Individualist anarchism

Individualist anarchism rejects the state and all claims of collective authority over the person, but — unlike its communist cousins — keeps a place for individual possession, contract, and exchange rather than common ownership. Its unit is the sovereign individual, not the commune.

Its strands differ sharply at the root. Stirner's The Ego and Its Own (1844) pushed an egoism that denies any abstraction — state, nation, humanity, God, even morality itself — a rightful claim on the individual, who is bound only by what serves them. Tucker's American tradition was tamer and more economic: a market anarchism of 'occupancy and use' property, free banking, and open competition in the services the state monopolizes, including defence.

It runs through a distinctly American lineage — Thoreau's Civil Disobedience (1849) and its refusal to lend the individual conscience to an unjust state, the Boston individualists, and the free-thought and free-love milieus of the nineteenth century — favouring withdrawal, dissent, and voluntary association over mass revolution.

What unites its quarrelsome strands is a refusal to swap state authority for communal authority: the individualist is as suspicious of the commune, the union, and the crowd as of the government, seeing in majority rule or collective ownership just another master.

Its critics on the anarchist left argue that without common ownership its 'freedom' protects the property-holder and leaves economic domination intact; others note that a philosophy of pure individual sovereignty offers little account of how large-scale cooperation happens at all.

It is easily caricatured as mere selfishness or adolescent rebellion, but it produced a serious literature on conscience, consent, and the moral standing of the individual against every collective — and, through Tucker, one of the direct ancestors of modern market anarchism.