HINCHMAN, Lewis P.the Idea of Individuality

University of Chicago Press
Southern Political Science Association
The Idea of Individuality: Origins, Meaning, and Political Significance

Author(s): Lewis P. Hinchman
Source: The Journal of Politics, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), pp. 759-781
Published by: University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Southern Political Science
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TheIdea of Individuality:Origins,
Meaning,and PoliticalSigniicance
Lewis P. Hinchman
Clarkson University
The contemporary liberal/communitariandebate depicts the self as essentially static and un-
spontaneous: in the first instance, as a detached agent of choice equipped with de facto un-
examined desires; in the second, as (optimally) the embodiment of virtues and narratives
imbedded in socially established practices. The notion of individuality, as it developed from
Goethe and Mill to the present, suggests a way to rethink this dichotomy. Individuality-as
distinguished from individualism-evokes the notion of personal identity constituted both
through reflective reexamination of the givens of life and through the continuous integration of
diverse traditions and influences into a coherent whole.
T here is something disquieting about the recent-and indeed also the

classical-debate between liberals and communitarians. In spite of the acuity
of their theories, both parties offer a curiously attenuated, flat, and static pic-
ture of the individual. Exponents of the liberal side, taking this label broadly
and inclusively enough to embrace, e.g., Locke, Bentham, and Hume,
Rawls, Dworkin, and Hayek, agree less on specific policies than about the
way in which social and political questions ought to be approached. The
point of departure for liberal theorizing is nearly always the individual, ab-
stracted from context, equipped with certain defacto desires, interests, and
needs, and freely choosing some set of institutions or rules. The common
good emerges at the intersection of these individually conceived and articu-
lated goals; it may involve elaborate mechanisms for redistributing wealth,
or simply a minimal frameworkwithin which people pursue private ends. In
neither case is much attention paid to the potential development of the self
and its powers of judgment. That is, the primary purpose of social and politi-
cal institutions here is to allow individuals to get what they already want, not
to induce them to reevaluate their wants.
The communitarians, of course, have skillfully exposed the difficulties in-
herent in a theoretical project that must move back and forth between ab-
stract "original positions," states of nature or hedonistic calculi and the real
The author wishes to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for its early support
of this project.
JOURNAL OF POLITICS, Vol. 52, No. 3, August 1990

? 1990 by the University of Texas Press
760 Lewis P. Hinchman
world of history and politics. Alasdair MacIntyre (1981, 147), for example,
has branded liberal individuals "citizens of nowhere" who have been "in-
vented" partly by political theorists and partly by the civil society whose
spokesmen they are. Similarly, Michael Sandel (1982, 64) has sought to show
that the assumptions of a Rawlsian original position "stand opposed in ad-
vance to any conception of the good requiring a more or less expansive self-
understanding, and in particular the possibility of community in the con-
stitutive sense.
One would expect from writers in the communitarian tradition a fairly ex-
plicit account of how the identity of the individual self both instantiates and,
at times, transcends the patterns of socially transmitted norms or forms of
life. Yet only Hegel among communitarian theorists (assuming that is a fair
categorization of his writings) really offers such an account. From Burke and
Durkheim to Sandel and MacIntyre, communitarians appear preoccupied
with the essentially negative task of demonstrating the futility of theories
that presuppose "unencumbered subjects of possession" (Sandel'sterm). De-
spite their internal disagreements, all would emphasize that the identity of
the self does (or ought to) embody the historical traditions, practices, nar-
ratives that give substance to ideas of virtue and vice, and preserve the self
from anomie, linguistic-moral confusion, and "beggar-thy-neighbor" poli-
cies. MacIntyre (1981, 161) goes so far as to say that, in a well-ordered polity,
there would not even be a self, an "I," apart from these traditional patterns.
A variant of the communitarianposition, embodied for example in Richard
Sennett's writings, treats the emergence of the modern individual as at least
contemporary with, if not the cause of, the decay of a thriving public sphere.
As individuals emerge from the network of conventions, roles, and formulas
of civility that once circumscribed their identities, they tend to see social
relationships as a medium in which to express what is personal and private.
This "quest for personality"is at the same time a wish for intimacy and feeling,
a desire to articulate one's needs and emotions and to form close attachments
to others on that basis. Underlying Sennett's analysis is the assumption that
the real content of individuality in our time is precisely this inner world, the
erstwhile private sphere now made quasi-public. Where MacIntyre and
Sandel dismiss the individual as a ghostly abstraction floating somewhere
above real historical communities, a product of liberal moral imagination and
economic institutions, Sennett (taking his cue from Rousseau rather than
Locke) treats the sphere of individuality as almost a pre-social phenomenon,
the residue of feelings, emotions, and experiences that remain as strictly
one's own when the socially mediated aspects of one's identity are eliminated
or ignored (Sennett 1978, 259-60).
At the risk of oversimplification, one might characterize the weaknesses of
the liberal and communitarianpositions as follows. Liberal writers (as Sandel
points out) do have difficulty showing how there can be a shared good that is
The Idea of Individuality 761
something more than the aggregation of individual self-interests. Commu-

nitarians, for their part, often fail to describe how it could be possible for
rebellion, alienation, "enlightenment," or reformation to represent anything
more than mistakes in judgment or lapses into misguided egoism. The "com-
munitarian self" is thus, in its own way, static and undeveloping, insofar as it
is a composite or reflex of the traditions and values that constitute it. The
"negative" power that manifests itself as critique, self-distancing, personal
independence, or autonomy is not treated as something essential, indispens-
able to becoming a fully achieved human being. MacIntyre, to be sure,
admires traditions that allow for internal disagreement and a more or less
open-ended search for the good. But it is not clear whether his position is
consistent with his own descriptions of well-ordered societies and traditions,
or even how such internal disagreements can legitimately arise within them.
One figure on the liberal side who sensed the historical and social thinness
of liberal individualism and reacted against it was John Stuart Mill (Eisenach
1985, 6). In On Liberty, Mill argued that at least liberty of action, if not lib-
erty as such, must be justified by its contribution toward encouraging and
preserving individuality. But individuality here is by no means synonymous
with individualism in the sense that this latter term pervades Benthamite
utilitarianism (every person is to count for one and no more than one). Mill
meant by individuality something very different: development toward the
fullest, most harmonious expression of one's powers. Such development will
likely involve certain transformationsboth in one's previous desires and in
one's relationship to those aspects of personality, both cognitive and affective,
that have been implanted by custom, authority, and tradition. In short, Mill
hoped to remain within the liberal/utilitarian orbit while working out a dy-
namic, almost teleological concept of the individual, one that could also be
rendered more historically concrete.
In the following essay I treat Millian individuality as a promising point of
departure but amend it in two directions. First, I reconstruct the intellectual
context of the idea of individuality and explain how it differs from related
ideas such as individualism. Individuality proves to be a notion that is in
some respects alien to classical liberalism and utilitarianism;it was invented,
in fact, partly in reaction to the Locke-inspired epistemology of the French
Enlightenment. After showing how Mill adapted it to his own version of
utilitarianism, I explore how some later authors try to advance the notion of
individuality beyond Mill's account.
Second, I argue that the best way to conceive of individuality is not, as
Mill assumed, to imagine it in light of organic growth. A promising alter-
native is found in a model of individuality based on the development of con-
sciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology, a process whereby "immediate,"taken-
for-grantedaspects of the self must first be externalized and negated in order
finally to be reassimilated into an emergent individual identity. What is cru-
cial to this process is the way in which traditions and socially mediated roles
are integrated into individuality and animated by it. We cannot really be in-
dividuals without appreciating the extent to which all individual identity is
socially mediated, any more than a poet can create original images without
drawing on the richness of a language that has evolved over the centuries and
possesses a trans-individual meaning.
THE DISCOVERY OF INDIVIDUALITY
Deciding what individuality means is partly a matter of finding an appro-

