When the Sovereign Individual Destroys the Common Good

 Liberalism was born of a magnificent impulse: emancipation.

In Enlightenment Europe, it tore the individual away from the tutelage of kings and clergy, granting him the right to reason, to speak, to be free. Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Kant, all proclaimed the same faith in human autonomy. It was as much a spiritual as a political revolution: henceforth, man was to obey no one but himself, or rather, his conscience.

Two centuries later, that promise has turned back on itself. Autonomy has mutated into radical independence, freedom into a cult of the “self.” Tocqueville foresaw it: in modern democracies, each person risks withdrawing into their private sphere, indifferent to the collective fate. This drift has become a system. Wedded to consumer capitalism, political liberalism has engendered an unchecked individualism, where emancipation is no longer a means to build together but a right to exist alone.

Today, “being yourself” has become a moral imperative. One must stand out, self-realize, self-manage like a brand. The market no longer needs to impose conformity : it produces it through the obsession with singularity. Michel Clouscard saw it clearly: permissive capitalism replaced morality with pleasure and repression with seduction.

The Western “I” and Its Cultural Exception

The contrast with other cultural spheres is striking.

In East Asia, the individual is inscribed in a web of relations; Confucian ethics rests on social harmony. In Africa, the philosophy of ubuntu proclaims: “I am because we are.” In the Muslim world, the umma -the community of believers- remains the matrix of social belonging. The West, by contrast, has turned the collective into an optional backdrop.

Yet this difference is fading as consumerism universalizes itself. The smartphone has become the banner of this mutation: a tool of hyperconnection and a mirror of planetary narcissism. The selfie embodies the victory of the self over the world. Everywhere, individuals imagine themselves free while being captive to algorithms that exploit their need to narrate themselves.

The COVID Test: Freedom Against the Common Good

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a brutal revealer.

In societies where collective consciousness remains strong -Japan, Korea, China- health discipline was broadly accepted: wearing a mask, self-isolating, submitting to digital tracing were not seen as assaults on liberty but as civic duties. The individual recognized himself as part of a whole.

In the West, the reaction was entirely different. The mask became a symbol of oppression, vaccination a matter of personal choice, restrictions a tyranny. The discourse of “individual freedom” overshadowed any sense of solidarity. Freedom there is conceived as absolute, detached from any bond. The result was plain: the most individualistic societies were also those where the pandemic wreaked the most havoc.

This marks an anthropological fracture: some peoples see collective constraint as the very condition of freedom; others see in it its abolition. By hypertrophying the individual, liberalism has made us forget this obvious truth: without connection, freedom loses all meaning.

An Individualist Drift That Permeates Every Sphere of Life

Marriage rates are collapsing. People wed later, have fewer children. The couple, once an ideal of stability, has become a temporary contract between two self-realizing trajectories. The fear of dependence replaces the promise of sharing.

Never have societies counted so many solitary beings. Hyperconnectivity conceals massive isolation. We “interact” without meeting, “communicate” without listening. Technology has not woven the social fabric : it has fragmented it.

The decline of organized religion has not erased the search for meaning, only scattered it. Each person now cobbles together their own faith: a bit of yoga, a dash of cosmic energy, a vague belief in “the universe.” This syncretism mirrors spiritual consumerism: choosing one’s sacred as one chooses a playlist.

The welfare state has replaced the neighbor’s charity with state allowance. It was progress—but also a loss: solidarity has become bureaucratized. We delegate care for others to the administrative machine. Solidarity is no longer a living bond, but a right to be claimed.

Great causes -climate, inequality, democracy- demand collective fervor. Yet mobilization has shifted to the symbolic. We sign petitions, we “like” indignations. Citizenship has become a digital gesture. As Hannah Arendt wrote, the modern individual prefers the private sphere to public engagement, and ends up severed from the common world.

Today, everything is designed to flatter the self: personalized ads, tailor-made content, “user experiences” customized to one’s profile. Ultra-personalization has become the contemporary form of social control. By selling difference, the market manufactures sameness.

A subtler symptom still: collective individualism. Each generation, each profession, each social group now defends its acquired advantages, often against the common good. Seniors cling to their pensions; the young reject the compromises required by intergenerational solidarity; protected professions block any reform that might erode their privileges. Particular interests ossify, and compromise becomes impossible. The national “we” fractures into a mosaic of defensive lobbies. In this society of rights without duties, every reform in the general interest is perceived as aggression. It is the collective version of narcissism: everyone for themselves, and the system for no one.

Reweaving the Common Fabric

Should we throw out the liberal baby with the individualist bathwater? Of course not. Emancipation remains one of modernity’s greatest achievements. But it must reconcile itself with the common good. Reweaving collective bonds without abandoning autonomy : this is a reat challenge of the 21st century.

Democracy must once again become an arena for action, not just opinion. Citizens’ assemblies, local cooperatives, participatory initiatives: the goal is to restore flesh to the word “we.”

Education glorifies individual achievement but rarely cooperation. We must teach responsibility, dialogue, and collective construction, not as moral decoration, but as vital skills.

Economic freedom must be subordinated to social cohesion. Limiting advertising, regulating attention exploitation, and supporting common goods -cultural, ecological, digital- are levers within reach.

Above all, societies need shared myths again. Democratic renewal, international reconciliation, ecological regeneration : these could become the new matrices of collective purpose.

The triumph of Western individualism is also its tragedy. Modern man, free from everything, no longer knows what he belongs to. Exhausted from “being himself,” he drifts without meaning or anchor. Isolation, loneliness, depression are not accidents; they are the symptoms of a society that has confused freedom with disconnection.

To return to the collective does not mean abolishing the individual, but saving him. As Durkheim wrote, “Only in society does man become fully human.”

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References

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Émile Durkheim, Suicide

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Michel Clouscard, The Capitalism of Seduction

Pierre Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals