As you note in the article, Rothbard thought “the good stuff in Ayn’s system is not Ayn’s original contribution at all.” This includes the non-aggression principle, which Rothbard thought was already found in Herbert Spencer and the anarchists around Tucker's Liberty.
They all thought that acts should be divided into those that are invasive and those that are not invasive and that invasive acts and only invasive acts should be prohibited, and that theft of legitimate property, whatever they conceived that to be, was invasive. They did not always agree on whether a particular hypothetical act was or was not invasive, but they agreed that was the standard by which permissibility should be judged.
Here are some quotes that demonstrate this:
Joseph Labadie: Crime is an injury done another by aggression. Anyone who injures another by encroaching upon his life, his freedom or his property is a criminal. The law of equal freedom, the essential principle of Anarchism, is a protection to life, liberty and property.[1]
Lysander Spooner: For everybody has a natural right, not only to defend his own person and property against aggressors, but also to go to the assistance and defence of everybody else, whose person or property is invaded.[2]
Francis Tandy: This is the Philosophy of Anarchism – the absence of all coercion of the non-invasive individual.[3]
Whether Rothbard believed the non-aggression principle was original to Rand is irrelevant. As I made clear in my conclusion, the distinctive feature of the NAP is not the division of actions into aggressive or non-aggression, invasion or non-invasion, but the belief that their entire political theory can be deduced from this singular principle. In that respect, the NAP is not found in Labadie, Spooner, Tandy, Spencer, or anyone else. As far as I can find, it really is original to Rand, even if it is an original error as a circular argument.
It's not irrelevant if this is the historical individualist anarchist position.
You are wrong on both points. The distinctive feature of the NAP is the division of acts into invasive and non-invasive and the belief that the former, and only the former, should be prohibited.
However it also happens to be true that the individualist anarchists thought that their entire philosophy did indeed flow entirely from the substance of NAP. This is true of Labadie, Spooner, Tandy and seemingly all of the American individualist anarchists.
This can be seen most explicitly in the Tandy quote given above. He identifies the philosophy of anarchism with "the absence of all coercion of the non-invasive individual." All the rest of anarchist philosophy, according to him, like the necessity of abolishing the state, flows from this premise.
It is irrelevant, because I decide the subject of my own post. The topic here is the circularity of the NAP, as it is found in its most prominent defenders: Rand and Rothbard. This is stated directly in the title. If you decide you want to use a special definition of the Non-Aggression Principle which only needs to make a distinction between aggression and non-aggression and doesn't have to work as a principle, then you can do that on your own page. Even if you do, it only further illustrates the claim I make in my title.
None of the people you list go beyond making the distinction between aggression and non-aggression. This includes Tandy, who does summarize his anarchism this way, which is not the same as DEDUCING his anarchism from this singular idea.
I consider the topic closed here, especially since we had this same discussion on reddit.
What ideas does Tandy use to reach his anarchism if he is not deducing it from something like the non-aggression principle? As far as I can tell, that is exactly what he is doing.
"In other words, individual freedom pre-supposes the suppression of the invader, whether that invader appears as an individual criminal or as the corporate criminal – the State, – and whether as the Republican or as the Imperial form of State.
The freedom of each individual denies all the freedom to invade. For when one individual invades, the activities of another are restrained." - Francis Tandy
This is not a page about Tandy. Not gonna say it again, comments need to be on topic. If you want to see why no one can deduce things from the NAP, you can read my article. The concept of "invasion" is meaningless unless we already have a sense of what limits, if crossed, would qualify as an invasion. Consequently, people who claimed they could deduce where these limits are from the concept of non-invasion, like Rand and Rothbard, needed to engage in circular reasoning, baking the conclusions they wanted into how they defined their terms and then pretend to "deduce" them.
As you note in the article, Rothbard thought “the good stuff in Ayn’s system is not Ayn’s original contribution at all.” This includes the non-aggression principle, which Rothbard thought was already found in Herbert Spencer and the anarchists around Tucker's Liberty.
