Session 11. (1) An Economic Theory of Constitutional Choice Favoring Supermajority Rules: Public Choice Theory—Part I: Its Foundation in Methodological Individualism and Social Atomism. (2) Individualism: Its Diverse Meanings. (3) What Is the Social Atomist Tradition, and Does It Underlie All Modern Contract Thinking?
James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent, pp. 3-39.
Steven Lukes, "The Meanings of ‘Individualism’," Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971): 45-66, READ pp. 45-58 ONLY.
Elizabeth H. Wolgast, "A World of Social Atoms," The Grammar of Justice (Cornell UP, 1987): 1-27.
So you'd like to know more...
F. A. Hayek, "Individualism, True and False," Individualism and Economic Order (UChicago Press, 1948): 1-32.
J. M. E. McTaggart, "The Conception of Society [i.e., the State] as an Organism," Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (1901)
Herbert Spencer, "The Social Organism," Westminster Review (1860)
Conceives both society and the state as like social organisms, but denies that from this there follows a demanding set of duties that we owe each other through the state. Indeed, agrees with Buchanan and Hayek that an atomistically conceived will of the people aggregated from individual preferences is a greater danger to individual liberty than the will of the organic state.
T. D. Weldon, "Political Theories," States and Morals: A Study in Political Conflicts (Whittlesley, 1947): 26-61
Contrasts the machine theory of the state--which subdivides into the consent theory and the vehicle-of-minority-control theory, with the organic theory of the state.