priate contrast concept. One could argue, as Burckhardtdid (1958, 143-50),
that individuality already influenced the beginnings of the Italian Renais-
sance because people recognized and asserted their separate existences,
rather than conceiving themselves through a general category such as na-
tionality, family, or corporation. Alternatively, one could depict the 17th and
18th centuries, especially in England, as the matrix of a "possessive" indi-
vidualism (Macpherson 1962). Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham described so-
ciety as an aggregation of individuals, each striving to maximize self-interest.
Their political philosophies bespoke an awareness of the individual not only
as a distinctive existence but as ontologically prior to the collectivity. In both
of these accounts, the pre-modern world-especially the Middle Ages-
supplies the contrast concept. Certainly, no conception of individuality can
stray too far from either version without contravening long-established lin-
guistic usage. If individuality means anything at all, it must denote at a mini-
mum human beings understood as separate, discrete selves aware of them-
selves as such.
Nevertheless, a third view of the individual took shape during the 18th
century, one I shall term the concept of individualitystrictly speaking (Lukes
1973, 17-22). Although its advocates occasionally cited both Renaissance
and liberal/Enlightenment sources, they began to locate the antipode of indi-
viduality in the mechanistic and rationalist outlook of their own time, and in
what would much later come to be called "mass society." They were less con-
cerned with overthrowing pre-modern vestiges than with formulatingan ideal
of development and harmonization that might prevent the newly emergent
individual from becoming abstract, artificial, and lifeless. Rejecting the rela-
tively ahistoricalapproachof their predecessors, they were fascinated by his-
tory, both personal and cultural.
In the English-speaking world, Mill contributed the most to making indi-
viduality a familiar category of political thought. Yet Mill admitted that he
had borrowed it from the German statesman, Wilhelm von Humboldt.
Humboldt drew his inspiration from Schiller, Goethe, and the early German
romantic movement, as well as from certain philosophers who were in many
respects their mentors. From Kant and Fichte, Humboldt appropriated a
thoroughgoing metaphysical dualism that described human nature in a series

of dichotomous relationships: reason and sense, moral obligation and inclina-
tion, ideal man and empirical man, abstract understanding and sensibility,
and freedom and necessity.' Starting from such assumptions, the romantics
sought to formulate a vision of human life that would demonstrate how these
opposed moments could be reconciled. Humboldt himself wrote that "the
ultimate object of all our mortal striving is solely to discover, nourish, and
recreate what truly exists in ourselves and others" (1854, 103-104). Each
person has a naturally given, undeveloped potential for harmony that must
be elaborated in a unique way. This is the same idea that Goethe had struggled
to express in his poems and plays, and finally brought to clarity in his autobi-
ography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth). A is in fact Goethe
rather than Humboldt who supplied the most vivid expression of individu-
ality in the sense given currency by Mill.2
The educated society of Goethe's childhood still took its bearings from the
Enlightenment's conviction that humans had a definite nature, and that their
behavior could thus be predicted and controlled. But Goethe's generation,
stimulated by Herder's historical school, learned to value the particular, the
historically contingent and concrete reality, as against the Enlightenment's
universalizing tendency. For Herder, who taught his youthful admirers to
appreciate the distinct spirit and contributions of various cultures, the word
"individuality"at first referred to unique collectivities-tribes, nations, cul-
tures-rather than specific persons. Goethe took the obvious step of extend-
ing Herder's meaning to include singular persons as well.
In one sense, Goethe always remained indebted to Enlightenment prin-
ciples. He insisted that human beings, despite their national diversity, shared
an essential nature (Goethe 1969, I, 301, 421). But he and his contempo-
raries could not accept the account of human nature that to them typified the
French Enlightenment-d'Holbach's Systeme de la Nature-which reduced
the rich diversity of nature and culture to abstract laws and passive, me-
chanical responses (Goethe 1969, II, 108-110). Instead, Goethe saw in hu-
man beings an urge toward growth stimulated by their natural and cultural
surroundings. All of his acquaintances, writings, travels, and scientific pur-
suits offered him opportunities to discover who he really was. The harmony
set down by Humboldt as the goal of all human energies seemed to Goethe
the as-yet-unrealized source of all his artistic endeavors. His efforts had to be
'For instances of such dichotomous thinking see Schiller (1965), fourth and twelfth letters;
Fichte (1956, 18-34); and Fichte (1970, 93-119).
'The thesis that the fully-developed concept of individuality first emerges in Goethe's autobi-
ography should be credited to Weintraub (1975, 1978) who has examined autobiographical
literature up to and including Goethe's to substantiate his claim. But the same result can be
reached by working backward from more recent ideas of individuality and seeking out their
common source.
directed at creating, in an overt, objective shape, the individual that he only

sensed himself to be. Such a project could not go forward in solipsistic iso-
lation but demanded a dialectic between the self and the world (Goethe
1969, II, 8).
Karl Weintraub (1978, xv) has pointed out how much Goethe's Dichtung
und Wahrheit departs from time-honored models of autobiographical litera-
ture. Members of traditional societies inherited clearly defined patterns of
personal conduct ("scripts"for life) that embodied the needs, ideas, and leg-
acy of their culture. In such societies, one's self-evident task and the measure
of one's attainment lay in living up to these accepted models of a virtuous
life. When their members thought about the direction implicit in their lives,
they tended to imagine it as a teleological unfolding of an inherent potential,
not as a development of individual possibilities realized because of the inter-
play between the self and its environment (Weintraub 1975, 830). The world
did not present them with opportunities for self-discovery in the way Goethe
and Humboldt imagined.
Charles Taylor'sreconstruction of the "expressive" theory of the self like-
wise furnishes a valuable schema for locating Goethe between the Aristo-
telianism of earlier centuries and the, by then, highly influential mechanistic-
rationalist pattern of thought. For the once-dominant Aristotelian outlook,
the cosmos embodied a "meaningfulorder of qualitatively differentiated lev-
els" (Taylor1975, 4); the world was a text in which one could read the divine
plan. The emerging mechanistic paradigm undercut its predecessor by de-
scribing the world without reference to final causes or any interpretive key.
For the new science and its Enlightenment progeny, one had to objectify the
world, freeing it of anthropomorphic, imposed meanings, in order to ap-
prehend its true structure. The subject had to define itself by its own will
and efforts; it could no longer hope to discover any cosmic order.
The German romantic/expressivist movement, including Goethe, Herder,
and Humboldt, seemed to revive aspects of the older Aristotelian tradition,
especially the notion of purposiveness. Nevertheless, it was essentially mod-
ern in the postulate of a "self-unfolding subject" expressing itself in its ac-
tions, relationships, and creations: "Totalk about the realization of a self here
is to say that the adequate human life would not just be a fulfillment of an
idea or a plan which is fixed independently of a subject who realizes it, as in
the Aristotelian form of a man. Rather, this life must have the added dimen-
sion that the subject can recognize it as his own, as having unfolded within
him. This self-related dimension is entirely missing from the Aristotelian tra-
dition" (Taylor1975, 15).
Now, a critic of the argument that the German romantics "discovered" in-
dividuality might concede the break between them and older models of vir-
tuous life but urge that it was actually Rousseau who inaugurated modern
individuality by defending the values of spontaneity, natural sentiment, and
authenticity against the artificialtastes and social masks imposed by civiliza-

