British philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously mocked Descartes’s notion of mind/body dualism, dubbing it “the ghost in the machine.” The mind is in the body, but it’s not of the body. The mind controls the body, independently, “everywhere yet nowhere.” There is a related problem in identifying a “will” in the state: is the state the sort of thing that can have an active, separate will? Or is the will of the state simply the aggregate of individual goals, actions, and votes?
The branch of political theory I inhabit, public choice, holds that ghosts don’t exist, because a foundational assumption is methodological individualism. But many people have argued for a romantic, collectivist approach. I’ll start with the most famous example, to make it clearer what methodological individualism is not.
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The General Will
I have to give Jean-Jacques Rousseau credit: he asked one of the best questions in political philosophy (Social Contract, Book IV, Chapter 2):
But it is asked how a man can be both free and forced to conform to wills that are not his own. How are the opponents at once free and subject to laws they have not agreed to?
In a monarchy or dictatorship, the answer is “coercion,” but subjects have no illusion of being free. Rousseau asks whether we can be “free” in a democracy, given that the majority decides for everyone.
This is the core concern of public choice: some deciding for all imposes an “externality,” a cost from choosing in groups. In a liberal democracy, the answer to Rousseau’s question is that authority comes from consent to the rules: if I agree we will decide by majority, I am bound by outcomes under those rules even when I disagree with a particular result. In such an approach, the locus of consent is the individual.
Rousseau went in another direction, however. He argued that groups have a collective will. As he answered his own question:
I retort that the question is wrongly put. The citizen gives his consent to all the laws, including those which are passed in spite of his opposition, and even those which punish him when he dares to break any of them. The constant will of all the members of the State is the general will; by virtue of it they are citizens and free.
When in the popular assembly a law is proposed, what the people is asked is not exactly whether it approves or rejects the proposal, but whether it is in conformity with the general will, which is their will. Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on that point; and the general will is found by counting votes.
When therefore the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken, and that what I thought to be the general will was not so. If my particular opinion had carried the day I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will and it is in that case that I should not have been free.
This presupposes, indeed, that all the qualities of the general will still reside in the majority: when they cease to do so, whatever side a man may take, liberty is no longer possible. (Social Contract, Book IV, Chapter 2, emphasis added)
If I am bound by the general will, Rousseau argues that I remain free, because I have already shown, by having agreed to join in the formation of this society, that the general will is indeed what I actually want. My belief that I wanted something else is simply mistaken. The collective, “general” will is doing a lot of work there. Rousseau’s description is frankly vague:
Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.
This act of association instantly replaces the individual person status of each contracting party by a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly has ‘voices’; and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life and its will. (Book I, Chapter 6)
And later:
It follows from what has gone before that the general will is always right and tends to the public advantage; but it does not follow that the deliberations of the people are always equally correct. Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.
There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter considers only the common interest, while the former takes private interest into account, and is no more than a sum of particular wills: but take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel one another, and the general will remains as the sum of the differences. (Book II, Chapter 3)
Notice the difference in the collectivist approach. The individualist asks each person what they want; if a majority favors one option, the group decides that way, with no implied moral force. In Rousseau’s approach, each chooser must think about what is best for the collective whole. The correct answer is discovered by counting votes—and “correct” here means objectively true. Disagreement is not dissent but error; it may even be treason. Each “member is an indivisible part of the whole,” so there are no individuals allowed.
This collectivist vision is demanding: each chooser must know a great deal, and must undergo an intersubjective reconceptualization of the self. If it could work, the collective choice problem would dissolve, because individual welfare would be subsumed into group welfare. But no serious advocate of the romantic approach actually believes it can work through voting. The goal becomes approximating the outcome of the ideal collective will using other means.
That requires a magic trick: Good laws are needed to form good citizens, but good citizens are needed to recognize good laws. That’s why Rousseau added that disclaimer at the end of the passage about the general will: “all the qualities of the general will still reside in the majority…” He doesn’t believe that for a minute, at least not when it comes to us.
