Louis Dumont – författare

In this sequel to "From Mandeville to Marx", in which Dumont established the primacy of economic ideology in European society, the author turns to the different national forms of the modern ideology of economic individualism. By means of a detailed comparison between France and Germany, Dumont demonstrates that the French and German notions of individualism are far from equivalent. Dumont focuses on the question of whether personhood or national ideology is the defining character of the individual. He studies the development of German nationalism and individualism in the work of Troeltsch, Thomas Mann, Goethe and others, and compares this with the French ideas of equality and individualism formed during the Revolution. For the French, Dumont demonstrates, one is a person first and, by virtue of being a person, a Frenchman second. For the Germans, on the other hand, one is a member of the German nation above all, and only by virtue of being a German is one a person.

This volume is based on Louis Dumont's many years of research into the development of individualism in Western culture. A sequel to "From Mandeville to Marx", in which Dumont established the primacy of economic ideology in European society, the book turns to the different national forms of the modern ideology of economic individualism. By means of a detailed comparison of France and Germany, it demonstrates that the French and German notions of individualism are far from equivalent. Dumont focuses on the question of whether personhood or national ideology is the defining character of the individual. He carefully studies the development of German nationalism and individualism in the work of Troeltsch, Thomas Mann, Goethe and others, and compares this with the French ideas of equality and individualism formed during the Revolution. For the French, Dumont demonstrates, an individual is a person first and, by virtue of being a person, a Frenchman second. For the Germans, on the other hand, an individual is a member of the German nation above all, and only by virtue of being German is one a person.Although the immediate comparison is between France and Germany, Dumont's comparative anthropological approach also seeks to shed light on European culture as a whole and offers a reinterpretation of Western ideology and the notion of the individual.

Louis Dumont's Essays on Individualism is an ambitious attempt to place the modern ideology of individualism in a broad anthropological perspective. The result of twenty years of scholarship and inquiry, the interrelated essays gathered here not only trace the genesis and growth of individualism as the dominant force in Western philosophy, but also analyze the differences between this modern system of thought and those of other, nonmodern cultures. The collection represents an important contribution to Western society's understanding of itself and its place in the world.

Louis Dumont's modern classic, here presented in an enlarged, revised, and corrected second edition, simultaneously supplies that reader with the most cogent statement on the Indian caste system and its organizing principles and a provocative advance in the comparison of societies on the basis of their underlying ideologies. Dumont moves gracefully from the ethnographic data to the level of the hierarchical ideology encrusted in ancient religious texts which are revealed as the governing conception of the contemporary caste structure. On yet another plane of analysis, homo hierarchicus is contrasted with his modern Western antithesis, homo aequalis.This edition includes a lengthy new Preface in which Dumont reviews the academic discussion inspired by Homo Hierarchicus and answers his critics. A new Postface, which sketches the theoretical and comparative aspects of the concept of hierarchy, and three significant Appendixes previously omitted from the English translation complete this innovative and influential work.