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In comments at The Art of the Possible, Jeremy asks:

And how come you get the country and I have to leave [in order to secure individual liberty from government coercion under majority rule]?

Angelica replies:

Well, as most people think democratic government is a good idea and it’s the idea we’ve used for a long, long time, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that your idea is better.

In logic, begging the question (sometimes known by its Latin name, petitio principii) is the fallacy of presupposing, in an argument, part of what you need to prove. There are lots of ways to spell out exactly what that comes to, and some interesting philosophical debate to be had. But one paradigm case of question-begging that pretty much everybody agrees on is the circular argument—a degenerate argument in which the conclusion supposedly to be proved is itself one of the premises. For example, when one argues that, all other things being equal, I ought to be ruled by a form of legal authority based on what most people want rather than based on my individual consent, because, regardless of whether or not I individually consent to it, that’s the form of legal authority that most people want.

Here’s noted evolutionary biologist and village atheist Richard Dawkins, in the course of his review of what seems to be a laughable little documentary that he was tricked into giving an interview for:

My own view, frequently expressed (for example in the The Selfish Gene and especially in the title chapter of A Devil’s Chaplain) is that there are two reasons why we need to take Darwinian natural selection seriously. Firstly, it is the most important element in the explanation for our own existence and that of all life. Secondly, natural selection is a good object lesson in how NOT to organize a society. As I have often said before, as a scientist I am a passionate Darwinian. But as a citizen and a human being, I want to construct a society which is about as un-Darwinian as we can make it. I approve of looking after the poor (very un-Darwinian). I approve of universal medical care (very un-Darwinian). It is one of the classic philosophical fallacies to derive an ought from an is. Stein (or whoever wrote his script for him) is implying that Hitler committed that fallacy with respect to Darwinism. If we look at more recent history, the closest representatives you’ll find to Darwinian politics are uncompassionate conservatives like Margaret Thatcher, George W Bush, or Ben Stein’s own hero, Richard Nixon. Maybe all these people, along with the Social Darwinists from Herbert Spencer to John D Rockefeller, committed the is/ought fallacy and justified their unpleasant social views by invoking garbled Darwinism.

—Richard Dawkins (2008-03-28): Lying for Jesus?

There’s a fair amount to praise here, and a fair amount to pick at. For the moment, though, I’d like to point out that Dawkins’ characterization of Herbert Spencer — the 19th century radical libertarian sociologist and philosopher — is completely wrong on two different counts.

Herbert Spencer, dirty evolutionist hippie

First, Spencer was not a Social Darwinist. He was not, in fact, a Darwinist at all; he published his most famous work on evolution and society, Social Statics, in 1851, eight years before Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species. His ideas about evolution, especially as applied to society, were Lamarckian, rather than Darwinian; which is not ultimately that surprising, since he came up with them independently of Darwinian evolutionary theory, and before that even existed in published form.

Second, Dawkins is completely wrong about Spencer’s radical political views, which bear virtually no resemblence to the belligerent Rightism and economic royalism of Thatcher, Bush, Nixon, or Rockefeller. Spencer was in fact a feminist, a labor radical, and a vehement critic of European imperialism (which he described as bearing a very repulsive likeness to the doings of buccaneers). Contrary to the most popular, and most wildly inaccurate, caricature of his social views, Spencer did not believe in cutting off charitable relief to, or mutual aid among, the poor, sick, or other folks whom the powers that be might marginalize and dismiss as unfit, in the name of survival of the fittest. (That is his phrase, but it is being misapplied.) Spencer opposed government welfare programs — because he opposed all forms of government command-and-control — but he believed that voluntary charity and mutual aid were not only a positive moral obligation, but in fact were features of the highest forms of social evolution (Social Statics, pp. 291-2), as the old militant mode of hierarchy and command was supplanted by the new industrial mode of solidarity and voluntary co-operation. Spencer devoted ten chapters of his late work, Principles of Ethics, to the duty of Positive Beneficence. He advocated the organization of voluntary labor unions as a bulwark against exploitation by capitalist bosses, and favored an economy organized primarily in free worker co-operatives as a replacement for the slavery of capitalist wage-labor.. For those — like the cartoon Social Darwinist that Spencer is so often portrayed to be — who advocated indifference or harshness towards the poor and blamed poverty on the ignorance, folly, or vices of the poor people themselves, Spencer himself had nothing but contempt:

It is very easy for you, O respectable citizen, seated in your easy chair, with your feet on the fender, to hold forth on the misconduct of the people – very easy for you to censure their extravagant and vicious habits …. It is no honor to you that you do not spend your savings in sensual gratification; you have pleasures enough without. But what would you do if placed in the position of the laborer? How would these virtues of yours stand the wear and tear of poverty? Where would your prudence and self-denial be if you were deprived of all the hopes that now stimulate you …? Let us see you tied to an irksome employment from dawn till dusk; fed on meager food, and scarcely enough of that …. Suppose your savings had to be made, not, as now, out of surplus income, but out of wages already insufficient for necessaries; and then consider whether to be provident would be as easy as you at present find it. Conceive yourself one of a despised class contemptuously termed the great unwashed; stigmatized as brutish, stolid, vicious … and then say whether the desire to be respectable would be as practically operative on you as now. … How offensive it is to hear some pert, self-approving personage, who thanks God that he is not as other men are, passing harsh sentence on his poor, hard-worked, heavily burdened fellow countrymen …. (Social Statics, pp. 203–5)

Of course, there is plenty in Spencer’s views that Dawkins, as a Social Democrat, would object to. But Dawkins has not yet succeeded in identifying what those disagreements would be. Spencer’s humanitarian, pro-labor, pro-charity radical left libertarianism has just about nothing in common with the authoritarian Right-wing political economy that Dawkins rightly condemns.

Further reading:

• Roderick Long (2007-05-29: More Spencer Nonsense, Part Deux
• Roderick Long (2007-04-10): Herbert Spencer, Labortarian
• Roderick Long (2003-08-28): Herbert Spencer: The Defamation Continues

Last week I wrote about Jamie Kirchick’s latest excursion into truthiness for The New Republic’s blogs; the comments seem to have lit out on an interesting tangent about language, grammar, and gender-neutral third-person pronouns. It’s all Anon73’s fault:

Continuing the pronoun pondering, I don’t really agree with the method of alternating he and she to make language gender-neutral; it provokes too much confusion when one actually does want to specify a person’s gender. I think the best method is to switch to new pronouns like ze and use he/she when gender matters to a discussion. But then I favor talking about kibibytes and mebibytes, so what do I know….

