Was There a Moment (When Americans Became Individualists)?

Was There a Moment (When Americans Became Individualists)?*

Claude S. Fischer

Department of Sociology University of California, Berkeley

[email protected]

*Paper presented to the Session on "Re-Conceptualizing Social Relations," Meetings of theAmerican Sociological Association, Anaheim, August 2001. Support for this work wasprovided by grants from the Committee on Research, University of California, Berkeley.This paper draws from a book-in-progress on American social history.

<<Version of August 10, 2001>>

1 Fowler, The Dance with Community, p. 121.

2 On definitions and typologies of individualism, see, for examples from a very long list: Abercrombie et al, SovereignIndividuals of Capitalism; Bell, Cultural Contradictions , 59ff; Bellah et al, Habits of the Heart; Curry and Goodheart, "Individualism inTrans-national Context;" Gans, Middle-Class Individualism; Lukes, "The Meanings of Individualism;" Swart, "'Individualism' in theMid-Nineteenth Century;" Swidler, "Cultural Constructions of Modern Individualism;" and Wolfson, "Individualism, New andOld."

3 This line dates from the 1830s, not the 1960s -- Emerson, "Self-Reliance."

Was There a Moment (When Americans Became Individualists)?

Historians argue vociferously about the moment when Americans became individualists. (Almost all

assume that Americans are individualists.) Did the European settlers arrive on these shores already

individualists, or did their descendants become so later? If later, just when? The moral -- and perhaps political

-- implications of the answer are great and explain the energy in the debate. If Americans have always been

individualistic, then it might be a fixed part of human nature -- or, at least, of Americans' nature -- and social

arrangements would have to accommodate that reality. If individualism arose more recently, however, then

change seems more possible; we might turn back. Then, depending on when and what sort of individualism

arose, the prescription changes. Was ruthless self-interest, for example, a product of the market or a product

of a debased modern culture? Should one then curb the market or curb the culture? As one observer put it,

"All of American history today is a plain where contestants for the soul of the United States quite openly

wage war."1

My purpose is to introduce sociologists to this controversy among historians. As we try to assess

whether this, the dawn of the 21st century, is the moment at which social relations are forever changing, we

may gain some perspective by reviewing some of the other moments at which they presumably changed

forever. (To any historians whose rambles bring them to this paper, I confess that this is but a gloss on a

large and complex literature. To sociologists, I note that I am not answering this question empirically in this

paper, just reviewing the debate.)

Meanings

Individualism is, as anyone who has ventured near the topic knows, a vortex of meanings, ambiguities,

and connotations.2 I mention only a few of the common formulations. One basic meaning of individualism

is a cultural assumption that each person has a unique and consistent "self" beneath all the social roles that he

or she plays. Individualism can also be the cultural assumption that individual will is the prime mover in the

world, the cause of action and the source of meaning. There is also the romantic, expressive individualism,

the edict of "do your own thing."3 Another use of the term emphasizes rational self-interest: Individualism is

the disposition of people to both calculate their interests and to pursue them against custom or against the

Fischer / "Was There a Moment . . . ?" -- 2 --

4 Sellers, The Market Revolution, p. 202.

5 Emerson, "Self-Reliance."

6 Arielli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology, p. 193. The matter was contested in the nation's early years. TheFederalists, for example, were scandalized by republican notions that individuals could make claims against family patriarchs orcommunity oligarches (Shalhope, "Individualism in the Early Republic."). But, by the mid-nineteenth century, romantics such asEmerson elevated individual conscience, even individual instinct, to primacy over social institutions and groups.

7 E.g., Fowler, The Dance with Community; Phillips, Looking Backward; Rutman, "Community: A Sunny Little Dream ;" Coser,In Defense of Modernity. For an overview, see Wood, "Inventing American Capitalism."

