individualism

n.

1. 1. Belief in the primary importance of the individual and in the virtues of self-reliance and personal independence.
   2. Acts or an act based on this belief.
2. 1. A doctrine advocating freedom from government regulation in the pursuit of a person's economic goals.
   2. A doctrine holding that the interests of the individual should take precedence over the interests of the state or social group.
3. 1. The quality of being an individual; individuality.
   2. An individual characteristic; a quirk.

Philosophy or quality that characterizes a manager or employee who makes decisions and performs tasks in his own way or style. The advantage of encouraging individualism is that creativity and naturalism may result in greater motivation and accomplishment. However, the company must be careful that the employee does not ignore corporate goals and policies.

noun

The set of behavioral or personal characteristics by which an individual is recognizable: identity, individuality, selfhood. See be.

Political individualism—in its most common, though not its only meaning—is a fundamental belief in the protection of the rights of the individual against the incursions of the state and of political power. However, there are many dimensions of individualism and it is possible to be an ‘individualist’ in several different fields. In general usage, an ‘individualist’ denotes a person with a distinctive or unusual personal style, who stands out from the mass. In metaphysics or ontology individualism is a belief that the universe consists fundamentally of individual particulars, separable entities. The opponents of individualism in this sense are holists or monists. The typical holist belief is that the relations (usually systematic relations in some sense) between entities have a more fundamental existence than the entities themselves.

Within the Christian religion individualism is closely associated with Protestantism and the belief in the human capacity for personal contact with God rather than the necessity of instruction through a hierarchy. ‘Economic individualism’ is usually taken to refer to a faith in the capacity of individual action and ambition, working through the market, to create wealth and to bring about progress. Political individualism, as defined above, is a more ambiguous idea.

The central question about individualism per se concerns the connections between these different dimensions. To what extent are they associated and what is the form of the association? Margaret Thatcher is often quoted as saying, ‘There is no such thing as society, but only individuals’, an overtly ontological statement which is ethically and politically suggestive. She actually added the words ‘and families’, which two words can be taken as the thin end of a more collectivist philosophical wedge. The connections between many of these dimensions is not logical entailment: there is no contradiction in being a philosophical monist, yet believing that individual initiative is the chief engine of economic progress or that persons possess rights which should be protected from the power of the state. But a desire for ideological consistency creates an association between the different dimensions of individualism.

There is also an important paradox at the heart of individualism. John Stuart Mill offers one of the most morally appealing images of the individualist society, in which people are unconstrained by conformity and are able to advance civilization by the freest possible development of their own ideas and forms of expression. But how is this individualist society to be achieved? The society which most clearly embodies a belief in economic individualism in its norms and institutions, and the protection of individual rights in its constitution, is the United States. But the United States has often been criticized for its tendency to homogenize people, products, and places, and to require conformity from individuals. In the field of education, it has often been remarked that the withdrawal of authoritarian requirements for conformity in schools is often replaced by a more effective pressure for social conformity which arises from the pupils themselves. Many people believe that the ‘totalitarian’ Soviet Union produced greater individual artists and political thinkers than many more free societies. In extremis, the paradox implies that an element of despotism is required to produce the full flowering of the individual, that authoritarian political structures can serve to protect individuals from social and economic pressures to conform. (See interests, individual.)

— Lincoln Allison

For more information on individualism, visit Britannica.com.

The view that the single person is the basic unit of political analysis, with social wholes being merely logical constructions, or ways of talking about numbers of such individuals and the relations among them. The consequence for the study of social facts is that they must be approached through the actions and intentions of individuals (methodological individualism). The approach has been a principal target of many sociologists, such as Durkheim. In liberal individualism the individual is the primary possessor of rights, with the activities of the state confined to the protection of those rights. Individualism is often charged with dissociating the ‘free’ individual from the matrix of social relations and norms that in fact make agency, freedom, and even self-consciousness possible. It is thus opposed by views holding that individual persons cannot be understood apart from linguistic, moral, legal, and social factors that shape their natures: such views are versions of holism, and the associated methodology that insists on the social whole as the basis of individual description is methodological holism. Marx expressed the position in the 6th thesis of the Theses on Feuerbach: ‘the essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in each particular individual. The real nature of man is the totality of social relations.’ Politically, individualism is associated with the right wing (the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said that there is no such thing as society, only individuals), while holism at its extreme is apt to be expressed in such doctrines as collectivism and totalitarianism.

