The third chapter traces the linkages between evolutionary science and aestheticism through the work of popular science writer Grant Allen and the arch aesthete Oscar Wilde, who shared a penchant for socialist politics as well as a firm belief in the truth of both Charles Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories. More importantly, Allen and Wilde were similarly repulsed by the cultural implications of social Darwinism, and for that reason looked to sexual selection – and, by extension, aesthetics – for a life-affirming alternative to the pressures of Darwinian competition. In their fiction and critical prose from the 1880s and 1890s, this chapter argues, both Allen and Wilde eventually arrived at a markedly utopian aesthetics that posited individual self-culture, through the emancipated pursuit of pleasure, as the key to radical social change. This chapter thus sheds light on aestheticism’s late-century polemical turn, which made it a lightning rod in the sexual controversies of the fin de siècle.

Chapter 7 examines the belief by some that affirmative action amounts to reverse racism and reverse sexism. The distinction between affirmative action and equal opportunity is described, as is the common belief that affirmative action involves quotas (quotas are illegal). Practices that undermine meritocracy in both college admissions and in employment are explored. These practices include legacy admissions, donors, and, in the context of employment, biases in job selection. Chapter 7 makes the case for the need of affirmative action because subtle forms of bias infiltrate all aspects of employment. The chapter critically examines the argument that diversity benefits organizations. The chapter ends with a discussion of goal-oriented versus process-oriented affirmative action plans, and other strategies to reduce bias in admissions and employment.

Collectivism symbolizes Japanese culture for many people in the world including Japanese themselves. The “collectivistic Japanese” are alleged to have the following characteristics: They feel at ease only in a group; they merge into their group and thus lack individuality and autonomy; they are indistinguishable from one another; they conform to their group and cooperate with the group members even at the sacrifice of their own individual interests; their obedience to their group leads to the hierarchical authoritarian society. However, these characterizations are mostly based on casual observations and personal experiences instead of systematic acadmic investigation. In psychology, nevertheless, two influential studies generalized the contrast between Western culture and Japanese culture in collectivism and individualism to the contrast between Western culture and all the other cultures.

Chapter Six begins by looking at how Americans of different racial and ethnic stripes think about politics and how these views have changed over time. This chapter looks not only at racial divisions in policy preferences but also at racial differences in public trust and confidence in institutions. Excerpts examine the echo chamber and skepticism over polling and the measurement of public opinion.

De Tocqueville helps us see American democracy as a way of life shaped by individualism and a dislike of theatrical display. In John Adams, the ideals of Protestant Christianity and Roman republicanism collided. Adams believed in personal integrity, but was unashamed to perform a social role, inspired by the Roman republican orator Cicero. In the nineteenth century Hugh Blair repositioned rhetoric as a way to speak truth, in a language that in practice confined truth-speaking to the elite. When working-class Irish Americans sought a more inclusive democracy, they found a symbolic representative in the actor Edwin Forrest, and many died in the ensuing riot outside a new opera house in 1849. Black Americans first found a public voice through the person of Frederick Douglass, whose oratory was founded both on preaching and on the old flamboyant republican tradition. Women first demanded a voice in the context of Quakerism and the campaign to abolish slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton later argued for female suffrage in terms that were more secular, more individualist and ultimately more elitist.

The history of government presents six lessons. Government has been crucial to building a nation truer to our nation, but it has taken both government and markets to do this. Government is big and complex in response to changes that were occurring in the economy which sent the country in directions inconsistent with its national values. Fourth, despite its size and complexity, government undertakes the same three essential functions it has undertaken over the history of the country. Government has been necessary to create, sustain, and expand markets, to protect people from economic loss and physical injury, and to maintain a social safety net for people mired in poverty due to age, health, or market conditions not of their doing. Finally, the pathway towards achieving America’s fundamental political values has been littered with mistakes and regrets. What makes us a nation has changed to encompass those who have been excluded and marginalized.

