Methodological Individualism

Dimostri pure il teorico che l'uomo ha diritto alla libertà, ma, qualunque sia il valore di tali dimostrazioni, ciò che è certo è che la libertà è diventata una realtà soltanto nella e grazie alla società (Durkheim, Sociologie e philosophie, p. 79) Il recente volume di Marzio Barbagli (2009a) ha giustamente riaperto il dibattito sul celeberrimo testo sul suicidio di Emile Durkheim e sulle sue implicazioni per la sociologia. Il dibattito si è così orientato sui limiti della spiegazione sociale del caposcuola francese, sulle possibilità di una spiegazione della variazione nei tassi di suicidio sulla base di cambiamenti culturali, e sui meriti e i limiti delle diverse tipologie proposte. Questo articolo intende discutere un punto che è rimasto sottotraccia nel dibattito italiano, ma che è al centro di forti contrapposizioni nelle scienze umane e sociali: la controversia fra spiegazione dei fatti sociali in termini durkheimiani e spiegazioni formulate in una versione radicalizzata dell'individualismo metodologico. Versione difficilmente riconducibile alla sociologia comprendente di Weber, etichettabile semmai come determinismo individuale, e foriera di una nuova sociobiologia, ovverosia di ampie «concessioni» alle neuroscienze cognitive e alle spiegazioni genetiche.

A brief intellectual history of the indigenization movement in Asia leads to the thesis that the generation of psychological knowledge is culture dependent. Indigenous psychologies go further and insist on viewing a target group from the natives' own standpoint. Psychological decentering underlies conceptions of human existence rooted in Asian intellectual traditions, in particular, relatedness between persons predominates in Confucianism. These conceptions demand new approaches to knowledge generation that signify a paradigmatic shift from methodological individualism to methodological

In the recent methodological individualism-holism debate on explanation, there has been considerable focus on what reasons methodological holists may advance in support of their position. We believe it is useful to approach the other direction and ask what considerations methodological individualists may in fact offer in favor of their view about explanation. This is the background for the question we pursue in this paper: Why be a methodological individualist? We start out by introducing the methodological individualism-holism debate while distinguishing two forms of methodological individualism: a form that says that individualist explanations are always better than holist accounts and a form that says that providing intervening individualist mechanisms always makes for better explanations than purely holist ones. Next, we consider four lines of reasoning in support of methodological individualism: arguments from causation, from explanatory depth, from agency, and from normativity. We argue that none of them offer convincing reasons in support of the two explanatory versions of individualism we consider. While there may well be occasions in which individualists' favorite explanations are superior, we find no reason to think this always must be the case. Title

Este paper foi publicado como capítulo do livro Teoria Sociológica Contemporânea: autores e perspectivas, organizado por Carlos Eduardo Sell e Carlos Benedito Martins, Ed. Ana Blumme, 2017.
O objetivo deste capítulo é discutir as principais contribuições de Jon Elster e James Coleman para a Teoria Sociológica Contemporânea. Existem alguns traços comuns importantes presentes na obra dos dois autores, o que justifica um capítulo que apresente, conjuntamente, suas respectivas obras: a identificação de ambos com a construção de explicações dos fenômenos sociais baseadas em mecanismos, o compromisso com o Individualismo Metodológico e o lugar privilegiado da racionalidade (e suas limitações) nos respectivos modelos teóricos. De alguma forma, ambos encaixam-se, de diferentes maneiras na formulação sintética proposta por Goldthorpe (1998, p. 167): apresentam um compromisso com o individualismo metodológico, ou seja, com primado explicativo da ação individual em relação aos fenómenos sociais; acreditam que uma teoria da ação é central para sociologia; e defendem que a teoria, deve ser apta para tratar dos problemas da ligação micro-macro, mas, sobretudo a primazia sociológica deve ser dada ao nível analítico, especialmente para as consequências (intencionais ou não intencionais) da ação individual.

This paper draws attention to the somewhat neglected domains of affects, emotions, and subjectivity in the study of the commons. The paper argues that a focus on affective and communicative relations among humans and between humans and more-than-humans can enrich our understanding of the practices of commoning and the processes of becoming a commoner. Using the case of community forestry initiatives in Odisha, India, it illustrates how rural people become commoners through the embodied practices of caring for the forests as a shared common. The paper uses this empirical example and conceptual resources from affect theory and relational ontology to think about the commons as affective socio-nature entanglements and as a nurturing ground for subjectivity. It discusses the implications of attention on the commons and the practices of commoning for enabling the emergence of other-than-capitalist subjectivities.

