Philosophies of Social Science.

    Figure 1 reflects our definition of individualism at the beginning of these notes.  That is, individualism is ‘a collection of doctrines which stress the importance of the individual compared with other entities’.  The size of this ‘collection’ is underlined by the list provided by Lukes (1973) who identifies the following:

• Political individualism
• Economic individualism
• Religious individualism
• Ethical individualism
• Epistemological individualism
• Methodological individualism

As explained earlier, it is not our purpose here to develop a comprehensive account of individualism.  The focus in these notes is the rejection of individualism by ‘holism’.  Paul will explore individualism more fully next week.  However, in interpreting the growing critique of individualism in the 19th and 20th centuries, as expressed notably in the emergence of sociology as a new academic discipline, we need to make some immediate observations about the idea of ‘individualism’.

   If you look again at Figure 1 and also at Lukes’ list of types (or typology) of individualism above, one particular distinction seems to stand out:

• Individualism and values (‘should’ questions)

Individualism is linked historically to major political, social and cultural movements which challenged the morality, justice and ethics of the old order and sought to replace it with something better.  The dignity of each individual was proclaimed as a value.   Linked to various ‘individualisms’ were the principles of ‘liberty’, ‘equality’ and the right to personal ‘autonomy’ and ‘self-development’.  So individualism was at the centre of political debates and revolutions, religious conflicts (not least the English Civil War) and ethical controversy.  Forms of individualism, separately and together, continue to be prominent in as people argue about what should happen from a moral point of view.

• Individualism and knowledge (‘how’ questions)

Individualism is not only a central concern in debates about what should be, but also in attempts to discover how things are.  It has become not just a principle of politics, religion and morality, but also a principle of scientific inquiry.  Hence, science developed on the principle that ‘truth’, even ‘facts’, could be made known by the individual scientist and his powers of rational thought and careful observation.  In Descartes’ famous dictum, ‘I think, therefore I am’.  Central in much early ‘social science’ in England, certainly in 18th and 19th century economics, was the concept of the ‘abstract individual’.  Just as natural science was making spectacular discoveries through analysis (breaking things down into their simple elements and observing their interrelationships closely), so the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment seemed to encourage a social analysis of the relationship between individuals.  ‘Individuals’ here were seen in very abstract terms:

‘According to this conception, individuals are pictured abstractly as given, with given interests, wants, purposes, needs, etc; while society and the state are pictured as sets of actual or possible social arrangements which respond more or less adequately to those individuals’ requirements …   The crucial point about this conception is that the relevant features of individuals … are assumed as given, independently of a social context’ (Lukes, 1973, p. 73).

      This is a module exploring the philosophy of the social sciences.  For this reason, we are focusing on the second ‘type’ of individualism identified here – individualism as a principle in achieving knowledge.  We are interested most obviously in how questions rather than should questions.  Hence, we are concerned with another particular variant of individualism – methodological individualism.

DEFINITION

Methodological individualism - this doctrine holds that ‘all social explanation is, in principle, reducible to statements about individuals’ (Williams and May, 1996, p.200).

This approach to social inquiry, therefore, argues that truly scientific explanations of affairs must, in the end, be earthed in explanations of the motivations and actions of individuals, not in terms of ‘wholes’ such as social classes or ethnic groups.  In the hands of many, methodological individualism has meant operating on the basis of the abstract conception of the individual, apart from social context, described above.  Other methodological individualists, including (as we shall see below) Max Weber, located the individual much more fully in a social setting.

   But, finally, it needs to be stressed that the ‘should’ and the ‘how’ varieties of individualism cannot really be kept entirely separate.  Hence, we find in the work of Hayek this example of ‘how’ methodological individualism:

‘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 behaviour’ (Hayek, 1949, p.6).

But we also find Hayek’s ideas being taken up, directly and indirectly, by the Thatcher government in the 1980s and being used as part of a political programme.

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This connection between individualism as a value and individualism as way of knowing is underlined as we turn now to look at the rise of sociology as a critique of individualism and liberal capitalist society.

