ABSTRACT
The sociological use of the term individualism derives from Alexis de Tocqueville's writings on American democracy. The classical sociological tradition had an ambiguous attitude towards this increasingly dominant system of beliefs and behaviour, as it did toward the new social order of capitalism which accompanied individualism. Ian Watt has discovered individualism in the eighteenth-century English novel. Georg Simmel contrasts the conceptions of individualism found in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the eighteenth century, social theorists argued for the severance of the ties between individuals and society and the freedom of the individual from constraints. By a rather major extension of Emile Durkheim's arguments, people might argue that economic man is the product of the capitalist economy, while Kantian man is the product of social solidarity in civil society. For Karl Marx, the capitalist mode of production is an economic system in which commodities are produced for exchange rather than use.
