Who Were the Sea Peoples?

It is interesting that I continue to see people make the assertion that if one accepts individual explanations as valid, then one is a methodological individualist. That is plain wrong: Methodological individualism, at least as it was presented by Mises, is a doctrine much stronger than that. It says that the only good explanations in the social sciences are explanations at the level of individuals. Explanations that rely on higher-level phenomena, such as national interests, class struggles, collective manias, collective action problems, and so on, all of those are at best shorthands for the true, individual-based explanation. Mises is very, very explicit on this in Human Action . The equivalent doctrine to methodological individualism in the social sciences is atomic reductionism in the physical sciences. The latter doctrine says that the higher-level sciences only exist because of human mental limitations: it's just too hard for us to calculate what each particle in a hurrica...

There seems to me to be a lot of defense of this doctrine for two reasons: 1) It can be used as a trump card by libertarians who wish to shut down a debate. 2) The early Austrians all defended it, so there is sentimental attachment to it. (I've said before that this was understandable: given the only alternative was methodological holism, I'd sure opt for methodological individualism as well!) Huff takes on the subject here ; his points are sound, I think. And again, just to be clear where I stand: the right approach is methodological pluralism. Analyze at whatever level of analysis enables you to make progress, whether it be the gene, the neuron, the individual, the firm, the social class, the nation, the culture, the civilization, etc.

This seems to be the thinking employed by some defenders of methodological individualism: Aristotle / the Spanish Scholastics / Adam Smith / somebody used individualist economic analysis at times. Therefore, whoever was a methodological individualist! But that is not really different than the fallacious argument in the post title. If methodological individualism has any teeth to it, it has to mean that only individual analysis is valid in the social sphere, or, perhaps, that only individual analysis is ultimately valid or truly scientific. Here, for instance, is Peter Klein (echoing the early Hayek) insisting that a macroeconomic theory without microfoundations is not a scientific theory at all. It should be clear that someone can think individualist analysis is fine, but also think we can have perfectly good macrotheories without individualist underpinnings. That person is a methodological pluralist. It is methodological holists who entirely reject individualist explanations. M...

I have had many good things to say about Wood, so it's time for some criticism, directed at Wood's notion of historical causation. This is expounded upon in the chapter on conspiracy theories. Wood quotes with approval Adam Ferguson noting that "in striving to remove inconveniences, or to gain apparent and contiguous advantages, arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate... and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design." Wood rightly criticizes conspiracy theorizing for ignoring the fact that the emergence of a social outcome certainly does not mean anyone, let alone a whole group of people, designed that outcome. But he oddly ignores the first part of the famous dictum: "As... ideas [such as Ferguson's] evolved, laying the basis for the emergence of modern social science, attributing events to the conscious design of particular individuals became mo...