Relation to others· Society and history
Individualism
Axis: Individual and society — To understand social life, should we start from individuals or from the social whole?
Society is nothing more than the individuals who compose it and their interactions. Their choices, interests, and rights explain social phenomena, and institutions must be conceived starting from them.
Movements 2
Liberalismexplicit
Liberalism starts from the , not from the social whole: institutions are conceived starting from persons, their choices and their rights, not the reverse. Society is not an organism that would precede its members and subordinate them to its end, but an association in the service of individual ends. Hence the primacy of the rights of the person over the demands of the collective.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government · Mill, On Liberty
Show inferred positions (1)
The Enlightenmentinferable
Society is thought from the individual, not the reverse: it is the individual, subject of rights and reason, who comes first, and institutions exist only to serve his ends. This individualism, extended by the nascent economics of , underlies the critique of the bodies, estates and corporations that hem the person in. is the exception here, subordinating the individual to the , a sign that the current is not monolithic.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government · Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Philosophers 5
Lockeexplicit
The individual is primary: bearer of natural rights (life, liberty, estate) in the state of nature, he enters society only by his own consent and the better to protect those rights. The community is an aggregate of free and equal individuals, not an organic whole that would precede them: methodological and normative .
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 2 (the state of nature) and ch. 8 (individual consent)
Millexplicit
Because no form of life holds a priori for everyone and no one knows in advance what suits him, Mill makes liberty the condition of those experiments of living through which each tests and shapes his own character. Individuality is therefore no mere private amenity but the mainspring of all progress: it is from original minds that the new truths and practices the whole of society inherits arise. Hence his target, the despotism of custom and the conformism that level characters and dry up that source, a threat all the more pressing as the power of mass opinion grows.
On Liberty, ch. 3 (of individuality as one of the elements of well-being)
Benthamexplicit
For Bentham, the community is a fiction: its interest is but the sum of the interests of the members who compose it. There is no collective entity with a good of its own above individuals; social happiness is but the aggregate of individual happinesses. This is a clear methodological individualism, the foundation of the whole utilitarian calculus.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §4 (the interest of the community, the sum of individual interests)
Show inferred positions (2)
Schopenhauerinferable
The parable of the porcupines says it all: pressed by the cold they draw together, but their quills force them apart, and they end by finding the right distance, that of politeness. The man of rich inner life prefers to suffer a little cold than to be pricked by contact, and holds solitude to be a privilege rather than a lack.
Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II, §396
Zhuangziinferable
Zhuangzi's wisdom is that of an individual who loosens himself from roles, offices and social recognition to preserve his inner freedom: better a free turtle in the mud than a revered shell in the temple. Society and its institutions, far from constituting the human, deform him by imposing distinctions and ambitions foreign to his nature. Priority clearly goes to the singular individual against the social whole, but through withdrawal and flight rather than a claim of rights.
Zhuangzi, ch. 17 (the turtle in the mud) · Zhuangzi, ch. 4 (the useless tree)
The porcupine's right distanceStanceAttested · Schopenhauer
Close enough to keep warm, far enough not to be pricked.
In a famous fable, describes porcupines that, numb with cold, huddle against one another, but whose quills force them apart; by trial and error they find the middle distance where one keeps warm without being pricked, and this distance, he says, is called politeness. The stance to cultivate: neither the fusion that wounds nor the solitude that freezes, but a warmth held at the right distance, all the wider the more one carries within oneself the means to keep oneself company.
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