What is "individualism"

Usage examples of "individualism".

When the French explorers entered it, it was a valley of aboriginal, anarchic individualism, with little movable spots of barbaric communistic timocracy, as Plato would doubtless have classified those migratory, predatory kingdoms of the hundreds of red kings, contemporary with King Donnacona, whom Cartier found on the St.

Hortense, Pauline, have all the grace and fascination of the earlier age, merge with it the abandon of the Directoire period, and touch the whole with the romanticism and individualism of the coming century.

This novel clearly suggests, it seems to me, that individualism is also deserting eroticism and that the donjuanesque journey itself is nearing its end.

I have accepted universal suffrage in principle, and defended American democracy, which I define to be territorial democracy, and carefully distinguish from pure individualism on the one hand, and from pure socialism or humanitarianism on the other.

As you and the world have reflected in your sager moods, an ordinary pebble may roll where it likes, for individualism of the multitudinously obscure little affects us.

But that average man, forgetful of the multitude of yesterday and ungrateful, has none the less wrought into his very fibre and spirit the uncompromising individualism, the unconventional neighborliness, and the frontier fellowships of yesterday.

The French were pioneers not merely of an exploiting individualism of a day, or of a hundred or two hundred years, not merely of a democracy thinking of an equality of the men of one generation, but also of the conserving dynamic civilization of hundreds of centuries of a people--to come back again to that best of definitions--who are the invisible multitude of spirits, the nation of yesterday and to-morrow.

So long as we ignore difference, so long as we ignore individuality, and that I hold has been the common sin of all Utopias hitherto, we can make absolute statements, prescribe communisms or individualisms, and all sorts of hard theoretic arrangements.

Rather than opposing an artistic individualism against an impersonal, collectivist technology, Gaddis investigates their common historical roots as creative collaborations.

If you prevent people making profit out of their children—and every civilised State—even that compendium of old-fashioned Individualism, the United States of America—is now disposed to admit the necessity of that prohibition—and if you provide for the aged instead of leaving them to their children's sense of duty, the practical inducements to parentage, except among very wealthy people, are greatly reduced.

Al­truists and collectivists have an obvious vested interest in persuading men that such is the meaning of individualism, that the man who refuses to be sacrificed intends to sacrifice others.

His disdain for the law of contradiction permits him to announce that true individualism is possible only in the collectivized community—that true freedom is possible only when production is taken out of the hands of private individuals and placed under the absolute control of the group—that men will cease to be objects of "use" by others, only when they are willing to renounce personal profit and make social usefulness the goal of their lives.

I believe -- it may be no more than a pious hope -- that though a collectivized economy is bound to come, those countries will know how to evolve a form of Socialism which is not totalitarian, in which freedom of thought can survive the disappearance of economic individualism.

And, indeed, this tension is reflected in the constant debate between liberal individualism (the unencumbered self) and various forms of communitarian theorists (of the saturated/situated self).

Their success, however, is due not to individualism, but to the inertia, the cravenness, the utter submission of the mass.