Modern anti-historical individualism means private appropriation of socially produced wealth

Evidence

Prejudices against individualism, taken to the point of Jeremiads, rather than criticisms of Catholic and reactionary thought; the form of “individualism” that today has become anti-historical is that manifested in the individual appropriation of wealth while the production of wealth has been progressively socialised. That the Catholics are the least qualified to moan about individualism can be deduced from the fact that, politically, they have always recognised a political personality only in property, implying in other words that man is not worthy for his own sake but insofar as he is completed by material goods. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1287

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the historically specific form of individualism Gramsci objects to: not a general philosophical stance, but the appropriation of wealth whose production has been socialized.
• XREF: connects to: The aestheticized self belongs historically to bourgeois private life — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 213; Wealth and power in bourgeois society come from fraud or force concealed as earnings — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 430; Friedman’s frontier individualism drew on a historical narrative already discredited — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 1074