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Classical Individualism CLASSICAL INDIVIDUALISM Machan’s book is one of the most thorough accounts of political and moral individualism available…. However classical its origins, classical individualism provides us with a new alternative perspective through which to make sense of the competing claims, interests and programs found in our world. Douglas J.Den Uyl, Bellarmine College, Louisville, USA In Classical Individualism, Tibor R.Machan argues that individualism is far from dead. Machan identifies, develops and defends what he calls classical individualism—an individualism humanized by classical philosophy, rooted in Aristotle rather than in Hobbes. Classical Individualism does not reject the social nature of human beings, but finds that everyone is a self-directed agent who is responsible for what he or she does. Machan rejects all types of collectivism, including communitarianism, ethnic solidarity, racial unity and gender identity. The ideas expressed in Classical Individualism have important social and political implications, and will be of interest to anyone concerned with the notion of individuality and individual responsibility. Anyone with an interest in social and political affairs, social ethics, political philosophy, economics, rights theory, the nature of the human being, libertarianism, capitalism, or environmentalism will want to read this book. Tibor R.Machan is Professor at Auburn University, Alabama, but is currently Professor and Distinguished Fellow at the School of Business and Economics, Chapman University, California. He is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His most recent books include Generosity: Virtue in Civil Society, Private Rights and Public Illusions and Liberty and Culture: Essays on the Idea of a Free Society. ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT 1 HAYEK AND AFTER Hayekian liberalism as a research programme Jeremy Shearmur 2 CONFLICTS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE Edited by Anton van Harskamp 3 POLITICAL THOUGHT OF ANDRÉ GORZ Adrian Little 4 CORRUPTION, CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY John Girling 5 FREEDOM AND CULTURE IN WESTERN SOCIETY Hans Blokland 6 FREEDOM IN ECONOMICS New perspectives in normative analysis Edited by Jean-Francois Laslier, Marc Fleurbaey, Nicolas Gravel and Alain Trannoy 7 AGAINST POLITICS On government, and order Anthony de Jasay 8 MAX WEBER AND MICHEL FOUCAULT Parallel life works Arpad Szakolczai 9 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CIVIL SOCIETY AND HUMAN RIGHTS G.B.Madison 10 ON DURKHEIM’S ELEMENTARY FORMS Edited by W.Pickering, W.Watts Miller and N.J.Allen 1 CLASSICAL INDIVIDUALISM The supreme importance of each human being Tibor R.Machan 12 THE AGE OF REASONS Quixotism, sentimentalism and political economy in eighteenth-century Britain Wendy Motooka 13 INDIVIDUALISM IN MODERN THOUGHT From Adam Smith to Hayek Lorenzo Infantino 14 PROPERTY AND POWER IN SOCIAL THEORY A study in intellectual rivalry Dick Pels 15 WITTGENSTEIN AND THE IDEA OF A CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY Giddens, Haberman and Bhaskar Nigel Pleasants 16 MARXISM AND HUMAN NATURE Sean Sayers CLASSICAL INDIVIDUALISM The supreme importance of each human being Tibor R.Machan London and New York First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. "To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk." Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 Tibor R.Machan All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Machan, Tibor R. Classical indiviualism: the supreme importance of each human being/Tibor R. Machan (Routledge studies in social and political thought: 11) 1. Indiviualism. I. Title. II. Series. HM136.M1553 1988 98–9404 302.5'4–dc21 CIP ISBN 0-203-16941-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-26490-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-16572-5 (Print Edition) FOR YONITA This page intentionally left blank. The beauty of life is nothing but this, that each should act in conformity with his nature and his business. Fray Luis de Leon This page intentionally left blank. CONTENTS Preface xi 1 Individualism and classical liberalism 1 2 Ethics and free will: a neglected connection 16 3 Human action and the nature of moral evil 29 4 Why objective ethical claims appear subjective 48 5 A defense of property rights and capitalism 62 6 America’s founding principles and multiculturalism 72 7 Radical feminism as uniformitarianism 86 8 Human rights reaffirmed 93 9 Do animals have rights? 