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A๏ฎ๏ค๏ฒ๏ฅ๏ก๏ณ B๏ต๏ณ๏ณ Louis Dumont has shown how Western individualism is rooted in religion. He explained the rise of modern inworldly individualism as the result of a transformation of outworldly individualism in early Christianity, brought about by a changing Church/State relationship. In this essay, Dumont's thesis is accepted in principle, but several nuances and qualifications are added. This essay traces the development of modern individualism from the outwordly individualism of early Hellenistic times to the new idea of the person in the 'broken' world of early Christianity, then further to the gradual rise of inworldly individualism within the 'unified culture' which occurred after the Papal Revolution, and to its blossoming, together with its corollary, the ethical personality, at the beginning of the Reformation. If finally points to a reaction to this transformation within Germany's Lutheran tradition. 2000 Academic Press 2000 Academic Press 0048-721X/00/010001+25 r35.00/0
of individualism whereas in the opposite, traditional case, where society as a whole is the paramount value, encompassing empirical individuals, he spoke of holism.
Dumont also looked for the origins of modern individualism. These origins need to be explained, he believed, because from a traditional point of view, it is difficult to understand how the individual, rather than society as a whole, can become the bearer and embodiment of ultimate values and, correlatively, how society came to be thought of as merely a collection of such individuals. In this search for the origins of modern individualism, he suggested that one should follow Weber's example-he could have added Troeltsch's name-and attach prominence to religion (see Dumont 1983, pp. 33-67). With this in mind he advanced this thesis: while in Axial Age civilisations and in early Christianity the individual as value was conceived of as being apart from the given social and political organisation, among religious renouncers outside and beyond the holistic society, a transformation towards inworldly individualism gradually started to take place from the eighth century as the Church developed a new conception of its relationship to the state or the 'world'. The representatives of the Church, being outworldly directed bearers of value, now claimed power in the world and thereby entered it. The final stage of this transformation came with Calvin, who suggested that the task of the individual was to work for God's glory in the world rather than to take refuge from it.
Dumont's article and its main argument that modern individualism could emerge from traditional holistic society only as a transformation of the 'outworldly' individualism of the religious renouncer must remain a major reference point and guideline for any attempt to understand the evolution of Western individualism and modernity. 1 This essay, while accepting the fact of this transformation as well as its roots in religion, will attempt to reinterpret the way in which it took place. In the process of weaving nuances and modifications into Dumont's account, both by moving the point of origin of the occidental Sonderweg backwards and by extending it further into the present. I argue not only that it is necessary to distinguish between the empirical human being and the autonomous individual, be it inworldly or outworldly, but that the concepts of person, personality and individuality, seen in the social and religious context which first shaped them, also play a definite role in the understanding of the transformation from traditional society to modernity.
When we refer to the 'Occident' as opposed to the 'Orient', we tend to attach to this contrast two different meanings. On the one hand we sometimes oppose the Jewish and Christian tradition to Asian religions and cultural traditions, such as Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian. On the other hand we also refer to the Western European religious and cultural tradition which has been separated from the Eastern Orthodox tradition since the schism of 1054. As we will see, the special path of the Occident, its Sonderweg, has both these meanings, for its first stage was characterised by a particularly Christian concept of the human being-the concept of the persona-in contrast to the concepts of the other major traditions, whereas the second stage was perhaps a Sonderweg within the Sonderweg, the Western European reinterpretation and transformation of the concept of the individual, a path which separated Western Europe from the Christian tradition surviving in Russia and elsewhere, and which provided the basis for its development towards modernity.
During the so-called Axial Age, c. 800-200 B.C.E., when Confucius, the Buddha and Heraclitus were contemporaries, thoughts and ideas emerged which became important
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