8 Another general assumption in most of the writing is that the transition to an individualistic society is a one-way move.Perhaps, instead, levels of individualism can vary, as Karen Cerulo ("Individualism . . Pro Tem") and Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone)have recently suggested.

collective's interest (for Tonnies, "rational will" over "natural will;" for historian Charles Sellers, "calculating

egotism"4). Most of the controversy in history revolves around this last sense of individualism, rational

pursuit of self-interest -- particularly, but not only economic self-interest -- as against submission to group

will. (As when Ralph Waldo Emerson declared to his family: "I must be myself. I cannot break myself any

longer for you, or you. . . . . I will do strongly . . . whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints."5)

Sometimes, the debate incorporates a broadened version of this individualism as well, such as self-absorption

or romantic self-expression.

Invoking "individualism" almost always involves an evaluative spin. "The term [individualism],

which in the old world was almost synonymous with selfishness , social anarchy, and individual

self-assertion," wrote Yehoshua Arieli in his major work on American ideology, "connoted in America

self-determination, moral freedom, the rule of liberty, and the dignity of man." 6 Most historians in this debate

have been concerned with the negative sense of individualism, as selfishness rather than as liberty. Some

commentators have defended a classically liberal position,7 but the debate about when Americans became

individualists has meant asking asked when Americans became self-interested.8

Antebellum Moments

Landing. The first moment, and one about which there has been considerable debate, was the

English settlers' initial footfall in America. Were Americans, as the phrase goes, "Born Liberal?" Some

scholars contend that many, if not most, of the English newcomers brought with them ideas of individual

liberty then germinating in Britain. Then, special features of colonial America which were there from the

start -- the strength of Protestant dissenters, the virtual absence of feudalism, the mixed multitudes who

came, single men or small families far from kin, seemingly uninhabited and inexhaustible land, the scattering

of households across that land, high mobility, nascent social institutions at best -- consolidated an

individualistic society. J. R. Pole suggested that "[m]uch of the experience of life and work on the American


9 Pole, American Individualism, p. 9.

10 For one overview of this debate, see Wood, "The Enemy is Us." Surely oversimplifying, I classify the followinghistorical works as examples of the two camps: Claiming that American settlers were at the start, or very early on, individualistic,see Innes, Labor in a New Land; Greene, Pursuits of Happiness; Fischer, Albion's Seed; Lemon, "Spatial Order" and The Best Poorman'sCountry; Wolf, Urban Village and As Various as Their Land ; Blumin, The Urban Threshold, and Greenstone, "Political Culture andAmerican Political Development". Claiming that Americans began non-individualistically but changed in that direction, see Shain,The Myth of American Individualism; Henretta, "The Slow Triumph of Liberal Individualism" and The Origins of American Capitalism; Lockridge, A New England Town (although see 1985 "Afterword"); Wall, Fierce Communion; Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee;Shalhope,"Individualism in the Early Republic;" and Countryman, "American Liberalism and the Problem of American Socialism."

11 Greene and Pole ("Reconstructing British-American Colonial History") noted in 1984 that "over the past decade it hasbecome powerfully obvious that [the New England case] fundamentally distorts the experiences of all colonies outside NewEngland and, perhaps more serious, that it gives excessive emphasis to the power of tradition and the resistence to change . . . ." (p.11). See, also, Greene, Pursuits of Happiness; Zuckerman, Friends and Neighbors. on the atypicality of New England. "Monopoly:"Bowden,"The Invention of American Tradition." See also Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory.

12 Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms, p. 6; Greene, Pursuits, p. 37. Among the important works on the Puritans are: Boyer andNissenbaum, Salem Possessed; Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee; Demos, A Little Commonwealth; Greven, Four Generations; Gross, TheMinutemen and Their World; Innes, Labor in a New Land; Lockridge, A New England Town; Melvoin, "Communalism in FrontierDeerfield;" Rutman, Winthrop's Boston; and Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms A more favorable spin comes from Shain, The Myth ofIndividualism, p. 63: They were "locally autonomous, consensual, and unusually democratic peasantlike villages." See also Brown,Modernization.

continent operated to establish the primacy of the individual."9 Other scholars argue, in contrast, that the

early colonists brought with them traditional, communitarian values from Europe and their experiences --

sailing and settling in tight-knit groups, struggling with subsistence farming, banding together to survive on a

dangerous frontier -- produced the opposite of modern individualists. Liberalism came only later.10

Making the case for the born-liberal argument difficult is the prominent example of the Puritans.

