[lbo-talk] Blue Dogs cashing in

[Alan Rudy]

As I've researched it for my Political Sociology and Individual in Society
courses, to De Tocqueville is usually attributed the term individualism and
he saw it as the/a result of the breakdown of stable, pre-modern social
statuses where people knew who they were, and where they stood, and could
therefore forget themselves (their selfish interests) and act according to
their status'/class interests.  According to Tocqueville, individualism led
people to look inward and locally towards themselves, family and community
(at best) and to undermine a sense of shared, collective unity.  Rather than
the positive product of transcendental natural rights, individualism was the
social product of the breakdown of society which was then only exacerbated
by xenophobia and isolationism.  Thus, the negative side of his description
of America.

Of course, Tocqueville, a pretty sophisticated guy, also saw many positives
in the self-reliance and creativity of the nation but nevertheless was
pretty sure that, untempered, individualism would be the undoing of America
as a representative democratic republic. (But, then again, he *was *French
so whatya want from an always-appeasing surrender monkey?!)

Jim O'Connor's follow-up to Fiscal Crisis of the State, Accumulation Crisis,
focuses quite closely on the economic and political contradictions of
individualism in the US but, sadly, far fewer people read that book than did
FCS.

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 12:35 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


> Alan Rudy writes: ".  It is the concept of individualism, not of the
> individual, choice or responsibility, that is new to the 18th and 19th
> C."
>
> I think that I agree with this - but perhaps you pack too much into one
> sentence, & I'm not wholly sure of exactly what you are saying. Could
> you expand it a bit.
>
> Carrol
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>