Pound's early critique on behalf of personal and social difference stakes out an individualist position of enormous attraction, and not only for Americans. Jean-Paul Sartre, a modernist of very different ideological investment and Pound's opposite in almost every respect, devoted considerable critical attention to the priority of the subject as well, and nowhere with more dexterity than in Search for a Method: “Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it,” Sartre wrote. And with a compression Pound would have admired, he added, “But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry.” For Sartre, that recognition called for renewed attention to biography, and it gestured toward a larger theoretical point as well: To deny the fact that individuals differ insofar as the manifold determinations of their situations differ – to dissolve the subject, in other words, by making it a mere epiphenomenon of vast social and ideological structures – is to indulge a self-serving idealism, if not a full-blown metaphysics. But Pound's early individualism, just because it is so radical, refuses (unlike Sartre's) to subject the self to class and collective structures. Consequently, it is severely limited not so much in fact but in the politics which that fact determines, because it establishes an unbridgeable gulf between the individual difference he valued and any collective means whereby such a fact might be constitutive of social relations in general. In its assiduous protection of “the peripheries of the individual,” Pound's individualism, despite its liberationist impulse and rationale, threatens to leave us in a stalemate between the private sphere of difference and the social, material sphere of all those features of modernity that promise to devour it.