# The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner **URL:** **By** Murray Rothbard **Published:** February 1, 1974 --- “No one should miss the uniquely Spoonerian blend of rigorous logic and devotion to liberty.” Lysander Spooner, the nineteenth-century American who was one of the greatest political philosophers of all time, has until now only been represented in print by a few brief essays. But now we have, for the first time, the collected works of the great Spooner, and it is an absolute delight. In the first place, Spooner was the only individualist anarchist who served as a constitutional lawyer, and so his devastating and shattering arguments against the State are delivered in a unique and delightful style that combines legal erudition and phraseology with an unquenchable passion for justice. Spooner’s _No Treason No. 6_ contains, in its comparison of the government with a highwayman, perhaps the most devastating assault on the nature of government ever written. No one should miss the uniquely Spoonerian blend of rigorous logic and devotion to liberty. The opening passage of Spooner’s brilliant _Letter to Grover Cleveland_ will serve as a brief example of the style: > “Sir—your inaugural address is probably as honest, sensible, and consistent a one as that of any president within the last fifty years, or, perhaps, as any since the foundation of the government. If, therefore, it is false, absurd, self-contradictory, and ridiculous, it is not (as I think) because you are personally less honest, sensible, or consistent than your predecessors, but because the government itself—according to your description of it, and according to the practical administration of it for nearly a hundred years—is an utterly and palpably false, absurd, and criminal one. Such praises as you bestow upon it are, therefore, necessarily false, absurd, and ridiculous.” _Reviewed by Murray N. Rothbard / Political Philosophy (Six Volumes) / BFL Price $140.00_