The Myth of American Individualism

"All social and political alternatives to liberal individualism can no longer be readily dismissed as 'un-American.'" --Barry Shain

One of the great myths of the American experience is that it is a country built on the ideals of the individual, his rights, and his preeminence over various forms of collectives. The instinct toward this position is a motivating factor in the one-time promise of a libertarian movement, and it still animates various conservative and libertarian-leaning dissenters from the emergent Leftism that has clawed its way into power. In fact, as I write about in an essay to be published in an anthology this fall, it is precisely this myth about America that attracts people to libertarianism and classical liberalism in the face of an Establishment that systematically opposes individual dissent.

But it is, indeed, a myth that American sociological formation was built on the themes of individualism, in sharp contrast to the instincts that drove the French Revolution. One book that addresses these themes head on and seeks to explain the roots of American individualism, which came after the founding years, is Barry Shain’s fantastic The Myth of American Individualism.

America, Shain argues, was built on a unique structure of radical communalism or familialism. If the development of Capitalism in post-industrial America hadn’t corrupted (like everything else) the word “corporatism” into a business-firm reference, then “corporatism” might even be a better word to describe the original American experience than anything else. For, neither the individual nor the state—and certainly not some modern conglomeration of the American nation—were the preeminent objects of sociopolitical order; rather, the corporate society or the corporate community, both preceded and molded the individual. The individual, far from being conceived in a libertarian state-of-nature abstraction, was a derivation of the social order.

Shain distinguishes three types of thinking in Revolutionary America, and contrasts these three with the type of individualism that came later (especially in the mid-nineteenth century) and which is now about the only type emphasized (and for good reason, which we’ll mention below). The three models that could be found at the time of the American founding were:

1. Classical republicanism; which is characterized by a public-orientedness that sees in the health of the community the true means of individual flourishing. By denying the fleeting desires of the self, the individual commits himself to the virtue of the public order and in doing so, he finds the means of his own improvement, indirectly.

2. Early rationalism; which is contrasted from later, downstream subjectivist-individualism (a product of the 20th century). This model sees individualism in its early stages, but emphasizes that only the individual pursuit of rational ends, guided by pure reason, and therefore in rejection of ways of life that are harmful to self-improvement, can produce a good society.

3. Reformed-protestant communalism; here, Shain points to what he describes as the predominant mood, yet one that has unjustly received almost no emphasis. In Shain’s mind, this communalism is actually, by far, the one most commonly held by independent societies across what is now the United States. This communalism sees the individual as needing to be crafted and shaped by the community, the strength and stability of which is always more important than any one individual person. In contrast to classical republicanism, the health of the community is not the means toward the end of the Good Man, but rather the health of the community is its own end, and the individual lives with reference to his obligation toward that health.

The American Individualism that is often the presumed model of the American experience, argues Shain, is a European import; the product of a 19th-century Europe in intellectual disarray and in a world-historical crisis of political legitimacy. Such individualism was filtered through the writings of the American Romantic movement during the early 19th century and reached a real political crisis by the time of the Civil War. The conflict between the North—full of commercial capitalists of individualistic instinct and the spirit of self-initiative— and the agrarian South, which Richard Weaver once referred to as the world’s “last non-materialist civilization,” was in some ways a reflection of this bifurcation. Shain himself writes that “it would be Abraham Lincoln, not James Madison, who would lead an army of millions and be the first to prevail against American local communalism.”

The Europe in crisis, immersed in a storm set forth by the Enlightenment (which only very much later penetrated the fiercely Protestant mind of decentralized America) and its child, the French Revolution, produced the contrast between Enlightenment individualism and Catholic moral-universalism. Great minds such as Tocqueville, argues Shain, did not quite know how to interpret the Protestant American scene on this specific point. While the latter was radically communalist, the European intellectuals were only able to see the contrast between nationalisms and individualisms, neither of which described the widespread American mood in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Shain writes of Tocqueville that he “had confused America’s localism, communalism, and particularism with social and political individualism. By conflating these localist attributes with individualism, they greatly added to, if they did not originate, the semantic chaos that surrounds the subject. 18th-century America became burdened with an inappropriate characterization.”

Here, Shain argues not so much that Tocqueville failed to understand America essentially, but rather that his rhetorical horizons were bound by his understanding of European dynamics. That individualism was the great movement against European nations does not mean America’s own suspicions about national endeavors were individualistic.

It was an inappropriate characterization precisely because the idea of the locally-construed social order being limited in its authority by the absolute rights of the individual would have been taken as an abject absurdity to these communities. The individual, far from being the most basic social unit, was for early Americanism subject to a body of restraints and obligations, a “gradation of duties,” which constituted an “order of nature established by God.” The attraction of the American impulse at this time was that it was radically particularistic; it rejected Enlightenment abstractions of the rootless individual, and the universal brotherhood of all mankind. Individuals, in the American tradition, were bound to their particular community and its interests. They were duty-bound to act as vehicles between the past and the future, within the context of the local social order. Shain emphasizes the socially-situated nature of the individual’s rights and duties:

“The adult white make was awarded his preferred position, with all the responsibilities that were entailed, only when he stood at the head of a household. Thus, living a life without wife and children was not socially sanctioned. The life of the free individual, like that of the tyrant, was a form of rootlessness, immaturity, or sacrilege that was viewed with suspicion. Living alone, or even without children, frequently made one unworthy of acceptance as a full member of society.”

