BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Hobbes’s scheme for the “collectivization” of opinion from above as pouring “the new wine of
royal absolutism” into the “old Baconian bottle of empiricism,” with its emphasis on education
and university reform. 43 According to Wood, English thinkers’ attraction to tabula rasa stemmed
from a “pervasive individualism” that promoted atomistic and empirical science as well as social
theory. Although Wood neglects to mention demands for the individual freedom to philosophize
voiced in the Dutch Republic by Baruch Spinoza and in German lands by Immanuel Kant later,
and while his rather weak cultural arguments for English individualism include private profit-
seeking, Calvinism and a fashion for empirical enquiry and fact-gathering inspired by the
Domesday Book, he does put his finger on a more convincing social cause of difference. A
greater degree of marginalization and disenchantment with L’Ancien Régime may have prompted
continental philosophes to advance more radical proposals for change. 44 Wood’s premise agrees
with Alan Macfarlane’s assertion that a unique individualism characterized English society from
at least the thirteenth century, a byproduct of social mobility and widespread affluence in an
individualistic market society. Macfarlane found English difference in everything from nuclear
family life to a fluid labor market, individualized property rights, a “peculiar” legal status for
women, an absence of extended kinship ties or typical peasant marriage patterns—even a less
sexual, less cannibalistic and more individualistic stereotype of the English witch as poor and
demanding rather than gaining supernatural advantage over neighbors. 45 Macfarlane bolstered
43 Ibid., 660.
44 Ibid., 666-67.
45 The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and Social Transition
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 1-2, 5, 135, 143, 148-49, 160-63, 166.
88