heeded ethics much, because it has relied on a type of individualism that precludes

a
coherent, intelligible concern with moral matters.
What is the central theme of classical liberalism in relation to this problem?
Classical
liberals have usually argued that a society organized wherein individuals have their
right
to pursue their chosen goals legally protected is for the bestit works to achieve
the
greatest public good. Put differently, via unimpeded self-interested behavior, the
overall
social good is supposed to be most efficiently promoted.3 When they have
addressed
ethics, the sort at issue has been what we would better classify as mores or habits
of
behavior that various features of a society encourage or hinder, not so much what it
is
that human beings ought to do in their lives.4
The connection between unimpeded individual selfishness and the public good
relies
on a specific understanding of the human individual, forged initially by Thomas
Hobbes
and later developed by classical-political economists. It is an understanding that is
repeatedly attacked by such writers as Robert Bellah and Thomas A.Spragens, Jr.5
They
note that such a view is false to the facts of human life, in which sociality is clearly
and
constantly manifest. They contend that the Hobbesian view of the individual is, at
best,
an analytical tool that can serve only limited purposes or, at worst, a grand illusion
that
has misguided Western political thought and institutions for several centuries.
Once they have finished with their criticism of individualism, these writers
predictably
go on to champion not only the fellow feeling they believe individualism fails to
bring to

prominence in human community life, but something of a coercive social system,

one
that issues in such public policy proposals as compulsory national service,
compulsory
health care, severe government regulation of the free exchange that is part and
parcel of
the classical-liberal political economy, and even more radical notions, such as the
abolition of the system of individual rights.6 Others may not be so harsh as to want
to
revamp classical liberalism completely, but even those from the right have
suggested
modifications that may have the identical result, namely, to undo the polity of
individual
liberty. Thus when Kristol calls for more attention to virtue, he is also championing
censorship and a large dose of government regulation of the economy. Clearly, once
the
individualism underlying classical liberalism has come unhinged, a kind of deuceswild
situation develops with regard to the degree of statism that should reign in a
community.
Certainly, a principled adherence to individual freedom vanishes in the process.
THE ROOTS OF RADICAL INDIVIDUALISM
What is this individualism that has disturbed so many people with different
orientations
on politics?
Radical individualism, as spelled out prominently first by the seventeenth-century
English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, is derived from a type of materialist
metaphysics
and nominalist epistemology. All of reality, by the tenets of this view, is matter in
motion, and our ideas do not reflect some objective reality but are constructed