The End of Individualism and the Economy

Emerging Paradigms of Connection and Community

Ann E. Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Economics
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429840494
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Individualism has been one of the driving forces in the rise of modern capitalism, and methodological individualism has been dominant in social science for many years. In this paradigm the economy is seen as a machine to routinize production and improve efficiency, and the discipline of economics has come to focus on control and automation. Recent innovations in natural and social sciences, however, indicate a shift in thinking away from individualism and towards interconnectedness. The End of Individualism and the Economy: Emerging Paradigms of Connection and Community traces the origins of "the individual" in history, philosophy, economics, and social science. Drawing from linguistic philosophy, there is increasing attention to language as a social substrate for all institutions, including money and the market. One irony is that the individual is a key term, related to distinct institutions and associated expertise; that is, the individual is social. The book explores the influence of individualism in the subversion of class consciousness, the view of impersonality as a virtue, and the rise of financialization. The founding assumption of economics, the rational autonomous individual with exogenous tastes, undercuts social solidarity and blocks awareness of interconnections and interdependencies. The text looks forward and embraces the new paradigms and alternative forms of governance, economics, and science which can be developed based on collectives and communities, with new values, frameworks, and world views. This work is suitable for academics, students, scholars, and researchers with an interest in economic and social collectives and methodological individualism, as well as those studying the connections between economics and other disciplines in the social and natural sciences.

1 The individual as a key term

“Modern Times”

In an interview in 1987, Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There’s no such thing as society. There are only individuals” (www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689).

Thatcher was also famously part of a “battle of ideas” to challenge the reining orthodoxy in Britain of Fabian socialism and Keynesian economics and is the only British prime minister in the twentieth century “whose name has become synonymous with a political philosophy” (Yergin and Stanislaw 1998, 101, 105). Her fame and influence, helping to establish “neoliberalism” in the 1980s (Harvey 2005), attest to the power of discourse in influencing forms of self-consciousness and political world views. That is, the very “individuals” of whom she speaks are influenced by social forces and political tides which she herself exemplifies.

The notoriety of her statement is partly due to her bold claim, like a grand truth proclamation, “There is no such thing as …” but also because her statement goes to the core of the divide between political perspectives, between right and left, and partly because “society” is truly strange; it is not a tangible “thing.” There is no object to which to point, to verify the existence of this “reifying abstraction” (Poovey 2002). Thatcher’s stark statement draws upon the work of Friedrich von Hayek, who held similar beliefs. But even his view of “individualism” gives more credence to society.

The first thing that should be said is that [true individualism] is primarily a theory of society, an attempt to understand the forces which determine the social life of man … the silliest of the common misunderstanding [is] the belief that individualism postulates … the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society.

(italics in original; Hayek 1948, 6)

The special relevance to this book is that Hayek believed in money as an object rather than a social symbol. Hayek’s view of money supports the proposition of the non-existence of society, especially since there is an inherent social dimension to money which he denies (Davis 2017; Yuran 2014, 125–139). There is also a “disciplinary” aspect to Thatcher’s statement. As she continues,

And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours. People have got their entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There is no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

(quoted in Brittan 1992, 7)

That is, Thatcher is implying that “individuals” have responsibility for themselves rather than a reliance on government assistance.

Now, more than 30 years after her statement, Thatcher’s ideas are still influential, even if under some challenges. As with the Charlie Chaplin movie Modern Times, there is much disruption of late to everyday existence and conventional wisdom. The January 1, 2019, (179:1, 52–55) issue of Fortune magazine had a cover story on the disappearance of the middle class; the population is not reproducing itself, and life expectancy is declining for white males (Case and Deaton 2017). The US government shutdown of December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019, was the longest on record, and the liberal democratic form of government is no longer the global ideal (Bell 2019; Barber, Foy, and Barker 2019). The attempt to extract Britain from the European Union is in chaos. In the neoliberal European Union, it is possible that Merkel’s attempts to save the euro is repeating the history of the interwar attempt to save the gold standard (Polanyi 1944), with the same disastrous effects.

Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been a critical perspective on “modernity,” with a continuing stream of “turns” in social science methodology. At such a time, it is propitious to examine fundamental assumptions, such as “the individual.” The related perplexity of money and society will be discussed more fully later in this book.

This chapter will conduct a selected review of the literature on the definition and history of this key term, “the individual.” We will interrogate this sense of the ubiquitous unitary individual with an examination of the variety of meanings and methods of differentiating the individual. We will conclude the chapter with a summary of the methodology of historical institutionalism which will guide us in this interrogation, to be further developed in Chapters 2 and 3.

Introduction to “the individual”

The “individual” seems self-evident to the modern observer.

One’s body seems to be a coherent whole, with an integrated system of organs, covered and protected by skin, operated by cognition, capabilities, and memories located in the brain. The boundaries between self and other seem clearly demarcated, with the nutrition consumed by one no longer available to the other. Personalities are unique, as are facial formations, irises, DNA, and fingerprints.

On the one hand, some view individualism as one of the highest achievements of Western Civilization (Berlin 1969; Habermas 1989; Davis 2011; Fukuyama 2018) and Enlightenment rationality (Israel 2004), while others view individualism as a disciplinary technique (Polanyi 1944; Poovey 1998, 2008), a technology of power of “liberal governmentality” (Foucault 1991). Arguably Marx viewed the “individual” as a bourgeois category, with de jure rights different from de facto powers (Cohen 1978).

There are even diametrically opposed conceptions of individual “consciousness,” such as the biophysical explanations of Gazzaniga (2018) compared with the social class dimension in Lukacs (1971).

Contrasting perspectives

One example of contrasting perspectives is in the opening paragraph of a recent highly regarded book on economics methodology, specifying the normative significance of the individual (Davis 2011, 16–19, 215–235).

Economics has long been seen as the social science that makes the individual central… . It is surely one of the great normative assumptions of contemporary human society – one not held in much of the past – that the human individual counts or should count, that the individual is important, and that individuals have an inherent moral value, despite all the evidence of human practices to the contrary.

(Davis 2011, 1)

While noting the inadequacies of the isolated, asocial, self-interested concept of the individual as Homo Economicus (Davis 2011, 6–10), Davis proceeds to propose a reconceptualization of the individual as embedded in social systems (Davis 2011, 13–16, 191–214; Huddy 2013). Bowles goes further and proposes an alternative characterization of human nature as homo socialis, who is motivated by social norms and ethical values (Bowles 2016, 41–56). Other possibilities include “expressive” individuals from the Romantic era (Cortois and Laermans 2018, 69–72). Marglin (2008) distinguishes between biological individualism and political or economic individualism, among others ways of conceptualizing a given human person.

Some historians see the “individual” as an expression of the gift of Western civilization to the world, drawing from roots in Christianity (Siedentop 2014). Others see the notion of human rights as ancient, as early as Roman law, but varying as to whether rights are individual or collective and whether inalienable or transmissible to the state or the sovereign (Edelstein 2019).

Some philosophers of modernity see a teleology towards ever greater freedom for individuals, as the course of human history, what some sociologists have called the “revolutionary idiom” (Somers and Gibson 1994, 45–50). Taylor bemoans the loss of a moral framework by which to establish the “good,” the goals for which life becomes worthwhile. He attributes this loss to the modern secular instrumental world view (Taylor 1989, 4–5, 49, 514). Taylor’s view of the modern self is defined relative to a “moral” standard which is not equally accessible to all human persons (Lemert 1994, 116–121). Yet he attributes a “long march” towards human rights to a Grotian-Lockean strand of moral economy, with values of equality, self-government, and mutual benefit gradually permeating the “modern social imaginary” (Taylor 2002, 98, 111).

By contrast, other renowned commentators see the social as a moral dimension, not just the individual. For example, Rorty sees a welcome corrective to American individualism in the tradition of American socialism in the first half of the twentieth century in association with the Progressive movement (Rorty 1998, 47–50). Rorty quotes Herbert Croly in saying that “the traditional American confidence in individual freedom has resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth … [so that] the whole associated life of that community rests on an equivocal foundation” (Rorty 1998, 47).

Even though the discrete human body has a sense of the eternal, formed in the image of the Creator, it has been shaped by the long-term forces of evolution and has not necessarily been recognized as an “autonomous individual” in all periods of history. Some commentators on the individual place even the formulation of the issue as related to the emergence of modernity, or the “modern self” (Giddens 1991; Beck 2002), associated with increasing reflexivity as well as anxiety and risk. The well-known contrast of ideal types between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft (Weber 1978; Calhoun 2012, 95–102; Appadurai 2016a, 74) compares the presumed cohesion of traditional society with the processes of individuation and mobility of modern industrial society. Drawing on Luhmann, White builds on a unitary person with multiple identities, seeking control in complex social settings from which meaning emerges (White 2008).

The concept of the individual is related to Western philosophy, drawing upon the ancient Hebrews and ancient Greeks, as well as Locke and the natural law theorists (Calhoun 2007, 124–127; Pierson 2013a, 2016). Rather than focus strictly on the boundaries between individuals, there is also an issue of the boundaries within individuals, such as Smith’s “impartial spectator” and Locke’s “inner legislator” as well as the management of passions and the threat of the subconscious (Mehta 1992, 74–75). There is a list of specific types of modern individuals whose emergence can be noted but not always explained, such as Charles Cooley’s “looking-glass self” (Konings 2015, 58, 81) or Riesman’s “inner-directed” vs. “other-directed” self (Konings 2015, 69, 93–100; Riesman 1954, 100–114). For George Herbert Mead, the self is that human capacity to be an object to itself (Lemert 1994, 120). For William James, “each of us” possesses a Self which is “what a man calls me,” with the obvious cultural assumptions of gender and class (Lemert 1994, 100). For Seigel, there is a “multi-dimensional self” (Sennett 2012, 126–127). Based on Kant’s distinction between the “subjective” and the “objective,” there developed a “scientific” self and an “artistic” self, the former reducing the influence of the individual’s own perspective and the latter explicitly expressing it (Daston and Galison 2010, 198–251).

Others see the focus on individualism as undermining human community by changing values and behavior. Without strong sanctions or absolute moral principles, any “free,” self-interested individual may be tempted to become a “free rider.”

Individualism is one way of being in the world rather than the only way … an important piece of the ideology of modernity … It is rather a characterization of people that makes us believe that a certain set of institutions – markets and private property – are the most sensible way of organizing production and exchange.

(Marglin 2008, 58)

The possible implication of hierarchy and domination is considered part of Western dualism.

Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man. The self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the service of the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other.

(Haraway 2016, 59–60)

The individual and the social

“The individual” seems to exist by itself, with no need for another, completely autonomous and self-sufficient. This concept is descriptive but also ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The individual as a key term
• 2 Property and reification
• 3 The public/private divide
• 4 The shaping of the modern liberal state
• 5 The economics of “autophagy”: Implications of the economy as “machine”
• 6 Methods of social science
• 7 “Unique individuals”
• 8 The property paradigm
• 9 Contradictions
• 10 Backlash
• 11 Alternatives
• 12 Conclusions
• Index