article from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodological-individualism/
This doctrine was introduced as a methodological precept for the social sciences by Max Weber, most importantly in the first chapter of Economy and Society (1968 [1922]). It amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors. It involves, in other words, a commitment to the primacy of what Talcott Parsons would later call “the action frame of reference” (Parsons 1937: 43-51) in social-scientific explanation. It is also sometimes described as the claim that explanations of “macro” social phenomena must be supplied with “micro” foundations, ones that specify an action-theoretic mechanism (Alexander, 1987).
A contrast is often drawn, following J.W.N. Watkins (1952a), between methodological individualism and methodological holism. This is usually tendentious, since there are very few social scientists who describe themselves as methodological holists. There are, however, forms of social-scientific explanation with more active adherents that methodological individualism precludes or downgrades. These include, most importantly, functionalism, many types of sociobiology, “memetics” or evolutionary cultural explanation, psychoanalytic and “depth hermeneutic” methods, and any form of explanatory generalization grounded in purely statistical analysis.
Defenders of methodological individualism generally claim that it is an innocent doctrine, devoid of any political or ideological content. Weber himself cautioned that “it is a tremendous misunderstanding to think that an ‘individualistic’ method should involve what is in any conceivable sense an individualistic system of values” (Weber 1968: 18). Nevertheless, the doctrine of methodological individualism became embroiled in a number of highly politicized debates during 20th century, largely because it was often invoked as a way of discrediting historical materialism. There were two distinct rounds of controversy on this score. The first occurred primarily during ‘50s, in response to the work of Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Popper. The second round occurred during the ‘80s, in response to Jon Elster, this time as part of critical debates within the movement known as “analytical Marxism.” During the latter period, methodological individualism became widely associated with what many called “rational choice imperialism.”
1. Weber
The phrase methodische Individualismus was actually coined by Weber's student, Joseph Schumpeter, in his 1908 work Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalökonomie. The first use of the term “methodological individualism” in English was again by Schumpeter in his 1909 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper, “On the Concept of Social Value” (see Udehn 2001, 214). However, the theoretical elaboration of the doctrine is due to Weber, and Schumpeter uses the term as a way of referring to the Weberian view.
In Economy and Society, Weber articulates the central precept of methodological individualism in the following way: When discussing social phenomena, we often talk about various “social collectivities, such as states, associations, business corporations, foundations, as if they were individual persons”(Weber 1968, 13). Thus we talk about them having plans, performing actions, suffering losses, and so forth. The doctrine of methodological individualism does not take issue with these ordinary ways of speaking, it merely stipulates that “in sociological work these collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action” (Weber 1968, 13).
For Weber, the commitment to methodological individualism is very closely related to the commitment to verstehende (or interpretive) patterns of explanation in sociology. The reason for privileging individual action in sociological explanation is that only action is “subjectively understandable.” Weber reserves the term “action” to refer to the subset of human behavior that is motivated by linguistically formulated or “meaningful” mental states. (Generally speaking: coughing is behavior, apologizing afterwards is action.) Updating the terminology somewhat, we can say that the defining characteristic of an action is that it is motivated by a mental state with propositional content, i.e., an intentional state. The importance of action for Weber is that we have interpretive access to it, by virtue of our capacity to understand the agent's underlying motive. This permits the social scientist to “accomplish something which is never attainable in the natural sciences, namely the subjective understanding of the action of the component individuals” (Weber 1968, 15). Action-theoretic explanation is central to social-scientific analysis, therefore, because without knowing why people do what they do, we do not really understand why any of the more large-scale phenomena with which they are embroiled occur.
Thus methodological individualism is a slightly misleading term, since the goal is not to privilege the individual over the collective in social-scientific explanation, but rather to privilege the action-theoretic level of explanation. This privileging of the action-theoretic level is methodological because it is imposed by the structure of interpretive social science, where the goal is to provide an understanding of social phenomena. Actions can be understood in a way that other social phenomena cannot, precisely because they are motivated by intentional states. Yet only individuals possess intentional states, and so the methodological privileging of actions entails the methodological privileging of individuals. Thus the “individualism” in methodological individualism is more a byproduct of its central theoretical commitment than a motivating factor. This is what defenders to the doctrine have tried to communicate, with greater or lesser degrees of success, by claiming that it is politically or ideologically neutral.
It is worth emphasizing the difference between methodological individualism, in Weber's sense, and the older traditions of atomism (or unqualified individualism) in the social sciences. Many writers claim to find the origins of methodological individualism amongst economists of the Austrian School (especially Carl Menger), and doctrines articulated during the Methodenstreit of the 1880s (Udehn 2001). Others trace it back to Thomas Hobbes, and the “resolutive-compositive” method elaborated in the opening sections of the Leviathan (Lukes 1968, 119). Yet the distinctive character of this type of atomism was summed up quite clearly by Hobbes, with his injunction to “consider men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddainly (like Mushromes) come to full maturity without all kind of engagement to each other” (1949 [1651], 8:1). The atomistic view is based upon the suggestion that it is possible to develop a complete characterization of individual psychology that is fully pre-social, then deduce what will happen when a group of individuals, so characterized, enter into interaction with one another. Methodological individualism, on the other hand, does not involve a commitment to any particular claim about the content of the intentional states that motivate individuals, and thus remains open to the possibility that human psychology may have an irreducibly social dimension. Thus one way of accentuating the difference between atomism and methodological individualism is to note that the former entails a complete reduction of sociology to psychology, whereas the latter does not.
Finally, it should be noted that Weber's commitment to methodological individualism is closely related to his more well-known methodological doctrine, viz., the theory of ideal types. Historical explanation may make reference to the actual content of the intentional states that motivated particular historical actors, but the sociologist is interested in producing much more abstract explanatory generalizations, and so cannot appeal to the specific motives of particular individuals. Thus sociological theory must be based upon a model of human action. And because of the constraints that interpretation imposes, this model must be a model of rational human action (Weber writes: “it is convenient to treat all irrational, affectually determined elements of behavior as factors of deviation from a conceptually pure type of rational action” [1968, 6].)
Thus one of the most important consequences of Weber's methodological individualism is that it puts rational action theory at the core of social-scientific inquiry. This is why subsequent generations of social theorists, under Weber's influence, sought to bring about the methodological unification of the social sciences by producing what came to be known as a “general theory of action” – one that would broaden the economic model of action in such a way as to incorporate the central action-theoretic insights of (primarily) sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. The work of Talcott Parsons in the first half of the century was the most important in this regard, with the unification movement reaching its apogee in the collaborative publication in 1951 of Toward a General Theory of Action, co-edited by Parsons and Edward Shils. Yet shortly thereafter, partly due to problems with the unification program, Parsons abandoned his commitment to both methodological individualism and action theory, adopting a purely systems-theoretic view. This led to an overall lapse in the project of producing a general theory of action, until it was revitalized in 1981 by the publication of Jürgen Habermas's The Theory of Communicative Action.
2. Hayek
It has never escaped anyone's attention that the discipline that most clearly satisfies the strictures of methodological individualism is microeconomics (in the tradition of neoclassical marginalism), and that homo economicus is the most clearly articulated model of rational action. Of course, this tradition has not always been in the ascendancy within the economics profession. In particular, there are many who have felt that macroeconomics could be a completely self-standing domain of inquiry (reflected in the fact that the undergraduate economics curriculum is still often divided into “micro” and “macro.”) There have always been those who would like to plot the movements of the business cycle, or of the stock market, in a way that disregards entirely the motives that individual actors may have for doing what they do. Similarly, many have tried to discover correlations between macroeconomic variables, such as unemployment and inflation rates, without feeling the need to speculate as to why a change in one rate might lead to movement in the other. Thus there has always been a very lively debate within the economics profession about the value of the “rational actor” model that is at the heart of general equilibrium theory.
One of the earliest iterations of this debate occurred during the so-called Methodenstreit between members of the Austrian School in Economics and the German Historical School. Most theorists of the Austrian School, however, like Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises, were pure atomists. It was only Friedrich von Hayek who explicitly identified himself with the Weberian doctrine of methodological individualism, and defended it through reference to the demands of interpretive social science. The key text is his paper, “Scientism and the Study of Man,” serialized in Economica (1942-44), and later published as the first part of The Counter-Revolution of Science (1955).
In Hayek's view, the desire on the part of social scientists to emulate the physical sciences creates an exaggerated fear of teleological or “purposive” concepts. This leads many economists to eschew any reference to intentional states and to focus purely upon statistical correlations between economic variables. The problem with this focus is that it leaves the economic phenomena unintelligible. Take, for example, the movement of prices. One might notice a constant correlation between the date of the first frost and fluctuations in the price of wheat. But we do not really understand the phenomenon until it has been explained in terms of the rational actions of economic agents: an early frost reduces yields, leading to less intense price competition among suppliers, more among consumers, etc. Thus Hayek insists that, in effect, all macroeconomic analysis is incomplete in the absence of “micro” foundations.
It is important to note, however, that while Hayek has a model of rational action as the centerpiece of his view, his is most emphatically not a form of rationalism. On the contrary, he puts particular emphasis upon the way that various economic phenomena can emerge as the unintended consequences of rational action. Even though the outcomes that people achieve may bear no resemblance to the ones that they intended, it is still important to know what they thought they were doing, when they chose to pursue to course of action that they chose – not least because it is important to know why they persist in pursuing that course of action, despite the fact that it is not producing the intended consequences.
Of course, part of Hayek's motivation for endorsing methodological individualism and demanding that social-scientific explanations specify a mechanism at the action-theoretic level is that he wants to emphasize the limitations of the individual's actor's perspective. It's fine to talk about macroeconomic variables like “the inflation rate,” but it is important to remember that individual actors (generally speaking) do not respond directly to such indicators. All that they can see are changes in the immediate prices that they must pay for production inputs or consumption goods, and this is what they respond to. The large-scale consequences of the choices they make in response to these changes are largely unintended, and so any regularity in these consequences constitutes a spontaneous order. This is a crucial element of Hayek's information-based argument for capitalism: economic actors do not have access to the same information as economic theorists, thus it is only when we see the operations of the economy through their eyes that we can begin to see the advantages of a decentralized system of coordination like the market.
To illustrate the importance of the individual's perspective, Hayek gives the example of the process that leads to the development of a path in the woods. One person works his way through, choosing the route that offers the least local resistance. His passage reduces, ever so slightly, the resistance offered along that route to the next person who walks though, who is therefore, in making the same set of decisions, likely to follow the same route. This increases the chances that the next person will do so, and so on. Thus the net of effect of all these people passing through is that they “make a path,” even though no one has the intention to do so, and no one even plans out its trajectory. It is a product of spontaneous order: “Human movements through the district come to conform to a definite pattern which, although the result of deliberate decisions of many people, has yet not been consciously designed by anyone” (Hayek 1942, 289).
