Robert Neelly Bellah was born in 1927 in Oklahoma. His father died before Bellah was three years old, and the family moved to Los Angeles. He grew up in a Protestant environment combining personal responsability with hard work. Form his mother, he inherited a love for books.

At the end of his high school, Bellah, like many other intellectuals at the time, became intrested in Marxism. He studied social antropology at Harvard, and developed an interest in the cultures of primitive societies. He was awarded a degree in sociology and Oriental languages.

During the McCarthy years, Bellahs fellowship, as well as a teaching position at Harvard comes under threat. He refuses to accept the conditions linked to the appointment, and in automn of 1995 he accepts a research position at the Islamitic Institute of McGill University in Canada. This periode is experienced as an exile.

In 1957, Bellah returned to Harvard with no conditions imposed. That same year, he published his doctoral thesis, Tokugawa Religion.

In 1967, the year that he left Harvard for Berkeley, one of Bellah's most influential articles: 'Civil Religion in America'.

In 1985, Habits of the Heart, appeared, a work co-authored with Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, An Swidler and Steven Tipton, presenting the results of more than 200-in-depth interviews in which middle-class Americans were asked about 'how people ought to live'.


Along the some lines, Bellah and his co-authors published 'The Good Society' in 1991. Here, he describes how the dominant economic paradigm and individualistic language continue to see social institutions as external, restrictive and inflexible.

Bellah's suggestions are finding a response far beyond the bounds of his academic discipline, giving him the status of a moral authority.

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Courage is the first, though not the highest, of the classical virtues. Indifference cannot be considered a virtue in any context. Thus I might reformulate my title as `Virtuous or Vicious Individualism.' Put this way, my subject might seem to be concerned exclusively with ethics. Ethics will be central in my discussion, but I want to talk about more than ethics. I want to talk about the philosophical anthropology which lies behind these two forms of individualism, and I about their connection with different kinds of political and economic policy.

But before I proceed further I want to be honest about why, after reading the position papers and other materials sent to me in advance, I think I was asked to participate in this conference and speak on this subject. If I am wrong, you can correct me in the discussion period. I believe it is because the American economy, American political influence, and American culture are all exercising an enormous pressure in a single direction on Europe, and indeed on the whole world, to be more like us, to be Americanized. As a strong critic of recent tendencies in my country, I think I have been asked to help you understand the nature of this pressure and even maybe to suggest some ways it might be resisted. Later this year I will go to Italy and Brazil with the same mission. Globalization is often a euphemism for this kind of Americanization and I have begun to feel that it is into the discussion of globalization that I am being pulled.
Globalization is a process understood primarily in economic terms: globalization means global economic competition. But if we are to understand it, we must see that globalization, like individualism, to which it is so closely related, has political and cultural, even philosophical, dimensions, all of which must be taken seriously if we are to assess its meaning.

But let me start with the most obvious phenomenon as it has appeared in American society, which is indeed economic: the increasing power of the market mechanism, not only in the economy itself, where previously existing constraints on it are being systematically dismantled, but in every other sphere of life as well.