A similar division exists in the philosophy of language, over whether the properties of individual words are prior to, or derivative from, the properties of larger linguistic entities such as sentences or whole collections of beliefs or theories.

Any social doctrine that advocates the autonomy of the individual in social actions and social affairs. Advocates of individualism in sport emphasize the importance of allowing the free expression of an individual's skills. In many sports there is a tension between individualism and collectivism.

One of our most familiar terms of analysis, individualism is also one of the most elusive. It is employed in so many different ways—approving and disapproving, descriptive and normative, social and psychological, economic and political—that one never knows quite what is meant when the word is trotted out. It is rarely clear, for example, whether "individualism" is describing a consciously held set of formal philosophical or ideological doctrines or merely an ingrained ethos, or mentalité, a set of assumed internalized social norms that is not being articulated. Even more bewildering, the student of American culture is likely to find that "individualism" is first highly praised and then roundly condemned in nearly the same breath. Everyone, it seems, finds something to dislike about individualism, but rarely the same thing. Conservatives may be severe critics of individualism in the moral and expressive spheres, but tend to be staunch supporters of individualism in the economic sphere. By the same token, liberal critics of individualism are likely to restrict their criticism to economics and distributive justice, preferring instead to celebrate the very moral and expressive individualism that conservatives deplore.

Such confusion should not blind us to the irreducible core of validity in this often nebulous concept. A widely shared belief in the dignity and worth of the individual person has long been a distinctive feature of what we imprecisely call Western civilization. As the medievalist Colin Morris well expressed the matter, "We [Westerners] think of ourselves as people with frontiers, our personalities divided from each other as our bodies visibly are.… It is to us a matter of common sense that we stand apart from the natural order in which we are set, subjects over against its objectivity, and that we have our own distinct personality, beliefs, and attitude to life." But in fact, he continues, Western individualism is so far from "expressing the common experience of humanity" that it might more aptly be regarded as "an eccentricity among cultures." And yet this "eccentricity" forms the indispensable basis for the ideas of liberty and equality, which are among the West's chief gifts to humanity. Belief in the independent standing of the individual human being loses none of its central importance as a legitimizing principle of Western moral and political life because it emerged only in fits and starts over the course of Western history; has nearly always been applied selectively and inconsistently; and is often more honored in the breach than the observance.

The first stirrings of this emphasis on the individual person can be detected as far back as the world of classical antiquity, in the emergence of philosophical inquiry and democratic institutions in Greece, and especially in the intensely self-directed moral discipline of Hellenistic-era Epicureanism and Stoicism. The ideas and institutions arising out of biblical monotheism also played a vital part in the formation of an individualistic ideal, placing heavy emphasis upon the infinite value, personal agency, and moral accountability of the individual person. That emphasis reached a pinnacle of sorts in the synthetic vision of Western Christianity, which incorporated the divergent legacies of Athens and Jerusalem into a single universalized faith.

Yet none of these expressions of belief should be equated with what we mean by modern individualism. Such freedom as the premodern individual enjoyed, particularly after the advent of Christianity, was always constrained by belief in the metaphysical existence of an objective moral order, which could not be violated with impunity by antinomian rebels or advocates of romantic subjectivity. It was equally constrained by belief in the inherent frailty of human nature, which insisted that moral virtue could not be produced in social isolation. Although nearly all influential Western thinkers had conceded the signal importance of the individual, none employed the term "individualism" to express that belief. Only with the dawning of modernity did essential components of modern individualism such as the belief in natural rights—that is, rights that precede the creation of political society—began to fall into place and prepare the way for what was to come.

As for "individualism" itself, like many of our most useful words, it began life as a term of abuse, appearing first in the discourse of opponents of the French Revolution. The nineteenth-century French archconservative Joseph de Maistre used the word "individualism" to describe the Revolution's overturning of established social hierarchies and the dissolution of traditional social bonds in favor of an atomizing and leveling doctrine of natural individual rights, which freed each individual to be his or her own moral arbiter. Maistre's idea of "individualism" was not an affirmation of personal human dignity. Instead, for him it represented a disordered nightmare of egotism and moral anarchy.

Alexis de Tocqueville also employed the term critically, albeit much more moderately so, in his classic study Democracy in America (1835–1840), a locus classicus for the consideration of the term's American career. Individualism is, he argued, a characteristic pitfall for all societies that are "democratic," by which he meant societies lacking any legally sanctioned distinctions of rank or status among their members. Indeed, he concluded that the American propensity for individualism was characteristic of all modernity, because America, as the first "great republic," represented the avant-garde of human history, and therefore served as a pioneering exemplar of what the future would likely bring to Europe.