tion. Yet Rousseau never portrayed individuality as a development of inchoate
selfhood toward its own realization in and through the world. Rather, he
tended to imagine the true self as something present from the very begin-
ning, as sentiment or heart which one need only heed, not develop. Society
could corrupt and distort this true self or sacrifice it in the name of a stern
virtue-ideal (as Sparta and Rome did), but that self never emerged in any
dialectic with its world. For the German romantics, however, Bildung or
self-cultivation seemed the very life of individuality, the guarantee that one's
nature would not remain forever hidden away in unseen recesses of the soul.
The difference between Rousseau and Goethe might be clarified by ar-
ticulating a distinction between individualism and individuality. Rousseau's
philosophy remains within the liberal tradition precisely because it still por-
trayed society as an association of individuals, however much the laws and
mores of society may predispose them to regard their own good as identical
with that of the commonwealth. I propose to call the liberal ideal of the indi-
vidual by the name individualism. Individualism has three components that
deserve special stress. The first is pointed out by Tocqueville (1956, II, 193):
"Individualism . . . disposes each member of the community to sever him-
self from the mass of his fellows, and to draw apart with his family and his
friends, so that, after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly
leaves society at large to itself." The second is corroborated by an American
sociology text (Queen et al. 1956, 459-60): "Usually, individualism is used in
American discourse . . . to refer to economic endeavor and enterprise. It
connotes striving in some self-reliant and relatively unfettered (particularly
by government) way for achievement and success, in short the acquisitive
urge. This notion is not identical with what we may call individuality-the
right to be 'one's self,' to develop one's own individual personality . .. to be
different, to be a nonconformist, to dissent from orthodoxy if one thinks it
necessary, in short, the right to diversity." Finally, liberal individualism tends
to see human desires as simply given, often by nature (as in Hobbes), but at
least by one's social and economic position. Mill stands out in the liberal/
utilitarian tradition partly because he insisted that progress should bring
about changes in the objects of human desire, convincing people to reform
their very conception of what constitutes a worthwhile life. Mill did this, at
least in part, because he was influenced by proponents of individuality.
Individuality differs from individualism in all the three respects men-
tioned above. It does not imply any isolation of the self, just the contrary:
"only mankind combined is the true man, and the individual can only be
joyous and happy when he has the courage to feel himself in the whole"
(Goethe 1969, I, 421). Nor does it suggest any sort of acquisitive drive, as the
sociology text rightly emphasizes. Finally, individuality is a dynamic notion.
The impulse behind this theme among German intellectuals was to show the
isolated and abstract person a path of development and transformation that

