the concept of the self in political thought

Société québécoise de science politique

The Concept of the Self in Political ThoughtAuthor(s): Peter McCormickSource: Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, Vol. 12,No. 4 (Dec., 1979), pp. 689-725Published by: Canadian Political Science Association and the Société québécoise de science politiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3230202 .

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The Concept of the Self in Political Thought

PETER McCORMICK University of Lethbridge

First, peoples were creators, and only in later times, individuals. Verily, the individual himself is still the most recent creation.

- Nietzsche, Zarathustra

The concept of the individual is a fundamental and central part of modernity; it separates our times from the Middle Ages as surely and sharply as the concepts of God, sin and salvation separate the Middle Ages from antiquity, and as the concepts of polis and citizen separate antiquity from the earlier cosmological empires. The purpose of this article is to illuminate and clarify this pivotal aspect of moder (by which I mean post-medieval) political and social thought-the concept of the individual.

The emergence of a concern with human individuality is typically the consequence of a collapse of a highly integrated society.1 Liberal discussions of the subject usually begin with the individual and then proceed to build up the notion of society and politics from this basic starting point; there is seldom any perceived need to defend this procedure beyond the observation that society is made up of a number of physically discrete human beings. Historically and existentially, however, the logic is all wrong, however self-evident it might appear within particular historical contexts (including our own). Society comes before any existing individual; the normal human perception is not of a sovereign self around which society must fit, but of an imposing social edifice within which he must fit. Generations such as the American Founding Fathers are so rare that they cannot serve as a human prototype or paradigm. Normally, the smooth functioning of a highly integrated society will assign each member an identity; an awareness of the autonomous, differentiated, self-starting individual emerges only when the rationale and mystique of that society begin to break down, only when the assignment of identities via status, heredity and custom is no longer perceived as a smooth and legitimate natural process. The "individual" in the sense in which it is normally employed is not a raw

1 Cf. Michael Oakeshott, "The Masses in Representative Democracy," in Albert Hounold (ed.), Freedom and Serfdom: An Anthology of Western Thought (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing, 1961), passim.

Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, XII:4 (December/ decembre 1979). Printed in Canada / Imprime au Canada



PETER MCCORMICK

datum, not a conceptual starting point, not a simple "given" to human experience, but a conceptual construction of considerable complexity emerging from a specific type of social experience, namely the experience of social breakdown.

Individualism is the essence of modernity. The point needs to be stressed because the concept of the individual and the self are far more opaque than they are often taken to be. Because the forces of liberal democracy have waved the banner of individualism so bravely, so loudly and for so long, the term tends to become their exclusive property, and we must invent some other political label-such as the misleading "collectivism"-to describe the forces and movements against which liberal democracy contends. "Our" celebration of the unique individual contrasts with "their" ant-like masses and drab-grey uniformity; "our" advocacy of the self-realization of the individual proudly refutes "their" goose-stepping regimentation. But this is caricature, not analysis, and it obscures more than it clarifies. Since it is more than a debating point to suggest that movements like Marxism and even Fascism are also built on a notion of the individual (albeit not the liberal-democratic notion), and since their indictments of liberalism also tend to include charges of conformism, this monopolization of the label stultifies investigation, and reduces us prematurely to shouting slogans in lieu of careful examination.

In other words, to isolate the individual as the focal point of moder political thought is not to solve the problems of politics but only to indicate a starting point for the investigation of these problems, and to suggest something of the conceptual language within which this investigation will be conducted. The problem of the individual is amenable to a number of different solutions, each of which will generate a different type of ideology; within each ideology, that notion of the self will enter the category of self-evident truths, for this is part of the process whereby an ideology becomes self-contained. Over time, either as the result of internal logical difficulties, or because of contingent external circumstances, an ideology may cease to "fit" the world it attempts to explain, and must undergo one of two possible transformations: first, collapse and radical replacement; second, gradual modifications of central concepts to evolve a modified version of the ideology that will meet more adequately the problems perceived as crucial. Such a natural history is greatly oversimplified, but the contrast serves to indicate the general direction of this article: the modern age begins with the collapse of the medieval world-view, and its replacement with a series of ideologies based on the concept of the individual; the actual history of moder political thought can be elucidated in terms of shifts in ideology from that basic foundation, with the most important shifts involving modifications in conceptualizations of individuality. The distinction between epochs lies not in the fact that they give

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Le probleme du moi dans la philosophie politique

L'individualisme est un aspect essentiel de la modernite, c'est pourquoi une etude du concept de l'individu nous fait connaitre un point de vue important de l'epoque moderne. Le but de cet article est, en premier lieu, de mettre en evidence cinq conceptions differentes de l'individu: la conception grecque, la conception liberale, le moi < cache *, le moi o essentiel v et le moi o fabrique *. En deuxieme lieu, cet article cherche a elucider la logique de ces conceptions, celle-ci suppose une dynamique interne a la notion de l'individu qui marque toute l'histoire de la pensee politique post-medievale. L'individualisme n'est pas une solution au probleme du politique mais une indication des problemes importants et du langage a travers lequel on doit chercher une solution. Notre typologie de cinq elements n 'estpas complete mais elle montre que le concept de l'individu n'est pas simple et qu'il estfructueux d'en examiner la complexit6.

different answers to the same question, but rather that they ask different questions; the "what must I do to be remembered?" of antiquity, and the "what must I do to be saved?" of the Middle Ages, yield to the "what must I do to be me?" of modernity. Within the modern period the shift from one ideology to another can be explained as a new answer given to the same basic question.

We can and should isolate a number of different meanings that can be assigned to the concept of the individual/self; I will explore five of them. All are significant and useful avenues that have been explored by great minds; none is trumped up as straw men or for the purposes of schematic neatness. The effort of cataloguing will not of itself solve the problems or vindicate one alternative over the others, but it will illuminate one important dimension of the modern controversy. This article is not about "the" concept of the individual, celebrating one formulation and revealing the alternatives as errors or dead ends. Rather, it is a study of shifting conceptions of the individual as an important aspect of the modern diversity of ideologies. In a sense, the project will justify its own assumptions-the fact that a rigorous analysis of modern political thought can be accomplished from the examination of the concept of the individual will itself serve to support the assumption that that concept is an important element of the various sectors of that thought.

The moral philosophers of Greece later imagined the eyes of God looking down upon the moral struggle, upon the heroism and self-torture of the virtuous: the "Herakles of duty" was on a stage and knew himself to be; virtue without a witness was something unthinkable for this nation of actors.

- Nietzsche, Genealogy

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Reculer pour avancer; we retreat in order to make progress. Modernity is not the first time during which the problem of the individual emerged on the stage of history; the example of the city-states of ancient Greece suggests itself as an obvious starting point for this discussion. The inclusion of the Greek example can be justified on other grounds as well: First, the Greek polis represents a subtle and powerful articulation of the problem of the individual, and one sufficiently different from our own that it helps to indicate something of the possible breadth of the concept. Second, given the extent to which liberals see the liberal concept of the self as self-evident, and all self-professed individualists therefore as automatic allies, the clarification of the Greek notion of the individual will help to bring out the naivete and simplemindedness of such terminological appropriation.

The individuality which made ancient Greece (especially Athens) so luminous in the history of political thought was the result of the breakdown of the earlier Greek city based on religion and tribalism.2 The concept of the self which evolved as a response to this need is elucidated in the Funeral Oration of Pericles and the Politics of Aristotle. The label I assign to this concept is the "agonal" self; the term is derived from the Greek agon, or contest, and thus brings out a central feature of the world of the polis.

In such a world, an individual acquires standing and the capacity for entering the public realm by being a citizen freed from the necessity of labour by the possession of a household.3 Man, said Aristotle, is a political animal, by which he meant that man is an animal intended by nature to live in that specific social form called the polis. Since the polis is defined as a number of citizens large enough to be self-sufficient,4 persons who fall into other categories such as slaves, women, children, freedmen and resident foreigners-who might be physically present within the walls of the city- simply become invisible. Only a citizen, an equal, may enter the harsh light of the public realm; only a citizen has any standing in the assembly or the courts or the eyes of other citizens. Within this realm and in the sight and hearing of his fellow citizens, he is to discover/reveal himself as a doer of deeds and a speaker of words-that is, of deeds and words worth remembering. It is through such actions that he establishes himself as an individual, as a self.

But as the discover/reveal pairing suggests, the problem is rather more complex than that, for the question becomes how we are to understand this "self." The polis is nothing other than or apart from the assembly of citizens, but at the same time the citizen is nothing apart

2 Cf. Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religions, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City: Double/Anchor, n.d.), passim.

3 Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition: A Study of the CentralDilemmas Facing Modem Man (Garden City: Doubleday/Anchor, 1959), Pts. I and 2, passim.

4 Aristotle, Politics, Bk. 1.

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from the polis (as witness Socrates in the Crito and his refusal to flee). There is an element of circularity in the agonal self that is absent from the liberal notion. It is not the case that one is an individual worthy of remembrance, and then seeks to do great deeds in order to bring this objective fact to the attention of others. Rather, one is merely a potential, and it is by doing great deeds that one becomes a person worthy of remembrance. The "I" is not something separate that does the deeds and speaks the words, but a total of deeds and words; it is less that a man is something which he then reveals, than that he is what he does and becomes so only in the doing.

What differentiates this from the liberal concept (to which many writers are so anxious to assimilate it) is the importance of the audience. Deeds require witnesses and words require hearers; the only worthy witnesses and hearers are fellow-citizens. A self is not revealed so much as discovered, and it is discovered by the fellow citizens who witness the actions and hear the words. The Greek shame culture means that we must push the point still further and leave the liberal self still further behind. It is not just that doer and speaker require an audience, but that the significance of those actions and words is not logically separate from the validation of that action or that speech by the citizens who witness it. In a guilt culture such as our own, values are internalized; the only witness of a transgression necessary to evoke a guilt response is the transgressor. In a shame culture, values are public and the shame response takes place only when the transgression is both witnessed and seen to be wrong. If the transgression is unwitnessed, or if it can be given an appearance that does not invite disapproval, there is effectively no transgression and no shame response. (Hence the radical nature of Plato's proposals on justice, so often overlooked by some who tend to view him backwards as a one-man philosophical establishment.) The agonal self, as a product of a shame culture, is earned from others, received from others; the agonal individual never sees himself directly, but only as a reflection in the eyes of others. It is difficult for him even to have a concept of himself to measure against the self he possesses in the eyes of others-this would be the liberal self, the private self, while the agonal self is, above all, the public self which is only what others recognize or concede it to be. Nor is this self a static or fixed phenomenon; as the name "agonal" implies, the proper reference must be to the strong element of competition.5 The agonal self is a self in constant flux with every victory or loss in any area of public activity within which comparison or contest is possible.

