Zubin Meer - Individualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity

Individualism

Individualism

The Cultural Logic of Modernity

Edited by Zubin Meer

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Individualism : the cultural logic of modernity / edited by Zubin Meer.

p. cm.

Papers presented at a conference of the American Comparative Literature Association held at Princeton University.

ISBN 978-0-7391-2264-8 (cloth : alk. paper)--ISBN 978-0-7391-6587-4 (electronic)

1. Individualism in literature. 2. Individualism--History. 3. English literature--History and criticism. I. Meer, Zubin, 1975-

PN56.I57I63 2011

809'.93343--dc22

2010051788

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To Bashir Ahmed Sheikh

for the gift of time

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Individualism Revisited

Zubin Meer

1: Individualism in Early Modernity

Julie Orlemanski

Frederick Turner

Megan Heffernan

James Cruise

Joanne E. Myers

Nancy Armstrong

Nigel Joseph

Vivasvan Soni

2: Individualism in Late Modernity

Philip Weinstein

Jonathon Penny

David Jenemann

Dale Shin

Tom McCall

Deborah Cook

Lisa Eck

Lucy Stone McNeece

Index

About the Contributors

Acknowledgments

This volume constitutes selected conference proceedings of the annual convention of the American Comparative Literature Association, held at Princeton University, 2326 March 2006, on the overarching theme of The Human and its Others. The essays in this collection belong to the five-part panel: Literature and the Sovereign Individual of Modernity.

I foremost wish to acknowledge the assistance of the ACLA, without which this endeavor would not have been possible. I would also like to express appreciation toward Vivasvan Soni and Lucy McNeece for chairing panels; Asher Horowitz and Philip Weinstein for aid in the beginning with the book proposal; Michael Sisskin, from Lexington Books, for continued patience and essential advice; Tim Reiss, whose oeuvre is central to contemporary research on indvidualism, for extraordinary graciousness and kind interest in the project; and various contributors for patiently answering all my questions and offering helpful suggestions. Special thanks goes to Jim Cruise, who has made all the differencenot only for sage counsel and mentorship but also a friendship that has sustained me these past few years more than he can know.

Introduction: Individualism Revisited

Zubin Meer

Few master-categories bear as formidable a modernist semantic freight as individualism and so perhaps a few words of initial clarification are warranted. To sketch out its broadest semantic delineations, and depending on the specific bourgeois usage in mind, individualism connotes a dynamic capitalist economic rationalityutilitarian, competitive, and profit-maximizinginimical to the supposed torpor of feudal and tribal mentality alike. It also implies a Protestant spirituality scornful of the sensuous iconicity and communal sociability of saints, relics, pilgrimages, and traditional church hierarchy. Pitched against the corporatist ethos of feudal political theory, individualism is of course also shorthand for the modern liberal sense of politico-juridical right and entitlement. And, finally, in a tonal register derived from formal philosophy, individualism is also tantamount to a creative rationalism, veridical empiricism, and intimate subjectivity, all conceived of as reactions againstas well as extensions ofthe hermeneutic authority of the classics and the Bible.

It should be apparent that even as a family of concepts, individualism, more looking-glass than lens, is inevitably over determined: we see in individualism what we want to see in it. Of course, family resemblances do obtain, and the boundaries between these diverse semantic fields have long been remarkably porous. For example, it is commonly recognized that Protestant theology on individual moral responsibility profoundly influenced the consensualism of social contract theory (which is not to say that pre-Reformation Christianity did not also play a role in the rise of a voluntarist contractualism, most notably with Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham as well as the Church Fathers). Furthermore, although bourgeois frames of reference predominate in contemporary discussions of individualism, it should not be assumed that ideological mystifications on the right and left have not also left their mark. As improbable as it may seem nowadays, the word individualism, as we shall learn, was coined by French Catholic conservatives in the early nineteenth century, and their polemical refrains echo resoundingly down to our own day in conservative as well as socialist critiques of liberal officialdomand in fairly complex, contradictory ways. Contemporary American conservatives, to take up only the most glaringly obvious example, embrace the laissez-faire economics of classical liberalism but not the modern or social liberalism of civil rights.