What is Individualist Anarchism?
Individualist anarchists start from the single person. Each of us, they say, owns our own life and has the right to run it, so no government can claim a right to rule us without consent. Most reject the state completely, and most accept trade and private possession. What makes them different from modern libertarians is that many early individualists also attacked rent, interest and big profits, which they blamed on state favors. They saw themselves as the true friends of workers, but as friends of free exchange and not of common ownership.
Core beliefs
- Every person has sovereignty over their own body, mind and labor.
- Rule without consent is illegitimate, and the state is a coercive monopoly.
- Free people should trade and associate on terms they agree to.
- Owning what you occupy and use is legitimate, but holding land idle for rent is not.
- Privileges that governments grant, in money, land, trade and patents, create unfair advantage.
- How people live, think and love is their own business.
History
The American Josiah Warren ran a "time store" in Cincinnati from 1827, where goods were priced by the hours of labor in them, and later helped set up the Modern Times village on Long Island. In Prussia, Max Stirner issued The Ego and Its Own in 1844, a bold defense of self-interest that attacked every sacred cause. Lysander Spooner, a lawyer, argued that the US Constitution never bound people who had not agreed to it. Benjamin Tucker edited the paper Liberty from 1881, combining Warren's ideas with those of Proudhon, and held that four state-backed monopolies kept workers poor. In France in the early 1900s, Emile Armand and his circle developed a lifestyle-focused, anti-moralist strand.
Variants
Egoists, who follow Stirner, deny that natural rights or moral duties exist and build association on self-interest. Natural-rights thinkers like Spooner start from a universal right to self-ownership. Mutualists around Tucker stress free banking and labor-based pricing. Later writers in the market-anarchist and left-libertarian camps built on parts of the tradition, as did anarcho-capitalists, though they differ with the older thinkers on rent, interest and the value of labor.
Criticisms
Social anarchists say the approach leaves room for wage labor and for the rich to dominate the poor, and underrates how much people depend on each other. Marx and Engels mocked Stirner in The German Ideology as a spokesman for the petty bourgeois. Liberal and conservative critics ask how rights could be defended and contracts upheld with no state. Anarcho-capitalists, from the other side, reject Tucker's labor theory of value and his hostility to interest and rent.
In practice
The tradition has lived in small experiments, newspapers and private life, not mass parties. Warren's villages, Tucker's circle and French individualist groups backed free thought, free love and the right to publish without censorship. Its arguments about consent and state monopoly keep being used by libertarians and by anarchists of other kinds. On the 12 axes it scores at the extreme Democratic end on Authority, strongly toward Liberty on Security and strongly Local on Structure, with Markets leaning Free.