Rugged Individualism Research Articles

“The Way to Dusty Death”: The Feminist Revision of the Western in Nomadland

The Western film genre is founded upon patriarchal and capitalist conditions embedded deeply within structuralist analyses. The portrayal of the solitary, white male cowboy—with its themes of rugged individualism and phallocentric mannerisms—has affected the depiction of women, people of color, and other marginalized groups across media. These prejudicial structures, though applied throughout the genre, has seen revision in recent productions, most notably by feminist directors of the modern era. In Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, Western narrative elements and cinematic techniques have been amended to favor genuine testimonials from affected individuals of economic collapse caused by the hubris of industrialists and the male-centered world that instigates it. Zhao’s cast offer division from gender binaries within the careless wilderness through the presentation of predominantly female and collectivist characters and her utilization of a performative documentarian approach that brings forth neorealist motivations of truthful representations of sidelined groups in this decayed West.

Superstitions of composure: the Ayn Rand cult and the pop-psychology of self-esteem.

Ayn Rand is known as an advocate of rugged individualism and unregulated capitalism, which has led to a scholarly focus on her influence on neoliberal and right-wing politics. This article focuses on the psychologically unrealistic conceptualisation of self-esteem in Rand's ethics, which arguably prevails in today's self-help culture. Rand endorsed Nathaniel Branden, her acolyte and lover, as official therapist for her circle. In this role, he promoted the positive effects of living according to Randian principles on mental health. Rand's so-called objectivism therefore provides not only a questionable philosophical framework for neoliberal politics but also, and perhaps predominantly for its followers, a set of guidelines for the project of self-optimisation. The fact that Rand's ideal of radical self-sufficiency is ultimately psychologically unliveable makes its use in applied psychotherapy ineffective and harmful. The article offers a cultural-historical case study about the ideological entanglements of philosophy and pop-psychological concepts and of clinical malpractice.

Eradicating dominant ideologies in higher education: the responsibility of campus leadership in developing a culturally-congruent education experience

ABSTRACT Educational leadership serves a pivotal function in establishing the tenor of campus cultures. Executive decisions shape educational policy and practice in ways that either hinder or advance marginalised students’ academic success. Leaders are in powerful positions to modify unjust academic ecosystems and to de-ideologise the white-centric dominant ideologies that lead to student pushout. Leadership actions tend to justify the status quo rather than to deconstruct campus culture and reconstruct antiracist options. Inaction from leadership has resulted in cultural discontinuities that lead some students to self-deidentify from academia. This article expands upon cultural mismatch theory to describe how race dysconsciousness, academic capitalism and rugged individualism operate to buttress ecosystemic conditions that create racially-antagonistic campus cultures. We propose strategies that leaders can implement to eradicate dominant ideologies at their home institutions and within educator-student relationships and individual mindsets. We also discuss important considerations and corresponding actions for creating culturally-congruent equity-focused educational spaces.

The Moral Values of "Rugged Individualism"

The Moral Values of "Rugged Individualism"

CEO Rugged Individualism and Workplace Safety

CEO Rugged Individualism and Workplace Safety

The Dream and Ideological Underpinnings in Gabriele Muccino’s the Pursuit of Happyness

The paper offers a critical examination of the film The Pursuit of Happyness vis-à-vis the American Dream set against the backdrop of 1980s San Francisco during a period of economic instability. Focusing on the life of Chris Gardner, an African American man striving for upward mobility, the film juxtaposes the ideals of rugged individualism and success with the harsh realities of systemic economic and racial barriers. Through theoretical frameworks provided by Louis Althusser, Terry Eagleton, and Walter Benjamin, this study explores how ideology interpellates individuals into specific social positions, reinforcing class hierarchies and perpetuating economic inequality. Althusser’s concept of interpellation is key in analyzing how Gardner's identity and aspirations are shaped by the cultural and ideological structures around him. By critically engaging with the film’s portrayal of financial struggles, systemic oppression, and the illusion of the American Dream, this analysis highlights the ways in which capitalist ideology constrains personal fulfillment and reinforces societal inequities. The paper shows the film serves a broader commentary on the enduring structural inequalities in capitalist societies than just a as a narrative of individual perseverance.

