Changing Patterns of Obligation and the Emergence of Individualism in American Political Thought

Sloth: America's Ironic Structural Vice

“…7 Contemporary studies have uncovered a late colonial shift toward the presumption of individuals as more inherently self-interested and thus in need of the procedures of government chiefly to protect their personal rights, a view that eventually influenced the development of the Constitution. 8 Hence, it is appropriate to conceive of individualism in the United States as one genus with two species, a republican species oriented to civic participation and a liberal species oriented to personal freedom.…”