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

Reigning In Hermits The Conflict Between Individualism and companionshipIn the wake of Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, who asserted the primacy of the various(prenominal) as the possessor of rights and emphasized the resulting legal equality of all men, the question arose of how an someone who originates in a state of nature interacts with society. Early 19th ampere-second writers had an advantage in answering this question over the original thinkers in the form of a grand experiment in Enlightenment surmise currently being conducted in America. Here, for the first time, was a democracy foot race by consent of the governed, all of whom were equal singulars before the law and, agree to the dominant religious tradition, before God. The more thorough this leveling, Alexis de Tocqueville argued in res publica in America, the less men are inclined to believe blindly in any man or any classall having the aforesaid(prenominal) means of knowledge, truth will be found on the placement of the majority (Tocqueville, 435). At the same time that the power of self-styled political science fades in both public and religious life and people are more apt to simply tow the line, he sees the ties that once created mutualness in aristocracieseconomic dependency and social hierarchyweaken, resulting in the closing off of the individual from public life, or, individualism (Tocqueville, 506-7). Tocquevilles apprehension towards individualism was not merely a passing worryhe saw in its extreme form the potential for despotism to replace democracy. Despotism, by its in truth nature suspicious, sees isolation of men as the best guarantee of its aver permanence (Tocqueville, 509). This tension between personal isolation and participation in civic life surfaced in other contemporary works as well, including Charles Finneys Lectures on Revival of Religion and Ralph Emersons On self Reliance, in which the former argued in a vein similar to Tocquevilles that the n ature of democracy will always create this conflict, and the latter devoted of democracy in favor of the individual. Tocquevilles own reconciliation of the individuals natural inclination toward isolation is found in his psychoanalysis of the nature of knowledge in democratic societies. On a strictly practical political level, there must, he argued, be certain beliefs held in common by all citizens in order for common attain to be taken to administer government (Tocqueville, 433). Local government is the individuals closest connection to the public sphere, and the same selfish beat that leads to individualism will make it necessary for him to form political associations to beneficial his interests.