Editing Individualism (section)

=== As creative independent lifestyle ===
[[File:Oscar Wilde by Napoleon Sarony. Three-quarter-length photograph, seated.jpg|thumb|left|upright=0.7|[[Oscar Wilde]], famous [[Irish people|Irish]] [[socialist]] writer of the [[decadent movement]] and famous [[dandy]]]]
The anarchist<ref>"The most ambitious contribution to literary anarchism during the 1890s was undoubtedly Oscar Wilde ''The Soul of Man under Socialism''. Wilde, as we have seen, declared himself an anarchist on at least one occasion during the 1890s, and he greatly admired [[Peter Kropotkin]], whom he had met. Later, in ''De Profundis'', he described Kropotkin's life as one "of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own experience" and talked of him as "a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ that seems coming out of Russia." But in ''The Soul of Man under Socialism'', which appeared in 1890, it is Godwin rather than Kropotkin whose influence seems dominant." George Woodcock. ''Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements.'' 1962. (p. 447).</ref> writer and [[Bohemianism|bohemian]] [[Oscar Wilde]] wrote in his famous essay ''[[The Soul of Man under Socialism]]'' that "Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine."<ref name="flag.blackened.net"/> For anarchist historian [[George Woodcock]], "Wilde's aim in ''The Soul of Man under Socialism'' is to seek the society most favorable to the artist, [...] for Wilde art is the supreme end, containing within itself enlightenment and regeneration, to which all else in society must be subordinated. [...] Wilde represents the anarchist as [[aesthete]]."<ref name="Anarchism 1962. p. 447"/> In this way, ''individualism'' has been used to denote a personality with a strong tendency towards self-creation and experimentation as opposed to tradition or popular mass opinions and behaviors.<ref name="thefreedictionary.com"/><ref name="Bohemia: The Underworld of Art"/>

Anarchist writer [[Murray Bookchin]] describes a lot of individualist anarchists as people who "expressed their opposition in uniquely personal forms, especially in fiery tracts, outrageous behavior, and aberrant lifestyles in the cultural ghettos of fin de siècle New York, Paris, and London. As a credo, individualist anarchism remained largely a bohemian lifestyle, most conspicuous in its demands for sexual freedom ('[[free love]]') and enamored of innovations in art, behavior, and clothing."<ref name="bohemian individualism"/>

In relation to this view of individuality, French individualist anarchist [[Émile Armand]] advocated [[ethical egoism|egoistical]] denial of social conventions and dogmas to live in accord to one's own ways and desires in daily life since he emphasized anarchism as a way of life and practice. In this way, he opined that "the anarchist individualist tends to reproduce himself, to perpetuate his spirit in other individuals who will share his views and who will make it possible for a state of affairs to be established from which authoritarianism has been banished. It is this desire, this will, not only to live, but also to reproduce oneself, which we shall call 'activity.{{'}}"<ref name="lifeactivity">{{cite web|url=http://www.spaz.org/~dan/individualist-anarchist/library/emile-armand/life-activity.html|title=Emil Armand "Anarchist Individualism as a Life and Activity"|last=_wlo:dek}}</ref>

In the book ''Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism'', humanist philosopher [[Tzvetan Todorov]] identifies individualism as an important current of socio-political thought within modernity and as examples of it he mentions [[Michel de Montaigne]], [[François de La Rochefoucauld (writer)|François de La Rochefoucauld]], [[Marquis de Sade]], and [[Charles Baudelaire]].<ref name="Princeton University Press 2002">''Imperfect garden : the legacy of humanism''. Princeton University Press. 2002.</ref> In La Rochefoucauld, he identifies a tendency similar to [[stoicism]] in which "the honest person works his being in the manner of a sculptor who searches the liberation of the forms which are inside a block of marble, to extract the truth of that matter."<ref name="Princeton University Press 2002"/> In Baudelaire, he finds the [[dandy]] trait in which one searches to cultivate "the idea of beauty within oneself, of satisfying one's passions of feeling and thinking."<ref name="Princeton University Press 2002"/>

The Russian-American poet [[Joseph Brodsky]] once wrote that "[t]he surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even{{snd}}if you will{{snd}}eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://quotes.dictionary.com/The_surest_defense_against_Evil_is_extreme_individualism |title=Dictionary.com|url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101119120030/http://quotes.dictionary.com/The_surest_defense_against_Evil_is_extreme_individualism |archive-date=2010-11-19 }}</ref> [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]] famously declared that "[w]hoso would be a man must be a nonconformist"{{snd}}a point of view developed at length in both the life and work of [[Henry David Thoreau]]. Equally memorable and influential on [[Walt Whitman]] is Emerson's idea that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines". Emerson opposed on principle the reliance on civil and religious social structures precisely because through them the individual approaches the divine second-hand, mediated by the once original experience of a genius from another age. According to Emerson, "[an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man." To achieve this original relation, Emerson stated that one must "[i]nsist on one's self; never imitate", for if the relationship is secondary the connection is lost.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://iep.utm.edu/ralph-waldo-emerson/|title=Emerson, Ralph Waldo &#124; Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy}}</ref>