Individualism versus its Critics
[This is work in progress - comments welcome]

Tibor Machan=20

Why Anti-Individualism Needs Scrutiny
=09In the wake of the collapse of centrally planned socialist
experiments around the world, questions have been raised about the
soundness of what has for a couple of centuries been the major alternative
to that system of political economy, namely capitalis m. Capitalism, in
turn, rests on a legal framework in which the individual is treated as of
prime importance.  The legal framework of the United States of America,
for example, is one in which the individual is often given prior
consideration, standing in importance above the society or community.=20
Thus American law has tended, in many cases, to stress the basic rights of
individuals to freedom of speech, religious thought, association, and even
trade.  Although the USA is by no means fully protective of individual
rights, as these are spelled out in the Lockean tradition of political
theory, it has certainly been identified closely with that tradition.=20
Indeed, both of the major ideologies of that society, modern liberalism
and conservatism, give some me asure of lip service and even sincere
respect to individualism, the general idea that human beings are
sovereigns and not the natural subjects of kings or involuntary servants
of their ethnic, racial, national or other groups.
=09In opposition to this individualism we have seen the rise and fall
of Marxist style socialism-or at least a version of it, as implemented in
the Soviet Union.  Some think that the demise of the Soviet Empire brought
the socialist alternative to its knees , but this is far from true.  In
any case, the central feature of socialism, as Marx makes clear in many
places but most accessibly in Grundrisse, is that every human being is
essentially a species being, one that nature of which is to be a part of
the or ganic whole (or body) of humanity.  (Some argue that in a sense
Marx was an individualist because he was forecasting the full emancipation
of the human individual in the coming communist world.  But this
emancipated individual turns out to be nothing othe r than the fully
realized specie-being.)
=09Even by those who reject Marxism, in all of its varieties, many
versions of socialism, in particular democratic and market-socialist
visions, are still widely championed.  Yet all non-Marxist socialist views
share this feature of the Marxist version, nam ely, that human beings are
primarily if not exclusively social parts, with society, the class, or
some other large collective as the significant entity to be considered as
we organize our lives.=20
=09A slightly different system that calls into question the
significance of the individual, communitarianism, has been gaining some
prominence, as well, particularly because its endorsement of the group is
not linked explicitly to the term "socialism."  The communities that stand
above individuals in importance can vary, of course, from the family,
tribe, nation, race, all the way to humanity itself.  The main point here
is only to note that in rejecting individualism of any kind, one is
usually going to op t for one or another of these collective beings.  (The
term "collective" is, of course, problematic because it must refer back to
the individuals who comprise it.  At that point it becomes interesting
just what the status of these individuals turns out to be.)

