5. The fifth unit-idea of individualism, the notion
of the abstract individual, needs to be carefully speci-
fied, for it has so often been misdescribed, especially
by its nineteenth-century opponents. It implies a con-
ception of society according to which actual or possible
social arrangements are seen as responding to the re-
quirements of individuals with given capacities, wants,
and needs. Society's rules and institutions are, on this
view, regarded collectively as an artifice, a modifiable
instrument, a means of fulfilling given individual ob-
jectives; the means and the ends are distinct. The
crucial point about this conception is that the relevant
features of individuals determining the ends which
social arrangements are held (actually or ideally) to
fulfil—whether these features are called instincts,
faculties, needs, desires, or rights—are assumed as
given, independently of any social context.
Morris Ginsberg calls this view “sociological indi-
vidualism,” defining it as “the theory that society is
to be conceived as an aggregate of individuals whose
relations to each other are purely external” (1956, p.
151). It is what Gierke meant when he observed that
“the guiding thread of all speculation in the area of
Natural Law was always, from first to last, individ-
ualism—an individualism steadily carried to its logical
conclusions,” so that, for all modern natural law
theorists, from Hobbes to Kant, “a previous sovereignty
of the individual was the ultimate and only source of
Group-authority” and “the community was only an
aggregate—a mere union, whether close or loose—of
the wills and powers of individual persons”; they all
agreed that “all forms of common life were the creation
of individuals” and “could only be regarded as means
to individual objects” (1934, pp. 96, 106, 111).
Gierke was right to locate the ascendancy of this
idea between the middle of the seventeenth and the
beginning of the nineteenth centuries. It was, obvi-
ously, intimately related to the “social contract” mode
of argument and, in general, to arguments concerning
society based on the conception of man in the state
of nature, though it can also be seen in a different
form—an abstract notion of man in general—in the
early utilitarians and the classical economists. Needless
to say the (pre-social, trans-social or non-social) “indi-
viduals” involved here—whether natural, or utilitarian,
or economic men—always turn out on inspection to
be social, and indeed historically specific (e.g., Mac-
pherson, 1962, passim). “Human nature” always in
reality belongs to a particular kind of social man.
For Hobbes, the archetypal abstract individualist,
Leviathan was an artificial contrivance constructed to
satisfy the requirements of the component elements of
society—“men as if but even now sprung out of the
earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full
maturity, without all kind of engagement to each
other” (De cive [1642], VIII, 1). Locke argued similarly,
as did very many eighteenth-century thinkers, espe-
cially in France and Germany. Even Rousseau, insofar
as he used the social contract idea, toyed with this
conception, though the central thrust of his thought
was incompatible with it. Perhaps the most explicit
(and most characteristic eighteenth-century) expression
of it occurs in an article in Diderot's Encyclopédie
(1752-72) by Turgot, who wrote: “The citizens have
rights, rights that are sacred for the very body of
society; the citizens exist independently of society; they
form its necessary elements; and they only enter it in
order to put themselves, with all their rights, under
the protection of those very laws to which they sacri-
fice their liberty” (article on “Fondation (Politique et
Droit Naturel)” in Vol. VII).
The idea of the abstract individual formed a princi-
pal target for many nineteenth-century thinkers, many
of whom held it to be a typically narrow and superficial
dogma of the Enlightenment. It was attacked by
counterrevolutionary and romantic conservatives in
France, England, and Germany, by Hegel and Marx
and their respective followers, by Saint-Simon and his
disciples, by Comte and the positivists, by sociologists,
especially in France, by German historicists, and by
English Idealists. It is what de Bonald had in mind
when he wrote: “Not only does man not constitute
society, but it is society that constitutes man, that is,
it forms him by social education...” (Théorie du
pouvoir [1796], Preface); and it is what F. H. Bradley
meant when he wrote that “the 'individual' apart from
the community is an abstraction.” Man, for Bradley,
“is a social being; he is real only because he is social
...” and if we abstract from him all those features
which result from his social context, he becomes “a
theoretical attempt to isolate what can not be isolated”
(Ethical Studies [1876], essay V, “My Station and its
Duties”).
