Recuperating the Individual

In his chapter “Can Economics Start from the Individual Alone?,” Geoffrey M. Hodgson gives an account of how economics turned its attention as a discipline away from a systemic focus and toward the individual homo economicus as its sole starting point. As Hodgson describes it, within the span of a few decades, scholars in economics chose to make their topic the “allocation of scarce means between alternative uses, as a universal matter of choice for every individual in a world of scarcity. Instead of the whole system of production and allocation of the means of life, the choosing individual alone became the foundation stone of economic theory” (57). To the contrary, Hodgson proposes that “the isolated individual is not viable as an analytical starting point” (58), and I see in his argument some instructive parallels to the shift in philosophical emphasis that some in composition have called “the social turn.” One of the more widely recognized indicators of that social turn is James Berlin’s landscaping of the field, wherein scholars focusing on formal concerns were labeled current-traditionalists, others focusing on the mental processes of composing were labeled cognitivists, and those focusing upon the authorial choices of the composing individual were labeled expressivists, to whom Berlin counterposed social-epistemic rhetoric, with its examination and critique of the ways social structures and institutions construct knowledge and interpellate individuals into hegemonic ideologies.

Berlin sets up social-epistemic rhetoric as a strong critique of what he characterizes as expressivism’s focus on the authorial choices of the individual composer, indicting that focus as divorced from the social and thereby unable to engage in anything other than apolitical, disconnected writerly solipsism. So, too, does Hodgson see a shift in political economy toward an emphasis on the choosing individual, which his essay strongly critiques — but his critique takes a direction quite different from Berlin’s.

According to Hodgson, “the idea of explaining institutions by beginning with individuals alone has never been successful because the starting point always involves more than individuals. In addition to individuals, some notion of rule system or social structiure is implicitly or explicitly assumed” (59). This may seem obvious, but in neoclassical economics 101 as it’s taught today, and in much of the mainstream discourse surrounding economics, one sees a constant reference to the originary influences of the choosing individual in discussions of utility maximization, pareto optimality, deadweight losses, game theory, and most of the other terms from the economics textbooks. In that regard, Hodgson’s essay stands as a strong critique of fundamental neoclassical economic assumptions about the centrality of the individual, while at the same time acknowledging that discussions of the choosing individual are a vital component of any conception of political economy.

In other words, Hodgson does not make the move Berlin does, and turn away from the individual toward the social, or to use his terms, turn away from methodological individualism toward methodological collectivism/holism. There are good reasons for this, and Hodgson is worth quoting at length here:

Many social theorists have criticized methodological collectivism for making the individual the mere puppet of social forces. In addition, it is argued here that the main problem is that methodological collectivism does not only diminish the individual, but that it also pays insufficient attention to the processes and mechanisms by which the individual is fundamentally altered. It also ignores crucial variations between individuals. One consequence of conflating the individual into the social structure is to lose sight, not simply of the individual, but also of the mechanisms of social power and influence that may help to reconstitute individual purposes or preferences. Because the explanation is in terms of structures and constraints alone, the ways in which institutions may actually affect individuals are ignored. It may appear paradoxical, but only by rescuing the individual from its conflation into the social, can the social determination of individuality be fully appreciated. (63)

This, to me, seems a key insight, and one that those Berlin twenty years ago characterized as social-epistemicists failed to apprehend. (Perhaps that failure was in some ways a conscious choice and a reaction to the political tenor of the times, but that’s a matter for another post.) In fact, a number of scholars Berlin landscapes (or likely would have landscaped) as social-epistemicist express, sometimes in brief asides, a desire to conceive of a student composer not buffeted about by hegemonic forces or overhwelmingly interpellated by dominant ideologies, but quickly offer the rhetorical sigh: would that it were so.

Things change, of course. Today, I think it’s clear that there’s a renewed interest in the figure of the choosing, composing individual in composition studies, particularly in the burgeoning scholarship on affect. Perhaps not a turn back to the idealized romantic individual scribbling away in the candlelit garret that so many caricatured Peter Elbow and others as privileging, but an attempt to recuperate some of the useful aspects of expressivism’s focus on what the individual thinks and does at the most fundamental, careful, and tightly focused close-up individual scale. An understanding that the individual, as she writes, is necessarily deeply bound up in and an irreducible component of “the whole system of production and allocation of the means of life” (Hodgson 57). In his economic context, Hodgson proposes not a bland compromise or middle way between methodological individualism and methodological collectivism/holism, but a reframing of the deeply bound relationship between the individual and the social, observing that because “social structures and institutions precede any one individual. . . there is a temporal asymmetry” (64, emphasis mine). As a result of this circumstance, he continues, “any adequate alternative to both methodological individualism and methodological holism [collectivism] must avoid any conflation of individual and social structure, and must acknowledge their temporal asymmetry. Instread of trying to explain all institutions in terms of individuals alone, or trying to explain all individuals in terms of institutions or structures alone, we have to understand social reality as a process” (65, emphasis in original).

Now there’s a thought.

Follow, closely, institutions and individuals (as constitutive of the process of social reality) in relation to one another as they interact — as they interconnect and influence and are influenced by one another, in and among an internetwork of influences — in a process that evolves over time. This, again, is where Elbow gets sold short, because it’s exactly what he’s talking about. People accuse him of ignoring social realities and social contexts in his proposal that students need some space to focus on their own individual investment in their projects as writers — he makes an argument, as he puts it, “for closing my eyes as I speak” — but the entire reason for closing one’s eyes is to acknowledge the overwhelming power possessed by the social, to acknowledge its presence, and to carve out some space in relation to that presence. It’s all too easy a move to turn the reification of ideological context into petrification, and then claim that one has no space in that context. In much the way that political economist J. K. Gibson-Graham gives the lie to the too-easy myth of all-consuming and irresistible capitalism and so makes space for individual economic agency by closely examining the diverse processes by which individuals engage in economic activities and processes within and outside market systems, by considering both individuals qua individuals and their relations to social and economic structures in her work on community economies, so too does Elbow resist that ease and offers a way — a process, as he describes it; the voyage out and voyage back — of making space for oneself in relation to social and ideological context by monitoring that self and that relation.

Hodgson, Geoffrey M. “Can Economics Start from the Individual Alone?” In A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics, Edward Fullbrook, ed. London: Anthem, 2004. 57-67.