Communism Kills, Pt. 3: Forests, Trees, and a Moral Methodological Individualism

[Originally published in the Front Range Voluntaryist, article by Richard G. Ellefritz, PhD]

I ended my previous installment of Libertarian Sociology 101 with an assertion that, under Marxian ideologies, which tend to be murderous in their pursuits of social justice, “whatever can be done to the collective can be done to the individual.” For my larger purposes of establishing a libertarian sociology, I would like to elaborate in a theoretical sense on the anti-Marxism of what would be a libertarian tradition in sociology and a sociological tradition in libertarianism. I argue for the conscious and conscientious inclusion of methodological individualism, including a moral center in the non-aggression principle and property rights (but more on that later), all of which are antithetical to the Marxian thought rampant in contemporary sociology and social sciences. (Though I currently lack scientific evidence, there are numerous examples of Marx’s popularity among sociologists and other academics).

A somewhat relevant commentary on (good) sociological thinking is an analogy to (thinking about) the relation between forests and trees. Can forests exist without trees? Well, yes, if you consider kelp forests to be forests, but generally we think of a forest as a collective unit composed of trees that form a distinct ecosystem and include habitats consisting of the canopy, forest floor, and everything in between. We should keep in mind for the larger purposes of this column that trees can exist without forests, but forests cannot exist without trees. Apart from that distinction, forests have their own properties distinct from the trees that compose them, and so if you miss the forest for the trees, focusing instead on their constituent, individual parts, you might be headed down the dead end road of methodological individualism. My concern, though, is not with methods, but with morality; not with description but rather with prescription, not with diagnosis but with prognosis: What is to be done?

It should be noted and apparent that no analogy is perfect. For example, we might ask if individual humans can exist apart from society. Social and behavioral scientists tell us no, no, no, no, and no (…well, maybe they can). Returning to my own statement above, that, from a certain point of view, what can be done to the collective can be done to the individual, it should be apparent that just as one can cut down or harvest a forest one can also cut down or harvest a tree; though, the reverse might not necessarily be true, for one cannot climb a forest. So what is the (imperfect) analogy to society and the individual? I’ll answer in a quote often attributed to the mass murderer and dictator, Joseph Stalin:

“The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”

It should be noted and apparent that I am not sold on this analogy, i.e. that trees are to humans as forests are to society, nor that there should be a sharp methodological line drawn between the collective and the individual, though I would not say the same for a line drawn in the sands of morality.

Harkening back again to my previous installments in this series, I believe it is imperative that methodological individualism not be eschewed to the dustbin of sociological thinking. For if it were we might trade one mistake, missing the forest for the trees, for another, a tendency to sacrifice the individual on the social altar for the religion of the Greater Good (see also here). For my purposes, methodological individualism can be traced to Max Weber and Ludwig von Mises, the two social theorists I would take as the starting point for a libertarian sociology. Routinely overlooked in contemporary sociology classrooms, insofar as this is indicated in the dozens of textbooks I have reviewed and used, is the importance of Weber’s critique of Marxism and the notion that an abstract collective does not have the same properties as individual human beings. Contradictory to this rather obvious proposition is Emile Durkheim’s dictum that society is sui generis, a thing in itself. This is typically taken as a truism yet paradoxically is dismissed as a vestige of the classic organicist model of the structural-functionalist school, which itself is used as a foil to prop up the Marxist tradition found in the conflict perspective (see my previous installments for more on those topics). None of this is to even mention that Mises is almost entirely silenced if not relegated to being part of the dreaded and much lamented ideological school of neo-liberalism! But, I digress.

Since most sociology textbooks aim to lead students to a macro-level, structural analysis (i.e. of the forest rather than the trees), and since most of these same books treat the structural-functionalist model and perspective as the equivalent of justifying slavery during the antebellum, pre-Emancipation period of U.S. history, it is the Marxian-bent, conflict perspective used to teach about social inequalities. And this is typically (sought to be) accomplished through teaching about social classes, class conflict, and class consciousness. In the Marxist tradition, a social class is a macro-level construct consisting of multitudes of mostly strangers tied together only by their common economic positions, i.e. their relations to the means of production. The capitalist class, as the story goes, exploits the working class, and this will continue until members of the working class achieve a common recognition of this, i.e. a class consciousness. Here is where it is important to recognize the difference between the structure of groups and those groups’ constituent parts.

I will pick up on this point in the next installment, but Marx and Engels took it as a theoretical necessity to obliterate the existing social order, including individuality, the family, and private property, and their political heirs took it as their mission to carry out these endeavors, leading to the deaths of tens of millions of individuals. This is in part due to viewing individuals as mere atoms, cells, or cogs in consideration of the larger structure of their (desired) societies. Though we can analyze society in terms of groups, organization, social classes, and other structures, none of these should be mistaken as a thing having some metaphysical access to a truth unknown to the very people who live out their lives in the very situations defined by their class situation or structural position. Put another way, was the class interest in communist societies to put to death thousands upon thousands of their fellow human beings? Either way, it would take a stretch of the imagination, and a cold heart, to believe that the individuals starving, freezing, and being worked and put to death had no interest in their own personal, familial, or communal survival. And here is where Weber offers a concept needed to counterbalance that of social classes, that of the status group.

“Those men whose fate is not determined by the chance of using goods or services for themselves on the market, e.g., slaves,” says Weber (2009, p. 183), “are not, however, a ‘class’ in the technical sense of the term. They are, rather, a ‘status group’.”

Hopefully by now you see the depth of Weber’s brilliance. What lower form of human life can there be than those who do not and, moreover, cannot own themselves? Perhaps in the freest societies imaginable there will still be those who engage in what are widely and historically considered heinous crimes, e.g., genocide, homicide, rape, armed robbery, assault, etc., but we know well that those behaviors occurred in slave-based societies of all stripes for eons into the past and up to the present. We also know well what it is that defines the essence of, or underlies each of those crimes: lack of consent and infringement upon property rights. Again, I will address those issues in the next installment, but here, suffice it to say, if our analyses of society are to be based upon the presumption that the collective is not only structurally different than its individual constituents, but that has moral properties that supersede those of individuals, then sacrificing individuals is not only forgivable but necessary.