CONTENTS
Wrestling with the angel
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Author: Powell Enoch
Year: 1977
(To set against Mrs. Thatcher's infamous dictum "There is no such thing as society, there are only individuals", we have her hero Adam Smith's assertion that "man can subsist only in society"*, as well as this from a great English individualist:)
It is nearer the truth to say that society is the only human reality that we know, and that the individual is an abstraction in terms of which, for certain purposes, it is convenient or even indispensable to think. Everything that is knowable or predicable about an individual - such as, for example, his liberty or freedom or rights or happiness - is derived from the society from which we have abstracted him in order to talk about him.
*Adam Smith (1723-1790) Theory of moral sentiments (1759)
"The paradox of personal liberty" in Wrestling with the Angel
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