Individualism is commonly seen by both its proponents and opponents to be the creation of the modern Western world, a development of Enlightenment liberal values. The term individualism was first coined in the nineteenth century, initially around 1820 in French, and then quickly spread to the other European languages.
Individualism is a doctrine concerning both the composition of human society and the constitution of sociocultural actors. The term was invented in the 1820s, apparently, in France (Swart 1962). Its first appearance in English dates from the 1835 translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's study of the United States (Tocqueville [1850] 1969, p. 506). The basic notion conveyed by the newly coined word, that the individual is sovereign vis-à-vis society, was intensely controversial, for it stood on the grave of one established order, proclaiming the rise of another. As an early French critic saw it, individualism "destroys the very idea of obedience and of duty, thereby destroying both power and law," leaving nothing "but a terrifying confusion of interests, passions and diverse opinions" (cited in Lukes 1973, p. 6).
Individualism should be distinguished from historically specific constitutions of the individuality of human beings. The word "individual," used to discriminate a particular human being from collectivities ("family," "state"), had been in circulation for centuries prior to Tocqueville (albeit mainly as an adjective), and individualizations had been practiced under one description or another long before that, at least as evidenced in the oldest surviving texts of human history. However, premodern constitutions of individuality did not become the foci of a distinctive doctrine of individualism. That development came in response to the profound changes of social structure and consciousness that had been slowly accumulating during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the transformation from a medieval to a modern world, new transparencies of meaning evolved—among the most important, a particular conception of "the individual." The enormous power of that conception is reflected in the fact that people of modern society have generally had no doubt as to what an "individual" is. The reference has been self-evident because the object referred to, an individual, has been self-evident, pregiven, natural.
But one must remember that "the individual" is a construct. Like all constructs, it is historically variable. The meaning of individualism's "individual" was formed under specific historical circumstances that, in practice as well as in ideology, increasingly prized values of rational calculation, mastery, and experimentation; deliberate efforts toward betterment of the human condition; and a universalism anchored in the conviction that "human nature" is basically the same everywhere at all times and that rationality is singular in number. These commitments were manifested in the doctrine of individualism (as, indeed, in the formation of the modern social sciences). By the time of Tocqueville and the newly coined word, individualism's individual had become integral to much of the practical consciousness of modern society. Human beings were being objectified as instances of "the individual"—that is, as instances of a particular kind of individuality.
The forces created during that formative period wrought great changes in the fabric of society, many of which continue to reverberate. Of course, as historical circumstances have changed, both "the individual" of individualism and the constitution of individuality have changed. Nonetheless, a certain transparency of meaning remains still today in our practical consciousness of "the individual," and it is still informed by a doctrine of individualism. Thus, when a sociologist says that "a natural unit of observation is the individual" (Coleman 1990, p. 1), he can assume without fear of failure that most of his readers will know exactly what he means.
The remainder of this article offers brief accounts of (1) the development of individualism during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, (2) recent shifts of emphases in individualism's conception of "the individual," and (3) some current issues and concerns. More extended treatments can be found in Macpherson (1962), Lukes (1973), Abercrombie and colleagues (1986), Heller and colleagues (1986), and Hazelrigg (1991), among others.
THE SELF-REPRESENTING INDIVIDUAL
While elements of individualism can be seen in expressions of practical affairs as early as the twelfth-century renaissance (Macfarlane 1978; Ullmann 1966), the first more or less systematic statement of the doctrine came during the 1600s. Scholars such as René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke believed that in order to understand a whole (e.g., society) one had first to understand the parts of which it is composed. In the case of society, those parts, the building blocks of a society, were instances of "the individual." Although disagreeing on various specific issues—for example, whether human agency is distinct from a natural world of causal necessity (Descartes) or a product of that causal necessity (Hobbes)—these seventeenth-century scholars displayed a remarkable confidence in their understandings of "the individual" as a presocial atom. Their individual was a highly abstract being, squatting outside the world.
