ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Can Methodological Individualism survive ?
Author: Lagueux Maurice
Methodological Individualism is probably the piece of standard economic methodology which has been the most criticised during the last decades. Since it was spontaneously associated to ethical individualism, it was scornfully rejected by communautarian thinkers as well as by interventionists who consider that it is the role of economics to open new ways for improving the quality of social life. On a more theoretical level, it was blamed for denying the fact that some phenomena cannot be explained otherwise than by social process irreducible to individual ones. More recently, methodological contributions by Davis and by Ross have rejected methodological individualism as requiring a unified conception of the self that is far from being warranted. Yet, it is not clear that many of the most illuminating economical theories can hold without being a straightforward illustration of this approach. This paper aims to disentangle this situation by arguing for the viability and the significance of a less imperialistic and more genuine understanding of methodological individualism, which is not separable from a notion of unwanted consequences and which has nothing to do neither with any kind of reductionism nor with Robinson Crusoe tales.
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