For a contemporary audience, the Individualists can seem something of a paradox. Both free marketers and labor movement radicals, “rugged individualists” and egalitarians, libertarians and socialists, their ideas weld together concepts that today’s easy narratives, transmitted by politicos and talking heads, would find counterintuitive and difficult to understand. Within a 19th century context, though, at a time when familiar ideological lines were less clearly drawn and the historical nexus between liberalism and socialism was less remote, solutions to “the Social Problem” explored a wide array of radical experiments and ideas. Though their views and uses of recognizable terms like “socialism” were far from uniform, the Individualists as a loosely defined group were overwhelmingly hostile to the political and economic status quo, which they rather consistently identified with “capitalism.”