  Christian List and Kai Spiekermann (2013) have recently argued that “causal-explanatory holism” is called for in the social sciences under a very precise set of circumstances. Their general thought is that descriptions can usually be formulated at different levels of generality, and that in certain circumstances it may be more illuminating to formulate explanations using concepts at a higher, rather than a lower, level of generality. This is particularly so when a higher-level property can be instantiated in various ways, but some causal relation in which it is embedded continues to obtain regardless of the particular instantiation (a condition that they refer to as “microrealization-robustness”). This suggests that methodological individualism will not be appropriate in cases where “social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization” (629). Under such conditions, “explanatory holism” is required. List and Spiekermann specify three “jointly necessary and sufficient conditions” (639) under which this will be so: