Who Were the Sea Peoples?

is a modern invention : Prince Modupe of the So-so tribe says that at the turn of the century in Africa, “Any destiny apart from the tribe was, of course, beyond the limits of either imagination or intuition. It was as un­thinkable as that one of the bright orange legs of a milli­pede should detach itself from the long black body of the creature and go walking off by itself.”[9] Chief Luther Standing Bear reports that a Lakota “could not consider himself as separate from the band or nation…to cut himself off from the whole meant to lose identity or to die.”[10] Alexis de Tocqueville emphasizes that in premodern Europe an “aristocracy link[ed] everybody, from the peasant to the king, in one long chain.”[11] Jacob Burckhardt, the great scholar of the Italian Renaissance, explains that during the Middle Ages a “man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation.”[12] If I were born in Medieval Europe, I would have understood myself as a p...

A friend of mine had mentioned on social media how puzzling the geopolitical events of the past year were for him. I could explain his perplexity with a single phrase: "methodological individualism." The idea(s) behind methodological individualism, however they are put, turn out to be false or vacuous. It is just not true that the only good explanation of social events individual, or that the only "final" explanation is individual, and so on for any exclusionary version of methodological individualism. Turn out to be not individualism at all: the fact that individuals mean something in social explanations is not particularly controversial, and doesn't really distinguish any methodological anythingism from any other one, except perhaps extreme holism. And it is not simply false but innocuous: It is actively harmful to to anyone trying to understand human social affairs. As Pierre Manent puts it: "As I've said, our political regime and our way of ...

"The discovery of wholes, and the primacy of wholes, occurred also in fields other than aesthetics. An example is the criticism of atomistic individualism in social philosophy. This criticism meant the revival, although in a strengthened form, of the classical idea of the social nature of man. The individual is conceivable only as a part of human society, not per se, as an isolated atom." -- Claes Ryn, Will, Imagination and Reason , p. 52

Various people you meet on the Internet love to trot out the phrase "only individuals act" when confronted with something difficult for them to explain, such as a collective action problem. (Never mind that collective action problems are recognized even by [intelligent] methodological individualists: whether methodological individualism is true, and whether collective action problems exist, are entirely separate questions, orthogonal to each other.) So what is supposed to be wrong with saying that "The Celtics released David Lee"? Talk like this is certainly common in everyday speech, which does not mean it is scientifically valid, but does place the burden of proof on those who want to reject it.* Furthermore, consider what happens in a case where common speech would say, "The Celtics release David Lee." A group of executives charged with running the team meet together in a room, or on a conference call. They discuss the situation with Lee, his pro...

“In his work on the evolution of social orders, Hayek thus abandons the individualist methodology he had proposed in his wartime writings, thereby rectifying the inconsistency that that precept implied for the system of his thought." (From Nell, Guinevere Liberty. 2014. Austrian Economic Perspectives on Individualism and Society: Moving beyond Methodological Individualism , p. 18)

"In his work on the evolution of social orders, Hayek thus abandons the individualist methodology he proposed in the wartime writings, thereby rectifying the inconsistency that that precept implied for the system of his thought." -- Andy Dennis, "Methodological Individualism and Society: Hayek's Evolving View," in Austrian Economic Perspectives on Individualism and Society , p. 18 That is correct.

Very interesting article , but what caught my eye: "After decades of observing wild elephants—and a series of carefully controlled experiments in the last eight years—scientists now agree that elephants form lifelong kinships, talk to one another with a large vocabulary of rumbles and trumpets and make group decisions ..."

"Modern republicanism makes a vigorous distinction between private or 'selfish' motives and public or 'selfless' motives of action, that is, between the motives of the individual and those of the citizen, and of course accords priority to the latter. Ancient republicanism largely ignores this distinction. If we believe the Latin historians in particular, we see that the motives we would call 'private' invade the space we call 'public.' There is a very compelling reason for this: the domain of the individual and the private has not yet been identified as a separate domain. All the human motives are at work in the city because the city is the sole locus of action -- there is no 'civil society' where individuals would 'assert their independence as they please...'" -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City , p. 252

"the inaugural act of modern political science [was] eliminating all real communities as so many insubstantial appearances, [and fixing] it's gaze on a purely abstract being, the individual out of which -- out of whose rights and power -- a political order that at last is rational can be constructed." -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City , p. 22 The human being is conditioned by society and history. (Not to say that society and history are not conditioned by human beings.) The individual of methodological individualism is, in fact, himself a socio-historical creation, called into being by the very sciences that supposedly take him as a natural object.