Tocqueville's complaint was very different from Maistre's, however. Egotism, he thought, was a mere emotional disorder, the passionate and exaggerated self-love one could find manifested throughout human history. But individualism was also something else. It was a more or less self-conscious social philosophy, "a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures: and to draw apart with his family and friends: so that … he willingly leaves society at large to itself." In other words, individualism was a conscious and calculated withdrawal, not from all human contact, but more specifically from the responsibilities of citizenship and public life. For Tocqueville—who was, unlike Maistre, a qualified friend of democracy, which he believed to be the God-ordained direction of human history—there was no greater threat to the health and stability of this new order than such a tendency toward privatism.

So "individualism" began its life as a critical term, and a reasonably precise one. But it did not remain so. Indeed, the critical view of individualism taken by these two French writers seems strikingly at odds with the self-conception that would come to be characteristic of most Americans, who had little or no comparable experience of feudal, aristocratic, monarchical, and other premodern political institutions, and who saw individualism in a largely favorable light. In the American context, especially with the social opening that came with the rise of Jacksonian democracy, the word has only rarely taken on pejorative connotations. It was more likely to refer to the sturdy values of the self-reliant frontiersman or the self-made entrepreneur—or to a broadly libertarian under-standing of the relationship between the individual and society or the state, wherein the liberty and dignity of the former are shielded from the grasping hands of the latter. As such, it pointed toward a view of all political and social groups as mere aggregations of otherwise naturally self-sufficient individuals, whose social bonds are largely governed by choice and consent. Even more radically, it might point toward a view, increasingly pervasive in our own day, that to the maximum degree possible, the individual should be regarded as an entirely morally autonomous creature—accountable to no person and no "higher law," armed with a quiver of inviolable rights, protected by a zone of inviolable privacy, and left free to "grow" and "develop" as the promptings of the self dictate.

In any event, there seems little reason to doubt that the dominant view in our own day tends to endorse the highest possible degree of individual liberty and self-development in political, religious, social, and economic affairs. American history is a record of the defeat or weakening of nearly all competing ideas. The language of individual rights—the tendency to regard individual men and women as self-contained, choosing, contract-making, utility-maximizing, and values-creating actors, who accept only those duties and obligations they choose to accept—grew steadily more powerful and pervasive in the latter part of the twentieth century, and now stands triumphant. The recourse to individual rights, whether expressed as legal rights, voting rights, expressive rights, reproductive rights, sexual rights, membership rights, or consumer rights, has become the near-invincible trump card in most debates regarding public policy. Although there are serious challenges to the hegemony of such "rights talk," particularly as evidenced in the critical works of such communitarian thinkers as Mary Ann Glendon, Philip Selznick, and Amitai Etzioni, such challenges have yet to find a broad audience.

The Unique Development of American Individualism

This has not always been the state of affairs in America, and we are reminded of just this fact by much of the best scholarship in colonial and early national history in recent years. The crucial role of Protestant Christianity in making the early American social and political ethos has been repeatedly emphasized. For example, the political scientist Barry Alan Shain has made the case that it was not Enlightenment liberalism but a very constrained form of communitarian Reformed Protestantism that best represented the dominant social and political outlook of early America. The political theorist Michael Sandel has argued that, until the twentieth century, America's public philosophy was based largely on the "republican" assumption that the polity had a formative, prescriptive, "soulcraft" function to perform in matters of the economy, the family, church-state relations, personal morality, free speech, constitutional law, privacy, productive labor, and consumption. Like so much else about the early American milieu, that assumption has been so completely erased by the individualistic liberalism of our own day that we have forgotten it was ever there.

In retrospect, however, it is hard not to see those earlier perspectives as fatally fragile. Certainly by the middle of the nineteenth century, figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman—romantic American nationalists and prophets of the unconstrained self—were already trumpeting the note that would have the most lasting resonance in the American imagination. It was Emerson who declared famously that a society is a "conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members," and that "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." And it was Whitman who declared that "the Great Idea" is "the idea of perfect and free individuals," and that "nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's-self is." One could hardly deny that such driving, self-interested ambition was itself a logical corollary to the spirit of unrestrained self-development, although both men would live long enough to be disappointed in the crass materialism that seemed to take hold of American society in the post–Civil War years. So, too, there is the irresistible story of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the semi-noble, semi-savage boy who lit out for the territory rather than enduring the phony rigors of civilization. Indeed, one sure index of the hold that individualism has had on American thought and expression is the culture's richness in figures of heroic individuality—and its relative poverty in providing convincing representations of community or social obligation.

