‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.’ This famous 1987 quote by Margaret Thatcher is a logical reflection of the methodological individualism of both the mainstream and Austrian schools of economics. We shall argue in this chapter that early economic thought – starting at least as far back as in the 1200s – was dominated by what we could call methodological holism. The economy could only be properly understood as a complex system of synergies that created welfare, something closely resembling a National Innovation System. We shall argue that the later Renaissance discovery of individualism was superimposed upon this earlier synergetic view of society, creating a dualistic view of the economy in which both the viewpoint of society and of the individual had to be taken into consideration. At times this dualistic approach obviously created tensions between the two perspectives, and a need for conscious trade-offs arose in the political sphere.