Individualism, in a general and robust form, maintains that there are only particulars, with the methodological rider that, in the final analysis, reference to particulars can account for whatever seems to involve something more. But social scientists are as inquisitive as anyone about human individuals, what makes them tick and whether they are the creators or creatures of the social world. This curiosity, I hope, warrants a focus on versions of individualism, where individuals are human agents with desires and beliefs and act in ways which account for what happens. Admittedly, there are behaviourists, who contend that a properly scientific approach neither wants nor needs to credit individuals with a subjective point of view or, indeed, any mental states. Also we have noted that, in some theories usually deemed individualist, the individuals are firms, nations or other agents lacking flesh and blood. But, indulging my own curiosity, I propose to explore the thesis that 'history is the result of human action, not of human design'.

That quotation comes from the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson and nudges us towards economics as the social science where a humane kind of individualism has been most thoroughly deployed. Lionel Robbins defined economics as 'the science which studies the relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses', and this makes it potentially a very far-ranging science indeed (1932, p.15).