Methodological Individualism

Methodological individualism is the position that social phenomena must ultimately be explained by reference to the actions, beliefs and motivations of individual people, rather than by treating a social whole, such as a class, a nation or a society, as though it had an independent reality, purpose or agency of its own separate from the individuals who make it up. The position is closely associated with the sociologist Max Weber, whose account of social action as meaningful behavior oriented toward other people treated individual actors and the subjective meaning they attach to their own conduct as the proper starting point for sociological explanation, and it was later given a more formal statement and name within economics and the philosophy of social science, including by the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who is generally credited with coining the term itself in the early twentieth century. Methodological individualism stands in direct contrast to the more holistic emphasis found in Emile Durkheim's concept of the social fact, which treats certain social phenomena as exerting an external, coercive reality of their own that cannot be reduced to individual psychology. The disagreement between individualist and holistic approaches to explanation has remained one of the most persistent and consequential methodological debates in the social sciences, shaping how sociologists, economists and political scientists alike decide what should count as an adequate explanation of a social outcome.