The Revolution

Abstract

Ron Paul’s The Revolution is adamant on one point: to solve the problems in modern America, Americans need to return to Constitutional values. ‘In times like these, we need a return to fundamentals’ (p. 168). The specific fundamentals to which Paul refers are as often the values of Austrian School economists as they are the Founding Fathers. The Revolution makes a call for widespread political change, based on a particular reading of the Constitution in which the potential activities and scope of government is strictly limited. American prosperity would be guaranteed not by political institutions, but a celebration of individual liberty, and in particular an adoption of free-market economic orthodoxy. As such, The Revolution is unquestionably a call for wholesale governmental reform. ‘We need to rethink what the role of our government ought to be, and fast’ (p. 172). Such rethinking need not involve reinventing the wheel, however. All it will take for American to return to the right path is to recover the 18th-century approach to government, without which ‘our American Revolution would have been impossible’ (p. 171).