Émile Durkheim, often considered the founder of the academic discipline of sociology, is famous for his treatment of social groups or collectives as emergent supraindividual entities. Indeed, among social scientists and philosophers, Durkheim is treated as a paradigm “holist,” competing with Plato, Marx, and Hegel for this doubtful honor.

Durkheim is famous for having maintained that social groups or collectives are distinct from mere aggregations of individuals and their individual psychologies: “The whole does not equal the sum of its parts; it is something different, whose properties differ from those displayed by the parts from which it is formed” (1895/1982a, p. 128). Durkheim is also famous for having maintained, apparently dogmatically, that social phenomena can only be explained socially and not psychologically: “Every time a psychological explanation is offered for a social phenomenon, we may rest assured the explanation is false” (1895/1982a, p. 129).

Durkheim's holistic account of social phenomena is opposed by many in the social sciences and philosophy who consider themselves “individualists” or “methodological individualists” (Lukes, 1968). Max Weber, another of the founding fathers of sociology, was one of the earliest to formulate the individualist position in sociology, in apparent opposition to Durkheim. Weber (1922/1978) maintained that references to social groups or collectives are nothing more than references to the potential or actual “social actions” of individual persons, social actions being defined as intentional behaviors “oriented” toward other persons: