Betrayal of the American Right - Ludwig von Mises Institute

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ORIGINS OF THE OLD RIGHT I:
EARLY INDIVIDUALISM
Individualism, and its economic corollary, laissez-faire liberalism,
has not always taken on a conservative hue, has not always
functioned, as it often does today, as an apologist for the status
quo. On the contrary, the Revolution of modern times was
originally, and continued for a long time to be, laissez-faire individualist.
Its purpose was to free the individual person from the
restrictions and the shackles, the encrusted caste privileges and
exploitative wars, of the feudal and mercantilist orders, of the Tory
ancien régime. Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, the militants in the
American Revolution, the Jacksonian movement, Emerson and
Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison and the radical abolitionists—
all were basically laissez-faire individualists who carried on the ageold
battle for liberty and against all forms of State privilege. And
so were the French revolutionaries—not only the Girondins, but
even the much-abused Jacobins, who were obliged to defend the
Revolution against the massed crowned heads of Europe. All were
roughly in the same camp. The individualist heritage, indeed, goes
back to the first modern radicals of the seventeenth century—to
the Levellers in England, and to Roger Williams and Anne
Hutchinson in the American colonies.
The conventional historical wisdom asserts that while the radical
movements in America were indeed laissez-faire individualist
before the Civil War, that afterwards, the laissez-fairists became
conservatives, and the radical mantle then fell to groups more
familiar to the modern Left: the Socialists and Populists. But this
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