Methodological Individualism: Background, History and Meaning (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Methodological Individualism Background, history and meaning Lars Udehn

London and New York

First published 2001 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. ©2001 Lars Udehn All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Udehn, Lars, 1948– Methodological individualism : background, history, and meaning / Lars Udehn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Individualism. I. Title. HM1276 .U33 2001 302.5~4–dc21 2001019663 ISBN 0–415–21811–x (Print edition) ISBN 0-203-20783-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-20786-6 (Adobe eReader Format)

Contents

List of figures Preface Acknowledgements

x xi xii

1 Introduction

1

2 Background

7

The social contract 7 The invisible hand 10 Classical economics 11 German historicism 19 Positivist sociology 27 Holism and collectivism 38

3 Psychologism in early social science

41

British psychologism 43 John Stuart Mill 43 Utilitarian economics 49 German psychologism 58 The rise of psychology 58 Wilhelm Dilthey 67 Georg Simmel 73 Psychologism on trial 77

4 Austrian methodological individualism Carl Menger 87 Max Weber 95 Joseph Schumpeter 104 Ludwig von Mises 107 Friedrich von Hayek 114 The Austrian influence 121

87

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Contents

5 Society as subjectively meaningful interaction

126

Symbolic interactionism 127 Phenomenological sociology 137 Existentialism 144 Ethnomethodology 150 Social constructionism 160

6 Positivism in philosophy and social science

167

Positivist philosophy 167 British empiricism 168 Logical positivism 173 Positivist social science 179 Systematic empiricism 179 Positivist social theory 189 Homans’s theory of exchange 190 German Verhaltenstheorie 196

7 Popperian methodological individualism

200

Karl Popper 200 J.W.N. Watkins 211 Institutional individualism 218 Joseph Agassi 218 Ian C. Jarvie 221 John O. Wisdom 224 Conclusion 226

8 Economics: the individualist science

228

Macroeconomics and microfoundations 230 General equilibrium theory 241 Game theory 250 Conclusion 254

9 The new institutional economics Social organisations 260 The household 261 The firm 265 The state 272 Interest groups 275 Conclusion 275 Social rules 276 Property rights 276 Law 278 Constitutions 281 Evolutionary economics 281 Conclusion 286

255

Contents ix

10 Rational choice individualism

288

Rational choice sociology 290 James Coleman 292 Raymond Boudon 306 Analytical Marxism 309 Jon Elster 310 John Roemer 316 Structural individualism 318

11 Why methodological individualism?

320

Philosophical background 321 Reductionism 324 Scientific reduction 324 Psychologism 331 Microfoundations 336 Normative individualism 336 Political individualism 337 Humanism 339 Conclusion 345

12 Methodological individualism restated

346

Strong and weak methodological individualism 346 Versions of strong methodological individualism 349 Explanatory methodological individualism 354

Notes Bibliography Index of author names Index

357 388 437 441

Figures

1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 8.1 8.2 9.1 9.2 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 12.1 12.2

A graphic representation of methodological individualism The theory of the social contract Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand Emile Durkheim’s rules of sociological method Social wholes and collectives John Stuart Mill’s psychologistic methodological individualism Carl Menger’s theory of social institutions Actions and institutions according to Robert Nozick Individuals in society according to Weber, Mises and Hayek Society according to symbolic interactionism Society according to phenomenological sociology Society according to ethnomethodology Berger and Luckmann’s dialectic of individual and society A mapping of some sociological theories in a two-dimensional space Mario Bunge’s methodological systemism Roy Bhaskar’s transformational model of the society/person connection Hedström and Swedberg’s typology of social mechanisms Popperian institutional individualism The elements of the economic system according to Keynes The methodological individualism of general equilibrium theory Social institutions as endogenous variables Social institutions as endogenous and exogenous variables Coleman’s micro–macro scheme Methodological individualism according to Coleman Coleman’s micro–macro scheme extended in time Social structure as a determinant of individual action Social structure as positions to be filled Structural individualism The individualistic research programme, or versions of strong methodological individualism Deductive–nomological explanations

5 9 11 34 40 49 91 125 125 136 144 160 161 165 186 187 188 227 232 245 286 287 299 300 301 303 305 318 353 355

Preface

This book is partly based on my doctoral thesis, Methodological Individualism – A Critical Appraisal (1987). More exactly, chapters 1, 4–7 and 11–12 are revised versions of parts of my dissertation, while chapters 2–3, and 8–10 are entirely new. I estimate the new material to make up about half of this book. Of my previous work, I have used only the first part, which consists of a presentation and clarification of methodological individualism, but not the second, critical, part. The reason for this is not that I am less critical of the original doctrine of methodological individualism today, than I was in 1987, but that I wanted to expand my presentation and explication of this doctrine. One thing, however, makes a critical appraisal of methodological individualism more complicated today than it was in 1987. It is now more obvious than it was before that methodological individualism exists in a number of weak versions, in addition to the strong version that still dominates in economics. These weak versions of methodological individualism are, in my opinion, far less objectionable than the original strong version, which I criticised in 1987. I don’t believe, however, that they are unobjectionable, but I will save my objections to a later work. The present book is part of a larger research project, which is going to include three more volumes. The first of these is a history of the individualistic theory of ‘man’ and society from Greek Antiquity to the rise of social science and of methodological individualism. My work on this volume is almost finished, and I hope that it will be published in about a year or so. A second volume will deal with the obverse of methodological individualism, usually called methodological collectivism, or holism. Also this volume is well on its way and I plan to complete it within the next couple of years. In a third volume, finally, I will return to the critique of methodological individualism, which I began in my dissertation. My intention is to try to carve out a position of my own, which is based on the viable elements of both individualism and holism, but avoids their objectionable features.

Acknowledgements

I have been working on this book for quite some time. My first research on the topic of methodological individualism goes back to the end of the 1970s. Over the years I have been helped in various ways by lots of people and I am afraid that today I do not even remember all who made some contribution to the end result which is this book. My first and greatest debt is to Thomas Coniavitis, who suggested that I should write my doctoral thesis on methodological individualism and who influenced my thinking about it over many years of teaching and discussion. Without him, this book would most probably not have been written at all, and had it been written, it had been different from what it is. My intellectual exchange with Thomas has shaped my own thinking about social theory and methodology in important ways. My thesis was written at the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, and my supervisors were Björn Eriksson and Ulf Himmelstrand. I am grateful to both of them, not only for the help they gave as part of their duty, but also for help I received after they had finished their assigned tasks. Peter Johnson read the whole manuscript and helped me improve upon many arguments and formulations. I am particularly grateful for his efforts to improve my English. A special thanks goes also to Tommy Törnqvist for intellectual stimulation and, not least, for unfailing moral support. Lola Billås wrote the whole thesis on a PC, with scrupulous exactitude, before I had myself switched to this new technology. Other people, then at the department of sociology in Uppsala, who read parts of my thesis and made valuable suggestions include Göran Ahrne, Tom Burns, Magdalena Czaplicka, Peter Ekegren, Mats Franzén, Kaj Håkansson, Bo Lewin, Peter Sohlberg, Richard Swedberg and Börje Svensson. A special thanks goes to Wodek Rabinowicz and Lars Bergström, then at the Department of Philosophy in Uppsala, who generously offered their philosophical expertise to a dilettante in this field. While helping me to avoid some philosophical blunders, they have no responsibility for those that remain. I am, finally, indebted to Margareta Bertilsson and Sven Eliaeson, who also read and commented on the manuscript to my dissertation. My doctoral thesis was presented and defended at a disputation in Uppsala in 1987. The faculty opponent was Steven Lukes, who is one of the main authorities on the subject of individualism, including methodological individualism. I

Acknowledgements xiii am grateful both for his critical remarks and for his valuable suggestions for future revisions of my thesis. Much of the later work on this book has been done at the Department of Sociology in Stockholm. Once more I had the benefit of constant support from Göran Ahrne and Richard Swedberg, who both moved there before me. Richard has commented on some new parts of the manuscript and advised me in many ways on how to improve it. In Stockholm, I have also benefited from discussions about methodological individualism with Patrik Aspers, Christofer Edling, Peter Hedström, Fredrik Liljeros and Per-Anders Lindén. Robert Andersson and Jens Rydgren read my dissertation voluntarily and made me think twice about some matters I had considered settled. In this second phase of my work on methodological individualism, I have finally received much help from Christine Roman, who has been my main discussant about everything that had to do with the writing of this book. Most of chapter 9 of this book, on the new institutionalism in economics, was written while I was a visiting guest at the Max-Planck-Institute for Research into Economic Systems in Jena. I am grateful to the Institutional Economic Unit for inviting me to this extremely favourable milieu for doing research. During my stay there in September-October 1998, I had every opportunity to read, write and discuss what I had written, undisturbed by any burdening duties. I am particularly indebted to Thrainn Eggertssom, who first invited me, and to Annette Mummert, Uwe Mummert, Oliver Volckart, Stefan Voigt and Michael Wohlgemuth for making my stay in Jena both intellectually stimulating and pleasant in every way. Two anonymous reviewers have read parts of the manuscript and offered some good advice on how to make a book out of it. I recognise one of them as Victor Vanberg, who has written an important book on methodological individualism, himself. I am particularly grateful for his generous comments on my manuscript. I would, finally, like to thank the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Humanistisk-Samhällsvetenskapliga Forskningsrådet, or HSFR), now a part of The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), for necessary financial support. Without the grants I have received from this source during large periods of my work on methodological individualism, it would have been quite impossible to write a book like this.

1

Introduction

There has been in the history of social thought a constant battle over the true nature of society and about the best way to understand and explain it. A major divide goes between those who see society as an aggregate, collection, or complex of individuals and those who see society as some kind of ordered whole and/or unitary collective. The former try to explain social phenomena in terms of individuals and their interaction, while the latter maintain that this is not possible without essential reference to the social wholes of which they are part and/or the collectives to which they belong.1 The opposition between these conceptions of society was inherited by the social sciences and divided them in two conflicting camps. With the emergence of the social sciences, however, the metaphysical issue was increasingly turned into a methodological issue. As we shall see, this does not mean that the metaphysical issue disappeared, only that it receded into the background. There have been many names used to designate the two camps and their respective doctrines. In the twentieth century two (or three) names have been selected as the most common. The battle has been increasingly waged in terms of methodological individualism, and its transmutations, versus methodological collectivism and/or holism. My interest, in this book, is in the former, but in order to understand one side, it is necessary to take a look also at the other side. Above all, it is necessary that there is a genuine divide separating the two doctrines, or else this book would be very much ado about nothing. There are those who see, in this issue, the most fundamental and most important problem of the social sciences: that of the relation between individual and society. According to others, however, individualists and holists are engaged in a sham battle.2 I believe the first view is more correct. Anyone the least acquainted with the social sciences, knows that it matters which view you adopt in this matter. Methodological collectivists and holists do tend to ask different questions and provide different answers than do methodological individualists. There are important differences also within the two camps, but this is another matter. I also find it hard and a little bit odd to believe that the best minds in the history of social thought should really have engaged, and with so much energy, in something which turns out to be a sham battle. Didn’t they notice? When I first started working on the topic of methodological individualism, I

2

Introduction

was often told that the debate about it was over. Several sociologists tried to persuade me that arguments against methodological individualism advanced by Steven Lukes and others are so strong as to render methodological individualism a mere curiosity, or at least harmless. The main point of Lukes was that it is vain to discuss methodological individualism without making clear what conception of ‘individuals’ you are using (Lukes, 1968; see also Burman, 1979). His argument was addressed in part to the methodological individualist, J.W.N Watkins, who had argued that methodological individualism is, or follows, from the ontological ‘truism’ that ‘[a]ll social phenomena are, directly or indirectly, human creations’ (Watkins, 1952a: 28). Today, we know that the debate about methodological individualists was not over. With the recent upsurge of rational choice, a new wave of methodological individualism has swept the social sciences. One of the most influential advocates of this approach, Jon Elster (1986b: 66; 1989b: 13),3 has recently repeated Watkins’s claim that methodological individualism is trivially true, but since it is impossible for a methodology to be at all true, I suppose that Elster really means metaphysical, or ontological, individualism.4 J.W.N. Watkins was more correct on this point, at least, since he recognised that his truism is an ontological thesis rather than a methodological rule. But, as he later himself admitted (1952b: 186f), he was nevertheless wrong to assume that the latter follows from the former. Even if ontological individualism is trivially true, it does not follow that methodological individualism is the only, or even the best, way to explain all social phenomena (Lukes, 1968; Kinkaid, 1997: 4, 16f). As Ernest Gellner (1956: 176) put it some time ago, with respect to history: ‘History is about chaps. It does not follow that its explanations are always in terms of chaps’. Today, it is fairly common to accept ontological individualism, but deny methodological individualism.5 I am not going to argue against ontological individualism, here, but I deny that it is trivially true. It is only if stated in a trivial enough way, that ontological individualism is true, but this says little, or nothing, about the real issues involved in the debate about it (cf. Miller, 1978; 1987: 115). If, for instance, methodological individualism is only intended to deny that society is literally an organism endowed with a mind, or consciousness, which exists apart from the minds of individuals, then, it is of course true, but as Miller points out, even the archholist, Hegel, maintained that the world spirit is manifested in the actions of individual human beings and nowhere else.6 Also, to suggest that the ‘truth’ of methodological individualism is secured by the fact that social wholes are made up of individuals and their relations to one another is to beg the fundamentally important questions: ‘What is an individual?’ and ‘What is a social relation?’7 The issue between methodological individualists and their critics, then, is genuine, but this does not mean that the debate has always been about the real issues involved. Far from it. There has been too much confusion surrounding the meaning and implications of the two positions, for a really fruitful debate to take place. This sad fact, has, no doubt, contributed to create the impression of a sham battle. To an astonishing degree, the disputants have argued at cross-

Introduction

3

purposes, and without a manifest intention to understand the opposite point of view. There has been a marked tendency among representatives of both sides to misinterpret and misrepresent the ideas and arguments put forward by the other side. The reason for this is, probably, that the issue of methodological individualism versus collectivism and holism is felt to be important, not only for purely scientific, but for extra-scientific reasons as well (cf. Kinkaid, 1997: 2ff). First of all, it seems to be inextricably mixed up with some of people’s most entrenched, and most strongly-held beliefs about human nature and society. Second, these beliefs seem to be closely linked to their moral and political convictions. Third, there is clearly a connection with fundamental beliefs about science and its growth. Finally, there is a more crass reason for social scientists to have strong opinions about methodological individualism. It seems to have territorial implications. Many social scientists, especially sociologists, have, no doubt, rejected methodological individualism, because they believed that it implies psychologism, or the reduction of sociology to psychology. If so, methodological individualism would rob sociologists of their discipline. For all these reasons, the debate between methodological individualists and their critics has been more confused than usual in social science and philosophy. It may be maintained – and sometimes I have been inclined to think so myself – that the debate between methodological individualists and methodological holists concerns one of those eternal issues which will never be settled by social science, philosophy, or by any form of argument. If so, it is, of course, mere waste of energy to write a book about it. Now, obviously, this is not what I believe. While, I still think that the issue between individualists and holists might never be finally settled, once and for all, I do believe that it is possible to make some progress. The aim of this study is to bring some clarity about the meaning of one side of the divide: methodological individualism.8 This is much needed, since, as David-Hillel Ruben (1985: 132) has maintained: ‘methodological individualism has never been stated with enough clarity and precision to permit its proper evaluation’. Now, I do not cherish any illusions about what can be accomplished by way of remedy, but I do hope to be able to shed, at least, some light on this controversial doctrine. I will try to do so by writing the history of methodological individualism. As far as I can see, there is no other way to contribute to our understanding of a doctrine than by looking at the various statements and uses of it in the history of ideas; in this particular case, in social science and philosophy. Since no doctrine can reasonably be interpreted as the sum total of all statements about it, at first I imposed two criteria of adequacy: Statements about methodological individualism must be consistent, and the doctrine stated must be significant. By the latter criterion, I mean that methodological individualism must be stated in such a way that it fits those social scientific theories and approaches which are generally considered individualistic. While working with this book, I have decided to drop both criteria. The

4

Introduction

reason is that the idea of methodological individualism has developed in curious ways, and is hard to recognise these days. It would, of course, be possible to stick to the criterion of consistency and rule out what is not consistent with the original version of methodological individualism as being something else. When an increasing number of people begin to believe that this else is methodological individualism, however, this strategy becomes problematic. In this situation, I have decided to take a less essentialist approach and accept the development of new versions of methodological individualism, different from the original one, but, nevertheless, versions of methodological individualism. The criterion of significance is, of course, dependent upon that of consistency, but it is still possible to conceive of some social scientific theories as being paradigm cases of methodological individualism and other theories as being more or less individualistic, compared to these paradigmatic cases. There are several possible ways of approaching the task I have set myself. The most obvious way to proceed is, probably, to scan the literature for explicit statements of the doctrine of methodological individualism. Another way is to concentrate on the uses of methodological individualism in social science and history. There might be other ways, as well, but these are the ways I have followed. In order to clarify and, perhaps, justify the second route, I make a distinction between methodological individualism as a principle, or programme, of social research, and methodological-individualism-in-use; social science that is in line with this principle, or programme, without being explicitly based upon it. It is, of course, possible to suggest, or accept, theories that comply with the strictures of methodological individualism, without being committed to, or even be aware of this principle, or programme. If we have to do with theories rather than particular explanations, it is possible to speak of ‘theoretical individualism’, and if it is a general theory, of the ‘individualistic theory of society’. When I use these expressions, in this book, I understand pieces of social science, which qualify as methodological-individualism-in-use. This study, then, seeks the meaning of methodological individualism in the short history of this doctrine. Methodological individualism goes back to the nineteenth century, and the various attempts to lay the foundation of the social sciences. The individualist theory of society is much older, of course, but this is a topic I will treat in another book.9 How do I choose what to include in this history? Who are the main representatives of programmatic methodological individualism and which theories are paradigms of methodological-individualism-in-use? There is no certain way to decide these things and, in the end, you have to rely on previous knowledge and rules-of-thumb, as your main guides. A first rule I have tried to follow, is to concentrate on those social scientists and philosophers, who themselves are adherents of methodological individualism, to the exclusion of those who merely comment upon it, or criticise it. A second rule I have followed, is to pay most attention to those methodological individualists who are singled out as most important by the scientific and philosophical communities. ‘Most important’, in this case, means most cited in the literature. Equally, when it comes to method-

Introduction

5

ological-individualism-in-use. I have presented those theories and approaches which are commonly cited as individualistic and actually there is more agreement on this than on the exact meaning of methodological individualism. In order to illustrate the differences there are between various versions of methodological individualism, I am going to make use of some graphic representations (see Figure 1.1). More specifically, I will use a scheme I have borrowed from the philosopher Arthur Danto (1965a). As we shall see, many others have used similar schemes to represent the relations between individual and society, action and structure, or micro and macro. As I use Danto’s scheme there are two levels, representing the individual and society, respectively. The arrows represent the direction of explanation according to methodological individualism proper, or of causality in the case of ontological individualism.

Figure 1.1 A graphic representation of methodological individualism Source: Adapted with modification from Danto (1965a: 269)

A word of warning should be voiced immediately against interpreting this simple scheme too literally. Individualists and collectivists usually understand both individual and society in different ways. To assume that we can talk about the individual and society in a neutral way is, therefore, an illusion (Lukes, 1968: 123ff; Archer, 1995: 34ff). If necessary qualifications are made, however, I think the Danto’s two-level scheme is a useful tool for making the differences between various versions of methodological individualism visible. Two more clarifications need to be made before I get on to my real task. This study is all about the meaning of methodological individualism, and not at all about its merits, if any. This does not mean that I am, somehow, neutral in the debate between methodological individualism and its critics. I belong to the critics, even if I am far less critical of the recent, weak versions of methodological individualism than I am of the original, strong version. Even so, I have refrained from passing explicit judgement on methodological individualism in this work and I have tried, seriously, to give a fair account of its background, history and meaning. I hope that I have succeeded. Finally, I am a sociologist, interested in the other social sciences and in philosophy, but, nevertheless, a dilettante, outside my own discipline. I have tried to

6

Introduction

understand the intricacies of economics and philosophy, in particular, and I hope I have succeeded reasonably well, but I may, of course, have failed in some respect. If so, I hope that my failure does not seriously damage the overall quality of this work.

2

Background

The individualist theory of society has a long history in Western thought. Since I will try to tell this history in another volume, I will not go into details here. My purpose in this chapter is merely to provide a brief background to the rise of the specifically methodological version of individualism. For this purpose, I will first present the two main versions of the individualist theory of society which preceded methodological individualism; the theory of the social contract and the theory of spontaneous order, as it took shape in Adam Smith’s idea of the market as an invisible hand. This idea laid the foundation of economics and it is often assumed that classical economics was not only the first social science, but also the first example of methodological individualism. I am going to argue below that, as such, it was not an altogether clearcut example, although I agree, of course, that it was more individualistic than the views of most of its critics. Classical economics was mainly a British phenomenon, but in Germany, and to a lesser degree in France, there was a massive reaction against the individualism of the Enlightenment, of utilitarianism and of classical economics. The main expression of this reaction is the cultural movement known as Romanticism, whose most significant manifestation in the human sciences is German historicism. In France there emerged a doctrine which shared some elements with both British and German thinking, namely the positivist sociology of Auguste Comte. Methodological individualism emerged, I believe, as an individualist counterreaction to the anti-individualist reaction of German historicism and the sociologism of positivist sociology. If this belief is correct, it becomes necessary to include the latter two intellectual currents as important parts in any account of the background of methodological individualism.

The social contract The individualist theory of society goes back, as far as we know, to Greek Antiquity, where it was advanced, in particular, by the Sophists and by the Epicureans. The former invented the theory of the social contract and saw all social institutions as man-made conventions. The latter adopted the theory of the social contract and added to it an atomist metaphysics and a hedonist psychology. The individualist theory of society disappeared with Antiquity and was

8

Background

replaced by a more holistic and collectivist view of society in the Middle Ages. It reappeared in the Renaissance and culminated with the Enlightenment. The most important figures are Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704), at least from an individualist point of view. Of these, I believe Hobbes is the most important as a representative of a theoretical, and perhaps also methodological, individualism, while Locke is more important as a representative of political individualism. The point of departure of most theories of the social contract, and Hobbes’s theory is no exception, is the ‘state of nature’. In Hobbes’s version, the state of nature is characterised by a war of each individual against all other individuals. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no Account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual feare, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short. (Hobbes, [1651] 1968: 186). The reason for this sad state of things is that there is no law and no common power to fear. But why is there need for a power to fear? Do people abide by law only for fear of consequences? According to Hobbes: Yes! Human nature is such that individuals seek only their own gain, and above all, glory, without regard for others. Without a law to prevent them, they will invade one another in order to take what they want, or to prevent others from taking what they want. Happily, human beings are not only self-interested, they are also rational, and this is their salvation. Hobbes’s state of nature is no place you would choose to inhabit, if there were an alternative. Now, since human beings are rational they realise that they would all be better off in a state of society where there is law and justice and, therefore, peace. Hence, they enter a contract where they give up their natural right to everything and authorise an absolute sovereign to institute justice. This is a schematic version of Hobbes’s theory of the social contract. It is a theory, which is extremely individualistic, in the sense that it starts with natural, or pre-social individuals and explains the institution of society, or the state, solely in terms of the human nature of these individuals (Peacock, 1986: 11–13; Pizzorno, 1991). Since human beings, according to Hobbes, are rational egoists, it is possible to see his theory of the social contract as a piece of rational choice analysis (see, e.g., Hechter, 1989: 60). It has been suggested by Steven Lukes (1968: 119; 1973: 110) that Hobbes was also the first to articulate the principle of methodological individualist (see also Watkins, 1955b: 132f; [1965] 1973: 34), but this is more doubtful. The closest you get to an articulation of methodological individualism, in the writings of Hobbes, is his advocacy of the method of resolution and composition, which is similar to the synthetic method suggested by Friedrich von Hayek (see p. 117). After Hobbes, the theory of the social contract was propagated by Benedict

Background

9

Spinoza (1632–77), Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94), John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), among others. Of these, Spinoza and Rousseau were not individualists at all. Pufendorf was an individualist, but with some reservations. Locke, however, was certainly an individualist, but he was primarily a political individualist and only secondarily a theoretical individualist. Like Hobbes, Locke took his point of departure in the state of nature, defined negatively as the absence of government. He did not share Hobbes’s view of the state of nature as a state of war, however. When Locke turns to the state of nature in the second volume of Two Treatises of Civil Government ([1690] 1960), he depicts it as a state of freedom, equality and reason. According to Locke, reason is the law of nature telling every man ‘not to harm another man in his Life, Health, Liberty and Possessions’ (p. 311). When Locke returns to the state of nature later on in Two Treatises, however, he paints another picture, closer to that of Hobbes. It is now a state of uncertainty, where the individual is ‘constantly exposed to the Invasion of others’. This makes him willing to quit a Condition, which however free, is full of fears and continual dangers; And ’tis not without reason, that he seeks out, and is willing to joyn in Society with others who are already united, or have a mind to unite for the mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties and Estates, which I call by a general name, Property. (Locke [1690] 1960: 395) Once in the condition of society, individuals see its advantages and consent to put themselves ‘under an obligation to every one of that society’, and ‘to submit to the determination of the majority’ (p. 376). The social contract, or compact, of Locke, is not limited to the original contract and it need not be explicit. People may also give their tacit consent to a Government, which fulfils its chief end; ‘the preservation of their property’ (p. 395). The theory of the social contract, in one form or another, is the main theory of society before the eighteenth century. It is also the first paradigm of an individualist theory of society, or of methodological-individualism-in-use. Using a, nowadays, common, if problematic, way of representing the relation of individuals to society, as two distinct levels of reality and/or analysis, I suggest the following representation of the theory of the social contract.

Figure 2.1 The theory of the social contract

10

Background

The invisible hand After Locke, there was a break with the theory of the social contract, at least as a theory of society. Social theory developed in a less rationalist and less individualist direction. In France and Scotland, there emerged the insight that social institutions are not conscious inventions, but have developed gradually and unintentionally. In the terminology, recently made popular by Friedrich von Hayek, most social institutions are ‘spontaneous orders’. Following the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), he maintains, that they are the result of human action, but not of human design (Hayek, 1948: 7). Among the most important critics of the theory of the social contract was another Scottish philosopher, David Hume (1711–76), who dismissed this idea as a mere fiction invented for political purposes ([1741/2] 1963: 452ff). The most important application of the idea that social institutions are the unintended consequences of the intentional actions of individuals would turn out to be the market. In this case there was a special twist to the idea of spontaneous order, because of its somewhat miraculous power of turning self-interested individual action into a collective good. The first to make this idea well known was the Dutch born physician Bernard Mandeville (c. 1670–1733), who moved to England and wrote his infamous Fable of the Bees (1714/29/32), with the more telling subtitle, Private Vices, Public Benefits. The argument of Mandeville is that many selfish and even some vicious actions, such as crimes, are turned into public benefits. The most famous use of the idea of spontaneous order, transforming private self-interest into collective benefit, is of course Adam Smith’s theory of the market working as if governed by an invisible hand. (1723–90). In The Wealth of Nations (1776), he suggested that an individual, while intending only his own gain, is in many cases ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end [the public interest] which was not part of his intention’ ([1776] 1937: 423). It is common among more recent methodological individualists to trace this doctrine back to the idea of spontaneous order, as suggested by Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith. The most wellknown example is Friedrich von Hayek, but he is not alone.1 It is my impression that this interpretation is most common among social scientists and philosophers who share a commitment to classical liberalism, which suggests a relation between methodological and political individualism. Be that as it may, those who trace the origin of methodological individualism to Mandeville and the Scottish philosophers have been anxious to point out that this version of individualism is, not only less rationalistic, but also less radical than that of the theory of the social contract. It is pointed out that the Scottish version of individualism takes its point of departure in the human individual as a social being, with a language and other social institutions. I agree with this interpretation, but suggest that this version of methodological individualism is different, not only from that implicit in the theory of the social contract, but also from all explicitly stated versions of this principle before Joseph Agassi suggested the principle of institutional individualism (cf. Song, 1995).

Background Society

Individual

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Social institutions Prices

Market exchange

Figure 2.2 Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand

Classical economics The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life … Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual … appears as an ideal whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history’s point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature. This illusion has been common to each new epoch to this day. (Marx, 1857–8: 83) This quotation is from the first page of Marx’s Grundrisse. A similar charge was made in the famous section on commodity fetishism in Capital, vol. 1 ([1867] 1976), where he observes that ‘political economists are fond of Robinson Crusoe stories’ (p. 169).2 Marx was not the only one and not the first to accuse political economists of excessive individualism. Similar accusations were part of the standard critique directed at classical economics from the quarters of German and English Romanticism.3 In his Past and Present (1843), Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) had called economics ‘The Dismal Science’ preaching the ‘Gospel of Mammonism’ and reaching strange conclusions: We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named ‘fair competition’, and so forth, it is mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation between human beings; we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of Man. ‘My starving workers?’ answers the rich mill-owner: ‘Did not I hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to

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Background the last sixpence, the sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?’ – Verily Mammon worship is a melancholy creed. (Carlyle [1843] 1965: 148f)

Carlyle was a conservative, but he was cited with approval by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto ([1848] 1967: 82), and it is not hard to see why. There is a close affinity between the conservative and the radical, socialist critique of captalism in the nineteenth century. This is even more obvious in the writings of John Ruskin (1819–1900), who was also a conservative, but exerted a strong influence on the guild socialists. Ruskin took a more scholarly approach to economics than did Carlyle, and made a detailed, if not very pertinent, critique of the theories of Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. The ideal economy, for Ruskin, was that of the household, which is a moral economy, governed by moral principles of the organisation of labour and of the distribution of its fruits. Political economy, therefore, ought to be a moral science, rather than a catallactics, or theory of exchange (Ruskin, 1857–62).4 In the critique of political economy by Carlyle and Ruskin are mixed theoretical, political and moral considerations. Economics is both theoretically and morally individualistic and by moral individualism, is understood self-interest. This is typical of the nineteenth century. Usually, no distinction was made between theoretical and methodological considerations on the one hand, and political, economic and moral considerations on the other hand (cf. Sowell, 1974: ch. 1 and Vanberg, 1975: ch. 1). As we shall see, the term ‘methodological individualism’ was introduced to make the distinction between methodological and political individualism.5 The view that classical economics was individualistic is not a story made up by its critics, however. As we have already seen, it is common among defenders of methodological individualism to trace the origin of this doctrine to the Scottish Enlightenment and this tradition included Adam Smith, the acknowledged founder of classical economics and, therefore, the father of economic science. But were Adam Smith and the other classical economists methodological individualists? There is no clear answer to this question, for several reasons. First of all, the classical economists, before John Stuart Mill, did not engage very much in methodological discussion and not at all systematically (Sowell, 1974: 112). By the time of John Stuart Mill, however, classical economics had become individualistic. Smith, however, was not a radical individualist, like Mill, and it was only later that his model of the market as a spontaneous order was turned into a paradigm of strong methodological individualism. In the theory of general equilibrium, first suggested by Walras and more recently developed by Arrow and Debreu (among others), we find an economic theory without any social institutions. The individualism of classical economics was more political and economic than theoretical and methodological. The classical economists favoured a free market with limited government, but their view of society was not radically individualistic and they did not advocate an individualistic methodology. Their

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approach to society is more aptly described by the term ‘institutionalism’. It is true, though, that Adam Smith’s analysis of the market as if steered by an invisible hand, when stripped of the institutional element, has turned into a paradigm of an individualist theory of society, or of methodological individualism-in-use. Thomas Malthus’s (1766–1834) An Essay on the Principle of Population ([1798] 1970) seems to be rather different from Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The pessimistic argument of the book is based on two postulates: ‘First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Second, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state’ (p. 70). From ‘these fixed laws of our nature’, together with some additional assumptions, Malthus arrives at the following conclusion: ‘Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic ratio’ (p. 71). This is an extremely individualistic argument, without a trace of social institutions, or historical relativity. But appearances are deceptive. The word ‘unchecked’ is important, indeed. The laws about the increase of population and food, are subject to a ceteris paribus clause (pp. 112f). As a matter of fact, Malthus’ discussion is unusually rich with observations on social institutions, which counteract the tendency to shortage of food. It may also be pointed out that, despite appearances to the contrary, Malthus was not an advocate of an abstract-deductive approach to political economy. He was very careful to support his laws by empirical evidence and in his Summary View of the Principle of Population (1830) he maintains that they are inductive generalisations, derived from experience. But this was after the intellectual exchange with his friend David Ricardo. On the other side of the Channel, Jean-Baptiste Say (1776–1832) also defended a more inductive and more ‘holistic’ approach to economics. Without denying the utility of the abstract-deductive method, which he himself frequently used, he maintained that all principles of economics must be based, not on hypotheses, but on observation of facts and derived from these facts by induction ([1803] 1971: xxvf, lii). Like Malthus, Say criticised Ricardo for starting from abstract hypotheses and then reasoning in a straight line, without ever comparing his conclusion with observed facts. ‘From that instant nothing in the author’s work is represented as it really occurs in nature’ (p. xlvii). In order to be of practical utility, however, the science of political economy must be based on observed facts. Say’s economist par préference was Adam Smith and, like the latter, he was some kind of methodological institutionalist. He seems to have gone further in a holistic direction, however. Not only did he advocate the approach of social economy, but he obviously conceived of society as an organism of interrelated parts (Forget, 1999: 53ff). He did not, however, wish to include politics in the science of political economy. Economics is a science of the production, distribution and consumption of wealth, but not of the government, or state, conceived of as a household, writ large. Jean-Baptiste Say clearly did not contribute to making classical economics more methodologically individualistic. He was, however, an advocate of laissez-faire and Say’s law of the market,

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which says that markets are always cleared (Sowell, 1974: ch. 2),6 is an article of faith for most libertarian economists. It is fair to say, I believe, that economics became more individualistic with David Ricardo (1772–1823). At least, it became more abstract, and this led to a more individualistic approach, simply because it was social institutions and relations which disappeared in the process of abstraction. In the case of Ricardo, there is some justification for Marx’s complaint in the quotation above. Ricardo frequently places his abstract reasoning in ‘the early stages of society’ (Ricardo, [1817] 1973: passim), as if it were a fully fledged market society. It is this lack of historical insight which Marx objects to with some justice.7 It should be pointed out, though, that Ricardo is still looking at the distribution of wealth, as a matter of its division among the three classes in society: ‘the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital necessary for its cultivation, and the labourers by whose industry it is cultivated’ (p. 3). This makes it possible to talk about ‘the holism of the Classicals’ (Greaves, 1996: 2). Economics would definitely become more individualistic with the rise of the neoclassical school of economics. In 1820 Malthus published his Principles of Political Economy, partly as a reply to Ricardo, who had criticised his theory of rent. This is not my business, but besides this disagreement there is a more principal one concerning approach and method. Malthus sides clearly with Smith against Ricardo ([1820] 1989: 22f), and this means that he is sceptical about the excessive simplification and generalisation, which follows with using mathematics, or geometry, as a model for economic theory (pp. 1ff). He is also critical of the unwillingness of some economists to test their theories, but, nevertheless, to use them as guides to political practice. Malthus repeats these complaints in Definitions in Political Economy ([1827] 1971 1ff), where he also criticises Ricardo for breeding confusion by using familiar economic terms in unfamiliar ways (pp. 28–36). This critique of Ricardo’s way with words was echoed by Nassau Senior (1790–1864) in An Outline of the Science of Political Economy ([1836] 1965: 5), where he also repeated some other complaints, made by Malthus, against Ricardo. Senior shared Ricardo’s view of economics as an abstract-deductive science, resting on a small number of indubitable general propositions, from which inferences are drawn, which, if our logic is impeccable, are as true as the premises. According to Senior, inferences about the nature and production of wealth are universally true, whereas those about its distribution are affected by ‘disturbing causes’, in the form of ‘the peculiar institutions of particular countries’ (p. 3). But no matter how general and how true the economist’s conclusions, they do not authorize him in adding a single syllable of advice. That privilege belongs to the writer or the statesman who has considered all the causes which may promote or impede the general welfare of those he addresses, not to the theorist who has considered only one, though among the most important, of those causes. The business of a Political Economist is neither to recommend nor to dissuade, but to state those general principles, which it

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is fatal to neglect, but neither advisable, nor perhaps practicable, to use as the sole, or even the principal, guides in the actual conduct of affairs. (Senior [1836] 1965: 3) The voices of Malthus and Senior were two in a choir. The critique against Ricardo’s use of the abstract-deductive approach was massive, even from those who used such an approach themselves. There were mainly two charges: (1) Ricardo failed to see that abstraction is also simplification and (2) he made illegitimate use of his abstract theory as a basis for political recommendations, later called the ‘Ricardian Vice’ (Schumpeter, 1954: 472). It is commonly assumed that Ricardo owed his method to his close friend James Mill (1773–1836), while Mill owed his knowledge about economic matters to Ricardo (Hutchison, 1978: ch. 2). Against this view, Samuel Hollander (1985: 1) has argued that ‘[a] sharp distinction should be made between the methodological orientations of James Mill and David Ricardo’. While Ricardo never published anything substantial about the method of economics, Hollander maintains that he had a fairly sophisticated view of the nature and limitations of economic analysis in his unpublished writings (pp. 15–36). That, in fact, he did fully recognise that abstraction is simplification. According to Hollander, then, Mill is the one to blame, not Ricardo. In a forceful reply to Hollander, Hutchison (1994: 91) describes this view as ‘odd’, since it is to deny ‘plain fact’, ‘for which there is abundant evidence’. Allen Oakley (1994) grants that Ricardo may have been a more sophisticated methodologist than commonly believed (p. 132), but it remains the case that the public impression given by Ricardo to his contemporaries and immediate successors was that he espoused a severely abstractdeductive methodology as the one most appropriate to political economy’ (p. 134). There is no doubt whatsoever that James Mill was a champion of an abstractdeductive methodology, based on the model of mathematics, and used it without hesitation, as a basis of political recommendation. In the Preface to The Elements of Political Economy (1820b), it is written: ‘My object has been to compose a school-book of Political Economy, to detach the essential principles of the science from all extraneous topics, to state the propositions clearly and in their logical order, and to subjoin its demonstrations to each’ (p. 204). He goes on to draw an analogy between demonstrations in political economy and in mathematics, which says something about his view of economic theory. In the introduction he makes another analogy: ‘Political economy is to the State, what domestic economy is to the family’ (p. 210). This view of economics was later deemed seriously wrong by the Austrian methodological economists. Friedrich von Hayek called it ‘false individualism’ (pp. 119f ). If political economy is a matter of state, there must be a sharing of subject matter between economics and political science. But this is not all. According to Mill, there is also a sharing of approach. In his famous ‘Essay on Government’ (1820a), Mill used an economic approach to politics, much like the recent theory of public choice.8 Mill’s main source of inspiration was Jeremy Bentham, who

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provided his view of human nature: ‘We may allow, for example, in general terms, that the lot of every human being is determined by his pains and pleasures; that his happiness corresponds with the degree in which his pleasures are great, and his pains are small’ (pp. 55f). This is Bentham’s first assumption. His second assumption is that it is the business of government to maximise happiness in society. A more remote source of inspiration was Hobbes, who provided Mill with two more assumptions: (1) that the principal means used to maximise happiness are wealth and power, and (2) that individuals, unless prevented, will use their power to appropriate the wealth of others. The task of government, then, becomes that of preventing individuals from interfering with the property of others.9 The question Mill tried to answer in his Essay was this: What is the best form of government, on the assumption that it is made up of individuals, who pursue their own selfish ends? The answer he reached differed from that of Hobbes. Instead of an absolute sovereign, Mill recommended a representative system. But then the original question reappears. There can be no doubt, that, if power is granted to a body of men, called Representatives, they, like any other men, will use their power, not for the advantage of the community, but for their own advantage, if they can. The only question is, therefore, how they can be prevented? In other words, how are the interests of the Representatives to be identified with those of the community? (Mill [1820a] 1978: 75) The answer Mill came up with was a form of representative democracy, which, however, excluded women on the ground that their interests are included in that of their fathers or their husbands, as the case may be (p. 79). Mill’s essay was bound to create controversy. The conservatives disliked it, because they rejected any form of democracy and those more radical than Mill himself – eventually including his own son John Stuart Mill – were disappointed with his exclusion of women. The most effective critique came from the historian Thomas B. Macaulay (1800–59), in a famous article in Edinburgh Review (1829). Macaulay’s critique was directed, not at this or that conclusion, but at the approach as such – an approach which, according to Macaulay, makes it possible to reach any conclusion whatsoever: ‘Our objection to the Essay of Mr Mill is fundamental. We believe that it is utterly impossible to deduce the science of government from the principles of human nature’ ([1829] 1978: 124). What proposition is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one: and that is not only true but identical [tautological]; that men always act from self-interest. This truism the Utilitarians proclaim with as much pride as if it were new and as much zeal as if it were important. But in fact, when explained, it means only that men,

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if they can, will do as they choose. … If the doctrine that men always act from self-interest, be laid down in any other sense than this – if the meaning of the word self-interest be narrowed so as to exclude any one of the motives which may by possibility act on any human being, – the proposition ceases to be identical; but at the same time it ceases to be true. (Macaulay [1829] 1978: 124f) Macaulay’s argument made a deep impression upon the younger Mill, who also was disappointed with the reply of his father (Mill [1873] 1961: 96f). By the time of Macaulay’s attack, John Stuart was already in a state of mental crisis, due, at least partly, to increasing doubts about his inherited worldview. The theory, method and politics of Benthamite utilitarianism no longer seemed to provide all the answers. Macaulay’s article was the last nail in the coffin of his father’s absolute intellectual authority. What escaped the notice of both Macaulay and John Stuart Mill, however, is the fact that James Mill did not derive his conclusions from assumptions of human nature alone. Equally important for his argument are the institutional arrangement; monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, different voting rules, etc., within which the play of individual interest takes place. The approach of James Mill was that of institutional individualism. It is arguable that John Stuart’s psychologism was more individualistic than the geometric method of James Mill. Eventually John Stuart would reject the geometric method altogether, and especially in politics, where he came to believe that the assumption of economic man simply does not work (see p. 47). Before he reached this conclusion, however, he wrote his classic article ‘On the Definition of Political Economy and the Method of Investigation Proper to It’ (1836). In this article, the younger Mill still believed that the abstract-deductive method of economics, and the other social sciences, is strictly analogous to the geometric method of Euclides. Unlike the elder Mill, however, he did realise, with perfect clarity, that abstraction is also simplification and, as a corollary, that abstract-deductive theories are inadequate guides to political action, and the more abstract, the less adequate. In the article ‘On the Definition of Political Economy’ Mill made a clear distinction between economics as a science and as an art: ‘Science is a collection of truths; art, a body of rules or directions for conduct’ (1836: 410). Political economy is a science, not to be confused with the art of domestic economy. More specifically, it is a moral – or psychological – science (p. 414). As such, it depends on the laws of mind, or human nature, but not upon these alone. According to Mill, we must distinguish between the individual (1) in isolation from other individuals, (2) in interaction with other individuals and, (3) ‘as living in a state of society, that is forming part of a body or aggregation of human beings, systematically co-operating for common purposes’ (p. 417). Mill calls the science of (3) ‘social economy’, or the ‘science of politics’. Political economy is not social economy, however, ‘but a branch of that science’.

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Background It does not treat of the whole of man’s nature as modified by the social state, nor of the whole conduct of man in society. It is concerned with him solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging of the comparative efficacy of economic means for obtaining that end. It predicts only such of the phenomena of the social state as take place in consequence of the pursuit of wealth. It makes entire abstraction of every human passion or motive, except those which may be regarded as perpetually antagonizing principles to the desire of wealth, namely, aversion to labour and desire of the present enjoyment of costly indulgences. These it takes, to a certain extent, into its calculations, because these do not merely, like other desires, occasionally conflict with the pursuit of wealth, but accompany it always as drag or impediment, and are therefore inseparably mixed up in the consideration of it. (Mill [1836] 1950: 420)

This is the first clear statement of the character and methodological role of economic man in the history of economic thought. Mill’s next step is to maintain that this is the procedure of political economy, not because ‘any political economist was ever so absurd as to suppose that mankind are really thus constituted, but because this is the mode in which science must necessarily proceed’ (p. 421). Even so, the assumption of wealth maximisation, is a fairly good approximation to the truth about men and women in their economic endeavours. Mill goes on to deny that political economy is based on induction. It is, on the contrary, essentially ‘an abstract science’ and its method is ‘the method a priori’ (p. 424). Just like geometry starts from an arbitrary definition of a line, political economy starts from an arbitrary definition of man. They are both equally removed from reality and their conclusions are only true ‘in the abstract’ (p. 425). Mill defends the use of the geometric method in social science, by pointing out that experiments are not feasible. I still find it a bit surprising that he saw the geometric method as the only alternative to experiment, especially, since he goes on to acknowledge the existence of disturbing causes (pp. 429ff) and to argue that because of them, the operation of laws in society give rise to tendencies only. In geometry, there are neither causes, nor tendencies. Except for the misleading analogy with geometry, Mill’s characterisation of political economy stands out as the first really adequate attempt to grasp the nature of economics as a science. In his most important work on the method of science, A System of Logic (1843), Mill abandoned the view that political economy uses a geometric method and in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), he departed from a strict use of the abstract-deductive method. Instead of neglecting disturbing causes, he frequently introduced them in his analysis. One example is his discussion of the division of the produce, which is said to be ‘the result of two determining agencies: Competition and custom’ ([1848] 1976: 242). The final statement of the method of classical economics is J.E. Cairnes’s The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy (1875), which is a work largely

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based on the position of Mill. Cairnes defends political economy against enemies, such as Comte, and he defends the Ricardian abstract-deductive version of economics against the alternative conceptions of Say and Senior. He is very emphatic about the importance of the ceteris paribus clause in the case of all economic laws ([1875] 1965: 61ff) and he seems to believe that the laws of economics depend upon those of physics and psychology (pp. 52, 72). Sometimes he also includes institutions among the facts that are given to economic analysis. In the considerations just adduced, we may perceive what the proper limits are of economic inquiry – at what point the economist, in tracing the phenomena of wealth to their causes and laws, may properly stop to consider his task as completed, his task as solved. It is precisely at that point at which in the course of his reasonings he finds himself in contact with some phenomenon not economic, with some physical or mental fact, some political or social institution. So soon as he has traced the phenomena of wealth to causes of this order, he has reached the proper goal of his researches; and such causes, therefore, are properly regarded as ‘ultimate’ in relation to economic science. Not that they may not deserve and admit of further analysis and explanation, but that this analysis and explanation is not the business of the economist – is not the specific problem which he undertakes to solve. (Cairnes [1875] 1965: 53f) This quotation is interesting mainly because it is a fairly clear – maybe the first – statement of what economists today would call exogenous variables, or givens. From my point of view, however, it presents a problem: like John Stuart Mill, Cairnes clearly senses the importance of social institutions for the functioning of the market, but, like the former, he is not equally clear about their role in economic analysis and explanation. As I have already said, he usually mentions only the physical and mental facts and laws on which, not only economics, but ‘historical, political and, in general, social investigation’ depend. Political economy belongs ‘neither to the department of physical nor to that of mental inquiry’, but occupies ‘an intermediate position’. The phenomena it investigates depend on ‘physical, physiological, and mental causes’ and are explained by ‘the concurrence of physical, physiological, and mental laws’ (p. 52). The conclusion I draw from these statements is that Cairnes believed that social institutions can be explained by the physical, physiological and mental laws. If this interpretation is correct, Cairnes – like Mill – was a psychologistic, rather than an institutional individualist (see pp. 218–27).

German historicism It has been pointed out, that the French and the British saw history as the advance of civilisation, whereas the Germans, with characteristic disdain for

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science and capitalism, saw themselves as the carriers of culture (Elias [1939] 1968: 3–34). This particular manifestation of German nationalism, would survive well into the twentieth century and reached a peak during the First World War (Kusch, 1995: 212ff). As a nation characterised by its culture, the Germans attached great value to the humanities and especially to history. Because of this, the dominating approach to man and society in Germany was historicism. There is a certain confusion surrounding the term ‘historicism’ (Iggers, 1995). According to the well-known view of Karl Popper, it denotes ‘an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is the principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the “rhythms” or the “patterns”, the “laws” or the “trends” that underlie the evolution of society’ (Popper, 1957: 3). But this is not what most people understand by ‘historicism’. One problem with Popper’s view, is that it includes many philosophers and historians from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, who also saw history as a law-bound process, but who did not manifest the most typical marks of ‘historicism’, such as historical relativism. The solution to this puzzle is that Popper made a distinction between ‘historicism’ and ‘historism’ (p. 17). What most people today understand by ‘historicism’ is what Popper, in accordance with an earlier convention, called ‘historism’. In this second sense of ‘historicism’, is denoted a doctrine which emphasises the historicity and individuality of human beings and societies. ‘The essence of historism is the substitution of a process of individualising observation for a generalising view of human forces in history’ (Meinecke, [1959] 1972: lv).10 All social phenomena, such as languages, myths, laws, customs, social institutions, even man herself, are products of history. As such they differ between times and places. Since human beings also change with history, historicism rejects the idea, defended most strongly in Great Britain, of a constant human nature. In this chapter, I want to add a third meaning to the term ‘historicism’. ‘Historicism’, as I use this term, also means a reduction, or subordination, of other disciplines to history. This form of ‘historicism’ was a distinctive feature of the human sciences in nineteenth-century Germany. Philosophy, economics, jurisprudence, linguistics, were dominated by historical schools and, more or less, transformed into historical sciences. Theoretical economics had no place at all in this intellectual milieu. Sociology was also resisted, but less so than economics. As I have already mentioned, German historicism did not share the French adoration of science and technology, but, above all, it rejected the positivist claim of unity of method between the human and the natural sciences. But what about psychology? Before I turn to this question, I will give a brief sketch of the development of German historicism, because it was this doctrine, or some of its elements, that methodological individualism was created to defeat. It should be pointed out at the beginning, however, that methodological individualism, as an explicitly stated principle of social science, emerged in a milieu dominated by German historicism, and adopted many of its ideas. In a rich and fascinating study of Carl Menger and the Origins of Austrian Economics (1990), Max Alter argues that the largely unknown roots of Austrian Economics are in

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German historicism and Romanticism. I find his argument, on the whole, convincing and recommend Part I of his book as a somewhat richer presentation of German historicism than the one I give here. The roots of historicism are to be found in Romanticism, and in the beginning there was an almost complete overlap between the two movements. Romanticism, of course, was broader, since it included literature and the arts. It is a commonplace to see Romanticism as a reaction against the Enlightenment. If the latter was characterised by rationalism, mechanism, individualism and utilitarianism, the former was a manifestation of irrationalism, vitalism, collectivism and culturalism. Against rationalism it emphasised emotion and will, against mechanism it posited life and organicism, against individualism it cherished the reality and value of nation, state and community and against utilitarianism it posited the Greek ideals of autonomy, virtue and self-realisation. A common source of Romanticism and historicism is the philosophy of history of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). In a prize-winning ‘Essay on the Origins of Language’ (1772), he criticised the Enlightenment view that language is the result of an agreement to use words in certain ways ([1772] 1966: 100f). Language is the result of organic growth (p. 113). ‘Least of all is it agreement. An arbitrary convention of society’ (p. 119). In his first important contribution to the philosophy of history, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menscheit (1774), he poured scorn and irony on the philosophy of history of the French Enlightenment and its belief in linear development, progress and ultimate superiority of European civilisation ([1774] 1967 102). Against this view, Herder maintains that each people, like each individual is a unique individuality, which cannot be compared to other peoples (pp. 41, 61). All peoples, however, are part of humanity and contribute to its culture. Despite his humanism, Herder is most famous as the father of nationalism. In his main work, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–91), he maintains that ‘every nation is one people, having its own national form, as well as its own language: the climate, it is true stamps on each its mark … but not sufficient to destroy the original national character’ ([1784–91] 1968: 7). ‘Time, place, and national character alone, in short the general cooperation of active powers in their most determinate individuality, govern all the events that happen among mankind’ (p. 159). Herder is often mentioned together with the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), because of the similarity of their views of history and society. Vico was the first to grasp clearly the differences between nature and history and, therefore, also between the methods used in the two sciences. Among other things, Vico maintained that we understand what is created by human beings, in a way different from the way we understand nature (see Berlin, 1976: xvi–xix). The reason for this is that human beings express themselves in their creations. There is no constant human nature, however, but humanity changes with the course of history. This means that we must understand each human creation as the expression, not only of a particular human being, but above all, of a human being belonging to a particular culture at a particular time and in a particular

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place. The fact that social institutions, like law, language, government, etc, are human creations, does not mean that they are constructions, made by design. Vico was a critic of the theory of the social contract. Like Mandeville, though independent of him, he argued that social institutions and nations are the unintended consequences of intentional human activity. Following Aristotle, he maintained that they grow, like organisms; that they are natural growths. All these ideas were shared by Herder, especially the idea of ‘expressionism’, to borrow a useful term from Isaiah Berlin. ‘Expressionism [is] the doctrine that human activity in general, and art in particular, express the entire personality of the individual or the group, and are intelligible only to the degree to which they do so’ (Berlin, 1976: 153). What led Herder to adopt and develop this idea, was his interest in the origin and development of languages and their various uses, especially in poetry (pp. 169–72). It is in language, above all, that we find the character, spirit, or soul, of a people (Volksseele), or what we, nowadays, call its culture (pp. 194–9).11 The idea of natural growth was also to become of tremendous importance in German historicism. It was shared by the conservative founder of the Historical School of Law, Friedrich, Karl von Savigny (1779–1861), who insisted that law is, or should be, the result of historical development, not of rational construction and by his student Karl Marx, who constantly maintained that society is a natural growth (naturwüchsig). In The Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence (1814), written in the wake of French occupation, Savigny rejects all attempts to introduce the Code Napoleon in German legislation. He is also concerned about the foreign element of Roman law. German law must be based on German legal tradition. The reason is that, like in the case of language, there is an ‘organic connection of law with the being and character of the people … Law grows with the growth, and strengthens with the strength of the people, and, finally dies away as the nation loses its nationality’ ([1814] 1975: 27). The main task of German jurisprudence is the study of German customary law, which must be the basis of all German law. ‘We shall then possess a truly national law; and a powerful expressive language will not be wanting to it. We may then give up the Roman law to history, and we shall have, not merely a feeble imitation of the Roman system, but a truly national and new system of our own’ (p. 154f). It may be pointed out that this, originally holistic, view of social institutions, was adopted by the methodological individualists Carl Menger and Friedrich von Hayek, who both suggested individualistic models of the growth, or evolution of, social institutions. An important role in the development of German historicism must also be assigned to German idealist philosophy and, in particular, to the philosophy of Hegel (1770–1831). In his Philosophy of Right (1821), Hegel maintained that ‘The state is the actuality of the ethical idea’ ([1821] 1967: 155) and of ‘concrete freedom’ (p. 160). As such, it ‘has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of a state’ (p. 156). The theoretical justification for this subordination of the individual to the state is that the state is an organism, such that each member is a part of this organic whole and depend

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upon the other parts for his/her existence and thriving. This is the ‘organic’, or, as it is sometimes called, the ‘metaphysical’ theory of the state, which was common to Romanticism and idealist philosophy, and which was eventually adopted also by most historians. Hegel’s theory of the state was part of his philosophy of history, which owes a lot to the ideas of Herder. Before the state, there is the people and a people is a ‘spiritual individual’, which expresses itself in ‘its religion, its cult, its customs, its constitution and political laws, the whole scope of its institutions, its events and deeds. This is its work: This one people. People’s are what their deeds are’ (Hegel, [1837] 1953: 89f). Each people has a history of its own and passes through different stages, according to a principle of differentiation, which turns each spirit into a particular national spirit. Each national spirit, in its turn, is only a moment in the development of the ‘world spirit’ towards self-consciousness, absolute knowledge and freedom. The idealist theory of the state as an ethical idea was adopted by the most famous of all German historians and historicists, Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886). Most people probably think of him as an ‘empiricist’ historian who introduced the critical method to the discipline in the form of new and more severe standards of documentary evidence and who saw the task of the historian as finding out how it really was (wie es eigentlich gewesen). But Ranke was also a defender of the idealist and metaphysical theory of the state as ‘a spiritual reality’ (Ranke, [1836] 1973: 110), ‘a living thing, an individual, a unique self ’ (p. 112). Because of the role of historians and of historicism in the creation and consolidation of the German nation-state, it is possible to see the former as its servants and the latter as its ideology (Iggers [1968] 1983: 17–28). Ranke was the head of its conservative branch. Due to the importance attached to the state in nineteenth-century Germany, economics took the form of political economy, or Nationalökonomie. ‘For the German economists the symbiosis of state and economy was self-evident’ (Tribe, 1988: 5). Because of the strength of historicism in the German universities, economics assumed the form of history. In Germany, the Historical School dominated economics well into the twentieth century, or until the Nazis seized power. The founder of the Historical School of Economics, was Wilhelm Roscher (1817–94). Other members of the Older Historical School, were Bruno Hildebrand and Karl Knies. The Older Historical School adopted some of the typical ideas of historicism, in general. According to Roscher, for instance, the national economy is an organism, and the task of political economy (Staatswirtschaft) is to find the law of development of this organism (1843: 4). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there emerged a Younger Historical School in Economics, with Gustav Schmoller as its head. Other members were Lujo Brentano and G.F. Knapp. The Younger Historical School had thrown off most of the romanticist baggage, but retained the view of economics as political economy. It was characterised, above all, by detailed empirical investigation of economic institutions. The German Historical School of Economics was to

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become the immediate object of attack for the Austrian methodological individualists.12 To sum up my presentation of historicism, so far, I suggest that it comprises the following holistic doctrines: I Organicism: The state and/or society is conceived of as an organism. This idea has two elements: (1) Organisms are wholes, where each part depends for its existence and functioning upon the other parts and upon its place in the whole. This doctrine is the traditional opposite of the individualist theory of the state and society. (2) As other organisms, social institutions and societies grow. The implications of this idea are not clear, however. According to one idea of organic growth (2a), it implies that history is irrational and unpredictable, because there is novelty in the development of life. According to a second idea of organic growth (2b), it implies Aristotelian teleology. Like natural organisms, societies originate as germs, or embryos, and grow until they reach their fully developed form. For some organicists, development is arrested at the stage of perfection, for others, societies also decay and die. Still others, understand by organic growth (2c) only spontaneous development. This is the thesis that social phenomena are the unintended consequences of human activity. There is also the idea of philosophy of history that history has a goal and/or meaning. This idea is not necessarily associated with organicism, but is more theological in origin. While organicism, tends to be materialistic, philosophy of history tends to be idealistic. It conceives of history as the development of mind, spirit, or reason. This view of history, brings me to the second important idea of early historicism: II Objective idealism: Like the natural organism of an individual human being has a mind, the social organism has a mind of its own. The ideas and values of a people (Volk) are expressed in their language, customs, laws, constitution, myths, literature, etc. All these social institutions are but various expressions of the soul, or spirit, of the people. In the well-known case of Hegel, objective idealism takes the form of a teleological philosophy of history, but this is an exception. Most versions of objective idealism, are content to point out the historical and geographical variability of folk spirits, but refrain from forcing them into a pattern of development, or succession. The main legacy of Romanticism, then, was holistic, but there was also, especially in the early phase, a fairly strong tendency of individualism. German individualism, however, was different from French and British individualism and the difference is caught very well by Georg Simmel ([1917] 1950: 81), who calls the latter quantitative and the former qualitative. As the term ‘qualitative’ suggests,

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German individualism highlights the individuality and uniqueness of human beings, rather than their equality. Because it tends to give pride of place to great individuals, or personalities, it has also been called ‘aristocratic’ individualism (Köhler, 1922: 48). Aristocratic individualism is both methodological and ethical: as a methodology, it assigns an important role to great individuals in historical explanation; as an ethic, it assigns more value to great individuals than to lesser ones. In Germany, qualitative individualism was represented, in particular, by Goethe, Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and, later, by Friedrich Nietzsche, but it also influenced some British philosophers and historians, such as Coleridge and Carlyle, and, to some extent, also John Stuart Mill (see p. 44). I find it convenient to divide qualitative individualism in three forms: political, historical and expressive. I Political individualism: While liberalism in Great Britain and France was characterised by quantitative individualism, the German version of liberalism was distinguished by qualitative individualism. In The Limits of State Action (1791–2) Humboldt saw political individualism, in the form of a minimal state, as a precondition for the free development of individuals, as did many other leading figures of German Romanticism. According to George G. Iggers ([1968] 1983: 7ff, 40ff), it was the experience of French dominion and the wars of liberation (1792–1815), which turned most German intellectuals, including Humboldt, into nationalists and defenders of a strong state. The historian Johann Gustav Droysen is a case in point, but also Max Weber would be an example. II Historical individualism: Historicism inherited, from Romanticism, the admiration of great individuals and personalities, and a corresponding contempt for, or at least lack of interest in, the destiny of the common people, or ‘masses’, as they were commonly called. This historical individualism originated in Germany, but it is best epitomised by the Briton Thomas Carlyle, who wrote in his On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History: ([1841] 1975: 239, 235, 266) that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men’. Historical individualism was opposed by many historians – especially Marxists – and there ensued an intense debate about the role of the individual in history. III Expressive individualism: I will end my short presentation of historicism, with a note about method. Historicism was, from the very beginning, closely associated with the study of language and this is probably the reason for the importance attached to the hermeneutical method, or art of interpretation. Vico had suggested that we understand human creations better than nature. Also Herder,

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had mentioned Einfühlung as a way to understand human expressions. The most important founder of hermeneutics, however, is the great theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). He developed hermeneutics into an astonishingly sophisticated art of interpretation, to which I cannot here, of course, do justice. An important point for my purposes is that he made a distinction between subjective, psychological interpretation and objective grammatical interpretation of language. ‘Understanding has a dual direction, towards the language and towards the thought’ and ‘[n]either language nor the individual as productive speaking individual can exist except via the being-in-each-other of both relationships’ (Schleiermacher [1809–10] 1998: 229). Both types of understanding are contextual: ‘every utterance has a dual relationship, to the totality of language and to the whole thought of its originator’ (Schleiermacher [1809–10] 1998: 8). The consequence of this is the famous hermeneutic circle: ‘The vocabulary and the history of the era of an author relate as the whole from which his writings must be understood as part, and the whole must, in turn, be understood from the part’ (p. 24). There is a hermeneutic circle also on the psychological side (pp. 90ff), but both moments rest on knowledge, not on intuition, or empathy, even though he admits that some people have a ‘talent for knowledge about individual people’ (p. 11). Wilhelm von Humboldt was also an important pioneer in the study of language, but his idea of hermeneutics is more romantic than was that of Schleiermacher. Humboldt pays lip service to Ranke’s view of the historians’ task, which is to ‘present what actually happened’ ([1821] 1967: 57), but actually, he is against this view. According to Humboldt, literal truth is strictly impossible. The reason for this is that the essence of truth is hidden from observation. When all the facts are collected, there remains the intuitive understanding of their ‘inner causal nexus, on which, after all, their inner truth is solely dependent’ (p. 58). Humboldt’s account of the historians’ task is suggestive, but impressionistic. It is not clear, for instance, what ‘inner truth’ refers to: if it is the subjective truth of the individuals acting in history, if it is some kind of objective truth inherent in their creations; a work of art, a system of ideas, or a historical event, or if it is the inner truth of the historian. One thing is clear, however: according to Humboldt, the task of the historian involves an important element of artistic creativity. Among professional historians, it was Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–84) who, more than anyone else, tried to develop the method of verstehen in history. Droysen was engaged in a two-front war against the critical method of Ranke, on the one hand, and the scientific history of Buckle, on the other hand. A liberal like Humboldt, Droysen was opposed to the conservative Ranke for political reasons. In the eyes of Droysen, Ranke’s critical method would reduce history to a sterile concern with mere facts, thereby robbing it of its role in the education (Bildung) and emancipation of mankind (MacLean, 1982). A similar concern, made him reject also the scientific history of Comte and Buckle. The problem with scientific history is that it is deterministic and aims at prediction.13 Once again like Humboldt, Droysen saw history as an art, not as a science.14 The method of verstehen was launched in opposition to both critical and scientific

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history, as a way of introducing moral agents, or subjects, in history (cf. Burger, 1978). Droysen made a distinction between nature and history in terms of the categories of space and time. The method of the natural sciences is explanation (erklären), that of history, understanding (verstehen) (Droysen [1858] 1977: 22, 150f). History deals with the traces left by human beings. Every such trace left is the expression of an individual “I”, but, nevertheless, an individual possible to understand. ‘With human beings … we have an essential kinship and reciprocity of nature: every “I” enclosed in itself, yet each in its utterances disclosing itself to every other’ (pp. 121f). The impression created by this translation is that Droysen’s method of verstehen is radically individualistic. This is not the case, however. For Droysen, psychological interpretation is only the third, of four, forms of interpretation. The other three, are (1) pragmatic interpretation, (2) interpretation of conditions and (4) interpretation of moral forces and ideas ([1858] 1977: 149ff). Of these, the first and third are clearly individualistic, while the second and fourth are not. Pragmatic interpretation is concerned with instrumental action; what the historical remains reveal about the ends of historical actors, while psychological interpretation digs deeper into their personalities. The conditions of action include, among other things, social institutions, while moral forces and ideas include cultural entities like religions, ideologies and worldviews. There is nothing to indicate that Droysen saw social institutions and cultural phenomena as psychic, or, in any other way, individualistic, as did some later advocates of the method of verstehen. On the contrary, Droysen is safely anchored in the tradition of historicism, collectivism and holism (Iggers [1968] 1983: 110ff; MacLean, 1982: 355).

