Liberalism and Atomistic Individualism

Abstract

Critics of classic liberalism assume that is radical individualist foundations are both necessary for its defense and its Achilles' heel. Radical individualism is the view that human individuals are, first and foremost, unique, particular beings with just one concern, namely, to advance their own goals. Critics of classical liberalism have said that its individuals are atomistic or asocial. Proponents of classical liberalism had often appeared to embrace an atomistic conception of the person because of their acceptance of the new science of classical mechanics. Whether or not anyone actually held the arid individualist view that has come to be associated with Hobbes is not important. What is crucial are the liabilities which critics have ascribed to this view. In ethics and politics, atomistic individualism goes against the grain. But the charges against individualism are open to serious criticism.

*u*n*s*t*u*r*t*u*r*e**t*e*x*t*

227LIBERALISM AND ATOMISTIC INDIVIDUALISMThe Journal of Value Inquiry 34: 227-247, 2000.(C) 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Liberalism and Atomistic Individualism TIBOR MACHAN Leatherby Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics, Argyros School of Business and Economics, Chapman University, Orange, CA 92866, USA

1. A Fatal Flaw in Individualism? Critics of classical liberalism assume that its radical individualist foundations are both necessary for its defense and its Achilles' heel. Radical individualism is the view that human individuals are, first and foremost, unique, particular beings with just one concern, namely, to advance their own goals. Critics of classical liberalism have said that its individuals are atomistic or asocial. Proponents of classical liberalism had often appeared to embrace an atomistic conception of the person because of their acceptance of the new science of classical mechanics. Hobbes admired mechanistic science so much that he visited Galileo in Italy to learn it from him. For Hobbes, human beings are just instances of matter-in-motion, only more complicated in their configuration than other things.

2. Flaws of So-called Hobbesian Individualism Whether or not anyone actually held the arid individualist view that has come to be associated with Hobbes is not important. What is crucial to us are the liabilities which critics have ascribed to this view.

Atomism does not square with the individual histories of most human beings. They are born into families where they remain significantly dependent on other persons prior to any possible calculation of their own advantages. The idea that standards of good and bad are no more than tastes and preferences is offensive to the common sense idea that there are some things that are good and some that are bad and that they are not all a matter of taste or preference, attraction, or aversion. Furthermore, the assumption of subjective value that is closely linked with this sort of individualism left no standard by which human conduct could be subjected to criticism. All criticism is left groundless if the only thing that matters is whether people prefer or do not prefer something. Even bad logic becomes immune to criticism.

[79]

228 TIBOR MACHAN

In ethics and politics, atomistic individualism goes against the grain. Many economists, for example, would say that the freedom of a classical liberal society is something they prefer. There is not much else to be said, since they take all values to be subjective.

But what if some of us, perhaps unwisely, do not prefer liberal freedom? What would be wrong with our reneging from liberal agreements even after we had expressed a preference for liberal norms? What of the supposed corrosive influence of all this influence that is said to undermine community bonds, loyalty, honesty, and decency, especially in the realm of commerce which in the modern age is all pervasive? To say that this would imply that we prefer the state of nature, with its risks and horrors, may be true, but what of it? Is there anything objectively, morally wrong with such a preference? Philosophers who champion such individualism, and the critics who decry them as representatives of the classical liberal ethos, deny that from this perspective any moral fault could be assigned to such persons.

Already in John Locke, intimations of a different kind of individualism are evident, however. This alternative conception of individualism is much more promising than its Hobbesian cousin. Indeed, it may have more than a fighting chance of being right. It can, at least, withstand the criticisms that are typically leveled against individualism.

3. Individualism Under Assault Individualism has a bad reputation, "willingly sacrificing all other human values so as to cultivate . . . a particular group of virtues - notably independence, courage and honesty." 1 By association, so does classical liberalism and its political economic system of capitalism. This gives 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

The targeted version of individualism is embraced, more or less intact, by neo-classical and Austrian economists. Its basic premise is that all human behavior is motivated by a narrow, subjective self-interest or utility maximization. Having shown this form of individualism to be untenable, the system closely associated with it, namely, limited government that stresses the basic negative rights of individuals, is also taken to be discredited.

But the charges against individualism are open to serious criticism. For example, proponents of individualism need not embrace atomism, anti-social attitudes and policies, hedonism, or moral subjectivism. Nor need limited government or a constitution of natural rights rest on the arguably fabricated version of individualism that the critics usually target.

[80]

229LIBERALISM AND ATOMISTIC INDIVIDUALISM Often the criticism of individualism, and its broader philosophy of classical liberalism, is reminiscent more of political propaganda than of scholarly exchange. Marx, for example, refers to it as an "insipid illusion." Alasdair MacIntyre regards liberalism itself as vile, nasty and 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 the 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 people 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 argued that individualism is an invention and individual rights are artifacts with no enduring, substantive moral significance. 4 Marx and MacIntrye, furthermore, consign individualism and liberalism to the status of ideologies serving some specific historical purpose, such as facilitating social productivity.

MacIntyre and others have argued that individualism rests on no more than arbitrary preferences that happen to have been expressed in a given epoch of Western history. Marx put the point succinctly:

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 private ends, as an external necessity.5

Prior to the eighteenth century, presumably, the individual as a choosing entity, seen as having the right to choose his social relationships on the principle of the consent of the governed, did not exist.

John N. Gray delivers the most virulent frontal attack on individualism:

[I]ndividualist cultures devour their own moral capital and slide into debtridden 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.

[81]

230 TIBOR MACHAN

In less harsh but equally damaging terms, Richard Rorty maintains that individualism is an ideology that in our era has come to be accepted, 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 principles of social organization are a function of what a given community has chosen, collectively, to embrace, and therefore rights, specifically those of the individual human being, are unfounded. Individual rights lack cognitive significance. There is no basis for the claims that a person has such rights and that other persons should not violate them. 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. 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 one, that tyrannies get something wrong that democratic societies get right."8

In order to assess these harsh or drastic conclusions about the doctrine, we need a clearer idea of what individualism amounts to. In particular, we need to distinguish between two types of individualism, atomistic and classical. With that distinction in hand it can be shown that at least the classical version of individualism is superior to collectivist alternatives.

4. Essentials of Individualism Mary 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" She adds:

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 be invented constantly become obvious. The language of impersonal process, 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

[82]

231LIBERALISM AND ATOMISTIC INDIVIDUALISM What are the modest facts that underlie an exaggerated individualism? First, there is an indispensable level of separateness of every person. A human being is an individual in part insofar as he experiences a measure of separateness, for example, that his death does not require the death of another human being. A human being dies by himself. Insofar as that involves the extinction of his identity in some important respect, he is an individual with a separate identity.

Another component is an element of self-directedness. Self-determination or free will is a part of individualism insofar as an individual is someone whose initiative, including choices, decisions, and actions, is instrumental in determining who he is and will become. Individualists regard every person as something of a self-made person, even if only in a minimal respect, culminating in no more than acquiescence. Individuals have a determining, decisive influence on their own lives. The idea is that how a human being develops is not reducible to the influence of other people, of history, or even of their parents. Individuals put forth the initiative or effort that will produce significant aspects of their lives: knowledge, character, conviction, skill, and other personal attributes.

Every human being is, furthermore, capable of, and more or less responsible for, engaging in creative reasoning: in figuring things out, learning about the world, and understanding it to some perhaps minimal but essential extent. Cognition, at least at the conceptual, idea-forming level, has to be generated by the person; it cannot be imposed. A person is not a container into which ideas are funneled or poured, or something that passively responds to various stimuli. There is an element of self-generated understanding, however minimal, on the part of an individual according to proponents of the individualist social philosophical tradition.

Defenders of individualism also uphold moral autonomy for human beings, in the sense that they identify the individual as the source of morally relevant choice. The point is not, as Steven Lukes argues, that individualism involves a subjective autonomy that "will eventuate 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 causally structural forces, cultural or genetic. It is not others, or the individual's DNA or environment that is held responsible for what the individual does. Thus, it is an essential point of individualism that it is the agent who makes the moral choice, whose input is the most vital one for whether he takes the morally right or wrong action. Indeed, all bona fide moral blaming and praising is implicitly individualistic.

Individualism pertains to what people are like and how they ought to be. In political matters, advocates of individualism propound the sovereignty of each adult human being. They hold that ultimately the individual members of a polity are sovereign, not the polity itself, its leaders, or its representatives. Citizens, as individual members of a polity, are not subject to any sovereign

[83]

232 TIBOR MACHAN

whose natural position or superiority, or divine selection, has come to entitle him or her to exercise power over them.

The political individualism with which this notion of sovereignty is associated is very much a part of the American and modern Western political tradition. Indeed, those of us who come to the United States from outside, from the very beginnings of our stirrings as Americaphiles, have associated America with this form of individualism precisely for that reason.

Finally, the notion of liberalism which is also associated very much with the American political tradition is related to individualism. This is the fairly sophisticated, although for many people virtually common sense, idea that individual negative rights to life, liberty, and property are by his nature to be ascribed to every human being.

These conditions, drawn from different branches of philosophy but comprising a reasonably cohesive doctrine, largely characterize individualism. Another might also have been mentioned. It is the metaphysical form of individualism, proponents of which maintain that every being in an essential respect is a particular being. According to metaphysical individualism, there are no general or concrete universal beings, no such thing as society or even family, let alone humanity or ethnic group or tribe, the team or America, blacks or whites, or women or men as such. Instead, there are a great many particular beings, although they can be of various specific kinds. But their actuality is individual.

5. The Platonist Criticism If the dialogues of Plato actually spell out a philosophical viewpoint, and that has been disputed, then we are forced to the conclusion that Plato favors the reality of concrete universals over concrete particulars or individual beings. Particular beings, you and I as manifest in this actual, visible world, are in some sense inferior, imperfect versions of the perfect concrete universal that is our type, just as a perfect circle, as defined in geometry, is superior to any actual circular being. Thus it is human nature, the form of humanity, that has an elevated or noble status. Actual persons, who imperfectly participate in this form, are always inferior, and lamentably so. It is, accordingly, no accident that Western civilization has always had some disdain toward the body, whether it be in connection with work, sex, business, or material possessions. This is a legacy of Plato.

Plato's view 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 derived from this Platonic outlook is embodied in a comprehensive, philosophical view. In response, we would have to deal with at least some aspects of that point of view, to which we will return later.

[84]

233LIBERALISM AND ATOMISTIC INDIVIDUALISM 6. Aristotle as Anti-Individualist Aristotle is invoked as a more moderate anti-individualist. The whole does not have to be all of humanity as is implicit in a certain reading of Plato, but may be the family, polis, community, or some other limited group.

Because Aristotle identifies human beings as essentially social, it follows from his view that no individual can flourish apart from the realization of communitarian goods. There are many echoes of this view in our own time, with the reemergence of communitarianism in the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, Robert Bellah, and Amitai Etzioni. 12 There are certain elements in Aristotle's position, however, that 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.

7. Christianity vis-a-vis Individualism The idea that each human being is a distinct, unique child of God and that the saving of each individual's everlasting soul is the task of the ethical life, suggests crucial elements of individualism in Christianity. But there are also anti-individualist directions in Christian theology. St. Augustine said that "every part of the community belongs to the whole." There also appear to be certain ways in Christianity in which the individual may be sacrificed at least for the purposes of the whole. When Jesus said, "Compel them to come in" and was taken by some, such as the more zealous missionaries, to suggest coercing people to join the faith, this is anti-individualistic because it rejects personal initiative and responsibility.

Debate continues about whether Christianity is more supportive or less supportive of individualism. The theologians Michael Novak and Robert Sirico stress the individualist element in the American debate, while the Catholic Bishops tend to stress the collectivist element, whereby compelling people to help the poor, thus denying their free choice in the matter of practicing the virtues of charity and generosity, seems to be favored.

8. The Marxian Critics Charles Taylor and C.B. Macpherson seem to follow Marx in their criticism of individualism. Both espouse a holistic view, to the effect that humanity is, as Marx said explicitly, an "organic whole" on a historical march toward self-development or emancipation, when all will have reached their full, unalienated species-being.13 Others who draw on this Marxian tradition mix

[85]

234 TIBOR MACHAN

it with Aristotle and communitarian ideas. Among the leaders of this group is Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University and editor of The Responsive Community. That journal has published essays criticizing a libertarianism that the author associates intimately with radical, atomistic individualism. Taylor and Macpherson also maintain that individualism is necessarily tied to an atomistic view of the self, holding that human beings are self-sufficient, apart from society.14

These critics are clearly focusing on what Mary Midgley called an exaggeration of individualism. Its Homo economicus version includes the posit that everyone is a utility maximizer and that social relations among human beings are entirely optional, neither biologically necessary nor morally required. It is taken 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, private, subjective preferences set, with no role played by ethics, their biological, psychological, or social nature in this process.

The critics, including communitarians and neo-Marxists, have found this version of individualism false to the sociological and psychological facts, or ethically flawed. Because this model of human nature and human behavior is sometimes taken out of the realm of technical economics and used to make sense 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 hasty.

9. Feminist Critique of Individualism Some radical feminists, especially Catherine MacKinnon, attack individualism, often from a kind of neo-Marxian perspective that has been transformed to embody feminists components. On this view it is supposed to be classes, not the individual members of the classes, who matter politically and ethically. For example, MacKinnon recommends that we cease talking about the right of women to utilize abortion, and instead cast the discussion 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:

[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 obligations increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service. . . . This ["to live for others"], the definitive

[86]

235LIBERALISM AND ATOMISTIC INDIVIDUALISM formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.15

This notion, it will be easily seen, harks back to Platonism and the idea that humanity is a reality which stands over and above every individual and subgroup of humanity.

