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  • Lysander Spooner: Nineteenth-Century America's Last Natural Rights Theorist

  • Edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, Jeffrey Paul, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, Fred D. Miller, Jr, Bowling Green State University, Ohio
  • Book:
    Natural Rights Individualism and Progressivism in American Political Philosophy
    Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    27 August 2012, pp 139-176

  • Summary

    This chapter articulates the ideas of the last powerful advocate of natural rights in nineteenth century America. To provide some context for Spooner's natural rights doctrine, it describes briefly some of the views of two other radical libertarian advocates who were writing in England around the time that Spooner began to address questions of political and legal theory in the late 1830s-Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869) and the early Herbert Spencer (1820- 1903). The chapter considers the views of the early Herbert Spencer. Beginning with his anti-slavery treatises and culminating in his essays on natural law and natural rights, Spooner staked out his position as the most philosophically engaging, forceful, and Lockean voice among the individual anarchists. The representation that Spooner offers is remarkably like Hodgskin's critique of legislation, with the crucial difference that Spooner is in position to distinguish sharply between law, i.e., natural law, and legislation.