This chapter lays out an argument for why a new approach to understanding children’s development in school is necessary. It first reviews the limitations of research with young children in Head Start programs and elementary schools serving large percentages of children in poverty within the US. These approaches are critiqued in light of findings that challenge the validity and reliability of teacher report and other commonly used measures. Issues of bias and cultural relevance in ways of defining the development of children placed at risk are discussed. Promising insights from research using alternative frames and units of analysis are then contrasted with those of large-scale studies. Finally, the rationale for focusing on collaborative competence as a key driver of development throughout childhood is elaborated. The potential of a developmental sequence of collaboration beginning with preschooler free play and leading into more complex collaborations during elementary school is proposed. Summaries of each chapter and how it contributes to this argument is provided.

Rather than focusing on dramaturgical or thematic developments in the post-war era, this chapter traces the changes experienced by playwrights in their practical working conditions. It begins by disputing widespread arguments against the prominence of playwriting in British theatre (that it is literary, logocentric, and individualistic). It then explores changes in play publishing, which helped raise the cultural profile of the playwright while also forming a new kind of dramatic canon; the industrial conditions in which playwrights have worked, which were precarious for the first thirty years since 1945 but were decisively transformed in the late seventies by an effective campaign of unionisation and collective bargaining; and the growing culture of play development, which has had mixed results, but which, at its best, helps demystify playwriting as a cultural practice, making it more accessible and helping to shepherd new plays and playwrights into being.

In what sense is language social? I suggest we distinguish two questions here: First, what degree of social interaction is essential to constituting someone as a language-user? Second, what degree of agreement in meanings must language involve? Each of these questions may be given individualist, interpersonalist, or communitarian answers – not necessarily the same to both. For instance, Davidson is an interpersonalist concerning the first question and an individualist concerning the second. Kripke’s “skeptical solution” is commonly taken to imply a communitarian answer to both of these questions, but in the present chapter I argue that, despite its differences with Davidson’s view of language, it is compatible with constitutive interpersonalism and meaning-individualism. While it may seem as though a genuinely communitarian answer to the first question would imply communitarianism about the second as well, I close the chapter by suggesting that this is not as obvious as it seems.

This final chapter treats the Snopes trilogy as a clear-sighted affirmation of immanence and interiority that responds in a self-contained way to the whole of Faulkner’s study of complex systems as outlined in this book. In The Hamlet, the symbolism of the submerged woman offers Faulkner’s clearest portrayal of an immanent underlayer to our networked social systems, an underlayer that gives value and dignity to the individual life. Although there may be a chaotic quality to the expression of such individual forms of novelty, this does not mean that the larger networked process is blind. For Faulkner, individual experience serves as both a moral anchorage for the larger expression of the social body and an ever-present wellspring for social change. The Town and The Mansion continue to depict how such individual behavior can challenge vertical paradigms of top-down power, bestowing a mercurial quality to the New South and making it open to the possibilities of change.

The Introduction argues that Faulkner discovered an epistemology for networked systems in the creation of his own imagined landscape. I present two major stages in which Faulkner’s discovery took place: (1) an earlier vision portraying how networks scale, circulate information, centralize, and produce potentially tyrannical paradigms of top-down vertical power; and (2) another view of dynamical networks that are constantly adapting to produce novel forms of movement and behavior. The Faulkner that this study evokes is at once the modernist developing a spatial narrative practice describing the emergence of complex social networks and the Romantic for whom the immanent life was paramount and even sacrosanct. That these two trajectories of inquiry and spiritual belief are not easily reconcilable gives philosophical and moral weight to the landscape and characters that Faulkner invented. They also provide a striking meditation on what it means for human beings to find themselves in systems so vast and ubiquitous that they can no longer remember what it was like to live outside them and, thus, to think outside of their ideological dicta.

Cultural groups address the initiation, development, and maintenance of romantic relationships and marriage in diverse ways. Western values, beliefs, and populations have dominated theory and research, which has led to a relatively monocultural science of relationships. This chapter explores the developing literature on East Asian ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to suggest avenues for further investigation of culturally-defined relationships. We first focus on relatively broad social, ideological, and institutional factors that shape the East Asian Confucian cultural model of marriage in comparison to Western models of relationships. Then we review research linking distinctive East Asian ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving to culturally valued practices, attitudes, and behaviors in romantic relationships and marriage.