Renowned far beyond their numbers or their importance at the time, the Puritans did, in the words of one

historian, gain a "monopoly on publicity" and come to represent the colonial era to later generations. (In no

small measure that was because their descendants, such as Emerson, shaped much of America's nineteenth-

century intellectual life.)11 Nonetheless, community control of individuals was stiff in the Puritan areas.

Michael Zuckerman called Puritan society a "totalitarianism of true believers." Jack Greene put the Puritan

agenda forcefully:

The world Puritans hoped to substitute for the one in which they lived [England] used suspicion and

mutual surveillance to achieve a tight social regimen and to suppress individual deviance and sin,

exert tight control over the unruly forces of the market, diminish acquisitiveness and the

covetousness or frivolous indulgence it engendered . . . and achieve a degrees of communal unity

virtually unknown in the fluctuating world of early modern England.12

That is, they created a less individualistic society than the one they left behind. Americans may have been born

individualistic, but they stayed that way only outside of New England. (Ironically, Puritan theology, if not


13 Shain, Myth of Individualism (p. 131), resolves this paradox by saying that in Puritanism, individuals needed the"community of saints" to find salvation, because, unaided, they were too corrupt or weak to succeed. See, also, Zuckerman, "TheFabrication of Identity in Early America."

14 Rutman, "Community," pp. 294, 301. See, also, Rutman and Rutman, A Place in Time; Lemon, "Spatial Order," Wolf,Urban Village; Fischer, Albion's Seed; Butler, Becoming American; Zuckerman, Friends and Neighbors.

15 On New England's "declension," see, e.g., Lockridge, A New England Town (although Lockridge has denied, in a reviewof Greene, Pursuits, that his is a story of declension); Greven, Four Generations; Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee; Zuckerman,Peaceable Kingdoms; Gross, The Minutemen; and Holifield, "Peace, Conflict, and Ritual in Puritan Congregations." The most dramaticstory of "declension" is in Boyer and Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed. Other accounts of rising individualism include Deetz, In SmallThings Forgotten; Brown, Modernization.

16 See, e.g., Nash, The Urban Crucible; Zuckerman, "Tocqueville, Turner, and Turds;" Curry and Valois, "The Emergence ofan Individualistic Ethos in American Society;" Maier, American Scripture; McDonnell, "Popular Mobilization and Political;"Hessinger, "Problems and Promises: Colonial American Child Rearing and Modernization Theory;" Smith, "Parental Power andMarriage Patterns;" Cott, "Divorce and the Changing Status of Women."

Puritan practice, was individualistic.13)

Communities outside New England -- with some exceptions, like the Quakers -- are described as

considerably more individualistic than either New or Old England. The harsh constraints of frontier life

necessarily entailed a "web of reciprocal obligations and responsibilities," acknowledged Darren Rutman who

has studied the South, but "the individual -- not the group -- was the core of the society."14

Perhaps most Americans were, notwithstanding the Puritans, individualistic to start. Or perhaps, not.

Falling Away in the Colonial Era. Historians of New England have pointed to a second "moment" of

individualization, somewhere in the mid-eighteenth century. In this account, the incursion of commerce and

the seductions of open land away from the village drained the solidarity of Puritan communities and even

tore them apart in conflict. Sons moved away, neighborhoods seceded, congregations watered down

requirements for membership to entice the indifferent young (the "halfway covenant"), and witchcraft was

asserted. This was the era -- at least as described by later divines and intellectuals -- of "declension," a fall

from grace and ever since one of the dominant frames for understanding American history.15

The Political-Cum-Social Revolution. The Revolution was, of course, a political watershed. For many

historians, it was also a social watershed, marking the transition from a traditional, deferential, communal

America to a modern, egalitarian, and individualistic one. And yet, historians differ about whether the social

change led to the political one, or vice-versa. Some point to turmoil, such as class tensions in the major cities

and new ideas about "human rights," as well as the decline of Puritan solidarity in the decades leading up to

the Revolution.16 Others stress instead dramatic changes in American comportment, especially a decline in

subordinates' deference to their betters, during the Revolution and in the generation immediately following it.

