Were the Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau proto-anarchists?
I read “Civil Disodedience” in High School and its opening lines seemed pretty anti statist to me so I did research and that’s how I first learned of anarchism. And I recently read Emerson’s essays “Self-Reliance,” “History,” and “The Oversoul” and he seems pretty aligned with individualist anarchism as he seems to criticize statism and wage labor.