ABSTRACT
Admittedly, individualism has been entrenched in the disciplines that deal with human affairs—politics, economics, morality. The normal and unquestioned mode of theorizing has been to start from the individual and his/her desires and preferences and show how the operations of human nature in individuals produced macroscopic results. In ethics, the signs of a shift are particularly interesting. As long as an individualistic model prevailed in major ethical conceptions, the social was limited to the content. John Dewey treats individualism as a particular historical phenomenon emerging under the specific historical conditions of seventeenth century on, and having specific consequences in human life. Such an unseating of the category of the individual was bound to be followed sooner or later by a comparable unseating of the category of the social. For the individual and the ideal of individualism Dewey substituted the ideal of individuality as a socially cultivated character with its virtues of initiative, intelligence, originality productive of diversity, and so on.
