A bloke came up to me on the tube while I was reading this and asked to take a picture of the cover – he wanted to know more about individualism. Was it any good?
What I said: ‘Eh, it’s alright.’
What I wanted to say: ‘How much time have you got!?’
It’s nice to hear from the other side for a change. There’s a lot of (fairly reasonable) criticism of individualism. I happen to quite like it, despite the potential to spiral into social atomisation and so on.
My primary concern with it is that it feels disingenuous in how it’s framing its argument. I don’t think it’s intentional, and I suppose you only have to look at those giant Norton anthologies of English Literature to find stacks of excerpts from essays and books and poems around a vague theme of X, Y, Z. Nonetheless, the excerpts this tends to go with are so small and generally seem like a tangentially supplement to another main argument, that you very quickly get the idea that there really aren’t many people who aren’t raving libertarian lunatics who are in vocal support of individualism, despite it being the dominant social ‘mode’ in the western world in the 21st century – which is a shame, because it could do with more consideration from the supportive side.
It’s not like this is a large book by any means, either. They weren’t strapped for space, so I’m curious as to why they felt to need to pull 2-300 words at a time out of almost random essays and insert them into this reader. There’s an impression that we’re really not getting the full context.
Compare this to the #Accelerate reader published by Urbanomic back in 2014, which has a tonne of essays in full, trying to outline the weird history of this odd, fairly nebulous idea. What, I have to wonder, was going on with ‘Individualism: A Reader‘ that we only really got a few very specific paragraphs at a time.
Towards the end of the book there’s a comically inane interview courtesy of Henry Wilson that is, aside from a couple of at-a-glance reasonable assertions, just a 10-page strawman.
I suppose it depends on where you fall on the question of how honest a person is being with the context of an essay if they isolate one small chunk of the essay, potentially decontextualised from the rest. Is this just an exercise in stapling respected names onto some decontextualised pro-individualism sentiment for the purpose of clout? Could you use this book to build a reasonable argument? To some extent, I remain sceptical.
The book is connected to libertarian.org, who I have zero experience with, so if that connection has any implications for anybody, then more power to you.
Words and Chaos 
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