Positivist sociology In France, the dominating approach to the scientific study of ‘man’ and society was positivist sociology. The first positivist sociologist, of some importance, was Henri St Simon, who is the source of many ideas, including that of a coming industrial society.15 More important, however, was his secretary Auguste Comte, who introduced, not only the terms ‘positivism’ and ‘sociology’, but also that of ‘altruism’. By ‘positivism’, Comte understood a science based upon observation of facts, as distinguished from religion based upon faith and metaphysics based on speculation. According to his famous law of the three stages, religion is the first, metaphysics the second, and positive science the third stage in the development of the human mind. ‘Sociology’ is the highest, but also the least developed and least exact, in the hierarchy of the sciences: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology. The reason sociology is the least developed and the least exact is that it deals with the most complex phenomena. Except for this, however, there is no gulf between natural science and social science. Their methods are essentially alike. Comte’s positivism, then, is a methodological monism. It may be noted that, neither economics, nor psychology is part of Comte’s

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ladder. The reason economics is missing is that Comte saw it as part of sociology; the all-encompassing science of society as a whole. The mistake of economics is to analyse the economy in isolation from the rest of society and from its history (Comte [1836–42] 1974: 446–50). It may be noted that Comte’s critique of economics is not directed at Adam Smith, who is mentioned with great admiration. Since I am partly engaged in a terminological survey, it may also be noted that Comte uses the term ‘spontaneous order’, made famous by Friedrich von Hayek and in a similar manner, to designate those social phenomena, including the market, which are not consciously designed.16 The term ‘altruism’ was also introduced with an eye on economics and the assumption of rational egoism, or self-interest. If the altruistic instincts did not exist in us, the mutual services that this activity of industry calls out would certainly not be able to create them. Were this dismal hypothesis a true one, the reciprocal assistance of man to man would never become gratuitous, and the only moral influence that this aid would have, would be to develop a constant prudence of interest. (Comte [1851–4] 1975: 407) Psychology fares even worse than economics, since it has no place at all in Comte’s system. A first reason for this is that the mind is unobservable and therefore inaccessible to positive investigation. A second reason is that the self is multiple rather than unitary. The idea of an I, or a self is a fiction created by religion and metaphysics. According to Comte ([1836–42] 1974: 3, 380ff), there is nothing in between the biological and social organism. Psychology is an ideology and, as such, superfluous. The affective and intellectual faculties it is used to explain is better explained by (phrenological) physiology. Psychology, then, is reducible to physiology. But only partly. Human beings are social beings and the main bulk of human action is part of society. What cannot be explained by physiology, therefore, must be explained by sociology. In addition to being a physiological reductionist, then, Comte was a sociological reductionist; the founder, not just of sociology, but of sociologism. Like many other social theorists in the nineteenth century, Comte conceived of society as an organism and like most of them, he saw the social organism as a whole which must be investigated as such: ‘viewing each element in the light of the whole system’ (p. 462). Sociology is divided in two branches: statics and dynamics, the former concerned with the mutual interdependency of the parts of the social organism and the latter with its development or growth. Social statics, or the theory of spontaneous order, seeks laws of coexistence, or harmony, while social dynamics seeks the laws of succession of social phenomena. The raison d’être of sociology lies in the historicity of social phenomena. At the beginning of history, social phenomena may be explained in terms of human nature alone. As soon as human beings have been modified by social develop-

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ment, however, this is no longer possible. Biological reductionism, therefore, is wrong. ‘The consequence of this error is that social modifications proper to certain periods, and passing away with them, are too often supposed to be inherent in human nature, and therefore indestructible’ (Comte [1836–42] 1974: 488). This argument has lost none of its topicality. It seems to be the main message also of the various versions of contemporary social constructionism. The reason, adduced by Comte, for the variability of human nature is the more dated. Human beings have become social beings and must be understood as part of the social organism. Comte does not reject all use of the laws of human nature in sociology. Since human nature does set limits to the variability of social phenomena, no law arrived at by way of historical induction can be allowed to contradict the ‘known laws of human nature’. This argument, in particular, appealed to John Stuart Mill, who made it the basis of his inverse-deductive, or historical, method. Comte’s organicism and his argument about the historicity of social phenomena is similar to that of German historicism (see pp. 20–22), but he is less interested in the spiritual, or cultural, side of society. His law of the three stages is about the development of knowledge, but there is no place for concepts like ‘folk soul’ and ‘national spirit’ in his sociology. The main difference, between them is that Comte was a positivist, preaching unity of method, whereas the German historicists saw the human sciences as entirely different from the natural sciences. Because of this, Comte was actually a main target of attack from historicist quarters. For the purposes of this book, however, the similarities are more important than the differences. Like the German historicists, Auguste Comte was a methodological holist, and as such both were common targets for the attacks of methodological individualists. It may be added that he was not an economic, or political individualist either and this contributed to his unpopularity among methodological individualists.17 According to Comte, the market may be spontaneous, but it is not self-regulating. If left to itself, it leads to chaos rather than order. This was one reason why Comte supported a big government, engaged in large-scale social engineering; in technocracy, if not in bureaucracy.18 A final note on positivism and the science of statistics.19 Comte, himself, saw no use for statistical, or other mathematical, methods in positivist sociology. He believed that social phenomena are too complex for mathematical treatment, and criticised Condorcet for failing to see the limits of mathematical analysis, including the probability calculus, in social science ([1819–26] 1974: 166–74; [1836–42] 1974: 492–4). But there were others, such as the Belgian statistician Lambert A.J. Quetelet (1796–1894) and the English historian Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–62), who saw the possibility of using statistics for the purposes of a positivist sociology and history. Quetelet was a pioneer in statistics and especially in its use to register moral phenomena. Following St Simon and Comte, he called his moral statistics, social physics. Quetelet is famous for his idea of the Average Man, which was much criticised, because it was believed that he failed to see that the Average Man is a

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fiction. Actually, Quetelet was aware that the Average Man is a ‘fictitious being’ ([1835] 1842: 8), but he obviously believed that averages tell us something important about ‘man in general’ and about society. Quetelet was also among the first to observe the astonishing constancy of many statistical phenomena, such as crime and suicide rates. Above all, he was among the first to collect a large body of statistical data to demonstrate such regularities. Quetelet was not satisfied, merely to register statistical regularities, he wanted to explain them, and his explanation was sociological: Society includes within itself the germs of all the crimes committed, and at the same time the necessary facilities for their development. It is the social state, in some measure, which prepares these crimes, and the criminal is merely the instrument to execute them. Every social state supposes, then, a certain number and a certain order of crimes, these being merely the necessary consequences of its organisation. (Quetelet [1835] 1842: 6) According to Quetelet, the crime rate depends upon social institutions, and this is encouraging, since it is possible to change social institutions in a way that reduces the number of crimes. Buckle’s views on statistics can be found in his History of Civilization in England (1858). In this work he appears as a follower of Comte and Quetelet, attempting to demonstrate that history, like the natural sciences is subject to necessity and, therefore, law-governed. His main argument for this thesis is the regularities found in moral statistics. These regularities, according to Buckle (pp. 20ff), force us to conclude that the actions of men are determined by the state of society and, therefore, subject to social laws. His main example is the apparently individual act of suicide, which exhibits such an astonishing regularity in the aggregate – a fact which led Buckle to reach the following dubious conclusion: In a given state of society, a certain number of persons must put an end to their own life. This is the general law; and the special question as to who shall commit the crime depends of course upon special laws; which, however, in their total action, must obey the large social law to which they are subordinate. And the power of the larger law is so irresistible, that neither the love of life nor the fear of another world can avail any thing towards even checking its operation. (Buckle, 1858: 25f) Buckle was not alone to be fascinated by statistical regularities and the suicide rate, in particular, had a powerful grip on the minds of nineteenth-century social scientists. The most famous study is, of course, Emile Durkheim’s Suicide (1897), ‘the masterpiece of nineteenth century statistical sociology’ (Hacking, 1990: 64).20 Before I turn to Durkheim, however, I will stay in Britain for a while. Early positivist sociology was mainly a French affair, but it is common to

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include also the British sociologist Herbert Spencer among its ranks. Spencer, himself, protested against being associated with Comte and published a list of Reasons for Dissenting From the Philosophy of M. Comte (Spencer [1864] 1984: 23). He did not deny, however, being a ‘positivist’ in a more general sense of that term. Spencer’s main quarrel with Comte was political. Being a radical individualist in matters political and economic, Spencer did not at all fancy the political part of Comte’s positivist programme (pp. 18f, 23f). In sharp contrast to Comte, Spencer was a supporter of a free market society watched by a minimal state.21 In this respect, Spencer had much more in common with another critic of Comte, Friedrich von Hayek. Another cause of dissension was Comte’s dismissal of subjective psychology as an important science in itself, and as an indispensable basis of sociology (Spencer [1864] 1984:10).22 According to Spencer, ‘psychological truths underlie sociological truths, and must therefore be sought by the sociologist’ ([1873] 1961: 348). No one indeed, who is led to dwell on the matter, can fail to see how absurd is the supposition that there can be a rational interpretation of men’s combined actions, without a previous rational interpretation of those thoughts and feelings by which their individual actions are prompted. Nothing comes out of society but what originates in the motive of an individual, or in the united similar motives of many individuals, or in the conflict of the united similar motives of some having certain interests, with the diverse motives of others whose interests are different. (Spencer [1873] 1961: 348f; see also [1864] 1984: 15) This seems to be a fairly clear statement of psychologism cum methodological individualism, but perhaps it is not clear enough. A problem with Spencer is that he also emphatically endorsed the idea of society as an organism (Spencer, 1860).23 As I have already indicated, this idea is almost unanimously conceived of as holistic and as the very opposite of methodological individualism.24 In the literature about Spencer, it is a recurrent allegation that there is a conflict between his individualism on the one hand and his organicism on the other. An extensive survey of these allegations can be found in Gray (1985) and Taylor (1992), who both argue that it is possible to save Spencer from contradiction. In a second and much extended work, Gray (1996) accepts that there are a number of apparent tensions both between his methodological individualism and organicism (ch. 2) and between atomism/mechanism and organicism in his theory of society (ch. 5). Even so, he argues (ch. 14) that most of these tensions are, indeed, more apparent than real, since they are due to conceptual ambiguity. A problem with this controversy is that the authors do not always distinguish clearly between ontological, methodological and political issues. For my part, I agree that there is no necessary conflict between political individualism and organicism. Even if most organicists are political collectivists, it is possible to combine organicism with political and economic individualism, and Herbert

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Spencer is, indeed, the primary example of this unusual combination.25 It is important to observe the difference between those who say that the state is an organism and those who say that society is an organism. The individualists are to be found among the latter and they usually have a leaning towards conservatism. There is an unintentional ‘wisdom’ in the organically grown traditions and in the working of the spontaneous order of the market, which cannot be achieved, only ruined, by political means. Of special importance for Spencer’s pro-market attitude was his view that the social organism lacks a consciousness of its own. Only individuals have consciousness (Spencer [1860] 1982: 397). The particular wisdom of the market lies in the spontaneous co-operation of individuals with specialised knowledge. This view foreshadows Hayek’s famous argument about the role of knowledge in a market economy (cf. Taylor, 1992: 143).26 Concerning the conflict between methodological individualism and organicism, I see more of a problem, even if I agree that it is always possible to formulate these doctrines in a way that makes the conflict disappear (see Gray, 1985: 246–53; 1996: ch. 14). I am not convinced that Spencer can be saved in this way, but my interest is not in the consistency of his position. I am interested in the question of whether or not he was a methodological individualist, and on that point I find myself in agreement with Ellen Frankel Paul (1988): ‘That Spencer was a methodological holist is, I think, beyond question’ (p. 443). She adds that ‘elements of methodological individualism can be discerned in some of Spencer’s writings but it must be considered a minor element’ (p. 444). After Spencer, positivist sociology returned to France. The most important figure was Emile Durkheim, who praised Spencer for going further than Comte in spelling out the details of the organism analogy. Like Spencer, Durkheim saw society as a spontaneous order, but he credits the economists with being first to suggest this idea. They [the economists] were the first to sense all that is living and spontaneous in societies. They understood that collective life could not brusquely be established by some clever artifice; that it did not result from an external mechanical impulsion but is slowly elaborated in the very heart of society. In this way they were able to ground a theory of liberty on a foundation more solid than a metaphysical hypothesis. In effect, it is obvious that if collective life is spontaneous, it must not be deprived of its spontaneity. Any fetter would be absurd. (Durkheim [1888] 1978: 48) Here agreement ends, however. According to Durkheim, Spencer made the mistake of believing that self-interested individuals could engage in peaceful exchange, without a system of rights and duties to regulate their behaviour. I do not believe, this is an altogether fair critique of Spencer, but it is certainly fair to say that Spencer was much more pro-market than Durkheim, who saw an important role for state in economic life (see Udehn, 1996: 354–7). Durkheim’s agreement with the economists is also limited to the idea of spon-

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taneous order. Economics is the individualist social science, par excellence, and, like most sociologists, Durkheim is the very opposite: a methodological holist, who sees methodological individualism as a serious defect.27 I will quote a passage at some length, because I believe it gives a clear and concise picture of economics that is fairly typical among sociologists. According to them [the economists], there is nothing real in society but the individual. Everything emanates from him, and it is toward him that everything converges. A nation is only a nominal entity; it is a word which serves to designate a mechanical aggregate of juxtaposed individuals. But it has no specific properties that distinguish it from other things. Its properties are those of the elements that compose it, merely enlarged and amplified. The individual is, therefore, the only tangible reality that the observer can get at, and the only question which science can set for itself is to investigate how the individual should conduct himself in the principal circumstances of economic life, given his nature. Economics and, more broadly, social laws, are not, then, very general facts which the scholar induces from the observation of societies, but logical consequences deduced from the definition of the individual. The economist does not say, ‘Things happen in this way because experience has established that fact.’ Rather he says, ‘Things should happen in this way because it would be absurd if it were otherwise.’ The word natural should therefore be replaced by the word rational, which is not the same thing. If only this concept of the individual, which is supposed to contain in itself the entire science, were adequate in reality! But in the attempt to simplify things, the economists have artificially impoverished the concept. Not only have they ignored the circumstances of time, place, and country in order to conceive of man’s abstract type in general, but in this ideal type itself they have neglected everything which does not bear upon strictly individual life to such an extent that, passing from abstraction to abstraction, nothing is left but the sad portrait of an isolated egoist. (Durkheim [1888] 1978: 49) Durkheim’s description of economics is, I believe, representative of the view of a majority of sociologists and (economic) historians in the nineteenth century. To some extent Durkheim’s view may be based on that of Comte, but it owes much more to his reading of Adolf Wagner, Gustav Schmoller and other economists belonging to the German Historical School (see Durkheim [1887] 1993: 58–77; [1888] 1978: 59ff). But is it a fair description, or is it the prejudice of an ignorant sociologist? The answer, I believe, is that Durkheim paints a largely correct picture of economics, at least at the end of the nineteenth century. It should be added, though, that what is a vice to the typical sociologist is a virtue to the typical economist. Durkheim seems to have shared Comte’s sociologistic view that economics is best conceived of as a part of ‘general sociology’ (Durkheim [1909] 1978: 83).

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He also shared some of the latter’s dismissive attitude towards psychology.28 He did not, however, deny it a place in the hierarchy of sciences. ‘In succession, physics and chemistry, then biology and finally psychology have been established’ (Durkheim [1888] 1978: 47). He even admitted that sociology depends upon psychology. He emphatically denied, however, that sociology is reducible to, psychology. It was the merit of Comte to have established the fact that society is like a living organism and, as such, ‘something more than a collection of individuals. A whole is not identical to the sum of its parts, even though without them it would be nothing’ (p. 50). Or in other words: ‘for Comte society was a being sui generis’ (p. 54). Durkheim adopted this view of society. For him, social facts are sui generis and, therefore, irreducible to facts about individuals. More specifically, social facts have two characteristics: (1) they are external to individuals and (2) have coercive power over them (p. 51; see also Durkheim, [1895] 1982: Ch. 1 and 1898). This does not mean, however, that social facts exist outside all individuals taken collectively. Durkheim’s argument is that they are external to each single individual. Nevertheless, from these characteristics of social facts, Durkheim derives the methodological rule that social facts must be explained in terms of other social facts, not in terms of facts about human nature ([1895] 1982: 134). Using the scheme I borrowed from Arthur Danto (see Introduction, p. 5), it is possible to represent Emile Durkheim’s methodology in the following way:

Figure 2.3 Emile Durkheim’s rules of sociological method

Vertical arrows represent Durkheim’s methodological rule that social facts are external constraints on individual behaviour, while horizontal arrows represent the rule that social facts must be explained in terms of other social facts. His famous explanation of the differences in suicide rates between countries is described, by himself, as horizontal, but James Coleman (1986a: 347f) has argued that it is better represented by the vertical arrows. I tend to agree with Coleman. Since Durkheim wants to explain an aggregated macro-phenomenon – namely differences in suicide rates, in terms of social facts such as solidarity and social control, it is clear that these social facts really act upon individuals (Durkheim [1897] 1951: 297ff), who decide to commit, or not commit suicide. In comparison with Comte and Spencer, Durkheim moved away from

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organicism towards idealism. What makes social facts sui generis is not that society is an organism, but that it has a collective consciousness (Durkheim [1900] 1973: 13; [1911] 1974: 93). The source of this change is probably Durkheim’s visit to Germany in the 1880s, where he was exposed to Völkerpsychologie and to Wilhelm Wundt’s empirical approach to ethics (Durkheim, 1887). There is, in fact, strong reason to believe that Durkheim derived most of his view of social facts from Wundt (Gisbert, 1959; Hall, 1993: 37–51). One idea, in particular, has been assumed to derive from Wundt; that of ‘creative synthesis’ (Ginsberg, 1956: 45). Just as life emerges out of the association of molecules in the cell and mind from the combination of physiological processes in the brain, social facts emerge as a result of the interaction of individual minds.29 Before Wundt, the idea of creative synthesis was used by John Stuart Mill, under the name of ‘mental chemistry’, to argue that new ideas emerge in the mind of individuals, but it was Wundt who used it to explain the emergence of social facts (see p. 61). Another source of Durkheim’s holism was the view of the statistician Quetelet, who led him to see in the stability of various statistical measures over time a sign of the existence of social facts. His own study of Suicide (1897) strengthened him in this belief and led him to argue that the suicide rate ‘is not simply the sum of independent units, a collective total, but is itself a fact sui generis, with its own unity, individuality and consequently its own nature – a nature, furthermore, dominantly social’ ([1897] 1951 46). Before leaving Durkheim, it is important to point out that when he maintains that sociology is irreducible to psychology, he intends individual psychology, of which he has a rather narrow view. It seems to be restricted to a concern with human beings as unaffected by society. As soon as they turn into social beings, they become the subject matter of sociology. Durkheim has no objection at all to calling sociology a form of ‘social’, or ‘collective psychology’ and therefore, in a broader sense, a proper part of psychology (see, e.g. Durkheim [1895] 1982: 249f; [1897] 1951: 312; [1898] 1974: 34). Because of this, and some other considerations, Lorenzo Infantino (1998: ch. 5) asks the question: ‘Is an “Individualistic” reading of Durkheim possible?’ Given the fact that Durkheim is probably the most often cited representative of collectivism and holism (see, e.g. Pratt, 1978: 112ff; Rosenberg 1988: 118ff; Pettit [1993] 1996: 132ff), this question might seem absurd, but I do not think it is. At least not with respect to ontological individualism. Having made this admission, I had better add that I also believe that an individualistic reading of Durkheim, even if not absurd, is ultimately wrong, and it is not possible with respect to methodology. Durkheim was certainly not a methodological individualist. Not all French sociologists joined the sociologistic camp. Durkheim’s fiercest critic, Gabriel Tarde was among the founders of social psychology and a defender of psychologism in sociology. On this issue he sided with Mill against Comte (Tarde [1898] 1969: 77ff). He was also critical of Quetelet’s social physics (Tarde [1890] 1962: 114ff) and the organicism of Spencer. His main target, however, was Durkheim. According to Tarde, Durkheim’s argument that social facts are sui generis, implies their existence in some Platonic heaven over and

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above individual human beings ([1894] 1969: 114ff). In a debate with Durkheim in 1903, he is reported to have said: Does Mr. Durkheim think that social reality is anything other than individuals and individual acts or facts? ‘If you believe that,’ said Mr Tarde, ‘I understand your method, which is pure ontology. Between us is the debate between nominalism and scholastic realism. I am a nominalist. There can only be individual actions and interactions. The rest is only a metaphysical entity, mysticism’. (Tarde, [1904] 1969: 140) In contradistinction to Durkheim, Tarde maintains that ‘it is imitation which is the elementary and universal social fact’ ([1898] 1969: 54). All social phenomena are transmitted not collectively, but individually, ‘from one individual – parent, teacher, friend, neighbour, comrade – to another’. This is not to deny, however, that the collective result often is fairly constant. According to Tarde, it is this fact which ‘gives rise to Mr Durkheim’s ontological illusion. For there is no doubt that it is veritable scholastic ontology that the learned writer is undertaking to inject into sociology in place of the psychology he opposes’ ([1894] 1969: 115). ‘To sum up the question which I began by asking: What is society? I have answered: Society is imitation. We have still to ask: What is imitation? Here the sociologist must yield to the psychologist’ ([1890] 1962: 76). Tarde, then, reaches the same conclusion as did Mill, and it is possible to see in the laws of imitation an attempt to realise Mill’s unfinished project of a science of ethology (see pp. 45f ). Tarde, then, is highly critical of Durkheim’s idea of social facts sui generis and, it might be added, of his associated idea of a ‘collective consciousness’, which is distinct from the individual consciousness of human beings. According to Tarde, there is nothing but individual consciousness. This does not imply, however, that there is nothing but individual psychology. Sociology is collective, or social, psychology, even if it depends on individual psychology. Collective psychology, inter-mental psychology, that is sociology, is thus possible only because individual psychology, intra-mental psychology, includes elements which can be transmitted and communicated from one consciousness to others, elements which, despite the irreducible hiatus between individuals, are capable of uniting and joining together in order to form true social forces and quantities, currents of opinion or popular impulses, traditions or national customs. (Tarde [1898] 1969: 95) In the debate between Durkheim and Tarde, it eventually turned out that also the former saw sociology as a kind of social psychology. Does this mean that there is no important difference between their respective versions of sociology? I believe there is, but I am not going to argue this point here. It may be added, though, that Tarde was critical of other aspects of positivist sociology, as well,

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and, especially, of its organicism and historicism ([1898] 1969: 77ff). While it would be absurd to call Emile Durkheim a ‘methodological individualist’, it seems fair enough to attach this epithet to Gabriel Tarde. I have suggested that sociology emerged, at least in part, as a holistic reaction to the individualistic discipline of economics. If so, what was the position of Vilfredo Pareto, who was both a neoclassical economist and a classical sociologist? It is often assumed (see e.g. Boland, 1982: 27ff), as more or less self-evident, that Pareto was a methodological individualist – maybe because it is simply taken for granted that a neoclassical economist has to be a methodological individualist – but I wish to cast some doubt upon this seemingly self-evident truth. Some things suggest that Pareto was, indeed, a methodological individualist: (1) his denial of the possibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility is typical of methodological individualists, at least in the Austrian tradition. (2) His famous Pareto optimality has become part and parcel of political individualism. (3) His critique of conceptual realism and leaning toward nominalism (Pareto, [1916] 1963: 31f, 1094ff), point in the direction of ontological individualism. But there are other indications pointing in the opposite direction. In his first important book, Cours d’Economie Politique ([1896] 1976), Pareto dresses his theory explicitly in organicist language, usually associated with social holism, and social evolution is an important theme. In his later works, organicism gives way to a theory of the economic system, as part of a larger social system, and evolution becomes a less prominent theme. Still, there is much that points in the direction of social holism. Pareto was a fierce critic of theories dealing with the origins of social institutions (see, e.g., Pareto [1909] 1972: 17f), as did the theory of the social contract and some of the Austrian economists. Instead of the causal-genetic approach, he favoured theories of functional interdependence. Pareto’s main units of analysis were the economic system and the larger social system. The main elements of these systems are ‘residues’ (motives) and ‘derivations’ (beliefs) inhering in individual human beings (pp. 1433ff), but residues and derivations are partly social facts (pp. 33, 71–4). According to Pareto, they are individual, from one point of view, and social from another. Investigating whether moral sentiments have an individual or social origin is useless. The man who does not live in society is a very unusual man, one who is almost, or rather entirely, unknown to us. And a society distinct from individuals is an abstraction which does not correspond to anything real. Consequently, all the sentiments which are observed in a man living in society are individual from one point of view, and social from another. (Pareto [1909] 1972: 71) The fact that we deal with individua by no means implies that a number of individua taken together are to be considered a simple sum. They form

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Background compounds which, like chemical compounds, may have properties that are not the sum of the properties of their components. (Pareto, [1916] 1963: 32)

This is the doctrine of emergence, typically used by holists, such as Wundt and Durkheim, to defend their position. It recurs in Pareto’s discussion of the composition of social forces, where he suggests that some composition effects are analogous to mechanical resultants, while others are analogous to the compounding of chemical elements (pp. 1446ff). Much like Durkheim, Pareto argues that these emergent social facts are objective and external to individual human beings. He also accepts the reality of social groups and makes a distinction between individuals and the positions they occupy in the social structure. There is, thus, quite a lot that goes against an interpretation of Pareto as a programmatic methodological individualist.

Holism and collectivism Methodological individualism has been opposed to a large number of nominally different doctrines, but most commonly to methodological collectivism and holism. In the early stages of its development, especially in the case of Austrian methodological individualism, it was usually opposed to collectivism. In the later stages of its development, methodological individualism has been increasingly contrasted with methodological holism. This change, which is due mainly to Karl Popper, was not possible until J.C. Smuts introduced the term ‘holism’ in his book Holism and Evolution (1926). I think it is possible to make a distinction between collectivism and holism, which may be worth keeping in mind throughout the rest of this book. In the doctrine of emergent evolution, which was a source of inspiration for both Smuts and Durkheim, these two root ideas are combined. The suggestion is that new phenomena, such as life, individual consciousness, and ‘folk souls’ emerge as a result of the organisation of parts into wholes, by way of creative synthesis. Holism is the term here coined (from olos = whole) to designate that wholeward tendency in Nature, this fundamental feature of ‘wholes’ in the universe … Every organism, every plant or animal is a whole with a certain internal organisation and a measure of self-direction, and an individual specific character of its own … beyond the ordinary domain of biology it applies in a limited sense to human associations like the state, and to the creations of the human spirit in all its greatest and most significant activities. (Smuts [1926] 1936: 96) Genuine wholes differ from mere aggregates by being more than the sum of their parts. ‘A whole which is more than the sum of its parts, has something internal, some inwardness of structure and function, some specific inner relations, some internality of character or nature which constitutes more’ (Smuts

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[1926] 1936: 101f). The difference, then, is that the parts of genuine wholes are internally related. This makes them different also from mechanical composites, whose parts are only externally related. ‘It is the very essence of a whole that while it is formed of its parts, it in turn influences the parts and affects their relations and functions. This reciprocal influence underlies the internality or interior character of the whole’ (p. 103). The picture of the world painted by the doctrine of emergent evolution is that of the universe as a hierarchic order of different levels, where each level has emerged from, but is supervenient upon, and irreducible to, the level immediate below. We have a progressive superposition of level on level. Higher kinds of relatedness – chemical, vital and conscious – are each in turn supervenient on those that stand lower in the scale; but they do not supersede them in the sense that, when some higher kind of relatedness comes, the lower kinds go. (Morgan, 1923: 278) According to the idea of social holism, society is the highest level of organisation in this hierarchic order. It is supervenient upon, but irreducible to, human individuals and their actions. This is the meaning of Emile Durkheim’s claim that society is sui generis. Actually, however, there are two distinct, though related claims made by Durkheim and by most social holists and both claims can be traced back to German Romanticism. In the section on German historicism, above, I made a distinction between organicism and objective idealism. According to the first doctrine, societies are wholes made up of interdependent and functional parts. If we assume that the parts of societies are individuals, the relation between individuals, according to organicism, is that of part-whole. According to objective idealism, on the other hand, social organisms have minds, or souls, which are expressed in their language, customs, laws, literature, etc. In this case, the relation between individuals and folk souls is not that between part and whole, but rather something they have in common, something they share. The relation here is more akin to that of particular-universal. Emile Durkheim’s distinction between mechanic and organic solidarity was an early attempt to catch this difference (Durkheim, 1893: 70ff). More recently, Philip Pettit ([1993] 1996: chs 3–4) has suggested that the opposite of individualism is collectivism, but not holism, which is instead the opposite of atomism. I agree with Pettit that there is a difference between collectivism and holism, but I do not agree with his rendering of this difference.30 The ideas of social organisms and social minds are metaphors, which were soon abandoned by social scientists, although they remain as root ideas about social life, even in contemporary social science. Organicism turned into structural-functionalism, which combines two holistic ideas: structure and function. The ideas about folk souls, national spirits and collective consciousness have turned into the social scientific idea of culture. Now, I suggest that it is possible to make a distinction between holism and collectivism. Holism is the idea that there are wholes made of social parts, which

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are interrelated in a way that makes them different from a mere aggregate and irreducible to the parts taken in isolation. Collectivism is the idea that individuals have something in common which turns them into a collective. The most common form of collectivism is ‘idealistic’. Individuals are supposed to share a culture that is common to the group to which they belong. But collectivism may also derive from structuralism. In this case, individuals are supposed to form a collective by virtue of the fact that they occupy the same position in the social structure. This is the Marxist case of class analysis. Holism and collectivism often combine into entities which are both wholes and collectives. All organisations, for instance, tend to be both: the wholes made up of parts (this is the meaning of organisation), but they also tend to develop a common culture and typically they act in common. To this extent, they are also collectives. A simple illustration of the distinction between wholes and collectives, would be this:

Figure 2.4 Social wholes and collectives

Having made this distinction between collectivism and holism, I immediately announce that I intend not to use it, unless it is called for by the circumstances or purpose at hand. Throughout this book, I am going to use the term ‘holism’ to refer both to collectivism and holism.

3

Psychologism in early social science

Methodological individualism, as a programme in social research, goes back to the nineteenth century, and the various attempts to lay a foundation for the social sciences. The rise of a specifically methodological version of individualism at this particular time probably had much to do with the divorce of the various social sciences from philosophy, and their establishment as academic disciplines at the universities of Europe and the USA. To turn the individualist theories of society into a methodological rule, principle, or programme for social scientific analysis answered a deeply felt need for philosophical justification. As we have seen in chapter 2, there existed at the beginning of the nineteenth century one social science; economics, and this science was largely individualistic. Other approaches to society, such as German historicism and French positivist sociology developed, partly, as reactions to the individualism of economics. Methodological individualism is, I suggest, a reaction to this reaction. In the nineteenth century, philosophers and social scientists started to reflect on the proper methodology of the social sciences, and the issue of individualism versus collectivism in social science was one of the most hotly debated. The nineteenth century was also characterised by the emancipation of the various human sciences from philosophy and their further differentiation into a number of academic disciplines fighting for a territory of their own. In particular, the relation of psychology first to philosophy and second to the various human sciences was a matter of much concern, and it was closely intertwined with the issue of individualism versus collectivism. Since psychology is the science of human individuals, it is only natural that methodological individualism should take the form of a requirement or suggestion that the human sciences must be based on psychology. It is the thesis of this chapter that individualism, as a methodological principle or programme for social research, arose in the nineteenth century and made its first appearance in the form of psychologism. The term ‘methodological individualism’ did not appear until the twentieth century. There is little agreement about the meaning of the term psychologism.1 For my purposes, it is a form of reductionism. Some other theory or discipline is reducible to, or at least heavily dependent upon, some form of psychology. I leave the term ‘reduction’ undefined in this chapter (see chapter 11 for a more

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detailed discussion), except to say that I understand it in a broad sense to include both complete and partial reduction. Most often, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was philosophy that was supposed to be reducible to psychology. We may call this version ‘philosophical psychologism’. My interest, however, is in psychologism with respect to the human sciences: the thesis that they are reducible to psychology. This thesis might be called ‘scientific psychologism’. These two versions of psychologism are analytically distinct, but not independent. Many psychologicists have endorsed both and some anti-psychologicists have defended the autonomy of both philosophy and social science and for a similar reason. The methodological individualist Karl Popper, for instance, would be one example (see pp. 202–10). For him, the existence of a third world, or world 3, of objective ideas makes both philosophy and the social sciences autonomous vis-à-vis psychology. ‘Psychology’, in its turn, may also mean different things (see pp. 331–36), but for the purposes of this chapter, I suggest that psychology is whatever putative knowledge we have of the minds and behaviour of individual human beings. On the basis of this broad view of psychology, I suggest that there are three forms of psychologism in social science: (1) scientific psychologism, which claims that all social phenomena can be explained by and all social laws deduced from, psychological laws, existing or potential; (2) folk psychologism, which maintains that all social phenomena can be explained by mental phenomena and/or human actions, and (3) ontological psychologism, which maintains that social phenomena are made up of, or constituted by, mental phenomena and/or human actions. Psychologism as an approach to philosophy, including social philosophy, is as old as individualism and, for obvious reasons, closely related to it. Psychology, for all its diversity, is a theory about the mental states and/or behaviour of individual human beings. Virtually all individualist theories of society, therefore, have been based upon some ‘psychological’ view of human nature. Actually, there is one view of human nature, in particular, which has dominated the history of individualism: the view of man as a rational egoist. This theory is really the conjunction of views of human nature: the Aristotelian idea of ‘man’ as a rational animal and Epicurean hedonism. This view of human nature was the psychological foundation of the theory of the social contract. It was eventually adopted and baptised as economic man (see Myers, 1983). A second psychological theory of considerable importance in the history of social thought is the suggestion that our beliefs result invariably from the association of ideas. This theory was held by most British empiricists and is an important part of David Hume’s theory of knowledge, in particular. The most elaborated version of associationist psychology is to be found in James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829).2 As we shall see in later chapters, these two psychological theories, or views of human nature, are far from dead. On the contrary, they are very much part of the short history of methodological individualism; the first, as part of economics and eventually of rational choice theory in all social sciences; the second because it is part of John Stuart Mill’s psychologism and the forerunner of behaviourist

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psychology, which was the psychological foundation of George Homans’s methodological individualism (see pp. 190–96). The doctrine of psychologism made its first appearance in the nineteenth century along with the discipline of psychology, and immediately became a matter of heated controversy. An important reason for this was, no doubt, the competition between representatives of the various academic disciplines for recognition and resources at a time when these disciplines were institutionalised at the universities in Europe and the USA (Kusch, 1995). Important as it is, however, this is not the only reason. There were also a number of genuine questions concerning the proper content and methods of the emerging social scientific and humanistic disciplines at issue. My interest in this chapter is mainly in psychologism as a doctrine which maintains that the foundation of the human sciences is to be found in psychology. As I have already suggested, this version of psychologism may be seen as the first form of the principle of methodological individualism in the social sciences. Following the methodological individualist Karl Popper, we may call it psychologistic methodological individualism. Its origin is in Great Britain and the first social science it conquered was economics. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the centre of psychologism was in Germany, where its main impact was on the humanities and eventually on sociology.

British psychologism I have mentioned two psychological theories in the history of social thought: hedonism and associationism. Both of them had their strongest hold in Great Britain. I think it is fairly safe to suggest that before the nineteenth century at least Great Britain was the main seat of psychologism. In no other country was the interest in human nature more intense. Psychology was at the centre of discussion, both among the British moralists and of the early social scientists. The conviction of most British social philosophers was that there is a universal human nature, constant over time and all over the world. The only problem was to find out exactly what this universal human nature is. John Stuart Mill John Stuart Mill is often mentioned as an exponent of psychologism, both in philosophy and in the social sciences. My interest is in the latter, viz., his view that social laws can and should be reduced to psychological laws. This view is generally considered a form of methodological individualism.3 Indeed, the methodological individualist Karl Popper ([1945] 1966: 88–99) has appointed Mill to being the main representative of ‘methodological psychologism’, which is according to him, an extreme and untenable form of methodological individualism. Popper’s follower Joseph Agassi (1960) has suggested the term ‘psychologistic individualism’, to designate the position Popper ascribed to Mill. Lorenzo Infantino (1998: 45–7) makes a distinction between the two, but I

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suppose he would not deny that psychologism is a form of methodological individualism. George Homans, however, is a methodological individualist who equates the two doctrines. Maybe that is because he is the only recent methodological individualist who was clearly indebted to John Stuart Mill? As a philosopher, Mill was deeply rooted in the British empiricist tradition. Like Locke, Berkeley and Hume, he believed that all knowledge, not self-evident, is based on induction from sensory experience. Like all empiricists, he also rejected conceptual realism, but he was not a nominalist, like Hobbes and Berkeley. With Locke, he accepted the existence of abstract ideas, which is to say that he was a conceptualist. Above all, however, John Stuart Mill was a defender of the associationist psychology, used by David Hume and his own father to explain the acquisition of belief.4 Mill was not a naive empiricist, though. He defended the deductive method in economics and he was a pioneer of the hypothetical-deductive, or covering-law, model of scientific explanation. Mill was also a utilitarian of sorts, but not in the form given to this doctrine by Jeremy Bentham and his father. At the end of the 1820s, he was exposed to certain alternative ways of looking at human beings in society and he was led in a direction away from simple-minded utilitarianism, both in ethics and social science. In his Autobiography (Mill [1873] 1961: 94ff), he mentions three people as particularly important in modifying his utilitarian view of ‘man’ and society: the historian Thomas B. Macaulay (1800–59), the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and the philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte (see pp. 27–29). I have already mentioned the strong impression that Macaulay’s critique of James Mill’s ‘Essay on Government’ made on his son. The younger Mill was shaken in his belief in the excellence of utilitarianism and of the ‘geometric’, or abstract-deductive, method. His doubts were reinforced by his reading of Coleridge, who introduced him to the ideas of German Romanticism (Mill [1840a] 1969). A first insight gained from reading Coleridge was that there are certain essential requisites of civil society, not noticed by Enlightenment thinkers. Mill mentions three: (1) ‘a system of education’ incurring a ‘restraining discipline’; (2) ‘a feeling of allegiance, or loyalty’, and (3) ‘a principle of cohesion among the members of the same community or state’ (Mill [1840a] 1969: 133–5). A second insight, gained from acquaintance with the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, in particular, concerned the existence and value of individuality; of differences between individuals, ignored by utilitarian individualism (Mill [1859] 1975: 69–91; Hinchman, 1990). According to Mill, Bentham himself was entirely insensitive to spiritual ends and failed to recognise the fundamental importance of self-formation, or self-culture, in a system of ethics. But formation of self, or character is also important in social science, where it is the subject matter of the all-important science of ethology (see below). Self-formation is, finally, important in Mill’s solution to the problem of freedom. While it is the task of ethology to explain individual character as the necessary consequence of circumstances, it is possible for individuals to influence their own circumstances and, thus, their character (Mill [1843–72] 1974: 836–43).

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The extent of Mill’s debt to Comte is a matter of some controversy. According to Hayek, ‘Mill himself, in the sixth book of his Logic, which deals with the methods of the moral sciences, became little more than an expounder of Comtian doctrine’ (1955: 186). Alan Ryan, points out that Mill himself ‘was anxious not to be thought to have learned everything from Comte’ and adds that ‘there is every reason to believe his declaration on this point’ (1974: 228). So far, I agree with Ryan, but there is, on the other hand, no reason at all to believe Mill, if the following statement is a correct rendering of his view of the matter: ‘[t]he only area in which Mill recognised a clear debt to Comte was that of the so-called method of inverse deduction’. Mill’s debt went further than this, but he did not share Comte’s view of psychology and political economy and, above all, he positively disliked Comte’s political thinking, not to speak of his later ideas of positivism as a religion of humanity. Probably, most of the differences between them boils down to the fact that Comte was a holist and collectivist, whereas Mill was an individualist. John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843) was probably the most influential work written on scientific method in the nineteenth century and this is especially true of the part devoted to the ‘social’ or ‘moral’ sciences.5 Mill did not use the term ‘methodological individualism’, but he did address the issue and advanced certain ideas that are clear manifestations of ‘methodological individualism’, in the sense eventually attached to this term. Like Comte, Mill was a methodological monist, who saw but one remedy of the backwardness of the social sciences: the use of the method that had already proved so successful in the natural sciences. He also agreed with Comte that the complexity of social phenomena makes this an exceedingly difficult task. Mill recognised three types of law in social science: (1) laws of the mind; (2) laws of the formation of character, and (3) laws of society. Laws of the mind are, of course, psychological law belonging to the science of psychology ([1843–72] 1974: 849–60). The main example of such laws are those of the laws of association, identified by Mill’s father James Mill (p. 852). Since there are no innate ideas, all our beliefs are a result of the association of ideas. Of our desires, on the other hand, some may be natural, even though most of them are acquired (p. 856). It is interesting that Mill sees a place for ‘mental chemistry’, as distinguished from mechanics. Just as two substances like hydrogen and oxygen, when mixed, give rise to a new substance, water, which has properties of its own, so association of ideas may give rise to new ideas.6 This is the idea of emergence, which was eventually to play such an important role in the doctrine of holism. It is significant, though, that Mill recognised emergence only within the individual mind, but not in the collective consciousness, as did the holist Emile Durkheim (see p. 35). Laws of the formation of character belong to the science of ethology, which was intended to be Mill’s own contribution to social science. Ryan has suggested that it corresponds to social psychology and I believe that this is largely correct. The subject matter of ethology is the way human beings are socialised and educated to become new members of society. Because the circumstances in

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which individuals are brought up are never exactly the same, each individual will become to some extent unique. Also, since circumstances differ between nations, there will be different national, or collective, characters. This phenomenon used to be the main object of investigation by German Völkerpsychologie, but it is not within the scope of mainstream social psychology today. The laws of ethology are either empirical or causal. As examples of the former, Mill mentions the maxims of common wisdom that exist in all countries.7 Invaluable as they are in everyday life, these approximate generalisations are not scientific. To the extent that they are true, they need to be explained by causal laws about the formation of character. The science of ethology does not exist, but it is an absolutely necessary precondition for the development of social science. The causal laws of ethology are the axiomata media which connects the laws of society with the laws of mind.8 The laws of the formation of character are derivative laws, depending upon the laws of mind and the specific circumstances. They tell us what will be the influence of circumstances on the formation of character. ‘In other words, Ethology, the deductive science is a system of corollaries from Psychology, the experimental science’ (p. 872). Mill went on to make clear that the science of ‘[e]thology is still to be created’ (p. 872) and he saw it as his own task to do so. His efforts in this direction failed, however, and he turned to other projects (Feuer, 1976; Collini, et al., 1983: 156ff). Among other things he wrote a book on political economy and an autobiography. Laws of society, finally, may be divided into laws of coexistence and laws of succession. The possibility of laws of coexistence are based upon the fact that there is a consensus among the different parts of society; that only certain combinations of social phenomena can coexist. Mill even uses the holistic metaphor of an organism to express this fact ([1843–72] 1974: pp. 899, 912). ‘The fundamental problem’ of social science, however, ‘is to find the laws according to which any state of society produces the state which succeeds it and takes its place’ (p. 912). The discussion, in which this passage occurs, has led Popper to accuse Mill of both holism and historicism (Popper, 1957: 72). I believe this accusation is a bit unfair. First of all, I think it is pretty obvious that Mill makes no serious use of the organism metaphor. He talks about ‘states of society’ succeeding one another, but this is ‘holism’ only in an extensive sense, to be carefully distinguished from true holism, which asserts that there are social wholes, which cannot be explained in terms of individuals. According to Mill, however, all laws about social states must be explained in terms of psychological laws. The same goes for Mill’s alleged historicism. He does suggest that there are historical laws of development, even if they are hard to come by, but they have the status of empirical laws, or trends, only. Like the laws of coexistence, they are only derivative law, which must be deduced from the ultimate laws of human nature ([1843–72] 1974: p. 916). A problem with finding the laws of society is that experiments are not feasible. The inductive or ‘chemical’ method suggested by Bacon is, therefore,

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inapplicable. Nor is the abstract or ‘geometric’ method used by Hobbes and the Benthamist school appropriate, except, perhaps, in the case of economics. One problem with the geometric method is that it relies entirely on the assumption of self-interest, but does not admit of conflicting forces in the form of mixed motives (pp. 887ff). The method of the social sciences is the ‘physical’ or concrete deductive. The following statement from Mill’s Autobiography is interesting, because it reveals the connection, first, between the method of concrete deduction and a mechanistic view of society and, second, between the latter and individualism. It is a characteristic feature of mechanical forces that they can be added, or aggregated, in a way that makes the whole equal to, instead of more than, the sum of its parts. My practice (learnt from Hobbes and my father) being to study abstract principles by means of the best concrete instances I could find, the Composition of Forces, in dynamics, occurred to me as the most complete example of the logical process I was investigating. On examining, accordingly, what the mind does when it applies the principle of the Composition of Forces, I found that it performs a simple act of addition. It adds the separate effects as the joint effect. But is this a legitimate process? In dynamics, and in all the mathematical branches of physics, it is; but in some other cases, as in chemistry, it is not … I now saw that a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the province it deals with, the effects when conjoined, are or are not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate. It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the method of philosophizing in politics to the purely experimental method of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry, which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or admit of any summing up of effects. (Mill [1873] 1961: 98) In the case of the general science of society, or sociology, however, the only possible method is that of inverse deduction, suggested by Comte (see p. 29). Since only such social states can exist that are compatible with human nature, laws of society must be subjected to ‘constant verification by psychological and ethological laws’ (p. 917). An important vehicle for tracing and verifying empirical laws of society is the emerging field of statistics. In an addition to the 1862 edition of a System of Logic, Mill (pp. 931–42) comments upon the recently published History of Civilization in England (1857) by Henry Thomas Buckle. In this book, as we have seen (p. 30) Buckle argued, like Quetelet before him, that the constancy of certain statistical phenomena, such as suicide and crime rates, is proof that there are statistical

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laws. It is significant that Mill rejects this argument in favour of a more individualist interpretation (p. 934). He also gives qualified support to the ‘aristocratic’ individualism of Carlyle, which assigns a special importance to great men in history. While agreeing that ‘the varieties of character among ordinary individuals neutralize one another on any large scale, exceptional individuals in important positions do not in any given age neutralize one another’ (p. 937). According to Mill, laws of society are empirical laws, or generalisations, only. As such they must be explained by the causal laws of the mind and of the formation of character on which they ultimately depend (pp. 896, 908, 914, 924f).9 The laws of the phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing but the laws of the actions and passions of human beings united together in the social state. Men, however, in a state of society are still men; their actions and passions are obedient to the laws of individual human nature. Men are not, when brought together, converted into another kind of substance, with different properties, as hydrogen and oxygen are different from water, or as hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and azote, are different from nerves, muscles, and tendons. Human beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the laws of the nature of individual man. In social phenomena the Composition of Causes is the universal law. (Mill [1843–72] 1974: 879) This passage is usually quoted as proof that Mill was a methodological individualist and, as such, it seems conclusive. It seems equally clear that his methodological individualism was psychologistic. According to Mill, all causal laws in social science are psychological laws about human nature. Social science is turned into large-scale psychology. More precisely, however, it is a metaphysical, or ontological, justification for methodological individualism. Mill explicitly denies that social phenomena have emergent properties and make up a reality of its own, or sui generis. Instead, he affirms the mechanist view of social phenomena as resultants, or composite effect, of the actions of individuals as governed by the laws of human nature. It seems clear that Mill was a psychologistic methodological individualist, as Karl Popper maintained. But Popper went further and maintained that Mill’s psychologism ‘forces him to adopt a historicist method’ (Popper [1945] 1966: 92) and ‘to operate with the idea of a beginning of society’ (p. 93). Alan Ryan rejects Popper’s argument and maintains that Mill’s psychologism is not different from Popper’s methodological individualism (Ryan, 1970: 156ff). Since it is not my aim to criticise psychologism here, I will not consider Popper’s argument, even though I believe that he is basically right (Udehn, 1987: 192–201). I also believe, however, that Ryan is right to maintain that Mill’s psychologism is not different from Popper’s methodological individualism. It takes Popper’s institutionalism to get rid of psychologistic historicism and Mill assigns no explicit role to social institutions in his methodology of the social sciences. There are only the laws of

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individual and social psychology (ethology). It may be argued that the science of ethology makes room for social institutions, but being a science of the formation of character, it is bound to give a psychologistic interpretation of them, and this is not enough to escape historicism in the sense of a quest for origins. It is quite another matter that Mill often treats institutions as real factors given to analysis and treated as causal factors in his empirical investigations.10 According to Mill, then, the social sciences are based on psychology. This view was in contradistinction to that of Comte, who saw no role at all for this science. But Mill took exception also to Comte’s view of economics. Whereas the latter argued that the economy must be analysed as part of society and inductively, rather than deductively, Mill defended the abstract-deductive approach of his father and his friend David Ricardo. Mill’s philosophy of the social sciences made a tremendous impact on the early human sciences. Even those who did not share his views, like Wilhelm Dilthey, advanced their own views in opposition to the positivism of Mill and Comte. The Austrians read Mill and were probably to some extent influenced by his psychologism, even if other influences may have been stronger. Karl Popper developed his institutionalism in contrast to Mill’s psychologism. The most clear example of Mill’s influence is the sociologist George Homans, who suggests a version of methodological individualism, which looks almost exactly like that of Mill (see pp. 190–96). But it is possible to see similarities also between Mill’s psychologism and the quest for microfoundations, advanced recently by many sociologists (see pp. 187–89). Like the latter, Mill maintained that empirical generalisations; both those of common sense and those of official statistics, must be provided by microfoundations in the form of causal laws of psychology.

Figure 3.1 John Stuart Mill’s psychologistic methodological individualism

Utilitarian economics In chapter 2, we saw that classical economics was largely if not wholly individualistic. There was also an important element of institutionalism in several of the classical economists. In my opinion, economics became definitely individualistic in 1871, when Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger made the marginalist revolution, together with Leon Walras (1874). The idea that revolutionised economics was that economic decisions about what to buy depend, not upon the total utility, but

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on their marginal utility to the consumer. What matters is not the utility of the total quantity I possess of a certain good, but the utility of an additional unit of that good. An important part of this revolution was also the switch from an objectivist to a subjectivist theory of value. A consequence of this switch was a shift in economic theory, from a concern with the problems of production and distribution to an almost exclusive preoccupation with consumption. All market phenomena were explained, in the last instance, as the result of the consumer’s subjective valuation and choice of goods. In this section, I am going to concentrate on the British branch of neoclassical economics, which is the clearest example of psychologism, at least in the early phase of its development. The psychological theory, used by the early British marginalists was, of course, the utilitarianism of Jeremey Bentham and James Mill. Stanley Jevons (1835–82) was first to introduce marginalism in British economics. He did not use the term ‘marginal utility’, however, but called it ‘final utility’. Jevons was also first to build economics on the foundation of utilitarianism, and described his theory as ‘the mechanics of utility and self-interest’ ( Jevons [1871] 1970: 90). He took utilitarianism from Bentham, but turned it from an ethical theory into an explanatory theory of human behaviour. ‘In this work I have attempted to treat economy as a calculus of pleasure and pain, and have sketched out, almost irrespective of previous opinions, the form which the science, as it seems to me, must ultimately take’ ( Jevons [1871] 1970: 44). Pleasure and pain are undoubtedly the ultimate objects of the calculus of economics. To satisfy our wants to the utmost with the least effort – to procure the greatest amount of what is desirable – in other words, to maximise pleasure is the problem of economics. ( Jevons [1871] 1970: 101) It may be noticed that, for Jevons, utility was not a psychic phenomenon, but a quality of objects with the capacity of producing a feeling of pleasure in its utilisers. However, in order to maximise pleasure or happiness we have to maximise utility. Jevons did not state any principle of methodological individualism, although there are some indications of individualism in his major work. He rejected the possibility of comparing the feelings of pleasure in different minds and, hence, of arriving at a utility function for a collectivity of individuals. According to Jevons, ‘the weighing of motives must always be confined to the bosom of the individual’ (p. 85). I must here point out that, though the theory presumes to investigate the condition of a mind, and bases upon this investigation the whole of economics, practically it is an aggregate of individuals which will be treated. The general form of the laws of economics are the same in the case of individuals and nations; and, in reality, it is a law operating in the case of

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multitudes of individuals which gives rise to the aggregate represented in the transactions of a nation. ( Jevons [1871] 1970: 86) Jevons here points to a practical problem which always did beset methodological individualism and which has led some social scientists to adopt a more collectivistic methodology. He continues: Practically, however, it is quite impossible to detect the operation of general laws of this kind in the actions of one or more individuals. The motives and conditions are so numerous and complicated that the resulting actions have the appearance of caprice, and are beyond the analytic powers of science. ( Jevons [1871] 1970: 86) The solution to this problem is to use averages, or aggregates, assuming that, in the long run, accidental and disturbing causes will neutralise each other and produce a more predictable aggregate outcome. ‘Accordingly, questions which appear, and perhaps are, quite indeterminate as regards individuals, may be capable of exact investigation and solution in regard to great masses and wide averages’ (p. 86). Jevons’s solution is not, however, to follow Quetelet and give up individualism, but to insist that laws of the aggregate depend upon laws of individual behaviour: The laws which we are about to trace out are to be conceived as theoretically true of the individual; they can only be practically verified as regards the aggregate transactions, productions, and consumptions of a large body of people. But the laws of the aggregate depend of course upon the laws applying to individual cases. ( Jevons [1871] 1970: 108f. See also p. 135) Jevons is no more explicit about the assumption of rationality. Of course it may be objected that the assumption of rationality is implicit in that of utilitymaximisation or, even, that they are identical. This is a common view today, but it is a view that I reject for at least two reasons. First of all, rationality presupposes conscious intention, whereas utility-maximisation does not, and second, individuals may try to maximise utility, but fail because they are irrational. It may be argued that Jevons talks about the calculus of pleasure and pain and that calculation certainly is part of rational choice. He also mentions that we derive pleasure from anticipation of future pleasure (p. 99). This is a further indication of conscious intention. On the other hand, he immediately adds that, in our ordinary affairs, we make these calculations almost unconsciously (p. 100). Francis Y. Edgeworth followed Jevons in leaning on Bentham’s principle of greatest happiness, but considered two different versions of this principle: the ethical and the economic. He called the former ‘utilitarian’ and the latter ‘egoistic’. According to Edgeworth the scope of economics is limited to self-interested

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utility-maximisation. In his well-known statement, ‘the first principle of Economics is that every agent is actuated only by self-interest’ ([1881] 1967: 16). As things turned out, however, also the utilitarian version would become a concern of economists. Edgeworth’s utilitarian calculus may be conceived of as an early contribution to welfare economics. More important, from a narrowly scientific point of view, Edgeworth was first to introduce the idea of indifference curves (pp. 21ff), thereby creating the possibility for an alternative mathematical representation of economic theory. Edgeworth’s distinction between an economical and a utilitarian calculus was based on a distinction between ‘egoistic’ and ‘universalistic’ hedonism made by Henry Sidgwick in his monumental and influential The Methods of Ethics (1874). There is no exact correspondence, however, since Sidgwick conceived of both as ethical doctrines to be distinguished from ‘psychological hedonism’. The latter corresponds to Edgeworth’s egoistic principle, which is also the first principle of the science of economics. Sidgwick was of another opinion, however. He defended universal hedonism, or utilitarianism, as an ethical theory, but rejected egoistic hedonism. Benevolence, not self-interest is the centrepiece of common sense morality and, therefore, of ethics. But there would be little point in defending universal hedonism if human nature were entirely dominated by psychological hedonism. Because of this, Sidgwick went to great length in order to rebut the latter assumption (Sidgwick [1874] 1981: 42ff, 199ff, 497ff). It would still be possible, of course, to use self-interest as a simplifying assumption for the purposes of economics, but Sidgwick rejected even this use of psychological hedonism. While admitting that economics has to use simplifying assumptions (Sidgwick, 1885: 37), he denied that it has to use the assumption of strict self-interest. All that the deductive reasonings of English economists supply is a method of analysing the phenomena and a statement of the general causes that govern them, and of the manner of their operation. In this analysis, no doubt, the assumption is fundamental that the individuals concerned in the actual determination of the economic quantities resulting from free exchange will aim, ceteris paribus, at getting the most they can for what they sell and giving the least they can for what they buy. (Sidgwick, 1885: 34) The reason this assumption does not imply self-interest is that individuals trying to get the most they can when selling and giving the least they can when buying, may do so for the benefit of their family, their friends, or some other people, rather than for their own benefit (p. 29). Sidgwick, then, appears as a precursor of Wicksteed’s principle of non-tuism. Instead of self-interest, economics relies on the assumption of wealth-maximisation: Other things being equal, they always prefer more to less (Sidgwick [1883] 1901: 46).

