Herbert Spencer, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The charge of recantation is Mr. George's, and it rests on setting the first book beside the last and counting the differences without asking what produced them. The first principle never altered. Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man. That is the root from which I drew the right to ignore the state, the rights of women and the doctrine of the land, and I have never withdrawn it.
What I revised was how far a given branch can be carried when the facts of social life are weighed. Take the state first. In 1851 I held that a citizen may adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry, since the state is only an agent employed in common to secure certain advantages, and it is for each to say whether he will employ such an agent.1
I added that he cannot be coerced into political combination without a breach of the law of equal freedom.1 The deduction is valid as a deduction. What the argument never touched was the question of how a society so constituted could be conducted in practice, and on that I said less than the subject required. On women I began where the principle begins.
Equity knows no difference of sex, and the word man in its vocabulary is generic; the moral sense that answers to the law of equal freedom exists in the feminine mind as in the masculine.2 A reviewer of my work, writing of my own opinions, put the later difficulty plainly, and I printed his words in my own Autobiography because I judged them fair.
He observed that as a matter of equity simply, the claim of political rights for women might be valid were the social positions of men and women alike in every other respect, but that men carry the obligation of defending the country, which women do not.3 Political power is the instrument by which rights are secured, and its possessors bear the burden of the force that secures them.
That is a consideration of equal burdens, not of lesser worth, and it sits beside the civil rights, of property, of contract, of person, which I never withheld. On land, the original chapters hold the community's title as the ultimate one, and they also hold, with equal care, that a tenant of society who pays his stipulated rent keeps the surplus of his produce as rightfully his own, since society cannot take it without trespassing upon his freedom.4
So the doctrine was never confiscatory even in its first form. The principle that the earth belongs to all alike I retain; what I have weighed since is the cost of dispossessing the holders, whose titles descend through centuries of improvement, and the quality of an administration by the state as landlord. Is this recantation? A young man deduces; an old man estimates the consequences of acting on the deduction.
The first principle governed both, and it was to find it, and to infer from it the limits of state action, that I wrote the book at all.5 Where I qualified an application, I did so by the same law and not against it.
Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man. The state exists to enforce that law and for nothing else: to protect life, liberty and property at home and the society from attack abroad. Poor relief, a state church, state education, colonies, sanitary inspection, currency and the post lie outside its office, and every extension of it is a step toward the coming slavery in which the citizen labours for the state.
The divine right of parliaments is the great political superstition of the age, as the divine right of kings was of the last.6 The first principle never changed; its applications were revised as the evidence was weighed.789
If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state — to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying towards its support.Social Statics
Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense. The law of equal freedom manifestly applies to the whole race — female as well as male.Social Statics
Now as a matter of equity simply, this claim might be valid were the social positions of men and women alike in every other respect. But they are not.An Autobiography Vol 1
Clearly, therefore, this surplus produce equitably remains with the tenant: society cannot take it without trespassing upon his freedom; he can take it without trespassing on the freedom of society.Social Statics
What ultimate principle is it from which may be inferred the limits of State-action? Analysis was required. The excogitation of this principle and the perception that not only these limits, but also the requirements of equity at large could be deduced from it, prompted the writing of Social Statics.The Filiation of Ideas
THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION. THE great political superstition of the past was the divine right of kings. The great political superstition of the present is the divine right of parliaments. The oil of anointing seems unawares to have dripped from the head of the one on to the heads of the many, and given sacredness to them also and to their decrees.The Man versus the State
And yet it is thought neither by electors nor by those they elect, that there is any need for systematic study of that law-making which in bygone ages went on working the ill-being of the people when it tried to achieve their well-being. Surely there can be no fitness for legislative functions wit tout Avide knowledge of those legislative experiences which the past has bequeathed.The Man versus the State
A man's liberties are none the less aggressed ujx)n because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited. In thus imposing by force their wrills upon his will, they are breaking the law of equal freedom in his person; and what the motive may be matters not. Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one is not sanctified when committed by a host.The Principles of Ethics Vol 2
Watchmaking requires a long apprenticeship; but there needs none for the making of institutions. To manage a shop properly requires teaching; but the management of a people may be undertaken without preparation." Were we to be visited by some wiser Gulliver, or, as in the "Micromegas" of Voltaire, by some inhabitant of another sphere, his account of our political institutions might run somewhat as follows:― "I found…Essays Scientific, Political, and Speculative Vol 3, Library ed
The core of his political philosophy and of the libertarian tradition that claims him; his later revisions on land, on the right to ignore the state and on women's votes are the ground of the charge, pressed hardest by Henry George, that he recanted.