Mutualism

The usual term of art in political science for the idea that “individual” in isolation might not be a well-posed concept seems to be mutualism. The first and best version of the concept is the one I encountered in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (though she doesn’t use the term), but it probably has a more complicated provenance. The basic idea is that a human who acts like an idealized individual is in fact in a degenerate subhuman condition. In her formulation, mutualism is characterized by true freedom, which can only be experienced in the presence of a plurality of other free individuals. Plurality is the load-bearing notion in her formulation, and in my opinion the main element of any well-formed notion of mutualism. It is an element which is lost in communist and fascist notions of mutualism, which look superficially similar. In those, you get the sense that the object of interest is a mass of fungible bodies bound by a solidarity of shared pain, shared identity, or both. I’ll call these latter varieties of group conditions pseudo-mutualisms to distinguish them.