Possessive individualism is a theory of human nature that views human beings as free agents who own themselves and have the ability to exchange their services, products, property and labor in markets to be traded.  The theory is founded on the idea that individuals are dissociated from one another in a state of nature and that the individual precedes society. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke have been greatly influenced by this theory.

Enlightenment thinkers sought to distinquish the individual from the community in order to understand society and situate the role of the individual in the context of materialist capitalism that was then emerging as the dominant economic system. Individuals were free to understand external reality through their own sensory perceptions and understanding through communal a priori categories. Individuals are thus able to make their own futures and religion, God, becomes less important. Once individuals are free from the categories that restricted them, they are free to make their own choices about themselves as commodities.

Karl-Marx talks a lot about the individual's right to own their work and products in his discussion of Commodity-Fetishism.