Someone must break into this circle from outside. The législateur is the magic trick, an extraordinary person who can see what the people should want before they are socially well-formed enough to see it themselves. The “law-maker” is described this way:
In order to discover the rules of society best suited to nations, a superior intelligence beholding all the passions of men without experiencing any of them would be needed. This intelligence would have to be wholly unrelated to our nature, while knowing it through and through; its happiness would have to be independent of us, and yet ready to occupy itself with ours; and lastly, it would have, in the march of time, to look forward to a distant glory, and, working in one century, to be able to enjoy in the next. It would take gods to give men laws. (Book II, Chapter 7)
The législateur cannot be chosen by democratic procedure, since the people cannot yet judge who is fit to give them laws—that is precisely the problem the législateur solves. Defenders of the collectivist model note that the législateur only proposes; the people must ratify, saving the system from tyranny. Formal enforcement belongs to the government (Book III), carefully separated from the sovereign and the législateur. But the deeper enforcement mechanism is a collectivist civil religion (Book IV, Chapter 8), which teaches social sentiments that make citizens want to obey. Both collective self-conception and the desire to obey will be instilled through mandatory public education.
It is completely unsurprising that Marx, Lenin, Mao, and in fact every leader who wants to implement something like Rousseau’s program, see themselves as the législateur. The entire romantic idea of politics requires an organized vanguard to lead the revolution, followed by consolidation of power and compulsory education in collective self-reconceptualization. The romantic collectivist and Cuban communist revolutionary Che Guevara put it perhaps most clearly (I have added emphases, to highlight the echoes of Rousseau’s original claims):
Society as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school… Education takes hold among the masses and the foreseen new attitude tends to become a habit… What is important, however, is that each day individuals are acquiring ever more consciousness of the need for their incorporation into society and, at the same time, of their importance as the motor of that society.
They no longer travel completely alone over lost roads toward distant aspirations. They follow their vanguard, consisting of the party, the advanced workers, the advanced individuals who walk in unity with the masses and in close communion with them. The vanguard has its eyes fixed on the future and its reward, but this is not a vision of reward for the individual. The prize is the new society in which individuals will have different characteristics: the society of communist human beings. (From “Socialism and Man in Cuba”)
So, to be clear: in the collectivist conception, society creates itself, and then society creates its own citizens. Society is not the result of citizen identities, but the cause. We turn now to a different perspective: individualism.
Methodological Individualism
It is important at the outset to distinguish method from ethics. Ethical individualism is a normative position; it holds that the individual is the proper locus of moral concern, that rights attach to persons and not to collectives, that “society” has no claims that override those of its members. Methodological individualism is more modest: it is an analytical commitment, a rule for how explanations of social phenomena can be constructed. It says that any complete account of what groups, institutions, or nations do must ultimately be reducible to the motivated actions of the specific human beings who compose them.
Of course, as we saw in the previous essay, ethical individualism can’t begin on a foundation of methodological collectivism. If the individual is by definition a social construction, then moral concerns about individuals must always yield to those that are said to be about society. Methodological individualism, though, starts with individuals and builds up; this approach lets us keep sight of individuals as the objects of moral concern. As we shall see, the advantage of allowing for the possibility of individual agency and diversity has a scientific advantage, because it allows for more moving parts. It may turn out that people think and act collectively, but it is a mistake to start from that premise.
The German sociologist Max Weber made this argument forcefully, noting that “[i]t is a tremendous misunderstanding to think that an ‘individualistic’ method should involve what is in any conceivable sense an individualistic system of values.” He conceded it may be “convenient or even indispensable to treat social collectivities, such as states, associations, business corporations, as if they were individual persons.” But he insisted that “for the subjective understanding of action in sociology, these collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and context of the particular acts of individual persons.” (Economy and Society, Part I, Chapter 1, emphasis added)
Two questions organize what follows. First: do the regular, predictable outcomes produced by state action eventually constitute something like genuine agency—such that methodological individualism needs to be qualified or supplemented? And, second, is methodological individualism perhaps best understood not as a positive theory of human action at all, but primarily as a negative claim—a denial of the logical coherence of any aggregate “will”?