The present work aims at criticising the foundationalist assumptions of Methodological Individualism (MI) in the social sciences by showing that they depend on one, but not necessarily the only, conception of the role of explanation in the construction of overall sociological theories. Philosophical arguments have been supplemented with a bird's-eye survey of contemporary social research in order to identify such conceptions in common strands of empirical research. This method tries to comply with the need for a tighter interaction between philosophy of science and working social science .

Stressing that the pronoun "I" picks out one and only one person in the world (i.e., me), I argue against Hunt (and other like-minded Rand commentators) that the supposed "hard case" of destructive people who do not care for their own lives poses no special difficulty for rational egoism. I conclude that the proper response to a terse objection like "What about suicide bombers?" is the equally terse assertion "But I don't want to get blown up."

Publicado en libro: Los avatares de la modernidad, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Tucumán, 2001) David Hume no sólo fue uno de los filósofos más destacados de los tiempos modernos debido a la importancia de sus doctrinas, sino que además elaboró una serie de refinadísimos argumentos críticos que echaron por tierra a algunas de las pretensiones de la tradición filosófica y que aún hoy tienen plena vigencia.

A discussion of the works of Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze reveals some common insights into a social epistemology that rejects both methodological individualism and methodological holism. In this respect, the debate on crowds in the last quarter of the nineteenth century is particularly interesting because it is the historical context within which the individualist and holist epistemologies took shape. Arguably, that debate is still rich and inspiring today insofar as it can be said to open the problem field of the relationship between the individual and the group in social thought and sociological theory. Despite several differences, Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze converge on a concept that can be termed 'multiplicity'. It includes phenomena like crowds and packs (or 'sects', in Tarde's terminology) that are properly speaking neither subjects nor objects. The concept provides a prism that also has relevant consequences for an understanding of the processes of imitation and leadership.

An actor-based model of political competition is proposed to explain the development of Chaco Anasazi groups in the northern American Southwest. This model is derived from neo-Darwinian theory and the associated concept of methodological individualism, and focuses on the transition from societies dominated by egalitarian relationships to those exhibiting increasingly coercive leadership. The model especially emphasizes the role of the physical and social context for structuring individual decision-making and competitive behavior. A brief survey of the ethnographic record from around the world is employed to identify how political competition might appear in the archaeological record, with a specific focus on settlement patterns and architecture. The model is evaluated through an analysis of Chacoan communities found in the southern San Juan Basin of New Mexico, an area that is peripheral to the alleged center of the Chaco Anasazi in Chaco Canyon. Although further research is needed to improve the database and rule out alternative models, the analysis suggests that political competition between aspiring leaders could have contributed significantly to the evolution of at least the peripheral areas of the Chaco Anasazi, resulting in the archaeological patterns seen there today.

Forty years since its publication, William Riker’s Federalism: Origin, Operation, Significance (1964) remains one of the most influential volumes on the politics of federalism. However, in assessing Riker’s federal theory, scholars tend to focus on the specific hypotheses, the famous claim that the “military threat” constitutes a necessary condition for federal success, and upon rejecting the validity of that claim,

Ideas about social scientific explanation lie at the core of debates about methodological individualism (MI). The spirit of MI is captured by definition by Jon Elster: " … all social phenomena – their structure and their change – are in principle explicable in ways that only involve individuals – their properties, their goals, their beliefs and their actions " (Elster 1985: 5). For many individualists, like Elster, the basic idea of MI, when properly understood, is obvious and almost trivial. However, in equal measure, for many opponents the doctrine is an obviously wrong and unnecessary limitation for social scientific theorizing. The main task of this chapter is to explain how this state of affairs is possible. Much hangs on how MI is formulated, it might be that David Ruben is still right: " … methodological individualism has never been stated with enough clarity and precision to permit proper evaluation " (Ruben 1985: 13). However, there is much more at stake than abstract issues about social explanation.