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The first and most fundamental [assumption] is that in a state of economic freedom, all persons engaged in industry will, in selling or lending goods or contracting to render services, endeavour, other things being equal, to get as much wealth as they can in return for the commodity they offer. This is more briefly expressed by saying the Political Economy assumes the universality and unlimitedness of the desire for wealth. (Sidgwick [1883] 1901: 41) Sidgwick does not express any manifest belief in methodological individualism. He does talk about ‘individualism or economic egoism’ to designate the nature of economic man ([1883] 1901: 34) and he often refers to a free market economy as the ‘individualistic organization’ of industry, or society (pp. 44, 591); still this does not imply methodological individualism. This principle seems to be implicit, however, in the first quotation from Sidgwick, above, and it may underlie his critique of organicist sociology (Sidgwick, 1885: 41–57). Philip Wicksteed was less committed to utilitarianism, and closer, in some respects, to Austrian than to British marginalism. In his first contribution to economics, The Alphabet of Economic Science (1888), he was still exploring the field opened up by Jevons, Walras and Marshall and, consequently, much concerned with ‘marginal utility’, yet he was much more interested in the rational choices made by individuals comparing the marginal utility of various goods (Wicksteed [1888] 1970: 51ff).11 His paradigm of a rational economic agent is the householder, which, as it happens, is usually a housewife: The clever housekeeper has a delicate sense for marginal utilities, and can balance them with great nicety. She is always on the alert and free from the slavery of tradition. She follows changes of condition closely and quickly, and keeps her system of expenditure fluid, so to speak, always ready to rise or fall on any one of innumerable and ever shifting, expanding and contracting channels through which it is distributed, and so always keeping or recovering the same level everywhere. She keeps her marginal utilities balanced, and never spends a penny on A when it would be more effective if spent on B; and combines the maximum of comfort and economy with the minimum of ‘pinching’. (Wicksteed [1888] 1970: 126) Wicksteed is also more individualistic than the other British marginalists. Like the Austrians, he insists that ‘we must make the relative intensity of the desires and wants of the individual our starting-point’ (p. 77). Consequently, he starts his analysis with the case of Robinson Crusoe. From this individualistic point of view, it is not legitimate to compare the desires and wants of different individuals and, hence, to arrive at a utility function for the whole community, conceived as a unity. Economics is a science of a ‘catallactic community … in which the individuals freely exchange commodities one with another, each with a view to

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making the enjoyment he derives from his possessions a maximum’ (p. 79, note).12 In Wicksteed’s major work, The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), utilitymaximisation is pushed a bit further into the background. Economics is now based on a ‘psychology of choice between alternatives’ ([1910] 1933: 2f). For the purposes of economic theory, each individual is endowed with a single scale of preferences encompassing all objects of desire (pp. 32–6). The economic problem confronting each individual is how to administer limited resources in the choice between alternatives according to his/her scale of preferences. Wicksteed is aware that choice is not always deliberate and not always rational, but maintains that the principle of price is always active (p. 28). Wicksteed’s real point of departure is the household, not the individual, but he assumes that it is administered by an individual in the form of a housewife. The end of economic analysis, however, is to explain the organization of industry and commerce. As in his first work, he calls it a ‘catallactic community’, but he also describes it as a ‘spontaneous organisation’, made up of ‘spontaneous relations’ (pp. 15f). The ‘aggregate’, or combined, result of the actions of all individuals in this catallactic community is called, with a term borrowed from mechanics, a resultant. (see, e.g. pp. 5, 162, 167). Wicksteed is critical of the idea of economic man acting from a specific economic motive. Economics is not based on the assumption of a specific motive at all, but on a specific, impersonal, economic relation called ‘non-tuism’. For the purposes of economic science there is no need to assume that individuals are self-interested. They may very well act from altruism or benevolence. The only assumption needed is that individuals are not altruistic or benevolent towards parties to exchange, but that they try to strike the best bargain they can in their economic transactions. ‘The economic relation does not exclude from my mind everyone but me, it potentially includes every one but you’ ([1910] 1933: 174). Wicksteed knows, of course, that economic relations are usually ‘embedded’ in social relations of various sorts, but defends the simplifying assumption of isolated economic relations for the purposes of economic science (pp. 194ff).13 Economics, then, is not based on assuming a particular motive such as selfinterest, or utility-maximisation, still this does not mean that it is free from psychology (Wicksteed [1914] 1933: 780): ‘If political economy is the science of wealth, then it deals with efforts made by man to supply wants and satisfy desires. “Want,” “effort,” “desire,” “satisfaction,” are each and all psychic phenomena’ (Wicksteed [1914] 1933: 766). It is equally obvious, however, that the economist is not engaged in doing psychology. Following John Neville Keynes, Wicksteed argues that economics takes psychological principles as its point of departure, rather than subjecting them to investigation. But the ultimate laws of economics are psychological and ‘it may be argued that political economy is largely, or even prevailingly, applied psychology, so that the economist must from first to last realise that he is dealing with psychological phenomena, and must be guided throughout by psychological considerations’ (p. 767). Alfred Marshall (1842–1924) was probably the most influential of the British

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neoclassical economists, at least in the long run, but he was not altogether orthodox in his outlook. Marshall was less prone than other neoclassical economists to engage in abstraction and insisted that economics is about real men and women as members of society and not about an abstract economic man acting in splendid isolation (Marshall [1890] 1920: 12–23). More than other neoclassical economists, Marshall took an interest in the German Historical School of Economics and in sociology, and tried to make use of some of its ideas (Coase [1975] 1982: 412). One obvious sign of this influence is that Marshall rejected the orthodox view of human nature as a constant ([1890] 1920: 3ff, 622, 630f). Another sign is that Marshall conceived of his own theory as holistic, or organicist, rather than as individualistic (pp. 20f, 637).14 Unlike the other British marginalists, he also advocated a development of economic theory in a more evolutionary direction (Foster, 1993). Marshall wished to play down the break with classical economics and accused Jevons for exaggerating discontinuity between classical and marginalist economics. He denied that value is altogether determined by utility and not at all by cost of production. ‘We might as reasonably dispute whether it is the upper or the under blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper, as whether value is governed by utility or cost of production’ (Marshall [1890] 1920: 290). He also rejected Jevons’s claim that the theory of consumption is the scientific basis of economics. Economics is a science of human action and of choice, not of wants, or of utility. Wants are of interest, only to the extent that they manifest themselves in the use of money for their satisfaction. The existence of the measuring rod of money is the basis of economics as a science and the reason for its superiority to the other social sciences. Marshall, then, might be seen as a progenitor of the idea of starting from revealed preferences, rather than from the psychological basis of choice. Economics, then, is a science of action and of choice as manifested in the use of money on the market. But this does not mean that Marshall conceives of all action as the result of deliberate choice. When we speak of the measurement of desire by the action to which it forms the incentive, it is not to be supposed that we assume every action to be deliberate, and the outcome of calculation. For in this, as in every other respect, economics takes man just as he is in ordinary life: and in ordinary life people do not weigh beforehand the results of every action, whether the impulses to it come from their higher nature or their lower. (Marshall [1890] 1920: 17) According to Marshall, much of ordinary life is governed by habit and custom, but he also suggests that most customs have been adopted and survive because they are rational, or functional, especially in the modern world ([1890] 1920: 18f; 1885: 48ff). It is a thesis of Marshall, that there has been a historical development from a society dominated by custom, to a society increasingly dominated by deliberate choice (Marshall [1890] 1920: 1–11, 602–23). A

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consequence of this thesis is that the theory of rational choice is of wider scope in modern than in traditional society. With all these provisos, it should finally be admitted that the main legacy of Alfred Marshall is as a founder of individualist neoclassical economics. It may be argued that Marshall’s methodology rested upon two pillars: the principles of substitution and continuity (cf. Boland, 1992: chs 2–3). According to the first, every economic agent will try ‘to obtain better results with a given expenditure, or equal results with a lesser expenditure’ (Marshall [1890] 1920: 295). In other words: individuals are constrained maximisers. The principle of continuity says that everything is relative and a matter of degree (314f). Most importantly, the principle of continuity applies to time. Thus there is only a difference of degree between the long run and the short. In the short run, both technology and social institutions are exogenously given as constraints on maximisation. In the long run, however, they themselves may be treated as endogenous variables subject to constrained maximisation. Which variables are conceived of as exogenous and endogenous is entirely relative to the time-perspective and to their stability over time. Those ‘variables’ that are stable over long periods of time, are treated as exogenously fixed conditions. Although the proximate causes of the chief events in history are to be found in the actions of individuals, yet most of the conditions which have made these events possible are traceable to the influence of inherited institutions and race qualities and of physical nature. (Marshall [1890] 1920: 602) It seems to me that Marshall represents what has been later called institutional individualism (see chapter 6). His way of tackling the problem reminds one of the new institutionalism in economics (see chapter 8), which is not surprising, since he has been a major influence on at least one of its branches, namely the Chicago School. I believe there is a difference, however. Whereas Marshall suggested that we should try to maximise the number of exogenously fixed conditions (see Boland, 1992: 27ff), the Chicago School tries to endogenise as much as possible. The strategy of the former may be described as institutionalistic and that of the latter as individualistic. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, economics was gradually to free itself from its dependence upon utilitarianism, and turn into a theory of rational choice, more or less drained of psychological content (see Stigler, 1950). Part of the responsibility for this development lies with the other branches of marginalism: the Austrian and Lausanne schools of economics. I believe it was mainly the Austrians, who turned economics from utilitarianism to rational choice (see chapter 4), while the Lausanne school paid virtually no attention at all to the individual, except as a cog in the lifeless machine of the market (see pp. 241–50). Of great importance in this development was also the mathematical–technical side of the matter. The first important steps were apparently taken by Irving Fischer and Vilfredo Pareto in the beginning of the 1890s.

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Other figures who contributed to this development were Gustav Cassel and Eugen Slutsky. The final step was taken by John R. Hicks and Roy G.D. Allen in their article ‘A Reconsideration of the Theory of Value’ (1934). According to them (p. 52), the most important figure in the replacement of the concept of utility by that of a scale of preferences was Vilfredo Pareto, the successor of Leon Walras in Lausanne (see also Stigler, 1950: 386ff, and Marchionatti and Gambino, 1997). It is a bit surprising, therefore, that Lawrence Boland (1982: 27ff) should single out Pareto’s position, among all economists, as an example of psychologism. However, this is not to suggest, that he is entirely wrong to do so. In Pareto’s main sociological treatise, The Mind and Society ([1916] 1963: 1442), we read: ‘All human conduct is psychological and, from that standpoint, not only the study of economics but the study of every other branch of human activity is a psychological study and the facts of all such branches are psychological facts’. This passage is quoted by Lawrence Boland (1982: 27) at the beginning of a chapter on methodological individualism, where he suggests that Pareto was a proponent of psychologism. But was he? It depends, of course, upon what you understand by ‘psychologism’, but I do not think that Pareto is a very good example of psychologism in economics. The passage quoted by Boland is from a note, where Pareto is really more concerned to play down the importance of psychology for the science of economics (see also pp. 20f, 324), but he might also have quoted the following passage from his main work on economics, Manual of Political Economy: Clearly psychology is fundamental to political economy and all the social sciences in general. Perhaps a day will come when the laws of social science can be deduced from principles of psychology, just as some day perhaps the principles of the composition of matter will give us all the laws of physics and chemistry by deduction; but we are still very far from that state of affairs, and we must take a different approach. (Pareto [1909] 1972: 29) This is the programme of reductionism, in general, and of psychologism, in particular, but it is not a programme that Pareto recommends, as can be seen from the last sentence. And it is not his own procedure. Being a follower of Walras, Pareto’s psychologism is minimalistic indeed. According to Pareto, the economist is not interested in the tastes of individuals (Pareto [1909] 1972: 95). Individuals may be represented by their indifference curves. ‘The individual can disappear, provided he leaves us this photograph of his tastes’ (p. 120).15 The relation of economics to psychology has been a constant bone of contention. While most economists deny that economics has anything to learn from psychology, there have always been dissenters who maintain the opposite. Some of the former go as far as to deny that economics in any way depends upon psychological knowledge. I believe that this view is mistaken (see pp. 331–36). It is rather a matter of the extent to which economics depends on psychological

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knowledge and what kind of psychological knowledge it is. Whether it should be based on detailed knowledge about human behaviour derived from the science of psychology, or upon some simple assumptions derived from common sense. I suggest that we make a distinction between thin and thick versions of psychologism. Thin psychologism is minimalistic, and makes use of very simple psychological assumptions, like those about economic man. It does not rely on any acquaintance with the science of psychology. Thick psychologism, on the other hand, makes use of more detailed knowledge about the motives and reasoning of human beings. An important source of this more sophisticated knowledge is, of course, the science of psychology. The psychologism of Pareto was a thin version of this doctrine. Pareto’s main contribution to individualism, was not his psychologism, but his denial of the possibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility and his famous idea of optimality, commonly called Pareto optimality, or Pareto efficiency. The latter idea is one of the central pillars of the individualist tradition in normative economics and political philosophy. Its basis, the denial of the possibility of comparing the utilities of different individuals is also a characteristic mark of individualism, but not of utilitarianism (despite the fact that Jevons also denied this possibility). Among economists, it is typically the most outspoken methodological individualists, the Austrians, who deny the possibility of comparing the utility of different individuals. The reason, of course, is that it blocks the possibility of constructing a collective utility-function and, more importantly, of a collectivistic politics, based on such a utility-function. The intellectual roots of this view are, I believe, in German qualitative individualism, which is a source, not only for Austrian individualists, but also for Pareto (cf. Carroll, 1973).

German psychologism In chapter 1, we saw that thinking about the individual and society in nineteenth-century Germany was dominated by historicism. It is perhaps paradoxical that the science of psychology should first emerge in this intellectual context, and that it should take the form of a natural, rather than a human, science. Nevertheless, it did, but not without a fight. The natural and experimental science of psychology met with strong resistance from the start and, in the end, there was a split between an experimental and explanatory psychology, on the one hand, and a phenomenological and descriptive psychology, on the other. The latter was conceived of as the foundation upon which all human sciences rest. The implication was a kind of psychologism, that was the most common version of methodological individualism in sociology (see chapter 5) before the rise of rational choice sociology (see chapter 10). The rise of psychology It is commonly agreed that psychology as a science, or at least as an academic discipline, originated in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century. It had

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two roots; one in philosophy, the other in natural science. Of these, the latter was the more important in turning psychology into a science, but institutionally speaking, psychology emerged as a sub-discipline of philosophy. There were, for quite some time no separate chairs in psychology. Psychologists competed with philosophers for chairs in their discipline. Like a young cuckoo, the science of psychology threatened to crowd out the philosophers from their nest. Or, so it seemed to philosophers proper, who mounted a counterattack in the form of anti-psychologism. Armed with the mighty weapon of logic, the philosophers eventually succeeded in throwing the psychologists out of their discipline. This story is told in much detail, and in a persuasive manner, by Martin Kusch (1995). In a larger perspective, it is just another chapter in the play of group interests which drives the process of the specialisation and differentiation of scientific knowledge. In Great Britain, as we have seen, philosophy was largely psychologistic. This was not the case in Germany: not even at the start. German philosophy in the nineteenth century was largely anti-psychologistic, and this explains some of the animosity, but even so, it did contribute to the emergence and development of the new discipline. It is virtually impossible to say anything at all about German philosophy without going back to Immanuel Kant. Unlike John Stuart Mill in England, Kant denied that philosophy depends upon psychology. Pure logic, for instance, ‘has nothing to do with empirical principles, and does not … borrow anything from psychology … Pure logic is a body of demonstrated doctrine, and everything in it must be certain a prior’ ([1781/7] 1965: 95). He also denied that psychology is possible as a science in its own right. In Kant’s terminology, only an ‘empirical’ psychology, but not a ‘rational’ psychology is possible (328ff). ‘This is because mathematics is inapplicable to the phenomena of the internal sense and their laws, unless one might want to take into consideration merely the laws of continuity in the flow of this sense’s internal changes’ (Kant [1786] 1970: 8). It might be added that, for Kant, science means natural science and quantification is its distinguishing mark. The reason why psychic phenomena are not quantifiable, in its turn, is that psychic experience exists only in time, but not in space. Perhaps, this says more about Kant’s concept of science, than about the prospects of psychology. According to Kant, chemistry also fails to qualify as a science. I suspect that Kant’s view of mental phenomena continued to play some role in the discussions about the possibility of measuring and comparing the utility of different individuals, which has been so important in welfare economics. Despite Kant’s own doubts, some of his disciples tried to establish psychology as a science (see Leary, 1978), and, ironically, two of them, Jacob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843) and Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798–1854), may have been first to advance and defend psychologism in philosophy (Notturno, 1985: 12). More well known is Friedrich Herbart (1776–1881), who argued, against Kant, that psychological experiences are, indeed, quantifiable. His most famous thesis was that the

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intensity of various sensations tend towards equilibrium. A change in the intensity of one sensation is offset by changes in other sensations. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Kant was replaced by the German idealists, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling (1775–1854) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), as the dominant philosophers of the epoch. The tenor of their philosophy was even more anti-psychologistic than that of Kant. While psychology is a science of the subjective experience of individual human beings, German idealism was holistic and objectivistic. From the latter point of view, the approach of psychology appeared as limited, at best. According to the German idealists, the mind of the individual is but a moment in the development of the absolute spirit. Even so, it made some contributions to the burgeoning science of psychology. First of all, it gave philosophical legitimacy to social psychology as a special branch of the new science. In Germany, social psychology took the special form of folk psychology (Völkerpsychologie).16 Second, Fichte, in particular, emphasised the active side of human beings, as a manifestation of will. This theme was developed by other philosophers, such as Arthur Schopenhauer and by Friedrich Nietzsche, in a more individualistic direction, but it also made an impact on psychology (Leary, 1980). The main root of scientific psychology, however, was natural science. Two important figures were Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–1878) and Gustav Fechner (1801–87), who both – but especially the latter – contributed to the famous Weber–Fechner law of psychophysics. According to this law, the smallest noticeable difference in the intensity of sensations increases in proportion to this intensity. The explanation for this fact is that the intensity of our sensations increases at a slower rate than the increase in the stimuli which causes the sensation. The most important natural scientist behind the development of scientific psychology, however, was Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), who specialised in the investigation of the functioning and activity of our senses and muscles. Part of Helmholz’s importance lies in the fact that he was the teacher of Wilhelm Wundt, who is considered by many the real founder of psychology as a science. Mention should, finally, be made of Hermann Lotze (1817–81), who was a philosopher and successor of Herbart, but who was trained in medicine and tried to accomplish a marriage between psychology and physiology. Among Lotze’s pupils was Franz Brentano, who might be considered a co-founder of scientific psychology. The emergence of psychology was gradual, but there is reason to assign a special importance to the year 1874. In this year two books of particular importance for the establishment of psychology as a science were published (see Titchener, 1921), namely Wilhelm Wundt’s Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology) and Franz Brentano’s Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint). Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) was an incredibly productive writer and, in

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addition, a good organiser, who created the first laboratory for experimental psychology in Leipzig in 1879. He did more than anyone to establish psychology as an academic discipline and therefore is often mentioned as the founder of psychology. As I have already mentioned, his background was in physiology and he always considered psychophysics an important part of psychology. The central part, however, was the study of mental phenomena themselves, and for the grounding of this part, he relied heavily on the associationist psychology of James and John Stuart Mill. It might be noted that he borrows the idea of mental chemistry from the later Mill, but calls it ‘psychic synthesis’ (Wundt, 1874: 484). Also this part, however, was to become part of experimental psychology. Eventually, Wundt would become much interested in Völkerpsychologie.17 In the first stage of his career, Wundt appears as a follower of Mill also in matters concerning the logic of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). In the first edition of his own Logik (1883), Wundt consistently maintains that (individual) psychology is the foundation of the human sciences (pp. 478ff, 572). The latter establishes facts of a singular, or generic, nature, but it takes psychological laws to explain them and the reason is that only psychological laws are causal (pp. 500, 514–18, 541). Statistical regularities, for instance, are not causal, but only empirical, and, therefore, in need of a causal explanation in terms of psychological laws (pp. 77–9). A significant difference between Wundt and Mill is that the former makes an important distinction between history and social science. In the case of sociology, he follows Mill closely, except in his opinion of Comte, which is much more negative. Wundt sees no justification for a science of sociology, à la Comte, which he dismisses as philosophy of history (p. 568f). Like most Germans, he is also somewhat less impressed by the achievements of abstract-deductive economics (pp. 586ff). As a German, finally, he assigns an important place to hermeneutics, or the art of interpretation, in the humanities (pp. 518ff). In his Ethics, however, written only three years later (1886), Wundt has turned into a critic of ‘the one-sided individualism of the Enlightenment’ (p. 394) and of utilitarianism (p. iv). He still maintains that psychology is an important aid to the social sciences and history, but now it is Völkerpsychologie, not individual psychology, which provides the foundation. As we have seen (p. 35), Wundt’s Ethics had a profound effect upon the sociologist Emile Durkheim and its place is in the history of holism, rather than in that of methodological individualism. Although Durkheim tried to deny it, Wundt is most probably the source of his idea of ‘creative synthesis’. As I have already suggested, Wundt took the idea of psychic synthesis from Mill and used it to explain novelty in the minds of individuals. This idea is also hinted at in the first edition of his Logik (1883: 523f), where he talks about ‘the creation of psychic energy’ in individuals. It is only in the second edition of this work (1895: 267–97), however, that creative synthesis (schöpferische Synthese) becomes an important topic and Wundt now applies this idea to cultural phenomena that originate in a community of individuals, rather than in an individual mind.

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From the 1880s to the end of his life, Wundt moved progressively away from individual psychology and individualism to Völkerpsychologie and social holism. In the preface to the posthumously published fourth edition of Logik (1921), his son Max Wundt writes that, his father’s last concern was to overcome individualism (Wundt, 1921: viii). Franz Brentano was a scholar of a somewhat different bent from Wundt. His training was in classical philosophy rather than natural science. As a Catholic he had a strong leaning towards Aristotle and the scholastics, but he was also well versed in modern philosophy, including Comte and Mill. Of these two, he preferred Mill, if for no other reason than that he defended psychology against the critique of Comte (Brentano [1874] 1973: 33–5). For Brentano, himself, psychology is the science of mental phenomena (pp. 19, 100) and it occupies an important place of its own in the hierarchy of the sciences. Brentano goes to some length in rebutting Comte’s reduction of psychology to physiology (pp. 48ff, 128f), but follows Mill in attempting to reduce philosophy and social science to psychology. ‘Along with aesthetics and logic, ethics and politics also stem from the field of psychology. And so psychology appears to be the fundamental condition of human progress in precisely those things which, above all, constitute human dignity’ (p. 21). With direct address to Comte, he also writes: The observation of mental phenomena in human society undoubtedly sheds light upon the mental phenomena of the individual; the opposite, however, is even more true. Indeed, in general it is a more natural procedure to try to understand society and its development on the basis of what has been discovered about individuals than to proceed the other way around and try to shed light on the problems of individual psychology by means of the observation of society. (Brentano [1874] 1973: 43) Brentano, then, seems to have been a psychologicist and, consequently, a methodological individualist, but this is not a central part of his argument. His most well-known contribution to philosophy and psychology is his argument that mental phenomena are characterised by intentionality; by ‘reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as a thing), or immanent objectivity’. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (Brentano [1874] 1973: 88) Brentano’s conception of psychology was somewhat modified towards the end of the century. In his later writings he made a sharp distinction between ‘genetic’, or explanatory, and ‘descriptive’ psychology, akin to, but not identical

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with, that made by Wilhelm Dilthey (see pp. 68, 70f). The former is an inductive science seeking laws of ‘mental’ phenomena. It is a ‘natural science’ connecting mental with physiological phenomena, in the manner of psychophysics. The descriptive psychologist, on the other hand, ‘investigates the constituents of human consciousness; he seeks out its elements and attempts to determine as exhaustively as possible their modes of combination’ (Brentano, 1890–1, quoted in Chisholm, 1976: 92). Descriptive psychology is also an ‘empirical’ though not an inductive science, since it aims at discovering apodictic, or certain, truths about psychic phenomena. It is a posteriori, to the extent that it is based on experience, but a priori, to the extent that its truths are independent of experience. In this respect, Brentano’s descriptive psychology complies with Kant’s synthetic a priori. Most of its statements, however, are analytic. Brentano’s descriptive psychology, therefore cuts across Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements (see Chisholm, 1976; de Boer, 1976). To conclude: unlike Dilthey’s descriptive psychology, that of Brentano is an exact science. Brentano’s ideas of a descriptive psychology and of the intentionality of mental phenomena would become important elements in the burgeoning phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, who had attended Brentano’s lectures as a student (Husserl 1981: 342–8). More important, for my purposes, is the suggestion that Brentano influenced members of the Austrian School of Economics. It is likely that Carl Menger got some of his Aristotelianism from Brentano, and more than likely that he got his idea of economics as an exact science from him (see Gordon, 1993: 17ff and Smith, 1986: 8ff). It has also been argued that Ludwig von Mises praxeological version of Austrian Economics pointed out that it owes a lot to Brentano (Chisholm, 1986: 191f). If so, it is a bit odd that Mises did not recognise the similarities between his own view and that of Menger, but believed that the latter was a follower of Mill (Mises, 1969: 27f). Wundt in particular, but also Brentano had a large number of students, who eventually became famous psychologists. I am not, however, aware of anyone who made an important contribution to psychologism in the human sciences. Wundt’s experimental psychology also made a great impact outside Germany and, especially, in the USA. An important link between Germany and the USA was the British psychologist E.B. Titchener (1867–1927), who had been a student of Wundt and organised his own laboratory at Cornell University. This is not to suggest, however, that psychology in the USA was imported from Germany. The Unites States had a tradition of its own closely associated with pragmatist philosophy, which exerted an important formative influence on the further development of psychology and philosophy, not only in the USA, but also in Europe. The pioneer was William James, who wrote one of the classics of the discipline, The Principles of Psychology (1890), which includes the famous chapter IX on ‘The Stream of Thought’. In this chapter, James rejects the analysis of the mind suggested by associationist psychology. The mind, or consciousness, is not a passive receptor of sense-impressions, as in Locke’s tabula rasa, but a function of human activity: hence, the label ‘functionalist

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psychology’.18 Equally wrong is the atomism of associationist psychology. The mind does not consist of bits and pieces put together into complex ideas. Whatever goes on in the mind is a process, or a stream. Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. ( James, [1890] 1950: 239) Also important is James’s theory of the self, and on this point he is more in agreement with associationist psychology, especially that of Hume. Like the latter, he rejects the idea of the self as some kind of substance. James’s analysis of the self is in terms of an ‘I’ and, especially, of a ‘me’, or empirical self. This empirical self is inclusive, indeed: In its widest possible sense … a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. ( James, [1890] 1950: 291) It is evident from this list that the self is, to a large extent, a social self. According to James, ‘[a] man’s social Self is the recognition which he gets from his mates’ ( [1890] 1950: 293). Or, properly speaking, ‘a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind’ (p. 294). James goes on to suggest that these individuals fall into different classes, which means that an individual ‘has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares’ (p. 294). For each of these groups, an individual shows a different side of his/her self. What James is hinting at here is the idea of a social role, which would later become an important part of social psychology and sociology. William James influenced the symbolic interactionists, and also Henri Bergson and Alfred Schutz, to mention only some of the more important. He also influenced John Dewey, who adopted his functionalism with respect both to mind and society. Around the turn of the century, a sub-discipline called social psychology was established as a field of its own. Of particular importance in the history of social psychology is the year 1908. In that year two books with that title were published – one written by the American sociologist E.A. Ross (1908), the other by the British psychologist William McDougall (1908). Of these works, the former was largely based upon the ideas of Tarde, while the latter exhibits important influences from him in the parts that deal with social psychology rather than general psychology. Both authors claim that social psychology provides a much-needed

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and necessary basis for the social sciences, and sociology in particular (Ross, 1908: 2; McDougall [1908] 1924: 1–3, 16), but neither in Ross, nor in McDougall, is it possible to find an explicit avowal of psychologism.19 The roots of social psychology are to be found both in Europe and the USA. In Europe, Völkerpsychologie was one source, even if it was closer to ethnology and social anthropology than to social psychology, as conceived of today. Two other sources were the sociologists Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel, who both wrote treatises on social psychology (Tarde, 1898; Simmel, 1908c). In the USA, James and Dewey had already been moving in the direction of a social psychology and Dewey’s follower Charles Ellwood wrote a ‘Prolegomena to Social Psychology’ (1899), which suggested an extremely holistic version of social psychology, derived from German Romanticism and from Hegel. In his later writings, however, Ellwood retreats from social holism into a more individualistic version of psychology and even into psychologism. In The Psychology of Human Society (1925), he has reached the conclusion that sociology differs from psychology in subject matter, but its explanations are ‘psychological’ (pp. 14ff). Unlike psychology, sociology is about groups, but since groups consist of individuals interacting with one another, and individuals consist of body and mind, or psyche, explanations of group life must be psychological. Ellwood claims that ‘psychological sociology’ is only a part of sociology, but his broad view of psychology makes it hard to see what would not be ‘psychological’. According to Ellwood (pp. 11, 461–6), the category of the ‘psychic’ includes culture. Ellwood’s later sociology, or social psychology is launched as a third way between the two untenable theories of society which had dominated earlier social thought: the theory of the social contract and the theory of society as an organism (pp. 453ff). Ellwood’s psychology of society is a synthetic work based upon the contributions made to social psychology in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and upon contributions to sociology, which are psychologistic, or, at least individualistic. Among social psychologists, Ellwood was influenced by William James, John Dewey, James Baldwin, William McDougall, E.A. Ross and Floyd H. Allport. Among sociologists, he mentions Georg Simmel and Gabriel Tarde, but seems to be most influenced by Franklin H. Giddings, Charles Horton Cooley, W.I. Thomas, L.T. Hobhouse and Robert M. MacIver. Of these, the sociologists L.T. Hobhouse and Robert M. MacIver, in particular, may be mentioned, since they were important critics of collectivism in social science. Hobhouse wrote a wellknown critique of The Metaphysical Theory of the State (Hobhouse, 1918), directed at the political philosophy of Hegel and, especially, at a book by his British follower Bernard Bosanquet: The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899). MacIver wrote a number of articles (MacIver, 1911; 1913; 1914; 1915), where he criticised both organicism and the idea of society as some kind of super-person with a social mind or collective consciousness. From Tarde, Baldwin and Ross, Ellwood took the idea of imitation as a form of learning,20 from McDougall, the notion of instincts, and from Giddings the theory of socialisation. From Simmel and Ross he borrowed the idea that

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sociology is about groups and from the interactionists Cooley and Thomas his concept of culture, as something subjective, or psychic. From Hobhouse, MacIver and Allport, finally, he derived his critical stance towards organicism and the concept of social mind. Among the most influential works in the early history of the discipline is Floyd H. Allport’s Social Psychology from 1924. In this work, Allport appears as a psychological reductionist, and as a passionate critic of all forms of the ‘group fallacy’ in social science. Social psychology, according to Allport is a science of the individual and, as such, a part of the psychology of the individual. There is no such thing as a psychology of the group, as distinguished from the psychology of individuals. Theories about a social mind, group mind, collective consciousness, class consciousness, general will and the like, are but various forms of the group fallacy, as is also the idea of a social organism (Allport, 1924b: 4–10). ‘Behavior, consciousness, and organic life, belong strictly to individuals’, which is also the reason why, according to Allport, social psychology is the foundation science of sociology (pp. 10f). ‘Since all behavior phenomena of groups are reducible to mechanisms of individual behavior in the social environment, the relation of social psychology to the disciplines which treat of these higher aggregates is a fundamental one’ (p. 382). Allport’s psychologism is even more explicit, and its identity with methodological individualism more evident, in the article ‘The Group Fallacy in Relation to Social Science’. As in Social Psychology, Allport argues that social phenomena must be explained by social psychology. The reason, once again, is that the cause of social phenomena is invariably to be found in the behaviour of individuals. Social institutions exist in the attitudes and consciousness of individuals (Allport, 1924a: 690ff). But psychologism is also justified as part of a more general reduction programme for scientific explanation. In the hierarchy of the sciences, each science describes phenomena at their own level, but they are only explained by a description of phenomena at the level immediately below. Turning now to the sociologist, we find that the data which he describes reach the highest point of breadth and complexity. They embrace collections of individuals in organised societies, the products of such organisations, and the changes which they undergo. This is indeed a vast field for descriptive analysis. Yet for explanation sociology is in its turn dependent upon the descriptive formulas of the science just below it, namely psychology. Just as psychology has to seek its causation within the units (reflex arcs) of which its material, individual behavior is composed; so sociology must find its explanatory principles in the units (individuals) of which society is composed. (Allport, 1924a: 700) When we turn to the individual for causation, we only follow the rule of the other sciences in explaining the complex in terms of the simple, the whole in

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terms of its parts (p. 703). In the case of sociology, this means behaviour that is stimulated by the behaviour of others, that is social behaviour, as investigated by social psychology. More specifically, then, when we want to explain social phenomena, as described by sociology, it is to social psychology that we should turn. ‘The work of sociology, therefore, would be to describe social aggregates and social change in terms of the group, but to explain these phenomena in terms of the social psychology of the individual’ (p. 703).21 Allport’s psychologism bears a striking resemblance to that of John Stuart Mill and Gabriel Tarde. Like the latter two, he argues that theories about social wholes and their development only describes, whereas a causal explanation must be sought at the level below, that is in the laws of psychology and social psychology. As we shall see later on, this is a view shared by many methodological individualists, who argue that any theory about social wholes, or aggregates, must be provided with individualistic microfoundations. The similarity goes further than a mere quest for microfoundations. Like some recent methodological individualists (see pp. 187–89), Allport identifies the causal mechanism of social phenomena in the behaviour of individuals.22 All theories which partake of the group fallacy have the unfortunate consequence of diverting attention from the true locus of cause and effect, namely, the behavior mechanism of the individual. They place the group prior to this mechanism in order of study, and substitute description of social effects in place of true explanation. (Allport, 1924b: 9) Wilhelm Dilthey The new science of psychology met with much resistance, from historians and social scientists, but, above all, from the philosophers. As I have already hinted at, the reason for this was that the philosophers had most to loose by the emergence of psychology. While historians and social scientists risked only the autonomy of their disciplines, philosophers also risked loosing their jobs. Psychologists were appointed as philosophers. In addition, philosophy was threatened, not only by psychology, but by positivism and historicism, as well. There was no place for philosophy in Comte’s hierarchy of the sciences and a seeming implication of his law of the three stages is that it belongs to the metaphysical stage and, thus, to history. The future belongs to the positive sciences. The effect of historicism was to turn philosophy into a kind of history of mind, or spirit, best exemplified by the philosophy of Hegel. It was in this situation that some philosophers turned to Kant as their saviour. Under the battle cry: ‘Back to Kant’, they fought back against all enemies trying to obliterate philosophy completely, or annex it to their own province (Willey, 1978). According to Kant, philosophy is a theory of knowledge, assuming the form of a critique of knowledge. This is an activity which cannot be reduced to any one of the scientific disciplines, not even to all of them together. Neo-Kantians showed the strongest

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resistance against positivism, historicism and psychologism, but they were not alone. They were joined by logicians, such as Gottlob Frege, and by Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. The most common reaction, from philosophers, then, was to deny that philosophy is, in any way, dependent upon psychology, or any other discipline. Some philosophers, however, admitted that philosophy does depend on psychology, but not upon experimental psychology. The main example of this reaction was Wilhelm Dilthey, who was a pupil of one of the founders of Völkerpsychologie, Moritz Lazarus. Dilthey wanted to build a new foundation for the human sciences in the form of descriptive psychology, to be distinguished from the explanative psychology of the professional psychologists. Dilthey’s first important attempt to lay a new foundation for the human sciences was in his Introduction to the Human Sciences (Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 1883), a work that was not far behind Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive and Mill’s System of Logic in terms of influence upon the human sciences. To some extent, it was also written as a response to the works of Comte and Mill. The main thesis of Dilthey is that there is a fundamental difference between the natural and the human sciences ([1883a] 1989: 60ff, 80f). While the former deal with external reality, which can only be inferred from experience, the latter deal with inner experience itself. Because we have direct access to our inner experience, the human sciences are epistemologically privileged, relative to the natural sciences. One consequence of this is that also their methods differ. In the human sciences, the method of understanding (vertstehen) plays an important role (pp. 88, 158), even if this is not at all an important theme in Introduction to the Human Sciences.23 But Dilthey was critical also of many aspects of historicism. He explicitly rejected the notions of Volksseele and Volksgeist ([1883a] 1989: 83, 92), which were used by his teacher Moritz Lazarus, and also the idea of a social organism (pp. 83, 87, 121). There is no unity of consciousness in a people and the analogy between a society and an organism is taken much too far by historicists and sociologists alike. Dilthey, finally, denied unity also to history. There is no meaning or goal of history and there are no laws of historical development. The attempts to detect such unilinear patterns by sociology and the philosophy of history are misconceived (pp. 142ff). The rejection of the most holistic aspects of historicism and sociology, does not lead Dilthey to run to the other extreme and jump right into the camp of radical individualism. ‘The fundamental error of the ancient natural-law school was to isolate individuals and then to connect them mechanistically as the method of constructing society’ ([1883a] 1989: 82). Dilthey wants to steer a middle course between the extremes of individualism and holism, but it is my belief, that he stays on the individualistic side of the divide, at least in his early writings. It is possible to understand his project as that of providing historicism with a new individualistic foundation (see pp. 48–52). The main idea of Dilthey was that the human sciences must be provided with a new foundation in the form of psychology. ‘Analysis designates the life-unit,

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i.e., the psycho-physical individual, as the element from which society and history are formed; and the study of these life-units constitutes the most fundamental group of the human sciences’ ([1883a] 1989: 80). As we have already seen, however, Dilthey rejected the extreme individualism of natural law, which takes its point of departure in the isolated, or abstract, individual. It is part of his foundation of the human sciences that individuals interact: The units that act on one another in the marvellously complex totality of history and society are individuals, psychophysical wholes, each of which differs from every other, each of which constitutes a world, for the world exists nowhere else but in the representations of such an individual. (Dilthey [1883a] 1989: 80f) There is, I believe, an obvious reference to Leibniz’s ‘monadology’ in this quotation, and there is no doubt about the influence of Leibniz on Dilthey, but if Leibniz’s monad has no windows, Dilthey’s individual has. ‘Thus the individual is found within it [society] in interaction with other elements’ ([1883a] 1989: 87). This interaction, moreover, is not ‘mechanical’ as in the case of neoclassical economics, but social, and for Dilthey this means symbolic or at least meaningful. It would probably not be too wide off the mark to conceive of Dilthey as the first symbolic interactionist, but as we shall see later, he was also a progenitor of phenomenology. A consequence of seeing society as meaningful interaction between individuals is that each individual can only be understood in the context of systems of interaction. ‘The individual is … an element in the interactions of society, a point of intersection of the various systems of these interactions, reacting to the influences of that society with conscious intentions and actions’ (p. 89). According to Dilthey, then, the human sciences are concerned with the intentional actions of human beings. He goes on to point out that intentions, or motives, are different from other causes, but he does not deny that they are causes. ‘The interaction which occurs here, namely, the motive which arises in consciousness, differs from every other cause’ ([1883a] 1989: 89). On this point he takes a position similar to that of Max Weber. The interaction of individuals in history gives rise to three classes of objects, which the human sciences need to study: ‘the external organization of society; the cultural systems within it, and individual peoples. Of all these enduring entities that of a people as a whole is the most complex and difficult’ (Dilthey [1883a] 1989: 92f). The sciences devoted to the study of these objects have to introduce, what Dilthey calls, ‘second-order concepts’ and the theories arrived at are, consequently, ‘second-order theories’, relative to individual psychology (pp. 92, 96). By second-order concepts, Dilthey understands all concepts developed within the human sciences, such as ‘work’, ‘value’, ‘price’, ‘status’, ‘role’, etc. There is no question, however, but that the second-order concepts and theories, used by second-order human sciences, such as philology, economics and ethnology, make sense only to the extent that they refer to psychic facts about the lived experience

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of individuals (pp. 114ff). All human studies become scientific ‘by establishing the reference of their concepts and propositions to psychological and psychophysical facts’ (p. 129). When this is achieved, ‘the sciences of the external organization of humanity would be based upon concepts of psychic and psychophysical facts and upon propositions about them which correspond to the concepts and propositions on which the sciences of the cultural systems are based’ (p. 118). I hope it is clear by now that Dilthey saw the basis of the human sciences in psychology. At the beginning of my presentation of Dilthey, I also mentioned that this psychology is called descriptive, as distinguished from the explanative psychology of Mill and Wundt. What the former amounts to is not made clear, except by what is indicated by the label ‘descriptive’. The latter, however, is characterised by its attempt to explain the whole of human reality by means of a few simple assumptions, or hypotheses, about human nature ([1883a] 1989: 84). Dilthey’s idea of a ‘descriptive’ psychology was a bit more developed in Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (1894). Once again, it is contrasted with the explanatory psychology of associationism and various types of materialism, that seeks to explain the constitution of the psychic life [Seelenleben] with the help of its components, energies and law, just as physics and chemistry explain those of the corporeal world … By explanatory science is to be understood every subordination of a domain of experience to a system of causality [Kausalzusammenhang] by means of a limited number of well-determined elements (i.e., the components of the system). (Dilthey [1894] 1977: 23) A first characteristic of explanatory psychology, then, is that, like the natural sciences, it seeks to give a causal explanation of psychic life with the help of a combination of hypothetical laws. ‘In the human studies, to the contrary, the nexus of psychic life constitutes originally a primitive and fundamental datum. We explain nature, we understand psychic life’ ([1894] 1977: 27). A second characteristic of explanatory psychology is that it is ‘constructive’, or ‘synthetic’. With another term, equally apt, and often used to describe British associationist psychology, we might call it ‘atomistic’. In sharp contrast to explanatory psychology, descriptive psychology is holistic. It is holistic because experience, immediately given, lived experience is holistic. ‘[L]ife exists everywhere only as a nexus or coherent whole’ (p. 28). Psychic life-process is originally and above all, from its most elementary forms to the highest, a unity. Psychic life does not grow together from parts; it is not composed of elements; it is not a composite nor is it a result of the collaboration of sensory or affective atoms: it is originally and always a comprehensive unity. (Dilthey [1894] 1977: 92)

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That psychic life is a whole does not imply, however, that social life or cultural life is also a whole, and it is not at all unusual that methodological individualists are psychological holists in the manner of Dilthey (cf. Rickman, 1979: 9–11). The reason for this is, of course, that psychic life – even if a whole – is contained in individual human beings. There are purposive systems of social life, such as economic life, law, art and religion, which may be studied apart. ‘But the ensemble of such a system is nothing other than the psychic nexus, of the people who cooperate in it. It is therefore, in the end, psychological’ (Dilthey [1894] 1977: 40). For Dilthey, the human sciences start and end in the psychic life of individuals. This is, in the first instance, an epistemological thesis. But it is also an ontological thesis. While the natural sciences point towards an external reality, existing independently of the lived experience of individuals, the human sciences do not. Society and culture exist nowhere, except in the immediately given, lived experience of individual human beings. This is subjective idealism, at least with regard to society and culture, and to that extent congruent with phenomenology. I mentioned above that Dilthey saw explanatory psychology as synthetic. Consequently, descriptive psychology is analytic. If psychic life is given to experience as a whole, it is the task of descriptive psychology to analyse this whole in its various parts ([1894] 1977: 51ff). ‘In the service of this descriptive activity stand the logical operations of comparing, distinguishing, establishing degrees, separating degrees, separating and associating, abstracting, connecting parts into a whole, deducing similar relationships from particular cases, analyzing individual events and classifying’ (p. 56). It is possible to see, in these tasks of descriptive psychology, a point of contact with phenomenology.24 It is a common observation among students of Dilthey that his view of psychology and its relation to the human sciences changed towards the end of his life. The direction of this change was away from subjectivism and individualism towards a more objectivistic and holistic view; from psychological experience to cultural hermeneutics.25 A clear sign of change can be found in the article on ‘The Development of Hermeneutics’ (1900). The source of knowledge about culture is no longer the lived experience of individuals, but the expressions of others and, especially of written records. Hermeneutics is defined as ‘the methodology of the interpretation of written records’ ([1900] 1976: 249). Such interpretation invariably takes the form of a circle: The whole of a work must be understood from individual words and their combination, but full understanding of an individual part presupposes understanding of the whole. This circle is repeated in the relation of an individual work to the mentality and development of its author, and it recurs again in the relation of such an individual work to its literary genre. (Dilthey, [1900] 1976: 259) What is only hinted at in the article on hermeneutics, however, is more fully developed in ‘The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Life-Expressions’

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(c. 1910). Dilthey here makes a distinction between two classes of lifeexpressions: (1) concepts, judgements and thought structures and (2) actions ([1927] 1986: 153). He also makes a distinction between elementary and higher forms of understanding of life-expressions. By elementary understanding, Dilthey means understanding of ‘single life-expressions’, for instance an assertion or a facial expression. A third example would be ‘elementary acts of which continuous activities are composed, such as picking up an object, letting the hammer drop, cutting wood with a saw’ (p. 154).26 The higher form of understanding also goes in two directions: either it seeks the relation between product and producer, or it is oriented to the relation between expression and what is expressed, which is not at all reducible to what the producer intended to express. When understanding is oriented to the producer of a life-expression, understanding takes the form or ‘re-creation’, or ‘re-living’ (Nacherlebnis). This is not, however, a psychological form of understanding. According to the later Dilthey, all understanding rests on the objective mind. ‘It is the medium in which the understanding of other persons and their life-expressions takes place’ (p. 155). A sentence is intelligible because a language, the meaning of words and of inflections, as well as the significance of syntactical arrangements is common to a community. The fixed order of behaviour within a culture makes it possible for greetings or bows to signify, by their nuances, a certain mental attitude to other people and to be understood as doing so. In different countries the crafts developed particular procedures and particular instruments for special purposes; when, therefore, the craftsman uses a hammer or saw, his purpose is intelligible to us. In this sphere the relation between life-expression and mental content is always fixed by a common order. This explains why this relation is present in the apprehension of an individual expression and why – without conscious inference based on the relation between expression and what is expressed – both parts of the process are welded into a unity in the understanding. (Dilthey [1927] 1986: p. 156) Dilthey’s commitment to the idea of an objective mind is clearly a move away from psychologism, at least in epistemology and methodology, but is it also a break with ontological and methodological individualism? H.P. Rickman, one of the authorities on Dilthey, argues that he made no metaphysical claims about the entities of the objective mind (1962: 42; 1979: 116f). They are human creations and have an existence independent of individuals. I am not at all convinced that this is a correct interpretation of Dilthey, but I will not argue that point here. I will call attention, instead, to a decisive difference between Dilthey and the methodological individualist Max Weber. The latter made a distinction, similar to that of Dilthey between elementary and higher understanding, but he called them direct and explanatory understanding. Weber, even used exactly the same example of a woodcutter, as did Dilthey, before him. For Weber, however, explanatory understanding, does not include

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reference to culture and social structure, which it certainly did to Dilthey. For Weber, explanatory understanding is exclusively understanding in terms of the motive of the producer of the product or, more generally, of the acting individual (see pp. 100f ). If the later Dilthey was a methodological individualist, therefore, he was not a methodological individualist in the sense of Weber and probably not at all. Georg Simmel It should be clear by now that in Germany it was history that dominated the human sciences. Psychology was also established as an academic discipline, first as an explanatory natural science, but in the second half of the nineteenth century also as a descriptive science of mind and as a science of culture (Völkerpsychologie). It might be added that philosophy was still strong and encyclopaedic. In this situation, there is little wonder that sociology met with much resistance – if less than psychology – before it was accepted as an academic discipline, and that the first German sociologists had somehow to adapt to this situation. Of the two most famous German sociologists, Max Weber was also a historian, and Georg Simmel a philosopher, making important contributions to the philosophy of history. Both of them rejected French and British positivism and created their own versions of sociology, better suited to German conditions. In the case of Weber, it was an interpretative (verstehende) sociology, in the case of Simmel a formal sociology. The impression created is that Weber owed most to Dilthey, whereas Simmel owed more to neo-Kantianism. The truth, I believe, is that it was the other way around, but certainly both Weber and Simmel were influenced by both Dilthey and neo-Kantianism.27 In the case of Weber, however, there was a third important influence, from the Austrian School of Economics. It was this influence, in particular, which turned Weber into a programmatic methodological individualist. I have found it convenient, therefore, to present Weber in the next chapter, which is devoted to Austrian methodological individualism. Here I will concentrate on Simmel, who was a kind of psychologicist, at least for a start. Like Dilthey, Simmel was a pupil of Moritz Lazarus and, therefore, certainly familiar with his Völkerpsychologie. It is also pretty certain that Simmel owed some important ideas to the latter, especially in his early writings, which include quite a lot on the theme of psychology (Frisby, 1992: ch. 2).28 Simmel’s debt to Dilthey was even larger and it is possible to detect many interesting similarities between them. The idea that the individual is situated at the point of intersection between many social circles, or groups, is, perhaps, the most obvious one. Both Dilthey and Simmel made important contributions to the philosophy of history and made much to clarify the problem of interpretation (verstehen).29 It has even been suggested that there is a parallel in the development of the thinkers: from psychologism to the idea of an objective mind, or culture (Oakes, 1980: 57–60). One difference between them is that Simmel tried to lay the foundation of sociology, a discipline that Dilthey rejected. But, then, it should be mentioned that

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Simmel’s sociology was not at all like that of Comte and much more in line with Dilthey’s view of the human sciences. Simmel is sometimes classified as a methodological individualist (Infantino, 1998: 95–9, 106–13, 131–34) and even as a psychologicist (Moscovici [1988] 1993: 236). I do not deny that there are some good reasons for doing so, but nevertheless I believe that it is wrong. Already in an early version of his article ‘The Problem of Sociology’ (1895) he wrote: ‘the overthrow of the individualist point of view may be considered the most important and fruitful step which historical science and the moral sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) generally have made in our time’ (p. 52). Of course this is not proof enough, since Simmel may have had some extreme version of individualism in mind, but it is an indication. In my view, Simmel attempted to steer a middle course in between the extremes of atomistic individualism and romanticist collectivism, but he ended up as more of a holistic structuralist, than as a methodological individualist. Simmel’s sociology is called ‘formal sociology’ because he was interested in the forms of social life, as distinguished from its content. The distinction between form and content he borrowed from Kant. With forms of social life, Simmel intended things like superiority, subordination, hierarchy, competition, opposition, division of labour, representation, etc. ([1908] 1909: 299). There are, I believe, two possible reasons for conceiving of Simmel as a psychologistic methodological individualist. The first obvious reason is that he maintained that the content, or stuff, of society is mental, or psychic (Simmel, 1895: 54; [1908] 1950: 24). The other, equally obvious reason is that he maintained that the form of society takes the shape of forms of interaction, or of social relationships (Simmel, 1895: 54; [1908] 1950: 10, 21, 40). Society, according to Simmel, is the sum-total of ‘intersubjective relations which bring it to pass that individuals become societies’ (1895: 61). Simmel’s concept of ‘society’, then, is a synthesis of two views of society: 1 2

The intersubjectivist theory of society as being made up solely of ideas in the minds of individuals. The interactionist theory of society, which says that society is made up of the sum total of interactions between individuals.

If this were the end of it, Simmel would clearly be a psychologistic methodological individualist, but it is not. First of all, it does not follow from the fact that the content of social phenomena is psychic, if that is a fact, that the explanation of social phenomena must be psychological. In The Problems of the Philosophy of History ([1892] 1977: 113–17) Simmel discusses the role of psychological laws in history. He takes his point of departure in the thesis that the ultimate constituents of society are human beings. Only human beings are real entities, with causal efficacy, whereas groups exist only in a secondary sense. Does it follow from this that the laws of history must be laws of individual psychology? Simmel does not want to draw this conclusion: first of

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all because the minds of individuals are extremely complex entities, which might be resolved into simpler elements. ‘Simplicity and complexity are relative concepts’. Simmel, himself seems to take an agnostic attitude to ontology. ‘Suppose there are no absolutely basic units or entities. Suppose that the definition of the unit of investigation is simply a consequence of the special criteria of each science’. If this is so, it is ‘certainly not prima facie self-evident’ that the ‘composite phenomena of historical life are nomologically comprehensible only if they can be deduced from the established laws of individual psychology … the theoretical interests of history could permit the societal group to function as its basic “unit” of inquiry’ (p. 114). Simmel agrees with the individualists that ‘at least in one sense’ the ultimate source of knowledge about history is ‘the individual mind or personal psyche’. It is therefore, also the basic unit of historical inquiry. ‘The mind is a basic unit or entity for this reason: what we call unity or uniformity is possible only as a consequence of the inner, first-person experience of the self ’ ([1892] 1977: 115). But he adds something potentially important: ‘It is not psychic unity or the mental entity as such that constitutes the historical event; on the contrary, it is the contents of mind’ (p. 117). This conclusion points in the direction of Simmel’s Hegelian idea of objective spirit, or in modern terminology, of culture. The development of the social freedom of the individual is correlated with the formation of an objective spirit, a wealth of superpersonal cultural products, scientific, aesthetic, and technological. These propositions and others like them may be regarded as precursors of proto-forms of structures that will eventually be the objects of exact nomological knowledge. (Simmel [1892] 1977: 145f) Simmel returned the theory of objective spirit and objective culture in his Philosophy of Money ([1900] 1978: 446ff), where his break with psychologistic individualism is fairly evident. Products of the objective mind (cultural products, such as buildings, machines, books, works of art, etc.) have an objective existence independent of each particular individual and exert a profound influence on individual human beings. Interaction taking place in this created cultural environment crystallises into more or less permanent social structures (pp. 170ff). These facts cast serious doubts on Infantino’s attempt to find convergences between Simmel and Carl Menger. Not that it is difficult to find such convergences, but the divergences seem, to me, more significant. Take their respective theories of money. For Carl Menger, as we shall see in the next chapter, the allimportant task is to explain the origin of money. For, Simmel, on the contrary, the main concern is to analyse the effects of money (pp. 228ff). In ‘The Problem of Sociology’ ([1908] 1909), Simmel admits that his discussion of this science ‘appear[s] to be nothing but chapters of psychology, or at most of social psychology’ (p. 313), but adds ‘that the scientific treatment of psychical facts still by no means needs to be psychology’ (p. 314). I interpret these passages as indicating that Simmel was an ontological individualist, but not a

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methodological individualist. At least not a psychologistic methodological individualist. But there are some clear indications that, in the end, Simmel gave up even his ontological individualism. Forms of interaction between individuals ‘crystallise’ into social structures, which take on a life of their own. More specifically, the interactions we have in mind when we talk about ‘society’ are crystallized as definable consistent structures such as the state and the family, the guild and the church, social classes and organizations based on common interests … The large systems and super-individual organizations that customarily come to mind when we think of society, are nothing but immediate interactions that occur among men constantly, every minute, but that have become crystallized as permanent fields, as autonomous phenomena. As they crystallize, they attain their own existence and their own laws, and may even confront or oppose spontaneous interaction itself. (Simmel [1908] 1950: 9f) In addition to individual human beings, then, there also exist social structures, which are autonomous relative to individuals. Thus, according to Simmel, society takes on a life of its own: ‘ “Society” develops its own vehicles and organs by whose claims and commands the individual is confronted as by an alien party’ ([1917] 1950: 58). The result is a kind of split between individual and society, which is inconceivable to an ontological individualist. A society … is a structure which consists of beings who stand inside and outside of it at the same time. This fact forms the basis for one of the most important sociological phenomena, namely, that between a society and its component individuals a relation may exist as between two parties. (Simmel [1908] 1971: 14f) The conclusion of Simmel’s investigation is that ‘[s]ociety is a structure composed of unequal elements’ ([1908] 1971: 18). He offers the phenomenon of bureaucracy as a small-scale analogue of society. Typical for a bureaucracy is that it consists of a structure of positions with a predetermined function assigned to each position, irrespective of the particular person occupying that position. Society ‘is a system of elements each of which occupies an individual place, a co-ordination of functions and function-centers which have objective existence’ (p. 20). There is much in Simmel that reminds us of Marx and Durkheim, but which has no place in an individualist theory, as represented by symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, existentialism and ethnomethodology (see chapter 5). There are certain similarities between Simmel’s notion of sociation (Vergesellschaftung) and Anthony Gidden’s theory of structuration, but Simmel’s dualistic conception of individual and society, make him clearly less individual-

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istic than Giddens. Because of this dualism, Simmel is closer to the later Sartre, Berger and Luckmann and Pierre Bourdieu (see pp. 147f, 161ff, 186f ), perhaps also to Roy Bhaskar. To conclude: Georg Simmel was not a psychologistic methodological individualist and probably not even an ontological individualist. It is still possible to classify him as a less radical methodological individualist. Perhaps, it is possible to conceive of him as a structural individualist (see chapter 10).

Psychologism on trial Dilthey’s move away from psychologism was, at least in part, a reaction to objections raised against this doctrine by the neo-Kantian philosophers Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, and by the phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl. The most destructive critique, however, was directed at Dilthey’s particular form of descriptive psychology, by the experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. Georg Simmel was influenced both by Dilthey and neo-Kantianism, but was not, himself, an object of much critique. Most critique was directed at experimental psychology, but this is not my business here. In the last section of this chapter, I will focus on some reactions to Dilthey, and also on some positive contributions to psychologism in social science. At the University of Strasbourg in 1894 in his famous Rectorial Address on ‘History and Natural Science’, the leader of the Southwest School of neoKantian philosophy, Wilhelm Windelband, took issue with Dilthey’s way of making a distinction between the natural and the human sciences ([1894] 1980: 173).30 The main problem with Dilthey’s dichotomy seems to be that psychology belongs to both types of science (p. 174). Instead of making this distinction on the basis of a substantive dichotomy of nature and mind, we should use an epistemological distinction, in terms of cognitive interest. From this point of view, the empirical sciences can be divided into those that seek general laws and those which are interested in specific historical facts. In the well-known terminology suggested by Windelband, ‘scientific thought is nomothetic in the former case and ideographic in the latter case’. In terms of this dichotomy, ‘psychology falls unambiguously within the domain of the natural sciences’ (p. 174). With Windelband’s distinction between history and natural science, it becomes necessary to reject also the positivist attempt to turn history into a natural science, seeking laws of historical development. Against this view, ‘it is necessary to insist upon the following: every interest and judgement, every ascription of human value is based upon the singular and unique’ (p. 182). The role of values was to become even more prominent in the constitution of the ‘cultural sciences’ by Windelband’s pupil Heinrich Rickert. Rickert’s much more ambitious attempt to establish a distinction between history and natural science can be found in his most important work, The Limits of Concept Formation in the Natural Science (Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, 1902) and in the shorter Science and History (also 1902).31 Like Windelband, Rickert was much concerned to combat various reductionisms and,

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in the first instance, those that threaten philosophy. Thus, he rejected historicism and positivism in philosophy. Psychologism was also rejected, because it is a natural science and psychologism, therefore, a form of positivism. ‘In all of its essential aspects, however, ours is a logical, or a methodological and epistemological, investigation’ ([1902] 1986: 19). Rickert’s main task, however, was to save history from being reduced to natural science, in the manner of Comte’s positivism (pp. 23ff). Hence, the project of identifying the limits to natural science, once again including psychology. Rickert’s distinction between history and natural science is similar to that of Windelband, but much more elaborated and refined. History and natural science are based on different cognitive interests: ‘Empirical reality becomes nature when we conceive of it with reference to the general. It becomes history when we conceive it with reference to the distinctive and the individual’ (Rickert [1902] 1986: 54). For Windelband this distinction was absolute. Rickert, however, saw the difference as relative and preferred to talk about the method of history as individualising and that of natural science as generalising ([1902] 1986: xii). Rickert’s point of departure was Kantian: there is an unbridgeable gap between concept and reality and the latter is inaccessible to our knowledge. Every form of epistemological realism, and especially the picture theory of meaning is therefore excluded from the outset. Reality is reality as perceived, or experienced, and as constructed by means of concepts. ‘Reality itself, the infinite manifold of which scorns every conception, can best be called “irrational,” and even this designation could be applied to it only on the grounds that it resists every conception’ ([1902] 1986: 52). According to Rickert, then, empirical reality is indefinite and, therefore, practically infinite. It is extensively infinite, in the sense that there are an infinite number of possible objects of knowledge and it is intensively infinite, in the sense that there are infinitely many aspects of every single object of knowledge. In order to cognitively master this infinite manifold, we use abstraction. The procedure of the natural sciences is to go searching for similarities, while abstracting from the differences of objects, including their position in space and time. Positivism assumes that this is the only scientific procedure. But, according to Rickert, there are limits to natural scientific concept formation, since it prevents us from seeing what is unique and individual about objects of knowledge. But this is exactly the cognitive interest of the historical sciences. They are interested in individual events, languages, works of art, cultures, etc, in space and time. The real problem that Rickert set out to solve was that of concept formation in history. If empirical reality is an infinite manifold and the method individualising, what kind of abstraction is used in history? Obviously, history is only interested in some of the (extensively infinite) manifold of individuals there are in empirical reality, and only in some aspects of these (intensively infinite) individuals. Rickert calls them ‘historical individuals’ and they comprise, not only human individuals, or personalities, but all sorts of historical particulars, such as the Renaissance, the French revolution and World War I (Rickert [1902] 1986: 78–98). Rickert’s solution to this problem is the so-

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called value relevance, or value relation (Wertbeziehung). History concentrates on those individuals and those aspects of individuals to which a value, or meaning is attached by people in general, that is individuals who are considered interesting and/or important in terms of cultural values. The thesis that the knowledge interest of history is directed at ‘historical individuals’, then, does not imply a focus on human beings and Rickert denies that history is ‘individualistic’ in this sense. First of all, he rejects the ‘rationalisticteleological’ historiography in which ‘historical events are shown to be intended consequences produced by rational and purposive beings’ ([1902] 1986: 103). Those who see the setting of a conscious purpose and the conduct that follows from it as the motive force of all historical movements, and in consequence regard purpose as the explanatory principle of history, must not only see individual personalities as the chief objects of history – because the setting of conscious purpose can be confirmed in them alone; as the result of this, they must also take the view that single individuals make history, so that everything becomes a product of individual intention. But we are far from advocating an individualistic conception of history in this sense. (Rickert [1902] 1986: 104) Second, Rickert denies that history is ‘individualistic’, even if by individuals we understand historical individuals. The reason is that no historical individual, whether a person or some larger individual, can be understood in isolation from the historical nexus, or whole, of which it is a part (pp. 107ff). Like Dilthey, then, Rickert argued that historical understanding is, in a sense, ‘holistic’. He also agreed with Dilthey (and Hegel) that understanding is of objective mind, or spirit ([1902] 1986: 138ff). Unlike Dilthey, however, Rickert took great care to point out that objective mind is ideal and nonreal. Culture consists both of that part of reality to which meaning is attached, and this nonreal meaning, or spirit, itself. According to Rickert ‘Dilthey confuses the nonreal meaningful content of culture that is situated in the realities of history with the real psychic existence that actually occurs in the mental life of single individuals’ (p. 146). This accusation would have been entirely justified, had Rickert intended Dilthey’s early writings, but his target is actually the theory of the human sciences that Dilthey developed in his last writings. This does not make sense to me, but the whole issue is too complex to be treated here. It seems extremely important for Rickert to distinguish culture from the psychic, or mental. A first reason for this is, no doubt, that his distinction between the natural and the cultural sciences must not be reducible to Dilthey’s distinction between natural and human sciences. A second, and related, reason, I presume, is that his logical/epistemological distinction must not be reducible to a material distinction between nature and mind, or spirit. Even so, there is a sense in which Rickert falls back upon an ontology of individuals and their minds. First, his view of objective mind as nonreal, makes it possible to avoid conceptual realism and maintain that only human individuals exist ([1902] 1986:

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150f ). The fact that ‘[m]eaningful wholes can be understood only as unities or totalities’ (p. 159), does not imply that there are real wholes, irreducible to their parts. The object of understanding as nonreal meaning configuration always remains a whole or a unity. Realities, on the other hand, are decomposed into their parts for the purpose of explanation. Or, in explanation, the path leads from the parts to the whole; in understanding, it proceeds in the opposite direction, from the whole to the parts. (Rickert [1902] 1986: 159) Since, for Rickert, the parts of real ‘wholes’ are individuals, this view is in agreement with the methodological individualism of Weber’s interpretive sociology (see pp. 101f ), which admits that holistic understanding is necessary as a preparation before the real sociological investigation of motives begins. Unlike Weber, however, Rickert never allowed subjective meaning to play an important role in historical methodology. While agreeing in substance, their emphasis is entirely different. Rickert admits that historical reality is meaningful because individuals attach meaning to it and values are valid because accepted as valid by individuals, but he never attaches much importance to the subjective meaning and causal explanation. For Weber, on the other hand, the subjective meaning of human action and causal explanation in terms of motives are the core of interpretive sociology. To conclude: Rickert was a metaphysical individualist, since he conceived of objective mind as nonreal. He was not a methodological individualist, if this is understood as a principle of understanding – which, according to him, is the main task of the cultural sciences – but to the extent that the cultural sciences engage in explanation, they are individualistic. The reason for this difference may be that Rickert’s methodology was intended for history, whereas Weber was engaged in the attempt to create an interpretive sociology. The most famous, and most influential, critique of psychologism came from Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of phenomenology. It can be found in the first volume – the so-called ‘Prolegomena’ – of his Logical Investigations (1900). Space does not admit of any detailed presentation of Husserl’s argument and it is not necessary for my purposes, since his argument was directed at psychologism in philosophy.32 Simply put, Husserl maintained that psychology has no bearing on normative disciplines such as mathematics and ethics, but leads to subjectivism, scepticism and relativism. In the second volume of (the German edition of) Logical Investigations, Husserl set out his first version of phenomenology, which, paradoxically, owed much to the descriptive psychology of his teacher Franz Brentano. ‘The Logical Investigations … are a full development of Brentano’s suggestions, as is a matter of course, since I was an immediate student of Brentano’ (Husserl, 1977: 24). The most important borrowing is the idea that mental phenomena are intentional. It also had some-

