Holism

To start from the individual in order to explain society is to take for a starting point what is in fact a result: the "isolated, self-sufficient" individual of liberalism and the social contract is itself a late product of a given society, not its cause. Marx reverses the order of explanation: the human is understood from class and place in the relations of production, for the human essence has no seat in the individual but in the ensemble of social relations. This holism is not a collectivist preference but a thesis of method, aimed against the abstract individualism of political economy and natural right.

Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, VI (1845) · Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse, 1857)

The city is prior in nature to the individual, as the whole is to the part: in isolation the individual is not self-sufficient and cannot actualize a properly human end. This priority of the whole leans holist, without dissolving the individual, since the end remains the flourishing of citizens.

Aristotle, Politics, I, 2

Society is not a sum of individuals that would preexist it: it is the ethical whole, Sittlichkeit, which has priority over them, not chronological but conceptual, and in which alone they attain their substantial freedom. Family, civil society and state are the moments of a concrete universal that particularizes itself in its members and lives in them. The abstract individual, prior to any community, is a fiction.

Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §142-157 (ethical life) · Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §257-258 (the state)

For Marx the isolated individual of the classical economists is a fiction: men are intelligible only through the social relations and classes to which they belong. Consciousness, needs, even ideas are determined by social being: a strongly holist stance, in which the social whole has primacy over the individual considered apart.

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) · Grundrisse, introduction (critique of the isolated Robinson Crusoe individual)

For Aristotle the criterion of priority is not chronological but functional: prior is that without which the rest cannot fulfil its function. Now a hand severed from the body is a hand only in name, since it can no longer grasp; likewise the individual outside the city cannot fulfil its nature and remains an unfinished human. The city is therefore by nature prior to the individual as the whole to the part, an avowed holism that does not, for all that, erase the city's end, the living-well of its citizens.

Politics, I.2 (1253a)

The Republic examines justice first in the city, "writ large", in order then to read it in the soul: the political whole is prior and illuminates the individual part. The city is an organism in which each class is a member, and the common good takes precedence over private interest, to the point of abolishing property and family among the guardians.

Republic, II, 368c-369a · Republic, V, 462a-466d

Rational beings are the limbs of one body, not mere parts set side by side: the individual is fulfilled only in working for the whole, and the antisocial act cuts itself off from nature. A holist view, in which the common good is no constraint but the completion of the individual's nature.

Meditations, VII, 13 · Meditations, II, 1 · Meditations, IX, 23

The pact does not juxtapose individuals: it transforms them into a moral and collective body, a « common self » endowed with a will of its own. The citizen draws his being and his liberty from this whole, to which he alienates himself entirely. Against the individualism of the Enlightenment, Rousseau leans holist, without dissolving the individual, since the end remains his liberty.

Rousseau, The Social Contract, I, 6