Individualist Anarchism

Individualist anarchism is a current within anarchism that treats the individual, rather than the community or class, as the starting point of political thought. Its supporters argue that every person is sovereign over their own life and that the state, as a monopoly on force, has no legitimate authority. Unlike social anarchists, who favor common ownership, most individualist anarchists accept markets and private possession of the products of one's labor. Many in the American tradition, however, also opposed rent, interest and profit, which they saw as products of state-protected privilege.

Josiah Warren, often called the first American anarchist, opened a 'time store' in Cincinnati in 1827, where goods were exchanged according to the labor needed to produce them, and later helped found the community of Modern Times in New York. In Germany, Max Stirner published The Ego and Its Own (1844), an argument for egoism that later became a founding text for individualist anarchists. Lysander Spooner argued in No Treason that the US Constitution could not bind people who had never consented to it. Benjamin Tucker drew these strands together in his journal Liberty, founded in 1881, which combined Warren's ideas with elements of Proudhon. Tucker held that four state monopolies, over money, land, tariffs and patents, were the source of economic exploitation. In France, writers such as Émile Armand developed a strongly egoist and anti-moralist current in the early twentieth century.

Egoist anarchism, inspired by Stirner, rejects natural rights and moral duties and bases association on the self-interest of each person. Natural-rights individualists, such as Spooner, argued from universal rights of self-ownership. Mutualist individualists, close to Proudhon, focused on free credit and labor-based exchange. Later thinkers drew on the tradition to develop anarcho-capitalism and market-oriented left-libertarianism, though each claims a different part of its legacy.

Social anarchists argue that individualist anarchism leaves room for inequality and wage labor, and that it neglects the cooperative basis of human life. Marxists, starting with Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, attacked Stirner's egoism as an expression of petty bourgeois outlook. Liberal and conservative critics argue that without a state, rights and contracts could not be reliably enforced. Anarcho-capitalists, in turn, criticize the labor theory of value and the opposition to interest and rent held by Tucker and his circle.

Individualist anarchism has mainly existed through small experimental communities, journals and personal practice rather than large movements. Warren's communities, Tucker's Liberty and French individualist circles influenced free thought, free love and anti-censorship campaigns. The tradition's arguments about consent and state monopolies remain an important source for later libertarian and anarchist thought.