Individualism Under Assault
=09Perhaps the most potent weapon favoring collectivist systems is
the opinion many intellectuals have of individualism and its economic
system, capitalism or the free market, laissez-faire economic order.=20
Because individualism, as understood by a great ma ny social-political
theorists, has a very bad reputation-"willingly sacrificing all other
human values so as to cultivate ... a particular group of virtues-notably
independence, courage and honesty"1-so does liberal capitalism.  This,
then, appears to giv e collectivist political systems and economies a
clear moral advantage. As Susan Mendus puts it, the "liberal commitment to
independence-to achieving things on one's own ... is [factually] false
...[and] morally impoverished."2 Individualism is taken to be an
anti-social, atomistic, hedonistic, morally subjectivist account of human
life, much of which is traceable to the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.
=09In our time this version of individualism is embraced, more or
less intact, by neo-classical and Austrian economists, with the basic
premise that all human behavior is motivated by a kind of narrow,
subjective self-interest or utility maximization.  And the flaws of this
kind of individualism, taken as the basis of the classical liberal free
society and free market economy, serve as targets of the collectivist
critics.  Having shown this individualism to be untenable, the system
closely associated with i t, namely, limited government that stresses the
basic negative rights of individuals, is also taken to be discredited.=20
The alternative must then turn out to be some version of collectivism.
=09But the charges against individualism are open to serious
criticism.  Those charges, as expressed by a variety of criticisms, will
bear some scrutiny.  It will become evident that individualism need by no
means embrace atomism, anti-social attitudes and policies, hedonism or
moral subjectivism.  Nor need limited government or a constitution of
natural rights rest on this radical individualism that the critics usually
target.
=09Often the tone in which of much of the criticism of individualism,
and its broader social-political philosophy, classical liberalism, is
articulated is reminiscent, in fact, more of political propaganda than of
a scholarly exchange.  Some very harsh word s roll of the lips of people
who find fault with individualism and its social philosophical companion,
classical liberalism.  Marx, for example, refers to it as an "insipid
illusion"-not exactly a kind term.  Alasdaire MacIntyre regards liberalism
itself as vile, nasty, and very harmful.  [T]he Marxists understanding of
liberalism as ideological, as a deceiving and self-deceiving mask for
certain social interests, remains compelling....Liberalism in the name of
freedom imposes a certain kind of unacknowledged domination, and one which
in t he long run tends to dissolve traditional human ties and to
impoverish social and cultural relationships.  Liberalism, while imposing
through state power regimes that declare everyone free to pursue whatever
they take to be their own good, deprives most p eople of the possibility
of understanding their lives as a quest for the discovery and achievement
of the good, especially by the way in which it attempts to discredit those
traditional forms of human community within which this project has to be
embodied .3 MacIntyre has argued4 that individualism is an invention and
individual rights are artifacts based on it with no enduring, substantive
moral significance.  This historicists approach-one that claims for
ethical and political ideas no more than the tempora ry validity of being
well received by certain social forces in certain historical
epochs-consigns individualism and liberalism to the status of ideologies
that arose as some point of history to serve some specific historical
purpose=BEin the case of Marx, t he purpose of facilitating social
productivity.=20
=09To put it differently, in moral and political philosophy what is
wanted is an identification of norms, principles of personal or community
conduct, that can be established as sound, true, rather than arbitrary, a
function of some people's preferences or otherwise arbitrary choices.=20
MacIntyre and others have argued that individualism as a putative
political theory rests on no more than such arbitrary preferences that
happen to have been expressed in a given epoch of Western history.  Marx
put the point s uccinctly: [t]he further back we go into history, the more
the individual, and, therefore, the producing individual seems to depend
on and belong to a larger whole: at first it is, quite naturally, the
family and the clan, which is but an enlarged family; later on, it is the
community growing up in its different forms out of the clash and the
amalgamation of claims.  It is only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil
society', that the different forms of social union confront the individual
as a mere means to his priva te ends, as an external necessity.5 So prior
to the eighteenth century, presumably, the individual as a choosing
entity, one who is seen as having the right to choose his social
relationships-via the principle of the "consent of the governed"-did not
exist.=20
=09It is, however, John N. Gray who delivers the most virulent
frontal attacks on individualism: [I]individualist cultures devour their
own moral capital and slide into debt-ridden stagnation as individualism
corrodes family life and long-term planning and investment.6 So, then,
what ails the poor nations of the globe is individualism, plain and
simple.  Exactly how this is done is not made clear but one may gather
that individualism is the sort of social philosophy that demoralizes us,
robs us of our sense of community and destroys our generosity, charity and
fellow feeling.=20
=09In less harsh but equally damaging terms, Richard Rorty maintains
that individualism is an ideology to which our age has come to accept,
even though it is a mistake.  As Rorty puts it, [His own
pragmatist-communitarian alternative] takes away two sorts of metaphysical
comfort to which our intellectual tradition has become accustomed.  One is
the thought that membership in our biological species carries with it
certain "rights," a notion which does not seem to make sense unless the
biological similarities entail the possession of something non-biological,
something which links our species to a nonhuman reality and thus gives the
species moral dignity.7 Rorty's point is that if his especially radical
pragmatic approach to politics is right, such that principles of social
organization are a function of what a given community has chosen,
collectively, to embrace, then rights, specifically those of the indi
vidual human being, are unfounded.  They lack cognitive significance, so
when one claims that one has such rights and no one should violate them,
there is no basis for that claim.  All such claims tell us is that the
view is one that some groups of people have embraced, while other groups
have decided to accept some other view.  So Rorty can say, in one of his
many more popular writings, that "[We]cannot say that democratic
institutions reflect a moral reality and that tyrannical regimes do not
reflect on e, that tyrannies get something wrong that democratic societies
get right." 8
=09Given these harsh or drastic conclusions, offered by some of the
most prominent thinkers of our time, about how the polity of individual
rights fares, it seems to me worthwhile to examine some of the criticisms
and see whether they hold up.  First, let's get a clear idea of what
individualism amounts to.  Then let us look at the views of some
particular critics of individualism.  Finally, we shall distinguishing
between two types of individualism, which I call "naughty and nice," and
proceed to show that the nice version is, of course, superior to
collectivist alternatives.=20
=20
Essentials of Individualism=09
=09Mary Midgley makes the point that "our own culture, in particular,
has grossly exaggerated the degree of independence that individuals have,
their separateness from other organisms, and also their degree of inner
harmony."9 But she goes on to add, But these exaggerations do not affect
the more modest facts that underlie them. Whenever people have to take
decisions, the language of agency has to be used, and the reasons why it
had to invented constantly become obvious.  The language of impersonal pr
ocess, by contrast, can scarcely be used at all for many important aspects
of human behavior and, when it is used there, it often serves only for
fatalistic evasions.10
=09What are those modest facts that underlie an exaggerated
individualism?  They are few but vital for human existence.  These facts
may be distinguished, though not separated.=20
=09One such fact is a certain indispensable level of separateness of
every person.  A human being is an individual in part insofar as he or she
experiences a measure of separateness-for example, that his or her death
does not require the death of another hu man being.  One dies by oneself.=
=20
Insofar as that involves the extinction of one's identity in some
important respect, one is an individual with some sort of separate
identity.=20
=09Another component is an element of self-directedness.  This lies
in the social psychological dimension of human life.  Self-determination
and free will is a part of individualism is so far as an individual is
someone whose initiative-choices, decisions a nd actions-is instrumental
in who he or she is and will become.  Individualism regards everyone as
something of a self made person, even if only in a minimal respect,
culminating in no more than acquiescence.  Individuals, according to the
individualist t radition, do have a determining, decisive influence on
their own lives, on who and what they will become over their lifetime of
development.  The idea is that how human beings develop is not reducible
to the influence of other people, of history, or even of their parents.
=09Furthermore, the capacity for self-generated rationality is a part
of the individualist conception of the human being.  Every human being is
capable of engaging-and, within different individual conceptions, more or
less responsible to engage-in creative reasoning, figuring things out,
learning of the world-of understanding it-to some perhaps minimal but
essential extent.  Cognition, at least at the conception, idea-forming
level, has to be generated by the person-it can't be imposed.  A person is
not a c ontainer into which ideas are funneled or poured, or something
that responds to various stimuli passively.  There is an element of
self-generated understanding, however minimal, on the part of the
individual according to the individualist social philosop hical tradition.=
=20
=09Individualism also upholds moral autonomy for human beings, in the
sense that it identifies the individual as the source of moral choice.=20
The point is not, as Steven Lukes argues, that individualism involves the
sort of subjective autonomy that "will ev entuate in ethical
individualism, the doctrine that the final authority of ethical behavior,
values, and principles is the individual alone."11 What individualism
requires is that the initiative to do what is right, or wrong, must come
from persons and cannot be wholly explained by reference to external or
structural causal (e.g., cultural or genetic) forces.  It is not others,
nor one's DNA or environment that is held responsible for what the
individual does.  Thus, quite independently of whatever mora l stance is
applicable to guiding individual conduct, whatever that stance may
be-whether utilitarian, altruist, egoist, hedonist, Buddhist, or
Christian-it is an essential point of individualism that it is the agent
who makes the moral choice, whose inpu t is the most vital one for whether
one takes the morally right or wrong action.  Indeed, all bona fide moral
blaming and praising is implicitly individualistic.  Those, for example,
who are very concerned with recent legal developments, whereby people ar e
able to plead as an exonerating condition that they couldn't help
themselves-where the mental incapacitation defense comes in-are
understandably associating this with the demise of individualism with
"group think," where the notion reigns that "I" don't do anything, "we" do
things or things happen to us.=20
=09There's also the idea associated with individualism of the
political sovereign of the human being; the idea that in a polity
ultimately it is the individual members of that polity who are sovereign,
not the polity itself, not the leaders of the polity, n ot some
representative crook of the polity, but the notion that it is you and I,
as citizens who are sovereign, who are not subject of some other sovereign
whose natural position or superiority or divine selection has come to
entitle him or her to power o ver us.  This political individualism which
this sovereignty notion is associated with is, I think, very much a part
of American political tradition.  Indeed, those of us who come to the
United States from outside, from the very beginnings of our stirring s as
Americaphiles, have kind of associated America with this individualism
precisely for that reason; we always thought that when you come within
these borders you are not anyone else's master and neither is anyone else
your master; you're sovereign.  Th is is a form of individualism for which
America is well known and also often criticized.=20
=09Finally, the notion of liberalism which is also associated very
much with the American political tradition is related to individualism;
the idea that individual rights, negative rights to life, liberty, and
property, are something that is by nature to be ascribed to every adult
human being.=20
=09So, these six conditions, I think, pretty much characterize
individualism.  I might have mentioned a seventh, but it takes us into
realm of metaphysics.  There was a hint of it in the first
one-separateness.  There is the metaphysical form of individuali sm that
is probably beyond the debate that I am participating in with this talk
and with other parts of my work and that metaphysical individualism
maintains that every being in an essential respect is a particular being.=
=20
There are no general or concret e universal beings.  There is no such
thing as society.  There is no such thing as family as a concrete thing.=20
There is no such thing as the team or America, or blacks or whites, or
women or men; there are beings and all beings, who although they can be of
a specific kind, nevertheless in their actuality are individuals.  As I
say, this is a slightly distinct form of individualism from the one with
which I'm concerned, although it is often mixed up with it.  The Platonist
Criticism
=09We have seen a sketch of the nature of individualism.  Let's now
examine a few of the more severe criticisms of individualism.  To begin
with, here is a brief look at the most traditional, perhaps even the most
powerful, anti-individualist thesis, namely , a certain understanding of
Platonism.=20
=09If one takes Plato's dialogues to actually spell out a
philosophical viewpoint-and there is dispute about whether one should take
Plato's dialogues that way-as indeed many textbooks have, many teachers
do, and many references to Plato imply-then I think one comes to the
conclusion that Plato favors the reality of concrete universals over
concrete particulars or individual beings.=20
=09Particular beings, you and I as we manifest ourselves in this
actual, visible world, are in some sense inferior, are imperfect versions
of the perfect rendition of this being in a concrete universal.  This can
be taken on analogy to the way a perfect cir cle, as defined in geometry,
is superior to any actual circular being.  Thus it is human nature-the
form of humanity-that has the elevated or noble status. We who imperfectly
participate in this form are always inferior, and lamentably so.  It is,
accordi ngly, no accident that Western civilization has always had
something of a disdain toward the body, whether it be in connection with
work, sex, business, material possessions and the like.  There is this
legacy of the pure idea or spirituality as superior to the actual
approximation of it here in this world.=20
=09This is anti-individualistic in that the individual is always an
inferior part of reality.  The truly elevated part of reality is the
universal, the ideal.  The criticism of individualism derivative of this
Platonic outlook is obviously embodied in a ver y comprehensive,
philosophical point of view.  In response, one would have to deal with at
least some aspects of that point of view, to which I return later.=20
Aristotle as Anti-Individualist
=09There is a more moderate view of ancient anti-individualism.
That's the Aristotelian notion that the human being can only be realized
as a part of the whole.  The whole doesn't have to be all of humanity as
is implicit in a certain reading of Plato, but something like the family,
polis, community, or some other group.  Because Aristotle identifies human
beings as essentially social, it follows from his view that no individual
can flourish apart from the realization of this communitarian good.=20
Aristotle himself seems to have been ambivalent on this matter, for the
self-sufficiency he associates with living in the polis need not deny an
essential individuality to every human being.  One can be essentially both
individual and social, given a certain unders tanding of these notions.=20
But in the history of political theory it is often claimed that
Aristotle's much revered and highly influential position implies the
rejection of individualism, mainly because everyone does best in life when
belonging to a commu nity.=20
=09There' are many echoes of this view in our own time, what with the
reemergence of communitarianism in the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre,
Richard Rorty, Bellah & Co., and Amitai Etzione.12 There are certain
elements in Aristotle's position, however, tha t stress individualism
since he gives a prominent place to self-directedness, something that does
not square fully with an exclusively communitarian conception of human
flourishing.  The idea in Aristotle is that it is, in fact, the individual
agent of co nduct who is virtuous or vicious. It is in part, not wholly,
through the individual's own effort that his or her character is achieved
and thus the ethical (or unethical) life is lived.  Still, certainly a lot
of scholars who are critical of individualism draw on Aristotle in their
criticism.=20

