Politics & Power Quote by Lysander Spooner

Spooner doesn’t argue about the Constitution the way civics classes do, as a sacred text with a “true” meaning waiting to be correctly interpreted. He treats it like a machine you judge by output. Look around, he implies: war, coercive taxation, slavery-era compromises, courts that bless state power after the fact. If that’s what the Constitution has “authorized,” then it’s guilty. If it didn’t authorize it but still couldn’t stop it, then it’s useless. Either way, scrap it.

The brilliance is the trap he sets for constitutional piety. He denies the comforting middle position: that abuses are merely “misreadings” or temporary deviations from the founders’ intent. Spooner forces admirers into a lose-lose syllogism: legitimacy depends on results, not rhetoric. The line “one thing, or another” is a deliberate shrug at interpretive debates, a refusal to be pulled into lawyerly hair-splitting. He’s saying: you can litigate meaning forever; people are still being ruled.

Context matters. Spooner is a radical individualist and abolitionist writing in an America where constitutional arguments were routinely used to defend the status quo (including slavery) and later to sanctify a growing federal state. His deeper subtext is consent: a constitution isn’t a moral contract if the governed never actually agreed to it. So his target isn’t just a document; it’s the whole alibi of “legal authority” that turns force into governance and calls it order.