—Anon73 @ 24 March 2008 at 11:37 am

I replied:

I don’t actually alternate pronouns very often; with a very few exceptions, I just always use she in preference to he as a gender-indefinite pronoun. But in any case I don’t see either practice as posing much of a stylistic problem when you do want to specify gender: you just do that in the antecedent, rather than in the pronoun. In a language that had no gendered pronouns, that’s what you’d have to do anyway.

Anyone who likes words like ze, hir, ey, xe, thon, etc. should feel free to use them as widely as they can; I’m certainly not going to begrudge them the minimal effort it takes on my part to pick up on new monosyllables. But I generally don’t like them, stylistically speaking, because they usually don’t sound much like English—they don’t fit very well into the phonetic structure of either formal English or dialect. (For example, how is hir even supposed to be pronounced by an English speaker?)

The one big exception to that is the singular they, which comes out of living speech and which flourishes in most dialects because in most of the constructions you might use it in, it sounds pretty natural. But it often gets frowned on and doesn’t have much uptake by self-conscious language reformers, because the kind of people who would actually use a word like ze in writing or speech also tend to be the kind of people who would feel awkward about using an incorrect singular they.

If yo gets some uptake, that would sound fairly natural, too, and would sidestep whatever uneasiness people may feel about the singular they.

—Rad Geek @ 24 March 2008 at 1:21 pm

Laura J., who knows more about language than I could ever hope to, and perhaps more than an entirely sane human being should, adds:

Yo? How curious. I don’t think I could easily get used to it - it simultaneously sounds too much like English you and Romance first-person pronouns for my tastes. But then, I don’t have a grammatical gap to fill there since I routinely use they as a singular pronoun when there isn’t one specific gendered person being referred to.

—Laura J. @ 24 March 2008 2:53pm

Here’s Roderick:

Shakespeare occasionally uses they as a singular pronoun, as I recall.

—Roderick Long @ 27 March 2008 9:30am

Me again, stirring up some controversy:

As do Jane Austen and the King James Version of the Bible. (Cf. 1 for still more examples.) But of course discomfort with the singular they has more or less nothing to do with the norms underlying actually-existing good English, either written or spoken, and everything to do with a fetishized ideal of how a logical language should work, or, more concretely, with participating in a particular culture of correction and officious priggishness, which institutional schooling browbeats most educated professionals into accepting.

—Rad Geek @ 30 March 2008 10:09pm

Anon72 (not to be confused with Anon73, unless they’re actually the same person—I don’t know one way or the other) joins in to reply

Well I think clarity and consistency are always good things to strive for in a language; I just don’t see the singular they as satisfying either.

—Anon72 @ 31 March 2008 11:32am

This is pretty much always the first line of defense when challenging an incorrect bit of dialectical grammar. But I don’t buy it; clarity and consistency are certainly things to be desired, but this seems like special pleading. I reply:

I agree with the principle, but not with the application of it.

Can you think of any actual cases in your life where somebody used the singular they and you couldn’t understand what they were saying because of it?

If so, what was the case? If not, then it seems like your worry about clarity is misplaced.

As for consistency, is it a violation of consistency for English to have a single word, you, for the second-person singular and the second-person plural? If not, how is that different from having a singular they? If so, does it rub you the wrong way when someone uses you in the plural (or singular) just as much as when they use they in the singular? If it does, do you fix the problem by introducing dialectical constructions like y’all or youse or yuns in formal contexts? If it doesn’t, what do you suppose accounts for the difference in your reaction?

—Rad Geek @ 31 March 2008 12:16pm

Anon72 answers one of my questions:

As for consistency, is it a violation of consistency for English to have a single word, you, for the second-person singular and the second-person plural?

Yes. I don’t like y’all, but it would be nice if the language had separate words for the singular and plural forms. If you want to know my philosophy on language, I think Heinlein was right when he said words should mirror the way we think about reality. Addressing a single person is very different from addressing a crowd, so it’s logical to have different words for each. I’d say similar considerations apply to neutral pronouns; sometimes people want to refer to someone of certain but unknown gender, and he/she/it doesn’t cut it. However, I don’t necessarily agree with Hofstadter that sexism is partly due to gendered pronouns.

Incidentally I was reading an old grammar guide (circa 1961) and when listing the different genders it said something to the effect of he, she, and it are for male living things, female living things, and non-living things (neuter) respectively. It’s interesting how the original english speakers decided a fourth category of living-but-necessarily-gendered was unimportant.

—Anon72 @ 1 April 2008 7:34pm

But I’m not especially convinced.

I agree that a proper language needs separate words for addressing a single person and addressing a group of people. But I think that privileged English already has two different words for those two different purposes, even without dialectical constructs like the ones I mentioned. Those two words are you and you.

Those are, to be sure, two words that can’t be distinguished by sound or spelling, but rather are distinguished by the context of their significant use (as expressed in word order, sentence structure, etc.). There are lots of pairs of words like that, sometimes with very different or even opposite meanings — sanction meaning punishment and sanction meaning approval or endorsement, for example — but in real, everyday language, context is often quite enough to distinguish those words from one another. To take another case, suppose that everyone suddenly stopped spelling their, there, and they’re differently in writing, and just used a single spelling for all three words, their. (Lots of people already do this unless a teacher raps them on the knuckles for it.) Would that impair your ability to distinguish the words from each other? Really? Does the fact that they all sound exactly alike impair your ability to distinguish them in speech?

Now, if someone’s depending on context rather than phonetic or graphical features to differentiate different words, then, to be sure, they have to consider how clearly context distinguishes and how often it leaves things ambiguous. In the case of you and you, it turns out there are enough cases with a significant risk of confusion that dialects have repeatedly, spontaneously with alternative second-person plural pronouns to solve the problem. But in the case of they, the situation is quite the reverse: the spontaneous and repeated trend, even among masterful and careful writers of good English — Shakespeare, Chaucer, Austen, the King James Version translators, et al. — has been to spontaneously use the singular they in order to get an epicene pronoun, where the privileged version of the language doesn’t provide it. I think that the dialectical situation is different here because, as a matter of actual fact, the rules for using singular they (which, grammatically, isn’t actually a perfect substitute for he or she; it only works in a subset of cases where he or she works) are such that there’s hardly ever any chance of confusion, given the context of the sentence.

Which brings me back to a couple of my earlier question, which I really would be interested to hear Anon72’s answers to:

Can you think of any actual cases in your life where somebody used the singular “they” and you couldn’t understand what they were saying because of it?

And also:

If so, does it rub you the wrong way when someone uses you in the plural (or singular) just as much as when they use they in the singular? … If it doesn’t, what do you suppose accounts for the difference in your reaction?

