With Transcendentalism/Idealism/Romanticism self-centered individualism arrives at its inevitable intellectual destination. Like the "State[s] of Nature" of Hobbes and Locke where it was born, there is nothing coherent within it for the collective governance of people living separate lives together in this world--other than, as Hobbes saw at the outset, outright domination (not that Marxism offers anything better in practical terms). Postmodernism, despite its 'leftist' associations in most people's minds, has inveigled the most extreme manifestation of self-centered individualism into Western culture, insisting (in the name of 'emancipation' from 'the rational') on the legitimacy of every individual's capacity to choose for oneself what is to count as truth and knowledge--but which is, after all, only the acknowledgement of the reality of that given capacity of ours as human beings. .

Fortunately, other-centered individualism, in the form of mutual respect (of a basic kind: taking one another into account as we live our separate lives together in this world) provides an ethic of justice while resolving all of the intellectual tensions self-centered individualism generates. A requirement of mutual respect follows from a belief in human equality as well as the observation (taking into the material realm an insight of Fichte's related in this article) that human beings have no choice but to effect choices (which I got from Warren J. Samuels).