Individualism

Burckhardt quotation on the birth of individualism in the Italian Renaissance

A favorite from Jacob Burckhardt’s great The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860): In the Middle Ages, “Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation — only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of

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Yukio Mishima’s sacrificial collectivism, nationalist version

“Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of

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“Individualism in Art” — Wittkower essay

A few excerpts from Rudolf Wittkower‘s important essay “Individualism in Art,” published in Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1961), 291-302. From guild monopolies to individual entrepreneurism: “It would seem that with the breaking of the guild monopoly in the course of the XVth century the artist’s attitude to his work changed. Instead of

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Socialism as *moral* failure (Den Uyl and Rasmussen quotation)

Well said, and a strong analogy: “Socialism is no more successful in ethics than in economics, and for similar reasons: it sacrifices the future to the present by discouraging innovation and inverts the source of positive marginal change by moving it from the individual to society. Ethical wealth, like economic wealth, will be a function

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