Methodological Individualism

Positivism in philosophy and social science 183human individuals who they are, what they own and what they think aboutvarious matters.According to George A. Lundberg (their most influential spokesman in sociology)operational definitions consist of ‘words clearly designating performable andobservable operations subject to corroboration’ ([1929] 1942: 89). Lundberg, himself, wasnot a methodological individualist, however. He was an instrumentalist and, assuch, rather liberal about the use of collective concepts in sociology; if only as aconvenient construct, and as long as they prove useful ([1929] 1942: 80–112).From this point of view, he criticised the psychologism of Floyd H. Allport(Lundberg, 1939: 163–73). The most ambitious attempt to provide operationaldefinitions of the concepts of sociology is by Stuart C. Dodd, who takes as hispoint of departure the so-called ‘S-theory’, according to which, ‘Every quantitativelyrecorded societal situation can be expressed as a combination of indices oftime (T), of space (L), of population (P), and of the many characteristics (I) of peopleor their environment’. Or expressed in a simple formula: S=(T:I:L:P) (Dodd,1942: 58f; see also 1939: 628). You need but little imagination to see that thispoint of departure makes for an individualist sociology.While it seems undeniable that systematic empiricism has an individualistbias, it is difficult to estimate the exact extent to which it is individualistic. Severalfactors complicate the attempt to classify the results of systematic empiricism intothose that are individualistic and those that are holistic. First of all, there is thefact that even though the individual is usually the basic unit of investigation, thisis not always the case. In econometrics, for instance – paradoxically, sinceeconomics is usually considered the most individualistic of the social sciences –the basic units of research are usually the household and the firm. A secondcomplication is that even in those cases where the individual is the basic unit ofresearch, it might be that he/she can only be described in terms that makeimplicit reference to the institutional setting and the social structure in whichhe/she acts. Thus, it has been argued that any study of voting behaviour makesimplicit reference to the political system (Udehn, 1987: 220ff). It could also beargued that the classification of individuals according to social backgroundimplies some notion of ‘social structure’ (Lukes, 1973: 121). It is nowadays generallyagreed that all data are theory laden or theory impregnated, and the data ofsystematic empiricism is no exception to this rule. It could be, therefore, that thedata about individuals generated by systematic empiricism are impregnated with‘social theory’ that is holistic. On the other hand, systematic empiricism, to theextent that it relies on any articulated theory at all, tends to assume a subjectivisttheory of social structure, so, that even when it uses concepts with a holist ring,such as ‘social role’ and ‘social status’, these concepts are defined in terms of theexpectations and rankings of individuals, that is, in individualist terms.Confronted with the charge of individualist bias, leading representatives ofsystematic empiricism sought a remedy in the development of new techniquesfor doing justice to the structural and collective features of social life. 20 Oneexpression of this ‘structuralist’ and ‘collectivist’ tendency in systematic empiricismwas the introduction of so-called multi-level research, that is, research