Individualism

Individualism is the view that each man is an independent, volitional being who owns his own life, and that a group has no existence, no consciousness and no rights apart from the individuals composing it. Objectivism holds it as both a metaphysical identification and its political consequence, and treats collectivism as its opposite.

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
~ Ayn Rand, "Racism", The Virtue of Selfishness

The metaphysical claim

The argument does not start with a preference for solitude or a claim that men do better alone. It starts with a fact about consciousness: thinking is done by individual minds, one at a time.

There is no collective consciousness. A committee does not perceive; a nation does not reason; a crowd does not have an idea. When we say that a society knows something, we mean that individuals in it know it and have communicated it. Every invention, every discovery, every advance that separates a modern life from a Palaeolithic one was made by particular people, sometimes working together and always building on predecessors, but the thinking in each case was somebody's.

Because the mind is the means of survival and the mind is individual, responsibility is individual too. A man cannot be made to understand, cannot borrow a conviction, and cannot delegate his judgment without ceasing to exercise it. See Reason, Volition and Independence.

The political consequence

If men are individuals in this sense, then each is an end in himself. He is not a means to the ends of other men, and they are not means to his. What follows is the principle of individual rights: a right is held by a person, and a group can claim no authority its members do not individually possess.

This is what rules out "the public good" as a justification for coercion. The public is a number of individuals; a benefit conferred on some of them at the expense of the rest is not a benefit to the public, only to the counted half. See Politics and Capitalism.

Individualism as a virtue

Practised by a person rather than stated as a doctrine, individualism means independence: taking reality rather than other people as one's primary orientation. It also requires justice, since holding people responsible for their own actions is what treating them as individuals amounts to in practice.

“There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.”
~ Ayn Rand

The non-conformist of that description is still taking other people as his standard; he has only changed the sign. An independent man is not defined by agreement or disagreement with anyone.

Common misunderstandings

That it means being a loner. Objectivism holds other people to be among the greatest values available to a man — as traders, colleagues, friends and objects of love. What it rejects is the claim that their needs constitute a claim on his life. See Trader Principle.
That it denies society matters. Division of labour and the transmission of knowledge across generations are enormous values, and Rand said as much. The point is about who does the thinking, not about whether cooperation pays.
That it is the same as atomism or selfishness in the crude sense. Individualism is a statement about the locus of thought and responsibility. What a man then does with his life is the subject of ethics. See Egoism.
That group identity is thereby denied to exist. People obviously share cultures, languages and histories. The claim is that none of that gives a group a mind of its own, or moral standing over its members. Racism, on Rand's analysis, is collectivism applied to ancestry — judging a man by his genes rather than his character.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. "Racism" and "Collectivized 'Rights'", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
Rand, Ayn. "The Soul of an Individualist", For The New Intellectual — Roark's courtroom speech.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 10.

External links

Individualism at the Ayn Rand Lexicon