saw as characteristic of the modern era.
Individualism could mean lots of things.18 It could mean valuing personal freedom over social obligations. It could mean that people should have rights as individuals, like those to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness claimed in the US Declaration of Independence. It could mean that people should look inside themselves to find the authentic inner meaning of their lives or that expressing one’s own thoughts and desires was important. It could mean an honorable independence of mind or a disreputable selfishness.
We saw that Hobbes and other social contract theorists analyzed legitimate government by positing separate individuals and asking about their choices. This is sometimes called atomism or methodological individualism. The basic idea is not to take a stand on how much individualism is good, but to break society into its smallest units for clearer analysis. Emile Durkheim objected, arguing that individuals by themselves were not the smallest units of society. Society was made up, rather, of social relationships; individuals were always embedded in these relationships. Talcott Parsons continued this argument for seeing the social whole which conditioned all such individual behavior.
Most classical sociological theory rejected the idea that individuals were completely psychologically autonomous. “Self and society are twin-born,” wrote the pioneering American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley.19 This insight was also basic to the work of George Herbert Mead (excerpted in this volume) who saw the self as emerging only in communicative interaction. The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, saw individuals as striving for autonomy but never achieving it, partly because of complex and contradictory inner life, but also because they developed in constant and challenging relations with other people.
Georg Simmel (excerpted in this volume) wrote an influential pair of essays asking “how is society possible?” and “how is individuality possible?” He too saw the two as fundamentally interdependent, though sometimes in tension. Social structure provided the conditions for individuality to develop, including freedom. This could never be based on perfect autonomy. At the same time, individuals are not fully contained within their social roles and necessarily experience social structure as external. Simmel’s famous example was the way growing modern cities allowed individuality to flourish, freeing people from the constant gaze and restrictive norms of small communities. This freedom was the result of social conditions – the relative anonymity of urban life for example. It was not just human nature.
Ferdinand Tönnies formulated a similar distinction as a contrast between community and society (or association). Community was grounded in a sentiment of closeness of families as well as individuals; society was built out of more formally chosen associations like business corporations or professional societies. It was still a matter of connections, but with more feeling of autonomy, less of mutuality.20
Many other classical sociological theorists wrestled with shifts in community life, transition to cities, and the growth of more individual chosen and formally organized relationships. Tocqueville saw balance as crucial to the future of democracy in America. Durkheim and many others worried that family, community, and social solidarity generally were being undermined by excesses of individualism.
Parsons saw his work as resolving the question Hobbes had asked: how could social order emerge. He resolved it partly by denying that individuals ever existed outside social order, but also by studying the many different kinds of formal and informal organizations and larger institutions that people created. These gave scope for individuality, but within social relations. And they were knit together with each other in a web of functional interdependencies.
In the mid-20th Century, a number of sociological theorists suggested that Durkheim and Parsons had gone too far in privileging the social whole vs the individuals within it. George Homans and Peter Blau (both excerpted here) offered new theories of how social organization was generated from interaction among individuals. This was microsociology as opposed to the macrosociology of those like Parsons analyzing society at its largest. But it was different from symbolic interactionism, the approach that grew out of the work of George Herbert Mead. Mead’s approach focused on the ways individuals communicated with each other. Homans drew on behavioral psychology, including theories of operant conditioning. He sought an objective account of social exchange and the formation of groups. Peter Blau’s theory built on Homans, but emphasized how exchanges among individuals reflected their interests, a sort of cost/benefit analysis.
These sociological accounts of individuals and community partially mirrored distinctions of liberalism and conservatism in political thought. Liberalism is a tradition of political and social thought founded on individualistic ideas of freedom. Though in their exchange theories neither Homans nor Blau engaged political ideology, they shared the liberal focus on individuals. Conservatism, by contrast, often holds that too much freedom can be a problem if it undermines marriages, communities, and moral commitments. In one of the most famous works of classical sociological theory, Suicide (excerpted here), Emile Durkheim agreed with the conservatives on this point, offering evidence that an excess of freedom – or extremely rapid social change, whether good or bad – could produce ‘anomie’ or normlessness. This deprived peopled of good bases for moral judgement and even finding meaning in their lives; it could contribute to suicide. Here Durkheim followed Tocqueville, who coined the term ‘individualism’. He wanted to distinguish selfishness, which he said was found in all times and places, from the specifically modern equation of freedom with independence. He saw individual rights as basic to modern freedom, but as necessarily organized in social relations and a republican culture of virtue. He thought the Americans he observed were one-sidedly obsessed with personal freedom. In fact, Tocqueville and Durkheim were both political liberals, they were simply worried about excesses of individualism and drew on conservative thought to understand the more communitarian side of the equation.
Herbert Marcuse, a critical theorist and humanistic Marxist, also noted that exaggerated freedom could undermine the specifically capitalist form of modern society. This depended on self-discipline – even psychological repression. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, for example, Weber had described the importance of saving and reinvestment, both dependent on resisting impulses to enjoy luxuries. Equally, it was important for workers and managers alike to be committed to hard work, disciplined, and rationalistic. Parents absorbed this orientation and objected to their children choosing lifestyles that emphasized liberation over authority and discipline. But by the late 1950s and 1960s, Marcuse argued, capitalism had become more consumer-oriented. Workers were motivated less by discipline and more by the cash to purchase the ever-growing ranging of consumer goods – Cadillacs with fins, for example, refrigerators with ice-makers. This brought a loosening of repression. Artistic and Bohemian lifestyles and liberated sexual expression spelled a challenge for capitalism and the prioritization of social authority.
The issue for classical sociological theory was not only judging how much or what kind of individualism was good. It was also how to understand societies in which so much of social organization was based on the idea of individual choice. This was full of paradoxes and questions. Did individualism promote the idea of romantic love? Yes. Did individualism contribute to rising divorce rates? Also yes. Was there freedom in children being able to choose different occupations and places to live from those of their parents? Yes. Was family transformed by this freedom? Yes. For one thing, nuclear families were increasingly separated from extended families (grandparents, cousins, etc.). Typical families became smaller.
Individualism’s most important early appearance was in religion. The Protestant Reformation encouraged ordinary people – to read the Bible for themselves (not leave that to priests), pray in terms they made up for themselves (not simply by official prayers handed down by the church), and develop a personal relationship with God.21 These ideas had an influence on the rise of science, which depended on researchers thinking and judging facts for themselves, not simply accepting what was traditionally understood to be correct.
Pervasive individualism often hid important biases.