Does the State as an Aggregate Have Agency?
When we observe large, durable institutions, we notice regularities that seem to transcend the particular individuals who staff them. The Roman Empire taxed grain. The American administrative state taxes income and regulates millions of transactions. Change the emperor, the president, the party in power: the fiscal apparatus persists, grows, and defends itself. Bureaucrats retire; the bureau remains and expands its mandate.
This has led some theorists to propose that entities like the state develop something analogous to preferences and intentions. We routinely speak of “the market” signaling scarcity without meaning any individual is the relevant agent. Could the same be said of the state?
Buchanan and Tullock in The Calculus of Consent insisted that collective action be understood as individual choices filtered through institutional rules. They rejected “any organic interpretation of collective activity” in which the collectivity has “an existence, a value pattern, and a motivation independent of those of the individual human beings” who compose it (Calculus of Consent, Chapter 2). Yet the constitutional economics they founded ended up explaining why “the state” tends toward expansion: incentive structures facing individual legislators, bureaucrats, and voters systematically push in that direction. The result is a pattern—not contingent on any particular officeholder—that looks for all the world like the state wants to grow.
This is a vindication, not a refutation, of methodological individualism. The regularity is explained by individual incentives, rather than by resorting to imputing a collective will to an entity that has no inherent will. But the explanation generates something uncomfortable: a structural logic so powerful that, practically speaking, it may be more useful to model “the state” as an agent with stable preferences than to attempt full disaggregation into millions of individual choices. This is the same methodological concession we make when we speak of “the firm” as a unitary profit-maximizer while knowing it is a coalition with conflicting interests.
The point is that we can acknowledge, without abandoning the individualist method, that the state produces emergent regularities useful to model at an aggregate level. But it is important to remember that these regularities are the product of individual incentive structures that can be changed by institutional reform.
The Impossibility of the General Will
The literature in public choice, and especially the technical work in social choice, raises daunting challenges to those who imagine a singular general ghost at the controls of the state. From this perspective, methodological individualism is not primarily a positive theory of human action. It is a negative claim: a denial of the coherence of any supra-individual will—any “general will” or “social welfare” that exists independently of, and takes priority over, the preferences of the individuals who compose the relevant group.
This denial does not require any particular story about how individuals actually choose. It requires only taking seriously what social choice theory has demonstrated since Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem: there is no procedure for aggregating individual preference orderings into a coherent social preference ordering that satisfies a small set of seemingly reasonable conditions. No voting rule, no welfare function, no deliberative procedure reliably produces a determinate, transitive, consistent “will of the people.”
In the previous section, I argued that it may be admissible to use an aggregate concept—"the state,” for example—provided that this labeling does no damage to explanation. Rousseau’s idea of “the general will” as an organic, actually existing concept would be very useful, if it could be shown to exist. The existence of a general will would allow us to abstract from all the messy details of democracy, asking opinions, and consulting the public. The government could simply implement the general will, and all would be well.
But if there is no coherent general will, any justification for state coercion that appeals to the “public interest,” the “common good,” or “social welfare” is either mistaken or disingenuous. It is mistaken if the claimant genuinely believes that the state can identify a coherent aggregate interest. It is disingenuous if the language of the general will is used to justify special pleadings of powerful interests.
The public choice contribution, expanding on the nonexistence of any coherent general will, is more important than is generally recognized. Suppose that a public official is honestly altruistic and wants to serve the “public interest.” That’s not difficult, it’s impossible, because no coherent public interest exists, at least not if we understand the public interest as an aggregate of individual preferences.
That is not to say that there should be no government, or that groups of people cannot create political institutions for their mutual benefit. What methodological individualism reveals is that the entire romantic project of “the ghost in the state machine” is misguided. The repeated failures of attempts to implement the Rousseauian project are not the fault of human error, because if the analysis starts, as it must, with individuals then that project cannot succeed.
