Volume 3, Chapter 72, The Revolutionary Movement, Ideology and Motivation
With the beginning of the American Revolutionary War at the outbreak of Lexington and Concord,
two truths about the Revolution already stand out clearly.
One is that the Revolution was genuinely and enthusiastically supported by the great majority
of the American Population. It was a true people's war against British rule. In addition
to all the evidence given above, the American rebels could certainly not have concluded
the first successful war of national liberation in history, a war against the world's greatest
naval and military power, unless they had commanded the support of the American people.
As David Ramsey, the first great historian of the American Revolution, put it in 1789,
the war was the people's war. The exertions of the army would have been insufficient to
affect the revolution unless the great body of the people had been prepared for it and
also kept in a constant disposition to oppose Great Britain. Professor Alden has shown that
Milton has shown that the myth of present-day historians that only one-third of the American
public backed the revolution, with an equal number opposed, stems from a misreading of
a letter by John Adams.
A second truth that emerges is the egregious fallacy of the view endemic among historians
of all ideological persuasions that there is a large and necessary dichotomy between
political or moral principle and economic self-interest. Historians friendly to the
revolution have insisted that the Americans fought for political freedom, for independence,
for constitutional rights, or for democracy. Critical historians maintain that the fight
was merely for economic reasons, for defense of property and trade against British interference.
But why must the two be sundered? Why may not a defense of American liberty and property
be conjoined to a defense of political and economic rights? The merchants rebelling against
The American masses, similarly, were battling for all property rights, for their own as well as those of the merchants.
In short, there need be no dichotomy between liberty and property, between defense of the
rights of property in one's person and in one's material possessions. Defense of rights
is logically unitary in all spheres of action, and what is more, the American revolutionaries
certainly acted on these very assumptions as revealed by their essential adherence to libertarian thought, to political and economic rights, and always to liberty and property.
The men of the 18th century saw no dichotomy between personal and economic freedom, between rights to liberty and to property.
These artificial distinctions were left for later ages to construct.
From our conclusions that the American revolutionaries commanded the loyalty of a large majority of the colonists and that they saw no dichotomy between liberty and economic rights, and therefore between ideology and economic interest, we may proceed to some broader speculations on the role of ideology as compared with that of economic interest in the various actions of political history.
However, we contend that the primary motivations will tend to differ among two classes of political
actions.
Actions of the state in expanding its power over the populace, and actions of the populace
in moving or rebelling against state power.
We contend that the actions of the former will tend to be primarily motivated by economic
Interest, while the latter will tend to be motivated primarily by more abstract ideological
or moral concerns. Let us see why this should be so.
The essence of the state throughout history is a minority of the population constituting
a power elite or a ruling class, governing and living off the majority or the ruled.
Since a majority cannot live parasitically off a minority without the economy and the
social system breaking down very quickly, and since the majority can never act permanently
by itself but must always be led by an oligarchy, every state will subsist by plundering the
majority in behalf of a ruling minority.
A further reason for the inevitability of minority rule is the pervasive fact of the division of labor.
The majority of the public must spend most of its time going about the business of making a living.
Hence, the actual rule of the state must be left to full-time professionals who are necessarily a minority of the society.
Throughout history, then, the state has consisted of a minority plundering and tyrannizing over a majority.
This brings us to the great question, the great mystery of political philosophy, the mystery of civil obedience.
From Étienne de la Boitie to David Hume to Ludwig von Mises,
Political philosophers have shown that no state, no minority, can continue long in power unless supported, even if passively, by the majority.
Why then does the majority continue to accept or support the state when it is clearly acquiescing in its own subjection?
Why does the majority continue to obey the minority?
Here we arrive at the age-old role of the intellectuals, the opinion-molding groups
in society.
The ruling class, be it warlords, nobles, bureaucrats, feudal landlords, monopoly merchants
or a coalition of several of these groups, must employ intellectuals to convince the
The majority of the public that its rule is beneficent, inevitable, necessary, and even
divine.
The leading role of the intellectual throughout history is that of the court intellectual,
who in return for a share of a junior partnership in, the power and pelf offered by the rest
of the ruling class, spins the apologias for state rule, with which to convince a misguided
Public. This is the age-old alliance of church and state, of throne and altar, with the church
in modern times being largely replaced by secular intellectuals and scientific technocrats.
When state rulers act, then, to use and aggrandize state power, their primary motivation is economic,
to increase their plunder at the expense of the subject and the taxpayer.
The ideology that they profess and that is formulated and spread through society by the
court intellectuals is an elaborate rationalization for their economic interest.
The ideology is the camouflage for their looting, the fictitious clothes spun by the intellectuals
to hide the naked plundering of the emperor.
