Both the title and the substance of “Vices are not Crimes” highlight the unique role that morality and moral principle had for Spooner among the anarchists and libertarians of his day. For Spooner was the last of the great natural-rights theorists among anarchists, classical liberals, or moral theorists generally; the doughty old heir of the natural law-natural rights tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries was fighting a rearguard battle against the collapse of the idea of a scientific or rational morality, or of the science of justice or of individual right.

Narrated by Michael Stack.