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In Defence of Individualism From Chapter 1 of Essays, Moral, Political and Economic Edinburgh University Press £9.95
Liberals versus Communitarians There are many writers and critics who regard what they call individualist-liberalism as the root of many of the evils of the modern world; and the emphasis of their attack is on the individualist half of the term. Those who take this line nowadays often call themselves communitarians. I would prefer to call them collectivists, as that brings out their dangerous tendency to regard the group as more important than the individuals of whom it is composed. But in what follows I shall concede on labels and most often refer to them as communitarians. There are a number of slogans characteristic to communitarian rhetoric. The most common of them is that Man is a political (or sometimes social) animal. The individualist-liberal is then accused of an atomistic view of society. Another slogan is that more emphasis should be put on duties instead of rights. Here there would be no difference between Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. In a lower key there is a preference for teamwork as opposed to individual responsibility (apparent even in the new UK arrangements for monetary policy). But the emphasis of the attack is on modern market capitalism. The historian of political thought, CB MacPherson, called this possessive individualism, an expression which has caught on with many who have not read a single word of his work. The more lowbrow version is a contempt for the pursuit of the bottom line which is said to characterise our age. Ordinary citizens are accused of consumerism or of being obsessed by the psychology of "me, me, me". In Britain the debate is confused because almost everyone on the left and centre now adopts a communitarian rhetoric. Having accepted much of the economic counter-revolution of the last decade and a half, the main issue on which Blairites dig in their heels is opposition to supposed Thatcherite individualism. This is based on the false chain of reasoning which identifies individualism and self-interest with selfishness. The last is a howler, as can be testified by anyone who has worked for a charity, for a good cause or any of the arts or religion or merely to improve the lot of his or her own family and intimates. Many on the left will wonder why I am putting right-wing authoritarians together with benevolent communitarians. The American debate sheds some light here. A whole movement has risen there to attack the liberal individualist foundations of Western politics and culture. US communitarians dislike almost equally ultra-free market libertarians and the more left-wing liberals, such as the philosopher John Rawls, who support the welfare state and other forms of economic intervention. Communitarians condemn them both for regarding the individual person and his or her choices as the measure of all things in politics, and their failure to find a higher purpose for government. The softer version of US communitarianism can be found in the writings of commentators such as Amital Etzioni, who is pictured with Vice President Al Gore of the dust cover of his book, The Spirit of Conformity. Its harder version can be found in the Republican Religious Right, with its support of compulsory religious practices (of which school prayer is but a symbol), belief in savage punishment for retributive reasons and paranoid nationalist fears that foreigners are taking away American jobs.
The two kinds of anti-individualists come together in their advocacy of a year or two of compulsory national service to knock some patriotism and civic virtue into the American young. They have been answered by an individualist liberal, David Boaz, who replies:
Another tell-tale symptom is propaganda for so-called Asian values and admiration for the Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew, who justifies his brutal punishments by saying, " To us in Asia, an individual is an ant". Are British Conservatives more tolerant? Almost every increase in personal liberty and toleration. from the legalisation of homosexuality among consenting adults to the abolition of theatre censorship and more sensible divorce laws, has been brought about in the face of opposition from the majority of Conservative MPs and activists. In nearly every country the political Right (with a few honourable individual exceptions) is adamantly opposed to any re-examination of the drug laws which have done so much to make money-laundering one of the world's biggest businesses. The text is still that of Lord Hailsham 40 years ago when he hoped that addicts of hashish and marijuana would be pursued with the utmost severity the law allowed. He hoped they would find themselves in the Old Bailey, where, "however distinguished their positions in the Top 10, they will be treated as criminals deserve to be treated". Unfortunately, too many Blairites rush to show their political moderation by coming down like a ton of bricks on anyone on the Labour or Liberal side who opposed such Hailshamite blusterings.
The Academic Debate
The communitarian-liberal debate has been going on in the USA for a decade or more; and two Oxford philosophers, S Muhall and A Swift, have recently written a textbook guide to it. This takes as its starting point John Rawls' Theory of Justice, which has acquired a canonical status and which I shall not attempt to summarise here. Many individualist-liberals have criticised Rawls for making too many concessions to collectivist goals. But the communitarian attack is just the opposite. It is on the priority which Rawls says he attaches to personal freedom.
The debate takes place on several levels. What seems to motivate Alasdair McIntyre and those who think like him is an intense hostility to theories in philosophical ethics such as emotivism, subjectivism and relativism. Such philosophers insist that some ways of life are preferable to others and are incensed by Jeremy Bentham's observation that the Push-pin (an early 19th century board game) was better than poetry if that is what people preferred. Today the argument would be in terms of Radio One versus Radio Three. But these philosophers are not necessarily committed to the specific proposal urged by more policy-orientated communitarians who are looking for some third way between socialism and market capitalism.
