/lit/ - Literature

>>14965657
Lysander Spooner was a very interesting American legal theorist with anarchist tendencies who produced most of his work a decade or two before the Civil War.

He does address himself to refuting democracy, as such (as best I can recall), but he does do yeoman's working in wrecking the various political apparatuses that are built upon democratic assumptions, such as constitutions, or *the* Constitution, in the case of his "No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority":

>The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago...

>Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years.

>And the constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them.

>They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature of things, that they could bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them. That is to say, the instrument does not purport to be an agreement between any body but “the people” THEN existing; nor does it, either expressly or impliedly, assert any right, power, or disposition, on their part, to bind anybody but themselves.

Spooner's views are cogently summarized by Randy Barnett, pbuh, here:

https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/lm-spooner