Page 94 - Culture Society and Economy

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CAPITALISM ORGANIZED AND DISORGANIZED

through to the Grundrisse. Durkheim’s critique of the ‘utilitarian egoism’ of
Spencer also has its roots here, as does the anarchism of Kropotkin. 26 It
is not confined to Continental Liberalism because Lukes demonstrates
that this line of thinking also influenced the Left liberalism of Oscar
Wilde and Hobhouse. 27
If subjectivity is formulated in atomistic terms – as synonymous with
a self-generated and self-sufficient personal autonomy which is absolute
28
in the Kantian fashion – then, as Weber discovered, it becomes impos-
sible to find a solution to alienation in modern society. This is because
it is obvious that every single social and economic trend is ineluctably
developing away from autonomy in the absolutist sense towards some
kind of ‘iron cage’. What is clearly needed, as has been repeatedly argued,
is for a different concept of individuality to be worked out which is conso-
nant with the actual conditions of modern life. This can only be an approach
based on the fact that the distinctive feature of modern individuality – its
newly found scope and depth – lies in its social derivation and connectivity.
Connectedness and the economic, social, cultural and political dependence
of billions of individuals on each other provide the preconditions and
bases of modern individuality.
This is fundamentally different from the conception of individuality
whose ideal is the independent consumer acting independently in the
market and living the private bourgeois life. No such independence exists
nor can it exist today or in the future. The point therefore is not to seek
to recover an autonomy for an individual cut off from the social as the
basis for a newly minted ‘reflexive’ subjectivity. The point is not to
‘oppose man as a social being’ to ‘the self-sufficient individual’. 29 For
a very long time there has been no such thing as a ‘self-sufficient indi-
vidual’. Sociological theories of the socialization of the individual ‘self’ –
such as that put forward by George Herbert Mead – are one recognition
30
of this reality. Nor should our thinking be governed by the equally erro-
neous idea that the purpose of re-asserting the ‘social being’ of humans
is to subordinate individualism. The entire point of the re-assertion of
sociality is not to overcome, but to realize, individuality. The entire point
is not to use sociality to crush individuality but to establish sociality as
the basis for the free individuality of all. The point is to ‘supersede’ (in
the Hegelian sense) the achievements of liberalism – individual freedom,
individual rights, individual ethics, rationality – by retaining them, over-
coming their limitations, expanding and supplementing them. As Lukes
demonstrates in his complex and subtle analysis of individualism,
Dumont missed the point completely when he set up a simple opposi-
tion between individualism and ‘holism’. When the issues are thought

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