Individualist anarchist, guerrilla abolitionist, insurgent against state monopolies, anti-constitutional legal scholar, our Nestor – wisest of the wise – Lysander Spooner.

The Lysander Spooner Research Scholar in Abolitionist Studies is the second academic position created by the Trustees of C4SS to advance the scope and sphere of abolition – total freedom.

It is named in honor of the versatile, relentless and rebellious abolitionist Lysander Spooner. Spooner’s life and work exemplifies total commitment to not just slavery’s containment and retreat from social life, but its pursuit and annihilation. As Spooner explained to the Editor of the Commonwealth:

“… I have no sympathy with the pusillanimous and criminal sentiment, ‘If Slavery will let us alone, we will let it alone’; that I am in favor of neither making nor keeping any compacts with slavery, … I hope then to see freedom and slavery meet face to face, with no question between them, except which shall conquer, and which shall die.”

This is the cause of the Scholar of Abolitionist Studies, to find slavery, wherever it may be found, to shine a blinding light and pursue it until it is yet another strange and horrifying relic of human social history.

To be awarded The Lysander Spooner Research Scholar in Abolitionist Studies position signals a scholar’s energy and capacity to contribute, in outstanding ways, to that interdisciplinary field of social theory – drawing on resources in economics, philosophy, sociology, history, and other fields – Abolitionist Studies.