so individualism is a key concept in liberalism in fact it's a core concept that other concepts rely upon and individualism is the idea but the individuals of supreme importance in terms of their rights in terms of their need over a collective group society is basically just an aggregation of individuals a fat lock would say that we join together in voluntary association with the social contract in order to join society because we're better off doing that but the individual is paramount this idea is very different to the idea of collectivism which we see particularly in socialism traditional conservativism even in Islamic ideas and also in Confucian ideas where the individual is subsumed within a collective be it the collective of the nation be it the collective of a class such as the working class or even the family so the individual comes first and this basically stems from the Enlightenment and it stems from the idea that the individual should come first which is very different of course to think of feudal society where the individual is very much part of a certain station within that society so the good thing about this is it's sort of arguably is an anti-slavery and anti-imperialism anti-racist anti-homophobia so these aspects of liberalism put the individual first and so the energy is individuals logically morally prior to society it can be no society without individuals and so Kant an Enlightenment +4 argues that individuals are ends in themselves not means to an end the emphasizes cause the dignity and the individual worth of every human being so not of course emphasized human rights universal human rights where he argued that no one ought to harm another in his life health liberty or possessions so that for Locke the individual comes first and so that they made formal social contract in order to join society to be better off so a lot of these ideas of enlightened phosphors are patil we call classical liberalism so for classical liberals they see very much the individual as maximizing their self-interest their self-reliance of maximizing their utility for example promoting their own happiness within the marketplace is how Adam Smith an economic level might see the individual so this is often called egoistical individualism and another term for it might be at HAP atomism which is the NIU society made up simply a collection of self-interested self-sufficient individuals a bit like atoms within a material okay so many of course many political thinkers dispute this and also starting individualist and so we look at the state of the consequences you know a minimal state where individuals are not to be controlled for the state interest or maybe more importantly for their own interests it may be heard of the term the nanny state which neo liberals tend to use when they talk about big government interfering in individuals lives like you shouldn't eat too much fat you shouldn't eat too much sugar you shouldn't drink too much you shouldn't smoke or surely us for classical liberal the bat is up to the individual themselves if they want to self-harm in that way because only the individual can judge what maximizes their own utility now moving on for this apps in the 20th century we have a more modern version of individuals which is called developmental and video individualism and this is this emphasizes really the ability of individuals to be able to pursue personal development to enable human flourishing perhaps in an Aristotelian sense so the idea is that people can reach that personal best within a free society ok thank you for Qing