capitalism

Individualist Anarchism 243
critical thinking became magnified as American virtues,
and to this day the cowboy remains a quintessential symbol
of American individualism. Again, in the decades after
World War II, individualism experienced a resurgence as
the civil rights movement demanded that social stratification
based on race and other immutable characteristics be
abandoned and that, in Martin Luther King’s words, people
should be “judged by the content of their character.” To this
end, American popular culture tends to celebrate remarkable
individuals, rather than classes or groups for their
unique gifts and talents.
TMS
See also Collectivism; Conscience; Individualism, Methodological;
Individualist Anarchism; Individual Rights; Rand, Ayn; Religion
and Liberty
Further Readings
Brands, H. W. The Age of Gold. New York: Doubleday, 2002.
Bronowski, J., and Bruce Mazlish. The Western Intellectual
Tradition. New York: Harper & Row, 1960.
Conway, David. Classical Liberalism: The Unvanquished Ideal.
New York: Saint Martin’s, 1998.
Dewey, John. “The Future of Liberalism.” Journal of Philosophy
32 no. 9 (April 25, 1935): 225–230.
Etzioni, Amitai. “Individualism—within History.” The Hedgehog
Review (Spring 2002): 49–56.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in
Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
MacIntyre, Alisdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed.
London: Duckworth, 1985.
Palmer, Tom G. “Myths of Individualism.” Cato Policy Report
28 (September/October 1996).
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New
York: Meridian, 1991.
Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM
Anarchism is the theory that there should be no ruling powers.
Because libertarianism is a theory of limited government,
some have argued that its logical extension (or
reductio ad absurdum, depending on one’s stance) is the
absence of all government. Libertarian or individualist anarchism
needs to be distinguished from socialist or collectivist
anarchism. From the 1840s to the 1860s, anarchism was
largely associated with the same social-revolutionary movements
that produced Marxism. Although Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, in his 1840 work, What Is Property? maintained
that all social arrangements should be based on voluntary
contractual agreement, he also regarded property as theft.
This idea is hardly the answer one expects to hear from a libertarian.
The differences between individualist and collectivist
anarchists are sometimes difficult to determine with
any specificity. Mikhail Bakunin advocated public ownership
of the means of production, yet took issue with Marx
over the issues of authority and liberty. In the 1890s, Peter
Kropotkin echoed Marx’s slogan “from each according to
his ability, to each according to his needs” and saw the state
as an agent of moral corruption. Max Stirner, in contrast,
was a radical individualist. A contemporary of Marx and
Bakunin, Stirner rejected the notion of society, instead advocating
a loose union of egoists.
The crucial difference between the anarchism of the left
and that of the right seems to rest on their understanding of
the notion of rights and of man’s nature. The left appears to
view anarchism as the logical result of the social nature of
man, freely joining into collective, yet decentralized, associations.
The right sees anarchism as the extension of the
priority of individual liberty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the
American anarchists tended to be of the individualist variety.
From Josiah Warren in the 1850s to Lysander Spooner
and Benjamin Tucker in the 1870s and 1880s, to Albert Jay
Nock in the 1930s, the development of anarchism in
America has been an integral part of libertarian history. The
individualist ideals of these early writers formed part of an
intellectual landscape where the ideas of liberty could be
developed free from any neo-Hegelian notions of history’s
progress, giving rise to such modern individualist anarchists
as Murray Rothbard and David Friedman. In
American libertarian thought, the problem has not been so
much whether individualism or collectivism formed the
basis for anarchism, but whether the priority of individual
liberty could be reconciled with a minimal state or if it
required its absence.
Individualist anarchists argue that there are no functions
of government that could not be handled by market
arrangements. Minimal-state libertarians typically argue
that individual liberty is the predominant value in the political
realm, and therefore government intervention in the
economy or in people’s personal lives is unwarranted. If a
person’s conduct is not in violation of the rights of others,
then the government should not regulate or prohibit it.
Nevertheless, the government has a legitimate, if minimal,
role in human affairs. Although these minimalists concede
that most goods and services can more effectively be provided
by the market, the government is needed to operate
courts where disputes can be resolved and run police agencies
to keep people safe. The individualist anarchist, in contrast,
argues that these services too can be provided by
voluntary market arrangements; hence, they sometimes
prefer the label anarcho-capitalists. Among anarchocapitalists,
Proudhon’s claim that property is theft is
replaced with the notion that taxation is theft because tax
money is collected coercively and used to fund the provision