Feb 1, 2004
The Big Wolowski
[cross-posted at Praxeology.net]
Murray Rothbard in several of his works refers favourably to an article on property rights by the 19th-century French economists Louis Wolowski and Émile Levasseur. (Rothbard sometimes refers to Wolowski as Léon Wolowski, perhaps confusing him with the Léon Faucher who wrote a rather similar article on property for Charles Coquelin's 1852-53 Dictionnaire de l'économie politique.) I thought the article deserved to be placed online, so I decided to track it down.
Rothbard usually cites the article from Lalor's Cyclopedia of Political Science. I had trouble tracking the volume down until I tried the alternate spelling Cyclopædia, and started treating"Lalor" as the editor's name rather than as part of the title. Then it turned out that my own university library possessed a copy. Joseph Lalor's Cyclopædia turns out to be a massive work -- three volumes of about 1000 pages each, in tiny print -- of mostly classical liberal opinion on a variety of subjects. Many of the entries are by prominent French libertarians of the day, including Frédéric Bastiat, Charles Dunoyer, and Gustave de Molinari. These entries, an introduction informs us, are mainly excerpted from various French reference works, most of which are not named; the translators are usually not credited either. (Lalor seems to have been a bit cavalier with sources.) Rothbard seems to have assumed that the Wolowski-Levasseur piece was written expressly for the Cyclopædia, but I began to suspect that this was not the case.
Two of the French reference works the introduction does deign to mention as sources are Coquelin's above-mentioned Dictionnaire and Maurice Block's Dictionnaire général de la politique (1st edition 1863-4, 2nd edition 1884). I already knew the piece wasn't in the Coquelin Dictionnaire, but wondered whether it might be in the Block. Happily, the Bibliothèque Nationale website turns out to carry an online PDF version of the second volume (only) of the second edition (only), and I was able to confirm that this did indeed contain the Wolowski-Levasseur article"Propriété." Since Wolowski (1810-1876) would have been deceased by 1884, I surmise that the article first appeared in the original 1863-64 edition, though I have not confirmed this.
On examining the original French version I discovered that the English translation, the version Rothbard knew, was greatly compressed by comparison with the French version, which contained, for example, an interesting critique of intellectual property absent from Lalor’s English version, as well as a note from Wolowski providing important iformation about the article’s authorship:
Murray Rothbard in several of his works refers favourably to an article on property rights by the 19th-century French economists Louis Wolowski and Émile Levasseur. (Rothbard sometimes refers to Wolowski as Léon Wolowski, perhaps confusing him with the Léon Faucher who wrote a rather similar article on property for Charles Coquelin's 1852-53 Dictionnaire de l'économie politique.) I thought the article deserved to be placed online, so I decided to track it down.
Rothbard usually cites the article from Lalor's Cyclopedia of Political Science. I had trouble tracking the volume down until I tried the alternate spelling Cyclopædia, and started treating"Lalor" as the editor's name rather than as part of the title. Then it turned out that my own university library possessed a copy. Joseph Lalor's Cyclopædia turns out to be a massive work -- three volumes of about 1000 pages each, in tiny print -- of mostly classical liberal opinion on a variety of subjects. Many of the entries are by prominent French libertarians of the day, including Frédéric Bastiat, Charles Dunoyer, and Gustave de Molinari. These entries, an introduction informs us, are mainly excerpted from various French reference works, most of which are not named; the translators are usually not credited either. (Lalor seems to have been a bit cavalier with sources.) Rothbard seems to have assumed that the Wolowski-Levasseur piece was written expressly for the Cyclopædia, but I began to suspect that this was not the case.
Two of the French reference works the introduction does deign to mention as sources are Coquelin's above-mentioned Dictionnaire and Maurice Block's Dictionnaire général de la politique (1st edition 1863-4, 2nd edition 1884). I already knew the piece wasn't in the Coquelin Dictionnaire, but wondered whether it might be in the Block. Happily, the Bibliothèque Nationale website turns out to carry an online PDF version of the second volume (only) of the second edition (only), and I was able to confirm that this did indeed contain the Wolowski-Levasseur article"Propriété." Since Wolowski (1810-1876) would have been deceased by 1884, I surmise that the article first appeared in the original 1863-64 edition, though I have not confirmed this.
On examining the original French version I discovered that the English translation, the version Rothbard knew, was greatly compressed by comparison with the French version, which contained, for example, an interesting critique of intellectual property absent from Lalor’s English version, as well as a note from Wolowski providing important iformation about the article’s authorship:
"At the moment when we began the drafting of this article, a serious indisposition prevented us from devoting to all the necessary time to it. Our friend, M. Levasseur, kindly agreed to come to our aid with his invaluable assistance; the form given to the expression of thoughts common to both of us belongs to him." [Translation mine – RTL]The Lalor version of the article is now available in the Molinari Institute online library, at: http://praxeology.net/LW-EL-PLV.htm. We plan in the future to post the complete version, both in the original French and in a new English translation; but until then, at any rate the version that Rothbard read and recommended is easily accessible for the first time.