The post-individual

All across American society, from the right to the left, from sociologists to novelists to feminists to black liberationists, postwar thinkers were united in a quest to recover the autonomous self from the morass of mass society.

On the one hand, we have the breakdown of traditional family structures, of belief in God, and of nationalism—the things in which we have historically found a sense of purpose that transcends the self. As these collective myths break down, the void has been filled by the rise of extreme individualism. There are no gods, no objective moral truths, a

The postindustrial era has concentrated political and economic power in just a few hands and denied ordinary people control of their own lives. Overwhelmed by unfathomably large forces, Americans can no longer think and act as fellow citizens. We look for answers in private panaceas, fixed ideas, group identities, dreams of the future and the past,

Unions and the state might have been outdated, but nothing was nurtured to replace them. Instead, all that was left was individual, atomised power: power that could only be mobilised by appeal to self-interest, and could only be expressed in the choice between options, not the power to shape those options.