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INDIVIDUALISM AS A SOCIAL MOVEMENT
by Mark C. Kennedy The American University in Cairo. The age of individualism in the West is passing away, but even so, it leaves its mark upon religion, politics, the family, science, philosophy, art and the economy, its also affects, powerfully jurisprudence, nation, courts of law, and most legal procedures; It has special influence on two vast bodies of civil and criminal law (the foundations of guilt) which originated and swept over the Western World increasingly from the fifteenth century to its mid-nineteenth century zenith in the United States. Its passage--dating forward from roughly 1890 in the United States--has not been without conflict both personal and societal. Indeed, insofar as the present chaos of social and personal life in the Western world is concerned, individualism seems to be struggling ever more desperately for renewal against the forces Erich Fromm described so well as an escape from freedom. So much is this so, that not only the New Left, but also the Dixie crates, and all manner of youth movements together with civil rights movements and misnamed race riots may be seen as the very expression of individualism against the co-optive forces of bureaucracy, mass society, and mass culture. At the Zenith of individualism, in its optimism, was the feeling generally shared that each person could carve out his own destiny, his own life style, and that the opportunities would always be abundant for doing just that. But directly as the opposing forces of bureaucracy and managed society have entered on the scene, these chances have diminished to a point where, in Mill's words, people feel they now inherit a 'second-hand world' prefabricated and readied for each individual as if all there was to life was to become 'educated' only to take up life in some ready-made occupational slot--there to subsist as a rubber stamp of those who will take one's place upon retirement and 'social security' receipts. Today, as in the 60's and 70's individualism is neither a dream of the future, nor a postscript to yesterday. It lingers both cynically and desperately as the difference between personal/social ideals and the organized realities of bureaucracy, centralization of power and authority, the internationalization of economic systems, multi-national corporations, and the extent to which the power elite of Millsian fame has successfully aborted the very political meaning of the apparatus of democratic rule. For those who are unprepared to accept the terms of this second-hand society, for those who have been steeped in the ethos of individualism and the American Dream, for those who still associate life with equal opportunities of success, upward mobility, and 'easy street', and for those constant admirers of Henry David Thoreau, the passage of individualism is a deep, a profound, crisis of identity. The burden of this essay is not to go into the endless complexities of the present crisis, as strong today as a few decades ago but rather to understand the origins, the diffusion, and the institutionalization of individualism from its Utopian beginnings in the collapse of feudal society, to its ideological, personal, social, political, and economic fealty , and ultimately to its demise, its violent dying, in the present era. Liberté is dying; Freiheit ascends. The new version of the old order returns to find most of us without a viable ideology, without a vision of what the future could otherwise be, and with the certain feeling that what power will impose upon the 'underdeveloped' world will be a replay of what already has happened to our own. Just as the forces of internationalism now everywhere crush the forces of nationalism, so did the forces of nationalism also crush the forces of individualism. Ironically, confirmed individualists of the present day, whether they are of the Ayn Rand/Barry Goldwater stripe, or whether they are from the New Left, while arguing for individualism succeed only in promoting the goals of internationalism. Ironically, so many carry on a fight against nationalism (or think they do) when nationalism has already succumbed to the forces of internationalism in so many political and economic ways. The man who first attempted to describe this fact, and who did not at the time (1984) see its full implications was Robert Brady. It was Brady who so well documented the increasing role of national trade associations of Europe and America in controlling legislation, law enforcement, executive policy, and the directions of military forces. He documented how such associations, through their increasing power to control governmental apparatuses in each country, could also shape socio-economic structure in every nation state to its own interests. National armies through this control of the apparatuses of 'democracy' could be thrown against any people anywhere in the world and at any time. But what Brady did not describe with equal care was that national trade associations, together with more encompassing transnational economies, and with corporations had internationalized. But the German Spitzenverbande, the National Association of Manufacturers, and other trade associations in European countries are now in effect under one roof with a common interest and a common mode of rule; no longer does a national trade association control national politics. Rather, a growing international association controls politics in every nation State. National armies in the West have ceased being national armies and have become, in effect, international police forces at the behest of the international politico-economic community. Against this, the disorganized movements of a dying individualism within each country, as in-and-and-appear to be as futile as such movements are naive. Tilting at windmills, they will be crushed by internationally organized power structures--the very same structures which have such a vested interest today in the fate of the so-called 'developing' and 'underdeveloped' countries. The rise of nationalism and the rise of individualism were not merely simultaneous events in Western history. They were related as body is related to its shadow. At their zenith, with the sun straight overhead, nationalism walked with its shadow firmly underfoot, and there was no disparity between individualism and nationalism. The world seemed whole and unified. In its early morning hours, nationalism was