In his book The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell argues that most people’s political opinions are shaped by “a particular set of underlying assumptions about the world—a certain vision of reality.” By vision, he means an instinctive sense of the correct way of understanding the world and making sense of what we see or hear.
The same insight applies to people’s understanding of political labels like libertarian or conservative. We assume we know what a libertarian means by reference to his ideology, or that we know what it means to describe a position as conservative. But often these assumptions owe more to our own vision of the world than they do to the speaker’s intention. To understand the different libertarian and conservative interpretations of the American Revolution, it is necessary to examine their philosophical roots in more detail, as political labels by themselves shed little light on their respective interpretations.
The conservative worldview is one in which people are primarily motivated by bonds of kith and kin, of faith and family, of time and place, not by theoretical philosophies or ideologies. To the conservative M. E. Bradford, the American Revolution was “conservative” in that sense. It defended the pre-existing political order. Bradford agreed with historians who argued that “the purpose of the American Revolution was to preserve (or restore) a known felicity, not to create a new one.” He rejected the argument that the Revolution was inspired by a progressive vision of utopia.
Mel Bradford’s interest in the Founding follows naturally from his Agrarianism. He believed that, unlike the French and Russian Revolutions, America’s was a conservative revolution. Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were conservative documents. According to Bradford, the American colonies revolted to preserve self-government, not to embark upon a progressive path toward Utopia.
To the libertarian, by contrast, the ideology of liberty plays the dominant role in their worldview and in their interpretation of human events. For Murray Rothbard, the Revolution was “radical,” a revolt by the American people “against the world’s greatest naval and military power.” He described it as “a true people’s war against British rule,” inspired by the ideals of liberty and property.
In the Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard argued that the ideals of liberty and property, which lie at the heart of natural rights libertarianism, are not conservative. They are “radical” in the sense that they inspire and justify revolution:
. . .the fact that natural-law theorists derive from the very nature of man a fixed structure of law independent of time and place, or of habit or authority or group norms, makes that law a mighty force for radical change.
At first sight, Bradford and Rothbard may seem to have been saying completely opposite things about the Revolution. Surely, by definition, the revolution cannot have been both radical and conservative? But closer examination reveals that both perspectives highlight important aspects of the Revolution.
Bradford emphasized “the lamp of experience” as a source of “political guidance.” He looked back to Ancient Rome and rejected the notion that the revolutionaries were motivated by “abstract doctrines and theories concerning liberty, egalitarianism, and natural rights”:
With compelling illustrations, Bradford shows that George Washington, Patrick Henry, John Dickinson, John Adams, and others turned to Rome for a model of republican government. Like the Romans, they were committed to “blood, place, and history,” to custom, to “prescribed rights and ordinances,” not to a priori political formulas or to teleological, ameliorative visions of a blessed city on the hill.
Rothbard agreed with Bradford that the Revolutionaries were not motivated by egalitarianism or utopian “visions of a blessed city on the hill.” Like Bradford, he rejected the Jaffa-ite view that the Revolution was based on a progressive vision of equality and universal human rights.
In explaining the Revolution as a defense of liberty and property, ideals central to Lockean natural rights theory, Rothbard depicted these ideals as an intrinsic component of political independence. Although he argued that the Revolution was libertarian—motivated by libertarian ideals—he did not see this as fighting purely for “abstract doctrines and theories.” Something more was required to give Lockean ideals popular appeal, and to inspire a “true people’s war against British rule.” As Rothbard explained it:
Locke’s philosophy, though ultimately highly important, was too abstract to generate the passions or to stimulate widespread reading by the bulk of the colonists. Something, [Professor Bernard] Bailyn rightly felt, was missing: the intermediate-level ideology that could stimulate revolutionary passions.
The ideals of political independence and economic liberty which stimulated revolutionary passions were not mere abstractions. The revolutionaries fought to be free and independent, not simply for the abstract “idea of liberty” in a theoretical sense. The ideals of liberty and property were intuitive—they were part of both the English and the American worldview and were the essential convictions and beliefs that gave meaning to the “blood, place, and history” which Bradford emphasized.
