 Individuals can be studied as psychic productive systems inherently related to each other as well as to more inclusive productive systems that are also at work in history. These larger productive systems come about because of the need for communication, interaction, and cooperation among individuals. But they can also take on a life of their own and survive the individuals that formed and shaped them. Dilthey’s category of Wirkung or productivity is at the root of Gadamer’s theory of the productive history (Wirkungsgeschichte) of works of art that grants them new meanings over time that exceed those intended by their creators. In the Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey had been unwilling to consider purposive social systems as subjects or carriers of history. In The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, he qualifies his opposition to the idea of a transpersonal subject such as the soul of a people by de-reifying it as the spirit of a people that is to be considered as a logical rather than a real subject. It is possible to regard cooperative productive systems as logical subjects that transcend individuals without positing them as super-empirical real subjects.