Examines a neglected but distinct group of extreme individualists of 19th-century America. Their social and political philosophies placed them in the anarchist tradition, yet these were mostly U.S.-born natives adhering to a variety of anti-statism peculiar to America and distinguishable from the more communitarian radicalism of the better known foreign-born advocates of anarchism like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. This book argues that they represented not a genuine departure from liberalism, but a radical variant of the tradition, more faithful to it in some important respects.
