Against the more insane forms of subjectivism in modern times there have been various reactions. First, a half-way compromise philosophy, the doctrine of liberalism, which attempted to assign the respective spheres of government and the individual. This begins, in its modern form, with Locke, who is as much opposed to “enthusiasm”—the individualism

Contemporary liberalism erodes the liberal tradition in two ways. First, it promotes ever-increasing negative liberty – freedom from restrictions except the law and private conscience – to the point where it flips over into the tyranny of individual choice abstracted from any relational constraints of family, community or nature.

The philosophers of Greece, down to and including Aristotle, were not individualists in the sense in which I wish to use the term. They thought of a man as essentially a member of a community; Plato’s Republic, for example, is concerned to define the good community, not the good individual. With the loss of political liberty from the time of Alexan