The Fallacy of Methodological Individualism
From
jeffrubard@gmail.com@21:1/5 to
All on Mon Jan 22 00:30:08 2018
[From May 2009. Are people still talking about Weber?]
The sociological legacy of Max Weber is almost as pernicious as it is enlightening. His devotees, Bourdieu among them, credit him with delivering the long-sought “Critique of Historical Reason”; but one could also argue that his theoretical framework
as expressed in Economy and Society is in large part a farrago designed to channel the Weimar Republic in ‘liberal’ directions (the threadbare character of this German liberalism having been memorably satirized in Simplicissimus in the person of the
liberale Frau” exhorting people to turn out at the polls for no reason in heaven or on earth). One of his principles which has been widely taken up is “methodological individualism”, the ultimate explanation of social action in terms of
individual agents. In a sense this is unimpeachable: people don’t come in bubble packs, after all. In the sense in which it is taken, though, it is a bad legacy of Neo-Kantianism which divorces sociological analysis from social reality.
Though Lukacs’ invocation of social totality as a historically effective category in the form of the proletariat should be taken more seriously by Neo-Weberians than it is – Lukacs was a member of the Weber circle before ‘converting’ to
Bolshevism, after all – the criticism I have in mind is less global and more Meadian. We are recently familiar with explanations of the concepts involved in formulating individual choice and preference as consequences of “forms of life”, but if
this is granted or no the near-immediate consequences of involvement in interaction systems still go curiously unconsidered by fans of methodological individualism. (The specific problems set by Wittgensteinian analysis are not directly related to the
issues that compel “social pragmatism”, nor are they incompatible with a sensible and sane approach to the issues.)
When ego and alter begin interacting, a principle of semantic realism demands that the interaction be viewed as an evolving system of meaning: no matter how encapsulated the initial intentions of the agents may have been, the significance of the acts in
their interaction depends on their dynamic, dyadic bond. The ability of agents to learn from and agree with each other, critical even for self-interested action, involves interpenetration of their perspectives — not simply the unloading of “
personally” held viewpoints on each other. This is not just a sociological truism: the consequences of what the Parsonsonians called “double contingency” for the question of mutual interpretation are generally overlooked from a philosophical
standpoint, the result being that a solipsism which is not methodological enough is automatically supposed to carry the day in lieu of thinking harder about what it means to interact.
An interesting special case of the problem is the “intention-based analysis” of literary conservatives. On their view, the utmost in critical seriousness involves probing what was going on in Shakespeare or Sterne’s “language of thought”, the
private and apperceptively self-contained musings of the great literary mind. Without even a “Warrenite” analysis of this “original intention” stance (asserting that the great text is prone to semantic emendation by centuries of use, and a fine
thing it is too) we can raise the question of whether this does not make a hash of literary history. Must we not think about what contribution the literary milieu, the world of the Spectator and Tatler – and perhaps that of the Rump Parliament as well
made to the language of the canonical authors? And if the noblest and most individual “sinngebende Akte“ do not lack an evolutionarily intersubjective tie, why are we to think that the world of mundane economic activity does?
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