How Philosophy Becomes Possible: XIII. When the Individual Becomes Political

If society is something made, rather than simply something given, then another question follows.

Who is doing the making?

The question brings the individual into political philosophy in a new way.

Aristotle had certainly considered the individual citizen. Human beings were political animals, and their flourishing depended upon participation in a political community.

But the emerging possibility is different.

The political order can now be imagined as something that exists because individuals stand in particular relations to one another.

This makes it possible to ask what those relations would be like without the institutions that organise them.

Hobbes's thought is one powerful expression of this possibility. By imagining human beings without an established political authority, he turns society into something that can be explained from a hypothetical starting point.

The state is no longer simply there.

It requires an account.

Other thinkers will take the possibility in very different directions. But the underlying transformation is broader than any one theory.

The individual can now become conceptually prior to the political order.

That does not mean that individuals historically existed before societies. Obviously they did not.

It means that philosophy can construct a conceptual situation in which the individual is considered apart from the institutions in which they ordinarily live.

Once that becomes possible, new questions emerge.

What rights does an individual possess independently of political authority?

Why should one person obey another?

What gives government legitimate power?

What does an individual owe to society?

What does society owe to the individual?

These are not simply new answers to ancient political questions.

They reorganise the questions themselves.

Political philosophy can now investigate the conditions under which authority becomes legitimate rather than beginning from authority as an established fact.

The individual therefore acquires a new philosophical status.

They are not merely a citizen occupying a place within an inherited order. They can become a bearer of claims against that order.

This possibility is connected with other transformations already underway.

If knowledge requires justification, individuals need not simply inherit beliefs.

If authority can be questioned, individuals can ask whether they have grounds for obedience.

If society is historically constructed, individuals can imagine its being otherwise.

If political institutions are made rather than natural givens, they can become objects of criticism and redesign.

The philosophical subject is therefore changing again.

The knower who once asked how they could be certain of the external world is now also a person asking what they are entitled to demand from the world they inhabit.

This helps explain the growing importance of concepts such as rights, liberty, consent and equality.

They become thinkable when the individual can be distinguished, conceptually, from the social and political arrangements into which the individual happens to be born.

But this new possibility carries its own difficulty.

The individual does not actually exist outside relationships.

Human beings are dependent upon language, institutions, traditions, other people and material circumstances. The very capacity to become an autonomous individual is socially produced.

So the possibility of thinking the individual independently of society immediately generates a new problem:

How independent can an individual actually be?

Modern philosophy has therefore created another tension.

It has made individual freedom increasingly conceivable.

It has also made increasingly difficult the question of what a genuinely independent individual could mean.

The political subject is emerging.

But so is the problem of the social world that makes that subject possible.