nine tenths, five are
in no position to give them alms, since they themselves are but a short way from being in
the same unhappy condition; of the four remaining tenths, three are worried and
encumbered by debts and lawsuits; and in the final tenth – where I place all men of the
sword and the robe, whether ecclesiastical or lay, all the high and distinguished nobility,
all those with military or civil responsibility, the successful merchants, the
bourgeois rentiers, and the most comfortable classes – there cannot be reckoned more than
 a hundred thousand families; and I do not think I would be wrong in saying that no more
than ten thousand families, great or small, could be described as living in much ease1.”
LTS-I.23 Such was the condition of the people before freedom of labour arrived on the scene.
LTS-I.24 Moroever, throughout this long period of sufferings, what is the cry of the multitude?
What was the demand of the captives of Egypt, the slaves of Spartacus, the peasants of the
Middle Ages, and later the workers oppressed by the corporations and guilds. They
demanded liberty!
LTS-I.25 They said to each other: our consciences, our thoughts, our labour are oppressed and
exploited by men who have imposed themselves on us by violence or trickery. Some of
them forbid us to love God and pray to him otherwise than according to their formula;
others require us to study God, man, and nature according to their books, imprisoning our
thoughts within the iron circle of their systems by forbidding us on pain of death to break
it; still others, after these have enchained our souls, enchain our bodies. They require us to
live attached like a plant to the place of our birth, and there they exercise their privileges
to seize the greater part of the fruits of our labour and sweat. Let us burst asunder, even at
the risk of our lives, these bonds which bruise us; let us demand, for all, both the liberty of
the soul and that of the body; let us claim, for all, the natural right to believe, to think, and
to act freely – and our sufferings will be at an end. Will our souls not be satisfied, once we
have obtained for them free access to the immaterial realm – the ability to sail the
immense and marvelous ocean of the mind, without being held back by the iron cable of
an imposed system? Will our physical needs not be entirely met, once the material realm
is freely open to us – once no fetters forbid us to bring our labour and exchange its
products over the entire surface of this fertile earth with which providence has generously
endowed us? Let us become free, and we will be happy!
LTS-I.26 Such was the cry of oppressed humanity. Well, then! do you suppose, therefore, that
humanity was mistaken when it raised, from century to century, this long cry of distress
and hope? do you that in their ceaseless pursuit of liberty they were running after a vain
mirage? No! look into your hearts, and you will not dare to affirm it; you will not dare,
you Brutuses of socialism, to say that liberty is only an empty name!
LTS-I.27 You will doubtless object that humanity still suffers! Most assuredly. But, and I insist on
keeping this fact before your gaze, it suffered before the arrival of liberty upon the earth,
and its sufferings then were harsher and more intense than they are today.
LTS-I.28 You cannot, therefore, without being guilty of gross anachronism, charge liberty with the
ills of the labouring classes before ’89; is it with greater justice that you impute to it those
which have crushed the workers since that time? The examination of that question I
reserve to a future letter.

A DREAMER.

Journal des Économistes vol. 20, no. 82. – June 15th, 1848 (pp. 328-332).

[Online editor’s note: while this article was originally published anonymously, Molinari later acknowledged
his authorship in his 1899 book Society of the Future, where he noted:
This appeal, which incidentally bears the imprint of the confident naïveté of youth, was, as events have
 shown, entirely premature. It went unheard; but one may be permitted to hope that it will yet be heard one
day, and that socialism, by contributing to the economists its contingent of forces, will aid them in
surmounting the resistance of those selfish and blind interests that set themselves athwart the necessary
transformation of a political and economic organisation which has ceased to be adapted to societies’
present conditions of existence..]

LTS-I.n1.1 1 Collection of the Principal Economists, Guillaumin edition, vol. I, p. 34.