Spooner

Abstract

Abstract More than any other thinker, Lysander Spooner has a plausible claim to the title of founder of libertarianism. In his mature works, he developed the conception of Lockean rights that began to emerge in Hodgskin into a nearly anarcho-capitalist vision that would later reemerge in the philosophy of twentieth-century libertarians like Robert Nozick. But Spooner did not begin his scholarly life in quite this vein. In his early works, Spooner defends a version of liberal republicanism that has room for collective rights and is by no means anarchistic. As his career wore on, however, he began to argue that political morality is a kind of a priori natural science—or, perhaps, mathematics—of individual rights, complete and determinate in all its details and innately knowable by all who reflect on it. This conception of justice left little room for legitimate political legislation (since there is no facet of human life it does not govern on its own), let alone collective political rights. So, in the end, Spooner, more clearly than his philosophical forbear Hodgskin, developed a right-libertarian solution to Locke’s property problem. According to this solution, there is no positive common right to the world, so there is no tension between a natural common right to the world and natural private property rights.