Re: individualism vs holism.

[Lawrence Boland <boland@xxxxxx>]

It would seem that there is a presumption that when one talks about methodological
individualism that one must also be presuming a dichotomy with "holism" (evidence:
the subject title of these e-mails). This is not the case in my book. For those of
you with access to JSTOR.ORG, you can look up two papers about methodological
individualism in the _British Journal of Sociology_ 1960 and 1975. The latter refers
to "institutional individualism". The full citations can be found in the
bibliography of my 1982 book.

The point of both articles is that there are four possible positions, not two. For
my purposes, I was distinguishing between two types of individualism: psychologistic
and institutional. Usually, I retain methodological individualism as the more
general view and psychologistic individualism as the narrow view characteristic of
neoclassical GET for the reasons that I explore more fully in my 1986 book.
Unfortunately, when Schumpeter introduced the notion of methodological
individualism, he was actually introducing what is now called psychologistic
individualism. Institutional individualism, which allows for the existence of
non-natural exogenous givens (such as institutions or anything that takes too long
to change for now), I think fits Keynes' alternative to neoclassical economics --
and it also fits my call for macrofoundations of microeconomics.

LB

--
Lawrence A. Boland, FRSC
Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University
Burnaby BC Canada V5A-1S6
ph: 604-291-4487, web: http://www.sfu.ca/~boland