In his 1992 article “Congress is a ‘They,’ not an ‘It’: Legislative Intent as Oxymoron” (International Review of Law and Economics 12 (2)), Harvard University political scientist Kenneth Shepsle opens:
An oxymoron is a two-word contradiction. The claim of this brief paper is that legislative intent, along with military intelligence, jumbo shrimp, and student athlete, belongs in this category.
I agree and add that any sort of group behavior (legislative intent, market intent, Supreme Court intent, etc) belong on this list. In this post, I will focus primarily on economic reasons for methodological individualism, but as the title states, the analysis can (and should) be broadly applied.
Methodological individualism is the idea that the dynamics of a group can best be analyzed by looking at the actions of the individuals that make up the group. Methodological individualism does not deny the existence of groups—of course groups exist. Indeed, there are times when it makes sense to refer to the group as something that accomplished a goal given the inherent complexities of life. For example, we might say “the firm produced the pencil.” Yes, many individuals toiling away at various stages worked to make a pencil, but the firm is the framework, or the coordinating mechanism, that brought the pencil into existence. Applying methodological individualism means that individual behavior is the focus of our analysis. The constitution of the group emerges out of the behavior of the individuals who make up the group.
Furthermore, the relationship is bidirectional. Individual behavior reflects the constitution of the group, and the constitution of the group influences the behavior of the individual. As Adam Smith discusses in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, our interactions with one another teach us what behaviours are appropriate and which are not. We learn conventions, customs, and self-control through our interactions with our peers.
Understanding group behavior as the result of interactions among individuals is key to understanding the nature of market behavior. Some time ago, I discussed the difference between economic theories and accounting identities. The discussion was mainly focused on technical differences, but methodological individualism, properly understood, leads us to another important distinction: markets do not force people to do anything. The relationship between economic variables does not represent compulsion. Behaviors and results are observed and explained, not imposed, by economic theory. There is no pre-existing equilibrium price, or optimal level of output, that the market desires or moves toward. Rather, those outcomes emerge from the actions of individuals. People are not profit-maximizing (which implies that a pre-existing level of profit is known and that individuals act to maximize it), but rather profit-seeking (which indicates people act in pursuit of profit). In the former description, people are passive. In the latter, they are active.
This is a long way of saying that those who treat economics, markets, or any group behavior as mechanistic fundamentally misunderstand the necessary method of analysis.[1] Rather, group behavior is organic and emergent. Methodological individualism helps us see this emergent nature.
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[1] At least in economics, there are other problems with a non-individualist approach to group behavior. I’d posit that the entire argument relies on an observed contradiction: groups are modeled as rational, but are observed as irrational. But that is a conversation for another time.
READER COMMENTS
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 22 2025 at 1:43pm
You make important points, Jon. I would only warn against the danger of a terminology suggesting the adequation of “emergent” and “organic” in human society.
David Seltzer
Aug 23 2025 at 2:30pm
Jon, nicely done. I suspect terms such as we, society, government and states, are assumed by some to have anthropomorphic properties. This gives central planners coercive license to improve the position of some individuals at the expense of others. Trump’s tariffs, for example. An obvious moral mistake that animates liberty loving individuals.
Mactoul
Aug 23 2025 at 11:00pm
In physical sciences, at least, the term emergent just signals ignorance.
It is largely a question of emphasis. Nobody denies that it is the individuals who act. But the mind of the individual is largely formed by the culture that he is raised in. This is ignoring the real and highly significant biological diversity among the groups themselves which is especially important regarding intelligence and impulsive violence and thus the ability of a particular culture to sustain civilization.
So, the culture informs the mind of individuals and reciprocally the culture is formed or at least continually modified by competition between the individuals that comprise the culture.
We may say that each culture is defined by the Way it seeks to realize. For instance , you may have the American Way, the Hindu Way and so on. But what the Way is, it emerges from competition between the individual Ways– which are individual conception of the Way of the culture.
IIn short, all individuals seek to define the Way of the culture as a whole and not merely their own personal Way.
This pattern includes the most classical liberal and libertarian of classical liberals and libertarians. They seek to realize their personal vision over the entire culture no less than any authoritarian.
Jon Murphy
Aug 24 2025 at 5:53am
Good thing we’re discussing the social sciences then.
To your second paragraph, I said exactly that in my fourth paragraph.
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say in the last two paragraphs. Especially your very last sentence, which is just a non sequitur
Mactoul
Aug 25 2025 at 1:12am
Classical liberalism is a political doctrine. Even in its extreme anarchist fringe, it proposes a vision of society as a whole and the vision which the partisans of liberalism seek to impose over the society.
In this sense, classical liberalism is as authoritative as any authoritarianism it derides.
Jon Murphy
Aug 25 2025 at 6:15am
Repeating a non sequitur doesn’t render it any less a non sequitur.
Ron Browning
Aug 24 2025 at 8:05am
If people would examine in depth what they actually mean when they say that a “building is threatened with demolition “, they would not have nearly as much time to post comments on blogs.
Jon Murphy
Aug 24 2025 at 8:51am
I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean.
Warren Platts
Aug 26 2025 at 3:51pm
I think he means that the can of worms you have opened is far bigger than you seem to realize. Many, many philosophers have spent their entire careers unpacking that can of worms.
