Products of an age when the lines dividing classical liberalism from inchoate socialism were less unyielding or clearly defined, nineteenth century reformers and radicals grappled with what they often called “the Social Question.” The results of their experiments and musings were various forms of socialism, various answers to that question, frequently as different from one another as they were from other -isms. As radicals, the individualist anarchists plumbed for the deepest connections between social, economic and political problems, their anarchism critiquing liberalism from a socialist perspective and vice versa. Within the nomenclatural paradigms of today, the individualist anarchists appear to present a paradox: Both free marketers and labor movement radicals, “rugged individualists” and egalitarians, libertarians and socialists, the alloy of ideas they present can confound the contemporary student of political thought.

By the close of the nineteenth century, individualist anarchism had coalesced into a distinct, recognizable variety of radical thought, largely owing to the stature of Benjamin R. Tucker and his anarchist periodical, Liberty, published more or less frequently from 1881 to 1908. As an MIT undergraduate, already sampling a number of radical notions, Tucker was intoxicated by the ideas presented during a spring meeting of the New England Labor Reform League. There he met William B. Greene and Josiah Warren, whose work would become part of the foundation of the distinctive libertarian position presented for almost thirty years in Liberty. Warren had been a devotee of the socialist Robert Owen, who emigrated from Wales at the beginning of the nineteenth century and undertook to establish utopian communities based upon his unique brand of thought. From his association with Owen, Warren inherited a number of the economic ideas that would come to characterize his own philosophy. He abandoned, however, Owen’s determinist rejection of individual responsibility and volition as real and important factors in community and economic life, eventually concluding that the Owenite settlements were foredoomed due to their “submergence of the individual within the confines of the community.” His formative experiences with and reactions to the particular socialist framework of Owen led to the extreme dissociative and decentralist tendencies that are core features of Warren’s own work — both his writings and his own practical experimentations.

As William O. Reichert put it in his study of American anarchism, Partisans of Freedom, the hallmark of Warren’s thinking was “struggling with the difficult problem of reconciling liberty and equality in such a way that neither would be compromised.” That struggle and the narrative that it frames are indispensable in understanding the later, more mature, fully formed individualist anarchism expounded by Tucker and the cast orbiting Liberty. And while Tucker’s individualist thinking was informed by everyone from Herbert Spencer and Pierre‐​Joseph Proudhon to Max Stirner, Warren was arguably his single greatest influence. It was Josiah Warren to whom Tucker dedicated his Instead of a Book, writing, “To the Memory of My Old Friend and Master, Josiah Warren, Whose Teachings Were My First Source of Light, I Gratefully Dedicate this Volume.” The import and centrality of Warren’s Cost Principle (“making cost the limit of price” ) in Tucker’s ideas is conspicuous in almost everything he wrote. Following Warren, Tucker argued that adherence to the Cost Principle, the full convergence of cost and price, would finally destroy, in Proudhon’s words, “the last vestiges of old‐​time slavery.”