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thing in common with Dilthey’s epistemology and descriptive psychology, at least that is what Dilthey, himself, thought.33 The mature version of phenomenology, however, took shape in the first decade of the twentieth century. A first groping attempt to lay a new foundation for this philosophy was made by Husserl in a series of lectures given in 1907, later published as The Idea of Phenomenology (1950). It is not easy to understand from these lectures what phenomenology really is, but it is clear that it has little to do with psychology, including descriptive psychology ([1950] 1973: 5, 33ff). Phenomenology is a priori (p. 41), but not in the sense of mathematics. ‘Phenomenology proceeds by “seeing,” clarifying, and determining meaning, and by distinguishing meanings’ (p. 46). Husserl’s method is that of Descartes. Like the latter, he seeks absolute certainty and finds it in cognition. A few years later, Husserl made a new attack on psychologism in ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’ (1911), but it is clear that he conceives of psychology as a natural science. The main fault of this naturalistic psychology is ‘to set aside any direct and pure analysis of consciousness’ (1981: 174). This time Husserl’s critique is extended to include also historicism (pp. 185ff), which ‘if consistently carried through, carries over into extreme sceptical subjectivism’ (p. 186). The target is Wilhelm Dilthey’s ‘Weltanschauung philosophy’, which, according to Husserl, is bound to lead to relativism. It is doubtful whether this is really the case, but what is more interesting is that Husserl makes no recognition of Dilthey’s version of a descriptive and analytic psychology, despite his knowledge about it.34 The first comprehensive expression of Husserl’s mature version of phenomenology is to be found in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (First Book 1913). This is not the place to assume the demanding task of doing justice to Husserl’s pure phenomenology. I will do no more than indicate some of the ideas, which may help us better to understand phenomenological sociology (see pp. 137–44). In our everyday life, we take the existence of an external world of physical things and other human individuals for granted. I suppose this is roughly what is understood by ‘common sense’ or ‘naive realism’. Husserl calls it the ‘natural attitude’, but, according to him, it characterises not only common sense, but also the empirical, or ‘experiential’ sciences. The distinguishing mark of the natural attitude is that it posits a world of external, or ‘transcendent’, objects in space and time. In addition to cognition of matters of fact, however, there is something Husserl calls ‘eidetic seeing’, or intuition of essences (Wesensschau), which is about a new sort of ideal universal objects (Eidos). The idea of a straight line in geometrics would be one example. The sciences about these objects are called the eidetic sciences and they include logic and mathematics, but also the ‘pure theories of time, space, motion, and so forth’ (p. 16). Pure phenomenology, as created by Husserl, is an eidetic science about essences – if different from mathematics and logic – and, like all such sciences, it is also a science about phenomena, or objects of intention, but not about a world of things beyond them, or things-in-themselves. In order to be able to attend

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only to phenomena, Husserl maintains that we must free ourselves from the natural attitude of presupposing things-in-themselves; we must put the objective world ‘within brackets’. This is the method of phenomenological reduction, which is similar to Descartes’s methodical doubt, except that it excludes also doubt. We simply disregard everything objective. Husserl calls it the phenomenological epoché, and it is a first preparatory step in order to reach the world of pure phenomena. The next step towards pure, transcendental, phenomenology is the intuition of essences, which I have already mentioned. This is called the eidetic reduction, because it leads from particular phenomena, such as this house, to universal phenomena and the necessary relations between them, but it is not yet the transcendental reduction which leads to the transcendental ego of pure phenomenology. In Ideas Husserl juxtaposed phenomenology to psychology and denied any common ground between them. Of course, they have something in common: both are theories of phenomena of consciousness; he even admitted that there is an eidetic psychology, but pure phenomenology is distinct from psychology and there is no phenomenological psychology. In his ‘Inaugural Lecture at Freiburg in Breslau’ in 1917, he told his audience that ‘pure phenomenology is too separated sharply from psychology at large and, specifically, from the descriptive psychology of the phenomena of consciousness’ (Husserl 1981: 14).35 In the middle of the 1920s, however, there is a new revision of phenomenology. An interesting document from this period is Husserl’s lectures on phenomenological psychology, given in Paris in 1925 (Husserl, 1977). In these lectures Husserl begins by paying tribute to Dilthey and Brentano. After hailing Dilthey as a genius, he goes on to state his main critique, which is that Dilthey was more of an intuitive than analytical thinker and therefore failed to lay the foundation of a new psychology. His main complaint, however, is that Dilthey was too much of a historicist, seeking the unique and culturally relative. A phenomenological psychology, on the contrary, seeks essences and universal laws. As firmly as Mill, he believes in a universal human nature, which it is the task of phenomenology to lay bare, and which is at the bottom of all social life. All concepts of the human sciences, therefore, rest on the foundation of phenomenological psychology. Having originated in the living nexus of the human psyche, they can be understood only on this same basis. Only because there is uniformity and regularity in psychic life can they arise as forces overreaching the individual and making the same order possible for all individuals. Another significant point is their combination with the theory of knowledge. (Husserl, 1977: 10) In the famous 1927 article on ‘Phenomenology’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica (repr. in Husserl, 1981), Husserl divides phenomenology into ‘phenomenological psychology’ and ‘transcendental phenomenology’. What is somewhat confusing,

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however, is that phenomenological psychology seems to have almost everything in common with pure phenomenology, as construed in Ideas, except that it operates within the natural attitude (p. 29). Like pure phenomenology, in Ideas, it is the result of both a phenomenological and an eidetic reduction (pp. 24ff). Pure phenomenology is now pushed back into the realm of the transcendental ego and is consequently called ‘transcendental phenomenology’. I will not even try to account for the ontology of possibilities that can be dimly perceived. Husserl himself is perfectly aware that to grasp the distinction between transcendental and phenomenological psychology is difficult, indeed. In his preface to the English edition of Ideas, he admits that it ‘is a problem that as a rule brings great difficulties with it … It has led to misunderstandings, to which even thinkers who subscribe to the phenomenological line of thought are subject’ (1981: 44). Despite these acknowledged problems, however, Husserl is confident that transcendental phenomenology is the universal science and the foundation of all other sciences and of all knowledge.36 It should be obvious by now that phenomenology is a form of radical subjectivism. What is perhaps less obvious, as yet, is that it is a form of intersubjectivism. ‘The reductive method is transferred from self-experience to the experience of others’. The application of the method of phenomenological reduction to ‘community experience’, or ‘community mental life’ is called ‘intersubjective reduction’ (Husserl, 1981: 25). ‘[T]the reduced intersubjectivity, in pure form and concretely grasped is a community of pure “persons” acting in the intersubjective realm of the pure life of consciousness’ (p. 25). Although these quotations referred to phenomenological psychology, transcendental phenomenology also is intersubjective. The psychic subjectivity, the concretely grasped ‘I’ and ‘we’ of ordinary conversation is experienced in its pure psychic ownness through the method of phenomenological-psychological reduction. Modified into eidetic form it provides the ground for pure phenomenological psychology. Transcendental subjectivity, which is inquired into in the transcendental problem, and which subjectivity is presupposed in it as an existing basis is none other than again ‘I’ myself and ‘we’ ourselves; not, however, as found in the natural attitude of everyday or of positive science; i.e., apperceived as components of the objectively present world before us, but rather as subjects of conscious life, in which this world and all that is present – for ‘us’ – ‘makes’ itself through certain apperceptions’. (Husserl, 1981: 30) Husserl’s claim that phenomenology implies intersubjectivity has always appeared as a problem to his critics. The subjectivist point of departure would rather seem to imply solipsism. In the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations (1929), Husserl set out to solve the problem of transcendental intersubjectivity. His proposed solution is in terms of Leibnizian monadology. According to Leibniz, monads have no windows; which means that they do not influence one another,

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at least not in a substantial way. The order of the world is a pre-established harmony. Now, according to Husserl, the transcendental ego is similarly unaffected by any interaction between ego and others. Transcendental intersubjectivity is egological and derived by analogy. ‘It is clear from the very beginning that only a similarity connecting, within my primordial sphere, that body over there with my body can serve as the motivational basis for the “analogizing” apprehension of that body as another animate organism’ ([1929] 1973: 111). Husserl’s term for this form of analogy is ‘pairing association’. It may be objected that this solution does not explain intersubjectivity, but this would be unfair, since phenomenology is not intended to be explanatory. In the terminology of Husserl, phenomenology ‘constitutes’ the world. Whether Husserl’s suggested solution to the problem of transcendental intersubjectivity is a successful constitution, or not, is beyond my power to judge. I will end this short presentation by mentioning the last development of Husserl’s thinking. Towards the end of his life, Husserl was working fervently with a new foundation for phenomenology and knowledge. The result was The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (written between 1935–7 and publihsed in 1954), which remained unfinished at his death in 1937. In this work, Husserl proceeds in the unusual way of a history of knowledge. Transcendental phenomenology now appears as the end-product and consummation of this history.37 The most interesting novelty, for my purposes, however, is the introduction of the concept of ‘life-world’ [Lebenswelt] as a new point of departure for phenomenological reduction. In their everyday life, human beings live together in a pregiven intersubjective world, which they take for granted ([1954] 1970: 103ff). ‘The life-world is a realm of original self-evidences’ (p. 127) or ‘common-sense’. The life-world is pre-scientific, both historically and epistemologically. Science emerges from the life-world, as the result of the rise of the ‘theoretical attitude’ in Greek Antiquity, but it is forever anchored in the life-world, to the extent that science is a human creation and a social activity (pp. 269ff).38 The dominant form of the theoretical attitude in the history of Western rationalism has been the objectivism of natural science. Also psychology has been snared in this unfortunate conception. According to Husserl, not even Brentano and Dilthey were successful in their attempts to escape this trap (pp. 222f, 245f). Closest to a breakthrough was Brentano, with his important insight that mental phenomena are intentional (pp. 233f).39 The only way to establish psychology as a rigorous science is subjectivism and phenomenological reduction ([1954] 1970: 212). The point of departure is the life-world, but stripped of any trace of objectivism. Why does not the whole flowing life-world not figure at the very beginning of a psychology as something ‘psychic,’ indeed as the psychic realm which is primarily accessible, the first field in which immediately given psychic phenomena can be explicated according to types? … Naturally there are differences in the manner of life-world experience, depending on whether one experiences stones, rivers, mountains or, on the other hand, reflectively

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experiences one’s experience of them or other ego-activity, one’s own or that of others … But does this change the fact that everything about the lifeworld is obviously ‘subjective’? Can psychology as a universal science, have any other theme than the totality of the subjective? (Husserl [1954] 1970: 220) As I have already pointed out, The Crisis is an unfinished work. It is risky, therefore, to use it as a basis for drawing conclusions about Husserl’s final position. It does seem to me, however, as if Husserl had been moving in the direction of psychologism. It is pretty obvious, I believe, that descriptive psychology now occupies an important place in the phenomenological reduction ([1954] 1970: 191ff, 235–41). Husserl even concludes that ‘pure psychology in itself is identical with transcendental philosophy as the science of transcendental subjectivity’ (p. 258). This conclusion looks like philosophical psychologism. But Husserl seems to be a psychologicist also with respect to the human sciences. what is required for the regional sciences of man, then, is obviously first of all what is sometimes called (by contrast to social psychology) individual psychology … This individual psychology must … be the foundation for a sociology and likewise for a science of objectified spirit (of cultural things), which after all refers, in its own way, to the human being as person, i.e., to the life of the soul. (Husserl [1954] 1970: 228) Husserl’s phenomenology, especially his phenomenological psychology and his idea of a life-world, made a tremendous impact on continental philosophy and on the social sciences, especially sociology. Among others, it influenced, directly and indirectly, Dilthey, Scheler, Jaspers, Heidegger, Schutz, MerleauPonty, Sartre, Ethnomethodolgy, the Frankfurt School, especially Habermas, Bourdieu and Giddens. Indirectly, through Schutz, it may even have influenced the Austrian School of Economics. I will return to some of these figures in later chapters. Here I will make a brief remark on the immediate reception of Husserl’s phenomenology. It has been maintained, by Kusch (1995: 224ff), that Husserl’s phenomenology emerged victorious in the battle between philosophical schools in Germany, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The most important reason for this was the success of Husserl’s critique of psychologism. Another reason was that phenomenology, unlike neo-Kantianism, could be assimilated by the emerging philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie). Kusch mentions three philosophers and three texts as especially important for the development of philosophy in the Weimar Republic. One of them, Oswald Spengler, was a historicist and holist, who is of no interest for my purposes. More interesting is Max Scheler, who was an influential philosopher – eventually sociologist of knowledge – who started as a phenomenologist, but later oriented himself towards the new philosophy of life. In an influential article

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from 1915, he hailed Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey and Henri Bergson as the most important representatives of this new philosophy (Scheler, 1915). All three have a place in the history of individualism. I have already discussed Dilthey and I am going to discuss Nietzsche in another work on the history of individualism. This leaves the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), who suggested a view of consciousness similar to that of German idealism and of William James. In his Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson rejected any attempt to quantify and measure psychic states, including the utilitarian states of pleasure and pain and the sensations of the Weber–Fechner law of psychophysics. So far, he agreed with Kant. He did not, however, accept Kant’s theory of the forms of understanding. In particular, he disagreed with Kant’s view of time and free will. Much like his friend and ally, William James, Bergson saw consciousness as a flow. Consciousness takes the form of duration (durée) of heterogeneous states, but not of a succession of measurable, homogeneous, time-units. The latter concept of time is really a misleading derivation from our concept of space. As indicated by the title of the English translation, Bergson’s book is about free will, which he accepted as a matter fact. We experience free will, and the reason, though philosophers and scientists often deny it, is the idea of time, modelled on that of space and fostered by science, or, at least, by mechanicism. Bergson was not an individualist and his main legacy was holistic. In his most famous work, Creative Evolution (1907), he advanced the idea of emergence of novel phenomena, which played an important part in the development of the doctrine of holism (see Udehn, 1987: 85ff). In his last book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), Bergson adheres to an organicist view of society, which is clearly holistic. But he also introduces the distinction between closed and open societies ([1932] 1977: 30ff), which Karl Popper used in his famous book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), and which includes one of most cited statements of the principle of methodological individualism (see pp. 200ff ). But even if Bergson was not a methodological individualist, himself, he did play a role in the development of an individualist theory of society. Bergson exerted a considerable influence on the phenomenology, not only of Max Scheler, but also of Alfred Schutz, and he also influenced the existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (see chapter 5). The third philosopher, mentioned by Kusch (1995: 228, 236ff) is Karl Jaspers, and the text is Psychologie der Weltanschauungslehre (1919), where Jaspers makes a ‘psychological’ analysis of worldviews. Jaspers mentions some precursors of this type of analysis, such as Hegel and Dilthey, but rejects the approach of the former. His own approach is based mainly on two of Hegel’s individualistic critics: Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Among other things Jaspers discusses individualism and collectivism/holism, but only as Weltanschauungen, as psychological facts that is. Jaspers is often conceived of as the founder of existentialism and, the germ of this doctrine can be clearly detected in his Psychologie, with its frequent references to the Existenz of human beings.40

4

Austrian methodological individualism

The new Austrian methodology, which traced market prices to the actions of individuals was known as methodological individualism. It pointed out that market prices, as well as all other economic phenomena, rested unequivocally on the decisions, preferences, and subjective values of individuals. (Greaves, 1996: 2) Methodological individualism, as an explicitly stated principle for social scientific research, originates with the Austrian School of Economics. It is also the members and sympathisers of this school, who have made most to propagate this principle in the social sciences, at least in the early stages of its development. The Austrian School has little in common with the British and Lausanne schools of economics besides the principle of marginal utility. Its roots are not in utilitarianism and it does not make much use of mathematics and the idea of equilibrium. Its hallmark is subjectivism and it uses a genetic approach to social institutions, prices included. The Austrian School of Economics is, I believe, best understood against the background of German and Austrian thinking about methodology, economy and society.1

Carl Menger The founding father of the Austrian School in Economics was Carl Menger (1840–1917), one of those three economists who made the marginalist revolution. The other two were W. Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras. Menger’s contribution to the rise of neoclassical economics was Principles of Economics (Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, 1871). The main message of this work was that the value and the price of an economic good is determined, neither by the labour it takes to produce it, nor by the total costs of production, but by the subjective evaluations of economising individuals. The ultimate determinant of economic value and of price is the needs of individual human beings.2 Already in the Preface to Principles of Economics, Menger makes the following proclamation:

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Austrian methodological individualism In what follows I have endeavoured to reduce the complex phenomena of human economic activity to the simplest elements that can still be subjected to accurate observation, to apply to these elements the measure corresponding to their nature, and constantly adhering to this measure, to investigate the manner in which the more complex economic phenomena evolve from their elements to definite principles. (Menger [1871] 1976: 46f)

This, according to Menger, is the method proposed by Francis Bacon and commonly accepted in the natural sciences.3 Applied to economics, it amounts to demonstrating ‘that man with his needs and his command of the means to satisfy them, is himself the point at which human economic life both begins and ends’ (p. 108). The ultimate explanation of all economic phenomena, therefore, is in terms of the behaviour of economising individuals. The starting-point of Menger’s analysis is the isolated individual, represented by Robinson Crusoe alone on his island (pp. 133ff), but the same principles of economising govern the behaviour of individuals exchanging goods on a market. This is Menger’s ‘atomistic’ method, which would later become known as ‘methodological individualism’ (see Hayek, 1973: 8; 1978: 276f). Principles of Economics was a work on substantive economic theory, containing only a few scattered remarks on methodology. The latter subject was treated more fully some ten years later in Menger’s second major work, Problems of Economics and Sociology (Untersuchungen über die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der Politischen Oekonomie insbesondere, 1883). The reason Menger turned to methodology was the relative neglect of his work on economic theory in an academic atmosphere dominated by the German Historical School in economics. His methodological treatise would become all but neglected. It became the igniting spark of the famous Battle of Methods (Methodenstreit), which divided German and Austrian economists of different scientific and political persuasions for several decades.4 The main combatants in this battle were Carl Menger and Gustav von Schmoller, the undisputed leader of the Younger Historical School in German economics. One, largely latent, source of animosity between the two combatants was no doubt political-ideological (cf. Cubeddo, 1993: 21ff). Menger was a liberal, with a certain conservative leaning, defending a free market economy against state intervention. Schmoller was a conservative state socialist, a so-called ‘Academic Socialist’, or ‘Socialist of the Chair’ (Kathedersozialist), who saw the economy as an affair of the state and advocated social reform. Simply put, Menger was relatively more pro-market, Schmoller more pro-state. More manifestly, however, the battle raged over the nature of economic science and the methods proper to it. Menger defended a theoretical economics proceeding, like classical economics, by abstraction and deduction. First, rational and self-interested economic man is abstracted from concrete human beings. Second, the market of pure exchange relations is abstracted from the society in which it is embedded. The laws governing the universe of theoretical economics have the status of exact natural

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laws. Schmoller conceived of economics as a historical science proceeding by induction from concrete historical reality, in order, eventually, to arrive at laws of economic phenomena. From this point of view, the postulates of theoretical economics are simply false – figments of the imagination. An important part of the argument concerned the relation between theory and practice, but this is not my business here. The most important difference, for my purposes, is that Menger defended an atomistic method focusing on individuals, while Schmoller suggested a holistic approach focusing on social institutions. For Schmoller, the economy is but one aspect of the life of nations and must be analysed as part of society as a whole.5 In his Problems of Economics and Sociology (1883), Menger made a division of the field of economics into three groups: the historical, the theoretical and the practical sciences. His main concern was to defend theoretical economics against the attempts to turn economics into a historical science. Theoretical economics, in its turn, was divided into a realistic-empirical and an exact orientation. Without denying the utility of the former, Menger saw, as the crowning achievement of theoretical economics, its development into an exact science.6 One of the historical school’s main criticisms of theoretical economics was that it is atomistic. This charge of atomism ‘is supposedly based on the fact that economic phenomena theoretically are reduced ultimately to individual economic efforts or to their simplest constituent elements, and are thus explained’ (Menger [1883] 1963: 90f). According to Menger, however, this criticism is based upon a misunderstanding, since all exact sciences are necessarily atomistic. Arguing for an exact economics, therefore, is tantamount to arguing for an atomist method (pp. 93f). Menger’s defence of atomism in economics is combined with a critique of the alternative interpretation of ‘national economy’ as concerned with the nation as ‘a large subject that has needs, that works, practices economy, and consumes’ ([1883] 1963: 92f). Thus the phenomena of ‘national economy’ are by no means direct expressions of the life of the nation as such or direct results of an ‘economic nation.’ They are, rather the results of all the innumerable individual economic efforts in the nation, and they therefore are not to be brought within the scope of our theoretical understanding from the point of view of the above fiction … Whoever wants to understand theoretically the phenomena of ‘national economy,’ those complicated human phenomena which we are accustomed to designate with this expression, must for this reason attempt to go back to their true elements, to the singular economies in the nation, and to investigate the laws by which the former are built up from the latter. But whoever takes the opposite road fails to recognize the nature of ‘national economy.’ He moves on the foundation of a fiction, but at the same time he fails to recognize the most important problem of the

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Austrian methodological individualism exact orientation of theoretical research, the problem of reducing complicated phenomena to their elements. (Menger [1883] 1963: 93)

Menger does not, however, deny the existence of unitary social wholes. While critical of the excesses of organicism in nineteenth-century social theory, he does admit that there are social ‘organisms’, in the sense of unitary wholes. He also admits that they may be subjected to functional analysis of social institutions as parts of such wholes. But the existence of organic wholes is not something to be assumed a priori, it is something to find out by research, and even unitary wholes are amenable to an exact atomistic analysis. ‘The acknowledgement of a number of social phenomena as “organisms” is in no way in contradiction to the aspiration for exact (atomistic!) understanding of them’ ([1883] 1963: 141). The defining characteristic of an ‘organism’ is that it has grown, without being anyone’s deliberate creation. Menger, thus, sides with the critics of the theory of the social contract, such as Hegel and Savigny. While many social institutions and structures are mechanisms of pragmatic origin, others are organisms which have ‘grown’, in the sense of being the unintended result of the actions of many men. This is the immediate source of Hayek’s celebrated distinction between two types of order: organisations and spontaneous orders (see p. 120). The most well known example of an organism or spontaneous order, in the sense of Menger and Hayek, is the market. At least, as analysed by Adam Smith, where the it appears as if guided by an invisible hand. Prices and other economic phenomena are the unintended results of the economic action of many individuals and, as such, amenable to atomistic analysis. More original and interesting, however, is Menger’s suggestion that other social institutions also, such as the family, the state, and law can be explained in similar manner. Simply stated, the procedure is to show how social institutions emerge as the unintended end-result of a sequence of actions, many of which are intended and rational, others mere custom. Menger himself uses this type of atomistic analysis in his well-known explanation of the origin of money (Menger [1871] 1976: ch. 8; [1883] 1963: 152–5; 1892). In the beginning, human beings exchanged goods in the form of barter. But some goods are more useful for this purpose than others, since they fulfil needs that are common to many people. These goods, therefore, are more saleable. Cattle, for instance, is a good which virtually all individuals find useful and therefore tend to accept as payment. This praxis turns into custom and this custom seems to have been the embryo of money in many cultures. Though useful, cattle have some disadvantages. They are big and heavy and not perfectly divisible, at least not when alive. Other goods such as shells and pieces of metal have obvious advantages in this respect. How it comes about that money takes exactly the form it has today may be hard to tell, but the principle of explanation is clear: It is clear … that the origin of money can truly be brought to our full under-

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standing only by our learning to understand the social institution discussed here as the unintended result, as the unplanned outcome of specifically individual efforts of members of society. (Menger [1883] 1963: 155) I suggested earlier (p. 9) that Hobbes’s theory of the social contract was a first paradigm of methodological individualism-in-use. I also suggested that Adam Smith’s idea of the market, as governed by an invisible hand, was a second paradigm of theoretical individualism (p. 12). I now wish to suggest that Carl Menger’s explanation of the origin of money is a third paradigm of methodological individualism-in-use.7 It is an explanation which has precedents in the conservative thinking of German historicism, especially that of Savigny and in Hume’s analysis of convention. It is similar to Smith’s theory of the market, to the extent that it is an invisible-hand explanation of a spontaneous order, but it is different in being an evolutionary, or genetic, explanation. Menger’s explanation, forebodes, not only the game-theoretic analysis of conventions as solutions to games of co-ordination (Wärneryd, 1990: ch. 4), but also explanations in terms of path-dependence.

Figure 4.1 Carl Menger’s theory of social institutions

The German economist Gustav von Schmoller reviewed Menger’s book on methodology in the year of its appearance, but in a tone that Menger did not like at all. From his pedestal in German academic life, Schmoller looked down upon Menger as an ‘acute dialectician, with a logical mind’, but lacking ‘the universal philosophical and historical training’ necessary for a reformation of economics (Schmoller, 1883: 251). It must have been the tone that Menger reacted to, since Schmoller was very predictable in his review and actually agreed with some of Menger’s views. Anyway, Menger became absolutely furious and wrote a piece called Irrthümer des Historismus (Delusions of Historism, 1884), which consists of little more than invectives and ironies directed at Schmoller. The final act was melodramatic: Schmoller (1884: 677) returned his copy of Menger’s Irrthümer to its author with an open letter explaining that the alternative would have been to throw it in the waste-paper basket.8 The Battle of Methods raged for decades and included several contributions by Menger himself and by his pupils. Nothing of great importance was added,

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however, to the topic of methodological individualism, or atomism. Menger made an addition to his earlier tri-partition of economics to comprise also a morphological orientation (1889) which may be seen as a departure from methodological individualism.9 Emil Sax (1884: ch. 5) made a distinction between individualism and collectivism as tendencies in the motives and actions of human beings and went on to argue that corresponding to these tendencies are different economic theories (ch. 6). Nothing follows from Sax’s suggestion, however, for the issue of methodological individualism versus collectivism. Eugen von Philippovich (1886: 50, n 3) rejected Sax’s distinction and restated Menger’s original position, which he clarified in some respects. He maintained (pp. 38f), for instance, that economics accepts individuals’ wants (preferences) as given, without asking the further question why they happen to have these particular wants. Friedrich von Wieser (1851–1926) agreed with Menger that there is no such thing as a social interest (1884: 25). Society is not a person and has no interest other than the interests of its members. He also defended the atomistic method of marginalist economics. The fundamental law of ‘marginal utility’ – a term that Wieser introduced (p. 128) – is true of the isolated individual, no less than of individuals in exchange (pp. 210–14). This is in contrast to the theory of price, which is a theory of economic exchange (Wieser [1893] 1971: 50–3). While critical of the ‘naive formulation’ of the ‘individualistic theory of society’, typical of political individualism, he defended methodological individualism: one cannot get away from its fundamental concept, that the individual is the subject of social intercourse. The individuals who comprise society are the sole possessors of all consciousness and of all will. The ‘organic’ explanation, which seeks to make society as such, without reference to individuals, the subject of social activity, has patently proved a failure. One must hold himself aloof from the excesses of the individualistic exposition, but the explanation must still run in terms of the individual. It is in the individual that one must look for those tendencies that make the social structure, that dove-tail (if we may use that expression) in such a manner as to give the firm cohesion of social unity and at the same time provide the foundation for the erection of social power. (Wieser [1914] 1967: 154) Eugen Böhm-Bawerk (1851–1914) similarly distinguished between two economic processes: one involving only the isolated Robinson Crusoe and the goods he uses, the other involving exchange of goods with other individuals (1891: 379). In the individualist imagery of Böhm-Bawerk, atomism is replaced by the idea of the individual as a microcosm, reflecting the macrocosm of the economy as a whole (pp. 380f). In his famous critique of Marxian economics, Böhm-Bawerk (1896: 258ff, 278f, 287) maintains that the root of the trouble is Marx’s use of Hegelian dialectics instead of adequate psychological microfoundations.

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Like early British neoclassical economics, the early Austrian School was clearly and explicitly psychologistic (Endres, 1997: 33–7).10 As we have already seen, the psychological foundation of Menger’s economics was a theory of needs. Von Wieser and Böhm-Bawer dropped the psychology of needs, but retained psychologism in the form of satisfaction of wants. According to von Wieser (1884: 39), ‘the theory of value, rightly conceived, is applied psychology’ and Böhm-Bawerk agreed, as we have seen. Increasingly, however, psychologism was replaced by new microfoundations in the form of rational choice (Endres, 1997: 213–15), conceived of as free from psychology. Menger was much less explicit about rationality than he was about methodological individualism. The individualist basis of his theory is individuals engaged in the satisfaction of their needs. No doubt, however, Menger’s reasoning is based on the assumption that individuals do so in a rational way. This becomes evident when he makes the qualification that individuals do not always act rationally in the satisfaction of their needs: Even individuals whose economic activity is conducted rationally, and who therefore certainly endeavour to recognize the true importance of satisfactions in order to gain an accurate foundation for their economic activity, are subject to error. Error is inseparable from all human knowledge. (Menger [1871] 1976: 148) It seems to me that the element of rational choice in early marginalist economics was pointed out most clearly by economists outside the Austrian camp. One of them was Heinrich Dietzel who argued, in effect, that economics is a theory of rational action. The economic principle (Das wirtschaftliche Prinzip) does not depend upon any particular motive, such as self-interest, but states only that individuals are instrumentally rational in the choice of means to satisfy their needs (Dietzel, 1883: 26ff; 1884: 17–44).11 The Austrian economist Emile Sax responded to Dietzel’s suggestion by pointing out that his formulation of the economic principle fails to exclude technology from the scope of economic theory. Following the German sociologist Albert Schäffle, Sax suggested that the economic principle is what the Austrians called economising (wirtschaften): the use of scarce resources to achieve a maximum of satisfaction (Sax, 1884: 9ff). This is, I believe, the main contribution of Austrian Economics to a theory of rational choice: they all conceived of economic theory as essentially concerned with individuals rationally engaged in economising on scarce resources, with alternative uses. This view of economics was eventually made famous by Lionel Robbins in his The Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932). The Austrians of the first generation were aware and admitted that marginalist economics relies on an assumption of purposeful and rational behaviour on the part of economic agents, but this assumption was never the focus of their attention. It is my conjecture that the work of Max Weber contributed significantly to make rationality a central assumption of Austrian

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Economics – it was certainly an important theme of Max Weber’s own work in history and sociology. To conclude: Carl Menger may be considered the founder of ‘methodological individualism’, but, like Mill, he did not use this term himself. Borrowing a label used by the critics of classical economics, he called it ‘atomism’, which means that complex phenomena should be explained in terms of their simplest elements, or parts. It is not absolutely clear to me whether Menger’s atomism necessarily implies strict methodological individualism, or if there may be atoms larger than individual human beings. From the point of view of economic theory any economising unit – a household, a firm, even a state – may be treated as an atom of analysis (see Menger [1871] 1963: 193–6). On the other hand, it is perfectly clear that, according to Menger, the ultimate explanation of all economic phenomena is in terms of needs, something attributable only to individuals. Menger’s plea for atomist analysis is not dogmatic and it is strictly limited to the exact orientation of theoretical economics. History and the empirical-realistic orientation in social science make legitimate and necessary use of a collectivist method.12 Menger’s immediate followers accepted his atomistic method, as well as its limits, but did not contribute to its development, or clarification. Among Austrian economists, it is above all Friedrich von Hayek who has followed Menger in matters methodological. But there were others. Two German economists, Heinrich Dietzel and Max Weber, were swimming against the tide and professed a heretical belief in abstraction and atomism against the orthodoxy of the Historical School. Of these two, Weber is by far the most important, and will be treated in a separate section below, but the now forgotten Heinrich Dietzel was not without influence in his own lifetime and deserves a few comments. Dietzel was read by the Austrian economists and may have had some influence on their methodological views. Like them, he made a distinction between the theory of man’s relation to economic goods, which he called economics (Wirtschaftslehre), and the theory of economic exchange, which he called social economics (Socialwirtschaftslehre, later Socialökonomik). Like Menger, Dietzel was critical of the idea of a ‘national economy’ (Volkswirtschaft or Nationalökonomie) because of the misleading connotations of this term (Dietzel, 1895: 51ff). His own preferred term ‘social economics’ was suggested as a way to avoid the Romantic ideas of a people (Volk) and a nation (Nation), which only obscured the true nature of the economy as marketplace. Dietzel was a defender of classical economics and later also of marginal economics against the critique of the Historical School. He defended the abstract or, as he preferred to call it, the isolating method and also atomism, or individualism, at least for the purposes of social economics. Dietzel (1882: 55) referred to individualism as a ‘premiss’ of social economics and, indirectly, as a ‘methodological assumption’ (p. 62) which comes close to suggesting the term ‘methodological individualism’, although he did not actually do so. Methodological individualism is also implicit in Dietzel’s conception of economics as a theory of instrumental action, more specifically

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economic action, aimed at the satisfaction of needs by means of economic goods (Dietzel, 1883: 59ff; 1884: 17ff). Social phenomena are caused and constituted by the actions of individuals, which are caused by the motives of action, which are caused by the needs of individuals (Dietzel, 1895: 18). Dropping needs as the ultimate causes of social phenomena, we get something close to Max Weber’s view in a nutshell.

Max Weber The Austrians of the first generation were aware and admitted that marginalist economics relies on an assumption of purposeful and rational behaviour on the part of economic agents, but this assumption was never the focus of their attention. It is my conjecture that the work of Max Weber contributed significantly to make rationality a central assumption of Austrian Economics – it was arguably the central concern of Max Weber’s own work in history and sociology. As is well known, Max Weber saw history, or at least the history of the West, as subject to a tendency of increasing rationalisation. Not only economic life, but also politics, social life and culture, are subject to the irresistible force of human reason. In economic life, we see a culmination of instrumental rationality with the development of modern capitalism and the market. For this reason, economics, in particular, must be based on the assumption of instrumental rationality on the part of agents. (Udehn, 1991: 134–6). The first source of Weber’s view of the role of rationality in economics is in some notes he made to a course on theoretical economics in 1898 (Weber [1898] 1990: 29ff). Weber here conceives of economising as means-ends rationality, but does not yet make the distinction between economic and technical rationality. He is careful to point out that economics is not about real human beings, but about a constructed economic subject with certain ideal characteristics. Among the most important features of this ideal figure are those that define her/his rationality: perfect knowledge of the situation (the alternatives) and perfect understanding of the most adequate means to realise the various alternatives. Weber returns to the ideal typical assumption of rationality in his early methodological essays on “‘Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy’ (1904) and on the German economist of the Historical School Karl Knies (Weber, 1903–6). In the first essay, Weber arrives at the common interpretation of economics as bound up with the fundamental fact of scarcity (1949: 64f). This article also contains Weber’s first extensive discussion of ideal types, illustrated by abstract economic theory: ‘It offers us an ideal picture of events on the commodity-market under conditions of a society organized on the principles of an exchange economy, free competition and rigorously rational conduct’ (pp. 89f). In the second article, Weber’s starting-point is Knies’s argument that freedom of will is somehow irrational and, therefore, escapes social scientific treatment ([1903–6] 1975: 95–101). Against this argument, Weber correctly maintains that freedom is related to rationality rather than to irrationality, and also that free and rational actions are most eminently suited to social scientific

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treatment (pp. 120–9). Weber presents rational interpretation as the most important form of interpretive understanding. Rational action, which consists in choosing the most adequate means to reach an end, exhibits a unique degree of self-evidence, which makes it methodologically privileged. If we know that an action X is related to Y as cause to effect, then we can explain X as a means to reach the end Y. Such rational interpretation can be used either as a hypothesis to be verified by the facts, or as an ideal type, with which to compare actual actions. Actions, which are not rational, may then be understood as non-rational actions, as deviations from the ideal type of rational action. In both cases, according to Weber, rational interpretation is of ‘extraordinary heuristic value’ (pp. 186–191). With this argument, Weber appears as an early advocate of the ‘principle of charity’, later defended by Donald Davidson and Jon Elster, among others. A fourth source of Weber’s views of rationality in economics is his article on ‘Marginal Utility and “The Fundamental Law of Psychophysics”’ (Weber, 1908a). His main business in this article is to deny that the idea of marginal utility is in any way dependent on the Weber–Fechner law of psychophysics or any other psychological laws for that matter. Economics is based on certain common-sense observations of economic behaviour and on the equally common-sense assumption that individuals are rational in their economic activity. Economic theory rests on the assumption of perfect rationality and its heuristic value rests on the socio-cultural fact that economic life in the West increasingly approximates this assumption. Weber’s last treatment of the methodology of economics, is in his article on ‘The Meaning of “Ethical Neutrality” in Sociology and Economics’ and in chapter II of Economy and Society (1922). In the first, you will find Weber’s second extensive treatment of ideal types, once again exemplified by economics: Economic theory makes certain assumptions which scarcely ever correspond completely with reality but which approximate it in various degrees and asks: how would men act under these assumed conditions, if their actions were entirely rational? It assumes the dominance of pure economic interests and precludes the operation of political or other non-economic considerations. (Weber 1949: 44) In Economy and Society, Weber returns to the nature of economics. Economic action is now defined as ‘any peaceful exercise of an actor’s control over resources which is in its main impulse oriented towards economic ends’. Economic action is not necessarily rational. Rational economic action ‘requires instrumental rationality in this orientation, that is deliberate planning’ ([1922] 1978: 63). But resources are necessarily scarce, ‘the most essential aspect of economic action for practical purposes is the prudent choice between ends’ (p. 65). Weber has finally arrived at the distinction between economics and technology. The difference between them is this: ‘Economic action is primarily oriented to

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the problem of choosing the end to which a thing shall be applied; technology, to the problem, given the end, of choosing the appropriate means’ (pp. 66f).13 Max Weber was not from Austria and he was not only an economist. He was a jurist, historian, economist and sociologist, with a special interest in methodology. To posterity Max Weber is known as a sociologist, but it has been argued that he was first of all an economist, albeit of a kind that is extinct today; a member of the German Historical School in economics (Hennis, 1988: ch. 3). More common is the view that Weber was primarily a historian, using sociology as an auxiliary science, providing history with a system of basic concepts (Burger, 1976: 138; 1994; Roth, 1976). This view is often coupled with the suggestion that he developed from being a historian, to becoming more of a sociologist.14 I think that Max Weber defies classification in terms of disciplinary belonging, but that is probably the least important thing about him. Whatever he was, Max Weber was a great scholar and a great thinker. Weber’s attention to methodological issues was, at least partly, occasioned by the Methodenstreit and resulted in his intervention in that battle. It is generally agreed that Weber tried to steer a middle course between the positions of the main combatants Menger and Schmoller. The famous ideal type is often interpreted as Weber’s way to avoid both horns of a dilemma.15 Weber agreed with Menger that theoretical economics is, and should be, an abstract and atomistic science, but agreed with Schmoller and the Historical School that economics is a cultural science and a Wirklichkeitswissenschaft; a science of reality (von Schelting, 1922: 701–26; Tenbruck, 1986). The simplifying assumptions of economics; homo economicus, perfect competition, etc., are ideal types used for heuristic purposes, but should not be mistaken for natural laws. As Schumpeter (1954: 819) suggests, Weber ‘saw no objection of principle to what economic theorists actually did, though he disagreed with them on what they thought they were doing, that is on the epistemological interpretation of their procedure’. Even so, Joseph Schumpeter classified Weber as a member of the ‘Youngest Historical School’ in economics. His reason for doing so is Weber’s adherence to the doctrine of Verstehen (cf. also Lachmann, 1970: 17–48). I suggest that Weber shared the substantive concerns of the Historical School, but was closer to the Austrian School in methodology.16 There are many sources of Weber’s methodology, but three, in particular, are generally recognised: Heinrich Rickert’s neo-Kantianism, Austrian Economics and Dilthey’s doctrine of Verstehen (Eliaesson, 1990).17 For my present purposes, the influence of Austrian Economics is most important, because this is the most immediate source of his methodological individualism. By way of extreme simplification, I suggest that Weber took methodological individualism from the Austrian School of Economics, supported it by a neo-Kantian view of concept formation and turned it into subjectivist methodological individualism with the help of Dilthey and Simmel.18 The suggestion that Weber took his methodological individualism from economics gains support from a letter he wrote to the economist Robert Liefmann in 1920:

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This is the first time Weber makes explicit mention of an ‘individualist method’. His critique of the use of collective concepts, however, goes back to his early methodological essays. Already in his articles on Roscher and Knies (1903–6) – economists of the German historical school – Weber criticises, as metaphysical, the use of concepts such as ‘Volk’ and ‘general will’. He is also critical of the view of societies as organic wholes, and the attempt by Roscher to arrive at the laws of development of such wholes (Weber [1903–6] 1975: 60–91, 202–7). Weber sees in the use of such concepts and doctrines the influence of German Romanticism and especially of Hegelian ‘panlogism’. What he objects to, is the view that particular cultural phenomena are explained as ‘emanations’ of a volksgeist and as parts of an organic whole. Weber obviously prefers the opposite route. To the extent that there are such things as Volksgeists and social wholes at all, they have to be explained as the results of particular cultural values and beliefs entertained by individual human beings (cf. Burger, 1994: 88ff). Weber, then, sides with Austrian atomism against the collectivism and organicism of the German Historical School.19 In his article “‘Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy’ (1904), Weber criticises the conflation of concept with reality. The failure to realise that concepts are theoretical constructs of the mind, has particularly unwholesome effects in the case of collective concepts taken from the language of everyday life. Weber mentions as particularly problematic the ascription of interests to collective entities such as ‘agriculture’, ‘classes’ and the ‘state’. ‘The use of the undifferentiated collective concepts of everyday speech is always a cloak for confusion of thought and action’ (Weber, 1949: 107–10). With respect to the scientific conception of the ‘state’, Weber makes clear that it is ‘always a synthesis which we construct for certain heuristic purposes … abstracted from the unclear syntheses which are found in the minds of human beings’ (p. 99). When we inquire as to what corresponds to the idea of the ‘state’ in empirical reality, we find an infinity of diffuse and discrete human actions, both active and passive, factually and legally regulated relationships, partly unique and partly recurrent in character, all bound together by an idea, namely, the belief in the actual or normative validity of rules and of the authority-relationships of some human beings towards others. (Weber, 1949: 99)

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Weber’s distrust of collective concepts was also voiced in his contribution to the meeting of the German Sociological Association in 1910. He attacked a certain Dr Ploetz for making unscientific use of the concepts ‘race’ and ‘society’. Biological traits do not explain social phenomena. The social use of the concept of ‘race’ is invariably ideological; invented and used to serve the interest of some group in the oppression of another group (race). The concept of ‘society’, according to Weber ([1910] 1971: 36), is purely conventional and may be replaced by ‘social relationships and social institutions’. What Weber objected to was Ploetz’s suggestion that society is a living creature; his organicism. From a sociological point of view ‘nothing useful ever emerges from the joining together of several precise concepts with indefinite notions. And so it is here. We have the possibility of understanding the rational behavior of single human individuals through intellectual empathy’ (p. 39). In these short remarks are contained two important seeds of Weber’s emerging sociology: (1) the belief that all complex social phenomena can be defined in terms of social relationships and (2) the conviction that all social phenomena can be ultimately understood and explained in terms of individuals’ motives for their own actions. Weber’s first positive statement of methodological individualism, or ‘atomism’, can be found in his article ‘Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology’ (1913). This article, written in preparation of his magnum opus Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1922), also for the first time contains an outline of his interpretive (verstehende) sociology. Methodological individualism, in fact, is presented as the logical outcome of verstehen. The object of the discussion, ‘Verstehen,’ is ultimately also the reason why interpretive (verstehende) sociology (as we have defined it) treats the single individual and his action as its basic unit, as its ‘atom,’ if a questionable analogy is allowed here. (Weber [1913] 1981: 158) Weber contrasts his sociology with other approaches, which treat the individual either as a complex of smaller (chemical or psychic) parts, or as parts of social wholes. Interpretive sociology, then, is atomistic not only in the sense of treating the human individual as its elementary unit, but also in the sense of treating the individual as itself indivisible. Most relevant for my purposes is the standpoint of interpretive sociology with respect to collective concepts. It is peculiar not only to language but also to our thinking that the concepts that comprehend action let it appear in the guise of a persistent structure, either of a material entity, or of a personified force leading a life of its own. This is true particularly in sociology. Concepts such as the ‘state,’ ‘association,’ ‘feudalism,’ and the like generally indicate for sociology categories of certain kinds of joint human action; it is therefore the task of sociology to reduce these concepts to ‘understandable’ action, meaning, without

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Weber mentions jurisprudence, which is justified in treating some collectives as wholes, without bothering much about the component individuals. Thus, for the purposes of legal science, the state might be treated as a ‘legal person’, but ‘[f]or sociological analysis, the word “state” – if it is used at all – signifies only a course of human action of a particular kind’ (Weber [1913] 1981: 159). In his essay on ‘The Meaning of “Ethical Neutrality” in Sociology and Economics’ (1917), Weber writes about the ‘individualistic orientation’ of economic theory and maintains that this individualistic orientation is ‘apolitical’ and for ‘analytical purposes only’ (Weber, 1949: 44) The term ‘individualistic method’ does not appear in Weber’s writings until the posthumous publication of Economy and Society (1922). This work also contains Weber’s most mature and most extensive treatment of methodological individualism and is, therefore, the main source for an understanding of his ideas on this subject. What he has explicitly to say about methodological individualism appears in the negative form of contrasts and oppositions to other doctrines, from which a positive statement has to be extracted. But one thing emerges clearly: Weber’s ‘individualistic method’ is inseparable from his definition of sociology as concerned only with subjectively meaningful behaviour, that is, action. Sociology (in the sense in which this highly ambiguous word is used here) is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences. We shall speak of ‘action’ insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior – be it overt or covert, omission or acquiescence. Action is ‘social’ insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course. (Weber [1922] 1978: 4) It is to be observed that interpretive understanding is not an end in itself, but a means for arriving at a causal explanation of action. To this effect, Weber makes the distinction between ‘direct observational understanding’ and ‘explanatory understanding’, which was part and parcel of the hermeneutic tradition before Weber. Direct observational understanding is achieved when an action is identified as being of a certain type, explanatory understanding when the motive of the action is known. ‘A correct causal interpretation of a concrete course of action is arrived at when the overt action and the motives have both been correctly apprehended and at the same time their relation has become meaningfully comprehensible’ ([1922] 1978: 12). It may also be pointed out that Weber’s social action makes sociology different from economics, which starts with the isolated individual and sees the

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market as a play against nature (see Swedberg, 1998: ch. 2). For Weber, then, rationality is not parametric. Individuals do take the actions of others into account, but Weber did not have the means (game theory) at his disposal to arrive at the idea of strategic rationality (Elster, 1979a; 68f; 2000: 38f). Unlike both mainstream economics and game theory, however, Weber focuses his attention on meaning and this meaning is cultural. For Weber, therefore, both economics and sociology are ‘cultural sciences’ dealing with cultural phenomena (Weber, 1949: 66ff).20 The reason why, according to Weber, his interpretive sociology implies an individualist method, is that only individuals act. ‘Action in the sense of subjectively understandable orientation of behavior exists only as the behavior of one or more individual human beings’ ([1922] 1978: 13). This is also the reason why Weber contrasts the sociological use of collective concepts with that of jurisprudence. In juridical contexts social collectives, such as the state, business corporations, associations and foundations are treated like individual persons – legal persons – and according to Weber, this is perfectly legitimate. But for the subjective interpretation of action in sociological work these collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants of and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in the course of subjectively understandable action. (Weber [1922] 1978: 13) Weber’s conclusion is not, however, that concepts denoting social collectives should – or could? (Weber is not absolutely clear on this point) – be entirely eliminated from sociological analysis. Such elimination is unrealistic for several reasons, including their use in other disciplines and in everyday speech. The important thing, according to Weber, is to keep in mind that ‘for sociological purposes there is no such thing as a collective personality which “acts”’, and in sociological contexts collective concepts refer only to ‘a certain kind of development of actual or possible social actions of individual persons’ ([1922] 1978: 14). Weber also opposes methodological individualism to the functionalist or ‘organic’ school of sociology, most typically represented by Albert Schäffle and his ‘brilliant work’ Bau und Leben des sozialen K örpers (1878). Weber does not, however, dismiss the functional approach as of no value at all to sociology. He assigns to it the role of something like a heuristic device, and this is yet another reason why, according to Weber, collective concepts cannot be altogether eliminated from sociological analysis. The functional frame of reference is useful, first of all, for illustration and for a provisional orientation. Second, the functional approach is sometimes the only means of identifying the processes at work in a given social phenomenon. Weber warns us, however, against overestimating the cognitive value and, thereby, illegitimately ‘reifying’ the collective concepts used. Functional analysis is only the beginning of sociological analysis, as understood by Weber. In sociological analysis it is possible to ‘go beyond merely

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demonstrating functional relationships’. It is possible to attain a ‘subjective understanding of the action of the component individuals’ ([1922] 1978: 15). Additional light is thrown upon Weber’s view of sociology, its individualist method and relation to functionalism, by looking at his encounter with the functionalist or ‘universalist’ method of Othmar Spann. Weber grants to Spann the insight that we must know what kind of action is necessary for the ‘survival’ or maintenance of a cultural type before we can even pose the question of what motives determine the action.21 It is necessary to know what a ‘king’, an ‘official’, an ‘entrepreneur’, a ‘procurer’, or a ‘magician’ does, that is, what kind of typical action, which justifies classifying an individual in one of these categories, is important and relevant for an analysis, before it is possible to undertake the analysis itself … But it is only this analysis itself which can achieve the sociological understanding of the actions of typically differentiated human (and only human) individuals, and which hence constitutes the specific function of sociology. (Weber [1922] 1978: 18) Weber concludes his discussion of methodological individualism by criticising, as mistaken, the belief that an individualist method somehow presupposes individualist values, or is applicable only to a free market economy. According to Weber, even a socialist economy has to be understood sociologically in the same ‘individualistic’ terms. Once again: The real empirical sociological investigation begins with the question: What motives determine and lead the individual members and participants in this socialist community to behave in such a way that the community came into being in the first place and that it continues to exist? Any form of functional analysis which proceeds from the whole to the parts can accomplish only a preliminary preparation for this investigation – a preparation, the utility and indispensability of which, if properly carried out, is naturally beyond question. (Weber [1922] 1978: 18) This exhausts what Weber has to say about the ‘individualistic method’. Any presentation of Weber’s version of methodological individualism would be incomplete, however, without a mention of his definition of the basic concepts of his sociology in terms of the social actions of individuals ([1922] 1978: 22ff). Weber’s verstehende sociology starts from the concept of ‘social action’, which, as we have seen above, is action oriented to the behaviour of others. On this concept is based the concept of ‘social relationship’ which is social action involving a plurality of actors, each taking account of the actions of the others. Of special importance is Weber’s utilisation of the concept of ‘probability’ in his definition of ‘social relationship’. A social relationship, according to Weber ‘consists entirely and exclusively in the existence of a probability that there will

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be a meaningful course of social action – irrespective, for the time being, of the basis for this probability’ (pp. 26f). It has been argued (see, e.g., Wrong, 1970: 24f; Weiss, 1975: 88–90), correctly I believe, that Weber’s use of the concept of ‘probability’, in this and in other definitions, should be understood as an attempt to avoid reification and, thereby, to secure methodological individualism (cf. also Ringer, 1997: 158f). Social orders or structures, being complexes of social relationships, do not exist as entities sui generis, but only as the probability that certain individuals will act in certain ways. Weber, then, recognises the ‘existence’ of organisations – such as firms and states – and of social structures – such as markets, religions, systems of law, cities, classes, status groups, nations, races, etc. – but not of society. There is no such thing as society. Society exists neither as an entity, nor as a ‘level of reality’ in addition to individuals and their actions. Weber’s sociology, therefore, has no use for the concept of ‘society’ (cf. Tyrell, 1994). Sociology is a science of individuals and their actions, not of society.22 To conclude this presentation of Weber’s methodological individualism: Weber advanced his ‘individualistic method’ in opposition to the use of collective concepts in sociology. Collective concepts are used in everyday life and influence the actions of individuals. As such, they are relevant for the sociologist. But sociologists should not turn collective concepts used in everyday life into their own tools of analysis. Collective concepts, such as class, race, etc., are also used by social scientists, but should then be treated with utmost suspicion, because they are often used for dubious ideological purposes. Weber did not, however, want to abolish collective concepts from sociological analysis altogether, provided one remembers that they denote nothing but complexes of actions of individual persons. To this end, collective concepts must be defined in terms of individuals. Weber’s definitions at the beginning of Economy and Society of the basic concepts of sociology in terms of social action is his attempt to achieve this end. But Weber’s methodological individualism is not only about concepts. It is also inseparable from his definition of sociology as exclusively concerned with the interpretation of the subjective meaning individuals attach to their actions and the causal explanation of these actions in terms of motives. From this definition follows that Weber did not allow the use of collective concepts in sociological explanation. A highly plausible interpretation of Weber’s methodological individualism, therefore, is that it forbids the use of collective concepts, if not in sociological analysis, then at least in sociological explanation (cf. Runciman, 1972: 24f). It is not altogether clear to me if Weber intended to suggest that all social phenomena should be explained in terms of motive alone and, if so, if he conceived of this as a peculiarity of his own interpretive sociology, or as imperative for all sociology. My guess is that the answer to the first question is yes, but that he saw interpretive sociology as one of several possible types of sociology.

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Joseph Schumpeter In 1909, when Max Weber was planning a handbook in economics called Grundriss in Sozialökonomik (Outline of Social Economics), he asked Friedrich von Wieser to write about economic theory and his pupil Joseph Schumpeter to write a piece on the history of economic theory. Wieser’s part was published in 1914 as Theorie der Gesellschaftlichen Wirtschaft (Social Economics, 1927). Schumpeter’s contribution was published the same year (1914) as Epochen der Dogmen- und Methodengeschichte (Economic Doctrine and Method, 1954). Eventually, Weber was to make a contribution of his own to this project; Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, published posthumously in 1922 (Economy and Society, 1978). When Weber, in 1918 was offered a chair in economics in Vienna, he was asked to give his opinion on the candidates to another chair in theoretical economics. Weber unhesitatingly recommended Joseph Schumpeter to the post – the ‘greatest theoretical talent’, who is also ‘an excellent teacher’ (quoted in Hennis, 1991: 49). Weber and Schumpeter knew and respected each other, but little is known about their personal relationship.23 Intellectually, influence was probably asymmetric, running mainly from the older man to the younger. It has been argued by Richard Swedberg (1991: 2) that Schumpeter was heavily influenced by Weber’s idea of a transdisciplinary economics, called Sozialökonomik (social economics), and eventually made it his own. There is a presumption of a connection between Schumpeter’s theory of economic development and Weber’s theory of capitalism. Schumpeter’s innovative entrepreneur seems to have something in common with Weber’s charismatic leader (Macdonald, 1965). Schumpeter defended and adopted Weber’s doctrine of value neutrality (Osterhammel, 1987: 109). Schumpeter’s theory of democracy, finally, bears a clear imprint of Weber’s ditto (Udehn, 1996: 138). Weber, on the other hand, got at least one thing from Schumpeter: the term ‘methodological individualism’. Schumpeter was probably first to use the term ‘methodological individualism’ (see Machlup [1951] 1978: 471f). He introduced it in Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalökonomie (The Nature and Essence of Theoretical Economics, 1908) in order to make the distinction between methodological and political individualism and, above all, to argue that they are altogether independent. The ultimate purpose of the distinction was to defend the theory of marginal utility against the recurrent accusations that, like classical economics, it propagates political individualism (Schumpeter, 1908: 88–98). The argument is repeated in Economic Doctrine and Method, which also includes a rather odd characterisation of political individualism: This method of starting from a fact of individual psychology led to two groups of objections. Firstly, the general objections to individualism and atomism were levelled especially against this school. In this respect an adequate distinction between political individualism, the view that individuals are independent causes of social phenomena which represent merely a

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resultant of these causes, and the mere method of starting from the individual for purposes of pure economics was not made. (Schumpeter [1914] 1954: 190) In the History of Economic Analysis (1954), Schumpeter distinguishes three forms of individualism: political, sociological and methodological. By the first, Schumpeter now means Manchester liberalism. What in the above quotation was called ‘political individualism’, is now called ‘sociological individualism’: the view widely held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that the self-governing individual constitutes the ultimate unit of the social sciences; and that all social phenomena resolve themselves into decisions and actions that need not or cannot be further analyzed in terms of superindividual factors. This view is, of course, untenable so far as it implies a theory of the social process. From this, however, it does not follow that, for the special purposes of a particular set of investigations, it is never admissible to start from the given behavior of individuals without going into the factors that formed this behavior … In this case we speak of Methodological Individualism. (Schumpeter, 1954: 888f) With ‘methodological individualism’, then, Schumpeter understood the method-in-use of theoretical economics: ‘the point of departure when describing economic phenomena is the actions of individuals’ (dass man bei der Beschreibung gewisser wirtschaftlicher Vorgänge von dem Handeln der Individuen ausgehe [Schumpeter, 1908: 90f] my translation). Unlike Weber, however, Schumpeter himself was not committed to ‘methodological individualism’, and he did not believe that this method was of much use in other theories and disciplines. In the theory of organisations, for instance, and in sociology more generally, Schumpeter did not believe that you would get very far with an individualist method (pp. 94f; 539–41).24 In a speech Schumpeter gave in Japan in 1931, but published only recently (1991), Schumpeter’s instrumental attitude to methodology in general, and to methodological individualism in particular, is most clearly expressed. It is no use before approaching a problem to form a preconceived idea of how to proceed with it. As you know, at the beginning of the eighteenth century all economists used to start in their analysis with the individual. The nineteenth-century economists also took the individualistic standpoint. It is [the creed of methodological universalism] that it is quite wrong to start from the individual. The individual is only a product of the social environment and therefore it is wrong to start from him. We know that every individual is fashioned by the social influences in which he grows up. In this sense he is the product of the social entity or class and therefore not a free agent. That is certainly so, but it is quite uninteresting as long as it is stated

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Austrian methodological individualism in this general form, where it is nothing but a phrase. It is interesting only when we can build a concrete knowledge on the basis of that view, and my great objection to it is that we do not make anything out of preaching universalism as a creed. In some problems of sociology or political life and so on we have no choice but to start from the social whole. In other cases, such as market phenomenon and most problems of modern industry, there is no choice but to start from the individual. In one class universalism and in the other class individualism is the indicated method. Therefore we ought to be neither individualistic nor universalistic. It is a matter of convenience; neither individualism nor universalism is an eternal truth. (Schumpeter, 1991: 286f)

This passage shows clearly that Schumpeter, like the early Austrians, was a methodological pluralist. It also indicates that ‘methodological individualism’ meant something different for Schumpeter, than it does for many contemporary methodological individualists (see pp. 112, 210). Finally, it shows that Schumpeter did not follow Weber in his attempt to build an individualistic sociology. With respect to sociology, Schumpeter sided with Weber’s methodological opposite Emile Durkheim. In his own sociological works, Schumpeter did not practise methodological individualism.25 The main sources of inspiration for his theory of social classes was Gustav Schmoller, Emile Durkheim and Othmar Spann (Schumpeter [1927] 1951: 135). As Schroeter has pointed out (1985: 163), this makes for ‘a very holistic and deterministic approach’, far from the individualistic method of Max Weber. And, indeed, according to Schumpeter ‘every social class is a special social organism, living, acting, and suffering as such and in need of being understood as such’ (Schumpeter, 1927: 137). Weber would have disapproved strongly of this definition, had he been alive. Another deviation from methodological individualism (cf. Swedberg, 1991: 104) is that Schumpeter saw the family, not the individual, as the unit of class analysis (Schumpeter [1927] 1951: 148).26 The term ‘methodological individualism, then, was coined by Joseph Schumpeter. However he himself did not adhere to any doctrine with this name. Schumpeter was a methodological pluralist with an exceptional tolerance for alternative approaches. Schumpeter used the term ‘methodological individualism’ descriptively, to designate the method of theoretical economics, but without normative implications for other theories. He also used it to distinguish between political, sociological and methodological individualism. I believe that another distinction would help to clarify his own position. I suggest that a fruitful distinction can be made between substantive and procedural methodological individualism. Substantive methodological individualism says something about the content of concepts and/or explanations. This is how Weber understood methodological individualism and, as we shall see, it is the most common version. Procedural methodological individualism, on the other hand, says something about the order of analysis and/or presentation. For Schumpeter, methodological individualism did not say anything about social reality, about the

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causes of social phenomena, or about how to explain them. It was merely an acknowledgement of the fact that marginal economics actually starts with the wants of individual human beings – something he calls its modus procedendi (Schumpeter, 1909: 214). Methodological individualism, according to Schumpeter, is procedural methodological individualism.

