Ryan McMaken, in “Why the French Revolution Was Not a Libertarian Revolution,” Mises Wire (08/20/2026), quotes Ralph Raico’s The Struggle for Liberty (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2025) to persuasively argue that the French Libertarian was not “some sort of classical liberal or libertarian revolution.” McMaken writes: it is a mistake
when modern libertarians attempt to rehabilitate the French Revolution to portray is as pro-freedom phenomenon. For example, in an essay titled “Thinking about the French Revolution,” David Boaz—a libertarian, although of the ultra-milquetoast regime-libertarian variety—lists the French Revolution among [the triumphs of liberalism.”
As Raico writes,
We further see the lack of liberalism among the revolutionaries in the fact that the French revolutionaries’ Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” is in no way as unequivocal as the American Bill of Rights. The French declaration says, for instance, there shall be freedom of thought, even for religion, “within the limits of the law.” They never got to the American point [as shown by the American Bill of Rights], which was that Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
McMaken is right to criticize the Declaration for using the “weasel words”: “These limits [on individual rights] can only be determined by law.” This is a point I have made before:
State laws and constitutional provisions often pay lip service to the existence of various personal and property rights, but then take them back by recognizing the right of the state to regulate or infringe the right so long as it is “by law” or “not arbitrary.” 1
For these and other reasons, McMaken concludes, “the French Revolution was not liberal in either the way it was conducted, or in the results it attained.”
I would agree. Its excess rationalism also led to the central planning and central legislating mindset—when the French Code Napoleon or Civil Code of 1804 was an elegant compilation of evolved, organic Roman and customary law but it was enacted as a statute and elevated legislation as the supreme source of law. This legislative positivism led to the rise of legal positivism and legislation and to the gradual replacement of more natural, organic, malum in se type law with malum prohibitum law—with the idea of the state as the primary or only source of law. 2
- Kinsella, What Libertarianism Is, n.38. See, e.g., the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, U.N. GAOR, 217A (III) (1948), at articles 22–26 (reciting, for example, “human rights” to “social security” and to “free” “education”); Khawaja on Socialist Welfare Rights; Using International Law to Protect Property Rights and International Investment. [↩]
- Kinsella, Legislative Positivism and Rationalism in the Louisiana and French Civil Codes; “Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society,” and Hoppe’s comments on the civil law vs. the common law, at n. 152; Herman, The Louisiana Civil Code: A European Legacy for the United States; KOL474 | Where The Common Law Goes Wrong (PFS 2025); On the Role of Commentators and Codes and the Oracles of the Law. [↩]
