Individualism in the context of Institution

Political philosophy studies the theoretical and conceptual foundations of politics. It examines the nature, scope, and legitimacy of political institutions, such as states. The field investigates different forms of government, ranging from democracy to authoritarianism, and the values guiding political action, like justice, equality, and liberty. As a normative field, political philosophy focuses on desirable norms and values, in contrast to political science, which emphasizes empirical description.

Political ideologies are systems of ideas and principles that outline how society should work. Anarchism rejects the coercive power of centralized governments. It proposes a stateless society to promote liberty and equality. Conservatism seeks to preserve traditional institutions and practices. It is skeptical of the human ability to radically reform society, arguing that drastic changes can destroy the wisdom of past generations. Liberals advocate for individual rights and liberties, the rule of law, private property, and tolerance. They believe that governments should protect these values to enable individuals to pursue personal goals without external interference. Socialism emphasizes collective ownership and equal distribution of basic goods. It seeks to overcome sources of inequality, including private ownership of the means of production, class systems, and hereditary privileges. Other strands of political philosophy include environmentalism, realism, idealism, consequentialism, perfectionism, nationalism, individualism, and communitarianism.

Communitarianism is a philosophy that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. Its overriding philosophy is based on the belief that a person's social identity and personality are largely molded by community relationships, with a smaller degree of development being placed on individualism. Although the community might be a family, communitarianism usually is understood, in the wider, philosophical sense, as a collection of interactions, among a community of people in a given place (geographical location), or among a community who share an interest or who share a history. Communitarianism is often contrasted with individualism, and generally opposes laissez-faire policies that deprioritize the stability of the overall community.

Georg Simmel (/ˈzɪməl/; German: [ˈzɪml̩]; 1 March 1858 – 26 September 1918) was a German sociologist, philosopher, and critic. A founding figure of sociology, his neo-Kantian approach helped establish sociological antipositivism, asking "What is society?" in analogy to Kant's "What is nature?". He pioneered analyses of individuality and social fragmentation.

Simmel discussed social and cultural phenomena in terms of "forms" and "contents" with a transient relationship, wherein form becomes content, and vice versa dependent on context. In this sense, Simmel was a forerunner to structuralist styles of reasoning in the social sciences.

Conservatism in the United States is one of two major political ideologies in the United States, with the other being liberalism (more specifically, modern social liberalism). Traditional American conservatism is characterized by a belief in individualism, traditionalism, capitalism, republicanism, and limited federal governmental power in relation to U.S. states, although 21st century developments have shifted it towards right-wing populist themes.

American conservatives maintain support from the Christian right and its interpretation of Christian values and moral absolutism, while generally opposing abortion, euthanasia, and some LGBT rights. They tend to favor economic liberalism, and are generally pro-business and pro-capitalism, while more strongly opposing communism and labor unions than liberals and social democrats. Recent shifts have moved it towards national conservatism, protectionism, cultural conservatism, and a more realist foreign policy.

Transcendentalism is a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday. They thought of physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather than as discrete entities.

Transcendentalism is one of the first philosophical currents that emerged in the United States; it is therefore a key early point in the history of American philosophy. Emphasizing subjective intuition over objective empiricism, its adherents believe that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention and deference to past transcendentalists. Its rise was a protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time. The doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School was closely related.

Romance or romantic love is a feeling of strong attraction towards another person, the mental state of being "in love" focused towards forming a relationship (or pair bond), the courtship behaviors undertaken by an individual to express those feelings and resultant emotions, and the practice of initiating relationships based on passionate feelings over more practical or ordinary concerns. Romantic love is considered to be a motivation or drive, which is distinct from (but related to) the concept of attachment.

Collins Dictionary defines romantic love as "an intensity and idealization of a love relationship, in which the other is imbued with extraordinary virtue, beauty, etc., so that the relationship overrides all other considerations, including material ones." The concept of romantic love also came to represent the idea of individualistic choice in marriage and sexual partners, although it's rarely realized fully and can be a source of both gratification and disappointment in relationships. The terms "romance" and "romantic love" are used with multiple definitions, which can be contradictory at times.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity. Friedrich Nietzsche thought he was "the most gifted of the Americans," and Walt Whitman called Emerson his "master".

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. His speech "The American Scholar," given in 1837, was called America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence" by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

In the United States, libertarianism is a political philosophy promoting individual liberty. Libertarianism has been described as laissez-faire on economic issues while supporting civil liberties and personal freedom. The movement is often associated with a foreign policy of non-interventionism. Broadly, there are four principal traditions within libertarianism, namely the libertarianism that developed in the mid-20th century out of the revival tradition of classical liberalism in the United States after liberalism associated with the New Deal; the libertarianism developed in the 1950s by anarcho-capitalist author Murray Rothbard, who based it on the anti-New Deal Old Right and 19th-century libertarianism and American individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner while rejecting the labor theory of value in favor of Austrian School economics and the subjective theory of value; the libertarianism developed in the 1970s by Robert Nozick and founded in American and European classical liberal traditions; and the libertarianism associated with the Libertarian Party, which was founded in 1971, including politicians such as David Nolan and Ron Paul.

The right-libertarianism associated with people such as Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick, whose book Anarchy, State, and Utopia received significant attention in academia according to David Lewis Schaefer, is the dominant form of libertarianism in the United States, compared to that of left-libertarianism. The latter is associated with the left-wing of the modern libertarian movement and more recently to the political positions associated with academic philosophers Hillel Steiner, Philippe Van Parijs and Peter Vallentyne that combine self-ownership with an egalitarian approach to natural resources; it is also related to anti-capitalist, free-market anarchist strands such as left-wing market anarchism, referred to as market-oriented left-libertarianism to distinguish itself from other forms of libertarianism.

The Road to Serfdom is a book by the Austrian-British economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. In the book, Hayek "[warns] of the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning." He further argues that the abandonment of individualism and classical liberalism inevitably leads to a loss of freedom, the creation of an oppressive society, the tyranny of a dictator, and the serfdom of the individual. Hayek challenged the view, popular among British Marxists, that fascism (including Nazism) was a capitalist reaction against socialism. He argued that fascism, Nazism, and state-socialism had common roots in central economic planning and empowering the state over the individual.

Since its publication in 1944, The Road to Serfdom has been popular among liberal (especially classical liberal) and conservative thinkers. It has been translated into more than 20 languages and sold over two million copies (as of 2010). The book was first published in Britain by Routledge in March 1944, during World War II, and was quite popular, leading Hayek to call it "that unobtainable book", also due in part to wartime paper rationing. It was published in the United States by the University of Chicago Press in September 1944 and achieved great popularity. At the arrangement of editor Max Eastman, the American magazine Reader's Digest published an abridged version in April 1945, enabling The Road to Serfdom to reach a wider non-academic audience.

Atlas Shrugged is a 1957 novel by Ayn Rand. It is her longest novel, the fourth and final one published during her lifetime, and the one she considered her magnum opus in the realm of fiction writing. She described the theme of Atlas Shrugged as "the role of man's mind in existence" and it includes elements of science fiction, mystery, and romance. The book explores a number of philosophical themes from which Rand would subsequently develop Objectivism, including reason, property rights, individualism, libertarianism, and capitalism and depicts what Rand saw as the failures of governmental coercion. Of Rand's works of fiction, it contains her most extensive statement of her philosophical system.

The book depicts a dystopian United States in which heavy industry companies suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations. Railroad executive Dagny Taggart and her lover, steel magnate Hank Rearden, struggle against "looters" who want to exploit their productivity. They discover that a mysterious figure called John Galt is persuading other business leaders to abandon their companies and disappear as a strike of productive individuals against the looters. The novel ends with the strikers planning to build a new capitalist society based on Galt's philosophy.

Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. The purpose of the movement was to advocate for the importance of subjectivity, imagination, and appreciation of nature in society and culture in response to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Romanticists rejected the social conventions of the time in favour of a moral outlook known as individualism. They argued that passion and intuition were crucial to understanding the world, and that beauty is more than merely an affair of form, but rather something that evokes a strong emotional response. With this philosophical foundation, the Romanticists elevated several key themes to which they were deeply committed: a reverence for nature and the supernatural, an idealization of the past as a nobler era, a fascination with the exotic and the mysterious, and a celebration of the heroic and the sublime.

