Individual Sovereignty

who owns you

Individual sovereignty (or self-ownership) is the concept of property in one’s own person, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to be the exclusive controller of his own body and life. According to Marxist philosopher G. Cohen,  the concept of self-ownership is that ‘each person enjoys, over himself and his powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that he has not contracted to supply.’

Sovereign individuals have supreme authority  over their own choices, without the interference of governing powers, provided they have not violated the rights of others. This notion is central to classical liberalism, abolitionism, libertarianism, objectivism, and anarchism. Sovereign-minded individuals would then seem to prefer an atmosphere consisting of decentralized administrative organizations acting as servants to the individual.

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