Methodological Holism

The opposite of methodological individualism, this doctrine holds that social wholes are more than the sum of individual attitudes, beliefs, and actions and that the whole can often determine the characteristics of individuals. Holism has been prominent in philosophy and social science since Hegel, and, arguably, it has its roots in the writings of Plato. Methodological holism (often abbreviated to holism) takes a number of forms across social science disciplines. Although very different in their views and emphases, Marx, Dewey, Durkheim, and Parsons can all be regarded as holists.

The quintessential holist thinker was the sociologist Emile Durkheim (1896/1952), who argued that social effects must be explained by social causes and that psychological explanations of the social were erroneous. His evidence for this came from his study of suicide statistics, over time, in several European countries. Although suicide rates rose and fell, the proportions attributed to individual causes by coroners remained constant, suggesting that even such an individual act as suicide was shaped by social forces.

Holism in anthropology and sociology was much encouraged by the biological “organicism” of Darwinism. Herbert Spencer (Dickens, 2000, pp. 20–24), for example, saw society evolving through the adaptation of structures, in much the same way as biological structures evolved. A more sophisticated version of organic thinking was advanced by Talcott Parsons (1968), in which, like the organs of the human body, the constituent parts of society function to maintain each other. Parsons's holism was explicitly functionalist, but critics of holism and functionalism have maintained that the latter is necessarily at least implicit in the former.

Notwithstanding Popper's and Hayek's political criticisms of holism (see methodological individualism), methodological critique has centered on the incompleteness of explanations that do not make ultimate reference to individual beliefs, desires, and actions. For example, although a reference to the Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent war reparations required of Germany might be offered as historical explanations of the origins of World War II, this cannot stand on its own without reference to the views and actions of agents responsible for its enactment and the response to it by other individuals, particularly Hitler.

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Durkheim, as well as many after him, believed that sociology particularly depended, as a scientific discipline, on the existence of social facts with an ontological equivalence to that of objects in the physical world. In recent years, however, the language of (and the debate about) methodological holism and individualism has been superseded by that of “structure and agency.” Only a few thinkers now refer to themselves as “holists” or “individualists,” and although extreme forms of each position can be logically demonstrated, much recent debate concerns the extent to which the social can be explained by individual agency, or agents' beliefs, desires, and actions by the social.

In recent years, sociologists such as Anthony Giddens (1984) and philosophers such as Roy Bhaskar (1998) have attempted to bridge the gap between holism and individualism by advancing versions of “structuration theory,” which, in Giddens's case, focuses on social practices, which he argues produce and are produced by structure (Giddens, 1984).

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