ABSTRACT
Methodological individualism is a methodological approach that has been traditionally associated with social sciences. For decades throughout the twentieth century, philosophers such as Karl Popper and J. W. N. Watkins, sociologists such as Max Weber and Raymond Boudon and economists such as Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek were particularly eloquent promoters of this approach of social sciences and were frequently engaged in debates with the defenders of the opposite view. Without necessarily being involved in theoretical debates, most social scientists proceeded in ways that were illustrative either of methodological individualism or of this opposite approach, which rejected individualist postulates and was known either as methodological holism or collectivism when it was not identified with a variety of organicism. For their part, most economists, especially since the so-called marginalist revolution, were inclined to adopt more or less explicitly the individualist posture which was more consonant with their attempts to elucidate the arcane dimensions of the market economy by relating them to well understood rational behaviour of people. Be that as it may, it is not my intention in this chapter to revisit the rich history through which methodological individualism and methodological holism have progressively defined themselves. This work has been competently done by various historians of thought who devoted works specifically to this question.1
