Abstract
This introductory chapter sketches the main argument of the book: that the American Revolution was a rebellion against the modern state, animated by the same kinds of concerns the European anti-state rebellions were driven by. These include taxation, economic dirigisme and military conscription in the first place. It also describes the methodology emphasizing the interdisciplinary use of economic and political arguments to shed light on the problem. The basic model of decoupled modernization is sketched that claims that centralization and state-building as expressions of political modernization should be radically separated from social modernization reflected in economic entrepreneurship, individualism, and cultural openness. The chapter reviews the basic arguments for an organic connection between political fragmentation and social liberalism and modernity, taking America as an embodiment of this connection.
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Notes
- 1.
Canonical “Federalist Papers” by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, elevated to the level of sacredness only the Declaration and the Constitution have in America, are the most formidable document of this criticism, see Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, and James Madison (2001 [1788]). The Federalist. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
- 2.
For the antifederalist critique, see Storing (1981).
- 3.
About this persistence of political views in early period, see McDonald (1985).
- 4.
This is abundantly clear when we look at the emergence of modern state in Europe and how modern scholarship explained that—war as a motor of state building, see Tilly (1975).
- 5.
See below for the explanation of both who belonged to this tradition, why and if it could be called “libertarian.”
- 6.
I will be using the terms “libertarian” and “classical liberal” in this book synonymously, as designators of an ideology uniting minimal government, decentralization, and free market economics, although some modern scholars or practitioners would object to erasing some of the nuances that differentiate them. But for the purposes of describing the ideology of American founders those two terms are equally good. Zuckert (1998) uses “liberal,” whereas Bailyn (1967) and Wood (1969) use “libertarian.”
- 7.
I am alluding here to the usage of these terms provided by Constant (1819).
- 8.
See Tilly (1975) for a detailed reconstruction of the political conflicts between absolute monarchies and “non-state” actors in the early modern period.
- 9.
Some of the exceptions to this trend could be Italian and German opponents of the unification who used in the mid and later part of the nineteenth centuries the arguments of American decentralists to resist their own advancing nation states, see especially, Sabetti (2011) for the Italian case.
- 10.
- 11.
For an explanation of the significance of economic theory for the study of history, see Thomas E. Woods (2008).
- 12.
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Jankovic, I. (2019). The American Revolution as the Last European Peasants’ Rebellion. In: The American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03733-8_1
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