In the premodern order of European society, social relations had been organic, corporate, and mainly ascriptive. Sovereignty was a complex relation of duty, responsibility, and charity, focused on a specific location in the hierarchical order of organic community. Certainly members of the community were individualized, but the distinction was constituted primarily by ascriptive position in the hierarchical order. It is clear from surviving documents of the twelfth century, for example, that one individual knight was discriminable from any other in ways that we would describe as "personality." With rare exceptions, however, the discrimination was local. Otherwise, knights were discriminable mainly by pedigree, lines of fealty, and quality of chivalry. Individuals could rise (and fall) through gradations of rank, but vertical movement was first within the family or household group. A knight who aspired to still higher standing had first to be retained in another, more powerful family. Similarly, while there is no reason to doubt that residents of a twelfth-century village or town could reliably discriminate one another by physiognomic features, the portrayal of human beings in paintings concentrated on matters of costume, placement, and posture to signal social distinctions among virtually lifeless mannequins. Even in the revolutionary works attributed to Giotto (1267–1337), whose use of subtle gestures and glances began to individualize portrayals sufficiently to be called portraits in the modern sense, such facial features as warts, wens, moles, wrinkles, lines, scars, and sagging skin were still quite irrelevant to, and therefore absent in, the visualized identity or character of a person. But by the end of the 1400s we see, most notably in Domenico Ghirlandaio's Portrait of Old Man and Boy (c. 1490), depictions that to the modern sensibility count as realistically individualized faces. The art of portraiture gradually developed into advertisements of a new actor, front and center—modernity's sovereign individual (Haskell 1993).
In this new order, by contrast to its predecessor, social relations were conceived as contractual rather than organic, based on achieved rather than ascribed traits of individuals liberated from constraints of community. City life was once again the center of gravity in territorial organization, having displaced the manorial system. What would become the modern nation-state was beginning to take shape during the period of relative peace inaugurated by the several Treaties of Westphalia in 1648. Within this context of invention and experimentation with new (or renewed) organizational forms, the new individual was conceived as a wholly separate entity of self-identical integrity, a "bare individual" who could freely consent to enter into concert with other, equivalently constituted individuals, each propelled by self-interest. This was, as Macpherson (1962) described it, the advent of "possessive individualism," and it correlated well with the developing motivations of capitalism.
By the end of the eighteenth century, individualism had attained mature statement in treatises by David Hume, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant, among others. This mature statement, worked out in the context of rapidly changing political-economic institutions, emphasized the centrality of a "self-representing individual." The chief claim—that "every individual appears as the autonomous subject of his [or her, but primarily his] decisions and actions" (Goldmann [1968] 1973, p. 20)—served as the linchpin to formalized explanations of the political and economic rights of members of society, especially the propertied members. Expressions of the chief claim in moral and legal rights of the individual became enshrined in newly invented traditions, in legitimizing principles such as "popular sovereignty" and "inalienable rights," and in documents of public culture such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Constitution of the United States of America (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Morgan 1988). The prayerful injunction "God bless the squire and his relations and keep us in our proper stations" had been replaced by the almost wholly secular "I pledge allegiance to the flag" (i.e., to an abstract sign). While the claim of autonomy emphasized the universality of rights and the particularity of the "I," the practical emphasis on a self-representing individual was formulated in political-economic terms that "necessitated" elaborate definitions and procedures for the defense of "property rights" long before equivalent attention would be given to, say, "rights of the handicapped."
Much like the individual of organic community, the self-representing individual is a substantial presence, manifest as the embodiment of a uniform human nature, and as such is the bearer of various traits, dispositions, and predications. However, the site of the self-representing individual's capacity of agency and potential for autonomy is neither the community nor the accumulated traits, dispositions, and predications. Rather, it is deeply interior to what became a new "inner nature" of the human being. Beneath the faculty of reason, beneath all feeling and emotion and belief, there is "the will." Emile Durkheim ([1914] 1973) described it as the egoistic will of the individual pole of homo duplex, for George Herbert Mead (1934) it was "the principle of action." But before either of those sociologists, the master theorizer of the self-representing individual, Immanuel Kant, had formulated the basic principle as the pure functioning of the "I" through time. Only because I can unite a variety of given representations of objects in one consciousness, Kant ([1787] 1929, B133) argued, is it possible that I can "represent to myself the identity of consciousness," throughout those representations. In other words, the very possibility of a knowledge of the external world is dependent on the temporal continuity of the "I." The individual is absolute proprietor of this pure functionality, this willing of the "I" as basic principle of action; the individual owes absolutely nothing to society for it.
