It took me a while, but after mulling over Wojtek's response I think I've figured out why I dislike Fisher's argument.
The historians, and historicist debates, Fisher reviews are looking for some sort of empirical, some sort of material, evidence for a shift to or shifts in the actuality of American individualism. After teaching Intro Soc intensively - five times a year - for the last three years, this article focused an inchoate sense I've been feeling out in the back of my mind for a bit. Critical sociologists, and there are many who aren't, argue that individualism, especially American individualism, is a bunch of ideological hooey... and the best way to make this clear to students is to help them see and express all the ways in which their lives are constituted through interaction with institutions that pre-existed them and over which they have little or no control - as well as helping them see and express all the ways their free will and self-interest is tinged by familial, cultural, religious, communitarian, nationalist and modernist commitments. Never anticipating that this would be the case, it has turned out that teaching symbolic interactionism is a far more radicalizing and mentally liberating tool for teaching students the sociological imagination than Mills, or Marx, or deBeauvoir, or DuBois (though double consciousness can come to look an awful lot like an insight from SI).
I know I've mentioned this before but Don Swearer, my comparative eastern religion prof as an undergrad, argued that the US is torn by an unresolved and unresolvable tension between ideological and political commitments to radical self-determination and inflexible populist values. Fisher's rejection of the idea of the birth of or shift to individualism misunderstands, or fails to engage, two issues then. The first is that the sociological issue is not that "Once we were communitarian and now we are individualist...", or even that some people are first one and then the other - whichever direction they are seen to move. The issue is the relative likelihood that a particular legitimating appeal will be successfully made in any particular point in peoples' lives or at any particular point in specific political struggles... and what that tells us about people and/or politics. The second is that, by buying into the question as formulated by the historians - and this is true even when he ends up rejecting the question altogether, Fisher brackets any and all issues of power the lie behind the discursive hegemony of vacillating, and sometimes even synthetic, individualism/collectivism.
In a nation foundationally legitimated - in public documents, market principals and bureaucratic practice - by the idea that seeing and acting in the world along competitive lines where one person = one democratic vote; one dollar = one market vote and one fact = one scientific vote will produce the greatest good for the greatest number is to embrace a very specific form of reductive individualism. However, as I recently said elsewhere, there is a fascinating contradiction that emerges over time... when democracy, capitalism and science are threatened (or threatening), Americans (of many kinds but esp.white male ones and their dependent female associates) invert the argument such that the greatest good for the greatest number can ONLY come from deepening our collective commitment to radical individualism and that any and all critics had better toe the line (in a way that suppressed democratic freedoms, market innovation and scientific freedom) or you'll show your true, dangerous and European or immigrant collectivist commitments to anti-democratic, anti-capitalist, and anti-technological unfreedom - and we, from real America, will then have the right to crush you as a threat to our glorious way of life.
In any event, I think Fisher missed the sociological, much less the critical sociological or socialist ecofeminist boat...
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 9:44 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
> [WS:] Interesting piece, indeed. As I read it, there is no such a thing as
> American individualism (or American group-think) in the sense of an
> exceptional quality that exists here and nowhere else. Rather, there are
> different ideologically grounded arguments about the presence or absence of
> individualism.
>
> ...
>
> Stated differently, USers ar emore likely to express individualist ethos
> than old Euros, but at the same time they are more likely to purse
> collective/communal action (at least in certain areas of life) than old
> Euros.
>
> Wojtek
>
>
>
> On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 11:16 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com
> >wrote:
>
> > was just going through my file of books/article to read, and happened
> > across something i saved in 2004, an essay by anthropologist Claude
> Fisher,
> > Was There a Moment (When Americans Became Individualists)?*
> >
> > http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/rsfcensus/papers/Individualists.pdf
> >
> > Fisher is actually providing an overview of a debate that animates
> > historians, and not actually answering the question from a sociological
> > perspective. thought folks might find it interesting.
> >
> >
> >
> > ___________________________________
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> >
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