diminutive, but its shadow stretched to touch the horizon where the sun would set. But now both approach nightfall. The sun is setting, and the long shadow of individualism stretches back to the East to Europe waiting for twilight, waiting but rather furiously for the long night which lies ahead. Today, its shadow is long but its body disappears as the shades of night are gathering all around. The mood of this image should not be taken too seriously. For even in the noonday of Nationalism, the world was not uniformly 'whole' an lovely for every member of each western country. Far from it. It was perhaps whole and lovely only for the entrepreneurial classes, and for men like Adam Smith, J.B.Say, the 'ideologues'; Herbert Spencer and the idealists. It was hardly whole and lovely for children laboring in mines, in textile mills, in sweat shops everywhere along with their parents and grandparents who also were torn from their holding, their traditional kinship systems as a nucleated, atomized institution. But there was a time when the dream of breaking out of lower cleass existence through upward mobility was more than a dream. Clerks could and did become the founders of huge corporations in the United States. But the likelihood of this today is equal like that to the probability of the survival of snow in the heat of a tropical night. But the night descends, the dream fades into it, and so does the body of nationalism as a political expression of the myth of individualism. THE HISTORICAL CONDITIONS OF INDIVIDUALISM IN THE WEST The ethical transformation from the ethic of shared responsibility to that of individual responsibility for individual conduct is basic to the comprehension of the origins, the diffusion and continuity of individualism as a general social movement. Without knowledge of the conditions and processes going into this transformation, it is impossible to see the limited character of political, economic, familistic, religious, and scientific institutions of the last two centuries. Without knowledge of the conditions which have effaced individualism as a social movement--it becomes impossible to see the manner in which these same institutions are undergoing transformation today.Predicated upon the collapse of feudalism, and as a function of the rise of institutions of capitalism which this collapse afforded, individualism emerged as a general social movement from feudal chaos to a social philosophy and a normative order, and, as it grew, transformed the whole of Western society and its culture. EArly or late, this ethic came to normative jargon in religion was Protestantism, I philosophy it was empiricism and idealism, In scholastic inquire it was the deductive and inductive methods of Natural science, In one economy it was the 'new' institutions of private property, the market, entrepreneurship, and the redivision of labor along wholly new lines. Politically, individualism found expression in the rise of formally rational States, in citizenship and social contract theory, and in the rise and spread of two interlinked bodies of/law guaranteed: (criminal law and civil law). And just as egoism came to play the major part in the genesis of self, so behaviorism came to play the major part in the genesis of self, so behaviorism came to play the major part in personality 'theory' and research. The same individualism which gave rise to egoism of personality gave rise also to the theory which would abstract it into propositional language by individualized methods wholly dependent upon sensory, individualized observations and measurements. All the while, kinship was being nucleated dispossessed and religion atomized to become impotent as a social control generally. On every side, with each new expression of individualism, the society founded earlier on the ethic of shared responsibility for individual conduct was vanishing from the scene. One fealty was for sale, altruism was dead. The 'new' ethic, crucial as it was to the reconstruction of all social institutions, transformed the relation of person to other, person to society, society to person, other to person, and it created a new relation between each individual as a citizen and the emergent States of Europe. In all these relations so transformed, the social fiction, and subsequently the legal fiction, that each citizen is alone responsible for his conduct and its consequences become reified both at the level of self or personality and at the level of law and judicial procedures. The acceptance of individual responsibility as an attitude of self become basic to guilt; as a premise of both civil and criminal law, it is elemental to the whole political practice of incrimination. THE ETHIC OF SHARED RESPONSIBILITY UNDER FEUDAL SOCIETY Between the last invasions and the middle of the eleventh century, Europe developed what came to be called the institutions of feudalism: this was the first feudal age, and the second extended to the fourteenth century. Institutions, norms, and the fundamental ethic laid down in the first age of feudalism increasingly collapsed in the second--finally leaving a chaotic state of individuation without individualism. In this anomic soil, prepared by the fall of feudal institutions, the incipient institutions of capitalism, State, citizenship, protestantism and rational law would be cultivated, and transplanted throughout the world. It was individualism, contrary to the Weber thesis which led to modern economic and political institutions. Protestantism was not the spark but rather the expression of the same ethic which sparked into being all other post-fifteenth century institutions. Moreover, contrary to Blumer's thesis about all social movement's beginning with unrest, the present thesis will demonstrate, in passing, that social unrest had very little to do with the rise of individualism, and its manifest institutions.That is to say, according to Blumer, one would expect the following account of individualism as a social movement. General unrest and socio-personal dissatisfaction with the customs and enforced practices of feudal authority, unrest relating to deprivations both physical and social would be set forth as crucial. Under Blumer's theory, one would see individualism first as a restive movement against the symbols of feudal authority, second a reversal of underlying premises or ethics of feudal institutions, third, the development of a morale, and an ideology, and ultimately the development