The problem with ignoring the agent's perspective, in Hayek's view, is that it can easily lead us to overestimate our powers of rational planning and control, and thus to fall into “rationalism.” By contrast, the central virtue of methodological individualism is that it helps us to see the limitations of our own reason (Hayek 1944, 33). Formulating theories that refer directly to the “interest rate,” or “inflationary pressures,” or “the unemployment rate” can mislead us into thinking that we can manipulate these variables, and thus intervene successfully in the economy. We forget that these concepts are abstractions, used not to guide individual action, but rather to describe the net effect of millions of individual decisions. The key characteristic of methodological individualism is that it “systematically starts from the concepts which guide individuals in their actions and not from the results of their theorizing about their actions”(1942, 286). It therefore encourages, in Hayek's view, greater modesty with respect to social planning.
Hayek does not mention methodological individualism after the 1950s. Indeed, the role that evolutionary explanations come to play in his later work implies a tacit retraction of his commitment to the doctrine.
3. Popper
For many years, the term methodological individualism was associated primarily with the work of Karl Popper. This is due to the extensive debate triggered by Popper's papers, “The Poverty of Historicism” (1944/45), and later his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Popper, however, although making use of the term, did little to defend his commitment to it. Instead he left this job to his former student, J.W.N. Watkins. It was this debate between Watkins and his critics that (perhaps unfairly) solidified the association in many people's minds between Popper and methodological individualism. (It was also this debate that brought the doctrine to the widespread attention of philosophers.)
Unfortunately, the version of methodological individualism that Popper bequeathed to his student Watkins was considerably more difficult to defend than the one he inherited from Hayek. Since the beginning, the precepts of methodological individualism were thought to have been imposed by the special requirements of the social sciences. For both Weber and Hayek, it was the reflection of a key difference between the Geisteswissenschaften and the Naturwissenschaften. Popper, however, denies that there are any significant methodological differences between the two. Indeed, his initial discussion of methodological individualism in “The Poverty of Historicism,” occurs in a section called “The Unity of Method,” in which he claims that both are simply in the business of “causal explanation, prediction and testing.”(1945, 78). He goes on to deny that “understanding” plays any special role in the social sciences.
The problem that this creates for the doctrine of methodological individualism is relatively immediate. A social science that aims at interpretation, or that uses interpretation as part of the centerpiece of its explanatory strategy, has a very clear methodological reason for privileging explanations that refer to individual actions – since it is precisely the underlying intentional states that serve as the object of interpretation. But if social scientists are merely in the business of providing causal explanations, just like natural scientists, then what is the rationale for privileging individual actions in these explanations? There no longer appears to be any methodological reason for doing so. Thus critics like Leon Goldstein (1958), and later Steven Lukes (1968), would argue that methodological individualism was actually just an oblique way of asserting a commitment to metaphysical or ontological individualism. In other words, Popper's “methodological individualism” was actually a claim about what the world “really” consisted of, little more than a fancy way of saying “there is no such thing as society.” Watkins went on to reinforce this impression by reformulating the thesis as the claim that the “ultimate constituents of the social world are individual people” (1957, 105).
Watkins also provoked doubts about the methodological status of the principle by distinguishing between “unfinished or half-way explanations” of social phenomena, which might not specify an action-theoretic or individualistic mechanism, and so-called “rock-bottom explanations,” which would (1957, 106). Yet in so doing, he grants that these half-way explanations (the example he gives is the relationship between inflation and the unemployment rate), while they may not tell us everything we would like to know, need not be meaningless or false. This creates problems, as Lars Udehn points out, since the mere fact that one can explain social phenomena in terms of individuals “does not imply the methodological rule that they should be explained this way” (2001, 216) – especially not if the “half-way” knowledge obtained is sufficient for our (extra-scientific) purposes.
Finally, it should be noted that Popper introduced a contrast between methodological individualism and “psychologism,” viz., the view that “all laws of social life must be ultimately reducible to the psychological laws of ‘human nature’”(1945, 89). Nevertheless, in Popper's formulation, methodological individualism does appear equivalent to at least some form of psychological reductionism. At very least, his formulation – at later Watkins's – left many commentators confused about how one could affirm the former without committing to the latter (Udehn 2001, 204).
4. Elster
For both Hayek and Popper, the primary motivation for respecting the precepts of methodological individualism was to avoid “grand theory” in the style of Auguste Comte, G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx. Yet the motivation for avoiding this sort of grand theory was not so much that it promoted bad theory, but that it promoted habits of mind, such as “collectivism,” “rationalism,” or “historicism,” that were thought to be conducive to totalitarianism. Thus the sins of “collectivism,” and “collectivist” thought patterns, for both Hayek and Popper, were primarily political. Yet as time wore on, and the dangers of creeping totalitarianism in Western societies became increasingly remote, the fear of collectivism that underlay the debates over methodological individualism became increasingly attenuated.
Thus the concern over methodological individualism began to fade away, and might have disappeared completely had it not been for the sudden explosion of interest in game theory (or “rational choice theory”) among social scientists in the 1980s. The reason for this can be summed up in two words (and an article): the prisoner's dilemma. Social scientists had always been aware that individuals in groups are capable of getting stuck in patterns of collectively self-defeating behavior. Paul Samuelson's “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure” (1954), Garrett Hardin's “The Tragedy of the Commons,” (1968), and Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action (1965), had all provided very clear examples of cases where the mere existence of a common interest among individuals nevertheless failed to provide them with an incentive to perform the actions necessary to realize that interest. What the story of the prisoner's dilemma – and more importantly, the accompanying game matrix – provided was a simple yet powerful model that could be used to represent the structure of all these interactions (see R. Hardin 1982).
This in turn gave renewed impetus to methodological individualism, because it allowed theorists to diagnose with unparalleled precision the errors that social theorists could be (and often were) led into if they ignored the action-theoretic level of analysis. Methodological individualism became important, not as a way of avoiding the political thought-crime of “collectivism,” but rather as a way of avoiding demonstrably fallacious inferences about the dynamics of collective action. For example, the traditional “interest group” theory of democratic politics generally presupposes that groups who share a common interest also have an incentive to promote that interest, by lobbying politicians, funding research, and so on. Olson's major contribution was to have driven home the point that the existence of such a common interest just as often generates a free-rider incentive. Individuals would benefit from acting to promote that interest, but they would benefit even more by sitting back while the other members of the group acted to promote it. As a result, no one may act to promote it. However, Olson confined this observation to large groups. The prisoner's dilemma, on the other hand, demonstrated the ubiquity of this incentive structure.
Jon Elster's contribution to the history of methodological individualism must be understood against this background. He presents the doctrine as part of a friendly yet trenchant critique of the use of functionalist explanations in the Marxist tradition; particularly those that seek to explain events as ones that “serve the interests of capital.” The problem with these explanations, Elster argues, is that they “postulate a purpose without a purposive actor” (1982, 452), and therefore (he claims) entail a commitment to some form of objective teleology. In itself, there is very little new in this criticism. As G.A. Cohen argued, in his response to Elster, there is no reason that the Marxian functionalist cannot provide “elaborations” (Cohen 1982, 131) of these explanations, ones that specifies how the benefit produced evokes the phenomenon, without reference to any objective teleology. This could be done either by appealing an intentional mechanism at the action-theoretic level or else a Darwinian “selection” mechanism (Cohen 1982, 132). In such cases, Elster's critique of functional explanation becomes just another version of Watkins's demand for “rock-bottom” rather than “half-way” explanations.
Thus what made Elster's attack so forceful was not the accusation of objective teleology in Marxist theory, but rather the suggestion that much of Marxian “class analysis” overlooked the potential for collective action problems among the various world-historical actors. Consider, for example, the familiar claim that capitalists retain a “reserve army of the unemployed” in order to depress wages. This means that individual capitalists must stop hiring new workers at a point where marginal benefits still exceed the marginal costs. What is their incentive for doing so? They have an obvious free-rider incentive to keep hiring, since the benefits stemming from depressed wages would largely be enjoyed by rival firms, whereas the benefits of further hiring would flow to the bottom line. In other words, the mere fact that it is in the “interests of capital” to have a reserve army of the unemployed does not mean that individual capitalists have an incentive to take the steps necessary to maintain such a reserve army.
An even more disturbing consequence of the “rational choice” perspective is the observation that the working class faces a major collective action problem when it comes to carrying out the socialist revolution (Elster 1982, 467). Fomenting revolution can be dangerous business, and so absent some other incentive (such as class solidarity), even workers who were convinced that a communist economic order would offer them a superior quality of life might still fail to show up at the barricades. Yet these possibilities were largely overlooked, Elster suggests, because a failure to respect the precepts of methodological individualism, along with the promiscuous use of functional explanation, had led generations of Marxian theorists simply to ignore the actual incentives that individuals face in concrete social interactions.
Beyond the critique of functional explanations, Elster does not advance any original argument in support of methodological individualism. He does, however, return to the earlier Weberian formulation of the position, with its emphasis on intentional action (Elster 1982, 463): “The elementary unit of social life is the individual human action,” he argues. “To explain social institutions and social change is to show how they arise as the result of the actions and interaction of individuals. This view, often referred to as methodological individualism, is in my view trivially true” (Elster, 1989, 13). Here one must assume that when he says “trivially true,” he is using the term in the vernacular sense of “platitudinous” rather than the philosophical sense of “tautologous,” since he goes on to derive a number of very substantive doctrines from his commitment to methodological individualism. For example, he goes on to claim at various points that methodological individualism commits him to psychologistic reductionism with respect to sociology (although he does not offer an argument for this claim).
Elster does not draw as sharp a distinction as he might have between the commitment to methodological individualism and the commitment to rational choice theory. Indeed, he also assumes that the latter flows directly from the former. The version of rational choice theory that Elster endorses, however, is one that is based upon a traditional instrumental (or homo economicus) conception of rationality, according to which “actions are valued and chosen not for themselves, but as more or less efficient means to the a further end” (Elster 1989, 22). He claims that this conception of rationality is implied by the fact that decision theorists are able to represent the rational actions of any agent possessing a well-behaved preference ordering as the maximization of a utility function. Yet whether utility-maximization implies instrumentalism depends upon the version of expected utility theory that one subscribes to. So-called “world Bayesian” versions of decision theory, such as Richard Jeffrey's (1983) do not impose an instrumental conception of rationality, since they permit agents to have preferences over their own actions. Thus Elster's move from methodological individualism to the instrumental conception of rationality is based upon a non sequitur.
