...Originally the word universally used to describe people who supported that position (and related ideas such as rationalism and progress or optimism about the future) was “liberal” with the ideas being labeled “liberalism.”...
...In the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the word “liberal” was taken over as a label by people who advocated a very different kind of politics and ideas. They had originally called themselves “progressives” but by 1900 had adopted the label of “liberal” and in so doing redefined the commonly understood referent or content of that term....
...Increasingly they came to describe themselves (and be described) as “conservatives.” This was problematic for a number of reasons: in particular, self-identified conservatives had been the main opponents of liberals since the two philosophies had emerged in the 1820s, and there are still significant differences between the two positions and traditions of thought....
...However the story for Anglophone supporters of individual liberty is a more complicated one than that. There was always another label available to them, and for a long time they made enthusiastic use of it. This was the term “individualism” and the associated “individualist.” Individualism was a word that had undergone the change from being a term of opprobrium to one of positive identity....
...Subsequently the terms “individualist” and “individualism” remained the main labels used by advocates of the radical case for personal, individual liberty. This was true in the 1920s and even as late as the 1940s and early 1950s (Friedrich Hayek used the term for example and spoke of “those of us who adhere to the individualist position”)....
...Then quite suddenly, in the middle of the 1950s, all of this changed. People who had described themselves as individualists and identified with that label suddenly stopped using it (with a very few exceptions such as Frank Chodorow). Many adopted the label “conservative,” particularly in the U.S. Most however took to calling themselves classical liberals or libertarians (a word that had previously referred to communist anarchists of the Peter Kropotkin type). The term “individualist,” which had been used until then by both friends and critics, almost vanished.
...Individualism as a label has always had a thick and extensive meaning or set of referents. It refers not just to economic liberalism (free markets and laissez-faire) or political individualism (strictly limited government) but also to lifestyle individualism (J. S. Mill’s experiments in living), cultural individualism and innovation (as in, e.g., Ibsen and Strindberg), and a particular vision of personal identity and the way to live and flourish as a human being....
...In fact there is a deep cleavage between people of that kind and radical individualists. As long as their principal opponents were advocates of a planned and collectivist economy this division could be ignored. However we are now rapidly moving into a world where the division between these two kinds of self-defined libertarians is becoming the main issue in politics.
In that situation the label “libertarian” is the object of a tug-of-war between individualists and small-government conservatives over who has the right to use it. A serious risk is that the term will become associated with what we may call right-wing collectivism and this will discredit and obscure individualists who continue to use it.
...Given this, why not revive the term that was used until the 1950s and call yourself an individualist and your philosophy individualism?...
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Originally Posted by Admiral Ackbar
