The Myths of American Individualism

[Chris]

The Myths of American Individualism is a review of a new book on American individualism and its development.

...The Roots of American Individualism: Political Myth in the Age of Jackson is the latest entry in these debates, which extend back at least to the late 1960s, when scholars including Bernard Bailyn and J.G.A. Po$#@! rediscovered the influence of classical republican ideas on early patriots. Synthesizing decades of research as well as introducing some unfamiliar primary sources, Alex Zakaras suggests that the familiar conception of American individualism coalesced only about half a century after the founding. To understand, and also to criticize, what look like fixed characteristics of American national identity, in other words, we need to turn to the age of Jackson and the emergence of the organized Democratic Party.

One advantage of Zakaras’ account is that he locates sources of our political culture outside the independence movement and very early republic. If the unattached individual is an almost inescapable assumption, the idea that what it means to be American was permanently fixed in 1776 or 1787 is another. The decade, more or less, that includes the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention did help define Americans’ conception of themselves and their place in the world. But that process did not cease when Washington was inaugurated as president. To the contrary, not only political institutions but also the ideologies, arguments, and narratives that sustained them continued to develop over the following decades. Fixation on a narrowly construed founding tends to obscure these changes, which eventually produced a country that defied and in some ways rebuked many Founders’ hopes.

...Zakaras argues that emerging American individualism was characterized by three distinct but overlapping visions of freedom. Rather than a formal definition, each vision revolves around a personal embodiment. Myth, after all, is not primarily an argument. It is a story about who we were, who we are, and who we hope to be.

The first of these “mythic heroes” is the independent proprietor....

...Locke’s treatment of the acquisition and disposition of property as a matter of natural rights is more distinctive and points toward a second vision of freedom. Here the American is understood as a “right-bearer,” defending his moral autonomy against infringement....

...Both the independent proprietor and the rights-bearer were theoretically egalitarian visions, insofar as neither form of freedom conceptually limited the ability of any other individual to enjoy the same liberty. The third hero, the self-made man, served less to justify equality than to explain inequality....

...The bulk of The Roots of American Individualism elaborates the evolution and deployment of these myths in the political debates of roughly the 1820s through the 1840s....

[Tahuyaman]

When America was founded the country was basically a vast frontier. The concept of “rugged individualism” was there from the very beginning.

Individualism was a requirement for survival.

[Chris]

Right the topic is about rugged individualism but that term was coined by Hoover in 1928 in a campaign speech: Herbert Hoover, "Rugged Individualism" Campaign Speech:

"When the war closed, the most vital of issues both in our own country and around the world was whether government should continue their wartime ownership and operation of many [instruments] of production and distribution. We were challenged with a... choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines * doctrines of paternalism and state socialism. The acceptance of these ideas would have meant the destruction of self-government through centralization... [and] the undermining of the individual initiative and enterprise through which our people have grown to unparalleled greatness."

He believed in it but also "launched the largest public works projects up until his time."

[RMNIXON]

In the historical sense Individualism was something taken for granted. We had neighbors, community, church, charity, ect.....but the emphasis was always on individual responsibility and reward. And all of this long before the notions of socialism/communism and massive central government organized to do things "for you" (Obama Progressives) came along.