By conceiving the essential core of human individuality to be a deeply interiorized, radically isolated pure functionality, connections between the individual and the substantive traits that he or she bears become arbitrary. The individual is formally free to exercise choice in which traits to bear, free to be mobile geographically, socially, culturally, personally. Ascriptive traits are devalued in favor of achieved traits, and one set of achieved traits can always be exchanged for yet another set. This principle of freely exchangeable traits, an aspiration directing progress toward "the good society," depended on new means of socialization (or "internalization of norms"), so as to insure sufficient regularity in processes of exchange. Indeed, the self-representing individual was central to a distinctive regimen of behavior, a new practical meaning of "discipline" (Foucault [1975] 1977). As the doctrine of individualism saw it, the contractual, associative forms of social relation, though looser fitting in their normative constraints than the old organic community, were complemented by the figure of "the self-made man" who had internalized all the norms of rectitude and propriety so nicely as to merit life in an unprecedentedly free society. When reality failed the image, there were courts and legal actions for deciding conflicts of interest and the clash of individuals' rights. Notably, not a single book on the law of torts had been published in English by the mid-1800s; the explosive growth of tort law and third-party rules was only beginning (Friedman 1985, pp. 53–54).
Because the doctrine of individualism provided a set of answers to questions that were foundational to sociology (as to the social sciences in general)—What is the individual? How is society possible? and so forth—virtually every topic subsequently addressed by sociology has in one way or another involved aspects of individualism. Given the composition of individualism's self-representing individual, the most prominent issues have often centered on questions of relationship between the rise of individualism and the development of new forms of political-economic organization as manifested in capitalism, bureaucracy, and the modern state. Indeed, that relationship was focus of one of the great controversies occupying many early sociologists (Abercrombie et al. 1986). Hardly anyone doubted the existence or importance of a relationship. Rather, the debates were about such issues as causal direction (which caused which?), periodizations (e.g., when did capitalism begin?), and whether ideas or material conditions (each category conceived as devoid of the other) were the primary motive force. In many respects the debates were a continuation of the struggles they were about.
What do men desire most in a relationship?
Men want to be treated in a way that doesn't diminish their egos or make them feel inadequate. They love to be praised and acknowledged for the...
Other, more specific topics addressed by sociologists have also involved aspects of the rise of individualism. Several have already been mentioned (e.g., a new regimen of discipline). Additional examples are the development of sectarian (as opposed to churchly) religions, followed by an even more highly privatized mystical-religious consciousness of the isolated individual; changes in domestic architecture, such as greater emphasis on individualized spaces of privacy and functionally specialized rooms; changes in table manners, rules of courtesy, and other "refinements of taste"; the emergence of a "confessional self" and practices of diarykeeping; increased emphasis on romantic love ("affective individualism") in mate selection; new forms of literary discourse, such as the novel and autobiography; the rise of professionalism; and the rise of the modern corporation as an organizational form that, having gained standing as a legal actor comparable to a flesh-and-blood person, cast into doubt reliance on understandings of "the will" as foundation and motive force of contractual relations (see Abercrombie et al. 1986; Horwitz 1992; Perrot [1987] 1990).
THE SELF-EXPRESSING INDIVIDUAL
The figure of the self-representing individual proved to be unstable, even as the meaning of representation gradually changed. This was mainly because the same factors that had produced this version of individualism's individual also led to dissolution of the transparent sign. For example, whereas clothing, manners, bodily comportment, and similar traits had been, in the old order, reliable signs (representations) of a person's rank or station in life, the sign became increasingly arbitrary in its relationship to ground. This loosening of the sign, together with a proliferation of signs in exchange, led to a new universalism of "the empty sign." The prototype was money and the commodity form: Devoid of intrinsic value and capable of representing everything, it represents nothing in particular. As one recent scholar has described the process, borrowing a clause from Karl Marx, "all that is solid melts into air" (Berman 1983).
