 Many positions on these matters descend from the debates between individualism versus holism that took place in the early part of the twentieth century (cf. O’Neill 1973, Udehn 2001, Zahle &amp; Collin 2014a). Individualism is the somewhat vague thesis that the social is built exclusively out of individual people. Holism is the even vaguer thesis that social entities are “sui generis”, or ontologically fundamental in some sense. Some recent work aims to clarify these (cf. List &amp; Spiekermann 2013, Epstein 2014a, entry on  methodological holism in the social sciences),  while some rejects the terms of that debate.