A social science which explains social regularities and phenomena, such as reciprocity and inflation, wholly from the decisions and behaviour of individual human beings is described as adhering to methodological individualism (henceforth, MI). Whether this is the right methodology for social science or not was once a matter of considerable dispute, which engaged the minds of leading economists and sociologists. Gradually, interest in the subject died down, individuals continued to do social science research without, mercifully, trying to explicitly articulate the method that they were in fact using. But with this developed the feeling, especially among economists, that the problem of MI was either trivial or resolved in its favour. There is, however, a revival of interest in the rights and wrongs of MI as evidence from the works of Bhargava (1993) and Arrow (1994). The aim of this essay is to evaluate this resurgence of interest, by critically examining some of Bhargava's ideas, and to present the reader with an open-ended and somewhat paradoxical problem concerning methodological individualism and normative judgements.

Rajeev Bhargava's book is meant to be a challenge to orthodoxy. In this book, which is a revised version of his PhD thesis submitted to Oxford University, Bhargava argues that MI is not trivial, there are versions of it which are intellectually sophisticated and deserve our attention; however, MI can be challenged and he goes on to construct non-individualist methodologies which according to him are at least as satisfactory as MI.