10. Radical Pragmatism The idea that there is something on which our belief systems can rest, which can hold it firm, which gives it stability and reliability, is rejected by proponents of at least the more radical versions of pragmatism. Skepticism about the existence of a foundational anchor for our belief systems is shared by such pragmatists as Charles Pierce, John Dewey, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Richard Rorty.

Rorty, for example, advances the belief that when people do have some understanding, it rests on what is agreed to by members of different communities. In his famous essay "Solidarity or Objectivity?" Rorty rejects the possibility of objective knowledge, the sort a person imagines he might get of reality after hard work, research, and the clearing away of prejudices and preconceptions. It is a myth that people can know the world as it exists, unconditioned by the thinking that they do in coming to know it. They are able to keep a stable, apparently independent worldview intact only because their community supports them in this. Individuals have their various communities, they belong to them, and in terms of what the communities give them, they formulate an understanding of the world.

Rorty goes so far as to indict much of our history of ideas, claiming: "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 Enlightenment, is the clearest example of the attempt to find a sense in one's existence by turning away from solidarity to objectivity."16 This objectivity, if attainable, would make some elements of individuality possible. A person could, at least occasionally, take an independent view of reality and thus perhaps criticize even his own community.

Rorty insists, however, 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 we need to do this is meaningless, "should not be asked."17

There is no role for the individual, with his independent consciousness, to ascertain or to stand apart from and criticize the viewpoint of the community.

[87]

236 TIBOR MACHAN

Rorty fashionably invokes Wittgenstein in support of this epistemological thesis by way of Wittgenstein's well-known private language argument. Proponents of the argument maintain that a certain type of empiricism is false, one according to which every individual gains sensory impressions of the world on which he then, individually, builds an understanding of reality by organizing, naming, and drawing inferences from the sense impressions.

Wittgenstein 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 I apply is like a christening, necessarily right because it is an act of will rather than a publicly correctable discovery. If I created a language all on my own there would be no way that anyone could correct what I am saying and doing. No one could hold me responsible for making a mistake.

Wittgenstein, no simple thinker to interpret, is taken to have argued that only if we look upon language as a social creation can it be understood as a medium within which errors and corrections can be made. Neither the subjective certainty of a Cartesian 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 proposed 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 profoundest thinker cannot by himself form the simplest language; it requires the co-operation of a community for several generations."18

Rorty thus supplements his pragmatist view of anti-foundationalism with Wittgenstein's private language argument, thereby disposing of the notion that any individual could ever take a cognitively independent stand from his community. In effect, this means that true dissidents do not exist. There are only warring groups.

11. Some Answers to Critics The criticism of individualism implicit in Plato's philosophical position is not particularly telling. First, it is arguable that the realm of perfect ideas is a philosophical myth. It is not supposed to be some objective reality, wherein actual ideals subsist as concrete universals, superior to individuals here in visible worlds. Instead, arguably, what 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 endorse individualism, but it certainly softens the blow against it.

[88]

237LIBERALISM AND ATOMISTIC INDIVIDUALISM As to Aristotle, it would be best to focus on Aristotle's ethics as against the frequent interpretation of his politics. Arguably, every individual has to be a member of a community but it is not necessary for the individual to be a member of some one kind of community or to select one community over all others, or to flourish within one community rather than another. As Zeller puts it,

Plato had demanded the abolition of all private possession and the suppression of all individual interests, because it is only in the Idea or Universal that he acknowledges any title to true reality. Aristotle refuses to follow him here. To him the Individual is the primary reality, and has the first claim to recognition. In his metaphysics individual things are regarded, not as the mere shadows of the idea, but as independent realities; universal conceptions not as independent substances but as the expression for the common peculiarity of a number of individuals. Similarly in his moral philosophy he transfers the ultimate end of human action and social institutions from the state to the individual, and looks for its attainment in his free self-development. The highest aim of the State consists in the happiness of its citizens. The good of the whole rests upon the good of the citizens who compose it. In like manner must the action by which it is to be attained proceed from the individual of his own free will. It is only from within, through culture and education, and not by compulsory institutions, that the unity of the State can be secured. In politics, as in metaphysics, the central point with Plato is the universal, with Aristotle the individual. The universal demands that the whole should realise its ends without regard to the interests of individuals; the individual demands that it should be reared upon the satisfaction of all individual interests that have a true title to be regarded.19

Zeller seems to make a convincing case, as do other commentators who show Aristotle to be, as Miller puts it, a "moderate individualist," to contrast him with those, like Hobbes, who propose an extreme or radical nominalist version.20

As to the Christian criticism of individualism, it depends largely on how we are to appreciate the theological criticism of a philosophical position. Taking Christianity as a fairly straightforward doctrine, where it joins hands with philosophy, there appears to be no major conflict between certain crucial aspects of individualism and Christianity. Augustinian Christianity sees the individual as a moral agent with free will and the responsibility 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. Thus, there appears to be no major opposition between the main thrust of Western Christianity

[89]

238 TIBOR MACHAN

and individualism, especially if we add the distinctive Christian doctrine of the status of every individual person as a child of God and as having the responsibility to achieve everlasting salvation by his own chosen deeds.

