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Individualism in America
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14980 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1988 |
1,775 Words |
| Author
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Everett Carll Ladd
Everett Carll Ladd is director of the Roper Center in
Storrs, Connecticut. |
MIDDLE AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM
The Future of Liberal Democracy
Herbert J. Gans
New York: The Free Press, 1988
298 pp., $19.95
As observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to the present have recognized, an intense and pervasive individualism lies at the core of American ideology and values. Although the term is used with many different shades of meaning, individualism is in its essence moral standard--an insistence that the needs and interests of each individual be placed at the very center of things. In this view, the ultimate test of the merit of society is its capacity to turn individuals loose so that they may achieve, create, and find their happiness.
A thoroughgoing individualism developed in the West in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Tocqueville recognized that it represented a dramatic departure from the past. "I have shown," he wrote in his monumental Democracy in America, "how it is that, in ages of equality, every man seeks for his opinion within himself: I now turn to show how it is that, in the same ages, all his feelings are turned towards himself alone. Individualism is a novel expression to which a novel idea has given birth. Our fathers were only acquainted with egoism (selfishness)."
Individualism emerged in Europe in large part from the economic claims of the new middle classes, who insisted upon their rights as individuals to gain and dispose of property as they wished. Any first-time reader of John Locke's Second Treatise of Government is bound to be struck by the dominant place it gives economic individualism. In America, though, individualism developed more from religious experience, as Tocqueville saw with characteristic brilliance. He assigned an especially large place in its development to the Puritans. "Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories." Each individual, equally worthy in the eyes of his Creator, needed equal earthly opportunity to worship as he chose. This meant, among other things, that he needed education, so that he himself could know God through the Bible.
All the other key components of American ideology have been shaped by individualism. To realize their rights fully, individuals must have freedom, the opportunity to make their own choices with a minimum of restraint. The intrinsic worth of
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