This paper builds on previous work to further explore the relationship between Marxism and methodological individualism. It argues that methodological individualism cannot be maintained in a Marxist context, despite the fact that the fundamental point that a macrological theory should always elaborate on its micrological foundations is sound.
Broadly speaking, there are four approaches in sociological analysis: atomistic, methodological individualistic, anti-reductionistic, and holistic:
Atomistic: the only explanatorily relevant facts are those that describe the individuals. Relations between individuals are only to be understood with reference to the effects they have on individuals as isolated from eachother. All institutional or social explanations must necessarily be reduced.
Methodological individualist: similar to atomistic, except that many of the properties to be ascribed to individuals as explanatory are irreducibly relational. Social and institutional explanations, however, can always in principle be reduced to explanations referring only to individuals and relations between them.
Anti-reductionistic: similar to methodological individualistic explanations, except it leaves room for the possibility that some social phenomena may be irreducible.
Holistic: not only are there certain irreducible institutional or social phenomena, but individual explanations are actually epiphenomenal in many cases.
The main difference between the anti-reductionistic and methodological individualistic forms of explanation is their approach to type-explanations as opposed to token-explanations. By employing an analogy with the type/token dichotomy as it occurs in the philosophy of mind, it is made clear in this paper that methodological individualism is in a weaker position by insisting on the necessity of reducing all types of social phenomena to instantiations of equally-frequent token occurrences.
If we consider to concepts as examples: the first being "water", the second being "fitness" (as it occurs in evolutionary biology), it is easy to see how the first can be reduced to "H20" with all predicative truth intact, whereas it is much harder to pin a token instantiation on the second type (with giraffes, "fitness" equates to having a long neck; with "frogs", a sticky tongue is the token). Wright, Levine and Sober claim that methodological individualism fails because social and institutional phenomena are more akin to concepts of the "fitness" type than the "water" type, and their multiple realizability prevents methodological individualism from being a viable option for Marxist sociological analysis.
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