Although the understanding of social ontology has been the subject of intense debate among constructivists in the discipline of International Relations the prevailing view drawn from these debates tends to equate social ontology with an intersubjective ontology. This stand, which is prominent among the constructivists adopting an interpretive epistemology, obstructs the conceptualization of the objective aspect of social ontology which is independent of intersubjective meanings. This article aims to rethink the social ontology understanding prevalent among the constructivists. This article argues that social ontology cannot be reduced to an intersubjective ontology. The article, based on the insights provided by scientific realism, suggests that the prevalent social ontology understanding in IR is derived from the interpretive epistemological concerns of constructivism and that the conceptualization of the objective aspect of social reality would remain inadequate in case we equate social ontology with intersubjective meanings. Specifically, it is argued that if we try to reduce social structure into the level of practices constituted by intersubjective meanings, we are forced to reduce the significance of social conditions into the significance of norms, rules or discourses. On the other hand, a proper conceptualization of social relations in international relations like hierarchy and dependency, which cannot be reduced to intersubjective meanings, requires considering the objective dimension of social reality.

Dependiendo de las inferencias preferenciales que la agregación de preferencias individuales (funciones colectivas de elección), podemos clasificar en dos grandes grupos a dichas funciones. Inspirado en el texto de Amartya Sen de 1970 sobre la imposibilidad del pareto-libertario (liberal), separamos el tipo de funciones colectivas de elección que violan el principio L y el principio U, o bien funciones colectivas de elección que son "entrometidas" y las que no, en un sentido muy específico. Esta separación disuelve una ambigüedad que podría servir para problematizar la derivación del teorema de imposibilidad de Sen ya citado. La razón por la que se llaman funciones orwellianas y funciones whitmanianas se explicita en el texto. Whitman, el poeta estadounidense tiene un poema en el que "construye" una especie de sujeto colectivo; Song of Myself. En la novela de 1984, George Orwell también tiene un personaje que es algo así como un sujeto colectivo entrometido en la vida volitiva de sus ciudadanos. Así, estos dos elementos literarios, el yo de Song of Myself y el Gran Hermano de 1984, aglomeran algunas de las características lógicas que tienen las dos clases de funciones colectivas de elección que aquí se especifican.

According to Searle's theory of collective intentionality, the fundamental structure of any society can be accounted for in terms of cooperative mechanisms that create deontic relations. This paper criticizes Searle's standpoint on the ground that, while his social ontology can make sense of simple systems of interaction like symphony orchestras and football teams, the whole coordinative structure of the modern market society cannot be explained solely in terms of we-intentional collaboration and deontic relations. As clarified by Hayek, because of its complexity, this society is a self-organizing system. It results not only from micro-level agreed constraints, but also from an unintended cybernetic mechanism that affects and shapes both its micro and macro dynamics via a circular causality. Searle ignores the coordination problem posed by complexity and provides strawman arguments against the theory of action underpinning the invisible hand explanation of social phenomena.

International law, we are taught, is the law made by states to govern their relations. Unsurprisingly, international law scholarship has traditionally embraced a corresponding methodological statism. Despite common perceptions, statism remains dominant: at most, elite non-state actors are studied alongside states. This article advocates a turn to ‘constructivist methodological individualism’: a commitment to studying the making, interpretation, implementation, development and breaking of international law by ordinary, individual people, together with the reciprocal engagement of international law with them.

This paper analyses the concept of empirical ethics as well as three meta-ethical fallacies that empirical ethics is said to face: the is-ought problem, the naturalistic fallacy and violation of the fact-value distinction. Moreover, it answers the question of whether empirical ethics (necessarily) commits these three basic meta-ethical fallacies.

As the entrepreneurship discipline grows, it increasingly faces unique research challenges. Recently, "interactive, activity based, cognitively hot, compassionate, and prosocial" approaches to the study of entrepreneurship have arisen to meet these challenges. This paper reflects and builds on recent discussions by emphasizing, in addition, the persistent value of economic foundations for a progressive research agenda in entrepreneurship. A realist economic perspective is both fundamental for entrepreneurship and complements newer research trends. It has also stood the test of time: economic questions relating to methodological individualism, uncertainty, judgment, opportunities, social motivations, and incentives have not only set the tone for past research, but continue to offer starting points and insights for contemporary work. This note thus makes two contributions: first, it explains the relevance of each of these concepts for contemporary work in entrepreneurship studies, and second, it uses them to pose novel research questions. These questions complement the abovementioned emerging trends in entrepreneurship.

