Othmar Spann, the Austrian philosopher and sociologist, was born in Vienna and educated at the universities of Vienna, Zürich, and Tübingen. He was a professor at Brünn from 1909 to 1919, when he was appointed to a chair of economics and sociology at Vienna.

Spann contrasted his "neoromantic universalism"—called neoromantic by Spann to indicate his debt to Adam Müller—with "individualism," that is, with the doctrine that society derives its character from the independently existing qualities of the individual men composing it. He classified as individualist such allegedly erroneous doctrines as the economic liberalism of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, utilitarianism, the various "social contract" theories, "natural law" theories of social life, egalitarianism, anarchism, Machiavellianism, and Marxism. As this heterogeneous grouping suggests, Spann was less interested in discussing the individual merits and faults of these doctrines than in placing them with...