Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought 0710813090, 9780710813091

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Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought

Andrew Collier Lecturer in Philosophy University o f Southampton

HARVESTER WHEATSHEAF LYNNE RIENNER PUBLISHERS

First published 1989 by Harvester W heatsheaf 66 Wood Lane End, Hemel Hemsptead Hertfordshire HP2 4SS A division o f Simon & Schuster International Group and in the USA by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 © 1989 Andrew Collier All rights reserved. N o part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing, from the publisher. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Billing & Sons Ltd, Worcester

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Collier, Andrew Scientific realism and socialist thought. 1. Philosophy erf social sciences. TheoriesComparative studies I. Title 300'. 1 ISBN 0-7108-1309-0

Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Collier, Andrew, 1944Scientific realism and socialist thought/Andrew Collier. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 1-55587-156-9 1. Communism 2. Communism and philosophy. I. Tide. 88-34371 HX73.C64 1989 CIP 335.43-dcl9

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3 4

5 93 92 91

90 89

For Adam Nicholas Collier

Contents Foreword Acknowledgements

ix xii

1 How Not to be a Bad Empiricist Althusser’s critique of empiricism (i) ‘extraction’ (ii) The distinction of practices Bhaskar’s critique of empiricism (i) ‘Actualism’ (ii) the social production of knowledge and the epistemic fallacy Transcendental arguments for realism The tally on empiricism Science/ideology 2

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Stratified Explanation and M arx’s Conception of History Continents or strata? ‘Determinance in the last instance’ as vertical explanation Overdetermination and multiple determination Applications: the falling rate of profit; the effectiveness of politics Structural Explanation and the Problem of Agency ‘Anti-humanism’ How is history made? Structure and bearers vii

1 2 2 5 11 11 14 20 24 26 43 43 58 61 66 73 73 76 78

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Structural causality: Spinoza or Leibniz? Spinoza and the dialectic Societies and people ‘Human nature’, ‘personal politics’ and non-structural change Personal and social transformations Laminated systems and horizontal emergence The pecularities of personal agency Groups 4

80 85 90 93 97 98 103 106

Epistemology and the Epistemoids ‘The theory of theoretical practice’ ‘Class struggle in theory’ Sciences, philosophies and epistemoids Naturalism in social science Do the human ‘sciences’ have any compensating advantages? Transcendental realism in the human world Paths and maps Objective distinctions between epistemoids Dialectical and undialectical thinking

113 115 118 126 134 137 142 145 148 153

Conclusion: The Possibility o f Scientific Socialism Socialist politics and laws of history Constraints on the transformation of societies Constraints on the reproduction of societies Starting from contradictions

163 165 168 173 178

Glossary Bibliography Index

182 195 200

Foreword The aim of this book is to show how the realist philosophy of science, particularly the ‘transcendental realism’ recently elaborated in the work of Roy Bhaskar, can help our under­ standing of human societies, and thereby help us to free ourselves from those social structures that are constraining and threatening us, particularly capitalism and the nation-state, along with the ideologies secreted by them. Apart from transcendental realism, the main recent body of thought with which I engage is the ‘structuralist’ version of M arxism proposed by Louis Althusser. Despite substantial disagreements with this theory, it seems to me that several of the positions staked out by Althusser against earlier tw entieth/century M arxists cannot be deserted by any reason­ able person who has understood them. For instance, that all ideas, not only correct ones, come from practice, so if we are to use the ‘criterion of practice’ for truth, we m ust distinguish the cognitive value of different practices; that it is not possible to retain Hegel’s notion of totality intact while inverting the relation between idea and m atter, since a material totality can only be a complex, creaking structure of causally interacting parts; tl^at if the proletariat needs theory, it needs it not to express, but to transform , its class consciousness; that belief in ourselves as inherently autonomous agents is never an aid, always an obstacle, to social science and human emancipation. These theses of Althusser’s opened the possibility o f a new realist approach to social science and to ‘scientific socialism’: realist firstly in the philosophical sense, that it would aim to discover real social structures which operate independently of IX

