WEBVTT NOTE 72. The Revolutionary Movement: Ideology and Motivation 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.960 Volume 3, Chapter 72, The Revolutionary Movement, Ideology and Motivation 2 00:00:07.960 --> 00:00:14.520 With the beginning of the American Revolutionary War at the outbreak of Lexington and Concord, 3 00:00:14.520 --> 00:00:19.560 two truths about the Revolution already stand out clearly. 4 00:00:19.560 --> 00:00:27.720 One is that the Revolution was genuinely and enthusiastically supported by the great majority 5 00:00:27.720 --> 00:00:35.440 of the American Population. It was a true people's war against British rule. In addition 6 00:00:35.440 --> 00:00:41.360 to all the evidence given above, the American rebels could certainly not have concluded 7 00:00:41.360 --> 00:00:48.760 the first successful war of national liberation in history, a war against the world's greatest 8 00:00:48.760 --> 00:00:56.000 naval and military power, unless they had commanded the support of the American people. 9 00:00:56.000 --> 00:01:03.000 As David Ramsey, the first great historian of the American Revolution, put it in 1789, 10 00:01:03.520 --> 00:01:09.880 the war was the people's war. The exertions of the army would have been insufficient to 11 00:01:09.880 --> 00:01:16.600 affect the revolution unless the great body of the people had been prepared for it and 12 00:01:16.600 --> 00:01:23.600 also kept in a constant disposition to oppose Great Britain. Professor Alden has shown that 13 00:01:23.600 --> 00:01:29.040 Milton has shown that the myth of present-day historians that only one-third of the American 14 00:01:29.040 --> 00:01:35.880 public backed the revolution, with an equal number opposed, stems from a misreading of 15 00:01:35.880 --> 00:01:38.680 a letter by John Adams. 16 00:01:38.680 --> 00:01:45.600 A second truth that emerges is the egregious fallacy of the view endemic among historians 17 00:01:45.600 --> 00:01:52.960 of all ideological persuasions that there is a large and necessary dichotomy between 18 00:01:52.960 --> 00:01:59.600 political or moral principle and economic self-interest. Historians friendly to the 19 00:01:59.600 --> 00:02:05.800 revolution have insisted that the Americans fought for political freedom, for independence, 20 00:02:05.800 --> 00:02:12.680 for constitutional rights, or for democracy. Critical historians maintain that the fight 21 00:02:12.680 --> 00:02:20.440 was merely for economic reasons, for defense of property and trade against British interference. 22 00:02:20.440 --> 00:02:27.320 But why must the two be sundered? Why may not a defense of American liberty and property 23 00:02:27.320 --> 00:02:35.040 be conjoined to a defense of political and economic rights? The merchants rebelling against 24 00:02:35.040 --> 00:02:42.040 The American masses, similarly, were battling for all property rights, for their own as well as those of the merchants. 25 00:03:05.040 --> 00:03:12.040 In short, there need be no dichotomy between liberty and property, between defense of the 26 00:03:19.800 --> 00:03:26.240 rights of property in one's person and in one's material possessions. Defense of rights 27 00:03:26.240 --> 00:03:33.240 is logically unitary in all spheres of action, and what is more, the American revolutionaries 28 00:03:33.240 --> 00:03:47.240 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. 29 00:03:47.240 --> 00:03:57.240 The men of the 18th century saw no dichotomy between personal and economic freedom, between rights to liberty and to property. 30 00:03:57.240 --> 00:04:02.240 These artificial distinctions were left for later ages to construct. 31 00:04:02.240 --> 00:04:32.240 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. 32 00:04:32.240 --> 00:04:39.820 However, we contend that the primary motivations will tend to differ among two classes of political 33 00:04:39.820 --> 00:04:42.120 actions. 34 00:04:42.120 --> 00:04:48.740 Actions of the state in expanding its power over the populace, and actions of the populace 35 00:04:48.740 --> 00:04:53.660 in moving or rebelling against state power. 