Thomas Hobbes left us with a fascinating dilemma., On the one hand, his description of humans as wholly self-interested beings, only linked by a Social Contract, has been most helpful politically. It has shaped the idea of freedom that lies behind modern individualism. Repeatedly, it has enabled reformers to widen their consultations – to spread the franchise – to insist that there is no substitute for "one man one vote".
On the other hand, in personal life it is not half so helpful. The trouble there is that not all our relations with the people round us are power-relations. Though we do very often want to be free from their demands, we also badly want to be free to make demands on them, and all these demands form parts of patterns which, as a whole, we may still want to be involved in. However tiresome other people are, we do not really want to get rid of them. When we worry about this, it surely emerges that Freedom, as an ideal, is merely a blank form, negative and neutral. It only means something clear when we specify just what we want to be free from and free for. Some demands are constitutive parts of our lives. We would not be ourselves without them.
For instance, what about families? Freedom from them – especially freedom of children from their elders – has been a prime theme of individualistic thinking from the eighteenth-century novelists on to R.D.Laing. And the little that Hobbes says on the topic shows just why. He declares flatly that, apart from the demands of a wider social contract,
a family is a little Monarchy, whether that Family consist of a man and his children, or of a man and his servants, or of a man and his children and servants together.
Yes, there is something odd about these lists and we'll consider it in a moment. The main idea, however, is that these people, having chosen to appoint someone as their protector, must accept his absolute authority over them. Considering how little voice the children ever had in the choosing this is surely very strange. It is a wild attempt to stretch the Social Contract model so as to justify traditional ideas of paternal authority. It shows us just how powerful and entrenched those ideas still were. It is because of that power that Romantic literature is full of stories of young people struggling, often successfully, to escape from the prisons built by their uncomprehending parents and parent-figures.
Often, however, their first act after escaping is to enchain themselves again by getting married. And here at last we encounter that awkward female family-member whom Hobbes forgot when he made his lists. I think the reason why he and his fellow-theorists found it so hard to see this person is that they really did not think of her as a substantial social item at all. They saw her mainly as padding, put there to ease the collisions between the solid, rational objects who had signed the contract. After a time, however, issues about her point of view and her relations to those around her inevitably did begin to surface. And at that point marriage itself began to come in question. Mightn't it too become a prison?
Reformers such as Shelley and the Mills thought that it might, so they campaigned vigorously to loosen its bars, hoping that, in the end, it might come to be seen as unnecessary and could be abandoned. This is a simple issue, they said. Either you love each other or you do not. So you straightforwardly decide either to live together or to part – making, of course, responsible arrangements for the children, if you have any. But might it perhaps be wiser not to have them in the first place? Then you are really free to do as you choose…
All this became part of a much wider campaign, conducted partly by Nietzsche and partly by the Existentialists, to exalt Freedom above all other ideals, isolating modern individuals in pure and heroic independence. Like all such one-sided campaigns this ignores crucial aspects of our social nature. We are not adapted to be independent items, isolated brains, intelligent billiard-balls which need no sustenance and could choose to live anywhere. We are earthly organisms, framed to interact continually with the complex ecosystems of which we are a tiny part. Though we all need some solitude and some independence, total isolation is for us a desolate and meaningless state - about the worst thing that can happen to us.
We really need to become clearer about this because the ideas that we have of our own nature have a lot of effect on our behaviour. Most humans, throughout most of history, have surely seen themselves as parts of a greater whole, continuous both with the life around them and with whatever higher powers may be acting within it. They have not aimed to become independent of it, much less (as is now sometimes suggested) to run the whole show.
Campaigners for modern extreme individualism have, I think, often represented this whole accepting tradition as something childish, an unsophisticated stage in development towards a fully adult individualism,. To the contrary, I am suggesting that their kind of individualism, like many other world-pictures, is just a local and limited point of view – just one element in an imagery which has been quite useful for political purposes but cannot serve as a general view of life. It needs to be seen as one among the many visions out of which we constantly try to forge a workable world-view. There is nothing specially adult about treating it as a final revelation.