Since my argument is that neither Individualism nor Collectivism can furnish the basis for adequate social theorizing, it is necessary to show why. Specifically this means examining the reasons which make their conceptions of structure, of agency and of the relations between them, unacceptable – and thus revisiting the well-trodden ground of this debate. In short, the very terms of the confrontation between Individualists and Collectivists have to be queried before we can appreciate their growing rejection and what they have been replaced by – in the case of those who have recently sought to redefine the terms of the traditional debate.

To develop these points it will prove impossible not to move forwards and backwards between ontological and methodological considerations, precisely because these issues are not distinct and no protagonist of either standpoint ever approached them as if they were other than inextricably intertwined. What is of the greatest importance is to disengage how the Individualist and Collectivist conceptions of social reality contained equally deficient concepts of both structure and agency and how correspondingly their two explanatory programmes served to block an examination of the interplay between structure and agency since what they had in common mandated epiphenomenalism in social theorizing. In the heritage of Individualism it was ‘structure’ which became the inert and dependent element, whilst Collectivism fostered instead the subordination or neglect of ‘agency’, thus respectively perpetuating the two forms of social theorizing which I have termed the fallacies of ‘upwards conflation’ and ‘downwards conflation’.