Ludwig von Mises Methodological individualism was also proposed by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. Although never his pupil, Mises was, as an economist, much influenced by Menger,27 and eventually became a leading representative of the Austrian, or the New Austrian, School in economics. He did not, however, share all of Menger’s ideas on methodology. According to Mises, ‘Menger was too much under the sway of John Stuart Mill’s empiricism to carry his own point of view to its full logical consequences’ (Mises, 1969: 27f). In matters methodological, Mises was also influenced by Weber (Selgin, 1988: 22), and this includes the matter of methodological individualism (Rothbard, 1979: 57). He was personally acquainted with Weber and frequently discussed methodological issues with him (Mises, 1978: 4). It has also been testified that Weber’s interpretive sociology was a favourite topic at Mises’s private seminar in the 1920s, which included members such as F.A. von Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Alfred Schutz and Felix Kaufmann (Haberler [1961] 1974: 191). There is no reason to doubt this testimony. Mises’s first substantial contribution to social science methodology, ‘Sociology and History’ (Soziologie und Geschichte, [1929] 1933), was a critical discussion of Weber’s ideal type. Like Schumpeter, Mises was sympathetic to Weber’s doctrine of valuefreedom. Unlike the former, however, he also agreed with Weber that sociology should conform to the principle of methodological individualism. It should be noted, though, that at least initially Mises had a different conception of ‘sociology’. He conceived of it as a general theory of action, which included economics, as its most developed branch. As soon as he realised that this was not in conformity with common usage, he replaced the term ‘sociology’ by the term ‘praxeology’. What Mises liked best about Weber’s sociology was its subjectivism and the fact that it is defined as a theory of action. He did not, however, agree with Weber on the status of economic laws as ideal types and on his concept of ‘rationality’ (Mises, 1933: 68ff; 1961: 124–7). For Mises, all action, as distinguished from (reactive) behaviour, is rational. Action is a category ultimately given to our experience, and praxeology is an a prioristic science resulting from pondering on this ultimate experience. It is sometimes maintained that Mises’s praxeology should be understood along Kantian lines (Rothbard, 1979: 35f; Parsons, 1990: 296ff), as made up of a priori statements that are either analytic (Smith, 1990: 279–82), or synthetic (Selgin, 1988: 21), but this is not the only possibility. Praxeology may also be understood as an exact science in the sense of phenomenology (Chisholm, 1986: 191; Smith, 1990: 279ff). Mises’s first discussion and defence of methodological individualism was in

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Socialism. An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Die Gemeinwirtschaft, 1922). First among Austrian economists, Mises explicitly insisted that economic action is rational action. Methodological individualism follows as consequence of this fact: All rational action is economic. All economic activity is rational action. All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts. How society arises from the actions of individuals will be shown in a later part of our discussion. (Mises [1922] 1951: 113) Mises’s next step is to argue that economics is based on principles governing the action of the isolated individual. Mises goes further than his predecessors and argues that it is ‘quite correct to regard all economic activity, even the economic activity of isolated man, as exchange’ (p. 117). Exchange, for Mises, reduces to choice. It is to prefer (exchange) A to (for) B. This does not mean, however, that Mises operates with an abstract, or asocial, individual. Rational man is a social being. Man is already a member of a social body when he appears as a thinking, willing creature, for the thinking man is inconceivable as a solitary individual … The development of human reason and the development of human society are one and the same process. All further growth of social relations is entirely a matter of will. Society is the product of thought and will. It does not exist outside thought and will. Its being lies within man, not in the outer world. It is projected from within outwards. (Mises [1922] 1951: 291) The prerequisite of all social life is language (pp. 321f). First of all, language is a precondition for thinking and rational action. Second, it is a precondition for co-operation and, hence, for society. Society, according to Mises, is co-operation and takes the form of division of labour. Therefore, to ask ‘how society arises from the actions of individuals’, is to ask for an explanation of division of labour. The explanation is simple: ‘Progress in the division of labour depends entirely on a realization of its advantages, that is of its higher productivity’ (p. 302). This seems like a rationalistic account of society, but Mises does not accept rationalism wholesale. He rejects the theory of the social contract. The doctrine of natural law has erred in regarding this great change, which lifts man from the state of brutes into human society, as a conscious process; as an action, that is, in which man is completely aware of his motives, of his aims and how to pursue them. (Mises [1922] 1951: 43)

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Like Menger, Mises recognises two types of social order: organisations and organisms; the former being conscious creations, the latter a result of growth. Mises is also influenced by Herbert Spencer, and it is probably from him, that he picks up a second way of drawing the above distinction: ‘Organization is an association based on authority, organism is mutuality’ ([1922] 1951: 296). The Organisation is the state, the Organism is the market and do not let the former interfere with the latter. Mises’s first explicit mention of methodological individualism is, probably, in the article ‘On the Development of the Subjective Theory of Value’ (Vom Weg der Subjektivistischen Wertlehre), first published in 1929 and included in his Epistemological Problems of Economics (Grundprobleme der Nationalökonomie, 1933). In this article, Mises ([1933] 1976: 153) identifies individualism with nominalism and opposes it to universalism (Universalismus). He returns to this subject, at greater length, in the main essay in this book, ‘The Task and Scope of the Science of Human Action’ (Aufgabe und Umfang der allgemeinen Wissenschaft von menschlichen Handeln, 1933), which is a preparatory work for his magnum opus Human Action. For the purposes of science we must start from the action of the individual because this is the only thing of which we can have direct cognition. The idea of a society that could operate or manifest itself apart from the action of individuals is absurd. Everything social must in some way be recognizable in the action of the individual. What would the mystical totality of the universalists be if it were not alive in every individual? Every form of society is operative in the actions of individuals aiming at definite ends. What would a German national character be that did not find expression in the Germanism of individuals? What would a church be that did not express the faith of individuals? (Mises [1933] 1976: 43) In this quotation, Mises uses an epistemological argument to back up a kind of procedural methodological individualism. Social science takes the individual as its point of departure, since only the individual human being is immediately given to experience. Mises differs from Schumpeter, however, by suggesting that the individual is the ‘empirical’ point of departure. For Schumpeter, the individual was the theoretical point of departure. Second, this epistemological argument is supported by the ontological thesis that only individual human beings exist, or that collective entities exist only in the actions of individuals. Methodological individualism is associated with nominalism and collectivism with conceptual realism. According to Mises, the development of methodological individualism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which supplanted the older conceptual realism or universalism was the Copernican revolution of social science (Mises [1933] 1976: 153). Mises returns to the principle of methodological individualism in his most important work, Human Action (1949), but little is added to his earlier treatment of

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this topic. Methodological individualism now appears as an implication of praxeology, the science of human action. Praxeology deals with the actions of individual men. It is only in the further course of its inquiries that cognition of human cooperation is attained and social action is treated as a special case of the more universal category of human action as such. (Mises [1949] 1966: 41) As in Socialism, Mises argues that economics starts with the isolated individual and also that action is exchange. He now makes a distinction, however, between autistic exchange and interpersonal exchange ([1949] 1966: 97f).28 Once again, ‘Society is concerted action, cooperation’. As such, it ‘is the outcome of conscious and purposeful behavior’ (p. 143). More surprising, Mises also endorses the following statement, if reluctantly: ‘Individual man is born into a socially organized environment. In this sense alone we may accept the saying that society is – logically and historically – antecedent to the individual’ (p. 143). This is a statement typically made by collectivists against individualism. The presumption is, of course, that the way society is organised to some extent determines the behaviour of individuals. This is how Schumpeter saw the matter and the reason he was a methodological collectivist (universalist) in sociology (see p. 366, note 26). But how does Mises avoid this conclusion. By shifting from methodology to ontology. ‘[S]ociety is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort. It exists nowhere else than in the actions of individuals’ (p. 142). As in Epistemological Problems of Economics, Mises introduces the topic of methodological individualism by discussing its relation to the issue of nominalism versus realism, but now with a more uncertain relation between methodological individualism and nominalism. No less inappropriate with regard to our problem is the reference to the antagonism of realism and nominalism, both these terms being understood in the meaning which medieval scholasticism attached to them. It is uncontested that in the sphere of human action social entities have real existence. Nobody ventures to deny that nations, states, municipalities, parties, religious communities, are real factors determining the course of human events. Methodological individualism, far from contesting the significance of such collective wholes, considers it as one of its main tasks to describe and to analyze their becoming and disappearing, their changing structures, and their operation. (Mises [1949] 1966: 42) Mises now seems to suggest that the problem of individualism versus collectivism has nothing to do with that of nominalism versus realism, but later on in the same work he once again lumps them together and declares that the doctrines of collectivism, conceptual realism, universalism and holism are the arch-enemies

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of individualism ([1949] 1966: 44, 145). The inconsistency disappears when it is realised that Mises uses the term ‘collectivism’ in two senses, rejecting it in one sense and accepting it in another: Insofar as collectivism asserts that collective entities have an existence independent of, or apart from, individual human beings, and insofar as it endows these collective entities with minds, purposes and interests of their own, it is wrong. If it merely asserts that individuals associate and co-operate for certain purposes, collectivism is quite legitimate and compatible with methodological individualism (pp. 145–53). But Mises not only accepts the existence of collective entities; in the quotation above, he maintains that collective wholes, such as ‘nations, states, municipalities, parties, religious communities, are real factors determining the course of human events’. How can this statement be compatible with methodological individualism? The answer is that his collectivism is illusory. Collective wholes do not exist ‘out there’. They exist in the minds and in the acts of individuals, and as such they determine the course of human events. It is the meaning which the acting individuals and all those who are touched by their action attribute to an action, that determines its character. It is the meaning that marks one action as an action of an individual and another action as the action of the state or the municipality. The hangman, not the state, executes the criminal. It is the meaning of those concerned that discerns in the hangman’s action an action of the state. (Mises [1949] 1966: 42) The reason why Mises can hold that collective wholes determine the course of human events and still be a methodological individualist is that, according to him, a ‘collective whole is a particular aspect of the actions of individuals and as such a real thing determining the course of human events’ ([1949] 1966: 43). Mises, then, does not at all accept the existence of collective wholes. Like Weber, he only accepts that individuals use collective concepts in their thinking and talking about ‘society’. Collective concepts, not real collectives, determine the actions of individuals. Because of this ontology of the social world, epistemological considerations suggest that methodological individualism is the appropriate procedure. If we scrutinize the meaning of the various actions performed by individuals we must necessarily learn everything about the actions of collective wholes … Thus the way to a cognition of collective wholes is through the analysis of the individual’s actions. (Mises [1949] 1966: 42) It is one thing, however, to say that something determines the meaning or character of an action, and another thing to say that it determines the course of events. Mises does not clearly separate these two cases, but actually holds that ideas ‘determine’ the actions of individuals in both ways. It would have been

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better, had Mises said that ideas about collectives determine the course of events, for this is what, in the end, it all comes down to. Mises’s methodological individualism turns out to be some kind of ‘subjective idealism’ opposed, primarily, to Marxian materialism. Society is a product of human action. Human action is directed by ideologies. Thus society and any concrete order of social affairs are the outcome of ideologies; ideologies are not as Marxism asserts, a product of a certain state of social affairs. (Mises [1949] 1966: 187) Methodological individualism is also an important theme in Theory and History (1957), and in The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962). Very little is added, however, to his earlier views on this matter. In the first work, Mises makes the somewhat startling statement that ‘collectivist philosophy denies that there are such things as individuals and actions of individuals’ ([1957] 1985: 256). In the latter work, he warns us against the mistake of hypostatisation, that is, the ascription of substance or existence to mental constructs. As an example of this fallacy Mises takes the way the term ‘society’ is used by the ‘various schools of pseudo science’. Against these schools – Mises’s example is Marxism – he holds that ‘society itself is neither a substance, nor a power, nor an acting being’ (1962: 78–80). Once again methodological individualism appears as a form of ‘subjective idealism’ advanced in direct opposition to Marxist ‘materialism’. For if one realizes that what sets action in motion is ideas, one cannot help admitting that these ideas originate in the minds of some individuals and are transmitted to other individuals. But then one has accepted the fundamental thesis of methodological individualism, viz., that it is ideas held by individuals that determine their group allegiance. (Mises, 1962: 82) So far I have concentrated on the meaning of Mises’s methodological individualism, but said nothing about its status and range of application. The immediate impression is that Mises is more dogmatic about it than were the earlier Austrians. I believe that Mises conceives of methodological individualism as a principle a priori, which the sciences of human action have to follow, because epistemology and ontology dictate that it is the only correct way to proceed. I also think it is safe to suggest that, for Mises, methodological individualism is universally applicable to the sciences of human action. According to Mises, there are two sciences of human action: praxeology and history (sociology is divided between them). Praxeology, as we have seen is certainly individualistic. But what about history? It is individualistic too. Methodological individualism, therefore, is universal in scope.

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Individualism, as a principle of the philosophical, praxeological, and historical analysis of human action means the establishment of the facts that all actions can be traced back to individuals and that no scientific method can succeed in determining how definite external events, liable to a description by the methods of the natural sciences, produce within the human mind definite ideas, value judgements, and volitions. In this sense the individual that cannot be dissolved into components is both the starting point and the ultimate given of all endeavours to deal with human action. (Mises, 1962: 82) Mises rejects the idea of a social science distinct from praxeology and history. There is no science of society, only sciences of human action (Mises [1957] 1985: 256ff; 1962: 105–8). In this respect, Mises is a follower of Weber, who saw sociology as a science of action, but not of Menger. He also agrees with Weber that sociology, if it is not a part of praxeology, is a science auxiliary to history or, rather, a part of it. We saw, at the beginning of this section, that Mises criticised Weber’s doctrine of Verstehen and his notion of ideal types. But what Mises rejected was only Weber’s understanding of economics. Mises actually accepted Weber’s methodology, tout court, for the purposes of history.29 Mises’s version of methodological individualism derives partly from Menger, but mainly from Weber. For Mises, as for Weber, methodological individualism follows from a theory of action and from a subjectivist interpretation of social reality. There is a difference, however. For Weber, subjectivism is bound up with his idea of an interpretive sociology; subjective reality is the subject matter of sociology, but it is not necessarily the only social ‘reality’. For Mises, subjective reality is the exclusive social reality. A consequence of this difference is a change of emphasis, from the methodological level in the case of Weber, to the ontological level in the case of Mises. The reason for this change of emphasis is, probably, that Mises was influenced by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz (see Mises 1943/44: 530). When it comes to explicit formulations of methodological individualism, there is not much to touch upon in the case of Mises. One of its main tasks is said to be that of describing and analysing collective wholes in terms of individuals. This methodological principle is underpinned by the epistemological argument that all we can know about collective wholes is the actions of individuals, and the ontological thesis that collective wholes exist only in the minds and in the actions of individuals. But Mises also formulates methodological individualism as a thesis about social causation: it is ideas held by individuals that determine their group allegiance. More generally, Mises holds the ontogenetic thesis that collective wholes, including society at large, are the products of human action, which in turn are the outcomes of ideas held by individuals, so that, indirectly, society is the result of the ideas of individuals.

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Friedrich von Hayek The Austrian branch – actually it is more like the root and trunk – of methodological individualism culminates in the writings of Friedrich August von Hayek. His particular version of it is a development of the ideas of Max Weber, Alfred Schutz and of his teacher Ludwig von Mises, but it owes, perhaps, even more to the original version of Carl Menger. With Hayek, the circle of Austrian methodological individualism comes to a close.30 It is a form of methodological individualism, which is less radical than that of the theory of the social contract and also of mainstream neoclassical economics. Austrian methodological individualism is based on the premise that humans are social and cultural beings (cf. Madison, 1990: and Lange-von Kulessa, 1997). In his inaugural lecture at the London School of Economics in 1933, Hayek introduced some of the main themes of his future work (cf. Caldwell, 1988). One of them was his version of methodological individualism: ‘By combining elementary conclusions and following up their implications he [the economist] gradually constructs, from the familiar elements, a mental model which aims at reproducing the working of the economic system as a whole’ (Hayek, 1933b: 128). The year after, he wrote an introduction to a reprint of Menger’s Grundsätze der Volkwirtschaftslehre published by the London School of Economics. This piece was also published as an article in Economica (1934) presenting Carl Menger to an English public. A point to notice, because unusual, is that Hayek devotes considerable space also to Menger’s methodological work, Problems of Economics and Sociology, and maintains that it was ‘hardly less an achievement than the Grundsätze’ (Hayek, 1934: 405). ‘Of the central contentions of the book one may be singled out for further comment; his emphasis on the necessity of a strictly individualistic or, as he generally says, atomistic method of analysis’ (p. 406). If methodological individualism is now separated from ethical individualism and if the subjective element has been fully developed only by Austrian Economics, ‘this is largely due to Menger’s brilliant vindication in this book’ (p. 406). In 1937 Hayek’s now classic article ‘Economics and Knowledge’ appeared: it questioned not only the theory of general equilibrium, but also Mises’s praxeology, and eventually led to a split within the Austrian movement. Hayek argued that equilibrium analysis and praxeology are both tautological and fail to say anything about reality. The general remedy for this is to work with verstehen and ideal types, as suggested by Max Weber (Hayek, 1948: p. 47, n. 12 and p. 52, n. 18). A particular problem is the assumption of isolated individuals, which fails to account for the interdependence of people’s plans. For equilibrium to be possible in the real world, individuals would have to know the plans of other individuals. Game theory is one attempt to deal with this interdependence, but it does not solve the problem of knowledge (see p. 252).31 The main source for an understanding of Hayek’s ideas on methodological individualism is ‘Scientism and the Study of Man’, first published as articles in Economica (1942–4) and later included as Part One in The Counter-Revolution of Science (1955).32 This work is first of all an attack on ‘scientism’; the mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought, taken from the natural sciences,

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in the social sciences. In contrast to the objective character of natural phenomena, Hayek stresses the subjective nature of human actions. In fact, most of the objects of social or human action are not ‘objective facts’ in the special narrow sense in which this term is used by the Sciences and contrasted to ‘opinions’, and they cannot at all be defined in physical terms. So far as human actions are concerned the things are what the acting people think they are. (Hayek, 1942–4: 277f; 1955: pp. 26f) Hayek’s subjectivism derives from his Austrian view of economics, but also from German hermeneutics and phenomenology. Therefore, since all human action is subjective in the sense of the above quotation, every science dealing with the results of conscious human action must follow the course taken by economics. The points which we want to stress are that in all such attempts we must start from what men think and mean to do, from the fact that the individuals which compose society are guided in their actions by a classification of things and events in a system of sense qualities and concepts which has a common structure and which we know because we, too, are men, and that the concrete knowledge which different individuals possess will differ in important respects. Not only man’s action towards external objects but also all the relations between men and all social institutions can be understood only in terms of what men think about them. (Hayek, 1942–4: 283; 1955: 33) So far, Hayek’s concern is with our understanding of human action. His aim seems to be the justification of a subjectivist methodology by epistemological arguments. Hayek is talking about knowledge. But his subjectivism goes deeper and turns out to be of an ontological nature, like that of Mises. Not only is our knowledge of society limited to knowledge about the beliefs of individuals. Society, itself, is made up of the beliefs of individuals. This is the reason knowledge of society is knowledge about the beliefs of individuals. Society as we know it is, as it were, built up from the concepts and ideas held by the people; and social phenomena can be recognized by us and have meaning to us only as they are reflected in the minds of men. (Hayek, 1942–4: 283; 1955: 33f) This does not imply, however, that the aim of social science is limited to investigating the minds of individual human beings. Social science is interested in social structures, but the true elements of social structures are beliefs existing in the minds of a plurality of individuals.

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Austrian methodological individualism The structure of men’s minds, the common principle on which they classify external events, provide us with the knowledge of the recurrent elements of which different social structures are built up and in terms of which we can alone describe and explain them. While concepts or ideas can, of course, exist only in individual minds, and while, in particular, it is only in individual minds that different ideas can act upon another, it is not the whole of the individual minds in all their complexity, but the individual concepts, the views people have formed of each other and of things, which form the true elements of the social structure. (Hayek, 1942–4: 283f; 1955: 34)

In order to illustrate his subjectivism, Hayek gives some examples from the social sciences. The first example, presumably taken from functionalist anthropology, concerns the concepts of ‘tool’ and ‘instrument’. Such concepts – that of ‘hammer’, for instance – cannot be defined by their physical attributes, but must be defined in terms of their function, or the ‘purpose for which men think they can be used’ (1942–4: 278; 1955: 27). From archaeology Hayek takes the example of the problem of determining ‘whether what looks like a stone implement is in truth an “artifact”, made by man, or merely a chance product of nature’. According to Hayek, the only way to answer this question is ‘by trying to understand the working of the mind of prehistoric man, of attempting to understand how he would have made such an implement’ (1942–4: 278; 1955: 27). A final example concerns a problem that belongs to economics, but would occur as a problem only in economic history or economic anthropology. That the objects of economic activity cannot be defined in objective terms but only with reference to a human purpose goes without saying. Neither a ‘commodity’ or an ‘economic good’, nor ‘food’ or ‘money’, can be defined in physical terms but only in terms of the views people hold about things. Economic theory has nothing to say about the little round disks of metal as which an objective or materialist view might try to define money. It has nothing to say about iron or steel, timber or oil, or wheat or eggs as such. The history of any particular commodity indeed shows that as human knowledge changes the same material thing may represent quite different economic categories. Nor could we distinguish in physical terms whether two men barter or exchange or whether they are playing some game or performing some religious ritual. (Hayek, 1942–4: 281f; 1955: 31) Now, the subjectivism of Hayek should not be interpreted as implying that the social scientist must use only such concepts as are used in everyday life, and in the same way. Hayek is careful to guard himself against such misunderstanding of his standpoint (1942–4: 284f; 1955: 36). The ideas and concepts used in everyday life are only the starting-point, the elements from which the social scientist gradually builds up his model of the social structure. The reason

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why the social scientist must not and cannot confine himself to the use of such concepts as guide individuals in their acting, is that social phenomena are ‘the unintended or undesigned results of the actions of many men’ (1942–4: 276; 1955: 25). In order to make clear his own idea of a scientific model of social structure, as distinguished from a naive collectivist approach, Hayek makes a distinction between, on the one hand, those ideas which motivate people in their actions and which are constitutive of social phenomena and, on the other hand, those speculative ideas people form about these phenomena in order to explain them (1942–4: 285; 1955: 37). He is aware that the same idea may occur in both capacities, but insists that the social scientist starts his analysis from ideas in their constitutive capacity, and takes speculative ideas for what they are; popular myths. It is the ideas which the popular mind has formed about such collectives as ‘society’ or the ‘economic system’, ‘capitalism’ or ‘imperialism’, and other such collective entities, which the social scientist must regard as no more than provisional theories, popular abstractions, and which he must not mistake for facts. That he consistently refrains from treating these pseudoentities as ‘facts’, and that he systematically starts from the concepts which guide individuals in their actions and not from the results of their theorizing about their actions, is the characteristic feature of that methodological individualism which is closely connected with the subjectivism of the social sciences. (Hayek, 1942–4: 286; 1955: 37f) The subjectivism and individualism of the social sciences make them in an important respect different from the natural sciences. The difference is epistemological and Hayek uses it in support of his methodological individualism. In the natural sciences complex phenomena are observed; material things which, for their explanation, must be analysed into their component parts. Their method, therefore, is ‘analytic’. In the social sciences the opposite is the case. We know by direct acquaintance only the parts; the individuals, from which the complex phenomena must be constructed. The method of the social sciences, therefore is ‘compositive’, or ‘synthetic’ (1942–4: 287; 1955: 39). The complex phenomena to which the social scientist must give his sole attention are those phenomena which are the unintended results of the conscious action of many men. Consciously designed social phenomena, though sometimes in need of a psychological explanation, are in no need of a social scientific explanation. Hayek gives an example of how order is produced by the actions of many men without being intended by any one of them. The way in which footpaths are formed in a wild broken country is such an instance. At first everyone will seek for himself what seems to him the best path. But the fact that such a path has been used once is likely to make it easier to traverse and therefore more likely to be used again; and thus

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Austrian methodological individualism gradually more and more clearly defined tracks arise and come to be used to the exclusion of other possible ways. Human movements through the region come to conform to a definite pattern which, although the result of deliberate decisions of many people, has yet not been consciously designed by anyone. This explanation of how this happens is an elementary ‘theory’ applicable to hundreds of particular instances … It makes no difference for our present purpose whether the process extends over a long period of time as it does in such cases as the evolution of money or the formation of language, or whether it is a process which is constantly repeated anew as in the case of the formation of prices or the direction of production under competition. (Hayek, 1955: 40; cf. 1942–4: 289)

This example shows the imprint of Menger on the methodology of Hayek. It is an attempt to illustrate the ‘exact’ and atomistic analysis of institutions suggested by Carl Menger in Problems of Economics and Sociology and used by Menger in his theory of money (see pp. 90f ). The particular example of the footpath, however, is borrowed from Descartes.33 Like Mises, Hayek sees a clear connection between individualism and nominalism, and collectivism and realism, respectively. Methodological collectivism is an outgrowth of conceptual realism. It makes the mistake of treating collective entities, such as society, economy, capitalism, or class as definite objects when, in fact, they are ‘models constructed by the popular mind to explain the connection between some of the individual phenomena which we observe’. The fundamental obstacle to the assumption made by naive realism is that ‘the wholes as such are never given to our observation but are without exception constructions of our mind’ (1942–4: 43; 1955: 54). But as with Mises, there is a certain ambiguity on this point. Hayek denies that collective entities exist as definite objects, but at the same time takes the view that wholes – the market, for instance – exist as structures of relationships (1942–4: 44; 1955: 55). The fallacy Hayek wants to avoid is also partly that of Mises. He wants to avoid the danger, inherent in collectivism, of treating collective entities as some kind of ‘superpersons’ endowed with ‘social’ or ‘collective’ minds (1942–4: 45; 1955: 57). In support of his view that collective entities are not definite objects, Hayek points to the fact that social wholes are not ‘natural units’ like flowers and butterflies; unlike physical things, they are not continuous in space and time, but ‘selections of certain elements of a complex picture on the basis of a theory about their coherence’ (1942–4: 43; 1955: 55). The social sciences, thus, do not deal with ‘given’ wholes but their task is to constitute these wholes by constructing models from the familiar elements – models which reproduce the structure of relationships between some of the many phenomena which we always simultaneously observe in real life. (Hayek, 1942–4: 44; 1955: 56)

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Hayek’s methodological individualism is also expounded in an article from the same period, ‘The Facts of the Social Sciences’ (1943), which is a concise statement of his views on the methodology of the social sciences. Social facts, including not only human actions and written language, but also ‘things’ such as tools, food, medicine and weapons, are subjective in contrast to the objective character of natural facts. ‘Collective wholes’ are not observable, and do not exist as definite objects, independent from the ‘theories’ people have about them. Collective wholes are ‘created by an act of construction or interpretation’. Terms denoting collective wholes refer to certain activities of individuals. This is all the theories of the social sciences aim to do. They are not about the social wholes as wholes; they do not pretend to discover by empirical observation laws of behaviour or change of these wholes. Their task is rather, if I may so call it, to constitute these wholes, to provide schemes of structural relationships which the historian can use when he has to attempt to fit together into a meaningful whole the elements which he actually finds. (Hayek [1948] 1972: 72) In this quotation, methodological individualism is opposed to the search for empirical laws about social wholes. This is another return to Carl Menger, who opposed the atomism of the exact orientation to the collectivism of the realisticempirical approach. But it is also an adjustment to the views of Weber and Mises. Hayek does not accept a social science based on the realistic-empirical approach. This type of research belongs to history. But social science is an aid to history by providing individualistic models of collective wholes. Or, in the terminology of Max Weber, sociology is an auxiliary discipline to history, providing individualistic ideal types of collective phenomena. In its early development, especially in Weber and Schumpeter, methodological individualism was clearly distinguished from political individualism. In Mises, this distinction is totally blurred. His allegiance to value-freedom is mere lip-service. Methodological individualism appears as inseparable from, sometimes even identical with, the political doctrine of liberalism. But Hayek is first among the proponents of methodological individualism to treat it as part of a wider system of ideas, something like a world view, including, or related to, a certain ideology. In his article ‘Individualism: True and False’ (1945), Hayek is careful to distinguish the ‘true individualism’ of the Scottish Enlightenment, and men such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Acton, from the ‘false individualism’, which originates with Réné Descartes. The most significant expressions of the latter are the philosophy of the French Enlightenment, especially JeanJacques Rousseau, and the English philosophical radicalism of Jeremy Bentham and the two Mills. The most mistaken element of ‘false individualism’, is the ‘design theory’ of social institutions; the belief that society can be constructed according to a plan, or blueprint.

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Austrian methodological individualism What, then, are the essential characteristics of true individualism? The first thing that should be said is that it is primarily a theory of society, an attempt to understand the forces which determine the social life of man, and only in the second instance a set of political maxims derived from this view of society … its basic contention … is that there is no other way toward an understanding of social phenomena but through our understanding of individual actions directed toward other people and guided by their expected behavior. This argument is directed against the properly collectivist theories of society which pretend to be able directly to comprehend social wholes like society, etc., as entities sui generis which exist independently of the individuals which compose them. (Hayek [1948] 1972: 6)

The main insight of true individualism is that most social phenomena are the unintended and unforeseen results of the actions of individuals; that like living organisms they have grown, step by step, without being consciously aimed at and constructed. This insight is used by Hayek, as by many other conservatives and liberals, to argue against social planning and social engineering. But Hayek has probably done more than anyone else to develop this argument in great detail, including the theory of society on which it is based. Like Menger, Hayek distinguishes two types of order: organisations and spontaneous orders (organisms). The main part of Hayek’s theory is about spontaneous orders, and the way they have developed in the course of history. The most important contributions to this theory are from the 1960s onwards. From about this time, Hayek also stops mentioning methodological individualism in his writings. I interpret this fact as an indication that Hayek no longer adheres to this principle, and for a good reason. His theory of society is no longer compatible with methodological individualism (see pp. 282–4). To sum up: Hayek’s methodological individualism is, like that of Weber and Mises, inseparable from subjectivism. Society exists only in the minds and actions of individual human beings. Social wholes do not exist as definite objects, on a par with natural units, like physical things and biological organisms. Concepts such as ‘society’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘imperialism’ are popular abstractions, and the concepts used by social science, such as ‘government’, ‘trade’ or ‘army’, are theoretical constructions. But neither the collective concepts of everyday life, nor those of social science, denote collectives that are real, independently of any idea, or theory, about them. I think it is possible to give the following explication of Weber’s, Mises’s and Hayek’s individualist analysis of collective concepts: their intension is ideas in people’s mind, their extension is the actions of individuals. But the subjective meaning individuals attach to actions and things is only the point of departure. The real task of social science is to construct and explain large-scale social (complex) phenomena. This is done by constructing models of individual actions and their intended and unintended consequences. The subjective meaning individuals attach to their actions (and to physical things) are the

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elements out of which the social scientist constitutes ‘social wholes’. Hayek’s methodological individualism is both procedural and substantive. The individual is the point of departure, but also the end of social science. The ultimate explanation of all social phenomena is in terms of individuals, their actions and the consequences of these actions. Like Menger, Hayek is especially interested in the evolution of social institutions, which he tends to see as conventions, in the manner of Hume.

The Austrian influence Although part of neoclassical marginalism, Austrian Economics has never really been part of mainstream economics. After the first generation, it disappeared definitely from the mainstream and formed a small marginal stream all of its own. At an early stage of its development, however, it made an impact on some important non-Austrian economists, who helped to propagate methodological individualism. I am going to end this chapter by mentioning three of them: Frank H. Knight, Lionel Robbins and the early Gunnar Myrdal. Frank H. Knight was an American economist and a founding father of the famous Chicago School of Economics, which counts among its members such prominent economists as George J. Stigler, Milton Friedman, Armen A. Alchian, Harold Demsetz, Richard Posner and Gary S. Becker. Knight was clearly influenced by all three versions of marginalism. He mentions Wicksteed, Pareto and Marshall, as especially important, but there is little doubt that also the Austrians loom large in his writings. His emphasis on uncertainty and his view that economics is an exact science, for instance, indicate an Austrian influence.34 In his classic treatise Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921), Frank H. Knight was first to make the important distinction between risk and uncertainty, where the former implies knowledge of the probabilities of different alternative outcomes, whereas the latter means that we are left completely in the dark concerning future states of affairs. According to Knight, it is the existence of uncertainty that gives rise to profit. If economic life were characterised by perfect knowledge, or even by risk, competition would eliminate profits. Despite the obvious problem of defining rationality in a state of uncertainty, Knight may have been the first to explicitly suggest that economics is a theory of ‘rational choice’ (Knight, 1921: 89).35 Following Wicksteed, he maintains that economics is a theory of choice, not of pleasure and pain. The term ‘rational choice’ is probably introduced to avoid the psychologism implicit in Wicksteed’s expression ‘psychology of choice’. The theory of conduct, relevant for economics, is the ‘Law of Choice’, stated by Knight in the following way: In the utilization of limited resources in competing fields of employment, which is the form of all rational activity in conduct, we tend to apportion resources among alternative uses that are open in such a way that equal amounts of resource yield equivalent returns in all fields. (Knight, 1921: 65)

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This is the Austrian view of economics, stated most succinctly by Weber and later by Lionel Robbins. It is possible to recognise an Austrian element also in Knight’s distinction between a Robinson Crusoe and a social economy. Economics is a theory of choice and exchange, but not of choice alone. This view is stated most clearly in The Economic Organization ([1933] 1971; see also 1961: 185–93, 273–82), where Knight draws the obvious conclusion that economics is limited in scope to systems of free market economics, but is repeated in The Ethics of Competition (1935/6). In its second aspect or stage, economic theory deals with social, in the sense of interindividual, relations. But the ‘economic man’ is not a ‘social animal’, and economic individualism excludes society in the proper human sense. Economic relations are impersonal. The social organization dealt with in economic theory is best pictured as a number of Crusoes interacting through the markets exclusively. (Knight, 1935/6: 282) Knight was not in any sense a radical individualist even though he did favour an individualistic organisation of the economy. He was fully aware of the significance of social institutions and social organisation for an understanding of social phenomena in general, and of economic phenomena in particular (see, e.g., Knight 1956: chs 1 (1951) and 5 (1941). It is difficult to tell, therefore, whether Knight was a programmatic methodological individualist, or not; and if so, what kind of methodological individualist he was. One thing is certain, however: like Schumpeter, he did conceive of theoretical economics as an individualistic science. By the nature of its fundamental conceptions, theoretical economics is an individualistic science. As explained at length in an earlier part of this essay, the ‘economic man’ is not a social man, and the ideal market dealings of theory are not social relations. The science takes its economic individual as a datum, in his three aspects of wants, resources and technical knowledge, ignoring all questions of origin; and it abstracts from all his social relations with other human beings, except those of the perfect market, which are really relations to commodities as such. (Knight, 1935/6: 337) Lionel Robbins was an English economist working at the famous London School of Economics in its most glorious days, from 1929 to 1961. He was an economist of somewhat similar bent as Frank Knight, but even more influenced by the Austrians and by Wicksteed. Robbins was the author of one of the most cited books on economic theory and methodology, his classic An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932). In this book you find, I am sure, the most often cited definition of economics ever produced: ‘Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and

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scarce means which have alternative uses’ ([1932] 1935: 17). It may be added that, in this situation, ‘behaviour necessarily assumes the form of choice’ (p. 14). Robbins made no secret of the fact that this is the Austrian conception of economics, or at least half of it. Robbins did not follow most of the Austrians and Frank Knight in conceiving of economics as a theory of exchange, or catallactics. Without this limitation, economics becomes a general theory of human action applicable to various social phenomena other than market exchange. Robbins was thus a precursor of theoretical economic imperialism, and also made some suggestions in this direction: ‘There is an important sense in which the subject-matter of political science can be conceived to come within the scope of our definition of the economic. Systems of government, property relationships, and the like, can be conceived as the result of choice’ (Robbins [1932] 1935: 134.). Unlike some later proponents of economic imperialism, however, Robbins was keenly aware also of the limitations of the economic approach (pp. 131–5; see also Udehn, 1991; 1996). Robbins was one of the main figures in the project to free economics from its dependence on psychological hedonism and turn it into a theory of rational choice. Economics does not in any way indulge in speculation about the psychological ‘causes’ of human action. It takes people’s motives and wants as given and treats them as data in its own theories. The psychological content of economics boils down to two simple assumptions: (1) ‘that individuals can arrange their preferences in an order, and in fact do so’ (pp. 78f); and (2) ‘that each final choice is consistent with every other, in the sense that if I prefer A to B and B to C, I also prefer A to C’ (p. 92). This is the meaning of the term ‘rational’ in economics (p. 91). Another important strain in Robbins’s thought, is his (individualist) denial of the possibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility. ‘There is no means of testing the magnitude of A’s satisfaction as compared with B’s’ (pp. 139f). Hence, the impossibility of a scientific concept of ‘social utility’. The only possible significance of such a concept is as part of ethical theory, which must be clearly distinguished from the positive theory of economics. ‘It is simply the accidental deposit of the historical association of English Economics with Utilitarianism: and both … will be the better if this is clearly recognised’ (p. 141). There are many similarities between Robbins’s An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932) and Gunnar Myrdal’s The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory (1929), even though they came to different conclusions and Myrdal, eventually, took off in another direction.36 Myrdal was even more critical, than Robbins, of the dependence of early British marginalism on utilitarian psychological hedonism and on the idea of ‘social value’, or ‘social utility’, as a sum of the utilities of individuals. Such addition of individual utilities is only possible by the scientifically illicit procedure of comparing the utilities of different individuals. The utilitarian economists were individualists, but they were also radicals and social reformers. As such they had a strong inclination to develop their doctrine in a politically relevant direction. By adding the utilities of all members of

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society it was possible to arrive at the politically relevant notion of ‘social value’ or ‘social utility’, which is at the basis of welfare economics. From the very beginning, methodological individualists have been sceptical about welfare economics, and especially about notions such as ‘social value’ or ‘social utility’. A first objection is that it presupposes the possibility of comparing the utilities of different individuals. The most serious defect of concepts such as ‘social value’ and ‘social utility’, however, is that they seem to suggest some kind of collective subject, engaged in ‘collective’, or ‘social housekeeping’ (Myrdal [1929] 1953: ch. 6). There is a clear echo of Carl Menger’s critique of the concept of ‘national economy’ in Myrdal’s objections to the concepts of ‘social value’ and ‘social utility’. The worst sinners are, of course, the German political metaphysicians, with their organicism and their speculation about the essence of the state. But also the utilitarian economists – especially when they draw political conclusions from their doctrine – ‘tend to be forced into an untenable “communistic fiction” about the unity of society’ (p. 54). Like Robbins, Myrdal observes that economics has progressively freed itself from its dependence upon psychological hedonism, and from any other psychological theory for that matter. Economics has become a ‘behaviourist’ theory of choice (Wahlhandlungstheorie). Unlike Robbins, however, Myrdal did not at all welcome this development. From his point of view, a ‘behaviourist theory’ of choice, ‘is an attempt to construct a subjective theory of value without psychological content. Such an attempt is bound to lead to empty mathematical scholasticism’ ([1929] 1953: 97f ). For Myrdal, the solution is not to reintroduce psychological hedonism in the science of economics – this theory is proven wrong by the science of psychology – but to find some better psychological theory to replace it. Myrdal, then, appeared as one of the first in a long line of critics, who have tried to reintroduce the programme of psychologism in economics, but in vain.

Conclusion The Austrian School of Economics is the single most important source of methodological individualism in modern social science. Its founder Carl Menger defended the use of an atomistic method in theoretical economics against members of the German Historical School and Joseph Schumpeter coined the term ‘methodological individualism’ to refer to this method. An important part of Menger’s individualist programme was his suggestion that not only prices, but all social institutions are amenable to individualist analysis. A possible problem with this extension of the individualist programme has been pointed out by Robert Nozick, who notices that Menger provides an explanation of the creation and maintenance of institutions, but adds the seemingly obvious point that ‘[e]xisting institutions also shape and affect the actions of individuals’ Nozick, 1977: 357). According to Nozick, therefore, the interplay of individuals and institutions should rather look like this:

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Figure 4.2 Actions and institutions according to Robert Nozick Source: Nozick (1977: 358)

The pertinent question, now, is this: ‘If each time we explain the current situation as arising from previous actions in a certain institutional setting, then why are actions prior? In this apparent chicken and egg situation, why aren’t we equally methodological institutionalists?’ As we shall see in chapter 6 on Popperian methodological individualism, Nozick was not first to ask this question, but he may have been first to ask it explicitly about Menger’s methodological individualism. I do not know if the later Austrians, Weber, Mises and Hayek, were aware of this problem, or saw it as a problem, but they did suggest a way of escape. While Nozick implies that social institutions are irreducible to individuals and their actions, Weber, Mises and Hayek adopted an intersubjectivist theory of society, which situates social institutions in the minds of individuals. Social institutions are the subjective meaning individuals attach to social actions or social things like money. Instead of conceiving of individual and society as two levels, we get a horizontal, or flat picture of individuals interacting with one another. Since there is a shift from methodology to ontology involved in this common route of escape, I call it the ‘ontological turn’ or ‘twist’.

Figure 4.3 Individuals in society according to Weber, Mises and Hayek

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In the beginning, sociology was mainly holistic. Most sociologists saw society as a reality sui generis, with laws of its own, irreducible to the acting individuals. But there were also some early sociologists, who took a more individualistic view of society: Gabriel Tarde, George Simmel and Max Weber, for instance. The early Simmel and Weber conceived of society as constituted by the subjectively meaningful action of individuals. The most important sources of this conception of society were German Völkerpsychologie and the descriptive psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey, who also saw society as interaction. Simmel, who, like Dilthey, had intellectual roots in Völkerpsychologie, saw society as both subjective meaning and interaction. Borrowing a distinction from Kant, he saw society as both form and content. Society consists of forms of interaction, but its content is subjective meaning. This is, I believe, the main sociological version of the individualistic theory of society. It differs from the theory of the social contract and the economic theory of the market by taking a broader view of social action, but, above all, by its interest in the meaning of social phenomena.1 In the further development of the individualist theory of society in sociology, there was an important input from two philosophical schools: American pragmatism and German phenomenology. Of these, the former was not really individualistic, but nevertheless it exerted a profound influence on one particular version of the individualist theory of society, namely symbolic interactionism. The philosophical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, finally, is the source, not only of phenomenological sociology, but also of existentialism – which is a theory somewhere in between philosophy, psychology and sociology – and of ethnomethodology. Symbolic interactionism, sociological phenomenology, existentialist sociology, and ethnomethodology are all sociological theories, which conceive of society as interaction and intersubjective meaning, even if they do not attach the same importance to both elements. Because these theories typically focus on interaction between human beings, in co-presence, or face-to-face relations, they are usually considered as ‘microsociology’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1981: 1ff) or as belonging to the ‘microinteractionist tradition’ (Collins, 1985: ch. 3). According to the American sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, the theories belonging to microinteractionist tradition are caught in an ‘individualist

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dilemma’. I agree with Alexander (and Parsons) that there is such an individualist dilemma, but my interest, in this chapter, is in individualism per se, without the dilemma.

Symbolic interactionism Symbolic interactionism is an American movement of thought usually associated with the name of George Herbert Mead, but really a creation of his pupil and follower, the sociologist Herbert Blumer. A philosopher and social psychologist of the pragmatist school, Mead was influenced by the work of Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey.2 Also important for Mead’s theory of the individual and society were some ideas of the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley. A third influence – in this case it is probably better to talk about cross-fertilisation – was the so-called Chicago School of Sociology, founded by William I. Thomas and Robert E. Park. Although mainly an American product (Alexander, 1987: 196ff; Joas, 1987: 94ff), symbolic interactionism was also influenced by European thinking. Among the more remote sources of symbolic interactionism we find Adam Smith and other representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment, the German Romantics and Hegel.3 A more immediate influence came from Völkerpsychologie, Dilthey and Simmel.4 I take Cooley, Thomas and Mead to be the most important progenitors of symbolic interactionism. I dispute, however, that any one of them was a ‘symbolic interactionist’, in the present-day sense of that term. I also doubt that any one of them held the intersubjectivist theory of society, or was a theoretical individualist (cf. Joas, 1987: 94ff).5 I do agree, however, that all of them developed certain ideas, which, if taken in isolation, were important contributions to the further development of symbolic interactionism into an individualist theory of society. Cooley’s contribution to symbolic interactionism was his theory of the looking-glass self and the theory of society that it suggests. The looking-glass self has ‘three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgement of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling such as pride and mortification’ (Cooley [1902] 1964: 184). An important part of our selves, then, is the way we imagine we appear in other peoples’ minds. From this, it is but a short step to suggest that people exist primarily or, exclusively, as ideas in the minds of one another. Cooley’s conception of society, as advanced in his first and most influential book Human Nature and Social Order (1902), is probably the most extreme version of an idealist and intersubjectivist theory of society ever proposed by a sociologist. Society, according to Cooley, is mental: ‘The immediate social reality is the personal idea … Society, then in its immediate aspect, is a relation among personal ideas … Society exists in my mind as the contact and reciprocal influence of certain ideas named ‘I’ Thomas, Henry, Susan, Bridget, and so on’ ([1902] 1964: 119). A consequence of this view is ‘that there is no separation between real and imaginary persons; indeed to be imagined is to become real, in a social sense’ (p. 95).

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Another consequence is that corporeal existence is immaterial for the question of social existence. Historic persons, characters of fiction and mythological figures are as real as corporeal persons, since they exist as ideas in the minds of people. Indeed, they may be more real, since a corporeally existent person is not socially real unless he is imagined. If the nobleman thinks of the serf as a mere animal and does not attribute to him a human way of thinking and feeling, the latter is not real to him in the sense of acting personally upon his mind and conscience. (Cooley [1902] 1964: 123) W.I. Thomas shared Cooley’s subjectivism, at least in methodology. His main contribution to symbolic interactionism was his stress upon the importance for social scientific investigation of taking account of the individual’s own definition of his situation. ‘There is always a rivalry between the spontaneous definitions of the situation made by the member of an organized society and the definitions which his society has provided for him’ (Thomas [1923] 1967: 42). On the other hand, this definition of the situation is from one standpoint as good as if it were true. It is a representation of the situation as appreciated by the subject, ‘as if ’ it were so, and this is for the behavior study the most important phase of reality. (Thomas [1927] 1966: 160) The subjectivist strain in Thomas’s thought is best epitomised in his famous dictum, sometimes called Thomas’s theorem; ‘if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas and Thomas, 1929: 572). Thomas’ subjectivism, then, was more methodological than that of Cooley. The reason for this is probably that he was much more engaged in empirical investigation than the latter. His most famous study is The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918), written together with the Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki. In the methodological introduction to this work, they state a methodological principle which, according to them, is fundamental both in social psychology and sociology: ‘The cause of a social or individual phenomenon is never another social or individual phenomenon alone, but always a combination of a social and an individual phenomenon’ ([1918] 1927: 44). This principle is of course written as a direct reply to Durkheim’s famous dictum (see p. 34), which denies the role of individual phenomena and individual psychology altogether. Thomas and Znaniecki opt for a less extreme alternative, which recognises the need for microfoundations, but not reduction, or, at least, only a partial reduction of sociology to psychology. George Herbert Mead’s main contribution to symbolic interactionism is his social psychological theory of the self and the main source for this theory is Mind, Self and Society (1934). It must be counted as an original and important contribution to social psychology, even if it was foreshadowed by Adam Smith, William James and Charles Horton Cooley. Mead’s theory deals with the rise of

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the self, both phylogenetically, in the human species, and ontogenetically, in the human individual, but above all, ontogenetically. As such, it is a theory about socialisation. The main contention of this theory is that the self can only arise in a human society. In very brief outline Mead’s theory of the self amounts to this: The self arises in communication by means of significant symbols, i.e., symbols that evoke the same kind of response in the self and in the other. The rise of the self, thus, presupposes a universe of discourse, a system of common or social meanings, that is, a common language. The self arises in the individual by his/her taking the attitude, or the role, of the other. It is only by taking the role of the other that the individual can become an object to him/herself, and it is only by becoming an object to him/herself that the individual acquires a self. Mead distinguishes two stages in the development of a social self in the child. The first stage is that of play, where the individual takes the role of a particular or ‘significant other’; a mother, a father, a policeman or a teacher. The second stage is that of game, where the child takes the role of all the others taking part in a certain activity. A game is an organised activity governed by a set of rules. Mead’s term for all others involved in a group activity is the ‘generalised other’. More generally, the generalised other is the form in which the individual confronts society.6 Closely related to the concept of the ‘generalised other’ is Mead’s distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’. Both the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ are selves, or rather, belong to the self, as phases of the undivided self. ‘The “I” is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the “me” is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes’ ([1934] 1962: 175). This process of relating one’s own organism to the others in the interactions that are going on, in so far as it is imported into the conduct of the individual with the conversation of the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, constitutes the self. (Mead [1934] 1962: 179) The ‘I’, then, is the spontaneous element in action. In most cases the ‘I’ is aware of the ‘me’ and acts according to its strictures, but it sometimes happens that it acts entirely on its own, as when we are surprised by our own actions. The ‘I’ exists in the specious present. As soon as an act is completed and becomes part of the past, as soon as we can reflect upon it, it sinks down into the ‘me’. The ‘me’ is the conventional, the habitual, the institutional element in action. The ‘me’ sets limits to the actions of the ‘I’ and is thus the means for the exercise of social control in the individual. The ‘me’ is then, it would seem, the internalised generalised other.7 Mead’s theory of the self could be interpreted as implying an individualist and intersubjectivist theory of society. This is the interpretation made by the symbolic interactionists. But it is not the only possible interpretation and it is hardly the correct interpretation. In the recent literature about Mead and symbolic interactionism, it has been argued convincingly that Mead’s social behaviourism was not individualistic. According to Lewis and Smith (1980: ch. 5),

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Mead was a social realist, who saw society as an objective reality sui generis. As Jeffrey Alexander has pointed out, Mead saw symbolic structures and social institutions as, in a sense, prior to the actions of individuals (see Alexander, 1987: 205–14). This view is shared by Wiley (1994: chs 2 and 6), who argues that Mead had a semiotic theory of the self, which means that it is irreducible to the subjective, or psychic, level. It may be added that Mead frequently referred to society as a whole, and not just to a meaningfully integrated whole, but also a functionally integrated whole. The implication is that also the method of social psychology must be holistic: We are not in social psychology, building up the behavior of the social group in terms of the behavior of the separate individuals composing it; rather we are starting out with a given social whole of complex social group activity, into which we analyze (as elements) the behavior of each of the separate individuals composing it. We attempt, that is, to explain the conduct of the individual in terms of the organized conduct of the social group, rather than to account for the organized conduct of the social group in terms of the conduct of the separate individuals belonging to it. For social psychology, the whole (society) is prior to the part (the individual), not the part to the whole; and the part is explained in terms of the whole, not the whole in terms of the parts. (Mead [1934] 1962: 7) This is a perfectly clear statement of methodological holism, taken from Mind, Self, and Society, and yet Mead has been interpreted as an individualist by the symbolic interactionists. According to Anselm Strauss, for instance, Mead’s social psychology is a form of ‘socialized individualism’. But this interpretation is possible only on the basis of a certain interpretation of the concept of the ‘generalised other’. It is possible only if the generalised other, that is society, is situated in the self. This interpretation is far from self-evident, but it is the interpretation made by most ‘symbolic interactionists’. According to Strauss ([1956] 1964: xxiii), ‘The generalized other is society’s representative in the individual’. Mead, although undoubtedly its most important progenitor, is not the creator of symbolic interactionism. Mead’s ideas found their way to the sociologists mainly through the influence of Ellsworth Faris and, above all, through Herbert Blumer (Fischer and Strauss, 1979: 459). Of these, the former was closer to Mead’s social behaviourism (Lewis and Smith, 1980: 170f, 187–9).8 The real architect of symbolic interactionism is, I suggest, Herbert Blumer. It was Blumer who coined the term ‘symbolic interactionism’ and who turned Mead’s social psychology into a ‘sociological’ theory of society; ‘society as symbolic interaction’ (Blumer, 1969: ch. 3).9 But Blumer’s symbolic interactionism is clearly different from Mead’s social behaviourism, in important respects. Above all, it is certainly more individualistic.10 In a presentation of social psychology as a discipline (1937), Blumer recognises, besides the instinct and stimulus-response approaches, a third important

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view of human nature, represented by a group of social psychologists ‘who may be conveniently labelled “symbolic interactionists”’. The theory of society ascribed to this group by Blumer is, in my terminology, typically ‘intersubjectivist’ (p. 153). A third view of human group life is that held by those social psychologists whom we have termed the symbolic interactionists. They, also, recognize that the life of human groups presents itself in the form of a body of customs, traditions, institutions, and so on, but they do not regard these forms of culture as consisting merely of so many ways of acting. Instead, they believe that these forms of culture consist of common symbols, which are mutually shared and possessed by the members of the groups. Individual ways of acting are alike because these individuals are guiding their behavior by a symbol that they share in common. Thus, individuals wear clothing, in accordance with the custom of their group, because each of them shares the common understanding that he is supposed to wear clothing. In the same way, any custom, folkway, or way of acting common to a group of individuals is traceable back to their common symbol or understanding. (Blumer, 1937: 158f) Contemporary symbolic interactionism is sometimes divided in two branches; the Chicago school, associated with the name of Herbert Blumer, and the Iowa school centred around Manfred H. Kuhn (Manis and Meltzer, 1967: vi).11 Of these schools, it is undoubtedly the Chicago school, including names such as Everett C. Hughes, Tamotsu Shibutani, Anselm Strauss and Howard S. Becker which can make the most legitimate claim to calling itself ‘symbolic interactionist’ (Charon, 1979: 289).12 It is also the Chicago school which is most relevant for my purposes, since it was within this school that Mead’s social psychology was turned into an individualist and intersubjectivist theory of society.13 Having said this much, some qualifications are necessary. All Chicago interactionists do not adhere to an intersubjectivist theory of society, nor do Blumer and his followers explicitly deny the existence of social wholes. It is rather a matter of most of them positively fostering an individualist and intersubjectivist theory of society. In his article ‘Society as Symbolic Interaction’, Blumer postulates ‘that human society is made up of individuals who have selves’ (1969: 82). From this point of departure, he goes on to attack sociological thought for reducing human beings to organisms responding to various forces acting upon them, whether in the form of ‘social system’, ‘social structure’, ‘culture’, ‘status position’, ‘social role’, ‘custom’, ‘institution’ or whatever. The main fault with traditional sociological theory, then, is that it seems to deny or, at least, to ignore the fact that individuals have selves. Blumer recognizes two fundamental sociological views: symbolic interactionism, which lodges social action in individuals and sees society as consisting of acting people, and traditional sociology, which ‘lodges social action

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in the action of society or in some unit of society’, and which tends to view human society in terms of social structure or social organisation.14 The same message is repeated in the article on the ‘Sociological Implications of the Thought of George Herbert Mead’. Blumer renews his attack on traditional sociology for resorting to ‘societal factors, such as cultural prescriptions, values, social roles, or structural pressures’, thereby missing ‘the central point that human interaction is a positive shaping process in its own right’ (1969: 66). Against the structuralist view of traditional sociology, Blumer posits Mead’s view of society as an ongoing process of social action. Mead’s scheme definitely challenges this conception. It sees human society not as an established structure but as people meeting their conditions of life; it sees social action not as an emanation of societal structure but as a formation made by human actors; it sees this formation made by human actors; it sees this formation of action not as societal factors coming to expression through the medium of human organisms but as constructions made by actors out of what they take into account; it sees group life not as a release or expression of established structure but as a process of building up joint actions … accordingly, it sees society not as a system, whether in the form of a static, moving, or whatever kind of equilibrium, but as a vast number of occurring joint actions, many closely linked, many not linked at all, many prefigured and repetitious, others being carved out in new directions, and all being pursued to serve the purposes of the participants and not the requirements of a system. (Blumer, 1969: 74f) The same points are repeated and expanded upon in Blumer’s introductory essay to his Symbolic Interactionism. In opposition to a ‘structuralist’ conception of society, Blumer insists that ‘human groups or society exists in action and must be seen in terms of action’. More specifically, ‘a society consists of individuals interacting with one another’. Even more specifically, such interaction in human society is characteristically and predominantly on the symbolic level’ (1969: 6–7). This is the view of society as symbolic interaction. The necessary precondition for this view, however, is intersubjectivity. In addition, therefore, Blumer suggests that the nature of an object, including social objects consists of the meaning that it has for the person for whom it is the object … The meaning of objects for a person arises fundamentally out of the way they are defined to him by others with whom he interacts … Out of a process of mutual indications common objects emerge – objects that have the same meanings for a given set of people and are seen in the same manner by them. (Blumer, 1969: 11)

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Concerning joint or collective action, the action of groups, institutions, organisations and social classes, Blumer takes the view that they ‘consist of individuals fitting their lines of action to one another … The joint action of the collectivity is an interlinkage of the separate acts of the participants’ (1969: 16f). Blumer ends his introductory essay by drawing the methodological implications of the symbolic interactionist view of society. Being a subjectivist theory of society, the methodology proper to that theory is also subjectivist. In order to understand social life, it is necessary that the social scientist sees the actions of people, the objects towards which these actions are directed and the situation in which the action take place, in the same way as the acting individuals themselves. It is also necessary that the social scientist analyses the process in which human action is formed or constructed and refrains from explaining human action in terms of antecedent conditions or causes. Concerning the activity of organisations, symbolic interactionism ‘seeks explanation in the way in which the participants define, interpret, and meet the situations at their respective points’ (Blumer, 1969: 58). Symbolic interactionism, then, is Herbert Blumer’s interpretation of George Herbert Mead’s social psychological theory of the self and the view of society it suggests. Typical for this interpretation is the view of society as an ongoing process of symbolic interaction or communication, together with an insistence that society is continually constituted and reconstituted by the actions of individuals. A typical representative of this view is Tamotsu Shibutani who sees society as a ‘communicative process’ based upon consensus in the form of shared meanings (1961, passim; 1962: 134ff). This consensus is not such as to give rise to anything like a stable social structure. On the contrary, Shibutani underscores the transient character of society. Society consists of the recurrent adjustment and cooperation of associated persons through which action patterns of all kinds are formed, sustained, modified, evaded, or contravened. Sometimes the coordinated activities become highly organized, but there are also transient forms of interaction. All this suggests that human society might best be regarded as an on-going process, a becoming rather than a being. Society might be viewed most fruitfully as a succession of events, a flow of gestural interchanges among people … In this sense society can be said to exist only in the give and take among human beings. (Shibutani, 1961: 174f) Another illustration of the symbolic interactionist view of society is Anselm Strauss’s image of society as a ‘negotiated order’. Strauss, at first takes over Shibutani’s view of society as a ‘communicative process’ (Strauss [1969] 1977: 148ff, 162), but later, while investigating the organisation of work in the hospital, develops his own vision of the social order.15

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Society as subjectively meaningful interaction In short, the bases of concerted action (social order) must be reconstituted continually; or as remarked above, ‘worked at’. Such considerations have led us to emphasize the importance of negotiation – the process of give-andtake, of diplomacy, of bargaining – which characterizes organizational life. (Strauss et al., 1963: 148)

Shibutani’s and Strauss’s views of society seem to me like new wine in old bottles. They are, in all essentials, new versions of the old theory of society as a social contract. What is new, is the emphasis upon change and renewal. People are constantly engaged in ‘signing’ new contracts. It is the theory of society as an ongoing social contract. This is the reason why consensus over rules does not give rise to a stable structure. When professionals are brought together and enjoined to carry out their work in the same locale, concepts of structure (formal or informal) as relatively set systems of norms and expectations are inadequate to explain resulting activity. The activity of interacting professionals is, we submit, largely governed by continual reconstitution of bases of work through negotiation. (Strauss et al., 1964: 375) The notion of ‘negotiated order’ was initially developed by Strauss and his colleagues in order to capture the nature of work organisation in the hospital, but was extended in its use to cover the nature of social organisation generally. Society becomes an arena on which individuals meet and carry out their complex negotiations. Pushing our logic to its extreme, we might even argue that the very idea of ‘nation’ or ‘society’ is only a fiction and that, if the sociologist subscribes to this common-sense fiction, rather than viewing a nation or society as an exceedingly complex arena, he may fall into the deadly trap of merely studying the fiction as if it were a fact. (Strauss et al., 1964: 377) Admittedly this is an extreme example. Symbolic interactionism, I have said, is individualistic not so much by explicit denial of the existence of social wholes, as by a positive fostering of the alternative view of society as an intersubjective community based on shared meanings. There are also many symbolic interactionists who do not present any general picture of society at all, and some who do not deny the utility or even the truth of a holist approach to society, but who have chosen to concentrate on the more ‘microscopic’ processes of face-to-face interaction, thereby unwittingly contributing to the spread and maintenance of the intersubjective theory of society. An obvious example of this kind of attitude is Erving Goffman, who is usually included among the symbolic interactionists, even if he did not include himself in this category.

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Goffman has, in his various studies, focused consistently on face-to-face interaction, especially in the form of so-called ‘encounters’ or focused gatherings, using the models of the theatre and the game as his main analytical instruments. Most well known is the model of the theatre and the dramaturgical approach, which he used in his path-breaking study of The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1959).16 It is not at all that Goffman denies the existence of social structures; quite the contrary. He explicitly affirms their existence and also discusses their relation to the kind of ‘situated activity systems’ and the kind of social interaction he is interested in (Verhoeven, 1985). I think it is fair to say that Goffman’s main concern is with human behaviour as a manifestation of the ‘degrees of freedom’ there are within social structures. A particularly clear example of this is his discussion of ‘role distance’ in Encounters (1961: 85ff), which deals with the relative autonomy of the individual with respect to social structure. Sometimes, Goffman’s focus is on the autonomy of actors, who are then depicted as strategically rational, more or less, in the manner of rational choice. The most obvious example of this approach is his book with the title Strategic Interaction [1969] 1970. At other times his focus is on social action as a manifestation of social structure. The essays assembled in Interaction Ritual (1967) exemplify this Durkheimian view of social life. Both approaches are used in Relations in Public (1971), where Goffman points to the problematic nature or concept of ‘individual’ and casts doubt on the idea of the individual as the unit of analysis in sociology. The individual turns out to be different things in different systems of activity (pp. 23ff). Goffman, then, is an individualist, if at all, in practice only, but not always in practice, and not at all in principle. The following disclaimer comes from the ‘Introduction’ to his Frame Analysis (1974), but is typical for his position: This book is about the organization of experience – something that an individual actor can take into his mind – and not the organization of society. I make no claim whatsoever to be talking about the core matters of sociology – social organization and social structure. Those matters have been and can continue to be quite nicely studied without reference to frame at all. I am not addressing the structure of social life but the structure of experience individuals have at any moment of their social lives. I personally hold society to be first in every way and any individual’s current involvements to be second; this report deals only with matters that are second. This book will have weaknesses enough in the areas it claims to deal with; there is no need to find limitations in regard to what it does not set about to cover. (Goffman, 1974: 13) Recent symbolic interactionism seems to go in several directions. Some parts are more individualistic, others more structuralistic (Fine, 1990). If we accept that Blumer is the founder of ‘symbolic interactionism’, we may call the individualistic tendency ‘orthodox’ symbolic interactionism. This tendency unites around some version of the intersubjectivist theory of society. In his introductory contribution to the first reader on symbolic interactionism Arnold M. Rose

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depicts society as ‘a network of interacting individuals – with its culture – the related meanings and values by which individuals interact’ (1972: 13). In the introductory contribution to another reader on symbolic interactionism Bernard N. Meltzer suggests that ‘human society rests upon a basis of consensus, i.e., the sharing of meanings in the form of common understandings and expectations’ (1967: 8). The clearest and most elaborated statement of symbolic interactionism as an intersubjectivist theory of society is probably to be found in Joel M. Charon’s Symbolic Interactionism (1979: ch. 11). Charon bases his view of society mainly on the writings of Blumer, but also on those of Shibutani, Strauss and Meltzer. Society is characterised by two things: symbolic interaction and cooperation. ‘Society, then, is defined here as individuals in symbolic interaction with each other, aligning their acts, and acting cooperatively to resolve problems in situations’ (p. 161). The year after Charon’s book was published, there appeared another book with the same concise title, Symbolic Interactionism (1980), by Sheldon Stryker, but with a different message. Stryker tried to launch a more structuralist version of symbolic interactionism. In order to do so, he had to return to the pragmatist roots of symbolic interactionism and to replace Blumer by Ralph Turner, as the most important figure in recent symbolic interactionism. The main interest of Turner has been in a theory of collective behaviour, but he has also made an important contribution to sociological role theory (Turner, 1956; 1962; 1978). Like Goffman, Turner has been interested in the difference and interrelation between role and person, and, especially, in the process of role-taking, first anlysed by Mead. I have nothing to object to Stryker’s attempt to create a more structuralist tradition within symbolic interactionism – the conditions are at hand – but the fact remains that there is a more well-known individualist tradition in symbolic interactionism, associated with Herbert Blumer, Anselm Strauss, Tamotsu Shibutani and others. This tradition has created an individualist theory of society which, like that of the early Simmel, is both intersubjectivist and interactionist. The combination of these elements, may be represented as in Figure 5.1. (Horizontal arrows represent intersubjectivism and vertical arrows represent interactionism).

Figure 5.1 Society according to symbolic interactionism

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As has been noticed by two symbolic interactionists, Chad Gordon and Kenneth J. Gergen, there are certain affinities between symbolic interactionism and the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz. According to the latter, ‘the cardinal feature of the social world is its intersubjectivity. This view emphasizes the shared-in-common and mutually sanctioned set of expectations and interpretative categories within a culture’ (Gordon and Gergen, 1968: 33).

