What do I mean by the modern individual?

Since this topic has generated some puzzlement, let me expand upon it.

First of all, consider the Middle Ages: Of course, people then still acted, and still made choices. But what sort of choices? If one was a peasant, one did not even really contemplate being something other than a peasant. (This began to change with the reemergence of cities, which is part of the transition to the modern era.) If my father was a peasant, I was going to be a peasant as well. I was going to do subsistence farming, and turn a certain portion of my crop over to the Lord of the Manor. I was going to marry another peasant, and we would have as many kids as we were able to. I would be a Catholic, I would observe all the usual holidays, and the goods I had would be those goods that other peasants had as well. The choices I did make would be along the lines of, "Should I flavor tonight's dinner with an onion, or with some garlic?"

Although if I were born into the nobility, although my choices would be a bit wider, they would not be very much wider at all. If I was the first son of a duke, I was going to become a duke, and I would live the way other dukes lived. My choices would be along the lines of "Shall I fight with Duke A, or with Duke B?" If I was the second son, I had a little more flexibility: I might become a bishop or an officer in the army.

Of course, in every time and place, there have been rare people who rose above the common condition. In the Middle Ages, St. Francis would be such an exception: Against his family's wishes, he went and became a monk. Bob offered the example of Lao Tsu in ancient China. Buddha would be another good example. But we know the names of these people precisely because their individuality was so exceptional in their time.

And why was it when cities began to re-emerge in the Middle Ages that it was said that "city air makes one free"? It was precisely because in these places, we were starting to see the emergence of modern states, whose residents were not feudal subjects with a precise place in the Great Chain of Being, but citizens, whose freedom to choose their role in the city was increasingly protected by its political order.

Now let us consider a modern individual. I will use the example of Deirdre McCloskey, simply because she came to mind, and I know something of her story. Donald McCloskey was a fairly successful economist, married, with two children, who one day made a choice: he would leave his family, and become a woman.

Of course, this was technologically impossible in the Middle Ages. But let us say we approached people in that time, and told them that we knew of a witch who could affect such a transformation. Almost without exception, those people would've been horrified with the possibility: they were born with the sex they had because that is what God had chosen for them, and it would have been seen as a demonic violation of his sovereignty to change this fact. And if there had been such a witch, and someone had employed her services, the chance that he would survive the transformation would be very small: The society around him would have completely shunned him, and unless he could survive on his own in the wild, he would likely die.

Of course, even today, not everyone alive is thrilled with someone making a choice like McCloskey's. But the state has gradually broken down the ability of other social groupings to effectively banish such a person to the wilderness. A landlord today is not allowed to deny McCloskey housing because of her choice to become a woman. A grocer is forbidden from denying McCloskey access to food, as long as she can pay. Her employer is forbidden from firing her for undergoing her transformation (except for rare cases, for instance, if she had been working as a male stripper). To expand on this example, consider the modern attitude towards having children: children are a "choice," and the modern woman may decide something like, "I will get my career going, and wait until I am 40 to have a kid." And if the child then conceived turns out to have Down's Syndrome, the modern woman may choose to abort her, similar to returning a defective product. Such choices concerning childbearing would have been inconceivable in the Middle Ages for almost all people.

This, then, is the modern libertarian individual, and this is how such an individual has been "created" by the state. (Of course, this process has been one of mutual determination: The modern state has been to a large extent the product of such individuals.)

Another thing I should clarify: in discussing this topic, the notion of "atomic individualism" has arisen. Commenter KP asked "Do you mean atomic individuals free of all social connections?"

But this is a misunderstanding of what intelligent critics of "atomic individualism" are targeting. Let us look at the metaphor: Atoms are not "free" of all connections to other atoms! There are many many other atoms that an atom of hydrogen might connect with. But in the atomic model, none of these connections are essential to the being of the hydrogen atom. It is what it is already, all on its own, whether it winds up connected with an oxygen atom or a carbon atom. (Whitehead, for instance, has denied that physical atoms are really like this, but that is beside the point here: this is the model being discussed.) Those who criticize "atomic individualists" realize that they acknowledge the ubiquity of social connections. The point under contention is that, for these critics, atomic individualists fail to realize that social relations to a great extent constitute the individual, and he would not be an individual at all outside of his social setting. If Bob Murphy had been raised by wolves, he would not be Bob Murphy simply with slightly different connections than he has today: he would not be Bob Murphy at all. (Major Freedom apparently was raised by wolves, so this does not apply to him.)

Finally, let me acknowledge that this analysis is hardly original to me: numerous thinkers, both for and against the change, have analyzed it similarly. For traditionalist Catholics, for instance, this change has been one for the worse, and they criticize the modern state for enabling it. On the other hand, someone like Michael Oakeshott, who according to his biographer was never sleeping with fewer than three women at a time throughout the 1950s, despite being married, welcomed this transition, but also acknowledged the importance of the modern state in bringing it about.