Abstract
Social scientists must continually deal with collective concepts (Kollktivbegriffe) such as “society,” “nation,” “class,” “state,” and so on. Historically, there have been two opposite currents of thought on the interpretation of these concepts: methodological individualism and methodological collectivism. Their opposition involves two problems: ontological and methodological. The ontological problem can be summarized as follows: What do collective concepts really refer to? Methodological individualists (e.g., Menger, Mises, Hayek, and Popper) reply that they refer only to individuals. Only individuals exist and only individuals reason and act. The methodological problem can be summarized as follows: Where does social research, which aims at explaining social events and institutions, begin? Since methodological individualists believe that only individuals exist, they maintain that any inquiry into the origins and changes in social events and institutions necessarily must start from the actions of individuals (these actions must be studied in order to explore their unintentional consequences).
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter directly draws from Chapter 8 of my book La Vienna di Popper published in 2000 by Rubettino. The English edition of this book was published in 2007 by The Davies Group Publishers under the title Popper’s Vienna.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
In Popper’s opinion, the two paradigms that respectively assert that institutions are either ‘designed’ or grow spontaneously are typical, on the one hand, of the theorist of the Social Contract and, on the other, of their critics, such as, for example, David Hume (see Popper 1989, p. 65 footnote 1).
- 6.
The easiest way to understand the concept of unintended consequences is to use an example: “If a man wishes urgently to buy a house in a certain district, we can safely assume that he does not wish to raise the market price of houses in that district. But the very fact that he appears on the market as a buyer will tend to raise market prices. And analogous remarks hold for the seller” (Op. cit., p. 96). Menger mentions this example in passing, but Popper returns to it several times. For example, see Conjectures and Refutations, cit., p. 452.
- 7.
According to Popper, the inability of psychologism to offer social explanations was well understood by Marx: “To have questioned psychologism is perhaps the greatest achievement of Marx as a sociologist. By doing so he opened the way to the more penetrating conception of a specific realm of sociological laws, and of a sociology which was at least partly autonomous” (op. cit., p. 88; see also Popper 1949, p. 452).
- 8.
According to Popper (1966b, p. 96), we can understand that this task is essential for the social sciences if we think that “an action which proceeds precisely according to intention does not create a problem for social science (except that there may be a need to explain why in this particular case no unintended repercussions occurred).”
- 9.
Popper (idem) argues that in so far as the development of society is repetitive “we may perhaps make certain prophecies. For example, there is undoubtedly some repetitiveness in the manner in which new religions arise, or new tyrannies; and a student of history may find that he can foresee such developments to a limited degree by comparing them with earlier instances, i.e. by studying the conditions under which they arise. But this application of the method of conditional prediction does not take us very far” (idem) because in the history of society situations and conditions change. Since the changing of conditions and their combinations are not predictable, neither are their effects.
- 10.
According to Popper (2004, p. 459), “while there are, admittedly, such empirical objects as the crowd of people here assembled, it is quite untrue that names like ‘the middle-class’ stand for any such empirical groups.”
- 11.
In the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies Popper (1966b, p. 323) points out that, as to the view that Marx conceived of social theory as the study of the unintentional repercussions of human actions, he is indebted to Karl Polanyi “who emphasized this aspect of Marxism in private discussions (1924).”
- 12.
In Unended Quest Popper (1976, p. 26) says, “there is an infinity of unforeseeable nontrivial statements belong ing to the informative content of any theory, and an exactly corresponding infinity of statements belonging to its logical content. We can therefore never know or understand all the implications of any theory, or its full significance”. In a certain sense, we never know what we are talking about. A similar view is presented in the Gadamer’s hermeneutics at the beginning of the history of effects (Wirkungsgeschichte). See Gadamer (1975).
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Antiseri, D. (2023). Viennese Methodological Individualism. In: Bulle, N., Di Iorio, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Methodological Individualism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41512-8_4
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