  One of the earliest iterations of this debate occurred during the so-called Methodenstreit between members of the Austrian School in Economics and the German Historical School. However, members of the “first generation” of the Austrian School, such as Carl Menger, were atomists (Menger defended his individualistic method in terms of conceptual gains achieved by “reducing complicated phenomena to their elements” [Menger 1883, 93]). It was only members of the second generation, first and foremost Friedrich von Hayek, who would explicitly identify themselves with the Weberian doctrine of methodological individualism and defend it through reference to the demands of interpretive social science. The key text is Hayek’s paper, “Scientism and the Study of Society,” serialized in Economica (1942–44), and later published as the first part of The Counter-Revolution of Science (1955).