LAUSR

Henry Rosemont’s Against Individualism is a critical meditation on the need to rethink the nature of human becoming in the pursuit of social justice as “the essence of a flourishing human culture” (Rosemont 2015, p. 7). It analytically disputes the modern ideology of the independent, rationally self-interested, rights-bearing individual and presents an alternative: a contemporary Confucian ideal of the interdependent, responsibility-focused, role-bearing person. The guiding premise of Against Individualism is that the great challenges of the twenty-first century—climate change and persistent hunger in a world of excess food production among them—cannot be resolved within the “confines of a capitalist economic system” (Rosemont 2015, p. x). Its conclusion is twofold: descriptively, the individual self is a fiction; prescriptively, individualism is a hindrance rather than a help in securing greater social justice. Rosemont’s own prescriptive alternative to individualism grows out of a