I. Concept

Individualism is a programmatic concept that surfaced around 1900 amid the ideological and ideopolitical debates of the modern bourgeois cultural world. Even at the time of its historical origin, it had negative overtones: it was thought to express a Zeitgeist that made the individual absolute, subordinating institutions and communities to the self-defined ends of the individual, and thus undermined the basic foundations of society (Communi…