I have finally decided to make available my MA Thesis in its original, unabridged version. Its 400 pages were produced, with a lot of youthful exuberance, during an intense period of writing from 1997-99. When I began to conceive it, I wanted to get closure from my obsessive love-and-hate relationship with Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar that I had developed during my days as an undergraduate student in philosophy and linguistics. Working through the foundations of Chomsky’s theory helped me to clarify my perspective on linguistic nativism, but also to understand more about the ‘deep’ history of generative grammar within linguistics, psychology, formal language theory, automata theory, and philosophy. What I offer in my thesis is an extended reconstruction of Chomsky’s argument for linguistic nativism, understood as a vast ‘inference to the best explanation’ based on his conception of what it means for a theory of grammar to have ‘explanatory adequacy.’ In the end, I cautiously endorsed important aspects of Chomsky’s theory, but questioned certain ‘hidden’ methodological assumptions that were part of the suggested inference.

Since its completion, more than 16 years have passed during which my attitude towards Chomsky’s nativism has become a lot more skeptical. I am still convinced that many of the ‘armchair’ arguments that were originally offered against Chomsky’s then-iconoclastic brand of ‘naturalistic’ mentalism are misguided, and that many ‘old-school’ linguists or psychologists who attacked his argument either misunderstood the mechanics of his theory, or failed to grasp the full complexity of first-language acquisition. However, I now believe that the empirical case for linguistic nativism is fairly thin. In my view, the evidence rests mainly on (a) an impoverished characterization of what can be considered as ‘primary linguistic data,’ (b) flawed methodological assumptions about how we ought to study language and its acquisition, specifically grammar, which lead to a distorted view of human development (e.g., ‘autonomy’, ‘modularity’, ‘methodological solipsism’) and an artificial inflation of certain results in formal learning theory, (c) a serious underestimation of the statistical power of present-day inductive learning machines. In short, I no longer believe that Chomsky’s conclusion is in fact supported by an ‘inference to the best explanation.’

Showing this would require a great deal more than a ‘significant revision’ of my original work. Basically, it means that I would have to write an entirely new book which reflects what we have learned about language, learning, and development over the past 15 years. Needless to say, that book would be very different in outlook, substance, style, and content. Perhaps I will one day write such a book. However, I find it increasingly unlikely that I will ever find the necessary time and energy to go back to my old work, and update and revise it for scholarly publication. Despite its inevitable flaws, though, I believe it would be a shame if my work never saw the light of day, or meet the court of public opinion. It contains interesting discussions of the development of generative grammar, its historical roots, and philosophical reception. If I may say so myself, it was a valiant effort at synthesizing the many interwoven threads of conceptual, formal, and empirical argumentation which together constitute (read: constituted) the case for Chomsky’s linguistic nativism. (And before you ask: it was completed before I was aware of Fiona Cowie’s What’s Within, which – as I later learned – came out a couple of weeks before I submitted my thesis.)

If you find in it any ideas to be of sufficient interest to discuss or otherwise refer to in your own work, I kindly ask that you give credit to it as an unpublished MA Thesis (submitted to, and successfully defended, in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, January 1999).

--Georg Theiner
Philadelphia, August 2015

Epstein begins by emphasizing that the social sciences are in crisis. Scholars, he explains, have attributed the crisis to at least five different practices: (i) The assumption of perfect rationality in economics; (ii) the commitment to reductionist explanatory strategies; (iii) the hyper-formalization and lack of realism of economic models, i.e., the fact that economic models ignore the problem that social phenomena are highly complex; (iv) the failure to base the social sciences on cognitive science; and (v) the tendency to model society or economies as a whole instead of developing small and more testable models. All five, however, miss the point for Epstein, because they all assume "that the objects of the social sciences are built out of individual people much as an ant colony is built out of ants" (7). Therefore, "they overlook a deeper problem" (ibid.): although individuals are obviously relevant to the social sciences, the social world cannot be reduced to a world of individuals. To Epstein, the "picture of the social world as being composed by individual people"the "ant trap" of the book's title -(10) appears naïve and inappropriate.

