Political Philosophy and Individualism Essay

Individualism is the moral stance, policy-making philosophy, ideology, or kindly outlook that emphasizes the moral expenditure of the individual. Individualists promote the exercise of ones goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance and advocate that interests of the individual should achieve precedence everyplace the country or a sociable group, while opposing external interference upon ones own interests by society or institutions such as the government.Individualism makes the individual its focus and so starts with the fundamental premise that the human individual is of primary importance in the struggle for liberation. Individualism then involves the righteousness of the individual to meltdom and self-realization. An individualist enters into society to further his or her own interests, or at least demands the right to serve his or her own interests, without taking the interests of society into consideration.The individualist does not lend credence to any philosophy that requires the sacrifice of the self-interest of the individual for any higher social causes. Jean-Jacques Rousseau would argue, however, that his concept of general will in the social contract is not the simple collection of individual wills and precisely furthers the interests of the individual (the constraint of law itself would be beneficial for the individual, as the lack of respect for the law necessarily entails, in Rousseaus eyes, a form of ignorance and submission to ones passions instead of the like autonomy of reason).Individualists ar chiefly concerned with protecting individual autonomy against obligations imposed by social institutions (such as the state or religious morality). (Encyclopedia Britannica) Individualism, political and social philosophy that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual. Individualism once exhibited interesting national variations, but its various meanings have since largely merged. Following the upheaval of the french Revolution, laissez fairee was used pejoratively in Franceto signify the sources of social dissolution and anarchy and the elevation of individual interests above those of the collective.The terms negative connotation was employ by French reactionaries, nationalists, conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike, despite their different views of a feasible and desirable social order. In Germany, the ideas of individual uniqueness (Einzigkeit) and self-realizationin sum, the Romantic vox populi of individualitycontributed to the cult of individual genius and were later transformed into an organic theory of national fellowship. According to this view, state and society are not painted constructs erected on the basis of a social contract but instead unique and self-sufficient cultural wholes.In England, individualism encompassed religious nonconformism (i. e. , nonconformity with the Church of England) and economic liberalism in its various versions, including both laissez-fai re and moderate state-interventionist approaches. In the United States, individualism became part of the core American ideology by the 19th century, incorporating the influences of New England Puritanism, Jeffersonianism, and the philosophy of natural rights. American individualism was universalist and idealist but acquired a harsher edge as it became infused with elements of social Darwinism (i.e. , the survival of the fittest). broken in individualismextolled by Herbert Hoover during his presidential campaign in 1928was associated with usageal American values such as personal freedom,capitalism, and limited government. As mob Bryce, British ambassador to the United States (190713), wrote in The American Commonwealth (1888), Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom have been deemed by Americans not notwithstanding their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possession. The French aristocratic political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville (18055 9) described individualism in terms of a kind of moderate selfishness that disposed earth to be concerned only with their own small circle of family and friends. Observing the workings of the American democratic tradition for Democracy in America (183540), Tocqueville wrote that by leading each citizen to isolate himself from his fellows and to draw apart with his family and friends, individualism sapped the virtues of public life, for which civic virtue and association were a suitable remedy.For the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (181897), individualism signified the cult of privacy, which, combined with the growth of self-assertion, had given impulse to the highest individual development that flowered in the European Renaissance. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim (18581917) identified two types of individualism the utilitarian egoism of the English sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer (18201903), who, according to.Durkheim, reduced society to nothing more than a vast apparatus of production and exchange, and the rationalism of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (17241804), the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121788), and the French Revolutions Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), which has as its primary dogma the autonomy of reason and as its primary rite the doctrine of free enquiry. The Austrian economist F. A. Hayek (18991992), who favoured market processes and was distrustful of state intervention, distinguished what he called false from true individualism.False individualism, which was represented mainly by French and opposite continental European writers, is characterized by an exaggerated belief in the powers of individual reason and the scope of effective social planning and is a source of new-fangled socialism in contrast, true individualism, whose adherents included John Locke (16321704), Bernard de Mandeville (16701733), David Hume (171176), Adam Ferguson (17231816), Adam Smith (172390), and E dmund Burke(172997), maintained that the spontaneous collaboration of free men often creates things which are greater than their individual minds can ever fully comprehend and accepted that individuals must submit to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society. Other aspects of individualism consult to a series of different questions about how to conceive the relation between collectivities and individuals. One such question focuses on how facts about the behaviour of groups, about social processes, and about large-scale historical events are to be explained. According to methodological individualism, a view advocated by Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper (190294), any explanation of such a fact ultimately must appeal to, or be stated in terms of, facts about individualsabout their beliefs, desires, and actions. A closely related view, sometimes called ontological individualism, is the thesis that social or historical groups, processes, and events are nothin g more than complexes of individuals and individual actions.Methodological individualism precludes explanations that appeal to social factors that cannot in sour be individualistically explained. Examples are Durkheims classic account of differential suicide rates in terms of degrees of social integration and the account of the relative incidence of protest movements in terms of the structure of political opportunities. Ontological individualism contrasts with various ways of seeing institutions and collectivities as reale. g. , the view of corporations or states as agents and the view of bureaucratic roles and rules or status groups as independent of individuals, both constraining and enabling individuals behaviour.An other(a) question that arises in debates over individualism is how objects of worth or value (i. e. , goods) in moral and political life are to be conceived. Some theorists, known as atomists, argue that no such goods are intrinsically common or communal, maintainin g instead that there are only individual goods that accrue to individuals. According to this perspective, morality and politics are merely the instruments by dint of which each individual attempts to secure such goods for himself. One example of this view is the conception of political authority as ultimately derived from or justified by a hypothetical contract between individuals, as in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (15881679).Another is the idea, typical in economics and in other social sciences influenced by economics, that most social institutions and relationships can best be understood by assuming that individual behaviour is motivated primarily by self-interest. Individualism with its endorsement of private enjoyments and control of ones personal environment and its neglect of public involvement and communal attachment, has long been lamented and criticized from both the right and the left and from both religious and secular perspectives. Especially notable criti ques have been made by advocates of communitarianism, who tend to equate individualism with narcissism and selfishness.Likewise, thinkers in the tradition of republican political thoughtaccording to which power is best controlled by being dividedare disturbed by their perception that individualism deprives the state of the support and active involvement of citizens, thereby impairing democratic institutions. Individualism also has been thought to distinguish modern Western societies from premodern and non-Western ones, such as traditional India and China, where, it is said, the community or the nation is valued above the individual and an individuals role in the political and economic life of his community is largely firm by his membership in a specific class or caste.