The Ship of Fools - a society of selfish individuals
Year: 2006
Type: preprint
Abstract: and general that there is plenty of room for the development of the individual personality. The area of personal freedom thus tends to grow as society becomes more advanced.” This was seen by Durkheim as important for the development of modern individualistic societies and the idea of the sovereign individual. On the surface it may seem strange that old societies with their high degree of self-sufficiency were collectivistic with very little room for individualism to play a role, while modern societies, with the extreme separation division of work and the net of global connections that each individual is enmeshed in, seem to offer possibilities for very individualistic views and behaviours. Reflecting a little upon this we may see that old societies were dependent on family, clans and guilds, or rather on goods and services provided by concrete persons, meaning that people were more or less directly dependent on each other. An individual in a modern society is no longer dependent on concrete people, the extensive exchange of goods and services that an individual finds necessary is provided more or less anonymously through exchange mechanism like the market or by depersonalised institutions paid for through taxes. The decoupling of the individual from the closely knit community of men must be seen as a precondition for the development of the kind of individualism we are talking about here. 8 Copleston, F. (1994). A History of Philosophy vol. ix. New York: Doubleday, p.124
Author: Verner C. Petersen
Language: English
Topic: Modernity and Self-Identity
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2145068347