Cultural theory as individualistic ideology: Rejoinder to Ellis

Abstract

How can one examine the sources of people's beliefs, tastes, and preferences without falling into the self‐refuting determinism that has so often characterized the most systematic theory of preferences, Marxism? Cultural Theory's attempt to do so posits five anthropologically derived, competing “ways of life"— individualism, egalitarianism, hierarchism, fatalism, and withdrawal from social life—that are intended to apply to all forms of culture and, therefore, to provide a universal framework for explaining people's preferential biases. Richard Ellis's defense of Cultural Theory, however, does not adequately address the concerns expressed in my critique of it. Ellis fails to instance a single case of a premodern culture containing the five ways of life; he does not show that exclusivist premodern versions of “individualism” and “egalitarianism” are more than superficially comparable to the inclusive modern variants of these alleged universals; and he adds new evidence to support my claim that in modern societies, people's preferences are largely unlinked to the particular social relations identified by Cultural Theory. While Ellis overtly denies that Cultural Theory is deterministic, his search for links between preferences and social relations shows that this denial cannot be sustained. Cultural Theory's reductionism stems from its neglect of historically contingent cultural traditions that thwart a priori attempts to predict culture. This ahistori‐cism transforms a myopic view of American politics as a battle of egalitarianism against individualism into a timeless truth, providing ideological self‐affirmation for “individualists” but diminishing the prospects for being able to explain or criticize individualism—or any other political preference.