Individualism old and new pdf

Individualism Old and New

American Literary History It was in many ways a distillation of themes he had been developing since , when he read William James's Principles of Psychology, but it was more decisive, more pointed, in its periodization of subjectivity. In a chapter titled "The United States, Incorporated," for example, he outlined his argument as follows:. The pressing intellectual problem was then to posit a form of subjectivity consistent with the "change of social life from an individual to a corporate affair," for "the absence of mentality that is congruent with the new social corporateness that is coming into being" would only deepen and prolong the "crisis in culture" whose characteristic gesture was the embrace of "romantic individualism" by young intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford and Waldo Frank 83, , Dewey understood that the first step toward the necessary reconstruction of subjectivity was an "acceptance" of the new corporate realities. But as Kenneth Burke understood, he was not preaching conformity or promoting acquiescence. The central fact, as he saw it, was of course the profoundly corporate quality of American civilization, yet facing it meant neither sacrificing individualism nor celebrating capitalism.