Individualism

The concept of individualism comprises at least three basic ideas in the political realm. First is the dignity of man: Following the Kantian formula, each individual being exists as an end in himself or herself and not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will. Second, the idea of autonomy holds that an individual's thought and action are his or her own and not determined by agencies or causes outside his or her control. Third comes privacy, according to which each human being should enjoy a private life, an area in which the individual should be untroubled by others and able to act and think in accordance with his or her own free will.

This concept of individualism is indissociably bound up with the tenets of modernity and with the conviction that meaning, truth, and value originate in—and exist for the benefit of—mankind. What we call our “modern societies” are no longer holistic, to use Louis Dumont's term. Holistic societies were understood as the units that existed before the individual, in which individuals had only to occupy their designated place. In individualistic societies, this relationship is turned on its head: Man's role is to grow into his or her autonomy and to learn to judge independently by detaching himself or herself from entrenched customs and prejudices.

However, this first brief overview of the concept should not hide the fact that individualism continues, as it always has, to lend itself to widely divergent interpretations. In a seminal book on this topic, Steven Lukes identified not less than 11 forms of individualism and added that they were not mutually exclusive or jointly exhaustive. As Pierre Birnbaum and Jean Leca have also shown, the notion of individualism can be interpreted in innumerable different ways that are not always in harmony with one another, whether we are referring to utilitarian individualism—a vision of independent units motivated by a common quest for well-being, romantic individualism—that of individuals inspired by their search for the most authentic form of the self, juridical individualism—which makes the individual the source and end of all law, ethical individualism—taking individual conscience as the supreme judge of the validity of moral norms, sociological individualism—emphasizing the distance between the subject and the plurality of his social functions, or, finally, epistemological individualism—which makes the individual a conscious subject distinct from his object.

This entry proceeds in four steps. The first two parts sketch a series of semantic histories that reveal alternative uses of the concept of individualism, ranging from a pejorative meaning to a positive conception associated with the defense of autonomy and the spirit of individuality. Both of these interpretations continue to feed into contemporary discussion. The next section proposes an explanation of methodological individualism since the concept has a distinct meaning when it is used in an epistemological sense. Finally, the fourth part examines the current debate on the relationship between political liberalism and individualism.