The proper relationship between the individual and the community has long preoccupied political theorists. In Volume 2 of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the potentially insidious outcome of political liberty in a democratic society: Should such liberty, and hence such individualism, be carried to excess, it can “endanger the peace, property, and lives of individuals” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville, Mayer and Lawrence2000, 504). Drawing a distinction between the close ties found in aristocratic societies and the looser bonds of the democratic world, Tocqueville identified the potential for the individual “to isolate himself from the mass and retire into a circle of family and friends” (ibid., 508). As he famously put it: “Aristocracy links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link” (ibid.). Among other potential consequences of breaking the chain is the advent of an increasingly atomistic life where citizens, no longer well connected to others in their communities and societies, are left apathetic toward collective questions and challenges. Politics, and democratic politics in particular, are left to suffer.

The two books under consideration in this essay continue in Tocqueville’s footsteps by reflecting on the nature and origin of individualism in contemporary Western society, albeit in decidedly different ways. For Larry Siedentop, the question is a grand one: From where did the idea of the individual come? In answering this question, Siedentop offers profound reflections on the meaning of individualism itself and subtly shifts the way in which we understand both the rise and substance of liberalism. For Nadia Urbinati, the challenge is more urgent. She holds that democracy is imperiled by an ideology of individualism that, in extolling qualities such as courage, responsibility, and self-help, only serves to create a society whose members feel they owe nothing to one another. Although Siedentop has been particularly interested in the shape and historical development of liberalism, and Urbinati more in democratic theory, each book challenges established narratives surrounding individualism, and together they offer a rethinking of the idea of the individual and the individual’s role in society.

These are certainly appropriate times for such a reconsideration. Throughout the Western world, liberal democracies are under threat in ways unseen for decades. The rise of Donald Trump and “Trumpism” in the United States, as well as far-right nationalist movements in Europe, have left many to ponder their causes and consequences. They are myriad, to be sure. And while we would be hard-pressed to say that it was Tocqueville’s broken chain that was doing the damage, we should not entirely discount the indifference and anomie felt by many toward other members of their political systems. For some in the United States, the uneven economic recovery following the Great Recession furthered a sense of abandonment that later led such people not just to vote for Trump but to vote against the establishment. On both left and right, there were those who believed that a vote for Trump was a signal of their disgust with the political system in toto. Consigned to the margins, disconnected from centers of power and decision making, the best they could do was to lob stones at the establishment from outside. Trump may never deliver on his promises, and indeed the swamp seems “swampier” than ever, but at least he offered the possibility of burning the whole thing down so that we might be allowed to start again. In short, these are the voters that the Democratic pollster and political strategist Stanley B. Greenberg once dismissively labeled the “F-You Boys” (Greenberg Reference Greenberg2004).

Although The Tyranny of the Moderns was written well before Trump’s rise, one can easily imagine Urbinati as responding to this facet of contemporary politics. Beginning by noting the problematic way in which individualism has appeared to manifest itself as an indifference toward others, Urbinati sets out to analyze different currents of individualism in the modern age, while making a case for a “democratic individualism.” “This book,” she writes, “proposes that we rescue individualism from its lethal identification with the ideology of individualism—as epitomized in the maxim ‘I don’t give a damn’—in order to recover its political meaning” (p. 5). For the author, this means rejecting both the egoistic individualism that makes democratic politics difficult or impossible, as well as the communitarianism that purports to be an antidote to egoism but merely ends up smuggling in the same through the back door by emphasizing social conformity.

The book, then, is largely a dissection of egoistic individualism, an historical analysis of its rise, and an overarching argument in favor of democratic individualism. Urbinati begins with something of a conundrum: How can we critique individualism, particularly an individualism whose maxim is “I don’t give a damn,” when we acknowledge the importance of the version of individualism associated with rights as important for constitutional democracy? The task is to retain individualism but to mold it in such a way as to emphasize its more democratic characteristics and to de-emphasize those features that lead to atomization. Individualism does not need to be a dirty word tied to the worst excesses of private interest. Rather, the concept can be wrested away from its association with egoism and restored as a central component of democratic politics.

In Urbinati’s account, individualism goes wrong when it no longer rests on strong “ethical impulses” (p. 7), such as an enduring respect for others, an underlying belief in equality, amity between citizens, and empathy between people. Without such principles at the heart of individualism, we are liable to see two particularly insidious problems, both of which hold particular relevance in today’s political world. The first is a complacency toward individual liberty: Living in a society where liberty appears to be guaranteed, we are susceptible to the belief that norms and institutions are enough to secure that same liberty into the future. But as is becoming increasingly obvious, institutions and norms can be all too easily eroded (pp. 7–8). The second is that we run the risk of civil rights becoming the privilege of some and not of all (p. 8). Without a strong sense of the importance of extending rights to others, citizens lose sight of political right’s characteristic as a limitation upon power and, instead, come to view it as the privilege of a select few.