Institutional theory rests on a rejection of reductionism. Instead of reducing higherorder phenomena to aggregates of behavior, institutional theory reverses this causal imagery. It attributes the behavior of organizations and nation-states to contextual factors, notably organizational fields, national institutional systems, or the emerging global polity, Institutionalists, particularly within sociology, also emphasize specifically cultural mechanisms for these higher-order effects. This article develops the methodological foundations for these claims. It surveys and elaborates research designs for documenting higher-order effects and for differentiating the cultural mechanisms of institutional influence. It also presents new strategies for assessing multiple logics and the coherence of institutional orders, moving beyond adoption and diffusion studies to analyze the dynamic and contested processes of institutionalization and institutional change. . For all their comments, criticisms, and suggestions, we would like to thank Sun-

The aim of this paper is to submit the doctrine of methodological individualism to a reconsideration from the point of view of the arguments formulated by contemporary communitarian philosophy. I propose to approach the opposition between the individual and the community, constitutive for the liberal–communitarian debate, by means of two concepts, i.e. those of recognition and order. I argue that for the individualists a social order emerges through a process of mutual recognition of the pre-existing individuals and their interests, while the communitarians claim that the task of individuals is to recognize values and norms of a pre-existing social order which is to become their own. The difference between them thus resides primarily in the ontological distinction between the respective objects of these two divergent concepts of recognition. The argument is developed through an analysis of David Hume’s concept of the individual. In opposition to some communitarian claims, I maintain that his approach may be interpreted as an antecedent of the communitarian views on the subject. I also outline a view of moral rules as neither universal, absolutist, nor purely emotivist in character, but as social constructions endowed with the status of “contingent permanence.”

The substitution of knowledge to information as the entity that organizations process and deliver raises a number of questions concerning the nature of knowledge. The dispute on the codifiability of tacit knowledge and that juxtaposing the epistemology of practice vs. the epistemology of possession can be better faced by revisiting two crucial debates. One concerns the nature of cognition and the other the famous mind-body problem. Cognition can be associated with the capability of manipulating symbols, like in the traditional computational view of organizations, interpreting facts or symbols, like in the narrative approach to organization theory, or developing mental states (events), like argued by the growing field of organizational cognition. Applied to the study of organizations, the mind-body problem concerns the possibility (if any) and the forms in which organizational mental events, like trust, identity, cultures, etc., can be derived from the structural aspects (technological, cognitive or communication networks) of organizations. By siding in extreme opposite positions, the two epistemologies appear irreducible one another and pay its own inner consistency with remarkable difficulties in describing and explaining some empirical phenomena. Conversely, by legitimating the existence of both tacit and explicit knowledge, by emphasizing the space of human interactions, and by assuming that mental events can be explained with the structural aspects of organizations, Nonaka’s SECI model seems an interesting middle way between the two rival epistemologies.

Schmoller and Menger provide strictly antagonistic accounts of how ethics and economics should be related. Their contentions are mainly methodological. Whereas Schmoller hopes to integrate ethics within economics in order to improve its empirical basis, Menger wishes to identify the different behavioural mechanisms linked to the economic and the ethical perspectives, and therefore wants to keep them separate wherever possible. Menger's critique of Schmoller's account suggests that the integration of ethics within economics cannot rationally be grounded upon postulates of psychological realism and methodological collectivism, as Schmoller proposed.

The article discusses recent scholarship on whether or not the association between agent-based computational models and methodological individualism is justified. It is argued that these analyses are problematic because they start with a specific understanding of methodological individualism, which makes their conclusion contingent on the chosen view of what this perspective either is or is not. To overcome this problem, the paper proposes to think of both agent-based models and methodological individualism as "generic instruments," i.e. devices with properties that are transversal to explanatory problems, fields, and disciplines. Within this framework, it appears that agent-based models and methodological individualism share some basic principles irrespective of the entities and levels of analysis involved by the explanatory problem under examination. In this sense, this study claims, they are essentially linked.

Neoclassical economic theories of violent conflict have proliferated in recent years and, with their application to contemporary wars, have influenced donors and policy makers. This paper reviews the intellectual foundations and empirical substance of such theories and offers a critique drawing on a political economy perspective. There are strong grounds for arguing that orthodox economic theories of war are reductionist, speculative, and misleading. Theories that are driven by methodological individualism are compelled somehow to model ''the social'' as it affects contemporary warfor example, by appeal to indices of ethno-linguistic fragmentationbut do so in ways that fail to capture reality and its variations.

One issue of dispute between methodological individualists and methodological holists is whether holist explanations are dispensable in the sense that individualist explanations are able to do their explanatory job. Methodological individualists say they are, whereas methodological holists deny this. In the first part of the paper, I discuss Elder-Vass' version of an influential argument in support of methodological holism, the argument from emergence. I argue that methodological individualists should reject it: The argument relies on a distinction between individualist and holist explanations that they find unacceptable and Elder-Vass' reasons in support of his way of drawing this distinction are not good ones. In the second part, I examine what, if anything, would be good reasons in support of a particular way of differentiating between individualist and holist explanations. I propose that a good reason is one which shows, in an acceptable manner, that the distinction, drawn in the same way in all contexts, is useful from the perspective of offering explanations of the social world. I show that if this criterion is adopted, it will result in a fruitful reorientation of the whole debate between methodological individualists and methodological holists.

