Lysander Spooner, one of the key figures in American individualist anarchism, wrote a book titled The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, which apparently (per Wikipedia) argued that whatever we might imagine about the intentions of the Founders, the actual text of the Constitution was incompatible with slavery. Supposedly he was one of the influences on Frederick Douglas's ideas on the matter. It's kind of curious, in that later Spooner wrote No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, which argued that the Constitution itself was not a valid legal agreement; I'm not sure how those two books were consistent with each other, if they were.
I've read both of those titles! "No Treason" didn't hit home to me. Spooner belabors his point that the Constitution doesn't have everyone's consent by general contract law principles, without ever even asking whether there can be other ways for a government to have legitimacy.
"Unconstitutionality of Slavery" was before I started keeping notes on what I read, so I don't remember much about it except that it struck me as ingenious hair-splitting about the meaning of words to the detriment of context or intent. This's exactly the sort of argument I could imagine raising to defend a vital principle when I can't find any better case. Maybe that's how Spooner raised it? Or maybe, given his contract-law thought in his (much later) "No Treason", that's the sort of interpretation he actually advocated?
Spooner's arguments in No Treason seem to derive from the lines in the Declaration of Independence about "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." He takes contract as the necessary form of a relationship based on consent—and that in itself isn't all that unusual: some nineteenth-century writers made a fundamental distinction between the Society of Contract and the Society of Status.
If you want an alternative, I think you can adopt one of two approaches: You can say that government need not be based on consent, that some people or organizations just have the right to rule whether people consent to it or not; or you can say that consent can take forms other than contract. I'm not in favor of the first, but I'm not seeing how the second would work. Do you have something in mind?
On the other hand, I don't think a "contract" model necessarily has the anarchistic implications Spooner draws from it.
Lysander Spooner, one of the key figures in American individualist anarchism, wrote a book titled The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, which apparently (per Wikipedia) argued that whatever we might imagine about the intentions of the Founders, the actual text of the Constitution was incompatible with slavery. Supposedly he was one of the influences on Frederick Douglas's ideas on the matter. It's kind of curious, in that later Spooner wrote No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, which argued that the Constitution itself was not a valid legal agreement; I'm not sure how those two books were consistent with each other, if they were.
I've read both of those titles! "No Treason" didn't hit home to me. Spooner belabors his point that the Constitution doesn't have everyone's consent by general contract law principles, without ever even asking whether there can be other ways for a government to have legitimacy.
"Unconstitutionality of Slavery" was before I started keeping notes on what I read, so I don't remember much about it except that it struck me as ingenious hair-splitting about the meaning of words to the detriment of context or intent. This's exactly the sort of argument I could imagine raising to defend a vital principle when I can't find any better case. Maybe that's how Spooner raised it? Or maybe, given his contract-law thought in his (much later) "No Treason", that's the sort of interpretation he actually advocated?
Spooner's arguments in No Treason seem to derive from the lines in the Declaration of Independence about "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." He takes contract as the necessary form of a relationship based on consent—and that in itself isn't all that unusual: some nineteenth-century writers made a fundamental distinction between the Society of Contract and the Society of Status.
If you want an alternative, I think you can adopt one of two approaches: You can say that government need not be based on consent, that some people or organizations just have the right to rule whether people consent to it or not; or you can say that consent can take forms other than contract. I'm not in favor of the first, but I'm not seeing how the second would work. Do you have something in mind?
On the other hand, I don't think a "contract" model necessarily has the anarchistic implications Spooner draws from it.