After all, if men fought purely for blood, place, and history, with no regard to any ideology, there could scarcely be deadly conflict between men who shared in common the same blood, place, and history. Some vision, some sense of grievance that could be philosophically explained and ideologically justified, was necessary for the cause to cohere with their understanding of what was right, just, and moral.
It is in that sense that Rothbard explained the popular American revolt as “primarily motivated by more abstract ideological or moral concerns.” He did not mean that abstract ideological or moral concerns, alone, inspired the revolution, but that these more abstract ideological or moral concerns explained why the cause was worth fighting for in the popular sense and why it was worth taking the serious step of opposing state power.
Rothbard argued that state power is rationalized by a powerful “ideology of legitimacy.” To persuade people to revolt against the state, they must have been presented with some opposing ideology that would justify them in doing so. This explains why “the major motive of the opposition, or of the revolutionaries, will be ideological rather than economic.” His point was that widespread popular revolt is not sparked simply by disagreeing with the rate of taxation, or whatever other unfair policy the state may happen to be enforcing, but by the sense of grave injustice, a “passion for justice” or “a commonly shared ideology.” He explained:
Only ideology, guided either by a new religious conversion or by a passion for justice, can arouse the interest of the masses (in the current jargon, “raise their consciousness”) and lead them out of the morass of daily habit into an uncommon and militant activity in opposition to the State.
This is not to say that an economic motive—for example, defense of their property—does not play an important role. But to form a mass movement in opposition means that they must shake off the habits, the daily mundane concerns of several lifetimes, and become politically aroused and determined as never before in their lives. Only a commonly held and passionately believed-in ideology can perform that role. Hence our conclusion that a mass movement such as the American Revolution must have been centrally motivated by a commonly shared ideology.
Understood that way, it is undeniable that ideology matters in understanding the motivation for revolution. The revolutionaries did not fight merely for the Anglo-Saxon or Scots Irish race, or for “the white race” more generally, as some people confused by critical race theories now argue. After all, the British were the same race, so race alone would not motivate Americans to fight against British rule. Something more was required to explain what they were fighting for, and why.
It is true that a shared loyalty to one’s own people—blood, history, and place—unites a people in revolution. People do not rise together unless they feel united by these types of natural kinship bonds. Some have argued that the Americans perceived the bonds of history and place to have been broken so that they no longer regarded the British as the “same” people.
That may be so, but it is also undeniable, as Rothbard explains, that most people want to believe that they are fighting for a just cause. They would not follow their own people to war, with the attendant death and destruction, if they believed the cause was unjust or morally indefensible. Nor would they devote so much time and effort to explaining the justice of their cause if ideas truly did not matter to them. It is precisely for that reason that war propaganda—some plausible justification of the cause—is so important in rallying men to fight.
Even the homely justification offered by the ordinary Southern soldier for why he fought in 1861—“I’m fighting because you’re down here”—is not simply an assertion of living in a different geographical place. It also implies a prior assumption of the right to self-defense, to fight in defense of one’s home and hearth, which is in turn rooted in the right to life and the right to property.
Only the most superficial view of human nature would assume that people fight for no reason other than loyalty to their kin who also happen to be fighting for any random reason or no reason at all. This could explain individual cases, but it could not explain a widespread popular revolt. Something more must have been presented to spark the revolt in the first place. Rothbard explains:
Bailyn found the missing ingredient in the radical libertarian Lockean English writers of the 19th century—especially Trenchard and Gordon of Cato’s Letters. . . . Trenchard and Gordon, and the other influential libertarian writers, clearly and passionately set forth the libertarian theory of natural rights, went on to point out that government in general, and the British government specifically, was the great violator of such rights, and warned also that power—government—stood ever ready to conspire to violate the liberties of the individual.
Therefore, Bradford is right that the revolutionaries did not lay down their lives just for “an abstract idea,” nor for the vision of racial equality that was later invented by Abraham Lincoln to justify his war against the South. But it is also true, as Rothbard argues, that without a moral or ideological conviction that their cause was just—justice rooted in the defense of liberty and property—the revolutionaries would have had no compelling reason for a popular revolt against the British Crown.
