Liberty, Equality, and the Origins of Communitarian Individualism
- Bryan Dumont
- May 28
- 11 min read
Updated: Jun 30
The First American Synthesis
Liberty lies at the very heart of the American creed. Yet in the United States, liberty has never been a purely abstract principle. It is woven into the fabric of American life in the form of a distinctive kind of individualism—one tempered by moral responsibility and collective duty. At its extreme, liberty is often miscast as the right to do whatever one pleases, so long as it infringes on no one else’s rights—a libertarian ideal of maximal autonomy. But this has never defined the American tradition in either theory or practice.
American individualism has always been constrained and shaped by a profound sense of moral obligation—not imposed by the state, but cultivated through community. What I call "communitarian individualism" describes this synthesis: the belief that liberty is real only when exercised within a moral order shaped by conscience, voluntary association, and mutual obligation.
From Puritan towns to frontier settlements, from immigrant enclaves to suburban PTAs, Americans have acted on a cultural instinct that liberty is best lived through community, not apart from it. Institutions of self-governance—voluntary, participatory, and often morally freighted—have been the scaffolding around which American freedom was built. The individual has always loomed large in our imagination, but rarely as a solitary figure. More often, it is the self-directed citizen, engaged in mutual aid, moral self-regulation, and civic construction, who defines our national story.
Everett Carll Ladd once described American individualism as “collectivist, though certainly not of a state-centered variety... a collectivism citizens give themselves freely.” Ladd’s observation helps recover a crucial distinction: that American individualism, while intense, has never been synonymous with selfishness or moral detachment. It has coexisted with high levels of volunteerism, private philanthropy, religious participation, and local engagement. It is not individualism in a libertarian sense, but in a civic one—bounded by shared norms, and sustained through institutions that individuals choose to build together.
This pattern is not accidental. In fact, it’s almost exactly what we would expect to find if we viewed American ideological development through a dialectical lens. In classical Hegelian terms, history moves not in a straight line, but through tension—opposing principles giving rise to higher syntheses. In the American context, the core philosophical tension has always been between liberty and equality. They are in inherent tension because, taken to their logical ends, each threatens the other: absolute liberty erodes the conditions for equality, while enforced equality can constrain personal freedom. Unlike societies that resolved this tension through top-down state mediation, Americans worked it out in culture. The result is communitarian individualism: a lived synthesis in which liberty is conditioned by moral equality, and equality is energized by personal responsibility. It is the ideological expression of freedom lived in community.
What follows is both a historical narrative and an analytical account: a closer look at how this synthesis—communitarian individualism—emerged. In the model I’ve proposed, there are four cardinal values that arise from the intersecting tensions of liberty and equality, of the national and democratic ideas: communitarian individualism, moral equality, federalism and republicanism. But communitarian individualism is, in many ways, the cultural and moral precondition for the American Ideology itself. This is why my mentor, the late Everett Carll Ladd, long argued that communitarian individualism is not just a feature of American civic life—it may be the most important attribute of the American Ideology. The balance between liberty and obligation must be learned, practiced, and renewed—generation after generation—or the entire framework begins to collapse.
The Five Traits of Communitarian Individualism
1. THE PURITAN FOUNDATION
The roots of communitarian individualism in America lie with a group of people who have been both mythologized and misunderstood: the Puritans and their close kin, the Pilgrims. These were not adventurers in the worldly sense, nor libertarians in the modern one. They were, in many ways, moral maximalists—men and women who believed that truth mattered enough to structure their entire society around it. They crossed the Atlantic not for riches, but for conscience. They wanted to live freely, yes—but freely under God’s law. They left behind familiar homes, kin networks, and social stability in pursuit of a higher order of life: one where liberty meant the ability to live rightly, not the license to do as one pleased.
We often forget how radical that idea was. The Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower, and the Puritans who followed them to Massachusetts Bay, were among the first people in modern history to attempt a voluntary moral republic. They believed that individuals could govern themselves, but only if they first governed their own souls. They believed in covenant: that people could freely choose to bind themselves to one another under shared laws and spiritual commitments. As Tocqueville later observed, Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine—it was “a political theory, a form of civil society.” These were people who thought hard about liberty, feared what it could become when untethered from virtue, and built a society designed to reconcile freedom with moral order.
John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, offered the most influential early formulation of this ethic in his 1645 speech distinguishing between “natural” and “civil or federal” liberty. Natural liberty, he warned, was the freedom to do whatever one pleased—including evil. It was “incompatible and inconsistent with authority,” and if indulged, would make men “worse than brute beasts.” In contrast, civil liberty was the freedom to do “only that which is good, just, and honest.” It was the liberty one enjoys under covenant—bounded by God’s law and by voluntary submission to rightful authority. This formulation of covenantal liberty—liberty through submission to moral law—became foundational.