There have always been a few important countercurrents, however, to this pervasive celebration of individuality. One such current emerged from women writers, both inside and outside the nascent feminist movement. Individualism being a game still reserved largely for males, the fiction and "domestic economy" literature produced by such nineteenth-century writers as the sisters Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe often had a very different tone, emphasizing the satisfactions of settlement, family life, nurture, and human connectedness—all the things that Henry David Thoreau and Huck Finn sought to escape. Such arguments were carried to a high pitch by the southern anti-suffragist Louisa McCord, who urged women to stand at a critical distance from the coarse individualism of the male public world. To be sure, the works of northern feminists such as Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were nothing if not individualistic in tone, testifying to the fact that some women were eager to get in on the game. Various forms of that same tension between equality and difference have persisted into the twenty-first century and continue to color our discussions of individualism and gender.

The immense human suffering and social dislocation wrought by industrialization was another stimulus to anti-individualistic thinking. One can see some elements of this critique emerging idiosyncratically in the antebellum years—for example, in the fascinating career of the anti-capitalist Catholic convert Orestes Brownson, who railed against individualism for destroying the grounds of human solidarity; or in the works of pro-slavery apologist George Fitzhugh, who presented slavery as an organic and patriarchal institution, far preferable to the inhumane and predatory institution of "wage slavery." But the best example could be found in one of the most widely read books of the nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy's 1888 fantasy Looking Backward, an effort to imagine a perfected postindustrial Boston, reconstituted as a socialist cooperative commonwealth in the year 2000. Bellamy openly reviled individualism, proposing in its place a post-Christian "religion of solidarity," which would radically de-emphasize the self, and instead emphasize social bonds over individual liberty (and traditional Christian doctrine).

The popularity of Bellamy's book showed that there was a market hungry for such ideas, and many of the most "progressive" forces of the day—ranging from the cooperation-minded Knights of Labor, the theological advocates of a modernist "social gospel," to Progressive reformers such as Herbert Croly, Jane Addams, and John Dewey—unreservedly admired and emulated its spirit. Indeed, the Progressive movement itself, at least in some of its manifestations, advanced a new corporate ideal that sought to downplay individualism and instead to defend and preserve "the public interest" in the face of industrial capital's power. In the hands of a sophisticated thinker like Dewey, a case was made that the values of community and individuality, far from being in opposition, are mutually supporting and mutually sustaining, particularly in an age dominated by large industrial combinations, immense asymmetries of wealth and power, and vast impersonal networks of communication. It was pointless, in their view, to restore the small-scale community of days past. Economic and social forces had rendered such community, with its personal bonds and face-to-face business transactions, impossible. The task ahead was the creation of something new, which Dewey called "The Great Community," a systematically reconstituted social order that, it was hoped, would adapt the best features of the old community forms to the inexorable realities of the new economy and society, and thereby preserve the possibility of a healthy form of individuality as well.

Individualism in a Postindustrial World

In retrospect, though, a social and political ideal based on solidarity seems never to have had much of a chance. Even the crisis of the Great Depression did little to dislodge Americans' individualistic assumptions, and a decisive blow to communitarian alternatives was administered by the rise of the totalitarian regimes of Europe, whose terrifying success in suppressing the individual for the sake of the nation threw all communitarian and corporate ideals into a disrepute from which they have yet to recover. The concerns generated thereby decisively shaped both the liberalism and the conservatism of the postwar years. Libertarians like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek and liberals like David Riesman, Lionel Trilling, and Reinhold Niebuhr—even conservatives like Robert Nisbet and Russell Kirk—all paid their disrespects to the Leviathan nation-state and thereby called into question the efficacy of any modern corporate or communitarian ideal. Instead, the social and political thought of postwar America seemed to be devoted to an entirely different ideal: the guardianship of the self.

The 1950s were awash in works devoted to that cause. Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950) warned against the conformism of "other-direction" in the American personality, and William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956) deplored the predominance of a "social ethic" in America's white-collar classes. Ayn Rand's fierce pop-Nietzschean novels celebrated the autonomy of the individual creative genius, sneered at altruism as a form of self-betrayal, and gave rise to the still lively intellectual movement called Objectivism. Neo-Freudian psychology concerned itself with the problems of the ego, and such leading psychological theorists as C. G. Jung and Erik Erikson focused obsessively on the problem of "individuation." Even the emergence of a New Left movement in the early 1960s, which purported to challenge the bourgeois assumptions of its liberal forebears, did little to alter this trend, since the movement's communitarian tendencies were no match for its commitment to a radical, near-anarchic standard of behavioral and expressive liberty.

