if i were re-narrating the history of american thought - which i seem to be - i'd add or even centralize centralize a line winding through some of the following figures: roger williams, anne hutchinson, john woolman, jefferson, lucretia mott, emerson, josiah warren, fuller, thoreau, lysander spooner, voltairine de cleyre, mencken. i have to say i think the anarchist anthropology of folks like david graeber and james c. scott is the biggest development in that sort of theory since kropotkin.
Look to like reading someone or to love certain of the their ideas and arguments is not to endorse the whole damn package lock, stock, and barrel. Never get into the business of making someone you love turn out right all the time or on the other hand turning away from ideas because of distaste for the person. It might just be that, you know, decentralized government and individual rights are plausible notions on other grounds: like the insanely disastrous results of not taking them seriously. Jefferson: that hypocrite! If you think that shows that his ideas about liberty or whatever it may be are actually false, you are really not a reliable reasoner. I don't fear being indetectibly infected by controversial opinions by jolly irascible assholes from the 1920s, seriously. If there is at times a little anti-Semitic whiff or whatever, I repudiate that. Why would you let that deprive you of such good art and thought?