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our conscious intentions, and which both provide the possibilities of, and impose the constraints on, social change. Realist secondly in a political sense - not indeed of cynical Realpolitik or opportunistic tinkering, but of knowing the objective strengths and weaknesses of the forces of liberation and of oppression, understanding the historical obstacles to (and indeed the natural limits of) human emancipation, and so avoiding the blind alleys in which the Left had been lost for the last half-century: blind alleys of social democracy, Stalinism and voluntaristic utopianism. It seems to me that the Left has for the most part missed this possibility, and is currently returning in large numbers to just those blind alleys. There are various reasons for this: a minor role only can have been played by the fact that there were unresolved problems in Althusser’s thought (as indeed in anyone’s). But in this respect at least we are not without a remedy. Bhaskar’s realist philosophy of science and of social science poses many questions in terms that parallel Althusser’s. That is hardly surprising: both take science seriously as a source of knowledge of the real world; both are also actuated by a socialist concern for human emancipation; and Bhaskar has read Althusser. But Bhaskar’s results have the advantage of being more determinate than Althusser’s (that this is an advantage, I argue in Chapter 4). It is clearer what Bhaskar’s conclusions ‘perm it’ and ‘forbid’ (as Popper would say), and also what it is about the practice of science that compels these conclusions. And this is not a m atter of clarity of expression, but of a different practice of philosophy. In part, I shall be claiming for transcendental realism that it answers several unanswered Althusserian questions. However, I am less sanguine than Roy Bhaskar about the prospects of scientific knowledge in the human world (see Chapter 4). All four chapters start with a comparative discussion of some Althusserian and Bhaskarian ideas, but try to take the argument a little further. They can be seen as separate essays in that one does not start where the last left off, b u t they are ordered, in that each presupposes some of the arguments of the previous one(s). The first and last essays are mainly about epistemology and method; the second and third mainly about ontology and

Foreword

xi

the nature o f explanation in social science. Since the questions that motivate this study are political, I append a conclusion indicating the sort of social-scientific questions which need to be answered if socialist politics is to be a scientifically justified project. I t would be out of place to attem pt definite answers; such answers as I refer to have been with us for a long time, even if they are currently unpopular with those who prefer to take the broad road that leads - well, not to socialism. I also leave aside questions of 'political philosophy’ questions about the values that motivate political action. I hope to write a sequel showing 'th e possibility of naturalism’ in this area too - i.e. showing that the best way to talk about values is by talking about facts. In referring to books by Althusser and Bhaskar I shall use the following abreviations: Althusser PH = Politics and History FM = Reading Capital LP = Lenin and Philosophy ESC = Essays in Self-Criticism Bhaskar RTS = A Realist Theory of Science PN = The Possibility of Naturalism

A cknowledgements I am grateful to the Philosophy Department at the University of Auckland in New Zealand for inviting me as visiting lecturer in 1983. Two papers that I read there became the core of this book, and the intellectual stimulus of working in that department helped me to write it. I would also like to thank my erstwhile colleagues in the Philosophy Department at University College of N orth Wales, Bangor (a departm ent which has now fallen victim to Government barbarism) for enabling me to have study leave, during which the book was completed. Of the many individuals to whom I am indebted, I would like to mention Roy Bhaskar, for his encouragement and his comments on my reading of his own work; Michael Westlake, with whom I have engaged in dialogue on socialism, ontology, psychoanalysis and structuralism since 1971; John Lovering, with whom I have discussed the implications of realism for economics and the analysis of the nation-state; and three postgraduate students working on the philosophy of the human sciences, who have been in enough agreement and enough disagreement with me to alert me to some of the problems I might otherwise have passed over: Judith Roman, David Unsworth and Ann Pritchard. And my thanks to my wife, Heather, for tolerating the usual authorial neuroses. I am grateful to New Left Books for permission to quote from Althusser’s Reading Capital, and to Eyre M ethuen for permission to quote Brecht’s poem ‘A Bed for the N ight’, translated by George Rapp.

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How N ot to be a B ad Empiricist On waxen tablets you cannot write anything new until you rub out the old. W ith the mind it is not so; there you cannot rub out the old till you have written in the new. Francis Bacon1 M ost people on the political Left who have written about the theory of knowledge have been agreed about one thing: that empiricism is all wrong. In general, it would be agreed that empiricism gives a false account of how the most successful sciences have in fact worked and progressed; and that it has led those who have tried to put the human sciences on as rigorous a basis as the natural to copy, not the actual method of the natural sciences, but its empiricist misdescription. Unfortunately, there is no such agreement about what constitutes empiricism. Sometimes the term is used in a vague way to refer to the Anglo-Saxon tendency to pile up facts and avoid theorising them; sometimes - quite misleadingly - to label and dismiss any theory which lakes science as the paradigm of knowledge, or which regards the structure of the world as something we discover rather than invent. This tost usage would make not only the classical Marxists but also rationalists such as Spinoza into empiricists, while excluding some who have so described themselves. Finally, in much recent M arxist and left-structuralist writing, die term ‘empiricism’ is used in Althusser’s technical sense. It is to this sense that I now turn.