Incidentally, I should add that I think that y’all is lovely English and I would have no problem introducing it (or you all or whatever) into the context of formal writing, which would (among other things) have the benefit of avoiding certain kinds of ambiguity. There are lots of cases where I prefer an academic she to a singular they, too, but honestly I think any charges of either unclarity or inconsistency against they are surely trumped up, and probably a reflection of just that fetishized ideal of how logical languages are supposed to look (as if the logic were in the signs themselves rather than in their significant use) that I complained about earlier.

Happy Tyrannicide Day (observed)!

Today, March 15^th, commemorates the assassination of two tyrants. Today is the 2,051^st anniversary — give or take the relevant calendar adjustments — of the death of Gaius Julius Caesar, the military dictator who butchered his way through Gaul, set fire to Alexandria, and, through years of conquest, perfidy, and proscription, battered and broke every barricade that republican institutions had put in the way of military and executive power, until he finally had himself proclaimed dictator perpetuus, the King of Rome in everything but name. On March 15^th, 44 BCE, a group of republican conspirators, naming themselves the Liberatores, rose up and stabbed Caesar to death on the floor of the Senate. Meanwhile, Thursday, March 13^th, was also the 127^th anniversary (give or take the relevant calendar adjustments), of the death of Czar Alexander II Nikolaevitch, the self-styled Caesar of all the Russias. Alexander was killed by grenades thrown by a group of anarchist conspirators on March 13^th, 1881 C.E., in an act of propaganda by the deed. In honor of the events, the Ministry of Culture in this secessionist republic of one has proclaimed March 15^th Tyrannicide Day (observed), which is kind of like President’s Day, except cooler. Instead of another dull theo-nationalist hymn on the miraculous births of two of the canonized saints of the United States federal government, Tyrannicide Day gives us one day in which we can commemorate the deaths of two tyrants at the hands of their equals — men and women who defied the tyrants’ arbitrary claims to an unchecked authority that they had neither the wisdom, the virtue, nor the right to exercise. Men and women who saw themselves as exercising their equal right of self-defense, by striking down the would-be tyrants just like they would be entitled to strike down any other two-bit thug who tried to kill them, enslave them, or shake them down.

It is worth remembering in these days that the State has always tried to pass off attacks against its own commanding and military forces (Czars, Kings, soldiers in the field, etc.) as acts of terrorism. That is, in fact, what almost every so-called act of terrorism attributed to 19^th century anarchists happened to be: direct attacks on the commanders of the State’s repressive forces. The linguistic bait-and-switch is a way of trying to get moral sympathy on the cheap, in which the combat deaths of trained fighters and commanders are fraudulently passed off, by a professionalized armed faction sanctimoniously playing the victim, as if they were just so many innocent bystanders killed out of the blue. Tyrannicide Day is a day to expose this for the cynical lie that it is. As many reasons as there are to criticize the strategy behind the assassinations of Czars, Princes, and Dictators Perpetual, the fact that the brutal absolute monarch of a monster State lay dead at the end is not among them.

There are in fact lots of good reasons to rule out tyrannicide as a political tactic — after all, these two famous cases each ended a tyrant but not the tyrannical regime; Alexander II was replaced by the even more brutal Alexander III, and Julius Caesar was replaced by his former running-dogs, one of whom would emerge from the abattoir that followed as Augustus Caesar, to begin the long Imperial nightmare in earnest. But it’s important to recognize that these are strategic failures, not moral ones, and what should be celebrated on the Ides of March is not the tyrannicide as a strategy, but rather tyrannicide as a moral fact. Putting a diadem on your head and wrapping yourself in the blood-dyed robes of the State confers neither the virtue, the knowledge, nor the right to rule over anyone, anywhere, for even one second, any more than you had naked and alone. Tyranny is nothing more and nothing less than organized crime executed with a pompous sense of entitlement and a specious justification; the right to self-defense applies every bit as much against the person of some self-proclaimed sovereign as it does against any other two-bit punk who might attack you on the street.

Every victory for human liberation in history — whether against the crowned heads of Europe, the cannibal-empires of modern Fascism and Bolshevism, or the age-old self-perpetuating oligarchies of race and sex — has had these moral insights at its core: the moral right to deal with the princes and potentates of the world as nothing more and nothing less than fellow human beings, to address them as such, to challenge them as such, and — if necessary — to resist them as such.

I have been informed that March 15^th is also commemorated as the International Day Against Police Brutality. Make of that what you will; what the Ministry of Culture will make of it is an excellent opportunity for a program of commemorative song.

Our first piece is a skolion for the Athenian lovers Aristogeiton and Harmodius, who assassinated the tyrant Hipparchus in 514 BCE, using swords they had concealed in ceremonial myrtle wreaths. In the Athenian democracy, the couple were celebrated as martyrs for liberty, and often remembered in hymns and songs sung before banquets. This is Edgar Allan Poe’s 1827 translation of the most famous surviving Hymn to Aristogeiton and Harmodius; feel free to sing it at your Tyrannicide Day holiday dinner:

Wreathed in myrtle, my sword I’ll conceal
Like those champions devoted and brave,
When they plunged in the tyrant their steel,
And to Athens deliverance gave.

Beloved heroes! your deathless souls roam
In the joy breathing isles of the blest;
Where the mighty of old have their home
Where Achilles and Diomed rest

In fresh myrtle my blade I’ll entwine,
Like Harmodius, the gallant and good,
When he made at the tutelar shrine
A libation of Tyranny’s blood.

Ye deliverers of Athens from shame!
Ye avengers of Liberty’s wrongs!
Endless ages shall cherish your fame,
Embalmed in their echoing songs!

—Hymn to Aristogeiton and Harmodius, trans. Edgar Allan Poe (1827)

Our second piece, in honor of the combined occasions for the day, is one of the most famous outlaw corridos from the south Texas borderlands, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, a cowboy and small-time farmer in Karnes County, Texas, who became a legal cause celebre, and a folk hero for many Tejan@s, after he fought back against a racist sheriff in June 1901. Sheriff W. T. Brack Morris was interrogating Cortez and his brother, and accused them of horse-thieving — based on nothing more than the fact that they did have a horse, and Cortez met the description of the suspect in a recent horse-theft — a suspect who had been described only as a middle-sized Mexican. Morris tried to arrest Cortez; Cortez told him off, and said that Morris had no reason to arrest him. The deputy who was translating mistakenly claimed that Cortez had said No white man can arrest me; that was enough for Morris, who pulled his gun and shot down Cortez’s brother. Cortez fired back, killing Morris, and then fled across the state on foot. He managed to elude capture for ten days, repeatedly making daring and close escapes when surrounded and outnumbered by sheriffs, posses, and the rinches (Texas Rangers). The cops threw his wife, his mother, and his children into jail. Anglo papers called for him to be lynched, and Anglo mobs rioted against Latin@s in Gonzales, Refugio, and Hayes counties. After Cortez was finally captured and put on trial for murder, his supporters organized legal defense campaigns, arguing that Cortez had killed only in to defend himself and his family; eventually they got all but one of the murder convictions reversed on appeal. In 1913, they convinced governor Oscar Colquitt to grant Cortez a conditional pardon. Meanwhile, his fame spread in the countryside through this ballad.

