336
PARTISAN REVIEW
antinomy offreedom; it is certainly debatable whether his solution to
the difficulty will stand up .
Needless to say, the same precariousness, in the most tangible
empirical sense, pertains to individual autonomy as it exists in con–
crete societies. Change the institutional fabric a little here , a little
there , and soon individual autonomy as an experience - and even–
tually even as an idea- becomes impossible to realize . Looking at
the world today, it is certainly not fanciful to fear that freedom might
"pass like a shadow and a dream." Western individuality and its
drama of liberation may well turn out to have been
an episode
in
human history, to be recorded (if at all) as a strange aberration . The
"common human pattern," in its collectivism, may reassert itself
once and for all, and the institutional structures that allowed in–
dividual autonomy may be demolished ("disaggregated") , never to
reappear- just as the institutions of countless other human cultures
have disappeared for good. The figures of individual autonomy (if
remembered at all) will then become historical ghosts -like the
perfecti
of Albi, or like the mighty nomads of Central Asia, or like the
hunters of the Stone Age.
History is not an inexorable process, but the sum of human ac–
tions. Individual autonomy did not appear in history of necessity;
conversely, it will not necessarily disappear. For those who believe
in its worth, therefore, the enterprise of understanding the phenome–
non leads to a political agenda.
