BY Table of Contents
Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) was an American political philosopher, abolitionist, and entrepreneur who argued that the U.S. Constitution was a contract that no living person had signed - and therefore no one was bound by it. He challenged the state’s monopoly on mail delivery by starting his own competing postal service, the American Letter Mail Company, and forced Congress to slash postage rates before they shut him down.
Spooner’s writing is radical in the original sense of the word - it goes to the root. His arguments about consent, natural law, and the illegitimacy of government coercion remain some of the most logically airtight cases for individual sovereignty ever written. If you have never read him, start with No Treason No. VI - it is short, devastating, and has never been adequately answered.
Lysander Spooner Quotes
“A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.”
- Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority (1870), p. 24
“Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.”
- Lysander Spooner, An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852), p. 14
“Certainly no man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire.”
- Lysander Spooner, Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Ch. 1, Section III, p. 7
“If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized.”
- Lysander Spooner, A Letter to Grover Cleveland (1886)
“Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.”
- Lysander Spooner, Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty (1875), p. 9
“Still another and all-sufficient answer to the argument that the use of spirituous liquors tends to poverty, is that, as a general rule, it puts the effect before the cause. It assumes that it is the use of the liquors that causes the poverty, instead of its being the poverty that causes the use of the liquors.”
- Lysander Spooner, Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty (1875), p. 33
“No middle ground is possible on this subject. Either ‘taxation without consent is robbery,’ or it is not. If it is not, then any number of men, who choose, may at any time associate; call themselves a government; assume absolute authority over all weaker than themselves; plunder them at will; and kill them if they resist.”
- Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. II: The Constitution (1867), p. 13
“So these villains, who call themselves governments, well understand that their power rests primarily upon money. With money they can hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort money. And, when their authority is denied, the first use they always make of money, is to hire soldiers to kill or subdue all who refuse them more money.”
- Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority (1870), p. 16
“If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them.”
- Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. I (1867), p. 59
“All human legislation is simply and always an assumption of authority and dominion, where no right of authority or dominion exists. It is, therefore, simply and always an intrusion, an absurdity, an usurpation, and a crime.”
- Lysander Spooner, Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Ch. 2, Section V, p. 13
“Majorities, as such, afford no guarantees for justice. They are men of the same nature as minorities. They have the same passions for fame, power, and money, as minorities; and are liable and likely to be equally - perhaps more than equally, because more boldly - rapacious, tyrannical and unprincipled, if intrusted with power. There is no more reason, then, why a man should either sustain, or submit to, the rule of the majority, than of a minority.”
- Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. I (1867), p. 8
“A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, (or by any other name indicating his true character,) or by millions, calling themselves a government.”
- Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. I (1867), p. 7
“A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offense of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases.”
- Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. II: The Constitution (1867)
“These conditions are simply these: viz., first, that each man shall do, towards every other, all that justice requires him to do; as, for example, that he shall pay his debts, that he shall return borrowed or stolen property to its owner, and that he shall make reparation for any injury he may have done to the person or property of another. The second condition is, that each man shall abstain from doing to another, anything which justice forbids him to do; as, for example, that he shall abstain from committing theft, robbery, arson, murder, or any other crime against the person or property of another. So long as these conditions are fulfilled, men are at peace, and ought to remain at peace, with each other.”
- Lysander Spooner, Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Ch. 1, Section I, pp. 5-6
“If there be such a principle as justice, or natural law, it is the principle, or law, that tells us what rights were given to every human being at his birth; what rights are, therefore, inherent in him as a human being, necessarily remain with him during life; and, however capable of being trampled upon, are incapable of being blotted out, extinguished, annihilated, or separated or eliminated from his nature as a human being, or deprived of their inherent authority or obligation.”
- Lysander Spooner, Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Ch. 2, Section IV, pp. 12-13
Lysander Spooner Constitution Quotes
“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”
- Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority (1870), p. 59
“The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing.”
- Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority (1870), p. 3
“The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this - that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.”
- Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority (1870), p. 7
Final Thoughts
Lysander Spooner wrote with the kind of precision that leaves no room for evasion. His arguments do not depend on sentiment or appeals to tradition - they follow from first principles of consent and natural law, and they lead to conclusions that most people are not prepared to accept. That is what makes them valuable. He does not ask you to agree with him. He asks you to find the flaw in his reasoning. Most people cannot.
What sets Spooner apart from later libertarian thinkers is that he was not merely a theorist. He put his ideas into practice - launching a competing mail service that outperformed the government’s, writing legal briefs arguing the unconstitutionality of slavery years before the Civil War, and refusing to soften his positions when they became inconvenient for either side of the political divide. He was an abolitionist who opposed the Union’s methods. Try finding that combination today.
If you read one thing by Spooner, make it No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority. It is fewer than sixty pages and it will permanently change how you think about the document most Americans treat as sacred. Whether you end up agreeing with Spooner or not, you will never again be able to pretend the question of consent has been settled.