Methodological Individualism: Background, History and by Lars Udehn

By Lars Udehn

In the course of the heritage of social inspiration, there was a relentless conflict over the real nature of society, and find out how to comprehend and clarify it. This quantity covers the advance of methodological individualism, together with the individualist thought of society from Greek antiquity to fashionable social technological know-how. it's a accomplished and systematic therapy of methodological individualism in all its manifestations.

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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).

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 -43suppose 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?

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.

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