Nevertheless, as a result of Elster's arguments, methodological individualism became synonymous in many quarters with the commitment rational choice theory. Such an equation generally fails to distinguish what were for Weber two distinct methodological issues: the commitment to providing explanations at an action-theoretic level, and the specific model of rational action that one proposes to use at that level (i.e., the ideal type). There are multiple permutations. For instance, there is no reason that one cannot be a methodological individualist while choosing to employ Habermas's theory of communicative action rather than rational choice theory as the model of rational action. In fact, this would make greater sense, since game theory, strictly construed, has never purported to offer a general theory of rational action. The Nash solution concept, which provides the standard definition of a game-theoretic equilibrium, specifically excluded all forms of communication between the players (and the solution does not work in cases where communication does intrude [Heath 2001]). Thus much of the furor over rational choice imperialism has been based upon a failure to appreciate the limitations of that model (in many cases both by its defenders and its critics).
5. Others
In the philosophy of mind, the phrase “methodological individualism” is commonly associated with a claim made by Jerry Fodor concerning the individuation of psychological states (1980, 1987, 42). It is important to emphasize that Fodor's use of the term has nothing in common with its traditional use in the philosophy of social science. Fodor introduces it by way of a distinction between “methodological individualism” and “methodological solipsism.” His goal is to deal with variations on the twin-earth problem, introduced by Hilary Putnam. The question is whether an individual with a belief about water on earth, where water is made up of H2O, has the same belief as an individual with a belief about water in a parallel universe, where water has the same appearance and behavior, but happens to be made up of XYZ. The “externalist” is one who says that they are not the same, whereas an “internalist” like Fodor wants to say that they are – speaking roughly, that the content of beliefs is determined by what is in the agent's head, and not what is in the world.
The issue comes down to one concerning the individuation of mental states. How do we determine what is and is not the “same” belief? Fodor begins by introducing the constraint that he calls “methodological individualism,” viz., “the doctrine that psychological states are individuated with respect to their causal powers” (1987, 42). This implies, among other things, that if one psychological state is incapable of causing anything different to happen than some other psychological state, then the two must be the same. “Methodological solipsism” is the stronger claim that “psychological states are individuated without respect to the semantic evaluations” (1987, 42). This implies, among other things, that even if one state is “true” in some context and another is “false,” the two may still turn out to be the same. As Fodor goes on to point out, the semantic evaluation of a mental state will typically be relational, e.g. whether certain beliefs about water are true will depend upon how things happen to stand with water in the world; thus methodological solipsism has the consequence of precluding one type of relational property from playing a role in the individuation of mental states. It is therefore “individualistic” in the everyday sense of the term, since it suggests that what's going on in the agent's head does most or all of the work in the individuation of mental states. Methodological individualism, on the other hand, “does not prohibit the relational individuation of mental states; it just says that no property of mental states, relational or otherwise, counts taxonomically unless it affects causal powers”(1987, 42). Thus it is very unclear why Fodor chooses to call this a form of “individualism,” since these relations could also be relations to other speakers, and not just the physical word.
There is considerable infelicity in Fodor's choice of terms. He is able to offer a cogent account of why methodological individualism counts as a methodological constraint. He argues that the desire to align terminological distinctions with objects having different causal powers is “one which follows simply from the scientist's goal of causal explanation and which, therefore, all scientific taxonomies must obey” (1987, 42). Thus it is a methodological precept. (Although one can see clearly here the stark contrast between Fodor's use of the term and that of Weber or Hayek, for whom the ability of the social scientist to provide something beyond merely causal explanation was what imposed the methodological commitment to the action-theoretic level of analysis.) It is simply unclear why Fodor chooses to call it individualism. With methodological solipsism, on the other hand, one can see why he calls it solipsism, but it is unclear what makes it methodological. Indeed, Fodor goes on to state that “solipsism (construed as prohibiting the relational taxonomy of mental states) is unlike individualism in that it couldn't conceivably follow from any general considerations about scientific goals and practices. ‘Methodological solipsism’ is, in fact, an empirical theory about the mind.”(1987, 43). Thus in Fodor's use of the terms, “methodological individualism” is not really individualistic, and “methodological solipsism” is not really methodological.
6. Criticism
Much of the critical discussion of methodological individualism in the philosophy of social science concerns the relationship between what Watkins called “rock-bottom” explanations and “half-way” ones – or those that do and those that do not specify an action theoretic mechanism. In general, there is no question that, given any particular half-way explanation of a social phenomenon, it would always be nice to know what agents are thinking, when they perform the actions that are involved in the production of that phenomenon. The question is whether the explanation is somehow deficient, or unscientific, in the absence of this information. The answer to that question will depend upon one's broader commitments concerning the status and role of the social sciences. Nevertheless, it is worth noting two very common types of social-scientific inquiry that fall short of providing the sort of rock-bottom explanations that methodological individualism demands:
6.1 Statistical analysis
Consider the following example of a social-scientific debate: During the 1990s, there was a precipitous decline in violent crime in the United States. Many social scientists naturally began to apply themselves to the question of why this had occurred, i.e., they set out to explain the phenomenon. A number of different hypotheses were advanced: the hiring of more police, changes in community policing practices, more severe sentencing guidelines for offenders, decreased tolerance for minor infractions, an increase in religiosity, a decline in the popularity of crack, changes in the demographic profile of the population, etc. Since the decline in crime occurred in many different jurisdictions, each using some different combination of strategies under different circumstances, it is possible to build support for different hypotheses through purely statistical analysis. For example, the idea that policing strategies play an important role is contradicted by the fact that New York City and San Francisco adopted very different approaches to policing, and yet experienced a similar decline in the crime rate. Thus a very sophisticated debate broke out, with different social scientists producing different data sets, and crunching the numbers in different ways, in support of their rival hypotheses.
This debate, like almost every debate in criminology, lacks microfoundations. It would certainly be nice to know what is going through people's mind when they commit crimes, and thus how likely various measures are to change their behavior, but the fact is we do not know. Indeed, there is considerable skepticism among criminologists that a “general theory” of crime is possible. Nevertheless, we can easily imagine criminologists deciding that one particular factor, such as a demographic shift in the population (i.e., fewer young men), is the explanation for the late-20th century decline in violent crime in the United States, and ruling out the other hypotheses. And even though this may be a “half-way” explanation, there is no question that it would represent a genuine discovery, one that we could learn something important from.
Furthermore, it is not obvious that the “rock-bottom” explanation – the one that satisfies the precepts of methodological individualism – is going to add anything very interesting to the “half-way” explanation provided by the statistical analysis. In many cases it will even be derived from it. Suppose that we discovered, through statistical analysis, that the crime rate varied as a function of the severity of punishment multiplied by the probability of apprehension. We would then infer from this that criminals were rational utility-maximizers. On the other hand, if studies showed that crime rates were completely unaffected by changes in the severity of punishments or the probability of apprehension, we would infer that something else must be going on at the action-theoretic level.
Results at the action-theoretic level might also prove to be random or uninteresting, from the standpoint of the explanatory variables. Suppose it turns out that the decline in crime can be explained entirely by demographic change. Then it doesn't really matter what the criminals were thinking – what matters is simply that a certain percentage of any given demographic group has the thoughts that lead to criminal behavior, so fewer of those people translates into less crime. The motives remain inside the “black box” – and while it might to nice to know what those motives are, they may not contribute anything to this particular explanation. In the end, it may turn out that each crime is as unique as the criminal. So while there is a concrete explanation in terms of actual people's intentional states, there is nothing that can be said at the level of a general “model” of rational action. (In this context, it is important to remember that methodological individualism in the Weberian sense explains actions in terms of a model of the agent, not the actual motivations of the real people.)
6.2 Subintentional explanations
Consider another social-scientific debate, this time the controversy over the data showing that stepparents have a far greater propensity to kill very young children in their care than biological parents. What would be involved in providing a rock-bottom explanation for this phenomenon, one that satisfied the precepts of methodological individualism? How informative would this be? It does not take much effort to imagine what people are thinking, when they shake a baby or hit a toddler. The motives are all-too familiar – almost everyone experiences episodes of intense frustration or anger when dealing with children. But that clearly does not explain the phenomenon. The question is why one group systematically fails to exercise control over these violent impulses, relative to some other group. Since very few people do it as part of a well-conceived plan, it is not clear that there is going to be an explanation available at the level of intentional states, or even that a complementary account of what is going on at this level will be in the least bit informative. The problem is that the behavior is generated by biases that function almost entirely at a subintentional level (Sperber, 1997). This suggests that an explanation in terms of intentional states is not really “rock bottom,” but that there are deeper layers to be explored.
It is not difficult to imagine how such an explanation might run. People experience a reaction to juvenile (or neotenous) characteristics of the young that is largely involuntary. This reaction is very complex, but one of its central characteristics is the inhibition of aggression. People are also quite poor at articulating the basis of this reaction, other than by repeated references to the fact that the child is “cute.” Of course, the overall strength of this reaction varies from individual to individual, and the particular strength varies with different children. Thus it is possible that biological parents simply find their own children “cuter” than stepparents do, and that this translates into a slightly lower average propensity to commit acts of aggression against them. Because they are unable to articulate the basis of this judgment, any analysis at the intentional level will simply fail to provide much in the way of an explanation for their actions.
Furthermore, it would seem that much “deeper” explanations of these behavioral tendencies are available. Most obviously, there is an evolutionary account available, which explains parental investment in terms of inclusive fitness (and also explains “new mate infanticide” in terms of sexual selection). Because of this, proponents of methodological individualism are open to the charge that they are promoting half-way explanations, and that the evolutionary perspective offers rock-bottom ones. More generally, any theory that purports to explain the origin of our intentional states in terms of deeper underlying causes, or that claims to explain much of human behavior without reference to intentional states (such as Freudianism, which treats many of our beliefs as rationalizations, our desires as sublimations), will be unmoved by the methodological individualist's demand that pride of place be assigned to explanations formulated at the action-theoretic level.
6.3 Fallacies
The primary methodological goal, among social scientists, for adopting a commitment to methodological individualism was to caution against certain fallacies (ones that were quite common in 19th century social science). Perhaps the greatest of these fallacies was the one based on a widespread tendency to ignore the potential for collective action problems in groups, and thus to move far too easily “down” from an identification of a group interest to the ascription of an individual interest. One way of avoiding such fallacies was to force social scientists to look always at interactions from the participant's perspective, to see what sort of preference structure governed his or her decisions.
