From the archives of The Memory Hole |
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.
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