John Adams wrote, "We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere;

that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians

slighted their guardians, and Negroes grew insolent to their masters." Women, too, Adams might have added,


17 Adams quoted by Foner, The Story of American Freedom, p. 16. The notion that the Revolution made American culturegoes back, in sociology, at least to Lipset's First New Nation. See also, e.g., Hemphill, "The Middle Class Rising;" Klepp,"Revolutionary Bodies;" Riley, Divorce; Schudson, The Good Citizen; and comments on Zuckerman, "Tocqueville," in the same issueof Journal of American History; June 1998.

18 Lender and Martin, Drinking in America, report that rising individualism unleashed problem drinking after theRevolution: The "personal binge was an assertion of individuality, of freedom from communal restraint" (p. 54).(54).

19 Degler, At Odds, p. 14.

20 Taylor, The Transportation Revolution.

21 The quotations: "Calculating ego:" Sellers, Market Revolution, p. 216. "Intertwined:" Henretta, The Origins of AmericanCapitalism, p. 269. "Nineteenth-century busines smen:" Johnson , "Market Revolution, " p. 552. The cen tral work in this vein isSellers, Market Revolution. Others include severa l other pieces by James Henretta -- such as "Families and Farms" (and debate inOctober, 1980, William and Mary Quarterly), "The `Market' in the Early Republic;" and "The Slow Triumph of Liberal Individualism"

were speaking up.17 Insurrection showed up in spheres far from politics , in unruly drinking, for example.18

Some even note that Revolutionary-era youth were starting to insist on love as a reason for marrying, a

stance, Carl Degler has noted, that "was the purest form of individualism; it subordinated all familial, social,

or group considerations to personal preference."19

Whether pointing to moments just before, during, or just after the Revolution, many historians

credit the years from roughly 1760 to 1800 as the time when Americans became the "New Americans" of the

individualistic sort we recognize now.

The Market (or Religious or Romantic) Revolution. A fury among American historians revolves around the

next period, roughly labeled the "Early Republic," Jacksonian, and ante-bellum period(s). Here is when and

not before, argue several historians of significance, that Americans turned from traditionally communal to

rationally individualistic.

The Market Revolution (which was, in turn, spurred by the "transportation revolution"20) got under

way before the political Revolution but peaked around the time that Tocqueville visited America. Many more

farm families than ever -- and Americans overwhelmingly lived on farms -- started selling their produce in

regional and national markets and in large volumes; they also started selling mothers' and daughters' labor in

putting-out systems (weaving, making collars, straw hats, and so on, at home, on contract). As rural

Americans increasingly participated in capitalist markets, goes the argument, they developed for the first time

a capitalist mentality, a desire to make profits and accumulate wealth. Previously, farmers worked for their

families, in concord with their neighbors, and toiled only as much as necessary to meet basic needs. Now,

they developed "calculating egos" which drove them to seek profits. Their lives, write one historian, "were

increasingly intertwined in a market system that altered their behavior and values." They, writes another,

"were forced to think like nineteenth-century businessmen and not like eighteenth-century husbands, fathers,

and neighbors."21 There is also an urban dimension to the argument -- that in this era large-scale


-- Clark, "The Consequences of the Market Revolution in the American North" and "Rural America and the Transition toCapitalism;" Kulikoff, "The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America;" Merrill, "Putting 'Capitalism' in its Place;" Shain, The Myth ofAmerican Individualism; and Shalhope, "Individualism in the Early Republic." Wood, in "Inventing American Capitalism" and "TheEnemy is Us," provides an overview of the debate circa 1994. General sources include Ellis et al., "A Symposium on CharlesSellers;" and Stokes and Conway (eds.), The Market Revolution in America.

22 E.g., Wilentz, Chants Democratic ; Johnson, Shopkeepers' Millennium .

23 This distinction points to sore methodologica l point in the literature: inferring intention from action, particularlythrough distant historical documents. Daniel Fe ller, "The Market Revo lution Ate My Homework," has noted that even "the simpleaccount books kept by [pre-market revolution] Yankee farmers can be read in contradictory ways -- as evidence of a noncapitalistmindset, since debts were carried for years without interest, or proof of a relentlessly commercial mentality, since even the smallestobligations were recorded in monetary terms and pursued for payment even beyond the grave" (p. 411).

