Realism, Philosophy and Social Science

Capital & Class, Autumn 2007 by Fleetwood, Steve

Kathryn Dean, Jonathan Joseph, John Michael Roberts and Colin Wight Realism, Philosophy and Social Science Palgrave, 2006, 199 pp. ISBN: 1-4039-4673-6 (hbk) £50

Realism, Philosophy and Social Science is an advanced text, focusing in depth on a narrow range of topics and assuming a solid understanding of critical realism and social theory. The introductory chapter by all four authors discusses philosophy and the possibility of a social science, and positivism and hermeneutic approaches, then goes beyond this dualism to look at realism; ethnography and realist research; Marx, philosophy and method; Bhaskar, Marx and the dialectic; and finally, where critical realism has gone wrong.

In Chapter 2, Colin Wight deals with the relationship between science and emancipation. He takes us on a journey through Ancient Greek and especially Aristotelian thought, to remind us of the tradition that sees the telos of humanity as eudaimonia'a state in which the flourishing of each human being is a condition of the flourishing of all. Wight pursues the argument from ontology to epistemology. Using Bourdieu's work on habitus to develop a more nuanced version of the transformational model of social action, he shows that the social structures that govern agents' actions are often Opaque to consciousness'. This opaqueness makes knowledge of these structures necessary in order that we 'might know the situations we are in; know that it is unwanted or unnecessary; and know the potential possibilities within the present social field' (pp. 51-2). Demonstrating the need for such knowledge is a necessary but insufficient condition for emancipation and, moreover, does not guarantee that such knowledge is possible to obtain; but to the extent that it is possible, we are now on the terrain of epistemology. Wight then introduces the 'foundationalist fallacy' (p. 53) according to which, if we cannot have absolute, guaranteed knowledge, then we have no knowledge. He introduces a neat continuum showing that our knowledge is usually somewhere between certainly true and certainly false. Finally, he deals with emancipation and the spiritual turn. While he sees Bhaskar's spiritual turn as a welcome attempt to re-establish the Aristotelian perspective, Bhaskar seems to have jettisoned science on the way. Since Wight has demonstrated the need for social science, jettisoning it makes the quest for human emancipation impossible.

John Michael Roberts turns his attention, in Chapter 3, to ways in which Marxism and critical realism 'can fruitfully work together to construct a Marxist method' (p. 67). His first section deals with critical realism and Marxism on method. In his second section, Roberts introduces two crucial concepts: systematic abstraction and historical specificity. Indeed, he goes on to add a fourth domain to the three extant domains of the real (or deep), the actual and the empirical; namely, the historical. The third section of Roberts's chapter uses the idea of systematic abstraction to draw our attention to the necessary contradictions inherent in the objects of our enquiry, as a means to uncovering what drives their movement in history. This section gets quite complicated, introducing ideas from Deleuze and Guattari-writers who are best known for their post-structuralist persuasion. The final section considers the implications stemming from the difference between a crisis of a social form and a crisis in a social form. Roberts explores this via the discursive mechanisms that constitute the law. Roberts's arguments are not only complex, but also difficult to summarise. To the extent that I understand him, his argument comes down to two interrelated claims: i) that critical realism is ahistoric whereas Marxism is historic, rooted firmly in historical context; and 2) that because of this, it is possible for Marxists to abstract in a systematic form, not only in order to find the 'cell form' of capitalism, but also to then trace, via dialectical contradictions, the categories that follow. The upshot is that for some critical realists 'there is no necessity to retroduce further causal determinations of an object as these are socially and historically mediated through a historical system like capitalism. In other words, some contemporary critical realists develop concepts that do not inhere in one another. And so, for example, we do not have any ground to say that the commodity within capitalism inheres within capitalism. The tendencies of a causal mechanism become selfascribed, non-historical' (p. 76).

In Chapter 4, Jonathan Joseph deals specifically with Bhaskar's book Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. He argues that critical realism can help Marxism primarily via critical realism's ontological groundwork, which has established a deep and transformational ontology. Critical realism furnishes us with an ontology of structures and agents while Marxism provides the social-scientific analysis of what these structures are, how they are reproduced and transformed by agents, and what the resulting tendencies might be, all within particular concrete contexts. It is worth emphasising the point that 'the role of critical realism is not to conduct such scientific investigation, but to provide the philosophical underpinnings to such an analysis' (p. 103). Joseph then turns his attention to summarising the dialecticisation of critical realism via Bhaskar's 'MELD' system: first Moment (IM), which is roughly critical realism in its pre-dialectic form; second Edge (2E), with its emphasis on absence and negativity; third Level (3L), which is the domain of totality where parts are seen as parts of a whole; and the fourth Dimension (40), where dialectical and transformative praxis is elaborated upon. Joseph's first objection lies in the very idea of dialecticising IM, which, for Joseph, always was dialectical in the first place. His second objection lies in Bhaskar's critique of ontological monovalence; that is, a purely positive ontology and (over)emphasis on negativity. The critique of ontological monovalence quickly turns into the replacement of positivity with negativity so that negativity has ontological primacy. 'By giving primacy to negativity' Joseph argues, 'we soon lose track of the specific ontological insights of critical realism's first moment such things as structures and generative mechanisms, stratification, causal powers and emergent properties, tendencies and much else' (p. 110). Joseph's third objection connects 2E and 40. If 2E establishes negativity and absence, then this supplies the basis for 40'$ transformative praxis in the form of absenting the absences. By this stage in Dialectic, however, Bhaskar is making such general claims that it is difficult to know how to cash them out in terms of more concrete theory or practice. Furthermore, while absenting absences invites a political programme based on gaining freedom via absenting constraints, living in a civilised society means that we will always have some constraints, and so Bhaskar's politics becomes a (naive) Utopian and impractical desire to remove all constraints. After a short section recalling Bhaskar's criticisms of Marx, Joseph offers his final objection, namely to Bhaskar's spiritual turn. Once we 'move to a transcendental universal notion of freedom as the absenting of constraints inherent in all human activity, then we no longer have the grounding in concrete social relations ... [which] become no more than an irrealist categorical structure that we can shed' (p. 117).