The Kingdom of Individuals : An Essay on Self-Respect and Social Obligation

In his distinctive and highly engaging style, F. G. Bailey meditates on individual prerogative and the coercive restraints exercised on people by large organizations. His witty, on-the-mark comments come directly from his own lifelong discomfort with hierarchy and authority. A wealth of personal anecdotes lend immediately to problems and issues often treated o an abstract and impersonal level, ass Bailey recollects his own experiences in school during the depression years in England, in the British wartime army. and both in peasant societies (as a practicing anthropologists) and in industrial societies (as an academic). He first makes a distinction between the pervasive spirit of collectivism that marks the social sciences (economics excepted) and disengagement - that is, the resistance makes to being absorbed into collectivities. Then he discusses tactics: collectivities legitimate themselves and how individuals resist these collectivities in an effort to keep their own separate identities. Finally, he draws on his wartime experience and on the everyday lives of working-class people to show how organizations usually defeat themselves if they try to define individualism out of existence. The kingdom of individuals is a trenchant and entertaining commentary on the dilemma of being a citizen. Of particular interest to cultural anthropologists and political scientists, it will also appeal to anyone who believes that bureaucracies too often overstep themselves and trespass into each of our lives as individuals.