African Communitarianism versus Western Individualism

The contrast between African communitarian conceptions of the person and the individualist metaphysics of much of the modern Western philosophical tradition constitutes one of the most systematically developed comparative debates in contemporary African philosophy, and it draws together several threads already introduced in this module's treatment of Ubuntu and of Nkrumah's Consciencism. The paradigmatic Western individualist position, as African communitarian philosophers typically reconstruct it, descends from René Descartes's cogito, ergo sum (Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641), which locates the certainty of the self's existence in solitary, pre-social rational introspection, and from the social contract tradition of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, in which rights-bearing, self-interested individuals are theorized as existing, at least conceptually, prior to and independent of society, subsequently entering into political community by voluntary agreement to secure antecedently existing individual interests — a picture that, communitarian critics argue, treats sociality as an optional, instrumentally chosen addition to an already-complete individual self rather than as constitutive of selfhood itself.