Marx and Methodological Individualism

Abstract

In this chapter I pursue two projects, one critical and one reconstructive. The critical project concerns Jon Elster’s influential and controversial argument that methodological individualism guides the acceptable aspects of Marx’s thought.¹ Elster’s claim is interesting not just because it breaks with the widely held notion that Marx’s thinking does not involve methodological individualism in any sense,² but also because he uses it to focus on the ‘microfoundations’ of Marx’s claims about social causalities.³ Marx provides an exemplary account of how to unravel the complex of relations between situated individual actions and their unintended outcomes, relations through which social and historical forces gain their quasi-independent logics. By taking this approach, Elster writes, Marx was able to transform the insight of his predecessors from Vico to Hegel ‘that history is the result of human action, but not human design … from a Weltanschauung into a scientific methodology’ (Elster 1985, p. 27).