36 00:04:53.660 --> 00:05:00.820 We contend that the actions of the former will tend to be primarily motivated by economic 37 00:05:00.820 --> 00:05:08.440 Interest, while the latter will tend to be motivated primarily by more abstract ideological 38 00:05:08.440 --> 00:05:14.020 or moral concerns. Let us see why this should be so. 39 00:05:14.020 --> 00:05:20.700 The essence of the state throughout history is a minority of the population constituting 40 00:05:20.700 --> 00:05:30.140 a power elite or a ruling class, governing and living off the majority or the ruled. 41 00:05:30.140 --> 00:05:36.260 Since a majority cannot live parasitically off a minority without the economy and the 42 00:05:36.260 --> 00:05:42.620 social system breaking down very quickly, and since the majority can never act permanently 43 00:05:42.620 --> 00:05:51.620 by itself but must always be led by an oligarchy, every state will subsist by plundering the 44 00:05:51.620 --> 00:05:56.060 majority in behalf of a ruling minority. 45 00:05:56.060 --> 00:06:04.060 A further reason for the inevitability of minority rule is the pervasive fact of the division of labor. 46 00:06:04.060 --> 00:06:11.060 The majority of the public must spend most of its time going about the business of making a living. 47 00:06:11.060 --> 00:06:19.060 Hence, the actual rule of the state must be left to full-time professionals who are necessarily a minority of the society. 48 00:06:19.060 --> 00:06:29.060 Throughout history, then, the state has consisted of a minority plundering and tyrannizing over a majority. 49 00:06:29.060 --> 00:06:38.060 This brings us to the great question, the great mystery of political philosophy, the mystery of civil obedience. 50 00:06:38.060 --> 00:06:43.060 From Étienne de la Boitie to David Hume to Ludwig von Mises, 51 00:06:43.060 --> 00:06:55.060 Political philosophers have shown that no state, no minority, can continue long in power unless supported, even if passively, by the majority. 52 00:06:55.060 --> 00:07:06.060 Why then does the majority continue to accept or support the state when it is clearly acquiescing in its own subjection? 53 00:07:06.060 --> 00:07:10.060 Why does the majority continue to obey the minority? 54 00:07:10.060 --> 00:07:16.060 Here we arrive at the age-old role of the intellectuals, the opinion-molding groups 55 00:07:16.060 --> 00:07:17.620 in society. 56 00:07:17.620 --> 00:07:25.220 The ruling class, be it warlords, nobles, bureaucrats, feudal landlords, monopoly merchants 57 00:07:25.220 --> 00:07:31.140 or a coalition of several of these groups, must employ intellectuals to convince the 58 00:07:31.140 --> 00:07:39.060 The majority of the public that its rule is beneficent, inevitable, necessary, and even 59 00:07:39.060 --> 00:07:40.900 divine. 60 00:07:40.900 --> 00:07:46.620 The leading role of the intellectual throughout history is that of the court intellectual, 61 00:07:46.620 --> 00:07:53.520 who in return for a share of a junior partnership in, the power and pelf offered by the rest 62 00:07:53.520 --> 00:08:00.620 of the ruling class, spins the apologias for state rule, with which to convince a misguided 63 00:08:00.620 --> 00:08:07.900 Public. This is the age-old alliance of church and state, of throne and altar, with the church 64 00:08:07.900 --> 00:08:15.380 in modern times being largely replaced by secular intellectuals and scientific technocrats. 65 00:08:15.380 --> 00:08:25.280 When state rulers act, then, to use and aggrandize state power, their primary motivation is economic, 66 00:08:25.280 --> 00:08:31.180 to increase their plunder at the expense of the subject and the taxpayer. 67 00:08:31.180 --> 00:08:37.400 The ideology that they profess and that is formulated and spread through society by the 68 00:08:37.400 --> 00:08:44.200 court intellectuals is an elaborate rationalization for their economic interest. 69 00:08:44.200 --> 00:08:50.640 The ideology is the camouflage for their looting, the fictitious clothes spun by the intellectuals 70 00:08:50.640 --> 00:08:54.900 to hide the naked plundering of the emperor. 