One does not need to look very hard to find a host of antecedents for this modern idea of the self. Elements of the West's foundational emphasis on the individual can be detected in classical Greece and Rome, in Hellenistic-era Epicureanism and Stoicism, and in the moral thought arising out of Biblical monotheism, particularly as expressed in the theology of the Protestant Reformation. But none of these amounted to anything approaching what we mean by modern individualism, because they saw the individual as inherently constrained in various ways, and particularly by belief in the existence of an objective moral order. Today that is changed. Arguably, the dominant American tradition in our own day would appear to be one of endorsing the highest possible degree of individual liberty and self-development in political, religious, social, and economic affairs.
American history records the defeat or erosion of most competing ideas.
The recourse to individual rights, whether expressed as legal rights, voting rights, expressive rights, reproductive rights, sexual rights, membership rights, or consumer rights, has become the near-invincible trump card in most debates regarding public policy, and it is only in the rarest instances that this trump has been effectively challenged. In the age of modernity and postmodernity, then, the self has become the chief source of moral value. It is a psychological term, largely stripped of metaphysical implications. There is are complications inherent in such a strictly psychological approach to the self. For one thing, the self appears to be inherently unstable.