And do not imagine that the present landholders alone are to be finally held liable. All who have been voluntary accomplices with them—and all who have voluntarily aided in upholding the British government, have been accomplices with them—have justly incurred the same penalty as the landholders themselves. Among these accomplices have been your great manufacturers, merchants, bankers, ship-owners, money-lenders (lenders of money to the government)—everybody, in fact, high or low, who has voluntarily been part and parcel of the British government—have been accomplices in the thousand crimes by which the people at large, throughout the Empire, have been plundered and enslaved. And having been such accomplices, their property may as rightfully be seized for purposes of reparation, as may the lands of the landholders themselves; for every member of a conspiracy shares in the guilt of all the others; and is equally liable with them to be coerced into making restitution and compensation.--Lysander Spooner (1880) "Revolution: The Only Remedy for the Oppressed Classes of Ireland, England, and Other Parts of the British Empire."
Lysander Spooner [Recall here, here, here, and here], an American abolitionist is, I think, only remembered by Libertarians. In many ways he is a Lockean and, as the quoted passage reveals, he has a very robust conception of individual property rights. These rights can be inherited and endure long after they have been violated. In context he is discussing the dispossession of the native Irish by the British, but as the final quoted sentence suggests he is willing to generalize the case much more broadly. I am unfamiliar with his views on the rights of native Americans, but because (I) Spooner very clearly denies American exceptionalism throughout his writings and (II) has no special fondness (to put it mildly) for the American form of government, there is no reason to assume his views couldn't be extended to cover the claims of original American inhabitants (if he were to be persuaded that these had some form of property).
So from sound Lockean principles, Spooner generates a right to compensation for loss of property/country even if this occurred many generations ago. (For example, he is quite clear that much of the British isles have been robbed from original owners since the invasion of the Saxons.) It is worth articulating the further principles Spooner relies to secure this. First, even though present occupants did not commit any crimes they are, first, complicit in the effects of the crime and, second, their occupancy prevents both the heirs of the original title-holders to benefit from the property, but also the counterfactual-would-be-new-owners of it if the (heirs of these) occupants would have been willing to sell or gift their property to them.
In fact, what's attractive about Spooner's approach is that he has, as the final quoted paragraph reveals, a very robust conception of complicity in crimes. And it follows from his account that all who are complicit in an original crime ought to compensate it. (He is quiet about the exact principles of compensation; how to evaluate the original value of the loss; how to figure out who the would be counterfactual-would-be-occupants; if the compensation has to take the place of return of property or payment, etc.) All settler/colonial projects generate obligations to compensation for successive generations.
These obligations are, and this is striking for a Libertarian, rather collective: while the argument goes through the complicity of individual accomplishes, the present inhabitants of a settler/colonial state X are collectively accomplices in the extension of the original theft and violation of rights. Spooner (who clearly has no interest in organized Christianity) here comes close to embracing a collective, original sin account of many states. (He is the kind of libertarian who thinks most actually existing governments are ways for the powerful to oppress the weak.) The bad origin of states generates obligations on present citizens.
Because the present occupants and their governments are tend to fail to meet their obligation to compensate, violence against them, especially the very rich who benefit most from the present status quo, is justified. On Spooner's view many present states are de facto continuation of the state of nature. (This is even more thoroughgoing than Spinoza, who thinks the state of nature is always a life possibility.)
Spooner does not spell out if there are intermediary steps that heirs of the original victims, accomplices, and beneficiaries must/can take before violence is justified. These gaps in his argument are, alas, characteristic of Spooner who also often seems to embrace commitments that are in tension with each other. So, one would not want to read Spooner for the strengths of his arguments and rigor. In addition, Spooner's positions are often neither pragmatic nor likely to be taken up by those that determine the status quo. But his works reveal that the distinctly American libertarian impulse (with its thoroughgoing embrace of individual property rights) originates in genuine concern for dispossessed others (slaves, irish, colonial inhabitants, workers, etc.) and that the radical implications of this concern are pursued with moral vigour.* Because Spooner rejects quietism, it is a bitter irony that his philosophy which explicitly aims at peace, ends up embracing conditions that would lead to permanent war until states disappear.
*Spooner's distrust of the Federal government and the war-aims of the North, led him to reject Reconstruction.
Comments