would, if successful, culminate both in genuine self-discovery and a glimpse
of harmony between the self and its cultural or natural environment. Al-
though the lines of development are never sharply defined in advance, "indi-
viduality" does summon people to regard their whole lives as open to drastic
revaluation. De facto desires are never taken as nondebatable because they
may not represent what an individual truly is and wants. In sum, individu-
ality may in certain respects have been an outgrowth of the older indi-
vidualism, but it embodies a very different idea of what constitutes a satisfac-
tory life.
Goethe's version of the individuality idea, however, contains some du-
bious claims. Picturing individuality as a creation of nature, as though the
latter were a "demoniacal"force (Goethe 1969, II, 423-24) controlling the
destinies of individuals, he attributed his poetic gifts to an indwelling, invol-
untary natural power. Humboldt went further, citing Goethe's treatise on
plant metamorphosis as the paradigm case of individual development. The
nature/individuality parallel transcended mere metaphor; both writers imag-
ined nature as a vast demiurge that created individualities much as it created
flowers and trees in its struggle for self-transparency. Certainly many con-
temporary readers would reject such a naturalizing of individuality.3 In the
wake of Darwin, people are less inclined toward pantheism. Moreover, it is
hard to see why Goethe, who stressed the role of culture in forming indi-
viduality, should suppose that it possessed a pre-cultural, even biological
dimension.
But one might raise a still more serious objection to the organic under-
standing of individuality which depicts the individual as standing in the same
relationship to the world as an organism to its physical environment. Just as
plants draw sustenance through their roots, absorb sunlight, and put oxygen
back into the atmosphere, so too individuals strike roots in their culture, ab-
sorb experiences and ideas from social contacts, and then return to the en-
vironment the creations of their own individuality. There is a certain plau-
sibility to this sort of image when one reads Dichtung und Wahrheit or
Wordsworth'sPrelude and realizes how an individual can be nurtured by a
culturally benign setting. But it would appear much truer to human life, at
least in the twentieth century, to emphasize the discontinuity between indi-
viduality and nature. Individual development often involves crises, collapses
of cherished relationships and beliefs, the eclipse of previous self-definitions,
bitter and painful battles to establish one's own identity. The image of natural
metabolism and smooth, unimpeded growth fails to communicate this sort of
experience, as Mill and Bosanquet realized later in the century.
3But by no means all modern readers would be skeptical. One, the philosopher David Norton
(1976, 21-23) has worked out a system of ethics that depends on the premise of a "core of self"
given by nature to each one of us.
INDIVIDUALITY IN MILL, BOSANQUET, AND THE MEADIANS
It may appear incongruous to discuss Mill in the same context with figures
such as Herder and Goethe who criticized the liberal-utilitarian tradition in
which he was schooled. Yet Mill's autobiography bears witness to a personal
crisis precipitated in no small measure by the aridity and narrow rationalism
of that tradition. Its adherents seemed able to demonstrate the folly of exist-
ing laws and practices, but they could not show plausibly what people ought
to make of themselves, how individuals might discover beauty, meaning, or
satisfaction in life. Mill found an antidote for his depression in the romantic
poets, especially Wordsworth and Coleridge, who shared many of the con-
cerns of their German contemporaries. In short, Mill is a theorist of indi-
viduality in large measure because of his receptivity to the expressivist
movement, not in his role as utilitarian.4And his infusion of liberalism with
expressivist ideas was designed to provide it with a more robust, historically
conscious, and multi-dimensional view of the self than the mechanistic one
presupposed by the Benthamites.
As noted already, Mill adapted the German romantic idea of individuality
to his defense of liberty. Like Humboldt, he argued that the supreme obliga-
tion of government lay in protecting individuality; indeed, liberty as a politi-
cal goal could ultimately be justified only if it encouraged individuality. But
Mill sharpened the older romantic idea by setting it in the context of his
theory of history. On the one hand, Mill thought of history as progressive.
As one surveys the social and political transformationsof the past few millen-
nia, one recognizes a tendency toward moral improvement, increased self-
discipline, and more effective organization. The most progressive societies,
such as England and the United States, contain literate, hard-workingpopu-
lations capable of "self-government" (Mill 1958, 30-36); in them, institu-
tions can be rationalized, despotism abolished, and individual liberty guar-
anteed, since it will seldom be abused. For Mill, progress such as this
depended on, among other factors, the emergence of a "commercial society"
or market economy that, by breaking down traditional barriers of caste and
estate, tended to make people more equal. Once equality of condition is the
rule, the natural "social feelings" of mankind, the "desire to be in unity with
our fellow creatures" (Mill 1961, 216), could become a powerful motive for
individual morality and for legislation that heeds the greatest happiness
principle.
4For Mill's account of the "mental crisis" which led to his reassessment of utilitarianism, see
his "Autobiography"(in Mill 1961, 82-99). Himmelfarb (1974, xx-xxii, 59-71) has developed
the thesis that there were "two" Mills, one defending liberty unequivocally in On Liberty and
another who would restrain liberty to make room for other kinds of goods. It is the second Mill
whom Himmelfarb prefers, partly because she recognizes-and rejects-the romantic or "ex-
pressivist" theory of individuality that underlies On Liberty, with its assumption of a quasi-
teleological development of the self toward moral and intellectual perfection.
On the other hand, commercial society clouds the prospect of future prog-
ress. It is a society increasingly dominated by the middle class, with its nar-
rowly acquisitive outlook and its "dogmatismof common sense." Mill consid-
ered any society dominated by one class to be "stationary" because few
within it will have the resources and determination to act or think in ways
different from the norm prevalent among the "mass" (Mill 1977, XVIII,
196-97). The sparks of genius and vision that, in earlier ages, insured the
progress of humanity toward higher stages of civilization would eventually
flicker out in our increasingly homogeneous commercial society, unless so-
cial and mental diversity could be kept alive (Mill 1975, 62).
In short, history is by no means as progressive as Mill sometimes makes it
seem. The engines of progress-the market economy and equality of condi-
tion-are also harbingers of stagnation and decline. For our purposes it is
important to understand the source of this stagnation. In On Liberty, Mill
suggests that archaic man heeded his passions and will to power far more
than the strictures of morality or conscience. Over time, society managed to
tame the strong, amoral man partly by means of law and political power, and
partly by the influence of religious ideas upon his character. Although such
internal and external discipline was necessary for the progress of civilization,
it has now reached such a pitch that most people scarcely have any will, pref-
erence, or identity left apart from what society has inculcated in them: "by
dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow" (Mill
1975, 58, 63).
Mill, in other words, creates a dichotomy between original nature or
"spontaneity," once a preeminent factor in the human personality and ar-
tificial, lifeless conformity, nowadays exercised officiallythrough religion and
unofficially by the "masses." His contrast between nature and conformity
calls to mind his early theory of poetry (Abrams 1971, 23-26), according to
which the intense, untrammeled expression of "feeling"or "nature"was sup-
posed to infuse true poetry. As one might expect, these assumptions find
their way into Mill's concept of individuality. Note the sort of metaphors he
introduces to illustrate what he means by individuality (Mill 1975, 56, 59):
"Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do ex-
actly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and de-
velop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which
make it a living thing." "Manypersons, no doubt, sincerely think that human
beings . . . cramped and dwarfed are as their maker designed them to be;
just as many have thought that trees are a much finer thing when clipped
into pollards, or cut out into figures of animals, than as nature made them."
Such metaphors sound very much like the ones Goethe and Humboldt pre-
ferred, making of individuality a dynamic, self-directing nature in each hu-
man being, awaiting only the proper circumstances to nurture it and pro-
mote its growth. Like Goethe, Mill claimed that "individuality is the same
thing with development" (1975, 60). So if we could remove or at least relax
the weight of conformity and mass mediocrity, we would soon witness an

efflorescence of individual, self-developing natures: "It is not by wearing
down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating
it, and calling it forth . .. that human beings become a beautiful and noble
object of contemplation" (1975, 59).
Mill's notion of individuality is open to criticism on a number of points. It
is, to begin with, left exceedingly vague in On Liberty. Moreover, Mill's
identification of individuality with "vigor"and "naturalimpulses" entangled
him in a problem of historical interpretation. For one thing, the "geniuses"
to whom Mill attributed a great measure of civilization'sprogress are surely
supposed to be "individuals"in Mill's sense, the very people who in an atmo-
sphere of liberty would help humanity discover new truths. Yet, however
much such men (e.g., Jesus and Socrates) can serve as models of intellec-
tual courage for people today, it is not at all clear that they acted under the
aegis of spontaneity and impulse. Indeed, Nietzsche (1968, 29-35) accused
Socrates of carrying on a war against all natural instincts precisely because
his own were so chaotic and dangerous. Be that as it may, there are certainly
different ways than Mill's to describe the historical development of charac-
ter. Nietzsche (1960, 24) and Weber (1968, 154), for example, emphasized
how much the lives of archaic people were in fact ruled by custom and au-
thority. Even exceptional human beings (Mill's"geniuses") were guided by a
conception of the good that invoked, at least verbally, traditional notions of
virtue (Weintraub 1978, MacIntyre 1981). There are important differences,
not sufficiently recognized by Mill, between geniuses of earlier ages and
men such as Goethe or Mill himself While the former sought to discover an
objective good in light of which individual differences would fade into insig-
nificance, the latter thought of individual development per se as historically
significant, indeed as the form that civilized progress would have to assume.5
But there is a deeper difficulty in Mill's conception of individuality. Al-
though he echoed Goethe in stressing the quasi-organic, natural flow of indi-
vidual development that ought to be attainable by the people of his time, the
drift of his argument differs from Goethe's. Where Goethe stressed the con-
tinuity, the symbiosis, between individuality and the traditions and culture
of the age, Mill tended toward the opposite view: society has more and more
become the enemy of individuality. Save for a small circle of bold and crea-
tive spirits, one can expect little sustenance from the social environment.
Thus, under present conditions, to be an individual necessarily involves
struggle against the ethos of the time, a commitment to preserve and en-
hance one's own original spontaneity even against society's resistance.
The British idealists appear at first less radical than Mill in their account of
5Consider Jesus' famous saying in the sermon on the mount that he had come to fulfill the law,
not to abolish it. Even Socrates' dialectics take for granted the table of virtues set down by the
Greek poets and propose merely to ascertain their "real"meaning.
individuality. Indeed, Bosanquet's various definitions sound like something

