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“THE MOST PERFECTLY AUTONOMOUS MAN”

I n Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, Virginia Woolf famously (and audaciously) declared that “in or about December 1910 human character changed” (4). Let me take my lead from Woolf here and open this introduction by suggesting – playfully and yet with a certain audacity of my own – that “in or about January 2018” the way we think about a longstanding cultural ideal of human subjectivity may have changed. As was the case for Woolf, this change “was not sudden and definite”; however, something about the way we conceive of ourselves and our relations to others may have shifted, and, as Woolf says, “since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910” (4) – or rather, in my case, the year 2018. What leads me to this suggestion is the accumulation of a number of small cultural shifts – in themselves perhaps not all that remarkable, yet collectively acquiring a kind of weight or momentum – that speak (if we are willing to listen) of a transformed way of thinking about ourselves and the appeal that the Enlightenment legacy of the solitary, autonomous individual has held for us since its inception. Arguably most prominent and notable among these developments is Theresa May’s appointment of Tracey Crouch as the world’s first Minister for Loneliness on 17 January 2018. While Europeans may have mocked Britain and suggested that the country’s decision to leave the European Union would “result in an isolated, lonely island nation” (Yeginsu) – and the apparent impossibility of securing an acceptable Brexit deal is intriguing to consider in this light – Britain’s pervasive problems with loneliness, such as they are evidenced by this appointment, are clearly not a laughing matter, for the detrimental impact of loneliness on both mental and physical health is increasingly well documented. What this appointment signals, therefore, is an official recognition of the systemic problem with isolation and disconnection that contemporary Britain has (and shares with large parts of the