Abstract
The religious dimension, meant as an expression of voluntary and conscious action, has proved crucial to understanding the transformations that religions have fostered in every aspect of social life, especially in the political and economic fields. The analysis of the conscious reasons leading to religious commitment has been the focus of classic authors’ investigations into the religious phenomenon, which have produced their best results precisely by (implicitly) adopting the perspective of Methodological Individualism. In this paper, beside mentioning the most notable achievements in the classics of sociology deriving from an MI-based approach, the advantages for a general theory of social relation deriving from the analysis of beliefs (the general ones and the religious ones specifically) from the MI perspective will be presented.
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Notes
- 1.
The difference between methodological individualism and atomistic individualism is the same as that existing between dog as an animal and dog as an astrological figure (Boudon, Bourricaud, A Critical Dictionary of Sociology).
- 2.
The notion of “good reasons” was developed by Boudon in his various works on ordinary rationality (see Jean-Michel Morin “Ordinary Rationality Theory (ORT) According to Raymond Boudon”, this volume). This notion is based on the Weberian approach to understanding sociology according to which beliefs, preferences and values are based on reasons in the mind of social actors (which are not limited to instrumental goals and do not respond to maximization objectives, as is the case in Rational Choice Theory).
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Abbruzzese, S. (2023). Applying Methodological Individualism in the Analysis of Religious Phenomena. In: Bulle, N., Di Iorio, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Methodological Individualism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41508-1_6
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