There were opinions at Woollett, but only three or four. The differences were there to match. If they were doubtless deep, though few, they were quiet--they were, as might be said, almost as shy as if people had been ashamed of them.  People showed little diffidence about such things, on the other hand, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, and were so far from being ashamed of them-or indeed of anything else-that they often seemed to have invented them to avert those agreements that destroy the taste of talk. 

-Henry James, The Ambassadors

Introduction

When talking about his life, Mr. Howard did not feel the need to refer to the help he may have received from his parents, siblings, or friends. Even after his wedding, "his" story did not become "our" story. In the same way, his wife's story was the story of an individual encountering the world and transforming herself in reaction to perceived changed in this world. Mr. and Mrs. Howard did not seek to transform the world so much as to use it most effectively for their own ends.

That they did not talk about their social environment in these contexts did not mean that they did not have friends or that they were not aware that they did. But this awareness came only in certain contexts, different from the one constituted by the telling of "his/her" story. The basic thesis of this book is that the distinction between these contexts constitutes one of the fundamental oppositions around which American culture is structured.

However, as I will try to demonstrate, this opposition, which can be perceived by sensitive natives as involving a moral dilemma, is a logical opposition in which each term implies the other. In other words, the internal organization of American individualism shapes, and is shaped by, the internal organization of the American notion of community. The opposition is dialectical and generative. Each term may appear to deny the other, but, in fact, implies it.

All this means that the structure is not linear. Mr. Howard is neither a rugged individualist nor a conformist in his chosen community. He is both at the same time, although his statements were framed in either one mode or the other. To understand these statements in their totality, it was necessary to know something of other statements that he made. This explains, I hope, a certain awkwardness in the presentation of my data, which must necessarily be linear. I had to present "individualism" and "community" separately, referring to each pole of the structure while talking about the other. I also had to make a choice as to which I would analyze first.

Structurally, neither individualism nor community is primary. They are contemporaneous, though distinct. However, this is so only for an outside analyst. My informants perceived that individualism generates community. For them, individualism is natural, community problematical. Society has to be built. This is a statement that must be understood both as a model for behavior ("Let's join together to make this a better world") and as a model of behavior ("This is the way the United States began"). Society was created by a joining of individuals for the greater good of each of them. And the institutions of' society down to the Farm Bureau were created in the same manner for the same purpose.

It is because my informants put individualism first that I also decided to deal with it first. And it will help the reader, I hope, not to read the forthcoming discussion of ideas about social organization as if it were a study of the dynamics of social structure as a separate domain. In the next four chapters, I will continue to deal with the cultural subsystem of action, with the natives' perception of their society, what one might call "ethnosociology." In these chapters when I talk about a "group," a "community," or "they," this must always be understood as in reference to a whole that is not necessarily greater than the sum of its parts. This is so radically opposed to what I as a social scientist consider to be the true reality of the human condition and what I take to be the central message of the social sciences in general that it must be stressed at the onset, and the organization of the presentation itself must reinforce the point.