Phenomenological sociology [S]ociety as such is a concept, an abstraction – What exists in reality are individuals in whose minds society exists as a factor determining certain types of behavior. If the mental attitude no longer exists, society does no longer exist either. If people were not aware of each other’s existence, society would not exist, even if all the same people were still in existence … Thus, society is an attitude in the mind of the individual which is subject to X changes each second. It is unstable and undetermined, although it may appear constant and concrete on the surface during long periods, or made to appear this way by social theorists. (Landheer, 1952: 22) This is one of the clearest statements of the intersubjectivist theory of society I have seen. It is written by a phenomenological sociologist, who is also a methodological individualist, or so it seems. Landheer writes: ‘The individual has historical and logical priority in regard to the group; or quite simply, a group develops out of individuals because no group can exist otherwise while the individual can, at least theoretically’ (p. 38). Two methodological rules follow from this ontological thesis: (1) ‘Social science deals with processes of change which must be explained in terms of the individual’ (p. 38), and (2) ‘Social science deals with those changes in the individual which occur in a plurality of individuals and which form, consequently, the basis for what is termed social patterns’ (pp. 38f). According to Landheer, ‘the individual is the basic unit of social science, although the changes in the individual may in turn be influenced by social processes’ (p. 39). Landheer, then, is both an ontological and a methodological individualist.17 As such he is typical of phenomenological social science. In this section I am going to substantiate this claim, by a presentation of the founder of phenomenological sociology, Alfred Schutz. As we have seen in chapter 3 (pp. 80–5), phenomenology is the name of a philosophical school, founded by Edmund Husserl. Other philosophers associated with the phenomenological movement are Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Aron Gurwitch. This list of names reveals a close, but controversial, relationship between phenomenology and existentialism. Sociologists, inspired by phenomenology, include, besides Schutz, himself, Maurice Natanson, Thomas Luckmann, Peter Berger, John O’Neill, Kurt H. Wolff, Edward A. Tiryakian and, more recently, those who call themselves ‘ethnomethodologists’.18

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Schutz claims to draw his ideas on the foundations of the social sciences from the work of Husserl. This claim is not uncontested, but very difficult to assess, due to the diverging interpretations of the development of Husserl’s own thought.19 The most radical critique comes from Barry Hindess (1973a: 5ff; 1977: 49–77), who argues that Schutz’s claim to base his phenomenology upon that of Husserl is totally unfounded. That, in fact, Schutz’s phenomenology is a serious distortion of Husserl’s views. According to Hindess, the basic premise and project of Schutz is instead to be found in the methodology of Max Weber. This project is to reduce the world of objective mind to that of the actions of individuals. As such, Schutz’s ‘phenomenology’ is a continuation of the humanism and individualist idealism of the German Geisteswissenschaften tradition. I believe that the accusation of a distortion of Husserl’s views is considerably exaggerated, if not entirely unfounded, but there is little doubt about Schutz’s place in the tradition of German individualist idealism, a fact which is readily acknowledged also within the phenomenological camp. What Hindess does not seem to realise, however, is that also Husserl, especially the later Husserl, was close to the German Geisteswissenschaften tradition (see pp. 82–5).20 Schutz’s phenomenological sociology is based on the ideas of the later Husserl (Schutz [1932] 1972: 31–44), ideas which Schutz knew well from his frequent discussions with Husserl himself (Schutz, 1940: 164ff; 1959: 86ff).21 I will not enter the debate about the relationship between Schutz’s phenomenological sociology and Husserl’s philosophical phenomenology, but accept as a fact that there is something called ‘phenomenological sociology’ and that Schutz is its founding father and central figure. First, however, I will draw attention to some ideas and notions of Husserl which have been important for the phenomenological sociology of Schutz. Schutz’s ontological and methodological individualism was grounded before he became acquainted with the work of Edmund Husserl. The first influence in this direction, probably came from his teacher in economics, the methodological individualist Ludwig von Mises. In the 1920s Schutz was a participant in the ‘Mises seminar’, where the sociology and methodology of Max Weber was a favourite topic of discussion (Wagner, 1983: 11ff; Prendergast, 1986). It is possible to see both Schutz’s first book The Phenomenology of the Social World (1932) and Mises’s first treatment of philosophical topics in Epistemological Problems of Economics (1933), as outcomes of these discussions. Both works are encounters with the ideas of Max Weber. In the first phase of his intellectual development Schutz was a Weberian. He was, especially impressed by the first part of Economy and Society, where Weber lays the conceptual foundation for his individualist and subjectivist approach to sociology (Wagner, 1983: 14). Schutz adopted this approach, himself, and remained a subjectivist methodological individualist for the rest of his life. In his Preface to the posthumously published The Structures of the Life-World (1973), Schutz’s co-author Thomas Luckmann makes the following authoritative statement about Schutz: ‘He shared Max Weber’s methodological individualism and

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realized the strategic importance of an adequate theory of human action for the methodology of social science’ (p. xix). Alfred Schutz’s theory of the social world and the method of its study is laid down in all essentials in his The Phenomenology of the Social World (1932). The central problems of this work are set by the interpretive sociology of Max Weber and his predecessors. In the first paragraphs of his Phenomenology, Schutz makes clear that the fundamental problem of the social sciences is that of the relationship between individual and society. Is society prior to the individual, so that apart from the social whole the individual does not exist at all? Or should we put it quite the other way and say that the individual alone exists and that social organizations, including society itself are mere abstractions – ‘functions’ of the behavior of separate individuals? (Schutz [1932] 1972: 4) In trying to answer these questions and improve upon the answers given by Weber, Schutz appeals first of all to the philosophy of Husserl, but also to that of Henri Bergson. Schutz makes clear, however, that in grounding his analysis of Weber on the phenomenology of Husserl, he leaves aside all problems of transcendental phenomonology and stays at the level of phenomenological psychology (Schutz [1932] 1972: 43f).22 There are, in particular, two elements of Weber’s methodology which Schutz wishes to improve upon. First, there is Weber’s analysis of the subjectively intended meaning of action. According to Schutz, Weber is not absolutely clear about whose subjective meaning, the actor’s or the observer’s, he is talking about (ch. 1). Weber also fails to make the important distinction between because motives and in order to motives, the first referring to the conditions in the past which make an individual act in a certain way and the latter referring to what the individual wants to achieve with his action in the future, the goals of his projected action (pp. 86ff). Second, there is Weber’s notion of ideal type, which Schutz analyses as a matter of common sense and of scientific typifications of differing degrees of anonymity (pp. 176ff). There is, however, one element of Weber’s methodology which Schutz accepts without reservations; his methodological individualism. we frequently use sentences in which ideal types like ‘the state’, ‘the economy’, ‘the nation’, ‘the people’, or perhaps the ‘working class’ appear as grammatical subjects. In doing this, we naturally tend to personify these abstractions, treating them as if they were real persons known in indirect social experience. But we are here indulging in an anthropomorphism. Actually these ideal types are absolutely anonymous … From the sociological point of view, therefore, the term ‘state’ is merely an abbreviation for a highly complex network of interdependent personal ideal types. (Schutz [1932] 1972: 198f)

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According to Schutz, the starting-point for the social sciences is to be found in the intersubjective world of ordinary life, but this is only the starting-point. The social scientist does not stay in this intersubjective world, he/she makes it the object of study, and this study is objective. The social sciences aim at an objective investigation of the intersubjective world of ordinary life, or in Schutz’s own words: ‘All social sciences are objective meaning-contexts of subjective meaningcontexts’ (p. 241). An excellent summary of the main themes of The Phenomenology of the Social World can be found in Schutz’s article on ‘The Social World and the Theory of Social Action’ (1949).23 I will quote extensively from this article, since, in my opinion, it is a superbly clear and concise statement of the intersubjective theory of society and its methodology, but also because, written in 1940, it reveals clearly the influence of Weber and of Ludwig von Mises on the thinking of Schutz, as well as the influence of Schutz on the thinking of Friedrich von Hayek. Schutz attacks those social scientists who admit that social phenomena consist of the activities of human beings, but who nevertheless deny that it is necessary to go back to the subjective activities of human beings for their description and explanation. He admits that, on a certain level, social science can proceed without entering into the problems of subjectivity But then – and this is an important point – this reference to the subjective point of view always can be performed and should be performed. As the social world under any aspect whatsoever remains a very complicated cosmos of human activities, we can always go back to the “forgotten man” of the social sciences, to the actor in the social world whose doing and feeling lies at the bottom of the whole system … The safeguarding of the subjective point of view is the only sufficient guarantee that the world of social reality will not be replaced by a fictional non-existing world constructed by the scientific observer. (Schutz, 1960: 207, 209) In contrast to the world of natural things stands the world of social things. I cannot understand a social thing without reducing it to the human activity which has created it and, beyond it, without referring this human activity to the motives out of which it springs. I do not understand a tool without knowing the purpose for which it was designed, a sign or a symbol without knowing what it stands for, an institution if I am unfamiliar with its goals, a work of art if I neglect the intentions of the artist which it realizes. (Schutz, 1960: 211f) ‘Summing up, we come to the conclusion that social things are only understandable if they can be reduced to human activities; and human activities are only made understandable by showing their in-order-to or because motives’ (p. 214).

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Social relations consist of the intersubjective adjustments of individual’s motives in their interaction with each other. It can be proved that all social relations as they are understood by me, a human being living naively in the social world which is centered around myself, have their prototype in the social relation connecting myself with an alter ego with whom I share space and time. My social act, then, is oriented not only to the physical existence of this alter ego but to the other’s act which I expect to provoke by my own action. I can, therefore, say that the other’s reaction is the in-order-to motive of my own act. The prototype of all social relationship is an intersubjective connection of motives. (Schutz, 1960: 215) In 1940 Schutz also wrote a review of Talcott Parsons’s recently published The Structure of Social Action (1937) on the request of Friedrich von Hayek and intended for publication in Economica. Before sending the review to Hayek, Schutz sent it to Parsons for a reaction, which turned out to be such that he decided to abstain from publication. The review is now published (Schutz and Parsons, [1940–1] 1978), together with the correspondence it occasioned. Obviously Parsons and Schutz did not understand each other, despite their common interest in the sociology of Max Weber. There are several possible reasons for this. One reason may be that Parsons was a neo-Kantian, whereas Schutz was a phenomenologist. Another reason may be that Parsons was not very interested in a philosophical foundation, whereas Schutz was convinced that it is necessary. A third reason is probably that, despite their common point of departure in Weber’s theory of action, they were moving from there in opposite directions: Parsons in the direction of a holistic structural-functionalism; Schutz in the direction of a more firm individualist foundation of social theory. The main point, made by Schutz ([1940] 1978: 25ff), is that Parsons’s approach is too objectivistic, but lacks an adequate subjectivist foundation, especially a theory of motives, which is necessary to all social science. A main part of the review consists of a summary of Schutz’s own attempt to provide this foundation (pp. 33ff). ‘Summing up, we come to the conclusion that social things are understandable only if they can be reduced to human activities; and human activities can be made understandable only by showing their in-order-to or because motives’ (p. 53). Parson’s reaction was negative, and one possible reason for this is that he was already on his way to developing an even more objectivistic theory of the social system. More recently, Jürgen Habermas has combined the subjectivist approach of Schutz and the objectivist approach of Parsons in his theory of society as both life-world and system (Habermas [1981b] 1987). Schutz’s later writings are elaborations of the views put forward in The Phenomenology of the Social World, with only minor modifications, inspired mainly by his reading of William James and the symbolic interactionists. Schutz now recognises the ‘existence’ of multiple realities or sub-universes; the world of dreams, of ‘imageries and phantasms’, the world of art, the world of religious

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experience and of science, but of these worlds the world of daily life is paramount. All other worlds are derived from, and refer back to, the intersubjective life-world within which we work and think and which is pre-given to us all (Schutz, 1945a: 549ff; 1955: 186–93). This intersubjective world of everyday life is a world of meaningful objects created by individuals in their interaction with one another. ‘Thus, in these reciprocal acts of positing meaning, and of interpretation of meaning, my social world of mundane intersubjectivity is built; it is also the social world of Others, and all other social and cultural phenomena are founded upon it’ (1940: 182). Social objects, such as nations, governments, markets, prices, etc. and cultural objects, such as books, tools, works of art, etc. are meaningful phenomena created and maintained by individual human beings. According to Schutz, however, social objects – collectivities and institutions – ‘are as such not entities within the province of meaning of everyday reality but constructs of common-sense thinking which have their reality in another subuniverse of ideal relations’ (1955: 198). These ideal relations have their locus in the minds of individuals. Schutz’s idealism is an individualist idealism and he is careful to dissociate himself from Durkheim’s notion of a ‘collective consciousness’ and also from ‘Husserl’s conception of the collectivity as a subjectivity of a higher order’ (1959: 92). Of special importance for the social sciences is Schutz’s view that all social relations derive from the ultimate social reality of interaction in face-to-face relationships. The related phenomenon of social role is reduced to the typical expectations people have of each other’s behaviour.24 Turning now to the reality of ‘scientific contemplation’, we find that Schutz refers to the concepts of social science as concepts of the ‘second degree’, as concepts referring to an already conceptualised world (1953: 3; 1954: 267ff).25 We also find that, according to Schutz, these concepts do not refer to concrete human beings, but to ideal types in the form of ‘puppets’ or ‘homunculi’ (1945a: 572; 1960: 219). The concepts of social science, like those of common sense, are subjected to the postulate of subjective interpretation; a variant of methodological individualism. According to this postulate, concepts such as ‘savings’, ‘capital’, ‘business cycle’, ‘unemployment’ and ‘monopoly’ are intellectual shorthand for human actions. Correctly understood, the postulate of subjective interpretation as applied to economics as well as to all the other social sciences means merely that we always can – and for certain purposes must – refer to the activities of the subjects within the social world and their interpretation, motives, relevances and so on. (Schutz, 1953: 27) If there is a central theme of Schutz’s theory of society, it is intersubjectivity (cf. Rogers, 1983: ch. 8). The life-world we all inhabit and experience, is an intersubjective world we share in common. It has been suggested, by Prendergast (1986: 3, 11), that the origin of this theme, in Schutz’s theory of society, should be sought in his early attachment to the Austrian School of Economics, which,

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according to Schutz, lacked, but needed, an adequate understanding of intersubjectivity. In the phenomenology of Husserl, Schutz found a theory seriously concerned with the problematic fact of intersubjectivity. In the natural attitude we take it for granted that we live in an intersubjective world, shared, to some degree, by all of us. In his last book on The Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl called the common-sense part of this world, the life-world. The main challenge, for Husserl, however, was to provide a transcendental constitution of intersubjectivity. His main attempt to do so was in Cartesian Meditations (see pp. 83f ). By the end of his life, Schutz voiced serious objections to Husserl’s treatment of transcendental intersubjectivity (Schutz [1957] 1970). I neglect the details and turn to the main conclusion: according to Schutz, it is simply impossible to constitute an intersubjective world, or community, from the transcendental ego, since ‘reciprocal understanding and communication already presuppose a community of knowledge’ (p. 72). Many unsettling questions arise concerning the transcendental ego. The transcendetal ego, we recall, is a Leibnizian monad, ‘[b]ut how can my full monad in its concretization enter into a transcendental we-relationship with yours? (p. 76). Is there such a thing as a transcendental we? ‘[I]s it conceivable and meaningful to speak of a plurality of transcendental egos?’ (p. 77). ‘Are the Sumerians and the pygmies of the African bush, who are unknown to me, actually constituted in my meditating ego? Do I constitute Socrates or does he constitute me?’ (pp. 81f). As a result of these considerations we must conclude that Husserl’s attempt to account for the constitution of transcendental intersubjectivity in terms of the operations of the consciousness of the transcendental ego has not succeeded. It is to be surmised that intersubjectivity is not a problem of constitution which can be solved within the transcendental sphere, but is rather a datum (Gegebenheit) of the life-world. It is the fundamental ontological category of human existence in the world and, therefore, of all philosophical anthropology. As long as man is born of women, intersubjectivity and the we-relationship will be the foundation of all other categories of human existence. The possibility of reflection on the self, discovery of the ego, capacity for performing the epoché, and the possibility of all communication and of establishing a communicative surrounding world as well, are founded on the primal experience of the we-relationship … It can … be said with certainty that only such an ontology of the life-world, not a transcendental constitutional analysis, can clarify that essential relationship of intersubjectivity which is the basis of all social science – even though, as a rule, it is there taken for granted and accepted without question. (Schutz [1957] 1970: 82) When Schutz died in 1959, he was engaged in the project of creating such an ontology of the life-world. The project was finished by his student Thomas Luckmann and published as a joint work called The Structures of the Life-World (1973: 19). In this work, there are some openings towards objectivism and

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structuralism, but since it is partly written by Luckmann, it is difficult to know whether these openings really reflect Schutz’s views. Since they point in the direction of the views expressed by Berger and Luckmann (1966), they might be the contribution of Luckmann, more than of Schutz. I conclude, therefore, with words written by a Popperian (objectivist) methodological individualist: Of the several forms of individualism, which is a basic schema in the social sciences, the phenomenological approach is one of the most significant and extreme. The overriding aim is to interpret all sociological happenings in relation to the individual experiences of individual people. (Wisdom, 1973: 257) The main idea of the phenomenological view of society is that of intersubjectivity. Unlike symbolic interactionism, it is almost exclusively concerned with intersubjective meaning, but hardly at all with social interaction. The view of society contained in phenomenology, may be represented like this (the continuous horizontal arrows indicate that intersubjectivism is more important than interaction, which is represented by broken arrows):

Figure 5.2 Society according to phenomenological sociology

Existentialism Existentialism first arose in Germany, and it is common to see Karl Jaspers as the founder of the movement. The most important forerunners are Sören Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Another important figure in the early history of the movement was Martin Heidegger. Today we think of existentialism as mainly a French movement of thought associated, above all, with names such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice MerleauPonty. Existentialism developed in close connection with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Because of this, it is sometimes called ‘existential phenomenology’. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, above all, is a phenomenological philosopher, but also Jean Paul Sartre was heavily indebted to Husserl. Equally important, however, is the French heritage. Existentialism is, like phenomenology, a philosophy of consciousness and, like the latter, it takes its

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point of departure in the cogito of Descartes. Another important source of inspiration is the early philosophy of Henri Bergson. The influence of Bergson is most obvious in the case of Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), the first French existentialist philosopher, who was also a Catholic, interested, above all, in the prospects of Christian freedom and morality in the modern world. Marcel was the first to introduce existentialism in France, but it was Jean Paul Sartre who made it the most popular philosophy in post-war France. Jean-Paul Sartre was an atheist, with a different attitude to the world, but he shared Marcel’s focus on the freedom of the individual subject. Sartre started as a phenomenological philosopher, addressing various problems in Husserl’s analysis of consciousness. In the latter half of the 1930s, he wrote some minor works, where he criticised Husserl’s analysis of the transcendental ego and laid the foundation for a phenomenological psychology of emotions. The phenomenological basis of existentialism is evident also in Sartre’s first magnum opus Being and Nothingness (1943), which bears the subtitle: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, but now he orients himself, also to Heidegger and Hegel. Ontology means a theory of being and, according to Sartre, there are two realms of being: ‘being-in-itself ’ and ‘being-for-itself ’. Being-in-itself is the realm of non-conscious being, or of things, passive and inert. Being-for-itself is the realm of consciousness, of activity and freedom. Having established these two realms of being, Sartre goes on to consider their relation. Like Heidegger, he conceives of it as the ‘being-in-the world’, on the part of being-for-itself. Since only human beings have consciousness, this relation takes the form of ‘man-in the world’. According to Sartre, the characteristic attitude of man-in-the-world is interrogation, to pose questions. And to questions there are two possible replies: yes and no. The very possibility of a negative reply creates ‘nothingness’. ‘Man is the being through whom nothingness comes to the world’ ([1943] 1956: 24). Now, if being is what is, nothingness is what is not, but which could be; nothingness is possibility. It is up to you and me to realise the possible. ‘Man’s relation with being is that he can modify it’ (p. 24). Existentialism is a philosophy of freedom. Human beings are free to choose, not only this or that, but their own lives, or essences. This freedom in the face of an open future of possibilities, however, creates anguish. But since anguish is not a pleasant feeling, the immediate reaction is flight from freedom ([1943] 1956: 40ff). This reaction is a manifestation of what Sartre calls ‘bad faith’. Bad faith is a form of self-deception. We delude ourselves into believing that we must do all the things we are expected to do. We renounce ‘being-for-itself ’ and enter ‘being-in-itself ’. According to Sartre, the traditional sociological picture of social life, as the enactment of social roles, is a life in the attitude of bad faith (pp. 59f). Existentialism, then, is a form of radical individualism. This becomes even more evident when Sartre turns to an analysis of ‘being-for-others’. On this point, he sides with Husserl’s monadology and solipsism, against Hegel’s holism and Heidegger’s collectivism ([1943] 1956: 223–52). The view of society that emerges is Hobbesian. If I am free to pursue my own project, it is only natural

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that my freedom should clash with that of Other. In asserting my freedom, I try to enslave Other and Other tries to enslave me. ‘Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others’ (p. 364). The reason for this situation is that each is the limit to the freedom of the other. ‘From the moment that I exist I establish a factual limit to the Other’s freedom. I am this limit, and each of my projects traces the outline of this limit around the Other’ (p. 409). In the end, this destructive relation gives rise to hate, first of Other, and eventually of all others (pp. 410–12). As Sonia Kruks has pointed out, this bleak picture of the human condition has much in common with Hobbes’ stature of nature, but without the escape of a social contract. The world would be Hobbesian not only in the sense of being fundamentally conflictual, but in the sense of being necessarily random, unstructured and anarchic. For the main features of Hobbes’ state of nature are not only fear and conflict, but lack of stability, of order, of institutions, of common linguistic meaning – of all those regularities that permit human culture to develop and which are made possible for Hobbes only by the contract to end the state of nature. (Kruks, 1990: 76) Sartre goes on to discuss and reject Heidegger’s idea of Mitsein and Durkheim’s idea of a collective consciousness (p. 414). His conclusion is that ‘the experience of the We-subject is a pure psychological, subjective event in a single consciousness … It is a question only of a way of feeling myself in the midst of others’ (p. 425). Being and Nothingness did not satisfy the Marxist intellectuals of the French communist party, who saw it as a manifestation of individualism and subjectivism. Sartre, who was sympathetic to the communist cause, and supported the party, felt obliged to clarify his position. This he did in the short essay on The Humanism of Existentialism (1947), which is the most accessible presentation of the latter doctrine. In this essay, he complains, like virtually every founder of a doctrine, that the word ‘existentialism’ has become ‘so stretched and has taken on such a broad meaning, that it no longer means anything at all’ ([1947] 1965: 33). Nevertheless, what all existentialists have in common, ‘is that they believe that existence precedes essence, or if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the starting point’ (p. 34). This mean that human beings make themselves and must assume full responsibility for what they make of their lives. ‘Subjectivism means, on the one hand, that an individual chooses and makes himself; and, on the other, that it is impossible for man to transcend human subjectivity’ (p. 37). The main message of existentialism, then, is that we are free to choose our own lives. ‘If existence really does precede essence, there is no fixed human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free … condemned to be free’ ([1947] 1965: 41). So far, there is nothing that goes beyond the message of Being and Nothingness, but Sartre goes on to take some small steps in a more collectivistic direction. A first step, I believe, is his suggestion that in making yourself,

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you ‘at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be’ (p. 37). In this way, we all contribute to the production and reproduction of society and of humanity. if I want to marry, to have children; even if this marriage depends solely on my own circumstances or passion or wish, I am involving all humanity in monogamy and not merely myself. Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man. (Sartre [1947] 1965: 37) This is really a piece of social constructionism, which reminds of ethnomethodology and of Anthony Gidden’s theory of structuration. The point Sartre is making is that social phenomena are, in Gidden’s terminology, ‘recursive’, they exist only in and through the actions, by which they are reproduced. An important difference is that, whereas Giddens believes that human beings are able constantly to create society only with the aid of social structures already there, if only as memory traces, Sartre believes that ‘man, with no support and no aid, is condemned every moment to invent man’ ([1947] 1965: 37; my italics). Even so, Sartre rejects solipsism and I feel that there is a certain ambiguity on this point. Sartre rejects the individualistic subjectivism of Descartes and Kant on the ground that ‘we reach our own self in the presence of others’ (p. 51). Others are the condition of our own existence. ‘Hence, let us at once announce the discovery of a world which we shall call intersubjectivity; this is the world in which man decides what he is and what others are’ (p. 53). The message of Sartre’s social constructionism is that we are responsible for the kind of community we live in and recreate, but there is always the possibility of creating another one, more to our liking; and if you want to do it by means of collective action you are free to do so. Existentialism is a humanism, but is Marxism a humanism? Sartre thought so and many other Marxists thought so too, but, not all of them. In France, there soon developed a structuralist version of Marxism, which denied that Marxism is a humanism and went as far as to reject all forms of subjectivism and humanism.26 Sartre would soon abandon his early version of existentialism, too, and move in a more Marxist direction, but he never moved as far as Althusser in denying the human subject. Far from it. His final view of society is presented in his second magnum opus, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). In this work, Sartre recognises society as an objective reality, made up of groups, organisations and institutions. These objective structures are part of the situation in which human subjects act. Life in society is conceived of as dialectic between human subjects and objective structures, much like the view of Berger and Luckmann in their The Social Construction of Reality (see pp. 161f). Sartre’s move from existentialism to Marxism is usually explained in terms of his allegiance to the French communist party. Sartre was not the only existentialist to move in a more structuralist direction, however. Before him, Simone de

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Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty had already taken existentialism in this direction. Could it be that Sartre was simply following their example? (Kruks, 1990: 16–18, 83ff). The second volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s classic, The Second Sex (1949), begins with the famous statement: ‘One is not born a woman, but rather becomes, a woman’ ([1949] 1988: 295). This statement is in line with the orthodox existentialist thesis that existence precedes essence, but the continuation is less orthodox: ‘No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch which is described as feminine’ (p. 295). According to de Beauvoir, a woman does not have the freedom to choose herself, she is the victim of a situation created and maintained by men. The culture and social institutions, which constitute patriarchy offer no room for escape. ‘Marriage is the destiny traditionally offered to woman’ (p. 445), and it leads to subordination and to ‘work within the home’, which ‘gives her no autonomy’ (p. 475). Because of her more structuralist view of society, Sonia Kruks has suggested that de Beauvoir was closer to Merleau-Ponty than to Sartre (Kruks, 1990: 111), but I believe that she was more of a structuralist than either of them. MerleauPonty was, above all, a phenomenologist, taking his point of departure in Husserl’s idea of life-world and, like Husserl and Schutz, he entertained an intersubjectivist theory of society, or so it seems to me.27 Two things tell against this interpretation of Merleau-Ponty, however. First, Merleau-Ponty is sympathetic to structuralist analysis in general and to that of French anthropology in particular, and structuralism is not normally seen as compatible with individualism in any form. If, however, as in Merleau-Ponty, structuralism is seen mainly as a method or a form of analysis, but not as an ontological thesis about social reality, the problem can be made to disappear. If, also, structure is seen as entering social reality only through the lived experience of individuals, structuralist analysis becomes compatible with an intersubjectivist theory of society (see Merleau-Ponty, 1974: 116, 120). Second, Merleau-Ponty is also sympathetic to Marxian social analysis. This is no less of a problem. Marxism is even more difficult to reconcile with an intersubjectivist theory of society. But also this difficulty is, somehow, overcome by Merleau-Ponty. It is done by concentrating exclusively on the philosophical anthropology of the young Marx. But, whereas the later Sartre interpreted this anthropology as based on a dialectic of subjective meaning and objective social reality, Merleau-Ponty conceives of Marx as a champion of intersubjectivism and uses him against Durkheim. Marx, unlike Durkheim, would not even agree to speak of a collective consciousness whose instruments are individuals … If it is neither a ‘social nature’ given outside ourselves, nor the ‘World Spirit’, nor the movement appropriate to ideas, nor collective consciousness, then what is, for Marx, the vehicle of history and the motivating force of the dialectic? It is man involved in a

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certain way of appropriating nature in which the mode of his relationship with others takes shape; it is concrete human intersubjectivity, the successive and simultaneous community of existences in the process of self-realization in a type of ownership which they both submit to and transform, each created by and creating the other. (Merleau-Ponty, 1974: 177f) Merleau-Ponty’s view of society, then, would seem to be a brand of the intersubjectivist theory of society. Existentialism did not make much of an impact on social science. At least not for a start and not positively. The main impact is probably negative, but as such it was far from negligible. The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre was the main target of attack for the French structuralists, who have conquered the world, since the 1960s. The sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, starts his main theoretical works with a critique of Sartre’s individualism, subjectivism and voluntarism (Bourdieu [1972] 1977: 73–6; [1980] 1990: 42–7). Bourdieu was more favourably disposed towards the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty.28 Among the most outspoken representatives of existential phenomenology in sociology is Edward A. Tiryakian.29 In his version, existentialist-phenomenological sociology becomes a hospitable theory, able to assimilate virtually all of traditional sociology. Not only Weber, Simmel and Mead, which makes sense, but also Durkheim, Sorokin and Parsons (Tiryakian, 1965), which is more difficult to understand. Most phenomenologists obviously find it necessary to relate their views to Durkheim’s notion of ‘collective consciousness’. The reason for this is not hard to find. Durkheim denied the possibility of reducing social facts, to psychological facts, and this seems to imply a rejection of the intersubjectivist theory of society. If the collective consciousness is a reality sui generis, it is presumably irreducible to the intersubjective social reality of phenomenology. Schutz and Merleau-Ponty were right, from a phenomenological point of view, to reject Durkheim’s notion of a ‘collective consciousness’. Berger and Luckmann accepted it (see pp. 161f ), but in doing so, went far beyond Schutz’ phenomenological foundation for the social sciences. Tiryakian represents a third reaction. He accepts the idea of a ‘collective consciousness’, but reduces it to the ‘we-pole’ of intersubjective consciousness; the ‘form of intersubjective consciousness which constitutes any and every community’, that is the commonly shared life-world (1965: 180–2; 1973: 192ff). In making this reduction, Tiryakian is true to phenomenology, but hardly to Durkheim. For Tiryakian, as for Schutz and Merleau-Ponty, the central tenet of a phenomenological social science is the intersubjectivist theory of society. ‘Above all, it [existential phenomenology] is an orientation that seeks to find the structure of social phenomena in their meanings, meanings which are grounded in the experience of subjects’. The primary application of existential phenomenology to sociology, therefore, is that of ‘sensitizing us to the nature and fundamental role of intersubjectivity in the structure of social action’ (Tiryakian, 1973: 209–21).

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Ethnomethodology Ethnomethodology is an Anglo-American movement, like symbolic interactionism. Its founder is Harold Garfinkel. At least, it was Garfinkel who coined the term ‘ethnomethodology’. Before he did, however, he was a pupil of both Parsons and Schutz. Since ethnomethodology is usually considered to be a development of phenomenology, it would seem that he sided with Schutz against Parsons, even though he wrote his dissertation for the latter. Be that as it may, ethnomethodology is, at least to some extent, a result of Garfinkel’s critical encounter with the structural-functional theory of his teacher Talcott Parsons.30 According to Garfinkel, ethnomethodology ‘is an organizational study of a member’s knowledge of his ordinary affairs, of his own organized enterprises, where that knowledge is treated by us as part of the same setting that it also makes orderable’ ([1968] 1974: 18).31 Among the many members and sympathisers of the ethnomethodological movement are Egon Bittner, Aaron V. Cicourel, Harvey Sachs, Emmanuel Schlegloff, David Sudnow, D. Lawrence Wieder, Don Zimmerman, Melvin Pollner, Thomas P. Wilson, Alan Blum and Peter McHugh. Ethnomethodology, as indicated by the name, is primarily a methodological approach to the study of social life. As such, it is, however, based upon certain assumptions about the nature of social life. It is with ethnomethodology’s (implicit) view of society, rather than with its methodology, that this section is concerned. Ethnomethodology is often classified as being part of or, at least, an outgrowth of the phenomenological movement, even its most vital part.32 An exception is Mary F. Roger (1983: ch. 7), who points out the important differences there are between these movements. Most important, ethnomethodology is much less concerned with subjective meaning than is phenomenology, but more concerned with actions, or practices. It has also been argued that ethnomethodology shows close affinities with symbolic interactionism (Denzin, 1969; Alexander, 1985: 43, 51; 1987: 272ff). If this is so, it ought to be individualistic and intersubjectivistic.33 This conclusion has been contested, however. While no one would deny that ethnomethodology is heavily influenced by the phenomenology of Schutz, the affinities with interactionism have been denied by members of the ethnomethodological movement (Zimmerman and Wieder, 1971). It has also been argued that ethnomethodology is close to hermeneutics, ordinary language philosophy and even French structuralism, and, therefore, not individualistic and subjectivistic.34 I do not deny that ethnomethodology is infected by ordinary language philosophy, hermeneutics and even structuralism, but not enough to make it immune to individualism and subjectivism. I would like to argue, instead, for the more important similarities between ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. Ethnomethodology, like symbolic interactionism is highly critical of structural-functional sociology with its ‘oversocialized conception of man’ (Wrong, 1961). Blumer’s critique of traditional sociology is echoed in Garfinkel’s reference to the ‘man-in-the-sociologist’s-society’ as a ‘cultural dope’ (1967: 68). Ethnomethodology goes even further than symbolic interactionism in viewing

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society as a process (rather than as an order). ‘Where others might see “things”, “givens” or “facts of life”, the ethnomethodologist sees (or attempts to see) process: the process through which the perceivedly stable features of socially organized environments are continually created and sustained’ (Pollner, 1974: 27).35 Society, although constantly reconstructed or reconstituted, is never there as something ‘tangible’. It has a transient or, to borrow a term from Habermas, an ‘occasional’ character (Habermas [1981b] 1987: 130). ‘The basic position is that social structures, conventionally defined as patterned social relationships, become visible and viable only as practical features of concrete moments of human existence’, or in other words: society is ‘the world as it happens’ (Boden, 1990: 190). To conclude: according to ethnomethodology, ‘Social reality is constantly created by the actors; it is not a preexisting entity’. This is the exact opposite of Durkheim’s holistic view of social facts, but similar to that of symbolic interactionism. Finally, it would be somewhat odd if ethnomethodology did not exhibit important similarities with symbolic interactionism, since it is a development of Schutz’s phenomenology, which is certainly close to symbolic interactionism in many respects (cf. Wagner, 1983: 73f, 136–40). Against Durkheim, Garfinkel argues that social facts are accomplishments. They are ‘accomplishments of the concerted activities of daily life’. But for concerted action to be possible, there must be some rationality or accountability, some common knowledge of these accomplishments or the way they are achieved. This common knowledge is the topic (and resource) of ethnomethodological study. ‘Ethnomethodological studies analyze everyday activities as member’s methods for making those same activities visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-allpractical-purposes, i.e., “accountable”, as organization of commonplace everyday activities’ (Garfinkel, 1967: vii). This double character of everyday activities, of being both accomplishments and ‘accountable’, is called with one of ethnomethodology’s most cherished terms, their reflexivity. The second most important term of ethnomethodology is indexicality. By ‘indexicality’ is understood the property of member’s talk and conduct of being dependent for their meaning and truth upon (1) the biography and present state of the speaker or agent and (2) upon the linguistic and social context in which talk and conduct take place. Ethnomethodology, then, becomes ‘the investigation of the rational properties of indexical expressions as contingent ongoing accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 11). Ethnomethodology, like both symbolic interactionism and phenomenological social science, finds the basis of social order in member’s shared meanings or common understandings. Garfinkel is anxious to make clear, however, that these common understandings are not of substantive matters, but of member’s methods for making their practical actions accountable, i.e., rational for all practical purposes. Common understandings have an operational structure. Garfinkel also attacks sociologists for taking the social order for granted, as a point of departure, instead of asking how social order is possible. He finds an exception in Alfred Schutz, however, and inspired by him, goes on to investigate the routine grounds of everyday activities, that is, ‘how the structures of

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everyday actitivies are ordinarily and routinely produced and maintained’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 38). Garfinkel’s solution to the problem of order is not as radical as many ethnomethodologists would have it. It is, in fact, the typical answer, not only of the intersubjectivist theory of society, but of sociological role theory in general. Social order is seen as based upon people’s expectations of each other’s actions and upon the ability of competent members of a language community to comply with these expectations. Earlier the argument was made that the possibility of common understanding does not consist in demonstrated measures of shared knowledge of social structure, but consists instead and entirely in the enforceable character of actions in compliance with the expectancies of everyday life as a morality. Common sense knowledge of the facts of social life for the members of the society is institutionalized knowledge of the real world. Not only does common sense knowledge portray a real society for members, but in the manner of a self fulfilling prophecy the features of the real society are produced by persons’ motivated compliance with these background expectancies. Hence the stability of concerted actions should vary directly with whatsoever are the real conditions of social organization that guarantee persons’ motivated compliance with this background texture of relevance as a legitimate order of beliefs about life in society seen ‘from within’ the society. (Garfinkel, 1967: 53) Ethnomethodology’s claim to originality, to having effected a radical revision of the problem of common understandings, rests upon two distinctions: (1) ‘the distinction between the social world as topic of, and resource for inquiry’ and (2) the related distinction between a ‘normative’ and an ‘interpretive’ paradigm in sociology. While traditional sociology treats common understandings, especially rules, as resources used in their explanations, ethnomethodology turns them into the topic of inquiry. The social order is turned from something taken for granted into a problem. This alternative conception of social inquiry hinges on ‘the occasioned corpus of social features’. By use of the term occasioned corpus, we wish to emphasize that the features of socially organized activities are particular, contingent accomplishments of the production and recognition work of parties to the activity. We underscore the occasioned character of the corpus in contrast to a corpus of member’s knowledge, skill and belief standing prior to and independent of any actual occasion in which such knowledge, skill, and belief is displayed or recognized. The latter conception is usually refered to by the term culture. (Zimmerman and Pollner, 1971: 94) What distinguishes ethnomethodology (and phenomenology) from traditional sociology is its treatment of rules. According to traditional sociology (and linguis-

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tics) rules are accepted as given. Social order (and language) is seen as a matter of following these rules. According to ethnomethodology, things are much more complex. Talk and conduct, far from being a simple matter of following clear-cut rules, pose tremendous problems of application in concrete situations. The operationalisation of rules into criteria for use almost always ends with an et cetera clause. The application of rules, therefore, involves an important element of ad hocing and glossing practices (Garfinkel, 1967: 18–24). This difference between ethnomethodology and traditional sociology is the basis of the distinction between an ‘interpretive’ and a ‘normative’ paradigm in sociology (Wilson, 1971). The distinction between an interpretive and a normative paradigm is genuine and important. As far as I can see, the interpretive paradigm is largely coextensive with what I call ‘the intersubjectivist theory of society’. This is why I disagree with those ethnomethodologists who, like Zimmerman and Wieder, exaggerate the differences between ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism and even classify symbolic interactionism as belonging to the normative paradigm (Zimmerman and Wieder, 1971: 286–8), but tend to agree with those ethnomethodologists who, like Wilson and Cicourel, see the important continuities between symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. According to Wilson, ethnomethodology belongs, together with symbolic interactionism, to the interpretive paradigm in sociology. Typical features of this paradigm are the view of social interaction as an interpretive, rather than as a rule-governed, process and the view of complex social phenomena as ‘patterned arrangements of interactions among individual actors’ (Wilson, 1971: 66). Thus, social organization is not treated as an objectively existing structure. Rather, the question is raised how it is that the members establish repetitiveness, stability, regularity, and continuity over space and time as features of their social world that are taken by themselves and anyone else as objective matters of fact rather than as creatures of fantasy or whim. (Wilson, 1971: 78f) Needless to say this view of social organisation has certain consequences for ethnomethodology’s view of social roles. Drawing upon symbolic interactionists such as Goffman, Turner and Blumer, Wilson emphasises role-taking as an interpretive process, rather than role behaviour as conformity to norms. Cicourel, who like Wilson is much influenced by Turner, emphasises role-taking and rolemaking as modifying and creative elements of role behaviour, but also follows Shibutani and Strauss in their view of society as a negotiated or constructed order.36 A corollary of the processual and occasional view of society is the ‘nominalist’ view that only individuals exist, but not institutions or other social wholes. On this view, to treat ‘social things’ as if they existed is to reify social reality.37 Wilson (1971: 58f), consequently, adheres to individualism as an ontological thesis about society (but not to psychological reductionism), while Cicourel (1981: 58–61)

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takes the view that macro-phenomena (concepts) can be, and should be, understood and analysed as aggregates of micro-situations (concepts). Pointing out these similarities between ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism is not to deny their dissimilarities. Symbolic interactionism is closer to traditional sociology and its interest in norms and roles, while ethnomethodology is closer to hermeneutics, ordinary language philosophy and structuralism, and their interest in language. There has been within sociology as a whole an increasing interest in language, and ethnomethodology is one of its most significant manifestations. What are the implications of this ‘linguistic turn’ for the question of the individualism and subjectivism of ethnomethodology? I think it is fair to say that the main thrust of the linguistic turn in the human sciences has been holistic. There is not, however, a necessary relation between an increasing interest in language and a holistic theory of society, or a holistic methodology. It all depends upon the view taken of language as a social phenomenon. My impression is that the view of language underlying ethnomethodological investigations of its uses is individualistic.38 The linguistic turn of sociology has taken two principal forms: (1) language has been seen as a phenomenon analogous or similar to society and (2) language has been seen as constitutive of social phenomena (Giddens, 1979: 4; KnorrCetina, 1981: 2–7). Ethnomethodology has followed both these routes, but mainly the second. There are several sources of the lingustic turn in the human sciences: hermeneutics, structuralist lingustics and ordinary language philosophy. What is the relation of ethnomethodology to these traditions? To begin with hermeneutics, it is easy to see certain superficial similarities between this tradition and ethnomethodology, but hard to find any deeper kinship between them. Above all, it is difficult to find any sign of direct influence of hermeneutics upon ethnomethodology. Hermeneutics might, for the present purpose, be understood in the crystallised form of the hermeneutic circle. As a matter of fact, there are two distinct but related circles. The first circle is temporal and connects understanding and pre-understanding. The second circle expands and contracts in the context of meaning and connects part to whole; word to sentence, sentence to text and social action to social system. It is only when applied to the relation between social action and social system that the hermeneutic circle implies a holist methodology (Udehn, 1987: 220–6). Ethnomethodology has not, however, made such use of the hermeneutic circle. Its main similarity with hermeneutics lies in stressing the importance for understanding of pre-understanding. But this is not incompatible with individualism or subjectivism. It is intersubjectivism over time.39 Another similarity between hermeneutics and ethnomethodology can be found in their emphasis on the contextuality of talk and conduct – but more about that below. The similarities to French structuralism are even more superficial. On closer inspection, they boil down to little more than a common interest in language, but from different perspectives. It is admitted that French structuralism and

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ethnomethodology rely on different theories of language. While the former relies on Ferdinand de Saussure and is interested in language as a system or structure (language), the latter relies primarily on English ordinary language philosophy and is interested in the use of language (parole).40 As a general observation, I would say that ethnomethodology tends to be averse to all kinds of structuralism, including linguistic structuralism (see, e.g., Douglas, 1971: 31ff and Zimmerman and Wieder, 1971: 107ff). There is one exception to this; Cicourel’s cognitive ethnomethodology. This version of ethnomethodology is explicitly formulated as similar, in certain respects, not to French structuralism, but to another member of the structuralist family; Chomskyan linguistics. Chomsky’s distinction between surface structure and deep structure has a direct counterpart in Cicourel’s distinction between the surface rules of the normative order and the interpretive procedures used by members when applying the surface rules to concrete situations. With this notion of ‘interpretive procedures’, Cicourel provides one answer to the ethnomethodological quest for something universal, invariant and trans-situational amidst the otherwise haphazard nature of social reality. Interpretive procedures are commonly shared and socially learned cognitive schemes operating upon the surface rules of the normative order and providing a ‘sense of social structure’. The key word here is sense, so it would seem that Cicourel is safely anchored to the individualist and subjectivist side (Cicourel, 1974: 99ff; see also KnorrCetina, 1981: 6f). The linguistic theory (theories) most obviously to be found behind ethnomethodology’s interest in language is that of English ordinary language philosophy. The influence of this philosophy can be found most expressly in ethnomethodology’s Wittgensteinian talk about social practices and in its primary concern with the contextuality of talk and conduct. Does not talk about social practices imply a transcendence of subjectivism and does not a concern with the contextuality of talk and conduct lead to a transcendence of both subjectivism and individualism? Not necessarily. To begin with the second question, it is true that, on a certain analysis, a concern with contextuality leads to holism, but I cannot find that ethnomethodologists go that far in their analysis. It is also true that ordinary language philosophers, such as Peter Winch and John R. Searle, have advanced arguments, based upon the contextuality of social action against individualism and subjectivism. But these are exceptions. In the main, ordinary language philosophy is individualistic and subjectivistic (Strawson, 1970: 4–9), and so, I believe, is ethnomethodology. Ethnomethodology’s term for contextuality is ‘indexicality’. Or, perhaps better, indexicality is one form of contextuality. If we look a little bit closer at the ethnomethodological analysis and use of ‘indexicality’, we find little to suggest that it is anything but subjectivistic. The notion of ‘indexicality’ goes back to Husserl, but the immediate source of Garfinkel’s use of this term is the philosopher Yehoshua Bar-Hillel. According to him, indexical sentences are such as contain tensed verbs or expressions like ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘now’,

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‘yesterday’, and ‘this’. Such sentences are dependent for their meaning and truth upon the pragmatic context of their production. By ‘pragmatic context’ BarHillel understands ‘the context which the producer might have had “in his mind”’ (1954: 366, 371). According to Bar-Hillel, then, indexicality goes together with a subjectivist theory of meaning. What matters is the subject’s own ‘definition of the situation’. This is also the way most, if not all, ethnomethodologists understand ‘indexicality’. The Zimmerman–Pollner–Wieder group, which among ethnomethodologists is most concerned with the problem of indexicality, is also the most subjectivistic.41 Garfinkel’s and Sack’s analysis of indexicality might seem a little more difficult to reconcile with individualism and subjectivism. Garfinkel and Sacks take off from Bar-Hillel, and as long as they follow him there is no problem to do so. According to Garfinkel and Sacks (Garfinkel, 1967: 4f; Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970: 347–50), a characteristic feature of indexical expressions is that their denotation is relative to the speaker, or user. If this is the reason why they oppose indexical to objective expressions, it is hard to see why their view of indexicality is anything but subjectivistic. Problems begin when they start talking about activities being organisationally situated and category-bound (Garfinkel, 1967: 11, 32–4; Sacks, 1972: 221–4). It is, supposedly, this kind of talk, which has led to the suggestion that ethnomethodology is an expression of methodological situationalism, but not of methodological individualism (Knorr-Cetina, 1981: 7–15). This suggestion is based on a misunderstanding. Methodological individualism, far from failing to refer to ‘interaction in social situations’ is explicitly stated in just those terms. Methodological individualism, then, is not characterised by a neglect of interaction, or of the social situation in which it takes place, but by the way it conceives of interaction and the social situation. The distinguishing feature of the strong version of methodological individualism is that it sees the social situation as consisting of other individuals, but not of social institutions, or social structure. In this, there is basic agreement between ethnomethodology and methodological individualism. As we have already seen, ethnomethodology does not accept the social order as something given, to be used by the social scientist as a resource for making explanations. To do this is to be guilty of reifying social reality; of turning a mere epiphenomenon into something having causal efficacy. Karin Knorr-Cetina also mentions an argument by Maurice Mandelbaum (1955) – similar to those of Winch and Searle – to the effect that the contextuality of social action implies that reference to a social action is also, at least implicitly, reference to the institutional context in which it takes place. She also makes the observation that while it is the case that micro-sociological approaches, including ethnomethodology, make use of institutional concepts, they have not taken notice of the holistic implications of this phenomenon (Knorr-Cetina, 1981: 12f; cf. also Zimmerman, 1978: 10). The closest ethnomethodology has come to Mandelbaum’s argument is, probably, Sacks’s analysis of categorybound activities. Category-bound activities, according to Sacks, are such activities that ‘are taken by members to be done by some particular, or several particular, categories of members’ (Sacks, 1972: 222). Activities are tied to cate-

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gories of members by norms and these norms provide the basis for our observation and description of these same activities. ‘Crying’, for instance is done by babies, but not by ‘big boys’. Sacks’s main interest, however, is in the sequential ordering of activities, especially conversations. A standard example is that of saying ‘Hello!’ as a conventional form of ‘greeting’, tied to certain individuals and situations by norms; these conventions and norms being also the basis for categorizing a token of ‘hello’ as an instance of ‘greeting’ (pp. 224–8).42 Certain similarities notwithstanding, Sacks does not go as far as Mandelbaum in his argument. Mandelbaum’s decisive argument is not that actions, and descriptions of actions, are governed by rules, or even that members, therefore, use holistic concepts – methodological individualism can assimilate that – but that institutions make up social systems, so that reference to certain social actions implies reference to social systems (see Udehn, 1987: 220–31). Garfinkel’s and Sacks’s writings are also replete with talk about ‘routines’, ‘practices’ and ‘social structures’. This terminology – and also more substantial considerations – has led some commentators to draw the conclusion that ethnomethodology has abandoned subjectivism for a more objectivist approach, directed at the analysis of language.43 This conclusion finds support in Garfinkel’s and Sacks’s definition of ethnomethodology’s central notion of ‘member’. The notion of member is the heart of the matter. We do not use the term to refer to a person. It refers instead to a mastery of natural language, which we understand in the following way … We offer the observation that persons, because of the fact that they are heard to be speaking a natural language, somehow are heard to be engaged in the objective production and objective display of common-sense knowledge of everyday activities as observable and reportable phenomena. We ask what it is about natural language that permits speakers and auditors to hear, and in other ways to witness, the objective production and objective display of common-sense knowledge, and of practical circumstances, practical actions, and practical sociological reasoning as well. What is it about natural language that makes these phenomena observable-reportable, that is accountable phenomena? (Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970: 342) Before discussing the issue of Garfinkel’s and Sacks’s alleged objectivism, a comment on their use of the word ‘social structure’: when Garfinkel and Sacks use this word they usually refer to structures of everyday activities as, for instance, the sequential ordering of conversations, but not to social structure as normally understood by sociologists, involving relations between individuals. This use of the term ‘social structure’, as more or less synonymous with ‘regular’ or ‘patterned behaviour’, does not conflict with methodological individualism. Concerning Garfinkel’s and Sacks’s objectivism, I venture the suggestion that it is, largely, a matter of terminology. This might seem too rash, but there certainly is a problem of double talk involved, at least, in the case of Garfinkel. If practical

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actions are routinely performed, in what sense are they ‘accomplishments’? If practical actions are objective phenomena, why this obsession with the problem of making them accountable, i.e., understandable, intelligible? And is there really anything about natural languages that make practical actions accountable? At other times you get the impression that the whole problem of making practical actions accountable arises, for ethnomethodology, because of the limitations of natural languages, especially their indexicality. Garfinkel, for instance, talks about the ‘essential incompleteness’ of any set of written instructions, while, according to Garfinkel and Sacks, indexical expressions are ‘obstinate nuisances’ to logicians and linguists (Garfinkel, 1967: 29; Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970: 349). Is it not the case, therefore, that members’ methods for making their actions accountable have to be some kind of commonly shared, extra-linguistic interpretive rules or procedures, as in the case of Cicourel, or else, a complete mystery? (see Garfinkel, 1967: 25–31, 38ff, 53ff, 262ff).44 There is also the fact that Garfinkel’s writings abound, not only in objectivist talk, but in subjectivist talk as well. Talk about ‘common understandings’, ‘expectancies’ and ‘definitions of the situation’ is not easily reconcilable with an objectivist view of society and an objectivist methodology. As a matter of fact, ethnomethodology is also highly critical of methodological objectivism, at least as manifested in traditional empiricist sociology. Being a radical movement, it criticises traditional empiricist sociology for not being empiricist enough (Hindess, 1973a: 9ff; Collins, 1985: 205–11). The main charge is that traditional empiricist sociology has not taken seriously enough the problematic, because subjective, nature of their data, and what follows from this in the form of limitations of their measurement (Cicourel, 1964: 7–38). Different cures have been suggested, from ceasing to do traditional empiricist sociology altogether, to suggestions of the repair of its data. Connected to this charge is a second, for our purposes even more interesting one. If the data of empirical sociology are subjective, they are, necessarily, also individualistic. The rates and measures arrived at by the statistical method of sociologists and officials, therefore, must not be mistaken for social facts about society. Once we follow the ‘disembodied numbers’ back to their sources to see how they were arrived at and what, therefore, they represent, we find that they are based on the most subjective of all possible forms of activity. This is especially true in the case of suicide statistics, which are the result of coroners’ evaluations of the ‘intentions’ of the actors involved. (Douglas, 1971: 6f)45 The address of this critique is, of course, Emile Durkheim’s famous study of suicide. I will not now go into any detailed discussion concerning the correctness of this critique – I think it contains an element of truth, while misrepresenting the position of Durkheim – only note that it raises some important questions about the use of statistical techniques in social research in general, and in empiricist social research in particular. Summing up the discussion in this section, it seems that the ethnomethod-

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ological movement started as a continuation of phenomenology. If so, it would seem to be safely anchored to the subjectivist tradition of social thought. As Rogers (1983: ch. 7) has argued convincingly, however, ethnomethodology is much less concerned with subjective meaning than is phenomenology, and much more concerned with action, or practice. A possible reason for this is that ethnomethodology is also influenced by the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, I believe that it would be wrong to conclude that ethnomethodology takes an objectivist approach to society, or even to language. The influence from phenomenology is too strong: The phenomenological approach remains within the limits of the analysis of consciousness. This is why Cicourel and Garfinkel do not take the obvious step from analysis of the lifeworld … to linguistic analysis. They are not able to recognize the obvious rules of the grammar of language games in the structure of consciousness. It is easy to show the systematic basis for this incapacity in the work of Schutz; the trail leads directly to Husserl. (Habermas [1970] 1988: 116) In view of these considerations, I risk the conclusion that ethnomethodology is, indeed, the ‘Californian way of subjectivity’ (Gellner, 1975). Ethnomethodology has met with much resistance from mainstream macrosociologists. A common critique is that ethnomethodology is individualistic and subjectivistic. This critique has been vehemently rejected by some of its adherents, who suggest that it is based on a serious misunderstanding of what ethnomethodology is really about. According to Sharrock and Anderson (1986: 48ff, 99ff), for instance, it is not the concern of ethnomethodology to criticise sociology, but to engage in a different type of foundational investigation, which leaves sociology as it is.46 ‘Popular sociological opinion to the contrary, ethnomethodology does not contradict Durkheim’s famous proposal that we should treat social facts as things, that we should recognize social structures as external and objective, environments capable of constraining our conduct’ (Sharrock and Andersson, 1986: 48). Garfinkel, himself, has defended ethnomethodology against the argument of Alexander, but his defence does not lend unambiguous support to Sharrock and Andersson. For [Parsons’s] The Structure of Social Action, Durkheim’s aphorism is intact: ‘The objective reality of social facts is sociology’s fundamental principle’. For ethnomethodology the objective reality of social facts, in that, and just how, it is every society’s locally endogenously produced, naturally organised, reflexively accountable, ongoing, practical achievement, being everywhere, always, only, exactly and entirely, member’s work, with not time out, and with no possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing, postponement, or buy-outs is thereby sociology’s fundamental phenomenon. (Garfinkel, 1991: 11)

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One obvious way to read this quotation is as a statement of an individualist alternative to Durkheim’s and Parsons’s holistic theory of society. But even if this reading is wrong, there is abundant evidence to show that ethnomethodology comprises a view of society, which is, in the main, radically individualistic, at least implicitly (see Collin, 1997, ch. 1). From phenomenology, it inherited an intersubjectivist view of society, but like symbolic interactionists, ‘the ethnomethodologists emphasize the interactional activities that constitute the social facts’ (Coulon, 1995: 50, see also 71ff). In my opinion, ethnomethodology is even more focused on action, or practices, than is symbolic interactionism and, therefore, an even more radical form of micro-sociology (cf. Collins, 1981b: 81–3).

Figure 5.3 Society according to ethnomethodology

Social constructionism A recent vogue in the human sciences is called social ‘constructionism’, or ‘constructivism’. In a broad sense, ‘social constructionism’ means simply that social phenomena are human creations, rather than natural phenomena, or ‘essences’. In this somewhat trivial sense, virtually all human sciences, and sociology, in particular, are forms of social constructionism. It has always been a fundamental thesis of the human sciences that society is made up of ‘conventions’, or ‘customs’, or social ‘institutions’, words that imply that society is human-made. What distinguishes recent social constructionism from this broader contructionism of all human sciences, with the possible exception of economics, is that it sees social phenomena as cultural; cognitive and/or linguistic, constructions. Social phenomena are constituted by our thinking and our discourse about them.47 Social constructionism, in the above sense, is not the same type of rationalist constructionism that Hayek objects to in his writings. The latter type is based on the belief that it is possible to construct society intentionally and rationally according to a preconceived plan. This is not at all the belief of recent social constructionists, who agree with Hayek that most social phenomena are unintended consequences of human actions. Actually Hayek, himself, was a ‘social’ constructionist in the recent sense of this term. His phenomenological view that social phenomena are constituted by people’s beliefs about them is the central pillar of, at least, one form of social constructionism.

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Above all, it is a central pillar of the main classic of social constructionism; The Social Construction of Reality (1966) by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The intellectual roots of this work are to be found mainly in the intersubjectivist tradition in social science, discussed in this chapter, but with an important dose of objectivism and structuralism added to it. Berger and Luckmann’s theory of society is a synthesis of ideas taken from Weber, Mead, Durkheim and Marx, but built mainly upon a foundation laid by the phenomenology of Schutz. According to Berger and Luckmann, society is a human product. This is fully in line with theoretical individualism and subjectivism. But it is also the case that human beings are social products. This is a more doubtful argument, from the point of view of an individualist theory of society. But, of course, it all depends upon the meaning of the word ‘social’. According to Berger and Luckmann, society is an objective reality, possessing structure, and consisting of functionally integrated institutions based upon division of labour ([1966] 1971: 69, 79–82, 95f, 134–7). This is not an intersubjectivist theory of society. It is not even an individualist theory of society. Intersubjectivity, which was so important to Schutz, plays no important role at all in Berger’s and Luckmann’s analysis. Instead, they speak of society as an objective reality, which is irreducible to the subjective reality of individuals ([1966] 1971: 150–4, 183). It may be added that the particular branch of social constructionism, most influenced by Berger and Luckmann; the new institutionalism in the theory of organisation is decidedly holistic, even if some of its main representatives do recognise the need for suitable microfoundations. These are to be found in the theories treated in this chapter, or in theories akin to them, but not in the theory of rational choice.48 More specifically, Berger and Luckmann recognise two sides of society, one subjective and one objective, standing in a dialectical relation to each other. This view is not strictly individualistic. Following Roy Bhaskar (1979: 40), I suggest the following graphic representation of Berger and Luckmann’s view of the relation between individual and society.

Figure 5.4 Berger and Luckmann’s dialectic of individual and society

It is clear that Berger and Luckmann differ from Austrian methodological individualism, which only admits of causal arrows leading from individuals to society. In the view of the Popperian philosopher J.O. Wisdom, Berger and Luckmann’s approach is closely allied to Popper’s ‘situational individualism’

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(Wisdom, 1973: 263). The problem with this view is that Popper’s so-called ‘situational individualism’ is a creation of Wisdom, himself. Popper, as we shall see, advanced two separate methodologies: methodological individualism and institutionalism, which he never joined and could not join without changing his methodological individualism, so as to make it compatible with his institutionalism. This was achieved, instead, by his pupil Joseph Agassi, who created institutional individualism. Situational individualism is, I believe, more or less, identical with institutional individualism. After this short digression, is it possible to pass judgement on Wisdom’s suggestion? Yes, I believe, it is possible to see Berger and Luckmann’s theory of society as compatible with the weak version of institutional, or situational individualism, but not with the strong version of methodological individualism, as formulated by Popper. Social constructionism today is an influential position in many areas of the human sciences, but especially in sociology and social psychology. The areas most influenced by social constructionism are, probably feminism, sociology of science, the theory of organisations and the theory of the personality, or self. I believe that the most fertile use of social constructionism has been in feminism, where it has been part of a struggle against patriarchy, or male dominance (cf. Hacking, 1999: 7ff). I have already quoted the famous words of Simone de Beauvoir: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’. This statement captures the ‘kernel’ – it would be wrong to use the word ‘essence’ – of social constructionism. The question remains, of course, how one becomes a woman, and on this point opinions diverge. The early Sartre would probably have maintained that human beings of the female sex chose to become women. De Beauvoir suggested that they had little, or no choice at all, to escape from being ‘women’ in the traditional sense. It is possible to divide also recent social constructionism into two main streams: one flowing from the interactionist and intersubjectivist tradition I have treated in this chapter, the other from French structuralism and post-structuralism.49 A good illustration of the difference between these strands of social constructionism is provided by two influential feminist works: S.J. Kessler and W. McKenna, Gender. An Ethnomethodological Approach (1978) and J. Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminsim and the Subversion of Identity (1990). In the former work, the authors approach the social construction of gender in an ethnomethodological manner, as a matter of gender attribution in the everyday interaction between members of society. In the latter work, the theoretical framework is provided by structuralism and post-structuralism and the social construction of gender is the work of culture and discourse, even if Butler has to find a place for agency in order to make room for the possibility of change. As expected, sociologists have tended to prefer the objectivist and structuralist version of social constructionism, whereas social psychologists have tended to follow the subjectivist and interactionist version (see, e.g. Sarbin and Kitsuse (eds), 1994). Most common is, perhaps, to attempt some kind of synthesis, or via media, between the two versions. Kenneth J. Gergen and Vivien Burr, for instance, opt for a methodology that avoids the pitfalls of both methodological individualism and social holism. The former suggests that we should concentrate

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on social relationships, rather than on autonomous individuals or social wholes (Gergen, 1994: 214ff). The latter makes a distinction between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ conceptions of society. According to the first, which is that of methodological individualism, individuals determine society, while in the latter society determines individuals. both top-down and bottom-up conceptions of the relationship between the individual and society are problematic for social constructionism. The topdown view leaves discourse as a side-effect of social structure, and it therefore cannot be the focus for social change. The bottom-up view, worse still, cannot accommodate any kind of social constructionism, since the individual is taken to be logically prior to the social. The individual is a ‘given’ from which society arises, and which therefore cannot be said to be constructed by that society. This methodological individualist view has all the attributes fiercely contested by social constructionists. It is humanistic and essentialist, claiming for the human being an essential nature, a coherent, unified self, and the capacity to make self-originated choices and decisions. (Burr, 1995: 96f) This argument to the effect that methodological individualism is contested by social constructionism is weakened by a narrow conception of the former. While it is true that there is a radical version of methodological individualism, which takes the individual as prior to society, this is not the only version. In fact, the most well-known methodological individualists – Weber, Mises, Hayek and Popper – do not at all defend this radical version of methodological individualism, represented by the theory of the social contract and the theory of general equilibrium in economics. On the contrary, they agree that human individuals are social beings, as suggested by Burr, and as implied by the individualistic theory of society discussed in this chapter. Finn Collin is much closer to the truth when he suggests that the constructivist ‘claim that social facts are determined by what agents think … points in the direction of an individualist approach to social research’ (1997: 229). He also observes that, at first sight, there is ‘much in social constructivism to please a methodological individualist and nothing to offend him’ (p. 230). His conclusion, however, is that social constructionism is not a reductionist form of methodological individualism. We have seen that there are both individualistic and holistic versions of social constructionism and, also, that there are many attempts, either to combine the two, or to dissolve the dualism. I will end this chapter by a brief mention of two such attempts, by two well-known sociologists, who seem to take a similar approach: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens. Pierre Bourdieu characterises his own work as ‘constructivist structuralism’ or ‘structuralist constructionism’ (1989: 14). Like Berger and Luckmann, he maintains that there are two sides to society: one subjective, phenomenological side and one objective, structuralist side, both dialectically related ([1972] 1977: ch. 2; [1980] 1990: 25ff). However, if Berger and Luckmann leaned most towards the

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former, I think it is fair to say that Bourdieu leans more towards the latter.50 It should also be pointed out, as a possible difference between them, that Bourdieu rejects a dualistic interpretation of the objective and subjective sides of society. Bourdieu also addresses the issue of methodological individualism versus holism, both of which he rejects, as the expression of a mistaken conception of the relation between individual and society (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 126f). Or rather, there is no such relation at all, since individual and society are not two distinct realities. There are only social individuals related to one another. The position of Bourdieu, therefore is that of methodological relationism (1985: 16ff; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 228ff). Anthony Giddens shares Bourdieu’s negative attitude towards dualisms, like individual–society, subject–object and action–structure. His own way out is the so-called theory of structuration, which owes more to ethnomethodology than to phenomenology. Like Garfinkel, Giddens sees society as chronically produced by knowledgeable individuals (1979; ch. 2; 1984: xxff, ch. 1). In Giddens’s terminology, human activities are ‘recursive’. That is to say, ‘they are not brought into being by social actors but continually recreated by them via the very means whereby they express themselves as actors’ (1984: 2). It seems to me that Gidden’s theory of society is strictly individualistic. However, this does not lead him explicitly to embrace methodological individualism. He criticises Popper, for assuming that it is possible to state methodological individualism, without making clear what is to be understood by the term ‘individual’. If we assume, however, that the individual is a social agent, then, the collective is implicated in the individual and two methodologies become possible: (1) methodological individualism, which focuses on strategic conduct, while neglecting the institutional aspect of action and (2) institutional analysis, which focuses on the rules and resources that are reproduced by individuals, but neglects the deliberations of individuals themselves (Giddens, 1979: 94f). Institutional analysis is not structuralism, however. Giddens (1984) objects strongly to the traditional sociological structuralism of Emile Durkheim (pp. 169ff) and Peter Blau (pp. 207–13). But, once again, he is not led by this to embrace methodological individualism, or is he? The methodological individualists are wrong in so far as they claim that social categories can be reduced to descriptions in terms of individual predicates. But they are right to suspect that ‘structural sociology’ blots out, or at least radically underestimates, the knowledgeability of human agents, and they are right to insist that ‘social forces’ are always nothing more and nothing less than mixes of intended or unintended consequences of actions undertaken in specifiable contexts. (Giddens, 1984: 220) This is a very weak opposition to methodological individualists, since most of them would readily admit that a full individualist description of society is not possible. The important thing for most methodological individualists, the Popperians, in particular, is explanation, not description.

