Methodological Individualism

Society as subjectively meaningful interaction 163on social relationships, rather than on autonomous individuals or social wholes(Gergen, 1994: 214ff). The latter makes a distinction between ‘bottom-up’ and‘top-down’ conceptions of society. According to the first, which is that ofmethodological individualism, individuals determine society, while in the lattersociety determines individuals.both top-down and bottom-up conceptions of the relationship between theindividual and society are problematic for social constructionism. The topdownview leaves discourse as a side-effect of social structure, and ittherefore cannot be the focus for social change. The bottom-up view, worsestill, cannot accommodate any kind of social constructionism, since the individualis taken to be logically prior to the social. The individual is a ‘given’from which society arises, and which therefore cannot be said to beconstructed by that society. This methodological individualist view has all theattributes fiercely contested by social constructionists. It is humanistic andessentialist, claiming for the human being an essential nature, a coherent,unified self, and the capacity to make self-originated choices and decisions.(Burr, 1995: 96f)This argument to the effect that methodological individualism is contested bysocial constructionism is weakened by a narrow conception of the former. Whileit is true that there is a radical version of methodological individualism, whichtakes the individual as prior to society, this is not the only version. In fact, themost well-known methodological individualists – Weber, Mises, Hayek andPopper – do not at all defend this radical version of methodological individualism,represented by the theory of the social contract and the theory of generalequilibrium in economics. On the contrary, they agree that human individualsare social beings, as suggested by Burr, and as implied by the individualistictheory of society discussed in this chapter.Finn Collin is much closer to the truth when he suggests that the constructivist‘claim that social facts are determined by what agents think … points in the directionof an individualist approach to social research’ (1997: 229). He also observesthat, at first sight, there is ‘much in social constructivism to please a methodologicalindividualist and nothing to offend him’ (p. 230). His conclusion, however, is thatsocial constructionism is not a reductionist form of methodological individualism.We have seen that there are both individualistic and holistic versions of socialconstructionism and, also, that there are many attempts, either to combine thetwo, or to dissolve the dualism. I will end this chapter by a brief mention of twosuch attempts, by two well-known sociologists, who seem to take a similarapproach: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens.Pierre Bourdieu characterises his own work as ‘constructivist structuralism’ or‘structuralist constructionism’ (1989: 14). Like Berger and Luckmann, he maintainsthat there are two sides to society: one subjective, phenomenological sideand one objective, structuralist side, both dialectically related ([1972] 1977: ch. 2;[1980] 1990: 25ff). However, if Berger and Luckmann leaned most towards the