A crucial question confronting any serious attempt to think about human history is the nature of the historical actors that are considered legitimate in a given philosophy. One can, of course, include only human persons as actors, either as rational choosers (as in microeconomics) or as phenomenological subjects (as in micro-sociology). But if we wish to go beyond this we need a proper conceptualisation of social wholes. The very first step in this task is, clearly, to devise a means to block microreductionism, a step usually achieved by the concept of emergent properties, properties of a whole that are more than the sum of the properties of its parts.