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A lthusser’s C ritique o f Em piricism (i) ‘Extraction’ Althusser’s first step is to criticise Galileo’s metaphor of reading ‘the book of the world’ instead of seeking truth in the books of Aristotle or other authorities. He sees this as a quasi-religious doctrine of ‘vision’ in which nature is transparent to our gaze. Indeed, Bacon was explicit about the parallel between this turn to ‘the book of the world’ and the Protestant turn from Scholastic theology to the Bible: ‘Let us never... think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word or in the book o f God’s works’ (quoted by Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins o f the English Revolution, p.91). One theme o f criticism levelled against empiricism, from Marxists among others, is that nature is not transparent, and our gaze is not innocent, but informed, often misinformed, by receive opinions. This is a m atter to which I shall return. However, Althusser does not identify empiricism with this notion of transparency as such, but as a particular variant of it: The em piricist conception may be thought of as a variant o f the conception o f vision, with the mere difference that transparency is not given from the beginning, but is separated from itself precisely by the veil, the dross o f im purities, of the inessential which steal the essence from us, and which abstraction, by its techniques of separation and scouring, sets aside, in order to give us the real presence o f the pure naked essence, knowledge of which is then merely sight. (RC, p.37)

For Althusser, empiricism conceives of knowledge as a process of abstraction, which he describes under the metaphor of extraction: ‘the essence is abstracted from the real objects in the sense of an extraction, as one might say that gold is extracted (or abstracted, i.e. separated) from the dross of earth and sand in which it is held and contained’ (ibid., p.36). Althusser extends this metaphor so far that one begins to wonder if he realises it is only a metaphor: the work of knowledge is to separate the essential (gold) from the inessential (dross) both of which were there in reality already; knowledge is really present in the real object as part of it. Althusser should not be blamed for the incoherence of this notion - how can knowledge of the object be

How N ot to be a Bad Empiricist

3

at the same time part of the object (at any rate if we are speaking of natural objects), and what happens to knowledge of the other part? - for he is drawing attention to this incoherence which he believes is an error of empiricism. But since ‘empiricism’ is not a word that Althusser invented, he can be blamed for spreading misconceptions about the history of philosophy. No empiricist, so far as I know, has ever used this metaphor, yet Althusser says it was ‘avowed by the eighteenth century [sic] from Locke to Condillac’ (p.38). The only historical reference he gives is the aesthetics o f Michelangelo. The metaphor could be an attem pt to describe Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities, but it is a misleading one: Locke thought that we could, on the basis of a scientific knowledge o f physical objects, distinguish among our ideas o f objects, between those that really resembled features of the object (e.g. ideas of shape), and those that did not (e.g. ideas of colour). Primary qualities are those really possessed by the object, secondary qualities depend on the effects of the object on the sensory apparatus that we (the human species) happen to be endowed with. But Locke does not identify our ideas of primary qualities with those qualities themselves; and the process o f separating the dross from the gold goes on entirely within our ideas. The ‘dross’ in our ideas does not correspond to what is there in the object, and that is precisely what makes it ‘dross’. One empiricist at least did think that our ideas and the object really are identical, namely Berkeley. But for Berkeley the whole object, not just part of it, is constituted by our ideas - there is no dross and no work of extraction to be done. In a nutshell, the difference between Locke and Berkeley is this: Locke thought that we can only perceive our own ideas, and that the material world does not consist of our ideas - hence we cannot perceive the material world; Berkeley thought we could only perceive our own ideas, and we can perceive the external world, hence the world must be composed o f our ideas. It is generally agreed that the mistake was the premiss they shared: despite them both, we can perceive the material world. However, neither Berkeley’s direct perception nor Locke’s indirect knowledge is a process of extraction. In one way, their theories would be better if they were, for so long as we recognise that ‘extraction’ can be no more than a metaphor, it is possible to interpret it in such a