24 Bender, Community and Social Change in America, p.113. See, e.g., Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy;Wood, "The Enemy is Us;" Shammas, "How Self-Sufficient was Early America?;" Nobles, "Breaking into the Backcountry;" Innes,"Fulfilling John Smith's Vision;" Greene, Pursuits of Happiness; Stott, "Artisans and Capitalist Development;" Feller, "The MarketRevolution Ate My Homework;" and contributors to Ellis et al. , "A Symposium on Charles Sellers."

25 On religious change, see, e.g., Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land; Stark and Finke, The Churching of America. On theindividualistic implications, see, e.g., Howe, "Protestantism, Voluntarism, and Personal Identity in Antebellum America;" Ryan,Cradle of the Middle Class; Johnson, Shopkeepers' Millennium ; Witten, All is Forgiven, Ch. 5; German, "The Social Utility of WickedSelf-Love;" and Wood, "Religion and the American Revolution." Wood points out with respect to the First Awakening -- but theSecond only expanded the message -- that "[t]he logic of Protestantism was drawn out further than ever before. Revivalistclergymen urged the people to trust only in `self-examination' and their own private judgments, even though `your Neighbors growlagainst you, and reproach you' (p. 182)."

manufacturing undermined independent artisans, forcing them to become wage-laborers, to be treated and to

treat themselves as market commodities.22

Critics, most of whom lean toward the born-liberal position, deny that any capitalist, rationally self-

seeking character emerged in this era that had not been there long ago. Perhaps Americans engaged in more

capitalist activity than they had before, thanks to the booming economy, but that is different than sporting a

new mentality than they had before.23 Thomas Bender, for example, has argued that "Americans at the outset

of the nineteenth century did not lack rationality, a concern for efficiency, or a willingness to work hard on

behalf of their self-interest. What they lacked, from a modern perspective, was an autonomous economic

institution legitimizing and facilitating the pursuit of economic goals outside the web of social networks and

cultural traditions." Market rationality already existed, but a market system was only just developing.24

Some historians also point to two other major developments in this era as possible causes or

consequences but certainly individualistic corollaries of the Market Revolution. One was Protestant enthusiasm.

Religious activity around the "Second Great Awakening" of the 1820s and 1830s drew many previously

unchurched Americans into evangelical Protestant movements. These movements stressed personal salvation

and good works in the world (rather than predetermination); they emphasized individual self-examination

and self-discipline. Even in New England, Congregational descendants of the fatalistic Puritans refined their

theology closer to "new birth" ideas.25 The other development was the emergence of a culture of sentimentality.

The Northern middle class, in particular, expressed this culture in the arts (bathetic poetry and melodramatic


26 One historian notes, for example, that abolitionists' repugnance for the cruelty of slavery (as in Uncle Tom's Cabin) andfor slavery's violation of "self-ownership" "struck a note that would persist in the evolution of individual rights consciousness" -- Clark, "`The Sacred Rights of the Weak'," p. 487. See also, for example, Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the HumanitarianSensibility;" Lewis, "Mother's Love;" Lystra, Searching the Heart; Stearns, Battleground of Desire; Curti, Human Nature in American Thought,Chapter 5 on the Romantics. The connection between sentimentality and individualism makes Emerson all the more striking afigure. He was, in this era, a professedly unsentimental ideologist of individualism (see, e.g., Cayton, Emerson's Emergence; Stowe, GoingAbroad, Ch. 5).

27 Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Howe, Making the American Self; Rodgers, "Socializing Middle-Class Children;" Weiss, TheAmerican Myth of Success.

28 Foner, The Story of American Freedom, Ch. 6; Larson, "Business Culture;" Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State; Woodand Fischer "American Individualism and the Law."

novels), romantic obsessions with death (Edgar Allan Poe; nature-garden cemeteries), social movements to

save the afflicted (slaves and abandoned children), a love ideology, and heightened emotional investment in

their dwindling number of children. Although these sentiments involved affection for others, they also

elevated the individual -- his or her bodily integrity, self-development, and especially feelings -- over groups

such as families.26

To some historians, all this was of a package. They argue that middle-class parents understood that

the emerging market called for a well-trained self-interest, imbibed the theology of self-improvement, and

with intense love for their young, shaped in them (or, at least in the boys) a new character: disciplined, inner-

directed, calculating but pious, and assertive -- the Yankee individualist.27 This era, just when Tocqueville

traipsed across the nation, was the forge of distinctive American individualism

While most historians point to some moment before 1860 when Americans became individualists,

some historians look to a later time. The Civil War seems not a good candidate, given the willingness of

hundreds of thousands of Americans to give their lives for their two nations. But there are several

possibilities after the War.