The economic motive behind the ideological garb of the state is the heart of the issue.
But what of the actions of the rebels against state power, those infrequent but vital situations
in history when the subjects rise up to diminish, whittle away or abolish state power?
What in short of such great events is the American Revolution or the classical liberal
movements of the 17th and 18th centuries. Of course an economic motive exists here too. In this case one of defending the private property of the subjects from the depredations of the state. But our contention here is that even when conjoined as in the American Revolution, the major motive of the opposition or of the revolutionaries will be ideological rather than economic.
The basic reason for this assertion is that the ruling class, being small and largely specialized, is motivated to think about its economic interest 24 hours a day.
Manufacturers seeking a tariff, merchants seeking to cripple their competition, bankers looking for taxes to repay their government bonds,
Rulers Seeking a Strong State from Which to Acquire Revenue, Bureaucrats Wishing to Expand Their Empire
All of these are professionals in statism.
They are constantly at work trying to preserve and expand their privileges.
Hence the promisee of the economic motive in their actions.
But the majority has allowed itself to be misled largely because its immediate interests are generally diffuse and hard to observe,
and because the majority comprises not professional anti-statists, but people going about their business of daily living.
What can the average person know of the arcane processes of subsidy or taxation or bond issue?
Generally, he is too wrapped up in his daily life, too habituated to his lot, after centuries
of state-guided propaganda, to give any thought to his unfortunate fate.
Hence, an opposition or revolutionary movement, or indeed any mass movement from below, cannot
be primarily guided by ordinary economic motives.
For such a mass movement to form, the masses must be fired up, must be aroused to a rare
and uncommon pitch of fervor against the existing system. But for that to happen, the masses
must be fired up by ideology. 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,
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 a defense of their property, does not play an important role,
but to form a mass movement in opposition means that the people must shake off their habits,
by the very nature of the masses, it is impossible for them to arrive at such an opposition or revolutionary ideology on their own.
Habituated as they are to their narrow and daily rounds, uninterested in ideology as they normally are,
It is impossible for the masses to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps to hammer out
an ideological movement in opposition to the existing state.
Here we arrive at the vital role of the intellectuals.
Only intellectuals, full-time or largely full-time professionals in ideas, have the time, the
The ability and the inclination to formulate an opposition ideology, and then to spread
the word to the people.
In contrast to the statist court intellectual, whose role as a junior partner in rationalizing
the economic interest of the ruling class, the radical or opposition intellectual's
role is the centrally guiding one of formulating the opposition or revolutionary ideology and
An important corollary. In weighing the motivations of the intellectuals themselves or even of
the masses, it is generally true that setting oneself up in opposition to an existing state
is a lonely, thorny and often dangerous road. It is usually directly in the economic interest
Most of the radical intellectuals to allow themselves to sell out, to be co-opted by
the ruling state apparatus. The intellectuals who do choose the radical opposition path,
who pledge in the famous words of the American revolutionaries, their lives, their fortunes
and their sacred honor, can scarcely be dominated by economic motives. On the contrary, only
The theory of fiercely held ideology, centering on a passion for justice, can keep the intellectuals
to the rigorous path of truth, hence again the likelihood of a dominant role for ideology
in an opposition movement.
Thus, statists tend to be governed by economic motivation, with ideology serving as a smokescreen
for such motives, while libertarians or anti-statists are ruled principally and centrally by ideology,
with economic defense playing a subordinate role.
By this dichotomy, we may at last resolve the age-old historiographical dispute over
whether ideology or economic interest play the dominant role in historical motivation.
We can now see why the Charles Beard, Carl Becker economic determinist model of human
motivation, a dominant school of American history in the 1920s and 1930s, so fruitful
and penetrating when applied to statist actions of the American government, fails signally
when applied to the great anti-statist events of the American Revolution.
The Beard-Becker approach sought to apply an economic determinist framework to the American
Revolution and specifically a framework of inherent conflict between various major economic
classes.
The vital flaws in the Beard-Becker model were twofold.
First, they did not understand the necessarily primary role of ideas in guiding any revolutionary
or opposition movement.
Second, they did not understand that there are no inherent economic conflicts in the free
market. Without government intrusion, there is no reason for merchants, farmers, landlords,
and others to be at loggerheads. Conflict is created only between those classes that
rule the state and those that are exploited by the state.
Understanding this crucial point, the Beard-Becker historians framed their analysis in terms
of the allegedly conflicting class interest of, in particular, merchants and farmers.