Christianity vis-=E0-vis Individualism
=09Then there are some elements of Christianity that do not
completely square with the individualist requirements that I have laid
out, despite some that do.  The idea that each human being is a distinct,
unique child of God and that the saving of each indi vidual's everlasting
soul is the task of the ethical life, suggests crucial elements of
individualism clearly enough.  But there are also anti-individualist
directions that one can find in Christian theology.=20
=09For example, St. Augustine said that ever part of the community
belongs to the whole. This holism also seems to be present in
Christianity.  Thus it appears there are certain ways that the individual
may be sacrificed to the whole, or at least the purp oses of the whole.=20
When Jesus said, "Compel them to come in" and was taken by some-e.g.,
missionaries-to suggest coercing people to join the faith, this is
anti-individualistic.  Debate certainly prevails about this in theological
circles, namely, as to whether Christianity is more supportive or less
supportive of individualism-Michael Novak and Robert Sirico seem to stress
the individualist element in the American debate, while the Catholic
Bishops tend to stress the collectivist element, whereby compel ling
people to help the poor, thus denying their free choice in the matter of
practicing the virtue of charity and generosity, seems to be favored.=20

The Marxian Critics
=09Now we come to some major criticisms of individualism and I'm
talking here about Marxism and several of its representatives in the 20th
century.  I mention only two who are most important in philosophy and
political philosophy in particular, Charles Tayl or and C. B. Macpherson.=
=20
The Marxian criticism is based on a holistic view, to the effect that
humanity is, as Marx said, an organic whole and it's on a historical march
toward self development or emancipation (of, course, with all the
individuals having reached their full, unalienated specie-being in the
process).  The period of human history in which individualism was
articulated, and to some extent political and public policy, is a glitch;
it's important, indispensable, but nevertheless still just a g litch. I
always try to characterize it as somewhat like the adolescent stage in an
individual's development; a kind of reckless, anarchic, self indulgent,
hedonistic period of humanity, at which time the ideology of individualism
had an objective function of promoting productivity, of getting us to be
more prosperous, of sifting us out from the era of feudalism, of
tribalism.  But, nevertheless, this ideology has very little to do with
truth.  It is not true that individuals are free, that they are sovere
ign, that they are self directed.  It is a convenient story we tell
ourselves of that a certain time of our history which propels us into
a new era which will then overthrow this individualist outlook, both in=20
mind and in fact.
=09I hope I don't need to tell more about the Marxian view.  I think
most of the talk about obsolete economic theories of the 18th century-the
reference to "voodoo economics" on the lips of some political
campaigners-draws a good deal from the Marxian notio n that the
institutions, including economic ones, associated with individualism have
only a set period of time during which they obtain.  That's because they
perform some function in the larger historical scheme of humanity's
development.  What is the cru cial point influenced by Hegel and Marx is
that they certainly do not identify the nature of human reality accurately
and correctly.=20
=09Now, there are others who draw on this Marxian tradition and mix
it up with Aristotle and the communitarians.  The leader of this group
tends is Amitai Etzione, the sociologist at George Washington University
who edits The Responsive Community. The jour nal has published essays
criticizing libertarianism which the author associates intimately with
individualism.  Individualism here is taken to be the homo economicus
approach, the sort Mary Midgley called an exaggeration of individualism.=20
It posits that everyone is a utility maximizer and social relations among
human beings are entirely optional, neither biologically necessary nor
morally required.  It is taken in this approach that the human individual
is in principle, essentially, an isolated self akin to Robinson Crusoe on
an island who just appears out of nothing but manages to survive and
flourish.  If another individual of this type shows up, say Friday, the
two then face the option of engaging in mutual transaction, each having
their personal, pri vate, subjective preferences set, with no role played
by ethics, their biological, psychological or social nature in this
process.=20
=09This economistic model of human nature and human behavior has, of
course, had a major role in certain aspects of individualism and spelling
it out has been one of the tasks of many famous political economists, such
as Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Gordon Tullock, and the late George
Stigler.=20
=09The critics, including communitarians and neo-Marxists, have found
this version of individualism quite false to the facts; they have found it
sociologically, psychologically or ethically flawed-flawed in almost every
respect.  Because, unfortunately, som etimes this model of human nature
and human behavior is taken out of the realm of technical economics and
used to make sense of political economy-by some economists who have
elevated and who come to be looked upon as not just technical economists
but spok espeople for an entire system of political economy-when criticism
is leveled at this type of individualism, it appears that individualism
per se is felled by the blows that are delivered.  But this move is quite
hasty.
=09Usually, the alternative placed before us is a rather ambiguous
kind of we-ism, a communitarianism in which the community is quite
undefined.  No answers are given to the crucial questions: Which is the
community that we belong to?  Where is it?  How lo ng does it last?  How
do we come to belong to it?  How do we leave one of them and go to the
other?  By what standard of assessment do we judge some communities to be
barbaric or corrupt and make our way, if we can, to some others? Feminist

Critique of Individualism
=09Some radical feminists, especially Catherine MacKinnon, attack
individualism, often from a kind of neo-Marxian perspective that has been
transformed to embody feminists components.  The essential point is that
there is class warfare, though not the econo mic kind, but one involving
gender classes.  It is supposed to be these classes, not the individual
members of the classes, who matter politically and ethically.=20
=09For example, MacKinnon is one of the feminists who rejects all
talk about the right to privacy, for example in connection with defending
the abortion option for women.  She recommends, instead, that the
discussion about women and abortion be cast in the collectivist parlance
of group power.  Here, again, the group is looked upon as the greater
reality than the individual.  This line of reasoning follows one advanced
two centuries ago by August Comte, the French father of sociology.  He
made the point tha t, [The] social point of view ... cannot tolerate the
notion of rights, for such notion rests on individualism.  We are born
under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our
successors, to our contemporaries.  After our birth these obli gations
increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any
service.... This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human
morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of
benevolence, the common source of happi ness and duty. [Man must serve]
Humanity, whose we are entirely.13
=09This notion, it'll be easily seen, harks back all the way to
Platonism-the idea that humanity is a reality which stands over and above
every individual or even every subgroup of humanity. =20

