No Treason

No Treason is a set of three essays written in 1867 by Lysander Spooner, a lawyer, strong abolitionist, and American individualist anarchist. Its best-known edition is titled The Constitution of No Authority. Spooner wrote the pamphlets in the aftermath of the American Civil War, a period shaped by the Reconstruction of the South, the prosecution of former Confederate soldiers for treason, and debates over the legitimacy of federal power.

His central claim is that the United States Constitution functioned as a governing contract, and that as such it had to meet the basic conditions of any valid agreement. Spooner argues that this contract had been irreparably broken during the war and was therefore void. He also contends that the federal government could never legally bind everyone living in the country, since none of them had signed or given explicit consent. For him, assuming consent without evidence fails the most elementary requirements for an agreement to be considered valid.

For Spooner, natural law is the foundation of all rights: every person is born with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which no state decree can erase. From this premise he criticizes the imposition of a majority's will on a minority, holding that numerical superiority does not guarantee a just decision. The essays also address slavery, which Spooner had already opposed in earlier writings, and they fault the North for not fighting the war in order to free the enslaved.

The pamphlets circulated widely, and extracts appeared in Southern periodicals of the time. Over the following decades they became a reference for American libertarian political thought and were reprinted in libertarian journals. The theorist Murray Rothbard, a leading figure of modern anarcho-capitalism, called it the most important argument for an anarchist political philosophy ever written.