Goethe might have written, especially in their tendency to represent the in-
dividual as a microcosm of his world. However, true to his mentor Hegel,
Bosanquet (1968, 289, 320) carefully avoided the sort of naturalistic images
that Goethe and Mill so readily adopted, insisting that individuality belongs
only to self-conscious beings. As self-consciousness, one is subject to the in-
fluences of society; but what makes one an individual is the way one actively
shapes these influences. Individuality is effectively empty and meaningless if
it is not expressed and so made external. This form of expression draws the
world around a person into the circle of the self. What guides us in this crea-
tive reshaping of experience is a donationn"to overcome the finitude, contra-
diction, and incoherence that we experience and to strive beyond it toward
the unity of a harmonious cosmos (Bosanquet 1968, 319-57).
Bosanquet'scontribution to the individuality debate complements Mill's in
several important respects. First, he was able to resolve individuality into an
aspect of self-consciousness, a step that preserves the concept from the se-
rious problems inherent in Goethe's and even Mill's organic-naturalistic ac-
counts. He could describe individuality without having recourse to the hy-
pothesis of a naturally given "true self." Second, in spite of the tribute he
paid to the ideal of a harmonious personality, Bosanquet (like Mill) stressed
the immense difficulty in coming anywhere near such an ideal (1968, 338).
Individuality is a kind of self-overcoming rather than a continuous, organic
development; it is an ongoing struggle to pull together the chaos and inertia
of one's life into an integrated whole.
Still, Bosanquet's version of individuality has flaws all its own. The con-
cept of individuality diverges from earlier models of personality by substi-
tuting the notion of development for that of teleological unfolding. But
Bosanquet came near to abolishing this distinction in his insistence that the
individual is driven by a "conation"toward unity and harmony. His "cona-
tion" resembles the Hegelian absolute struggling toward self-clarity within
finite minds: What makes a person try to become an individual is a conscious-
ness of the disparity between the finite self and the harmonious cosmos, the
absolute, that is the goal toward which all individual striving moves. But
Bosanquet offered no proof that there is, in fact, any higher, more harmo-
nious cosmos beyond the individual. Unlike his mentor, Hegel, whose "ab-
solute" necessarily contains all the incongruency and alienation of its various
manifestations, Bosanquet simply revived in philosophical language the tra-
ditional theological relationship between fallen man and glorified God.
Nevertheless, the British idealists and especially Mill have enriched and
clarified the concept of individuality. First, Mill injected a note of social criti-
cism into the idea of individuality by treating it as the antithesis of the dead-
ening burden of custom, law, and public opinion. A person who simply drifts
along thoughtlessly will never be more than a passive creature of mass so-
ciety. To become an individual rather than remaining a composite portrait of

existing rules and prejudices demands that one think and judge for oneself.
Second, Mill suggested the links between individuality and vitality on the
one hand and conformity and deadness on the other. People feel most vibrant
when they are intensely involved in what they do; by contrast, when people
simply act out roles, habits, and routines in which their individuality is not
enmeshed, they may feel overwhelmed by emptiness and ennui, almost
as though they had become mere machines. Finally, Mill explicitly elabo-
rated the normative implications of the concept: to become an individual is a
task that everyone should attempt.
For its part, Bosanquet's conception of individuality clears up a lurking
confusion. Undeniably, people are distinct partly because they had different
parents, childhood experiences, and cultural settings. Yet, individuality
must be more than the aggregating of contingent, unique circumstances;
otherwise, one would be forced to ascribe individuality to virtually every
sentient creature. By making self-consciousness the core of individuality,
Bosanquet moved in the right direction. Somehow one must see the individ-
ual manifested both in the mores, roles, and values received from society
and in the struggle to transcend and reshape these influences. Without the
former, individuality would be empty; without the latter it would be illusory.
Individuality must therefore involve the sort of continuous self-shaping or
transcendence that lies at the heart of self-consciousness. The tendency of
Mill and Bosanquet to stress the obstacles in the path of individuality has
carried over into the work of numerous twentieth century writers, including
Horkheimer (1947), Fromm (1969) and Huxley (1979), who saw individuality
as threatened alike by totalitarianismand mass consumption capitalism. But
George Herbert Mead and his followers deserve special mention because
they incorporatedthe tension between individuality and conformity or reifica-
tion into the very structure of personality.
Mead (1964, 232-33, 238-39) originated the distinction in social psychol-
ogy between the "I" and the "me," the individual and social aspects of con-
sciousness. The "me"is formed from the expectations of others, while the "I"
represents the ever-present potential of acting and thinking in unanticipated
ways. Kenelm Burridge, one of Mead's disciples, develops the implications
of this dichotomous self by placing it in the context of cultural anthropology.
Individuality is rare or nonexistent in archaic societies, where the elements
of social control and group expectations dominate the personality. Mead's
"me" becomes Burridge's "person," an aspect of the self that is "colonized
and formed by social roles," reproducing "the structure of a given tradition
in a system of rationalizations . . . and symbolic representations." At times,
though, one might be able to actualize the "individual"(Mead's "I")as a dis-
tinct mode of being: the part of oneself that, by "transcendingthe given cate-
gories, . . . provides a moral critique" (Burridge 1979, 7, 33, 50).
Burridge'scategorizations help us move beyond the stale duality between

"individual"and "society" by emphasizing, in the mode "person," that so-
ciety is not something merely external to the self; it is a complex of shared
meanings and expectations that helps constitute one's identity (makes us be
"someone" in Burridge's terms). Similarly, Burridge's essay underscores a
point that can scarcely be emphasized enough: individuality is not achieved
by obsessively examining one's thoughts and behavior in the hope of uncov-
ering and weeding out every possible influence of society upon the self (a la
Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground). Rather, individuality seems to in-
volve a reinterpretation of established meanings, symbols, relationships, and
values, revivifying what had become moribund.
Nevertheless, to pass from one system of interpretation to another means,
at least temporarily, ceasing to be "someone" and becoming "no one" or
"anyone." That is, traditional roles and worldviews tell us who we are; they
assign us a place in the larger scheme of things. Creating or invoking a differ-
ent scheme with other sorts of roles and values means passing through a kind
of no man'sland between past and future where one is somehow poised be-
tween the old identity, now discarded, and a not-yet articulated, still inchoate
and tentative new identity.
Burridge comes close to uniting the different ideas of individuality con-
tained in Mill and Bosanquet. The notion that individuality implies a critical,
negative stance toward what is socially expected is explicitly conjoined here
to a theory of consciousness that stresses what Hegel called the "power of
negativity." Yet the gulf between individual and person yawns too wide in
Burridge's model. Ordinary experience does not bear out his either/or im-
perative. As Bosanquet and Goethe observed, individuality bears some re-
semblance to artistic creativity, requiring an extraordinaryeffort of thought
and imagination to be original. All too often, the attempt to escape from and
transcend things as they are culminates in the sort of abstract negation that
leaves one trapped by the circumstances one has repudiated. The shrill vil-
lage atheist still defines himself by opposition to what is expected of him. In
short, one does not simply cross a magical bridge from personhood to indi-
viduality by dint of sheer will. In such descriptions there is a tendency to
hypostatize very elusive categories. The more revealing fault line runs be-
tween those who adhere to conventions and traditional meanings out of blind
habit and those who have worked through and incorporated what is of value
in them. Moreover, the project of being an individual as Burridge under-
stands it seems too remote and grandiose. Ultimately he tends to identify
individuals with charismatic figures who fashion new religions or moral
codes. Compared to them, almost all of us would be "persons"all the time, a
categorization that blurs the distinction between truly reified selves and
those who struggle to attain a perspective beyond that which orthodoxy and
fixed social forms afford.
Nevertheless, Burridge has shown that individuality is not a different,

