 Individual human beings are important for the understanding of history, but instead of making them the monadic building blocks of history, they are to be considered as points of intersection of many forces. Only a multidisciplinary approach to human history can do it justice. Qua conscious living beings, individuals are the carriers of history, but they are just as much the products of history. Individuals are not self-sufficient atoms. But neither are they to be regarded as swallowed up by encompassing communities like nations or peoples. Concepts that posit the soul of a people “are no more usable in history than is the concept of life-force in physiology” (1883/SW.I, 92). Suspicion of those who posit overriding self-sufficient entities like nations and peoples led Dilthey to distance himself from the nationalism of his contemporary Heinrich von Treitschke and to ally himself with a political reformism reminiscent of Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt.