"What is a state if not an association of individuals under the law?"
-M. Tullius Cicero, On the Laws
How are we to make sense of individualism and culture?
In his book, From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities, Geoffrey M. Hodgson argues that a methodologically individualistic point of view cannot make sense of society because of the problems that are brought up by the social environment of institutions all human behavior is embedded within. He argues that the existence of general rules of conduct that not only have preceded the lives of every individual within society, or our great-great-great-great-great-great ancestors in the case of sanctions against incest and murder, but that they form the backdrop upon which all the actions of all individuals within society must be understood within. Following the argument, there simply cannot be a Robinson Crusoe and Friday Faraday explanation of society due to the existence of those general rules of conduct that are presupposed in human action. A explanation simply in terms of individual plans and intentions is thus impossible, and with that impossibility comes the conclusion of having to assume the independent existence of the rules of the game outside of individual plans and intentions.
In making this argument, Hodgson is careful to differentiate between ontological individualism and methodological individualism since even though Hodgson denies the ontological reality of social entities like general rules of conduct, but still insists that we must presuppose their existence for analyzing human behavior within society. For Hodgson, then, it is not individualism that is the problem, but the naïve individualism that he finds in Mises’ claim in Human Action that society is nothing but the aggregation of all individuals that is the problem. However, I find that Hodgson may lack a nuanced appreciation for what Mises is trying to claim in that statement: That all social entities require individual human action to have any existence whatsoever. It is certainly true that society cannot simply be considered a linear aggregation of all human action, human beings are simply not added up one by one to create society, but there are rather spontaneous orders that create second-order effects on top of the simple aggregations of individuals. Nevertheless, even though individual action is the only source of efficient causation, to use Aristotelian language, within society, it cannot be understood without the context of the second-order effects which occur from the aggregation of all human action. This was one of the main lessons of Friedrich Hayek's “Individualism: True and False.”
How then can we understand culture if it has never been the deliberate creation of human beings? After all, it is certainly possible, as Hodgson does in From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities, to simply assume the backdrop of culture upon which people interact and it may very well be true that a grand history of culture from an individualistic perspective is impossible. Nevertheless, as an individualist, I find that lacking. Just as answering economic problems in terms of partial-equilibrium techniques leaves open questions about how the economy as a whole operates, so does assuming the backdrop of culture leave open the question about how that backdrop is itself an emergent outcome of individual action.
To argue that this leads to an infinite regress is practically true for most analyses, but false for the greater understanding of human society. It is practically true when understanding human behavior within a limited environment since it is analytically impossible to provide a sufficient explanation for the cultural norms that help to determine all of that behavior. Hence, like in the case of partial equilibrium a fudge has to be made, except this fudge is not the ceteris paribus assumption, it is assuming the independent reality of those norms. However, just as partial equilibrium must yield not general equilibrium if we are to fully appreciate the causal mechanisms at work within the market, so to must assuming the independent reality of culture theoretically give way to explaining it all in terms of individual human behavior. It is certainly quite the task, a task that may never be able to be done, but it is a task that must at least help to define a point of understanding beyond which we may never proceed.
There is another lesson that can be learned here once we push the regression as far as possible: that culture cannot be fully understood without biology. After all, there is certainly a point in explaining human culture where now the theorist must explain why Homo sapiens, and perhaps other hominids, developed culture, and how the preconditions for cultural evolution were made possible by natural selection. A strange place to end up from thinking about the theoretical status of cultural norms like general rules of conduct in society, but that we get there is surely a corroboration that those are the right questions to be asking.