At the same time, it is worth noting that too much emphasis on the action-theoretic perspective can generate its own fallacies. One of the most powerful resources of sociological inquiry is precisely the capacity to objectivate and aggregate social behavior using large-scale data collection and analysis. Furthermore, the analysis of social phenomena at this level can often generate results that are counterintuitive from an action-theoretic perspective. Too much emphasis on the action-theoretic perspective, because of its proximity to common sense, can generate false assumptions about what must be going on at the aggregate level. As Arthur Stinchcombe observes in his classic work, Constructing Social Theories, constructing “demographic explanations” of social phenomena often requires a break with our everyday interpretive perspective. Too much focus upon individual attitudes can lead us to make illegitimate generalizations about the characteristics of these attitudes in groups (1968, 67). For example, the stability of a belief in a population only very rarely depends upon its stability in individuals. There can be considerable volatility at the individual level, but so long as it runs with equal force both ways, its prevalence in the population will be unchanged (68). If ten per cent of the population loses their faith in God every year, yet ten per cent have a conversion experience, then there will be no change in the overall level of religiosity. This may seem obvious, but as Stinchcombe observes, it is “intuitively difficult for many people” (67), and inattention to it is a common source of fallacious sociological thinking.
It is also worth nothing that the action-theoretic level of analysis, with its focus upon the intentional states of the agent, can generate considerable mischief when combined haphazardly with evolutionary reasoning. The most common fallacy arises when theorists treats the “self-interest” of the individual, defined with respect to his or her preferences, as a stand-in for the “fitness” of a particular behavior (or phenotype), at either the biological or the cultural level, then assumes that there is some selection mechanism in place, again at either the biological or cultural level, that will weed out forms of behavior that fail to advance the individual's self-interest. The problem is that neither biological nor cultural evolution function in this way. It is an elementary consequence of “selfish gene” theory that biological evolution does not advance the interests of the agent (the most conspicuous example being inclusive fitness). For similar reasons, cultural evolution benefits the “meme” rather than the interests of the agent (Stanovich 2004). Thus the evolutionary perspective imposes a much greater break with the rationality-based perspective than many social theorists appreciate. Thus methodological individualism can sometimes impede the sort of radical objectivation of social phenomena that the use of certain sociotheoretic models or tools requires.
Bibliography
· Alexander, Jeffry. 1987. The Micro-Macro Link. Berkeley: University of California Press.
· Cohen, G. A. 1982. “Functional explanation: Reply to Elster,” Political Studies 28 (1):129-135.
· Elster, Jon. 1982. “The Case for Methodological Individualism,” Theory and Society, 11: 453-482.
· -----. 1985. Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
· -----. 1989. Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
· Fodor, Jerry. 1980. “Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Science,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3: 63-73
· -----. 1987. Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
· Goldstein, Leon. 1958. “The Two Theses of Methodological Individualism,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 9: 1-11.
· Habermas, Jürgen. 1984/87. The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols. trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press.
· Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, 162: 1243-1248
· Hardin, Russell. 1982. Collective Action. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
· Hayek, Friedrich von. 1942. “Scientism and the Study of Man I,” Economica, 9: 267-91
· -----. 1943. “Scientism and the Study of Man II,” Economica, 10: 34-63.
· -----. 1944. “Scientism and the Study of Man III,” Economica, 11: 27-39.
· -----. 1955. The Counter-Revolution of Science. New York: Free Press.
· Heath, Joseph. 2001. Communicative Action and Rational Choice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
· Hobbes, Thomas. 1949. De Cive, or the Citizen. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
· Jeffrey, Richard. 1983. The Logic of Decision, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
· Lukes, Steven. 1968. “Methodological Individualism Reconsidered,” The British Journal of Sociology, 19:2, 119-129.
· Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
· Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The Structure of Social Action, 2 vols. New York: Free Press.
· Parsons, Talcott, and Edward Shils, eds. 1951. Toward a general theory of action. New York: Harper & Row.
· Popper, Karl. 1944a. “The Poverty of Historicism I,” Economica, 11: 86-103.
· -----. 1944b. “The Poverty of Historicism II,” Economica, 11: 119-137.
· -----. 1945. “The Poverty of Historicism III,” Economica, 11: 69-89.
· -----. 1966. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
· Samuelson, Paul A. 1954. “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure,” Review of Economics and Statistics, 36: 387–89
· Schumpeter, Joseph. 1908. Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalökonomie, Leipzig: Duncker & Humbolt.
· -----. 1909. “On the Concept of Social Value,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 23: 213-32.
· Sperber, Dan. 1997. “Individualisme méthodologique et cognitivisme,” in R. Boudon, F. Chazel & A. Bouvier (eds.) Cognition et sciences sociales. Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, pp 123-136.
· Stanovich, Keith. 2004. The Robot's Rebellion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
· Stinchcombe, Arthur. 1968. Constructing Social Theories. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
· Udehn, Lars. 2001. Methodological Individualism. London: Routledge.
· Watkins, J.W.N. 1952a. “Ideal Types and Historical Explanation,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 3, 22-43.
· -----. 1952b. “The Principle of Methodological Individualism,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 3, 186-189.
· -----. 1955. “Methodological Individualism: A Reply,” Philosophy of Science, 22, 58-62.
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· Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, Berkeley: University of California Press.
article by Dr.Carl Ratner
http://www.humboldt1.com/~cr2/holism.htm
Methodological Individualism vs. Holism
This entry speaks to the nature of the individual element. Individualism says that the individual element is an independent entity that has self-contained properties, though, of course, it draws on resources around it. An example is the popular idea that the individual is responsible for his/her own fate. Your success and failure depend ultimately on how hard you work.
Holism says that the individual element is inextricably tied to other individuals. Individuals are interdependent, and they are internally related in the sense that each is imbued with, and constituted by, the qualities of others. An example is a child in a family. The child's psychology depends utterly on the way he/she is treated. Any intrinsic tendencies are modulated and mediated by experience. From this perspective, the child is not entirely responsible for his/her behavior.
Holism regards individuals or elements as reciprocally influencing each other. The child affects the family while being affected by it. This dialectical relation of individuals/elements comprises a system, or a whole. The whole is composed of individuals and affected by them. It is not independent of individuals. However, the whole is not simply a sum of independent individuals sequentially summed together, one after the other (see the entry on reductionism). The whole is more than the sum of the parts.
Solomon Asch explains the holistic nature of social interactions in the case of two boys carrying a log. The boys adjust their actions to each other and to the object. The two do not apply force separately. There is a unity of action that embraces the participants and the common object. This performance is a new product, unlike what each participant would do singly and also unlike the sum of their separate exertions. What each contributes is a function of his relation to the other, how the other acts. The other's actions lead to changes in the self's behavior. Self is permeated by other. Larger social units, such as teams and institutions, manifest other kinds of emergent properties.
Emergence is central to holism. It denotes the fact that the whole is different from the sum of the individual constituents. This whole then affects the qualities of the constituents. They are not self-sufficient, independent qualities.
These examples illustrate how the two approaches construe the nature, or existence, of the individual. These ontological perspectives of individualism and holism entail corresponding epistemologies, or ways of acquiring knowledge.
An ontology that construes individual elements as self-contained and self-determining, and as combining arithmetically to form groups, necessarily insists that knowledge of things consists of reducing complexity to simple, separate individual elements --e.g., a group is simply a collection of individuals co-existing. An ontology that construes elements as part of a system of relations that constitute them, insists that knowledge of things requires understanding elements as complex, multifaceted entities that are dialectically related to other things and embody their features.
Individualistic and holistic ontologies and epistemologies also entail distinctive methodologies.
Methodological Individualism
Positivism
Methodological individualism is the hallmark of positivism. Positivism construes phenomena as simple, homogeneous, separate, variables. A variable is defined as qualitatively invariant, and only quantitatively variable. The reason it is qualitatively invariant is because it is separate from other variables. This prevents others from imbuing it with their qualities, altering its quality, and complicating it. Intelligence, depression, aggression, and all other psychological phenomena are construed as separate variables with simple, fixed qualities.. Only their degree varies in different conditions. This ontology leads positivists to concentrate on measuring quantities of variables. They eschew investigating, or theorizing about, their qualities which are taken for granted as obvious, simple, and fixed.
Methodological individualism is also evident in positivistic instruments such as questionnaires. Each item on a questionnaire is a separate (discrete) element that supposedly taps a discrete psychological attribute. Items are randomly presented in order to prevent any association among them that would bias the subject away from responding to each one independently. In addition, each response is treated as a separate element that is accorded equal weight, and can be summed with the others. Sums are indifferent to the order of the elements. 5 + 3 + 1 is the same sum as 1 + 3 + 5. Sums presume that items are independent of each other, and that a 5 at the beginning is the same as a 5 at the end of a sequence. Of course, responses are statistically correlated together (e.g., in factor analysis). However, it is a correlation of separate, independent items.
Qualitative methodology
One might suppose that methodological individualism, or atomism, is the basis of positivistic methodology, while holism is the basis of qualitative methodology. However, this would be a simplification. In fact, individualism is pervasive in qualitative research, along with holism.
Individualism in qualitative methodology takes the form of treating individual subjects as self-contained individuals who create their own meanings and behaviors. Researchers focus on recording and reporting individuals' subjective accounts. They do not attempt to understand an individual's subjectivity as influenced by other people and conditions. (see entry on subjectivism).
This is characteristic of a good deal of discourse analysis. While some analysts relate discourse to cultural values and practices, many emphasize discourse as an invention of the individual speaker. Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter advocate this position.
It appears in Wetherell's analysis of 17-year old boys' sexuality. She analyzes the discourse Aaron had with his friends about a weekend during which he slept with four girls. At one point, his friend Paul wondered whether Aaron had deliberately set out to have lots of sex ("out on the pull") that weekend. Wetherell analyses the conversation as follows:
What I wish to note is Paul's new description of Aaron's activities as "out on the pull". This account seems to be heard [by Aaron] as an uncalled for accusation in relation to the events of Friday night and Aaron and Phil issue denials ä in attempting to reformulate and minimize the actions so described -- `just out as a group of friends'. (Wetherell, 1998, p. 399).