71 00:08:54.900 --> 00:09:02.020 The economic motive behind the ideological garb of the state is the heart of the issue. 72 00:09:02.020 --> 00:09:09.260 But what of the actions of the rebels against state power, those infrequent but vital situations 73 00:09:09.260 --> 00:09:17.420 in history when the subjects rise up to diminish, whittle away or abolish state power? 74 00:09:17.420 --> 00:09:22.660 What in short of such great events is the American Revolution or the classical liberal 75 00:09:22.660 --> 00:09:52.660 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. 76 00:09:52.660 --> 00:10:06.660 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. 77 00:10:06.660 --> 00:10:15.660 Manufacturers seeking a tariff, merchants seeking to cripple their competition, bankers looking for taxes to repay their government bonds, 78 00:10:15.660 --> 00:10:23.660 Rulers Seeking a Strong State from Which to Acquire Revenue, Bureaucrats Wishing to Expand Their Empire 79 00:10:23.660 --> 00:10:27.660 All of these are professionals in statism. 80 00:10:27.660 --> 00:10:33.660 They are constantly at work trying to preserve and expand their privileges. 81 00:10:33.660 --> 00:10:38.660 Hence the promisee of the economic motive in their actions. 82 00:10:38.660 --> 00:10:49.660 But the majority has allowed itself to be misled largely because its immediate interests are generally diffuse and hard to observe, 83 00:10:49.660 --> 00:10:58.660 and because the majority comprises not professional anti-statists, but people going about their business of daily living. 84 00:10:58.660 --> 00:11:06.660 What can the average person know of the arcane processes of subsidy or taxation or bond issue? 85 00:11:06.660 --> 00:11:13.300 Generally, he is too wrapped up in his daily life, too habituated to his lot, after centuries 86 00:11:13.300 --> 00:11:18.420 of state-guided propaganda, to give any thought to his unfortunate fate. 87 00:11:18.420 --> 00:11:25.580 Hence, an opposition or revolutionary movement, or indeed any mass movement from below, cannot 88 00:11:25.580 --> 00:11:30.540 be primarily guided by ordinary economic motives. 89 00:11:30.540 --> 00:11:37.420 For such a mass movement to form, the masses must be fired up, must be aroused to a rare 90 00:11:37.420 --> 00:11:44.920 and uncommon pitch of fervor against the existing system. But for that to happen, the masses 91 00:11:44.920 --> 00:11:52.100 must be fired up by ideology. Only ideology, guided either by a new religious conversion 92 00:11:52.100 --> 00:12:00.020 or by a passion for justice, can arouse the interest of the masses. In the current jargon, 93 00:12:00.020 --> 00:12:11.020 and lead them out of the morass of daily habit into an uncommon and militant activity in opposition to the state. 94 00:12:11.020 --> 00:12:19.020 This is not to say that an economic motive, for example a defense of their property, does not play an important role, 95 00:12:19.020 --> 00:12:25.020 but to form a mass movement in opposition means that the people must shake off their habits, 96 00:12:55.020 --> 00:13:08.020 by the very nature of the masses, it is impossible for them to arrive at such an opposition or revolutionary ideology on their own. 97 00:13:08.020 --> 00:13:16.020 Habituated as they are to their narrow and daily rounds, uninterested in ideology as they normally are, 98 00:13:16.020 --> 00:13:23.020 It is impossible for the masses to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps to hammer out 99 00:13:23.020 --> 00:13:28.160 an ideological movement in opposition to the existing state. 100 00:13:28.160 --> 00:13:32.140 Here we arrive at the vital role of the intellectuals. 101 00:13:32.140 --> 00:13:40.460 Only intellectuals, full-time or largely full-time professionals in ideas, have the time, the 102 00:13:40.460 --> 00:13:47.140 The ability and the inclination to formulate an opposition ideology, and then to spread 103 00:13:47.140 --> 00:13:49.260 the word to the people. 