Individualism
Individualism
The term individualism covers a range of ideas, philosophies, and doctrines that emphasize the unlimited freedom of the individual and the individual’s right to protect his or her own interests against those of society. The French liberal writer Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) coined the word to characterize individual selfishness—a value system that predisposes human beings to be concerned only with themselves and their small circle of family and friends. Arising in reaction to the collectivist spirit of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, its original meaning tended to be rather negative and controversial, implying that individualism was a source of social atomism, anarchy, and public disorder. Thus, while praising the individualism of nineteenth-century America, Tocqueville at the same time cautioned against its threat to public life through the weakening of social bonds and obligations.
LIBERAL INDIVIDUALISM
Today the term is often employed to describe a political and social philosophy—sometimes referred to as “liberal individualism” or “laissez-faire individualism”—that stresses the primacy of the individual and the importance attached to individual freedom, self-reliance, privacy rights, and individual choice. In its full-fledged form, it emerged first in Britain with the spread of the laissez-faire ideas of Adam Smith (1723–1790) and the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) in economic and political theory. In the Anglo-Saxon world, liberal individualism became a catchword for free enterprise, free markets, limited government, and unrestricted economic freedom, as well as for the individualistic attitudes, forms of behavior, and aspirations that sustain the idea of “self-made man.” One influential version of this usage was U.S. president Herbert Hoover’s campaign speeches in 1928 celebrating “rugged individualism” in America. Above all, individualism came to signify a preference for a minimal government role in social, economic, and religious affairs, as exemplified by the slogan “That government that governs least governs best”—though not in matters of public morality or law and order—as opposed to the more collectivist ideals of socialism.
Individualism is frequently contrasted with collectivism, a social philosophy in which the collective or common weal rather than the individual good is considered paramount. Man is seen in the Aristotelian tradition as a social animal, whose very nature, wants, and capacities are to a very large extent the product of society and its institutions—running the gamut from the family through the workplace and all kinds of voluntary associations to the nation-state and the global market. For example, the famous Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) advocated subordinating the individual will to the collective will, a view that is in fundamental opposition to the philosophy of individualism. Rousseau’s popular treatise Social Contract (1762) maintains that each individual is under an implicit contract to submit his or her will to the “general will” of the entire citizenry (volonte generale ), although the “general will” need not be the will of absolutely all citizens (volonte de tous ).
In his major work Democracy in America (1835, 1840), Tocqueville himself took a rather ambiguous stand about individualism, at times giving it a distinctly pejorative flavor. He was torn between his admiration for the individualism of American democracy and his anxiety about its political implications, such as the danger of widespread social conformism. He pointed to two major aspects of the individualistic character of American society—on the one hand, a faith in individual reason as the sole basis of public opinion, and, on the other, a self-centered, self-interested preoccupation with private concerns.
This second aspect of American individualism manifested itself in pervasive egoism, a widespread tendency to withdraw from public affairs and to focus on the material welfare of the family as the most important purpose in life. This egoism was evident in unrestrained personal ambition and atomistic competition. In a society where the scramble for power and possession was widely thought to be open to all—and failure could not be ascribed to disadvantages of birth or any other privilege—the contest was bound to be fierce and uncompromising. Tocqueville believed that individualism could pose a threat to liberty, because individualistic attitudes encourage individual subservience to public opinion and conformism. U.S. democracy found its source of intellectual authority in prevailing public opinion based on the idea of the moral equality of all individuals. The conformity to generally held attitudes and social standards was thus the result of the imposition of social sanctions by one’s peers. When Tocqueville asked why there were no professed atheists in the United States, his answer was that atheists would not get any jobs or customers. When faced with the opinion of the majority, the individual felt powerless: If the majority of one’s equals is always right, then a dissenting opinion must be always wrong. For Tocqueville, this conformist attitude was an assault on individual liberty—a “new kind of despotism” over isolated individuals too afraid of public opinion to object, too absorbed in private concerns to participate in public activity, too aware of the economic value of public order to threaten protest and disorder. Such “tyranny of the majority,” the Frenchman warned, would weaken not only liberty but the very will to liberty.
