The Life Source Missing From Today’s Narratives
In 1761 lawyer James Otis delivered a five-hour speech in a packed Boston courthouse in which he dismantled Parliament’s claim that general search warrants known as writs-of-assistance were constitutionally valid. Though Otis lost the case his scholarly and fiery rhetoric won the support of onlookers such as 25-year-old John Adams, who near the end of his life wrote about his experience:
Every Man of an immense crowded Audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take Arms against Writs of Assistants. Then and there was the first scene of the first Act of opposition to the Arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the Child Independence was born.
What did Otis say that revolutionized so many people? Author-researcher A. J. Langguth tells us the King’s advocate Jeremiah Gridley delivered a death blow to Otis’s case by claiming “the British constitution was now only and whatever Parliament said it was.” Therefore, case closed.
But not for Otis. He fought back taking Enlightenment philosophy to its logical conclusion. As you read Otis’s words consider how utterly foreign they sound in today’s world, while at the same sparking exhilaration to know men once spoke like this:
Every man was his own sovereign . . . No other creature on earth could legitimately challenge a man’s right to his life, his liberty and his property. That principle, that unalterable law, took precedence—here Otis was answering Gridley directly—even over the survival of the state. [emphasis added]
Given that today states are sovereign entities wherever they exist, and by virtue of that status can legally overpower any domestic challenger, to assert that each individual is sovereign would seem at best wishful thinking. Individuals can act like they’re sovereign but the state will carry them off somewhere, if necessary. If “state” is defined in Rothbardian terms as a criminal gang writ large, then the adage “might is right” permeates state behavior. Stripped of its august facade that’s what state sovereignty means. Otis was saying we don’t need states.
In his inflammatory 1776 pamphlet Common Sense Thomas Paine wrote that “Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. . . . Society in every sta
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