Gregorio Cortez Traditional (1900s–1920s). En el condado de El Carmen miren lo que ha sucedido, murió el Cherife Mayor quedando Román herido. Se anduvieron informando como media hora después supieron que el malhechor era Gregorio Cortez. Decía Gregorio Cortez Con su pistola en la mano: —No siento haberlo matado, lo que siento es a mi hermano.— Soltaron los perroes jaunes pa’ que siguieran la huella, pero alcanzar a Cortez era seguir a una estrella. Tiró con rumbo a Gonzales sin ninguna timidez: —Síganme, rinches cobardes, yo soy Gregorio Cortez.— Y en el condado del Kiansis lo llegaron a alcanzar y a pocos más de trescientos allí les brincó el corral. Decía Gregorio Cortez, con pistola en la mano: —¡Ay, cuánto rinche cobarde para un solo mexicano!— Cuando les brincó el corral, según lo que aquí se dice, se agarraron a balazos y les mató otro cherife. Decían Gregorio Cortez con su alma muy encendida: —No siento haberlo matado, la defensa es permitida. Salió Gregorio Cortez, salió con rumbo a Laredo, no lo quisieron seguir porque le tuvieron miedo. Decían Gregorio Cortez: ¿Pa’ qué se valen de planes? No me pueden agarrar ni con esos perros juanes. Decían los americanos: —Si lo alcanzamos ¿qué hacemos? Si le entramos por derecho muy poquitos volveremos.— Allá por El Encinal, Según lo que aquí se dice, le formaron un corral y les mató otro Cherife. Ya se encontró a una mexicana, le dice con altivez: —Platícame qué hay de nuevo, yo so Gregorio Cortez. —Dicen que por culpa mía han matado mucha gente, pues ya me voy a entregar porque eso no es conveniente.— Venían todos los rinches, por el viento volaban, porque se querían ganar diez mil pesos que les daban. Cuando rodearon la casa Cortez se les presentó: —Por la buena sí me llevan porque de otro modo no. Deciá el Cherife Mayor, como queriendo llorar: —Cortez, entrega tus armas, no te vamos a matar.— Decía Gregorio Cortez, gritaba en alta voz: —Mis armas no las entrego hasta estar en calaboz’.— Ya agarraron a Cortez, ya terminó la cuestión, la probre de su familia lo lleva en el corazón. Ya con ésta me despido a la sombra de un ciprés; aquí se acaba el corrido de don Gregorio Cortez.

Gregorio Cortez Trans. (2008) Charles Johnson. In the county of El Carmen, Look what’s gone down The Big Ol’ Sheriff is dead, Leaving Roman dying on the ground. They walked around asking questions and in half an hour or so they found out the man who did it was Gregorio Cortez. And so said Gregorio Cortez, with his pistol in his hand, I don’t feel sorry that I killed him; what I feel sorry about is my brother. They unleashed the hound dogs, to follow on his trail, but chasing after Cortez was like following a star. He tore off down toward Gonzales Not timid in the least; Come after me, cowardly rinches; I am Gregorio Cortez. And in the county of Kiansis, They showed up to try and grab him, A bit more than three hundred There, and he jumped out of their corral. And so said Gregorio Cortez, With his pistol in his hand: Man, look how many cowardly rinches For just one Mexican! But when he jumped the corral, What they say around here is, The bullets started flying, And he killed them another sheriff. And so said Gregorio Cortez, With his soul burning bright, I don’t feel sorry that I killed him. A man’s got a right to defend his life. Then Gregorio Cortez got away, got away down the way to Laredo; they wouldn’t have wanted to follow, Now he had them scared to. And so said Gregorio Cortez: What’s the good of your plots? You can’t get your hands on me, Not even with those hound dogs. And so said the Americanos: If we catch up to him, what can we do? If we go after him in a straight-up fight, There won’t be many coming back. Out there by El Encinal, What they say around here is, They got him in another corral And he killed them another sheriff. Then he met another Mexican, And he said with some arrogance, What’s the news? Tell me— I am Gregorio Cortez. They say that because of me, They’re killing lots of folks So now I’ll turn myself in, because that ain’t fit at all. Down came all the rinches, Flying through the wind, Because they wanted to get ahold of Ten thousand pesos like they were offered. When they surrounded his house Cortez showed himself to say: You’ll take me in by my own will, And not any other way. And so said the Big Ol’ Sheriff, like he was about to cry: Cortez, hand over your guns, and you won’t have to die. And so said Gregorio Cortez, With a great big yell, I’m not handing my guns over Until you’ve locked me in my cell. And so they took in Cortez, And that’s where it came to an end. His poor family Carry him in their hearts. And with that I’ll say my goodbye In the shade under a cypress; Here I’ll finish off the ballad Of Don Gregorio Cortez.

Thus always to tyrants. Beware the State. Celebrate the Ides of March!

Further reading:

• GT 2007-11-23: The present anarchy of our commerce features a Tyrannicide Day commemorative t-shirt from the Rad Geek People’s Clothing Collective storefront
• GT 2007-03-15: Tyrannicide Day 2007: The fourth annual celebration, with an oration and a commemorative reading from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, a dramatic retelling of the legendary Swiss tyrannicide which, if genuinely historical, was perhaps the most strategically successful tyrannicide in history.
• GT 2006-03-15: Tyrannicide Day ceremonies for 2006: the third annual celebration, with some thoughts on equality and a commemorative reading from The Tragedy [sic] of Julius Caesar.
• GT 2005-03-15: Happy Tyrannicide Day (observed)!: the second annual celebration, and some thoughts on tyrannicide and terrorism
• GT 2004-03-15: Happy Tyrannicide Day (observed)!: the first annual celebration. It’s like President’s Day, only cooler.
• Professor Wilkes: Tyrannicide Not Terrorism
• Leo Tolstoy (1900): Thou Shalt Not Kill

Over in the comments on GT 2006-04-09: Freedom Movement Celebrity Deathmatch, Jeremy (of Social Memory Complex) asks the following question, referring back to an exchange I had with Lady Aster (1, 2), and an exchange that Jeremy and I had at his blog (1 et seq.):

In your reply to Aster you spoke of the danger of relativism. Is it possible for you to expand on this concept? Can you be more descriptive and perhaps specific about the danger you see in a relativist view of the morality? Or perhaps you have written about this elsewhere and can direct me to your existing writing. I only ask because we’ve recently discussed this and I’m interested in your argument here.