Jeremy Bentham (/ˈbɛnθəm/; 4 February 1747/8 O.S. [15 February 1748 N.S.] – 6 June 1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.

Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong". He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and (in an unpublished essay) the decriminalizing of homosexual acts. He called for the abolition of slavery, capital punishment, and physical punishment, including that of children. He has also become known as an early advocate of animal rights. Though strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights (both of which are considered "divine" or "God-given" in origin), calling them "nonsense upon stilts". However, he viewed the Magna Carta as important, citing it to argue that the treatment of convicts in Australia was unlawful. Bentham was also a sharp critic of legal fictions.

Traditionalist conservatism, often known as classical conservatism, is a political and social philosophy that emphasizes the importance of transcendent moral principles, manifested through certain posited natural laws to which it is claimed society should adhere. It is one of many different forms of conservatism. Traditionalist conservatism, as known today, is rooted in Edmund Burke's political philosophy, as well as the similar views of Joseph de Maistre, who designated the rationalist rejection of Christianity during previous decades as being directly responsible for the Reign of Terror which followed the French Revolution. Traditionalists value social ties and the preservation of ancestral institutions above what they perceive as excessive rationalism and individualism. One of the first uses of the phrase "conservatism" began around 1818 with a monarchist newspaper named "Le Conservateur", written by Francois Rene de Chateaubriand with the help of Louis de Bonald.

The concepts of nation, culture, custom, convention, religious roots, and tradition are heavily emphasized in traditionalist conservatism. Theoretical reason is regarded as of secondary importance to practical reason. The state is also viewed as a social endeavor with spiritual and organic characteristics. Traditionalists think that any positive change arises based within the community's traditions rather than as a consequence of seeking a complete and deliberate break with the past. Leadership, authority, and hierarchy are seen as natural to humans. Traditionalism, in the forms of Jacobitism, the Counter-Enlightenment and early Romanticism, arose in Europe during the 18th century as a backlash against the Enlightenment, as well as the English and French Revolutions. More recent forms have included early German Romanticism, Carlism, and the Gaelic revival. Traditionalist conservatism began to establish itself as an intellectual and political force in the mid-20th century.

National conservatism is a variant of conservatism that prioritizes the defense of national and cultural identity, often based on a theory of the family as a model for the state. It is oriented towards upholding national sovereignty, which includes opposing illegal immigration or immigration per se and having a strong military.

National conservatism departs from economic liberalism and libertarianism and takes a more pragmatic approach to regulatory economics and protectionism. It opposes the basic precepts of enlightenment liberalism such as individualism and the universality of human rights, and in America and Europe is majoritarian populist. National-conservative parties often have roots in rural environments, contrasting with the more urban support base of liberal-conservative parties.

Sociocultural Perspective or Sociocultural Orientation is an individual's worldview (perspective) as formed by their social and cultural contact. Sanderson's Social Psychology (2010) defines sociocultural perspective as "a perspective describing people's behavior and mental processes as shaped in part by their social and/or cultural contact, including race, gender, and nationality" (p. 19). Everyone possesses a sociocultural perspective and, as human behavior and worldview is diverse, there are numerous orientations that individuals can hold. Some common orientations include: individualism, communitarianism, collectivism, and corporatism. An individual's sociocultural perspective can strongly predict how they will interact with and perceive the world around them.

Christian humanism refers to two related concepts. In one usage, the term is applied retrospectively to sixteenth century Christian thinkers who were Renaissance humanists (medieval scholars involved in recovering the humanities traditions of Classical Antiquity). Another is "modern" Christian humanism, which is 20th century coinage emphasising the importance of humanitarian principles within a Christian moral framework, such as human dignity, individual freedom, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is not to be confused with modern humanism, which refers to philosophies that assert the primacy of human values and frame of reference over gods, theology, or religion in general. It should also not be conflated with religious humanism, which refers to a nontheistic movement that practices humanism in congregational structures.