Individualism has long been a stereotype of European identity. In such magisterial works as C. B. Macpherson's The Rise of Possessive Individualism and, in a contrastive mode, Louis Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus, the conventional self-view of Europeans as autonomous selves possessing discrete property and distinctive properties appears as a fundamental assumption, the bedrock on which virtually all explorations of European society and culture comfortably rest. In the nineteenth century, notably in the writings of the conservative politician-pamphleteer François Guizot, that self was expanded to fill the image, not only of a nation (France), but of a far larger entity that was at once continent, idea, and culture—namely, Europe itself.

That concept was powerfully exported through colonial and other extensions of the imperial European presence. An outstanding example is the celebration of “rugged individualism” in the United States, where today that notion of tough self-underscores a range of ideologies from official voluntaristic doctrines to the rantings of the far right. In Québec, as Richard Handler has shown, it underwrites the logic and appeal of Francophone nationalism. In Australia its realization as a form of egalitarian “mateship” is perhaps blunter in its gendered and racial exclusivity, but for that reason exemplifies and illustrates the same basic pattern. Thus exported, individualism has acquired a truly global significance: as the “common sense” of universalizing models of responsibility and rationality, it precludes alternative visions of the relationship between self and society.