Even though the Greeks gave us one of the words commonly used to

designate and explore the problems of the self (that is, "psyche" or

5 Cf., for example, Alvin W. Gouldner, The Hellenic World: A Sociological Analysis (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), chap. 2; and B. G. Rosenthal, The Images of Man (New York: Basic Books, 1971), Pt. 2.

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"psuche"), there are at least two grounds for suggesting that they never developed a complete notion of the self, even if they did make a good-perhaps an indispensable-start.

First, there is the Greek results ethic6 which, unlike the moder ethic of intention, evaluates action in terms not of the intention of the actor but of the consequences of the action, however unforeseen and unforeseeable these might be. This militates against the development of a unified notion of the self, for as long as results and not intent are what count, there is no pressing need to develop the idea of the willing self as a responsible agent. The same logic is present in the Greek failure to develop any other than the most shadowy of theories of an after-life; since there is no responsible "self' to be separated from the actions, since there is no need for a divine judge to distinguish between evil intent with good results and good intent with harmful results, the self is simply identified with the consequences of his actions and, in a very real sense, lives so long as his deeds are remembered. The Funeral Oration of Pericles is the classical statement of this logic, and John Dunne7 elaborates its implications for social organization. The agonal self continually vanishes behind the potentially endless train of consequences initiated by any action, and the glimmer of luminosity from within tends to be overwhelmed by the harsh light of the public realm expressed in terms of public validation. Plato's attempt to penetrate appearance in search of reality, which applies to ethics as much (possibly even more) than to the physical world, is a clear break with the earlier ethics and therefore a step toward a fuller notion of the self-but it is still relevant that the metaphor in Republic is to a multiplicity, not a unity. The tripartite division of the soul is a step along the route but not the end of the journey "from the many to the one."8

Second, the tight logical connection between Greek self and polis prevents the development of the radical concept of the self. The polis is nothing without or apart from individual citizens, but at the same time the individual citizen is nothing without or apart from the polis. There is a theological argument that defends the existence of evil on the grounds that good would have no meaning unless its opposite existed; this same kind of polar logic is relevant to the citizen/polis relationship. As Jonas puts it,9 in the polis the individual derives his being from an entity which he then maintains with his being. The agonal self is a derivative self, a mediated self, a reflected self; it can never stand stark and naked and

6 Cf. especially A. W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Midway Reprint, 1975).

7 John Dunne, The City of the Gods: A Study in Myth and Mortality (New York: Macmillan, 1965).

8 The reference is to A. W. H. Adkins, From the Many to the One (Ithaca: Corell University Press, 1970), passim.

9 Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (2nd ed.; Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 248.

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alone, for by the very act of separating itself from its background and context, it ceases to exist.

Such, then, is the notion of the agonal self, the Greek solution to the problem of individuality posed by the breakdown of the ancient city. To describe it is a "solution" is not to imply any degree of finality, for historically, of course, the system did break down-or, more precisely, did show signs of evolving into something different. In the ideas of Socrates and Plato (specifically, the suggestion of a private inner voice,10 and that of making justice a question of fact as opposed to appearance or opinion),1 there begins to emerge ground for an individual to have a self of which he can be directly aware, and therefore there begins to emerge a need for a new philosophical elaboration and solution to the problem of the individual. What Socrates and Plato represent on the level of ideas, Alcibiades is on the level of practice: viz., a fundamental challenge to the concept of the agonal self, however much the content may differ on the two levels. Unlike the host of Greek traitors of earlier generations, who by their actions sought validation in the eyes of their peers of the class in whose name they betrayed their city, Alcibiades seemed almost indifferent to the audience before whom he paraded his self, whether it was constituted of Athenians or Spartans or Persians. Instead of choosing deeds that would be applauded by a given audience, he sought an audience that would applaud his deeds. The shift in emphasis is crucial. The concept of the self, cut loose from its tight identity with public validation, became too corrosive to be contained within the social system that was the polis. The figure of Alcibiades bears a striking resemblance to that early stage of the evolution of modern individualism epitomized by Machiavelli's prince (or, more correctly, to a shallow interpretation thereof), but since the genesis of the new notion of individualism coincided with the absorption of the polis into the larger sphere of empire, the insights could not be followed up and the potentialities remained largely undeveloped.

The end of the polis obviously and necessarily implies a readjustment in the notion of the self. Gunnell suggests that this

readjustment was massive and fundamental: a focus on the "differentiated self' was caused by the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian Wars, as man became estranged from the cosmos and fell back upon himself.12 The logic of the description may be accurate, but the timing is surely premature, and the Greek schools (especially Cynicism and Stoicism) provide a detour between the Peloponnesian Wars and the emergence of the "differentiated self." Undeniably, Diogenes' use of the term "cosmopolitan"-"the cosmos is my

10 Plato, The Apology of Socrates (Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill edition), 38. 11 Plato, Republic, Bk. 2, 45-53. 12 John G. Gunnell, Political Philosophy and Time (Middletown: Wesleyan University

Press, 1968), 124.

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polis"-is evocative and negative rather than substantial, implying only a rejection of the classical celebration of the polis and a repudiation of all its values without any positive vision to put in its place; Diogenes of himself does not refute Gunnell. But surely Stoicism-both Greek and Roman-does provide the substance that Diogenes lacks, suggesting a new linkage between man and the cosmos, postponing the acceptance of a total estrangement and alienation. Plato's remark in Book IX of Republic-the just man is a citizen of the perfect polis, whether or not it achieves earthly existence, and not of the imperfect polis into which he happens to be born-is transitional in this regard. In Stoicism, the individual is a significant locus of consciousness and/or activity, but he is so as one side of a polarity, with "cosmos" as a substitute for "polis." The effect is still through philosophy to allow man to derive his being from an order which he maintains with his being. Instead of participation in the polis (an option which historical vicissitude had removed as a practical possibility), man was offered participation in the ordered cosmos. Instead of an individual identity mediated through one's fellow citizens as constant witnesses of one's actions, man was offered an individual identity mediated through the Logos. For one conceptual circle, we substitute another, for

we substitute individual individual

and men continue to derive their identity from a larger order of which they are only a part. Admittedly, the new forms of participation involved-the Greek Stoic inner attitude of a physically impotent will; the Roman Stoic acceptance of duty in the face of adversity-are hardly perfect substitutes for the all-pervasive activity of the polis. It can be doubted whether the Stoic synthesis was ever so integrated, so experientially based, so emotionally satisfying, as that of the polis, but the parallel logic is revealing. The Stoic self remains close to the agonal self; the removal of the city to the heavens is a significant step without being a fundamental one.

The historic first arrival of a concept of the self that can serve as a prototype for the modern concept can probably be placed in the first century A.D., and identified with the rise of Gnostic thought.13 Stoicism rejects the polis only to put the cosmos in its place; Gnosticism takes the further step of rejecting the cosmos itself as a source of value. An important component of the Greek concept of "cosmos" is its implication of order, and Stoic and Christian thought alike celebrate this order as a normative source-the Stoic self is a citizen of the universe, and within the Christian tradition even Augustine (hardly an enthusiast for corrupted nature) can find in the concept of order a pervasive link

13 Cf., for example, Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 23ff.

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between God and physical nature. What the Gnostic rejects is not the idea that cosmos means order, but rather the idea that the order thus

designated possesses value, or that individual identity or fulfillment is to be found in participation either in the order itself or with the creator-God of that order. The parody of Manicheanism is an apt rendering of the Gnostic mood: this world was made not by God but by a bungling assistant when God was not looking. God therefore has no direct connection with this world, nor can He be found in it; He is the

Stranger-God, separate from and alien to the cosmic order. Gnosticism suggests a dual dichotomy: the first is between God and cosmos, and the second between the self (pneuma) and the cosmos. The combination makes the cosmos, not a source of norms and values, but a wall

separating the pneuma from the Stranger-God. Only through a Gnosis, which is not to be identified with classical concepts of cognition, can the

pneuma win through the intervening cosmos and the evil creator-God that rules it, to meet a love more incomprehensibly divine than that of the Christian deity (who, after all, is loving only that which He has made). In inosticism, the contrast is the same self-cosmos polarity of Stoicism, but it is now a contrast of total opposition, of negation, and not one that is to be rounded off by participation. The logical circle is broken, and the radical notion of the self emerges.

Emerges-but does not prevail. Gnosticism was only one of a number of religions emerging in the first century A.D., and of those religions it was Christianity that was to dominate. For all that there are of Gnostic traces within Christianity (to such an extent that until recently it was academically fashionable to treat Gnosticism as a Christian heresy), the Christian religion owes far more to Stoicism, stressing as it does a God who is trans-mundane but not anti-cosmic,14 and who invites

participation. The Christian metaphor is the Church as the Bride of Christ, while the Gnostic metaphor is that of the Stranger. The languages of Christianity and Gnosticism are often parallel, both suggesting extra-physical schemata and solutions, but the fundamental contrast between the two only accentuates the defeat of Gnosticism, the triumph of Christianity. Gnosticism may prefigure the moder age (such is the central thesis of much of the writings of Eric Voegelin)'5 but it does so as a seed that takes fifteen centuries to germinate, playing a minor if not an

insignificant role in the Middle Ages that intervene.

According to the celebrated Swiss historian [Burckhardt], the quest for personal glory was the attribute of the men of the Renaissance.

14 Ibid. 15 Cf., for example, Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays

(Chicago: Henry Regnery/Gateway, 1968); and Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), passim.

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The Middle Ages proper... knew honour, and glory only in collective forms, as the honours due to groups and orders of society, the honours of rank, or class, or of profession. It was in Italy... under the influence of antique models, that the craving for individual glory originated.

