FLAVIA MONCERI

Filosofia politica e universalismo "metodologico" in Othmar Spann

N. 195

Summary - The opposition between individualism and universalism as methodological approaches to "social phenomena" is one major theme of Othmar Spann’s philosophy. In the first part of this essay, an analysis of Spann’s works is presented, in order to reconstruct his criticism of individualism and its political results (liberalism and democracy). In the second part, Spann's "methodological universalism " is taken into consideration, as well as its main theoretical features consisting in the concepts of "totality" [Ganzheit] and " pairing " [Gezweiung]. Within Austrian philosophy of the social sciences, Spann sees the Austrian School of Economics as his main theoretical opponent, for it was the founder of that school, Carl Menger, who first suggested using individualism as a methodological tool investigate all spheres of human action. However, a deeper analysis seems to show that Schumpeter’s problematic formulation of "methodological individualism" is the real object of Spann’s critique, whereas it could be maintained that even Spann’s universalism is indebted to Menger’s revolutionary methodology. It can indeed be affirmed that both Menger and Spann share the idea that the decomposition — be it individualistic or universalistic — of social phenomena into their simplest factors is the proper aim of social sciences. Moreover, such an idea allows us to distinguish the two " Austrians " from the " German " tradition of thought, according to which social sciences should fully comprehend social phenomena in their complex " concrete reality ".