Methodological Individualism

Methodological individualism is the doctrine that large-scale social events and conditions, such as wars, social customs, economic recessions, the crime rate, and the state, should be explained or understood wholly in terms of the beliefs, intentions, attitudes, and actions of individual people. It is “methodological” in the sense that it indicates how social scientific inquiry ought to proceed; the “individualism” stems from its insistence that social scientific explanations should, at least ultimately, involve only facts about individual agents. Methodological collectivism or holism, in contrast, contends that at least some social phenomena can be explained only at a macroscopic or holistic level.

Methodological individualism was at issue in many high-profile disputes in sociology, psychology, economics, and the philosophy of history during the late 19th and 20th centuries. An early example is the socalled Methodenstreit controversy between members of the German Historical School and the Austrian [Page 1383]School in economics. More recently, Jon Elster has defended methodological individualism as a corrective to Marxists' fondness for functional explanations. Notable proponents of the doctrine include the sociologist Max Weber, the philosopher Karl Popper, and the economist Friedrich A. Hayek. The philosophers G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx and the sociologist Émile Durkheim are prominent collectivists. Although few social scientists today identify themselves as methodological collectivists or holists, methodological individualism is at odds with forms of explanation that remain widely used in the social sciences, such as structuralism, pure statistical analysis, and the explanations found in many kinds of sociobiology.

Although methodological individualism, at least as Weber initially formulated it, is an epistemological view about social scientific explanation, it is easily and often confused with other views, partly because it is often found together with other kinds of individualism and atomism. Popper and his student J. W. N. Watkins, for example, seem to defend methodological individualism out of a commitment to metaphysical or ontological individualism, the view that social entities are in reality nothing but aggregates of individual people and their behavior. One need not embrace this metaphysical thesis to be a methodological individualist, however, nor does embracing it commit one to the doctrine. So too, methodological individualism is distinct from political individualism, although Hayek and Popper espouse both doctrines and claim to find important connections between them. Although Thomas Hobbes is often characterized as a methodological individualist, his political individualism is better understood as related to his psychological atomism—his attempt to explain the possession of characteristic human capacities such as thinking and reasoning without appealing to people's relationships with others. Atomism of a different sort holds that social goods should be regarded as wholly constituted by interconnected individual goods, but this position too neither implies nor is implied by methodological individualism.

Weber acknowledges that we often speak of “social collectivities” such as corporations, associations, and states as though they were individual agents, but he contends that in social science research, collectivities should be treated as the product of individuals and their actions. This is because the actions of individuals are, in his words, “subjectively understandable.” We can understand the motives and intentions of individuals that lead them to act as they do, and macrolevel social happenings and conditions are adequately explained only when given in these terms. Since the actual motivations of individuals may be unknown or unavailable to the sociologist or economist, however, social scientists must typically invoke a model of rational human action, which for Weber is his theory of ideal types.

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