Description
Book Synopsis Drawing on anthropological, socio-psychological, religious, and philosophical material, this book engages in a discussion of what it means to be an ‘individual’ in relation to notions of selfhood, personality, and social role. This theme is explored with reference to the investigations of Louis Dumont into Hindu and other Indian ideologies, and with regard to the dominant threads of Western individualism. Clarifying and at times building upon his analyses, the author follows Dumont in a consideration of Indian ideology (Hindu non-individualism, the ‘dividual’, social personhood); French ideology (sociopolitical individualism); German ideology (subjective individualism); and Western ideology (the Christian beginnings of individualism, political and economic individualism, the philosophical ‘categorisation’ of self).
While most commentators have tended to focus primarily on one aspect of Dumont's work – either his views on Indian hierarchy or writings on modern individualism – the author reveals considerable continuity throughout Dumont’s entire oeuvre based around the notion of 'categories' and the concept of the 'individual’. Dumont’s intellectual background is explored with reference to the Durkheimian tradition, with Marcel Mauss being highlighted as the principal architect in his thinking. In particular, Dumont’s interest in the ‘category of the individual’ is shown to be an extension of Mauss’s concern with the ‘category of the person’. The distinctiveness of Dumont’s structuralist approach is thrown into full relief through comparison with that of others acknowledging an intellectual dept to Mauss, namely, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Fernand Braudel.
The book covers an assessment of general approaches to the study of individualism, with the relevant perspectives of other thinkers discussed and related to Dumont’s approach as appropriate.
Trade Review “…clear, careful, and economically written, and closely focused on one theme…with many careful and subtle points” • Elizabeth Tonkin in Focaal
Table of Contents Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. On Ideological Comparison
Chapter 2. On French Ideology
Chapter 3. On Homo Duplex and l’Homme Total
Chapter 4. On Homo Hierarchicus
Chapter 5. On Structuralism
Chapter 6. On the Category of the Individual
Chapter 7. On German Ideology
Chapter 8. On World-Historical Structures
Chapter 9. On the Category of the Self
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
