Introduction
introduction he early- and mid-nineteenth-century United States produced a T bewildering variety of individualists, in the sense of people who advocated the primacy of the human individual politically and of the particular thing metaphysically, and in the sense of seriously idiosyn- cratic persons who followed their own odd genius wherever it dragged them. It was, in many ways, a religious revival, but it soon sacrificed God on the altar of nonconformity. It produced undoubted geniuses of the caliber of Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Melville, Whit- man, and Hawthorne. It produced social reformers as pure and in- tense as any that the world has known—such as William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Captain John Brown. And it produced utopians who thought they could found a new social order—including Adin Ballou, John Humphrey Noyes, Amos Bron- son Alcott, and Josiah Warren. Like almost all of these astonishing and exasperating people, Josiah Warren hailed from New England. Like Garrison (and Ben Franklin, { 1 } 2 introduction Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Albert Parsons) he was a printer. Like John Brown he was a revolutionist, though Brown was violent and Warren, by his own declaration, peaceful. Like Emerson and Whit- man, he sang, or in his case lectured, about free individuality and connected it to an understanding of the universe. Like Thoreau he loved simplicity and skill, and displayed them prodigiously as quali- ties of character and thought throughout his life. And like Ballou— and the rest of these people at one time or another—he loathed the state and took steps to fashion a life without it.
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