Although Urbinati’s text was originally written over a half decade ago (and initially published in Italian), these concerns have proven to be quite prescient. In the recent wave of populism and nationalism, civil liberties appear eroded and ever more restricted in their application to some privileged peoples, mirroring the aristocratic privilege that democracy purportedly sought to undermine at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A loss of individualism grounded in democratic principles results in antisocial behavior—incorporating a general indifference to the fate of society as a whole.

Here, Urbinati’s understanding of communitarianism as egoistic individualism writ large is instructive. While communitarianism purports to solve the problem of atomization by connecting the individual to communities of meaning, Urbinati sees a dark side to such ideas. There is a double move in communitarianism, incorporating both isolation and the search for community, but retaining egoistic individualism by simply redirecting isolation against noncommunity members. That is, atomized individuals feeling alone cling to a constructed community but are all too ready to retain their larger isolation against other groups. It is as if the proliferation of egoistic individualism has not led to a disinterest or apathy toward the political but, rather, to the embrace of certain agonistic elements of the political. It is the destruction of public life, but an active rather than apathetic one. The result is an antipolitics that, on the basis of communal sentiment, seeks out a way of life that both exists in and for the private sphere (p. 123).

Conversely, the democratic individual is said to have “a moral sense of her own autonomy and dignity, and who in acting is swayed by passions and emotions as powerful as reasons and interest are; who is not only focused on her own endeavors but is also emotionally attuned to others for the most diverse reasons, such as empathy, curiosity, the will to imitate, the pleasure of experimenting” (p. 26). Democratic individualism therefore stands on two pillars: “the civil culture of rights and the political culture of the equal dignity of persons” (p. 13). Urbinati argues that we can have either (good) democratic individualism, or we can have (bad) individualism that veers toward the antisocial and apathetic indifference toward the fate of the wider community. Democracy, hinging upon a belief in liberty and/or the equality of citizenship, is thus seen as the most effective means of limiting power without restricting access to the political decision-making process (p. 18). The destruction of hierarchical or authoritarian ties allows the space for new bonds to form. This includes ties imagined to be traditional or ancestral, as they are intended to be a source of meaning for the individual.

To make this argument, Urbinati mobilizes a variety of thinkers. And because her democratic individualism is positioned against a conventional understanding of liberalism, she incorporates voices from outside the liberal canon—Antonio Gramsci, in particular, helps her to define the concept. Employing such atypical thinkers works to dislocate individualism from the specific (and more immediately obvious) association with the liberal tradition.

There are, however, places where it is unclear whether Urbinati is speaking of democracy, liberalism, or perhaps both at once. Indeed, throughout the book it often appears that she wishes to speak about democracy—that is, to write a book on democratic theory—but insofar as she has written a book on the individual and individualism, she invariably ends up writing about liberalism. As individualism is arguably “one of the principal ‘ideas’ of liberalism” (Manent Reference Manent1995, xvi), it is perhaps not as easy to segregate the “individual” from the liberal tradition as Urbinati might like it to be. To be fair, a strength of the book is its aptitude in identifying and analyzing different versions of individualism. In pushing toward a democratic individualism, the author is able to expose the limitations of a certain brand of economic liberalism closely associated with the Cold War era, which may itself be a singular cause of the tyranny of the moderns (p. 90). But at times the reader is left wondering if a more direct confrontation with liberalism might have helped to support the book’s thesis. While Urbinati rightly associates “I don’t give a damn” individualism with economic liberalism and neoliberalism, it is not particularly clear what differentiates democratic individualism from the broad tradition of liberalism writ large.

Not all liberalisms are devoid of the empathy she locates in her democratic individual. As such, perhaps there is more to be gained from other currents of liberalism than is suggested in this book. A more expansive survey of liberalism would likely uncover a great many thinkers who share a desire for an individualism tempered by a strong sense of the common good and who could therefore help conceptualize a more political form of individualism. Nonetheless, The Tyranny of the Moderns functions nicely as an extended meditation on the compatibility—or incompatibility—of liberalism and democracy, though it is not framed this way.

Siedentop makes no equivocations regarding the link between his search for the origins of individualism and the later rise of liberalism. If Urbinati works to demonstrate the mutations of individualism present in modernity, Siedentop works to uncover its premodern origins. It is not often that one reads a study of the history of liberalism that ends with the Renaissance, as he pushes beyond accounts of liberalism that treat it as arising alongside the Protestant Reformation (e.g., Laski 1997), or those that view liberalism as primarily a phenomenon of the nineteenth century and after (e.g., Fawcett Reference Fawcett2014), and turns instead to antiquity in order to identify the slow shift to the world of the individual.