Since the merchants clearly led the way in revolutionary agitation, the Beard-Becker
approach was bound to conclude that the merchants, in agitating for revolution, were aggressively
are only pushing their class interest at the expense of the deluded farmers.
But now the economic determinists were confronted by a basic problem.
If indeed the revolution was against the class interest of the mass of the farmers, why did
the latter support the revolutionary movement?
To this key question, the determinists had two answers.
One was the common mistaken view criticized above that the revolution was supported only
by a minority of the population.
Their second answer was that the farmers were deluded into such support by the propaganda
beamed at them by the upper classes.
In effect, these historians transferred the analysis of the role of ideology as a rationalization
of Class Interest, from its proper use in explaining state action, to a fallacious use
in trying to understand anti-state mass movements. In this approach, they relied on the jejune
theory of propaganda, pervasive in the 1920s and 1930s under the influence of Harold Laswell.
Namely, that no one sincerely holds any ideas or ideology, and therefore that no ideology
of the American School of American History demonstrated that the Revolution was indeed supported by the majority of the population.
Unfortunately, however, under the aegis of such major consensus theoretician as the neoconservatives Daniel Burstyn and Clinton Rossiter,
The consensus school moved to the truly absurd conclusion that the American Revolution, in
contrast to all other revolutions in history, was not really a revolution at all, but a
purely measured and conservative reflex against the restrictive measures of the Crown.
Under the spell of the American celebration and of the hostility to all modern revolutions
generated by the post-World War II era, the consensus historians were constrained to deny
any and all conflicts in American history, whether economic
The difference is that where the determinists saw class conflict, the consensus school maintained that the genius of Americans has always been to remain unfettered by abstract ideology of any kind, and that instead they have met every issue as ad hoc problem-solving pragmatists.
Thus, the consensus school, in its eagerness to deny the revolutionary nature of the American
Revolution, failed to see that all revolutions against state power are necessarily radical
and hence revolutionary acts, and further, that they must be genuine mass movements guided
by an informed and radical ideology.
Fortunately, however, the most recent and now dominant school of historiography on the
American Revolution, that of Professor Bernard Balin, brings radical ideology and radical
libertarian ideology at that into the forefront of the causes of the Revolution.
Against the hostility of both of the older schools of historians, Balin has managed,
It took in scarcely a decade to emerge as the leading interpreter of the revolution.
Balin's great contribution was to discover for the first time the truly dominant role of ideology among the revolutionaries.
He stressed not only that the revolution was a genuine revolutionary and multi-class mass movement among the colonists,
but also that it was guided and impelled, above all, by the ideology of radical libertarianism,
or as Balin happily calls it, the transforming libertarian radicalism of the revolution.
In one sense, Balin harked back to a generation of historians at the turn of the 20th century,
the so-called constitutionalists, who had also stressed the dominant role of ideas in
and the Revolutionary Movement.
But Balin correctly saw that the mistake of the Constitutionalist was in ascribing the
central and guiding role, first, to sober and measured legalistic arguments about the
British Constitution, and, second, to John Locke's philosophy of natural rights and
the right of revolution.
Malin saw that the problem of this interpretation was to miss the major motive power of the
revolutionaries.
Constitutional legalisms, as later critics pointed out, were dry as dust arguments that
hardly stimulated the requisite revolutionary passions, and furthermore they neglected the
important problem of the economic depredations by Great Britain.
And Locke's philosophy, though ultimately highly important, was too abstract to generate
the passions or to stimulate widespread reading by the bulk of the colonist, something Balin
rightly felt was missing, the intermediate-level ideology that could stimulate revolutionary
passions. Balin found the missing ingredient in the radical libertarian Lockean English
of the 18th Century, especially John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon of Cato's Letters. These writers applied and transformed Lockean natural rights theory into a radical and passionate and explicitly political, libertarian and anti-British framework. 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.
To stop this crippling and destructive invasion of liberty by power, the people must be ever
Ever wary, ever vigilant, ever alert to the conspiracies of the rulers to expand their
power and aggress against their subjects.
It was this spirit that the American colonists eagerly imbibed, and that accounted for their
conspiracy view of the English government, a view which historians like Bernhard Nolenberg
have shown was basically correct.
Since after 1760, such conspiracies were all too real. Thus what some historians have derided
as the paranoia of the colonist turned out to be not paranoia at all, but an insightful
apprehension of reality, an insight that was of course fueled by the colonist's libertarian
understanding of the very nature and essence of state power itself. Thus in the deepest
In a sense, the American Revolution was a conscious majority revolution in behalf of libertarianism and against power.
A libertarian ideology that stressed the conjoined rights of liberty and property.
The American Revolution was not only the first great modern revolution, it was a libertarian revolution as well.