Methodological individualism

Methodological individualism is a philosophical method aimed at explaining and understanding broad society-wide developments as the aggregation of decisions by individuals (and a version of individualism in general). In the most extreme version, the "whole" is nothing but the "sum of its parts". It has also been described as "reductionism", a reduction of the explanation of all large entities by reference to smaller ones.

Social science
Methodological individualism is opposed to, for example, the comparison of experimental and control groups of individuals, because individualism denies that a collectivity is an autonomous decision-maker, and demands that the social sciences ground their theories in individual action. The idea has also been used to attack, among other ideas, historicism, structural functionalism, and the roles of social class, gender roles, or ethnicity as even partial determinants of individual behavior. Even the trivial idea that advertising affects individual tastes has been seen as contrary to methodological individualism.

One early version of methodological individualism can be seen in the writings of Thomas Carlyle, in which human history is seen as a collection of the biographies of heroes. (See philosophy of history.) William James tried to free methodological individualism of Carlyle's elitism. He wrote that "communities change from generation to generation" due to not only "the Grants and the Bismarcks, [but also] the Joneses and the Smiths." Grant and Bismarck were the heads of governments of the U.S. and Prussia respectively when James wrote those words, but they are balanced in this passage by the anonymous Joneses and Smith, who also throw their stones and have their says in the communities' development.

Methodological individualism is an essential part of modern neoclassical  economics, which usually analyses collective action in terms of "rational", utility-maximizing individuals. This is the so called Homo economicus postulate. In this view, the structure and dynamics of most economic institutions can be explained using it. One example of methodological individualism in economics was the criticism of the Historical School's promotion of statistical analysis by the Austrian School of economics in the Methodenstreit.

In sociology, Jon Elster (among others) follows this lead: "The elementary unit of social life is the individual human action," he argues. "To explain social institutions and social change is to show how they arise as the result of the actions and interaction of individuals. This view, often referred to as methodological individualism, is in my view trivially true." (Elster, 1989, 13)

Strictly speaking, methodological individualism is not an argument for political individualism. At least, this was Max Weber's position, who argued at the start of the twentieth century that if a properly-functioning socialist regime were to arise, it too would have to be sociological understood on methodological individualist principles. However, the conflation of methodological with political individualism (i.e., liberalism of the laissez-faire variety) is common, by friends and foes of the former alike. When this is done positively, it is often asserted that the precepts of methodological individualism are a matter of mere commonsense.

Critiques
Some radical feminist and postmodern critics have argued that this kind of "rationality" is itself a typically male, Western construction, and that "common sense" varies among cultures. For example, common sense notions in the US, such as women's rights, are very different from those in Iran. Similarly, to Marxists, "common sense" represents the partial and necessarily incomplete and ideological vision of those looking at a social system from the inside and lacking any clear understanding of the system as a whole. Methodological individualism has also drawn philosophical critiques, especially from sociologists.

In one alternative perspective, the dynamics of a society can be seen as involving a dialectic of three parts:


 * 1) heterogeneous members of society act, helping to create the structure and functioning of society as a whole;
 * 2) the society as a whole limits and shapes the perspectives, preferences, and in the end, actions of the individuals, while helping to determine which individuals' actions have the most impact; and
 * 3) the interaction between these two levels leads to changes in both individuals and society.

Consider a life-boat that is about to founder because there are too many occupants. (1) The actions (including words) of the individuals helps to create a fight or a consensus about what to do (or some in-between situation). (2) That social situation then "feeds back" to affect individual attitudes and actions. (3) The "dialectic" between these two forces eventually leads to either the abandonment of the boat by one or more individuals &mdash; or collective destruction in a watery grave.

The most neglected aspect of methodical individualism is the realisation that reality can only be experienced and mediated by an individual's consciousness, which in turn is shaped by the societal reality. That is, methodological individualism ignores or forgets the second part of the process limned above, overemphasizing the first. Each individual is assumed to be autonomous, an unmoved mover. This usually means that the third part is forgotten, so that a static perspective is embraced, so that society and humanity are unchanged over time.