1st Edition

Methodological Individualism Introduction and Founding Texts

By Nathalie Bulle Copyright 2024
112 Pages
by Routledge

112 Pages
by Routledge

Originating in the late 19th century and becoming the subject of ongoing methodological debates in the social sciences, methodological individualism is a paradigm that focuses on understanding social phenomena through the actions and choices of individuals rather than through collective explanations. This book highlights its theoretical bases as defined and developed in the writings of its... Read more

 

Chapter 1. The turmoiled emergence of methodological individualism within the social sciences landscape: a path to its understanding.

 

Chapter 2. Carl Menger (1883). On the theoretical understanding of social phenomena that are neither the products of convention nor of positive legislation, but the unintended results of historical development.

 

Chapter 3. Joseph Schumpeter (1908). Methodological individualism and the emergence of the marginalist school of economics.

 

Chapter 4. Georg Simmel (1905-1907). The intrinsic conditions of historical knowledge and the mental nature of history. 

 

Chapter 5.  Max Weber (1922). The basic concepts of sociology.

Biography

Nathalie Bulle is a sociologist research director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, Groupe d’Etude des Méthodes de l’Analyse Sociologique de la Sorbonne) in France. Her interest in the analysis of human thought, in its common or scientific form, is at the core of her work applied to educational ideas and the epistemology of the social sciences. She has published articles on methodological individualism in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, the Journal of Classical Sociology, and L’Année sociologique.  http://www.nathaliebulle.com/