Murray N. Rothbard, Conceptual Change and the Constitution [Review] (1989)

Rothbard’s book review assesses Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock’s edited collection of papers from a constitutional bicentennial conference. The collection examines changes in political concepts during the American revolutionary and constitutional periods; Rothbard concentrates on its methodological assumptions and its interpretation of republican virtue. His central objection is that fashionable linguistic philosophy obscures historical inquiry, while the civic-humanist framework associated with Pocock too readily turns opposition to corruption into a commitment to state-enforced virtue.

The review opens by attacking the penetration of historical scholarship by hermeneutics and philosophy’s “linguistic turn.” Rothbard accepts that concepts change during political upheaval. What he disputes is whether the contributors’ theoretical commitments help explain those changes. Their discussions of republic, virtue, democracy, and sovereignty appear to him inconclusive rather than illuminating. His criticism nevertheless allows for particular achievements:

One happy exception is Gerald Stourzh's compact and sure-footed analysis of changes in the meaning of "constitution."

Rothbard reports Stourzh’s finding that the modern understanding of a constitution as an overriding limit on governmental power begins with Vattel in 1758 and enters American usage through Rhode Island resistance to the Stamp Act. This example gives substance to his preferred alternative: a historically specific account of conceptual development whose significance remains intelligible without elaborate philosophical machinery. He also acknowledges useful analyses of Federalist–Antifederalist debates.

The review then develops two explicit criticisms. The first concerns James Farr’s dismissal of the eighteenth-century view that ideas precede words. Citing G. A. Wells’s defense of the linguistic realism of Reid, Monboddo, and Condillac, Rothbard argues that this older position deserves reconsideration. His methodological demand is to understand historical actors through their own assumptions about language:

If the authors had treated the eighteenth-century figures on their own linguistic terms, we at least would have been spared a great deal of murky writing and indecisive inquiry.

The objection therefore concerns more than difficult prose. Rothbard suggests that imposing a contemporary philosophy of language can prevent historians from adequately understanding the conceptual world they investigate. The review invokes Wells as support for this challenge, though it does not develop a detailed linguistic theory of its own.

The second criticism targets what Rothbard calls “the Pocockian Moment”: the interpretation of the founders as seeking a republic that would impose civic virtue. He contests Pocock’s inference that a republic charged with preventing corruption must consequently preserve virtue. For Rothbard, this moves unjustifiably from an ordinary rejection of political misconduct to a demanding classical conception of public morality:

I submit that everyone, even the staunchest laissez-faire liberal, opposes "corruption," whether it be that of Warren Hastings or the Reagan "sleaze factor"; and that the antithesis of corruption is not a grandiose Athenian or Spartan concept of virtue, but a simple absence of such sleaze, an absence that is perfectly compatible with commerce or with Lockean liberalism.

This distinction is the review’s decisive conceptual move. Anticorruption language does not by itself establish hostility to commerce or allegiance to coercive civic virtue. Rothbard closes by invoking Ronald Hamowy’s then-unpublished interpretation of Cato’s Letters as libertarian and radically Lockean, challenging a central example of Pocock’s civic-humanist genealogy. The review’s relevance lies in its compact intervention in debates over republicanism and liberalism: it questions both the linguistic methods used to reconstruct founding-era thought and the inference that republican opposition to corruption excludes a liberal political outlook.