Implementation of Home Parenting Activities as an Effort to Prepare Early Childhood Growth and Development

Parents have an essential role in caring for, educating, and meeting the needs of a child, especially in the aspect of growth and development. How parents educate is very important for the growth and development of early childhood. Education and upbringing at home must be harmonized with education at school so that children grow up to be intelligent, independent, and have character, growing into strong and rugged individuals. This research was motivated by a need for parental awareness of children's learning activities at school, inappropriate parenting patterns, and the importance of children's education. This research aims to determine children's development as a communication tool and the model for implementing learning programs in collaboration with parents in early childhood education, especially in Blora Regency. This research was conducted using a qualitative approach obtained through interviews, documentation data, and observation data regarding the implementation of home parenting programs or activities. This research shows that home parenting activities can be carried out through reporting on children's learning progress at school, knowledge of early detection of growth and development, parents' skills in creating work, and involvement of parents as resource persons. Parenting methods are usually carried out at school and sometimes only once a semester; for home parenting, this is done once a month. Implementing home parenting activities can make it easier for parents to provide parenting lessons and learn more about their children's activities.

Kyrie Irving, vaccine hesitancy, and the politics of rugged individualism

ABSTRACT NBA superstar Kyrie Irving has a well-earned reputation for both his elite talent and his unpredictable public commentary. Such expressions have included references to the Earth being flat, advocacy for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and reluctance to proceed with the 2020 basketball season in the midst of a pandemic and resurgent Black Lives Matter movement. He has become most notorious, however, for his refusal to be vaccinated against COVID-19, a position that earned him both praise and scorn. We argue in this article that Irving’s stance prioritizes a form of rugged individualism characterized by neoliberal politics and professional sport. His retreat into rugged individualism contributed to delegitimizing public health policies and prompted vocal defenses of his actions from political conservatives who had condemned his earlier forms of activism. The controversy over Irving’s vaccine hesitancy spotlights the rhetorical effect of his ambiguous voice and its implications for democratic contestation. More specifically, it speaks to the challenges of prioritizing the public good under the conditions of neoliberal political culture.

Are street children juvenile migrants? Discoveries from their earning, spending and saving practices (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso)

ABSTRACT In Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, the so-called street children and youth I worked with usually preferred to describe themselves as juvenile migrants, ‘searching money’ in order to support themselves and their family and, some day, build their own future. Could they indeed be considered as participating to a form of juvenile migration? I addressed this hypothesis as an anthropologist by looking empirically at their economic practices. The analysis of the daily budget of dozens of bakoroman revealed that their desire to appear as providers for their family was not simply delusional: it materialised in routine saving practices and remittances to their family. But these practices varied significantly from one group and from one individual to another. These variations revealed that they navigated between norms of juvenile labour migration, which entailed redistribution to kin, and that of a deviant street ethos, which is based on a rugged individualism.

Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific: REFUGIO by Roger Palmer and the Marxian theory of economic character masks

ABSTRACT Robinson Crusoe is among the world’s most mythologized fictional characters. As homo economicus, economic man, Crusoe is a byword for rugged individualism. Crusoe has been linked to the emergent bourgeois individual, and this role offers a way to reconsider, after 300 years of circulation, an alternate economic reading of the character. This article rereads Crusoe’s role in Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, prompted by an art installation, REFUGIO – after Selkirk, after Crusoe by Roger Palmer, which explores a visually doubled figure of Crusoe relocated to the Pacific Ocean. This trope of doubling is reinterpreted with Marx’s concept of “economic character masks” and J.M. Coetzee’s postcolonial re-imagining of the Crusoe story, Foe, showing that Crusoe’s economic character mask continues to operate in the capitalist world while his body is absent. Homo economicus is a fiction that obscures the capitalist individual’s imbrication with globalizing networks of exchange, accumulation, and exploitation.

Solidarity in Catholic Social Teaching and Its Implications for Creating an Authentic Human Self

The human self has been narrowly and erroneously understood in some quarters as simply purely scientific, naturalistic, individualistic, and materialistic. This understanding of the self has contributed to problems like selfishness, rugged individualism, materialism, get-rich-quick syndrome, ritual killings, genocidal wars, profiteering, and so forth. If these erroneous perceptions of the human person or self are left unchallenged, they will continue to degrade human society and dignity. This paper theorizes that the Catholic understanding of the human being as a social and communal being, thus implying solidarity, can help to recover the authentic human self. In this light, this paper uses the methods of critical analyses and hermeneutics to examine the Catholic understanding of solidarity and how it can help in retrieving the authentic human self. The paper finds that there are erroneous and narrow understandings of the human self and person. It concludes that the Catholic concept of solidarity can help to build an authentic human self and society.

Rugged Individualism Revisited: Herbert Hoover's Adaptation of Individualism in the 1928 Election

Abstract With Trump's election in 2016 prompting us to reflect on what qualifies one to the U.S. presidency, I turn to the 1928 election to consider the only other candidate who became president without having held elected office or a military position: Herbert Hoover. I argue that Hoover was able to establish his presidential qualifications by articulating a vision of “rugged individualism” as an American value, one that was not linked to traditional political experience but instead to a distinctively American character that combined past myths of the frontier and the “self-made man.” In so doing, Hoover adapted “individualism” into a “rugged individualism” connected to twentieth-century conservative economic policies. Through this discourse, Hoover was able to establish himself as the heir to previous Republican presidents while pushing the boundaries of presidential qualifications and the use of individualism as a rhetorical appeal. Beyond providing the first article-length critique of Hoover's 1928 campaign, my analysis adds to the scholarship on the use of rugged individualism as a rhetorical appeal, one that foreshadows the Republican response to the Great Depression and later conservative economic rhetoric.

The very idea of rational irrationality

I am interested in the “rational irrationality hypothesis” about voter behavior. According to this hypothesis, voters regularly vote for policies that are contrary to their interests because the act of voting for them isn’t. Gathering political information is time-consuming and inconvenient. Doing so is unlikely to lead to positive results since one's vote is unlikely to be decisive. However, we have preferences over our political beliefs. We like to see ourselves as members of certain groups (e.g. “rugged individualists”) and being part of those groups depends on having certain beliefs (e.g. about welfare spending). Even if a decrease in welfare spending would be bad for me, I might still benefit by believing in and, consequently, voting for a decrease since my vote is unlikely to make a difference but getting to see myself as a rugged individualist will make a noticeable difference to my wellbeing. It is sometimes argued that this hypothesis fails for empirical reasons. I will argue that things are worse: it is conceptually incoherent. I will do so by first showing that it is a rationalizing explanation and then argue that rationalizing explanations must be reflectively stable from the agent's perspective. The rational irrationality hypothesis is not.

Local individualism culture and lower third-party guarantee loan defaults: evidence from SBA loans in the US

ABSTRACT Building on the literature on individualistic culture and entrepreneurship, we use variation in a US county’s frontier experience (rugged individualism) as a proxy for local individualism to explain variation in SBA loan default rates. For every 10-year increase in frontier experience in a county (ranging from 0 to 63 years between 1790 and 1890), the hazard of default was 0.964 times lower, a small but economically meaningful effect. The effects are more salient for sole proprietors and robust to economic shocks from neighbouring shale boom counties and placebo tests. The results indicate that expanding the eligibility requirements for SBA loans to include individuals from US counties with individualistic cultures may be beneficial.

The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism

The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism

Tensions of Modernity: Privilege, Precarity, and Colonial Nostalgia among European Security Contractors in East Africa

AbstractPrivate security work can be a brutal world of short-term contracts, exploitation, and under-regulation, where the imperative of profit is expected to trump collective notions of military brotherhood. Why then do so many demobilized soldiers turn to it as a vocation? While a rich body of work has revealed the vulnerabilities of demobilized military life, ethnographic investigations into how contractors experience and make sense of precarity are less common. Drawing on fieldwork with military veterans of European descent working and living in East Africa, this article argues that a central, yet underexplored, feature of contemporary security work is colonial nostalgia. Some contractors read the travelogues of colonial adventurers, while others trace their family genealogy to ancestral colonial frontier soldiers. A few even write their own memoirs in similar fashion. Writing, reading, and living the colonial past through this contractor canon serves several present-day functions. First, the parallels between risk-taking colonial adventurers and the kind of rugged individualism associated with homo economicus masks the tensions and fissures that emerge from soldiers’ discharge from the military and subsequent remobilization as privatized contractors. Secondly, colonial nostalgia forms part of a larger political critique of Western military interventions, of which many of these contractors experienced first-hand. Here, private security work is imagined as replicating an older, more effective tradition of frontier soldiering that is rooted in a logic of settler-colonialism. Finally, fantasies of a colonial past feed into contractors’ attempts to market themselves to clients and to organize their everyday work.

