Society and Organism

Proudhon shares with other Modern Political Philosophers, including Marx, the premise that the Individual human is the fundamental unit of society.  He, thus, shares with them a limitation of that premise--its inadequacy to the concept of Organism, in which an  Individual is re-conceived as a Part.  That inadequacy is a reflection, at least in part, of the ignorance of Biology in an era generally dominated by inanimate Physics, an era that begins to get transcended by the writings of von Humboldt, for example.  So, to apply the thesis of the latter--that the Earth is an Organism--to Political Philosophy, society is a whole of which its members are parts, thereby undermining one of the fundamental premises of the preceding era.  In other words, the application to Political Philosophy of the principles of the Ecologism that has been emerging over the past century or so potentially overrides all the main doctrines of the 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-centuries, and perhaps renders them obsolete.