Individualism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Individualism is largely understood today as a normative doctrine holding the autonomy of individuals to be the final object of moral and political life. The term was originally descriptive, however, invented in the early nineteenth century to describe the atomization of European society that attended democracy’s emergence after the collapse of the ancien régime. Scholars attribute the first public use of the word to the French conservative Joseph de Maistre, and the philosophical disciples of Henri di Saint Simon popularized it in the late 1820s and 1830s as a mournful term for the disintegration of the social whole.

The most enduring analysis of individualism as a social pathology is Alexis de Tocqueville’s. In Democracy in America (1835, 1840), he characterized individualism as a “sentiment that disposes each citizen to cut himself off from the mass of his fellow men and withdraw into the circle of family and friends, so that, having created a little society for his own use, he gladly leaves the larger society to take care of itself ” (Tocqueville 2004, 585). Tocqueville’s critique of individualism as a phenomenon that dampens public involvement, depletes political virtue, and produces alienation survives into the present—inspiring Robert Bellah and his colleagues’ Habits of the Heart (1985), one of the most popular contemporary communitarian critiques of individualism.

Individualism’s vigor as an affirmative moral, political, and economic doctrine matches the vehemence of its critics. The enduring power of both the Christian ideal of individual dignity and the Enlightenment ideal of personal autonomy partly accounts for this. In the mid-nineteenth century, American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and British philosopher John Stuart Mill made these ideals the centerpiece of their positive normative accounts of individualism. They fortified these ideals, moreover, by positing that the individual’s freedom to enact his or her inborn genius produces greater social, intellectual, and artistic goods than could ever be realized through centralized social coordination. Emersonian and Millian individualism yields a democratic political morality: the foremost obligation of individuals is to respect their own and each other’s autonomy, and the objective of government is to create the social conditions necessary for citizens to realize their autonomy. The pragmatist John Dewey elaborated Emerson and Mill’s conception of democratic individuality in the early twentieth century, and the political theorist George Kateb is its most eloquent spokesperson today.

Neoclassical economists and political libertarians are also counted among the twentieth century’s most energetic defenders of individualism. F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Robert Nozick held that society could best honor individuals by minimizing the state’s functions to just protecting private property and maintaining a competitive market economy. Reducing the role of the state to the optimization of free market competition, they argued, produces the widest range of life options and greatest life chances for individuals as well as lessens the dangers of government paternalism and tyranny.

The egalitarian liberal John Rawls responded, however, that a morally individualist theory of justice demands that government intervene in the economy to minimize material inequality. Such inequality among citizens, he claimed, is justifiable only when it is necessary to improve the position of the least well-off member of society. Because the wellspring of Rawls’s egalitarianism is his basic commitment to the equal dignity of individuals, Kateb crowns Rawls’s moral theory the twentieth century’s “greatest statement of individualism” (Kateb 1989, 184).

The final form of individualism central to political science is methodological individualism. Methodological individualism is a doctrine of social explanation that holds that all social phenomena are descriptively reducible to interactions between persons; it denies that there are “social forces, structural features of society, [and] institutional factors” greater than the sum of the decisions and actions of society’s members (Lukes 1973, 122). Articulated originally by Max Weber in response to Hegelianism, Marxism, and Durkheimian sociology, the tenets of methodological individualism were later elaborated by Hayek and Karl Popper. The foundation of neoclassical economics, methodological individualism opposes historical materialism. At the same time, its chief contemporary exponent—Jon Elster—has sought to reconcile Marxist social analysis with methodological individualism.

Bibliography:

Bellah, Robert B., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swider, and Steven M. Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Dewey, John. “Individualism, Old and New.” In John Dewey:The Later Works, 1925–1963, vol. 5, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 41–123. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1988. First published 1929–1930.
Elster, Jon. “The Case for Methodological Individualism.” Theory and Society 11, no. 4 (1982): 453–482.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson: Essays and Lectures. Edited by Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983.
Kateb, George. “Democratic Individuality and the Meaning of Rights.” In Liberalism and the Moral Life, edited by Nancy Rosenblum, 183–206. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992.
Lukes, Steven. Individualism. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Edited by David Bromwich and George Kateb. New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2003. First published 1859.
Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Swart, Koenraad W. “‘Individualism’ in the Mid-nineteenth Century (1826–1860).” Journal of the History of Ideas 23, no. 1 (1962): 77–90.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Edited by Olivier Zunz. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Library of America, 2004. First published 1835, 1840.
Zakaras, Alex. Individuality and Mass Democracy: Mill, Emerson, and the Burdens of Citizenship. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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