Liberalism

Individualism

Political liberalism is inherently a philosophy and practice of protecting individuals to live and act as they please, so long as they do not harm others; without individualism, therefore, it has no point. The central figure in the history of a vision of the place of individualism in political theory is Thomas Hobbes, who assumes individualism in his account of social order and the state. One might suppose that his assumption of individualism is normative or libertarian. But for him, in fact, it is much more explicitly a descriptive and causal issue just as Karl Marx's or Max Weber's account of economic motivation is causal. Descriptively, individualism is based on an assumption about human nature. Causally, therefore, it is a necessary part of the explanation of human behavior and, by implication, of political institutions that are designed to deal with individuals. We are self-interested; therefore, to explain our behavior, one must start from the assumption of self-interest.

Historians continue to debate when, where, and why individualism first arose. The most common view is that peasants in England were communally organized and held together by the fetters of the kinship group, and their land was collectively, not individually, owned. Economic progress required what Weber calls “defamilization.” Richard H. Tawney observes that most people in England in the 16th century “have never seen more than a hundred separate individuals in the course of their whole lives, where most households live by tilling their great-grandfather's fields with their great-grandfather's plough” (quoted in Alan Macfarlane, 1978/1979, pp. 53–54). In its Greek origin, economy means household management, and until recent centuries, that would still have been its apt meaning in most of Europe. For the overwhelming majority of people, there was little exchange and virtually no money or commerce; there was at best merely self-sufficiency in a subsistence agrarian society. In a society under these conditions, liberalism is irrelevant.

Major historians of the relevant periods, such as Thomas B. Macaulay, among the greatest of liberals, commonly do not include individualism in their indexes, whereas the idea runs through the work of the great liberal theorist Leonard T. Hobhouse. In reading the historians who frequently delve into political theory, one often wonders where Hobbes has gone. Not surprisingly, Friedrich A. Hayek makes a major issue of individualism and, implicitly, of Hobbesism. For many liberal theorists, the world of Hayek and Hobbes is in principle our world. In fairness, many other scholars address individualism, although somewhat obliquely, through discussions of Puritanism and Calvinism and the role of individualist Protestant religions more generally in the development of capitalism. While these individualist religions are surely causally important, secular aspects of social life in these centuries and even the secularizing tendencies of the individualist religious beliefs provide the final force for remaking English social and economic relations well ahead of continental Europe.

...