DESCRIPTION:
Lysander Spooner has many great distinctions in the
history of political thought. For one thing, he was un-
doubtedly the only constitutional lawyer in history to
evolve into an individualist anarchist; for another, he
became steadily and inexorably more radical as he grew
older. From the time that Benjamin R. Tucker founded
the scintillating periodical, m,in 1881, Spooner and
Tucker were the two great theoreticians of the flourish-
ing individualist anarchist movement, and this continued
until Spooner's death in 1887, at the age of 79.
Spooner and the younger Tucker differed on one crucial
point, though on that point alone: Tucker was strictly
and defiantly a utilitarian, whereas Spooner grounded
his belief in liberty on a philosophy of natural rights
and natural law. Unfortunately, Spooner's death left Tucker
as the major influence on the movement, which quickly
adopted the utilitarian creed while Spooner's natural rights-
anarchism faded into the background. The present-day
followers of Spooner and Tucker, in the United States
and England, have also forgotten the fundamental natural-
rights grounding in Spooner and have rested on the far
more shaky and tenuous Tuckerian base of egoistic utili-
tarianism.

The following is the complete and unabridged pamphlet
by Spooner; his characteristic subtitle to the pamphlet
was: A Treatise on Natural Law, Natural Justice, Natural
Rights, Natural Liberty, and Natural Society; Showine. That
All Legislation Whatsoever is an Absurdity, a Usurpation,
a Crime. Spooner also appended anothercharacterisric
note that: "The Author reserves his copyright in this
pamphlet, believing that, on principles of natural law, authors
and inventors have a right of perpetual property in their
ideas."