Christopher Dawson claimed that there had been a breakdown of corporate medieval society caused by the rise of capitalism. This had led to unrestrained individualism, which in turn led to the infamous evils of the factory system, rampant profiteering, slums, disease and chronic poverty. However the real cause of the evils of industrialism, Dawson felt, was not so much individualism itself as the spirit which sacrificed the individual to the economic process. Money, profit, economics became all. The old corporate sense of mutuality and cooperation had been lost.

[Religion and the Modern State, 1935]