Does anyone know of a good overview of individuality? I am

Try googling
>emergence of western subjectivity
>invidual vs. dividual
>historicizing the self
>historicizing the ego

>>7826441
Thanks. I never actually heard of those phrases before.

I initially wanted to ask this question /his/ but I feared it would turn into some kind of /pol/ shitfest.

Hey OP this may not be the kind of thing you're looking for but Erich Fromm provides an interesting history / theory on the development of individuality in the West over time and its contribution to modern anxieties in particular.

I have like twelve pages of quotations and I can post (read: spam) them here if you'd like.

>>7826446
It's weirdly hard to make recommendations off the top of my head for some reason but what you're asking is actually a huge and well-developed concept in history and anthropology at least.

I can cite individual random things like Foucault:
>Foucault's argument is that discipline creates "docile bodies", ideal for the new economics, politics and warfare of the modern industrial age - bodies that function in factories, ordered military regiments, and school classrooms. But, to construct docile bodies the disciplinary institutions must be able to (a) constantly observe and record the bodies they control and (b) ensure the internalization of the disciplinary individuality within the bodies being controlled.
..or some recent history book I read that says Western individualist interiority developed from Protestant culture's insistence on the one-to-one, direct relationship of the interior reflective "soul" with God, or anthropology (this is where the "dividual" thing will unlock a lot of related concepts) directly talking about how non-Western cultures have "porous selves" or that they animistically imbue "selfhood" in objects and areas, or whether our concept of "selfhood" itself presumes some category of analysis that is/isn't universal.. there's a classic, classic article by Mauss on the emergence of the Western subject that I can't recall. There's stuff by Geertz. The instrumentalization of Western consciousness (Horkheimer & Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, very first essay).

I'm just a dabbler, so it's frustrating that I know how much is out there, but I can't give you a single keystone to it. Hopefully I can impart the vague impression I have though at least, so you keep looking into it.

>>7826486
Does it delve into the historical evolution of the concept and the East/West difference?

Contributions to modern anxieties are something I'd like to read about in the future but at present I am looking mostly for the above mentioned.

>>7826511
I don't want to derail my own topic but how does this protestant individualism relate to or conflict with Calvinism especially the concepts of self-denial and obedience, if anything it seems those concepts work towards what this Foucault describes. Where I live calvinist is both synonymous with protestant and with discipline.

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I want to be a farmer.

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>>7826511

There's quite an interesting element of :
>Mind and Body over Matter in Catholic Europe. (The predominance of Natural and instinctive factors)
And
>Matter over Mind and Body in the Protestant East. (The predominance of environmental Nurturing, which is compatible with the American and Slavic ideologies)

It's important to define what we mean by Protestantism, because while Hus & Calvin can be aligned in some aspects, Lutheranism began by being very qualitative and introduced some uniqueness as a branch.

Hussite Christians are undoubtedly 'East of Rome', while Lutherans are distinctly 'North of Rome'.

English Protestantism as defined by the last four centuries is likely more Eastern than Germanic in origin, which is probably why there could never be an alliance between them during the era of European nationalism. Does England possess more discipline than Germany? I don't think so, but it held wider ties to the outside world during that time. It was better connected.

>>7826690
Meaning that there wasn't a lasting peace between Protestant England and Protestant Germany.

It's a very interesting phenomenon that one Western nation with the same religion as another would find a need for the 'balance of power' theory. In theory at least, fraternal wars would not have increased but decreased, and one country would manage to benefit another, yet the schism within the new religion prohibited this for centuries. Germany's notion of Protestantism simply wasn't nihilistic enough to be agreeable.

England still chooses to play both sides of the fence with Germany, on one hand they're 'the most horrid people in the world', but on the other, they share 'the same religion'. Commentators like Peer Hitchens play this game for all its worth, but in my view go so far as to make themselves look ridiculous.