They all thought that acts should be divided into those that are invasive and those that are not invasive and that invasive acts and only invasive acts should be prohibited, and that theft of legitimate property, whatever they conceived that to be, was invasive. They did not always agree on whether a particular hypothetical act was or was not invasive, but they agreed that was the standard by which permissibility should be judged.
Here are some quotes that demonstrate this:
Joseph Labadie: Crime is an injury done another by aggression. Anyone who injures another by encroaching upon his life, his freedom or his property is a criminal. The law of equal freedom, the essential principle of Anarchism, is a protection to life, liberty and property.[1]
Lysander Spooner: For everybody has a natural right, not only to defend his own person and property against aggressors, but also to go to the assistance and defence of everybody else, whose person or property is invaded.[2]
Francis Tandy: This is the Philosophy of Anarchism – the absence of all coercion of the non-invasive individual.[3]
1 http://www.ozarkia.net/bill/anarchism/library/Anarchism-Labadie/index.html
2 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lysander-spooner-vices-are-not-crimes-a-vindication-of-moral-liberty
3 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/francis-dashwood-tandy-voluntary-socialism
Whether Rothbard believed the non-aggression principle was original to Rand is irrelevant. As I made clear in my conclusion, the distinctive feature of the NAP is not the division of actions into aggressive or non-aggression, invasion or non-invasion, but the belief that their entire political theory can be deduced from this singular principle. In that respect, the NAP is not found in Labadie, Spooner, Tandy, Spencer, or anyone else. As far as I can find, it really is original to Rand, even if it is an original error as a circular argument.
It's not irrelevant if this is the historical individualist anarchist position.
You are wrong on both points. The distinctive feature of the NAP is the division of acts into invasive and non-invasive and the belief that the former, and only the former, should be prohibited.
However it also happens to be true that the individualist anarchists thought that their entire philosophy did indeed flow entirely from the substance of NAP. This is true of Labadie, Spooner, Tandy and seemingly all of the American individualist anarchists.
This can be seen most explicitly in the Tandy quote given above. He identifies the philosophy of anarchism with "the absence of all coercion of the non-invasive individual." All the rest of anarchist philosophy, according to him, like the necessity of abolishing the state, flows from this premise.
It is irrelevant, because I decide the subject of my own post. The topic here is the circularity of the NAP, as it is found in its most prominent defenders: Rand and Rothbard. This is stated directly in the title. If you decide you want to use a special definition of the Non-Aggression Principle which only needs to make a distinction between aggression and non-aggression and doesn't have to work as a principle, then you can do that on your own page. Even if you do, it only further illustrates the claim I make in my title.
None of the people you list go beyond making the distinction between aggression and non-aggression. This includes Tandy, who does summarize his anarchism this way, which is not the same as DEDUCING his anarchism from this singular idea.
I consider the topic closed here, especially since we had this same discussion on reddit.
What ideas does Tandy use to reach his anarchism if he is not deducing it from something like the non-aggression principle? As far as I can tell, that is exactly what he is doing.
"In other words, individual freedom pre-supposes the suppression of the invader, whether that invader appears as an individual criminal or as the corporate criminal – the State, – and whether as the Republican or as the Imperial form of State.
The freedom of each individual denies all the freedom to invade. For when one individual invades, the activities of another are restrained." - Francis Tandy
This is not a page about Tandy. Not gonna say it again, comments need to be on topic. If you want to see why no one can deduce things from the NAP, you can read my article. The concept of "invasion" is meaningless unless we already have a sense of what limits, if crossed, would qualify as an invasion. Consequently, people who claimed they could deduce where these limits are from the concept of non-invasion, like Rand and Rothbard, needed to engage in circular reasoning, baking the conclusions they wanted into how they defined their terms and then pretend to "deduce" them.