Discuss this excerpt

[Greenbeard]

To try and steer this back on topic:

Nevertheless, the result is that
we remain totally indifferent to the individual and have almost
forgotten that he exists. A man used to be a man for a' that. Today he
is generally conceived as an automaton blindly obeying material or
economic laws. We no longer think of a man as a man, but as a cog in a
wheel, a member of a union or class, an alien to be imported by
quotas, a petit bourgeois to be referred to with contempt, or a
capitalist to be denounced, or a worker to be regarded as a comrade
because he is a worker. It seems that to label a man as a petit
bourgeois a "capitalist" or a "worker" is already to understand him
completely, and he can be conveniently hated or hailed as a comrade
accordingly. We are no longer individuals, no longer men, but only
classes. May I suggest that this is an over-simplification of things?
The scamp has completely disappeared as an ideal, and so has the man
with his gloriously scamp-like qualities of reacting freely and
incalculably to his external surroundings. Instead of men, we have
members of a class; instead of ideas and personal prejudices and
idiosyncracies, we have ideologies, or class thoughts; instead of
personalities, we have blind forces; and instead of individuals we
have a Marxian dialectic controlling and foreshadowing all human
activities with unfailing precision. We are all progressing happily
and enthusiastically toward the model of the ants.

This is an interesting critique because it seems to be striking out at a way of thinking that cuts across a broad range of thinkers. I imagine some political conservatives on this board might reflexively agree with this because of the emphasis on the individual but this isn't necessarily a conservative argument.

This passage made me think of a friend of mine, an economist who isn't particularly engaged politically but swings somewhat conservative in his thinking (he's a product of the Chicago school). He's a disciple of Gary Becker and, as such, he's very into behavioral economics, i.e. the notion that economic analysis can shed light on a range of social scientific questions. At its heart, this kind of analysis is based on a rational actor model--the same sort of thinking that an ardent proponent of free markets would use to argue that the invisible hand of a market made up of countless rational individuals will result in the best allocation of resources. But this seems to be exactly the sort of thinking being critiqued here ("Today he is generally conceived as an automaton blindly obeying material or economic laws. We no longer think of a man as a man, but as a cog in a wheel...").

At the same time, it would also be (and this comes up explicitly in that excerpt) a critique of thinking at the opposite end of that spectrum, like Marxist sociology with its focus on class struggles, etc. In short, it sounds like a criticism of anyone (regardless of their other philosophical inclinations) who believes people do, by and large, act in predictable ways. But as appealing as the author may find the notion of "reacting freely and incalculably to his external surroundings," that doesn't seem to be the way humans function. People are subject to social/economic/political/etc forces and structures and they tend to respond to them in relatively predictable ways. Sure, any of these models is an oversimplification to some extent but that's what a model is: an oversimplification aimed at ironing out the messiness and identifying the underlying currents that are actually driving things.

I haven't read this book so I don't know what the rest of the context is but it doesn't seem to me that his idealized conception of the individual ever existed or even could exist.