pre-social identity; it is the capacity to dissolve accustomed meanings and
roles, to reinterpret them and thus create new identities, new ways of being
oneself. In light of this, one can understand why individuality should incor-
porate both development and an ongoing struggle against social pressures
and established meanings.
WHAT IS AN INDIVIDUAL?
We can now construct a coherent description of individuality that remains

consistent with the philosophical traditions from which the idea first emerged
and yet avoids their cul-de-sacs. Following Weintraub, MacIntyre, and
Burridge, we may suppose that traditional societies, with their strictly pre-
scribed roles and duties, scarcely knew the individual. Individuality is pri-
marily the offspringof the modern world's tendency to extricate people from
long-established patterns of life, allowing them to distinguish what they are
from what society expects them to be.
Accordingly, one might think of individuality as an ongoing process of dis-
tinguishing the "I" from the "me," the individual from the person. Hegel's
Phenomenology, especially its introduction and first few chapters, suggests a
way to conceptualize that process. That work is meant to analyze the experi-
ence of consciousness in trying to discover and express what it actually is and
what is true for it. At first, consciousness tends to affirm the value, and the
validity, of its immediate circumstances, and its opinions about them; it is
completely absorbed in the here and now and believes that this world's fea-
tures should be obvious to anyone to whom they are pointed out. In the
course of its further experiences, however, consciousness begins to realize
that the immediate is actually "mediated";the world of everyday life is a con-
struct of thought, language, and social consensus. Even the "I"whose opin-
ions seemed so certain is mediated through the terms of the relationships it
establishes. Hegel (1952, 68-69) portrayed the course of development from
this consciousness as a "determinate negation." As each successive descrip-
tion of the world, which is also implicitly a self-definition, fails and lapses
into incoherence, consciousness adopts another in its stead. Yet, the ex-
perience of failure is incorporated into the new "description" cum self-
understanding in such a way that previous forms are preserved, remaining
present in later, more highly mediated ones.
The structure of Hegel's work, the movement from immediacy to media-
tion, can be adapted easily to illustrate the process of individuality, the
movement from "me" to "I." The first and indeed decisive aspect of indi-
viduality must be negativity or transcendence, the capacity to grasp that I
am not identical with any of my roles, beliefs, or other modes of being: I can
stand outside them, judge them, and change them, or at least imagine they
could be different. Assuming that I can withdraw emotionally and spiritually

from these objectification, what am I then? The emptiness and barrenness
of individuality-as-negativity stands starkly revealed when one asks such a
question. Obviously, if I am always beyond any custom, role, or meaning, if I
can lay these aside as easily as an old shirt, I can never be an individual be-
cause no mode of self-presentation will ever express my individuality.6
One could easily infer with Sartre (1972, 56-85) that the self, as a sort of
"nothingness,"must simply choose to be something or other with no grounds
for the choice whatsoever. But Taylor (1976, 289-96) has revealed the cru-
cial weakness in such a move. Some decisions are far more weighty than
others, possessing intrinsic characteristics that compel us to take them seri-
ously. They involve choices fundamental to one's sense of self-identity, un-
like choices between mere defacto desires (e.g., between a chocolate or va-
nilla milkshake). Taylor'spoint illuminates this stage of the investigation. If
one aspect of individuality is negativity, moving into the spaces of nonbeing
beyond prescribed roles and beliefs, another must be the obscure but com-
pelling sense of a center from which crucial choices radiate. A person who
knew what this focal point of self contained could overcome the empty ab-
stractness of individuality as negativity. The inner, intuited identity of such
an individual would precede, and always be fully expressed in, all of the indi-
vidual's actions and speech. But few of us possess any such clear knowledge
of who we are; indeed, to speak and act from unshakeable conviction would
be more characteristic of preindividualistic ages and of the "Aristotelian"bi-
ography as the acting out of a teleologically conceived identity. Rather, the
problem precisely for the modern individual is learning to recognize Taylor's
"decisively important"issues as such. That is, a person must sense that some
choices are trivial, whereas others end up defining or clarifying the sort of
person one is going to be. To distinguish significant from trivial issues, to sort
out serious argument from ideological cant, to see the difference between
genuine and spurious forms of expression, to separate out rational discourse
from manipulation. All require a well-developed faculty of judgment. But
how are our powers of judgment developed?
Goethe's autobiography, which conceived of individuality as an ongoing,
open-ended interchange between self and world, provides a valuable clue.
Goethe realized that his individuality, though a creation of nature, depended
for its concrete development on the cultural tradition into which he was
born: his family and Weimar, contemporary Germany, and ultimately the
Christian and Greek cultures that came before. He always strove to incorpo-
'For similar reasons, both Goethe and Hegel sharply rebuked extreme forms of romantic
rebellion and pietism on the grounds that such posturing rendered individuality meaningless,
sundering it from all possibility of self-actualization. See Hegel (1952, 445-72) on the "beauti-
ful soul."
rate into himself the living impulses from these concentric rings of culture,
making himself consciously into a representative of the best elements in
each. To him, individuality could never mean only a free-floating potential
for existential choice detached from its milieu. If Goethe's intuition is cor-
rect, we become individuals by learning to mediate the abstract negativity of
consciousness (Mead's "I" and Burridge's "individual") with the concrete
wealth of culture that we confront partly as external reality, such as books,
paintings, or speeches, and partly as internal impulses, knowledge, and feel-
ing. Taylor'scriticism of the Sartrean existentialist suggests how this takes
place. Although tradition may have no pat answers for our questions, it does
teach us how to distinguish morally momentous issues from trivial ones. This
process of mediation constitutes the second, and more elusive, moment of
individuality.
Recalling the distinction between individualism and individuality, we may
now elaborate it in the following way. Individualism bespeaks an urge for
"immediate"independence, a resolve to judge everything for oneself and es-
cape the snares of traditional opinion, especially learned opinion. Tocque-
ville (1956, II, 4) described this propensity, which he observed in America,
as a loss of trust in authority: "Everyone shuts himself up tightly within him-
self and insists upon judging the world from there." Having thrust aside tra-
ditional authorities of all kinds, but needing some foundation upon which to
rest their judgments, Americans naturally fell back upon public opinion,
what everyone else seemed to be thinking and saying. In other words, indi-
vidualism-a way of living in which independence is deemed the supreme
good-culminates in a new kind of dependence, the more insidious because
it is scarcely recognized.
Tocqueville also discussed tendencies that counteract individualism, and
they resemble what I call mediation here. In aristocratic ages, people were
drawn out of the narrow circle of their personal opinions because their iden-
tities incorporated the fortunes of their family, estate, church, or trade. In
democratic America, public affairs and intermediary associations tended to
draw people out of their narrow individualism, causing them to "forget
themselves" (Tocqueville 1956, II, 110). In either case, selfhood is mediated
through ideas and associations that at first may appear to create dependency,
but actually create the possibility for a richer, more complex identity capable
of resisting despotism and public opinion. Nevertheless, these mediating
forms of self-definition, without the power of negativity to dissolve and inte-
grate them, do indeed become further forms of dependency. A Tocquevillean
aristocrat, whose intellectual horizon is bounded by family and estate, has
not even reached the level of "individualism:"he does not recognize himself
as a self apart from the social bonds in which he has grown up and the ethical
codes they enjoin. Thus his life is as habit-dominated, as automatic, as the
lives of the "mass"so harshly criticized by Mill in On Liberty.
Admittedly, the account of individuality offered thus far seems to diverge