Because of its other-worldliness, it is troubling how Christianity would answer the question, "Who is the I?" It may not be possible to answer this in a way that is accessible to non-believers and non-Christians. And there is the related provision of the Bible already mentioned, namely, that the nonChristian might need to be forcefully brought to the 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 autonomy in making the decision to aspire to the kingdom of God.21 Similar problems can be found in other religious faiths, of course.

As far as the Marxian view is concerned, although it is now somewhat out of favor, many people still embrace it. It even receives some support from scientists, such as the late Lewis Thomas and many ecologists who endorse the conception of humanity or earth as an organic whole. 22 Marxism shares one problem with all anti-individualist positions, namely, that it is contradicted by the creativity of human beings, especially an undeniably creative intellectual like Marx himself.

Intellectuals, and all of us in our capacity as willing, intending, thinking beings, are frequently 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 a role that individuals 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 is one reason the late Sidney Hook could not square the role of the individual in history with hardline Marxism. Marx by implication excludes himself, as a potent member of the historical drama, from his understanding of human affairs. This is a powerful argument against the Marxian conception of humanity as a collective entity. In being unable to accommodate people like Marx himself, it reveals a self-referential inconsistency in the system.

As to communitarianism, the editors of The Economist recently pointed to a crucial flaw in the condemnation of individualism as expressed by communitarians. The flaw is that communitarianism "caricatures outrageously" the substance of Western liberalism, "calling it a doctrine of economic atomism that pays no heed to man's social nature." This, as the editors noted, "is simply false."23

A further serious difficulty with the communitarian attempt to privilege the community rather than the individual in social and political thought is that communitarians have no way to decide which community we owe our loyalties to. Is my community constituted by my fellow ex-Hungarians, members of

[90]

239LIBERALISM AND ATOMISTIC INDIVIDUALISM the professional community in which I work, my neighbors, fellow tennis players, fathers, drivers of BMWs, travelers, fans of the blues or the dancing of Fred Astair, libertarians, or divorced men? Communitarians like Etzioni offer no clue as to how we can be grouped so that we can be understood fully, as who we are, by reference to our membership in that group.

Is anything better to be said for Rorty's version of communitarianism? Rorty talks about solidarity replacing objectivity, but with which group do we proclaim this solidarity? Wittgenstein does not help here, either. He argued against radical empiricism, the notion that any single mind, faced with nothing but sense data, could come to know the world, to attain propositional or conceptual knowledge. There is nothing in Wittgenstein's work that denies a human being the independent ability to perceive some parts of the world. The private language argument does not tell against perceptual knowledge, only against knowledge based just in sense data.24 As we would anticipate, it is from simple ordinary experience and reflection that human beings begin to know. They perceive the world and are not simply told about it. Even after they have mingled this knowledge with what they learn from others, including elaborate conceptual knowledge built on complex chains of concepts, they must take care, individually, to remain properly anchored, to keep their bearings. Furthermore, the idea that knowledge begins with community runs aground when we consider just how this could happen. Communities have no brain, only their members do. Even if after centuries of human history, the bulk of what any of us knows does come 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, people who often try to indoctrinate or brainwash them and whose efforts often enough need to be and do get thwarted by individual resistance. But for Rorty and other communitarians, the heroic stance of the dissident is impossible. Would-be dissidents are either deluded in thinking they are lone rebels or actually amount to lunatics.

12. Individualism: Atomistic or Classical? There are forms of individualism not of the type that much of the classical liberal tradition inherited, which can withstand assault from the critics we have considered. One type of individualism that especially deserves consideration stresses the humanity of each individual. Advocates of this type of humanistic, or classical, individualism recognize that there is in nature a distinct class of beings we call human. This is to contrast such an individualism with one that contains the claim that the individual is a bare particular, that what are called natures are constructs invented by our minds.

[91]

240 TIBOR MACHAN

On the one hand we must acknowledge the inadequacy of atomistic individualism, but on the other hand we can firm up the foundation for individualism per se. This can be achieved by noting that in a study of human nature, by a careful examination of what it is to be a human being, we arrive at the conclusion that one of the crucial factors about being a human being is individuality. Instead of saying, with Hobbes, that there is no human essence, we can say in opposition to both Marx and Hobbes that the human essence is the true individuality of man. That human beings are also essentially social does not render their individualistic nature void. But their social nature must always be understood alongside their individuality. Accordingly, for example, while human beings require community affiliation, they need to consent to it as adults, not have it imposed upon them. That is the great insight of classical liberalism and the rejection of this the failure of collectivism.