I initially posted this reply as a very long comment; after thinking about it, I decided that it would be of general enough interest, even though it’s a fairly sketchy overview, to make it a post of its own.

Jeremy, I think that the best reply partly depends on what sort of dangers you’re interested in.

I have philosophical reasons for believing that moral relativism is theoretically flawed. If relativism is intended to be a description of the logic behind people’s actual use of moral terms, then it’s not an accurate description; it’s not really a theory of morality at all, but rather a theory of something else — etiquette, taste, or, in its crudest forms, conventional wisdom or personal pleasure. If, on the other hand, it’s intended to be a normative theory about the criteria that people ought to use in making certain kinds of judgments — by, say, abandoning the morality-game’s requirements for certain kinds of consistency across differences of culture or personal psychology, and adopting some other, relativistic set of requirements — then I think that that theory is undermotivated, false, and, at least in most versions, logically incoherent. If it’s intended as a meta-ethical theory, which takes for granted the rules of the morality-game as they are, and doesn’t specifically counsel abandoning those rules, but which claims that those rules either don’t express factual claims at all, or else express factual claims that presuppose something false, then what you’ve got is not really relativism exactly, but either non-cognitivism or an error theory (respectively). I have my own logical and philosophical problems with each of those, which we can discuss at more length if you want.

I also have reasons for thinking that relativism is a moral danger, in the sense that I believe that, under many circumstances, indulging in relativistic argument is in fact a moral vice, and that it tends to encourage other kinds of moral vice. Basically because on any form of relativism (cultural relativism, agent relativism, speaker relativism, etc.) you necessarily, in order to remain a relativist, must fail to hold some people to moral standards that it’s appropriate to hold them to, and to hold some other people to moral standards that it’s inappropriate to hold them to. It amounts to either excuse-making or bigotry, depending on the case. (For example, consider the very common, implicitly culturally-relativist claim that contemporary writers shouldn’t judge George Washington harshly for enslaving hundreds of his fellow human beings if most of his contemporaries, or at least most of the minority faction of his contemporaries whose opinions he cared about — the white and propertied ones — believed that slavery was O.K. and if Washington’s methods weren’t especially harsh by their standards. I don’t think there is any possible way to make this kind of claim without, thereby, expressing a really massive callousness toward the well-being, dignity, and rights of the hundreds of people that George Washington enslaved. Not only do I regard it as being philosophically mistaken, but the callousness itself is wrong. And if you live the kind of life that that kind of immorality accords with, well, that’s a problem with your life, not a problem with morality.)

I also have reasons for thinking that libertarians should regard relativism in general, and relativism about the duty to respect other people’s rights in particular, as a political danger. If justice is thought of as something that’s less than universally and categorically binding, which individual people or cultures of people can take or leave as it pleases them, then I don’t think it is very surprising that what will soon follow is a whole host of reasons or excuses for leaving it in favor of some putative benefit to be got through coercion. Politically speaking, I’m not just interested in theories which proclaim my reasons for not beating, burning, and bombing innocent people; I wouldn’t do that anyway, and just about nobody would support me or make excuses on my behalf if I did. I’m much more concerned with theories which proclaim George W. Bush’s or Dick Cheney’s reasons for not beating, burning, and bombing innocent people, because the problem in this case is precisely those who don’t believe that they have any personal reason not to do that.

Of course, I could instead adopt a moral theory on which it’s O.K. for them to act like that, but also O.K. for me to try to resist them, and a sociological theory which predicts that if I stick to my values and they convert to similar values, it’ll lead to a better outcome for the both of us than if we each stick to our values, or if I convert to Bush’s and Cheney’s. (Maybe that’s what Max Stirner believed.)

But, again, in addition to the theoretical and the moral problems that I’ve already mentioned, I also think that this kind of theory is unlikely to get you much political traction, because it underplays your dialectical hand. (I think that binding moral claims are really much stronger, rhetorically and dialectically, than most people seem to believe they are. Lots of people very often rule out a stark moral arguments—say against slavery, or imprisoning nonviolent drug users, or forced pregnancy, or the war on Iraq—in favor of some much more complicated technical argument, or a pseudo-conciliatory hand-wringing argument, because they dismiss the moral argument as somehow impractical, even though it would be perfectly convincing to them, and even though they would find complicated or hand-wringing argument confusing, unfocused, or worse, if they were the ones listening to the argument. The problem in these cases is often not with the moral argument but rather with the arguer underestimating her audience.) I also think that these kind of approaches very often involve a mistake about the best target for your argument; sometimes it makes sense to try to persuade aggressors to stop being aggressive by argument, but it’s much more often the case that the smarter goal would be to try to convince other victims of aggression to resist, or at least stop collaborating with, the aggressor, and stark moral arguments against the legitimacy of the aggression are very often going to be the most effective way to inspire comrades and shame collaborators.

But, setting aside political strategy, I think the most important reasons are the moral and logical ones. The fact that relativism and relativistic arguments are dangerous to the political prospects for liberty, if that is a fact, is just a secondary reason to more strongly dislike it. The primary reason to oppose it is that the position is false, the arguments are fallacious, and the vision of human life and moral discourse that it presents — one in which people are just so many bigots and partisans, divided in our basically irreconcilable values by personal temperament or, worse, cultural or parochial loyalties, whose normative discourse consists of battering their own preferences against other people, to whom those preferences are ultimately alien, in the hope that their opponents will eventually be remade in their own image and their own preferences will triumph, through means explicitly other than rational conviction, which of course has been ruled out from the get-go by the relativist premise — is a narrow and mean and miserable thing compared to the vision on which we are, each of us, fellow citizens of a cosmopolis of all rational creatures, open to each other’s reasons and concerns, and in both amenable to, and hopefully guided by, reason, when it comes to the things that are most important to each of our individual lives. The highest form of flourishing is one in which I neither regard myself as made for the use of others, nor regard others as made for my own use, but rather see my taste and idiosyncratic projects, other people’s taste and idiosyncratic projects, and the common tastes and projects which we may agree to cultivate cooperatively, as all existing within the scope of shared and universally intelligible norms of respect, consent, humanity, and rational discourse. Relativism often advances itself as if it promoted that form of flourishing, under the veneer of a phony tolerance, but in fact to the extent that it attacks the sharedness and universal intelligibility of those norms, it is attacking that form of flourishing, and attempting to claim that tolerance means my right to make you tolerate whatever I want you to (or vice versa), since (after all) the relativistic version of tolerance can in principle include tolerance of absolutely any value, including values for coercion, aggression, parasitism, and sadism.