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It seems to me, that Giddens, like Bourdieu, wants to tread some via media between a radical methodological individualism and traditional sociological structuralism, but ends up closer to the former than to the latter. Today, there are many self-proclaimed methodological individualists, who adopt a more structuralist position than does Giddens in his theory of structuration.

Conclusion The theories discussed in this chapter are united by taking an intersubjectivist and interactionist approach to society. They differ, however, in the extent to which they emphasise either the (inter)subjective, or the (inter)active element as constitutive of society. Phenomenology focuses on the intersubjective nature of society. Ethnomethodology is most concerned with the actions, or practices, which constitute society. Symbolic interactionism, finally, seems to attach equal weight to subjective meaning and interaction. According to Hans Joas ([1980] 1885: Ch. 9), it is the advantage of symbolic interactionism over phenomenology, that it explains how intersubjectivity arises in symbolic interaction, instead of taking it as given to phenomenological analysis. The theories discussed in this chapter differ from mainstream sociology, which tends to conceive of society as an objective reality made up of cultural objects, social institutions and social structures. The theories dicussed in this chapter conceive of (reduce) culture to intersubjectively shared meanings and social structure to social interaction. To the extent that culture and social structure can be said to exist, at all, they are epiphenomenal. What is real are the thoughts, feelings, desires and actions of individual human beings.

Figure 5.5 A mapping of some sociological theories in a two-dimensional space

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A final note of caution: it is not the case, that all representatives of the theories discussed in this chapter actually deny the existence of objective culture and social structure, but I agree with Jeffrey Alexander that, even if they do not, they nevertheless tend to treat them as residual categories in their theories and to introduce them in an ad hoc manner, without theoretical grounding (Alexander, 1985: 27).

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As we have seen (p. 27), the term ‘positivism’ was coined by Auguste Comte, who was not a methodological individualist. Nor were the other positivists among the classical sociologists, with the possible exception of Herbert Spencer. This indicates that there is not a necessary connection between these two doctrines. More recent positivist social science, however, is more indebted to British empiricism and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. This influence works in a more individualistic direction.

Positivist philosophy By ‘positivism’, I understand a philosophy with two basic characteristics: (1) Methodological monism, which is the doctrine that the method of all sciences is one and the same. More specifically, methodological monism means that the social sciences must use the same method as the natural sciences. (2) Empiricism, which means that all knowledge ultimately derives from observation, or experience. From the very beginning, positivism was advanced as an alternative to metaphysics and this remained an essential feature of this philosophy. In the case of logical positivism, the demarcation of science from metaphysics was made with the help of the empiricist criterion of verifiability. Methodological individualism sometimes looks like just another variant of the empiricist attack on metaphysics: a bit less radical than phenomenalism and, perhaps, also than physicalism, but, nevertheless, motivated by the same kind of epistemological considerations. It could be argued that flesh and blood human beings are the only directly observable entities in society – if we exclude human artefacts such as buildings, machines, books, etc. – while social wholes and collectives are not in the same way directly given to the senses.1 It would seem, therefore, that empiricism implies or, at least suggests, methodological individualism.2 This relation is asymmetric, however, and does not hold the other way around. Methodological individualism does not imply empiricism and, as a matter of fact, few of the most well-known advocates of methodological individualism have been empiricists. As we have seen in previous chapters, most of them have been hermeneuticians, neo-Kantians, phenomenologists and existentialists. As such, they have adopted a subjectivist version of methodological individualism, which

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conflicts with the physicalism and behaviourism of philosophers.3

most empiricist

British empiricism In the history of philosophy, empiricism has been mainly a British affair. The beginning is in the Middle Ages with William of Ockham and Roger Bacon. In the Renaissance, there was Francis Bacon, sometimes conceived of as the ‘father of empiricism’, because of his advocacy of induction. On the threshold to the Enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes defended a kind of empiricism, which incorporated an important deductive element from Descartes’s rationalism. British empiricism culminated with the contributions of the three Enlightenment philosophers, John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. After them, John Stuart Mill was an important bridge between seventeenth and nineteenthcentury empiricism. Mill, once again, introduced an important element of deduction in his empiricist methodology, which makes it very close to that of the logical positivists. Common to the most important British empiricists is that they believed that all knowledge derives from sense perception and that sense perception is atomistic. Knowledge is built out of simple ideas of sense-data. These simple ideas are combined into complex ideas, by a psychological mechanism of association. All complex ideas are ultimately collections of simple ideas of sense-data. Complex ideas of social wholes and collectives, in their turn, are collections of ideas about particulars, that is about individuals. In the nineteenth century this analysis is turned into the idea that social wholes and collectives are logical constructions of individuals – a view which is congenial to most methodological individualists. The idea of logical constructions goes back to Bertrand Russell, who suggested in Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) that matter, physical objects, when analysed, turn out to be logical constructions out of sense-data (see also [1914] 1926: 106).4 It is not that Russell denies the existence of physical objects. His point is rather that if we can construct them logically out of sensedata, there is no need to assume that they exist except as logical constructions. Russell’s method of analysis or logical construction, then, is used to serve the maxim called Ockham’s razor: ‘Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity’, or in Russell’s version; ‘Wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities’ (p. 112). But the method of logical construction is also a method of justification, since, in a way, our belief in the existence of physical objects is justified to the extent that it is possible to replace them by logical constructions out of sense-data (Pears, 1968: 37f; Ayer, 1971: 40; 1972: 11). The reason Russell calls physical objects logical constructions is that they can be analysed as series of classes of appearances or sense-data, and series and classes are things that belong to logic ([1914] 1926: 111, 128; [1917] 1963:

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114–18, 97, 106f). Explaining how it comes that a chair, for instance, can be a series of classes of sense-data, Russell says: A chair presents at each moment a number of different appearances. All the appearances that it is presenting at a given moment make up a certain class. All those sets of appearances vary from time to time … So you get a series in time of different sets of appearances, and that is what I mean by saying that a chair is a series of classes. (Russell [1918] 1972: 134) Russell’s theory of logical constructions cannot be understood unless you are already acquainted with his theory of definite descriptions, his theory of knowledge and his logical atomism. What follows is an extremely compressed presentation of some of Russell’s main ideas, which, of course, fails to do justice to this epoch-making contribution to twentieth century philosophy. Russell’s theory of descriptions was advanced, for the first time, in his famous article ‘On Denoting’ (1905), as an attempt to come to grips with denoting phrases, such as ‘the present King of France’, which lack denotation. How can a denoting phrase, which lacks denotation have a meaning? Russell’s answer is ‘that denoting phrases never have meaning in themselves, but that every proposition in whose verbal expression they occur has a meaning’ (p. 480). The basic idea of the theory of definite descriptions is to replace the original proposition by a propositional function, in which the denoting phrase does not occur, and, then, to expand it into an existential statement to the effect that what is described exists. (Russell held that descriptions imply an assertion that the described objects exist.) Take the proposition ‘the present King of France is bald’, replace it by the propositional function ‘x is now King of France and x is bald’, and expand it into the existential statement: ‘There is exactly one x, such as x is now King of France, and x is bald’. After this transformation, the problem with denoting phrases lacking denotation is solved. Since there is no present King of France, the expanded existential statement is simply false ([1917] 1963: 164f; [1918] 1972: 99–112; 1924: 148). In his exposition of the theory of descriptions, Russell uses as examples ordinary names, such as Scott, Bismarck, London, etc., as if they really had denotation. But these names are used only for the purpose of illustration. Ordinary names are really descriptions, or rather, abbreviations for descriptions; truncated descriptions. They are what Russell calls, ‘incomplete symbols’ ([1917] 1963: 156–8; [1918] 1972: 56, 100, 111f). But if ordinary names are really descriptions, what is left? The only logically proper names that Russell permits are ‘I’ and ‘this’, or ‘this’ and ‘that’, and the only things they can name are sensedata ([1917] 1963: 162; 1924: 56). The reason why logically proper names can only denote sense-data, but not objects in the external world, must be sought in Russell’s theory of knowledge, in his empiricism and scepticism.5 According to Russell’s empiricism, all our knowledge derives, ultimately, from ‘knowledge by acquaintance’. ‘Every proposition

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which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted’ ([1917] 1963: 159; see also [1912] 1951: 46–59). Among the things with which we are supposed to be acquainted, particular sense-data are most important, but we also know universals in this way. Sense-data are such things as colours, noises, shapes, etc., but not as universals, only the particular noise etc., which is the immediate data of my senses right here and right now. While the particular yellowness-of-this is a sense-datum, the yellowness that we know through acquaintance with several yellow objects is universal.6 In his theory of knowledge, Russell admits of sense-data being complex, but according to his logical atomism, particulars, qualities and relations are simple objects ([1917] 1963: 155; [1918] 1972: 129). Simple objects are such objects as cannot be symbolised otherwise than by simple symbols, and simple symbols are those symbols whose parts are not symbols ([1918] 1972: 48f). Logically proper names, then, are symbols for particulars, while predicates are symbols for qualities, and verbs, sometimes single, sometimes whole phrases, are symbols for relations. Combinations of simple objects (particulars, qualities, relations) make up atomic facts, and the propositions expressing these atomic facts, containing only simple symbols (logically proper names, predicates and verbs), are called atomic propositions (pp. 53–5). A language built up according to these strictures is a logically perfect language. In a logically perfect language there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple, will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component. (Russell [1918] 1972: 52) The criterion of simplicity, then, is language, and it must not be assumed that the objects of simple symbols are simple in an absolute sense. When I speak of ‘simples’, I ought to explain that I am speaking of something experienced as such, but known only inferentially as the limit of analysis … A logical language will not lead to error if its simple symbols … all stand for objects of some one type, even if these objects are not simple. The only drawback to such a language is that it is incapable of dealing with anything simpler than the objects which it represents by simple symbols. (Russell, 1924: 158) We have seen that Russell’s theory of descriptions leads to the elimination of ordinary names, such as Scott, Bismarck, London, etc. Such names are abbreviations for descriptions, and the things they name can be reduced through the analysis of facts which are apparently about those things ([1918] 1972: 47). It has been argued by A.J. Ayer that Russell’s theory of descriptions leads to the elimination of bare particulars and, therefore, of logically proper names as well (Ayer, 1971: 43–7; 1972: 104–106). According to Ayer, ‘We are left with descrip-

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tive signs, which stand for properties or groups of properties at various logical levels; with demonstrative signs, which are neither names nor predicates but signals, which simply do the work of orientation’ (1971: 47). I think this conclusion is correct, as evidenced by the development of Russell’s later philosophy. Logically proper names, we have seen, are symbols for particulars, as distinct from qualities and relations. Characteristic for these bare particulars (or particular particulars, as distinguished from general particulars), according to Russell, is that they stand entirely alone and are entirely self-subsistent, much as the old notion of ‘substance’, except that they persist through a very short time ([1918] 1972: 56f; 1924: 158). Logically proper names, then, are ‘words which do not assign a property to an object, but merely and solely name it’ ([1917] 1963: 162). Now, according to Russell, the simplest imaginable fact is the possession of a quality by some particular thing, as expressed by the proposition ‘This is white’ ([1918] 1972: 53). It is hard to see how the name ‘this’ can have any denotation as distinct from the quality white (and all other qualities possessed by this particular thing). It would seem that the substance of an object, the bare particular is exhausted by an enumeration of all facts about it. If so, logically proper names, like ordinary names, appear as abbreviations for descriptions. The function of names becomes demonstrative rather than denotative. Names become signals used to point out groups of qualities, while their original task is taken over by descriptions. ‘Logically proper names’, in the original sense, have become dispensable (see Ayer, 1971: 43). In his later writings, Russell follows the logical implications of his theory of descriptions and his logical atomism and drops the commitment to a belief in the existence of particulars. Things have no substance behind or distinct from their qualities. They are nothing but bundles of coexisting qualities. The main reason for taking this view is that ‘we experience qualities but not the subject in which they are supposed to inhere’ ([1940] 1973: 89–93; 1959: 120–7). But if particulars are abolished, logically proper names must go with them, since only particulars can have names. Russell knows this, of course, but chooses to change his theory of names, since he is doubtful about the possibility of inventing a language without names. This new theory is very liberal. ‘For our purpose, unless reason should appear to the contrary, we may accept as a name whatever would ordinarily be considered as such: Tom, Dick and Harry, the sun, the moon, England, France, etc.’ ([1940] 1973: 89–91). Russell was not interested in the logical construction of social phenomena out of individuals. His primary interest was in the logical construction of any kind of complex entity out of sense-data. He did use, as one of his stock examples of a complex entity, ‘Rumania’, but he never attempted its reduction to individuals. Nor, for that matter, did he attempt its reduction to sense-data, although he did hold that it was so reducible. It was probably John Wisdom who made it a main preoccupation among British analytical philosophers to logically construct social collectives, especially nations, and among nations, especially England, out of individuals. According to Wisdom, when speaking about social collectives, such as nations, or institutions,

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such as the Church, we are either speaking indirectly about individuals, or about something over and above individuals. He finds the first alternative both more ‘attractive’ and less ‘objectionable’, and concludes that collectives, such as nations, are logical constructions of individuals. ‘For if we have said all there is to be said about Tom, Dick and Harry, including of course statements about their interrelations, we have said all there is to be said about England, even if none of our statements mention England’ (1933b: 176). It is possible, therefore, to substitute statements about individuals for statements about nations. The latter can be translated or reduced by way of definition to the former. ‘If a nation is reducible to its nationals (and it is) then statements about nations, i.e. predicates applicable to nations are definable in terms of predicates applicable to their nationals’ (p. 10). Wisdom’s examples of logical construction – and this has become tradition – are all, or nearly all, about acts of hostility between nations. His first example is ‘England declared war’, which is translated, without any claim of exactness, as ‘Englishmen had selected a man (Minister for War) who decided that they should fight’ (1931: 192). The motive for this aggression was presumably that ‘Every Englishman fears a Frenchman’, which is substitutable for ‘England fears France’ (1933a: 44ff). But confronted with such a fearful enemy as France, you need allies. Consequently, according to Wisdom, ‘Every nation invaded France’, which is rendered ‘Every group of individuals with common ancestors, traditions and governors forcibly entered land owned by Frenchmen’ (1934: 77). But why should we substitute statements about individuals for statements about nations? In the case of Wisdom, as in that of Russell, the answer must be sought in his empiricist epistemology. Philosophy is analysis and analysis is ostentation; the substitution of more ostensive for less ostensive sentences. Now, according to Wisdom, sentences about individuals are more ostensive than are sentences about nations. This is so, because individuals are, in Wisdom’s terms, (epistemically) more ‘fundamental’ or ‘ultimate’ than are nations. But most ultimate are sense-data. Another way of expressing this is to say that facts about individuals are (epistemically) ‘primary’ relative to facts about nations, but ‘secondary’ relative to facts about sense-data (1931: 212–16; 1933a: 187–9, 195–9; 1934: 75ff). Unlike Russell, however, Wisdom seems quite satisfied to accomplish the logical construction of nations out of individuals, and doesn’t bother much to achieve the further reduction of individuals to sense-data. The idea of logical constructions was adopted by Alfred J. Ayer in his bestseller Language, Truth and Logic (1936) where he denies that they are fictitious objects. For while it is true that the English State, for example, is a logical construction out of individual people, and the table at which I am writing is a logical construction of out of sense-contents, it is not true that either the English State or this table is fictitious, in the sense in which Hamlet or a mirage is fictitious. (Ayer, 1936: 74)

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Ayer was a philosopher with one leg in the tradition of British empiricism and the other leg in logical positivism. His book Language, Truth and Logic was generally conceived of as an introduction to the latter and contributed significantly to its great success. As we shall see in the next chapter, Ayer is also the source of the idea amongst some Popperian methodological individualists that collective entities are logical constructions. Logical positivism Logical positivism is the name of the philosophy of the Vienna Circle. It is so called, because it combines logical analysis of language with a positivist, or empiricist, theory of knowledge. To the original Vienna Circle belonged a number of famous philosophers, such as Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Herbert Feigl, Gustav Bergmann and Friedrich Waismann. Close to the Vienna Circle were many other important philosophers, such as A.J. Ayer, Gustav Hempel, Hans Reichenbach, R.B. Brathwaite and Ernest Nagel. The logical positivists also counted the early Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper as their allies, but none of them accepted the invitation to join the movement. The main objective of the logical positivists was to put an end to metaphysics in science and philosophy. By metaphysics was understood every statement that cannot be reduced to immediate sense experience. The implication for social science was that concepts and laws, which do not refer directly to the observable features of human beings, are suspect and must be abolished, or redefined in terms of facts about individuals (cf. Hempel, 1969a). Already in the pamphlet that constituted the Vienna Circle, it was stated that concepts, such as ‘folk spirit’, should be dropped and replaced by concepts referring to ‘groups of individuals of a certain kind … The object of history and economics are people, things and their arrangement’ (Neurath et al., 1929: 315). The most ambitious, not to say heroic, attempt to construct the world, logically, out of immediately given sense-data, or ‘elementary experiences’ was made by Rudolf Carnap in his The Logical Structure of the World (1928). By logical construction, Carnap understands ‘explicit definition’ in a broad sense, including, most importantly, definitions in use. An explicit definition is such that all statements about the object (or concept) defined (definiendum) can be eliminated and replaced by statements about the elements in terms of which it is defined (definiens) ([1928] 1969: 5–10, 61ff). The objective of logical construction, according to Carnap, is the reduction of all objects to those that are epistemically basic (pp. 78ff). As the basic elements of his system Carnap chooses ‘elementary experiences. But even more fundamental is the basic relation ‘recollection of similarity’, out of which they are constructed. ‘Recollection of similarity’ is the basic undefined concept with which Carnap wants to construct the whole world (pp. 98ff, 122ff). Of special interest from the point of view of the present investigation is Carnap’s treatment of ‘cultural objects’. The logical construction of cultural

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objects, according to Carnap, rests upon the relations of manifestation and documentation. The manifestation relation is that between a cultural object and its (psychological) manifestations in the persons who are its ‘bearers’. The documentation relation is that between a cultural object and its representation in physical objects, in artefacts, works of art and written documents. Of these relations, the manifestation relation is primary in that documentation is reducible to manifestation (Carnap [1928] 1969: 39–41). It is the thesis of Carnap that ‘every cultural object is reducible to its manifestations, that is, to psychological objects’. In other words: ‘In principle, all statements about cultural objects can be transformed into statements about psychological objects’ (pp. 89–92). Despite this possibility in principle, Carnap admits of certain difficulties when it comes to actually carrying out the logical construction of cultural objects from its psychological manifestations. We have to rest content, therefore, with an indication of the general form of such logical constructions. Carnap makes a distinction between primary and higher cultural objects. Primary cultural objects are ‘those objects whose construction does not presuppose the construction of other cultural objects’, but which ‘are always constructed on the basis of their manifestations … i.e., on the basis of those psychological events in which they are actualized or become apparent’ (Carnap [1928] 1969: 230). As an example of a primary cultural object, Carnap mentions the custom of greeting, which is said to consist in the disposition on the part of the members of a society to act at a certain time in a certain way in a certain type of situation (p. 231). It would seem that Carnap understands, by ‘primary cultural objects’, the institutionalised behaviour of individuals. The higher cultural objects are simply the remaining ones, but most important among them are groups and organizations. The higher cultural objects are constructed on the basis of the primary ones, sometimes together with psychological and physical objects. As an example of a higher cultural object, Carnap takes, not surprisingly, that of the state. The object ‘state’ could perhaps be constructed in the following form: a relational structure of persons is called a ‘state’ if it is characterized in such and such a way through its manifestations, namely, the psychological behavior of these persons and the dispositions toward such behavior, especially the disposition, on the part of some persons, to act upon the volitions of other. (Carnap [1928] 1969: 231f) Carnap’s claim that all objects in the world are reducible, in principle if not in practice, to the recollection of similarity between elementary experiences is advanced as an epistemological thesis, but supposed to be metaphysically neutral. It is a thesis about the empirical, but not the metaphysical, reality of objects. Applied to cultural objects, it says that they are called real if their manifestations belong to real psychological objects, otherwise they are called unreal (Carnap [1928] 1969: 275).

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In The Logical Structure of the World, Carnap chooses a phenomenalist or ‘autopsychological’ basis for his system. Later, under the influence of Neurath, he comes to adopt a physicalist position. According to physicalism, all scientific sentences are translatable into the universal physicalist language, i.e. to sentences about physical occurrences in space and time. Applied to the social sciences, physicalism says that all its sentences (insofar as they are about people or groups of people, including organisations and institutions) can be translated into sentences about the movements of physical bodies in space and time (Carnap, 1931: 434, 451f; [1932/33] 1959: 165ff). Among the logical positivists, Otto Neurath has written most extensively about the social sciences, especially sociology. There is nothing to suggest, however, that Neurath should have been a champion of an epistemological reduction programme implying methodological individualism (Hempel, 1969a: 165–74). Like the methodological individualists, Neurath repudiated, as metaphysical, concepts such as ‘folk spirit’, ‘spirit of a nation’, ‘spirit of the age’ and the like (1944: 4). But not because they are holistic. His main charge against these concepts is that they are idealistic, something which they share with individualist concepts such as ‘mental’, ‘personality’, ‘soul’, ‘motives’, etc. (Neurath [1931a] 1973: 325, 332, 356f; [1931/32] 1959: 289, 299). Neurath, then, is not an enemy of collectivism and holism. Amongst social scientific theories, his sympathies are clearly with Marxism, and he also suggests that his own ‘aggregational program’ has a metaphysical counterpart in the holism of J.C. Smuts (Neurath, 1944: 20).7 Neurath’s arch-enemy is idealism in every conceivable form, including the method of Verstehen (1930/31: 121; 1931a: 356–8; [1931/32] 1959: 295). The alternative to idealism is physicalism, which is the modern form of materialism and in social science roughly takes the form of behaviourism. According to physicalism, unified science, including of course the social sciences, deals exclusively with physical occurrences in space and time.8 Now, it might be thought that physicalism implies methodological individualism. At times, Neurath also expresses himself in a way indicating that he subscribes to ontological individualism. ‘Peoples, states, age groups, religious communication, all are complexes built up of single individuals’ (Neurath [1931a] 1973: 386). But this does not imply any commitment to methodological individualism. Neurath’s Marxist leanings make him critical towards the individualism of economic theory and to prefer, instead, an institutionalist theory, using holist and collectivist notions such as ‘classes’, ‘states’, ‘feudalism’, ‘slavery’, ‘tribes’, etc. ([1931a] 1973: 366, 389–403; [1931/32] 1959: 306–15). ‘The sociologist is completely unimpeded in his search for laws. The only stipulation is that he must always speak, in his predictions, of structures which are given in space and time’ ([1931/32] 1959: 301). Of some relevance is Neurath’s frequently expressed opinion that it is often easier to predict the behaviour of groups and collectives than to predict the behaviour of single individuals.9 Nor does Neurath advocate any radical empiricist reduction programme. His one and only requirement for statements to be scientific is that they be stated in the universal ‘slang’, or ‘jargon’, of physicalism. He makes the demand that all

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scientific statements, or predictions made on their basis, must be compared with, or ‘assayed’ by, observation statements, but even so, he denies a privileged status to observation reports expressed by protocol sentences. Neurath denounces as a metaphysical fiction an ideal language constructed out of pure atomic sentences. There are, according to him, no immediate and atomic experiences, which can serve as basic elements of the system. Nor are there any atomic sentences which are primitive relative to other sentences, which can serve as primitive protocol sentences, and which are exempted from verification. All sentences of the universal slang of unified science are on an equal footing. There is no way of taking conclusively established pure protocol sentences as the starting point of the sciences. No tabula rasa exists. We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials. Only the metaphysical elements can be allowed to vanish without trace. Vague linguistic conglomerations always remain in one way or another as components of the ship. If vagueness is diminished at one point, it may well be increased at another. (Neurath [1932/3] 1959: 201) This metaphor was later to become famous, and the view of scientific theory it discloses has won wide acclaim. The modern, more elaborated, version is the socalled ‘holistic view of scientific theories’, suggested by Willard van Orman Quine (1961: 40–2). Some version of this holistic view of scientific theories is today accepted by most philosophers of science. It is even assimilated as a part of the so-called ‘standard’ (Hempel, 1970), ‘orthodox’ (Feigl, 1970), or ‘received’ (Suppe [1973] 1977: 16ff), view of scientific theories, which represents the last stage in the development of logical positivism. According to this view, scientific theories consist of axiomatic, or hypothetico-deductive, systems of scientific concepts and laws, more or less general. At the top of the system, there are primitive (undefined) terms and axioms. From these axioms are deduced laws of lesser generality, called theorems. At the bottom of the system, some terms are operationally defined, by means of some measurement procedure. One of the most clear and succinct statements of the logical positivist orthodoxy, by a social scientist, is Hans Zetterberg’s On Theory and Verification in Sociology (1963).10 In this work, it is assumed that the primitive or undefined terms of sociological theory are such as denote individual human beings and their actions. Pareto and Weber, as well as most contemporary social theorists, have assumed that the building blocks of sociological definitions are terms that denote human beings and their actions. The rationale for this choice is found in a suggestive analogy between the position of ‘action’ in all modern sociological theorizing, and the position of ‘primitive terms’ in any taxonomy. The sociologists say that all social events consist of combinations of human beings and their actions. The logicians say that all terms of a theory can ultimately be defined by combinations of primitive terms. It

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therefore, seems useful – at least as a first approximation – to assume that the primitive terms of sociology should be words that denote human agents and their actions. (Zetterberg, 1963: 52f) The analogy, pointed out by Zetterberg, may be suggestive, but it is not at all compelling, until supplemented by the empiricist requirement that primitive terms must refer to observables. This requirement is implicit in Zetterberg’s real reason for choosing as primitive, terms denoting human beings and their actions. The real reason is that only human beings and their actions are observable. Zetterberg, thus, complains about Rousseau’s notion of a volonté générale, that ‘we do not know any constellation of observables that define it’ (Zetterberg, 1963: 54). The same holds for any sociological conception which does not represent a combination of observable human beings and their actions. Thus, as social theorists, we are well advised to select primitive terms that stand for actors and types of actions. Since these primitives then are used as building blocks, which in various combinations furnish more complex terms, we are assured that even very complex ideas – e.g., property, institution, feudalism, or class – will remain on this side of metaphysics. (Zetterberg, 1963: 54) Zetterberg’s advice concerning choice of primitive terms, provides an excellent illustration of how empiricism, when applied to social phenomena, becomes identical with epistemological individualism and lends support to methodological individualism. Logical positivism, in a narrow sense, never exerted much direct influence upon the social sciences. Probably more influential, at least in sociology, was its American kin, the doctrine of operationalism. According to its founder, the American physicist P.W. Bridgman, to know the meaning of a term we must know the conditions of its use, and this implies ‘an analysis of activity of one sort or another, or in other words, an analysis of operations. From this point of view, meanings are operational’ (1938b: 116). Originally confined to physical concepts, Bridgman extends the range of applicability of operational analysis to social concepts (1938a: 8). Among the social concepts analysed by Bridgman is that of the ‘state’ (not surprisingly, in Bridgman’s example, it declares war). Like the methodological individualists, Bridgman objects to ‘the idea of the “State” as something intrinsically different from and superior to the people that compose it’ (p. 133). Especially abhorrent is the idea of the state as an organism or superperson, endowed with a consciousness of its own. While admitting that the state, like the individual, has to take unique action (declaring war), the action of the state is nothing but the action of its individuals;

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Despite Bridgman’s declaration that ‘Operational analysis really does make a difference’ (1938a: 199), I find it difficult to figure out exactly whereof this difference consists. This difficulty does not become less when later on he accepts the personification of society and the state as convenient ways of speech, and even finds it legitimate and harmless to ‘talk of society demanding this or that, or doing this or that, quite in the conventional and convenient way’ (p. 211). The main problem with Bridgman’s argument is that he does not provide any clear example of an operational analysis of a social concept.11 Especially confusing is Bridgman’s remarks about ‘verbalism’. On the one hand, ‘verbalism’ stands for lack of operational meaning. On the other hand, verbal operations are recognised as important in the operational specification of meaning. But what is the difference between ‘verbalism’ and verbal operations? There is a strong element of verbalism in our use of the concept of state. We generalize and abstract certain aspects of the joint behaviour of groups of people, and then cover this complicated combination with a single word. An enormous amount of circumlocution is thereby avoided, so that the single word thoroughly justifies itself economically in everyday usage, particularly if the situation calling for the word arises frequently. But from the point of view of analysis and comprehension we have merely messed things up by throwing so many points of view into a single word. (Bridgman, 1938a: 136) This passage is perfectly clear if taken in isolation, but in conjunction with much else Bridgman has to say on the subject, confusion is bound to arise. Take for instance the following passage: I think one must have been struck on analyzing these various social concepts to observe how many of the operations which gave them meaning were verbal operations, and how much of our concern that a concept should be rational was a concern that we should be able to substitute it in familiar ways into common verbal forms. (Bridgman, 1938a: 138) What is needed, I believe, is a distinction between an intensional and an extensional context, and a more consequent upholding of the separation between common-sense verbalism and scientifically relevant verbal operations.

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Positivist social science I understand ‘positivist social science’, broadly, as social science based on a belief in the fundamental similarity between the social and the natural sciences, as these are depicted by positivist and empiricist philosophers. My use of this term is motivated solely by convenience – more specifically, my need for a rubric – and does not at all reflect any wish, on my part, to label social scientists ‘positivists’, or to say anything essential about positivist social science. My only interest is to find manifestations of methodological individualism within this important research tradition in social science. For the purposes of this section, I divide positivist social science in two parts: one empirical and one theoretical. The empirical part is ‘empiricist’, in the sense that it is based on the belief that all knowledge about society derives from observation. The theoretical part is based on the belief that social phenomena can only be explained by covering laws of varying generality, organised as hypothetico-deductive systems, in according with the ‘orthodox’ view of scientific theories. Systematic empiricism It was argued above (p. 167) that methodological individualism follows naturally from a radical empiricist epistemology. This might lead us to expect that empiricist social science is largely individualistic. As we shall see, this is not really the case. At least not in a way that satisfies all methodological individualists. The philosophical background of empiricist social science can be found in pragmatism, logical positivism and operationalism, but above all, in British empiricism. Most influential have been those who are seen as representing the scientific outlook, such as Francis Bacon and John Stuart Mill, and later, those who developed the statistical version of the scientific outlook, such as Francis Galton, Karl Pearson and R.A. Fisher. The important role played by statistics in social scientific empiricism, has motivated the name ‘systematic empiricism’.12 It is true that empiricist social science is characterised, above all, by the use of statistical techniques, but this is historical accident more than logical necessity, as witnessed by the ethnomethodological critique of systematic empiricism for not being empiricist enough. According to some critics, the main cause of the dominant position of this particular form of empirical investigation is the need on the part of the administration of nation-states to know and control the population living, as subjects of state, on its territory.13 But while empiricism in social science does not necessarily resort to the use of statistical methods of investigation, the use of statistical techniques does not necessarily imply a commitment to empiricist epistemology. Statistical techniques are used by empiricists and nonempiricists alike, but assigned a different role in the research process by the more theoretically inclined social scientist than by the empiricist. While, according to a radical systematic empiricism, the resources of social science are exhausted by statistical analysis, theoretical social science tends to assign to statistics a more modest role in the research process. When, in this section, reference is made to

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‘empiricist social science’, this term should be understood in the sense of ‘systematic empiricism’. Among the resources and techniques used by systematic empiricism are the experiment, the utilisation of official statistics in the form of census data and, most important, the survey. The experiment is, of course, the ideal weapon of causal and, therefore, scientific analysis. Due to the limited possibility of controlling and manipulating social phenomena, however, and the ethical problems involved in the control and manipulation of human beings, the experiment has turned out to be of limited value to the social sciences. Experiments are only possible with small groups of people and have, therefore, been used primarily in psychology and social psychology. Much ingenuity has been spent on the attempt to develop research designs that simulate the experiment, or otherwise capture its logic. Nevertheless, real experimental analysis, because of its limited applicability to large-scale social phenomena, tends to be individualistic (see Coleman, 1969a: 99f). The subsequent discussion concerns the census and the survey but not the experiment. Among the social sciences, systematic empiricism first gained ground in sociology, where it still has its strongest hold, but later spread to political science in the form of behaviouralism. In economics, systematic empiricism is known as ‘econometrics’ and has gained little or nothing from sociology, but was rather ahead of sociology in assimilating regression analysis as an important tool of research (Coleman, 1969a: 91; Halfpenny, 1982: 40). Anthropology is interested in cultures where census data are rare and the survey not the most suitable method for gaining information. Empirical anthropology relies, instead, on the less systematic method of participant observation. In what follows, there will be a concentration upon systematic empiricism in sociology, but it is assumed that the conclusions have a more general application. There are two radically opposed views concerning the relation of systematic empiricism to methodological individualism. According to one view, systematic empiricism, in social science, is a largely holistic enterprise, because its units of analysis, are typically large-scale social phenomena at the macro-level. According to another view, systematic empiricism tends to be individualistic, because its unit of observation is typically individual human beings; their attitudes, opinions and beliefs, etc. The first view dominated in the early history of social science, when methodological individualists, such as John Stuart Mill, Carl Menger and Gabriel Tarde, criticised social theorists, like the statistician L.A.J. Quetelet and the historian Henry Buckle, for being too much macro-oriented and for mistaking statistical regularities and correlations for social laws.14 Statistical regularities and correlations are empirical generalisations, not laws. As such, they describe, but do not explain.15 In order to explain social phenomena, you need causal laws and the only causal laws in social life are psychological; or, if this is too narrow, at least, they are laws about individuals. According to most methodological individualists, there are no social laws, at least, no causal social laws. Since only individuals exist, only individuals can be causes of social phenomena.

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The symbol and personification of macro-oriented systematic empiricism is Emile Durkheim (Little, 1991: 189f; Rosenberg 1988: 118ff), as he appears in his classic study of Suicide (1897). Impressed by its stability over time, Durkheim argued that the suicide rate ‘is not simply a sum of independent units, a collective total, but is itself a fact sui generis, with its own unity, individuality and consequently its own nature – a nature, furthermore, dominantly social’ ([1897] 1951: 46). As we have seen in chapter 2 (pp. 29f ), Durkheim was not the first to be impressed by the stability of many statistical measures, but more than any other he used this fact as proof that there are social facts, irreducible to facts about individuals. There seems to be a certain ambiguity in Durkheim’s view of the suicide rate, however. If he were really suggesting that the suicide rate itself is a social fact sui generis, then, his view would be open to serious objection. But he is not (see below). The suicide rate, as a statistical measure is, of course, a fact about a population of individuals. As Friedrich von Hayek has pointed out, statistical collectives are not social wholes. Statistics is concerned with the properties of the elements of ‘collectives’ (Hayek, 1955: 61–3). In a similar vein Ludwig von Mises ([1957] 1985: 260) maintains that social, or mass phenomena, as measured by statistics, ‘are not things standing outside and above individual phenomena. They are not the cause of individual phenomena. They are produced either by the cooperation of individuals or by parallel action’.16 It is necessary, therefore, to make a clear distinction between a macro-approach that is based upon the set-element or class-member relation, and one that is based upon the whole-part relation. Statistics deals with the former relation. A typical feature of this relation is that facts about the set (collective) are arrived at by aggregation of facts about the elements. No statistical fact about a collective, therefore, is a social fact sui generis. Statistical facts are facts about numbers, large or small, of elements. This leads immediately to the following conclusion: no macro-theory which deals with relations between aggregated data, whether of the first, second or any order is holistic relative to its elements. A corollary of this conclusion is that systematic empiricism is not holistic only because it deals with the relations between aggregated data.17 No statistical information about the elements can explain to us the properties of the connected wholes. Statistics could produce knowledge of the properties of the wholes only if it had information about statistical collectives the elements of which were wholes. (Hayek [1942–4] 1955: 62) This leads us back to the ambiguity in Durkheim’s view of the suicide rate. On closer inspection, it turns out to be, not so much the suicide rate per se, as its explanation, which is, and must be, social (cf. Hacking, 1990: 177). Durkheim’s point was that psychology is not enough to explain the relative stability of the suicide rate over time, its variability between cultures, societies and different strata of the population, and its sensitivity to social disruptions. ‘The conclusion from all these facts is that the social suicide-rate can be explained only sociologically’

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(Durkheim [1897] 1951: 299). It may also be pointed out that Durkheim was perfectly aware of the phenomenon of spurious correlation. This is evidenced by his statistical analysis of the so-called ‘egoistic suicide’ ([1897] 1951: chs 2–3) and by his explicit statement: Concomitance can occur, not because one of the phenomena is the cause of the other, but because they are both effects of the same cause, or indeed because there exists between them a third phenomenon, interposed but unnoticed, which is the effect of the first phenomenon and the cause of the second. (Durkheim [1895] 1982: 152) Durkheim’s conviction that the suicide rate can only be explained sociologically was not supposed to be limited to this particular phenomenon. Rather, the study of suicide was an attempt to demonstrate the validity of a general methodological principle stated by Durkheim two years earlier ([1895] 1982: 110): ‘The determining cause of a social fact must be sought among the antecedent social facts and not among the states of the individual consciousness’. The difference between the methodological individualists and Emile Durkheim, then, is not that the latter saw, statistical regularities, per se, as social facts, sui generis. The difference is that the individualists believe that an explanation of statistical regularities and correlations, must be psychological or, at least individualistic, while Durkheim believed that they must be sociological, that is in terms of social facts such as social institutions and social structure. According to the second view, mentioned above (p. 179), the problem with systematic empiricism is not that it is too holistic, but that it is too individualistic. It is a common view, held both by its critics and by its defenders, that systematic empiricism has a strong individualist, atomist and subjectivist bias.18 The individualist bias is due to the fact that much official statistics and most survey research take the individual as its element and basic unit of observation. The atomist bias is due to the further fact that official statistics and survey research usually study the individual in isolation, without taking into account his interaction with other individuals. The subjectivist bias, finally, concerns only survey research and is the result of its traditional preoccupation with the opinions, attitudes and beliefs of individuals. The charge of individualism did not appear until the advent of the survey and this is probably no coincidence. The survey tends to be more individualistic, or, at least more subjectivistic, than official statistics. One reason for this is the development of various instruments of measurement, which have been an important ingredient in systematic empiricism, especially for its claim to being a Science. There is little doubt that the tendency to accept only operational definitions, as scientifically legitimate, has contributed to pushing systematic empiricism further in the direction of subjectivist individualism.19 The reason is, probably, that the easiest ‘operation’ available to the social scientist is to ask

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human individuals who they are, what they own and what they think about various matters. According to George A. Lundberg (their most influential spokesman in sociology) operational definitions consist of ‘words clearly designating performable and observable operations subject to corroboration’ ([1929] 1942: 89). Lundberg, himself, was not a methodological individualist, however. He was an instrumentalist and, as such, rather liberal about the use of collective concepts in sociology; if only as a convenient construct, and as long as they prove useful ([1929] 1942: 80–112). From this point of view, he criticised the psychologism of Floyd H. Allport (Lundberg, 1939: 163–73). The most ambitious attempt to provide operational definitions of the concepts of sociology is by Stuart C. Dodd, who takes as his point of departure the so-called ‘S-theory’, according to which, ‘Every quantitatively recorded societal situation can be expressed as a combination of indices of time (T), of space (L), of population (P), and of the many characteristics (I) of people or their environment’. Or expressed in a simple formula: S=(T:I:L:P) (Dodd, 1942: 58f; see also 1939: 628). You need but little imagination to see that this point of departure makes for an individualist sociology. While it seems undeniable that systematic empiricism has an individualist bias, it is difficult to estimate the exact extent to which it is individualistic. Several factors complicate the attempt to classify the results of systematic empiricism into those that are individualistic and those that are holistic. First of all, there is the fact that even though the individual is usually the basic unit of investigation, this is not always the case. In econometrics, for instance – paradoxically, since economics is usually considered the most individualistic of the social sciences – the basic units of research are usually the household and the firm. A second complication is that even in those cases where the individual is the basic unit of research, it might be that he/she can only be described in terms that make implicit reference to the institutional setting and the social structure in which he/she acts. Thus, it has been argued that any study of voting behaviour makes implicit reference to the political system (Udehn, 1987: 220ff). It could also be argued that the classification of individuals according to social background implies some notion of ‘social structure’ (Lukes, 1973: 121). It is nowadays generally agreed that all data are theory laden or theory impregnated, and the data of systematic empiricism is no exception to this rule. It could be, therefore, that the data about individuals generated by systematic empiricism are impregnated with ‘social theory’ that is holistic. On the other hand, systematic empiricism, to the extent that it relies on any articulated theory at all, tends to assume a subjectivist theory of social structure, so, that even when it uses concepts with a holist ring, such as ‘social role’ and ‘social status’, these concepts are defined in terms of the expectations and rankings of individuals, that is, in individualist terms. Confronted with the charge of individualist bias, leading representatives of systematic empiricism sought a remedy in the development of new techniques for doing justice to the structural and collective features of social life.20 One expression of this ‘structuralist’ and ‘collectivist’ tendency in systematic empiricism was the introduction of so-called multi-level research, that is, research

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which aims at an integration of the level of individuals with that of groups and other collectives (van den Eden and Hüttner, 1982). Among the most important spokesmen of multi-level research – and of systematic empiricism in general – is Paul F. Lazarsfeld, who, in collaboration with Herbert Menzel, developed a wellknown classificatory scheme for properties of individuals and of collectives (Lazarsfeld, 1968: 617–24; Lazarsfeld and Menzel, 1969). Lazarsfeld and Menzel distinguished between absolute, relational, comparative and contextual properties of individuals, and analytical, structural and global properties of collectives. This classification, Lazarsfeld and Menzel point out, is purely formal (1969: 510f). As such, it is not altogether adequate for addressing the substantive issues involved in the combat between individualists and holists. Of special interest, for our purpose, is the classification of properties of collectives into analytical, structural and absolute. Analytical properties are obtained by aggregation of properties of individuals and are, therefore, individualistic. ‘Structural properties’ of collectives would seem, by their very name, best suited for catching the idea of ‘social structure’, but appearances are deceptive. These properties are exemplified, most typically, by the concentration of choices revealed by sociometric analysis. The study of these popularity and friendship structures belong, most naturally to the province of social psychology, and have little or nothing to do with the kind of structural analysis advocated by methodological holists. The global properties of collectives alone, are not based upon information about individuals. Examples of global properties of collectives are the presence of certain social institutions, such as a school, an army, or a certain type of government. The recognition of the existence of global properties of collectives opens the way to truly structural, hence holist, analysis of society. It remains to be seen, whether multi-level research takes that direction. Hitherto, it has suffered from the lack of an adequate conception of ‘social structure’, and so, remained largely individualistic (van den Eden and Hüttner, 1982: 60ff). The most popular view among those doing multi-level research, seems to be that structural analysis consists of so-called ‘contextual propositions’, explaining the behaviour of individuals in terms of properties of the collective or group.21 The main problem with this view is that it does not discriminate between the different kinds of collective properties – analytical, structural and global – mentioned by Lazarsfeld and Menzel, and, in fact, tends to be directed mainly at the analytical and, to some extent, the ‘structural’ properties of collectives (van den Eden and Hüttner, 1982: 60ff). What Peter Blau at first called ‘structural effects’, for instance, is no more than the effects of the commonly shared values of individuals and of the interaction between individuals (Blau, 1960: 178–93). It should be pointed out, however, that Blau soon developed a more holistic concept of ‘social structure’ (1974; 1977), and that Lazarsfeld came to realise that what many sociologists have in mind when speaking of social structure is the global, as distinguished from the aggregative, properties of collectives (Lazarsfeld, 1970b: 312). Among the problems facing multi-level research, are the so-called ‘fallacies of the wrong level’.22 These fallacies are the various mistakes you could commit

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when making inferences from results obtained at one level of research to that of another level. Most well known is the ‘ecological fallacy’, first notified by W.S. Robinson (1950: 351–6). Put simply, the ecological fallacy consists in drawing conclusions from results obtained at the collective, or group level about the properties or behaviour of the individuals making up that collective or group. Thus, it does not follow from the fact that there is a high correlation between the percentage of the population that is black and the percentage of the population that is illiterate that blacks are more often illiterate than are other ethnic groups making up the entire population. It might be thought that ecological correlations, because of their seeming ‘irreducibility’, point to the existence of social facts sui generis, but this is not necessarily the case. Far from being irreducible social facts, ecological correlations are sometimes spurious, and this is why inference from the collective to the individual level may be invalid. But, whether spurious or not, ecological correlations are between analytical properties of collectives and, as such, are based upon data about individuals.23 The argument of this section has been that systematic empiricism, even when it engages in multi-level research, has a strong individualist bias, due to the fact that it usually takes the individual as its element and basic unit, and, for the remainder is based upon aggregation of facts about individuals. This argument has force only with respect to a radical systematic empiricism, which stops at the level of fact-finding and empirical generalisation. As soon as systematic empiricism leaves this extreme position, however – as the large majority of empirical social scientists do – and asks for a theory with which to explain these facts, the problem shifts into that of determining whether this theory is individualistic or not. It seems a fair contention that even when systematic empiricism has sought some theory to explain its statistical findings, it has looked primarily in the direction of social psychology, that is, in an individualist direction (van den Eden and Hüttner, 1982: 39–53; Bryant, 1985: 168–73). But how is it that opinions about the nature of systematic empiricism are so divided? How is it possible that some believe it is a paradigm of holism and others that it is much too individualistic? The reason, I suggest, is that there are two forms of individualism (introduced in the presentation of Schumpeter above (pp. 106f)): substantive and procedural methodological individualism. Systematic empiricism, to the extent that it is at all individualistic, is a form of procedural methodological individualism: it often takes the individual, as its point of departure, or unit of observation. Its unit of analysis, however, is usually some macrophenomenon. It differs from the procedural methodological individualism, discussed by Schumpeter, however. While the latter is a theoretical procedural methodological individualism, that of systematic empiricism is, not surprisingly, an empirical procedural methodological individualism. As we have seen, methodological individualists have always complained that statistical, and other forms of, empirical generalisations fail to explain. This critique has been most common in economics, where it takes the form of a requirement that macroeconomics must be provided with microfoundations (see

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pp. 234ff ), but it has been a recurrent phenomenon in political science and sociology, as well. But methodological individualists have not been alone in this. Social scientists of a more holistic persuasion have been no less emphatic about the need for theory (see, e.g. Adorno, 1957 and Willer, 1967). What distinguished the latter from the former, then, was not the need for theory, but the kind of theory they believed was needed. For a long time, it was taken for granted that a theory is a body of concepts and law-like statements that are used to explain empirical regularities. As time passed, however, it became painfully obvious that the social sciences do not produce an abundance of generally accepted laws, as do some of the natural sciences. This is probably one of the reasons social scientists have, recently, suggested a reorientation of social science, away from the focus on laws, to a search for social mechanisms.24 A pioneer in this reorientation is the philosopher Mario Bunge, who has advocated a turn to mechanisms, for deaf ears, since the 1960s (Bunge, 1997). According to him mechanisms are needed to open the black boxes of positivist science and to provide genuine causal explanations of phenomena, described in a ‘kinematical’ manner, for example statistically. It may be pointed out that Bunge adopts neither individualism, nor holism, but accepts both microreductive (bottom-up) and macro-reductive (top-down) explanations. He calls his approach systemism.

Figure 6.1 Mario Bunge’s methodological systemism Source: Bunge (1997: 441)

In the more recent development of social science, there are, at least, two different approaches to social mechanisms. The first approach is the so-called critical, or new, realism in social science, stemming from the work of Rom Harré and Roy Bhaskar, but the latter, in particular (Bhaskar, 1979: ch. 2).25 Bhaskar rejects both the macro-reductionist collectivism of Durkheim and the microreductionist individualism of Weber. He also rejects the dialectical view of Berger and Luckmann (see pp. 161f). His own suggestion is that both individuals and society exist, but in a symbiotic, rather than a dialectical, relation. ‘Society is both the ever-present condition (material cause) and the continually reproduced outcome of human agency’ (p. 43).

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Figure 6.2 Roy Bhaskar’s transformational model of the society/person connection Source: Bhaskar (1979: 46)

As is often pointed out, Bhaskar’s model has much in common with Anthony Gidden’s theory of structuration (see pp. 164f ). I agree that there is a similarity, in that both maintain that society is constantly created, but there is also an important difference. While for Giddens the creative aspects is in focus, Bhaskar conceives of structuration as reproduction and transformation of existing structures, with causal powers. In the end, therefore, Gidden’s theory of structuration is a theory of action, where structure appears only as an epiphenomenon, whereas Bhaskar’s theory is a form of structuralism. Other philosophers and social scientists belonging to this research tradition, include Russel Keat, John Urry, Ted Benton, Andrew Sayer, Jeffrey C. Isaac, Margaret S. Archer and Derek Layder. In this theoretical tradition, which has important roots in Marxism, the causal, or generative, mechanisms used to explain social phenomena and empirical generalisations are, typically, social structures. A comprehensive treatment of the individualism-holism issue can be found in Archer (1995), who also offers an interesting alternative to both Giddens and Bhaskar (without mechanisms). Her main point, with which I agree, is that, for the purposes of social science, we do need a dualistic approach to the relation between individual action and social structure. Among critical realists, Sayer (1984), and Pawson (1989: ch. 6), in particular, have tackled the problems with systematic empiricism. The second branch of the new turn to social mechanisms is decidedly individualistic, and engaged in an attempt to provide social science with microfoundations. The ‘social’ mechanisms identified are those of acting individuals. The approach of this branch is similar to that of Floyd Allport (see pp. 66f ), except that the latter was a behaviourist and called his mechanisms ‘psychological’. The recent call for mechanisms in social science is based on rational choice and other forms of intentional action. Important sources of inspiration for this individualistic approach are Raymond Boudon ([1977] 1982; 1979a; 1979b) Thomas Schelling (1978), Jon Elster (1983a: Part I; 1985: 5ff; 1989a: ch. 1) and James Coleman (1986c; 1990c: ch. 1). I will return to Boudon, Coleman and Elster in chapter 10. Here I will draw attention to the contribution

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of Hedström and Swedberg, which is, to a large degree, aimed at systematic empiricism. In a first article, Hedström and Swedberg (1996b) argue that there is an unfortunate gap between theory and empirical research in sociology, and also that this gap can be filled by rational choice. They make the common observation that statistical correlations and other empirical generalisations are descriptive, not causal, but require a causal explanation. Such explanation, they suggest, is best understood as being in terms of the mechanisms that have produced the correlation (p. 136). Unfortunately traditional sociological theory has not been very successful in providing such causal mechanisms. The hopes of Hedström and Swedberg go, instead, to rational choice, which has the advantage, over much traditional sociology, in being (1) analytical, (2) based on methodological individualism and (3) providing intentional explanations of observed phenomena (pp. 129ff). The upshot is that rational choice produces deeper and more fine-grained explanations of empirical generalisations (p. 141). Hedström and Swedberg introduce the notion of social mechanism in their first article, but make it the main topic of a second article (1996b), which also includes a new critical discussion of statistical variable sociology (pp. 291–3). The most important features of Hedström’s and Swedberg’s social mechanisms seem to be the following (p. 287): (1) the idea of generative mechanisms differs from Hempel’s famous covering-law model of causal explanations; (2) generative mechanisms are invariably at the micro-level of macro-phenomena. My interest is in the second feature, which is a manifestation of methodological individualism. The third article by Hedström and Swedberg is their ‘Introduction’ to Social Mechanisms (1998), which is something of a manifesto for a turn to individualistic mechanisms in social science. This introduction is largely a restatement of the arguments in their previous two articles, which I will not repeat here. Following Coleman, Hedström and Swedberg use the following illustration of different types of mechanism:

Figure 6.3 Hedström and Swedberg’s typology of social mechanisms Source: Hedström and Swedberg (1996b: 297)

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The first type of mechanism, mentioned by Hedström and Swedberg, is called situational mechanism. It is exemplified by the ways in which the social situation shapes the desires, or interests, beliefs and opportunities of individuals. The second type of mechanism is called individual action mechanism and refers to the way individuals’ beliefs and desires generate actions. The third type of mechanism is called transformational mechanism and it depicts how interaction between individuals gives rise to collective outcomes. Of these mechanisms, the second and third are most individualistic, while the first, seems to imply a holistic element. I feel that there is a certain ambiguity surrounding the situational mechanism. While the arrow runs from the macro-level to the micro-level, Hedström and Swedberg maintain that there are no macro-level mechanisms (1996b: p. 299). This is odd, since it implies that the mechanism lies in the effect rather than in the cause. It would seem that Hedström and Swedberg follow Watkins and Elster, rather than (the later) Popper and Coleman, since they maintain that ‘the elementary “causal agents” are always individual actors’ (p. 11), which implies that social institutions can in principle, if not always in practice, be explained in terms of the actions of individuals (p. 12). It is worth noticing that one of the most renowned empirical sociologists, John Goldthorpe (1996; 1998), has recently turned to rational choice and methodological individualism, for reasons similar to those of Hedström and Swedberg, and inspired by the same people, especially Raymond Boudon. This means, among other things, that he sees the approach of generative mechanisms as the most promising way of providing a causal explanation of the results of statistical investigations (Goldthorpe, 2000: 149ff ). Goldthorpe is not very explicit about methodological individualism, but he denies being an ontological individualist (1998: 167). The main thing is rational action theory, which is a less restricted version of rational choice, inspired mainly by Max Weber’s verstehende sociology and Raymond Boudon’s cognitivist model (see pp. 306ff ). The important thing in rational action theory is to understand the meaning individuals attach to their actions; the motives and reasons they have for acting in certain ways. These motives may be utilitarian, but they could also be of a more normative kind. An example of this can be found in his and Richard Breen’s explanation of educational differentials in terms of class differences in resources. Cultural explanations in terms of social norms are considered less important than instrumental rationality, but not devoid of ‘some explanatory significance’ (Breen and Goldthorpe, 1997: 297–300). Positivist social theory The first and main example of an individualist theory in social science is economics. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that social scientists, who are methodological individualists, but not economists, should use economics as a model for their own theoretical endeavours. As we have seen in chapter 4, this was the case with Max Weber. Now, economics is a theory of exchange. At least, it is seen as a theory of exchange, or catallactics, by those economists who have

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been most eager to declare themselves methodological individualists. It is only natural, therefore, that social scientists, opting for an individualist theory of society, should develop a theory of social exchange. The main example, I believe, is the sociologist George Caspar Homans.26 Homans’s theory of exchange 27 Homans seems to be fond of writing his own intellectual biography. As he is one of the most influential sociologists in the second half of the nineteenth century, sociologists have every reason to be grateful for this idiosyncrasy. From the four autobiographical writings Homans has produced, we may extract the following facts about his professional and intellectual career.28 Homans came to sociology by chance. He was advised by his tutor in English literature, his original subject, to attend a course on the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto held by the biochemist and historian of science, L.J. Henderson at Harvard. Thus becoming expert on Pareto, he wrote An Introduction to Pareto (1934) together with the lawyer J.P. Curtis. Circumstances conspired to make him a sociologist and this is what he eventually became, if not intellectually, then at least professionally. At Harvard, Homans became acquainted with the anthropologist Elton Mayo and through him, with the writings of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. Being convinced that it is the nature of individuals that determines the nature of society, rather than the other way around, Homans was suspicious of functionalism from the very beginning. Homans recognizes three kinds of statement in which the word ‘function’ appears: The first kind of statement said that one institution in a society was a function of another in the sense that the two were interrelated … The second kind of functional statement said that an institution was functional for members of a society in the sense of meeting their needs … The third kind of functional statement said that an institution was functional for a society in the sense of helping to maintain society as a going concern. (Homans, 1962: 23f) The first statement was made by both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, the second, especially by Malinowski, and the third only by Radcliffe-Brown. That is why Homans came to accept Malinowski’s functionalism, which he calls ‘individualistic’, but reject Radcliffe-Brown’s which is ‘societal’ (Homans 1983: 12).29 When Homans in his next work, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (1941), set out to seek his own roots, he did so with the conscious aim, and despite his doubts about it, of applying functionalist analysis to this historical material. While working on the English Villagers, however, Homans came into contact with an intellectual current very different from functionalism, P.W. Bridgman’s operationalism. The influence was indirect and came from the anthropologists Eliot Chapple and Conrad Arensberg, who wanted to define the chief concept of

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anthropology in terms of the order, frequency and duration of interactions between men. Homans felt that interaction was not enough to grasp the content of social life and added sentiment and activity. This conceptual scheme; ‘interaction’, ‘sentiment’ and ‘activity’ was set out for the first time in the last chapter of English Villagers and became the analytical tool of his next main work, The Human Group (1951: 33–44). Behind Homans’s conceptual scheme lay, besides the impact of operationalism, a conviction he had gained through his critical reading of anthropological literature, that ‘human nature is the same the world over’. The ultimate explanatory principles in history, anthropology and sociology, therefore, are psychological propositions, propositions about men as men (1951: 443). In his last work, the autobiographical Coming to My Senses (1984: 329, 351), Homans says that he reached this conclusion before the Second World War, and was turned into a methodological individualism already at that early stage of his career. He also invokes the support of John Stuart Mill, who had adopted the same approach in his A System of Logic (see pp. 43–9). It is possible that Homans had already turned into a methodological individualist in the 1930s, but there is much even in The Human Group (1951), which is hard to reconcile with this position. Above all, there are many remnants of the organicist influence of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (pp. 6–10, 86–8, 272–6), which do not fit methodological individualism. Even so, The Human Group marks a definite change of direction in Homans’s work, from an earlier preoccupation with social institutions to his later concentration on elementary or sub-institutional behaviour in small groups. Connected with this change was Homans’s introduction of the distinction between the internal and the external systems (pp. 90, 109f). The latter would eventually be turned into the given, or boundary, conditions of Homans’s theory of exchange (Homans, 1962: 272f; 1961: 230f). The Human Group was published in the same year (1951) as Talcott Parsons’s, even more influential, The Social System. Being a work of a totally different inspiration, it is only natural that Homans should have felt challenged. Most provocative to Homans was Parsons’s claim to have produced a sociological theory. Homans read the philosophers of science, especially R.B. Braithwaite, later also Ernest Nagel and Carl G. Hempel and learned that a theory consists of propositions stating relationships between properties of nature. The job of a scientific theory is to explain, and in order to be able to do this job, scientific propositions must be general. Scientific explanation is the deduction, or derivation, of lower-order generalisations from higher-order generalisations under specified given conditions. Now, the trouble with Parsons’s ‘theory’ is that it does not consist of propositions, but of concepts. It is a conceptual scheme, not a scientific theory and the problem with most sociological propositions, including Homans’s own propositions in The Human Group is that they are not general enough. Homans is forced, therefore, to go outside the field of sociology in order to find the most general propositions. He finds them in economics and, especially, in the behaviourist psychology of B.F. Skinner.30

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This is a bit odd, since the behaviourist view of man is diametrically opposed to that of economics. While the latter depicts man as an autonomous being making choices, behaviourism regards her/him as an automaton reacting passively to his environment. The difference could not be greater it would seem, and yet, when it comes to application, they turn out to be very much alike. They are both based on motivational assumptions of a hedonist or utilitarian origin, even if expressed in somewhat different languages. The terminology of ‘reward’ and ‘punishment’, however, occur in both. But while behaviourism and rational choice agree that men seek to maximise their rewards, rational choice assumes that they do so by free choice, while behaviourism insists that they do so automatically as a result of their previous learning histories. Since social scientists, in contradistinction to some psychologists, are ignorant of the biographies of the people they investigate, reference to their learning histories becomes a matter of mere faith in behaviourist doctrine, but of little consequence for actual research. Even behaviourist social science tends to treat men as if they acted purposively (see Homans 1961: 12–14; 1970a: 317–24). Behaviourism originated as a psychological theory, or perhaps we should say methodology. It was first advanced by John B. Watson, very much as a reaction to the introspective psychology prevalent in the beginning of the twentieth century. Watson wanted to get rid of all ‘psychical’ concepts such as ‘soul’, ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’, etc., referring to an inner ‘man’, and replace them with concepts referring to the objective behaviour of individuals, notably those of ‘stimulus’ and ‘response’. Behaviourism, according to Watson, has the twin purpose of prediction and control of human behaviour. To predict the behaviour of an individual we must know the way he/she has been conditioned from earliest childhood. To control his behaviour we must be able to control his environment (Watson, 1913: 158–77; 1924/5: ch. 1). Behaviourism soon found out that there is a gap between stimulus and response and tried to fill this gap with an intervening variable. This intervening variable, however, was not a very satisfactory solution since it seemed to reintroduce what behaviourism wanted to avoid, that is, reference to some mysterious force within the human organism. B.F. Skinner, the leading representative of contemporary behaviourism, solves the problem, not by invoking some intervention between stimulus and response, but by looking beyond the response. Skinner rejects the stimulus-response model and replaces it by a model centering on contingencies of reinforcement: the when and where and how of reinforcement (1965; 1969). If behaviourism is used to explain social, and/or cultural, phenomena, it turns into a form of methodological individualism and it seems that Skinner approves of such use. At least, he is an ontological individualist. A species has no existence except as a collection of individuals, nor has a family, tribe, race, nation, or class. A culture has no existence apart from the behavior of the individuals who maintain its practices. It is always an individual who behaves, who acts upon the environment and is changed by the

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consequences of his action, and who maintains the social contingences which are a culture. (Skinner, 1974: 204).31 Behaviourist psychology is Homans’s solution to the problem with Parsons’ so-called ‘theory’. Instead of concepts, it generates general laws. The result is Homans’s theory of exchange, first presented in ‘Social Behavior as Exchange’ (1962: ch. 17) and, more fully, in Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (1961: 51–82). It consists of five propositions and reads like this: 1

2 3 4

5

If in the past the occurrence of a particular stimulus-situation has been the occasion on wich a man’s activity has been rewarded, then the more similar the present stimulus-situation is to the past one, the more likely he is to emit the activity, or some similar activity, now. The more often within a given period of time a man’s activity rewards the activity of another, the more often the other will emit the activity. The more valuable to a man a unit of the activity another gives him, the more often he will emit activity rewarded by the activity of the other. The more often a man has in the recent past received a rewarding activity from another, the less valuable any further unit of that activity becomes to him. The more to man’s disadvantage the rule of distributive justice fails of realization, the more likely he is to display the emotional behavior we call anger.