13. Platonism Rejected One 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 the tradition of natural rights there is often an allusion to a Platonic conception of the nature of something. But there is a very serious problem with this view of the nature of a thing.

We need first to remember that for Plato the nature of anything is a timeless, unchanging, perfect form in another, timeless dimension of reality. We do have some plausible examples of this: when we study geometry we can, perhaps usefully enough, think of the perfect circle as being in a 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.

We were left with two extremes: the radically skeptical idea that issues in nominalism and radical individualism, and the Platonic alternative of an unattainable, hopelessly utopian and ideal conception of human nature. Both lead to skepticism in the end.

14. Rethinking Essentialism We should rethink essentialism or naturalism, not abandon it. 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 classification that we thus make, on the basis of evidence we have gathered and which is limited to the context of our present knowledge,

[92]

241LIBERALISM AND ATOMISTIC INDIVIDUALISM is 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 perhaps 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.

We need an approach to understanding the nature of things that gives us stability as well as makes room for gradual change. The world itself, as we know it from common sense, demands just that. We learn from history, from science, from everything that we are aware of that nature is stable as well as changing.

15. The Stability of Human Nature When we study the history of Homo sapiens over the one hundred thousand 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 does not just happen to go into motion. It is one feature of conceptual consciousness that individuals must initiate it; they must themselves start this process, otherwise they perish, unless they enlist the thinking of others, who have started it, as a substitute.

It is by their own particular initiative, circumscribed by their family backgrounds, traditions, habits, customs, environment, opportunities, and climate, that human individuals must confront the task of living their lives. They face the task of implementing or establishing their individuality every moment of their lives. But it also quickly points to the social nature of human life. The very fact that individuals are thinking animals points to the fact that flourishing in their lives is utterly interwoven with their fellow human beings.

16. Individualism Humanized How does all this help us out of some of the problems and paradoxes that critics of individualism tend to focus upon? First, since we have now a viable, sound, or feasible conception of human nature, not timeless yet having the stability to be expected of a view about the nature of things, we can identify some general principles that we could count on to guide our lives. The principles are going to be general enough to apply over time to succeeding generations, even if they will not be guaranteed to hold for eternity as earlier naturalists had hoped.

[93]

242 TIBOR MACHAN

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 probably requires applying the principles to telephones, call waiting, fax machines, and computers. Two hundred years ago people did not have the responsibility to be honest in just this way. 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. This will be so too with other virtues such as courage, prudence, or justice.

There 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. The traits that make for human excellence could well be human virtues, so that, for example, trans-historically we could consider a person four-hundred years ago and if we discover that he is a liar we could say that he did something objectively, morally wrong.

A good example of misguided criticism of individualism may be found in Charles Taylor's essay "Atomism." 25 Taylor claims that ascribing basic negative rights to individuals necessarily presupposes atomism, the view that human beings are self-sufficient apart from society. He links this view to Hobbes and Locke. He tells us that

Theories which assert the primacy of rights are those which take as the fundamental, or at least a fundamental, principle of their political theory the ascription of certain rights to individuals which deny the same status to a principle of belonging or obligation, that is a principle which states our obligation as men to belong to or sustain society, or a society of a certain type, or to obey authority or an authority of a certain type.26

To see the inadequacy of Taylor's view, we shall take Locke as an example of a theorist who asserts the primacy of rights as Taylor understands this. Contrary to Taylor's claim, Locke identifies pre-political moral responsibilities, when he tells us: "The state of Nature has a law of Nature of nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions."27

Locke clearly, unambiguously refers to "a law of Nature" that governs the state of nature, and "obliges everyone." Locke does not claim this is the only law of nature or moral principle. But he does say that it obliges us all, so Taylor is wrong to think that Locke begins his understanding of politics with individual rights. In the state of nature there are obligations. Of those, Locke calls attention to the obligation that "no one ought to harm another in his life,

[94]

243LIBERALISM AND ATOMISTIC INDIVIDUALISM health, liberty or possessions." Locke treats this obligation as enforceable. But it is too weak for theorists like Taylor who want us to be the possessions of society. The East German socialists implemented precisely this belonging when they regarded everyone who tried to leave them as embarking on a kind of kidnapping of part of the collective self.

The obligation identified by Locke implies that we ought to abstain from killing, assaulting, kidnapping, robbing, and otherwise interfering with the choices of other people, the failure of observing which would justify forcible defensive response. But other laws of nature, for example, that "everyone is bound to preserve himself," may not be enforceable. Furthermore, Locke says of each person that "when his own preservation comes not in competition, [he] ought as much as he can preserve the rest of mankind." But this is not an enforceable obligation. It is a moral, freely chosen, obligation of charity toward others.

