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Individuality is in many ways the foundational modern concept. Consider by way of illustration the derivative character of individuality in “premodern” societies, which are founded and sustained based on appeals to supraindividual entities or ideals, such as tradition, nature, or God.1 In premodern societies, individuals’ social function and duties, their political rights and responsibilities, their honors and their shame, their personal identities and sense of place in the universe, are all established by their role or station within tradition or nature or the “Great Chain of Being.” For the premoderns, “community” precedes “individuality ” in at least three senses. First, premodern community provides individuals with an identity or self-understanding such that individuals think of themselves first and foremost as members of a community— as Spartans or Athenians, for instance. Second, the community is the source of legitimate binding authority on individuals. The church, or the elders, or nature itself declares that I have certain duties to perform, certain rules to abide by, and hence I must follow this authority whether or not I happen to disagree or even have a say in the matter. Finally, the community sets the ends for individual action, the function for its members’ lives. Traditional communities contain certain roles that individuals occupy and strive to live up to with excellence or virtue, such that the failure to perform one’s role is regarded as a failure to lead a good life. These ends are ultimately rooted in something like an Aristotelian natural science or a Great Chain of Being, a metaphysical edifice in which human beings are situated and which grounds our specific role or meaning, the standard for living a complete human life. By contrast, modern individuality challenges premodern community 1 Three Concepts of Individuality Three Concepts of Individuality 9 on all three fronts, seeking thereby to liberate the individual from these premodern constraints. First, moderns argue that individuals should be free to choose their own associations, craft their own identities, and hence be recognized in virtue of their own self-developed identity rather than one developed for them. Individuals should have this freedom because, second, individuals are the only legitimate authorities over themselves. I am thereby obliged to obey a social or political norm only insofar as I acknowledge this norm as binding upon me. Finally, individuals do not (or rather, should not) derive the meaning of their lives from some external metaphysical or political structure, but rather craft for themselves an understanding of the good life. These basic normative ideals are the basis for a liberal institutional design—for instance, a civil society of estates and associations open to the free choice of all, the administration of justice blind to class or gender differences among individuals, regular elections and the rotation of offices. As we will see, though the philosophers of the modern age agree about these basic features of the individual, they nonetheless disagree vehemently about how this ideal can be realized in the political world. The notion of individuality, I argue, undergoes a development in the history of modern philosophy, and this development occurs in three stages, each stage dialectically building on the previous one. In this chapter, I briefly articulate the first two conceptions of individuality in the modern age, what I call the “natural” and “formal” individuals. Each of these views is seeking to solve a problem posed by the previous understanding, and so part of the task of this chapter will be to clarify the main objections to these first two models of individuality in an attempt to set the stage for a defense of the “historical” individual in the remainder of the book. My account of this development follows Hegel’s own views. For Hegel, there are “always only two possible viewpoints” to develop a theory of the individual and community. First, one can “proceed atomistically and move upward from the basis of individuality [Einzelheit]” to community. Or one can “start from substantiality” (PR 156Z) or from community and work down toward individuality. The second is Hegel’s own position, whereas Hegel attributes the first to his modern predecessors such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. These “atomists” come in two varieties, what I will refer to as the “natural” and “formal” individuals, following Hegel’s own presentation in his early essay “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law.” The main problem with naturalist and formalist “atomism” is, as we will see, that this “viewpoint excludes spirit, because it leads only to an aggregation...

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