In the age of postmodernity, then, the self has become the chief source of moral value. But one need only state such a proposition to realize how deeply problematic it is. Notwithstanding the naive certitude of Descartes's cogito, there is nothing more elusive than the self, which is both something that we "are" and something that we "have" in our less-than-full custody. Not only is it the ultimate seat of our subjectivity, it is equally the object of our therapeutic ministrations. Moreover, it is an entity whose highest refinement is its reflexive ability to stand outside of itself, enacting a selfhood that is beyond self. Indeed, the tortuous complexity of this description lends plausibility to one of the most powerful themes of post-modernism: its assertion that the modern idea of the unitary self cannot bear the weight placed upon it by fragmented modern life, and that in fact what we call the "self" is finally deconstructible into an ensemble of social roles. If so, though, then in what can individualism, let alone morality, be grounded?

It may be, too, that what appears to be unrestricted individualism turns out, on closer examination, to be something rather different. It may be that our broadened individual liberty is constrained in ways we hardly notice, so that we have been granted greater and greater freedom to live lives of less and less heft and consequence. A choosing consumer is not the same thing as a deliberating citizen, because the freedom to choose is not the same thing as freedom to shape. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, among others, has argued that the expanding moral freedom of the modern world has been purchased at a very considerable price in public disempowerment. In our "bifurcated" modern world, moral evaluation has been relegated to "the realm of the personal," he says, while vast public bureaucracies and private corporations rule unchallenged over "the realm of the organizational" by means of impersonal procedural dicta. Hence individuals are remarkably free to order their personal lives as they see fit, but at the cost of having ceded any substantial voice in the shaping of public life. There is, MacIntyre has asserted, a "deep cultural agreement" between the ideal of the unencumbered private self and the corporatist ideal of rule by bureaucracy. Both accept a diminished understanding of humanity. In this view, we may already resemble the soma-numbed denizens of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) more than we would like to think.

Such a state of affairs bears an uncanny resemblance to the condition Tocqueville most feared, in which individualism enervates Americans' will to act in public ways. Accordingly, it would seem that the most useful response to the disintegration and diminution of the self might be a movement away from the characteristic preoccupations of modern sociology and psychology, and toward a fresh reconsideration of our political natures, in all their complexity, contingency, and promise. Just such a view was put forward memorably by the late American historian Christopher Lasch, who argued that it is in the school of public life, and in the embrace and exercise of the title of "citizen," that the selves of men and women become most meaningfully equal, individuated, mature, and free—not in those fleeting, and often illusory, moments when they evade the constraints of society and retreat into a weightless zone of privacy, subjectivity, and endlessly reconstructed narratives of the "self." This insight will be well worth our pondering in the years to come.

Bibliography

Arieli, Yehoshua. Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964.

Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Curry, Richard O., and Lawrence B. Goodheart, eds. American Chameleon: Individualism in Trans-National Context. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991.

Hewitt, John P. Dilemmas of the American Self. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. Revised, New York: Norton, 1991.

———. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. Reprint, New York: Norton, 1991.

Lukes, Steven. Individualism. Reprint, Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1985.

McClay, Wilfred. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Morris, Colin. The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200. Reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995.

Sandel, Michael. Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.

A view that stresses the importance and worth of each person. In economics, it is the doctrine that individuals best serve the public interest by pursuing their own self-interest. For example, the businessman who expands his company to increase his profits also creates jobs for many people and thereby serves the public interest. (See laissez-faire.)

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - individualisme, egoisme

Nederlands (Dutch)
individualisme, zelfzuchtigheid

Français (French)
n. - individualisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Individualismus

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ατομικισμός, ατομοκρατία, ατομικότητα

Italiano (Italian)
individualismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - individualismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
индивидуализм

Español (Spanish)
n. - individualismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - individualism, individualitet, egoism

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
个人主义, 利己主义

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 個人主義, 利己主義

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 개인주의, 개성

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 個人主義, 利己主義, 個性, 特異性

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) الفرديه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮עקרון העצמאות האישית וההישענות העצמית, אנוכיות, אגואיזם, אינדיבידואליזם, תיאוריה חברתית התומכת בפעולה חופשית של יחידים‬

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