ABSTRACT
The individualist theory of society has a long history in Western thought. Since I will try to tell this history in another volume, I will not go into details here. My purpose in this chapter is merely to provide a brief background to the rise of the specifically methodological version of individualism. For this purpose, I will first present the two main versions of the individualist theory of society which preceded methodological individualism; the theory of the social contract and the theory of spontaneous order, as it took shape in Adam Smith’s idea of the market as an invisible hand. This idea laid the foundation of economics and it is often assumed that classical economics was not only the first social science, but also the first example of methodological individualism. I am going to argue below that, as such, it was not an altogether clearcut example, although I agree, of course, that it was more individualistic than the views of most of its critics. Classical economics was mainly a British phenomenon, but in Germany, and to a lesser degree in France, there was a massive reaction against the individualism of the Enlightenment, of utilitarianism and of classical economics. The main expression of this reaction is the cultural movement known as Romanticism, whose most significant manifestation in the human sciences is German historicism. In France there emerged a doctrine which shared some elements with both British and German thinking, namely the positivist sociology of Auguste Comte. Methodological individualism emerged, I believe, as an individualist counterreaction to the anti-individualist reaction of German historicism and the sociologism of positivist sociology. If this belief is correct, it becomes necessary to include the latter two intellectual currents as important parts in any account of the background of methodological individualism.
