The notion of individualism has been at the center of numerous debates over the past two centuries.1 It came out of controversies surrounding emerging democracies, and its various interpretations made it difficult to grasp. Rather than focusing on its definition, we will turn our attention to its historical and philosophical origins, with the aim of demonstrating its fundamental incoherence. From this perspective, we will once again rely on the concept of idealization. We will conclude by addressing the obstacles that individualisms pose on the path to freedom of thought.
Polysemy of the word
Initial Uses
The term ‘individualism’ was coined at the beginning of the 19th century, amidst the intellectual upheavals of the French Revolution.2 Initially, it was used by counter-revolutionaries of all stripes to denounce the prioritization of individual interests over those of communities.
In 1835, in his study of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville made a distinction between selfishness and individualism:
Selfishness is a passionate and exaggerated love of oneself, which drives a person to relate everything only to themselves and to prefer themselves above all else.
Individualism is a considered and peaceful sentiment that inclines each citizen to isolate themselves from the mass of their peers and to withdraw into a private sphere with their family and friends; in this way, after having thus created a small society for their own use, they willingly abandon the larger society to itself.3
Tocqueville’s conception, less pejorative than that of the counter-revolutionaries, remains negative as it portrays an attitude that, despite its rationality, contributes to social dissolution. It differs from Anglo-Saxon economic liberalism, which views society as composed of individuals whose interests naturally harmonize through market interactions. In the United States, individualism is even more deeply rooted in customs, as politics developed locally and gradually consolidated at the level of a federal state.4
Another form of individualism emerged in Germany in the wake of Romanticism. Often infused with a mythical vein, it idealizes the individual. This perspective reached its peak in the philosophies of Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche and later unfolded in various forms of nationalism.
Three main meanings can thus be identified in the early uses of the term ‘individualism’:
- The attitude that tends to prioritize individual interest over collective interest.
- The idea that a society results from the aggregation of individuals who coordinate through economic means (the market) and political means (democracy).
- The idealization of the individual, who becomes a ‘superman.’
Individualism and Freedom of Thought
At the end of the 19th century, Émile Durkheim linked individualism with freedom of thought. He explained that this phenomenon is not new and that its origins fade into the depths of history:
Individualism and free thought did not emerge in our time, nor in 1789, nor during the Reformation, nor with Scholasticism, nor with the fall of Greco-Latin polytheism or the Oriental theocracies. It is a phenomenon that begins nowhere but develops continuously throughout history. Certainly, this development is not linear. […] The collective consciousness […] increasingly consists of very general and indeterminate ways of thinking and feeling, leaving space for an ever-growing multitude of individual dissensions. […] As all other beliefs and practices take on an increasingly less religious character, the individual becomes the object of a kind of religion.5
While Max Weber saw the rationalization of Western societies as leading to a decline in religiosity,6 Émile Durkheim perceived in individualism a transformation of the sacred, shifting from the whole (society as a collective, equated with God) to its components (individuals).
Regardless of the respective roles of rationalization and religion in the emergence of individualism, can we assert that, historically, individualism has gone hand in hand with freedom of thought?
From Idealizations to Individualisms
The concept of idealization, which I have been developing since 2020, seems philosophically relevant to me because, unlike the concept of will, it highlights the psychological and contingent aspects of the thoughts produced. It also allows for the inclusion of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, religious, political, economic, and other dimensions.
It is thus important to differentiate between scientific idealizations and ethical idealizations:7 the former contribute to accurately describing reality, whereas the latter serve more as goals to be achieved which are therefore often removed from reality. Moreover, numerous aesthetic and economic idealizations fall outside the realms of science and ethics. These idealizations guide behavior as much as, and sometimes even more than, moral principles.
Ancient Idealizations
Ancient religious beliefs, as we have noted elsewhere,8 reflect forms of idealization of human power. Regarding the individual, we can particularly highlight the heroic acts whose memory the Greeks fervently preserved—a memory perpetuated by the community. As Jean-Pierre Vernant explains,9 the imperishable glory of heroes allows, in a way, for transcendence over death:
In a culture like that of archaic Greece, where each person exists in relation to others, under the gaze and through the eyes of others, where a person’s foundation is all the more solid the farther their reputation extends, true death is forgetfulness, silence, obscure indignity, the absence of renown.10
From memory arise Plato’s eternal ideas in the Meno. The soul recalls knowledge it has forgotten upon entering the body. The Greek philosophical valorization of knowledge metaphorically signals that the power derived from the sciences begins to surpass the athletic strength of warriors.