- Huizenga, Waning of the Middle Ages

The general statement is that the concern with individuality grows out of the collapse of an earlier highly integrated social system. As the Greek concept of the agonal self grew out of the collapse of the "ancient city," so the modern preoccupation with the individual grows out of the collapse of the medieval synthesis. There is no need to exaggerate the parallel to make the point, for the medieval system in no way represents a simple return to the compact pre-philosophical experience of primeval time.16 The Stoic overtones, as well as the idea of the unique individual soul, are themes that remain important throughout the Middle Ages, and prevent a full recapitulation of the ahistorical flatness of the myth. The idea of romantic love (even though it was peripheral rather than central to medieval society) might be seen as another case in point. It is tempting to push the matter to the opposite extreme, and to present medieval society as a repeat of, rather than a regress from, the Greek articulation of the individual-to see, for example, the medieval quest for glory as a parallel to the Greek search for excellence and fame-but such a characterization would be most incomplete and inaccurate. A society which sees life as a morality play, particular episodes as allegories, and the shape and detail of human events as symbolic representations of a limited number of eternal spiritual truths-such a society stands much closer to the compactness of the primeval myth, with its tendency to collapse the time dimension so as to preclude the existence of a stage on which "the individual" could make any more than the occasional fleeting appearance. Those remnants now contemptuously dismissed as superstition are echoes of a world quite different in mentality and focus. If all journeys are allegories of the soul's journey through life; if all shapes and numbers and directions contain hidden messages and significance; if all "accidents" are punishments for sins known or unknown; if all tales and histories (even those one tells of oneself) are related to archetypes or embody moral lessons or repeat scriptural patterns; if the God that sees to the heart is linked to a church demanding regular formal repetition of ritual patterns; if pre-philosophical patterns and models are assimilated to Christian dogma merely by changing the names and designations of some of the symbols (a fact which necessitated the recent and rather controversial purging of the list of the Saints)-if all these things be true, as they were subjectively true to the

16 For a discussion of the concept of primeval time and its political implications, see, for example, John Gunnell, Political Philosophy and Time (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1968).

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medieval mind,17 then there is little room for the preoccupation with and celebration of the individual that so typifies the moder age. To a significant extent-and especially so when compared with the Greek experience before it and the modem period following it-the feudal society of Western Europe provided a stable social structure, assigning via social status the identity of its members. In such a society, "to know oneself as the member of a family, a group, a corporation, a church, a village community, as the suitor at a court or the occupier of a tenancy... [was], for the vast majority, the circumstantially possible sum of self-knowledge."18 The public features of medieval Catholicism-compulsory church attendance, confession, penance, pilgrimages-are further elements of integration. The lack of social mobility reduces resentment and alienation; where none are expected to advance and very few ever do, pressure for performance outside the routine and resentment over personal achievements below the exceptional are dampened. We must avoid the anachronism of reading back into the Middle Ages the modern distaste for such a closed and static agrarian existence (for example, Karl Marx's famous comment in the Manifesto about the complacent idiocy of rural life). For centuries, feudalism provided an emotionally satisfying and durable hierarchical organization for Western European society, assigning individuals their identity by means of hereditary status.

Durable-but not permanent. First in Italy, and then progressively in the rest of Europe, for a variety of reasons irrelevant to our present purpose, the elements of the medieval world began to erode and collapse, and by the sixteenth century, "the disposition to regard a high degree of individuality in conduct and in belief as the condition proper to mankind and as the main ingredient in human "happiness" had become one of the significant dispositions of the modern European character." 19 As the background they had taken for granted faded, men began to rediscover themselves. The early celebration of the homo unico-the virtuoso of power who places himself over the law-is more inspirationally evocative than programmatically significant as a synthesis of the new era. Through the Renaissance and Reformation, the concern for the individual coexists with the fading vestiges of medieval society; under the impetus of the ferocious and terrifying religious wars, individualism carved out a bolder path and began shaping its own world, with the invention of the myth of the social contract constituting a large first step. The Enlightenment is the formative period of modern individualism; the era since the French Revolution is its playground.

The reemergence of the problem of the individual is far from a simple replay of the Greek experience of the agonal self. If anything, it is 17 Rosenthal, Images of Man, Pt. 2, passim. 18 Oakeshott, "The Masses in Representative Democracy," 152. 19 Ibid., 154.

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possibly more accurate to see the moder experience as beginning where the earlier synthesis of the polis began to break down-the homo unico corresponds to Alcibiades, the priesthood of all believers gives every man a Socratic inner voice, and Luther's distinction between inner and outer man replicates the fact/appearance problem of justice that is explored in Plato's Republic. But the Greek swan song becomes the modem overture. Modem political thought may be described in terms of a series of responses to the problem of the individual, each distinct from the Greek experience and from each other. These responses do not constitute a flat catalogue, as if the path of the history of thought simply split into several alternate routes; more correctly, they bear a basic relation to each other, in that we may trace an internal dynamic to the concept of the self. This dynamic is, in outline, a history of the political thought of the last three centuries.

One has one's little pleasure for the day, and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. "We have invented happiness," say the last men, and they blink.

-Nietzsche, Zarathustra

A first reaction to the problem of the self is simply to deny that there is a problem, to insist that the self is directly aware of itself and, armed with this sure self-knowledge, directs its own action. For an ideology derived from such a view, effort is to be directed not at the discovery of the self, but rather at the liberation of the actions of the self, the removal of impediments that prevent the fulfillment of that self. The normal processes of sensation, cognition and simple reflection yield adequate and complete knowledge of the "I" that senses, knows and reflects, and this "I" is immediately and simply capable of directing and understanding its own action. A label descriptive of its content for this concept of the self would be the "nonproblematic self'; a label describing this concept as an active force in the history of political philosophy would be the "liberal self," and this is the label I shall employ.

This concept of the self is primary in terms both of logic and of the chronology of the moder period. As the ancien regime became more and more vestigial, less and less a living force in the daily lives of men (especially of men of letters), the institutions of that society appeared to be walls or fetters limiting and restricting the individual. Since one is directly aware of the frustrations of living within archaic institutions, such a simple conceptualization of the self is more than adequate to direct the critique of existing institutions. Logically, there is the possibility that such an awareness of self was only the artifact of outward pressure from a problematic core against a partially transcended

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society, but its very longevity after the victory over archaic institutions is an indication of a significant degree of independent and internal strength.

The self is not a problem; it does not need to be discovered or to be created, but simply to be observed. Descartes' system of radical doubt, culminating in the famous cogito ergo sum, may have shocked the devout by questioning the existence of God, but it never questioned the existence or identity of the self that thought. Even the style of autobiography of the Enlightenment is indicative; one writes, for example, of the "genial self-certainty" of Montaigne, as he describes a self that "need only be noticed and described."20 It is inappropriate to read back into this period a romantic or existentialist concern with the question "What is it that I am?"; the answer to such a question was perfectly obvious (although, of course, this is not to say such an answer was therefore uninteresting, or there would be no point in writing an autobiography).

The myth of social contract, so typical of seventeenth-century thought, may be taken as the first full articulation of the social implications of this concept of the individual. The "natural man" figuring so prominently in these speculations possesses a self that is nonproblematic; for Hobbes and Locke, the individual is a fact so basic and primary, so simple and directly comprehensible, that he needs neither genesis nor programming. A rational agent fully aware of his desires, this social atom drives directly for the security and prosperity ("commodious living") he so passionately wants. This self possesses within him, ready-made and easy of access, all the elements and motives that are available or necessary to the social contract thinker to explain and justify the particular organization of society he wishes to discuss. Being so basic and primary, the self so described is scarcely amenable to change; the quasi-history of the social contract form is built upon an essentially ahistorical conception of man and of the self. The straightforward starkness of these natural men is such that they are simply incapable of undergoing any major social transformation. The contrast is not between natural and civil men but between natural and civil conditions, not between different levels of human development and awareness capable of transcendence, but between different milieus within which hardshelled natural men operate.21

There is a curious-and revealing-"stop" in the thinking of Hobbes and Locke. It is not just that their social atoms are compulsive power-seekers, and that deeper analysis should suggest that such behaviour derives from an anxiety which in turn needs to be dissected 20 Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the

Emergence of Modem Society (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 79. 21 These brief remarks on social contact are based on the expanded argument in my

"Social Contract: Interpretation and Misinterpretation," in this JOURNAL 9 (1976), 63-76.

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and understood, although this is problem enough. More than that, their concept of man and of the self seems curiously suspended. Hobbes's true starting point is the appetitive and selfish individual, and his resolutive-compositive method never succeeds in pushing back any further than this (the "movement of particles" model in either of its formulations is laughably inadequate for his purpose). Nor does Locke ever succeed in deriving adequately or expanding upon the "law of God given to men in the state of nature" that figures so prominently in the early chapters of the Second Treatise, and in the absence of such amplification his vaunted natural rights collapse back upon a Hobbes-like defence in terms of "self-preservation." For both of them, the reduction of reason to a faculty of prudential calculation is conveniently assumed, and not rationally justified or independently derived. Indeed, the altered role of reason helps to illustrate the implications of the concept. Reason is no longer a sufficient mover for human action; rather, it becomes the "scout for the passions," never setting goals but only optimizing the satisfaction of the impulses with which the self is to be identified. The light of reason is not to be turned inward, not to be turned back on the self that possesses (or simply is) those impulses, but to be employed in an instrumental fashion. The nonproblematic self does not need a rational faculty that would turn back on its own nature; and the instrumental faculty of reason is not one that leads us beyond the nonproblematic self. As in all effective ideologies, the logical circle closes. For all its alleged hard-headedness, the philosophy of social contract rests on extremely flimsy foundations.

