POST-INDIVIDUALISM An Introduction Professor Christopher Newfield
M
any of us were raised to assume that individualism and democracy naturally went together. People would use their democratic freedoms to protect individual rights, and these individual rights insured the exercise of democratic freedoms. Individuality and democracy were the paired practices of a free people in a free society. The greater the scope for people to control or at least consent to the laws that everyone followed, the freer both they and their societies would be. Although no political philosopher ever thought it was this simple, the liberal harmony of individualism and democracy was a regulative ideal and a pillar of Anglo-American national self-esteem. ISRF fellows say otherwise. My first year at ISRF coincided with COVID lockdowns and the moving of the Foundation’s events online, and these included a new series of launches for our Fellows’ consistent outpouring of books. Their topics covered the whole academic waterfront, and yet they used the powers of independent scholarship to pierce the veil democratic individualism casts over politics and daily life. Their research is distinctly pluridisciplinary, by which I mean it gets at underlying structures treated by fields like psychology or critical theory that are sometimes missed or separated off by the orthodox social sciences. These overlooked structures often involve an inner difficulty, in Alessandra Gribaldo’s useful phrase, one that finds breaks in the visible structure and falsehood in established wisdom. Without our having planned it as such, the launches formed a procession of revelatory demonstrations that individualism has generally failed to create the democratic conditions of its own 7
