Questions to Guide Your Reading

Carter Snead, “Expressive Individualism”

1.How does Carter Snead describe “expressive individualism”?

2. What are the sources and character of American individualism?

3. What are the sources and character of American “expressivism”?  Why expressive individualism?  What, on this view, is involved in human authenticity?

4. Describe what Michael Sandel calls “the unencumbered self.” What was Sandel’s response to John Rawls’ attitude toward “constitutive ends”?

5. How is Sandel’s notion of the “unencumbered self” similar to Charles Taylor’s notion of “atomism”?

6. What, according to Carter Snead, is the anthropology of expressive individualism?  Why does it lead to “forgetting the body”?

7. How is forgetting the body related to Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of disability?

8. Why is expressive individualism self-destructive of future generations? (Hint: What is required to develop young people into expressive individuals?)

9. Explain what Charles Taylor means when he refers to the “dialogical character” of human life.

10. What does Carter Snead mean when he criticizes expressive individualism for being “monological and ahistorical”?

11. Why, according to Snead, might the erosion of social ties noted by Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor have deleterious consequences for self- government?

12. What, according to Snead, would be some of the virtues we would need to restore if we are to restore an “anthropology of embodiment”?