 The contention that social entities have independent and overriding causal powers is often ascribed to Comte, Hegel, Marx, and their followers. Today the claim enjoys very few adherents. One important reason for this is that the claim is regarded as incompatible with the widely held view that social phenomena are noncausally determined by individuals and their properties, and sometimes by material artifacts too. Particularly since the 1980s, the notions of supervenience, realization, and emergence have received a lot attention as ways of spelling out this non-causal dependency relation between social phenomena, on the one hand, and individuals and their properties, on the other. These notions have served as the basis for alternative versions of the argument from social phenomena as causes.