Since Socrates' trial and execution in Athens, reconciling the conflict between individual and community has remained a persistent and vital concern in politics. In contemporary political thought and practice, however, the conflict has grown ever more vociferous and increasingly muddled. The rising intensity and confusion of the conflict have resulted from the incomplete acceptance of the transformation of the concept of the individual effected by Rousseau, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Before Rousseau, philosophers conceived of the individual as a natural entity. After Rousseau, Hegel and Nietzsche argue that nature does not produce individuals, but rather individuals are human products. What previous thinkers understood to be natural qualities of human beings, such as reason or human passions, are results of developments in human history and reactions to social pressures and mores. If we understand that individuals are not natural entities to be protected from an external government or civil society, but are themselves products of political and social interactions, then we can concentrate on re-organizing our institutions so that they do not produce incomplete or dissatisfied persons, but rather reflective and whole individuals who can maintain their own independence by carving out spaces for their freedom and resisting becoming cogs in a social machine. Hegel and Nietzsche, however, disagree fundamentally about the scope and meaning of this practical act of individuation. Hegel claims that individuals constitute themselves within, and find their completion only in, social and political life, whereas Nietzsche asserts that individuals are oppressed by state and society, and can only create themselves and thereby experience satisfaction by transcending their time and place. These two positions form an antinomy in the concept of the individual, a contradiction that reflects the perennial conflict of individual and community. This antinomy is salutary for our political practice in that it replaces nature as a restraint on ambitions and expectations of political progress for a final reconciliation of individual and community.