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way that is is quite an illuminating one, pointing to a feature of knowledge neglected by empiricism. For one common fault of empiricism (though it cannot be alleged against Bacon,2 and only with some reservations against Locke), is its tendency to take pure observation as the source of knowledge, failing to explain why we have to work quite hard to produce the experimental conditions which make observation significant in our attem pt to discover laws of nature, rather than just things which happened. The metaphor of extraction could be used to indicate that, in order to identify a law of nature, we must isolate a mechanism that will operate in a given way other things being equal, and since other things rarely oblige us by being equal of their own accord, we have to abstract from factors which prevent the supposed taw from producing its expected result; we have to make this abstraction at least in thought, and if we want a good experimental test, we have to find a way of sealing off the process we are investigating from the ‘other things’, of making the abstraction real. It will be necessary to return to this later. Meanwhile let us return to the other aspect of this metaphor: the identification of knowledge with (part of) its object, of our ideas with what they are about. The understanding of this ‘aboutness’ is the perennial problem of the theory of knowledge. In discussing the difference between Marx’s method as set out in the 1857 Introduction and Hegel’s method as criticised by Marx in that text, Althusser claims that Hegel confuses while Marx distinguishes the ‘real object’ and the ‘object of knowledge’, and that Hegel thus reproduces ‘the confusion which characterises the problematic of empiricism’ (RC, p.41).3 It seems to me that M arx, on the contrary, saw Hegel as taking ‘one step forward, two steps back’ in relation to the empiricists. The step forward is in recognising that we do not acquire knowledge simply by observing, but rather, in Marx’s phrase, by ‘the working up of observation and conception into concepts’ (Grundrisse, p.101). Hence knowledge is the product of theoretical labour, not something that is impressed passively on our minds by nature through experience. But Hegel goes wrong in thinking that, since knowledge is our product, the real that is known is our product. For this reason, it is unfortunate that Althusser uses the term ‘the object of knowledge’ for that

How N ot to be a Bad Empiricist

5

which is to be distinguished from the real object, rather than, say, ‘the object in thought’; for the natural interpretation of the term ‘the object of knowledge’ is ‘the real object which the knowledge is about’. Hegel as presented by M arx here differs from the empiricists both in what he gets right and in what he gets wrong; on Althusser’s non-standard definition of empiricism, he turns out to be an empiricist - arguably, the only empiricist. The inadequacy of Althusser’s real object/object of know­ ledge distinction to clarify the ‘aboutness’ of knowledge will be taken up again when I discuss Bhaskar’s distinction between the intransitive and transitive objects of science. But first I want to consider a section of this essay of Althusser’s which does show up the inadequacies of empiricism as it has actually existed. This is done under the guise of a critique of pragmatism, particularly in its M arxist form. (ii) The distinction o f practices Althusser accepts that all knowledge is the result of practice and that every practice involves some sort of knowledge, but he rejects what he calls an egalitarian conception of practice; in which practice is said to be the source of knowledge, and, since nothing is said to the contrary, it is assumed that all practices are equal in this respect. Something of the sort was presumably implicit in the sending of intellectuals to work in the fields during Mao’s ‘cultural revolution’, in so far as this was given epistemic and not merely sociological or moral significance, and it is not unknown for people on the Far Left in Britain to imagine that one’s insight into the nature of capitalist society will be in direct proportion to the number o f hours one has spent selling socialist weeklies on the High Street. But since not only correct but also incorrect ideas come from social practice where else? - this is obviously not good enough. This point against ‘pragmatism’ tells against empiricism too, for the empiricist’s test of knowledge is ‘experience’, which could be another way of saying ‘practice’, though the classical empiricists compounded their error by a rather more passive, contempla­ tive model of experience. For the rest, their case is the same; no account is given why one experience should be more significant as a source of knowledge than another. Indeed, there are species

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of modem empiricism, usually of a vaguely ‘radical’ kind, which explicidy adopt this egalitarian conception of experience in order to attack the alleged elitism of science: one person’s experience is as good as another’s, so why should not the experience of consciousness-raising be as good as that of scientific research? The answer, of course, is another question: Good for what? H ie question at issue is the epistemic worth of the experience, and not how exciting or therapeutic or confidence-boosting it is. Classical empiricist philosophy does not make explicit its egalitarian conception o f experience, b ut it does not have any satisfactory way of designating some experiences significant. When I was at school and got bored during maths lessons I used to amuse myself by counting the seagulls on the ridge of the roof opposite at regular intervals, and plotting the variation on a piece of graph-paper. Why is this less significant than, say, plotting the changes of tem perature in a test tube in which a chemical reaction is taking place? For it certainly is. (Not, of course, that there is anything intrinsically scientific about test tubes or unscientific about seagulls: the example is meant to indicate the difference between random observation of nature, however exactly recorded, and a genuine question put to nature by the isolation of its mechanisms.) Althusser’s real departure from empiricism is in rejecting this egalitarian conception of social practice (‘that night in which all practices are grey!’ RC, p.57), and a fortiori, of experience. ‘We must recognise that there is no practice in general, but only distinct practices which are not related in any Manichaean way with a theory which is opposed to them in every respect’ (ibid., p.58). He distinguishes economic, political and ideological practices (equivalent to the three traditional ‘storeys’ of the M arxist base-superstructure model of society), and also, theoretical practice, the practice of science. Since he stresses that all these practices have the character of production, each with its own kind of raw material, means of production, and product, I shall take it that they can be differentiated by the nature of their products: economic practice produces commodities, political practice produces (reproduces or transforms) social structures, ideological practice produces people’s ideology, theoretical practice produces theory.

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Althusser says: As w ell as production social practice includes other essential levels: political practice - which in M arxist parties is no longer spontaneous but organised on the basis o f the scientific theory o f historical materialism and which transforms its raw materials: social relations, into a determinate product (new social relations); ideological practice (ideology, whether religious, political, moral, legal or artistic, also transforms its object: men’s ‘consciousness’): and finally, theoretical practice. (FM , p.167)

In the examples here, the product appears to be the same kind of thing as the raw materials (social relations, consciousness); moreover, he has just written: . . .the determinant moment (or elem ent) is neither the raw material nor the product, but the practice in the narrow sense: the moment o f the labour of transformation itself, which sets to work, in a specific structure, men, means and a technical method o f utilising the means, (ibid., pp. 166-7)

All this looks unpromising for the interpretation that practices are to be defined by their products - of which we might expect Althusser to be suspicious anyway, as smacking o f teleology. Nevertheless, any plausible and non-tautological account of the determinance of ‘practice in the narrow sense’ will involve telling how that practice selects means and materials precisely with a view to producing a determinate result. So I shall take the definition of practices by their products to be the best option. However, economic practices, for instance, do also produce ideology, since one cannot engage in any activity without some understanding of what one is doing. We regard an elem ent o f ‘knowledge’, even in its most rudimentary forms and even though it is profoundly steeped in ideology, as always already present in the earliest stages o f practice, those that can be observed even in the subsistence practices of the most ‘primitive’ societies. (RC, pp.58-9)

Every practice gives rise to ‘practical experience’, which is knowledge of a sort, as a by-product, while producing its own characteristic product. Theoretical practice however is con­ stituted by its character as knowledge-producing. This, I think, is the foundation stone of Althusser’s version of the science/

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ideology distinction. Ideology does not necessarily involve false­ hood, but it is random, in the sense of Spinoza’s ‘random experience’ (experientia vaga). It is acquired in accordance with Picasso’s motto, ‘I don’t seek, I find’. Theoretical practice does seek. How does ideological practice fit into this? I take it that it is not a practice o f the production o f theories, as theoretical practice is, but of the transformation (or confirmation) of people’s ideology. Even without ideological practices there is ideology, since every practice secretes it. But there are also specifically ideological practices, such as education and pro­ paganda. These are not ideological because they are deceptive or repressive or anti-scientific; teaching science or arguing for socialism are just as much ideological practices as teaching astrology or arguing for liberalism. They are ideological because they are not practices of producing new knowledge, but of changing the ideas ‘in people’s heads’, the way people relate to their worlds, and so on. Hence the term ‘ideology’ is much less pejorative in Althusser’s use than in most M arxist writing (though it is compatible with Lenin’s usage). There is ideological knowledge and there is liberatory ideology. Only where ideology makes claims that conflict with the results of the sciences, or where it acts as an obstacle to scientific discovery, it is to be rejected and opposed. For instance, for all his ‘anti­ humanism’ (see Chapter 3 of this book), Althusser has never criticised humanism as an ideology. Maybe he should have done, but he has not. He attacks only its pretensions to be science, blocking the path of real scientific explanation in history. What do have to be opposed are theoretical ideologies (e.g. bourgeois economics). These are systematically elaborated theories, and hence produced by a ‘theoretical practice’ of a kind, but a theoretical practice whose conclusions are already prescribed for it by the ideology of the day. Thus Marx had criticised ‘vulgar economists’ as simply theorising the ideology spontaneously secreted by the economic practices of business­ men. The question might still be asked: what is so special about the products of theoretical practice as distinct from ‘ideological knowledge’? After all, there is a familiar form of ‘pragmatism’

