ABSTRACT
Americans tend to think that such notions as equal opportunity, individual freedom, civil liberties, and constitutional thinking are in essence America’s gift to the world’s intellectual history. The very notion of modern individualism does not imply that people of earlier eras—say, before the American and French revolutions–did not feel themselves individual personalities. In 1517 a German priest Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation, the beginning of a long process during which the centuries-old traditional European ways of living and of thinking faded away. The political turning point in the development toward the core modern ideal of human equality came with the American and French revolutions in 1776 and 1789. The simultaneous emergences of the ideal of autonomous individual, mass society, and the bureaucratic state machinery created a serious dilemma for human civilization. Identity formation, nevertheless, must remain an individual’s own responsibility.