Sociology and the Critique of Individualism

By the middle of the 19th century, certainly in Britain, the impact of the various strands of individualism was pervasive.  Of the early 19th century, Krishan Kumar refers to

‘the dominant philosophical individualism and atomism of the time’ (Kumar, 1978, p.304),

and observes that, by this period,

‘the crude working ideologies had been liberalism, individualism, constitutionalism utilitarianism and laissez-faire’ (Kumar, 1978, p.38).

   Again, these intellectual traditions will be explored more next week by Paul.  Here it is sufficient to illustrate the virtual displacement of the old medieval corporate world-view and the feudal economy by an industrial capitalist society in which individualism was fundamental to a new way of thinking, a new morality and a new economy.

• New Thinking – the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was a European philosophical movement of the 18th century, often also called ‘the Age of Reason’.  It was marked by its commitment to reason; belief in progress through science; freedom of thought and expression; and its emphasis on the individual as the source of knowledge and morality.

• New Morality – Utilitarianism

The Utilitarians held that the greatest good could be defined as the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people.  Hence, at the core of utilitarianism is the satisfaction of the individual’s wants.  This moral philosophy also informed an approach to social science – a model of society as an aggregation of atomised individuals united by self-interest, rationally seeking to meet their personal wants (utility).  Among the social sciences, economics has been particularly influenced by utilitarianism.  Hence, there is a close link here with …

• New Economy – Classical Liberal Economics

Deriving especially from Adam Smith, classical economics has stressed private property, the market and free competition as the best means of meeting the criteria of efficiency and equity.  The focus is on liberty and a minimum of state regulation, allowing individuals to maximise their profits.  Smith himself, and other classical economists did recognise that this individual economic exchange must take place within a legal and moral framework.  So there is a role for the state in setting down the rules and also in ensuring that issues such as sanitation, health and factory conditions are addressed (Lukes, 1973, chapter 13). 

   The triumph of individualism was associated with a dynamic culture of ‘modernity’ and the unprecedented economic growth of industrial capitalism.  To its enthusiasts it really did seem like ‘best of all possible worlds’ was coming into view.

   However, for others, this new world was alarming and threatening.  Unrestrained individualism was central to a society characterised by selfishness, social polarisation, extremes of social inequality, a loss of community, alienation, and political instability.  Critics of liberal individualism linked this social and spiritual deterioration with the material reality of Victorian cities, with their slums and disease and spatial segregation.

   Some of these critics were predictable – straightforward reactionary conservatives, often traditional Catholics, who looked back with affection and a sense of loss to pre-modern Christendom.   Others, however, were enthusiastic about the potential of the new modern world and committed to the prospects for progress through science, but fearful of the consequences of unchallenged individualism.

ACTIVITY 1

Here you can make some links between two modules in your Level 2 course.  

Look again at your notes for Weeks 1 and 2 of the Society, Politics and Cities (SPC) module.  On pp. 5-7 of the Week 1 notes you will see how Auguste Comte, who first coined the word ‘sociology’, was both critical of Enlightenment individualism, but also continuous with it.  He saw it as an engine of progress, but he also feared that it was unsustainable, lacking social cohesion and leading to war and revolution.  Hence, the early sociologists wee anxious to secure social cohesion and harmony.

In Week 2 of SPC we looked more at middle-class fears in England about the social consequences of capitalist individualism and attempts through social intervention (especially in housing and town planning) to achieve community and cohesion.

Read these notes again, noting the links between these material concerns and the philosophical division between individualism and holism.

   

   In this more progressive critique of individualism, we encounter the first developments of sociological ‘holism’.  In the work of people like Saint Simon and Auguste Comte, we see a focus on ‘society’ which challenged the individualism of their times.  Both these French writers identified a process of social evolution whereby one type of society was replaced by another.  Thus, Comte traced a movement through three stages

‘theological’ society;

‘metaphysical’ society; and

‘positive’ society.

We are now living in the ‘positive’ age.  Comte was enthusiastic about this and saw ‘positive’ science as offering the potential for unprecedented progress and prosperity.  But the new world was perilous and unstable.  What could be done to secure both progress and order?  Comte’s answer was to advocate a new ‘science of society’ – sociology.  This ‘queen of the sciences’ would involve a study of ‘society’ as an entity that was more than the sum of its individual members.  By understanding the causes of change (‘social dynamics’) and social ‘stability’, sociology could be a source of social advance to parallel the contribution of natural sciences to material advance.