Radical Pragmatism
=09Finally, I return to the radical pragmatist view of individualism.
Pragmatism is most noted for its rejection of metaphysical foundations-of
human knowledge, human morality, scientific understanding, indeed of
everything.=20
=09The idea that there is something on which our belief systems can
rest, which can hold it firm, which gives it some sort of stability, is
rejected by pragmatism. In some ways this is just another rejection of the
mode of thinking encouraged by Descartes a nd his famous attempt to build
all our beliefs on the one certainty that the individual thinker exists as
a subjective, conscious self.  That much all pragmatists have in common,
including Charles Pierce, John Dewey, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Richard
R orty, just to mention the major ones.=20
=09Out of this position Rorty advances the belief that when we do
have some understanding, this rests on tents of thought agreed to by
members of different communities.  In his famous essay "Solidarity or
Objectivity?" Rorty rejects the possibility of objec tive knowledge-the
sort we imagine we might get of reality after hard work, research, and the
clearing away of prejudices and preconceptions.  It is a myth that we can
know the world as it exists, unconditioned by the thinking that we do in
coming to kno w it.  We are able to keep a stable, apparently independent
world view in tact only because our community supports us in this.  We
have our various communities, we belong to them, and in terms of what
these communities give us, we formulate an understandi ng of the world.
Rorty goes so far as to indict much of our history of ideas, claming that
"The tradition of Western culture which centers around the notion of the
search for Truth, a tradition which runs from the Greek philosophers
through the Enlightenm ent, is the clearest example of the attempt to find
a sense in one's existence by turning away from solidarity to
objectivity."14 This objectivity, if attainable, would make individuality
possible-one could, at least now and then, take an independent view of
reality and thus perhaps criticize even his or her own community.  But
Rorty insists that no such objectivity is possible because, as he puts it
in another place, "we should have to climb out of our own minds" in order
to attain such a stance.  Indeed , he thinks, following Ludwig
Wittgenstein, that any question that suggests that he need to do this is
meaningless, "should not be asked."15
=09There is no role for the individual, with his independent
consciousness, to ascertain or to stand apart and criticize the
community's viewpoint.  Rorty, as have others done, brings in Wittgenstein
to give him support in this epistemological thesis.  Witt genstein has
this argument, well known in contemporary philosophy, called the "private
language argument." In it he maintains that a certain type of empiricism
is false, one according to which every individual gains sensory
impressions of the world on whi ch he then, individually, builds an
understanding of reality by organizing, naming, and drawing inferences
from these sense impressions.=20
=09Wittgenstein held that no individual could ever create a language
since such a language could never admit of being corrected.  If I create
my own language, every name that I give-just like if I give a name to
somebody-is necessarily right because it is a n act of will or choice, not
a matter of a publicly affirmable or correctable discovery.  If I created
a language all on my own there would be no way anyone could correct what
I'm saying and doing.  No one could hold me responsible for having made a
mista ke.=20
=09Wittgenstein, no simple thinker to interpret, is taken to have
argued that the only way that language can be understood as a medium
within which errors and corrections can be made, is if we look upon it as
a social creation.  Neither the subjective certa inty of Descartes'
individual mind, nor that of the empiricists' subjective sensory
impressions, can provide us intelligible knowledge.  Thus the argument is
supposed to oppose individualism. Another statement of this view which
Rorty advances was advance d nearly two centuries ago by August Comte: The
man who dares to think himself independent of others, either in feelings,
thoughts, or actions, cannot even put the blasphemous conception into
words without immediate self-contradiction, since the very language he
uses is not his own.  The profoundes t thinker cannot by himself form the
simplest language; it requires the co-operation of a community for several
generations.16
=09So, Rorty supplements his pragmatist view of anti--foundationalism
with Wittgenstein's private language argument, thereby disposing of the
notion that any individual can could ever take a cognitively independent
stand from his or her community.  In effec t this means that true
dissidents do not exist, there are only warring groups. Some Answers to
Critics
=09There are other criticisms of individualism, such as social
psychological, sociological, historical and related ones.  But I will
concentrate on those I discussed above because the others tend to be
derivative of them.
=09Was Plato's criticism a telling one?  There are different ways of
reading Plato and one way to read it is to imagine that his dialogues
present us with an image of how to keep some semblance of the rationality
vis-=E0-vis the hustle-bustle world facing us. One such way is to develop
certain philosophical myths, useful suggestions embodying half-truths.=20
=09Thus it is arguable that the realm of perfect ideas is a
philosophical myth.  It's not supposed to be some objective reality, one
wherein actual ideals subsist as concrete universals, superior to
individuals here in visible worlds.  Rather, arguably, wha t Plato may
have had in mind is that we should always have a set of standards to which
we refer the actual and in terms of which the actual world might be
improved.  This reading of Plato does not exactly endorses individualism,
but it certainly softens t he blow against it.  One has to become less of
a Platonist and more of a supporter of Socrates, the more common sensical
teacher of Plato.  Or, to put it another way, one should move in the
direction of Aristotle's empiricism and remove the dualism entire ly and
endorse a universe in which there really is just one kind of reality and
within this reality, the individual is one whose existence we can, if we
careful, if we think about it carefully and bear it out, affirm.  And if
we affirm the individual huma n being's existence within this one system
of reality, I think the result will be that the individual is of paramount
significance.=20
=09As to the criticism, here I would prefer the ethics of Aristotle
towards polities.  I would argue that the individual has to be a member of
a community but it is not necessary for the individual to be a member of
some particular community or to ignore on e community over another, or to
flourish within one community rather than another.  I think there are many
different communities within which individuals can flourish.  But if you
retain the self directedness portion of individualism, as you must with
Ari stotle, I think there is no conflict between Aristotle and
individualism. There is a conflict between Aristotle and some thoughts of
individualism, for example the Hobbesian nominalist version and I'll
return to this matter later.17
=09As to the Christian criticism of individualism, it depends largely
on how one is to appreciate the theological criticism of a philosophical
position.  Taking Christianity as a fairly straightforward doctrine, where
it joins hands with philosophy, there a ppears to be no major conflict
between certain crucial aspects of individualism and Christianity.=20
Augustinian Christianity sees the individual as a moral agent with free
will and the responsibilty to live a virtuous life.  Thomism draws on
Aristotle and thus affirms the role of the individual ethical agent, since
Aquinas takes seriously the place of the individual's moral choice or
initiative, as did Aristotle.  As such, there appears to be no major
opposition between the main thrust of Western Christian ity and
individualism, especially if one adds to this the distinctive Christian
doctrine of every individual person's status as a child of God and as
having the responsibility to achieve everlasting salvation by his or her
own chosen deeds.=20
=09There is one problem with this, though, which is that because of
the otherworldly aspects of Christianity, it is problematic just what
exactly is the individual.  That is, to get a clear idea of the nature of
the human individual may not be possible, in light of this central
otherworldly component.  So, "Who is the 'I' from a Christian
perspective?" is impossible to answer in a way that is accessible to
non-believers and non-Christians.  There is also the often cited provision
of The Bible that Christian s may need to be forceful in bringing others
to their faith.  "Compel them to come in" can be rendered in such a way as
to lead to policies that would rob the individual agent of his or her
autonomy in making the decision to aspire to the kingdom of God.1 8
=09There is, then, some ambiguity in the individualism that is found
within Christianity. That could arguably be a flaw in the Christian as
against the secular version of individualism, since if one is to appraise
a theory of individualism, one has to know something about the nature of
individuality-e.g., what is the extent of the person's sovereignty, what
are the implications of that sovereignty and self directedness?  One
cannot answer such questions from a point of view that is heavily laden
over with s upernatural referencess.=20
=09As far as the Marxian view is concerned, although it is now
somewhat out of favor, many still embrace it.  It even receives some
support from scientists, such as the late Lewis Thomas who endorsed the
conception of humanity as an organic whole.19 What i s flawed in Marxism
is something wrong with all anti-individualist positions, namely, that it
is contradicted by certain very evident facts on the part of every human
being, including, especially, one as Marx-a creative intellectual.=20
Intellectuals, and i n our intellectual capacity, each one of us, are
nearly always engaged in original acts.  We are not the kind of beings who
can be entirely submerged as mere passive particles in some revolutionary
progression of history.  There is always the role individ uals play in
understanding human history, recasting and criticizing it, not to mention
putting its lessons into practice.  Marx is an especially renowned example
of a critical human individual who has a personal, self-determined impact
