Jon Elster's Methodological Individualism And Its Evaluation

What this paper studies is the Methodological individualism, which is the core idea of Jon Elster, who is the key representative of analytic marxism. In his famous work of Making sense of Marx, he try to use the principle of Methodological individualism to construct a microscopic foundation of Marx in philosophical anthropology, economics, ethical theory, history theory and ideology theory. However, the comprehensive"analysis"of his use of Methodological individualism to marxism can truly replace or amend marx deserves to be studied in depth.The paper first present the origin of individualism and its main form, and put forward the theme of the discussion—Methodological individualism; in chapter II, it introduce the detailed information of the content of Methodological individualism, and made a transition of the basic framework of explaining philosophy to Methodological individualism, and specify the main concepts of Methodological individualism, including a full explanation of rational choice,'game theory', causal explanation, intentional explanation; chapter III made a review about his use of Methodological individualism to the"analysis"of marx, from three aspects of methodology, empirical theory, normative theory; chapter IV made an evaluation of Methodological individualism and his explanation, and point out the theoretical significance and the inspiration it gave us. This paper seeks to make a correct understanding and evaluation of Methodological individualism, and correct some mistaken view of Jon Elster, So we can make an in-depth discussion and understanding of the thinking of Marx.