1 - Four Discourses of Individualism

Summary

Introduction

As Erich Fromm writes in one of the more influential social science books of the twentieth century, The Fear of Freedom, sometime during the late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the modern era, “a radical change in the per-sonality structure of man” took place. Before a “person was identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, an artisan, a knight, and not an individual who happened to have this or that occupation.” Now people began to liber-ate themselves from the primary ties of family, clan, and a face-to-face group and began to grow progressively more independent, self-reliant, and critical. Individuals increasingly saw themselves as self-determining agents able, in Fromm's words, to “govern [and] make decisions for” themselves. Much of European and American history since the end of the Middle Ages, as read by Fromm, has been “the history of the full emergence of the individual.”

This book develops Ken Jowitt's claim that “an effective liberal capitalist democracy rests on the foundation that is not marketization or privatization; it is individuation.” Jowitt, a political scientist, builds on a long tradition of social inquiry into the “cultural constitution of liberty” as represented, most prominently, by Alexis de Tocqueville, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Hannah Arendt, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Robert Bellah. Each of these writers was convinced, in his or her own way, that liberal democracy needed a special cultural soil to take root and that the autonomous individual was that soil's crucial ingredient.

Tocqueville was this tradition's founder. Writing in the 1830s, he was seeking to understand why liberal democracy functioned in the United States but not in his native France. Tocqueville saw part of America's success in the peculiarities of its origin and social structure (the relative equality of birth and wealth, high social mobility, and the decentralization of American society into self-governing townships that were schools of democracy). But what was equally central to his argument, and is less appreciated today, was culture, or what he variously called “mores” and “habits of the heart.” American culture had several qualities that made a key difference between democracy's success and failure. First, it contained a firmly ingrained set of self- and individual-affirming beliefs.