the.com/individualism

means The principle that the individual person — their rights, judgment, and interests — matters more than the claims of the group, state, or collective.

from Built from 'individual' (from Latin individuus, 'not divisible' — in-, 'not,' plus dividuus, 'divisible') plus the ideological suffix '-ism.' The word itself is a 19th-century coinage, rising alongside liberal political thought; it entered English partly via French individualisme, where early users — including critics of the new democratic age like Tocqueville — used it somewhat warily, to describe a modern tendency to withdraw into private life and family, away from wider society. So the term was born already carrying its double edge: a declaration of personal sovereignty that others immediately read as a diagnosis of social isolation.