-Individualism
and Collectivism--one marking the decrease, the other the increase of
the power and authority of the state. When our period begins, the day of
individualism was passing. Ever since the Reformation it had, in spite
of Burke, dominated political theory. Two forces had given it
strength--one idealistic, one scientific. It represented the revolt of
the individual conscience against the claims of authority, and as such
was a theory which attempted to limit the power of government over the
individual, whether by an appeal to natural rights in Locke and Tom
Paine, or to the greatest happiness of the greatest number in the
Utilitarians, or to the super-eminent value of individual liberty as set
forth in John Stuart Mill's noble panegyric. The French Revolution gave
a notable impetus to this side of individualism, with its passionate
assertion of the principle that political institutions exist for man,
not man for political institutions, and that all government must be
tested by the life which it enables each and every one of its citizens
to live. Individualism in this sense is concerned with the discovery of
principles by which the power of government over the lives of its
members may be limited. It is not necessarily a theory of the nature of
society. Hobbes, however, was an individualist as well as Locke, and for
Hobbes the individual was the scientific unit from which societies and
states were built up--the starting-point for a scientific treatment of
society. As the French Revolution gave a fresh impulse to idealistic
individualism, the Industrial Revolution reanimated the scientific, for
it displayed the economic man, Hobbes's hero, come to life and a
respectable member of society. With him came the growth of political
economy, apparently the first really scientific study of man. From
Political Economy Darwin borrowed the conception of the struggle for
existence and the survival of the fittest, and from the new biology the
doctrine of Evolution through individual competition returned to
reinforce with the prestige of the new science the economists'
conception of society.

For the first half of the nineteenth century all the forces inspiring
individualism seemed to work together, for economics and biology
breathed a benevolent optimism which promised that if the scientific
forces of individualism were left to work unchecked by state
restriction, they would of themselves produce that individual liberty
and fr