Methodological Individualism

Methodological individualism is a doctrine in the philosophy of the social sciences about the relationship between society and individuals. The idea can be formulated in several related but somewhat different ways: Social facts are constituted by facts about individuals; social entities are composed of individuals and their properties and relations; social structures and entities are nothing but ensembles of individuals and their behaviors; social explanations must be derivable from facts about individuals; scientific statements about society must be reducible to statements about individuals and their properties and relations; social laws or generalizations must be derivable from general facts about individuals. There may be other possible formulations as well.

The idea of methodological individualism is one that has appealed to philosophers and social thinkers for almost as long as there has been systematic thinking about social science. Modern philosophy of social science began in the nineteenth century, and John Stuart Mill's theories of social knowledge contained the assumption of methodological individualism. In A System of Logic Mill argued that social phenomena are nothing but the aggregate result of the actions and dispositions of individuals; so the foundation of the social sciences should be found in the laws of psychology. A classic twentieth-century statement of the doctrine was presented by J. W. N. Watkins, who argued that the most fundamental explanations of social phenomena must be derived from facts about the beliefs, goals, and constraints of individuals. Max Weber also assumed the doctrine, particularly in the context of his definition of the object of sociology as social action carried out by individuals.

In recent years, methodological individualism has had a rebirth of interest among philosophers. The thesis can be formulated as a statement about explanation, as a thesis about social ontology, or as a statement about intertheoretic reduction. The explanatory version, as stated by Daniel Steel, holds that it is possible and desirable to explain social outcomes exclusively in terms of the actions and behaviors of individuals. James Woodward's fundamental idea is that one explanation is more fundamental than another if it is invariant with respect to a wider range of interventions. The ontological version, as stated by Daniel Little, maintains that social entities and their properties are constituted by individuals and their actions; social entities have no independent existence. The intertheoretic version, as stated by Julie Zahle, holds that it is possible to reduce theories containing social properties to theories containing only properties of individuals.

Methodological individualism is the limited version of a family of perspectives on social explanation that we might refer to as “agent-centered” approaches to social explanation. Here the general idea is that we explain social outcomes as an aggregate result of the actions, choices, and mentalities of individuals. Individuals' behavior and choice constitute the causal dynamics of social outcomes. A special case of the agent-centered approach is the field of rational choice theory: the view that social outcomes can be explained as the aggregate effect of the individually rational actions of a set of actors. But agent-centered approaches can give more “social-ness” to the individual than the founding statements of methodological individualism would permit. For example, the position of [Page 881]methodological localism, as formulated by Little, identifies socially constituted and socially situated individuals as the foundation of social explanation, but explicitly denies the idea that all social facts are reducible to bare psychological facts about individuals. Rather, individuals are themselves constituted and constrained by previously established social conditions. A recent strategy—expounded by both Jon Elster and Little—in approaching the issue of the relationship between social facts and individual facts is to postulate that social-level statements and causal judgments need to be provided with microfoundations, that is, descriptions of the pathways through which socially situated individuals are led to act in such a way as to bring about the macro-level fact.

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