At the same time, the rhetoric of transhistorical forms of value (e.g., the commodity, inalienable rights) allows for an enormous amount of individual variation in the sociocultural conditions under which it can succeed. Individualism's emphasis on the bare individual was being increasingly generalized, further reducing the import of group-based relations and traits. In the mid-1800s, for instance, the distinction between public affairs and private matters was drawn at the door of home and family. Family life provided the chief "haven" of organic relations, nurturant domesticity, and refuge from the trials of work and politics. But soon the haven itself became a site of struggle toward still greater individuation. Of the many factors contributing to this rebellion against the traditional restraints of family, one of the most important was a new culture of sexuality, which manifested a more general and growing concern for the interior interests and needs of the individual.
Precedent for this concern can be seen in Kant's conception of the self-representing individual (because of the transcendental "I," every individual has in common a potential for self-actualization) as well as in romanticist movements of the early 1800s. However, the development of a new "inner discourse of the individual" has been mostly a twentieth-century phenomenon. The psychology of Sigmund Freud and his disciples formed part of that development, certainly; but another part was formed by the conception of a new "social citizenship" (Marshall 1964), which emphasized an individual's rights of social welfare in addition to the earlier mandates of political and economic rights. A new figure of individualism's individual gradually emerged, the "self-expressing individual."
The individualism of the self-representing individual promoted the idea that all interests are ultimately interests of the bare individual. The new version of individualism both extends and modifies that idea. Whereas the self-representing individual puts a premium on self-control and hard work, the self-expressing individual generalizes the value of "freedom of choice" from political-economic exchange relations to matters of personal lifestyle and consumption preferences (Inglehart 1990). The central claim holds that "each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized" (Bellah et al. 1985, p. 336), and each person has the right to develop his or her unique capacities of self-expression. A recent change in divorce law partly illustrates the import of that claim. Prior to the 1960s one of the few organic relations still surviving in modern society was the marital bond; few conditions were deemed grave enough to have legal standing as grounds for breaking it. With the invention of "no fault" divorce (relatively noncontroversial legislation that spread rapidly from state to state; Jacob 1988), the marital relation became a civil contract much like any other, and a spouse's freedom to choose divorce in the interest of satisfying unfulfilled needs of self-expression gained recognition.
Another manifestation of this self-expressing individual is the recent development of a specialized field, the sociology of emotions (e.g., Barbalet 1998; Thoits 1989). Certainly earlier scholars (e.g., Georg Simmel) had recognized emotive dimensions of sentiment, tradition, trust, and the like, and had assumed motivations such as fear of power, anxiety about salvation, envy of success, frustrated ambition, and eponymous glory. No one imagined that persons of premodern societies did not experience emotions—though usually this would have been in an idiom of "the passions," and scholars disagreed whether these were in fact ahistorical, noncultural formations. But emotions had rarely been treated as important topics of inquiry by sociologists until the latter decades of the twentieth century. The emotive dimensions of life had typically been regarded as subordinate to other dimensions, just as the passions had been treated as dangerous when unbridled—energies which belonged properly in the harness of reason or "the rational faculty." (Most of the seven deadly sins, remember, were emotional states or effects of emotional states.) When rightly yoked by reason, emotive energies of the self-representing individual could achieve highly valued public outcomes even if the particular emotion itself was classified as a vice. Thus, avowed Adam Smith among others, private greed or avarice could become, through the device of market transaction, a public benefit. For the self-expressing individual, on the other hand, emotive aspects of life are, or should be, valued in themselves, not only for what might result from them. Whereas the eighteenth-century "pursuit of happiness" (one of the self-representing individual's inalienable rights) was idiomatic for the unfettered formal liberty of the individual to pursue self-interest in commerce (an inherently outward-looking, social activity), for the self-expressing individual the pursuit of happiness refers to a much more introspective, privately evaluated emotional state, "being happy with who one is."
