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writers praising the value of being alone. William Wordsworth articulated this more explicitly than most in his poem ‘The Prelude’:
When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.
    In a way, this Romantic vision could almost be seen as a return to the early Christian paradigm: the authentic inner self, or true soul, is obscured and weakened by too much worldliness and corrupting materialism. The person desiring perfection must flee into the desert and nurture the inner life in solitude. The difference is, of course, that the idea of God has been replaced by the idea of the ego as quasi-divine.
    Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this idea extended its reach. Originally it had been understood as a route for ‘geniuses’, for especially endowed talents, but gradually, as this set of ideas met with wider ideas of equality and human rights, everyone became a genius.
    This might well have led to a renewal of the values of solitude, but in fact it had, as we know, the opposite effect. This was partly because the concept of freedom and rights had other important dimensions – and many of those required collective actions; among them widening the vote, the trade-union movement, the various campaigns for national freedom (Byron, the great Romantic hero, died in the war to liberate Greece), the struggle against slavery and the two activist phases of the women’s liberation movement. These necessarily pulled people into social association and demonstrated the power and effectiveness of collective engagement.
    At the same time a general improvement in health, the enormous stresses of increasingly alienated labour and a lowering of inhibition about sex made personal relationships a more important source of pleasure and personal fulfilment. The theme of sexual and emotional satisfaction was picked up as a central issue in the early psychoanalytic movement, so that solitude began to seem not only impossibly difficult but also unhealthy.
    Throughout the twentieth century the conflict in values continued. In one sense you could argue that the present model – which emphasizes ‘fulfilment’ as a ‘human right’, by widening (but thinning) one’s social environment, while seeking the individual good (rather than the communal good) within it – was a clever compromise. But because this model is so brittle, it is inevitably defensive and particularly punitive towards anything that tries to challenge it.
    This almost absurdly brisk canter through some elementary history of European cultural paradigms reveals, I hope, a sort of pendulum swinging between various options for understanding the good life; and in all them the question of solitude – both of our psychological capacity and of our ethical obligations to be alone – has been key to the understanding of society and identity. As we came to the beginning of a new millennium, the pendulum was reaching an extreme outer limit of its range, in favour of relationality and social life. This has perhaps been obscured by the cult of individualism, which has, rather oddly, developed simultaneously.
    This situation is increasingly fragile. The global financial crisis has raised massive questions about the sustainability of consumerist capitalism based on perpetual economic growth; the language of human rights appears to have delivered just about all the benefits (and they were real and substantial) that it can; people, at least in the developed world, are losing commitment to participatory democracy and to liberal religious faith; and the eco-scientists are showing us with increasing clarity just how tenuous the whole life-as-we-know-it project is becoming. To go back to Rome, the barbarians are at the gate. In these circumstances solitude is threatening – without a common and embedded religious faith to give shared meaning to the choice, being