Individualism, Holism and Functional Explanation

One of the features that distinguishes Weber, and some other versions of interpretive sociology, is the explicit or implicit individualism that underlies attempts to explain the social world.

There is a question as to whether these approaches are as incompatible as it is sometimes claimed; one way of looking at them is that Durkheim's use of statistics and his positing of social facts (his positivism) and society as being over and above the individual (his holism) take us only part of the way - they tell us that we might expect more suicides in Protestant communities, but not all Protestants commit suicide. There is still an explanatory space to be filled by individualist and interpretive processes. This argument points to the fact that the social world might be composed of different types of being, in this case social structures, social processes and individuals, and that they are different from each other. This possibility will recur through the coming chapters and will be explored more fully when we discuss critical realism.

There are certainly difficulties involved with sticking either to individualist arguments alone or to holistic arguments alone. An individualist approach has difficulties in explaining the social uniformities that Durkheim and others have been able to identify. A holistic approach has problems with explaining the mechanisms of social change and development. In Durkheim and later in Talcott Parsons's sociology there is a tendency to see society as equivalent to a biological organism, and both approaches employ a form of functional explanation.

The argument against functional explanation is quite simple: even if we can attribute ‘needs' to a society or a social system or part of a social system, there is no way of showing that these needs must be met or that they must be met in a particular way. For example, the development of capitalism towards the end of the nineteenth century could be said to ‘need' an education system, but the rate of development and type of system depended on all sorts of other factors; different capitalist societies developed different educational systems. A Weberian account would look at the historical process of the development of education systems on a comparative basis. One way of summing up this argument is that holistic explanations need to identify the mechanisms of change in social systems and structures, and one way of doing this might be through historical interpretive approaches. Rather than talk about ‘needs', some thinkers talk about ‘conditions of existence' - which do not cause something to appear but which create the space for its appearance and which interact with a multiplicity of other processes to produce whatever the outcome turns out to be.