Wetherell construes dialogue as a way that individuals represent themselves to each other and themselves. She focuses on the mechanics of how individuals accomplish this: Paul describes Aaron, Aaron hears the description, he responds. This methodology does not go beyond identifying sequential conversational acts. It does not utilize long patterns of dialogue to interpret statements, code them, organize them, make inferences or deductions from them concerning psychological or cultural issues. This restriction conforms to discourse theory that speech is an invention that expresses the individual, it is not a reflection of cultural or psychological processes. Wetherell is not interested in the nature of Aaron's sexual desire -- i.e., whether it is impersonal, egocentric, loving, considerate, domineering, instrumental, etc. -- and how these sexual qualities might reflect macro cultural factors. She is concerned with how individuals voluntaristically present sex in discourse.
Methodological Holism
Holistic methodology is only found in qualitative methodology. It does not appear in positivism.
One of the most important applications of holism in qualitative methodology is Dilthey's hermeneutics. (see entry on objectivism). The central idea is that the psychological significance of any behavioral expression can only be discerned by relating that response to other
responses. The significance of a response is not transparent in a single behavior. For example, to know whether a remark is a joke or an insult, you must situate it in a context of other comments, the speaker's countenance, and other behaviors. By itself, the comment is ambiguous. The context disambiguates the element.
This relating of behaviors in order to disclose psychological phenomena is known as the hermeneutic circle.
If we want to hermeneutically interpret the psychology of a mother who spanks her child, we must know how the child acted before he was spanked, how the mother behaves toward him in other situations, what she says to him during and after the spanking, how she behaves toward him after the spanking, her facial expression during the spanking, how she explains the spanking to her husband and friends, etc. Only this complex configuration of related behaviors reveals whether her spanking was motivated by concern for the child's well-being, hatred for the child, revenge against the child, or by frustration which was provoked by an event unrelated to the child.
Similarly, the cognitive processes which enable a student to perform well on a math test is only known by observing her extended solution to several math problems in different situations. Test performance may express a number of psychological phenomena. It may reflect the student's ability to memorize material, it may reflect test taking ability, anxiety, or mathematical reasoning. Which of these possibilities is operative is only disclosed by observing the pattern of steps which the pupil takes to solve problems in different situations.
Kurt Goldstein used a hermeneutic analysis to diagnose neurological deficits. He observed the pattern of responses by which patients match a colored stimulus with objects of similar color. Normal and impaired subjects often find the same number of objects that match the hue of the stimulus; however their pattern of responses is quite different. The patient proceeds sequentially by first matching the stimulus to an object that most closely resembles it (O1), then matching another object (O2) to (O1), then matching (O3) to (O2), and so on. In contrast, normal subjects compare each color directly with the stimulus color. The qualitative difference in the behavioral patterns reveals the patient's deficit.
This is a hermeneutical, holistic analysis because it examines patterns of interrelated responses which indicate the quality and significance of each. The fact that O3 is matched to O2 rather than to the stimulus hue makes it a different (impaired) kind of response and indicates it to be a different kind of response. Hermeneutic methodology that elucidates patterns is holistic. In contrast, counting the number of correct matches, and comparing the sums for normals and patients obscures patterns and the qualitative differences of responses within them. As we have mentioned, sums of responses are indifferent to their order and their interrelationship. A sum treats each response as separate and independent. Sums are individualistic forms of methodology, while patterns are holistic.
Cultural hermeneutics
The highest form of methodological holism not only elucidates patterns of behaviors among individuals, it additionally recognizes the internal relationship between psychological phenomena and cultural phenomena. This cultural-hermeneutical interpretation of psychology was actually the crux of nineteenth century German hermeneutics. It has been largely overlooked as hermeneuticists focus on the behaviors of individuals apart from culture. However, Dilthey maintained that the interpretation of meaning belongs to the larger science of history. To understand means to understand historically. It means to understand that psychological phenomena such as self concept, sexuality, motivation, reasoning, memory, emotions, perception, mental illness, and developmental processes are integral components of macro cultural factors such as institutions, artifacts, and cultural concepts, and embody their features. Cultural hermeneutics elucidates this cultural quality of psychological phenomena, as Carl Ratner explains in his writings.
A Synthesis
In their current forms, holism and individualism approach psychological phenomena very differently, and are antithetical. However, a synthesis is possible. This cannot be an eclectic, unprincipled, combining together. For this would combine weaknesses as well as strengths. Nor can the synthesis take the form of a golden mean that is in between the extremes. For that negates the strengths of the positions by watering them down with their opposites.
A workable synthesis requires a reformulation that makes holism and individualism logically consistent through a set of common principles. Lev Vygotsky explained what this involves. He said that an analysis of complex patterns into units is necessary and workable. It requires construing the part as embodying qualities of related parts, patterns, wholes. This reformulates the individualistic concept of an element as an independent entity with a self-contained quality. It makes the unit logically consistent with its holistic existence, internally related to other units.
Vygotsky (1987, p. 46-47) explained this as follows: "A psychology concerned with the study of the complex whole must replace the method of decomposing the whole into its elements with that of partitioning the whole into its unitsä in which the characteristics of the whole are present." "In contrast to the term `element,' the term `unit' designates a product of analysis that possesses all the basic characteristics of the wholeäThe living cell is the real unit of biological analysis because it preserves the basic characteristics of life that are inherent in the living organism."
These units can be studied, counted, and added. The benefits of analysis can thus be integrated into methodological holism. This enables holism to become a precise, rigorous, scientific approach. It loses its pejorative connotation as a mystical, ineffable, impractical methodology.
Additional Readings
Asch, S. (1952). Social psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Goldstein, K. (1948). Language and language disturbance. Grune & Stratton.
Ratner, C. (1997). Cultural psychology and qualitative methodology. New York: Plenum.
Ratner, C. (2002). Cultural psychology: Theory and method. New York: Plenum.
Ratner, C. (2006). Cultural psychology: A perspective on psychological functioning and social reform. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Ratner, C. (2007a). Cultural psychology and qualitative methodology: Scientific and political considerations. Culture and Psychology, 2007, 13,
Ratner, C. (2007b). A macro cultural-psychological theory of emotions. In P. Schultz, & R. Pekrun (Eds.). Emotions in Education (chap. 6). Academic Press.
Ratner, C. (2007c). Contextualism versus Positivism in Cross-Cultural Psychology. In G. Zheng, K. Leung, & J.Adair (Eds), Perspectives and progress in contemporary cross-cultural psychology. Beijing: China Light Industry Press.
Sayers, S. (2007). Individual and society in Marx and Hegel: Beyond the communitarian critique of liberalism. Science and Society, 71, 84-102.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1987). Collected works, vol. 1. New York: Plenum.
Wetherell, M. (1998). Positioning and interpretative repertoires: Conversation analysis and post-structuralism in dialogue. Discourse & Society, 9, 387-412.
further resources
wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodological_individualism
wayne D.Parker
http://www.socionomics.org/pdf/neoclassicism_institutionalism.pdf
methodological individualism,explanation and invariance-Daniel Steel
http://www.msu.edu/user/steel/MI_and_Ex.pdf
article by Kaushik Basu
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/econ610/basu.pdf
Meanings of Methodological Individualism-Geoffrey M. Hodgson
http://www.geoffrey-hodgson.info/user/image/meanmethind-free.pdf
Monday, October 1, 2007
Monday, September 24, 2007
Pierre Bourdieu and Reflexive Sociology
wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu
Some examples of his empirical results include:
showing that despite the apparent freedom of choice in the arts, people's artistic preferences (e.g. classical music, rock, traditional music) strongly correlate with their social position
For Bourdieu, sociology was a combatant effort at exposing the unthought structures that underly the somatic and cognitive practices of social agents. He saw sociology as a means of combating symbolic violence and exposing those unseen areas where one could be free.
Selected works:
Les héritiers: les étudiants et la culture (1964), engl. The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture, University of Chicago Press 1979
Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World: The Sense of Honour: The Kabyle House of the World Reversed: Essays, Cambridge Univ Press 1979
Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d'ethnologie kabyle (1972), engl. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press 1977
La distinction (1979), engl. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard University Press 1987
Homo Academicus, (French Edition) Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1984. (English Edition) Polity (publisher) 1990
Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Theory, Culture and Society Series), Sage, 1990, with Jean-Claude Passeron (in French: La Reproduction. Éléments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement, Minuit, 1970)
with Luc Boltanski e P. Maldidier, La défense du corps, in Social Science Information, vol. 10, n° 4, pp.45-86, 1971
with Luc Boltanski, Le titre et le poste : rapports entre système de production et système de reproduction, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 1, n° 2, pp. 95 – 107, 1975.
with Luc Boltanski, Le fétichisme de la langue, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 1, n° 4, pp. 2– 32, 1975.
with Luc Boltanski, La production de l'idéologie dominante, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 2, n° 2-3, 1976, pp. 4-73.
Choses dites, 1987 - In Other Words: Essays toward a Reflective Sociology, Stanford, 1990
The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Polity (Publisher) 1991
The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, Stanford University Press 1991
Language & Symbolic Power, Harvard University Press 1991, paperback edition, Polity (publisher) 1992
An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (with Loic Wacquant), University of Chicago Press and Polity (publisher) 1992
with Hans Haacke, Free Exchange, Stanford University Press 1995
(with Luc Boltanski and Robert Castel), Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, Stanford University Press 1996
Les régles de l'art, 1992 - Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Stanford University Press 1996
(with Monique De Saint Martin, Jean-Claude Passeron),Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power, Polity (publisher) 1996
Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Stanford University Press 1998
"La domination masculine" (1998), engl. Male Domination, Polity (publisher) 2001
State nobility. Elite Schools in the Field of Power, Polity (publisher) 1998
Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Polity (publisher) 1999
On Television, New Press 1999
Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, New Press 1999
Pascalian Meditations, Polity (publisher) 2000
"Contre-Feux" (1998), engl. Counterfire: Against the Tyranny of the Market, Verso Books 2003
"Science de la science et réflexivité" (2002), engl Science of Science and Reflexivity, Polity (publisher) 2004
Interventions politiques (1960-2000). Textes & contextes d’un mode d’intervention politique spécifique, 2002
The Social Structures of the Economy, Polity (publisher) 2005
References
Calhoun, C. et al. (1992) "Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives." University of Chicago Press.
Lane, J.F. (2000) Pierre Bourdieu. A Critical Introduction. Pluto Press.
Wacquant, L. (2005) Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics. Polity Press.
Fowler, Bridget, Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (London, California and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997).
Jean-Philippe Cazier [edit.],Abécédaire de Pierre Bourdieu, Sils Maria Press, 2007.
article in kirjasto
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bourd.htm
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)
French sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher, and champion of the anti-globalisation movement, whose work spanned a broad range of subjects from ethnography to art, literature, education, language, cultural tastes, and television. Bourdieu's most famous book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984). It was named one of the 20th century's 10 most important works of sociology by the International Sociological Association.