Other difficulties with Taylor's analysis include his claim that theorists who grant a primacy to the rights of individuals in their theories must deny the sociability of individuals. But Locke makes it clear, using a quotation from "the judicious Hooker" that he believes human beings are by nature social: "[W]e are naturally induced to seek communion and fellowship with others."28 Taylor also claims that prior to Hobbes and Locke there was no reference to rights, which is flatly contradicted by other scholars.29

Taylor laments that our choices are not always mature enough to guide us toward self-fulfillment and self-development, so that the obligation to develop ourselves must be an enforceable one. But a moderate individualist would say, first, that assisting with the initial stages of self-development is the task of parents, not the state or strangers who have come to govern society. Furthermore, ordinarily each of us, except for the very unfortunate, will be able to set himself or herself to the task of self-development, gaining help when in need of it from society, not the state. Finally, self-development must amount to something highly individualized, so others will usually be unprepared to assist in it very much except in a voluntary, invited capacity. This fulfills the necessarily social component of human nature with no need to extend it to coercive impositions that arise from seeing each of us as belonging to society.

It is important to note that Taylor equates "a principle of obligation" with "a principle of belonging." The two are very easy to differentiate. A person may have the obligation to be generous or kind or helpful without belonging to those who would benefit from this. It is slaves who belong and do service not from their sense of morality or ethics but from the requirement to comply with the demands of those to whom they belong. Men and women who possess both free will and moral responsibilities do the right thing, including fulfilling their obligations, because they choose to do so. Taylor completely ignores this distinction between an enforceable and an ethical obligation. Because he ignores this distinction, he never has to deal with whether the social nature of

[95]

244 TIBOR MACHAN

human beings is something they need to fulfill as a matter of their moral responsibilities or can be made to fulfill at the command of others.

Furthermore, there is the occasional serious ambiguity in Taylor's use of the concept of obligation. Are we to understand by that term a course of conduct that is mandatory and enforceable or one that is a matter of moral requirement? If it is morally required, a person needs to be free from the coercive interventions of others so as to fulfill the obligation. If it is mandatory, others may impose it upon the individual by force. But then no credit is due to the person who obeys and thus ostensibly fulfills the obligation. A mark of a virtuous person is to recognize that his nature requires, among others things, extensive social engagement which is a part of his self-development, and the fulfillment of his nature. What it does not require is that such engagement be unconditional. Taylor does allow that there are "certain theories of belonging . . . which hold that our obligation to obey, or to belong to a particular society, may in certain circumstances be inoperative." But he discounts this exception and says that "in theories of belonging it is clear that men qua men have an obligation to belong to and sustain society."30 Taylor makes too little of what

is, after all, an important qualification on so-called theories of belonging. For if a person has the authority to withdraw from a perverse society, he will have the authority, also, to determine what criteria to use for this purpose. This is not an epistemological carte blanche , of course, but a serious moral responsibility to find out what kind of society is suitable to human flourishing.

Critics of individualism might consider that competing accounts of our nature need to be assessed not only on the basis of how wildly certain elements of our nature might be exaggerated within them, but also on how exaggerating aspects of our nature in one way may be far more harmful than in another. Thus while it is true that individualism can be propounded in an arid fashion, this has been far less harmful than similarly exaggerated collectivist accounts. 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 grandly horrid example of collectivist 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. 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 more 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.31

[96]

245LIBERALISM AND ATOMISTIC INDIVIDUALISM Tolstaya's choice of terms may suggest to some that this is an overstatement of the collectivist position. But we can wonder. Marx himself refers to human society as "an organic body."32 We have already seen that "belong" is Taylor's preferred term. And St. Augustine states that "every part of the community belongs to the whole."33 What else does this suggest but that human beings are component parts of some larger body and are, thus, ultimately not selfdirected? Indeed, it means that some people, be it a majority, politburo, central committee, or dictator, will have directive power, not that the whole body will exercise it in some kind of cohesive, integrated fashion.

Within smaller collectives, such as communes or convents, especially where entry is voluntarily, the probability of disharmony and instability will not be so great, precisely because such groups can very well reflect the main attributes of the individuals who comprise them. Even if such groups are established and maintained coercively, their configurations may well suit the individual purposes of their membership, making stability more likely. But that is less and less likely as the collective becomes larger.

The individualist idea can, of course, also be made to serve unsavory purposes, but never so readily and with such cataclysmic results as those of collectivism, small or large. Most importantly, however, individualism can be rendered in terms that are closer to the truth of the human situation, regarding both actual human capacities and realizable human ideals.

