A good question (via my referrer logs, which tell me what people visiting this site via a search engine were looking for).

I am by temperament and training an individualist. This is in my view neither a good and praiseworthy nor a bad and blameworthy thing to be; it takes all sorts to make a world. What it means politically is that I will tend to be on the look-out for anything in any political system that treats as dispensible, or proposes some systematic violation of, the rights and dignity of “the individual”.

The concept of “the individual” that I have in mind is classically white, bourgeois, and male gendered: the practice of “individuality” according to its rubric presupposes social and material circumstances that are, to put it mildly, not universal. Nevertheless, it has a universal appeal (which is not to say that everyone finds it equally appealing): structurally, the possibilities of agency, integrity and independence of mind it represents are not tied to any particular class, gender or ethnic identity.

If “the individual” is a sort of male bourgeois ego-ideal, this ideal may bear little resemblance to the reality of any particular bourgeois male’s daily life. The agency such a person really exercises may be desperately etiolated, his putative integrity continually compromised in shameful ways, his thinking largely or entirely derivative and conformist. On the one hand, this indicates that “bourgeois individualism” is a type of pathetic delusion - the sustaining fiction of clerks and middle-managers who are unwilling to confront the true extent of their own co-optation and subordination. On the other hand, it indicates that such ideal “individuality” is in no sense the exclusive property of the white, bourgeois male, since in fact it is scarcely his property to begin with. Agency, integrity and independence of mind are desirable things; if the white, bourgeois male especially desires them because he especially lacks them, then the question becomes one of where and under what circumstances they are to be found.

So when I say that I am an individualist, what I mean is that I am interested in discovering or creating the conditions under which true individuality might flourish: agency, integrity and independence of mind are things that I care about. To give a concrete example, this means that I prefer free software to proprietory software, both as product and as process - in spite of, or rather because of, the fact that I work as a developer of proprietory software.

It should be reasonably clear that “individualism” in this sense is not necessarily opposed to “collectivism”, inasmuch as some forms of collectivity are necessary to create the conditions under which individuality can flourish. What it is opposed to is any collectivism that does not have individual flourishing as its object, that regards agency, integrity and independence of mind as mere bourgeois illusions and consequently not worth wanting (or as impure, immoral, selfish desires). The challenge for individualism is to recognise how completely unfulfilled its desiderata are by the concrete circumstances of the vast majority of human beings living today - including many of the most privileged. The challenge for collectivism is to recognise and affirm the validity of those desiderata, and to imagine collectivities that do not depend for their survival on passive obedience, moral co-optation, and intellectual conformism.