This theory is, with minor modifications,32 Homans’s main contribution to sociological theory. In his later writings, Homans is satisfied to demonstrate the fruitfulness of his theory and to defend it against alternative approaches, both in its specific form as a behaviourist theory of exchange and, more generally, as an example of psychologistic reduction and of methodological individualism. Homans for the first time proclaims himself a psychological reductionist in a paper from 1953 (Homans, 1962: ch. 16), but later denies being a psychological reductionist, on the ground that there are no general sociological propositions to reduce (1964a: 817; 1967b: 83–6; 1969: 15f). His explicit commitment to methodological individualism is of later date and seems to replace his commitment to psychological reductionism. According to Homans, however, methodological individualism entails psychological reductionism. Homans’s individualism, like Schumpeter’s (see pp. 105f), is pragmatic and strictly methodological. It lacks every connection with ontological individualism and so, does not deny the existence of institutions and other social wholes. Being pragmatic in character, Homans’s methodological individualism is also free from dogmatism. The issue of individualism versus holism is scientific and cannot be settled by philosophical argument (see Homans, 1967b: 83–6; 1980: 19–21). This does not prevent Homans from expressing definite opinions about social structure, however; opinions that are typical for methodological individualists. If, according to Homans, there is such a thing as social structure at all, it is only as

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certain patterns of interaction among people (1975: 54). Concerning Peter Blau’s notion of ‘structural effect’, Homans suggests that it is better called ‘collective effect’, since ‘it concerns the influence of a collection of individuals – but if a collection, still individuals – on another individual’ (p. 56). But ‘Why should things recognizable as social structures exist at all?’. Homans’s answer to this fundamental question by Raymond Boudon is as follows: I have tried to show how relatively enduring structures, a status-system for instance, can be created and maintained by the actions of individuals, actions of course taken under the influence and constraint of the actions of other individuals. That is, I have tried to explain the properties of certain simple structures using as general propositions the propositions of behavioral psychology. (Homans, 1975: 64) Homans’s work was widely read and much debated, but he seems to have attracted few immediate followers, at least in the USA.33 Among later applications of behaviourist psychology to sociological problems in the USA, there is reason to mention John H. Kunkel’s attempt to explain social change, especially economic growth, with the help of behaviourist learning principles (Kunkel, 1970). The most significant contributions to a theory of social exchange, after Homans, were made by Richard M. Emerson, Peter M. Blau and James C. Coleman. But all of them took a more structuralist approach to social exchange, than did Homans. Most holistic was Blau, who was never a methodological individualist, but who became ever more dedicated to structuralism.34 James Coleman will be treated at length in chapter 10. Here I concentrate on Richard M. Emerson. Emerson appeared on the sociological scene in 1962, with a seminal article on ‘Power-Dependence Relations’. A fundamental thesis of this article is that power is a property of social relations, or social structure, not of actors (pp. 32ff). From the very beginning, then, Emerson takes a more structuralist approach than Homans and he does not give up structuralism when turning to the theory of social exchange (Emerson, 1969; 1972a; 1972b). According to Emerson, Homans’s psychological reductionism suffers from two serious shortcomings: first, it conceives of society as the sum of individual behavior, or more accurately, it fails to offer a conception of society; and second, the overwhelming burden of ‘explanation’ falls upon ‘given conditions.’ In short, it takes as ‘given’ the very conditions sociology seeks to comprehend: the structure surrounding ‘behaving persons,’ and lawlike changes in that structure. (Emerson, 1972a: 41) A third shortcoming of Homans’s theory of exchange is its exclusive concern with dyadic relations. This is, of course, a serious limitation of any sociological theory and it was an important step forward, when Emerson generalised the

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theory of social exchange so as to apply also to social networks (1972b). From then on, Emerson and his colleagues were mainly concerned with experimental research on relations of power in exchange networks (Cook and Emerson, 1978; Cook, Emerson and Gillmore, 1983). In the meantime, a parallel development took place around the so-called elementary theory of David Willer and his colleagues. Taking their point of departure in classical structuralist sociology (Willer and Andersson, 1981; Willer, 1992), rather than in social exchange theory, they arrived at an approach similar to that of Emerson and his followers. In a well-known article from 1988, Markovsky, Patton and Willer criticised the analysis and results obtained by Cook, Emerson and Gilmore. This led to a further exchange between the two groups of researchers, but despite the disagreement between them, there was a general feeling that both groups were united in a common project: that of creating a new field of social research. The name of the new field became ‘network exchange theory’ (see Bienenstock and Bonacich, 1997). This new version of social exchange theory is different from that of Homans in two important respects: it includes a distinctive structuralist element and it has replaced behaviourist psychology by rational choice. The latest development seems to be the use of game theory to analyse the exchange between individuals in power relations (Willer, 1992; Willer and Skvoretz, 1997; Markovsky, 1997). This transformation of social exchange theory has led to a rapprochement with two other theoretical traditions in the USA: the network theory of Harrison White and followers, and the rational choice based theory of social exchange developed by James S. Coleman.35 The former tradition is characterised by a strong commitment to structuralism, which leaves little room for individualist microfoundations (White, Boorman and Breiger, 1976; White, 1992: 3, 298, passim; Wellman and Berkowitz (eds), 1988). An exception is Mark Granovetter, who makes frequent use of rational choice as a microfoundation in his analyses of networks (1973; 1978). The second tradition is more individualistic, but does not neglect social structures, as did Homans (see, e.g., Burt, 1982). Coleman, himself, is committed to methodological individualism, but, as we will see in chapter 10, it is a weak form of individualism, including also an important structuralist element. Coleman’s methodological individualism is, I believe, identical with the structuralindividualism defended by some Dutch sociologists (see p. 199). Network exchange theory is closer to Coleman’s theory of exchange than to the network theory of Harrison White. Like the former, it combines action theory and structuralism. There is a certain ambiguity on this point in the Emerson approach.36 According to Cook (1991: 32): ‘The goal was to construct a theory of social exchange in which social structure is the dependent variable’ (see also Cook, 1987: 214). Support for this claim can be found in Emerson (1972b: 58). But there is also abundant evidence that both Emerson and Cook use social structure as independent variable. This is fundamental to the theory of power dependence, which sees power as a function, or effect, of the position

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individuals occupy in social structure. Thus social structure is both dependent and independent variable: Structure is conceived, according to exchange theory, as the interconnection of various positions in an exchange network. Framed this way, exchange theory can illuminate not only the behavior of actors, but the structures that emerge as the result of these exchange relations. Furthermore, by focusing on a given structure or social institution, exchange theory provides an explanation both for the behavior of actors within structures and for structure itself. (Cook, O’Brien and Kollock, 1990: 160) Homans’s original theory of social exchange was individualistic and psychologistic. Network exchange theory differs from Homans’s theory by introducing a structural element in the theory. Indeed, for many sociologists working in this tradition, the structuralist element is the more important and most of them seem to reject methodological individualism. Karen Cook has argued that Emerson’s approach is, at least, not a radical methodological individualism. If it is, at all, individualistic, it has to be a form of structural-individualism, since its main characteristic seems to be that it links micro and macro or, better, action and structure (Cook, 1987; 1991; Willer, 1992).37 Perhaps, it would qualify as methodological individualism in the sense of political scientist David Knoke (1990), who defends an approach to political networks, akin to the general approach of James Coleman, which ‘requires that a structural theorist embrace a genuine methodological individualism’ (p. 27). German Verhaltenstheorie Homans’s theory of exchange was brought to Germany by the Polish sociologist Andrzej Malewski, who was more interested in the behaviourist foundation than in the idea of exchange. Like Homans, Malewski wanted to integrate social science under the edifice of the most general of all theories about human behaviour. Not only sociological theories, but also economics, and certain psychological theories, such as Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, are on a lower level of generality, and can be explained by, or reduced to, behaviourist psychology. According to Malewski ([1964] 1977: 148 [my translation]), ‘Behaviourism is the psychological foundation of all behavioural sciences’ (Die Verhaltenstheorie ist das psychologische Fundament für alle Wissenschaften von menschlichen Verhalten). The most influential representatives of behaviourist social science in Germany, however, were Hans J. Hummell and Karl-Dieter Opp. Their behaviourism was part of a more inclusive programme of reducing sociology to psychology. For this reduction to be possible, it is necessary to make clear what is meant by the terms ‘psychology’, ‘sociology’, and ‘reduction’. ‘We wish to characterize as psychological all statements about and all concepts concerning absolute

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properties and relations of individuals, and all statements and concepts concerning relations of individuals and things.’ ‘We wish to call sociological all statements and concepts concerning properties and relations of collectivities and concerning collectivities and things or collectivities and individuals’ (Hummell and Opp, 1968: 206f). Reduction, can be achieved in two ways: by a definition of sociological terms by psychological terms, and by a derivation of sociological hypotheses or theories from psychological hypotheses and theories. By a combination of definition and derivation Hummell and Opp arrive at four different possibilities: (1) neither definability nor derivability; (2) definability but not derivability; (3) derivability but not definability; and (4) both definability and derivability. The thesis which Hummell and Opp set out to test is the fourth one; that sociological terms are definable by psychological terms and that sociological hypotheses or theories are derivable from psychological hypotheses and theories. After a systematic and thorough investigation, which I have discussed and criticised elsewhere (Udehn, 1987: 167f ), Hummell and Opp find their thesis corroborated; sociology is reducible to psychology (1968: 220–3; 1971: 1–12; Opp, 1977a). Reduction, however, is not to be regarded as an end in itself. Its justification lies in the wholesome effects it has on the development of social science, i.e., sociology: reduction is supposed to lead to more general theories, stated in more precise terms and more easily testable, and, therefore, to an integration and accumulation of our knowledge (Hummell and Opp, 1968: 220–3; 1971: 81–6). Hummell and Opp at first make no mention of ‘methodological individualism’, but later recognise a close kinship between their psychological reductionism and Joseph Agassi’s ‘institutional individualism’ (Hummell and Opp, 1971: 8). Still later, they become sceptical about the label ‘reductionism’ and suggest that ‘methodological individualist’, or simply ‘individualist’, is a better characterisation of their programme (Hummell, 1973a: 64f; Opp, 1979: 4, 47, 109). The individualist research programme, according to Opp (1972: 6 [my translation]), consists in ‘the explicit use of individualistic theories to explain and predict social facts and to bring practical problems closer to a solution’ (unter expliziter Anwendung individualistischer Theorien soziale Sachverhalten zu erklären, vorauszusagen und praktische Probleme einer Lösung näherzubringen). Opp’s individualist research programme, which is influenced by structuralindividualism, differs from Hummell’s and Opp’s psychological reductionism, above all in the following respects. (1) It aims at explaining social facts rather than reducing sociological hypotheses and theories. There is, on the whole, a shift of emphasis from definition to explanation (Opp, 1979: 1–3, 6, 20). Explanation is not possible, however, without a previous definition, or ‘Rekonstruktion’, of collective concepts occurring in the explanation (p. 147). (2) The rules of co-ordination (Koordinationsregeln), referred to by Hummell and Opp as the means by which to provide the bridge between sociological and psychological theories, are replaced by transformation functions. Like rules of correspondence, transformation functions may be analytic or empirical (Hummell and Opp, 1968: 208f; 1971: 13ff). (3) The ‘requirement’ of definability is replaced by the reconstruction thesis (Rekonstruktionsthese), which says that

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collective concepts can, but must not, be reconstructed by individualist concepts denoting individuals and their properties (Opp, 1979: 116, 150). Neither Hummell’s and Opp’s psychological reductionism, nor Opp’s individualist research programme, says anything about the kind of psychological or individualist theory to be used in the attempted reduction, or reconstruction, of sociology. Several alternatives are possible, but Hummell and Opp finally settle for B.F. Skinner’s behaviourist learning theory as the most promising alternative. Other theories that are mentioned include Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance and different versions of the so-called ‘theory of balance’. The behaviourist research programme then is a sub-programme (Teilprogram) of the individualist programme. According to Opp (1972: 15–30; 1973: 39–45; 1977b), it consists of the following claims or theses : 1

2 3

4

5

6

Singular social phenomena can be explained by hypotheses in learning theory. (Singuläre soziologische Ereignisse sind mittels lern-theoretischer Hypothesen erklärbar). Learning theory and sociology are in competition. (Hypothesen der Lerntheorien stehen mit soziologischen Hypothesen in einer Konkurrenzbeziehung). Learning theory explains singular social phenomena better than does sociology. (Lerntheoretische Hypothesen können soziologische singuläre Ereignisse zutreffender erklären als soziologische Theorien). Learning theory is superior to sociology with respect to truth, empirical content and precision. (Lerntheoretische Hypothesen sind soziologischen Theorien bezüglich ihres Wahrheitsgehalts, ihres Informationsgehalts und ihre Präzision überlegen). Learning theoretical hypotheses are better than sociological theories for solving pratical problems, if the latter are at all useful for that purpose. (Hypothesen der Lerntheorie sind für die Lösung praktischer Probleme besser geeignet als soziologische Theorien, sofern diese ebenfalls anwendbar sein). The use of Skinner’s theory of learning in sociology leads to faster progress in this discipline than does the use of other theories of learning and other social psychological theories. (Die Anwendung der Skinnerschen Lerntheorie in der Soziologie führt zu einem grösseren Erkenntnisfortschritt in der Soziologie als die Anwendung anderer Lerntheorien und die Anwendung anderer sozialpsychologischer Theorien).

Hummell and Opp have done a great deal to clarify Skinner’s behaviourist learning theory, and to turn it into a programme adapted to sociological questions. They have also made great efforts to show that their programme works. I will not go into details about this work, but limit myself to a mention of their treatment of social structure. As a point of departure Hummell and Opp adopt the orthodox sociological view of social structure as a set of relationships between social roles, or positions (1971: 40–4). According to Opp, however, the concept of role is of little theoretical fertility, if used in addition to the concept of ‘expectation’, by which it is defined. More precisely, a role is a set of expectations somehow perceived to

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belong together. The only fertile use Opp can find for the concept of ‘role’ is in answer to the question: Under what conditions will certain expectations be perceived to belong together? Typical for any answer to this question is that the role – or the criterion used to sort out the bundle of expectations constituting that role – appear as an independent variable (Opp, 1972: 174ff; 1973: 133–46). Hummell uses a somewhat broader concept of ‘social structure’, or ‘social system’, which includes also the unintended consequences of human action. In compliance with methodological individualism, he proposes a strategy of research, which explains the social processes at the molar level in terms of individuals, acting at the molecular level (Hummell, 1973a: 65). Like many methodological individualists before, Hummell affirms the reality (in a sense) of social collectives and institutions, but demands their explanation in terms of individuals (Hummell, 1973b: 138f, 150). Anticipating the structuralindividualists, Hummell recommends the synthetic explanation of the systemic effects of the actions of many individuals (1973a: 71f). In the 1980s German Verhaltenstheorie merged with the so-called ‘structuralindividualist research programme’, residing mainly in Holland. Among the leading figures of structural-individualism are Siegwart Lindenberg, Reinhard Wippler and Werner Raub. Influenced by Homans, Coleman, Hummel and Boudon, the structural-individualists have as their main objective, the explanation of the unintended, composite, or collective, effects of the actions of individuals.38 Their aim is to develop an explanatory micro-sociology – rather than a descriptive macro-sociology – and to use it for the explanation, mainly of macro-phenomena, but also of micro-phenomena. The explanation of macrophenomena is achieved, materially, by providing a causal mechanism and, formally with the aid of so-called ‘transformation functions’, or ‘transformation rules’, turning laws about individual behaviour into statements about aggregate effects (Lindenberg, 1977; Raub and Voss, 1981: 88ff). Structural-individualism differs from German Verhaltenstheorie in being less, if at all, individualistic. As indicated by the name, it is both individualistic and structuralistic – if such a unity of opposites is possible. I believe that it is, but it is not methodological individualism as originally conceived. It is a weak form of methodological individualism, which is considerably less vulnerable to critique than the original strong version (see Udehn, 1987: 202ff). I will return to structural individualism in chapter 10, which deals specifically with rational choice sociology. Structural-individualism, at first, differed from German Verhaltenstheorie in being neutral with respect to behavioural assumptions. The tendency, however, has been to replace behaviourism by rational choice. Today it seems that all structural-individualists have adopted rational choice as the individualist part of structural-individualism.39

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Popperian methodological individualism

Methodological individualism was until quite recently – before the renaissance of Austrian Economics – most often associated with the name of Karl Popper. This, as we have seen, is not because he was its inventor. Nor is it, as we shall see, because he has very much to say about it that is entirely new. Popper did bring about a major change in methodological individualism by advocating institutionalism, but he did not integrate this element in methodological individualism, himself. One reason methodological individualism used to be more often associated with Popper than with the Austrians, is that, being a philosopher himself, Popper was more widely read among philosophers. Another reason is that, in the decades after the Second World War, he was probably also more widely read by social scientists, than were Weber, Mises and Hayek, whose influence was largely confined to their own disciplines of economics and sociology. Today this is no longer true. Interest in the philosophy of Karl Popper has been on the wane among social scientists for some time, while interest in Austrian Economics has increased. My conjecture is, however, that we will soon see a revival of interest also in the philosophy of Karl Popper.

Karl Popper Popper, then, was not an ‘Austrian’ in his methodology for the social sciences. He was, however, an Austrian by birth and, what is more, he was a student of Ludwig von Mises and a friend of Friedrich von Hayek. This fact alone makes for a certain continuity between Austrian and Popperian methodological individualism. More important, however, is the fact that Popper read an early version of The Poverty of Historicism at Hayek’s private seminar in London in 1936. In his ‘Intellectual Biography’, Popper also tells us that Hayek ‘saved his life’ twice. First, by helping him to find a publisher for The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and by writing most encouragingly about it. Second, by offering him a readership at the University of London, tenable at the London School of Economics, and by publishing ‘The Poverty of Historicism’ as an article in Economica (1944–5), for which Hayek was then acting editor (Popper, 1974a: 95; 1976: 120). When Popper takes up the subject of methodological individualism in The Poverty

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of Historicism, it is with direct reference to Hayek, but ironically, in a chapter entitled ‘The Unity of Method’. Now all this, I believe, is not only true for the natural, but also for the social sciences. And in the social sciences it is even more obvious than in the natural sciences that we cannot see and observe our objects before we have thought about them. For most of the objects of social science, if not all of them, are abstract objects; they are theoretical constructions. (Even ‘the war’, or ‘the army’ are abstract concepts, strange as this may sound to some. What is concrete are the many who are killed; or the people in uniform, etc.). These objects are the result of constructing certain models (especially of institutions), in order to explain certain experiences – a familiar theoretical method in the natural sciences (where we construct our models of atoms, molecules, solids, liquids, etc.). (Popper, 1944–5, III: 80; see also 1957: 135) Popper is here, more or less, repeating the view of Weber and Hayek, that the objects of social science are models or theoretical constructions. The ontological status of social objects remains obscure, however. Their being theoretical and abstract does not preclude the possibility that they refer to something real. But Popper certainly gives the impression of denying that social objects are real. What he has to say about social objects – and about the models of natural science – comes suspiciously close to an instrumentalist view of scientific concepts. This is surprising, since Popper in various contexts has appeared as an energetic defender of a realism in science (cf. Johansson 1975: 98f ). The impression of instrumentalism remains after reading the following passage, where Popper makes his first mention of methodological individualism. That we are very often unaware of the fact that we are operating with theories, and that we mistake our theoretical models for things is true, but this is a kind of mistake which is only too common. This use of models explains and at the same time destroys the claims of methodological essentialism … It explains them, for the model is of an abstract or theoretical character, and we are liable to believe that we see it, either within or behind the changing observable events, as a kind of permanent ghost or essence. And it destroys them because our task is to analyse our sociological models carefully in descriptive or nominalist terms, viz., in terms of individuals, their attitudes, expectations, relations, etc. – a postulate which may be called ‘methodological individualism’. (Popper, 1944–5, III: 80; see also 1957: 136) In this quotation, Popper mentions the doctrine of ‘methodological essentialism’, which he rejects. Opposed to methodological essentialism is ‘methodological nominalism’, which he advocates. By ‘essentialism’, Popper means conceptual realism, or the thesis that there are universals. Nominalism, as we have seen in

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chapter 4 (pp. 109f ), is the doctrine that there are only particulars. By adding the word ‘methodological’ before ‘essentialism’ and ‘nominalism’, Popper wants to avoid the metaphysical issue involved and replace it by the methodological issue of how best to achieve the objects of scientific investigation.1 He suggests that scientists should not concern themselves with asking essentialist questions, such as ‘what is matter?’, or ‘what is the nature of man’ and the like, but ask, instead, ‘how does this piece of matter behave?’ or ‘how do people act in a certain type of situation?’2 Popper, thus, rejects the use of real definitions in science. It is not entirely clear to me why methodological nominalism is supposed to imply methodological individualism. A corollary of anti-essentialism is that we should not be interested in the meaning of words. One of Popper’s favourite sayings is that ‘words do not matter’. There is nothing to be gained in precision, or otherwise, from definitions. In defining a word, term, or concept, what we do is to substitute several words for one word, thus introducing new words which are left undefined. The attempt to clarify the meaning of words by way of definition, therefore, leads to an infinite regress.3 Most early adherents of methodological individualism dissociated themselves from psychologism; the doctrine that social science is reducible to psychology. But Popper is more careful, than his predecessors, to distinguish the two doctrines – probably because he is anxious to avoid subjectivism. To this end, Popper always mentions ‘interaction’ or ‘relations’ in his statements of methodological individualism. If it only mentioned ‘attitudes’, ‘expectations’, or some other ‘psychological propensity’, it would be altogether indistinguishable from psychologism (see, Popper, 1944–5, III: 86–8; 1957: 152–9). In order to develop a methodology that is a real alternative to psychologism, Popper makes use of two methodological strategies: ‘situational logic’ and ‘institutionalism’. Situational logic is a generalisation of the method of theoretical economics; the science usually cited as the very prototype, or paradigm case, of methodological individualism. Briefly stated, situational logic consists in constructing models of action, based on assumptions about the ends, or goals, of people and about the situation in which they act, and then to ask what their actions would be on the fundamental assumption that they act rationally to achieve these ends. Now, it is a much debated issue, whether the method of theoretical economics rests on assumptions of a psychological nature or not, but Popper’s standpoint is that it does not. ‘I should like to mention, in passing, that I consider neither the principle of methodological individualism, nor that of the zero method of constructing rational models, as implying the adoption of a psychological method’ (1944–5, III: 82; cf. 1957: 142). What Popper means by ‘institutionalism’ is not perfectly clear, but he seems to use the term ‘institution’ in a broad sense, to cover every man-made social arrangement, from organisations, such as universities and other schools, to language and writing (1944–5, III: 87f; 1957: 154ff). A certain ambiguity is created by the fact that Popper suggests that we need both ‘studies, based on methodological individualism, of … social institutions’, and ‘individualist and

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institutionalist models of such collective entities as nations, or governments, or markets’ (p. 154). If institutions are to be studied with an individualist method, why do we need models of collective entities that are both institutionalistic and individualistic? This ambiguity remains when Popper concludes his own institutional analysis of progress. I believe that this analysis is typical, and that the human or personal factor must be generally the irrational element in most, or all, institutional social theories. The opposite doctrine which teaches the reduction of social theories to psychology, in a similar way as we try to reduce chemistry to physics, is, I believe, based on a misunderstanding. It arises from the false belief that this ‘methodological psychologism’ is a necessary corollary of a methodological individualism – of the quite unassailable doctrine that we must reduce all collective phenomena to the actions, interactions, aims, hopes, and thoughts, of individuals. But we can be individualists without accepting psychologism. The ‘zero method’ of constructing rational models is not a psychological, but rather a logical method. (Popper, 1944–5, III: 88; cf. 1957: 157f) What exactly is the ‘human or personal factor’, if it is not ‘the actions, interactions, aims, hopes and thoughts of individual men’? Popper returns to the topic of methodological individualism in The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), where he once again separates it from psychologism and even defends the autonomy of sociology. Concerning his conception of institutionalism, we are, however, still left very much in the dark. Against psychologism, Popper says that ‘the defender of an autonomous sociology can advance institutionalist views’ (Popper [1945] 1966: vol 2, 89ff). Popper, then, is a defender of an autonomous sociology and the view he advances is that no action can be explained in terms of motives alone, but that a reference to the environment is also needed. ‘In the case of human actions, this environment is very largely of a social nature; thus our actions cannot be explained without reference to our social environment, to social institutions and to their manner of functioning’ (p. 90). To this, the psychologist might counter that social institutions are man-made and, therefore, to be explained in terms of the psychological factors responsible for their creation and development. This was how some earlier methodological individualists saved methodological individualism from the threat of collectivism. But, for Popper, who rejects psychologism, this is no solution. Or is it? Psychologism, after all, has one praiseworthy aspect: its sane opposition to collectivism and holism, its refusal to be impressed by Rousseau’s or Hegel’s romanticism – by a general will or a national spirit, or perhaps, by a group mind. Psychologism is, I believe, correct only insofar as it insists upon what may be called ‘methodological individualism’ as opposed to ‘methodological collectivism’; it rightly insists that the ‘behaviour’ and the ‘actions’ of collectives, such as states or social groups,

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Popperian methodological individualism must be reduced to the behaviour and to the actions of human individuals. But the belief that the choice of such an individualistic method implies the choice of a psychologistic method is mistaken (as will be shown later in this chapter), even though it may appear very convincing at first sight. (Popper [1945] 1966: 91)

Popper now admits that methodological individualism seems to imply psychologism, but promises to show that it does not. He advances three arguments against psychologism. The first argument is that it ‘is forced to adopt historicist methods’, and ultimately, ‘to operate with the idea of a beginning of society’. This is so, because a psychological explanation of social institutions must start with a state where there were no social institutions, since only in such a state can psychological factors alone be responsible for the rise of new social institutions. Psychologism, according to Popper, is a form of the historical and methodological myth of the social contract; the idea that society can be explained in terms of a pre-social human nature (p. 93). Second, Popper repeats Hayek’s argument that social institutions, far from being ‘explicable in terms of needs, hopes, or motives’, are usually ‘the indirect, the unintended and often the unwanted by-product of [human] actions’ (p. 93). Popper’s third argument against psychologism is that social science makes use of the method of situational analysis, based upon the ‘logic of the situation’ (p. 97). Popper ends his defence of the autonomy of sociology by, once again, reminding us of the healthy aspect of psychologism; its methodological individualism. Also we must not overlook the great merits which psychologism has acquired by advocating a methodological individualism and by opposing a methodological collectivism; for it lends support to the important doctrine that all social phenomena, and especially the functioning of all social institutions, should always be understood as resulting from the decisions, actions, attitudes, etc., of human individuals, and that we should never be satisfied by an explanation in terms of so-called ‘collectives’ (states, nations, races, etc.). The mistake of psychologism is its presumption that this methodological individualism in the field of social science implies the programme of reducing all social phenomena to psychological phenomena and psychological laws. (Popper [1945] 1966: 98) The problem with Popper’s arguments against psychologism is that they seem to hit methodological individualism too. Popper’s main argument, implies the adoption of an institutionalist method, but this suggestion does not work as long as Popper insists that also institutions must be analysed by an individualist method. In Popper’s later writings on the methodology of the social sciences, the theme of methodological individualism recedes into the background and finally disappears altogether. After The Open Society and Its Enemies it is not even

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mentioned by name. The idea behind it appears, however, in some of the articles assembled in his Conjectures and Refutations [1962] 1968. In ‘Prediction and Prophecy in the Social Sciences’ (1948), Popper sums up the argument of The Poverty of Historicism. Methodological individualism is mentioned as the only sound alternative to collectivism, and collectivism as one of two ‘naive theories of society which must be disposed of before we can understand the function of the social sciences’. The first is the theory that the social sciences study the behaviour of social wholes, such as groups, nations, classes, societies, civilizations, etc. These social wholes are conceived as the empirical objects which the social sciences study in the same way in which biology studies animals or plants. This view must be rejected as naive. It completely overlooks the fact that these socalled social wholes are very largely postulates of popular social theories rather than empirical objects; and while there are, admittedly, such empirical objects as the crowd of people here assembled, it is quite untrue that names like ‘the middle-class’ stand for any such empirical groups. What they stand for is a kind of ideal object whose existence depends upon theoretical assumptions. Accordingly, the belief in the empirical existence of social wholes or collectives, which may be described as naive collectivism, has to be replaced by the demand that social phenomena, including collectives, should be analysed in terms of individuals and their actions and relations. (Popper [1962] 1968: 341) The second naive theory of society recognised by Popper is the conspiracy theory of society, the theory that behind everything that happens in society there is the will of some individual or group of individuals. This theory is also criticised in ‘Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition’ (1949), where Popper repeats and develops his ideas on social institutions, taking what may be characterised as a moderate rationalist position. His main argument against a radical political rationalism is the same as Hayek’s: ‘that nothing ever comes off exactly as intended’ (Popper [1962] 1968: 124). As with Hayek, this fact also sets the task for the social sciences. It is the task of social theory to explain how the unintended consequences of our intentions and actions arise, and what kind of consequences arise if people do this that or the other in a certain social situation. And it is, especially, the task of the social sciences to analyse in this way the existence and functioning of institutions (such as police forces or insurance companies or schools or governments) and of social collectives (such as states or nations or classes or other social groups). (Popper [1962] 1968: 125) Popper here makes a distinction between institutions and collectives. The meaning of this distinction, although possible to guess, is not immediately

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obvious. Above all, I find it difficult to understand the classification of states as collectives. I would classify it as an institution, or organisation, if I had to choose. Popper makes the further distinction between institutions and traditions. The notion of ‘institution’, according to Popper, rests upon that of ‘social function’. What characterises a social institution is that it fulfils a social function, whereas traditions simply are. This is interesting, because functional analysis would not normally be considered compatible with methodological individualism. Institutions and traditions have much in common; among other things that they must be analysed by the social sciences in terms of individual persons, their actions, attitudes, beliefs, expectations, and interrelations. But we may say, perhaps, that we are inclined to speak of institutions wherever a (changing) body of people observe a set of norms or fulfil certain prima facie social functions (such as teaching, policing, or selling groceries) which serve certain prima facie social purposes (such as the propagation of knowledge, or protection from violence or starvation), while we speak of traditions mainly when we wish to describe a uniformity of people’s attitudes, or ways of behaviour, or aims or values or tastes. Thus, traditions are perhaps more closely bound up with persons and their likes and dislikes, their hopes and fears, than are institutions. They take, as it were, an intermediate place, in social theory, between persons and institutions. (Popper [1962] 1968: 133) The addition of the term prima facie before those of ‘social function’ and ‘social purpose’ should probably be interpreted as an attempt to eliminate the suspicion that Popper’s institutionalism is infected by functionalism. More interesting however, is Popper’s separation of persons and institutions. For, what are institutions made up of ? The methodological individualist is, I believe, obliged to say: persons. But an alternative answer is to say that social institutions are made up of functions, roles, or positions.4 In the 1950s, Popper is occupied mainly with preparing the English edition of Logic der Forschung and does not write anything about the methodology of the social sciences. When he returns to this subject in the 1960s, the theme of methodological individualism has almost disappeared. The few scattered remarks there are about anything resembling methodological individualism are consistently ambiguous. Institutionalism, however, remains important, but most important is situational analysis, which is now launched as the method of social science (see Hedström, Swedberg and Udehn, 1998). ‘Situational analysis’ is Popper’s final name for a methodological tool which he had earlier called ‘logical’ or ‘rational’ reconstruction, the ‘zero method’, the ‘logic of the situation’ and ‘situational logic’. It is a method for constructing models in social science, based on the assumption that people act rationally in the pursuit of their ends. If we know people’s ends, the situation in which they act when seeking these ends and assume that they act rationally, i.e., choose the adequate means for attaining their ends, then, we can explain why they acted as

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they did. A problematic feature of Popper’s situational analysis is the status of the rationality principle. Popper denies that the rationality principle is psychological, or even empirical. According to him it is not a theory or a testable hypothesis, but a principle a priori. It is false, however, and therefore not valid a priori. But although false, it is a good approximation to reality. The principle of rationality is an integral part of most theories in social science. These theories are tested as wholes, but in case of falsification, Popper suggests as a methodological rule that we keep the rationality principle and treat our analysis of the situation as refuted (Popper [1963–4] 1994: 169f, 177f). How does this square with Popper’s famous principle of falsifiability. I do not intend to answer this question, but I would like to suggest that the origin of Popper’s position is John Stuart Mill and ultimately Auguste Comte; more specifically, his method of inverse-deduction, which was borrowed by Mill (see pp. 29, 47). According to Popper, himself, situational analysis is the method of marginalist economics. As such, it has much, but not everything, in common with Max Weber’s ideal type of purely rational action (cf. Jacobs, 1990). Situational analysis is also the inspiration behind Spiro J. Latsis’ critique of ‘situational determinism’ as the dominating research programme within economics (Latsis, 1972; 1978). More recently, it is discussed by John Goldthorpe as one version of rational choice in social science (1998). And, indeed, Popper’s ‘situational analysis’ seems to be another name for rational choice. It is possible, however, to conceive of situational analysis in a less restricted way. Among Popper’s pupils and followers, only J.W.N. Watkins seems to equate situational analysis with rational choice, while Joseph Agassi, Ian. C. Jarvie and John O. Wisdom appear to take a more broad view of this method. But how individualistic is situational analysis. That, I suggest, depends upon what is included in the situation. In his contribution to a symposium arranged by the German Sociological Association in Tübingen in 1961, Popper claims that situational analysis is an individualistic method. But he also makes the following curious statement: ‘Institutions do not act; rather only individuals act, in or for institutions. The general situational logic of these actions will be the theory of the quasi-actions of institutions’ (Popper [1962] 1976: 333).5 Whatever is that supposed to mean? One interpretation is that the ‘quasi-actions of institutions’ means normative action, which may be part of social roles, or not. In Popper’s recently published lecture on ‘Models, Instruments and Truths’ (1994), already referred to, Popper mentions social institutions as the most important element of the situation, besides the physical environment. In fact, I propose to use the name ‘social institution’ for all those things which set limits or create obstacles to our movements and actions almost as if they were physical bodies or obstacles. Social institutions are experienced by us as almost literally forming part of the furniture of our habitat. (Popper [1963–4] 1994: 167) Popper, then, conceives of social institutions as objective and thing-like, very

208 Popperian methodological individualism much like Emile Durkheim (see p. 34). This might be an indication that he no longer adheres to methodological individualism. At least, he does not mention this principle in his lecture. In Popper’s latest work (from the middle of the 1960s and onwards), methodological individualism has disappeared altogether. It is not even alluded to in his Intellectual Autobiography (1974a), and the reason is not hard to find. Popper’s theory of an autonomous world of objective ideas, capable of acting back upon individuals and their subjective ideas is hardly compatible with the original Austrian version of methodological individualism.6 Popper’s theory of an autonomous world of objective ideas is part of an ontological theory stating that there are, at least, three distinct worlds in the universe, each of which exists as an autonomous part of reality. They are (1) ‘the world of physical objects or physical states, (2) the world of states of consciousness, or mental states, or perhaps behavioural dispositions to act’ and (3) ‘the world of objective contents of thought’ (Popper [1968] 1972: 106). Popper discusses World 3 mainly from an epistemological point of view, but it is clear that his theory about three worlds has implications also for the methodology of the social sciences. To World 3 belong, first of all, such things as scientific theories and arguments, but also tools, institutions, traditions, works of art and values (Popper, 1972: 113; see also 1976: 187, 195). What Popper calls world 3 is what many social scientists call ‘culture’. According to Popper, then, culture, or at least part of it, belongs to world 3. This world, although man-made, transcends individual human beings and acts back upon them. Admitting that world 3 originates with us, I stress its considerable autonomy, and its repercussions on us. Our minds, our selves, cannot exist without it; they are anchored in world 3. We owe to the interaction with world 3 our rationality, the practice of critical and self-critical thinking and acting. We owe to it our relation to our task, to our work, and its repercussions upon ourselves. (Popper, 1976: 196) Popper’s theory of three worlds is a theory of emergent evolution. As such, it belongs in the holistic tradition.7 An important element in the theory of emergent evolution, including Popper’s version of it, is that each level in the hierarchic structure of the world is irreducible to the level ‘below’, but exerts a causal influence upon it. Popper calls it ‘downward causation’. In this ‘downward causation … the whole, the macro structure, may qua whole, act upon a photon or an elementary particle or an atom’ (Popper, 1977: 19). But there is also a downward causation from society to individuals: The most interesting examples of downward causation are to be found in organisms and their ecological systems, and in societies of organisms. A society may continue to function even though many members die; but a

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strike in an essential industry, such as the supply of electricity, may cause great suffering to individual people. (Popper, 1977: 20) What has been said so far concerns only ontological individualism. It remains to show that Popper’s theory of three worlds has implications also for methodological individualism. Central to Popper’s methodology of the social sciences and to his theory of objective knowledge is the idea of situational analysis. By this is understood ‘a certain kind of tentative or conjectural explanation of some human action which appeals to the situation in which the agent finds himself ’ (Popper, 1972: 179). From the very beginning, Popper has maintained that this situation is largely made up of social institutions. What is new, in his theory of three worlds is that social institutions are conceived of as belonging to a reality distinct from individual human beings. According to the original version of methodological individualism, institutions do not belong in the situation, at least not if they are conceived of as belonging to an autonomous reality ‘above’ individuals, capable of acting back upon them. According to Austrian methodological individualism, institutions should be analysed and explained as the result of the actions of individuals, but not as a cause of human action. According to Popper, however, human action and thinking is, at least partly, caused by social institutions. According to the Austrian view, institutions exist only as ideas in people’s minds. According to Popper, they exist in an autonomous world of objective ideas ‘over and above’ individuals. Popper’s theory of world 3 may be seen as a ‘secularised’ version of the theories of Plato and Hegel, as he admits himself (Popper, 1972: 106, 125f), and it is no less incompatible with original methodological individualism. Popper’s theory does not depict society, culture, or history, as some kind of super-person, or semigod, situated over and above human beings and deciding their fates, or standing behind the scene pulling the strings of human marionettes, but it does say that social institutions, are part of a reality, separate from individual human beings. As such, it is the expression of a view of society, which methodological individualists were always eager to combat: the hypostatisation of society as an entity independent of individuals. Popper’s theory of a world of objective thought contents belongs clearly in the holistic tradition. As Popper observes, himself, it has certain similarities to Plato’s theory of forms and to Hegel’s theory of objective spirit. It may be added that it has some similarities to the Marxist theories of objectification, alienation and reification. More obviously, it resembles the later Dilthey’s theory of objective mind, Durkheim’s theory of collective consciousness, Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms and, perhaps, most obviously, Georg Simmel’s theory of objective mind and objective culture. It has also much in common with structural-functionalism and with the theory of culture prevalent in social anthropology, the most holistic of the social sciences. To sum up and conclude, Popper’s methodological individualism has much in

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common with that of Weber, Mises and Hayek. Like his precursors, Popper advances methodological individualism in direct opposition to the naive belief of collectivism or methodological essentialism that social objects exist apart from the models used to construct and to analyse them. In a nominalist, or instrumentalist, fashion Popper holds that social objects are abstractions, or theoretical constructions. Only individual human beings are concrete objects. Methodological individualism is stated as the principle that social phenomena (collectives, institutions, traditions) should be (a) analysed in terms of, (b) reduced to, or (c) understood as resulting from the attitudes, expectations, actions, interactions and relations of individuals. In particular, it is the task of social theory to explain the existence and functioning of institutions and social collectives in terms of the intended and unintended consequences of the social actions of individuals. One important difference between Popper and the Austrians is that he is much less interested in the meaning of concepts, including collective concepts. For Popper, methodological individualism is not at all about the meaning of collective concepts. It is about the explanation of social phenomena. Another difference is that Popper, more explicitly than his Austrian predecessors, advances methodological individualism as a categorical imperative, valid a priori and universally applicable to the social sciences and to history. Methodological individualism is stated, by Popper as the ‘postulate’, ‘demand’, or ‘unassailable doctrine’ that social phenomena ‘should’, or ‘must always’ be analysed, or understood, in terms of individuals, etc. The main difference between Popper and the Austrians, however, is that Popper rejects the subjectivism of the latter. Methodological individualism is no longer a corollary of an intersubjective theory of society. According to Popper, subjectivism leads to psychologism and, ultimately, to a genetic concern with the origins of society. In order to avoid this predicament, Popper adopts institutionalism. What is more, institutions are conceived of as objective elements of social reality, not as ideas in the minds of individuals. This creates a tension in Popper’s social science methodology which is not easily resolved (cf. Bunge, 1996b: 533; 1999: 107f). I have argued that methodological individualism and institutionalism, as stated by Popper, are irreconcilable doctrines. Institutionalism is an addition to methodological individualism, which does not fit in; a young cuckoo which eventually replaces methodological individualism as the substantive part of Popper’s social science methodology. I believe that Popper, when fully appreciating the consequences of his commitment to institutionalism, silently dropped methodological individualism, while retaining institutionalism and situational analysis as the main elements of his social science methodology. Nevertheless, the tension between individualism and institutionalism in Popper’s thought leads his followers in somewhat different directions. J.W.N. Watkins stays on the individualist side, while Joseph Agassi and I.C. Jarvie try to sit on the fence, but finally come down on the institutionalist side. This is also where Popper eventually lands with his theory of the objective mind.

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J.W.N. Watkins J.W.N. Watkins was a student of Popper, and became his successor, as professor in philosophy, at the London School of Economics. He has probably written more about methodological individualism than any other adherent of this doctrine. The reason for this is, I believe, that it fell to his lot to defend methodological individualism against its critics during the height of the debate in the 1950s. Because of the many critical attacks, Watkins was forced to attempt a clarification of the doctrine of methodological individualism and to state it in a way less vulnerable to critique. A result of this is that Watkins has provided more explicit statements of methodological individualism than any other adherent of this principle. Watkins’s first treatment of methodological individualism is in the article ‘Ideal Types and Historical Explanation’ (1952a), where he presents Weber’s ideal type as a forerunner of the principle of methodological individualism (as we have seen, Weber not only launched the ideal type, but was a spokesman of methodological individualism as well). Watkins’s methodological individualism is derived from the fact that All social phenomena are, directly or indirectly, human creations. A lump of matter may exist which no one has perceived, but not a price which no one has charged, or a disciplinary code to which no one refers, or a tool which no one would dream of using. From this truism I infer the methodological principle which underlies this paper, namely, that the social scientist can continue searching for explanations of social phenomena until he has reduced it to psychological terms. I am not, of course, denying that such things as a long-term price movement will partially determine other events, which will be partially in terms of it. I only assert that it too is, in principle, explicable, and explicable in terms of individual attitudes towards things and other people. To sum up my argument so far; An understanding of a complex social situation is always derived from a knowledge of the dispositions, beliefs, and relationships of individuals. Its overt characteristics may be established empirically, but they are only explained by being shown to be the resultants of individual activities. (Watkins, 1952a: 28f) According to Watkins, then, his individualism is a methodological principle, which may be inferred from the truistic ontological thesis that social phenomena are human creations. But is it really a methodological principle? Watkins says that the social scientist ‘can’, ‘in principle’ reduce social phenomena to psychological terms. This looks more like an epistemological thesis. A methodological principle is a rule telling us not what we could, but what we should do. This epistemological thesis is about explanation, and (with the possible exception of Menger) Watkins is first, among the methodological individualists discussed so far, to formulate it as implying a reduction to psychology. It may also be noted

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that the psychological factors Watkins invokes in order to explain social phenomena are ‘dispositions’ in the sense of Gilbert Ryle (Watkins, 1952a: 35–40). It may be recalled that Gilbert Ryle introduced his notion of ‘disposition’ as a way of avoiding mentalistic language and as part of a behaviourist analysis of ‘mental’ phenomena (Ryle [1949] 1963: 301–11). Presumably, Watkins’s use of the term ‘disposition’ – and despite his frequent use of the term ‘attitude’ – is motivated by a similar wish to break with the subjectivism of Austrian methodological individualism. Watkin’s first statement of the principle of methodological individualism gave rise to questions concerning its exact status. He replies that he had first thought that it was analytic, and for three reasons: (1) because it is entailed by the truism that ‘social things’ are created by ‘personal attitudes’, (2) because the social scientist and the historian have ‘direct access’ only to concrete individuals and (3) because it appeared ‘invulnerable’. Watkins now gives up his belief in the analyticity of the principle of methodological individualism and changes its status ‘from a rule to an aspiration’ (Watkins, 1952b: 186). In a revised and expanded version of his ‘Ideal Types and Historical Explanation’ (1953), can be found a restatement of methodological individualism, together with a statement of its opposite; methodological holism. This principle [methodological individualism] states that social processes and events should be explained by being deduced from (a) principles governing the behaviour of participating individuals and (b) descriptions of their situations. The contrary principle of methodological holism states that the behaviour of individuals should be explained by being deduced from (a) macroscopic laws which are sui generis and which apply to the social system as a whole, and (b) descriptions of the positions (or functions) of the individuals within the whole. (Watkins, 1953: 729) Watkins has now settled for a strictly methodological version of methodological individualism. The epistemological thesis that social phenomena can, in principle, be explained in terms of individuals, is replaced by the methodological principle that they ‘should’ be thus explained. This means that Watkins has also reverted to his original belief concerning its status: Methodological individualism is a rule, not just an aspiration. Watkins gives two reasons for accepting methodological individualism and rejecting methodological holism. 1

Whereas physical things can exist unperceived, social ‘things’ like laws, prices, prime ministers and ration-books, are created by personal attitudes. (Remove the attitudes of food-officials, shop-keepers, housewives, etc., towards ration-books and they shrivel into bits of cardboard.) But

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if social objects are formed by individual attitudes, an explanation of their formation must be an individualistic explanation. 2

The social scientist and the historian have no ‘direct access’ to the overall structure and behaviour of a system of interacting individuals (in the sense that a chemist does have ‘direct access’ to such overall properties of a gas as its volume and pressure and temperature, which he can measure and relate without any knowledge of gas-molecules). But the social scientist and the historian can often arrive at fairly reliable opinions about the dispositions and situations of individuals. These two facts suggest that a theoretical understanding of an abstract social structure should be derived from more empirical beliefs about concrete individuals. (Watkins, 1953: 729)

Methodological individualism is no longer entailed by any self-evident truth about society and the invisibility of social structures, but is supported by an ontological (1) and an epistemological (2) thesis, respectively, and it is no longer analytical. ‘The principle whose status I have been trying to elucidate is a methodological rule which presupposes the factual assertion that human social systems are not organisms’. And, while there is no counter-evidence to this assertion, ‘one cannot assert a priori that it is true’ (1953: 730f). Methodological individualism, then, has an ontological basis, and this basis, according to Watkins, is ‘the assumption that society is not some kind of organism, but really consists only of people who behave fairly intelligibly and who influence each other, directly or mediately, in fairly comprehensible ways’ (p. 732). The epistemological argument used to support methodological individualism is of unmistakable empiricist origin. Watkins’s talk about ‘direct access’ very much resembles Bertrand Russell’s notion of ‘knowledge by acquaintance’, and he quotes, with approval, A.J. Ayer’s statement that ‘the English state … is a logical construction out of individual people’ (p. 730). In response to some critical observations by May Brodbeck (1954), Watkins sets out to clarify his ideas on the principle of methodological individualism, but, unfortunately, achieves the contrary; increasing confusion. His first attempt at clarification is intended to defuse any criticism to the effect that social events are the result, not only of individual activity, but of the physical environment as well. I will begin by reformulating the principle. It is based on the metaphysical commonplace that social events are brought about by people. Speaking loosely, one can say that climate, famine, the location of minerals and other physical factors help to determine history, just as one can say that alcohol causes road accidents. But speaking strictly, one should say that alcohol induces changes in people who drink it, and that it is the behaviour of some of these affected people, rather than alcohol itself, which results in road accidents … Thus the fact that physical causes operate in society does not

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Popperian methodological individualism invalidate the assumption on which the principle of methodological individualism rests. For they operate either by altering (and sometimes destroying) people, or through people’s ideas about them. In either case it is people who determine history, however people themselves are determined. Now if social events like inflation, political revolution, ‘the disappearance of the middle classes,’ etc., are brought about by people, then they must be explained in terms of people; in terms of the situations people confront and the ambitions, fears and ideas which activate them. In short, large-scale social phenomena must be accounted for by the situations, dispositions and beliefs of individuals. This I call methodological individualism. (Watkins, 1955a: 58)

So far, Watkins has only achieved a restatement of his earlier version of methodological individualism, but with an ambiguous relation to its ontological basis. The ambiguity consists in the fact that he, on the one hand, argues that it is ‘speaking loosely’ to say that physical factors help to determine history, and, on the other hand, says that the situation helps to explain social phenomena. Unless, of course, Watkins intends by the ‘situation’ only other individuals. But even so, he runs into trouble, since also other individuals exert only an indirect influence upon the actions of a particular individual. So, it would seem, Watkins will either have to admit ‘loose speaking’ in the explanation of social phenomena, or else, omit any mention of the situation in his statement of methodological individualism. Watkins also breeds confusion by seemingly changing methodological individualism from a principle concerning the explanation of social phenomena into a thesis about the meaning of concepts. When, in his polemic with Brodbeck, he goes on to discuss the relation of concepts such as ‘group climate’ and ‘cohesiveness’ to the principle of methodological individualism, it turns into a thesis about the meaning of holistic concepts. I do not see how such concepts can be meaningful and yet involve no reference to individuals. If ‘The Jewish race is cohesive’ does not mean that, for instance, Jews usually marry Jews, live in close communities, share religious rituals, etc., if it does not refer to Jewish people (whose behaviour can be observed), then I do not see how it can be tested or have any empirical content. (Watkins, 1955a: 61) Concern with concepts seems to be a temporary aberration, however. Watkins’s final word on this matter is decidedly against a preoccupation with the meaning of concepts. I should have realized, when I insisted that all large-scale happenings are, in principle, individualistically explainable, that there are many social methodologists who concern themselves with the uninteresting question of

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analysing sociological concepts rather than with the interesting question of ways of explaining what those concepts describe, and that these methodologists would naturally tend to mis-read me as insisting that all sociological concepts are individualistically analysable. (Watkins, 1959b: 243) As we saw in the previous quotation, this is exactly what Watkins insisted in his reply to May Brodbeck. The statement in the last quotation is more typical of Watkins, however, and more in keeping with the ‘spirit’ of Popperian philosophy, which certainly does not recommend any preoccupation with the meaning of concepts. Another thing to notice about this quotation, is that Watkins has returned to his initial formulation of methodological individualism as an epistemological thesis: social phenomena are said to be individualistically explainable, in principle. Watkins’s last extensive treatment of methodological individualism is in ‘Historical Explanation in the Social Sciences’ (1957b), where it undergoes still another change. Methodological individualism now becomes an ontological, or metaphysical, thesis about the ultimate constituents of the social world. According to this principle [methodological individualism], the ultimate constituents of the social world are individual people who act more or less appropriately in the light of their dispositions and understanding of the situation. Every complex social situation, institution, or event is the result of a particular configuration of individuals, their dispositions, situations, beliefs and physical resources and environment. (Watkins, 1957b: 105f) The reason why Watkins changes his formulation of methodological individualism from a strictly methodological rule to an ontological thesis may be that he has come to feel that it is too strong a demand to put upon explanations in social science and history, that they must all be in terms of individuals. This guess derives some support from Watkins’s recognition of so-called ‘half-way’ explanations. There may be unfinished or half-way explanations of large-scale social phenomena (say inflation) in terms of other large-scale phenomena (say, full employment); but we shall not have arrived at rock-bottom explanations of such large-scale phenomena until we have deduced an account of them from statements about the dispositions, beliefs, resources and inter-relations of individuals. (Watkins, 1957b: 106) The difference may seem unimportant, but there is undoubtedly a weaker claim involved after the substitution of ‘rock-bottom explanations’ for merely ‘explanations’. The reason is that this allows for the use of so-called ‘half-way

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explanations’ in social science and history; if only in the interim, while awaiting the ‘rock-bottom explanation’ of large-scale social phenomenon in terms of individuals, their dispositions, beliefs and interrelations. The recognition of half-way explanations illustrates the difference between epistemological and methodological individualism. The epistemological fact that social phenomena are explainable and/or definable in terms of individuals, does not imply the methodological rule that they should be explained in this way. In this article, Watkins introduces a still weaker version of methodological individualism and contrasts it with sociological holism. If methodological individualism means that human beings are supposed to be the only moving agents in history, and if sociological holism means that some superhuman agents or factors are supposed to be at work in history, then these two alternatives are exhaustive. (Watkins, 1957b: 106) This version is weaker than his earlier versions, because it is possible to agree with Watkins that human beings are the only moving agents in history, and yet to deny that human beings are the only constituents of social reality, or the only causes of social events. Watkins’s weakening of methodological individualism is the result of his encounter with the anthropologist Leon Goldstein, who accused him of breeding confusion by using two different principles of methodological individualism; one truly methodological and one ontological (Goldstein, 1958). Watkins answers that he has distinguished these two principles from the very beginning, and so, denies being guilty of confusion. What he does not mention, however, is that he originally reserved the name ‘methodological individualism’ for the strictly methodological principle, while later using this name also for the ontological thesis. This is unimportant. More important is the fact that Watkins now makes a synthesis of the two, so that methodological individualism comes to comprise both versions: ‘(1) Human beings (together with their material resources and environment) are the only causal factors in history. (2) Explain all social events in terms of human factors’ (Watkins, 1959a: 320). Watkins did return to methodological individualism in an article on Hobbes from 1976, where he restates and rejects his position in the 1950s. This retrospective statement is perhaps the most clearly worded formulation there is of the original, strong version of methodological individualism. In order not to miss, or misinterpret, anything in this careful and authoritative statement of methodological individualism, I quote it in full: Let S be any (human) society, institution, or social process, and let an Ipredicate be a one-term predicate that is predicable of individual people; that is to say, it always makes sense, though it may be false, to predicate any I-predicate of any individual. I-predicates can designate physical, psychological, and psycho-physical properties of individuals. Thus ‘tall’, ‘ambitious’

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and ‘weary’ are all I-predicates. Let an R-predicate be a relational predicate which designates a relation either between individuals (‘a is a cousin of b’) or between an individual and a thing (‘a owns this house’) or between individuals and things. There is no restriction on the type of relation that an R-predicate can designate – it may be spatial, physical, biological or social – provided that it is a relation into which individual people can enter. Then my old position can be restated thus: 1

An adequate description of S will essentially involve predicates – say Spredicates – that are neither I- or R-predicates.

2

However, the explanans of an adequate explanation of the formation of S, or of the subsequent functioning of S or of changes in S, will essentially involve only I- and R-predicates. If S-predicates still figure in our explanans we have an ‘unfinished’ or ‘half-way’ explanation: we could proceed to a deeper explanans containing no S-predicates.

3

Moreover, explanations of the formation of properties designated by the I-predicates in our explanans for S will in turn essentially involve Ipredicates but not S-predicates. (Watkins, 1976a: 710)

Despite the apparent clarity of this statement of methodological individualism, it involves one important ambiguity. The notion of an ‘R-predicate’ begs a fundamental question in the metaphysical issue of individualism versus holism: What is the nature of social relations? Are they external, or are they internal. Only if they are best conceived of as external relations is it possible to accept Watkins’ statement as an adequate explication of methodological individualism. I will return to the matter of internal versus external relations in a sequel to this work on social holism. For the time being I merely notice that Watkins no longer (or at least in 1976), subscribes to this version of methodological individualism. He still believes, though, ‘that the right way to explain social phenomena is to exhibit them as the (largely unintended) resultants of the activities of interacting individuals’ (p. 712). I suggested in the introduction to this section that Watkins tried to clarify the principle of methodological individualism in reply to its critics. I do not think he was altogether successful in this endeavour. There were too many shifts in his position. Paradoxically, however, Watkins has done us a service, by failing to state methodological individualism unambiguously as one single principle. By failing to do so, he has called our attention to the fact that what people have called ‘methodological individualism’ is really a number of distinct, but interrelated, theses and principles. Strictly speaking, methodological individualism is a rule telling us to explain social phenomena in terms of individuals, etc. This rule is supported by the epistemological thesis that such explanations are possible in principle and the

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ontological thesis that social phenomena are caused by individuals and nothing else. Since Watkins is an adherent of the covering-law model of scientific explanation, methodological individualism can also be stated as a principle about laws. Social phenomena can, and should, be explained by being deduced from individualist laws and initial conditions. There are no irreducible social laws governing the behaviour of collectives. Methodological individualism has, finally, been stated as a principle concerning the meaning of concepts, but Watkins finds this version less interesting. Watkins is a bit uncertain about the status of methodological individualism. He first believed that it is an analytical principle, valid a priori, then changed its status from a rule to an aspiration and back again to a rule, justified mainly by philosophical (epistemological and ontological) arguments. As distinguished from Popper’s categorical version of methodological individualism, which admits of no exception, Watkins’s version allows for half-way explanations in terms of macro phenomena.

Institutional individualism Methodological individualism has also been defended by some other Popperians and, especially, by Joseph Agassi and Ian C. Jarvie. They have both done a great deal to clarify and develop certain ideas in Popper’s philosophy of the social sciences. They have made explicit what was only implicit and they have developed what was embryonic. Above all, they have tried to bring together Popper’s methodological individualism with his institutionalism. But in attempting this, Agassi and Jarvie reached for the impossible. As stated by Popper, methodological individualism and methodological institutionalism are irreconcilable doctrines. In their hands, therefore, methodological individualism eventually turned into something else, which Agassi called ‘institutionalistic individualism’. Joseph Agassi In his highly suggestive article ‘Methodological Individualism’ (1960), Joseph Agassi declares that his aim is ‘to defend institutionalistic individualism’, which he considers ‘to be Popper’s great contribution to the philosophy of the social sciences’ (p. 244). Institutionalistic individualism is a via media between psychologism and holism, which combines the reasonable elements in both doctrines, while rejecting what is untenable (p. 248). Another important part of Popper’s social science methodology is situational logic (p. 264), or, what today goes by the name of ‘rational choice’. According to Agassi, the combined use of individualism, institutionalism and situational logic is the characteristic mark of all serious work in social science and history. I agree that Popper’s institutionalism, combined with situational logic, is an important contribution to the methodology of the social sciences. I also agree that it represents a via media between psychologistic individualism and the extreme view that wholes have aims and interests of their own. I even agree that

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this methodology may be conceived of as a form of individualism. But it is not compatible with Austrian methodological individualism and it is not compatible with Popperian methodological individualism, as stated by Popper, himself, and by Watkins. Institutionalism and methodological individualism are traditionally opposite views,8 and, as Agassi eventually realises, they remain opposites also in the writings of Popper and Watkins. Agassi’s institutionalistic individualism, therefore, is really a new version of methodological individualism. Before realising this, however, Agassi gets entangled in the same contradictions as Popper, himself. The main thesis of Agassi’s article is that the controversy between holism and individualism has been based upon the implicit assumption that ‘if “wholes” exist, then, they have distinct aims and interests of their own’, and that Popper has developed a via media between the two traditional views, by rejecting this assumption. According to Agassi, Popper ‘asserts that “wholes” do exist (though, of course, not in the same sense in which people exist), but they have no (distinct) interests’ (1960: 247f). As we have seen, the belief that holism implies that wholes have aims and interests of their own does, indeed, loom large in the writings of methodological individualists. It is not at all that common among holists themselves and Popper’s combination of institutionalism and situational logic is not the only via media between psychologism and the view that wholes have aims and interests of their own. But it is one possible alternative to these doctrines. Thus … not the aims of institutions but rather their existence affects the individual’s behaviour; the existing institutions constitute a part of the individual’s circumstances which together with his aims determine his behaviour … While according to psychologistic individualism only material conditions may be considered as relevant circumstances, according to Popper the existence of institutions may be considered as relevant circumstances too. (Agassi, 1960: 247) This is a fair characterisation of Popper’s institutionalism, but it differs from his methodological individualism, by including institutions in the relevant circumstances. Indeed, if institutions are ‘wholes’ affecting the behaviour of individuals, the term ‘institutional individualism’ looks very much like a contradictio in adjecto. According to Agassi, then, Popper’s ‘institutional individualism’ differs from psychologist individualism, by allowing us to take institutions for granted and using them to explain the behaviour of individuals (1960: 261–3). But it differs also from Popper’s methodological individualism, and Agassi, like Popper, has great difficulty separating the two. According to Agassi, psychologistic individualism entails the view that ‘all statements about societies and social institutions … should be viewed as shorthand assertions about many individuals’ (p. 246). But this does not make psychologist individualism different from Popper’s methodological individualism. According to Popper, methodological individualism is equal to the analysis of sociological models in nominalist terms (see pp. 201f ),

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and nominalist definitions are ‘shorthand symbols … introduced to cut a long story short’ ([1945] 1966: vol. 2, 14). Agassi also says that the individualist’s acceptance of institutional analysis amounts to this: ‘He does not deny that the behaviour of an individual is constrained and influenced by social factors provided that we can explain such constraints and influence as results of choices of other individuals’ (Agassi, 1960: 245). On this view, institutionalism ‘accords with the classical individualistic idea that social phenomena are but the interactions between individuals’ (p. 267). This seems to me a fair account of methodological individualism, but closer to psychologism than to institutionalism. Instead of taking institutions for granted, the individualist is now supposed to explain them as the result of the choice of other individuals or, in other words, as the result of interaction between individuals. Institutions have disappeared from view. They have dissolved into the theory of