Abstract
This chapter examines one of the most influential developments in current social theory, namely Actor Network Theory (ANT), in the perspective of the individualism-holism issue. ANT moves the actor to the centre of the social stage, yet an actor different from anything that has been encountered before in the literature. The development of the basic ideas of ANT is traced as these ideas gradually evolved in the work of its chief protagonist, Bruno Latour. Latour’s thought has a distinctively philosophical flavour, and yet his ideas have been put into practice with ostensible success in a particular area of social research, namely the field of science and technology studies. Latour’s work is still in progress, but its current version incorporates many ideas that are also encountered in other recent authors, among them several represented in the current volume. These ideas, however, are pushed beyond their normal bounds, which leads to a dissolution of the classical conception of methodological individualism and results in a radical position that is dubbed “methodological particularism”. An examination of this position holds important methodological lessons for social science.
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Collin, F. (2014). Who Are the Agents? Actor Network Theory, Methodological Individualism, and Reduction. In: Zahle, J., Collin, F. (eds) Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate. Synthese Library, vol 372. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05344-8_11
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