The industrial-scientific society which was emerging and rapidly becoming dominant in Europe, and was soon to spread throughout the world, has two possibly contradictory aspects: it has both an individualistic and a holistic bias. Their interaction calls for some comment.

The tendency towards individualism is more immediately obvious. How it all began remains contentious. That it must be such in order to function (though not absolutely beyond all questioning) at any rate seems fairly obvious, and perhaps is unquestionable at any rate for the early stages of the first and endogenous industrialisation. The new man had to choose his productive activity and his methods independently, in the light of his own aims and assessments of the circumstances, rather than have them dictated by his status, his location in the social hierarchy, his guild membership, and so forth. Status constrained him less than it had his ancestors, and he chose his contracts in the light of his own interests and views. Naturally he recognised himself in the new individualist philosophies which portrayed such an individualist procedure in the various spheres of life which concerned him.

So far, so good. His life situation made our new man into an individualist. Perhaps, as Weberian sociology would have it, he was an individualist first, in virtue of his Protestant religion, and he later, unwittingly, created a new individualist society in his own image. Be that as it may, an individualist world and ethos, and its accompanying individualist rationale, were emerging. It made, or was made of, so to speak ‘modular’ men, unlike the traditional men who came as part of communal package deals.