on events That's one reason that the late Sidney Hook could not square the
role of the individual in history with hard line Marxism.  Marx by
implication excludes himself, as a powerful, potent member of the
historical drama, from his understanding of human affairs.  Thi s is a
powerful argument against the Marxian conception of humanity as a
collective entity-because it cannot make room for people like Marx, there
is a self-referential inconsistency in the system.=20
=09As to communitarianism, the following should make a telling
critical point: In the first place, as The Economist recently noted,
communitarianism "caricature outrageously" the substance of Western
liberalism, "calling it a doctrine of economic atomism th at pays no need
to man's social nature."  This, as the editors noted, "is simply false."20
Second, the communitarians haven't a clue to which community we owe our
loyalties.  A little story will bring home this point:  On a trip a while
ago, I put my thr ee children through the agony of actually hearing a talk
by Amitai Etzione, broadcast on National Public Radio from the National
Press Club.  My children were then 14, 13, and 8.  As I was listening to
Etzione, he went on and on about how "We ought to d o this" and "We might
do that."  My oldest daughter was sitting in the back of the van and at
one point she cried out: "Papa, Papa.  Who is this 'we' this man is
talking about?"
=09Even a smart child can understand the problems in Etzioni's and
many others' communitarianism.  Which community is the decisive one?  Is
it my fellow ex-Hungarians, members of the professional community in which
I work, my neighbors, fellow tennis player s, fathers, drivers of
minivans, lovers of travel, the blues, or Fred Astair's dancing,
libertarians, divorced men, or what?  What is the "we" into which the
communitarian is grouping us so that we can be understood fully, as who we
are, by reference to t his group? From Etzione's communitarianism no clue
is forthcoming.=20
=09Nor is there anything better to be said for Rorty's version of the
communitarian or solidaristic thesis.  Rorty talks about solidarity
replacing objectivity, but it is very difficult to figure out to which
group we do or should proclaim this solidarity.  Which one has this force
of obligation upon us?  Am I supposed to look at the world as a refugee?=20
As a member of a particular faculty?  Which is our point of view?  That of
an ex-Hungarian?  An academic?  A person with a given yearly income?  It
is ent irely unclear, in terms of this position, where one refers to as a
member of a community, concerning judgments one needs to make every moment
of one's waking life.=20
=09Wittgenstein does not help here, either.  What the famous ordinary
language philosopher argued against was radical empiricism, the notion
that any single mind, faced with nothing but groupings of bits of sensory
impressions-sense data-could come to know the world, to attain
propositional or conceptual knowledge.  There is nothing in Wittgenstein
to deny a human being the independent ability to perceive some parts of
the world, just as other animals do this quite successfully, and use his
or her perceptua l information as a kind of anchoring point for checking
what beliefs are urged upon him.  The private language argument does not
tell against perceptual-only sense data based- knowledge.  As David Kelley
argues (following Ayn Rand), in his book written, i ncidentally, under
Rorty's guidance when the latter was Kelley's dissertation guide at
Princeton University,21 the ground of knowledge is perceptual, not sensory
or conceptual.  And as we would anticipate, from simple ordinary
experience and reflection, h uman beings begin to know.  They perceive the
world and are not simply told about it.  So they must take care,
individually, to remain properly anchored, to keep their bearings.  In the
end they must ground their understanding and thus their intellectual and
moral independence on their intimate contact with the world, via their
perceptual knowledge (something, incidentally, that they share with other
higher animals).  Unlike other animals, however, human beings must use
this perceptual data in order to gr ound their concepts.  This is true
even though once at the conceptual level, reliance on community is
central.
=09Furthermore, the idea that knowledge begins with community runs
aground when we consider just how this could happen?  No community has a
brain.  It's the members who do.  So even if after centuries of human
history the bulk of what any of us knows does c ome by way of what others
teach us, it could not have been like that from the start.  Nor is it
always like that now-there are plenty of cases in which children stand
their ground against their teachers, citizens against their leaders, one's
who often try to indoctrinate or brainwash them and whose efforts often
enough need to be and do get thwarted by individual resistance.  (For
Rorty and other communitarians, the heroic stance of the dissident is
impossible-such folks are either deluded in thinking the y are lone rebels
or actually amount to lunatics.) Individualism, Naughty or Nice?
=09So critics of individual score badly against the central tenets of
that view, the idea that a human being's individuality is central to what
he or she essentially is.  There are forms of individualism not of the
type that much of the classical liberal t radition inherited, which can
withstand the collectivist assault. The particular type of individualism I
have in mind stresses humanity of each individual.  This humanistic-or
classical-individualism recognizes that there is in nature a distinct
class of beings we call human.  They are justifiably designated as a dist
inct class, not simply arbitrarily named, as nominalism would have it.  In
other words, there are indeed good reasons to classify human beings as a
distinct class of entities in nature.  Yet there is also good reason to
regard their individuality as one of their essential, central features.=20
So on the one hand we must abandon radical individualism but on the other
hand we can firm up the foundation for individualism by noting that in the
nature of the caseby a study of human nature, by a careful examination of
what it is to be a human beingwe arrive at the conclusion that one of the
crucial factors about being a human being is that human being are
individuals.  In response to this, instead of saying, with Hobbes, that
there is no human essence, we can say in opposition to both Marx and Hobbe
s thatthe human essence is the true individuality of man. The Case for
Classical Individualism But of course saying all this is not quite proving
it.  Does what I dub classical individualism have anything going for it?=20
Just how difficult it is to answer this might be appreciate from the fact
that the very idea of "the nature of something"an idea vitally important
to classical individualism as well as to most natural law defenses of
classical liberalismhas been under attack for several centuries.  I have
already mentioned Hobbes' dissatisfaction with classical naturalism, the
view that there are natures of things in reality.  To this day the
dominant philosophical systems and positions have rejected the possibility
of identifying the nature of human, or for that matter any other beings,
as objectively real, a fact of independent reality.  Inde ed, one reason
such doctrines as deconstructionism and relativism have fared well in our
academic communities is that these simply extend the anti-naturalist,
skeptical viewpoint to special areasto wit, literary interpretation and
ethics.  I have already noted how the multicultural movement owes a good
deal to the rejection of classical naturalism. Platonism Rejected.=20
=09One of the major objections to the idea of an objective or real
nature of something has to do with Platonism.  It was Plato's form of
naturalism that had been most widely developed, embraced and utilized in,
for example, natural law theory.  Even in th e tradition of natural rights
there is often an allusion to a Platonist conception of the nature of
something.  But there is a very serious problem with this view of "the
nature of something." We need first to remember that for Plato the nature
of anything was to be a timeless, unchanging, perfect form in another,
timeless dimension of reality.  We do have some plausible examples of this
when we study geometrywe can, perhaps usefully enough, t hink of the
perfect circle as being in this timeless, perfect, unchanging realm
however we might actually understand the precise status of being of the
figures geometers define.  Euclidean geometry is a formal field, so at
least there is a plausible case here. Yet when we consider the nature of
trees, or cats, or human beings, or justice, or governments for us to know
such a thingwhat the nature of, e.g., a human being iscan we expect that
we have to know something that is timeless, perfect, unchanging, eternal ?=
=20
Hardly.  It is an impossible request.  No human being could know such a
thing simply because we are actual, temporal beings.  We have only so many
years to discover what's what.  We are not in a position to ever
demonstrate the truth of some clai m as to what something is timelessly,
perfectly, and finally. Out of this Platonic tradition of naturalism
arises a skepticism, a belief that if that is what we have got to come up
with to know the nature of man, we simply reach an impasse.  No wonder
Hobbes did just that by concluding that skepticism concerning wh ether
things have a naturethat is, whether in reality different beings really
are different by virtue of certain features or attributes they possessis
the sensible conclusion.  So instead of naturalism, the alternative of
nominalism seemed the best we cou ld ask for.  Thus, human nature might be
one thing in this epoch and another in that epoch, one thing for this
society, another for another society, depending on how it all suits us.=20
That this makes it impossible to rest any sort of stable social or po
litical order or conception of a good society on human nature, natural
law, or natural rights was managed by a great deal of artificial
theorizing involving social contracts, conventionalism, pragmatism and so
on.  All of these views try to reinvent the stability that we lost when
the Platonic tradition of naturalism had to be abandoned because it lead
to skepticism. So we were left with two extremes: the radical skeptical
idea which issues in nominalism and radical individualism, =E0 la Hobbes,
and the Platonic alternative of an unattainable, hopelessly utopian and
ideal conception of human nature.  Both imply skeptic ism in the end.=20

