'The highest and holiest duty of freemen': Revolutionary libertarianism in American history

摘要

The dissertation traces the history of revolutionary libertarianism, a radical strain of American Revolutionary thought. Revolutionary libertarianism combines constitutional fundamentalism, popular nullification, the suspicion of despotic conspiracy articulated in 1770s Whig ideology, and an understanding of the eighteenth-century militia as an insurrectionary institution. In comparing a series of libertarian insurrectionary movements across American history, the dissertation concludes that revolutionary libertarian ideas continued to resonate with political actors of all social backgrounds until the onset of American anti-Communism in the aftermath of the Civil War.;The dissertation is based on four case studies: Fries' Rebellion in Pennsylvania, 1798--99, the Sons of Liberty Conspiracy in Indiana and Illinois, 1863--64, the Black Legion in Michigan and Ohio, 1932--36, and the constitutional militia movement that has emerged in the Midwest since 1994. Radical understandings of legitimate resistance and the right of revolution, articulated in 1774--1775 and revisited during the 1787 ratification debates resonated strongly during the Alien and Sedition Act Crisis of 1798. Democratic-Republican opponents of these Acts declared that they would resist by force of arms. In 1798 the tension between these insurgents and moderate "leading men" lay in class and gender identity rather than in constitutional theory or political culture. Federalists responded with warnings that Republicans had joined in the alien, subversive conspiracy of the illuminati. The crisis of 1798 thus injected libertarian and nativist impulses into American political culture, but prior to the Civil War these impulses were understood as antithetical. For example, radical libertarianism shaped Democratic opposition to the war policies of President Lincoln, while nativist counter-subversion lodged itself firmly within Republican ideology in the 1850s and 1860s.;In the aftermath of the railway strike of 1877, the rise of anti-Communism reshaped American politics and fused revolutionary libertarianism and nativism. The resulting ideological hybrid produced far-right paramilitaries such as the Black Legion during the Great Depression. With the waning of anti-Communism in the aftermath of the Cold War, the militia movement of the 1990s marks the renewed resonance of revolutionary libertarianism, and within the movement's constitutionalist wing revolutionary libertarian thought has broken free of its fusion with nativism.