Methodological Individualism

Austrian methodological individualism 119Hayek’s methodological individualism is also expounded in an article fromthe same period, ‘The Facts of the Social Sciences’ (1943), which is a concisestatement of his views on the methodology of the social sciences. Social facts,including not only human actions and written language, but also ‘things’ such astools, food, medicine and weapons, are subjective in contrast to the objectivecharacter of natural facts. ‘Collective wholes’ are not observable, and do notexist as definite objects, independent from the ‘theories’ people have about them.Collective wholes are ‘created by an act of construction or interpretation’. Termsdenoting collective wholes refer to certain activities of individuals.This is all the theories of the social sciences aim to do. They are not aboutthe social wholes as wholes; they do not pretend to discover by empiricalobservation laws of behaviour or change of these wholes. Their task israther, if I may so call it, to constitute these wholes, to provide schemes ofstructural relationships which the historian can use when he has to attemptto fit together into a meaningful whole the elements which he actually finds.(Hayek [1948] 1972: 72)In this quotation, methodological individualism is opposed to the search forempirical laws about social wholes. This is another return to Carl Menger, whoopposed the atomism of the exact orientation to the collectivism of the realisticempiricalapproach. But it is also an adjustment to the views of Weber andMises. Hayek does not accept a social science based on the realistic-empiricalapproach. This type of research belongs to history. But social science is an aid tohistory by providing individualistic models of collective wholes. Or, in the terminologyof Max Weber, sociology is an auxiliary discipline to history, providingindividualistic ideal types of collective phenomena.In its early development, especially in Weber and Schumpeter, methodologicalindividualism was clearly distinguished from political individualism. InMises, this distinction is totally blurred. His allegiance to value-freedom is merelip-service. Methodological individualism appears as inseparable from, sometimeseven identical with, the political doctrine of liberalism. But Hayek is firstamong the proponents of methodological individualism to treat it as part of awider system of ideas, something like a world view, including, or related to, acertain ideology. In his article ‘Individualism: True and False’ (1945), Hayek iscareful to distinguish the ‘true individualism’ of the Scottish Enlightenment, andmen such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Acton, from the ‘false individualism’,which originates with Réné Descartes. The most significant expressions ofthe latter are the philosophy of the French Enlightenment, especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the English philosophical radicalism of Jeremy Benthamand the two Mills. The most mistaken element of ‘false individualism’, is the‘design theory’ of social institutions; the belief that society can be constructedaccording to a plan, or blueprint.