July 2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Here at the Mises Institute we plan to commemorate this important anniversary in a number of ways. Chief among these will be remembering the Declaration of Independence as the radical and revolutionary document that it really was. That is, we won’t be doing what the regime and media will be doing this year. We won’t use the anniversary as an occasion to celebrate the American government, its military, and the power that the regime has seized for itself in the centuries since the Declaration was adopted.
Rather, we will recall that the Declaration was a document that asserted the importance of natural rights and the right to secession. As Murray Rothbard repeatedly noted, the Americans were fighting to secede from a foreign state, and the American Revolution was a war of self-determination. Moreover, the Declaration envisioned a new, radically decentralized America composed of numerous independent states.
This contrast between Rothbard’s view of the Declaration on the one hand and the pro-regime view on the other can be seen in what the court historians and pundits ignore in the text of the Declaration. In the pro-regime view, the only part of the Declaration of Independence worth quoting is the line about all men being “created equal.” This line is then deliberately misinterpreted to support political schemes and programs aimed at economic equality and political centralization.
Yet the portions of the Declaration that best summarize its intent are found in the lines that affirm the natural right to throw off the chains of government. Or, as Jefferson put it, when the government becomes destructive to natural rights, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Nor was it assumed this would require a single government for all Americans. This is made quite clear in the final paragraph, where the Declaration notes: “We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America . . . solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”
This was not a single independent state that was being created. It was a group of “free and independent states.”
You’ll hear almost nothing about this from the usual pundits who speak of American history. And there is a key reason why. The spirit of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence of the 1770s was crippled by the successful counterrevolution and the resulting constitution of the 1780s, which undid much of what the Declaration had achieved.
This was one of Murray Rothbard’s most penetrating insights on the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, which envisioned a radically decentralized league of free American polities, was overturned by the new constitution of 1787, which was designed to create a far more powerful central government. By 1800, the forces of centralization, taxation, and national power had won.
There is much more to be said on this, and much more to draw from Murray Rothbard’s groundbreaking research on the topic, published as Conceived in Liberty, his five-volume history of colonial America and the American Revolution. In honor of the Declaration’s and Rothbard’s anniversaries, we will be celebrating the Rothbardian interpretation of the Declaration and the Revolution throughout the year.