104 00:13:49.260 --> 00:13:54.900 In contrast to the statist court intellectual, whose role as a junior partner in rationalizing 105 00:13:54.900 --> 00:14:01.220 the economic interest of the ruling class, the radical or opposition intellectual's 106 00:14:01.220 --> 00:14:09.180 role is the centrally guiding one of formulating the opposition or revolutionary ideology and 107 00:14:09.180 --> 00:14:23.180 An important corollary. In weighing the motivations of the intellectuals themselves or even of 108 00:14:23.180 --> 00:14:31.100 the masses, it is generally true that setting oneself up in opposition to an existing state 109 00:14:31.100 --> 00:14:39.040 is a lonely, thorny and often dangerous road. It is usually directly in the economic interest 110 00:14:39.040 --> 00:14:44.700 Most of the radical intellectuals to allow themselves to sell out, to be co-opted by 111 00:14:44.700 --> 00:14:51.580 the ruling state apparatus. The intellectuals who do choose the radical opposition path, 112 00:14:51.580 --> 00:14:58.240 who pledge in the famous words of the American revolutionaries, their lives, their fortunes 113 00:14:58.240 --> 00:15:06.040 and their sacred honor, can scarcely be dominated by economic motives. On the contrary, only 114 00:15:06.040 --> 00:15:13.440 The theory of fiercely held ideology, centering on a passion for justice, can keep the intellectuals 115 00:15:13.440 --> 00:15:20.800 to the rigorous path of truth, hence again the likelihood of a dominant role for ideology 116 00:15:20.800 --> 00:15:22.880 in an opposition movement. 117 00:15:22.880 --> 00:15:29.680 Thus, statists tend to be governed by economic motivation, with ideology serving as a smokescreen 118 00:15:29.680 --> 00:15:37.800 for such motives, while libertarians or anti-statists are ruled principally and centrally by ideology, 119 00:15:37.800 --> 00:15:41.840 with economic defense playing a subordinate role. 120 00:15:41.840 --> 00:15:47.960 By this dichotomy, we may at last resolve the age-old historiographical dispute over 121 00:15:47.960 --> 00:15:55.680 whether ideology or economic interest play the dominant role in historical motivation. 122 00:15:55.680 --> 00:16:01.880 We can now see why the Charles Beard, Carl Becker economic determinist model of human 123 00:16:01.880 --> 00:16:09.420 motivation, a dominant school of American history in the 1920s and 1930s, so fruitful 124 00:16:09.420 --> 00:16:16.640 and penetrating when applied to statist actions of the American government, fails signally 125 00:16:16.640 --> 00:16:22.760 when applied to the great anti-statist events of the American Revolution. 126 00:16:22.760 --> 00:16:28.860 The Beard-Becker approach sought to apply an economic determinist framework to the American 127 00:16:28.860 --> 00:16:35.900 Revolution and specifically a framework of inherent conflict between various major economic 128 00:16:35.900 --> 00:16:37.260 classes. 129 00:16:37.260 --> 00:16:41.420 The vital flaws in the Beard-Becker model were twofold. 130 00:16:41.420 --> 00:16:49.580 First, they did not understand the necessarily primary role of ideas in guiding any revolutionary 131 00:16:49.580 --> 00:16:51.860 or opposition movement. 132 00:16:51.860 --> 00:16:58.100 Second, they did not understand that there are no inherent economic conflicts in the free 133 00:16:58.100 --> 00:17:05.900 market. Without government intrusion, there is no reason for merchants, farmers, landlords, 134 00:17:05.900 --> 00:17:13.060 and others to be at loggerheads. Conflict is created only between those classes that 135 00:17:13.060 --> 00:17:18.180 rule the state and those that are exploited by the state. 136 00:17:18.180 --> 00:17:24.620 Understanding this crucial point, the Beard-Becker historians framed their analysis in terms 137 00:17:24.620 --> 00:17:31.940 of the allegedly conflicting class interest of, in particular, merchants and farmers. 138 00:17:31.940 --> 00:17:37.300 Since the merchants clearly led the way in revolutionary agitation, the Beard-Becker 139 00:17:37.300 --> 00:17:44.140 approach was bound to conclude that the merchants, in agitating for revolution, were aggressively 140 00:17:44.140 --> 00:17:50.780 are only pushing their class interest at the expense of the deluded farmers. 