The origins of American individualism: Reconsidering the historical evidence

This paper reconsiders S.M. Lipset's well-known thesis that the origins of America's dominant value system can be directly traced to the formative eve nts of the American Revolution. Our specific concern is with one core value , individualism, and the suggestion that individualist ideas and beliefs we re widely held in the American population in the Revolutionary era. A centr al claim of the present paper is that the crux of Lipset's depiction of the American value system, or "American Creed", is a particular version of ind ividualism, which we call "liberal individualism". We assess research by le ading recent historians, all of which casts serious doubt on the assumption that individualist values were prevalent among Americans in the late 1700s and early 1800s. We suggest three key weaknesses in Lipset's historical ac count: the failure to distinguish between different forms of individualism when characterizing American values; the conflation of elite beliefs and ma ss beliefs; and the lack of attention to evidence suggesting that Americans were more communalist than individualist in the Revolutionary era and beyo nd. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible reasons behind misund erstandings concerning the origins of American individualism.