 Social atomism (or atomistic individualism) holds that the social world is built out of individual people understood as isolated “atoms”. As Taylor 1985 points out, the term ‘atomism’ is mostly used by its enemies, so its characterization often depends on what it is used to be a foil for. But, typically, atomism is a combination of two claims: the view that society is exclusively built out of individual people, and that individual people are somehow isolated from one another, as opposed to being mutually interdependent.