It is true that individuals ought to form social ties, that they ought often to be loyal to their groups, that it is best for them 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 nature 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 the combined individual effort of many generations can produce. Just as 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.

But 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 accept the protection, for everyone, of his moral space or personal moral jurisdiction. This amounts to respect for the basic rights that make it possible for us to act on our own initiative. It is the hallmark of individualism that even actions that are clearly right for someone to do must be a matter of choice. Without choice the very dignity of the human being, the capacity for a person to earn moral credit for doing what is right, is destroyed.

Alas, though this may be true, it is also the case that without sustained philosophical support, such common sense ideas are quickly overwhelmed,

[97]

246 TIBOR MACHAN

first by doubt and then by sophistry. In that spirit, suffice it to note that there is now a serious change of direction, at least in biology, concerning the adequacy of the mechanistic, scientistic model for understanding behavior, not just human but animal as well. In neurophysiology and psychophysics conclusions have been reached that give solid support to the idea that human brains are exactly the sort that enable human beings to function as causal, governing agents.34 Furthermore, it is evident that although there is a great deal of value in approaching much of the world along lines recommended by the methods of modern natural science, that method has been extrapolated too hastily to areas of inquiry where it fails to apply. The enthusiasm with social science and engineering, both spheres where individualism fares badly except in economics, seems now to have abated. The type of moderate or classical individualism that has been defended in the present discussion may well be the missing element. Surely this is suggested by the current tendency to abolish individual responsibility and to embrace the idea that we are all basically helpless in the face of our troubles.

In any case, the individualist stance is not by any means so out of line as some of its critics suggest. It could indeed be the opposite story, at the end of the day.35

Notes

1. Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 123. 2. Susan Mendus, "Liberal Man," in G.M.K. Hunt, ed., Philosophy and Politics (London:

Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 47. 3. Alasdair MacIntyre, "Nietzsche or Aristotle?" in Giovanna Borradori, ed., The American

Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 143. 4. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,

1981). 5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), p. 17. 6. John Gray, "From Post-Communism to Civil Society," Social Philosophy and Policy ,

10:2, 1993, p. 44. 7. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (London: Cambridge University Press,

1991), p. 31. 8. Richard Rorty, "The Seer of Prague," The New Republic, 1 July 1991, p. 37. 9. Midgley, op. cit., p. 103. 10. Ibid. 11. Steven Lukes, Individualism, (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 101. 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). 13. Marx, op. cit., p. 39. 14. Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, England: Cambridge

University Press, 1985), pp. 187-210. 15. August Comte, Cathechisme positiviste (Paris: Temple de l'humanite, 1957). 16. Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 21.

[98]

247LIBERALISM AND ATOMISTIC INDIVIDUALISM 17. Ibid., p. 7. 18. August Comte, A General View of Positivism (New York: Robert Spellers & Son, 1957),

p. 246. 19. Eduard Zeller, Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics , trans. B.F.C. Costelloe and J.H.

Muirhead (London: Oxford University Press, 1897), ii. 224-226, quoted in Fred D. Miller Jr., Nature, Justice and Rights in Aristotle's Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 200-201. See also Emerson Buchanan, Aristotle's Theory of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Monographs, 1962). 20. See Miller Jr., op. cit. 21. 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). 22. Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell (New York: Viking, 1971). 23. The Economist, March 18, 1995. 24. David Kelley, The Evidence of the Senses (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University

Press, 1986). 25. Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences. 26. Ibid., p. 188. 27. John Locke, Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay. An Essay Concerning the

True Origin and Extent or End of Civil Government (1690), Chapter II, "Of the State of Nature." 28. Ibid. 29. See Brian Tierney, "Origins of Natural Rights Language: Text and Contexts, 1150-

1250," History of Political Thought 10, Winter 1989 and "Conciliarism, Corporatism, and Individualism: The Doctrine of Individual Rights in Gerson," Christianesimo hella Storia 9, 1988; and Cary J. Nederman, "Property and Protest: Political Theory and Subjective Rights in Fourteenth-Century England." See also Miller Jr., op. cit. 30. Taylor, op. cit., p. 188. 31. Tatyana Tolstaya, "The Grand Inquisitor," The New Republic, June 29, 1992, p. 33. 32. Marx, op. cit., p. 33. 33. St. Augustine, quoted in Thomas Beauchamp, ed., Ethical Issues in Death & Dying

(Englewood-Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984), p. 103. 34. See Roger W. Sperry, Science and Moral Priority (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1983), as well as Midgley, op. cit. See, also, Edwards Pols, Acts of Our Being (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982) and Mind Regained (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998). 35. See Tibor Machan, Classical Individualism (London: Routledge, 1998), ch. 14.

[99]

248 TIBOR MACHAN