Tocqueville’s warnings about the paradoxical contradictions of individualism have been echoed numerous times in modern social and cultural criticism. The philosophy of liberal individualism has been criticized for creating a culture of what Canada’s most eminent political theorist, C. B. Macpherson (1911–1987), called “possessive individualism,” a theory of human nature that is rooted in the seventeenth century and is based on “a conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them” (Macpherson 1962, p. 3). Such a society, according to Macpherson, where individual skills are a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market, demonstrates a selfish and unrestricted thirst for private consumption that is celebrated as the very essence of human nature. The American sociologist Robert Bellah (1985) has similarly warned that individualism is becoming so pervasive and excessive in the United States that it is destroying the integrity and moral foundations of American society.
During the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, economic individualism in the form of laissez-faire capitalism came into conflict with political individualism in the form of representative democracy, as the newly enfranchised working-class voters increasingly came to demand government intervention in the marketplace far beyond the mere enforcing of economic contracts. The rise of militant labor unions and the mass socialist parties built upon them made free-market economic policies morally untenable and politically risky, especially after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s and the governmental response to it based on the interventionist theories of John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), the preeminent British economist who revolutionized the science of economics by advocating active state involvement in the capitalist economy, ushered in the collectivist-inspired “social-welfare state” and also seemed to sound the death knell for the discredited doctrines of economic individualism. But the waning of western social democracy and the decline and eventual downfall of Soviet-style “state socialism” in the late twentieth century led to the revival of the ideas of laissez-faire capitalism—first during the era of Thatcherism in the United Kingdom and Reaganism in the United States, and later with the neoliberal policies of “globalization capitalism.” The anti-Keynesian and antistatist writings of Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992), Milton Friedman (1912–2006), and their followers have also contributed to restoring the previously tattered intellectual reputation of economic individualism.
METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM
In another widespread, although thematically separate usage, the so-called “methodological individualism” in the social sciences refers to the position adopted by those who argue that groups (collectivities) are nothing more than their individual members. In this view, there are no properties of groups that are not reducible to individual properties. Not only must scientists study individuals, but also the explanations of the social phenomena they study—phenomena such as social class, power, the political system, and so on—must be formulated as, or be reducible to, the characteristics of individuals. While not denying that groups exist, the individualist does deny that they have any independent status and that they are more than the sum of their parts. As former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared, “There is no society, only individuals.”
This individualistic position stands in marked contrast to the so-called “methodological holism,” the theoretical principle that each social entity (group, institution, society) has a totality that is distinct and cannot be understood by studying merely its individual component elements. There are emergent group properties that are not reducible and, therefore, groups (collectivities) are more than the sum of their parts. For example, the famous French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) claimed that collective phenomena are not reducible to the individual actor or psyche; hence, social facts can be investigated and explained independently of the individual. The debate over methodological individualism versus methodological holism in the social sciences reflects an underlying ideological tension about the relationship between the individual and society, recognizing that these two analytical levels are distinct and may have to be explicated separately.
SEE ALSO Altruism; Bentham, Jeremy; Bolshevism; Choice in Psychology; Collectivism; Competition; Conformity; Constructivism; Durkheim, Émile; Elite Theory; Elites; Enlightenment; Freedom; French Revolution; Friedman, Milton; Great Depression; Hayek, Friedrich August von; Keynes, John Maynard; Laissez-faire; Libertarianism; Liberty; Microanalysis; Microeconomics; Mises, Ludwig Edler von; Party Systems, Competitive; Philosophy; Philosophy, Political; Political Theory; Reductionism; Rousseau, JeanJacques; Smith, Adam; Social Contract; Sociology, Micro-; Tocqueville, Alexis de; Tyranny of the Majority; Utilitarianism; Welfare State
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, et al. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brodbeck, May. 1958. Methodological Individualism: Definition and Reduction. Philosophy of Science 25 (1): 1–22.
Hayek, Friedrich A. von. [1948] 1976. Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Lukes, Steven. 1973. Individualism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Macpherson, Crawford B. 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
O’Neill, John, ed. 1973. Modes of Individualism and Collectivism. London: Heinemann.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. [1835, 1840] 1994. Democracy in America. New York: Knopf.
Rossen Vassilev