Recent democratic theory has tended to develop along one of two tracks—the first being the theorizing of institutions, mechanisms, and structures (be they representative, deliberative or direct). The second is the theorizing of the culture, habits, and character traits of the citizenry (be they liberal, republican or agonistic). I am tempted to say that the two tracks both reflect and evade Rousseau's famous paradox concerning the circular relationship between good laws (institutions) and good citizens (character). Nevertheless, Alex Zakaras's Individuality and Mass Democracy makes a good case for the fruitfulness of working on one side of this divide. Zakaras himself says that while critical attention should be paid along both lines, his “is a book about citizens” (4). It is also, I would add, simply an excellent book about John Stuart Mill and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Zakaras focuses on how Mill and Emerson embrace and rework “individuality,” which they adopt from Romanticism and give a more democratic and political inflection. And unlike its more stigmatized cousin, individualism, individuality is a positive value for Mill and Emerson and, crucially, they see it as socially embedded. Zakaras convincingly criticizes readings of Mill and Emerson that ignore these authors' accounts of the social context and social practices within which robust individuality develops. Individuality, for them, is self-authorship in a social context, purged of the Kantian assumption of rational self-control. Individuality is a perpetual process, a struggle for self-definition that occurs within and against the pressures of tradition and “conformity.” Finally, Zakaras makes a convincing argument that individuality is not an apolitical or privatist value but, rather, “an ideal of self-authorship that demands we take responsibility for our public and private commitments alike” (p. 214).

Zakaras acknowledges that the embrace of individuality by Mill and Emerson is as much an aristocratic value as it is a needed ingredient in robust democracy. But these authors, he writes, seek “to create an aristocracy of everyone” (p. 22). For both, individuality is opposed to docility and conformity. Both, Zakaras writes, pinpoint docility as the infirmity that most threatens emergent democratic regimes—since unlike aristocratic and authoritarian political orders, democracies require something more than obedience. While liberal democracies need engaged and reflective citizens, modern party politics and mass society with their “power to impose conformity” (p. 127) often produce docility. Mill and Emerson each identify a particular danger associated with citizen docility in a democracy: For Emerson, it is the danger of the withdrawing citizen who through inaction allows injustice to be committed in one's name. The silence of citizens in response to the Fugitive Slave Law, for instance, is not just apathy but an immoral form of “intentional acquiescence” (p. 205). For Mill, it is the danger of the docile (but politically active) member of the herd and the tyranny of public opinion. In both regards, unreflective and conforming citizens become complicit in injustice.

Zakaras positions individuality as a realistic ideal for large-scale democracies in which the opportunities for strong forms of deliberation are limited. Individuality is a form of critical citizenship, in which citizens do not expect to be Rousseauian law-makers but, rather, “work to ‘detach’ themselves from complicity by speaking and acting bluntly against the unjust uses of power” (p. 97). Active citizenship requires both the exercise of independent judgment and taking action on the basis of that judgment. However, individuality is but a possibility—rather than the telos or exclusive justification of liberal democracy. Individuality must be generated and sustained by citizens themselves pushing back against the norms and institutionalized incentives of their political order.

This is a valuable and insightful contribution to the study of Mill and Emerson. It is also very well written. Zakaras deftly weaves together threads in Emerson's work, moving from the pursuit of individuality in private life to its manifestation in the public life of responsible citizenship, which he envisioned despite his “low opinion of politics as a practice” (p. 89). With Mill, Zakaras situates the arguments from On Liberty in the context of a conceptual distinction between open and closed social practices, which is drawn from Mill's discussion of marriage in The Subjection of Women. In both cases, Zakaras emphasizes the thinker's generous and democratic aspects, but to his credit he does not ignore or bury the exclusionary and aristocratic side. One might say that Zakaras soft-peddles the aristocratic dimension of these philosophical defenses of individuality via the argument that a certain kind of elitism—the elitism of exemplars—is compatible with a deep commitment to democratic life. The exemplar for both Emerson and Mill leads by example. Her function “is to inspire ordinary individuals to strive for ethical excellence” (p. 193). Zakaras engages the compelling idea that exemplars are “paradoxical figures” inasmuch as they inspire imitation in pursuit of one's individuality. But he shies away from a further exploration of the paradox by situating such imitation in a developmental narrative of individual self-development. This mimesis is “provisional,” not “outright” (p. 195), a developmental step that “must itself be overcome” (p. 75).

Zakaras is most compelling when navigating the ambivalence or hesitation each author manifests toward democracy, and then nudging each in a more democratic direction. Thus, for example, he argues that when Mill imagines people as (docile) members of groups, he conjures up a dangerous vision of “conformist democracy.” But when citizens succeed in cultivating individuality, the possibility for a robust “discursive democracy” presents itself.

His other purpose—an intervention into contemporary democratic politics—is admirably pursued but somewhat less fully achieved. This is not the place to rehearse old communitarian critiques of liberal individualism since Zakaras does a good job of distinguishing individuality from individualism. It is, though, perhaps appropriate to consider whether the fantasy of self-authorship is the cure for what ails us. Does the opposition between individuality and docile conformism shed light on a “mass, consumer culture” that uses that very opposition as one of its foundational myths (and its most effective consumer marketing strategies)? Zakaras is correct that diversity, fragmentation, and consumer capitalism's celebration of the individual do not render conformity an obsolete concern; citizens still are prone to unreflective adoption of the various social norms of the plural groups, spheres, and identifications of modern life, and “scripted forms of hedonism and stylishness” (p. 135) can promote stifling conformity no less than did the culture of Victorian England. But docility and conformism have a more complex institutional context, one which is not really captured by the ideas of “mass society” and “public opinion.” Hierarchical workplaces, homeowners' associations, and new media (just to name a few) each exerts its distinctive pressures and influences our practices of self-authorship in private and public life.

Furthermore, the very notion of conformity has become something of a well-worn cliché. Every high school student knows how to point out the irony of the conforming nonconformist—the one whose rigorous attention to the violation of bourgeois norms matches, identically, the uniform of his or her subcultural peers. In a world of tweets and retweets, mashups, and viral imagery, of collectively written online encyclopedias and their vandalization, political theorists need a more supple conceptual vocabulary than the individuality/conformism dichotomy. Such a vocabulary would move beyond diagnosing conformity to give more subtle and nuanced attention to the manifold ways that persons adopt, iterate, and transform, both reflectively and unreflectively, the cultural and political content of their individual identities.

These concerns are partly answered in the more explicitly political and wonderfully substantial conclusion. Addressing a variety of contemporary political issues including global warming and economic inequality, Zakaras shifts the emphasis of his analytic language from conformity and docility to complicity and “epistemic negligence.” This more politicizing language suits his contemporary democratic theory argument better than the conformity language that runs through the readings of Mill and Emerson: To the extent that the political life of responsible individuality includes (or perhaps requires) not just saying “no” to injustice but the advocacy of a more just alternative in the guise of legal and regulatory reform, what one seeks is not nonconformity but, rather, conformity to justice.