141 00:17:50.780 --> 00:17:55.100 But now the economic determinists were confronted by a basic problem. 142 00:17:55.100 --> 00:18:01.740 If indeed the revolution was against the class interest of the mass of the farmers, why did 143 00:18:01.740 --> 00:18:05.640 the latter support the revolutionary movement? 144 00:18:05.640 --> 00:18:10.860 To this key question, the determinists had two answers. 145 00:18:10.860 --> 00:18:16.780 One was the common mistaken view criticized above that the revolution was supported only 146 00:18:16.780 --> 00:18:19.620 by a minority of the population. 147 00:18:19.620 --> 00:18:25.620 Their second answer was that the farmers were deluded into such support by the propaganda 148 00:18:25.620 --> 00:18:29.520 beamed at them by the upper classes. 149 00:18:29.520 --> 00:18:37.100 In effect, these historians transferred the analysis of the role of ideology as a rationalization 150 00:18:37.100 --> 00:18:43.940 of Class Interest, from its proper use in explaining state action, to a fallacious use 151 00:18:43.940 --> 00:18:50.940 in trying to understand anti-state mass movements. In this approach, they relied on the jejune 152 00:18:51.660 --> 00:18:58.660 theory of propaganda, pervasive in the 1920s and 1930s under the influence of Harold Laswell. 153 00:18:59.740 --> 00:19:06.740 Namely, that no one sincerely holds any ideas or ideology, and therefore that no ideology 154 00:19:37.100 --> 00:19:45.100 of the American School of American History demonstrated that the Revolution was indeed supported by the majority of the population. 155 00:19:45.100 --> 00:19:57.100 Unfortunately, however, under the aegis of such major consensus theoretician as the neoconservatives Daniel Burstyn and Clinton Rossiter, 156 00:19:57.100 --> 00:20:04.060 The consensus school moved to the truly absurd conclusion that the American Revolution, in 157 00:20:04.060 --> 00:20:10.660 contrast to all other revolutions in history, was not really a revolution at all, but a 158 00:20:10.660 --> 00:20:17.820 purely measured and conservative reflex against the restrictive measures of the Crown. 159 00:20:17.820 --> 00:20:23.780 Under the spell of the American celebration and of the hostility to all modern revolutions 160 00:20:23.780 --> 00:20:30.680 generated by the post-World War II era, the consensus historians were constrained to deny 161 00:20:30.680 --> 00:20:51.240 any and all conflicts in American history, whether economic 162 00:20:51.240 --> 00:21:17.240 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. 163 00:21:17.240 --> 00:21:25.080 Thus, the consensus school, in its eagerness to deny the revolutionary nature of the American 164 00:21:25.080 --> 00:21:32.440 Revolution, failed to see that all revolutions against state power are necessarily radical 165 00:21:32.440 --> 00:21:39.020 and hence revolutionary acts, and further, that they must be genuine mass movements guided 166 00:21:39.020 --> 00:21:42.000 by an informed and radical ideology. 167 00:21:42.000 --> 00:21:48.160 Fortunately, however, the most recent and now dominant school of historiography on the 168 00:21:48.160 --> 00:21:55.920 American Revolution, that of Professor Bernard Balin, brings radical ideology and radical 169 00:21:55.920 --> 00:22:03.720 libertarian ideology at that into the forefront of the causes of the Revolution. 170 00:22:03.720 --> 00:22:08.880 Against the hostility of both of the older schools of historians, Balin has managed, 171 00:22:08.880 --> 00:22:14.880 It took in scarcely a decade to emerge as the leading interpreter of the revolution. 172 00:22:14.880 --> 00:22:24.880 Balin's great contribution was to discover for the first time the truly dominant role of ideology among the revolutionaries. 