Conceived in Liberty (203 page)

As usually happens in such cases, the postponement of revolutionary vengeance led to a cooling off of temper and resolution. The Yorkite prisoners were either released on bond or sent for trial to Massachusetts, where they were all soon released; not one of the Yorkers implicated in the massacre even came to trial. However, the generally hated Justice Noah Sabin, on returning to his farm, was treated by his fellow citizens with an intense wrath that stopped just short of invading another man’s sacred right of private property. Sabin was assured that should he take one step beyond the borders of his own farm, he would be shot that instant.

Unity between the east side and the west side was further forged on April 11, when a convention of the town committees of safety of the two regions assembled at Westminster and proclaimed that all citizens should “wholly
renounce and resist” the oppressive jurisdiction of the government of New York. Two east-siders and Ethan Allen were selected to draw up a remonstrance on their joint behalf.

As the news arrived of the shattering events at Lexington and Concord, the sturdy and successful Vermont revolution naturally blended into the Revolution against Great Britain. For one thing, the enemy New York government, particularly its executive, was a royal government, as was that of New Hampshire. For another, the call of liberty against the oppression of the state was very familiar to the men of the Green Mountains; they had fought for the libertarian cause for years. What more natural than to extend the fighting against the larger despotism of imperial Britain?

*
Darline Shapiro, “Ethan Allen, Philosopher-Theologian to a Generation of American Revolutionaries,”
William and Mary Quarterly
(April 1964): 243.

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 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.”
*

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 stamp tax, or sugar, or tea taxes, or the 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 eighteenth 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. In particular, 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 Etienne de La Boetie 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 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 interests. 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 as the American Revolution or the classical liberal movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth 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 interests twenty-four 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 primacy 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 “antistatists” 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, “raise their consciousness”) 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, their daily mundane concerns of several lifetimes, and become politically aroused and determined as never before in their lives. Only a commonly held and passionately believed-in ideology can perform that role. Hence our conclusion that a mass movement like the American Revolution must be centrally motivated by a commonly shared ideology.

How then do the masses of subjects
acquire
this guiding and determining ideology? 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 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 is a junior partner in rationalizing the economic interests of the ruling class, the radical or opposition intellectual’s role is the centrally guiding one of formulating the opposition or revolutionary ideology and then of spreading the ideology to the masses, thereby welding them into a revolutionary movement.

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 interests of the radical intellectuals to allow themselves to “sell out,” to be coopted 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 a 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 antistatists 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 interests 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, et al. to be at loggerheads. Conflict is created only between those classes that rule the state and those that are exploited by the state. Not understanding this crucial point, the Beard-Becker historians framed their analysis in terms of the allegedly conflicting class interests 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 pushing their class interests at the expense of the deluded farmers.