It has been proved that after the Middle Ages a new philosophical and legal worldview started to shape, which ensured a significant development of the philosophy of law that enabled emerging individualism. In the philosophy of the Renaissance, the problem of individualism changed its vector from the objective world to all spheres of social life that led to a rise of individual consciousness, causing human’s discovery of itself as a subject of activity. It has been established that the changes also occurred in the type of thinking that moved from collectivist to new thinking focused on defending dignity, the value of an individual, showing interest to interpersonal relationships, respect to individual sense of being, increasing attention to the process of self-knowledge, awareness of individual notion of oneself. It has been proved that the Renaissance relieved a human from external authorities and gave him a space of freedom, in which new notions of human’s place in the world appeared: the role of the state in organizing public life, the importance of social and individual values in taking significant decisions. It has been found out that the reasons that contributed to the emergence of a new individualism in the Renaissance era, in our opinion, include: the replacement of Christian theocentrism with humanistic anthropocentrism; integration of aesthetic and moral ideas taken from the ancient world order; the exit of individual freedom of the subjective «I» from the category of universal, denying the fundamental foundations of the latter; growth of intellectual movement; formation of new economic relations based on the freedom of economic entities; growth of free market economy, raising the prestige of educated people; proclamation of the right to individual initiative, self-awareness; the rise of individual religious consciousness; affirmation of the priority of human nature over the immanent reality; human’s discovery of itself as a subject of activity and law; fast growth of interest to self-knowledge, awareness of individual notion of oneself, transformation of a view of human nature and its relationship with the social and legal aspects of life, significance if internal motifs of individual actions as part of social and legal evaluation of an individual, focusing on humanism.
Keywords: individualism, individualization, individuality, personality, individual, Renaissance, freedom.
Thorstein Veblen on economic man: toward a new method of describing human nature, society, and history