Individualism [Paperback]

In this classic text, Steven Lukes discusses what 'individualism' has meant in various national traditions and across different provinces of thought, analysing it into its component unit-ideas and doctrines.Individualism embraces a wide diversity of meanings and is widely used by those who criticise and by those who praise Western societies and their culture, by historians and literary scholars in search of the emergence of 'the individual', by anthropologists claiming that there are different, culturally shaped conceptions of the individual or 'person', by philosophers debating what form social science explanations should take and by political theorists defending liberal principles. In this classic text, Steven Lukes discusses what 'individualism' has meant in various national traditions and across different provinces of thought, analysing it into its component unit-ideas and doctrines. He further argues that it now plays a malign ideological role, for it has come to evoke a socially-constructed body of ideas whose illusory unity is deployed to suggest that redistributive policies are neither feasible nor desirable and to deny that there are institutional alternatives to the market.contentsNew introduction by the author1Foreword17Part One: The Semantic History of Individualism19Chapter One: France21Chapter Two: Germany30Chapter Three: Jacob Burckhardt35Chapter Four: America37Chapter Five: England41Chapter Six: History and the Social Sciences46Part Two: The Basic Ideas of Individualism49Chapter Seven: The Dignity of Man51Chapter Eight: Autonomy55Chapter Nine: Privacy60Chapter Ten: Self-Development66Chapter Eleven: The Abstract Individual70Chapter Twelve: Political Individualism74Chapter Thirteen: Economic Individualism80Chapter Fourteen: Religious Individualism84Chapter Fifteen: Ethical Individualism87Chapter Sixteen: Epistemological Individualism92Chapter Seventeen: Methodological Individualism94Part Three: The Relations Between These Ideas103Chapter Eighteen: Eql“p