The document discusses the historical conceptions of individualism and self-reliance in America from the Puritans to the modern era. It notes that while Puritan leader John Winthrop emphasized community and mutual aid over unrestrained self-interest, later figures like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson celebrated the self-made man and economic independence. However, historians like Charles Beard later argued that the state had always supported business. The document also discusses how progressives like John Dewey believed a new form of individualism was needed that recognized social connections rather than disconnection.

1. Week Two – 2A
“The Historical Conversation”
Reading: Chapter 2 of Habits,

2. Self vs. Society
Did the Puritans
emphasise self-
reliance?

3. American character / ideals
 ‘self-reliance’,
 independence, and
 the freedom to determine and direct one’s own
resources
 These are central to ‘American’ values
 They descend from the Puritans.
Is this what the Puritans were really saying?

4. Left England b/c unhappy with the ‘Roman’
influences in the Church of England and the
corruption in government
The Puritan experiment in America would stand
as an example that would help reform the
English Church (and the world):
“For we must consider that we shall be as a city
upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
– “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630)
Their example would be what helped them to “stay
connected” to their society back in England.
 It wasn’t meant as an ESCAPE!
John Winthrop (1587-1649)
Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company

5.  “[We must] “entertain each
other in brotherly affection,
we must be willing to
abridge ourselves of our
superfluities, for the supply of
others’ necessities … we
must delight in each other,
make others’ conditions our
own, rejoice together,
mourn together, labour and
suffer together, always
having before our eyes …
our Community as members
of the same Body.” “A Model of Christian Charity”
(1630)
Self-reliance?

6. The “social contract”
 In exchange for certain
protections from the
government,
 individuals surrender some of
their freedom.

7. America: founded on a promise
 The architects of the
Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution were
influenced by the
Enlightenment thought that a
republic is best founded on
the idea of social contract
between the government
and the people.
 In America, this “social
contract” often slips back into
the minds of the people as a
promise, a hope.

8. Puritans covenant w/ God, not Man

9. We have to look after each other
 “every man [is to] afford his help to another in every want
or distress.”
 “… he that gives to the poor, lends to the Lord …”
 “we must love one another with a pure heart fervently, we
must bear one another’s burdens.”
 [Winthrop warns against the unrestrained pursuit of self-
interest] Invoking the Gospel, Matthew: 6:19:
“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the
earth.”
From Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity”

10. Edmund Morgan, The Puritan
Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop.
We have to caricature the Puritans in order to feel
comfortable in their presence. They found answers
to some human problems that we would rather
forget. Their very existence is therefore an affront, a
challenge to our moral complacency; and the
easiest way to meet the challenge is to distort it into
absurdity, turn the challengers into fanatics.
(p. 13)

11. Winthrop’s sermon has been invoked by John Adams, JFK,
Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama.

12. Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
“The Republican Party “must be
the party of the individual. It
must not sell out the
individual to cater to
the group. No greater
challenge faces our society
today than insuring that
each one of us can maintain
his dignity and his identity in
an increasingly complex,
centralized society.
… Then with God’s help we
shall indeed be as a
city upon a hill with the
eyes of all people upon
us.”
“Liberty can be measured
by how much freedom
Americans have to
make their own
decisions – even their
mistakes.”

13. America: founded on documents
“Take away the Declaration of
Independence and the
Constitution, and perhaps various
public speeches that lie behind
those documents or pass them
on, and as a nation you have
little more than a collection of
buildings and people who have
no special reason to speak to
each other, and nothing to say.”
(Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come:
Prophecy in the American Voice 10)

14. Do you need a B R E A K?

15. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
author of the Declaration of Independence
A republic is based on active
citizenship.
He designed a system of local
government in which
“wards” of 100 citizens
would be self-ruling “small
republics.”
 “Love your neighbor as
yourself, and your
country more than
yourself.”
(Qtd in Bellah et al, 31)
 “our rulers will become
corrupt, our people careless.”
[If people forgot themselves]
“in the sole faculty of making
money, the future of the
republic was bleak and
tyranny would not be far
away.”

16. Benjamin Franklin (1760-1790)
His Autobiography of 1791 and
the maxims contained in his
Poor Richard’s Almanack
establish the model of the
“self-made” man.
 “… the most important thing about
America: the chance for the
individual to get ahead on his own
initiative” (Bellah et al, 33)
“God helps those who help themselves.”
- From “The Way to Wealth”, 517)

17. "All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the
Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation
of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can
justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to
such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who,
by their Laws, have created it, and who may
therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the
Welfare of the Publick shall demand such
Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on
these Terms, let him retire and live among the
Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of
Society, who will not pay his Club to the Support of
it.“
Ben Franklin, “Private Property Is a Creature of Society, November
1789” Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, Norton Critical Edition (1986), 221
Franklin believed prosperous men had an
obligation to give back to society:

18. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813)
The notion of the self-
interested individual was
celebrated in Letters from an
American Farmer (1782)
“Here the rewards of his industry follow
with equal steps the progress of his labour;
his labour is founded on the basis of
nature, self-interest” (Qtd in Bellah, 35)
“We are all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and
unrestrained, because each person works for himself.” (Qtd in Bellah, 36)

19. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
Democracy in America (1835 & 1840) examined the
unique influence democracy had on people.
Individualism thrived particularly in America and
he wondered if that was due to the character
of the people or the system of government –
democracy.
He saw unbridled individualism as a threat to
society.
Yet the worst effects of too much individualism
were mitigated by certain “habits of the
heart” and through participation in social and
public associations. He called this “self-
interest rightly understood.”

20. Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Walt Whitman, embodied
“expressive individualism.”
“For Whitman success had little to do with material acquisition. A life rich in
experience, open to all kinds of people, luxuriating in the sensual as well as the
intellectual, above all a life of strong feeling, was what he perceived as a successful life
… Freedom to Whitman was above all the freedom to express oneself …”
(Bellah et al, 34)
 Song of Myself (1855)
“I celebrate myself, and sing
myself, ...”
the great poet of
democracy

21. Shifts to
“... Working life became more specialized and its
organization tighter …Domesticity, love and
intimacy increasingly became ‘havens’ against
the competitive culture of work … [A]ll this [was]in
strong contrast to ... the often-sentimentalized
family farm [in which] these functions had only
indistinct boundaries”
(Bellah et al, 43, 44)

22. Herbert Hoover (1874-1964), 31st US President (1929-1933)
the Progressive Era
Herbert Hoover’s
American Individualism
(1922) provided a
critique of traditionally
understood
individualism and
argued for the need for
“certain restrictions on
the strong and the
dominant.”

23. Charles Beard (1874-1964) historian
was known for studies such as
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913)
Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915)
The Economic Basis of Politics (1922)
The Rise of American Civilization (1927)
“Myth of Rugged American
Individualism” (1931) revised
traditional narratives that
Americans’ success was due to
self-reliance and argued instead
that the State had always been
involved in supporting industrial
and commercial ventures.

24. John Dewey (1859-1952)
A philosopher, psychologist and educational
reformer in the Progressive era.
Individualism Old and New (1930)
People who drew upon older notions of
individualism to justify the concentration wealth
of at the top of society were not fit for the present age.
Equally, the ‘losers’ in the way wealth had been distributed in the
modern age were inappropriately nostalgic – he calls them vain –
when they long for an earlier age that had not been so mechanized
by science.
A NEW form of individualism was required: individuality could only
be come into being where connections among and within the
broader collective were recognized.

25. John Dewey (1859-1952)
[In his essay “Individuality Today,” Dewey quotes
Emerson:
“The same Emerson who said that ‘society is
everywhere in conspiracy against its members,’
also said, and in the same essay, ‘accept the
place the divine providence has found for you,
the society of your contemporaries, the
connection of events.’”
Dewey emphasised that “disconnection” from events and society
“conspire[s] against individuality.”
… But the ‘connection of events,’ and ‘the society of your
contemporaries’ as formed of multiple and moving associations, are the
only means by which the possibilities of individuality can be realized.”
“Individuality Today,” in The Political Writings of John Dewey. Ed Debra
Morris and Ian Shapiro. p. 87]

26. The Progressive Era & the New Deal’s
Optimism toward Mass Man
Thomas Hart Benton. City Activities with Subway.
(1931) The New School for Social Research, NY.
John Stewart Curry’s
Baptism in Kansas,
1928.
William Gropper, Automobile Industry, 1940-1,
Mural in the Northwest Post Station, Detroit.
“Intellectuals were being acknowledged as a working part of the nation,
not individually but collectively. This was new and it communicated
something of the American tradition that had never been congenial to
artists before
– the get-together, corn-husking democracy
of mutual help.”
Jacques Barzun, “Our Country and Our Culture,”
Partisan Review 14.4 (July-August 1952): 424-431, 426.

27. But after WWII, people grew skeptical of movements that involved
‘Mass Man’ and a shift took place back towards the Individual
No. 5 (1948 by
Jackson Pollack)
Jackson Pollack, the artist working in his studio,
on his own.

28. Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
Author of The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas
Shrugged (1957).
Man should not be forced into charity by
some misplaced sense of collective guilt.
Laissez-faire capitalism is the best way to
assure individual freedom.
“Altruism is incompatible with freedom,
with capitalism and with individual
rights.”
- The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), p. 69

29. Baby Boomers
• Anyone born in the 1940s,
1950s and early 1960s.
• Raised to put “duty”
ahead of personal
gratification.
However, the1950’s in
particular were experienced
by many as an oppressive
“age of conformity.”

30. Late 1960s & 1970s
During and post
Vietnam, the
cultural revolution
and the self-
actualization
movements caused
people to focus on
themselves again
and drop-out of
civic engagement.

31. 1980s The 1980s was an
era dominated by
Wall St, Young
Urban Professionals
(YUPPIES) and
withdrawal of State
supports for service –
aka, ‘Privitization.’
Some say that self-
preoccupation has
bred a cruel
narcissism.

32. Where are we today?