During the year of the 250th anniversary of American independence, Paul Meany reflects on how the American Declaration ...

For hundreds of years, thinkers have tried to answer this problem by attempting to understand the origin of laws and rights ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Thomas Paine critiques and expounds upon ideas of government. Claiming it is but a “necessary evil” and distinguishing it from society at large. Some writers have so confounded society with government ...

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 ...

“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 ...