Spooner argues in this radical essay that the Constitution, which he frames as a legal contract, is not binding. The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or ...

Jonathan Fortier talks with Bruce Pardy, Professor of Law at Queen’s University and Executive Director of Rights Probe. Bruce Pardy is professor of law at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, ...

John Locke lays out the foundational arguments of liberalism: people have rights preexisting government, and government exists to protect those rights. Nicknamed the "Father of Liberalism," Locke's ...

There is perhaps no writer better at articulating the economic way of thinking and exposing the myths that plague political debate than the Frenchman Frédéric Bastiat. During his short life (1801-1850 ...

Kant discusses his theory of the state, concluding, “Whatever a people cannot impose upon itself cannot be imposed upon it by the legislator either.” Immanuel Kant is considered to be one of the ...

Bruce Pardy is professor of law at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada and executive director of Rights Probe, a law and liberty thinktank. He is an academic, lawyer, columnist, and ...

In this excerpt from The Rights of Man, here Thomas Paine argues that the order naturally observed in human society is not the result of government. Great part of that order which reigns among mankind ...

In Man Versus the State, Herbert Spencer argues that as the state tries to regulate more of our lives, it inches us closer to slavery. What is essential to the idea of a slave? We primarily think of ...

Croce argued that the lifespans of particular regimes, tyrants and oppressors are limited, but history always and inevitably arcs toward Liberty. Benedetto Croce was born in Abruzzi, Italy in 1866 to ...

Paine explores the distinction between society and government and the impact the latter has on the former in this selection from Common Sense. SOME writers have so confounded society with government, ...

William Graham Sumner held a professorship in political economy at Yale and did pioneering work in sociology when the field was in its infancy. In addition to doing academic work that spanned a ...

Emma Goldman discusses the nature of the state as an institution and how it is fundamentally at odds with the dignity of the individual. Emma Goldman was a socialist anarchist activist, writer, and ...