of new and differentiated roles and statuses as the building blocks of new institutions. In view, modern society by and large is but the product of an antithetical movement and reversal of feudal society--beginning with unrest and dissatisfaction. I hope to show, however, that the unrest--though rampant in feudal society--especially toward the close of the Middle Ages--was simply the unrest occasioned by the collapse of feudal values, the collapse of feudal institutions and the ethic of shared responsibility. In short, feudal society 'died'. It came to a halt throughout most of Europe. It was supplanted or superseded by a new society growing up alongside it. Having lain half dormant and repressed by the very predominance of feudal values, the ethic of individualism and the institutions manifested by it grew by leaps and bounds with every decline of feudal institutions--and absorbed at the same time a good deal of feudal energy and wealth, feudal manpower, and consequently political power. While the collapse of feudalism catalyzed the growth of the institutions of individualism, it was never the objective of individualism as a social movement to 'overthrow' it. It overthrew itself. It became meaningless, as an individuated society--as collective individuation without individualism. Individuated members, cut loose from the bonds of fealty, homage, companionage were cut loose also from the soil and livelihood. They were alienated and as alienated beings were swept into the areas where as cheap wage labor, they would fall heir to a growing ethic and an entrepreneurial world view which determined, and under law came to predetermine their status as being among the lowest ranking members of the culture of capitalism. Thus, capitalism, State, Citizenship, protestantism, and other 'urban institutions' fell heir to prevalence but did not at first actively seek it. But once the State transformed and allied itself with capital and jurisprudence, the enforced norms of society transformed, and transformed all social life in the process. In short, new norms, based on the ethic of individual responsibility were instituted and enforced to the exclusion of the rule of custom and the ethic of shared responsibility for individual conduct. In the first feudal age, customs and the oral tradition prevailed and were imbedded in the religious mentality, the epic, and the folk memory. The legal system was the rule of custom orally related, and it rested on the conviction that whatever has been has the right to be. Precedent, not innovation, ruled. Such rules were jargon expressed not in hierarchy as we know it now but in mutually binding obligations of a quasi-kinship nature, and up the feudal scale of enfieldment they followed mutually binding oaths. Land, labor, and such usufruct as-and-(the only capital) were tied solidly to these obligations and could not for that reason become marketable goods. The notion of exclusive proprietary rights, so basic to capitalism, was generally not part of the mental equipment of members of feudal society. The tenant who-from father to son, as a rule--plough the land and gathers in the crop: his immediate lord, to whom he pays dues and who, in certain circumstances, can resume possession of the land: the lord of the lore, and so on right up the feudal scale--how many persons there are who can say with justification. . . "That is my field!"With landed wealth and labor differentially but commonly owned and tied to mutuality of tenure by custom in perpetuity for kinship and vassalage, capitalism had no existence institutionally--even though it existed incipiently in the precious few who were scorned as pariahs and who, sporadically but without single-mindedness of purpose, traded for trinkets and goods in kind. No important privately held properties could, under custom, be objects of trade during the first feudal age. While buying and selling were known, no one lived by it except perhaps a few who were generally banished from the usual affairs of feudal life. Even barter was peripheral, for the chief means of distribution of goods and services, demanded by precedent, were 'aid', or tallage, and the corvée in return for protection. As Bloch put it, the corvée' furnished more labor than hire." Kinship and vassalage found unity in companionage--so much that fealty was meaningless without it. Vassalage, the core of feudalism, was meaningless without kinship ties, and kinship-in-vassalage was meaningless without 'friends by blood' or companionage. Friends in vassalage were nearly exclusively blood relatives. Public authority had not emerged, and while vassalage meant subordination, subordination was personal and quasi-familistic in character. In this first age, feudal society differed as much from societies based wholly on kinship as it now differs from those dominated by formally rational States. Just as shared responsibility for individual conduct was the ethical basis for vassalage, land tenure, and feudal methods of distributing goods and services, so was it the basis for kinship solidarity and restoration of good relations between offenders and the wronged. Persons united by blood were not necessarily friends, but friendship did not exist unless persons were united by blood. Companionage obligations were not at first weakened in the fact of differential status between friends of blood, but were strong--at least until feudal expansion by sub-infeudation eventually collapsed the feudal system. Any harmful act falling on one fell on all, and any avengement suffered by one was suffered by all members of the companionage. This ethic also found expression in oath helping or compurgation. The collective oath from one's kindred and companionage was sufficient to clear charges against the accused, and ironically was enough also to confirm charges brought against the accused by the plaintiff and his companionage. When compurgation balanced each other, the impasse could be broken either in trial by battle or voluntary compensation to the injured part. Defeat in trial by battle would fix both guilt and punishment simultaneously--not merely for the defeated champion (who might be either accused or plaintiff) but for all members of his companionage who had stood 'surety' for him, Both punishment and guilt were the terminal point of an act of war. The American University in Cairo. Top to communicate with Mr. Kennedy. September 2004 Newsletter Go To Current Newsletter Colveyco Reading Room |