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Collectivism, any of several types of social organization in which the individual is seen as being subordinate to a social collectivity such as a state, a nation, a race, or a social class. Collectivism may be contrasted with individualism (q.v.), in which the rights and interests of the individual are emphasized.
The earliest modern, influential expression of collectivist ideas is in the French writer JeanJacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social, of 1762 (see social contract), in which it is argued that the individual finds his true being and freedom only in submission to the “general will” of the community. In the early 19th century, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel argued that the individual realizes his true being and freedom only in unqualified submission to the laws and institutions of the nation-state, which to Hegel was the highest embodiment of social morality. The German revolutionary thinker Karl Marx later provided the most succinct statement of the collectivist view of the primacy of social interaction in the preface to his Zur kritik o’er politischen Okonomie:
“It is not men’s consciousness,” he wrote, “which determines their being, but their social being which determines their consciousness.
Collectivism has found varying degrees of expression in the 20th century in Socialism, Communism, and Fascism. The least collectivistic is social democracy, which seeks to reduce the inequities of unrestrained capitalism by regulation, redistribution of income, and varying degrees of planning and public ownership. In Communist systems collectivism is carried to its furthest extreme, with a minimum of private ownership and a totally planned economy. The collectivist ideal under Communism is expressed in the motto that the individual will contribute to production “according to his ability” and be rewarded, in material terms, “according to his needs.”
