Understanding and Explanation: Is Social Science Already Unified?

Abstract

This is a paper from methodology and history of social sciences. Since the methodological aspect is often neglected in recent debates on the unification of social science, it is overlooked that conventional social science is to a large extent already unified. In order to prove this, I reconstruct the research program implied in the works of many classic social scientists, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile Durkheim to Thomas Schelling. That program is called methodological individualism and relies on two notions: the notion of individual action and the notion of unintended consequences. Finally, I suggest that the rest of the unification task should be pursued in the form of further inference from this program, which is now being fully realized in the field of behavioral economics.