A powerful ideal that signifies the preeminence of the self as an autonomous, rights-bearing entity, individualism first emerged as a national ethic during the half-century after the American Revolution. Elements of individualistic thought reach back to ancient Greece and Renaissance Europe. Over the centuries, various writers have used individualistic themes to express and proclaim all sorts of agendas and convictions. All of these efforts, however, strive to locate the singular person within—or atop of—the social institutions that standardize life. Individualism is, at root, a relational idea, one that responds to and rejects its foils: anonymity, passivity, conformity. As such it has often borne a defensive or embattled posture. This was certainly true in early national America. For some, individualism helped to define the Republic against its ancien régime enemies; for others, individualism menaced both public order and personal morality.
The concept of individualism grew from religious, political, and economic roots in early America. Protestant Christianity, practiced in some vein by most Euro-Americans, rejected the symbolic and institutional props of Catholicism in favor of a more intimate link between the seeker and God. The personalized thrust of Protestantism inhered in Puritan diaries, through which the writer catalogued his or her search for salvation, and in Quaker meetings, during which men and women silently accessed their "inner light" of faith. The conversion experiences of eighteenth-century Evangelicals also underlined this personal connection to God. American individualism also derived from liberal political theory, especially from John Locke's precept that an individual's rights preceded the formation of governments. According to Locke, all men—women were subsumed by their fathers or husbands—bore inherent entitlements to life and property that the state had to respect. Finally, the concept of individualism issued from the market economy that developed throughout the North Atlantic world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In light of this new economic setting, some philosophers celebrated the "natural" workings of trade and commerce. When each person pursued his own interests, they argued, every person benefited. Mercantilist or paternalistic controls on self-interest (and, by extension, self-awareness) thereby lost some of their cultural legitimacy.
As powerful as these experiences and belief systems were in colonial America, they cut against the grain of early modern thought and culture. In both Europe and North America, most of those in power as well as most philosophers understood society as an organic whole, a "body politic" of unequal but interdependent parts. No one but Robinson Crusoe lived alone or unattached; all people bore duties and obligations to those above and below them on the "great chain of being." In Revolutionary America, political radicals who called themselves "republicans" found these old ideas increasingly hollow. Haughty aristocrats who curried favor with the crown did not appear to uphold their responsibilities to the commonweal. Yet such radicals did not seek an alternative to monarchical "corruption" in the ascension of the individual. On the contrary, republicans exhorted would-be citizens to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the political community. "Every man in a republic," declared the physician and Revolutionary Benjamin Rush, "is public property. His time and his talents—his youth—his manhood—his old age—nay more, life, all belong to his country" (Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, p. 61). Thus, neither the monarchical precepts that Americans rejected nor the republican philosophies they embraced during the Revolution celebrated (or even tolerated) the free-floating, autonomous individual.
Nonetheless, the American Revolution propelled individualistic thought toward its eventual enshrinement as a (not the) national ethic. Historians often argue that the Revolution bequeathed a dual legacy of republican and "liberal" tendencies to American culture, and that the latter eventually won out. Individualism is often taken as the end product of liberal capitalism and liberal democracy. Early national Americans, however, would have puzzled over the term "liberalism." Many, perhaps most, explicitly invoked or implicitly embraced Christian and republican virtues of self-sacrifice and public service. Yet others discerned a fresh potential for self-fulfillment within the cultural topography of the new Republic. They celebrated "emulation"—creative tension between an individual and a certain goal or another person—as the key to such fulfillment. Teachers, ministers, and other local notables argued that emulation pushed people, especially youth, to "excel" their peers in learning or virtue, tapping reservoirs of personal energy that monarchy had kept frozen. Some even lauded the long-feared passion of "ambi-tion"—the personal desire for honor and preemi-nence—as a potential virtue, an emotional "fire" to be harnessed rather than stamped out. Such beliefs intersected with hero-worship of Revolutionary figures ("which one of you will be the next Washington?" asked one academy preceptor) and manifested in everything from school spelling-bees to debate societies. For the first time, the cultivation of the self for a distinct role in "the grand theater of the world" gained widespread legitimacy.
Again, though, such ideas ran counter to vital currents of thought and experience. Even as Americans moved toward a popular and competitive rather than an elitist and consensual political culture, and even as they participated in an ever-expanding commercial economy, they remained enmeshed in household and neighborhood obligations. The family economy, in which women and children worked for household heads, survived the Revolution. In fact, it adapted to and helped to propel a burgeoning of commerce in the early nineteenth century. Farmers and artisans enhanced labor demands on their wives and children and used republican citizenship to affirm their authority within the household. Many an "ambitious" farm lad found his aspirations thwarted by his father's wishes. Ironically, proponents of emulation often assailed such fathers as litigious, greedy, and selfish—in other words, as individualistic. Protestant views of the self as depraved and worthless also retained their power over the new nation's religious culture.
The term "individualism" finally emerged in national discourse during the 1820s, as those who inherited the Revolution and its new grammar of personal potential gained civic, cultural, and economic power. The word, and the social types associated with it, celebrated personal discovery and self-definition, not (or not just) personal gain and self-interest. The appearance of the term coincided with the rise of the autobiography as a popular genre. The first of the so-called "self-made men" in America were those who had left the farm, admired and imitated some hero or ideal type, and then invented a special vocation or niche—a "career"—in society. They included itinerant ministers, factory founders, Western explorers, and college professors; they also included many who went bankrupt and a few who struck it rich. Women faced even greater obstacles to self-definition. Effectively marginalized from the world of commerce, ambitious women sought distinction and personal fulfillment in reform movements like temperance, antislavery, and, of course, women's rights. All of the early autobiographers conveyed a sense of strug-gle—with physical disabilities, with financial hardships, and with the provincial mores and local commitments that fettered the self.
By the 1830s, the language of individualism helped to portray the United States as a hurried and "bustling" place, one where the demands of moneymaking and self-making intersected and collided. Yet no sooner had individualism established itself in the American vocabulary than it provoked new criticisms and alternatives. The French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), for example, believed that the America he toured in 1831 was degenerating into individualism, which he called "a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows." Many middle-class commentators, who now worked in offices or shops rather than at home, praised that very tendency. The middle-class home, by design, provided a gentle retreat from the callous world of work. But many worried that this withdrawal hindered the civic engagement and public spirit that made republics better than monarchies. Tocqueville also noted that the prevailing sense of self-interested busy-ness actually suffocated personal creativity and selfexpression. Individualism was, in a sense, its own worst enemy.
Even as it became the nominal core of the democratic, capitalistic world of nineteenth-century America, individualism remained a controversial and complex notion. As home and work divided in the industrial age, more and more Americans took for granted the need to exercise one's ambition, to find one's unique place in the wide world. Competition and the disciplined pursuit of wealth and status became organizing principles of American society—at least, of its bourgeois elements. But the formation of a full-blown market economy and democratic polity only sparked a new quest for authentic freedom and self-determination. Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau sought a more satisfying form of autonomous experience than industrial society, or conventional ideas of individualism, would allow. Thoreau found his in the solitude of Walden Pond outside Concord, Massachusetts; Emerson, in the introspective faith he called "self-reliance." Religious perfectionists, moral reformers, and factory workers all invented new kinds of associations to combat the anonymity and inequity of nineteenth-century America. And the vexed career of individualism stretches to the present day, underscoring the multiple and conflicting legacies of the American Revolution.