Individualism and its contemporary fate.

• Author: Minogue, Kenneth
• Position: Essay

My concern in this article is to explore what I take to be the essence of freedom and to locate it in the context of our civilization. Described thus, the idea is insanely ambitious, and all I can do is sketch a position. I shall identify freedom with individualism, discuss first its emergence and then its established character in the eighteenth century, and finally say something about its paradoxical place in the world today.

Individuality is a universal characteristic of objects, but individualism is the practice that accords to some personal acts, beliefs, and utterances a legitimacy that may conflict with the dictates of custom or authority. Today, this practice is usually formulated as "self-interest," which makes it clear that individualism may liberate some individual wants from customary controls. As self-interest, individualism is often wrongly identified with the moral vice of selfishness and gets a bad press. Sometimes it is foolishly attacked as "consumerism" and described as "hyperindividualism" or the mania for accumulating material goods. These hostile characterizations are part of contemporary rhetoric to which we shall return. Let me begin, however, by sketching the emergence of freedom in its individualist form.

Ambivalence and the Coming of Modernity

We inherit various aspects of our freedom from the Greeks, the Romans, and the barons of the feudal period, but in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries something new was beginning to appear. Urbanization and printing were its essential preconditions, and it took many forms, but in all cases the enterprise of individuals was at the heart of it. If the coming of freedom may be grasped in terms of any single formula, we might invoke that of Martin Luther writing on Christian freedom. Jesus came, Luther affirmed, to free us from the law into a higher dutifulness. These words make it clear why, whatever religious beliefs we may entertain, Christianity is and remains at the heart of our civilization. They also reveal why Luther's doctrines led to endless conflict. The question is: What might these terms--law and higher dutifulness--signify? For Luther, the law was clearly Judaic, and the higher dutifulness was Christian piety subject to divine grace. Luther was taking his followers back to what he understood to have been the pure origins of their faith. However, the "law" from which we might seek to be freed might in individualist terms be any restraint that a critical spirit encounters. Consider, for example, Montaigne's use of this structure of thought when he remarked: "Wherever I wish to turn, I have to break through some barrier of custom, so carefully has custom blocked all our approaches" (1958, 119). Such a formula might equally, however, become a dangerous incitement to any lunatic who wanted to shrug off all restraint or spread some rabble-rousing gospel of his own. What then makes this the insight that lies at the heart of individualism?

Human life is everywhere subject to customs, rules, and restraints, but in most cultures these things change more or less insensibly. In European cultures, by contrast, we have a world in which rising generations develop new enterprises and often challenge the assumptions by which their parents lived. Some old "laws" are rejected, and in general some new "dutifulness" emerges. Enterprise is the key, and competition is the result, and this pattern appears not only in economic endeavors, but in ideas, moral sentiments, science, religious convictions, and everywhere else.

Human beings everywhere experience ambivalence about some area of life, and such feelings pose a serious danger to the settled order of things. Our evaluation of most things in our lives varies not only from person to person, but sometimes even from moment to moment. In Europe, however, we find the one civilization that found a way of combining ambivalence with social order. Ambivalence thus liberates the critical spirit, and it lies at the heart of many of the disagreements and conflicts among which we live. In our free societies, such attitudes can be entirely compatible with civility. The skill of combining ambivalence with civility did not come easily even to Europeans, however, and was especially difficult to practice in early modern times, when disputes about Christian theology and practice were at their most passionate. It took time before religious tolerance became a standard feature of European societies. In politics, centuries were to pass before we institutionalized the debate between government and opposition as the standard way of conducting public business. First religion and later socialism and nationalism subjected the harmony of European states to severe strains, but the eventual outcome was a societal condition not only remarkably free and tolerant, but also resilient and outstandingly prosperous. As modern European societies became prosperous and technologically inventive, even those who hated toleration and feared conflict had no alternative but to take notice. Everyone then wanted to understand the "secret" of European power and prosperity.

The basic "secret," one might say, is that modern European states differed from other cultures by the moral practice of individualism, in which the wants and beliefs of individuals are recognized not as disruptive, but as valuable in themselves. Intellectually speaking, individualism led to a revolution in the way in which Europeans thought about the world. The solid realities of traditional societies dissolved into subjective and objective components out of which Europeans could construct a world they found in some degree congenial. It was not at all irrelevant to this kind of pluralism that Europeans were divided into different cultural realms or states, each with its own language and traditions. These "national" variations stimulated each other. Custom, rank, and religion continued to be powerful elements in life, but alongside these universals of human experience something new had emerged: the recognition of difference as having a value of its own. The corresponding tendency at the level of the state was the appearance of sovereign rulers who could repeal laws without having to break them or ignore them. The right to repeal a law (whatever might be understood as "law" in this context) was essential in facilitating an unbroken moral legitimacy over the generations. The rule of law was thus to be distinguished from the commands of any ruler disposing of despotic powers; law must, of course, be distinguished from any sort of command, for law is not something we obey, but something to which we conform. Slaves may have to obey, but subjects conform to a law.

How did this new social and moral world differ from that of other cultures? The answer lies in the fact that in other cultures, custom and religion (along with the usual admixture of human caprice) determined the manner of life, subject to local variations. But whatever these variations, people in non-European societies lived according to what was believed to be the One Right Order of life, which supplied for each individual both a social location and a corresponding set of duties and expectations. Such orders in the most notably elaborated civilizations were the Hindu caste system, the Muslim sharia, and the hierarchies of the Middle Kingdom. And the basic point about these systems and of every other, down to tribal cultures, was that those living in such a world regarded their customs as the one right way of life. A consequence of this belief was a remarkable lack of curiosity about how other peoples lived. Lack of curiosity resulted from the belief that one need not take an interest in "error." Other ways of life were simply wrong! In fact, of course, most people in earlier times knew virtually nothing about the rest of the world. This contrast became one of the most conspicuous differences between European individualism and other cultures' traditional practices. Europeans were from an early period profoundly interested in how others lived, just as they were fascinated by other individuals' character. Shakespeare's creations--irresolutes such as Hamlet, lovers such as...