In practice, this meant that Puritan towns emphasized both local self-rule and rigorous moral regulation. Town meetings, schoolhouses, and churches were built and governed by the community, but participation also entailed strict adherence to shared norms. Church membership, while voluntary in theory, carried strong communal expectations. The famous “blue laws” prohibiting Sabbath-breaking or excessive drinking were not seen as violations of liberty, but as protections for the community’s right to live according to conscience. Dissenters like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, who challenged communal orthodoxy, were exiled—not because Puritans rejected liberty, but because they feared that unconstrained individualism would unravel the covenantal bonds on which true liberty depended.
This covenantal structure shaped American civic life well beyond the colonial period. Tocqueville, visiting two centuries later, was struck by the strength of what he called “municipal spirit” in New England. Towns governed themselves, levied their own taxes, built schools and churches, and enforced local norms. Tocqueville noted that the town “acts within a sphere beyond which it cannot pass, but within that domain its movements are free.” Citizens viewed their towns not as extensions of the state but as shared enterprises—and thus felt morally invested in them. This pattern—liberty exercised through local authority, bounded by shared purpose—persisted in countless American contexts: school boards, congregations, fire brigades, charitable societies.
The Puritan conception of liberty—federal liberty, under covenant—was a demanding but durable foundation for the American idea. It fused conscience with community, and defined freedom not as release from all bonds but as the capacity to choose one’s obligations and live them out in a morally ordered society. From this sprang the enduring belief that liberty must be structured, taught, and renewed—not imposed from above, and not left to dissolve in personal whim. The Puritans did not give us modern pluralism. But they did give us the paradox at the heart of American liberty: that freedom is real only when grounded in responsibility, and that self-government begins with the government of the self.
2. THE FRONTIER: INDIVIDUALISM SHAPED BY COOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
In American mythology, the frontier is often remembered as the proving ground of rugged individualism—a vast expanse where solitary pioneers carved out liberty with axe and rifle. Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous 1893 “Frontier Thesis” helped cement that image, arguing that the continual push westward produced “restless energy” and a “dominant individualism” that defined American character. But Turner also acknowledged something more complex: that the frontier, while it celebrated self-reliance, also demanded cooperation. It was not a realm of atomized liberty, but of what might be called cooperative individualism—where survival depended on mutual aid, and freedom was preserved through community action.
This paradox was visible from the earliest days of western settlement. Pioneers were indeed self-directed, but they quickly discovered that liberty required infrastructure—schools, roads, churches, courts—and those had to be built together. Out of necessity, frontier communities created informal governments, wrote charters, elected officers, and formed what Richard Maxwell Brown called “communal justice” systems—vigilance committees, claim clubs, and mutual protection societies. These were not imposed from above. They were spontaneously organized by people who insisted on freedom, yet recognized that without shared norms, freedom would collapse into chaos.
Tocqueville, traveling through young frontier settlements in the 1830s, was struck by this instinct. In Europe, he observed, people relied on aristocrats or the state to initiate public projects. In America, if citizens needed a road, a school, or a moral reform, they formed an association. He marveled that “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all minds constantly unite.” On the frontier, these associations were not luxuries; they were survival mechanisms. Whether organizing claim associations to defend land rights, forming congregations around traveling preachers, or agreeing on wagon train constitutions before heading west, settlers consistently translated individual ambition into shared action.
The result was a new kind of community—not inherited through blood or hierarchy, but chosen and built in real time. People joined together with strangers, united not by tradition but by a shared vision of a better life. This “plasticity,” as Turner called it, made American society unusually adaptive—and unusually dependent on voluntary cooperation. Churches, schools, and mutual-aid networks arose from the bottom up. Even as settlers remained suspicious of distant government, they accepted and often demanded local authority as long as it was their own creation. Freedom did not mean rejecting order; it meant building order from within.
Yet this tradition was not without exclusions. The same frontier communities that championed self-rule often denied membership to outsiders. Native Americans, free Black settlers, and Chinese laborers were frequently excluded from the civic benefits of frontier cooperation—and in some cases violently driven out. Still, even in its narrowest form, frontier communitarianism reinforced the pattern: liberty required community, and community was built not by fiat, but by people who believed that governing themselves meant taking responsibility for one another. The frontier extended, reinterpreted, and at times distorted the Puritan legacy—but it sustained the same ideological synthesis. Freedom, to survive on the edge of civilization, had to be social.
Thus the frontier exemplifies communitarian individualism in practice: settlers exhibited fierce independence yet continuously organized themselves into schools, militias, churches, and claim associations. The frontier balanced the impulse toward personal autonomy with the necessity—and moral imperative—of collective action.
3. IMMIGRATION AS THE “SECOND FRAGMENT”
Louis Hartz described the United States as a liberal “fragment" of Europe—a society founded by settlers who transplanted a very unique segment of mostly devout, fiercely independent, and industrious members of a budding new middle class. Our ideological DNA was borne of this strange bunch: the values of Protestant bourgeois settlers and their dissenting ethos and middle-class outlook stamped early American culture and institutions with an enduring liberal character.
