One of the more interesting aspects of Christian Personalism was its insistence on the distinction between individualism, by which most understood the classic liberal vision of society as that of a contractual negotiation among separate selves, and personhood, by which they meant a Judeo-Christian vision of persons who are interdependent and spiritual in their interactions and identities. Here's an example of this way of defining the terms from Emmanuel Mounier:
The fundamental nature of the person is not originality nor self-knowledge nor individual affirmation. It lies not in separation but in communication. . . . Individualism is a system of morals, feelings, ideas and institutions in which individuals can be organized by their mutual isolation and defence. This was the ideology and the prevailing structure of Western bourgeois society in the 18th and 19th centuries. Man in the abstract, unattached to any natural community, the sovereign lord of a liberty unlimited and undirected, turning towards others with a primary mistrust, calculation and self-vindication; institutions restricted to the assurance that these egoisms should not encroach upon one another, or to their betterment as a purely profitmaking association--such is the rule of civilization now breaking up before our eyes, one of the poorest history has known. It is the very antithesis of personalism, and its dearest enemy.
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