2 - Individualism Reconsidered

Summary

In what follows, I take as a starting point the anthropological construct of the “person,” not in the sense of a public value but rather as a form of self- conception of a social actor, that is, as identity. Using Parsons and Shils's “action frame of reference,” I propose a more comprehensive model of individ-ual identity in which the remaining discursive traditions—the psychological, the sociological, and the ethicist, complement the anthropological understand-ing and each other. Each highlights a specific layer or dimension of individual identity. The concepts of corporate identity, the individualist social order, and the corporate order follow. Individualism as a larger order arises and persists, I go on to argue, when a sufficient number of actors have internalized the indi-vidual identity model reasonably well, and when it has been further fortified in the broader culture by way of various symbolic and institutional elements. The conceptual framework presented in this chapter clarifies the terms of a novel theory of the individuation process (chapter 3) that I subsequently use to inves-tigate the origins and significance of Polish individualism (Parts II and III).

The Structure of Individual Identity

Let us recall the main elements of the idea of the person in its rich version, that is, the one associated with Western tradition as presented by anthropolo-gists. The person is a universal inborn status accorded humans by virtue of being human. It implies supreme and inalienable moral value together with an ontological unity and a cognitive self-sufficiency. It further implies moral and intellectual competence (the ability to form judgment), individual moral responsibility, as well as uniqueness. I favor this anthropological definition as a description of the individual but with a modification: the beliefs so described constitute the set of beliefs that ideal-typical actors known as individuals hold about themselves and, by extension, about others. They capture such actors’ primary personal identities. Put differently, the individual's primary identity is that of a person (in the above sense), as opposed to a corporate identity of a family member, a tribesman, or a member of a religious group. This view of the individual as first and foremost a self-conception is associated above all with the Weberian tradition of social inquiry. A further, brief explication is in order.