Two Roots of Institutional Individualism

The chapter investigates two roots of institutional individualism: Karl Popper and Ernest Gellner. Institutional individualism is a critical rationalist version of methodological individualism. Joseph Agassi, who coined its name originally, ascribed it to Popper. But Agassi later stopped doing so and seems to have taken some distance from Popper under the influence of Gellner. This means that we need to examine not only Popper, but also Gellner to better understand institutional individualism. Nevertheless, the difference between them and Gellner’s influence on Agassi do not seem to have been closely investigated so far. In this chapter, I shall first examine the difference between Popper and Gellner by way of the latter’s debate with J. W. N. Watkins. Second, I shall argue that Agassi’s claim about the existence of wholes relies on Gellner rather than on Popper, and then discuss the relation between institutional individualism and Durkheimian collectivism, which comes from Gellner’s vindication of social facts as statistical regularities. Third, to investigate this point further, I shall scrutinize Ian Jarvie’s view of functionalism in relation to Gellner, and argue that Jarvie owed much to Gellner, but there are some differences between them. Gellner endorsed functionalism as a method. By contrast, Jarvie valued it to some degree, but not as did Gellner. Jarvie argued for Popper’s situational analysis as a replacement for functionalism. For this reason, institutional individualism can be viewed as an attempt to reconcile Popper’s methodological individualism with Gellner’s Durkheimian collectivism.