New Book: Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle

by Stephan Kinsella on November 10, 2026

Shepard Humphries, a.k.a. “Shepard the Voluntaryist” (one of my new Wyoming neighbors) has a new book out: The Consent Principle: The Moral Line Between Freedom and Force (2026), available on Kindle and in paperback.

The book’s thesis is simple: any human interaction can be judged by one question. Was there genuine, voluntary agreement? Humphries applies that test to laws, institutions, and relationships, and he applies it consistently, with no carve-outs for the reader’s favorite causes. Along the way he covers the nonaggression principle, self-ownership, political authority, “manufactured consent,” spontaneous order, and voluntary alternatives to the state. He builds the argument on what he calls his REELS framework (Reason, Empirical Evidence, Logic, and Scientific Methodology), and he writes for general readers, not just the already converted.

A few lines give the flavor:

“No institution can possess rights that individuals do not possess.”

“Need, however urgent, does not generate a right to someone else’s property.”

“A right that requires the compelled labor of others is not a right. It is a claim.”

“The hallmark of a civilized creature is the transition from the crude reign of force to the luminous realm of consent.”

Consent is the right thing to focus on. Aggression just is the use of someone’s body or property without his consent, and consent is what turns an otherwise invasive act into a legitimate one: a trade, a handshake, a surgery.¹ The radical libertarian tradition has long pressed this to its logical conclusion: if legitimate authority requires consent, then the state, which never obtained it, has none.² Humphries’s book is a fresh, accessible statement of that case. Fittingly, he also maintains Stoic Voluntaryist, a mirror of Watner’s voluntaryist writings.

It belongs on the shelf next to other accessible introductions to the case for a stateless society—see reading lists linked below. (I’m also working on a new curated list of introductory and other classic libertarian treatises, and will post it when it’s ready.)

For more on the book, see Mark Maresca’s interview with Humphries on The White Pillbox (May 22, 2026). Pick up a copy, and if you like it, leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Books from independent authors live or die by their reviews.

Anthony de Jasay, Choice, Contract, Consent: A Restatement of Liberalism (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1991) (a rigorous restatement of classical liberalism grounded in individual choice and voluntary agreement, with strict conditions on when government may override people’s voluntary choices; a more academic treatment of the theme of Humphries’s book)
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Anarcho-Capitalism: An Annotated Bibliography,” LewRockwell.com (Dec. 31, 2001) (Hoppe’s annotated guide to the core literature of anarcho-capitalism; the natural next step for readers who want to go beyond an introduction like Humphries’s)
Kinsella, “Review of Anthony de Jasay, Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 1, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 85–93, reprinted as ch. 20 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023) (my review of de Jasay’s later collection on government, anarchy, and order, for readers who want more of de Jasay after Choice, Contract, Consent)
Idem, “Top Ten Books of Liberty,” Mises Blog (Aug. 3, 2006) (my response to Liberty magazine’s list of the ten best libertarian books, faulting some of its picks and noting the absence of Rothbard and Hoppe)
Idem, “Other Top Ten Lists of Libertarian Books,” Mises Blog (Aug. 7, 2006) (proposes fresher categories for book lists than “the usual suspects”: neglected titles, books by non-libertarians, histories, fiction, pre-twentieth-century precursors, and works not originally in English)
Idem, “The Greatest Libertarian Books,” LewRockwell.com (Aug. 7, 2006) (my own picks, led by Hoppe, Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Bastiat, the Tannehills, and Spooner, with honorable mentions and fiction; the online version adds updated suggestions, including de Jasay’s Choice, Contract, Consent among the older works, and links to other libertarian bibliographies)
Idem, “Attention Minarchists: Mind Your Manners (2008),” StephanKinsella.com (Aug. 2, 2026) (an unfinished 2008 piece addressed to limited-government libertarians; its recommended-reading section includes Hoppe’s bibliography above)
Idem, “The Relation Between the Non-Aggression Principle and Property Rights: A Response to Division by Zer0,” Mises Blog (Oct. 4, 2011) (argues that the nonaggression principle presupposes a theory of property rights, with aggression understood as using another’s body or property without his consent; the theoretical backdrop for Humphries’s focus on consent)
Idem, “Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?” (NYC LibertyFest, Oct. 11, 2014), revised as ch. 25 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023) (a retrospective on the modern libertarian movement that traces the books that shaped it, from Rand, Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard through the Tannehills, David Friedman, Nozick, and Barnett, to Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed)
Idem, “Foreword to A Spontaneous Order,” StephanKinsella.com (June 22, 2015), foreword to Chase Rachels, A Spontaneous Order: The Capitalist Case for a Stateless Society (2015) (surveys the libertarian literature, from Rand, Paterson, and Lane through Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe’s A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, to more recent books, and places Rachels’s introduction to anarcho-capitalism in that tradition, where Humphries’s book also belongs)
Idem, “Michael Malice’s The Anarchist Handbook: Supplemental Readings,” StephanKinsella.com (May 20, 2021) (supplemental readings for Malice’s anthology of anarchist writings, featuring my favorites such as Molinari, Rothbard, and Hoppe; an update notes that Keith Knight’s The Voluntaryist Handbook collects many of them)