Inventing the Individual provides a probing historical analysis that draws on Siedentop’s deep knowledge of the history of European liberalism. As such, the book is in part an extended reflection on the importance of several key thinkers in shaping his understanding of the West’s political history. Benjamin Constant’s famous distinction between the liberty of the ancients contrasted to the liberty of the moderns stands in the background as a guiding thread for Siedentop (Constant looms large in Urbinati’s book as well). Siedentop effectively works to uncover the mechanism by which liberty underwent a transformation from being understood by the ancients as consisting “in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty,” to being understood by moderns as a realm in which individuals had the right to be subjected only to the laws, the right to express their opinion, the right to associate with other individuals, and the right to exercise some influence on the administration of government (Constant Reference Constant and Fontana1988, 310–11).

If Constant prompts the question, François Guizot provides much of the material with which Siedentop identifies his answer. Holding that “changes in attitude often precede and mould changes in ideas” (p. 179), he uses Guizot as his guide in identifying the subtle shifts in attitudes that result in the slow rise of the individual to center stage, both politically and socially.

The mechanism for such shifts is primarily religious. Western philosophy may be a series of footnotes to Plato, but in Siedentop’s telling, Western liberalism is the legacy of Saul of Tarsus. The transition from ancient to modern understandings of the individual truly begins with those who would interpret the meaning of Jesus’ life and death. Claims about Jesus and his sacrifice were presented as dramatic interventions, with Jesus and his story illustrating the importance of individual moral agency. This represented a break with the ancient world where the patriarchal family had been the sole agent of immortality. Through the interpretation of Saul (who became St. Paul), the message of Christianity becomes one of human equality and of individuals as their own moral agents. Moreover, putting this egalitarianism into action, Paul’s message was to all humanity, not just to Jews (p. 60). The idea that there was a moral law from God that applied to “all souls equally” is the linchpin of Siedentop’s argument (p 180). This penetrating belief worked toward a more egalitarian conception of society—even if this was not always the expressed desire—as well as the ever-increasing, if uneven, belief in the importance of the individual.

Notwithstanding the power of this argument, there is nevertheless something totalizing in Siedentop’s book. While Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus may have amounted to the discovery of human freedom (p. 60), Siedentop tells us that the conditions for such a “discovery” had slowly arisen over the preceding centuries. The diminishing role of the family in ancient religion and politics had laid the foundation for the subsequent development of individualism. In a sense, this means that the rise of individualism was a two-thousand-year story, traceable back to the religious role of the family in the ancient world. The author’s account is compelling here, and yet there is a reductive quality to this narrative. Once established that the ancient family was a religious center, and once convinced that social and political institutions were designed with this fact in view, then how could it be any other way than to say that modern Western civilization, and ultimately individualism, is indebted to the religious family? Following this, and despite warnings against believing the rise of the individual to have been inevitable (e.g., p. 8), in some regards it is precisely a sense of inevitability that is taken away from this book.

A strength of Inventing the Individual, however, is the volume of evidence demonstrating the central role that Christianity, from Augustine to Charlemagne to Ockham, played in elevating the individual. In linking individualism, and hence liberalism, to Christianity (a “child of Christianity,” he calls it at p. 333), Siedentop picks up on several tantalizing suggestions that liberalism may have older, more religious, roots than previously acknowledged by scholars. Showing how a foundational belief in moral equality resulted in an ever-greater appreciation of the individual, he indeed offers a plausible explanation of the transition from ancient to modern liberty. Still, as Pierre Manent has argued, while Christianity may have offered the first expressions of liberty and equality, it was only through a fight with Christianity—and the Catholic Church in particular—that the principles of the rights of man and the citizen, freedom of conscience, and sovereignty of the people had been forged (Manent Reference Manent1995, xvii). Similarly, Guido de Ruggiero began his classic study of European liberalism by acknowledging that liberty (“atomized into a myriad of particular liberties” [Ruggiero Reference Ruggiero1961, 1]) was present in the feudal world. For him, however, modern liberalism itself comes about through the struggle between the monarchy and aristocracy, each pushing for the expansion or preservation of its own power. All of this suggests that modern individualism is both political and secular in ways that are not reducible to its distant Christian roots—something acknowledged by Siedentop in the concluding chapters.

Both of these books offer historically rich and theoretically sophisticated treatments of the individual. Moreover, both Urbinati and Siedentop make novel arguments. Certainly, locating the individual in either the democratic/liberal context, as Urbinati does, or in the older individualism linked to pre-Lutheran religious culture, as does Siedentop, works to dislodge the genesis of individualism from tired narratives. If, as Urbinati shows, “individualism” is no single thing, but rather a broad category under which fall a wide range of types of individualism, our understanding of the individual as closely linked to the rise of modernity in the West is challenged. And, with Siedentop, if the story of the individual’s rise as corresponding with Luther’s famous nailing of his theses half a millennium ago is flawed, the individual ought not to be seen as belonging specifically to modernity.