Early Christians, on the other hand, performed miracles rather than feats of strength, and they emphasized emotions more than reason. Unlike the Greek gods, who retreated to Olympus and showed little concern for the vicissitudes of human life, the Christian God remains close to His creation. He knows the thoughts and deeds of every individual and uses this knowledge to grant or deny salvation. Free to follow or deviate from moral rules, Christians must monitor their thoughts and actions throughout their lives. This fosters an interiority that likely contributed historically to the development of individualism.11 Thus, individualism partly stems from a religious idealization—the divine ability to know the soul of each individual.
Modern Idealizations of Freedom
Individual freedom was not self-evident in Antiquity, as the peoples of the Mediterranean believed their existence to be determined by the gods. The Greeks cherished the independence of their city-states, but they cared little for the freedom of their citizens, who belonged, body and soul to their city-states.12 Individual freedom began to emerge as a human capacity to act independently of fate with Epicurus, and later with Augustine of Hippo, who emphasized free will.13 At that time, free will was understood as the ability to commit evil, not good. Thus, individual freedom, in the sense of acting independently of fate or providence, was not valued in Antiquity. Nor was it during the Middle Ages.
A shift in perspective on freedom occurred gradually starting in the 16th century. As previously mentioned,14 the expansion of freedom of thought from the 16th to the 18th century was supported by an increase in knowledge, techniques, and sciences. These advancements encouraged questioning, criticism, and the formulation of new theories. Questions arose particularly with the development of techniques that facilitated experimentation and discoveries, both geographic and scientific. The great explorations of the world provided opportunities to observe cultural diversity and compare different societies.
Thus, the expansion of knowledge largely relied on practices and methods that initiated modern scientific approaches. The modern individual is one who experiments for themselves. The Cartesian intuition of the cogito expresses this tendency abstractly, while simultaneously demonstrating how isolated experimentation can lead to errors and foster idealizations.15
This technical and epistemological effervescence accompanied the development of commerce and industry, and, consequently, the rise of the bourgeoisie. Until the 18th century, the bourgeoisie lived in the shadow of the aristocracy, as work was culturally devalued,16 often seen as a divine curse.17 However, attitudes toward the economy gradually evolved, initially for reasons of political philosophy with the emergence, in the 16th century, of a raison d’État (reason of state). All definitions of this concept share « a preliminary recognition that the welfare and happiness of the state, its interest, must be regarded as the ultimate goal of all political action. In this sense, interest refers to a form of rational calculability.« 18
The notion of interest also ties into economics19. Starting in the 16th century, the question of a state’s enrichment, as a source of its power, became a major topic of reflection,20 clinked to the emancipation of politics from religion. Sovereignty and wealth became interdependent, with the latter underpinning the former. Jean Bodin, in Les six livres de la République, argued that « finances are the sinews of the Republic. »21 According to Bodin, the primary sources of wealth are land, war, family, and alliances, with commerce ranking fifth or sixth—whether conducted directly by the Prince or taxed for profit.
Economics gained legitimacy not only through its political contributions but also through a moral legitimization of interest, as brilliantly analyzed by Albert Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests.22 The pursuit of individual interest, whether economic or otherwise, was justified by the moderation of behavior it encouraged. Furthermore, the coordination of interests was facilitated by the market, which Adam Smith saw as a kind of divine providence.23 By the 18th century, commerce was increasingly viewed as a source of enrichment and a means of pacifying international relations by philosophers like Montesquieu and Hume.24
One cannot understand how freedom became idealized without considering the intellectual, technical, economic, and political upheavals that occurred between the 16th and 18th centuries.25 The rupture was not a matter of a natural right, which had existed since Antiquity and was extensively debated from the 11th century onward.26 Rather, it was a revolution in knowledge and techniques. This revolution created the impression that mastery over nature and its resources was within reach and that a harmonization of social customs and economic exchanges was on the horizon.
Contemporary Idealizations
If I have devoted so much time to studying freedom and continually return to it, it is because it represents the foremost value in Western societies, ahead of equality, with structural inequalities and opinion polls on citizens’ concerns supporting this view. It seems to me that the idealizations of freedom and the power associated with it form the foundation of many of the ills that have plagued human relations for millennia. These idealizations underlie a multitude of others because we covet things to the extent that we believe we have legitimacy or a right to aspire to them.
