No Treason

Written in the aftermath of the American Civil War, Lysander Spooner’s pamphlet mounts a radical attack on the authority of the United States Constitution. Spooner argues that a document signed generations ago by a handful of men can bind no living person, since none of us ever agreed to it, and that an obligation nobody consented to is no obligation at all. From there he dismantles the claim that voting or paying taxes counts as genuine consent, and questions whether any government can rightfully speak for the governed. Sharp, relentless and deeply unsettling to defenders of state power, it became a foundational text for later individualist anarchist and libertarian thought. This free PDF and EPUB edition collects the essays.