Rethinking Essentialism.  =20
=09We should rethink essentialism or naturalism, not abandon it.=20
When we talk about the essence or nature of something we are most sensibly
talking about what that thing is, given the best, most reasonable way to
classify our experiences.  The classificat ion that we thus makeon the
basis of evidence we have gathered (limited to the context of our present
knowledge as that may be provided that we are consistent and reasonably
historically complete) to form our conception of what the nature of
something isi s stable enough, given that the world cannot just up and
change without rhyme or reason.  Even such a changeable being as we are,
can be classified in terms of certain basic capacities that can be stable
enough to guide us in our political and even perha ps in our personal
lives.  It can be just as stable as we can expect the world to be, just
from our knowledge of history and from our common sense.  Actual aspects
of the world, its substance-what the sciences tells us, what our common
sense shows-cannot be thought of in the same fashion as we think about
formal features-for example, logic.  The material of these fields is
capable of being handled by constructing final definitionsalthough some
dispute even thatbecause these definitions are devices of measurement and
not actual objects.  But human beings, cats, zebras, or just actions are
not mere measurementsthey actually exist and can undergo gradu al change,
something which our theory of understanding them must also accommodate.=20
In other words, we need an approach to understanding the nature of things
that both gives us stability as well as makes room for gradual change.=20
The world itself, as we know it from common sense, demands just that.  We
can learn it from history, from s cience, from everything that we are
aware of:  Nature is stable as well as changing!=20