With the gradual establishment of democracies starting in the late 18th century, the ideal of wealth, initially the preserve of the aristocracy and then the bourgeoisie, became democratized. As I have previously noted,27 the ambition for growth has transcended political boundaries, becoming a shared goal across all parties in the 19th and 20th centuries. The pursuit of wealth did not corrupt existing moral systems; rather, it integrated into secular moralities through the concept of freedom. Moreover, contemporary ethical debates often revolve around individual rights rather than the notion of living together in harmony.
The societal primacy of freedom as a value complicates the issue of individualism. How can one label as individualist a behavior aimed at accumulating wealth when such accumulation forms part of the shared ethical framework? This is not to deny the benefits brought by technological and economic progress, but rather to critique the harm caused by excessive accumulation—whether financial, territorial, or material—which we struggle to quantify and define.28 One could argue that the idealizations of freedom have undermined the philosophical principle of moderation, a cornerstone of ancient philosophy. These idealizations have led us into an age of excess, reflected in the overreaching ambitions of political and economic leaders, ambitions that contributed to 19th-century colonization and 20th-century world wars. This excess continues to drive today’s “leaders,” whose control is further eroded by the growing complexity of societies, and it is also a major factor in climate change.
The cultural passion for freedom, however intense, does not quench the thirst for recognition. Like the pursuit of wealth, the quest for public recognition has become democratized, particularly since the advent of the internet. Born from the desire to stand out—much like the heroes of antiquity who sought to leave an indelible mark on collective memory—social media has cast a spotlight on this pursuit. It reflects in contemporary imaginations the persistence of a mythical mindset, often found in fictional narratives. From this perspective, individualism does not mean withdrawing from others, as Tocqueville suggested, but rather seeking their attention and approval. It sharpens an endless social competition in which individuals strive to stand out in order to exist socially.
Thus, many ancient idealizations coexist with modern ones, fueling various forms of individualism—from the aristocratic retreat into bourgeois homes to the pursuit of public recognition on social media. Among these ancient idealizations are religious beliefs and their moral systems, whose coexistence within a single country often generates friction. Since empathy is often more readily extended to those with whom we share commonalities,29 doesn’t the diversity of ethical systems tend to foster behaviors labeled as individualist but which merely reflect a limit to empathy? Indifference toward others, in such cases, simply reveals an absence of empathy. Moreover, our densely populated societies and the overwhelming number of demands they place on us can easily lead to empathy fatigue. In such conditions, the notion of individualism becomes elusive.
Freedom of Thought Tested by Individualisms
When we demonstrate how contemporary individualisms are rooted in idealizations, the concept of individualism begins to fracture. The idealizations discussed here originate from society; they are not the work of any single individual but are shared and collective. This is one reason why the notion of individualism, from the outset and unlike that of selfishness, is inherently unstable: it inevitably leads to apparent paradoxes, such as the craving for recognition within so-called individualistic societies.
Conformist Individualism
Another major paradox of individualism is that of conformism, a phenomenon widely observable and the subject of numerous studies in cognitive psychology. As Paul Bloom recounts in Psych:
It turns out that a great trick for getting people to do something, such as to vote or recycle, is to tell them that most other people are doing it. When a Holiday Inn in Arizona wanted guests to reuse their towels, they found the most effective method was to leave a card in their rooms, informing them that « seventy five percent of our guests use their towels more than once. »30
In a now-famous experiment,31 psychologist Solomon Asch tasked participants with a perception exercise. In reality, all but one participant—the subject of the experiment—were actors following instructions from the experimenter. The exercise’s purpose was to observe the subject’s responses. Each participant was shown the following two cards in succession:
The first card displayed a single line.The second card displayed three lines, one of which matched the length of the line on the first card. Participants were then asked to indicate which line on the second card matched the length of the line on the first card. In some exercises, the actors gave the correct answer; in others, they gave the wrong answer—but they all provided the same response. In total, 74% of the subjects gave at least one incorrect answer under the misleading influence of the actors.