If individualism as an American fundamental is more a recent conception than a foundational one, what are the implications of the rhetoric of liberty? This question is immensely important and Shain engages it to demonstrate that America has undergone a sort of “revolution within the word” not unlike what happened in the transformation toward the Managerial State during the New Deal era. Liberty was never meant as a reference to the individual’s desire to act in accordance with his own fleeting desires. This libertarian understanding came much later. Rather, liberty was a situation in which lesser corporate bodies—with the family being the smallest unit—were exempt from the dictates of more centralized ones. C.S. Lewis writes, in this regard, of “the guaranteed freedoms or immunities (from royal or baronial interference) of a corporate entity.” Rights and freedoms were corporately, not individually, conceived. A political order has freedom not when the individual has no sociopolitical restraints (which would have been conceived of man’s slavery to his passions) but when a small community can operate on its own particular framework of rights and duties independent of a political body that undermines this framework.

Thus, the American transformation away from vast dispersion of political and social authority toward one of centralized totalitarianism is the same transformation toward the release of the individual from these communal orders. The release of the individual from his localist-familialist context is precisely the means of the American’s new ordering within the Total State, managed from the power centered in Washington. Individualism and totalitarianism are two sides of the same coin in the American development. The new conception of freedom in America came at the great cost of the older conception of freedom; which modern individualists, feminists, industrialists, and innovative capitalists would have considered as culturally oppressive. And the same rhetoric animates movements today, as freedom is seen as a matter of policy to be achieved and administered from the Great Center of the American political order.

These discussions are immensely important. At the present political moment, the thrust of the Left’s argument in defense of the most egregious moral abominations are centered around America’s alleged nature as a hyper-individualistic “live and let live” political order. Any argument in defense of a social standard that transcends the individual will and applies to the good of the commons is met with severe disapprobation. And moreover, perhaps an even more sobering sign of the times, the “conservative” response is so often in the direction of affirming the non-negotiable of the individualism.

One can see this in the debate over abortion. The Left declares that individualism demands the choice be made by the mother, with no other influence; the non-Left (presenting itself as the conservative, though it is often more classically liberal than conservative) declares that this is illegitimate on the basis that the child, not the mother, is the individual of our concern. Is there anyone willing to speak for the interests of the metaphysical community? Few remain who would consider abortion as an assault on the preeminence of the Natural Family and a declaration of war on the health of the social order itself, independent of the interests of a given individual (either the mother, the father, or the child).

Understanding abortion in the communalist model would have the act of aborting the unborn not merely an exercise in murderous impulse, but also itself the social sin of undermining the vitality of the social order in preference for the narcissism of individual desire. A proper political discussion of abortion would refer to sociological and cosmological themes: the family is the basic social unit; the family functions to further nation and heritage; sex has metaphysical reference and procreation is an aspect of this. Abortion is an assault on the primacy of the family, the teleology of sexual desire, the continuity of tradition and heritage, the stability of meta-culture over time. It incentivizes continued breakdown of the vitality of cultural inheritance. It is anti-civilizational because it idolizes self-indulgence through the mechanism of death.

The Jacobin individualism that pervades the Conservative movement in our time has rendered the Left almost completely unopposed. All speak in terms of individualism and all have as their reference point the happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment of the self. This, not the possibility of a contracting economy and lower standards of living in the future, constitute our social crisis.

Increasingly aware of this crisis of the cult of individualism comes a Newer Right sympathetic to the rhetoric of nationalism; and among Christians, there is a Christian Nationalism. Their argument is a decent one, and it is something toward which I am sympathetic; namely, it points out that power must be countered with a corresponding quest for power. As the Left seeks to wield power from the center, so they must be confronted on this plane. Those who want merely to be left alone, to remove themselves from the jurisdiction of the central authority, under-appreciate the extent to which the power-seeking Left will not stop until all dissenting communities are crushed.

Here, I sympathize—even agree with—the instincts of this new nationalism. But this sympathy is not to be confused with the assumption that good will come out of it. The nationalism, like the radical individualism, is foreign to the American past. Political artificiality always ends in ruin. Neither nationalism nor individualism are organic to the spirit of our history; neither can be a basis for renewal precisely because both are, essentially, foreign. Yet since the Old Communalism of our past belongs as well to a now long-vanished world, it too remains outside the scope of the possible. I therefore remain in the sorrowful camp of the sociopolitical pessimists, reflecting on the tragedy of the American experience.

Nevertheless, for those interested in understanding an alternative America beyond the political myths of the 20th century, Shain’s book comes highly recommended. As he himself puts it, we should be confident in dismissing the rhetoric of individualism against those who attempt to convince us that licentious behavior is part of our heritage. “All social and political alternatives to liberal individualism can no longer be readily dismissed as “un-American.” The tendency to participate in this dismissal is a wrongheaded result of a myth that pervades not just the Democratic Party and those Left of center. It also seems to characterize the Conservative Movement, the Straussian “Right,” and all those along the libertarian-[modernist] conservative spectrum who try, without much success, to form a legitimate opposition.