The Stability of Human Nature.=20
=09When we study homo sapiens over the 100,000 years they have been
on this earth, we see that human beings do, indeed, have a stable nature
as thinking animals-biological entities that have the distinctive facility
to think and depend upon exercising this facility in order to make their
way through and do well in life.  Moreover this thinking capacity of human
beings doesn't just happen to go into motion.  It is one feature of
conceptual consciousness that individuals must initiate itthey must
themselves start this process, otherwise they perish (unless they enlist
the thinking of others, who have started it, as a substitute).  We can
compare this human characteristic to what we know of other animals. They
behave as they need to so as to survive without any need for individual
effort. Mistakes come about in the rest of the animal world through "acts
of nature," not through failu re or neglect.  No other beings engage in
malpractice outside of humans. Human beings seem to always be confronted
with the possibility of mishaps through their own agency, which accounts
fort the existence of criticism!  They can be wrong as well as righ t in
what they do, unlike others animals, and it is often up to them. This
characteristic, in turn, introduces an inescapable individuality into
their nature.  It is by their own particular initiative-circumscribed by
their family backgrounds, traditions, habits, customs, environment,
opportunities, climate, and so forth-that they must confront the task of
living their lives.  So they face the task of implement ing or
establishing their individuality every moment of their lives.  But it also
quickly points to the social nature of human lifethe very fact that they
are thinking animals points to the fact that flourishing in their lives is
utterly interwoven with their fellow human beings from whom they must
learn, with whom they will find enjoyment and love, with whom they will
trade and play and produce and carry on all the most exciting aspects of
their humanity. Individualism Humanized
=09Now how does all this help us out of some of the problems and
paradoxes that critics of individualism tend to focus upon?  For one,
since we have now a viable, sound, or feasible conception of human
natureone that need not be timeless and yet has the sta bility one expects
of what the nature of something iswe can identify some general principles
we could count on to guide our lives.  These principles are going to be
general enough to apply over time to succeeding generations even if they
will not be guar anteed to hold for eternity as earlier naturalists had
hoped.  Of course, as Aristotle already recognized, the precise
application of the general principles that rest on our knowledge of human
nature may not be exactly identical in different situations, at different
times.  Being honest in the twentieth century prob ably requires applying
the principles to telephones, call waiting, fax machines, and computers.=20
Two hundred years ago people didn't have the responsibility to be honest
in just this way.  So honesty, although it may well be a very general
human virtue that we all ought to practice, will also have its very
individual, regional, temporal, and culturally related manifestations.=20
And so, too, with other virtues such as courage, prudence, or justice.=20
=09There can be very many general human traits of character that make
for human excellence that we ought to practice.  That these must be
applied in particular circumstances does not imply at all that they have
to be subjective, mere preferences or choices that we invent at a given
moment.  These could well be human virtues, so that, for example,
trans-historically we could consider a person 400 years ago and if we
discover that he is a liar we could say that he did something objectively,
morally wrong.=20
=09What is most unfortunate in the critiques of individualism is that
no attempt is made by any of the critics to discover a more generous
rendition of this social philosophy, one that sees the high regard
individuals has for the human individual somewhat m eritorious, somewhat
sensible, somewhat morally palatable.  Instead we find the critics to
stress elements of individuals that seem obviously morally repugnant and
often wholly unrealistic.  Individuals are taken to be presented as
isolated, atomistic cre atures whose "independence" is not the virtuous
motivation of someone who is set on ascertaining truth and justice
objectively, without prejudice or free of group pressure but the vice of
fantasizing some kind of solitary existence, of denying moral conne ction
and responsibilities with family, friends, and others.  That the
individualist is mainly concerned with denying subjugation, oppression, a
natural subservience of the human being to some supposedly higher
group-which is most often translated as subs ervience to some select other
persons-does not appear to phase the critics very much (although some,
such as Mary Midgley, make mention of this motivation).=20
=09Nor does it appear to be of importance for the critics to take
into consideration that competing accounts of our nature need to be
considered not only on the basis of how wildly certain elements of our
nature might be exaggerated but also on how exaggera ting aspects of our
nature one way may be far more harmful than another.  Thus while it is
true that individualism can be propounded in an arid fashion, a la the
economists' approach to understanding human life, this has been far less
harmful than the sim ilarly exaggerated collectivist accounts.  Surely one
concern of a moral evaluation of alternative social systems ought to be to
consider how corruptible respective systems can be.  And collectivism
certainly has fared badly in some of its renditions.  Et hnic, religious,
tribal, national, economic and other human groupings have reeked havoc
upon humanity aplenty throughout history.  The Nazi horrors, racism,
ethnic cleansings, lynch mobbings, the Inquisition and the like all
provide examples of collectivi sm having gone awry.  Consider, as just one
example, the Russian author Tatyana Tolstaya's observation, in an essay
written for The New Republic magazine shortly after the fall of the Soviet
Union, of the nature of one grand a horrid example of collectivi st social
organization: ... According to [collectivists] "the people'' is a living
organism, not a "mere mechanical conglomeration of disparate
individuals.'' This, of course, is the old, inevitable trick of
totalitarian thinking: "the people'' is posited as unified and whole in
its multiplicity.  It is a sphere, a swarm, an anthill, a beehive, a body.=
=20
And a body should strive for perfection; everything in it should be
smooth, sleek, and harmonious.  Every organ should have its place and its
function: the heart and brain are m ore important than the nails and the
hair, and so on.  If your eye tempts you, then tear it out and throw it
away; cut off sickly members, curb those limbs that will not obey, and
fortify your spirit with abstinence and prayer.22 Is this really such an
exaggeration, after all?  Marx himself refers to human society as "an
organic body."23 St. Augustine states that "... every part of the
community belongs to the whole ..."24
=09In an attempt to understand human ideals it is not enough to
conceive of the best conceivable rendition of what a given ideal might
bring forth.  It is also important to explore how readily it can be
corrupted, how vulnerable to corruption is the impleme ntation of the
ideal.  The individualist idea can, of course, be made to serve unsavory
purposes, but never so readily and with such cataclysmic results as those
of collectivism, small or large.=20
=09Most importantly, however, individualism can be rendered in terms
that are closer to the truth of the human situation, both actual human
capacities and realizable human ideals.  It seems, also, that many of the
welcome features of collectivism, the empha sis on sociality, community,
fellow feeling, generosity, charity, and such, can find a home within
individualism, provided no violence is done to the element of free choice,
of the human being's capacity and responsibility to forge a life of
excellence fo r himself or herself volitionally, without being coerced
into what he or she will do and be.  The only way one can take the
criticism of individual freedom seriously, as some kind of telling point,
is if one believes that an individual's freedom to choose means that what
is right or wrong are something this choice determines.  But there is no
need for this subjectivist provision in individualism.  It is quite true
that individuals ought to form social ties, that they ought often to be
loyal to their group s, that it is best for the to choose to be generous,
compassionate and kind toward others.  It is also true that mere
individual initiative will not lead to full human flourishing, which is
the thrust of Aristotle's observation that human beings are by n ature
social-political animals.  Even thinking cannot get much beyond mere
familiarity with, as it were, the surface of the world, unless it is
enhanced by the kind of education that only many generations' combined
(individual) effort can produce.  Just a s the argument for individualism
shows that the individual is indispensable, it also demonstrates that the
company of other individuals is essential, to the flourishing of human
life.=20
=09But it does not follow from any of this that individuals ought to
be coerced, by others, to comply with the tenets of any given social
arrangement.  All that can be demanded of anyone is that he or she accept
the protection, for everyone, of his or her moral space or personal moral
jurisdiction-that is, the respect of our basic rights that make it
possible for us to act on our own initiative.  It is the hallmark of
individualism that even what is dead right for someone to do must be a
matter of choice.  Without that the very dignity of the human being-the
capacity for a person to earn moral credit for doing what is right-is
destroyed.=20

