The Persistence of the Individualism Debate Today

Abstract

This chapter looks at two questions, one regarding Ernest Gellner’s ideas, the other regarding Gellner’s reception and current thinking about the issues in dispute. Beginning with ‘Explanation in History’ (1956), through ‘Time and Theory in Social Anthropology’, and perhaps concluding with ‘Concepts and Society’, Gellner endeavoured to give voice to the rational claim of sociology to find individualistic explanations inadequate. What he did not anticipate was the rise of neoclassical economics, rigidly subscribing to individualistic reductionism. Nor could anyone have foreseen that the language philosophy Gellner had so effectively pilloried would transform itself into the neutral-sounding ‘analytic philosophy’ and that it would try very hard to colonize the philosophy of the social sciences on the side of reductive individualism. Much of the debate as currently carried on is deeply confused and flawed due to a failure to attend carefully to the arguments that Gellner, qualified both as philosopher and as working social scientist, distilled as the vital main points. This chapter will show the relevance of his thought today and the continuing poverty of reductionist and individualist philosophy in the philosophy of the social sciences.

The problem of historical explanation is also the problem of the nature of sociology.

—Ernest Gellner (1956)

In the social sciences, methodological individualism is the principle that subjective individual motivation explains social phenomena, rather than class or group dynamics which are (according to proponents of individualistic principles) illusory or artificial and therefore cannot truly explain market or social phenomena.

—Wikipedia entry on methodological individualism

Appendices

Comments on Ian Jarvie’s ‘The Persistence of the Individualism Debate Today’

David N. Gellner

School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

david.gellner@anthro.ox.ac.uk

I was somewhat nervous when asked to comment on the arguments over methodological individualism of the 1950s. They always seemed somewhat abstruse to me and I had parked them in the folder labelled ‘I’ll look at that later and, if I really have to, I’ll make up my mind then’. Neither my training on the religions of South Asia nor my repeated attempts to do ethnographic research in Nepal and India provide any obvious answers, though these experiences do predispose me to doubt that all the complexities of human action can be reduced to, or re-described in terms of, a collection of monads with dispositions, as required by the strong methodological individualist programme.

What, I wonder, would those individualistic theorists of the 1950s have made of contemporary academic notions of ‘distributed agency’ (Enfield and Kockelman 2017), ‘communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991), or ‘dividuals’ whose selfhood is bound up with multiple others (Strathern 1988)? In other words, we now have multiple ways of describing and thinking about collective selves, on one side of the argument. At the other extreme, the very widely influential Actor-Network Theory—which its originator, Bruno Latour, says should really be called Actant-Rhizome Ontology (Latour 1999: 19)—dissolves the individuals presupposed by rational actor theorists and posits instead networks of agents in non-human form and on multiple inanimate levels. Hence the trend for what is now called ‘more-than-human’ or ‘multi-species anthropology’ that decentres humans and the purely human social sphere and focuses instead on humans’ entanglements with other beings and forces (Miller et al. 2015; White and Candea 2018).

My remarks pertain mainly to the methodological individualism side of Jarvie’s chapter, but let me first say something about the Oxford context. On the attack on linguistic philosophy: I agree that things have moved on and people have changed the subject. My father was once invited to Oxford to address his critics. But, by that time, he was bored with the whole thing. In later life, he regretted declining the invitation. After that, both sides ignored each other. Oxford philosophy, for the most part, has come to require ever more abstruse technical expertise (though a minority have discovered real-world ethical problems), which was certainly not a precondition of being a philosopher in the 1950s. My father remarked more than once that he fled philosophy for anthropology in order to escape the hermeneutic plague, only to find that it followed him into anthropology.

My impression, and it is no more than an ignorant outsider’s guess, is that, except for a few students with a philosophical vocation, the philosophy stream within Oxford’s famous PPE (politics, philosophy and economics) degree has withered. The majority opt to abandon the philosophy after the first year and concentrate on politics and economics, though some, who dislike the maths element, give up economics instead. Despite the fact that a surprising number of British politicians took the degree, I don’t think you can blame the present state of misrule in Britain on the Oxford PPE curriculum of the last thirty or forty years (Kuper 2019).

As Jarvie notes, ‘the main reservoir of Durkheimian sociology in Oxford was the Institute of Social Anthropology’ (footnote 7); there was also Nuffield College, founded in 1937, which was and to a great extent remains the spiritual home of Oxford sociology. The atmosphere of the two departments could not be more different. Anthropology was until recently the department of E.E. Evans-Pritchard and his disciples (who did much to translate and popularize the work of Marcel Mauss in the Anglophone world), whereas Sociology was and is dominated by Goldthorpean quantitativists.¹⁵ The sociology department has recently moved from a purpose-built social sciences building on the far side of town to a building right opposite the entrance to Nuffield College.

