ABSTRACT
The articles combined in this volume centre around one common theme, the role of rules and institutions1 in human social life. They seek to explore how rules emerge and change, and how they affect the ways in which persons deal with each other. And they examine the question of what we can say about the comparative merits or the desirability of alternative rules or systems of rules. In both these dimensions, in their explanatory concern as well as in their concern with the normative issue, the arguments in this volume are informed by an ‘individualist’ meta-orientation. They are informed by a methodological individualism, i.e., the methodological presumption that, whatever phenomena at the social aggregate level we seek to explain, we ought to show how they result from the actions and interactions of individual human beings who, separately and jointly, pursue their interests as they see them, based on their own understanding of the world around them. And they are informed by a normative individualism, i.e., the normative presumption that the evaluations of the persons involved, their interests and values, provide the relevant criterion against which the merits or ‘desirability’ of alternative rules are to be judged.
