The Development Of Individuality In The Modern World
...Individuality and Cultural History
In Reflections on History Jacob Burckhardt describes that “culture may be defined as the sum total of those mental developments which take place spontaneously and lay no claim to universal or compulsive authority” (55) and claims that culture is developed as a process of human mental activities, "The spearhead of all Culture is a miracle of mind – speech, whose spring, independently of the individual people and its individual language, is in the soul, otherwise no deaf-mute could be taught to speak and to understand speech. Such teaching is only explicable if there is in the soul an intimate and responsive urge to clothe thought in words" (56).
He continues to discuss that culture can highly be developed as the movement of renaissance showed. As he explains that the Italian and European movement of renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Renaissance was a special pure renaissance and “its specific characteristics were its spontaneity, the evidential vitality through which it triumphed, its extension, to a greater or less degree, to every possible domain of life, e.g. the idea of the State, and finally, its European character, (ibid.: 63-64) Burckhardt attempts to argue that the Renaissance was the crux that enabled the development of individuality.
David Riesman in Individualism Reconsidered explains the situation of the movement of individualism, "Men of the emerging middle classes, after the Renaissance, were turned loose in an economic order freed from the supervision of mercantilism, in a political order freed from the supervision of an hereditary aristocracy, in a religious order freed from the supervision of ecclesiastical hierarchy" (26). He also points out that individualism had appeared not only in business and colonization, but also in many reform movements for several hundred years (27-28)....
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