An even more famous experiment related to conformism was conducted by Stanley Milgram.32 Though highly controversial, it revealed a tendency to obey authority—an inclination that resonates with Hannah Arendt’s reflections on totalitarianism:
For the pitiless machines of domination and extermination, the masses of well-organized philistines were a far better material and capable of far greater crimes than the so-called professional criminals, provided those crimes were carefully organized and bore the appearance of routine work.33
The Freedom to Think… Absurdities
In addition to the pursuit of idealizations, the desire for recognition, and prevailing conformism, contemporary individualisms are influenced by specialization and digitalization. Specialization complicates the ability to broaden one’s knowledge and, consequently, to develop intellectual autonomy. Digitalization, while facilitating access to knowledge and seemingly offering an antidote to specialization, carries the risk of excessively outsourcing knowledge, delegating reasoning to artificial intelligence, or being swept away by fanciful ideas, particularly on social media.
Thus, caught between blindness, driven by social aspirations, and narrow-mindedness, encouraged by specialization and digitalization, contemporary individualisms hinder freedom of thought. In such a context, freedom of thought is no longer the ability to align one’s opinions with science and reality but instead becomes a rejection of any reflective constraint—particularly a right to disguise absurdities as truths or to cultivate beliefs that contradict facts.
Continue the reflection: The correlated evolution of privacy, freedom of thought, and idealizations
Notes
1.↑ See for instance (not translated): https://damiengimenez.fr/du-holisme-a-lindividualisme-methodologique-un-eventail-de-rationalites/
2.↑ https://www.britannica.com/topic/individualism
3.↑ Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique II, UQAC, p. 97.
4.↑ Ibid.
5.↑ Émile Durkheim, « L’individualisme et les intellectuels », Revue bleue, 4e série, t. X, 1898, pp. 7-13.
6.↑ https://damiengimenez.fr/la-rationalite-selon-max-weber-raison-desenchantee-et-ideal-sociologique (not translated)
7.↑ https://damiengimenez.fr/synthese-conceptuelle-des-modelisations-en-economie-et-en-sociologie-et-plus-largement-en-sciences/#Idealisations_categories (not translated)
8.↑ https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/idealization-in-history/
9.↑ Jean-Pierre Vernant, L’individu, la mort, l’amour. Soi-même et l’autre en Grèce ancienne, Gallimard, 1989, p. 52-53.
10.↑ Ibid.
11.↑ Ibid., p. 231.
12.↑ One can cite the example of Socrates, who preferred to drink hemlock rather than go into exile.
13.↑ Damien Gimenez, La question de la liberté, L’Harmattan, 2018, p. 28 sq.
14.↑ https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/progress-and-limits-of-freedom-of-thought-in-europe-from-the-16th-to-the-18th-century/
15.↑ The critiques of the cogito were immediate, and Descartes was later accused of having favored skepticism.
16.↑ This devaluation was found across all Greco-Roman cultures.
17.↑ The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the original paradise in the book of Genesis. See, for example, Dominique Méda, Le travail, PUF, 2018. The negative perception dominated despite the existence of passages from Saint Paul valuing work.
18.↑ Domenico Taranto, « Le discours de la raison d’État », in Alain Caillé, Christian Lazzeri, Michel Senellart (dir.), Histoire raisonnée de la philosophie morale et politique, La Découverte, 2011.
19.↑ Since the 13th century: https://www.littre.org/definition/int%C3%A9r%C3%AAt
20.↑ See the treatises on political economy from the 16th to the 18th centuries, particularly the two major economic schools of thought: mercantilism and physiocracy.
21.↑ Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République, Librairie générale française, 1993, p. 498.
22.↑ Albert O. Hirschman, Les passions et les intérêts, PUF, 2020.
23.↑ Adam Smith, Théorie des sentiments moraux, PUF, 2003, p. 257 sq.
24.↑ For Hume, see especialy this article (not translated):
https://damiengimenez.fr/la-philosophie-de-david-hume-aux-sources-de-la-rationalite-economique-classique/
25.↑ How could such upheavals be reduced to just one of their aspects (intellectual, material, etc.) when, clearly, these different aspects have interacted with one another?
26.↑ Natural law dates back to ancient Greece. Plato (The Republic, 369b) and Lucretius (De Rerum Natura, V) offer versions of the formation of societies that can be described as individualistic.
27.↑ https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_snapshot/do-we-want-to-live-in-peace/
28.↑ For example, discussions about the salaries of top executives are systematic, but nothing happens because of international competition, which stems from the global quest for wealth.
29.↑ https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_article_en/projection-a-major-obstacle-to-distancing/
30.↑ Paul Bloom, Psych, HarperCollins, 2023, chapter 11.
31.↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
32.↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
33.↑ Hanah Arendt, Le système totalitaire Les origines du totalitarisme, Volume 3, Seuil, 2005, p. 87.