Contained within Rothbard’s multi-volume history of the American Revolution, Conceived in Liberty, is an extended argument against the conservative narrative on the American Revolution and the French Revolution.
Writing in the 1960s, Rothbard was addressing what was then a common claim among conservatives about the revolution: that it was a conservative, restrained, and almost gentlemanly revolution that sought only to preserve and restore what had already been established. It was the British regime that was “revolutionary,” we are told, and it was the American revolutionaries who were simply seeking to move back to an old status quo.
Rothbard understood that this characterization of the revolution served a modern-day political purpose: to manufacture support for the status quo and to deny any possible moral legitimacy to any new revolutionary political movements that might arise. In this way of thinking, the American Revolution is to be interpreted as something so totally unique that it can never be repeated, and thus it is now unacceptable for Americans to support any revolution at all.
Moreover, in the conservative schema, the American revolution is to be contrasted with the French Revolution, which is portrayed as a more typical revolution, and an illustration of how revolutions are too dangerous to risk at any time.
Rothbard, however, was skeptical of this conservative narrative and saw that it led to an ultra-conservative pro-regime position. After all, if a “good” revolution like the American revolution is a once-in-ten-thousand-years event, then it is dangerous that any population anywhere courts the idea of revolution. In this view, it is always better to simply defer to the status-quo regime, and admit that whatever regime one lives under, that it is simply the best that can be hoped for.
As a Jeffersonian and a pro-secession, free-market anarchist, Rothbard takes a less-than-approving view of this sort of dogmatic complacency and quietism in the face of state power.
Was the American Revolution Radical?
In volume IV of Conceived in Liberty, Rothbard identifies a problem with the conservative view:
A myth has been promulgated by neoconservative historians that the American Revolution was a uniquely mild revolution, so mild as to be scarcely a revolution at all. In an America that now frowns strongly on the concept of revolution, this sort of mythologizing should not come as a surprise.
Rothbard was writing this during the period of the so-called liberal consensus. This was a time when American ideology was kept within a narrow field of acceptable establishment “liberalism.” This was maintained by government-funded intellectual institutions and by a small number of network “news” outlets that made it clear to the public which opinions were within the window of allowable opinion. Needless to say, radicalism was frowned upon.
The “neoconservatives” to which Rothbard refers were of the Buckleyite, pro-regime brand of haute-bourgeoisie conservatism that greatly discouraged radicalism of any kind.
Rothbard goes on to note that:
Especially since the early 1950s, America has been concerned with opposing revolutions throughout the world; in the process, it has generated a historiography that denies its own revolutionary past. This neoconservative view of the American Revolution, echoing the reactionary writer in the pay of the Austrian and English governments of the early nineteenth century, Friedrich von Gentz, tries to isolate the American Revolution from all the revolutions in the western world that preceded it and followed it.
Gentz, with his essay “A Comparison of the French and American Revolutions,” published in the spring of 1800, established the long tradition of comparing the American and French revolutions as a means of pushing anti-revolutionary politics. Gentz’s essay was widely read and was later published by John Quincy Adams in book form. Like the pro-establishment conservatives who came after him, Gentz, was using his joint analysis of the American and French revolutions as a means of discouraging revolutions overall.
This type of analysis relied heavily on pointing out the violent excesses of the French revolution. But that was not enough. Since the American revolution retained such a good reputation internationally in the decades after the American victory, it became necessary to somehow explain why the American revolution was not a good example of a revolution at all. This was Gentz’s method—which countless conservatives have since adopted. Rothbard writes:
The American Revolution, this view holds, was unique; it alone of all modern revolutions was not really revolutionary; instead, it was moderate, conservative, dedicated only to preserving existing institutions from British aggrandizement. Furthermore, like all else in America, it was marvelously harmonious and consensual. Unlike the wicked French and other revolutions in Europe, the American Revolution, then, did not upset or change anything. It was therefore not really a revolution at all; certainly, it was not radical.
In his historiographical essay on the history of comparisons between the two revolutions, A.A. Fursenko explains that the alleged calm and conservative nature of the American revolution, along with its “uniqueness” formed what Fursenko called the “Traditional dogmas of bourgeois literature on the subject.”1
Throughout Conceived in Liberty, and especially in the fourth volume, Rothbard injects commentary which makes it clear he vehemently disagrees with this thesis from Gentz and the “neo-whigs.”2
Drawing heavily from R.R. Palmer’s The Age of Democratic Revolution, Rothbard illustrates that the Americans revolution was not at all the conservative and non-radical affair that the modern Gentzians make it out to be.3 Central to the evidence is the American conflict with the American loyalists (also known as Tories) who sided with the British state during the war. The conflict with the loyalists is generally ignored by conservatives, largely because it is thorough inconvenient for the narrative of a gentlemanly revolution.
An actual practice, the conflict with the loyalists was bitter and led to what was effectively a civil war within many of the American colonies at the time. Rothbard notes that it is true that the US war for independence was fundamentally a war over secession. Yet, within the colonies themselves, it remained necessary to remove the old institutions of the British state, in a revolutionary fashion. Conflict with the loyalists often bred paranoia among the secessionist “patriots” and violence reprisals were often used against those who supported the old regime. These pro-regime groups were, to use the vocabulary of the French Jacobins: counterrevolutionaries.
So widespread was the internal war against the loyalists that the American revolution produced more refugees per capita, than even the French revolution.
Further contrary to the idea of a bourgeois and restrained revolution is the fact that the American revolution was fought and led, in many cases, by lower-class farmers, who formed the great mass of the population. Rothbard contends that one of the reasons the American revolution succeeded was because it was not, in fact, an affair of the urban bourgeois intellectual classes. That is, the war was not fought and won by legions of John-Adams-like urban professionals. It was won, rather, by armed farmers, many of whom were near the bottom of the income pyramid in colonial America. Fursenko echoes Rothbard in this point and writes:
The American Revolution stirred up the “lower classes”—propertyless workers, petty artisans, and poor farmers, who composed the largest single group in the colonies ...It was precisely these “lower classes,” hostile toward the property owners and the “gentlemen” who occupied the administrative positions, who were the driving force behind the Revolution.
So-called “mass meetings” became an important form of political activity, these deriving from the tradition of town meetings. These mass meetings passed resolutions that were much more radical than any legislature’s proposals. They were organs of popular lawmaking in which the propertyless and those without the vote took part.4
The middle-class farmers, merchants, and lawyers were certainly not absent from this equation, but they worked together with what modern conservatives would call “the mob” in conservative critiques of what today could easily be called “direct democracy.” to govern the colonies during the war. It was precisely these groups, Rothbard notes, who were responsible for executing anti-loyalist edicts and policies in many colonies.
Rothbard identifies a number of areas in which it was abundantly clear that the revolution was indeed quite radical: land reform, the acceleration of the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the franchise, the rapid expansion of religious liberty, the end of established churches, the writing of new written constitutions, and more. None of this was conservative by any measure from the eighteenth century. The idea this was all the American version of “conservatism” is not a convincing claim.
Moreover, to further illustrate the point, Rothbard points his readers to the work of Robert Nisbet—one of the conservatives not on board with the “not-a-revolution” theory of the American Revolution. In his essay “The Social Impact of the Revolution,” Nisbet writes:
I believe we are obliged to accept the view that revolution in the true sense of this word did indeed take place at the end of the eighteenth century in America, and that a good deal more than mere war of liberation from England was at work. ... The essence [of a revolution] lies in the social changes involved: changes in such institutions as property, family, religion, and social class. These changes, as I want to show, were very much a part of the American experience at the end of the eighteenth century.
As Rothbard notes, the very act of secession is itself revolutionary because it requires a change in the entire orientation of the ruler-ruled relationship. Moreover, in the case of the American revolution, entire social systems connected with the crown were swept aside. The remnants of nascent feudalism in America were abolished by the American revolution. The old system of deference was gone. In its place civil government was provided by localized democratic institutions. This all fundamentally changed how Americans saw themselves and their relationship to civil authorities. Yet, the not-a-revolution thesis endures because modern-day apologists for the current regime want to deny that a true revolution could ever be legitimate.
Comparison with the French Revolution: “Social Revolution” versus “Political Revolution”
As part of their effort to define the American revolution as non-revolutionary, the anti-revolutionary conservatives typically also compare the American Revolution to the French Revolution. This is done to highlight the most violent radicalism of the French Revolution as a means to making the American Revolution look non-revolutionary in comparison.
Logically, this tactic employs some logical spin because, as Nisbet has noted, that fact that the American Revolution was different from the French revolution does not render the American revolution something other than a revolution. Nisbet writes:
That nothing resembling the zeal, ferocity, and terror of the other revolutions is to be found in the American experience need not be stressed here. But, as I have suggested, the essence of any genuine revolution is not the terror that may or may not be associated with it, nor even the kind of millennialist passion that is so often to be observed in modern revolutions.
Often, at the core of the comparison is the idea that the American revolution was a purely political revolution while the French Revolution was a “social revolution” or an “ideological revolution.” As both Rothbard and Nisbet make clear, this neat-and-tidy distinction did not exist. Both revolutions were spurred by political problems like taxes, political representation, and lawmaking. At the same time, both were very much influenced by philosophical debates.