173 00:22:24.880 --> 00:22:33.880 He stressed not only that the revolution was a genuine revolutionary and multi-class mass movement among the colonists, 174 00:22:33.880 --> 00:22:41.960 but also that it was guided and impelled, above all, by the ideology of radical libertarianism, 175 00:22:41.960 --> 00:22:49.160 or as Balin happily calls it, the transforming libertarian radicalism of the revolution. 176 00:22:49.160 --> 00:22:55.300 In one sense, Balin harked back to a generation of historians at the turn of the 20th century, 177 00:22:55.300 --> 00:23:01.640 the so-called constitutionalists, who had also stressed the dominant role of ideas in 178 00:23:01.640 --> 00:23:03.880 and the Revolutionary Movement. 179 00:23:03.880 --> 00:23:09.240 But Balin correctly saw that the mistake of the Constitutionalist was in ascribing the 180 00:23:09.240 --> 00:23:16.240 central and guiding role, first, to sober and measured legalistic arguments about the 181 00:23:16.240 --> 00:23:23.040 British Constitution, and, second, to John Locke's philosophy of natural rights and 182 00:23:23.040 --> 00:23:25.080 the right of revolution. 183 00:23:25.080 --> 00:23:32.640 Malin saw that the problem of this interpretation was to miss the major motive power of the 184 00:23:32.640 --> 00:23:35.440 revolutionaries. 185 00:23:35.440 --> 00:23:41.460 Constitutional legalisms, as later critics pointed out, were dry as dust arguments that 186 00:23:41.460 --> 00:23:47.260 hardly stimulated the requisite revolutionary passions, and furthermore they neglected the 187 00:23:47.260 --> 00:23:53.120 important problem of the economic depredations by Great Britain. 188 00:23:53.120 --> 00:23:58.960 And Locke's philosophy, though ultimately highly important, was too abstract to generate 189 00:23:58.960 --> 00:24:05.920 the passions or to stimulate widespread reading by the bulk of the colonist, something Balin 190 00:24:05.920 --> 00:24:12.720 rightly felt was missing, the intermediate-level ideology that could stimulate revolutionary 191 00:24:12.720 --> 00:24:19.680 passions. Balin found the missing ingredient in the radical libertarian Lockean English 192 00:24:19.680 --> 00:24:49.680 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 193 00:24:49.680 --> 00:24:55.840 set forth the libertarian theory of natural rights, went on to point out that government 194 00:24:55.840 --> 00:25:03.280 in general, and the British government specifically, was the great violator of such rights, and 195 00:25:03.280 --> 00:25:10.520 warned also that power, government, stood ever ready to conspire to violate the liberties 196 00:25:10.520 --> 00:25:12.520 of the individual. 197 00:25:12.520 --> 00:25:19.340 To stop this crippling and destructive invasion of liberty by power, the people must be ever 198 00:25:19.340 --> 00:25:26.000 Ever wary, ever vigilant, ever alert to the conspiracies of the rulers to expand their 199 00:25:26.000 --> 00:25:30.220 power and aggress against their subjects. 200 00:25:30.220 --> 00:25:36.340 It was this spirit that the American colonists eagerly imbibed, and that accounted for their 201 00:25:36.340 --> 00:25:43.260 conspiracy view of the English government, a view which historians like Bernhard Nolenberg 202 00:25:43.260 --> 00:25:46.140 have shown was basically correct. 203 00:25:46.140 --> 00:25:54.180 Since after 1760, such conspiracies were all too real. Thus what some historians have derided 204 00:25:54.180 --> 00:26:01.460 as the paranoia of the colonist turned out to be not paranoia at all, but an insightful 205 00:26:01.460 --> 00:26:08.100 apprehension of reality, an insight that was of course fueled by the colonist's libertarian 206 00:26:08.100 --> 00:26:14.780 understanding of the very nature and essence of state power itself. Thus in the deepest 207 00:26:14.780 --> 00:26:24.780 In a sense, the American Revolution was a conscious majority revolution in behalf of libertarianism and against power. 208 00:26:24.780 --> 00:26:31.780 A libertarian ideology that stressed the conjoined rights of liberty and property. 209 00:26:31.780 --> 00:26:41.780 The American Revolution was not only the first great modern revolution, it was a libertarian revolution as well.