somewhat from ordinary language which associates individuality with the as-
sertion of one's own spontaneous wishes and perceptions against society. By
contrast, the notion of mediation introduced here suggests that the path to-
ward individuality necessarily leads back toward the cultural traditions and
moral standards that seemed to threaten or stifle individuality. But this di-
vergence is more apparent than real. The commonsensical idea of indi-
viduality cannot resolve the question of what "my" wishes and preferences
actually are, what spontaneous behavior would look like, and what I could do
that would express the real me.
One popular way to evade that question is to assume that one's indi-
viduality resides in sticking to and defending whatever attitudes, opinions,
styles, and other forms of self-expression one happens to hold at the mo-
ment. This would resemble, in some respects, Hegel's "immediacy." From
such a perspective, any challenges to one's attitudes and opinions appears as
an attack on one's individuality.7 The flaw here lies in the relationship as-
sumed to exist between the self and its forms of expression, according to
which one "has"opinions as if they were material belongings. Opinions are
drawn into the circle of the personal, saturated with possessive feelings, and
thus transformed into immobile and brittle components of one's identity-
especially when this process of reification is accompanied by the reflection
that "I am the sort of person who ought to have certain opinions and atti-
tudes." But such a rigid fusion between the self and its expressions is not an
authentic manifestation of individuality. To become an individual in the em-
phatic sense requires a paradoxicalstep: abandoning the "personal"stress on
opinions, attitudes, and ways of life; coming to recognize that they are always
open to discussion and criticism, part of the public domain and not one's pri-
vate property. To break down this sort of reification, one must realize that
one cannot simply "have"opinions about morality, politics, poetry, or what-
ever. Instead one must discipline oneself so far as to learn about these
matters, a step that demands, at least initially, acknowledging the superior
competence of the relevant authorities. Contrary to our usual ideas, then,
individuality seems at first to entail a loss of self. One's original opinions
(once seen as expressions of a unique individuality) are put aside; one now
becomes the apprentice of others, receiving whatever new opinions they
want to instill.
But this loss of self sets in motion a genuine process of development. Now
the "I,"previously congealed and fragmented in the myriad opinions labeled
7See Hegel (1952, 68), who remarks that "following one's own convictions" may be in prin-
ciple an advance over unthinking submission to authority; however, if the content of those con-
victions remains more or less the same then one has achieved at best a kind of "pseudo-
liberation."
"my own," can collect itself as a living, active, protean power. By virtue of
the negativity inherent in consciousness, one can see the emptiness of the
old, beloved opinions, since they were never really one's own at all but un-
assimilated fragments of socialization. Having overcome the barriers of re-.
ification, a person may now be free to experience the complexity and rich-
ness of the world in novel ways. Paradoxically,individuation thus seems to
involve closer attention to what would, on a superficial view, be considered
"objective" factors of experience-the historical resonances of language,
symbols, and ideas; the realities of power and control as opposed to their
ideological obfuscation; the search for valid explanations as opposed to unre-
flective responses to manipulated images. But these observations suggest a
potential problem in the account of individuality offered so far. If one takes
one's bearings from things as they are and is shaped by the objective content
of experience, in what sense is one individualized? Wouldn't the nascent in-
dividual become a composite, chaotic microcosm of the external influences
shaping his or her thoughts and emotional responses?
At this point, mediation, the formation of the faculty of judgment, be-
comes the essential moment in defining individuality. We become aware that
ethics, politics, and art have a history that is partly constitute4)by the lan-
guage we employ to talk about them. Our erstwhile opinions usually turn out
to have been versions of previously defined positions detached from the lin-
guistic/cultural context in which they made the most sense. The effort, then,
to replace ill-considered, reified opinions with more adequate ones leads to-
ward systematic rethinking of what opinion is. It also leads into the heart of
the traditions that, in a debased form, constitute the foundation for most
contemporary opinions. Although these traditions cannot offer any easy an-
swers, they can show us how to tie our own existence and our questions
about it into a more profound way of thinking. A Christian may remain what
he always was, but there is a great difference between the Christianity of a
modern televangelist and that of a St. Thomas or a Kierkegaard.
What we strive for, then, as individuals is to draw on those traditions so as
to create a "second nature" that is genuinely our own. Every negation of
some frozen aspect of self, every struggle to attain a clear and fresh view of
things, leaves behind a core of self around which emergent individuality can
crystallize. As individuality develops, it affects the faculty of judgment across
the board. Seeing through the layers of obfuscation, triviality, and ideology
in one sphere makes it easier to do so in others. Becoming an individual
means, in part, focusing within oneself, though in a unique, unrepeatable
way, the intellectual, political, and artistic currents that provided the re-
sources for one's self-formation. Thus, Bosanquet was not wrong to speak of
an urge toward completeness; but to regard it as a quasi-entelechy obscures
the open-endedness and ultimate unattainability of the project of being an
individual. On close inspection, individuality proves to have much in com-
mon with the creative process, especially in literature. Striving to discover

