Individualism

1.1 Postulates of individualism

... during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe they are in that condition which is called warre; and such a warre is of every man against every man.... It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but only that to be every mans that he can get; and for so long as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition, which man by meer Nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it. (Hobbes 1651)

The most challenging way of responding to Hobbes is to take him literally and attempt to envisage his state of war. Does it preclude all social relationships? What of linguistic relationships: are linguistic communication and the sharing of knowledge and ideas precluded as well? And where might people be found living in this "natural" condition, if indeed it is a condition in which people conceivably could live? These, however, are large questions, too large for our immediate purposes. It will be better to start with a narrower, more conventional approach, one that recognizes that Hobbes' account of the state of nature is designed not to inspire a search, but rather to make peace and order in society the focus of curiosity, and to introduce an individualistic account of how they are sustained. This has become the standard mode of use of Hobbes in the context of modern sociological theory.

Hobbes poses a problem of social order deriving from the conflicting wants of individual human beings and their mutual distrust, and he offers a solution based on the common fear of coercion by a single sovereign power. Hobbes' solution is no longer widely accepted, but his individualistic formulation of both problem and solution remains of great importance. Individualism continues to be a thriving theoretical tradition today, and is in many ways the least problematic of all the traditions of social theory. Our immediate awareness of social life is awareness of individuals. We watch individuals doing things, take account of them as we do things ourselves, try to guess what they are likely to do as we work out our own future plans. And when we gather data as social scientists it is usually data about individuals; indeed it is not obvious what else there is, in the last analysis, to observe, besides the activities of individuals and the products of that activity. Thus, it is perfectly plausible to conjecture that it is through observing individuals, and theorizing about the basis of what they individually do, that we shall come to an understanding of social life and social order, that a society is the aggregate of all the separately engendered actions of its individual members.

There are many kinds of individualism and the term means different things in different contexts, but for present purposes it will suffice to look at the predominant form of individualism in current theory. This is the form of individualism, particularly favoured in economics, that takes as its point of departure "the two well-known a prioris of self-interest and calculative rationality" (Reisman 1990: 10). In specifying calculative rationality and self-interest this approach seeks to identify the ways in which individuals remain independent of each other and stably internally constituted, as they engage in the fluctuating circumstances of social life. Individuals are to be treated as independent reasoning and information-processing systems with independent ends or objectives. To this extent individuals are unaffected by other people or indeed their environment in general, even though in other ways they may be profoundly affected by both, and obliged to take account of both. To this extent individuals stand as so many independent sources of action. This crucially simplifies the task of understanding entire systems of actions: if the actions are separately produced, then they are amenable to deductive modelling and aggregation by quantitative methods. These are very much the preferred techniques of most current individualistic theorists, and it can indeed be asked how far individualistic postulates are adopted not in response to evidence but in order to facilitate and simplify the application of these mathematical techniques.

Certainly, individualistic theorists tend to agree not only in their theoretical point of departure but in their methodology. They favour a deductive approach to social theory, and their work serves to exemplify the merits and problems of that approach. They start with simple postulates about the behaviour of individual human beings, and the overall outcome of that behaviour in any given context is then deduced from the postulates. In the form of individualism that concerns us here, four postulates are generally taken as fundamental. Human beings are presumed to be:

– independent

– rational/calculative

– goal-oriented

– egoistic or self-regarding

The assumption of independence is the most important of all. The entire individualistic approach is based upon the conviction that actions are produced by agents whose objectives and decision-making procedures are stable, intrinsic characteristics independent of the immediate context. Individualism expects individuals to take account of their environment and of the actions of other individuals in it, but not to change their nature or intrinsic properties in response to them. Individualism wants to use the rationality and the objectives of individuals as givens with which to explain other things, not as variables that are in need of explanation themselves.

Individuals are assumed to be rational and calculative (and hence knowledgeable, since knowledge is required for calculation), in order to account for their ability to imagine the consequences of possible actions prior to choosing which they will actually perform. There are, however, different accounts of what is involved in being rational and calculative.

The assumption that individuals have goals (often referred to as "wants" or "desires" by individualists) is made in order to explain why they should choose one course of action rather than another. It is commonly assumed that the wants of individuals can be ranked in an order of priority or preference and that individuals act optimally to realize their preferences. It is also generally assumed that preferences and their rank ordering are fixed and stable. "The assumption of stable preferences ... prevents the analyst from succumbing to the temptation of simply postulating the required shift in preferences to 'explain' all apparent contradictions to his predictions" (Becker 1976: 5).

Finally, it is commonly assumed that the wants and desires of individuals relate to their own benefit rather than the benefit of others, that individuals are egoistic and self-regarding. This, however, is the least important of the four postulates, and is...