For further reading: Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. by Richard Shusterman (1999); Pierre Bourdieu; Language, culture and education - theory into practice, eds. Michael Grenfell, and Michael Kelly (1999); Le savant et la politique. Essai sur le terrorisme sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu by Jeannine Verdès-Leroux (1998); Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory by Bridget Fowler (1997); Pierre Bourdieu: A Bibliography by Joan Nordquist (1997); Culture and Power by David Swartz (1997); Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. by Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (1993); Cultural Capital by John Guillory (1993); Pierre Bourdieu by Richard Jenkins (1992); An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu, ed. by Richard Harker, Chellen Mahar, and Chris Wilkes (1990) - For further information: - Pierre Bourdieu link page - Bourdieu and the Sociology of Aesthetics by Jonathan Loesberg - The essence of neoliberalism by Pierre Bourdieu - Documentary film: La sociologie est un sport de combat, dir. by Pierre Charles, 146 mininutes (2001)
Selected works:
Leibnitii animadversiones in partem generalem principiorum Cartesianorum, 1953
Sociologie de l'Algérie, 1958 (rev. ed. 1961) - The Algerians
Travail et travailleurs en Algérie, 1963 (with Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Rivet, Claude Seibel)
Le déracinement. La crise de l'agriculture traditionelle en Algérie, 1964 (with Abdelmalek Sayad)
Les hérities, 1964 (with Jean-Claude Passeron) - The Inheritors
Un art moyen. Essais sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, 1965 (with others) - Photography. A Middle-Brow Art
La reproduction. Elèments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement, 1970 - Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (with Jean-Claude Passeron)
Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique, précéde de trois études d'ethnologie kabyle, 1972 - Outline of a Theory of Practice
La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, , 1979 - Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Le sens pratique, 1980 - The Logic of Practice
Questions de sociologie, 1980 - Sociology in Question - Sosiologian kysymyksiä
Ce que parler veut dire. L'économie des échanges linguistiques, 1982 - Language and Symbolic Power
Homo academicus, 1984 - Homo Academicus
La Sociologie de Bourdieu. Textes choisis et commentés, 1986 (ed. by Alain Accardo und Philippe Corcuff)
Choses dites, 1987 - In Other Words: Essays toward a Reflective Sociology
L'ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger, 1988 - The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger
La Noblesse d'état. Grandes écoles et esprit de corps, 1989 - The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power
Les régles de l'art, 1992 - The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field
The Field of Cultural Production, 1993 (ed. by Randall Johnson)
Libre-Échange, 1994 - Free Exchange (with Hans Haacke) - Ajatusten vapaa-kauppa
1992 - An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (with Loic Wacquant)
Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l'action, 1994 - Practical Reason
Sur la télévision; suivi de l'emprise du journalisme, 1996 - On Television - Televisiosta
Méditations pascaliennes. Éléments pur une philosophie négative, 1997 - Pascalian Meditations.
Contre-feux. Propos pour servir à la résistance contre l'invasion néo-libérale, 1998 - Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time - Vastatulet
La domination masculine, 1998 - Masculine domination
Les structures sociales de l'économie, 2000
Propos sur le champ politique, 2000
Contre-Feux 2. Pour un mouvement social européen, 2001
Science de la science et réflexivité: Cours du Collège de France, 2000-2001, 2001
Langage et pouvoir symbolique, 2001
Interventions politiques (1960-2000). Textes & contextes d’un mode d’intervention politique spécifique, 2002
Science de la science et reflexivité, 2002
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu (August 1, 1930 – January 23, 2002) was an acclaimed French sociologist whose work employed methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines: from philosophy and literary theory to sociology and anthropology. He is best known for his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he tried to connect aesthetic judgments to positions in social space. The most notable aspect of Bourdieu's theory is the development of methodologies, combining both theory and empirical data, that attempt to dissolve some of the most troublesome antagonisms in theory and research, trying to reconcile such difficulties as how to understand the subject within objective structures (in the process, trying to reconcile structure and agency).
Bourdieu also pioneered methodological frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field, and symbolic violence. Bourdieu's work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics. It builds upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Norbert Elias, among others. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal after whom Bourdieu titled the book Pascalian Meditations.
BiographyBourdieu was born in Denguin, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France in 1930, where his grandfather was a sharecropper and his father was a postman and later, a postmaster. He married Marie-Claire Brizard in 1962 and had three sons.
Bourdieu studied philosophy in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure. After getting his agrégation he worked as a teacher for a year. During the Algerian War of Independence in 1958-1962, and while serving in the French army, he undertook ethnographic research, laying the groundwork for his sociological reputation. From 1964 on, Bourdieu held the position of Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (the future École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), in the VIe section, and from 1981, the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France , in the VIe section (held before him by Raymond Aron, Maurice Halbwachs, and Marcel Mauss). In 1968, he took over the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, the research center that Aron had founded, which he directed until his death. In 1975, with Luc Boltanski, he launched the interdisciplinary journal "Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales", with which he sought to transform the accepted canons of sociological production while buttressing the scientific rigor of sociology. In 1993 he was honored with the "Médaille d'or du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique" (CNRS). In 1996, he received the Goffman Prize from the University of California, Berkeley and in 2002 the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
InfluencesBourdieu's work is influenced by much of traditional sociology, which he undertook to synthesize into his own theory. From Max Weber he retained the importance of domination and symbolic systems in social life, as well as the idea of social orders which would ultimately be transformed by Bourdieu into a theory of fields. From Karl Marx he took the concept of capital, generalized with respect to all forms of social activity, and not merely economics. From Emile Durkheim, finally, he inherited a certain deterministic and, through Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, structuralist style that emphasized the tendency of social structures to reproduce themselves. However, Bourdieu critically diverged from these Durkheimian analyses in emphasizing the role of the social agent in enacting, through the embodiment of social structures, symbolic orders. He furthermore emphasized that the reproduction of social structures does not operate according to a functionalist logic.
One should not neglect Bourdieu's philosophical influences: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, through him, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl played an essential part in the formulation of Bourdieu's focus on the body, action, and practical dispositions (which found their primary manifestation in Bourdieu's theory of habitus).
Bourdieu's work is built upon the attempt to transcend a series of oppositions which characterized the social sciences (subjectivism/objectivism, micro/macro, freedom/determinism). In particular he did this through conceptual innovations. The concepts of habitus, capital or field were conceived, indeed, with the intention to abolish such oppositions.
Work Bourdieu routinely sought to connect his theoretical ideas with empirical research, grounded in everyday life, and his work can be seen as cultural sociology or as a theory of practice. His contributions to sociology were both empirical and theoretical. His key terms were habitus, field, and symbolic violence. He extended the idea of capital to categories such as social capital, cultural capital, and symbolic capital. For Bourdieu each individual occupies a position in a multidimensional social space; he or she is not defined by social class membership, but by the amounts of each kind of capital he or she possesses.
Bourdieu felt uncomfortable in the role of the ivory tower social scientist and intellectual. Although he had no partisan affiliation, he was known for being politically engaged and active. He supported workers against the influences of political elites and neoliberal capitalism. Because of his independence, he was even considered an enemy of the French Left; the French Socialist party used to talk disparagingly of "la gauche bourdieusienne" (Bourdieu's Left).
Some examples of his empirical results include:
showing that despite the apparent freedom of choice in the arts, people's artistic preferences (e.g. classical music, rock, traditional music) strongly correlate with their social position
showing that subtleties of language such as accent, grammar, spelling and style — all part of cultural capital — are a major factor in social mobility (e.g. getting a higher paid, higher status job).
Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasized how social classes, especially the ruling and intellectual classes, preserve their social privileges across generations despite the myth that contemporary postindustrial society boasts equality of opportunity and high social mobility, achieved through education.
Bourdieu was an extraordinarily prolific author, producing hundreds of articles and three dozen books, nearly all of which are now available in English. His style is dense in English translation, but he was considered an elegant and incisive writer in French-speaking Europe.
Bourdieu's theory of power and practiceAt the center of Bourdieu's sociological work is a logic of practice that emphasizes the importance of the body and practices within the social world. Against the intellectualist tradition, Bourdieu stressed that mechanisms of social domination and reproduction were primarily focused on bodily know-how and competent practices in the social world. Bourdieu fiercely opposed Rational Action Theory (Rational Choice Theory) as grounded in a misunderstanding of how social agents operate. Social agents do not, according to Bourdieu, continuously calculate according to explicit rational and economic criteria. Rather, social agents operate according to an implicit practical logic--a practical sense--and bodily dispositions. Social agents act according to their "feel for the game" (the "feel" being, roughly, habitus, and the "game" being the field).
Bourdieu's sociological work was dominated by an analysis of the mechanisms of reproduction of social hierarchies. In opposition to Marxist analyses, Bourdieu criticized the primacy given to the economic factors, and stressed that the capacity of social actors to actively impose and engage their cultural productions and symbolic systems plays an essential role in the reproduction of social structures of domination. What Bourdieu called symbolic violence (the capacity to ensure that the arbitrariness of the social order is ignored—-or misrecognized as natural—-and thus to ensure the legitimacy of social structures) plays an essential part in his sociological analysis.For Bourdieu, the modern social world is divided into what he calls fields. For him, the differentiation of social activities led to the constitution of various, relativley autonomous, social spaces in which competition centers around particular species of capital. These fields are treated on a hierarchical basis and the dynamics of fields arises out of the struggle of social actors trying to occupy the dominant positions within the field. While Bourdieu shares prime elements of conflict theory with the Marxists, he diverges from Marxist analyses in thinking that social struggles are not reduced to the fundamentally economic conflicts between social classes. The conflicts which take place in each social field are largely specific to those fields and are not reducible to each other.
Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory of the action, around the concept of habitus, which exerted a considerable influence in the social sciences. This theory seeks to show that social agents develop strategies which are adapted to the needs of the social worlds that they inhabit. These strategies are unconscious and instead act on the level of a bodily logic.
FieldBourdieu shared Weber's view, contrary to traditional Marxism, that society cannot be analyzed simply in terms of economic classes and ideologies. Much of his work concerns the independent role of educational and cultural factors. Instead of analyzing societies in terms of classes, Bourdieu uses the concept of field: a social arena in which people maneuver and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources.