This chapter argues that looking at how Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler approached the state of nature brings to the fore where the two political leaders converge and where they diverge. Sharing a belief in the existence of a quasi-Hobbesian state of nature, they disagree how to respond politically to that state of nature. Whereas Hitler thought that domestically the state of nature could be overcome through a strong state and through strong communitarian bonds holding people together, and whereas internationally he believed peoples simply had to live with the continued existence of an unregulated state of nature, Trump’s conclusions are different. He puts little faith in the existence of the state. Yet he believes that both domestically and internationally the state of nature can be tamed through an intricate web of power relationships within groups as well as between groups that creates a relatively stable system. Trump is part of two quintessential American traditions rather than of fascism: the Mafia subculture of New York City and the extreme individualism of Ayn Rand. The concept of fascism thus ultimately distorts our understanding of today’s America.

The chapter charts the emersion of a powerful rhetorical attack on fedual property in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France, a powerful combination of critiques that would become one of the standard tropes of the modern property discourse well beyond the boundaries of Europe. To this fabricated negative archetype, French jurists juxtaposed the modern idea of Roman absolute dominium enshrined in the Napoleonic Code. Neither Roman nor absolute, the new law of property was a collection of prexisting doctrines couched in the lnaguage of a hyerbolic individualism.

This chapter opens by considering the vexed relationship between Romantic poetic practices that were increasingly interested in the powers and perceptions of individuals and the Romantic period’s burgeoning metropolitan profusion. The first sections explore the ambivalent or outright negative attitudes towards cities and their populations expressed by poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey and considers how distancing perspectives are employed in writings by Walter Scott and Letitia Landon. The later parts of the essay consider alternative versions of the urban sublime, touching on topographical and statistical representations by Thomas Malton and Patrick Colquhoun; celebrations of multiplicity by Pierce Egan and William Hazlitt; readings against the grain by Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb; and considerations of ruination by John Martin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Shelley.

In the empirical exploration of ethical pedagogies, a quartet of themes are salient. The classic theme of and debate over the relative weighting of nature over nurture is inescapable. A second concerns the extent to which any given repertoire of norms, values, exemplars, and ideals are written in sociocultural stone versus the extent to which they are malleable, fluid, of unstable valence, and liable to elimination or supplementation. A third concerns the degree to which the techniques of the ethical pedagogue are informal or formal. A fourth concerns the place that ethical students occupy within the dynamics of incorporation and objectification. Neglect any of these themes and infelicities can result. Among them, the crucial role that childhood socialization plays in ethical formation might not receive the acknowledgement it is due. The distinction between ethics and ethos might suffer conflation. Worst of all, the anthropologist of ethics might run the risk of slipping into methodological or – even worse – ontological individualism. Proper attention to ethical pedagogies can ameliorate such infelicities. It can also facilitate recognizing that pedagogies, at whatever stage in the life course, are foundational to ethical formation, deformation, and reformation.

This chapter examines Foucault’s theory of self-cultivation and its influence in anthropology. It considers the criticisms of atomistic individualism and social determinism that are often levelled at practices of self-cultivation and argues that practices of self-cultivation are neither wholly self-directed nor wholly socially determined. Ethnographies of self-cultivation reveal the efforts that people make to shape themselves and the worlds in which they find themselves. How far such efforts go, the form that they take, and the relationships in which they are embedded will be specific to particular lives, but focussing on practices of self-cultivation enables anthropology to account for the reflective efforts that people make to live well. Resisting interpretations of self-cultivation as entirely self-directed or socially determined collapses a second dichotomy prevalent in the literature, between those practices of self-cultivation found in ‘pedagogic’ ethical projects and those found in ordinary life. This chapter makes the argument that forms of reflective self-cultivation are found in the ‘midst’ of everyday practice to varying degrees, and in contexts of intense ethical training people remain vulnerable to moral plurality and the contingency of messy everyday life.