Postbellum Moments

The Industrial Revolution. For some scholars, it is the mass industrial economy of the late nineteenth

century that fundamentally changed Americans. Until roughly the 1880s and 1890s, Americans had, in Robert

Wiebe's oft-cited metaphor, lived in "island communities," autonomous and personal. Then, massive outside

forces displaced local institutions and disempowered average Americans, leaving many frustrated and

resentful. Having lost meaningful control over their lives, people found fulfillment in expressive

individualism, in, for example, consumption. At the same time, laissez-faire ideology, the expression of

individualism in political economy, took command of national political discourse and of the law. Courts

supported economic expansion by, for example, insisting that individuals' freedom to contract with one

another -- however unequal the contract -- could not be abridged by any community interest, even in health

and safety.28 In essence, goes the argument, industrialization fractured community and individualism -- or at


29 An earlier individualism had been confined to economic self-determination; this individualism was more pervasive andcorrosive, in Wiebe's argument.

30 Wiebe, The Search for Order; Segmented Society; and Self-Rule.

31 Sussman, Culture as History; Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization;" Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; Leach,Land of Desire, esp. pp. 261ff; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance; Dumenil, The Modern Temper, Ch. 2. One critique of the se arguments isMartin, "The Myth of the Consumption-Oriented Economy ."

32 Putnam, Bowling Alone. Putnam, it must be noted, does not argue that there was a moment when Americans turned awayfrom community , but instead that the post-'60s witnessed a return to levels prior to the "civic generation" of the 1940s and '50s.Nevertheless, the mass of his data portray "declension" since 1960. On the general argument, see, e.g., Bell, Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism; Collier, The Rise of Selfishness in America.

33 E.g., Glendon, Rights Talk. See, e.g., Friedman, Total Justice and Republic of Choice; Siegel, "The First Amendment's NewStandard History."

34 Battan, "The `New Narcissism' in 20th-Century America;" Morawska,"Educating the Emotions."

least, a solipsistic individualism29 -- emerged from the wreckage about the turn of the last century.30

The Consumer Revolution. In a variant of the industrialization thesis, some point to the early twentieth

century, notably the 1920s, as the moment of transformation. Americans turned to consumption rather than

production as the way to measure their lives. Influential historian Warren Sussman argued that there may

have been earlier forms of individualism in American culture -- the Victorian emphasis on character and

moral discipline, for example. But the twentieth century brought, along with the loss of community, a

heightened self-consciousness and a practice of a self-promotion that fit the new world of marketing and

advertising. By using the right toothpaste and driving the right car, the consumer could express his or her real

(and superior) self. Some argue, as did Wiebe for the earlier moment, that real individuality had been undercut

by modernization and that consumption provided a false front of "personality." The era, nonetheless,

produced the individualism of hedonism.31

The '60s Revolutions. And then there is the era when, some say (although not that many historians,

since it is so recent), American community finally disintegrated into total atomism -- both sybaritically

expressive and selfishly utilitarian individualism -- sex, drugs, rock-and-roll and stock options. Some analysts

emphasize the emergence of a new culture of self-indulgence. How come. Perhaps this culture was created by

material affluence, by the contradictions of capitalism, by Spock-ian child-rearing, by television, by high

divorce rates, by political upheaval, or by the demography of the Baby Boom. Whatever the origins, the

1960s seem to be the climactic chapter in the story of American individualism, a chapter amply illustrated by

the charts in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone.32

Some analysts point specifically to the "Rights Revolution" as emboldening Americans with a sense

of individual prerogative.33 Others describe what might be called a "Therapeutic Revolution," a new ethos of

inwardness and self-absorption.34 Debased culture, rights run rampant, or out-of-control navel-gazing, all


35 Trachtenburg, The Incorporation of America, p. 86.

36 The American Mind , pp. 412, 408.

37 One expression of this viewpoint in History is the "organizational synthes is:" large institutions undercut smallcommunities and individual autonomy (e.g., Galambos, "The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History;"Brinkley, "Prosperity, Depression, and War, 1920-1945"). Stearns' account, in American Cool, of increasing emotional constrictioncould be fit into this thesis; perhaps Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World, might too.

