The New Individualism

The old individualism unilaterally emphasizes on personal freedom and neglectssocial common interests, which leads to various irregularities in the reality. Thatmakes the traditional liberalism be queried by people. In the circumstances, the newindividualism animadverted on the old individualism's opinion with inherit andestablishment a kind of bran-new relation between individual and society. In the newindividualism's opinion, individual liberty integrates with more social factor, thewhole interests of society was valued. The transformation from the old individualismto the new individualism was successful to some extent and had positive significance.However, the core value of the new individualism was the same with that of the oldindividualism. It is still in the frame of the old individualism and has its limitation.This dissertation is composed of five parts. The first part is the introduction. Inthis part, the author discusses the importance of this topic, analyzes the currentresearch and tells the research way.The first chapter discusses the background that the new individualism produces.The old individualism advocates complete free competition and view that the societydoesn't shoulder any responsibilities or obligations to personal failure, which leads tothe situation that society polarization between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat isgrave and social contradictions aggravates. People don't confide in traditionliberalism's view any more. In the circumstances, the new individualism criticized theold individualism's defects in theory, including the old individualism can not makethe satisfaction come true, which related to personal society value, the oldindividualism has restricted the cooperation between people, has restricted therebyalso development of individuality, and so on.The second chapter discusses the new individualism's view on the problem of therelation between individual and society. The new individualism's view includesattaching importance to individual sociality, emphasizing the sociality of individualrights, emphasizing the importance of the interpersonal cooperation, advocating stateintervention, and so on. These views have important differentiation with the old individualism, which is a kind of brand-new cognition to the problem of the relationbetween individual and society.The third chapter discusses the valuation to the new individualism. One the onehand, the new individualism has positive significance. In terms of theory, the newindividualism has balanced individual liberty and society liberty to some extent, hasestablish a basis for the liberalism transforming from the tradition liberalism tomodern liberalism; In the reality, the new individualism promoted equality, wasadvantageous to carrying out democracy, and laid foundation for the creation of thelater welfare state. On the other hand, the new individualism also has limitation,including the new individualism's foundation is still individualism, it is still in theframe of the old individualism, it has a basic dissimilarity with collectivism; the newindividualism's methodology is still universalism, which makes new individualismabstractly but not historically ground view the relation between individual and society;the new individualism does not and can not solve the inherent defect ofliberalism, which is the contradiction between liberty and equality.The last part of this dissertation is the conclusion, which is the newindividualism's enlightenment to us. The most important enlightenment to us is thatwe must both guarantee individual liberty and pay attention to common interests, andnot neglect any one of them. In the meantime, we should adjust and manage therelation between individual and society according to the social development.