In most recent philosophical discussion, the contrast between holism and individualism in history and the social sciences has been presented as a methodological issue. Stated generally, the question is whether we should treat large-scale social events and conditions as mere aggregates or configurations of the actions, attitudes, relations, and circumstances of the individual men and women who participated in, enjoyed, or suffered them. Methodological individualists say we should. Methodological holists (or collectivists, as some prefer to be called) claim, rather, that social phenomena may be studied at their own autonomous, macroscopic level of analysis. Social "wholes," they say, not their human elements, are the true historical individuals.

This issue obviously bears directly upon the way we are to conceive the relations between such social sciences as psychology and sociology, and between these and historical...