A field is a system of social positions (e.g. a profession such as law) structured internally in terms of power relationships (e.g. the power differential between judges and lawyers). More specifically, a field is a social arena of struggle over the appropriation of certain species of capital--capital being whatever is taken as significant for social agents (the most obvious example is monetary capital). Fields are organized both vertically and horizontally. This means that fields are not strictly analogous to classes, and are often autonomous, independent spaces of social play. The field of power is peculiar in that it exists 'horizontally' through all of the fields and the struggles within it control the 'exchange rate' of the forms of cultural, symbolic, or physical capital between the fields themselves. A field is constituted by the relational differences in position of social agents, and the boundaries of a field are demarcated by where its effects end. Different fields can be either autonomous or interrelated (e.g. consider the separation of power between judiciary and legislature) and more complex societies are "more differentiated" societies that have more fields.
Fields are constructed according to underlying nomos, fundamental principles of "vision and division" (the division between mind and body for example, or male and female), or organizing "laws" of experience that govern practices and experiences within a field. The nomos underlying one field is often irreducible to those underlying another, as in the noted disparity between the nomos of the aesthetic field that values cultural capital and in some sense discourages economic capital, and that of the economic field which values economic capital. Agents subscribe to a particular field not by way of explicit contract, but by their practical acknowledgement of the stakes, implicit in their very "playing of the game". The acknowledgement of the stakes of the field and the acquiring of interests and investments prescribed by the field is termed illusio.
HabitusBourdieu re-elaborated the concept of habitus from Marcel Mauss--although it is also present in the works of Aristotle, Norbert Elias, Max Weber, and Edmund Husserl--and used it, in a more or less systematic way, in an attempt to resolve a prominent antinomy of the human sciences: objectivism and subjectivism. Habitus can be defined as a system of dispositions (lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action). The individual agent develops these dispositions in response to the objective conditions they encounter. In this way Bourdieu theorizes the inculcation of objective social structures into the subjective, mental experience of agents. For the objective social field places requirements on its participants for membership, so to speak, within the field. Having thereby absorbed objective social structure into a personal set of cognitive and somatic dispositions, and the subjective structures of action of the agent then being commensurate with the objective structures and extant exigencies of the social field, a doxic relationship emerges.
Doxa Doxa are the fundamental, deep-founded, unthought beliefs, taken as self-evident universals, that inform an agent's actions and thoughts within a particular field. Doxa tends to favor the particular social arrangement of the field, thus privileging the dominant and taking their position of dominance as self-evident and universally favorable. Therefore, the categories of understanding and perception that constitute a habitus, being congruous with the objective organization of the field, tend to reproduce the very structures of the field. Bourdieu thus sees habitus as the key to social reproduction because it is central to generating and regulating the practices that make up social life.
Reconciling the Objective (Field) and the Subjective (Habitus)As mentioned above, Bourdieu utilized the methodological and theoretical concepts of habitus and field in order to make an epistemological break with the prominent objective-subjective antinomy of the social sciences. He wanted to effectively unite social phenomenology and structuralism. Habitus and field are proposed to do so for they can only exist in relation to each other. While a field is constituted by the various social agents participating in it (and thus their habitus), a habitus, in effect, represents the transposition of objective structures of the field into the subjective structures of action and thought of the agent.
The relationship between habitus and field is a two-way relationship. The field exists only insofar as social agents possess the dispositions and set of perceptual schemata that are necessary to constitute that field and imbue it with meaning. On the other hand, by participating in the field agents incorporate into their habitus the proper know-how that will allow them to constitute the field. Habitus enacts the structures of the field, and the field mediates between habitus and practice.
Therefore, Bourdieu attempts to use the concepts of habitus and field to tear down the division between the subjective and the objective. (Whether or not he successfuly does so is debatable.) Bourdieu asserts that any research must be composed of two "minutes." The first an objective stage of research--where one looks at the relations of the social space and the structures of the field. The second stage must be a subjective analysis of social agents' dispositions to act and their categories of perception and understanding that result from their inhabiting the field. Proper research, he says, cannot do without these two together.
Symbolic capital and symbolic violenceBourdieu sees symbolic capital (e.g. prestige, honour, the right to be listened to) as a crucial source of power. Symbolic capital is any species of capital that is perceived through socially inculcated classificatory schemes. When a holder of symbolic capital uses the power this confers against an agent who holds less, and seeks thereby to alter their actions, they exercise symbolic violence. We might see this when a daughter brings home a boyfriend considered unsuitable by her parents. She is met with disapproving looks and gestures, symbols which serve to convey the message that she will not be permitted to continue this relationship, but which never make this coercive fact explicit. People come to experience symbolic power and systems of meaning (culture) as legitimate. Hence the daughter will often feel a duty to obey her parents' unspoken demand, regardless of her suitor's actual merits. She has been made to misunderstand or misrecognize his nature. Moreover, by perceiving her parents' symbolic violence as legitimate, she is complicit in her own subordination - her sense of duty has coerced her more effectively than explicit reprimands could have done.
Symbolic violence is fundamentally the imposition of categories of thought and perception upon dominated social agents who then take the social order to be just. It is the incorporation of unthought structures that tend to perpetuate the structures of action of the dominant. The dominated then take their position to be "right." Symbolic violence is in some senses much more powerful than physical violence in that it is embedded in the very modes of action and structures of cognition of individuals, and imposes the vision of the legitimacy of the social order.In his theoretical writings, Bourdieu employs some terminology of economics to analyze the processes of social and cultural reproduction, of how the various forms of capital tend to transfer from one generation to the next. For Bourdieu, education represents the key example of this process. Educational success, according to Bourdieu, entails a whole range of cultural behaviour, extending to ostensibly non-academic features like gait or accent. Privileged children have learned this behaviour, as have their teachers. Children of unprivileged backgrounds have not. The children of privilege therefore fit the pattern of their teachers' expectations with apparent 'ease'; they are 'docile'. The unprivileged are found to be 'difficult', to present 'challenges'. Yet both behave as their upbringing dictates. Bourdieu regards this 'ease', or 'natural' ability--distinction--as in fact the product of a great social labour, largely on the part of the parents. It equips their children with the dispositions of manner as well as thought which ensure they are able to succeed within the educational system and can then reproduce their parents' class position in the wider social system.
Cultural capital (e.g. competencies, skills, qualifications) can also be a source of misrecognition and symbolic violence. Therefore working class children can come to see the educational success of their middle-class peers as always legitimate, seeing what is often class-based inequality as instead the result of hard work or even 'natural' ability. A key part of this process is the transformation of people's symbolic or economic inheritance (e.g. accent or property) into cultural capital (e.g. university qualifications)- a process which the logic of the cultural fields impedes but cannot prevent.
ReflexivityBourdieu insists on the importance of a reflexive sociology in which sociologists must at all times conduct their research with conscious attention to the effects of their own position, their own set of internalized structures, and how these are likely to distort or prejudice their objectivity. The sociologist, according to Bourdieu, must engage in a "sociology of sociology" so as not to unwittingly attribute the object of observation the characteristics of the subject. One must be cognizant of their own social positions within a field and recognize the conditions that both structure and make possible discourses, theories, and observations. A sociologist, therefore, must be aware of his or her own stakes and interests in the academic or sociological field and render explicit the conditions and structures of understanding that are implicitly imbued in his or her practices within those fields. Bourdieu's conception of reflexivity, however, is not singular or narcissistic, but must involve the contribution of the entire sociological field. Sociological reflexivity is a collective endeavor, spanning the entire field and its participants, aimed at exposing the socially conditioned unthought structures that underlay the formulation of theories and perceptions of the social world.
Bourdieu's sociology in general can be characterized as an investigation of the pre-reflexive conditions that generate certain beliefs and practices that are generated in capitalist systems.
Science and objectivityBourdieu contended there is transcendental objectivity, only there were certain historical conditions necessary for its emergence. Bourdieu's ideal scientific field is one that persistently designates upon its participants an interest or investment in objectivity. Transcendental objectivity, he argued, requires certain historical and social conditions for its production. The scientific field is precisely that field in which objectivity may be acquired. The structure of the scientific field is such that it becomes increasingly autonomous and its "entrance fee" becomes increasingly strict. Further, the scientific field entails rigorous intersubjective scrutinizing of theory and data. This makes it difficult for those within the field to bring in, for example, political influence. Therefore, the structure of the scientific field imposes upon its participants a habitus that has tacit interest or investment in objectivity.
Language Bourdieu takes language to be not merely a method of communication, but also a mechanism of power. The language one uses is designated by one's relational position in a field or social space. Different uses of language tend to reiterate the respective positions of each participant. Linguistic interactions, thus, are manifestations, or instantiations, of the participants' respective positions in social space and categories of understanding, and thus tend to reproduce the objective structures of the social field. This determines who has a right to be listened to, to interrupt, to ask questions, and to lecture, and the degrees thereof.
LegacyIn its obituary, The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom said Bourdieu "was, for many, the leading intellectual of present-day France... a thinker in the same rank as Foucault, Barthes and Lacan". His works have been translated into two dozen languages and have had an impact on the whole gamut of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Several works of his are considered classics, not only in sociology, but also in anthropology, education, and cultural studies. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste was named as one of the 20th century's ten most important works of sociology by the International Sociological Association. His book Outline of a Theory of Practice is among the most cited in the world. The Rules of Art has impacted sociology, history, literature and aesthetics.
In France, Bourdieu was not seen as an ivory tower academic or cloistered don, but as a passionate activist for those he believed subordinated by society. Again, from The Guardian: "[In 2003] a documentary film about Pierre Bourdieu — Sociology is a Combat Sport — became an unexpected hit in Paris. Its very title stressed how much of a politically engaged intellectual Bourdieu was, taking on the mantle of Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre in French public life, and slugging it out with politicians because he thought that was what people like him should do."For Bourdieu, sociology was a combatant effort at exposing the unthought structures that underly the somatic and cognitive practices of social agents. He saw sociology as a means of combating symbolic violence and exposing those unseen areas where one could be free.
Bourdieu's work has continued to be influential, and sociologists such as Loïc Wacquant have persisted to apply his theoretical and methodological principles to subjects such as boxing, employing what Bourdieu termed participant objectivization, or what Wacquant calls carnal sociology.
