Abstract

Hobbes understood the state as the consequence of collective action by self-interested individuals. His political philosophy thus combines a theory about the nature of the pre-social individual with a theory that social phenomena such as the state are to be explained by showing how such individuals interact. ;These ideas continue to exert a powerful influence. In attempts to explain all sorts of social phenomena, from the autonomy of bureacracies to antagonism between classes, modern work in the social sciences and social philosophy is guided both by some version of the self-interest assumption and by the assumption that to explain some collective is to model accurately the rules or patterns by which individuals interact to form and change such collectives. ;The first Hobbesian assumption is psychological egoism: the second is methodological individualism. I argue that the two are connected, and seem mutually supportive, because of an implicit theory about interests; that the theory is wrong; that if it is wrong, and in any case for independent reasons, we should not accept psychological egoism or methodological individualism, or indeed various modifications of them; and, finally, that to reject these Hobbesian assumptions is to reject the most influential strategies guiding actual research in social science, especially in the explanation of collective political action