The Causes and Consequences of the French Revolution

On the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the French Revolution is being re-litigated again—the left holding it up as necessary progress, conservatives citing Burke to argue it proves free-market ideas end in blood. Ryan McMaken, drawing on Rothbard and Ralph Raico, rejects both. Liberalism’s role, he argues, was small and confined to the revolution’s first months; what followed owed nothing to Jefferson and everything to three forces—the extreme centralization of the French state, twenty-five years of war, and a revolutionary regime that simply replaced the old bureaucracy with a harsher one while keeping every lever of power intact. The real mirror of the American Revolution wasn’t the revolution at all, but the decentralist, secessionist peasants of the Vendée it crushed.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 25, 2026.

Mises University is the world’s leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.