38 Zuckerman, "Fabrication," p. 185; Rutman, "Community Study," p. 31.

amounted to self-centeredness, even, according to some critics, an epidemic of narciss ism.

Pick your moment, then, when Americans became individualists. Historians provide us with many to

choose from.

When Did Americans Stop Being Individualists?

Some historians (and other scholars) tell the story in reverse: Americans were once individualists, but

stopped being so. Most stories of individualism's demise are, like most stories of individualism's ascendance,

sad stories. Yet, despite being told in the same key, the accounts are radically different. It is worthwhile to

note them briefly.

The most common argument is that the forthright individualism of the nineteenth-century yeoman,

the epitome of Emerson's self-reliance, gave way under the pressures of modernization to the group-think

and sheep-like conformity of mass society. This may have happened during industrialization. Trachtenburg

quotes John D. Rockefeller's comment that, with the coming of trusts, "individualism has gone, never to

return."35 Others point to the twentieth century. (As I noted, a few of the historians who describe the rise of

twentieth-century individualism in the form of self-indulgence also describe the submergence of an older

individualism of independence.) The most well-known statements of this idea were written in mid-century by

non-historians -- Riesman's Lonely Crowd; Whyte's Organization Man; Fromm's Escape from Freedom -- but the

theme was pervasive. Historian Henry Steele Commager wrote, in 1950, that twentieth-century urbanization,

mobility, and communications had produced a "pressure for intellectual conformity" and a "greater

uniformity of character and habit than had been common in the nineteenth century."36 For the record, then,

we could be searching instead for the day individualism died.37

(One historian, Michael Zuckerman, who has noted not only this contradiction, but also the plethora

of accounts for the rise of individualism, has tried to combine them, arguing that Americans became "more

individuated and more regimented," drawing on complex psychodynamic theories of guilt, compensation, and

self-doubt. Darren Rutman has been more skeptical, writing that in "history, the variety of pronouncements

and expropriations over the past few years [about different losses of community] has made us appear to be

classic absent-minded professors regularly losing our valuables."38)


39 Fischer, ""Just How is it that Americans are Individualistic?" On cultural consistency, see, e.g., Archer, "The Myth ofCultural Integration;" Swidler, "Culture in Action."

Implications

How might the historians' arguments aid our own deliberations about whether this is the moment

when Americans are becoming individualists or are otherwise fundamentally changing their social relations?

Perhaps all, or most, of these accounts are right -- right in the sense that each moment ratcheted

American individualism up another notch in an ever-rising spiral. Or perhaps they are right in a different

sense -- that at each moment individualism rose after a preceding decline, that individualism has risen and

fallen in waves. But that all the accounts are true in any straightforward way is unlikely.

Maybe these stories suggest the importance of making distinctions. We could distinguish among types

of individualism. Perhaps individualism as the concept of the autonomous self arrived with the English

settlers, individualism as proto-capitalist thinking emerged dur ing the market revolution, and individualism as

personal expressiveness burst out in the twentieth century. Alternatively, we might distinguish among

domains of society. Political individualism perhaps developed around the Revolution, economic individualism

during the Tocquevillian era, and familial individualism in the 1960s. There is, after all, no compelling reason

to think that all parts of society have to be culturally consistent.39

But such reconciliations of so many stories of radical transformation is difficult. More likely, most

accounts -- maybe all -- are wrong. Instead, this review might caution us to not be too hasty to define our

own moments in history -- or, as scholars, the moments we specialize in -- as turning points. Moreover, as we

seek to define the present moment, we should fully appreciate the complexity of the history that brought us

to it.


References

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Was There a Moment (When Americans Became Individualists)?

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