If you examine social groups, people tend not to choose things with the kind of libertarian freedom you are advocating. People tend not to choose things that are radically outside of what is normal for their socio-economic group (with all the money power or lack of it to do what you want to do), for example, delimited by their geographical location, the way they are formed. What I am saying in part is that “the ability to choose without interference from “external” forces” is actually false. I doesn’t actually happen. People are always influenced by external forces and people do not join “a group of their own individual choosing” but a group that is in part the result of actually external influences. Plus on the flip side, allowing people to believe they can individuate themselves leads to an idea that they don’t effect anyone else – yet the point is surely that this is false, and their actions, whether in the marketplace or in the ecological systems they inhabit do effect someone else. Hence if they are even minimally moral, they need to consider this when making decisions and equally others need to consider them.

I would handle individualism in the fields you mention by examining the sociological backdrop for these practices. No one decides to start reading the Bible as individuals on their own, but because social forces told them this. But I might add genuinely individualistic readings of the Bible seem to be rather rare. I’m guessing you are talking about contemporary evangelical movements, and it seems to me that, in fact, their reading is far from individualistic. They have very strong social rules as to what reading is acceptable and what is not and they enforce them very strongly. One only needs to look at the reactions in certain quarters to NT Wright’s recent book on justification to see that this is the case. Then again, I’m just throwing this out there, I’d have to spend a lot of time in a mega church to work out what was going on.

If you take the social ontology of Macintyre et al seriously then the ‘individualization’ phase is actually rather difficult to ‘pick out’. In a sense, the reordering is at the same time as the individuating or any ‘surface effect’ of individualising. Hence there is no Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ of atomised individuals before the reordering comes along.

But this is false when you look deeply, as Alex as done, at the actual phenomenon. What is happening is not in fact the creation of a bunch of unique individuals, but of new communities of many sorts often united around products, trends, political, religious, or social sensibilities, etc.

In other words its really not a question of “individualism vs. community” but rather a constant negotiation of social forces that simultaneously create, shape, and prey on all sorts of communities. So we need to think in terms not of individualism as opposed to community formation, but in terms of what sorts of communities are good and which are not.

Its far to easy to fall into the rhetorical binary of individual=bad/community=good. Community can be utterly demonic, I’d say generally more so than “individuals”.

How would you handle individualism in biblical hermeneutics, or in worship, or in political identity and practice, etc., etc? Sure people are wanting to be in a group sometimes, but that is usually a group of their own individual choosing; and the ability to choose without interference from “external” forces is precisely what is being extolled in the systems these theologians are critiquing. Would that person buying the Nike shoes want to be guided in their purchase of footwear by a community or communities of discipline that actually bind them in some way? Probably not.

Critiques of atomism veer wildly off target when they fail to recognise that atomism doesn’t really exist. This is shown in your response in a sense. People don’t form “a group [...] via social contract merely to further the interests of the individual” unless we are talking about formal economic relations. At least not immediately, though the market can codify relations like this. People do things to fit into a social group, or particularly, into a class. This is why I used the Nike example – people buy expensive sneakers to fit into a particular group (of course, not the best kind of one) not to further their interests in a strictly market related one – they certain seek a sense of belonging, though generally one with no element of self-giving.

So what I’m saying is a deeper level of analysis is needed here.

My problem is that critiques of ‘individualism’ which dovetails with critiques of ‘liberalism’ is that weirdly, they believe that social atomism is real while simultaneously recommending a community. This is because people don’t even become consumeristic individuals without wanting to be part of a social group, as sociology tells us. In short, you can’t generate social atomism because humans can’t exist atomistically anyway, they are always seeking social approval. So you uber consumerist kid buys Nikes because he wants to be in the “in gang” – part of a social group – not because he wants to be an atomistic individual. You can see this is in all sub-cultures and all consumerism – people buy not to be individuals, but to fit in. Marxism (with all its attendent problems of perhaps completely erasing the individual – but, naturally, early Marx at least had a response to this as well as many elements of the tradition) at least tries to understand this with some more subtly as someone points out above.

I use scare quotes over ‘liberalism’ since critiques of liberalism often neglect and reduce the vital differences between liberalism and neoliberalism, the latter being the important force of our times. Neoliberalism grew out of a negative reaction to the developments in liberalism (sometimes articulated by Christians) that tended towards a more subtle form of social liberalism where you saw that community empowers the individual – Hobhouse and Tawney are obvious examples. These were mostly linked to theologically liberal positions, a bit like Albert Schweitzer, which is something interesting to note in passing.

There are certainly some things to challenge in Cavanaugh’s constructive account of theopolitics, but in general I consider his work very stimulating and helpful.

Professor McCarraher is exactly right: we are not individualistic enough. In the sense, that we experience individualism on the cheap via remaining (do we have choice, though?) within the apparatus of capital. The most interesting forms of individualism are seen in the nomad, the prophet, the disciple who chooses exodus: the one who does not posses her individualism, but is open to hospitality that may or may not be offered from people along the way. This might shed light on an individualistic form of life that does not hoard and keep others at bay, but wanders alone in search of parables of the kingdom, where the spirit in empowering new forms of living.