The Hierarchy of Self‐Positions: Towards a Historical Psychology of Capitalist Individualism

ABSTRACT Social psychology requires a theory of capitalist individualism that explains how meritocratic beliefs and a phenomenology of autonomy interact with historic and systemic factors that facilitate hierarchic constraint on most individuals. Here, we present such a theory and apply it to capitalist individualism as it has manifested in the history of the United States. Our hierarchy of self‐positions model suggests that groups and individuals in the United States are stratified along an economic dimension of differing apparatuses of value‐capture and an interrelated political dimension of differing modes of social control. The ideal self in capitalist individualism is the disciplined self , but many people find themselves failing to achieve this form of selfhood for a variety of reasons and cast into the less desired positions of the precarious self or the incarcerated self . Well‐resourced individuals often attain disciplined selfhood: They contribute to value generation with perceived autonomy and yet are subject to temporal disciplinary control. Disadvantaged (e.g., racialised) individuals are disproportionately ascribed precarious or incarcerated selfhood: They contribute to value generation in ways that feel relatively heteronomous and are subject to disciplinary control that is more intense and spatialised.