Spooner argues in this radical essay that the Constitution, which he frames as a legal contract, is not binding. The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or ...

William Graham Sumner held a professorship in political economy at Yale and did pioneering work in sociology when the field was in its infancy. In addition to doing academic work that spanned a ...

In Man Versus the State, Herbert Spencer argues that as the state tries to regulate more of our lives, it inches us closer to slavery. What is essential to the idea of a slave? We primarily think of ...

Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments included this passage about spontaneous order vs planned economy. Adam Smith was a Scottish political philosopher and economist, considered one of the ...

When it comes to checking tyranny, the jury box beats the ballot box. Spooner argues that the jury, composed of and beholden to the people, serves as constant check on government power, rendering the ...

So far, Menger has gently revised Classical Economics. Once subjective and marginal utility enter the equation, though: a revolution is underway. So far in our explorations in early Austrianism, Carl ...

Thoreau describes his brief imprisonment and discusses the relationship between the state, his community, and his duties as an individual. …Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true ...

Social order is often the unintended consequence of many people’s actions, rather than the intentional design of one person. Adam Ferguson observes that competing human designs often give rise to ...

Emma Goldman discusses the nature of the state as an institution and how it is fundamentally at odds with the dignity of the individual. Emma Goldman was a socialist anarchist activist, writer, and ...

To begin our series on the book that practically made modern political philosophy, we join Locke in demoting Adam from global dictator to mere father. Nicknamed the "Father of Liberalism," Locke's ...

Haynes argues that there is no principled reason to deny people their natural rights on the basis of race, and that as such, slavery must be abolished. Lemuel Haynes spent his early life as an ...

In this excerpt from On Liberty, Mill argues that the right of an individual to her own opinion isn’t only good for her, but for the rest of society. The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by when any ...