and define oneself requires discarding hackneyed concepts and finding ways
to allow the richness of things to appear in language. Mill was right to associ-
ate individuality with spontaneity and to call conformity deadening. To speak
and think in the stock phrases so readily available is to become robot-like in
one's self-expression. This image underlines the point that individuality is
incommensurable with and nonidentical to any of its manifestations. It is not
an objective form but a restless activity.
Finally, the model of individuality proposed here reveals the inadequacy
of the Rousseauian thesis that the real self resides only in natural sentiments.
When popularized, this view suggests that if we doffed our social masks and
got in touch with our feelings we could become authentic selves. But in-
dividuality is not immediately there behind a variety of facades. To be any-
thing definite it must express itself, and when the available expressions are
hackneyed slogans and reified opinions, individuality either remains hidden
or else simply does not exist as such. Likewise, the feelings that lie behind
people's social masks have often been preformed and molded by the agents
of socialization. The more desperately one tries to dig beneath this socializa-
tion, the more primitive and infantile are the layers of self unearthed. The
road to individuality does not lead back to pure, unsullied feeling, but to-
ward reflection, judgment, and knowledge of what is really valuable in the
culture that shaped one's identity.
The notion of individuality, in sum, gives us a way to speak and think
about what some communitarians would call issues of character. We can es-
cape the long-standing liberal preoccupation with adapting institutions to the
pre-existing desires of those who participate in them. By treating indi-
viduality as a standard of what human beings could become, we can evaluate
the success or-failure of a society to promote the self-development of its
members. What is more, since mediation is a crucial part of individuality,
the side of human affairs that Mill allotted to Coleridge can be taken into
account more fully than is usually the case in liberal thought. The effort to
derive "light from other minds," so notable a virtue in Coleridge and so
utterly lacking in Bentham, becomes an explicit part of the notion of individ-
ual self-development.8 To be an individual involves finding adequate language
and imagery to bring forth and define the embryonic sense of who one actu-
ally is. And this language resides, in large measure, in the literary and intel-
lectual traditions that Coleridge cherished and Bentham mostly contemned.
On the other hand, the idea of individuality entails, for its realization, cer-
tain essential "liberal" desiderata: the appeal to enlightened self-interest,
8Mill of course wrote essays on both figures and remarked that anyone who could find a way
to integrate them into a single world view would "possess the entire English philosophy of their
age" (1977, X, 26).
the uncompromising demand for civil and political liberty, the rejection of
traditions that have hardened into mere dogmatism or formalism. Treating
character as a political issue, then, does not mean imposing a uniform stan-
dard of moral rectitude or intellectual orientation upon a diverse culture.
But it does mean that we have another dimension for evaluating a civilization
besides the ones most commonly applied-e.g., the degree of political lib-
erty and economic prosperity enjoyed by citizens, the degree of fairness evi-
dent in the distribution of wealth, power, or prestige, and the prevailing lev-
els of personal satisfaction and "integration"into the collectivity. We could
well imagine a society in which most citizens possessed full civil and political
liberty, had achieved a high level of affluence, and felt relatively satisfied
with their lives, but which had nonetheless become a sort of "brave new
world" populated by shallow, reified, manipulated citizens who had so far
lost their moorings in the language and concepts of the past that they could
not put their own situations into historical perspective. This is the nightmare
that haunted Frankfurt school theorists like Adorno and Horkheimer, and
that still deserves to be taken seriously by liberals and communitarians alike.
However we frame our concepts of justice, liberty, happiness, and the
common good, we usually assume that these words are still intelligible and,
perhaps too, that they carry a historical penumbra of meaning objectified in
certain literary and political documents. If someone tells us that we are free
or happy and "supports" that claim mostly by symbolic manipulations, we
ought to be able to evaluate his statement by reference to the various theo-
retical and practical significances those ideas acquired from classical antiq-
uity forward. But if one's horizon of judgment has atrophied so much that the
present-a present, moreover, made intelligible largely through cliche' and
the techniques of mass marketing-must be the standard of evaluation for
itself, then concepts like freedom and happiness can be made to mean virtu-
ally anything a politician or advertising executive wants them to mean. Di-
vorced from the animating power of their own histories, these words become
a prey to the power of the "associationof ideas"; they "mean," for the person
thinking about them, whatever image or subjective experience has been
grafted onto them.
In short, individuality as a descriptive-normative idea enables us to ad-
dress the issues of character that have especially troubled some commu-
nitarians. We need not, as is so often the case in liberal theorizing, take de-
sires, passions, preferences, or interests as "givens" or as part of man's
"natural"equipment. We should instead always ask whether the desires or
interests a person now has are really his or her own, or whether they would
not appear one-sided or unworthy from the perspective of that person's fur-
ther development as an individual. It may not be possible, as moralists
would like, to persuade others to act in ways contrary to their perceived self-
interest. But it may be possible to convince them that the "self" which they
had treated as something stable and immutable may in fact be a kind of

artificial construct imbued in them by the forces of socialization. And if the
notion of a self becomes problematical, so too must all ideas of self-interest as
ordinarily understood. If there is any indisputable "interest" a person has,
then it must consist in creating (or discovering) in a more or less autonomous
way the self one truly is.
The concept of individuality may, then, enable us to approachcertain kinds
of political issues in ways that circumvent the usual liberal-communitarian
dichotomies. Yet, it must be emphasized that individuality is at most only
one dimension of a good life and not necessarily the most important one.
Some communities (e.g., ancient Sparta, or the Amish today) have worked
out ways of life that have won admiration, even though they actively strove
to suppress the potential individuality of their members. By the same token,
a society that encourages individuality does not, merely by doing so, simulta-
neously achieve all the other important desiderata that political theorists
have sometimes defended. Certainly, a society that puts a premium on indi-
viduality would normally also create an institutional setting of maximum per-
sonal liberty (as Mill himself emphasizes). But such a society might still be
unjust, highly stratified, even morally bankrupt.
However, if the line of thought developed here is plausible, the converse
should also be true. A society might be just, orderly, pious, even formally
free. But if its citizens think and act in stereotyped, mechanical, or purely
habitual, conformist ways, why should we ascribe any value to what they do
and say? A computer or robot could have done as well. The worth of human
actions involves what is sometimes called an "existential" element, an en-
gagement of the mind and emotions of the agent. I think this is the point Mill
(1975, 56) has in mind in the famous lines from On Liberty that will conclude
this essay: "It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what
manner of men they are that do it. . . [If great things were done] by automa-
tons in human form, it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these
automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civi-
lized parts of the world."
Manuscript submitted 11 May 1988

Final manuscript received 15 November 1989
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Lewis P. Hinchman is associate professor of political science, Clarkson

University, Potsdam, NY 13676.

HINCHMAN, Lewis P.the Idea of Individuality

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University of Chicago Press

Southern Political Science Association

The Idea of Individuality: Origins, Meaning, and Political Significance

T here is something disquieting about the recent-and indeed also the

JOURNAL OF POLITICS, Vol. 52, No. 3, August 1990

something more than the aggregation of individual self-interests. Commu-

THE DISCOVERY OF INDIVIDUALITY

Deciding what individuality means is partly a matter of finding an appro-

thoroughgoing metaphysical dualism that described human nature in a series

directed at creating, in an overt, objective shape, the individual that he only

authenticity against the artificialtastes and social masks imposed by civiliza-

isolated and abstract person a path of development and transformation that

INDIVIDUALITY IN MILL, BOSANQUET, AND THE MEADIANS

the weight of conformity and mass mediocrity, we would soon witness an

individuality. Indeed, Bosanquet's various definitions sound like something

ciety. To become an individual rather than remaining a composite portrait of

Burridge'scategorizations help us move beyond the stale duality between

Nevertheless, Burridge has shown that individuality is not a different,

We can now construct a coherent description of individuality that remains

could be different. Assuming that I can withdraw emotionally and spiritually

Admittedly, the account of individuality offered thus far seems to diverge

mon with the creative process, especially in literature. Striving to discover

had treated as something stable and immutable may in fact be a kind of

Manuscript submitted 11 May 1988

Burridge, Kenelm. 1979. Someone, No One: An Essay on Individuality. Princeton: Princeton

Lewis P. Hinchman is associate professor of political science, Clarkson

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