Abstract

The problem of holism in social science has, as Zahle and Collin, the editors of this volume note, a long history. It has revived, however, in a peculiar way, inspired by such things as the literature on corporate responsibility in ethics, the idea of supervenience, “Critical Realism” in sociology, ideas about emergence, the use of game-theoretic models to account for collective outcomes, and various notions of collective actors with collective intentions. These new inspirations interact with older problematics, such as the micro–macro relation problem in sociology, the traditional argument that sentences such as “the crowd stormed the Bastille” have explanatory import apart from the import of sentences about the individual, and claims about reducibility of various kinds.This volume collects original papers by many of the main commentators on this set of topics and is an indispensable starting point for future discussion. No one should venture into this area without understanding the v ..