Individualism's self-expressing individual remains a trait-bearing substantial entity, to be sure. The variety of bearable traits is greatly expanded by the shift in emphasis from self-control to self-expression through lifestyle experimentation ("the person as work-in-progress-from-within," as it were). Moreover, this shift in emphasis is accompanied by the stipulation that only those traits that an individual can freely choose to assume, and then jettison, should be relevant criteria by which to discriminate and evaluate individuals. Criteria falling outside the bounds of individual choice ("immutable" traits, whether biological or sociocultural) are deemed to be both irrelevant and, increasingly, a violation of an individual's rights. In conjunction with the "entitlements" logic of social citizenship, this stipulation of a radically individualistic freedom of reversible choice has been linked to the emergence of a generalized expectation of "total justice" (Friedman 1985).
By the same token, the doctrine of individualism has always contained a large fictive component. Long after the doctrine proclaimed the sovereignty of the bare individual, for example, the actual individuality of human beings continued to be heavily marked by ascriptive traits (e.g., gender, race) and by sociocultural inheritances from one's parents. The shift to an expressive individualism reflects efforts to situate the agency of a "free individual" outside the separately conceived domain of relations of domination. Rather than attempt to change those relations, the self-expressing individual would "transcend" them by concentrating on a logic of rights pertaining to the free expression of individual will in a domain of "personal culture" (Marcuse [1937] 1968).
Fictions can be productive in various ways, however. The fictions of individualism have often been made taskmasters, as women, African Americans, persons with disabilities, and other human beings discriminated primarily by ascriptive or group-based criteria have struggled to make reality conform to doctrinal image.
SOME CURRENT ISSUES
Because individualism has been one of the professional ideologies of the social sciences ("methodological individualism"), a perennial issue concerns the proper structure of explanation—specifically, whether explanation of any sociocultural phenomenon must ultimately refer to facts about individuals, and if so, what precisely that means (Coleman 1990; Hazelrigg 1991; Lukes 1973). No one denies that collectivities are composed of individuals. But that truism settles neither the question of how "composition" is to be understood nor the question of what constitutes "the individual." In short, the methodological issue involves a number of theoretical-conceptual issues, including several that are located at the intersection between individualism's "individual" and historical variations in the actual constitution of individuality (Heller et al. 1986). The doctrine of individualism has consistently conceptualized "the individual" as a distinct and self-contained agent who acts within, yet separate from, a constraining social structure. Rather than being an ensemble of social relations, individualism's individual is the substantial atom out of which any possible social relations are composed. This has certain implications for the empirical field.
How, for instance, does one understand the category "rational action"? What minimal criteria must be satisfied in order that a particular action can count as "rational"? The individual who stands forth in individualism tends to the heroic—self-made, self-reliant, and self-governing, rising above circumstances, taking charge of one's own destiny, and, in the aggregate of similar atoms, building a better world. This individual was soon accorded central place as the chief fount of rational action. Whereas late eighteenth-century scholars such as Adam Smith continued to remind readers that rational action could and did stem from nonrational motivations (e.g., moral sentiment, the ethos of tradition, even the simple inertia of habit), pride of place in the list of motivational sources increasingly shifted to that part of the "faculties of mind" called "the rational faculty," conceived as an instrument of the will. The emphasis on rationality as faculty, an "instrumental rationality," was no doubt encouraged by, and at the same time promoted, a growing list of successes in the inventiveness of carefully deliberated, calculated designs, plans, and projects of human engineering. (Recall the success of Dutch efforts, beginning on an ever larger scale in the 1600s and 1700s, to push back the sea and create thousands of square miles of new land—for most of us a barely remembered fact of history, but in those earlier times a truly audacious undertaking.) Are the limits of rational action therefore as closely circumscribed as the limits of an individual actor's rational deliberations, calculations, and intentions? Most sociologists today are agreed in answering "no" to that question, although they diverge, sometimes sharply, in particulars of the answer (Coleman 1990; Kuran 1995; Sica 1988).
