question from a reader

A blog reader writes:

“You mentioned it on your blog recently (but it’s also a point in Prince of Networks) that for you (and also for Latour, according to your reading) things need to be explained in terms of the interactions of individual concrete objects.

Would you say then that you subscribe to methodological individualism then? (‘the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions’)”

The reader also gives THIS LINK for methodological individualism, where we read as follows: “This doctrine was introduced as a methodological precept for the social sciences by Max Weber, most importantly in the first chapter of Economy and Society (1968 [1922]). It amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors.”

The answer in my case (and probably even in Latour’s) is “no.”

The fact that I think the world is made up of individuals, ontologically, does not mean that I grant primacy to human individuals over larger individuals such as Germany, the EU, or Generation X. Quite the contrary, since I don’t grant primacy to any particular size of object as being the place where all the action occurs.

Latour has certainly made attacks on the reification of Society as an all-encompassing whole that defines everything else. But that doesn’t mean his method, either, grants primacy to individual people over larger actors. His method (and mine) simply disallows any granting of primacy in the other direction in such a manner that individual people would simply be products or dependents of a larger system called “Society.”