Reigning In Hermits: The Conflict Between Individualism and Participation :: Essays Papers

Reigning In Hermits The involvement Between Individualism and ParticipationIn the wake of Enlightenment thinkers standardised Hobbes and Locke, who asserted the primacy of the individual as the possessor of rights and emphasized the resulting legal comparison of all men, the distrust arose of how an individual who originates in a state of reputation interacts with society. Early 19th Century writers had an advantage in answering this question over the original thinkers in the form of a grand sample in Enlightenment theory currently being conducted in America. Here, for the outset eon, was a democracy run by consent of the governed, all of whom were tinct individuals before the law and, according to the dominant apparitional tradition, before God. The more thorough this leveling, Alexis de Tocqueville argued in Democracy in America, the less men are be to believe blindly in any man or any classall having the same means of knowledge, truth will be found on the side of the majority (Tocqueville, 435). At the same time that the power of self-styled authorities fades in both popular and religious life and people are more apt to simply haul the line, he sees the ties that once created interdependence in aristocracieseconomic dependency and favorable hierarchyweaken, resulting in the isolation of the individual from public life, or, individualism (Tocqueville, 506-7). Tocquevilles apprehension towards individualism was not merely a passing fillhe saw in its extreme form the potential for despotism to replace democracy. Despotism, by its very nature suspicious, sees isolation of men as the best guarantee of its own permanence (Tocqueville, 509). This tension between individual(prenominal) isolation and participation in civic life surfaced in other(a) contemporary works as well, including Charles Finneys Lectures on Revival of worship and Ralph Emersons On Self Reliance, in which the former argued in a vein similar to Tocquevilles that the nature o f democracy will forever and a day create this conflict, and the latter disposed of democracy in favor of the individual. Tocquevilles own reconciliation of the individuals natural inclination toward isolation is found in his analysis of the nature of knowledge in parliamentary societies. On a purely practical political level, there must, he argued, be certain beliefs held in common by all citizens in order for common action to be taken to administer political relation (Tocqueville, 433). Local government is the individuals closest connection to the public sphere, and the same selfish impulse that leads to individualism will make it indispensable for him to form political associations to secure his interests.