Individualism Theories and Methods

by Birnbaum, Pierre; Leca, Jean; Gaffney, John

• ISBN13: 9780198273240
• ISBN10: 019827324X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1990-12-13
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

In recent years the ability of holistic social theories to account for the rights, duties, even the reality, of the individual have been called into question more and more. At the same time, interest in individualism in a whole variety of forms has been gaining ground, both as an object ofstudy and as a methodology in itself. Individualism brings together essays by eminent social scientists from many countries. They discuss the question of individualism from a historical, methodological, hermeneutical, political, and sociological point of view and try to reconcile methodological individualism with the classicalapproach of sociological theory, based on collective identity. The contributors are: Bertrand Badie, Pierre Birnbaum, Raymond Boudon, Francois Chazel, Jon Elster, Ernest Gellner, Guy Hermet, Georges Lavau, Jean Leca, Alessandro Pizzorno, Adam Przeworski, and Charles Tilly.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
What is Methodological Individualism?	p. 15
The Gaffe-Avoiding Animal or a Bundle of Hypotheses	p. 17
Individualism and Holism in the Social Sciences	p. 33
Marxism and Methodological Individualism	p. 46
Marxism and Rational Choice	p. 62
The Historical Conditions of Sociological Individualism	p. 93
Community, Individualism, and Culture	p. 95
The Citizen-Individual in Western Christianity	p. 116
Individualism and Citizenship	p. 141
Individualism and Collective Action	p. 191
Individual Mobilization and Collective Action	p. 193
Individualism, Mobilization, and Collective Action	p. 216
Individual Action, Collective Action and Workers' Strategy	p. 239
Individualism and Democracy	p. 267
Is the Voter an Individualist?	p. 269
On the Rationality of Democratic Choice	p. 295
Index	p. 333
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