Individualism (redirected from Atomized individualism)

individualism

Political and social philosophy that emphasizes individual freedom. Modern individualism emerged in Britain with the ideas of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, and the concept was described by Alexis de Tocqueville as fundamental to the American temper. Individualism encompasses a value system, a theory of human nature, and a belief in certain political, economic, social, and religious arrangements. According to the individualist, all values are human-centred, the individual is of supreme importance, and all individuals are morally equal. Individualism places great value on self-reliance, on privacy, and on mutual respect. Negatively, it embraces opposition to authority and to all manner of controls over the individual, especially when exercised by the state. As a theory of human nature, individualism holds that the interests of the normal adult are best served by allowing him maximum freedom and responsibility for choosing his objectives and the means for obtaining them. The institutional embodiment of individualism follows from these principles. All individualists believe that government should keep its interference in the lives of individuals at a minimum, confining itself largely to maintaining law and order, preventing individuals from interfering with others, and enforcing agreements (contracts) voluntarily arrived at. Individualism also implies a property system according to which each person or family enjoys the maximum of opportunity to acquire property and to manage and dispose of it as he or they see fit. Although economic individualism and political individualism in the form of democracy advanced together for a while, in the course of the 19th century they eventually proved incompatible, as newly enfranchised voters came to demand governmental intervention in the economic process. Individualistic ideas lost ground in the later 19th and early 20th century with the rise of large-scale social organization and the emergence of political theories opposed to individualism, particularly communism and fascism. They reemerged in the latter half of the 20th century with the defeat of fascism and the fall of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. See also libertarianism.

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individualism

1. another word for laissez faire

2. Philosophy the doctrine that only individual things exist and that therefore classes or properties have no reality

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Individualism

See also Egotism.

Beaumont, Ned

gambler-detective solves murder case in unorthodox manner. [Am. Lit.: The Glass Key, Magill I, 307–308]

Different Drummer

Thoreau’s eloquent prose poem on the inner freedom and individualistic character of man. [Am. Lit.: NCE, 2739]

Longstocking, Pippi

eccentric young girl who sets her own standards. [Children’s Lit.: Pippi Longstocking]

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Individualism 

a type of world view the essence of which is, in the last analysis, the assignment of an absolute value to the isolated individual as opposed to society, by which is meant not some particular social system but society in general. Individualism is expressed in real-life conduct, in moral behavior, as well as in abstract conceptions of various kinds—ethical, philosophical, ideological, and political. Individualist conceptions depict man as a primordially asocial or even antisocial being.

Individualism is not characteristic of primitive or archaic societies, where individuals are still so undeveloped and immature that they belong to their social milieu as dependent parts. In this case individuals have not yet developed even to the level of individualism (see K. Marx in K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 46, part 1, p. 18). Individualism arises and consolidates itself only in developed, antagonistic class formations; the grounds for it develop, on the one hand, as individuals acquire independence and, on the other, as cultural and historical forces acquire an alienated and impersonal form of existence in opposition to the immediate existence of individuals.

Relations under private-property systems, especially the bourgeois system, are of this sort, which Marx called “purely atomistic” (ibid., vol. 23, p. 103). These relations give rise to the point of view of the lone, isolated person and create the appearance of a primordial separation of the individual from any social whole, although the separation is, in fact, the result of a prolonged process of sociohistorical development. The fundamental contradiction of individualism consists in the fact that it presupposes the individualization of socially developed cultural riches in order for the individual to assert himself or herself, but at the same time it refuses to recognize the social origin, nature, and orientation of this very individualization.

Even the earliest conceptions of individualism arose as a result of the contradictions in cultural development in ancient society (the Cynics and the Cyrenaic school). The Renaissance was characterized by a cult of individuality that verged on individualism. The ideologists of the Enlightenment often took the abstract individual as their starting point. With the intensification of social atomization under developed bourgeois society sharper and more distinct individualist conceptions were formed. Thus, the Young Hegelian M. Stirner in his The Ego and His Own (Russian translation, 1906) proclaimed the renunciation by the self of everything not given as “mine” (see the criticism of Stirner by K. Marx and F. Engels, ibid., vol. 3). Since individualism places any logic in the social process outside the bounds of human essence, it makes an irrationalist interpretation of its viewpoint possible. This possibility has been most fully realized by existentialism. Under the conditions of monopoly capitalism two tendencies prevail: first, the crisis-stricken ideology of liberalism and individualism is being replaced by the ideology of anti-individualism, tied in with apologetics for the manipulation of people by bourgeois social institutions and with the favorable evaluation of the “organization man”; and second, the utilitarian attitude toward culture has grown stronger, with a retreat from broad social problems and struggle to mere consumerism. On the common ground of anarchistic and nihilistic ultraleftist “revolutionism,” rebellious individualism combines with an extremely primitive anti-individualism hostile to socialism and to the world communist movement (Maoism and gauchisme).

Marxism has explained the nature and historical role of individualism and shown the way for overcoming it. In criticizing individualism, Marxism does not counterpose to it impersonal social forms, detached from individuals, but rather an orientation toward the practical elimination of the social basis of individualism and the total assimilation by individuals of the complex and contradictory content of their social life. The full development of an independent individual can be realized only in association with a genuine collectivity and through it, consequently, only through the elimination of all “surrogate collectivities” (ibid., p. 75). In the struggle for communism, the free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of all (ibid., vol. 4, p. 447). This idea has been made a programmatic thesis of the Communist Party: “Everything for man.” Communist education and the entire ideological activity of the Communist Party are aimed at completely overcoming all survivals of individualism, such as acquisitiveness, arrogance, opposition to the collective, and egoism and at achieving an all-round, fully developed personality, dedicated to communist ideals, with a sense of deep responsibility, a morally concerned activism, and a creative attitude toward all aspects of social life.

G. S. BATISHCHEV