On the methodological individualism argument: On the one hand, of course society is made up of individuals and talk of collectives must be a kind of shorthand and must be in some sense translatable into statements about individuals if it is to have any meaning. Yet there is such a thing as group-think. People, in many contexts, and not only in Asia, do instinctively and unselfconsciously think of themselves and act, not as isolated individuals, but as part of a household, a kin group, a clan or a nation.

Just because people think of themselves as parts of larger wholes, it does not follow that wholes are made up of, and are nothing more than the sum of, individuals and their dispositions. Gellner asserted that there was nothing in the Berber tribesmen’s dispositions that could explain the functioning of the system, that ‘it also might very well be impossible to isolate anything in the characters and conduct of the individual tribesmen which explains how they come to maintain the system’ (Gellner 1973: 14).

However, this didn’t stop some influential theorists from positing exactly such a thing. When Bourdieu refers to habitus as ‘that system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them’ (Giddens 1990: 53)—when Bourdieu defines habitus in that way, providing an explanation is exactly what he is trying to do. He is claiming that the Berber tribesmen have internalized ways of feeling and acting such that, without consciously aiming at it, they act and cooperate and oppose others in ways that do indeed perpetuate the structure of segmentary system.

Giddens’ structuration works in much the same way: individuals may not consciously be aware that their actions perpetuate the system, but they do (Giddens 1986). I am pretty sure that both Bourdieu and Giddens would be, or would have been, horrified to see their theories lumped together with the methodological individualists. It is, nonetheless, noteworthy that they both felt obliged to couch their theories in a way that gave causal primacy to the action of individuals.

While Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is an intuitively comprehensible idea and is one that has very much caught on, it has been notoriously difficult to operationalize it, measure it or see it. In other words, it offers a re-description of the phenomena, one that may feel very plausible, and sound impressive, and may indeed be heuristically helpful, but arguably it does not really amount to a serious explanation of anything.

Gellner’s argument, if I have understood it properly and am not ignoring too many philosophical subtleties, is that any attempt to ‘cash’ the terms of generalizations about groups in terms of individuals and their dispositions fails mainly because it falls into an endless regress: each step of translation requires the further specification of a context, which involves invoking yet more general concepts referring to social entities. (Interestingly the same infinite regress argument might be made against Geertz’s (1973) interpretivist attempt, following Gilbert Ryle’s The concept of mind, to re-describe all descriptions both of individual states of mind and of social states of affairs in terms of individual dispositions.)

Jarvie argues that both the objects of Gellner’s critique—linguistic philosophy and methodological individualism—presuppose psychologism. Linguistic philosophy is ‘psychologistic par excellence: beliefs are held by individual minds, so knowledge is, if you like, a state of mind’ (p. 9). It unthinkingly adopted a first-person epistemology (p. 13). At the level of common sense, as presupposed by many practitioners, this may well have been true. Yet the linguistic theory they espoused, that of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, was profoundly social.

Gellner’s stance towards ‘the social’ in the two cases Jarvie discusses was subtly different. In one case he is insisting that the social is not everything; it does not exhaust the universe of what there is; social usage or custom is not the only principle to which one can meaningfully appeal. In the other case he is asserting: The social does exist; individuals are not all there is.

In the case of linguistic philosophy, Gellner is against the argument that language use is nothing more than its social content, that there is nothing outside the language games. While allowing that most language use is indeed social, crucially, he is asserting that it is possible, under certain circumstances (circumstances that it is crucial to study and to specify; see Plough, sword and book), to have context-free truth claims and it is possible to transcend one’s social context. In the case of the methodological individualism debate, he is arguing for the ontological reality of social entities. He is not, however and of course, claiming that one is necessarily and always trapped within those social realities. In the case of language, it is deeply social, but one can escape it. In the case of social entities, they do exist, but they are certainly not all there is.

Note, however, that Gellner ends his response to Watkins by saying:

Finally, I should like to say that I still find the problem confusing, that my criticism of what seems to me over-simple reduction is not an argument for a mystique of the social whole, and that my guess is that the solution may be found in more careful distinguishing of the way in which whole-and-part, generalization-and-instance, premise-and-conclusion, cause-and-entity and perhaps other dichotomies enter into statements one can make about men and groups…¹⁶

Finally, I agree with Jarvie that John Searle’s attempts to rethink social theory from scratch (without taking any help from sociology or anthropology) and his refusal to take Durkheim seriously are evidence of arrogance on the part of the practitioners of linguistic philosophy. But if Searle’s writings on the nature of sociality are in error, they are, at least, fruitful and productive error and they are at least an attempt by a prominent philosopher to think seriously about the ontological status of social phenomena. Searle’s writings have generated much interdisciplinary dialogue and many attempts to explicate where he, Searle, went wrong.¹⁷

References

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• Enfield, N.J., and Paul Kockelman, eds. 2017. Distributed agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays, ed. Clifford Geertz, 3–30. New York: Basic Books.

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• White, T., and M. Candea. 2018. Animals. https://doi.org/10.29164/18animals.