BibliographySelected works:
Les héritiers: les étudiants et la culture (1964), engl. The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture, University of Chicago Press 1979
Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World: The Sense of Honour: The Kabyle House of the World Reversed: Essays, Cambridge Univ Press 1979
Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d'ethnologie kabyle (1972), engl. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press 1977
La distinction (1979), engl. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard University Press 1987
Homo Academicus, (French Edition) Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1984. (English Edition) Polity (publisher) 1990
Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Theory, Culture and Society Series), Sage, 1990, with Jean-Claude Passeron (in French: La Reproduction. Éléments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement, Minuit, 1970)
with Luc Boltanski e P. Maldidier, La défense du corps, in Social Science Information, vol. 10, n° 4, pp.45-86, 1971
with Luc Boltanski, Le titre et le poste : rapports entre système de production et système de reproduction, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 1, n° 2, pp. 95 – 107, 1975.
with Luc Boltanski, Le fétichisme de la langue, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 1, n° 4, pp. 2– 32, 1975.
with Luc Boltanski, La production de l'idéologie dominante, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 2, n° 2-3, 1976, pp. 4-73.
Choses dites, 1987 - In Other Words: Essays toward a Reflective Sociology, Stanford, 1990
The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Polity (Publisher) 1991
The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, Stanford University Press 1991
Language & Symbolic Power, Harvard University Press 1991, paperback edition, Polity (publisher) 1992
An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (with Loic Wacquant), University of Chicago Press and Polity (publisher) 1992
with Hans Haacke, Free Exchange, Stanford University Press 1995
(with Luc Boltanski and Robert Castel), Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, Stanford University Press 1996
Les régles de l'art, 1992 - Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Stanford University Press 1996
(with Monique De Saint Martin, Jean-Claude Passeron),Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power, Polity (publisher) 1996
Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Stanford University Press 1998
"La domination masculine" (1998), engl. Male Domination, Polity (publisher) 2001
State nobility. Elite Schools in the Field of Power, Polity (publisher) 1998
Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Polity (publisher) 1999
On Television, New Press 1999
Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, New Press 1999
Pascalian Meditations, Polity (publisher) 2000
"Contre-Feux" (1998), engl. Counterfire: Against the Tyranny of the Market, Verso Books 2003
"Science de la science et réflexivité" (2002), engl Science of Science and Reflexivity, Polity (publisher) 2004
Interventions politiques (1960-2000). Textes & contextes d’un mode d’intervention politique spécifique, 2002
The Social Structures of the Economy, Polity (publisher) 2005
References
Calhoun, C. et al. (1992) "Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives." University of Chicago Press.
Lane, J.F. (2000) Pierre Bourdieu. A Critical Introduction. Pluto Press.
Wacquant, L. (2005) Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics. Polity Press.
Fowler, Bridget, Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (London, California and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997).
Jean-Philippe Cazier [edit.],Abécédaire de Pierre Bourdieu, Sils Maria Press, 2007.
article in kirjasto
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bourd.htm
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)
French sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher, and champion of the anti-globalisation movement, whose work spanned a broad range of subjects from ethnography to art, literature, education, language, cultural tastes, and television. Bourdieu's most famous book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984). It was named one of the 20th century's 10 most important works of sociology by the International Sociological Association.
"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed." (from Distinction)
Pierre Bourdieu was born in the village of Denguin, in the Pyrénees' district of southwestern France. His father was the village postmaster. At school Bourdieu was a bright student but also gained fame as a star rugby player. He moved to Paris, where he studied at the École normale superiéure - his classmate was the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Bourdieu became interested in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl - Heidegger's Being and Time he had read earlier - and also in the writings of the young Marx for academic reasons. His thesis from 1953 was a translation and commentary of the Animadversiones of Leibniz. After attaining agrégé in philosophy, Bourdieu worked as a teacher for a year and was then drafted into the army. He served for two years in Algeria, where French troops tried to crush the Algerian rebels. In 1959-60 he lectured at the University of Algiers, and studied traditional farming and ethnic Berber culture. "I thought of myself as a philosopher and it took me a very long time to admit to myself that I had become an ethnologist," Bourdieu once said. In 1960 he returned to France as a self-taughtd anthropologist.Bourdieu married in 1962 Marie-Claire Brisard. He studied anthropology and sociology, and taught at the University of Paris (1960-62) and at the University of Lille (1962-64). In 1964 he joined the faculty of the École pratique des Hautes Etudes. In 1968 he became director of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, where with a group of colleagues he embarked on pioneering extensive collective research on problems concerned with the maintenance of a system of power by means of the transmission of a dominant culture. One of the central themes in his works was that culture and education are central in the affirmation of differences between social classes and in the reproduction of those differences. In La Reproduction (1970) Bourdieu argued, that the French educational system reproduces the cultural division of society. He also implied a correspondence between "symbolic violence" of pedagogic actions and the state's monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence.
In 1975 Bourdieu launched the journal Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, devoted to deconsecrating the mechanism by which cultural production helps sustain the dominant structure of society. In 1981 he was appointed to the prestigious chair of sociology at the Collège de France. By the late 1980s Bourdieu had become one of the French social scientists most frequently cited in the United States. For his students he became a guru, Bour-dieu (god), or a terrible example of terrorism in the disguise of sociology. In the mid-1990s Bourdieu participated in a number of activities outside academic circles. He supported striking rail workers, spoke for the homeless, was a guest at television programs, and in 1996 he founded the publishing company Liber/Raisons d'agir. In 1998 he published in the newspaper Le Monde an article, in which he compared the "strong discourse" of neoliberalism with the position of the psychiatric discourse in an asylum. Bourdieu's last publications dealt with such topics as masculine domination, neoliberal newspeak, Edouard Manet's art, and Beethoven. Bourdieu died of cancer in Paris at the Saint-Antoine hospital on January 24, 2002."Of all the oppositions that artificially divide social science, the most fundamental, and the most ruinous, is the one that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism." (from The Logic of Practice, 1980)
Key terms in Bourdieu's sociological thought are social field, capital, and habitus. Habitus is adopted through upbringing and education. The concept means on the individual level "a system of acquired dispositions functioning on the practical level as categories of perception and assessment... as well as being the organizing principles of action." Bourdieu argues that the struggle for social distinction is a fundamental dimension of all social life. Thorstein Veblen's (1857-1929) thoughts about conspicuous consumption come near Bourdieu's view, but Bourdieu has corrected that: "la distinction" has another meaning. It refers to social space and is bound up with the system of dispositions (habitus). Social space has a very concrete meaning when Bourdieu presents graphically the space of social positions and the space of lifestyles. His diagram in Distinction shows that spatial distances are equivalent to social distances. "The very title Distinction serves as a reminder that what is commonly called distinction, that is, a certain quality of bearing and manners, most often considered innate (one speaks of distinction naturelle, "natural refinement"), is nothing other than difference, a gap, a distinctive feature, in short, a relational property existing only in and through its relation with other properties." (from Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, 1994)
All human actions take place within social fields, which are arenas for the struggle of the resources. Individuals, institutions, and other agents try to distinguish themselves from others, and acquire capital which is useful or valuable on the arena. In modern societies, there are two distinct systems of social hierarchization. The first is economic, in which position and power are determined by money and property, the capital one commands. The second system is cultural or symbolic. In this one's status is determined by how much cultural or "symbolic capital" one possesses. Culture is also a source of domination, in which intellectuals are in the key role as specialists of cultural production and creators of symbolic power. In Distinction, based on empirical material gathered in the 1960s, Bourdieu argued that taste, an acquired "cultural competence," is used to legitimise social differences. The habitus of the dominant class can be discerned in the notion that 'taste' is a gift from nature. Taste functions to make social "distinctions".
Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992) examined the work of Flaubert, and how it was shaped by the different currents, movements, schools and authors of the time. It can also be read as a collective biography, a Bildungsroman, presentation of a method, and an examination of Bourdieu's own philosophy. On Television (1996), based on two lectures, was a surprise best seller in France. Bourdieu considered television a serious danger for all the various areas of cultural production. Television is degrading journalism because it must attempt to be inoffensive. "Above all, time limits make it highly unlikely that anything can be said. I am undoubtedly expected to say that this television censorship - of guests but also of the true journalists who are its agents - is political. It is true that political intervenes, and that there is political control... It is also true that at a time such as today, when great numbers of people are looking for work and there is so little job security in television and radio, there is a greater tendency toward political conformity. Consciously or unconsciously, people censor themselves - they don't need to be called into line."
Selected works:
Leibnitii animadversiones in partem generalem principiorum Cartesianorum, 1953
Sociologie de l'Algérie, 1958 (rev. ed. 1961) - The Algerians
Travail et travailleurs en Algérie, 1963 (with Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Rivet, Claude Seibel)
Le déracinement. La crise de l'agriculture traditionelle en Algérie, 1964 (with Abdelmalek Sayad)
Les hérities, 1964 (with Jean-Claude Passeron) - The Inheritors
Un art moyen. Essais sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, 1965 (with others) - Photography. A Middle-Brow Art
La reproduction. Elèments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement, 1970 - Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (with Jean-Claude Passeron)
Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique, précéde de trois études d'ethnologie kabyle, 1972 - Outline of a Theory of Practice
La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, , 1979 - Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Le sens pratique, 1980 - The Logic of Practice
Questions de sociologie, 1980 - Sociology in Question - Sosiologian kysymyksiä
Ce que parler veut dire. L'économie des échanges linguistiques, 1982 - Language and Symbolic Power
Homo academicus, 1984 - Homo Academicus
La Sociologie de Bourdieu. Textes choisis et commentés, 1986 (ed. by Alain Accardo und Philippe Corcuff)
Choses dites, 1987 - In Other Words: Essays toward a Reflective Sociology
L'ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger, 1988 - The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger
La Noblesse d'état. Grandes écoles et esprit de corps, 1989 - The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power
Les régles de l'art, 1992 - The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field
The Field of Cultural Production, 1993 (ed. by Randall Johnson)
Libre-Échange, 1994 - Free Exchange (with Hans Haacke) - Ajatusten vapaa-kauppa
1992 - An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (with Loic Wacquant)
Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l'action, 1994 - Practical Reason
Sur la télévision; suivi de l'emprise du journalisme, 1996 - On Television - Televisiosta
Méditations pascaliennes. Éléments pur une philosophie négative, 1997 - Pascalian Meditations.
Contre-feux. Propos pour servir à la résistance contre l'invasion néo-libérale, 1998 - Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time - Vastatulet
La domination masculine, 1998 - Masculine domination
Les structures sociales de l'économie, 2000
Propos sur le champ politique, 2000
Contre-Feux 2. Pour un mouvement social européen, 2001
Science de la science et réflexivité: Cours du Collège de France, 2000-2001, 2001
Langage et pouvoir symbolique, 2001
Interventions politiques (1960-2000). Textes & contextes d’un mode d’intervention politique spécifique, 2002
Science de la science et reflexivité, 2002
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