Bryan S. Turner - Sovereign Individuals of Capitalism (RLE Social Theory)

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
SOCIAL THEORY

Volume 77

SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUALS OF CAPITALISM

SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUALS OF CAPITALISM

NICHOLAS ABERCROMBIE, STEPHEN HILL AND BRYAN S. TURNER

First published in 1986

This edition first published in 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

1986 N. Abercrombie, S. Hill, B. S. Turner

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-415-72731-0 (Set)
eISBN: 978-1-315-76997-4 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-138-78801-5 (Volume 77)
eISBN: 978-1-315-76325-5 (Volume 77)

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

____________________

NICHOLAS ABERCROMBIE

STEPHEN HILL

BRYAN S. TURNER

London

ALLEN & UNWIN

Boston Sydney

Set in 10 on 12 point Sabon by
Computape (Pickering) Limited, North Yorkshire
and printed in Great Britain by
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ADDENDUM

The following references were omitted from the list provided at the end of the volume ().

Berger, P. L. (1969), The Social Reality of Religion (London: Faber and Faber).

Dore, R. P. (1983), Goodwill and the spirit of market capitalism, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 34, pp. 45982.

Durkheim, E. (1977), The Evolution of Educational Thought (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).

Lenski, G. (1961), The Religious Factor (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books).

Mill, J. S. (1946), On Liberty (Oxford: Blackwell; ed. R. B. McCallum).

Miller, D. (1967), Individualism (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press).

Mills, G. (ed.) (1965), Innocence and Power: Individualism in 20th Century America (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press).

Tillich, P. (1952), The Courage to Be (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press).

Weber, M. (1968), Economy and Society (Totowa, NJ: Bedminster).

The references to the work of Michel Foucault on should be to Foucault (1979b) rather than Foucault (1976).

We wish to acknowledge the helpful comments made by participants at seminars where we have read various versions of parts of this book: at the Universities of Lancaster, Essex, Birmingham, New South Wales, Monash and Tasmania. Our very grateful thanks also go to Pam Ebdon who typed the manuscript.

This book is about individualism and capitalism, and their relationship. The conviction that individualism and capitalism are related has proved pervasive, powerful and persistent. It is to be found in contemporary social and economic thought, and among those nineteenth-century commentators who shared a concern to describe and explain industrial capitalism. Indeed, classical sociology was largely formed in reaction to, and in order to understand, the changes that embryonic industrial capitalism brought about in society. These changes were seen as transforming traditional society and the place of individuals. The rise of individualism as a novel conception of the sovereignty of individuals, and as a new pattern of individual behaviour, appeared to be corrosive of existing social arrangements. Individualism was in turn seen to be a defining feature of capitalism. Individualism and capitalism have remained indissolubly linked in subsequent sociological and economic theory. The relationship, however, has been subjected to remarkably little systematic analysis. How and why it holds, and whether it will continue to hold, are questions that rarely get asked.

Several commentators have seen flaws in the purported linkage. These include the problem of periodization, namely that individualism and capitalism do not correspond in time, and the problem that some societies are capitalist but do not appear to give much weight to the individual. But such specific insights have not been developed into any more general position. We notice also that capitalism has been widely scrutinized and discussed in the literature, with some clarification of the concept and the phenomena to which it refers. Individualism, however, has not been examined in the same way; indeed, the term has largely been taken for granted as something whose meaning is both commonplace and common sense. In point of fact, current usages refer to several quite different things. These flaws indicate that there is a need to revisit individualism and capitalism. In this book, we subject both, and their relationships, to systematic historical and conceptual investigation. We find that there is no necessary or inevitable linkage: they simply relate to each other contingently.

We can identify a number of different definitions of individualism. These include the social recognition that individuals differ among themselves and that individuals should be given importance as against collectivities. This for us is the simplest and least developed social conception of the individual, and one that lies behind more elaborated cultural representations. We refer to this as the Discovery of the Individual. We also find individualism, individuality, individuation. Individualism, properly so called, was in origin mainly a political and subsidiarily an economic doctrine relating to the rights and obligations of persons that was associated with the English political theory of the seventeenth century, which later heavily influenced British and American culture. Individuality is concerned with the education of inner feeling and subjectivity. By contrast, individuation is a bureaucratic procedure that uniquely identifies individuals for the purpose of social administration and control.