   You can see here a challenge to individualistic thinking.  You can also see a challenge to individualist morality and politics.  For Comte, we are not atomised individuals.  The individual apart from the community is a meaningless abstraction.  My happiness is bound to your happiness and vice-versa.  And, in ensuring the best of all possible futures, we cannot rely on individualism and competition.  There is a need for social intervention informed by this new ‘social science’.

   The beginnings of ‘holism’ in social science are seen in Saint Simon and Comte.  Buy they can be illustrated more graphically in the much more influential work of two otherwise very contrasting scholars – Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx.

Examples of Holism – Durkheim and Marx

Durkheim

Durkheim’s work spans the end of the nineteeth century and the early years of the twentieth.  He was influenced greatly by Comte’s earlier work.

   For Durkheim, sociology was the study of ‘social facts’, not individuals.  He mounted the most famous challenge to idea that

‘facts about individuals could be understood entirely in terms of other facts about those individuals.  There were, rather some facts about individuals which could only be understood in terms of social facts’ (Hughes et al, 1995, p.178 – emphases in original).

   To try to prove his point, Durkheim took an apparently extreme case in the seemingly individual act par excellence – suicide.  Suicide seems to be the act of a lonely, isolated individual, perhaps suffering from a personal mental illness.  But can it be shown to be a social act, prompted by a person’s membership of a wider society?

   Durkheim’s focus was not so much on suicide as on suicide rates as indicators of ‘social facts’.  He noted how their was long-term stability in the numbers of people committing suicide within different groups European societies.  His working hypothesis was that individual well-being was dependent on there being a correct balance between the individual’s dependence on, and independence of, society.  Too little or too much independence is harmful (Hughes et al., 1995, pp. 178-9).  He identified four kinds of suicide:

Through this theory and typology, Durkheim was able to explore the differing rates of society between societies and also the different types of suicide characteristic of different social settings.  For example, as a more individualistic religion, Protestantism was more associated with egoistic suicides than Catholicism.  Anomic suicides are much more characteristic of modern urban life than altruistic suicides.  

   Thus, Durkheim questions individualism in two ways.  We cannot understand ourselves simply as individuals, our lives determined by our own rational choices.  This is because we are in society and society is in us.

• We are in ‘society’

The example of suicide shows that, even in the seemingly most individual acts, our understanding and behaviour is shaped by our membership of society.  We live within a pre-existing framework of norms, values and material constraints that influence the meaning that we attribute to the word and the pattern of our actions.  In Peter Berger’s words,

‘If we follow the Durkheimian conception, society…  is there, something that cannot be denied and that must be reckoned with.  Society is external to ourselves.  It surrounds us, ecompasses our life on all sides.  We are in society’ located in specific sectors of the social system.  This location predetermines and pre-defines almost everything we do, from language to etiquette, from the religious beliefs we hold to the probability that we will commit suicide…  In sum, society is the walls of our imprisonment in history’ (Berger, 1966, pp.108-9)

Society is ‘in us’

‘Society’ does not only confront us as an ‘external’ reality.  We ‘internalise’ is norms and values so that they become our norms and values.  Most of the time we want to obey the rules!  Again, in Berger’s words:

‘Society, then, is not something ‘out there’, in the Durkheimian sense, but also ‘in here’, part of our inner-most being.  Only an understanding of internalisation makes sense of the incredible fact that most external controls work most of the time for most of the people in a society.  Society not only controls our movements, but shapes our identity, our thoughts and our emotions.  The structures of society become the structures of our own consciousness…  The walls of our imprisonment were there before we appeared on the scene, but they are ever rebuilt by ourselves.  We are betrayed into captivity with our own co-operation’ (Berger, 1966, pp.140-41).

   In Durkheim, we find an example of ‘holism’ – a perspective that seeks explanations in terms of the wider structures, processes and institutions within which individuals live their lives.  It is a challenge to the view of methodological individualists that all satisfactory social explanations must be reducible to statements about individuals.

   But individuals don’t disappear in Durkheim’s sociology or from his moral agenda.   He came to see society as not only constraining people from without, but also as being internalised by them within.  He was concerned at the development of a society where people did not feel that norms were meaningful for them.   He himself was a moral individualist, committed to ‘the sanctity of the individual person and the inviolability of individual rights’ (Lee and Newby, 1983, p. 212).  He sought to use sociology to inform social policies that would create the right balance between the individual and society.

Marx

Karl Marx  argued that philosophers throughout history had tried to understand the world.  For him, however, the point was to change it.  And, especially in his earlier writings, his focus was on the dehumanising and alienating consequences of capitalist society for the individual.  His life’s work was to develop a critique of capitalist that would be liberating for the individual.  He argued that each person has a wide range of creative potentialities and the need to fulfil them.

   However, people become fully human not by being left alone to compete with others and to develop in isolated autonomy.  Rather,

‘Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions …  Individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association’ (Marx and Engels, 1845, pp.431-2, 91-2 – quoted in Lukes, 1973, p.71)

Hence, for Marx, we are fundamentally social beings, who realise our true selves and highest potential in association with others.  If we are individuals, then we are social individuals who are in society and have society in us.

    But, if individual liberation was the ethical foundation as Marx commenced his life’s work, in methodological terms he was very distrustful of the classical economists and their focus on individual action and the immediate appearances of things and the reality behind these appearances.

‘If things were as they appear to be, Marx remarks…, there would be no need for science to discover the truth.  It would just be apparent to us.  So it is with human society.  The implication, which has been highly influential in twentieth-century social thought, is that in order to understand the workings of society we must go beyond immediate experience and seek the real, underlying structures and processes which determine its appearance and form’ (Hughes et al., 1995, p.64 – emphasis added).

This focus on the ‘real underlying structures and processes’ underlines the strongly holistic character Marxist economics and politics.  The everyday behaviour and interaction of individuals occur within a capitalist economy and society.  Whether people realise it or not (and often they don’t), they are positioned as individuals with a set of economic, social and political structures which shape their opportunities, relationships and thinking:

• Economically - they are placed within an economic system structured around the search for profit through exploitative labour relations.

• Socially – the ‘social relationship of production’ that grow up around the labour process involved crucial divisions of social class that shape everyday life and opportunities.

• Politically and culturally - the economic power of the capitalist class gives them ideological dominance and control over political institutions (notably the state) and over thought.  This Marx argued that ‘the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class.

So, in Marx we find a social analysis that is very much weighted in the direction of ‘holism’.  Rather than individual behaviour, it is the social ‘wholes’ of capitalism and the large-scale processes which connect them that are the focus:

• capitalist society;                 
• modes of production;
• social classes;
• political ideology;
• forms of social reproduction; and
• state forms.

ACTIVITY 2

Marxism has featured in two other modules at Level 2:

Week 3 of Research Development, where, in the later pages of the classnotes, we explored Marxist realism and the argument that, beneath the surface appearances of things, there are ‘real underlying generative mechanisms’ that shape day-to-day life.

Week 4 of Society, Politics and Cities, where we examined Marxist urban theory and concepts such as ‘regimes of accumulation’ and ‘modes of regulation’.

Have another look at these notes.  How far do they underline Marxism as a predominantly holistic perspective?

There are varieties of ‘Marxisms’.  On the one hand, some Marxist historians such as E. P. Thompson have insisted on the importance of focusing on the conscious and purposive actions of real people.  (Thompson, 1978).  This style of Marxism emphasises local research and the study of the lives of actual individual people and local groups of workers and their institutions.

   On the other hand, there is a structuralist Marxism in which individuals are secondary to the point, at the extreme, where they become invisible altogether.

DEFINITION

Structuralism – in a general sense, this refers to social scientific approaches that regard social structure as more important than social action and the view that society is prior to individuals (Abercrombie et al., 1994: p. 415-6; and Williams and May (1996), p.202-3).

