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I began thinking about a project on the modern individual several years ago as a way to get to the bottom of the disputes between liberalism and its many critics. I found that the claims and counterclaims—about individual rights, the liberal community devoted to defending these rights, and the ethos of self-reliant “individualism”—were based on different conceptions of what an individual is and ought to be, and were not fully intelligible apart from them. A Christian view of an ensouled human being, for instance, results in a very different political self-understanding than a Hobbesian view of individuals as bundles of passions. This project was motivated, then, by the age-old desire for self-knowledge, to understand who or what the modern individual is, and, more deeply, whether the modern individual fulfills what it means to be a human being or whether it corrupts or dehumanizes us. Yet I found that the most powerful challenges to liberal individuality from the nineteenth century to the present held that individuality is not real but an illusion. How can one understand the individual if it vanishes under the force of these criticisms? These criticisms of liberalism in late modernity are familiar: advanced commercial societies dissolve individual freedom by submitting human thought and action to commodity fetishism, ever more specialized and benumbing forms of labor, and manipulative and reifying forms of technology. Mass democracies undermine individual freedom with a tyranny of social custom and the disciplinary apparatus of the modern state. Structural patterns of inequality strip individuals of effective agency while ever reproducing and deepening these same patterns. At a deeper philosophical level, universal “determinism”—the view that all events, including individual actions, are determined by previous natural or cultural causes—threatens individual agency as the “uncaused cause” with “ultimate causal responsibility” for its actions and with the capacity “to do otherwise” for any particular choice. Preface x Preface Though powerful, these criticisms nonetheless seemed to me to be flawed in not revealing a way out, a way to foster individual agency and defend the institutions of modern public life through a decisive response to these malaises of modern liberalism. What I was looking for, then, was a theory of the individual that could weather these storms. Happily, I came then to deepen my knowledge of the classical German philosophers Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, who examined the nature and basis of individual freedom in a much deeper and more satisfying way than I’ve encountered in other theorists past or present. These philosophers deployed a deep, modern skepticism about fanciful models of the human self, while nonetheless defending the irreducible agency of subjectivity and the boundlessness of human reflection. They themselves leveled many of the same cultural and philosophical criticisms of individual agency and modern community, but yet designed creative ways to avoid the usual problems and dichotomies. Hegel and Nietzsche came to be the central figures of this project because they defended a notion of modern individuality—what I call the “historical individual”—that could resolve these modern problems. Hegel and Nietzsche’s key contribution was to historicize human subjectivity while nonetheless retaining a normative standard of “perfection ” internal to its nature. I call Hegel and Nietzsche’s notion of individuality the “historical individual” because the individual is not pregiven by nature nor is it any kind of “substance” or “thing,” but rather an achievement of accumulated individual and communal historical meaning. Their shared view of individuality as a historical creation helps us understand the late modern challenges to the individual—if history shapes the individual, then oppressive and alienating communal practices will construct distorted human personalities. Yet this view also points toward a solution, in that we can design communal practices that can help construct complete human lives according to the standard internal to human subjectivity. Instead, then, of opposing individual and community as theorists from Socrates to Mill have done, Hegel and Nietzsche argue that they can be mutually reinforcing. At the same time, neither Hegel nor Nietzsche thinks that cultivating genuine individuals is an easy task. On the contrary, they both argue that individuality is difficult to achieve. To be more precise, for these philosophers, individuality is not an all-or-nothing affair, but rather achievable according to degrees of success. I was motivated, then, in this project by a philosophical aim, namely, to argue that Hegel and Nietzsche can help us see how a robust theory of individuality is both possible and desirable in...

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