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 ...

“Plantain was resolved that he would now make himself King of Madagascar, and govern there with absolute Power and Authority.” Clement Downing served on a variety of ships in the Indian Ocean as an ...

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 ...

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 ...

In Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” he prefers the traditional rights of Englishmen over French revolutionaries’ “rights of man.” I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, ...

“He fell upon Government, and shew’d, that every Man was born free, and had as much Right to what would support him, as to the Air he respired.” One of the most important primary sources of any kind ...

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 ...

When the Roman Empire collapsed, society persisted and new regimes thrived. Europe quickly became a patchwork of new and competing socio- political orders. As the Western Roman Empire dissolved ...

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 ...

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 ...

If Old South slavery was so awful, how did it produce poet George Moses Horton?--Through his life and verse, we seek out an answer. George Moses Horton was born a slave in North Carolina. He never ...

“All the great elements of society were drawn within the feudal enclosure, so even the…most trifling circumstances of common life, became subject to feudalism.” After establishing the origins of ...