Mechanistic individualism versus organistic totalitarianism

Islamism and Totalitarianism

Ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and even more so since the spectacular attacks by Qa‘idat al-Jihad against the U.S. on 9/11, there has been an ever-growing flood of academic and journalistic publications devoted to radical Islam. Unfortunately, much of that literature has embodied problematic conceptual perspectives that can best be characterized as ‘Islam bashing’, ‘Islam apologism’, o...

Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences

Individualism and Supervenience

Ontological individualism reconsidered

The thesis of methodological individualism in social science is commonly divided into two different claims – explanatory individualism and ontological individualism. Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts. Initially taken to be a claim about the identity of groups with sets of individuals or their properties, ontological individu...

Herbert Spencer’s Evolutionary Individualism