Individualism Archives - Public Seminar

The philosopher Charles Taylor goes hunting for cosmic connections

When the protagonist of Miranda July’s recent novel, All Fours, plummets into a crisis, she realizes, at age 45, that she “had entirely misunderstood the assignment, the scale of what life asked of us.” She had “only been living second to second—just coping—this whole time.” Being a writer, the character’s ...

Politics

Individualism Vs. the Common Good in America

For all that Republicans insist that individualism is the heart of Americanism, in fact the history of federal protection of the common good began in the 1860s

August 30, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

_____ America is in a watershed moment. Since the 1980s, the country has focused on individualism: the idea that the expansion of the federal government after the Depression in the 1930s created a form of collectivism that we must destroy by cutting taxes and slashing regulation to leave individuals free to ...