David Henderson writes : "One participant mentioned that after the Japanese government (he actually said "the Japanese") bombed Pearl Harbor, it was obvious that the U.S. government (he said "we") had to go to war with Japan." But really, if you want to be a good methodological individualist, stopping at "the government" is intolerable. Henderson should be satisfied with nothing less than naming a particular individuals in the Japanese and US governments who decided to go to war. I don't know and am not going to look up what government departments Japan had in 1941, but certainly it was not the Parks Department that went to war, right? Or the Department of Education? Or the minister in charge of fisheries? Hmm, I wonder why he stopped at "the government" level? I wonder...

Pete Boettke describes Lachmann's argument for methodological individualism here : "Austrian economists, Lachmann insisted, are methodological individualist because it is only at the level of the individual that we can attribute meaning to human action." Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that Lachmann is correct about the level of the individual and meaning. (I don't think he is, but I don't wish to argue that point here.) Does methodological individualism follow from the fact that "only at the level of the individual that we can attribute meaning to human action"? I can't see why it would. Why must all social explanations be related to the meaning of human actions? Schelling offers the following example that I believe shows they don't: Let us say human beings gain fine-tuned control over the height of their offspring, due to advances in genetic engineering. Most people are not that concerned with the height of their children, we w...

So, I have a friend, Joe Bob, who makes a bundle of money in the stock market. He sells his small Brooklyn apartment, and buys a mansion up the Hudson river, with an extensive "park" around it, of the sort where scattered large trees are set in acres of lawn. How might I explain this? Well, one thing I might say is, "This has been a goal of Joe Bob for a long time: he always wanted a mansion with some grounds like that, and now that he has the money, he values achieving that goal more than anything else he might do with the cash." That is a fine explanation. But here is another explanation: people's appreciation of such settings comes from the fact that our ancestors lived on the savannah for many, many, many generations. Therefore, it is in our genes to like such scenes: they make us feel at home. And here is yet another explanation: European nobility possessed just such manner houses in just such natural settings for hundreds and hundreds of years. Th...

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...

In responding to this post , Bob Murphy makes an interesting error. He says: "Hang on a second Gene. Why stop at society? How about this way of blowing up Boettke et al.?" "What about money, a social institution par excellence? No individual acted 'rationally' to pick something as money, weighing the marginal costs and benefits of a transition to a common medium of exchange. So clearly these guys are terrible economists." "That wouldn't work, right?" What Bob is thinking (I believe) is that money was not intended by anyone, but was the unintended outcome of individuals doing cost-benefit analysis. And just the same, of course no one said "Let me create human society," but it too was the unintentional outcome of individuals doing cost-benefit analysis. But while the former could be the case, the latter is historical nonsense and, if we believe Wittgenstein, impossible to boot. That is because: 1) Historically speaking, ...

I'm teaching Micro I this semester, in a situation where my textbook was chosen before I was the instructor. The book is Heyne, Boettke, and Prychitko's The Economic Way of Thinking . So far I like the book... but not every bit of it. For instance, in the first chapter, the authors claim: "[The economic way of thinking ] can be best summarized as a set of concepts derived from one fundamental presupposition: All social phenomena emerge from the actions and interactions of individuals who are choosing in response to expected additional benefits and costs to themselves. " That presupposition strikes me as both: 1) Unnecessary; and 2) Clearly false. Let us take up the second point first. All we need note to conclusively show the presupposition is false is that society itself, the social phenomena par excellence , certainly did not come about through such individual weighing of costs and benefits. The individual of rational choice theory only came to exist histo...

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.

Mises : "The total complex of the mutual relations created by such concerted actions is called society. It substitutes collaboration for the--at least conceivable--isolated life of individuals... The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man's reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs." -- Human Action ...

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...

In response to a post of mine at Think Markets , Gerry O'Driscoll contended, "[Methodological individualism] goes back to the Spanish Scholastics at least." Well, some people tend to classify any thinker who thinks individuals are real and of concern to social science as a "methodological individualist." But the absurdity of the position can be seen by actually looking at what the Spanish Scholastics thought, such as Francisco Suárez: "But since the same moral characteristics are possessed by all men in common, it is equally possible to think of the state of nature not as a community of individuals, but rather as 'a single mystical body' in which all members recognize the same obligations, follow the same rules, and are thus 'capable of being regarded, from the moral point of view, as a single unified whole.' It is Suárez's essential contention that once we think of men in their natural condition in this alternative way, there is ...