Metaphysical Anti-individualism
In my experience, communitarians like to start from some metaphysical proposition. They say for instance that an individual is constituted by his or her social relationships. He or she is a grandfather, a doctor, a member of certain clubs, an active Scottish Nationalist, and so on. Without these relationships he or she is said to be nothing. Even a hermit is identified by his decision to abandon the community from which he springs. (One often reads that the individual was an invention of the Renaissance and was unknown to the ancient and mediaeval world. I am not sure that this can be reconciled with the funeral oration of Pericles, as expounded by Thucydides.)
We soon get into an impasse. Groups are made up of individuals; but individuals form groups. A debate on which fact is primary is the kind of dispute which never gets settled. As Stephen Holmes has pointed out:
A Biological Perspective
Communitarians are inclined to say that the issue depends on the nature of Man. To my mind this is a biological matter rather than one for armchair speculation. And you do not escape the biological nature of the problem talking in seemingly more philosophical terms of the nature of the person instead. It is a cliché to say Man is a social animal. The statement can be given empirical content by noting that for the greater part of his existence on this planet he has belonged to clans of hunter-gatherers of not more than a couple of hundred people. It is, therefore, not surprising that people feel alienated, both in mass society and if left entirely to their own devices in nuclear families. The could be held to support the communitarian preference for relying on, whenever possible, local groups rather than the isolated individual or the nation state. Communitarians are, however, seldom specific about how this transfer can be undertaken.
Let us, moreover, not romanticise the small group. It can be very oppressive and stultifying; and even in primitive times there were those who left their groups to start other clans. Many of today's most vibrant communities are not people who are geographically close to each other. The most important communities for users of the Internet in the Orkneys may consist, not of village neighbours, but other users with whom they form a professional link which can blossom into friendship and mutual support.
The worst side of group psychology is the hostility almost always generated to those outside the group. This long predates modern nationalism. Byzantine emperors were able to generate artificial hostility between groups of citizens by dividing them by an arbitrary line into blues and greens. From here it is but a short distance to the bitter struggles in places like Bosnia, where people who had previously lived at ease with each other for generations, and indeed intermarried, went in for the barbarities of ethnic cleansing.
Many of the achievements of civilisation are due to what Graham Wallas, the Fabian sociologist, called the great society. This was the linking together through the market process of millions who have no chance of being personally acquainted. One interpretation of globalisation is that the whole world is becoming a great society. The problem since the Industrial Revolution, if not earlier, has been how to combine the benefits of the great society with the human ties generated by the smaller group.
Defensible Individualism
In current political polemics individualism is a pejorative term used by opponents of the concept. Few political writers call themselves individualists. They are more likely to say they are classical liberals, market liberals, old-fashioned liberals or something of the kind. But there clearly is an individualist component of their beliefs which is worth defending. The kind of individualism for which I will fight in the last ditch is ethical individualism. In its minimal form, it is the belief that actions should be judged by their effects on individual human beings.
How would I justify this judgement? It is individuals who feel, exult, despair or rejoice. And statements about group welfare are a shorthand way of referring to such individual effects. This seems to me a plain statement of fact, despite the numerous thinkers who deny - or more usually - bypass it. Whatever might be said about sharing feelings with a close member of one's family, the rejoicing of a nation or a football club or a school is metaphorical.
The danger of collectivism is that of attributing a superior value to collective entities over and above the individuals who compose it. This disastrous error was made respectable by the teachings of Hegel and reached its apotheosis in the state worship of the Nazi and Communist regimes. But it is lurking behind even the more soft-hearted varieties of communitarianism.
Statements about large abstractions such as the interests of a country and the health of the economy must be translatable into statements about individual human beings. This translation cannot logically prevent the collectivist judgements I find so repellent; but such translations can lead us to pose useful questions such as: How much suffering is justified by the gratification of my feelings of national pride as a Serb or a Croat? Analysis along such lines would be likely to make people more self-conscious. It might even lead to a weakening of unreflective willingness to die for one's country, or the working class, and to a waning of nationalism and ideological enthusiasm in general.
Going beyond this reductionism, we do not find a single individualist creed. Benthamite utilitarianism does involve a commitment to individual welfare, but not to personal freedom. (The inhabitants of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World were made to take their Soma pills.) Post-Bentham, individualists from John Stuart Mills onwards, argued for the largest possible measure of individual freedom consistent with avoiding harm to others. They did so formerly on the ground that individuals were less bad judges of their own interests than governments, experts or others who claimed to judge. But it is pretty clear from reading the classical liberals that they value freedom for its own sake.
What is so wonderful about individual choice? One can only reply that it lies in the absence of coercion or man-made obstacles to the exercise of people's powers and capacities. In the final analysis, this judgement cannot be demonstrated rigorously against those with incompatibly different values. One can only try to remove misunderstandings and to display by anecdote, rhetoric and imaginative literature the virtues of the kind of society in which people have maximum opportunity to satisfy their preference against societies where others make their judgements for them.
A particular misunderstanding is to pit the individual against the family. Anthropology and biology suggest that human beings are creatures who tend to live in one kind of family or another. The individualist is, however, more content to let the family evolve and hesitates to out a political imprimatur on the nuclear family in the state it reached among the middle classes of the late 19th century. Nevertheless, the liberal-individualist passion for choice is always tempered by the proviso that it must not harm others; and, if the break-up of traditional families is having the adverse effects on individual welfare which Melanie Phillips claims, governments need to take such factors into account in legislation. However important the family, one is still allowed to write on other matters. And it is surely clear that it is not families, but collective entities, from the state down to local collections of busybodies, from which the individualists want to protect us.
