The work from Lukes has stressed the polysemy of contemporary individualism.1 Actually individualism appeared firstly as a description stemming from conservative factions after the dislocation and the disintegration of the traditional pre-industrial society, but, as we will show, its seeds, its basic shapes, were already present in the modern plane of construction on which Hobbes stood and shaped.2 Its character as a particularly modern ideology produced a configuration, in the sense of a fait social total, as analyzed by Dumont.3 A configuration remarkable in asserting the values’ chasm between elements and totality, actualized already in the analytic-synthetic method incorporated in the modern plane of construction.
Individuality is a contended notion at least since the foundation of contemporary sociology.4 A manifold approach to individualism is indeed common among social theorists.5 Still there seems to be a certain consensus concerning the recent shift from a participative notion in political and social matters towards an expressive individualism; from a reflexive individualism to a focus in the body, encompassing hedonistic and narcissistic modalities, that sign a reply. A strong polarization, sensible to the question of the exact extent and value of the individual, is amply affirmed throughout social science within diverse approaches and analysis. This disparity conveys the climate of recapitulation and reconfiguration regarding this central notion. Among the solutions, normative versions of individualism have emerged tending towards communitarism.6 This central concept has been also reviewed from psychological perspectives, from social cognition to psychoanalysis, to underline the importance of relation, and the unfinished character of a self-concealed, autonomous, unified, individual.7 Basically, it is the sense of individuality, the feature of a unity implied in subjectivity, that is at stake.8 Thus individuality seems indispensable to understand the criticism of modern subjectivity and its political and social implications.
(1) S. Lukes, Individualism, Oxford, 1973.
(2) Cf. C.B. McPherson, The political theory of possessive individualism: Hobbes to Locke, Chicago, 1962.
(3) L. Dumont, Essaie sur l’individualisme. Une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie moderne, Paris, 1983. In his Postscriptum he asserts how modernity contains other characteristic configurations, although he deals extensively with the division of state an Church and the constitution of the modern states, he does not overtly refer to sovereignty.
(4) Schroer proposes a division of three currents that have underlined either the endangered individual as conceptualized by Weber, Adorno’s critical theory or Foucault, a hyper-individualism portrayed in Durkheim, Parsons and Luhmann and a more ambivalent tradition headed by Simmel, Elias or Beck. M. Schroer, Das Individuum der Gesellschaft. Synchrone und Diachrone Theorieperspektiven, Frankfurt, 2000.
(5) For a thorough analysis of the later social theory with chronological perspective about man’s self-conception cf. H. Keith, Das Sebstverständnis des modernen Menschen. Theorien des vergesellschafteten Individuums im 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt, 2001.
(6) Cf. M.J. Piore, Beyond Individualism, Cambridge, 1995. J. Crittenden, Beyond Individualism: Reconstituting the Liberal Self, Oxford, 1992. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self. The making of modern identity, Cambridge, 1989. A. McIntyre, After Virtue. A study in moral theory, Notre Dame, 1984. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, 1989.
(7) Against a cartesian theatre of unified consciousness cf. D. Dennett, The intentional stance, Cambridge, 1987. On individuation as a process rather than an ontology cf G. Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, Paris, 2006. Well known is the tripartite model developed by Freud in Das Ich und das Es (1923). Similarly Lacan’s analysis and the separation of three domains: symbolic, real and imaginary.
(8) P. Bürgin, Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, Frankfurt, 1998. Halman suggests the parallel trends between post-modernism and the popular growing attachment to individualism as a social attitude but it is also a configuration of individual that departs from classical formulations. L. Halman, “Individualism in contemporary Europe”, A. van Harskamp and A.W. Musschenga (eds.), The many faces of individualism, Leuven, 2001.
