The concept of individualism is a relatively recent addition to political and social philosophy. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau in the seventeenth and eighteenth century proposed influential interpretations of the role of the individual in the social context. Out of such appraisals came two major concepts that were to drive the evolution of Western society and help define the nature of individuals over the next 300 years. The Enlightenment focused on reason as the hard-and-fast guiding principal promoting such developing institutions as science and democratic politics as the mechanism of individual nourishment and progress. Romanticism, an almost instinctive refutation of reason as the sole moderator of human conduct, dwelt instead on the passions, emotions and internally derived principals of individuals coming to grips with their temperament and position in nature as the divining force in humanity. These two perspectives established and defined the core of the sometimes complementary sometimes contradictory nature of American culture.

The American Revolution, driven by the enlightened principles of the “founding fathers” such as Jefferson, Franklin and Madison, drew from rationally derived ideals of political and social equality for all citizens with minimal governmental obstruction of individual expression. This grand experiment left plenty of room for the popular, “romantic” notion of cultural individuality (and for social differentiation). Beginning with the founding fathers, and continuing through a litany of sometimes dubious folklore—Johnny Appleseed, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Wyatt Earp, George Custer, etc.—and outright myths such as Paul Bunyan, the westward expansion of European culture in North America was accompanied and often driven by the poeticization of the individual.

Despite the enlightened social perspectives of twenty-first-century America, the dichotomy of the role of the American individual still commands the cultural stage, often to conflicting messages. Political campaigns are marked by candidates striving to distinguish themselves from their opponents as individuals and reformers, while being financed by the largest, wealthiest and most homogeneous political system in history.

Sports and mass-media celebrities constitute the bulk of modern cultural heroes and role models, whose claim on the American psyche derives from their fame and wealth, and whose conduct often refutes systemic ideals of behavior. American competitiveness now marks the political and sports industries to such a degree that victory at all costs, demonizing the adversary to the point of exclusionary differentiation, and total defeat and humiliation of the opponent are acceptable strategies. Meanwhile, the environmental movement has elevated the argument that the discerning individual, in opposition to lumbering bureaucracies and malignant industry will elaborate the new role of humanity and be the last best defense against self-destruction, while free-market consumerism converges on the conceit of the individual to peddle mass-produced goods, essentially promoting objects as markers of cultural acceptability and superiority.

In the middle of the greatest economic upturn in history such incongruities are prime elements of modern domestic terrorism, fostering reactionary and combustible individualism in the order of the unabomber, the Columbine high-school massacre in Colorado and the Oklahoma City bombing.