Individualism

Individualism runs across two books in Kyle’s wiki as the same idea viewed from opposite poles. In American Sphinx, Joseph Ellis frames it as Thomas Jefferson’s defining legacy: a vision in which “individual citizens had internalized their social responsibilities so thoroughly that the political architecture Madison was designing was superfluous.” Energetic government “was intolerable because it originated outside the individual… it violated his romantic ideal of personal autonomy.” Ellis sets Jefferson’s “individual sovereignty” against the collectivist assumptions of Adams, Madison, and Hamilton, who “began with the assumption of society as a collective unit,” and argues Americans adopt “a more collectivistic mentality” only under threat (Depression, world war, Cold War) before reverting to “individual sovereignty… the ideological home-base for all mainstream political thinking.” The closing note (quoting Robert Wiebe): “There never has been an American democracy without its powerful strand of individualism, and nothing suggests there will ever be.”

Anthem gives the dystopian inverse. Ayn Rand’s novella indicts collectivism (“there is no will save the will of all men together”) and closes on the rediscovered word EGO — the fuller individualist ethic Rand develops in Atlas Shrugged (“I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them”). The two readings bracket the wiki’s individualism–collectivism axis: Jefferson’s optimistic faith in self-governing citizens on one end, Rand’s absolutist defense of the individual will against engineered conformity on the other.

Context: Individualism is the political and moral stance prioritizing the autonomy, rights, and self-reliance of the individual over collective or state authority — a foundational thread in American political philosophy (Jeffersonian liberalism, later Emersonian self-reliance, and 20th-century libertarian thought including Rand’s Objectivism).

Where this appears

• American Sphinx — Ellis treats American individualism as Jefferson’s enduring legacy, contrasted against the collectivist assumptions of Adams, Madison, and Hamilton.
• Anthem — Rand’s novella dramatizes individualism as resistance to engineered collectivism, closing on the word EGO.