ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature of political inquiry and the scope and content of politics by looking at the place of the individual in political life and the status of the individual in political analysis. A process beginning in Western Europe in about the fifteenth century, the idea of modernity achieves its full intellectual flowering during the Enlightenment. It is usual to tie modernity, or becoming modern, to the emergence of the nation-state, industrialism and the institution of private property. Cultures that have emphasised the collective good, or collective identity over the good of individuals and their autonomy, have often been very hostile to the concept of individual rights or to the idea that, in the last resort, the individual is arbiter of her own fate. Using individuals as the unit for analysis is strongly associated with certain types of political and social inquiry.
