Conservative View: The Revolution Was a Defense of Tradition: M.E. Bradford saw the American Revolution as conservative, aimed at preserving pre-existing liberties, self-government, and Anglo-Saxon traditions rooted in blood, place, and history rather than abstract ideologies or utopian visions.

Libertarian View: The Revolution Was Radically Inspired by Ideals of Liberty: Murray Rothbard viewed it as a true people’s war driven by Lockean natural rights—liberty and property—providing the ideological justification needed to mobilize popular resistance against British rule.

Both Perspectives Highlight Complementary Truths: The Revolution defended concrete traditions and grievances (conservative) but required a moral/ideological framework of natural rights to inspire widespread revolt (libertarian). People fight for their own people and place, but also need to believe the cause is just.

In his book The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell argues that most people’s political opinions are shaped by “a particular set of underlying assumptions about the world—a certain vision of reality.” By vision, he means an instinctive sense of the correct way of understanding the world and making sense of what we see or hear.

The same insight applies to people’s understanding of political labels like libertarian or conservative. We assume we know what a libertarian means by reference to his ideology, or that we know what it means to describe a position as conservative. But often these assumptions owe more to our own vision of the world than they do to the speaker’s intention. To understand the different libertarian and conservative interpretations of the American Revolution, it is necessary to examine their philosophical roots in more detail, as political labels by themselves shed little light on their respective interpretations.

The conservative worldview is one in which people are primarily motivated by bonds of kith and kin, of faith and family, of time and place, not by theoretical philosophies or ideologies. To the conservative M. E. Bradford, the American Revolution was “conservative” in that sense. It defended the pre-existing political order. Bradford agreed with historians who argued that “the purpose of the American Revolution was to preserve (or restore) a known felicity, not to create a new one.” He rejected the argument that the Revolution was inspired by a progressive vision of utopia.

Mel Bradford’s interest in the Founding follows naturally from his Agrarianism. He believed that, unlike the French and Russian Revolutions, America’s was a conservative revolution. Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were conservative documents. According to Bradford, the American colonies revolted to preserve self-government, not to embark upon a progressive path toward Utopia.

Mel Bradford’s interest in the Founding follows naturally from his Agrarianism. He believed that, unlike the French and Russian Revolutions, America’s was a conservative revolution. Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were conservative documents. According to Bradford, the American colonies revolted to preserve self-government, not to embark upon a progressive path toward Utopia.

To the libertarian, by contrast, the ideology of liberty plays the dominant role in their worldview and in their interpretation of human events. For Murray Rothbard, the Revolution was “radical,” a revolt by the American people “against the world’s greatest naval and military power.” He described it as “a true people’s war against British rule,” inspired by the ideals of liberty and property.

In the Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard argued that the ideals of liberty and property, which lie at the heart of natural rights libertarianism, are not conservative. They are “radical” in the sense that they inspire and justify revolution:

. . .the fact that natural-law........

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