Voluntaryism

Voluntaryism is defined in the book as a political doctrine that treats coercion by government as illegitimate, even when the state uses force to abolish slavery or restrain private domination. Its decisive significance in the argument is therefore paradoxical: a principle advertised as protecting freedom is portrayed as preventing the collective force necessary to end conditions in which human beings are treated as property and ordinary people are compelled by economic necessity.

Definition and Core Logic

Voluntaryism appears most directly in the discussion of the Non-aggression Principle. The book asks whether the jungle supports either the Non-aggression Principle or Voluntaryism and answers no: in nature, creatures prey upon one another, and survival requires fighting, killing, or successful flight. From this perspective, voluntary consent cannot be treated as the natural baseline of social life. The argument instead presents conflict and force as unavoidable features of existence, making a blanket prohibition on coercion appear detached from the conditions it claims to regulate.

The book also places Voluntaryism within a wider account of hierarchy. Drawing on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, it describes social relations as shaped by unequal willingness to risk life, use force, and pursue power. The Ownership Class is said to occupy its position because it accepts greater risks and exercises greater force, while much of the population is characterized as seeking domination by stronger figures rather than attempting to seize power itself. Within that framework, Voluntaryism is not neutral: refusing organized coercion can leave existing masters in place while denying the dominated an effective means of resistance.

Voluntaryism and Slavery

The sharpest example is the American Civil War. The book states that the Union held slavery to be wrong and believed it had to be stopped, whereas the Confederacy claimed that the state had no right to interfere with business or private property. Because enslaved people were legally treated as property, the Confederacy presented military resistance as defense against a supposedly tyrannical government attempting to confiscate that property.

Voluntaryism is condemned because, in the book’s formulation, it would require slaveholders to volunteer the abolition of slavery rather than submit to righteous state coercion. The doctrine thus places the consent of the person exercising domination above the freedom of the person being dominated. The Confederacy becomes the historical demonstration of this contradiction: it invoked noninterference and property rights while maintaining a system that treated human beings as possessions. The book consequently characterizes the principle as the opposite of morality, because it can recognize ownership claims over people while presenting the owner’s liberty as sacred.

The argument extends beyond chattel slavery. The book states that women and children were also treated, within Christian patriarchal structures, as forms of human property. It recalls an English legal order in which husband and wife were regarded as one person represented by the husband, leaving a married woman without an independent legal existence, property rights, or the ability to enter contracts or sue without her husband. A doctrine that protects private property while refusing coercive intervention, the book argues, offers no adequate answer to such embedded forms of domination.

Economic Coercion and the State

The book’s critique of Voluntaryism rests on a distinction between formal consent and material freedom. In a capitalist system, it argues, only people who possess capital are genuinely free; everyone else is a forced participant in an economic arrangement that constrains the choices available to them. Under these conditions, workers may appear to volunteer while lacking a meaningful alternative to dependence on property owners and employers.

This criticism is linked to the book’s broader account of predatory capitalism. It describes the earliest form of capitalism associated with the British Empire as a system in which workers broadly opposed the Ownership Class. The creation of a middle class is then interpreted as a strategy that divided the lower orders and supplied the elite with managers, agents, enforcers, and ideological allies. Voluntaryism, in this setting, can function as part of the same division: it treats isolated individual choice as decisive while leaving the material structure that distributes power untouched.

The tax system provides a contrasting model of collective organization. The book describes one system for corporations and the super-rich and another for ordinary people, who face a complex system without the lawyers and accountants available to large enterprises. It proposes a “virtual corporation” through which ordinary people could pool resources to obtain comparable legal and tax expertise. The proposal illustrates the book’s preferred response to unequal power: not atomized voluntariness, but coordinated collective capacity capable of resisting institutions that otherwise intimidate and separate individuals.

Political and Ideological Consequences

Voluntaryism is identified with the modern Republican right and with efforts to thwart the state. The book calls the doctrine evil because it would oppose government action to abolish slavery, regulate domination, or enforce substantive rights. It presents the contemporary right as a New Confederacy whose commitments to minimal government, negative liberty, maximum profit, and unrestricted private property reproduce the Confederate philosophy in altered form.

This political critique depends on a broader contrast between negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty is portrayed as a state that stands aside while abuses continue, preserving the appearance of noninterference even when vulnerable people remain subject to violence and dependency. Positive liberty, by contrast, is assigned the task of actively protecting human and civil rights. The book therefore treats Voluntaryism’s suspicion of state power as a refusal of responsibility: the state’s abstention does not remove coercion, but allows private and economic coercion to continue without effective restraint.

The doctrine is also placed within the book’s account of ideological consent. The 99 percent are said to be numerous enough to overthrow the 1 percent, yet many accept elite rule and even support billionaire plutocrats. In this analysis, domination survives not only through force but through the internalization of beliefs that make hierarchy appear desirable or inevitable. Voluntaryism contributes to that condition when it directs opposition toward government while leaving concentrated private power protected by the language of individual freedom.

Significance in the Book’s Argument

Voluntaryism serves as a test case for the book’s central claim that liberty cannot be separated from power. Its formal insistence on consent is judged by its practical consequences: whether it removes domination or merely prevents public institutions from confronting private dominators. Because the book believes that property can be used to enslave, that economic participation can be forced, and that inherited power reproduces the Ownership Class, it rejects voluntariness as sufficient evidence of freedom.

The concept therefore marks the boundary between the book’s preferred politics and the right-wing system it attacks. The former requires organized collective action, taxation, state intervention, and coercive protection of rights; the latter treats government force as the principal danger while defending private power. Voluntaryism is significant precisely because, in the book’s interpretation, its promise of freedom conceals a choice about whose consent matters: the consent of the master, or the liberation of the person subject to the master’s power.