Contesting Conformity

Be yourself!" "Don't just follow the crowd!" Such injunctions valorizing non-conformity pervade contemporary American culture. We praise individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Steve Jobs who chart their own course in life and do something new. Yet surprisingly, recent research in social psychology has shown that in practice, Americans are averse to non-conformity. This disjunction between our public rhetoric and practice raises questions: Why is non-conformity valuable? Is it always valuable--or does it pose dangers as well as promise benefits for democratic societies? What is the relationship between non-conformity as an individual ideal and democracy as a form of collective self-rule? Contesting Conformity brings a fresh interpretive lens to the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Nietzsche to investigate non-conformity and its relationship to modern democracy. Drawing new insight from their work, Ikuta argues that non-conformity is an intractable issue for democracy. While non-conformity is often important for cultivating a most just polity, non-conformity can also undermine democracy. Insofar as democracy depends on the ability of each citizen to critically reflect and dissent from an unjust public opinion when necessary, Tocqueville and Mill enable us to appreciate non-conformity as an ethical and political ideal for democratic citizens. However, non-conformity can also undermine democracy, as Nietzsche helps us see, insofar as unconstrained expressions of non-conformity may stand in tension with the equality constitutive of democracy. Contesting Conformity demonstrates that while non-conformity can enhance democracy, non-conformity is not necessarily democratic"--