The utilitarians brusquely discarded some of the baggage of the social contractarians (for example: natural man, natural law, pseudo-historical contract), but in the process they only reveal the new concept of the self more fully and clearly; the more bare the stage, the better we can see the actors. The implications of Bentham's two sovereign masters of pleasure and pain are that man is conceptually reduced to a bundle of appetites and aversions, which complex is impelled into action by itself. The role of reason is, at best, that of optimizing the realization of pleasure and avoidance of pain, and at worst (when misled, for example, by superstition) obstructing that pursuit. Since this bundle of appetites and aversions is the self, it follows that the knowledge of the self can pose no problem for the individual; the common-sense pre-Freudian concept of appetite precludes such phenomena as unconscious desires and unfelt appetites, just as the common-sense notion of pleasure and pain avoids such theoretical lacunae as the masochist or the Nirvana principle. Since only the individual is directly aware of his own appetites and aversions, it follows that no one other than himself can decide what is and what is not a source of gratification to him; logically, it might be the case that appetites and desires come in standard human-issue packages, but we cannot know a

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priori that this is the case. Finally, since one's gratification is a goal only for himself, it follows both that each pursues only his own pleasure, and that that pursuit is his own concern and nobody else's. The logic of the argument leads directly to the orthodox liberal position that the individual, being the best (indeed the only qualified) judge of his own interests, should be made as free as possible to seek gratification. The inscrutability of the individual's appetites to the outside observer, the uniqueness of his particular combination of appetites and aversions, the impossibility of deciding on any a priori basis the appetites and aversions of any extensive number of persons-all these point toward a state which does as little as possible and leaves the individual as free as possible to do that to which the appetites that are the self direct him. As the self is conceived in terms of appetites and aversions, the fulfilment of self must be considered in terms of happiness, a conclusion which finds its most succinct encapsulation in the American Declaration of Independence-man's inalienable rights are expressed as including "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The reduction of the individual to sensation has of course a levelling tendency; what counts is not one's social class but one's capacity for feeling pleasure and pain. This levelling is curiously open-ended, as Bentham on occasion acknowledged-if all that counts is a capacity for feeling pleasure and pain, a sensitivity to sensation and a capacity to respond, then there is no reason to draw an artificial boundary around the human race to the exclusion of animals.

The ideas of John Stuart Mill represent some modification of these early utilitarian sentiments. There are now "levels of pleasure" ;22 some degree of education is required to distinguish the fully human pleasures of Socrates from the less than human pleasures of pigs, implying a developmental view of human reason rather than the on/off of the light switch usually implied by the prudential calculation approach; and the "permanent interests of man as a progressive being"23 are less starkly reductionist than the simple responses of pleasure and pain. However, the modifications are significant without being fundamental, and they must be so, as long as the starting point is utilitarian with the primary facts being pleasure and pain and the final goal being happiness (however many levels or types we may choose to differentiate in all three). For Mill, man is capable of development, of growth, of change and fulfillment within society-to this extent, the hard shell of the Hobbesian/Lockean social atom is softened, but it cannot be broken so long as the man is conceived in terms of his own appetites, actual or latent, and so long as reason is conceived in instrumental terms. This is not to deny that Mill played an important part in the modification and transcendence of 'classical" liberalism, since an ideology can take only 22 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, chap. 1, 7-10, in Everyman Library edition. 23 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, chap. 1, 74, in Everyman Library edition.

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a certain amount of clarification and complexification before it loses the stark simplicity that convinces directly; the point is to insist that Mill comes before, not after, that transcendence.

(Indeed, it would appear that Mill's substantive theory mixes very poorly with the assumptions and language of utilitarianism, that he did not so much modify the utilitarian tradition as dismantle it from within. If Mill wishes to defend the "higher" and "better" life of Socrates, then why not do so from within a framework that deals directly with such ideas as "higher" and "better," rather than a highly sensationalist conceptual structure that makes a remark like "better Socrates unsatisfied than a pig satisfied" simply incomprehensible as a sentiment or a program. And if Mill wishes to defend enlightenment-or even, if I read the tone of some of his remarks in On Liberty correctly, Truth itself-then why does he not do so directly, rather than becoming embroiled in the very moot question of the connection between enlightenment and happiness. Would it really make a difference to Mill if more knowledge makes one unhappy? Of course not. Then why does he pretend to be a utilitarian?)

Liberalism does stress the uniqueness of the individual. This emerges from the agonal view as well-no other person has spoken my words, done my deeds, won and lost my contests-but is rendered explicit in the liberal notion. Every self is unique, every self is different from every other self, every self represents a unique combination that has never happened before and will never happen again. This is not to deny an element of social shaping in the formation of the self-as witness Mill's remark about being a Buddhist had he been born in China (which we should have to translate into being a Communist)-but it does deny that the individual self is simply a product of such programming, simply a plastic artifact of the environment. The misfortune is that this uniqueness is assigned to the capacity for sensation, that the self becomes a locus for activity merely because no one else can feel my pleasure. No theory of man would ever deny that man possesses appetites and aversions; the unique feature of liberalism, the one that earns it the label of reductionist, is that these are seen to constitute the nature and limits of the self.

Bentham's observation that each individual is inscrutable in that no other individual can directly know his appetites and that men are therefore insoluble mysteries to other men24 points to the only problems that can rise within the notion of the liberal self, namely, those of hypocrisy and insincerity. Both suggest an individual who knows himself but chooses to present himself to others as having a self he does not in fact possess. This is a problem because the liberal self is asocial only in the sense of being largely unmodified and unmodifiable by 24 Cf. Shirley R. Letwin, The Pursuit of Certainty (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1965), 141.

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society, not in the sense of being able to do completely without society. More precisely, liberalism tends to lack much notion of society, but concedes the need for interaction and cooperation among individuals. But it remains the case that although one man's self may in this way pose something of a problem for other men, it cannot be a problem for himself; the liberal man is the man who knows himself directly by knowing his appetites and his powers, and who seeks only the freedom for that self to act on the basis of that knowledge.

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge-and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves-how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?... So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves, for us the law "Each is furthest from himself' applies to all eternity-we are not "men of knowledge" with respect to ourselves.

Nietzsche, Genealogy

But the reductionism of the liberal concept of the self is too obvious to go unchallenged for long. Can it really be the case that the self is exhaustively described by a list of appetites and aversions? Is a capacity for pleasure and pain all there is to the individual? The very self-awareness that prompts the question seems to defy a positive response, and the search must begin for the self of which the appetites are only a part or even an attribute. The uniqueness postulate goes unchallenged-it is intuitively obvious that I am separate and different from all other things, to such an extent that it is mere conjecture to attribute selves to other things shaped like me-but the problem is understanding that which possesses uniqueness. Once the easy identification of liberalism is rejected, the answer to the question becomes more difficult even as it becomes more important. Even when one has attempted some kind of an answer, some suggestion as to the nature and content of the true self, he cannot be sure that what he thinks to be his real self is not simply an attribute or a distortion of his true self. The recurrent metaphors are of masks, veils, theatre, stage-plays; there is also the apprehension that the enquiry has not pushed deep enough, has not penetrated all the masks and veils, has not separated the actor from the part. Hence the name I suggest to describe this third alternative-as distinct from the agonal self and the liberal self, we now have the hidden self-and hence also the overtones of anguish and anxiety exhibited by many of the thinkers who explore this possibility.

The anguish of the problem of the hidden self cannot be avoided or answered any more than can the claim of the solipsist; there is no logical point at which the self-critical probe can be stopped, no suggested formulation of the self that might not require further analysis and

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penetration to a deeper truth. Nor is the question an empty one; if one is to attach importance to the individual, one is committed to making statements about the connected notion of the self, and if the self remains inscrutable or tentative even to its owner, then the premise of individualism simply hangs suspended. There can be ominous overtones to the search for the hidden self; the suggestion that the self is a problem, that it does not reveal itself simply and directly to the searcher whose self it is, but must instead be sought vigorously and interminably, raises the two possibilities, both rather terrifying: that one may not be able to find the self, or that the self one finds might be utterly horrible.

Historically, one of the best and most obvious examples of a philosopher of the hidden self is, of course, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially in such works as La Nouvelle Heloise, Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques, Confessions and Reveries d'un Promeneur Solitaire. The nature of the self is far from self-evident to its possessor, and therefore the knowledge of the self necessitates a difficult and protracted search, one not without perils and not guaranteed any degree of success. The very existence of society creates veils and masks between the individual and an awareness of himself, veils that must be penetrated if the self is to be understood. When one wishes to present one's self to others, the result is a tumbling profusion of detail-if one cannot be absolutely sure what "the self' is, the best one can do is to present all the evidence, since criteria for distinguishing the extraneous from the relevant would presuppose a sure knowledge of the self that is to be displayed and described. Hence the almost embarrassing quality of much of Rousseau's writings, as he swings from overwhelming conceit to timid self-pity, from the most incredible claims to the pettiest trivia; the difference in the style of autobiography between Montaigne and Rousseau is the clearest indication of the difference between the liberal self and the hidden self.

Rousseau is clearly aware of the ambivalence of the pursuit of self, that the drama of self-awareness ends as often in tragedy as in triumph. In Nouvelle Heloise, Julie is unable to sustain the courage necessary for the pursuit of self, and flees first into the false and unstable security of total subordination to the will of another, and finally into a rather inexplicable death, apparently brought about by the simple loss of the will to live.25 Emile, the delicately machined product of several hundred pages of detailed preparation, is a weak-willed fumbler, eternally needing to be advised or rescued by the tutor he can never quite outgrow, and we know that Rousseau planned a sequel in which Emile's failure would be brought out even more clearly.26 Both represent victims of the pitfalls along the road to self-discovery. If we are to take seriously 25 Cf. Berman, Politics of Authenticity. 26 Cf. John McManners, The Social Contract and Rousseau's Revolt Against Society:

An Inaugural Lecture (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1968), 14.

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the rhetoric of Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques, we are presented with an equally daunting possibility-the person may discover himself, only to find that in the process of self-discovery the rest of the world has become incomprehensible.27

To be sure, the portrait of Rousseau suggested here is somewhat over-simplified: if there was one thing of which Rousseau seems to be sure, it was the uniqueness and value of his own personality, his own self. It often does not seem that Rousseau found his own self sufficiently hidden to require much of a search. His project instead seems to be: first, to examine how it could have come about that a self as marvelous as his own actually developed; second, to explore some of the utterly fascinating corners of this incomparable self; and third, to use this self as a standard for the critique of the inadequate society whose creatures he saw and suffered all about him. All this, of course, is heavily tinged with the vanity that normally flows from massive insecurity, but it cannot be said that Rousseau often sees his own self as a problem of discovery. Rousseau is a philosopher of the hidden self only to the extent that he sees the selves of others (the selves d'autrui if not the selves de tout) as hidden by masks and veils and eluding direct perception.

