Individualist anarchism is the distinctively American branch of the tradition. It holds that the sovereignty of the individual is the foundational political principle, and that genuinely free markets, cleared of the state-enforced monopolies that let capital extract from labor, are required by that sovereignty and not merely compatible with it.
Josiah Warren began it with practical experiments in labor-for-labor exchange. Lysander Spooner supplied the constitutional and legal argument, holding in No Treason (1870) that the Constitution binds nobody who did not sign it. Benjamin Tucker gave the tradition its systematic form in the journal Liberty (1881-1908). Tucker identified four monopolies, in land, money, tariffs and patents, as the actual mechanism of capitalist exploitation, and argued that abolishing them would dissolve concentrated wealth without abolishing markets or private possession.
It shares mutualism's critique of capitalist ownership but cares less about which cooperative form economic life should take and more about the individual's freedom from any external authority, including the social pressure of federation. It is sharply distinct from market anarchism: where Rothbard treats existing property titles and wage labor as legitimate products of free exchange, individualist anarchism treats them as artifacts of the state-backed monopolies it wants abolished. Pro-market and anti-capitalist in the strict sense, it occupies a position most contemporary political vocabulary has no word for.
Largely dormant through the mid-twentieth century, it has been revived since the 2000s by Kevin Carson and the Center for a Stateless Society, who extend the monopoly analysis to intellectual property, platform rents and digital labor. The recurring objection is empirical, not philosophical. Critics doubt that removing Tucker's four monopolies would in fact dissolve concentrated economic power, and the tradition has never had the opportunity to find out.