Recent JLF Headliner Wilfred McClay tackles the pros and cons of “individualism” in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (ISI Books, 2006).
McClay notes that the term “individualism” presents problems for conservatives — exposing fundamental tensions between traditional and libertarian elements of the conservative movement.
Libertarians tend to view individualism “as an affirmation of the human person, and as a counter to the oppressive statism, collectivism, and conformism of socialist and nationalist thought.”
Traditional conservatives often see individualism “as one of the chief pathologies of modernity, another element in the abstract, rationalistic, nakedly self-interested, egalitarian, leveling, atomistic, antitraditional, and antinomian tendencies that have disordered the present age.”
Yet McClay contends that American conservatism — at its best — has found ways to reconcile an individual’s liberty with social order.
Radical centralization and radical individualism go hand in hand, precisely because centralization gradually eliminates the functional need for individuals to understand and comport themselves as social creatures, accountable to one another and nourished by and embedded in their proximate social contexts. If, on the other hand, the trend toward centralization could be reversed and social policy be consciously reoriented toward the preservation and strengthening of intermediate associations, it seems reasonable to suppose that the current excesses of individualism might also begin to recede and the tension between individual liberty and social order might be made less intense, and more fruitful, than it is at present.
Both the libertarian and the traditionalist should welcome the benefits of reduced centralization.
