Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

oretical articulation and groundwork. This does not mean that no theoretical
rationale existed. Indeed, it exploded in a mighty surge during the height
of the Puritan revolution; Roger Williams and his friends among the libertarian
wing of that revolution helped each other develop these doctrines.
But the significant fact of the mid-seventeenth century was the defeat of
the revolution and the victory of the counterrevolution. In England this
victory can be pinpointed in Oliver Cromwell's shift rightward and his suppression
of the Levellers—perhaps the finest libertarian movement up to that
time. The steady retreat of Roger Williams from libertarian principles and
enthusiasm can be dated from the disheartening victory of this Cromwellian
counterrevolution. A similar counterrevolution against liberalism occurred
in other parts of Europe: in France with the defeat of the Holy League in
the late sixteenth century and of the popular Frondeur movements in the
seventeenth century; in Holland with the victory of the Orange party over
the Republicans. Civil war and foreign wars prevented England from turning
its attention to its American colonies until the end of the seventeenth
century. When it finally did so, it used its power to crush libertarian reality
where it existed in America. Thus England imposed a counterrevolution on
virtually libertarian conditions in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and reversed
the liberal-tending Leislerian revolution, which had had to force its
way against what was in many ways the most reactionary colony of all, New
York. Liberal-tending rebellions in the South (for example, Bacon's Rebellion
in Virginia) were crushed, and reactionary policies entrenched or
deepened. After the vigorous turmoil and turbulence of the late seventeenth
century, when so many parts of America struggled in various ways
toward freedom, a rather bleak uniformity was imposed on the colonies by
England. The first half of the eighteenth century saw an increasing political
stalemate between the contending forces, now generally consisting of Crown
and privileged oligarchy as against the rest of the population. This period of
quiescence was matched in the mother country, in institutions as well as in
thought and opinion. In the first half of the eighteenth century, England
settled down into a centrist Whig settlement; radical-liberal thought was
more or less underground, expressed in thin trickles by lone independent
thinkers. These liberals kept alive the torch of seventeenth-century Republican
liberalism; when the radical-liberal movement burst forth once again as
a political force in England in the later eighteenth century, it came not as a
completely new phenomenon but as a renaissance of seventeenth-century
radical models.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, America was more eager to
learn from British liberalism past and contemporary than were the English
themselves. England was, for one thing, the major cultural and ideological
influence in the colonies, and Americans were eager to learn. For another,
America had the heritage of its virtual epoch of libertarian revolutions in
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