In this chapter we will lay out some of the key concepts and tools that we will be using over the course of this book. Many of the core notions such as individualism, neoliberalism, citizenship and the process of responsibilization itself have already generated large and growing literatures of their own and we can merely scratch their respective surfaces. Nevertheless, it is valuable to adumbrate some of the key features as they will be informing our discussion later in the volume. Many of these ideas did not spring to life fully formed. Rather, they are the product of specific intellectual histories, as commentators, educators, policymakers and individuals themselves sought to make sense of what was happening in particular cultures at specific moments. Nevertheless, they have played important parts in contemporary social and political drama, and have often been among the principal sites, objects and instruments of responsibilization. Let us begin with the oldest concept to bear its present name, that of individualism.

Individualism

American scholars such as Bellah, Madsen et al. (1985) point to the nineteenthcentury French social philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) as the originator of the term ‘individualism’. Tocqueville coined the term following his government-sponsored nine month visit to survey the American prison system (Triandis 1995, 20).

In Tocqueville's Democracy in America, the first volume of which was published in 1835, he described individualism as arising as a result of the loss of an older system where social worlds were more overtly hierarchical.