Such moves certainly raise other questions. If individualism is not as closely tied to Protestantism as previously believed, where else might it belong? Correspondingly, a question arises regarding the workings of the individual in different religious and cultural contexts: With different types of individualism, do we also see different types of liberalism? Here, we may say that the two books contain certain blind spots. In Siedentop, the rise of the individual is traced through the developments of Christianity, and—after first discussing intellectual movements in Greece and the Levant—his account settles in Western Europe. While this was definitely a locus of Christianity, it was not the sole area in which that religion flourished. And thus, partly due to this, and partly due to the book not exploring Christianity’s further spread in the late medieval and early modern era, there is something of a lacuna concerning what happened in areas such as Eastern Europe, or (later) in Latin America, where Christianity held sway but did not embrace liberalism early on. Similarly, while Urbinati looks beyond liberals to theorize the democratic individual, her account of liberalism itself relies almost exclusively on a familiar cast of characters (e.g., Tocqueville, Constant, Mill). This leads to her eventually holding on to a vision of Cold War liberalism as liberalism proper.

However, neither liberalism nor individualism is confined to these areas and thinkers. Though unfortunately little known among Anglophone political theorists, there are studies of other liberalisms in unconventional—that is, not Anglo-American, Franco, or Germanic—locations that illustrate both the diversity of liberalism itself and the possibility of an individualism that stresses different qualities. For example, scholars have highlighted the existence of a “Catholic liberalism” in Spain in the early nineteenth century (See, e.g., Fernández Sebastián Reference Fernández Sebastián and Sebastián2012; Maravall Reference Maravall1972; Stoetzer Reference Stoetzer1979; Westler Reference Westler2015).

Like those liberals farther north, Spanish liberals struggled against the entrenched institutional power of the Catholic Church, but were at the same time much less concerned with the church’s enduring social power. In practice, Spanish liberalism therefore amounted to a fusion between liberalism and Catholicism. It was a liberalism that took seriously the need both for individual liberty and for a more nuanced conceptualization of the bonds of the community and the shape of society in which individuals live. As a result, Spanish liberals buttressed the negative liberty found in Britain with communitarian supports, and thus charted their own path. This is not to say that the Spaniards necessarily avoided the problems of communitarianism highlighted by Urbinati, but it does represent an overlooked attempt at negotiating this same terrain. And it is interesting to note that the retention of Catholicism as a social force supplied nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism with similar “ethical impulses” to those that Urbinati would see restored to contemporary individualism. This same “Catholic liberalism” would also seem to complicate in interesting ways the end of Siedentop’s account. In particular, it would suggest that the relationship between Catholicism and liberalism did not merely go in a single direction.

This unsettling of settled notions of individualism corresponds with a renaissance in studies of liberalism. Some 30 years since the liberal–communitarian debates began to fizzle out, and following the end of the so-called end-of-history arguments, liberalism again appears to be ripe for debate. Explorations of the more insidious elements of liberalism, such as the support it often lent to imperial projects, have refocused the scholarly gaze such that liberalism’s diffuse effects are now being better understood (e.g., Morefield Reference Morefield2004; Pitts Reference Pitts2005). But at the same time, and to some extent corresponding with the exposition of liberalism’s dark side, scholars such as Duncan Bell and Edmund Fawcett are helping to illustrate the diversity of the liberal tradition (Bell Reference Bell2016; Fawcett Reference Fawcett2014).

Such studies are particularly valuable now, at a time when populism and nationalism are once more threatening the liberal democratic order. While there are certainly differences, the impulse toward nationalism found in Brexit, Catalonian separatism, far-right political parties in Central Europe, or in Trumpism in the United States suggests a dissatisfaction with liberal democracy, but also with the individual’s place in the world.

Under such circumstances, it is helpful to be reminded—or to discover—that the discourse of the individual is not set in stone. It does not need to be linked to a narrow defense of private space in the form of negative liberties. What Judith Shklar called “a liberalism of fear” (Shklar Reference Shklar and Rosenblum1989), designed to alleviate political uncertainty in the face of ever-more authoritarian political systems (and, ironically enough, against the nationalistic impulses from the mid-twentieth century), appears to have resulted in a sense of anomie. The division of the world into “Us” and “Them” reflects the “I don’t give a damn” maxim that so concerns Urbinati. It suggests an indifference toward others, and a willingness to create and embrace arbitrary divisions between people: an isolation by way of community. As long as we are unwilling to give up on the idea of liberal democracy, however, we must remember that the individual has both a more complicated history and more diverse possibilities than we often think.