Having thoughts about individualist vs. materialist perspectives – it's Asimov's psychohistory, from the Foundation series.
The concept Asimov introduces is that, at extraordinarily large scales of population, one can mathematically predict social, cultural, and political crises. These can take the shape of religious schisms, economic tensions, political divisions; whatever the root causes are, there are always reasons for critical moments in history.
And something that comes up in the books is that psychohistory is the math of vast populations – I think the empire at the beginning of the series has a population in the trillions, iirc – and cannot predict individual actions. Yet for the characters, each crisis is seemingly resolved thanks to the actions of a significant individual. I remember one line, "We don't have a Hober Mallow this time;" the characters felt that greatness came from individuals, and they weren't up to the task.
But... this is where we get to analytical materialism, I think. Material conditions create the circumstances an individual emerges in, they shape the beliefs that individual forms, they influence the actions that individual takes. An individualist perspective doesn't account for this, however, so it just sees a person taking action where others didn't.
Analytical materialism, though, seems like psychohistory at the smaller scale. It's like thermodynamics: Calculating every bit of information, every material circumstance, is simply too much information to process, but by zooming out towards large groups and observing average behavior, we can get a generally accurate answer.
Individualists will say one leader took action, one person made the influential decisions, and without them, history wouldn't have gone the way it did. They technically aren't even wrong. But that's because that person is part of the societal system, is part of the material conditions of the world. If we want remove that person from the situation to analyze how things may've gone otherwise, we would have to drastically alter our information on real-world conditions. Circumstances create individuals that go on to create circumstances.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that individualist perspectives seem like approximations of the results of materialist analysis, but distort the results because they're not doing the analytical legwork. It only looks at proximate causes, not the root causes.