The Right to Ignore the State
1850
Spencer's 1850 polemic remains one of the most radical defenses of individual liberty ever written. Before Rand, before libertarianism as we know it, this Victorian philosopher argued that no government holds moral authority over a person who wishes to be free of it. Written with brutal logical clarity, he contends that taxation is theft, that majority rule is not divine mandate, and that any citizen possessed of conscience may reject the state's monopoly on force without becoming a criminal. His argument rests on a simple, devastating premise: if the state claims legitimacy through the consent of the governed, it must respect the right of any individual to withhold that consent. The essay thrilled early libertarian thinkers and horrified mainstream Victorians in equal measure. For readers who have ever wondered whether obedience to government is truly obligatory, Spencer offers his answer: it is not.
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“As a corollary to the proposition that all institutions must be subordinated to the law of equal freedom, we cannot choose but admit the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state”
— Herbert Spencer
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Spencer, Herbert. The Right to Ignore the State. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-right-to-ignore-the-state-20b28fd9-085f-44cb-94a0-cfce2c3da04b.Spencer, H. (1850). The Right to Ignore the State. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-right-to-ignore-the-state-20b28fd9-085f-44cb-94a0-cfce2c3da04bSpencer, Herbert. The Right to Ignore the State. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-right-to-ignore-the-state-20b28fd9-085f-44cb-94a0-cfce2c3da04b.