Endnotes:

1 Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate (London, England: Routledge, 1994), p.
123.=20

2 Susan Mendus, "Liberal Man," in G. M. K. Hunt, ed., Philosophy and
Politics (London, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 47.=20

3 Alasdair MacIntyre, "Nietzsche or Aristotle?" in Giovanna Borradori, The
American Philosopher (Chicao, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p.
143.=20

4 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).=
=20

5 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), p. 17

6 John Gray, "From Post-Modernism to Civil Society," Social Philosophy and
Policy, Vol. 10 (1993), p. 44.=20

7 Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (London, England:=20
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 31.=20

8 Richard Rorty, "The Seer of Prague," The New Republic, July 1, 1991, p.
37.=20

9 Op. cit. Midgley, The Ethical Primate, p. 103.

10 Ibid.

11 Steven Lukes, Individualism , (London, England: Oxford University
Press, 1973), p. 101.=20

12 Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community (New York: Crown Publishing
Co., 1993), Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper &
Row Publishers, 1985).=20

13 August Comte, Cathechisme positiviste (Paris: Temple de l'humanite,
1957).=20

14 Op. cit., Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 21.=20

15 Ibid., p. 7.

16 August Comte, A General View of Positivism (New York: Robert Spellers &
Son, 1957), p. 246.=20

17 See, for more on the measure of individualism and the natural rights of
individuals in Aristotle's philosophy, Fred D. Miller, Jr., Nature,
Justice and Rights in Aristotle's Politics (Oxford, England: The Clarendon
Press, 1995).=20

18 For more on this, see J. D. P. Bolton, Glory, Jest & Riddle, A Study of
the Growth of Individualism from Homer to Christianity [New York: Barnes
and Noble, 1973).=20

19  Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell (New York: Viking, 1971).=20

20  The Economist, March 18, 1995.=20

21 David Kelley, The Evidence of the Senses (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana
State University Press, 1986).=20

22 Tatyana Tolstaya, "The Grand Inquisitor," The New Republic, June 29,
1992, p. 33.=20

23  Op. cit. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 33.

24 St. Augustine, quoted in Thomas Beuchamp, ed., Ethical Issues in Death
& Dying (Englewood-Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984), p. 103.=20