20
PARTISAN REVIEW
most verbiage, the so-called Hempel-Dray controversy, and the one con–
cerned with the nature (or reality) of "social facts," seem
to
me somehow
exhausted. I have referred several times to the former. It has to do with the
dispute between
explanation
and
understanding.
On the one hand, historical
explanation, patterned after the ideal type of scientific explanation, requires
one or more general propositions fi-om which one can deduce particular con–
sequences. This scheme can often be found, not fully explicit, in the writings
of sociological historians. But when there is a question of one decision, one
man in a unique situation, the historian illuminates the decision through the
logic of the situation along with the character of the agent. To understand
Hitler's decision to attack the Soviet Union in June 1941 on the basis of his
ambitions and his personality seems both easy and uncertain;
to
explain it as
one would explain an embolism, a storm, or an earthquake seems to me
logically and existentially mistaken.
The second controversy is of more interest to me. It has to do with
societal facts, not to be confused with social facts. Can a postal system, a
railway system, a church be assimilated to an entity, or simply
to
a subject
capable of making decisions and of being characterized by adjectives, like a
person? It is a subtle, complex, and perhaps inexhaustible controversy. A
postal system or, in an archaic society, the system of reciprocal gifts, is not
Peter or Paul, a human individual, a being of flesh and feeling. A "societal
fact" includes individuals, stabilized, ritualized, or organized relations, behav–
iors that assure the permanence of the system. Does this system act and or–
ganize in the same way as an individual? I am tempted to answer, along with
one of the most penetrating analysts, yes and no, or else yes or no, as you
like. The various groupings that make up a society, narrow and archaic, or
broad and modern, exist; the sociologist does not create them by observing
them, but they do not exist in the same manner as a biologically delimited
and particularized individual. In these "societal facts," a number of individuals
are obviously interchangeable; a substitute mail carrier fulfills the same
function as the regular one on vacation.
These analyses fascinate me, even though they seem
to
me to be
rather frustrating. They are connected to the debate over methodological
individualism
3
as well as to that over holism.
4
I would have liked
to
clarify
3. Methodological individualism consists in asserting that in the last analysis all social facts
result from individual behaviors and that all explanations, in the social sciences, ought to go
back to those individual behaviors.
4. This name has been given
to
the theory of totalities or of groups that cannot be reduced
to the elements they contain .