I should note before I conclude that I don’t think that the argument of Aster’s which I was originally responding to is at all guilty of relativism. I think that’s a danger implicit in the kind of language she recommends, but there are other, related dangers of authoritarianism which are implicit in the kind of language that she criticizes; whichever kind of language you choose, there’s dialectical work to be done in making clear what you want to make clear while avoiding the error that the language might suggest in careless hands. And if she does at some point fall into a relativistic error about the status of rights — which as far as I know she doesn’t, and which I certainly don’t mean to attribute to her —then I’m quite certain, based on what she’s written here and elsewhere, that it’s not for some of the reasons (e.g. underestimating her audience or confusion about the appropriate audience) that I discuss here. I think all forms of relativism involve at least some of these confusions, but only some forms involve all of them.

Anyway, I hope this helps somewhat in explaining, but I think that I probably haven’t covered what you wanted me to cover in the detail that you wanted. But I think there are a lot of different points to cover, and to cover any given point more deeply and more illustratively, I’d need to know a bit more about what specific kind of dangers, and in what context of discourse, you’re interested in my views on. A conversation that I’d be happy to have in comments, for those that are interested.

Further reading:

• GT 2005-07-26: Pet Peeves
• GT 2006-09-01: One man’s reductio, GT 2004-12-05: The Humane Impaler, and GT 2003-09-30: Why There Are No Arguments for Terrorism
• G. E. Moore (1912), Ethics, Chapter III and Chapter IV, on The Objectivity of Moral Judgments.

From Jason Smathers’s report on Wendy McElroy’s recent anti-voting lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

You put your trust in the state because it filters out complexities of life you either cannot manage on your own or see no need to. Why do people obey unjust laws? Because — for the majority, in most cases — it’d be a whole lot more problematic and chaotic without the system there. I may recognize that a war we’re involved in is unjust, but I don’t attempt to overthrow the government because the state simplifies my life in ways that more directly affect me.

Well. I, for one, know that if I were an Iraqi child, I would be happy to die so that Jason Smathers can live a simpler life.

Here’s two pieces of correspondence that arrived within three hours of each other, on this past Tuesday. The first comes to us from Stasi [sic!] in reply to GT 2008-01-28: The tall poppies, part 3, my recent article on the spread of opium poppies as a cash crop for impoverished farmers in southern Iraq:

From: stasi
To: Rad Geek
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 1:45 PM
Subject: You Must be High: Tall Poppies, III

How can you even think that raising opium plants is a suitable way of making money to raise your family out of poverty. The only to benefit from drug trade are the high powered, high financed drug cartels.

Additionally, drug use (opium, heroin, etc) has been proven to have detrimental effects on individuals, families, and SOCIETIES. Let’s ALL start raising drug inducing plants to make money.

You MUST be high to think in such terms.

Well, I’m convinced.

Remember, impoverished farmers who grow opium poppies may think that growing a lucrative cash-crop and trading pain-killers to willing customers benefits them more than would starving themselves to grow unprofitable crops that meet the approval of U.S. narcs. But whatever they may think, the Stasi knows that the only people to benefit from the drug trade are high powered, high financed drug cartels. How foolish of Iraqi farmers to think that the ability to provide for your family, rather than starving for the sake of U.S. government narco-diplomacy, would be a benefit worth counting. The Stasi certainly knows what their families want and need better than they do.

Later in the afternoon, I received this from the starr, in reply to one of my posts on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which over 200,000 Japanese civilians (about a third of the population of Nagasaki, and more than half of the population of Hiroshima) were burned alive, crushed to death, or otherwise killed, in a deliberate use of terror-bombing on heavily-populated city centers intended to force the unconditional surrender of the Japanese government. Apparently my objection to this deliberate act of nuclear terrorism — the first and the only two cases in the history of the world — is the result of historical ignorance.

From: the starr
To: Rad Geek
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008, 4:23 PM
Subject: Atomic Bomb

I read your article on the Atomic Bomb, and I must say, you don’t understand World War II at all. The use of the bomb was ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. The Japanese were a brutal and evil empire and it had to be stopped. They slaughtered countless innocent people, not to mention Pearl Harbor. We urged them to surrender, but they wouldn’t. And they wouldn’t stop killing. The war would have continued for who knows how long and thousands upon thousands of more people would have died. The bomb was our only choice. You said that it killed thousands of innocent people. That’s true. But were the Japanese not doing the same? Did they not slaughter thousands of innocent people by invading other countries, including the completely un-called for attack on Pearl Harbor? There is no morality in warfare. It is foolish to try and equate them. You may want to do a little more research before you criticize the government’s carefully calculated decision.

If only I had understood World War II better before I wrote that post. I would have seen that, even though the Japanese military had already long been stopped from any further expansion, and indeed broken, long before August 1945, absolute geopolitical triumph over the Japanese government, and the territorial conquest of Japan, was far more important than the irreplaceable lives of 200,000 or more innocent non-combatants. Indeed, it was important enough to justify or excuse deliberately targeting those 200,000 or more innocent non-combatants in order to force somebody else (the dictatorial clique tyrannizing Japan) to make the necessary political concessions. And little did I know that the Japanese were all invading other countries and killing thousands of innocent people and refusing to surrender. I had foolishly thought that it was a small and unaccountable minority of the population of Japan who were extorting and tyrannizing the rest through the armed power of a military dictatorship. But since more research would have revealed that those 200,000 dead civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians from the over 100 Japanese cities that the U.S. Army attacked with low-altitude firebombing and conventional high explosives) weren’t actually non-combatants after all, but were all running around with The Japanese as a whole, invading other countries and killing thousands of innocent people, well, I guess that’s that.

Normally, I would also have thought that if you have a true statement of the form There’s no morality in that, that’s as good a reason as you could possibly find to draw the conclusion that you have an unconditional moral obligation to forswear ever engaging in that. This is another sure sign of my folly, ignorance or vice. One man’s reductio … and all that; no doubt had I carefully calculated like the Masters of War in the U.S. government, when the antecedent of that is War, it would become clear that what you actually have is a military obligation to sometimes forswear engaging in morality.

