Charly Coleman

“As this study has shown, the modern subject had a long and painful birth. Individualism arose neither fully formed nor without opposition, but through intense conflicts and unprecedented conjunctures. Indeed, as late as 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville could still remark on the sheer novelty of the term individualisme in French.8 The gradual acceptance in France of the idea of the individualist self—defined by personal identity, autonomy, and agency—hinged on the matter of the human person’s relationship to spiritual, existential, and material goods. Without establishing the self’s owner- ship of its thoughts and actions along with its belongings, property in all its forms would remain insecure. The Thermidorean reaction neutralized the dispossessive politics that dominated France for a brief, bloody phase during the Year II, and the regimes that followed reaf rmed their commitment to the institutionalization of property rights established in 1789. During the postrevolutionary period, defenders of self-ownership set about fashioning their ideals into a coherent political, economic, and pedagogical framework. It is more than telling that “individualism” only entered into common usage at this time. Even then, the term carried mainly negative connotations. The modern self—whether known as the moi, the individu, or by any other name—would continue to bear the ambiguities of its origins.”
― Charly Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment

“From the perspective of these debates, the Enlightenment no longer appears exclusively secular either in its origins or orientation. On the contrary, it was as much a movement within theology as a reaction against it. Every thinker writing about the self during the period—even self-professed atheists—formed his views with theological questions in mind. At the conceptual level, moreover, the affinities shared by mystics and materialists in their elaborations of the dispossessed self reveal another aspect of the secularization process. Unlike defenders of self-ownership, whose growing perception of divine transcendence compelled them to stress the fundamental autonomy of the human person, advocates of dispossession invoked God and nature as immanent, totalizing forces with absolute dominion over the self. Their efforts to resacralize the world culminated in the French Revolution, when politicians and citizens alike devoted themselves to self- sacrifice for the patrie—a polity that in their eyes radiated the authority of natural and divine law combined with the people’s indivisible will.”
― Charly Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment