capitalism

490 State
He is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery in Boston, where a
monument to him was erected by his admirers in 1999.
See also Abolitionism; Constitution, U.S.; Contractarianism/Social
Contract; Individualist Anarchism; Secessionism; Slavery in
America
Further Readings
REB
Barnett, Randy E. “Was Slavery Unconstitutional Before the
Thirteenth Amendment?: Lysander Spooner’s Theory of
Interpretation.” Pacific Law Journal 28 (1997): 997–1014.
Cover, Robert M. “Formal Assumptions of the Antislavery Forces.”
Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process. New
Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1975. 149.
Martin, James J. “Lysander Spooner: Dissident among Dissidents.”
Men against the State. Colorado Springs, CO: Ralph Myles
Publisher, 1970. 167–201.
Phillips, Wendell. Review of Lysander Spooner’s “Essay on the
Unconstitutionality of Slavery.” Boston: Andrews, 1847 [1969].
Shively, Charles, ed. The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner.
6 vols. Weston, MA: M & S Press, 1971.
Smith, George H., ed. The Lysander Spooner Reader. San Francisco:
Fox & Wilkes, 1992.
Weicek, William M. “Radical Constitutional Antislavery: The
Imagined Past, the Remembered Future.” The Sources of
Antislavery: Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. 249–275.
STATE
Definitions of the state vary depending on the political
theory or political philosophy inspiring the definition.
However, there is a common element to all of them. The
state is an organization monopolizing the legitimate use of
force or claiming a monopoly on the use of coercion in a
given geographic area and over a political entity, and possessing
internal and external sovereignty. Recognition of
the state by other states, and thus its ability to enter into
international agreements, is often considered a crucial element
of its nature. When not conceptually specified, the
term state is typically defined ostensibly by pointing out
the political structure that emerged after the Peace of
Westphalia and that currently constitutes the dominant
form of political organization in the world. The terms
country, nation, and land are sometimes used as synonymous
with state. In addition, the term also is used to
describe the territorial and politico-administrative divisions
within a federal system. Many authors have emphasized
the distinction between the state and the government—the
second referring to the group of people who make decisions
for the state and/or their specific decision-making
institutional arrangements; however, this distinction is not
universal in common parlance.
Theories about the origins of the state fall into two categories.
On the one hand are the consensual theories, which
regard the state as having evolved from a stateless society
through the consent of the governed. Under this notion, the
state is a mechanism that expresses the public interest and
acts on its behalf. Realizing that they need a state-like
mechanism, the members of a society agree to create it.
This mechanism is both a producer and provider of public
goods while ensuring that individuals do not free ride (i.e.,
do not overconsume these public or common goods) and
that all contribute to the costs of their production. This
benign view of the origin of the state contrasts with a different
set of theories that hold that the state is born in conflict.
These theories trace the state’s origins to the
application of force applied by a victorious (or stronger)
group on a defeated (or weaker) group. The purpose of the
resulting institution is to regularize the dominion of the
stronger group over the weaker. It ensures against revolt
from within and attacks from abroad, and it functions in a
more or less explicit way as an instrument of exploitation
by one group of another.
Although at the normative level libertarians may have
disagreements regarding the justification for a minimal
state, their views on the origins of the state and its historical
nature tend to embrace conflict-based interpretations.
The libertarian theory is an outgrowth of the distinction
between economic and political behavior, voluntary
exchange and coercion, monocentriciy and polycentricity,
catallaxy and hierarchy, and market processes and government
processes. Irrespective of which dichotomy is
employed, libertarians consider that there are two basic
organizing principles of social order. One is peaceful and
based on one’s own labor and voluntary exchange. The
other is based on coercion, domination, and the administration
of force. The state emerges from society when people
utilize force against others and when an entire institutional
structure is established on the basis of this relationship.
Many libertarians reject the standard view that the state’s
origin is natural, created by people who have voluntarily
surrendered their sovereignty, or the view that the state
grew organically, as a consequence of economic surplus
and the division of labor. “Force, and not enlightened selfinterest,
is the mechanism by which political evolution has
led, step by step, to the state.” When robbery, expropriation,
and conquest become institutionalized, the state takes
shape. At that point, the voluntarism of market exchange is
overwhelmed by the coercive apparatus of the state. It is for
this reason that the analogy between the state and a criminal
gang is so popular in libertarian literature again and
again, and it is why so many libertarians embrace the view
that those who use the state to advance their objectives are
a professional criminal class.