Balibar begins his text as follows: "I cannot say if the expression “possessive individualism” was invented by MacPherson in his 1962 book, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, or if he took it from another source. What is sure, however, is that from that moment onwards it became an extraordinarily successful instrument of historical analysis and ethical judgment which largely escaped the original intentions of the author. I find it especially remarkable that the category could be invoked at the same time by writers coming from opposite ideologies: those who took it as an index of all the negativecharacteristics of modernity which should be criticized and rejected – namely an absolute domination of utilitarian values, the logic of profit and commodification, a suppression of all collective or communitarian dimensions of human life – and those who saw it as a positive definition of the anthropological prerequisites of social and political theory, a counterpart to the descriptive category of “methodological individualism” and the normative cate- gory of “rational behavior” from a liberal point of view.

Let us recall that the term “individualism” was invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It replaced such notions as self-love and selfishness, amour- propre and égoïsme in French, Eigenliebe or Selbstsucht in German, progressively shifting from a moral to an analytical discourse. Tocqueville’s celebrated book on Democracy in America has particularly remarkable formulations in this respect.1It then became an issue to decide whether every form of “individualism” derived from the logic of appropriation, and conversely if the development of private property was the determining factor in the isolation and the promotion of individuality. The question could be displaced into various directions. In the sociological tradition, it was never resolved whether possessive individualism represented a general structure of social organization which had triumphed under certain historical conditions, or whether it was typical only of a specific realm of human behavior, e.g., the economic realm, where the generalization of market institutions imposed the anthropological figure of homo oeconomicus."