various mechanisms of diffusion, each complementary of one another. In the case of the Port
wine, the institutions are the Companhia Geral, the AssociacCio Comercial do Porto, the City
of Porto, the Parliamentary Commissions on wine and agriculture, the British Association of
Porto, and the cultural aspects of the production and trade of Upper Douro wines.3
The role of professions is not studied in the present paper. The professionalization of
economics and the emergence of an economic profession, no matter how small it was at that
time, for the implementation of economic policies and the necessity of human resources for
the expanding national and regional bureaucracies, are an aspect that bears influence on the
diffusion process. In the present case, this last factor is not relevant.4
2. Bastiat and the diffusion of economic ideas (doctrines)
Today, Bastiat is basically non-existent in any major textbook on the history of
economics (or economic thought).5 I would like to start by the general appraisal of the
importance of Bastiat that can be considered the dominant view today, if the hypothesis of
almost total oblivion is excluded: “Frédéric Bastiat, [...] a strong free trader and laissez-faire
enthusiast, [.] played merrily on the surface of the free trade argument has ever since been
the delight of many. [.] Admired by sympathizers, reviled by opponents, his name might
have gone down to posterity as the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived”
(Schumpeter 1954: 500). However, if Schumpeter recognized some “good ideas” in the work
of Bastiat, he denied any theoretical value: “I do not hold that Bastiat was a bad theorist. I
hold that he was no theorist. This fact was bound to tell in what was essentially a venture in
theory, but does not affect any other merits of his” (Schumpeter 1954: 500). And other merits,
at the level of economic journalism and debates over economic issues, his works surely have
some that I will make use of in the next sections.
3 In the present study, I do not discuss the notion of institution. It encompasses both typical organizations in the
usual sense of the word and stable sets of social and economic norms. For further discussion on that matter see
Hodgson (2000, 2002c, 2003, 2004a, 2004b). I have also developed briefly the notion of institutions applied to
the case of the port.-wine regulation in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (Jacquinet forthcoming).
4 There is a interesting treatment of the profession of economists by Joseph Spengler in a paper on the state of
the history of economics (Spengler 1968).
5 Several authors could be cited that are used as reference books for the history of economic thought and that
make reference to Bastiat (Blaug 1979, 1986, Ekelund and Hébert 1997, Samuels, Biddle and Davis 2003).