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While methodological individualism is a fundamental approach within the social sciences, it is often misunderstood. This highlights the need for a discursive and up-to-date reference work analyzing this approach's classic arguments and assumptions in the light of contemporary issues in sociology, economics and philosophy. This two-volume handbook presents the first comprehensive overview of methodological individualism. Chapters discuss historical and contemporary debates surrounding this central approach within the social sciences, as well as cutting edge developments related to the individualist tradition with philosophical and scientific implications. Bringing together multiple contributions from the world's leading experts on this important tradition of theorizing, this collective endeavor provides teachers, researchers and students in sociology, economics, and philosophy with a reliable and critical understanding of the founding principles, key thinkers and intellectual development of MI since the late 19th century.
List of contents
Part I - MI/ Methods and Key Research Topics in the Social Sciences.- 1. MI/History/Religious Phenomena; David D'Avray.- 2. MI/Organized Action; Erhard Friedberg.- 3. MI/Collective Intentionality; Jens Greve.- 4. MI/Culturalism/Multiculturalism; Simon Langlois.- 5. MI/Educational Inequality; Ye Liu.- 6. MI/ Social Movements; Anthony Oberschall.- 7. MI/Historical-Sociological Explanation; Richard Münch.- MI/Deviance; Michael Rosenberg.- 8. MI/Theories of Social Change; Michael Schmid.- 9. MI/Cultural Anthropology; Richard A. Shweder.- 10. IM/Kelsen/Social Theory.- 11. IM/Kelsen/Social Theory; Stephen P. Turner.- Part 2 - Controversial Issues about MI.- 12. MI and its Critics/Analytical Philosophy; Alban Bouvier.- 13. The Limitations of the Economic Approach/MI; Olivier Favereau.- 14. Contemporary Debates on RCM/MI; Catherine Herfeld.- 15. Reductionism/MI; Francesco Di Iorio.- 16. Agent-Based Computational Models/MI; Gianluca Manzo.- 17. MI and Political Individualism; Branko Mitrovik.- 18. Reductionism/Invisible Hand Explanations; Emma Tieffenbach.- 19. The Individualism-Holism Debate in Economics; Richard Wagner.- 20. MI/Methods and Political Assumptions in Sociology, Holistic Biases; Ieva Zake.- Part III - MI in Practice.- 21. Beliefs/Religions: Case Studies; Salvatore Abbruzzese.- 22. Sociological Analysis of Singular Phenomena; Raymond Boudon.- 23. ABS/IM/Empirical Case Studies; Shu-Heng Chen.- 24. MI, Unintended Consequences and Economic Empirical Research; Christopher J. Coyne.- 25. Understanding Radicalization; Hans Kippenberg.- 26. MI/Mathematical Models of Social Action; Werner Raub.- 27. MI/Understanding the Meaning of Social Action; Natalia Ruiz-Junco.- 28. MI/Anthropology and Identities; Gunther Schlee (Max Planck Institute, Emeritus, Germany): MI/Anthropology and Identities.- 29. MI/Risk and Uncertainty/Catastrophes/Covid19; Bryan Turner.- Part IV. Methodological Individualism and its Critics: A Roundtable Discussion.- 30. Institutional Individualism and Methodological Individualism; Joseph Agassi, N. Bulle & F. Di Iorio.- 31. MI and Critical Realism; Margaret Archer.- 32. Methodological Localism and Methodological Individualism; Daniel Little, N. Bulle & F. Di Iorio.- 33. MI/Reductionism/Social Facts; Steven Lukes, N. Bulle & F. Di Iorio.
About the author
Nathalie Bulle is Research Director at the National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris, France.
Francesco Di Iorio is Associate Professor at Nankai University, Tianjin, China.