101 10 Politics and generosity 113 11 Understanding Eastern European developments 126 12 Individual rights and the common good: the case of the environment 137 13 Individualism and political dialogue 150 14 Individualism versus its critics 159 15 Reason, individualism, and capitalism: the moral vision of Ayn Rand 179 Epilogue 194 Notes 195 Bibliography 223 Index 232 PREFACE Over the last three decades, I have been spelling out some of the details of a position in ethics and political philosophy that I have called classical individualism. It is the view, put briefly, that human beings are identifiable as a distinct species in the natural world and have as at least one of their central attributes the capacity to be rational individuals. Whatever else, then, is central about being a human being, it includes that each one, unless crucially debilitated, has the capacity to govern his or her life by means of the individually initiated process of thought, of conceptual consciousness. Furthermore, excelling as such an individual human being is the primary purpose in each person’s life. A just political community, in turn, is one that renders it possible for this purpose to be pursued by all (or as many as is realistically possible). As the novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand put the point—following similar observations by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas—adult persons are “beings of volitional consciousness.”1 This involves, among other things, the crucial capacity to choose to embark upon—to initiate—a process of (thoughtful) action. The following work is animated by Rand’s thought, although mostly not in the precise terms she made use of in the presentation of her ideas. Instead I will couch the case for classical individualism in the philosophically familiar—as well as ordinary—language of virtue ethics. The classical-individualist stance I develop in the ensuing pages is to be seen as fitting within the tradition of eudaimonistic ethics and Lockean politics.2 If we are the type of entity that can be a causal agent, the initiator of its behavior, this serves as a crucial basis for individuation: different human beings will be able to choose to exercise their conscious capacities and direct their ensuing actions differently. Putting it more simply, if we have free will, our diverse ways of exercising it can make us unique. So even if there were nothing else unique about different persons, their free will could introduce an essential individuality into their lives. (This is something that will have a major impact on the social sciences, on psychology and psychotherapy, and, of course, on ethics and morality.) Yet different people are also uniquely configured, as it were, as human beings; thus they can face different yet equally vital tasks in their lives. Our fingerprints,voices, shapes, ages, locations, talents, and, most of all, choices are all individuating features, so we are all unique. This is the crux of the individualist thesis. Nonetheless, since we are all such individuals, we constitute one species with a definite nature possessed by each member. This may seem paradoxical, as existentialists have been known to point out, but ultimately it is not: one of the defining attributes of the human (kind of) being is the distinctive potential for individuality, based on both diversity and personal choice. The position being advanced here has certain implications that are very close to what is usually thought to follow from a different version of individualism, namely, radical individualism. These implications are the classical-liberal political ideas and ideals of individual rights to life, liberty, and property. Yet, as I have argued in my book Capitalism and Individualism: Reframing the Argument for the Free Society,3 classical individualism supports these more firmly and cogently than the radical individualism on which the case for classical liberalism had previously rested. Such radical individualism, often dubbed atomistic, bourgeois, or rugged individualism, is distinct from classical individualism. It is usually linked to Thomas Hobbes and his nominalist and moral-subjectivist followers. Its most basic, ontological thesis is that human beings are numerically separate bare particulars, and it has serious weaknesses. For one, according to this neo-Hobbesian tradition, political norms are ultimately subjective—usually taken to be mere preferences by its proponents. For Hobbes, to start with, “whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good: and the object of his hate and aversion, evil.”4 So the classical-liberal polity is itself, by the tenets of such individualism, no more than some people’s preference, one that others may not share, quite legitimately. As some put the point, liberty is just one among many different values people desire. This political tradition has, thus, been vulnerable to the charge of arbitrariness, of resting simply on preferences that some people—for example, the bourgeoisie, capitalists, or white European males— happen to have.
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