The ideas of Max Stirner, the anarchist individualist, may be seen as a response to the same problem. His political prescription is a vaguely defined union of Egoists, recognizing only might and never right, defiantly repudiating such debilitating abstractions as God or Humanity to which individuals are usually sacrificed, and directed toward permitting each egoist to own himself, to find himself, to be himself. But when it comes to discussing more specifically this unique self, this ego, that is to be set free, the silence is deafening. The most concrete utterance Stirner gives us is the dictum "Realize thyself'28 and an assertion that the self is not to be acquired but rather to be realized in being squandered, enjoyed, spent, lived out-that is, the self is to reveal itself in action-but this culminates in the rather hollow epigram "What one can become he does become."29 It is difficult to imagine what this means when it is put into practice; given the details of Stirner's own biography, we might even suggest that this self displays its triumphal vigor in an entirely inner world, a realm of purely subjective freedom-a man who writes daring and shocking books under a pen name while he teaches at a girls high school. The complete lack of content makes the concluding epigram take on Stoic overtones, adopting apathy toward an external world in order to enjoy more fully the freedom of an internal world; this, indeed, is precisely the criticism levelled by Marx in The German Ideology. The product of such a combination of completely private internality and complete spontaneity cannot be observed, it 27 J.-J. Rousseau, Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques, Premier Dialogue, passim. 28 Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, selected and introduced by John Carroll (New

York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), 187. 29 Ibid., 227.

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cannot be discussed, it can hardly be conceptualized; in The Ego and His Own the stage is set, but the actor does not quite appear.

In this respect, Nietzsche may be seen as a variation on a theme by Stirer. Even more explicitly than Stirer, he dismisses society as an arena for the discovery or presentation of the self-deploring the Darwinian multiplication of zeros, contemptuously dismissing the herd and the "maggot" men, Nietzsche fixes his gaze firmly on nature's rare lucky hits, such as Socrates (as opposed to the Platonic distortion of his insights), Christ (as opposed to the Pauline distortion of his ideas and example) and Napoleon. The few men capable of such a self are more potential than reality; Nietzsche addresses himself to "a species of man that does not yet exist"30 and (like the madman speaking of the death of God) he seems to fear that he is giving the message before men are yet ready to hear it.

The actual explication of the nature of this valuable self is in terms of a trio of misunderstood and greatly abused labels-the Overman (Ubermensch), the blond beast, and the barbarian. This conceptual trio resists comprehension because the liberal mind tends to reduce all notions of the self to the liberal notion, with the result that the repudiation of all social and moral restraints can only result in a selfish, sensual brutish existence directed toward senseless murder, rape and destruction. This is not at all what Nietzsche had in mind. The barbarian he extols is a "barbarian from above,"31 and the image is of Prometheus, not Atilla. The oft-decried blond beast refers not to sturdy and bloodthirsty Germanic warriors, but to that overworked and rather trite symbol, the lion.32 To Nietzsche, the self is, at least potentially and at least for some, far more than a bundle of appetites-"Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman-a rope over an abyss'"33-so the liberation of the self will not result in anything so brainless and animalistic.

Higher than the "thou shalt" of civilization, of moral values, of Christian ressentiment, Nietzsche praises the "I will" of the heroes, but higher yet stands the "I am" of the Greek gods,34 with the obvious if unstated oblique reference to the Scriptural I AM THAT I AM. Surely it would be a mistake not to link this to the statement in The Gay Science that men must become gods themselves to become worthy of the murder of God. Unrestrained by moral codes, unhampered by ressentiment, pure in an innocence that is beyond good and evil, such a self lives in a boisterous and unchecked spontaneity that welcomes every challenge and adversity as further fulfillment. By being himself, the great man, the possessor of such a self, becomes a creator and legislator of values; he "hangs [his] own will over [him]self as a law" and enjoys the terrible 30 Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, Pt. 4, No. 958. 31 Ibid., No. 900. 32 Cf. Kaufman's footnote in Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 41. 33 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Pt. 1, "Zarathustra's Prologue." 34 Nietzsche, Will to Power, Pt. 4, No. 940.

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solitude of freedom.35 The fullest realization of this ideal is in the twin ideas of amorfati and the Eternal Recurrence, which Nietzsche himself found to be hard and terrifying. The life of the great man is an unrestrained and joyous living out, endlessly matching the self against all challenges with a gleeful spontaneity; since any outcome reveals and fulfills the self, since the activity is spontaneous and authentic, such a man can love and welcome his fate and be undeterred by the vision of an endless succession of such tests. It is only the product of ressentiment, the man who is weary of life, who fears the Eternal Recurrence; and it is only a thinker who finds purpose beyond history, rather than in the every-moment revelation and free play of great selves, that rejects a universe that circles endlessly in repetitious cycles.

But what does all this mean in terms of social articulation? Nietzsche's mytho-poetic style abounds in symbols (barbarians from above, Napoleon, Socrates, Christ), but not in concrete paradigms or models; what would happen if the dream was realized, if all or some men became Nietzschean heroes? Is the impetus primarily narcissistic, do they sit around all day saying "oh how daring we are?" Or is there more in his epigram about the Greeks than meets the eye-is his hero a man who craves an audience he can never really find? Has he smashed through and out of society only to find that society provided at least in potentia that which he so needed-an audience? If we have lost a stage on which the self can be the actor, then must we not make of the self a stage on which something else-for Neitzsche, the Will to Power-appears as the actor? If the self cannot be the actor, does it become the audience to its own inner drama? And how can we keep this from falling back on the Stoic retreat, the regress implicit in Stirner of one who finds freedom by writing daring books under a pen name?

As an exposition of Nietzsche, this is of course only a beginning; the point is merely to indicate that Nietzsche can be approached usefully through the concept of the hidden self. He may be described as the fullest exposition of the concept of the hidden self, and thus he indicates most clearly the central defect of that concept-given the uniqueness postulate, such a philosophical exploration can be only an open-ended search within general boundaries, and never a fully-articulated resolution.

The asocial or antisocial nature of the philosophy of the hidden self is one of its most perennial and therefore one of its distinguishing features. The agonal self desperately needs society, for without an audience to validate its actions, it is nothing and cannot become anything. The liberal self is suspicious of society, but grudgingly out of self-interest accepts the need for interaction and cooperation. The hidden self, its gaze fixed inwards, repudiates all such commitments and sees society as an obstacle; fulfillment is achieved by at least ignoring 35 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Pt. 1, "On the Way of the Creator."

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and at most smashing through and away from all social bonds. Nietzsche's frank elitism, his casual dismissal of the herd and his willingness to sacrifice whole civilizations for the production of a single great man, a single true self, is the fullest expression of this asociality. The ideal of the hidden self lies beyond, not within, politics, and its pursuit lies outside the ambit of political and social activity. As Zarathustra says: "All-too-many are born: for the superfluous, the state was invented.... Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous: there begins the song of necessity, the unique and inimitable tune."36

The exploration of the problem of the hidden self reaches no final development, no culmination, no conclusion; once the direct intuition of the liberal self is denied, the pursuit becomes endless and certainty impossible. The anguish of achieving no answers to such an essential question drives the thinkers of the hidden self to extremes that can only seem excessive to those who do not share the anxiety-the effusive vanity of Rousseau, the emotionalism of the Romantics, the cheerfully irresponsible anarchic individualism of Stirner, the iconoclasm of Nietzsche, the despair of the existentialists. To repeat, the problem of the hidden self is inherently insoluble; the philosophy of individualism, pushed by its own logic beyond the security of the liberal self to the seething chaos of the hidden self, must either retreat or be abandoned, and the retreat brings us to the fourth concept of the self.

That the communist sees in you the man, the brother, is only the Sunday side of communism. According to the workday side he does not by any means take you as man simply, but as human labourer or labouring man.... If you were a "lazybones," he would not indeed fail to recognize the man in you, but would endeavour to cleanse him as a "lazy man" from laziness and to convert you to the faith that labour is man's "destiny and calling."

Stirner, The Ego and His Own

The agonal self is ancient history; the internal logic of the liberal self develops into the hidden self; and the insolubility of the hidden self leads to the essential self. Basically, this approach cuts short the interminable question mark of the search for the hidden self and avoids its open inconclusiveness by artificially selecting one of the variety of formulations of contents of the self and stipulating it as the "real" self. The basic argument of this approach is that there is an essential self which is common to all human beings, that social conditions are at present such as to deform men and hide from them the true universality of their essential selves, and therefore the optimal programme of political action and self-discovery is either through informed human

36 Ibid., "On the New Ideal."

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action to intervene directly and immediately to bring about the transformation of social conditions which will remove the distortion, or to participate in the evolutionary transcendence of present distorting social conditions toward a more adequate future. The philosopher of the essential self does not deny that each individual may very well be a unique combination of attitudes and qualities, but he tends to regard these specific attributes as the artefacts of social conditions, as epiphenomena lacking any degree of value or importance. Where liberalism seizes on the attributes and stresses the inscrutable uniqueness of each actor, essentialism drives beneath the surface to the hard core of human-ness that is common to every human being. If the self will not yield any final answer to introspection, it will be fixed by arbitrary stipulation.

It is far from paradoxical that Rousseau, the thinker who early and deeply explored the labyrinth of the hidden self, should also be the earliest example of an escape via the essential self. The duality is never clear in his mind, and the shifts are complex and elusive, but the basic distinction emerges by comparing, say, the Confessions or Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques on the one hand with Du Contrat Social on the other. In the former, he makes claims for uniqueness, for being something never seen before; in the latter, he assigns to all humans an essential self which he discovered in himself. To put the contrast as sharply as possible: to free men from the burden of discovering themselves, Rousseau the philosopher of the essential self proposes a political system so organized as to reveal the self they never recognized themselves as having.

To summarize the argument: natural men, possessing pity and amour de soi, undergo transformation within society to become the kind of men who are his contemporaries, dominated by amour propre and thus driven to comparison, competition, deceit, insecurity and misery.37 In Deuxieme Discours, this appears as a flat return-to-nature indictment of civilization, but Du Contrat Social clarifies the logic; rather than presenting this state of nature as something to be desired, he dismisses natural man as a circumscribed and brutish animal and recommends instead a particular form of social organization that will realize the human potential. Amour propre is prevented from deforming men, not by being eliminated entirely (since this would be the same thing as eliminating society itself) but through channelling and using it. Pity and amour de soi must be kept active in men, competition must be directed toward public service, and at the same time the potential for reason and virtue, undeveloped in the asocial natural condition, is carefully 37 Robert Derathe, "L'Homme selon Rousseau," in Etudes sur le Contrat Social de

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Etudes des journees d''tude organise'es a Dijon, 1962 (Dijon: Publication de l'Universit6 de Dijon, 1964), 61; cf. John Charvet, The Social Problem in the Philosophy of Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

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nurtured and encouraged. Only one element of the state of nature is retained, that of natural happiness, the condition within which a man's wants never exceed his capacities and his duties and pleasures coincide.s3 This is to be brought about by carefully curtailing men's appetites and desires, such that wants and capacities, duties and pleasures, are kept in balance. The result will resemble Sparta and Rome, in which ascetic and virtuous men delight in serving the whole, and compete only in the accomplishment of this end; as Rousseau puts it, men will be citizens first, individuals second39 and in this way within such a social setting they will achieve a happiness and fulfillment that are impossible and even inconceivable to occupants of a corrupt society like Rousseau's contemporary France. How is this condition to be brought about? Here Rousseau turns pessimist-it is almost impossible. Only if conditions are just so-a small, young, self-sufficient people-and only if a rare and exceptional Legislateur (such as Rousseau?) happens along atjust the right time, is there even a chance of attaining success for even a short time. For the bulk of mankind, no such hope is possible, and the optimal life is that of isolated simplicity on the fringes of society. Yet it is not without reason that Rousseau was part of the inspiration of the French Revolution, and that political actors like Robespierre could adopt his slogans and paraphrase his arguments. There remains a profound ambiguity in Rousseau, suggested by the remark that the Legislateur is to be capable of changing human nature-is the essential human self that all men share to be discovered, or created?

From a unique self, to an essential self common to all men and exhibited by men who are citizens first and individuals second-the retreat is clear, all the more so because it takes place within the writings of a single man. This second aspect of Rousseau is developed and greatly expanded by G. W. F. Hegel. For Hegel,40 man's essential self has to do with Geist (Spirit, or Idea), which is Being capable of self- consciousness. All men, and only men, share this, which is why men have a history and plants and animals do not. Part of what is involved in Geist is awareness of the oneness of the universe, and the establishment of a universe in which men can feel at home, but it is not only this, and I cannot accept that Hegel expected the cosmic curtain to ring down when he put the final period on the last page of Phenomenology. The substance of history, the concept whose application permits history to

38 Cf. John Plamenatz, "On le Forcera d'Etre Libre," in Maurice Cranston and R. S. Peters (eds.), Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, Doubleday/Anchor, 1972), passim.

39 J.-J. Rousseau, Du Contract Social, Bk. 4, chaps. 1 and 2. 40 Cf. Raymond Plant, Hegel (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973); Herbert

Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston: Beacon, 1954), Pt. 1; Walter Kaufman, Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Garden City: Doubleday/Anchor, 1965); Shlomo Avineri, Hegel and the Modem State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

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make sense, is not knowledge but freedom; and in Hegel's hands as applied to his contemporary period this is a two-sided concept. It accepts the liberal idea of civil rights ("subjective freedom") while steering clear of its concomitant social atomism by positing an objective freedom that involves a feeling of social unity and harmony resembling that of classic antiquity, symbolized by a constitutional monarch who reigns but does not rule. To make the implicit explicit, I am insisting that Hegel is more than a Prussian apologist, however much of a buttress to the Prussian state Hegelianism of the right may have become. Similarly, it is easy but inaccurate to play down the role of the individual in Hegel's conception of history, to suggest that because he is not a liberal individualist he is not an individualist at all. For example, the "cunning of reason," using men as its pawns, can be interpreted as denying men any role other than those of passive observers or unwitting tools, but this seems excessive. At the very least, it is men's attempts to accomplish things through politics that furnishes the raw material for reason to fashion so cunningly, so (as Marx puts it) it is men that make history, even if they do not make history simply as they choose. The neutrality of Hegel's scheme is also open to doubt when we bear in mind that his defence of the ideas of the French Revolution as a new stage in freedom was hardly a matter beyond controversy in a Germany that had just thrown off the French yoke; and the attempt to see his idealism as advocating a purely cerebral and therefore opiate freedom is surely countered by the fact that for Hegel the philosophical comprehension of freedom remains incomplete until it takes concrete form in actual social institutions. The free man Hegel anticipates is one in whom we have "cancelled" the atomism of liberal individualism but "preserved" its freedom, cancelled the self-swallowing collectivity of antiquity but preserved its feeling of unity; who lives in a cultural milieu and set of social institutions which concretely realizes this freedom; who feels at home in the universe, and whose philosophical comprehension of his universe represents the highest point hitherto of history. With this in mind, men can make some progress toward a higher stage in history, although they are unable to fashion history as they will ex nihilo. As to whether there is a higher stage beyond that which Hegel described, the best answer would seem to be that implied in Hegel's famous metaphor about the owl of Minerva, suggesting that the grey-on-grey of philosophy can only comprehend retrospectively; it can tell us neither if there will be a higher stage nor what that stage might look like.

The continuity with Rousseau is clear; both speak in terms of an essential self common to all men, and propose the transcendence of apparent diversity and division among individuals through a politics based on the appreciation and development of that essential self. This is not to deny the equally clear differences between them-Rousseau's ahistorical ideal as against Hegel's developmental system, Rousseau's

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heavy pessimism as against Hegel's gradualist optimism-but the similarities are significant.

Hegel's most famous intellectual descendant was, of course, Karl Marx. With oversimplification but without serious distortion, we may present Marx in terms of the model of the essential self.41 For Marx, the essential self is the labouring self; this is so both in the sense that man as man labours to overcome the otherness of nature by transforming it, and in the sense that man and only man possesses the capacity for transforming nature. In the capacity for labour lies man's uniqueness and his differentiating quality; in the free play of his productive powers lies his true and essential freedom. This presentation is slightly truncated, but not misleadingly so. More fully: man as a "being for himself' possesses both a potential for self-consciousness and a capacity for mutual recognition with other selves. Therefore man, as distinct from animals, is capable of acting within a social context that both reflects and reproduces the level reached by the development of these two capacities at any given time. Production is not the only, but it is the most concrete and most significant, activity whereby human beings reveal and develop their self-consciousness and mutuality. The defect of capitalist production is that it is alienated, stultifying rather than contributing to the developing self-consciousness of the producer, and competitive, denying rather than enhancing human mutuality. Therefore, it will be, or at least should be, replaced by a mode of existence which includes an organization of production within which men will spontaneously exercise their species powers through production, and within an environment both reflecting and reproducing the highest possible level of self-consciousness. Man thus reveals and develops himself as a being for himself through a dynamic-that is, a dialectical-process of which productive labour is the most important component; man discovers and fulfills his species being, his uniqueness, through labour.42 It is in this expanded sense that the shorthand phrase "the essential self is the labouring self' is to be understood. Yet if man's history can be said to be marked by a steady increase in productivity, it does not follow that this is at the same time a steady progress towards freedom precisely because, in the famous phrase from the Manifesto, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. The relationship of men to their own productive capacity takes concrete form in the social relations of classes; the opposition of class interests obscures the essential one-ness of man's basic nature, and the

41 Cf. Irving M. Zeitlin, Marxism: A Re-examination (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1967); Adam Schaaf, Marxism and the Human Individual (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970); Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976).

42 Cf. especially Bertell Oilman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

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manifestations of class differentiation in such forms as ideology and religion tend to appear as independent truths and thus further obscure from men the realities of themselves and of their society. The class structure of society, after several stages, assumes the form of capitalism, in which all social relationships tend toward an absolute polarity between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Although productive capacity has reached such a level that we can begin to think of the total conquest of scarcity, freedom (in Marx's sense) has enjoyed no such progress. Man is essentially himself when he labours, yet the worker while he works feels himself subject to the will of another and resents the fact, while the fruits of his labour stand apart from him as the product of such subjection. The worker feels free when he eats, drinks, sleeps, plays, procreates-but these activities are not uniquely human at all, since they are also performed by animals. The worker resents and hates the essential human activity of labour while finding himself in activities which are essentially animal, and the bourgeois is equally misled in that he prides himself on his freedom from labour and merely expropriates the fruits of the labour of another. This is the basic lie of capitalist society, against which Marx directed his intelligence and his will.

The question of whether or not Marx saw the proletarian revolution as inevitable, or merely as very likely and most desirable, will probably never receive a final answer. At the least, we can say that he undertook a careful analysis of capitalist society, and from this analysis derived the contradictions and weak points within capitalism, the group which is essential to capitalism and yet totally hostile to it, the factors that would tend to goad this group into action, and the kind of action to which that group would gravitate given an adequate understanding of the situation. (Of course, it did not happen that way, but my concern here is not the history of Marxism but its philosophy; Lenin's remark that the working class by itself is incapable of anything more than a trade union mentality demonstrates a disillusionment that postdates Marx and should not be read back into him.) The culmination of this transformation was to be the abolition of classes, and thus the elimination of apparent differences between men created by class division. The famous plagiarism from Fourier about man being a hunter in the morning, and so forth, is too often taken literally as if the point of the socialist revolution were to free men from labour. It would be better to bear in mind that the plagiarism is from Fourier, whose contribution to the history of socialism was the theory of attractive labour-the idea that work was not the curse it had hitherto been considered but a potential source of individual happiness and self-fulfillment. The man that Marx wants to set free is a man whose essential attribute is the capacity for labour; what he wants is not freedom from labour, but rather the free and spontaneous enjoyment of that unique human property. Man's essential self being a labouring self, at one with itself in its fullness only in the act of labouring, the Marxian

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Utopia is not a paradise of idlers but a world where every man pushes his skills to their utmost without feeling that his activity is forced upon him by a force outside himself.

Rousseau, Hegel and Marx do not exhaust the history of the essential self, but they do indicate the general form of the argument and some of its possible permutations. The immediate rebuttal to this exposition of the history of the essential self is that it does not properly belong within the history of individualism at all, that it denies the individualism from which I have attempted to derive it by rejecting the postulate of uniqueness. There is something to this objection; the philosophers of the essential self, like the famous commander of United States forces in Hue during the Tet offensive (whose remark is too good not to perpetuate and paraphrase) might well say that they had to destroy the self in order to save it. But their claim to be considered within the rubric of individualism cannot lightly be dismissed. Rousseau does not want lobotomized zombies, but citizens of virtuous reason; Hegel's concern is for real individuals who will realize freedom concretely in their everyday lives; Marx's passionate polemic is on behalf of those men who will never know what it is to be fully and freely human. To assert that the selves of others are fundamentally identical to my own is not to deny that I possess a self or that the self is important or that this fundamentally identical self is capable of considerable and valuable development and growth from that common base, much as it may alter the parameters within which the search for and the effort toward the development of that self may take place. The liberal notion of the self is not the sole claimant to the label of individualism, but only one of a series of reactions to the basic problem.