The relationship between social revolutions and political revolutions—at least in the case of the American and French Revolutions—is perhaps best summed up by the American historian George V. Taylor. Addressing the debate over whether or not the French revolution was primarily a social revolution, Taylor put it this way: “The struggle against absolutism and aristocracy [in France] was the product of a financial and political crisis that it did not create. Second, it was essentially a political revolution with social consequences and not a social revolution with political consequences.”5
In this vein, conservatives often claim—as Burke did in his “Reflections on the Revolution in France“—that economic and political conditions were generally pretty good in France, and thus the revolution was excessive and groundless. In this view, eighteenth century philosophers had tricked the French people into thinking themselves oppressed by the absolutist French regime. The French didn’t understand how wonderful things were. But, as Taylor, Nisbet, and Rothbard all show, the origins of the French revolution go far beyond philosophical debates. The need to address pressing economic and political matters was very much at the center of the French Revolution. In France, the French state’s financial bankruptcy and its high taxes were prominent factors in the decline of the French state’s legitimacy and the subsequent revolution. Empirical data has even shown that in those regions of France where taxation was higher, revolutionary fervor was greater, and “Taxes under France’s ancien régime (1750–89) fueled the spread of revolutionary sentiment; more heavily taxed districts were more likely to experience economic and political riots.”6
Moreover, the idea that some revolutionaries were complaining too much in the face of a generally good economic situation can be applied more readily to the American Revolution than to the French. As Fursenko notes, in the years leading up the revolution, Americans were much better fed than the French, and paid fewer taxes. The standard of living for the average person was higher in the American colonies than in France in the late eighteenth century.7 Yet, it was the Americans who declared war on their own government first. If we are to make a case for revolutionaries ignoring practical realities, and entering into a war on ideological grounds, the Americans fit the model better than the French.
In any case, Rothbard concludes that the American and French revolutions, at least in their origins, were not so different. They were anti-regime rebellions against an established order, with taxes and economic liberalism as animating factors behind it all.
Rothbard clearly views this aspect of the French Revolution as a good thing. Thus, we find Rothbard speaks approvingly of the French revolution, at least in its initial phases, as a movement to topple the old absolutist and mercantilist powers in France. This should not be surprise, since opposition to absolutism and mercantilism—in various forms—has, since at least the days of the Levellers in England, been at the center of libertarian political movements. Rothbard’s work is very much part of this tradition.
Rothbard, of course, does not deny or downplay the violent excesses of the French Revolution, but he also agrees with Palmer who states “the [French] revolution was itself a reaction against an immovable conservatism already formed.”8 Rothbard shows no interest in preserving this old conservatism—characterized by war and economic exploitation—and apparently regards both the American and French Revolutions are important examples of the “western revolutionary tradition.”9
In America, thanks to the continued popularity of the American Revolution, conservatives have been forced to support it, at least nominally. To make this support seemingly compatible with conservatism, they have twisted the nature of the revolution and revised it so as to erase its connections with the French Revolution. The conservatives have defined down the American revolution to the point of being a mild reform movement. Rothbard was combatting this false narrative fifty years ago. The same conservative myths persist today.
- 1
A.A. Fursenko, “The American and French Revolutions Compared: The View from the U.S.S.R., trans Gilbert McArthur, The William and Mary Quarterly 33, No. 3, (Jul., 1976): 484.
- 2
Ibid, p. 483.
- 3
See R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution I: The Challenge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959).
- 4
Fursenko, p. 487.
- 5
George V. Taylor, “Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution,” The American Historical Review 72, No. 2 (Jan., 1967): 491. The Burkean narrative would have us believe that the monarchy was enjoying high levels of legitimacy until crisis came out of nowhere during the revolution. In truth, the origins were far more in the area of economics. Taylor writes: The Revolution resulted from a bankruptcy that left the monarchy discredited and helpless. The disclosures of the first Assembly of Notables shocked everyone capable of reacting to public affairs, set off an expanding discussion of reformed, and raised hopes for a national regeneration.” Perhaps the institution most responsible for undermining the legitimacy of the monarchy was the monarchy itself.
- 6
See Tommaso Giommoni, Gabriel Loumeau, and Marco Tabellini, “Extractive Taxation and the French Revolution” NBER Working Paper 34816, February, 2026. (https://www.nber.org/papers/w34816)
- 7
Fursenko, pp. 485-486.
- 8
Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, Vol. 4 (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 1999 (1975).), p. 453.
- 9
Ibid., p. 454.