Starting from the plurality of explanatory strategies in the actual practice of social scientists, I introduce a framework for explanatory pluralism -a normative endorsement of the plurality of forms and levels of explanation used by social scientists. Equipped with this framework, central issues in the individualism/holism debate are revisited, namely emergence, reduction and the idea of microfoundations. Discussing these issues, we notice that in recent contributions the focus has been shifting towards relationism, pluralism and interaction, away from dichotomous individualism/holism thinking and a winner-takes-all approach. Then, the challenge of the debate is no longer to develop the ultimate individualistic approach or defending the holist approach, but rather how to be combine individualism and holism; how can they co-exist, interact, be integrated or develop some division of labour, while making the best out of the strengths and limitations of the respective explanatory strategies of holists and individualists? Thus, the debate shifts to how exactly pluralism should be understood as the next leading question, going beyond the current individualism/holism debate. The paper ends with a discussion and evaluation of different understandings of explanatory pluralism defended in the literature.

This special issue of COSMOS + TAXIS is devoted to the non-reductionist variant of methodological individualism and analyses its nature and heuristic power from both an historical and methodological standpoint. It opposes the dominant assumption that social scientists need to get rid of the individualist tradition and develop alternative approaches because of the devastating arguments provided against reductionism by philosophy and systems theory. A basic assumption is that the tendency to equate methodological individualism and reductionism is both historically and logically untenable and that, as a consequence, arguments against the latter do not undermine the former.

This article analyzes the relationship between methodological individualism and nominalism in the light of the most recent debates on this topic. It is argued, contrary to Mario Bunge and Brian Epstein, that as an approach committed to a nominalist ontology, methodological individualism is compatible with a non-reductionist theory of the social world. According to this article, the incompatibility thesis stems from a confusion between ontological anti-substantialism and linguistic or semantic reductionism. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between supervenience, a nominalist theory of the social world developed and widely discussed in analytic philosophy in recent decades, and methodological individualism.

Uluslararası Politikanın Yapısal Teorisi adlı bu çalışma, Mayıs 2016’da Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi’nde Uluslararası Politikanın Yapısal Teorisi: Kenneth Waltz ve Alexander Wendt’in Uluslararası Yapı Kavramsallaştırmalarının Eleştirisinden Yeni Bir Senteze Doğru başlığı ile doktora tezi olarak sunulmuştur.
Uluslararası politikayı sosyal olarak inşa edilmiş bir alan olarak görmenin sıradanlaştığı günümüz akademik çalışmalarında, yapısal soruları ve açıklamaları artık kültürel veya dilsel betimlemelere indirgeme eğilimi öne çıkmıştır. Bu genel eğilim karşısında sosyal ontoloji ve uluslararası yapının nedenselliği arasındaki ilişkisine odaklanan elinizdeki bu çalışma, Uluslararası İlişkiler teorisinde yapısal yaklaşımlarda önde gelen iki yaklaşımı (Neorealizm ve İnşacılık) karşılaştırmalı bir yöntemle ele almış ve yeni bir senteze yönelmiştir.

Altruismus heißt so viel wie Uneigennützigkeit und Selbstlosigkeit. Namensgeber, Auguste Comte, benannte im Jahr 1851 Altruismus als das Denken und Handeln „(…) das anderen nützt und nicht in Erwartung einer Belohnung erfolgt“ (Macaulay/Berkowitz 1970: 3). Er stellte das „vivre pour autrui“ dem Egoismus gegenüber und sah es in einer immer individualistischer werdenden Gesellschaft als „höchste aller Tugenden“ (Hunt 1990: 25) an. Ideengeschichtlich erfolgte eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema lange vor Comte. Bereits Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant und zahlreiche weitere Philosophen beobachteten die Existenz eines „unerklärlichen selbstlosen Verhaltens“ (ebd.: 25). Bis heute beschäftigt das Rätsel der Nächstenliebe, wie Morton Hunt es nannte, Natur- und Geisteswissenschaftler gleichermaßen.