Indvidualism and Personalism

I always wondered at the source for this central passage in Gaudium et Spez (24):

"Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, "that all may be one. . . as we are one" (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God's sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.(2)" (emphasis added)

Here is what Emmanuel Mounier said in his Personalism (at pp 18-19):

"Other persons do not limit [the person], they enable it to be and to grow. The person only exists thus towards others, it only knows itself in knowing others, only finds itself in being known by them. The thou, which implies the we, is prior to the I-- or at least accompanies it. . . . But the person is only growing in so far as he is continually purifying himself from the individual within him. He cannot do this by force of self-attention, but on the contrary by making himself available (Gabriel Marcel) and thereby more transparent both to himself and others. Things then happen as though the person, no longer 'occupied with himself' or 'full of himself', were becoming able -- then and thus only -- to be someone else and to enter into grace." (emphasis added)

Mounier did battle against what he called Individualism. Here is what he said about it:

"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 udirected; turning towards others with a primary mistrust, calculation and self-vindication; institutions restricted to the assurance that these egoism should not encroach upon one another, or to theri 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."

Mounier said that the impetus for his Personalist Manifesto was the world stock market crash and a world lurching from war to war. His work was echoed in many respects by Gabriel Marcel. These thinkers sowed the seeds which blossomed in Vatican II, and are flowering even now.