This book argues that Romanticism develops as a critique of radical changes in political theory of the mid-seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries and of the new theory of a social contract. In the seventeenth century, natural law philosophy devised a modern concept of a self that is independent of society, turning sharply away from the former idea of the individual as dependent on the community. Aristotle's assertion that ‘the whole is necessary to the part’ had held sway on classical, medieval and early modern cultures, which all variously defined the individual as the subsidiary of a greater social body (Aristotle 1995: 11). However, in the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes began exploring the new possibility that ‘man is made fit for society not by nature, but by training’ (Hobbes 1998: 24). By the Enlightenment, the full implications of this change had come into view. The former assumption that the social collective takes priority over individuals had broken down, as part of the Enlightenment's broader unbinding of ‘the most usual conjunctions of cause and effect’ (Hume 1978: 267). Jean-Luc Nancy elegises the individual who emerges from this change as ‘merely the residue of the experience of the dissolution of community. By its nature – as its name indicates, it is the atom, the indivisible – the individual reveals that it is the abstract result of a decomposition’ (Nancy 1991: 3). Nancy's quintessentially modern formulation of individualism parts ways with Aristotle, whose legacy now recedes into the past, becoming difficult to distinguish in its somewhat faint and vestigial state. Instead, a new post-Aristotelian formulation of community takes its place and becomes the central model for sociability. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the most dominant voice of this change.