Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in the Preface to his famous Discourse on
Inequality that "I consider the subject of the following discourse as
one of the most interesting questions philosophy can propose, and
unhappily for us, one of the most thorny that philosophers can have to
solve. For how shall we know the source of inequality between men, if we
do not begin by knowing mankind?" (Rousseau, 1754). This citation of
Rousseau appears in an article in Spanish where Dagum (2001), in the
memory of whom this book is published, also cites Socrates who said that
the only useful knowledge is that which makes us better and Seneca who
wrote that knowing what a straight line is, is not important if we do
not know what rectitude is. These references are indeed a good
illustration of Dagum's vast knowledge, which was clearly not limited to
the ?eld of Economics. For Camilo the ?rst part of Rousseau's citation
certainly justi?ed his interest in the ?eld of inequality which was at
the centre of his scienti?c preoccupations. It should however be
stressed that for Camilo the second part of the citation represented a
"solid argument in favor of giving macroeconomic foundations to
microeconomic behavior" (Dagum, 2001). More precisely, "individualism
and methodological holism complete each other in contributing to the
explanation of individual and social behavior" (Dagum, 2001).