Self-realisation
Individualists usually desire to go beyond liberating human beings from collectivist pressures and want to celebrate the achievements of particular people, whether in the arts or sciences or sport, or in the more mundane art of everyday living. This kind of positive individualism has its antithesis in the idealisation of the team. Indeed, it is the British focus on team spirit which heavily qualifies the romantic continental notion that they are a nation of individualists.
Recently I had occasion to congratulate an economist friend on some well-deserved professional promotion. He thanked me very generously, saying how glad he was that the work of his team had been recognised. But this is not what I meant at all. I was expressing pleasure that he personally had been promoted and that the choice had not been made on political grounds.
To go further into the more positive and indeed romantic aspects of individualism would take a separate paper. This would have to recognise the danger of this kind of individualism becoming worship of great men, such as Napoleon or Frederick the Great, for whom the lives and welfare of millions are sacrificed. Even in everyday life rugged individualism sometimes means a craggy disregard for other people's interests, which is not a quality I wish to celebrate.
Political Economy
A point requiring some emphasis is that an ethical individualist does not have to be an economic individualist. Generations of socialists have indeed argued that the collective control of economic activity would not only enable more individual citizens to satisfy more of their wants, but would enable them to flourish in a broader way.
The argument against collectivist economic systems is that they utterly fail to fulfil their promise. Of course, it is a bonus to the individualist that allowing some rein to individual instincts for self-betterment will produce better results than centrally imposed direction. Nevertheless, the test of Adam Smith's view of the superiority of Natural Liberty must be that of experiments thrown up by events and not just of its psychological attractiveness or otherwise.
Just as a philosophical individualist does not have to be an economic individualist, the same distinction works the other way round. An economic individualist does not have to share a wider individualist philosophy. He or she may simply accept that a market-based economic system brings better results without having a deeper belief in individual choice or "people doing their own thing".
Exponents of free markets often oppose freedom in every other sphere, especially in sexual behaviour and the behaviour of the young. This combination of economic individualism with authoritarian wider beliefs is all too common among many Conservatives, even in the so-called Thatcherite wing of the party.
Economic Individualism
Despite these disclaimers, the type of individualism which is most under a cloud is economic individualism. It is associated with slogans like "It's every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost". Or with Charles Dickens' Mr Grandgrind (his name, not the actual character in Hard Times). Or with thick-skinned City types who celebrate the rat-race in which they boast they are engaged. Even if the collapse of collectivist economic systems leaves people with no alternative, this fact is regarded as a necessary evil rather than anything to celebrate.
The greatest obstacle faced by economic individualism is the belief that it is based on, or encourages, materialism or acquisitiveness. In fact, self-interest in a market economy merely means that people follow their own chosen goals. These may be individual consumption; but they may equally mean the acquiring of means to promote charitable, cultural or religious causes. Or they may try to maximise leisure to pursue some hobby or interest; or some mixture of all these. The altruistic businessman should indeed strive harder than his rivals to make profits and differentiate himslef by what he does with his gain.
These necessary elaborations only take us a certain way. Defenders of market capitalism have rarely faced up to the shock with which many well brought-up people react when they learn that their job is not to feed or clothe, or even entertain, their fellow citizens directly, but to promote the profits of the company's owners. That is irrespective of how worthy or unworthy are the purposes to which the profits are devoted.
The most controversial aspect of economic individualism was expressed two centuries ago by Adam Smith. No sentence in political thought has attracted more opprobium than the passage in the Wealth of Nations saying:
The moralist is not appeased to learn that Smith also write The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which emphasised benevolence. Nor is she or he appeased to learn that in the Wealth of Nations itself, a few sentences before the notorious ones just quoted, Smith sressed how much man was a social animal and has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren. "While a human being's whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons, in civilised society he stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes. It is for this reason that he has to enlist their self love in his favour and cannot rely on their benevolence alone."
This self love will be effective only if certain background conditions are fulfilled. There has to be a legal system and a political order which enforce contracts, protect property rights, and provide for limited liability or the equivalent. In other words, there is no private property without good government. Until the disillusioning experience of post-Communist countries, such background considerations were regarded by many modern economists as too obvious or insufficiently mathematical to be worth discussing. Their neglect has made it all too easy for former Communist bosses to flip over to being Mafia-style capitalists instead.
But it is not the incompleteness of invisible hand statements which worries moralists, but their apparent reliance on the greed motive for the successful workings of an advanced civilisation. (A generation before Adam Smith a similar shock was supplied by Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, which suggested that the vices of the few were essential for the prosperity of the many.) The two most common reactions are either to reject Smith's doctrine as outrageous or to accept it in a cynical spirit and say that Smith understood that the world was a jungle and that the animal with the sharpest teeth would inevitably win (which was not what he thought at all). |
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