The Causes and Consequences of the French Revolution
On the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the French Revolution is being re-litigated again—the left holding it up as necessary progress, conservatives citing Burke to argue it proves free-market ideas end in blood. Ryan McMaken, drawing on Rothbard and Ralph Raico, rejects both. Liberalism's role, he argues, was small and confined to the revolution's first months; what followed owed nothing to Jefferson and everything to three forces—the extreme centralization of the French state, twenty-five years of war, and a revolutionary regime that simply replaced the old bureaucracy with a…
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