Could you create a god? Then do not speak to me of any gods. But you could well create the overman....

Nietzsche, Zarathustra

But the dynamics of the concept of the individual do not seem yet to come to an end. It is not a large step from the essentialist concept of the individual to a position in which the essential nature of man is not to be discovered but to be produced through human effort, this effort being predicated not of mankind as a whole but of an enlightened and exceptional minority. Neither history nor psychology is adequate to delineate the nature of man thus understood; both indicate only the decadence, the mediocrity, the crassness, the emptiness, of contemporary man. Rather man, as a being worthy of value, as a truly and completely human being, exists only as a project of the will of the exceptional few. The essential nature of man does not exist in any immanent sense, it is not already present lurking beneath the surface;

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instead, it must be created by men and imposed upon history as an act of human volition.

This view can be subsumed under the general category of elitism, but at the same time it implies a conception of elitism subtly and significantly different from most such theories that have recurrently been adopted as a form of human and social self-understanding. Where most forms of elitism (for example, the Heroic Vitalism discussed by Eric Bentley)43 end by despising, almost by discarding, the unexceptional many that form the mass, the variant here under discussion accepts that the masses now are indeed unworthy and mediocre, but ends by valuing them for their potential, for the future that lies ahead if the masses are properly shaped and molded and purified and directed. The distinction between the heroic and the ordinary is not a permanent and ineradicable feature of the human condition, as the older versions of elitism implied, but is instead to be transcended through the conscious human effort of the elite. Today we have the decadent masses, but in the future we will have a nation of heroes. If the approach exemplified by Marx be characterized as essentialism, then the view suggested here as a modification from that basis can be described as a voluntarist version of essentialism-in a phrase, the concept of the manufactured self. The truly human self is to be found, not in the past or in the present, but in the future-a future, moreover, which is not simply going to happen by itself but which must be consciously created.

The concept of the manufactured self provides one angle of approach to the study of the only completely new ideology to emerge during the twentieth century-namely Fascism, most specifically and cogently the Italian form and those movements modelled after it. Fascism as an ideology rejected liberal individualism and the parliamentary forms derived from it; equally, it rejected Marxism and its divisive war between the classes. To both forces of division-liberalism setting every individual against the other, socialism/communism setting proletarian against bourgeois-Fascism countered with the symbol of the nation as a mobilizing and unifying force. This nationalism could, but need not, involve racism. Of necessity, the references to nationalism were mainly to the past, for the nation (however conceived or defined) is an entity that has gained both existence and boundaries through history. However, while most nationalist movements have conservative overtones, praising the nation as it now stands as a result of history and using the past to justify and defend the present, Fascism did not invoke nationalism as an end in itself and thereby sidestepped such implications. The Fascist program for the nation posited as a mobilizing symbol was oriented toward the future. At best, the past was praiseworthy for having created a nation that could become a suitable 43 Eric Bentley, The Cult of the Superman: A Study of the Idea of Heroism in Carlyle

and Nietzsche (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1969).

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vehicle toward the future; it was not praiseworthy in and of itself, nor is it alone a source of all norms and values. The revolutionary overtones of Fascist ideology (if not always of Fascist practice) were both clear and recurrent; although it praised the nation as historically defined, it was more concerned with transforming it, purifying and correcting it. Italian Fascism demanded totalitarian control over communication and education in order to "create homines novi, living new life in a new style and temper."44 Szalasi's Arrow Cross movement advocated "Hungarism," which would involve the creation of an industrialized peasant state engendering moral and spiritual rebirth organized around a purified Turanian Christianity.45 Codreanu's Legion of the Archangel Michael advocated a complete "almost evangelical" break with both past and present through the creation of an "Omul Nou" (New Man) who would fulfill the destiny of the Rumanian people.46 Jose Antonio Prima de Rivera's Falange movement dreamed of an "audacious minority which would inauguarate radical political and economic reforms by authoritarian means,"47 issuing in a new revitalized Spain populated by a new man who would be half worker and half priest.

The form of the Fascist movements modelled after the Italian pattern was therefore essentially similar: first, an evocation of the national glories of the past as a mobilizing and inspirational device; second, a devastating critique of contemporary members of that nation, usually blamed on liberalism but rejecting socialism/communism as well; and third, a vision of a glorious future for a purified nation to be transformed by authoritarian means by an elite leadership of the movement and necessarily involving a sharp break with both past and present. A stress on the conservative overtones of nationalism is therefore misleading or partial in discussing Fascism, and even a phrase like "conservative revolutionaries"48 seems inadequate as a representation of this aspect of the movement; Fascist movements were quite aware of the novelty of their projected future and the creative revolutionary act that provided access to it. Equally, although this glorious future could be seen in terms of territorial expansion through the militarism that was often associated with the ideology, it is again misleading to overstress this aspect. Military expansion was secondary rather than primary as a goal, in that it was derivative from rather than essential to a regeneration that was seen in aesthetic (Szalasi), religious 44 James Gregor, The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1974), 195. 45 Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others: A History of Fascism

in Hungary and Romania (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1970), 114ff. 46 Ibid., 265ff. 47 Stanley G. Payne, Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1961), 25. 48 Cf. Fritz Stem, "Introduction," The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise

of the Germanic Ideology (Garden City: Doubleday/Anchor, 1961).

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(Codreanu, Primo de Rivera) or moral (Gentile) terms. It is not that expansion is the desired end and national regeneration is advocated as a means thereto; more accurately, revolutionary national regeneration is the desired end, and territorial expansion will simply be an incidental result of the accomplishment of this purification, almost a badge of greatness rather than something desired for its own sake. Neither militarism nor nationalism is the central key to understanding Fascism, although both are present as common strands uniting the various movements.

In all cases, this reform, this sharp revolutionary break from past and present, was to be accomplished by a dedicated and exceptional minority as an act of human will imposed upon the matter of history. Herein lies the central and crucial distinction between the essentialist conception of the individual and the voluntarist modification of it. It was one of the unique features of Marx's system that the purifying transformation he anticipated so keenly was itself the product of the degrading conditions of the present; in the oppression itself lie the seeds of the future reorganization of society. The Fascists, however, had no such simplifying device; every step in the degradation of the masses takes them further away from the projected ideal, and no dialectical deus ex machina could eliminate the problem by waving a magic wand. Spontaneous movements on the part of the masses are futile, for the ideal, the essential nature of man lies not within the masses but within the exceptional minority; the ideal will not and cannot emerge by any natural process from the masses but must be imposed upon them from above. The secondary nature of the historical references in the nationalistic slogans is clear; in the final sense, the new man does not emerge in any simple way from history, but rather results from the imposition of the will of the few upon history. The agency and mechanism for the realization of the human ideal is not the cunning of history, not the forces of production, not accident, not historical process, but the application of a voluntary optional nondeterminist self-conscious human act of will.

This reiterated element of will and its function separates the Fascists from the nineteenth-century ideologies in the same sense that catastrophists are logically separated from uniformitarians-not more of the same, not the ageless and immutable laws of progress, not the regular march of freedom through history, but the conscious human command "Fiat homines novi; fiat mundus novus." If one of the distinguishing features of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is man's conception of himself as separate from (rather than part of) a nature on which he imposes his will, then the Fascist ideology of the twentieth century represents a further and bolder step, as the objects of human will are expanded to include human history and human nature itself. That the attempt to control history failed in the cataclysm of World War Two in no way minimizes or detracts from the grandeur and scope of the vision.

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The addition of racism to the ideology is a significant modification. Not all Fascist movements were racist; indeed, the approach to Fascism which sees the Italian movement as paradigmatic provides the angle from which best to observe and appreciate the curious hybrid that resulted. The vitalism embodied in Italian Fascism is fundamentally optimistic. The racism juxtaposed to it by German National Socialism, on the other hand, is essentially pessimistic-all the great racist thinkers (if that phrase is not an oxymoron) are gloomy prophets of inevitable doom, crying the praises of racial purity from the perspective of a miscegenated present beyond any hope of redemption. Gobineau's fatalism is in this sense paradigmatic-"What is truly sad is not death itself but the certainty of our meeting it as degraded beings."49 The focus of racist thinking is not on a malleable future so much as a racial Paradise lost, and the Nazi Gotterdamerung is fitting not so much in a moral sense as in terms of the dominant moods and expectations of the racism it so proudly proclaimed. Given these racist preoccupations, the theme of the "new man" could be expressed only in terms of eugenics, with the Aryanism of the future being less a question of will imposed upon a resisting world than of good bloodlines. If the voluntarism of Italian Fascism suggests a Promethean image, the racism of National Socialism suggests instead the model of the horsebreeder. The result is a curious double paradox. First, although the Nazis entitled their famous propaganda flm, "The Triumph of the Will," what they really had in mind was "the triumph of the blood" as epitomized by Himmler's examination of the genealogies of SS recruits, while the Italian dream of a new Roman Empire better suited the German romantic nostalgia than the future-directed optimism of homines novi. Second, for all that the Nazis saw the intractable will of their leaders as factors in the triumph of the movement, it remains an ineradicable anomaly that none of the Nazi leaders (except Heydrich) even vaguely resembled the tall, blonde, blue-eyed, Aryan ideal. In the nonracist variation, it is not a similar anomaly that (for example) Szalasi was not an ethnic Hungarian nor Codreanu an ethnic Rumanian, since the whole point of their doctrine was the creation through human will of a new and purified nation defined in other than genealogical terms. The approach via the concept of the manufactured self thus suggests that Italian Fascism was the paradigmatic form of the twentieth century's only new ideology, with German National Socialism being a curious sideshow.

A more contemporary elaboration of the concept of the manufactured self can be found in the writings of B. F. Skinner. His theory presents the individual, the self, as completely programmable by means of "operant conditioning"-that is, the principle that an organism tends to repeat those actions that are followed by pleasant 49 M. D. Biddis (ed.), Gobineau: Selected Political Writings (New York: Harper

Torchbooks, 1970), 176.

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effects. (It is one of the central points of operant conditioning that the reverse-actions followed by unpleasant effects are not repeated-is not strictly true, and therefore punishment is less effective than coherent reward systems in establishing and maintaining desired patterns of behaviour.) What is stressed is the totally fluid malleability of the behaviour system of all organisms, including that organism called man. By controlling the environment-that is, in practical terms, being able to determine which actions will be followed by consequences that the organism finds pleasant-it is possible to create any desired pattern of behaviour. As Skinner puts it:

A person is first of all an organism, a member of a species and subspecies, possessing a genetic endowment of anatomical and physiological charac- teristics, which are the product of the contingencies of survival to which the species has been exposed in the process of evolution. The organism becomes a person as it acquires a repertoire of behavior under the contingencies of reinforcement to which it is exposed during its lifetime. The behavior it exhibits at any moment is under control of a current setting.... A person is not an originating agent; he is a locus, a point at which many genetic and environmental conditions come together in a joint effect.50

Because this programmability is posited of any organism, not just of "lower" ones, there is no mediation of rational assessment on the part of the organism; the connection between an actor's rational process and his behaviour is severed completely. An organism (man included) does not do something because he thinks it will have a pleasant consequence, but rather repeats an action because in the past it was followed by pleasant consequences. It is possible, even likely, that he himself will not know why he is doing what he is doing, and may explain it to himself and others in quite erroneous terms; this explanation has no significance. The programming and modification of behaviour takes place entirely on a subrational level. As Skinner explains, if our concern is with human behaviour, we can discard such unobservable phantasms as "man's rational faculty" as residues of earlier unscientific ways of looking at things, as products of the pseudo-explanations of "mentalism." He says,

Traditional theories of knowledge run into trouble because they assume that one must think before behaving (not to mention thinking before existing, as in Cogito, ergo sum). No one thinks before he acts except in the sense of acting covertly before acting overtly.51

(It is interesting that Skinner manages to misconstrue totally the logic of the Cartesian argument to make his point.) The clarity of presentation defies any desire to tone down the argument; anyone who can entitle a book Beyond Freedom and Dignity has little to fear from having his arguments exaggerated. 50 B. F. Skinner, About Behaviorism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 207, 168. 51 Ibid., 235.

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There is a progression in the argument that needs to be brought out. Marx spoke in terms of a human self that was in some sense immanent, even if material conditions prevented it from achieving full development, and in terms of a rational human project directed toward its accomplishment. Paradigmatic Fascism denies that this truly human self is in any sense immanent in man or society or the nation as presently constituted, having its existence as a project of the will of the few, with the role of the rational faculty stressed somewhat less than in previous ideologies because of the emphasis on nonrational or extrarational faculties in explaining men's actions. Skinner denies the idea of any essential truly human self, immanent or otherwise, as a goal for human action, arguing instead the virtually total plasticity of behaviour patterns; the role of reason is flatly obliterated and with it any space for a self-conscious, self-reflective, developing, reasoning, autonomous and intrinsically valuable self. The fact that Skinner talks in terms of organisms is instructive; from the point of view of operant conditioning, there is no essential difference between men and pigeons.

The description of Skinner's ideas is intended to be the stopping point to this analysis of the dynamics of the concept of the individual. From the self as self-evident, through the self as problem, past the essential self, to the self as manufactured product-at the extreme end of which the concept of the individual again vanishes. It is both relevant and instructive that Skinner devotes the early pages of Beyond Freedom and Dignity to a repudiation of the notion of autonomous inner man as a mode of explanation of human behaviour. Luther to Skinner, the circle closes, and a history of the concept of the individual in the modern age that began with a concept of autonomous inner man ends in his flat rejection. Nor, once travelled, can the path be retraced-if man is programmed, if his self is unreflectively given to him by his environment in such a way as to preclude transcendence, then the nonproblematic bundle of appetites and the essential labouring self of free spontaneous creative work both turn into manufactured results, social products of no intrinsic (although possibly of some incidental) value, while the problem of the hidden self simply evaporates-to explain and understand the "self' (or what is left of it), one does not vanish inward in never-ending introspection, but rather looks outward to the physical environment conceived as comprising a system of rewards. In this regard, Fascism stands as a sort of halfway house to a central problem of modernity-namely, what happens to ideologies based on a concept of the individual faced with scientific theories and technological undertakings that tend to deny or obliterate that very foundation.

The apocalyptic tones of the foregoing must immediately be modified; simply to put "Skinnerism" in parallel with liberalism and socialism reveals the distortion. The ideas of Skinnerian behaviourism represent a countercurrent against the very foundations of

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individualism; however, the question of whether this set of ideas will ever be fully translated into an ideological system, or what it would look like when such translation was effected, is beyond the scope of this investigation.

There is no way of telling what may yet become part of history. Perhaps the past is still essentially undiscovered! So many retroac- tive forces are still needed!

Nietzsche, Gay Science

The initial claim was that individualism was a pivotal notion of post-medieval thought, and that an investigation of the dynamics of the concept of the individual would provide a useful perspective on the intellectual history of this period. The Greeks, the first to raise the problem of the individual and to attempt a solution, gave us the agonal self, whose goal is an undying name. During the individualist revolution of the modem period, the first attempt at an answer was the liberal notion of the unproblematic self, a self-contained actor whose aim was happiness. Although this answer has been generally satisfactory, it has tended perennially to generate critical off-shoots in the form of the notion of the hidden self, whose endless and all-but-insoluble quest is authenticity. From the uncertainty of this search, the retreat was to the notion of an essential self, whose aim is the concrete realization of an objectively derived ideal. With the transcendence of the nineteenth-century predilection for impersonal forces, this in turn generated the notion of the manufactured self, in which formulation the truly human self is placed in a future that is the voluntarist project of human will.

The liberal notion of the self has culminated in the liberal-democratic tradition of the Western world; the notion of the essential self has culminated in the Communist regimes of Europe and Asia; the notion of the manufactured self briefly achieved concrete form in the short-lived Fascist regimes of Europe. The notion of the hidden self has enjoyed no such culmination or concrete realization; it is, as it were, the hidden face of the assumption of the importance of the individual that lies at the root of liberalism, essentialism and voluntarism alike, and that all try by different means and from different directions to exorcise. It represents a perennial reaction to individualism as such, whenever self-awareness develops into the awareness of a problem and leads to an inherently solipsist inner search.

It has been suggested that there are inherent problems in each of the modern formulations-the reductionism of liberalism, as man becomes only a bundle of appetites; the unending inconclusiveness of the quest for the hidden self; the a priori assertion of the essential self; the

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arbitrary projection of a future for the nonimmanent manufactured self. It has not been suggested that this in any way indicates the impending collapse of either of the two models that have succeeded in concretely realizing themselves. Logical adequacy in the eyes of an external observer is not really relevant; what is important is the adequacy of the ideology to confront and explain the essential conditions of existence for those inside the system. There is no real indication that this fit is becoming too difficult to make in either of the general types of system so as to prefigure the collapse of the ideology; to paraphrase Hegel, the dusk is not yet deep enough for the owl of Minerva to spread its wings over our era.

To ground the majority of contemporary ideologies in individualism is not to give an answer but only to state the problem and indicate the terms in which such a solution is usually attempted-that is, the notion of the self. The foregoing has perhaps suggested something of the complexity of the concept of the individual, and it might now be useful to suggest some of the dimensions implied by such a concept. First, there must be an awareness of the separateness of each human unit of the society. This seems so basic it goes without saying-after all, every known culture seems to have found it necessary to employ the device of assigning names to all significant members of society-but the point is that it is only a first step and takes us almost nowhere. After all, men also assign names to buildings, streets and weapons. Second, there must be some notion of the individual as a unified entity corresponding to this uniquely specifying label, and this requirement is rather harder to satisfy. Snell says of the early (that is, the Homeric) Greeks that "the physical body of man was comprehended not as a unit but as an aggregate."52 Similarly, Adkins and Snell demonstrate that the notion of a unified psychological organization proved just as difficult of development as the unified notion of the body. Plato's famous metaphor in Republic of a tripartite division of the soul clearly indicates some of the problems involved in this process. Third, this entity, the individual, must be conceived as a being capable of reaching action-initiating decisions; the unified self must constitute a locus capable of action. Again, Snell tells us flatly that "Homer's man does not regard himself as the source of his own decisions,"53 and this rather than artistic convention is the reason for the endless intervention of the gods in Homeric writing. Fourth, the unified decision-making self must be assigned space, time, and importance for his decisions, a point illustrated by contrast with the notion of primeval time. If the only important "time" is prehuman, if all human life occurs in a timelessly flat context of endless repetition, if all human actions are simply 52 Bruno Snell, The Discovery of Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought

(Garden City: Doubleday/Anchor, 1959), 35. 53 Ibid., 31.

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reenactments of divine prototypes, then the focus of perception will prevent the emergence of the individual in any full sense. The two formulations are obviously interdependent-the discovery of human time is a precondition for the emergence of the expanded notion of the individual, and the developing concept of the individual demands a time dimension within which it may act and take on being. Fifth, the individual thus emerging must be "illuminated from within"; that is, in some sense, it is crucial that this individual be aware of himself and that his actions (at least the most important) be predicated or capable of being predicated upon this awareness. The phrase "self-conscious" is most apt; it is only at this point that the individual truly begins to have a self of which to be aware, or that he acquires the capacity to be aware of that self. Sixth, society must be organized around the individual whose outlines have been delineated by the previous considerations. The individual does not derive his importance from society, but rather the just or appropriate social order is derived from and justified in terms of the individual whom it accommodates. If the development of the notion of historicity gives the individual a time frame within which to exist, the articulation of society gives (or will give) that individual a social context and a stage on which to appear.

The combination of these dimensions yields the type of view I wish to label as "individualism," embodying a concept of the individual and of the self in a developed and expanded sense. What this analysis cannot do is to offer any answer to the question of whether any final resolution to the problem of the self is possible, or whether the five-item catalogue here presented exhausts the potentialities of the philosophy of the self.

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the concept of the self in political thought

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