Methodological Individualism Versus Social Realism: Is Theoretical Synthesis Possible?

Abstract

One of the meaning-forming axes that builds the theoretical landscape of modern social sciences is still the dialectical problem of «subject (action, agency) — structure». The main thesis of this article is the assertion that the voluntarism of human action («freedom of will») is inevitably, that is, naturally, woven into a network of structures of different levels and orders («internal» and «external», micro- and macro-, cultural and institutional, axiological and normative), forming a number of conditions and prerequisites for the reproduction of organized forms of social interactions and relationships, and also acting as sources of explicit and latent rule-based behavior of people in society. The author adopts a theoretical and methodological approach that is oriented toward «synthetic» sociological concepts and shows its potential for combining the «realist» and «nominalist» perspectives of analyzing social life and overcoming their internal logical contradictions.

Acknowledgements. The research was supported with the financial support of the Russian Science Foundation, Project No. 24-18-00440 «Analysis of social causality and invariants of social development as a method of overcoming the fragmentation of socio-philosophical knowledge».