   Craib observes that structuralist Marxism offers a view of ‘the world as a puppet theatre’ (Craib, 1992, chapter 9).  Individuals in capitalist society are, in this view, 'on strings', manipulated by capitalist structures and processes.  Even the thoughts that they think are thoughts planted by the dominant capitalist ideology.  At best, when times are good, they can be the ‘cheerful robots’ of capitalist consumption, living our their lives in an allotted niche (Mills, 1970).  Against Margaret Thatcher’s statement that ‘there’s no such thing as society’, some structuralists would counter with ‘there’s no such thing as the individual’!

   This loss of the individual was the subject of a biting moral critique of Marxism by Karl Popper.  He linked it morally to the horrendous disregard of the individual in the Stalinist tyranny of the Soviet Union.  And, methodologically, he regarded theories not rooted in falsifiable statements about individuals as offering not scientific explanation but dangerous ideology (Popper, 1945).

Combining Individualism and Holism?  - Linking to the Seminar

Finally, as we have reviewed this dispute between individualists and holists, with all the heat and rage that it has generated, you may have concluded that both may have something to offer.  Is it possible to combine a focus on individuals with a focus on wholes, a focus on people as conscious and purposive agents with a focus on social structures?

   There is no time to develop this here, but in our seminar we shall be considering this possibility in the context of the very practical context of finding a home.  How do we come to live where we do.  Is our home the result of our individual choice, ‘maximising our utility’ within budgetary constraints?  Or is our home the result of our location within a wider set of structures or ‘wholes’ that determine the outcome?

Here, we can point to two sociologists from different eras that have tried to combine individualism and holism.

• Max Weber - sought to develop social explanations that were adequate at two levels:

• The level of meaning - that is, explanation has to make sense in terms of the meanings which people give to their actions and that of others.  This involves taking the individual’s account of their behaviour seriously. 

• The level of cause – that is, a form of explanation that can show that one state of affairs can bring about another.

So, in explaining the rise of capitalism in Western Europe before elsewhere,  in causal terms, Weber identified the distinctive nature of Protestant Christianity as a possible causal factor.  He then looked at the world through the eyes of the Protestant Calvinist to show how his/her belief system would lead to a particular view of the world conducive to capitalist success.  In other words, he looked at their meanings.  His analysis involves a focus on both individuals and social wholes, but, in the end, Weber argued that explanations must be rooted in the study of individuals.  In this sense, he was a methodological individualist.

• Anthony Giddens – writing much more recently, Giddens has sought to hold together individuals and wholes in his theory of ‘structuration’ (Giddens, 1979)  In the process the language has changed to refer to:

• human agency (this can mean particular individuals or individuals operating together or in conflict with one another); and

• social structures (these may act as constraints on people, determining their actions, but they are also themselves the product of human agency and can serve to enable people to act

Both Weber and Giddens alert us to the possibility that the best explanations are ones that can combine a focus on

• individuals and on wholes;

• human meanings and causal links; and

• human agency and social structures.

Easier said than done, and Giddens has been criticised for not backing up his theory of structuration with examples.  But our seminar offers a basis to take some tentative steps!

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References

Abercrombie, N., Hill, S. and Turner, B.S. (1994), The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, third edition, London: Penguin Books.

Berger, P. (1966), Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books edition.

Craib, I. (1992), Modern Social Theory: From Parsons to Habermas, second edition, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Giddens, A. (1979), Central Problems in Social Theory, London: Macmillan.

Hayek, F.A. (1949), Individualism and Economic Order, London, 1949.

Hughes, J.A., Martin, P.J. and Sharrock, W.W. (1995), Understanding Classical Sociology, London: Sage.

Kumar, K. (1978), Prophecy and Progress: The Sociology of Industrial and Post-Industrial Society, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Lee, D. and Newby, H. (1983), The Problem of Sociology, London: Hutchinson.

Lukes, S. (1973), Individualism, Oxford, Blackwell.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1845), The German Ideology, Moscow.

Mills, C. W. (1970), The Sociological Imagination, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Popper, K. R. (1945), The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Thompson, E. P. (1978), The Poverty of Theory, London: Merlin Press.

Ullmann, W. (1967), The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages, London.

Williams, M. and May, T. (1996), Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Research, London: Routledge.

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