Hartz’s thesis emphasized the uniqueness of this founding fragment and its enormous influence on the American Ideology. Yet subsequent waves of immigrants—arriving into an established liberal order—constituted what we might call a "second fragment society." These newcomers were not passive passengers on a pre-set course; rather, they were self-selected reinforcements of the American ideology. Each major immigration wave effectively re-founded America in spirit, replenishing and even amplifying its foundational liberal values by bringing new energy and personal commitment to the creed.
Every act of migration is, at its core, an expression of human agency—a bold individualistic choice. The millions who crossed oceans to reach the United States did so as active agents of their own destiny, embodying a spirit of risk-taking and self-reliance. They opted out of the familiar bonds of home—often fleeing class-bound societies, state persecution, or stagnant economies—and chose a republic free of feudal hierarchy, where individual effort promised advancement. This self-selection produced immigrant streams inclined toward America’s ethos. In effect, those who most believed in self-making were the ones most likely to uproot themselves to pursue it.
Upon arrival, immigrants did not simply assimilate. Rather, they actively recharged the nation’s entrepreneurial and civic culture through their labor, ingenuity, and institution-building. They became dynamic economic actors, started businesses at high rates, and organized a wide array of ethnic associations that mirrored and reinforced the civic practices of earlier Americans. These were not cultural anomalies; they were ideological affirmations. Through hard work and voluntary cooperation, immigrants breathed new life into the tradition of communitarian individualism.
This revitalization was visible in communities across the country. Italian Americans in Boston established food markets and bakeries that anchored neighborhoods. Jewish immigrants in New York built educational societies and mutual aid networks that helped their children ascend into the professions. Irish laborers in Chicago and New York formed fraternal orders and eventually helped shape political machines that gave voice and representation to immigrant neighborhoods. Chinese immigrants in San Francisco organized clan associations and regional aid societies to defend their community in the face of legal exclusion. These were not isolated episodes of cultural preservation; they were living affirmations of the communitarian individualism value at the center of our shared ideology. They recreated it in new languages and new settings, but grounded in the same commitments: self-reliance, voluntary association, and the moral promise of earned equality.
Immigrants exercised the liberty to reinvent themselves—they came to America to enjoy freedoms unavailable at home. At the same time, their presence posed a question of equality: would these newcomers be accepted as full and equal members of society? By striving for the American Dream, immigrants challenged the nation to live up to its creed that merit—not birth or caste—should determine destiny. In doing so, they helped ensure that the liberty-equality tension at the heart of the American Ideology did not stagnate. They kept it alive.
Across these founding moments—the Puritan covenant, the frontier compact, the immigrant neighborhood—we see a recurring truth: liberty in America has rarely existed in isolation. It has flourished when rooted in community, shaped by conscience, and renewed through voluntary association.
In the next chapter, we’ll explore how that pattern came to define American civic life—and why its erosion today threatens not just our institutions, but our ideological identity.
What is the American Ideology? America Ideologue is a new Substack series that examines that question and introduces a bold and timely thesis: that America is, and has always been, defined by a coherent—if often unspoken—ideology. Most nations are bound by land, blood, or tradition. But as G.K. Chesterton observed, America is “the only nation...founded on a creed.”
This series explores how that creed was not merely an aspirational abstraction, but a working ideology deliberately enacted through constitutional design, civic institutions, and cultural norms. The analytic framework I developed as part of an unfinished doctoral dissertation aborted thirty years ago provides a way to define and possibly restore the American Ideology as a true ideology.
The question at the heart of the series is both urgent and enduring: Can the ideology that once bound us together still hold?
- TABLE OF CONTENTS -
MODULE I. FOUNDATIONS OF IDEOLOGY
This module sets the conceptual groundwork, clarifies the stakes, and establishes the need for a new analytic model.
Introduces the project and its provocations. Outlines the goals of this project. Challenges modern cynicism about ideology and stakes the claim that America has one.
A personal narrative rooted in Bellah, Putnam, and Ladd. Establishes the cultural infrastructure necessary for ideology to function.
Defines ideology as a dual system (normative + operational). Separates ideology from partisanship, movements, and opinion. Includes historical grounding in de Tracy, Marx, and contemporary political theory.
For much of our history, parties appeared curiously idea-less. They were reactive rather than visionary, transactional rather than transformational. For a nation founded on ideas, how is it that its political parties are non-ideological?
Survey of major intellectual schools: Hartz, Lipset, Ladd, Smith, Bellah, Sandel, Hofstadter. The need for an analytic model.
MODULE II. THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY REVEALED
“The Methodology.” Revealing a new systematic approach to discovering, understanding and defining the American Ideology.
Introduces the two-axis analytic model that defines the American Ideology. Together, these axes give rise to four cardinal values at the center—values that synthesize these tensions into a coherent system.
6. Communitarian Individualism
Explores the American expression of liberty—not as unbounded autonomy, but as liberty constrained by moral obligation, civic duty, and belonging.
6A. The First American Synthesis: Liberty, Equality, and the Origins of Communitarian Individualism
6B. The Five Habits of American Liberty: Freedom’s Architecture-The Five Traits That Define Communitarian Individualism
6C. America at a Standstill: What the Decline in Mobility Means for the American Ideology
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