Linked from

The 21 pages that link to Methodological individualism, each with the reason it gives.

• Émile DurkheimCompared with: It challenges Durkheim’s insistence that social facts require explanations at the social level.

• SociologyCompared with: It raises the question of whether collective patterns can be explained from individual action alone.

• Collective responsibilityCompared with: It challenges explanations that treat a collective as an independent bearer of responsibility.

• Economic determinismCompared with: It challenges explanations that assign decisive causal power to economic structures above individuals.

• Public choiceNarrower topic: Public choice builds political explanations from the choices of people inside institutions.

• Analytical MarxismRelated: It supplied a standard for replacing unexplained social functions with actor-level mechanisms.

• InterpretivismCompared with: It can reduce explanation to individual action, whereas interpretivism also examines shared cultural meanings.

• Actor–network theoryCompared with: ANT instead follows relations among people, objects, and institutions.

• VerstehenRelated: Verstehen’s focus on meaningful action fits explanations that begin with actors.

• Social factCompared with: It challenges explanations that treat social facts as irreducible collective forces.

• Austrian school of economicsRelated: Austrian explanations begin with choosing individuals rather than aggregate forces.

• HolismCompared with: It offers a rival starting point for explaining institutions and collective outcomes.

• James M. BuchananRelated: Buchanan analyzed political institutions as outcomes of choices by individuals rather than collective actors.

• Social theoryCompared with: It challenges explanations that treat social structures as independent causal forces.

• Structure and agencyCompared with: It gives explanatory priority to individual action rather than social structures.

• Constitutional economicsRelated: It grounds constitutional analysis in the choices of individuals rather than treating the state as a single actor.

• Social practiceCompared with: Practice theory shifts attention from isolated actors to organized activity and shared conditions.

• The Rules of Sociological MethodCompared with: Durkheim rejects reducing social facts to individual motives.

• Charles Horton CooleyCompared with: Cooley resisted separating individuals from the social relations through which they develop.

• James Samuel ColemanRelated: Coleman’s explanations often traced institutions and group outcomes back to individual-level processes.

• Criticism of MarxismCompared with: It disputes explanations that treat classes or economic structures as primary historical agents.