Abstract
In several recent books by critics of individualism, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin has served as the primary historical example of individualism’s negative aspects. While these critics echo long-standing disputes in scholarship on Franklin, placing the man and his autobiography in the context of the debate about individualism raises new issues. In effect, Franklin is said to lack a social conscience: a genuine appreciation of the interconnectedness of individuals in society and a concern for community. In spite of his benevolent actions, Franklin’s way of thinking is held to betray an essentially self-interested and self-serving outlook. Communitarian critics of Franklin’s individualism raise significant ethical issues which deserve more careful analysis and scrutiny. Neither Franklin’s autobiography, his active social conscience, nor the complexity of the many ideas and tendencies loosely categorized as ‘individualism’ are adequately interpreted when Franklin’s autobiography becomes the epitome of an ideology rejected as morally unscrupulous.
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Notes
Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973).
Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery, eds, Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986) pp. 1, 2.
Michael Sandel, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Sandel, ed., Liberalism and its Critics (New York: New York University Press, 1984) p. 9.
The phrases in quotation marks refer to the last three chapters of Jean Grimshaw’s Philosophy and Feminist Thinking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) a sympathetic though critical analysis of these themes in feminist thought.
‘Now, all Franklin’s moral attitudes are coloured with utilitarianism. Honesty is useful, because it assures credit; so are punctuality, industry, frugality, and that is the reason they are virtues …. Those virtues, like all others, are only in so far virtues as they are actually useful to the individual, and the surrogate of mere appearance is always sufficient when it accomplishes the end in view. It is a conclusion which is inevitable for strict utilitarianism.’ Max Weber, from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in the Norton Critical Edition of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, edited by J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York: Norton, 1986) p. 283.
Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) p. 336.
MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: Univeristy of Notre Dame Press, 1981) p. 175.
Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978) p. xi.
My discussion of ‘cautionary doubles’ draws on Michael T. Gilmore’s ‘Franklin and the Shaping of American Ideology’, in Brian M. Barbour, ed., Benjamin Franklin: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979) pp. 105–124.
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts (New York: Random House, 1975);
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory (New York: Bantam, 1982).
Raymund A. Paredes, ‘Autobiography and Ethnic Politics: Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory’, A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 3 (1987) 21.
See Daniel B. Shea, Jr., Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).
Although I think he exaggerates Franklin’s ironic detachment from his various roles, the distinct personae who narrate the parts of Franklin’s autobiography are well traced by Robert Sayre in The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964).
On the notion of authenticity see Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) from whom I have also drawn the phrase ‘the adversarial stance towards society’.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983) p. 261.
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© 1992 John D. Barbour
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Barbour, J.D. (1992). Franklin and the Critics of Individualism. In: The Conscience of the Autobiographer. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371088_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371088_5
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