For roughly a century—if we take the years from Fourier and Bentham to the triumph of Freud—the study of politics concerned itself mainly with institutions. Fourier, in plotting a Utopia, took his individuals just as they were, expecting by the perfection of social arrangements to turn individual weakness and vice into virtues. Bentham also by-passed the infinite problem of the individual (this was relegated to religion) and concentrated on the finite reform of institutions; the greatest happiness of the greatest number was never the principle of an individual psychology, although since 1832 Bentham's formula has grown ironically appropriate as the individual in a mass society has become, characteristically, a quantity.