Monte
Aug 24 2025 at 10:07am
A very well written and thought-provoking post. Shepsle:
Of what explanatory use is methodological individualism in the absence of intent? How are we to interpret the actions of individuals or a collective without it?
David Seltzer
Aug 24 2025 at 4:06pm
Monte wrote; “Of what explanatory use is methodological individualism in the absence of intent? How are we to interpret the actions of individuals or a collective without it?” I think yours is a good question. The etymology of methodological comes from the Greek, methodos. Methodological, as it applies to individualism, is the study or way of inquiry to interpret one’s behavior or actions. My conjecture, intent can be deduced from the study of actions by individuals. Apologies for all the italicized emphasis.
Jon Murphy
Aug 24 2025 at 4:26pm
To be clear, the author is referring to legislative intent, not individual intent. One cannot derive “legislative intent” from a bill because the legislature has no intent. That’s what he is referring to.
Furthermore, using individual intent makes interpreting bills difficult as a doctrine. Each individual who voted for/against a bill may have different intents.
So, that’s why interpretive tools like textualism, originalism, etc have use.
nullius momenti
Aug 24 2025 at 1:52pm
There’s another similar way of misunderstanding group dynamics: meronymy.
Often a representative of a group — especially, a prominent member or nominal leader — is taken for the group itself.
Jon Murphy
Aug 25 2025 at 8:46am
Agreed. Always a big problem
Mactoul
Aug 25 2025 at 1:09am
When the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence, was there no collective intent?
Each field may be allowed its terms of art. I suppose legislative intent is a term of art.
Many analysis implicitly assume egalitarianism which is inappropriate when you wish to understand phenomenon. People are unequal in political field and not all intents count. The intent of the group is simply understood as the intent of those who count.
Jon Murphy
Aug 25 2025 at 6:19am
There was not, as evidenced by the fact that they signed it.
Ok. That’s methodological individualism.
Warren Platts
Aug 25 2025 at 12:38pm
I would go further: attempting to assess the real intent “of those who count” is just as forlorn as attempting to assess the legislature’s intent. Whether I read a text written by Jon Murphy or Plato, it is pointless for me to 2nd guess the text in an attempt to gauge their true intent. Why? Because I’m not a mind reader. As Justice Holmes famously wrote (quoted by Shepsle (1992, p. 250 ), “we do not inquire what the legislature meant; we ask only what the statute means.” It is the same with texts written by a single individual. The problem is, of course, is that there will always be disagreement about what a given text actually means. And the problem goes much deeper than incomplete contracts and statutes. The problem is there is no fact of the matter when it comes to the meaning of a text. That is to say, there will always be alternate interpretations where there is no objective way to determine which interpretation is the “true” interpretation (cf. Quine’s indeterminacy of translation in his Word and Object, 1960). Yes, interpretations that invoke Godzilla can be ruled out as false, but that does not affect the claim that there will always be competing interpretations among which there is no objective means of determining which one is the “correct” version.
As for whether groups can behave in a rational, problem-solving manner, the evidence shows that it does happen. After reading Shepsle’s description of Congress as this inordinately complicated, Rube Goldberg contraption, one cannot be blamed for thinking that the system is fundamentally irrational. However, the mere fact that the American government has lasted close to 250 years, making it one of the oldest, continuous governments on the Planet, is prima facie evidence that the American government, including Congress, is “fit” in an evolutionary sense.
Upon reading Shepsle’s account of Congress, I am reminded of descriptions of ant colonies. It turns out that only about 1/3 of the ants do anything constructive, another 1/3 just lay about and don’t do much of anything, while the remaining 1/3 actively go about destroying the constructive work of the first 1/3. Yet the anthill survives — or if it’s too dysfunctional, it dies.
Therefore, the inefficiency of the U.S. government must be a feature, not a bug. Indeed, instead of “In God we trust” that’s inscribed on our coinage, we should instead write “In Inefficiency we trust.”
(For an interesting take on problem-solving groups, see Jonathan Schull’s (1990) “Are species intelligent?” where he makes the case that biological species of plants and animals have an ability to solve problems via evolution that amounts to a form of literal intelligence, on the order of, say, monkeys.)
Jon Murphy
Aug 25 2025 at 6:39pm
Well, that’s just nonsense. Words have meaning. The meaning of the words can be used to determine the interpretation.
Warren Platts
Aug 26 2025 at 9:49am
Now that is a great example of the reification fallacy. After all, what exactly is a word? Is it an inscription on a piece of paper? A pattern on a screen? Sound vibrations? A thought in one’s head? One thing we can say for sure is that words are not material objects: they have no mass that can be measured. Are they like numbers then? Numbers are also immaterial, but at least you can construct objective theorems and reach genuine, true conclusions. That is not the case with the meanings of words. Moreover, it does no good to resort to dictionary definitions. Dictionaries are not in the business of defining words. Rather, it is the job of dictionaries to report on the common usage of words. Indeed, that’s about the best that can be said: that the meaning of a word is its use. And since people use words differently, there will always be disagreements on the strict meanings of words; furthermore, there will be no objective test to say who is definitively right. This is proved by the fact that at least half of all U.S. Supreme Court decisions are not unanimous. There is a vast literature on this stuff. I recommend starting with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
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