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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 22 Sep 2021

Taken: 21 Sep 2021

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Hidden History •
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Daniel J. Boorstein •

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Individualism

Individualism

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . . It is significant that the first use of the “individualism” in the English language recorded by the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ is in Henry Reeve’s translation (1840) of Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’. Reeve apologizes for taking the word directly from the French. Tocqueville used the word to describe what he thought was an American way of feeling, but here his misunderstanding of American life was peculiarly French, or, rather, Old Worldly. For he used “individualism” as a term of half-reproach, describing it as “or democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of conditions. “When the eye of a perceptive but short-term traveler, he was understandably baffled by the attitude of Americans towards the activities of their governments.

After Tocqueville, the term “individualism” like “socialism,” had very little vogue in America for most of the nineteenth century. Walt Whitman vaunted the “individual,” but he was no man of doctrine. The best known use of the word “individualism” in recent American history was Herbert Hoover in a campaign speech in New York (October 22, 1928), when he offered it as half of the familiar European antithesis: “We were challenged with a peacetime choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a Duropean philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines -- doctrines of paternalism and state Socialism.” ~ Page 196
3 years ago.
 RHH
RHH club
Interesting history of the word. de Tocqueville's book is one of my favorite reads and I have it in a beautiful leather-bound old set.
3 years ago.

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