Individualist Anarchism

The distinctively American anarchist tradition developed in the nineteenth century by Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner, and — building on Warren's earlier experiments — Benjamin Tucker, holding that the sovereignty of the individual is the foundational political principle and that genuine free markets — freed of the state-enforced monopolies that allow capital to extract from labor — are compatible with, and indeed required by, that sovereignty. Tucker's Liberty (1881–1908) gave the tradition its most systematic statement, identifying four monopolies (land, money, tariffs, patents) as the actual mechanism of capitalist exploitation and arguing that abolishing them would dissolve concentrated wealth without abolishing markets or private possession. The tradition shares mutualism's critique of capitalist ownership but is less concerned with the cooperative form economic life should take and more concerned with the individual's freedom from any external authority, including the social pressure of cooperative federation. It is sharply distinct from anarcho-capitalism: where Rothbard's tradition treats existing property titles and wage labor as legitimate outcomes of free exchange, individualist anarchism treats them as artifacts of the state-backed monopolies it seeks to abolish — pro-market, but anti-capitalist in the strict sense. The tradition was largely dormant in the mid-twentieth century but has been revived since the 2000s through Kevin Carson and the Center for a Stateless Society, who have extended the framework to digital labor, intellectual property, and contemporary corporate power.