Social action can be highly rational in the aggregate, both in outcome and in process, even when individual actors, attending more to nonrational or irrational than to rational motivations and intentions, behave in ways that hardly fit the doctrinal image of "heroic actor." People do learn from experience (if fitfully and slowly), and part of the accumulated fund from that learning consists in organizational forms that have rationalities built into them. This "rationality as form"—a materialized intelligence in the same way that a hand-held calculator, an airplane, or a magnetic resonance imager is a materialized solution to a set of problems—enables many more people to use, benefit from, and even operate the rationalities built into such devices than have the understanding ("rationality as faculty") required to design their architectures or to convert design into working product. Moreover, whereas the examples just cited can be readily interpreted as immediate and punctual products of some specific individual's rational faculty (thus fitting the heroic-actor model of the inventor or discoverer as genius), many other examples of rationality-invested organizational forms—family structures, markets, bureaucracy, and so forth—are as much or more the gradual accretions of indirection, sentiment, habituation, and happenstance than the intended consequences of rationally deliberated, calculated, instrumental actions of particular individuals. The doctrine of individualism has often slighted the importance of these latter wellsprings of rational action, as if the actions they motivate do not quite count, or do not count in quite the same way, as action that directly manifests the willful force of an individual's reasoned intentions.
How do you know if you lost her?
These signs all point out that you have lost a good woman. You've broken her trust. ... She stops putting you first. ... She treats you cold. ......
In a related vein, if the individual owes nothing to society for the "I" as principle of action, where should the distinction be drawn between determinants of action that are social and those that are psychological? Consider, for instance, a person suffering the characteristics clinically (and thus socially) categorized as "depression." Are these characteristics proper to the individual only, or are they also in some way descriptive of a social condition that is integral to the individual so characterized? If Willy Loman, of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, is depressed, does that description say anything about the circumstances of a life Loman shared with countless others, or is it the description only of a misery interior to an isolated individual? Each of these accounts of what is under description has had its proponents. The popularity of a medicative regimen that emphasizes direct palliation or amelioration of psychic state (as in chemical applications, whether Prozac or psilocybin) suggests a growing preference for the second account.
Some sociologists contend that individualism's self-expressing individual is an accurate depiction of contemporary reconstitutions of individuality, and that in this new form of "the individual" the substance of selfhood, an individual's self-identical integrity, is being evacuated. Bellah and colleagues (1985) indict the emergence of "a language of radical individual autonomy" in which people "cannot think about themselves or others except as arbitrary centers of volition (p. 81)." Others argue that the emphasis on individual autonomy and separation is an expression of masculine, patriarchal values, as contrasted to feminine values of social attachment (Gilligan 1982). Still others see the development of an entirely new "order of simulacra" (Baudrillard [1976] 1983), in which simulation or the simulacrum substitutes for and then vanquishes the real (e.g., television images establish the parameters of reality). The alleged result is a collapse of "the social" into the indifference of "the masses," who no longer care to discriminate among "messages" (beyond their entertainment effects) since one simulation is as good as another.
Equally contentious issues surround the evident growth in people's sense of entitlement and in the array of legal rights claimed and often won on behalf of "individual choice." Individualism's figure of the self-expressing individual is held by some to be the harbinger of a new age of democracy, by others to be the confirmation of a continuing trend toward greater atomization (Friedman 1985). Both assessments point to the emergence of a "rights industry" that promotes the invention of new categories of legal right pertaining to everything from a guaranteed freedom to experiment with unconventional lifestyles without risk of discrimination or retribution, to the rights of animals both individually and at the species level, to the possibility of endowing genes with "subject-like powers" and thus legal standing (Glendon 1991; Norton 1987; Oyama 1985). Some critics contend that the expansion of concern for increasingly particularized and "arbitrary" individual choices comes at the expense of a diminished concern for social outcomes. "Unless people regain the sense that the practices of society represent some sort of natural order instead of a set of arbitrary choices, they cannot hope to escape from the dilemma of unjustified power" (Unger 1976, p. 240). The conviction recalls that of the early French critic quoted in the opening paragraph.
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