Individualism

Treatment among Disciplines

In the social sciences, the doctrine of methodological individualism holds that all social explanations, at bottom, must refer to individuals in terms of their mental states, actions, or other attributes. Methodological individualism, then, focuses on individuals as the primary unit of analysis and the primary source of explanation. This view stands in contrast to holism, which maintains that one cannot understand individual action outside its social setting. An example of methodological individualism is rational choice theory, while various forms of structural and institutional explanations exemplify methodological holism. For some of its proponents, though not all, methodological individualism [Page 734]is based on what might be called ontological individualism, the view that individuals are, as J. W. N. Watkins states it, “the ultimate constituents of the social world” (quoted in Lukes 1973: 114). Margaret Thatcher's quip that there is “no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families” (1993: 626) is the best-known popular statement of this view. As a normative view, individualism holds that the individual is of primary ethical concern. One sees this in doctrines in political, economic, and moral theory. In political theory, individualism maintains that individual interests or the consent of individuals should be the basis of a legitimate political order. This idea is reflected in the social contract theories of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who, for all their differences, agreed that government should be seen as the result of a voluntary agreement among individuals. Liberal theory also reflects political individualism, and it is individualist in at least two additional ways. First, it sees individuals as the possessors of rights that limit what the state—even a democratic state—may ask of or do to its citizens. Second, the liberal state is presumptively to treat its citizens equally as individuals, rather than as members of an estate, a class, a gender, a religion, or a race.

In the economic realm, individualism is closely associated with laissez-faire policies that its proponents see as providing maximum freedom for individual action. In this libertarian view, the functions of the state are to be strictly limited to the protection of individual rights against force or fraud and to the enforcement of contracts. Any state action beyond these functions is a violation of the extensive rights against coercion that individuals possess in this view.

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