The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past by Liora R. Halperin

Reviewed by: The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past by Liora R. Halperin Tamir Sorek Liora R. Halperin. The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 368 pp. Since Yael Zerubavel’s seminal study of Zionist collective memory and commemoration, Recovered Roots (1995), scholars have paid growing attention to “memory struggles” in Israeli society. The controversies over the representation of the past are always, at least partly, related to contemporary conflicts over interests, resources, and ideologies. In that body of scholarship, the main axis of struggles has been the challenging of the hegemonic memory of the Ashkenazic secularist Labor Zionist movement by various forces: Palestinians, Mizrahi Jews, religious Zionists, and others. Liora Halperin’s excellent study directs our attention to a forgotten intra-Zionist struggle that seemingly has lost its relevance—the one between the collective ethos of immigrant settlers who came mainly in the 1880s and the 1890s (known in Zionist vocabulary as the First Aliyah), emphasizing private enterprise, reliance on a native labor force, and explicit religiosity, and the subsequent wave arriving between 1904 and 1914 (known as the Second Aliyah), that was collectivist in its ideological orientation, promoted a discourse of (intra-Jewish) class struggle, whose leaders advocated exclusive Jewish labor, and was frequently secularist or even antireligious. It is the second wave that became dominant in shaping both the discourse and the practice of the colonizing efforts in Palestine for many decades. The tension between these groups and their public representation is at the center of the book. By analyzing diverse commemorative practices between the 1920s and the 1960s, Halperin’s book traces the construction of the “First Aliyah” as a distinct category, the various meanings ascribed to it by different political actors, and the political roles this commemoration served. The book both reflects and promotes two emerging scholarly trends. First, it contextualizes the study of Zionist commemoration within the paradigm of settler colonialism, and originally illustrates how this commemoration has been shaped by the settler-colonial character of Zionism. This is done by drawing parallel lines between the commemorative discourse that evolved around late nineteenth-century Zionist settlers and their agricultural colonies (known in Hebrew as moshavot), and the commemoration of other communities of European settler colonies, such as those that emerged in North America and Australia. Creatively borrowing analytical and theoretical concepts from scholars of settler [End Page 234] colonialism, such as Partrick Wolfe, Jean O’Brien, and Kevin Bruyneel, the book illustrates their relevance to the Zionist/Palestinian context. The similarity with North American settlements is especially pronounced. Halperin argues that the historiographic overemphasis on Labor Zionism obscured the central place of settlement entrepreneurship and individualism in Zionist history, which had echoes in memory power struggles. For example, in the twentieth century the moshavot celebrated this rugged individualism using explicit American imagery: “the Jew on a horseback was the cowboy, the Arabs were hostile Indians” (105). The second trend reflected in this book is the revival of scholarly interest, across disciplines, in social class. While the class aspect of tension between the First and Second Aliyah is nothing new, Halperin directs our attention to the way this tension has shaped Zionist commemoration of the moshavot. The struggle over the image of the First Aliyah and its stature in Zionist collective memory was a reflection of competing economic ideologies. For both their sympathizers and their opponents, the moshavot have become a symbol of the power of private capital and entrepreneurship. The ethnic boundaries of the Zionist project interacted with the class struggle in interesting ways. In the commemorative discourse aligned with the moshavot, the hiring of Arab labor was part of a seemingly apolitical “free market” approach, and this inclusive tendency has been used to present the moshavot pioneers as peace-loving individuals who knew how to maintain good relationships with the native Arabs. This discourse of “apolitical” coexistence ignored the hierarchical nature of the economic relationship and the broader ethnopolitical context of the colonies. For their part, the leaders of the Second Aliyah who aspired for economic separation from the Arabs have presented the reliance on Arab labor as a profit-driven, unpatriotic practice. Both sides...

