Methodological Individualism

There is a long tradition in the social sciences—going back to Hobbes and continued through J. S. Mill, Weber, and, more recently, George Homans and J. W. N. Watkins—that insists that explanations of social phenomena must derive from the characteristics and dispositions of individual agents. In recent decades, this methodological approach has become somewhat conflated with individualist political and economic doctrines (Lukes, 1994).

Most of the arguments for methodological individualism have been couched in response to the pposite doctrine, METHODOLOGICAL HOLISM (and vice versa). Individualists reject the latter's claim that there can be social wholes existing beyond or separate to individuals—not by saying these social wholes do not exist, but rather claiming that the social world is brought into being by individuals acting according to the “logic of the situation.” That is, individuals create social situations by directing their actions according to the expected behavior of other individuals in particular situations. Complex social situations (e.g., economic systems) are said to result from particular alignments of individual dispositions, beliefs, and physical resources or characteristics. In explaining a given economic system, reference to constituent parts (e.g., the role of merchant banks) can only be seen as partial explanation, although they may be constructed as heuristic models. A full explanation must, at rock bottom, refer to actual or possibly “ideal” (statistical) agents.

Since J. S. Mill, there has been an association between individualist political and economic philosophy in liberalism and an individualist methodological approach. This association became more explicit in the writings of Frederich von Hayek and Karl Popper. Popper maintained that “collective” (holist) explanation blinded us to the truth of the matter that the functioning of all social institutions results from the attitudes, decisions, and actions of individuals. Moreover, he claimed, collectivist views about what is lead to collectivist views about what should be and, ultimately, the totalitarianism of fascism and communism (Popper, 1986).

Whatever the merits or demerits of this political argument, it is widely acknowledged to be a non sequitur from the methodological argument, which has been associated with thinkers of both the right and left (Phillips, 1976). There are, however, a number of methodological objections to the doctrine, foremost among which is that it leads to the conclusion that social characteristics can only be described in terms of individual psychologies, yet most individual characteristics (such as being a banker, a teacher, or a police officer) can only be explained in terms of social institutions. A second realist objection concerns the ontological status of social practices or objects. Methodological individualists maintain that, unlike physical objects that have real properties, social phenomena are simply collective mental constructions. The response to this is that many things in the physical world can only be known by their observed effects (e.g., gravity), and much the same is true of social [Page 643]phenomena such as a foreign policy or a body of law, but they, nonetheless, are real for this.