My bad.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-08-07: It was a different time, or: moral standards, part 2
• GT 2006-09-27: Moral standards
• GT 2006-09-01: One man’s reductio…

Here’s what I got in the mail Monday afternoon. It took a week longer to reach me than it did to reach Roderick; I don’t know whether that’s one of the perks of being an editor rather than a mere contributor like me, or simply because I’m way out west and he’s in Alabama.

Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism

Charles Johnson

The purpose of this essay is political revolution. And I don’t mean a revolution in libertarian political theory, or a revolutionary new political strategy, or the kind of revolution that consists in electing a cadre of new and better politicians to the existing seats of power. When I say a revolution, I mean the real thing: I hope that this essay will contribute to the overthrow of the United States government, and indeed all governments everywhere in the world. You might think that the argument of an academic essay is a pretty slender reed to lean on; but then, every revolution has to start somewhere, and in any case what I have in mind may be somewhat different from what you imagine. For now, it will be enough to say that I intend to give you some reasons to become an individualist anarchist,¹ and undermine some of the arguments for preferring minimalist government to anarchy. In the process, I will argue that the form of anarchism I defend is best understood from what Chris Sciabarra has described as a dialectical orientation in social theory,² as part of a larger effort to understand and to challenge interlocking, mutually reinforcing systems of oppression, of which statism is an integral part—but only one part among others. Not only is libertarianism part of a radical politics of human liberation, it is in fact the natural companion of revolutionary Leftism and radical feminism.

My argument will take a whole theory of justice—libertarian rights theory³—more or less for granted: that is, some version of the non-aggression principle and the conception of negative rights that it entails. Also that a particular method for moral inquiry—ethical individualism—is the correct method, and that common claims of collective obligations or collective entitlements are therefore unfounded. Although I will discuss some of the intuitive grounds for these views, I don’t intend to give a comprehensive justification for them, and those who object to the views may just as easily to object to the grounds I offer for them. If you have a fundamentally different conception of rights, or of ethical relations, this essay will probably not convince you to become an anarchist. On the other hand, it may help explain how principled commitment to a libertarian theory of rights—including a robust defense of private property rights—is compatible with struggles for equality, mutual aid, and social justice. It may also help show that libertarian individualism does not depend on an atomized picture of human social life, does not require indifference to oppression or exploitation other than government coercion, and invites neither nostalgia for big business nor conservatism towards social change. Thus, while my argument may not directly convince those who are not already libertarians of some sort, it may help to remove some of the obstacles that stop well-meaning Leftists from accepting libertarian principles. In any case, it should show non-libertarians that they need another line of argument: libertarianism has no necessary connection with the vulgar political economy or bourgeois liberalism that their criticism targets.

The threefold structure of my argument draws from the three demands made by the original revolutionary Left in France: Liberty, Equality, and Solidarity.⁴ I will argue that, rightly understood, these demands are more intertwined than many contemporary libertarians realize: each contributes an essential element to a radical challenge to any form of coercive authority. Taken together, they undermine the legitimacy of any form of government authority, including the limited government imagined by minarchists. Minarchism eventually requires abandoning your commitment to liberty; but the dilemma is obscured when minarchists fracture the revolutionary triad, and seek liberty abstracted from equality and solidarity, the intertwined values that give the demand for freedom its life, its meaning, and its radicalism. Liberty, understood in light of equality and solidarity, is a revolutionary doctrine demanding anarchy, with no room for authoritarian mysticism and no excuse for arbitrary dominion, no matter how limited or benign. […]

1. For the purposes of this essay, I will mostly be using the term anarchism as shorthand for individualist anarchism; since the defense of anarchism I will offer rests on individualist principles, it will not provide a cogent basis for communist, primitivist, or other non-individualist forms of anarchism. And I will use the term individualist anarchism in a broad sense, to describe any position that (1) denies the legitimacy of any form of (monopoly) government authority, (2) on individualist ethical grounds. As I will use it, the term picks out a family of similar *doctrines*, not a particular self-description or historical tradition. Thus it includes, but is not limited to, the specific nineteenth and early twentieth-century socialist movement known as individualist anarchism, whose members included Benjamin Tucker, Victor Yarros, and Voltairine de Cleyre. It also includes the views of twentieth and twenty-first-century anarcho-capitalists such as Murray Rothbard and David Friedman; contemporary self-described individualist anarchists and mutualists such as Wendy McElroy, Joe Peacott, and Kevin Carson; and of others, such as Gustave de Molinari, Lysander Spooner, or Robert LeFevre, who rejected the State on individualist grounds but declined (for whatever reasons) to refer to themselves as anarchists. Many self-described socialist anarchists deny that anarcho-capitalism should be counted as a form of anarchism at all, or associated with individualist anarchism in particular; many self-described anarcho-capitalists deny that socialist anarchism should be counted as a form of genuine individualism, or genuine anarchism. With all due respect to my comrades on the Left and on the Right, I will use the term in an ecumenical sense, for reasons of style, and also because the relationship between anarchism, capitalism, and socialism is one of the substantive issues to be discussed in the course of this essay. ↩

2. See Chris Matthew Sciabarra (2000), Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. See also Sciabarra 1995a and 1995b. ↩

3. Libertarianism as discussed in this essay is a theory of political justice, not as a position on the Nolan Chart. Small government types who speak kindly of economic freedom or civil liberties may or may not qualify as libertarians for the purpose of my discussion. Those who treat liberty as one political good that must be balanced against other goods such as social stability, economic prosperity, democratic rule, or socioeconomic equality, and should sometimes be sacrificed for their sake, are unlikely to count. Since they are not committed to the ideal of liberty as a principled constraint on *all* political power, they are no more likely to be directly convinced by my arguments than progressives, traditionalists, communists, etc. ↩

4. Of course, the male Left of the day actually demanded fraternité, brotherhood. I’ll speak of solidarity instead of brotherhood for the obvious anti-sexist reasons, and also for its association with the history of the labor movement. There are few causes in America that most twentieth-century libertarians were less sympathetic to than organized labor, but I have chosen to speak of the value of solidarity, in spite of all that, for the same reasons that Ayn Rand chose to speak of the virtue of selfishness: in order to prove a point. The common criticisms of organized labor from the twentieth-century libertarian movement, and the relationship between liberty and organized labor, are one of the topics I will discuss below.↩

—Charles Johnson (2008), Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism in Roderick T. Long and Tibor Machan (eds.), Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country. Ashgate Press, ISBN 978-0-7546-6066-8. 155–157.

The good news, for those whose interest is piqued and who would like to read the whole thing, is that the book is now available for pre-ordering and will be shipped somewhere around the end of the month. The bad news is that it’s about $80.00 for the hardcover edition, which is, for the time being, the only edition there is. (If you’re interested in reading the essay but are unlikely to have the bread to buy the book anytime soon, contact me privately.) In any case, for those who do get a chance to read the essay, I’d be glad to hear what you think, or any questions you may have, in the comments section at this post.

I mention this in the essay, but I’d like to repeat it here while I have the chance: the debts I accumulated in the process of writing this essay, and the earlier work on which it drew, are too numerous to give an accounting of them all, but I would especially like to thank Laura Breitenbeck and Roderick Long. The essay would have been much the poorer, or simply nonexistent, without their patience, inspiration, collaboration, encouragement, and detailed and very helpful comments

Perhaps apposite, under the circumstances.

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother [sic] abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? … At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

—Frederick Douglass (1852), What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?

And:

A cruel kindness, thought to be friendly regard, assumes to protect those who, by divine right of rational being, are entitled, at least, to be let alone. We are not among wild beasts; from whom, then, does woman need protection? From her protectors.

—Ezra Heywood (1873), Uncivil Liberty: An Essay to Show the Injustice and Impolicy of Ruling Woman Without Her Consent

To-day — 19 January 2008 — is the 200th birthday of the militant abolitionist, philosopher, and individualist anarchist Lysander Spooner (b. 19 January 1808, Althol, Massachusetts; d. May 14, 1887, Boston, Massachusetts). In honor of his life and work, the Ministry of Culture of this secessionist republic of one has declared that 19 January shall be celebrated as Lysander Spooner Day.

This is from the end of Spooner’s famous pamphlet No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority:

Inasmuch as the Constitution was never signed, nor agreed to, by anybody, as a contract, and therefore never bound anybody, and is now binding upon nobody; and is, moreover, such an one as no people can ever hereafter be expected to consent to, except as they may be forced to do so at the point of the bayonet, it is perhaps of no importance what its true legal meaning, as a contract, is. Nevertheless, the writer thinks it proper to say that, in his opinion, the Constitution is no such instrument as it has generally been assumed to be; but that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize. He has heretofore written much, and could write much more, to prove that such is the truth. 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 (1870): No Treason No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority

And this is from an earlier number of No Treason:

But to say that the consent of either the strongest party, or the most numerous party, in a nation, is sufficient justification for the establishment or maintenance of a government that shall control the whole nation, does not obviate the difficulty. The question still remains, how comes such a thing as a nation to exist? How do millions of men, scattered over an extensive territory — each gifted by nature with individual freedom; required by the law of nature to call no man, or body of men, his masters; authorized by that law to seek his own happiness in his own way, to do what he will with himself and his property, so long as he does not trespass upon the equal liberty of others; authorized also, by that law, to defend his own rights, and redress his own wrongs; and to go to the assistance and defence of any of his fellow men who may be suffering any kind of injustice — how do millions of such men come to be a nation, in the first place? How is it that each of them comes to be stripped of his natural, God-given rights, and to be incorporated, compressed, compacted, and consolidated into a mass with other men, whom he never saw; with whom he has no contract; and towards many of whom he has no sentiments but fear, hatred, or contempt? How does he become subjected to the control of men like himself, who, by nature, had no authority over him; but who command him to do this, and forbid him to do that, as if they were his sovereigns, and he their subject; and as if their wills and their interests were the only standards of his duties and his rights; and who compel him to submission under peril of confiscation, imprisonment, and death?

Clearly all this is the work of force, or fraud, or both.

By what right, then, did we become a nation? By what right do we continue to be a nation? And by what right do either the strongest, or the most numerous, party, now existing within the territorial limits, called The United States, claim that there really is such a nation as the United States? Certainly they are bound to show the rightful existence of a nation, before they can claim, on that ground, that they themselves have a right to control it; to seize, for their purposes, so much of every man’s property within it, as they may choose; and, at their discretion, to compel any man to risk his own life, or take the lives of other men, for the maintenance of their power.

To speak of either their numbers, or their strength, is not to the purpose. The question is by what right does the nation exist? And by what right are so many atrocities committed by its authority? or for its preservation?

The answer to this question must certainly be, that at least such a nation exists by no right whatever.

We are, therefore, driven to the acknowledgment that nations and governments, if they can rightfully exist at all, can exist only by consent.

—Lysander Spooner (1867): No Treason, no. 1

And this is from A Letter to Grover Cleveland, on His False Inaugural Address, The Usurpations and Crimes of Lawmakers and Judges, and the Consequent Poverty, Ignorance, and Servitude of the People, perhaps the finest letter ever written to the President of the United States:

Let me then remind you that justice is an immutable, natural principle; and not anything that can be made, unmade, or altered by any human power.

It is also a subject of science, and is to be learned, like mathematics, or any other science. It does not derive its authority from the commands, will, pleasure, or discretion of any possible combination of men, whether calling themselves a government, or by any other name.

It is also, at all times, and in all places, the supreme law. And being everywhere and always the supreme law, it is necessarily everywhere and always the only law.

Lawmakers, as they call themselves, can add nothing to it, nor take anything from it. Therefore all their laws, as they call them, —- that is, all the laws of their own making, —- have no color of authority or obligation. It is a falsehood to call them laws; for there is nothing in them that either creates men’s duties or rights, or enlightens them as to their duties or rights. There is consequently nothing binding or obligatory about them. And nobody is bound to take the least notice of them, unless it be to trample them under foot, as usurpations. If they command men to do justice, they add nothing to men’s obligation to do it, or to any man’s right to enforce it. They are therefore mere idle wind, such as would be commands to consider the day as day, and the night as night. If they command or license any man to do injustice, they are criminal on their face. If they command any man to do anything which justice does not require him to do, they are simple, naked usurpations and tyrannies. If they forbid any man to do anything, which justice could permit him to do, they are criminal invasions of his natural and rightful liberty. In whatever light, therefore, they are viewed, they are utterly destitute of everything like authority or obligation. They are all necessarily either the impudent, fraudulent, and criminal usurpations of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, or the senseless work of ignorant or thoughtless men, who do not know, or certainly do not realize, what they are doing.

—Lysander Spooner (1886): A Letter to Grover Cleveland, on His False Inaugural Address, The Usurpations and Crimes of Lawmakers and Judges, and the Consequent Poverty, Ignorance, and Servitude of the People

Further reading:

• Francois Tremblay (2008-01-19): Happy birthday, Lysander Spooner!
• Lysander Spooner (1858): To the Non-Slaveholders of the South: A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery
• Lysander Spooner (1882): A Letter to Thomas F. Bayard, challenging his right — and that of all the other so-called Senators and Representatives in Congress — to exercise any legislative power whatever over the people of the United States