Page:An introduction to ethics.djvu/240

223 examine briefly the meaning of socialism and individualism, and indicate the errors which they contain in the extreme form which they often assume.

Individualism emphasises the rights which the individual possesses in the state and against the state. It assumes that the individual has, to start with, a large stock of natural rights, rights to live, to work, to enjoy the produce of his work, to perform his function without molestation from other individuals or from the state itself. In particular, individualism asserts the right of liberty. Liberty, it maintains, is a natural right, and every encroachment of the state upon the private freedom of its individual citizens must be resisted to the last. It is assumed that the laws of the state and political restrictions are constantly tending to lessen the freedom of the individual ; and that individual freedom is possible only if the state and its regulations are held at arms' length. In a state of nature, it is supposed, the individual is wholly free; but as social communities develop, slice after slice is cut from his freedom until hardly anything remains. An extreme individualism regards the free life of Robinson Crusoe as its ideal. Crusoe on his solitary island was free from all state interference; no social restrictions nor moral laws nor political regulations encroached upon his liberty of thought and action. He was monarch of all he surveyed. Now a little reflection is sufficient to show the inadequacy of an individualism of this extreme type. The whole individualist theory rests on a false view of freedom. It is not true that freedom means absolute independence of all restrictions and