THINKING FOR THEMSELVES: EXAMINING THE REACTIONARY RIGHT'S "BOOTSTRAPS EPISTEMOLOGY"

This paper offers a new way of conceptualizing conservatives’ approach to truth and knowledge, based on over two years of online fieldwork (2019-2021) into reactionary YouTube channels and their audiences. I use qualitative content analysis to examine over 100 hours of YouTube videos, 1050 YouTube comments, and online interviews with 15 current and former fans of these channels. Drawing on these data sources, I argue that the reactionary right’s emphasis on “rugged individualism” forms the basis not just of their political project but also of their imagined epistemology. I find that reactionary YouTubers and their viewers describe arriving at their political beliefs as a highly idiosyncratic process of personal research and rational deliberation. I call this narrative of political formation "bootstraps epistemology." Just as the bootstraps narrative in politics argues that individuals have the duty to reject government “handouts” and improve their circumstances through hard work and thrift, bootstraps epistemology encourages people to reject dogma and instead pursue knowledge through solitary study and intellectual combat with opponents. I propose that the bootstraps narrative of personal responsibility and bootstraps epistemology are mutually-enforcing discourses that advance individualistic solutions to social problems. I find that the latter has gained currency in recent years, with the widespread loss of trust in mainstream media and the proliferation of “alternative” sources of onli news and information.

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy

Reviewed by: Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy Gregory Brown Jason Stacy, Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 234 pp. $27.95 (paper). In Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town, Jason Stacy states that he has "treated Spoon River Anthology like a historical subject" but cautions the reader that the work's "significance lies not only in its history but also in its enduring life as a book that people read" (173). Stacy's analysis of the text is sensitive to the literary aspects of Masters's work, and it is thus useful and engaging to literary critics and historians alike. Stacy begins by tracing two distinct origin myths of the American small town: the New England version and the midwestern one. The myth of the New England small town has roots that reach back before the American Revolution and defines itself as moral, industrious, and cooperative. The midwestern small town, on the other hand, is steeped in the frontier mythos popularized by Frederick Jackson Turner and emphasizes rugged individualism. These rival mythologies "both featured an established small municipality," but "the New England village served as a founding enterprise [of the nation] and thereby preserved original values" while the "Midwestern town was the result of a mythical frontier experience" (33). Both contrasted with urban centers such as New York City, which were portrayed as "dens of hypocrisy and vice" (11). Masters's family history intersected with both myths due to Illinois's patterns of settlement. On both sides of his family tree, Masters's ancestors moved into Illinois to distance themselves from slavery; however, Masters's branch of the family shifted their political sympathies to the South after the Civil War due to increases in federal power and taxation. Stacy notes that Hardin Masters, Edgar Lee's father, "sought to enlist on the side of the North" at the age of sixteen, but by the end of the conflict he [End Page 206] supported the South, and Edgar Lee was named after the famous southern general (38). Hardin Masters was haunted by his reputation as a southern sympathizer; rumors that he had been a Copperhead cost him prestige and business. This opprobrium, Stacy demonstrates, is the seed of the character of the exile, a major trope of Spoon River. In the central chapters of Spoon River America, Stacy synthesizes the familial and cultural currents that surround the creation of Edgar Lee Master's Anthology. As Masters was turning his attention away from practicing law and fully toward a literary career, he moved to Chicago, which had become an important cultural and literary center. There, Masters became acquainted with the "'Little Room,' an informal club of artists, social reformers, and philanthropists" (61). Among the members of the Little Room was Harriet Monroe, the future editor of Poetry; nevertheless, Masters was uncomfortable among this society and faulted them for what he perceived as "haughty exclusiveness" (61). Instead, cultivating an outsider status he would uphold for the rest of his life, Masters preferred the society of the more libertine "Press Club." Through close readings of several poems, Stacy identifies character types such as the moralistic fraud, the libertine, and the exile. The character of the exile fits well with Masters's conception of himself as both a Midwesterner and a populist in post-Civil War America. This character type was also key to the popular success of Spoon River Anthology. The necessity for the exile type was clear to Masters's contemporaries: Stacy quotes a review of Masters's subsequent book, Songs and Satires (1916), wherein T. S. Eliot notes that Masters requires a "personage … detached from himself in order to give his particular meditative irony its opportunity" (113). The detached, meditative tone of Spoon River Anthology, together with its popular if imitable style, allowed readers to take from the work what they wanted. Through the concluding chapters, Stacy demonstrates how the myths that led to Spoon River Anthology continued through the twentieth century. Disneyland commercialized the small town, and...