As soon as the ego had become sufficiently strengthened by the feeling of equality and universality, it sought once again inequality—but this time an inequality determined only from within. After the individual had been liberated in principle from the rusty chains of guild, hereditary status, and church, the quest for independence continued to the point where individuals who had been rendered independent in this way wanted also to distinguish themselves from one another. What mattered now was no longer that one was a free individual as such, but that one was a particular and irreplaceable individual.

XREF: Connects to Tocqueville's observations on equality driving individualism, and to the historical shift from ascribed to achieved identity in modernity.

XREF: Echoes Tocqueville's and Nietzsche's observations about how democratic equality breeds a new desire to differentiate oneself.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 535