Lysander Spooner

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) enters this wiki through Natural Law; or The Science of Justice, the most radical use of the natural-law tradition in this corpus.

Place in This Wiki

Spooner was an American individualist anarchist, abolitionist, entrepreneur (his American Letter Mail Company challenged the postal monopoly), and constitutional theorist. The wiki already holds his work through Let’s Abolish Government; this profile adds his most concentrated natural-law statement.

His argument is that justice is an exact natural science of person and property, from which it follows that “all human legislation” beyond enforcing natural justice is “an intrusion, an absurdity, an usurpation, and a crime.” Where Locke used natural rights to limit the state, Spooner uses them to delegitimize the legislative state outright — the individualist-anarchist edge of the tradition, and a direct ancestor of Rothbard’s natural-rights libertarianism.

See Also

• Natural Law; or The Science of Justice - the work present in this wiki

• Let’s Abolish Government - the existing Spooner collection in this wiki

• The State as Parasite: A Thesis - newsroom thesis backlink

• The Declaration of Independence - the founding creed whose natural-rights premises Spooner turned against the state it created

• Rights of Man - Paine’s natural-rights radicalism, adjacent to Spooner’s individualist edge

• John Locke - Short author reference for John Locke (1632–1704), the English philosopher whose Second Treatise of Government gave the natural-rights tradition its decisive modern form

• Mutualism and Individualist Anarchism - The market-anarchist tradition of Proudhon, Warren, Spooner, and Tucker: no state and free exchange, but with a labor-cost theory of value, mutual (interest-free) banking

• Natural Law - The wiki’s natural-law hub: the classical lineage of reason-knowable justice above positive law, from Aristotle and Cicero through Aquinas, Grotius, Locke

Sources

• Spooner, Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (Full Text) - the basis for this profile