ABSTRACT
As the modern world took decisive shape in the middle of the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill polished the liberal defence of liberty by specifying the principles that would protect the individual from society. The manner of life in the absence of society, Thomas Hobbes argues, allots "no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief". The authors of a highly acclaimed study of middle-class Americans find their subjects speaking a "first language of individualism," by which they regard society as a constraint on both freedom of personal choice and the opportunity for individual success and happiness. Speakers of the language, middle-class Americans, among the purest embodiments of modernity's individualism, know they can realize their true selves only away from the distorting encumbrances of social obligation. Emile Durkheim treated anomie as an attribute of social structure. Liberalism emphasizes the priority of the individual over the social. Individuals are said to antedate society.
