Hegel, Tocqueville, and “Individualism”

Abstract

Critics of liberal individualism have pointed out the many failures of “atomism” as a method in social and political philosophy. Their methodological criticisms have a tendency, however, to devolve into repudiations of moral individualism as such. In part, this is due to a misreading of Hegel and Tocqueville, two critics of individualism who nevertheless upheld the importance of individual rights and what Hegel called “freedom of subjectivity.” My essay brings these two very different theorists together in order to show how each deliberately dispensed with the ontology inherited from eighteenth-century social contract theory, the better to focus on associational life and public freedom. The end result is not a relapse into the rhetoric of civic republicanism, but a refurbishment of that tradition from the standpoint of modern liberty: the liberty of the individual. This common project links Hegel, the idealist philosopher, and Tocqueville, the liberal-republican, in unexpected but complementary ways.