ABSTRACT
Three different intellectual traditions, each of which developed fundamentally during the nineteenth century, have supplied contemporary Western civilization with its key social images of man. These traditions have exerted in their different ways a decisive and enduring influence on patterns of behaviour and social structure. First, there is the British, liberal, utilitarian, rationalist social philosophy which sprouted from the roots of the school of Political Economy, and provided the emerging industrial society with its guiding ideology. Second, there is the Marxist socialist tradition. Third, there is the tradition with which this study is centrally concerned, one whose principal interests are psychological and whose political orientation is anarchist. The first two traditions are well known; the third has been completely neglected by modern philosophers and intellectual historians alike.
