https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/07/murray-n-rothbard/americas-libertarian-revolution/

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By Murray N. Rothbard
Mises.org
July 6, 2026

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. 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 Ramsay, 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 effect 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.1 ”

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, of political and economic rights be conjoined? The merchants rebelling against the stamp tax, or sugar or tea taxes, or restrictions of the Navigation Laws, were battling for their rights of property and trade free from interference. In doing so, they were battling for their own property and for the rights of liberty at the same time. The American masses, similarly, were battling for all property rights, for their own as well as those of the merchants, and acting also in their capacity as consumers fighting against British taxes and restrictions.

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.

Ideology and the State

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 to economic interest in the various actions of political history. In particular, we contend that the primary motivations will tend to differ between two classes of political actions, between 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 primarily motivated by more abstract ideological or moral concerns.

Let us see why this should be so. The essence of the State through history is a minority of the population, constituting a power elite or a “ruling class,” governing and living off of 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 on behalf of a ruling minority. A further or corollary 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 daily living. Hence the actual rule of the State must be left to full-time professionals who are necessarily a minority of the society.