ABSTRACT
The institutions and other social entities which make up society are not, perhaps, altogether like Peter Pan's fairies. This chapter is concerned with metaphysics, it is not quite on the grand scale of Gellner's. Gellner is concerned with each item of social life as an aspect of The Transition, whereas it concerned only with the changeability of social entities as a problematic aspect of their objectivity. Ontological individualism only clashes with ontological holism if they are formulated so as to be mutually exclusive. An ontological individualist wants to argue that the only real entities in the social world are individual persons; that social structure and social organization would be patterns of interrelatedness between persons and not stand over and above persons. A methodological holist holds that social entities like groups, institutions, classes, societies, have to be studied as a whole.
