Session 4A:What is Methodological Individualism? 4B:Why methodological Individualism is mistaken

Prof. Rajeev Bhargava
Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) 
New Delhi

Abstract: It is part of the orthodoxy in the social sciences that explanations of social phenomena are deficient if they ignore the agent’s own point of view and that only methodological individualism makes the perspective of the agent the linchpin of its programme.  Thus a consensus appears to exist among social scientists that methodological individualism is trivially true. Prof. Bhargava challenges this consensus.  He defends his view by unmasking the crucial ontological assumption of individualists that the intentional ingredient in action is a mental state existing in the individual, and that it can be known without reference to anything outside one’s mind.  He argues that intentions also lie embedded in social practices external to the individual mind, and that without an understanding of such practices even those intentions that lie in the heads of individuals remain unknown.  Thus he rehabilitates a non-individualist strategy that encourages a contextual study of individual actions and an enquiry into social contexts relatively independent of the study of the actions of individuals.

Suggested Readings

1. Rajeev Bhargava, “Individualism in Social Science”, Oxford: OUP, 1992 and Delhi 2008.

2. “Methodological Individualism”, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

3. Steven Lukes, “Methodological Individualism Reconsidered," in Alan Ryan, ed. The Philosophy of Social Explanation, Oxford: OUP, 1973.

Prof. Rajeev Bhargava came into the course at the point when we were attempting to pull out of internal dialogues to approach the question of knowledge production within disciplines, with his take on a particular debate that has had both historical currency and its own implications for the agency-structure debate, the individual-social debate, or the intent-design debate. This was the debate around methodological individualism. In Prof. Bhargava’s words, it is part of the orthodoxy in the social sciences that explanations of social phenomena are deficient if they ignore the agent's own point of view and that only methodological individualism makes the perspective of the agent the linchpin of its programme.  Thus a consensus appears to exist among social scientists that methodological individualism is trivially true. Bhargava challenges this consensus. He defends his view by unmasking the crucial ontological assumption of individualists that the intentional ingredient in action is a mental state existing in the individual, and that it can be known without reference to anything outside one's mind.  He argues that intentions also lie embedded in social practices external to the individual mind, and that without an understanding of such practices even those intentions that lie in the heads of individuals remain unknown.  Thus Bhargava rehabilitates a non-individualist strategy that encourages a contextual study of individual actions and an enquiry into social contexts relatively independent of the study of the actions of individuals.

As against collective explanatory concepts, as emerging in Marxism for instance, MI came up with the question of individual agency as against the apparently empty and authoritarian categories of collectivity, saying that standards of good SS must include MI. All human phenomena must be wholly and exhaustively explained in terms of properties of human individuals, goals, intentions, desires, wills, choices … this movement was around the 1950s … upto 1968 when the debate was declared an arid one by Steven Lukes. It was in the mid-80s that analytic Marxists brought it back. Prof. Bhargava ended by speaking of the ability to make meaning, which is what makes connections between the individual and the social; psychological states, or collectivities, therefore, cannot be held responsible for this.

Interesting questions that came up were in the realm of emergent properties, in which scenario the distinction between the individual and the collective seems redundant.

The session and the larger discussion threw up several implications for ways of doing research – that of the individual knower within the context of sociality, and that of the production of knowledge in such contexts, the relationships between social concepts and individual experience, among them.