Individualism

Ancient and Modern Individualism

There are two broad definitions of individualism. In political terms, it is a political doctrine associated with liberalism that emphasises the autonomy, importance, and freedom of the individual in relation to society and state. Secondly, it is the culture associated in modern society with private property, consumption, and subjectivity. Individualism is often thought to be an important component of Western culture per se with its origins in both Greco-Roman civilization and Christianity. However, the doctrine had its modern roots in seventeenth-century religious dissent, especially the Protestant sects, and it is interpreted as a fundamental ideology of capitalism. In economic theory, the fictional character Robinson Crusoe is often taken to be the quintessential representative of individualistic capitalism.

As a term of condemnation, individualisme was employed in France to criticize the rational individualism of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Edmund Burke (1729–1797) believed that individualism and the promotion of individual interests undermined the common-wealth and created an uncivil and unstable society. Nineteenth-century French sociology emphasized the importance of social solidarity against the rise of egoistic forms of individualism, and the sociology of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) can be interpreted as a sustained intellectual attack on utilitarian individualism represented by Herbert Spencer (1820–1895). Although the analysis of individualism has played a significant analytical role in the development of sociological theory, the ideological and intellectual relationship between individualism and sociology is often contradictory and antagonistic. As a result, understanding the relationship between “the individual” and “the social” remains an ongoing issue in sociological theory. Individualism has also had an important impact on economic theory, because the concept of utility has been important to the development of assumptions about market exchange, consumer sovereignty and consumption preferences, and on political theory where it underpins the contemporary notion of rights.

The modern emphasis on subjectivity, the individual, and privacy is often contrasted with the classical world, where these values were reversed. The “quarrel between the ancients and moderns” compared the respect for public institutions and public space in the ancient world with the emphasis on conscience and individual subjectivity in modern society. Benjamin Constant (1988) argued that the liberty of the ancients, which arose from their active engagement in politics, required them to sacrifice their personal interests to the polis. By contrast, the moderns pursue their personal pleasures and regard politics as merely a means to protect their private lives. The concept of individualism is thus interconnected with a range of other key concepts in social and political theory such as privacy, rights, and social contract. In contemporary thought, individualism is closely associated with privacy, because private space outside the public realm is assumed to be important for cultivating and protecting the individual from political scrutiny and interference. Both privacy and individualism are in turn associated with the liberalism of political philosophers such as John Locke (1632–1704). In liberal political thought, the protection of the rights of individuals is held to be essential to guard against the threat of arbitrary rule and authoritarian regimes. Rights refer to the legal entitlements of free and rational agents, who combine through a social contract to form a state, whose sole purpose is to guarantee their enjoyment of these privileges.

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