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individuals as viewed by the social sciences are always abstract individuals. They exist only in thought or as an idea and, being abstract, do not have a physical or concrete existence. The social scientific individual, therefore, is fictional, not real.
This is, of course, most obviously true of economics, as is shown by the way in which the motivations of economic actors are expressed in the language of "preferences" assumed to be complete and transitive, "rational expectations," "maximizing," "satisficing," and the like. It is no less true of all research and theorizing based on rational choice, collective action, and public choice theories. It is no less true of work that takes issue with these assumptions, qualifying or even replacing them. It is true of all theoretically based work that sees parsimony of assumptions as a criterion of good theorizing. Indeed it is true, I claim, of all social scientific work—or social research (the name of this very journal)—the point of which is to advance understanding through explanation. And it is true across the many and various methodological social scientific traditions, including psychology, since it is the only way in which a scientific explanation (however that contested phrase is understood) of processes and phenomena in an infinitely complex social world can be rendered manageable.
Thus it is true of work that explicitly rejects the abstraction implied by methodological individualism and that insists upon social construction and the social formation of individual subjects. In the "Theses on Feuerbach," Karl Marx saw it as a mistake to "abstract from the historical process" and "presuppose an abstract—isolated—human individual," since that abstract individual "belongs to a particular form of society" (Marx and Engels 1969, 14). And yet historical materialist explanations of the historical process require micro-foundations—standard human motivations and responses to situations—to account for its dynamics. When Émile Durkheim insisted upon the independent reality of social facts and denounced what he understood as individual psychology, he averted his attention from the account of individuals' motivations he needed to explain their susceptibility to suicidogenic circumstances or to the impact and workings of ritual and symbolism. And, for example, Pierre Bourdieu's compelling accounts of the reproduction of social and cultural hierarchies, of domination and subordination, rely on implicit assumptions about individuals'...