19th Century
Herbert Spencer
1820–1903 · Equal freedom
Every person may do as they will, provided they infringe the equal freedom of no other.
In their words
“The liberty of each is limited only by the like liberties of all.”
Spencer's law of equal freedom made him the most famous philosopher of liberty in the English-speaking world before he was refashioned into a caricature of social Darwinism. He opposed empire, compulsory schooling, a state church, public libraries and colonial wars, arguing that protection of rights exhausts the legitimate work of the state and that lawmaking beyond it manufactures dependence.
Why it matters for freedom
He built an entire ethics on the equal freedom of persons, and predicted that states would shrink as voluntary cooperation grew.
Who they stood against
the Victorian state, its wars and its sanitary despotism