From the archives of The Memory Hole

Individualist Anarchism: By Way of Introduction

The following is James J. Martin's pithy introduction to a 1966 printing of Lysander Spooner's pamphlet No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority that also included Spooner's open A Letter to Thomas F. Bayard: Challenging His Right--And That of All the Other So-Called Senators and Representatives In Congress--To Exercise Any Legislative Power Whatever Over the People of the United States.


Introduction

Since late Neolithic times, men in their political capacity have lived almost exclusively by myths. And these political myths have continued to evolve, proliferate, and grow more complex and intricate, even though there has been a steady replacement of one by another, over the centuries. A series of entirely theoretical constructs, sometimes mystical, usually deductive and speculative, they seek to explain the status and relationships in the community since it became discernibly organized, politically. But in essence these constructs are all alike in that with varying degrees of persuasiveness they attempt to examine the origins of the State with little or no attention to its historic record, and then try to justify and fortify it in the face of criticism or objection.
In the long millennia during which theological authorizations of one kind or another were principally employed to sanctify the State and to promote its safety and continuity, we know very little of the critics and their products. Threats of divine retaliation by the gods upon any so sinful as to question the validity of the State may have been sufficient to inhibit the crime of deviationism. On the other hand, perhaps many ages may have had a formidable roster of adversaries of the State, but theirs must apparently have been largely an oral tradition, and has been lost to posterity with hardly a trace. A scrap or two have come down to us from the Orient, but ancient literary survivals are essentially a Statist apologia.
Undoubtedly the largest part of such criticisms may have subjectively denounced the more obvious vulnerabilities of the institution, particularly its capacity for promoting institutionalized robbery, murder, injustice, and tyranny. Traces of such protest are discernible in the traditions of many peoples.
But the unvarying, wearisome replacement of one State by another for thousands of years reveals the depth of the fixation humankind has had concerning it, in part testifying, as Ludwig Gumplowicz and Franz Oppenheimer and others have observed, to the long-standing drive to make a living without working, a stage which has been tied to the evolution of productive processes to a point where a surplus existed beyond the needs of the producer. (The steady increase in the numbers who batten upon the substance of the productive community in the name of the State testifies in turn not to a mellowing expansiveness, a generous enlargement of the preying nomad band, as Oppenheimer would have it, but to the prodigious increase in production totals beyond subsistence or survival demands of the former.)
Oppenheimer described the United States of America a half-century ago (in The State [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1914], p.17) as "among the most powerful State-formations in all history." Its prodigious growth since that time would surely have prompted him to elevate it to first place, and perhaps decades ago, had he lived to make such observations.
There is no apparent logic or law regulating the age-old conflict between the individual and the collectivity, between the State and the idea or the reality of the voluntary social system. However, in America, the site of the evolution of the mightiest State of all time, there has been an inverse ratio between its growth and the production of native anti-Statism. Vaslii Klyuchevski, the giant of historical scholarship in the last century of Czarist Russia, put it best: "The State swells up; the people diminish." Part of the reason for this has been the much more opaque and intangible nature of the adversary. No stylized, symbolic vested agents, such as perhaps a traditional oligarchical priesthood of antiquity or a devine-right monarch, have existed here to provide a convenient target for word or deed. The tying of political tenure to astronomy instead of to dynasty has removed the possibility of a long-enduring personal symbol from the scene. And a massive obstacle has been created as a result of the homogenization growing out of mass voting, mass taxpaying, mass gun-bearing, and mass dispersal of the tidbits bestowed by the State; a vast, gray, shapeless enterprise has come into being, with which it has been difficult to come to grips, as in the manner of classical conflicts with the State.
One of the important consequences of all this has been a difference in the structure and strategy of Statist apologetics in America. There has been a marked diminution over the years in the invocation of the Deity as responsible for its installation and overall direction and protection. Divine-right and related theories have never enjoyed a vogue at all. The American genius has been concentrated in perfecting vague and generalized secular verbiage; elusive, imprecise terminology which often sets the line for seemingly interminable battlegrounds of conflicting interpretation. Expressions such as "general welfare," "public good," "social contract," "general will," and many others, come to mind.
Of course, the crowning achievement in the American experience was the production of the Constitution, the ultimate verbal bastion on which is perched the American State. Constitution-worship is our most extended public political ritual, frequently supervised as often by mountebanks as by the sincere. This is an unusual enterprise in world history, in view of the casual attitude toward such developments in most places and at most times. In point of service, it is easily the oldest such political document in history, which adds much to the awe and veneration in which it is held. For though we have had over a century of native critics and opponents of our State, from Warren, Th