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or ‘empiricism’ (in non-technical senses) which disparages theory and extols the merits of practical experience particularly in politics, which is Althusser’s prime concern. And while ‘pragm atist’ politics is usually a conservative or moderate reform ist stance, there has also been that debasement of M arxist theory that has so often brought it into disrepute: its use to produce rationalisations for whatever the leading party bureaucrats have decided to do. ‘There is dogmatic Marxism and creative Marxism; I stand by the latter,’ said Stalin;4 w hether there has ever been dogmatic M arxism I don’t know; but the sort of unprincipled ‘creative Marxism’ which consecrates every policy tu rn of a capricious dictator is something we can do without. Althusser later said of his category of theoretical practice that he was justifying ‘the right of M arxist theory not to be treated as a slave to tactical political decisions’ (ESC, p.169). But it is obviously not just a m atter of defending the ¡Freedom of conscience of party intellectuals, worthy as that is. I t is being claimed that theoretical practice can produce knowledge which could not have been obtained by mere practical experience, so that political practice, for instance, can become more effective by virtue of learning and applying the results of theoretical practice - just as industrial production can become more effective by virtue of applying the results of research in the natural sciences. It is to the example of the natural sciences and to mathematics that Althusser appeals at this point: they don’t need to wait for the practical successes of their applications in order to justify themselves; they have their own standards of proof, internal to each science; they are not just bodies of information culled from practical experience, they are theoretical practices and not theoretical aspects of other practices. The proofs of mathematics do not derive their cogency from their use in physics; and in ‘the experimental sciences’, experiment is internal to the theoretical practice of the science. This has sometimes been misunderstood as a re­ jection of any kind of practical testing, as if theoretical practice all goes on in the scientists’ heads; if it is excusable (though demonstrably inaccurate) to interpret some passages in Reading Capital that way, Althusser makes it very clear retrospectively, in his doctoral submission, what he was denying by the formula

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‘the internal character of the criteria of validation of theoretical practice’. He is denying that the tests and the applications of a science are the same. The formula is not intended to be read in accordance with the theory/practice contrast which he is engaged in challenging with his notion of theoretical practice: it does not mean ‘theories can be verified within pure thought’. It does not even have the primary meaning: you can’t generalise fom the way one science demonstrates its theories - another may do so quite differently. Its primary meaning is: sciences have means of proof that are independent of the practical applications of the science. We can work out whether a bridge will take heavy traffic - we don’t have to risk lorry drivers’ lives finding out. For some purposes, the proof of the pudding is in the dietician’s analysis. Hence he can link this doctrine with one which, on the face of it, would seem quite unconnected: Lenin’s anti-pragmatist point that Marxism works because it is true (i.e. that it is not that it is true because it works). Now I think that Althusser is quite right about ‘the experi­ mental sciences’, but that leaves a serious problem: experiments are internal to theoretical practice, but they are also ‘questions put to nature’. But the social sciences, while they have internal ‘thought-experiments’ and external applications, appear to have no mechanisms internal to their theoretical practice whereby questions can be put to nature. Unless it can be shown that this is not so, that social sciences have some mechanism which does for them what experiment does for the natural sciences, the appeal to the example of the latter gets us nowhere in thinking about the social sciences. Before we can explore the implications of this situation, we need to know a lot more about the significance of experiment than Althusser tells us. To that end I shall turn to Roy Bhaskar’s book A Realist Theory of Science. It is a critique of empiricism that has many points of contact with Althusser’s, but which takes as a central theme the question: W hat is it about the structure of the world that makes experiment possible and necessary? Its answers go much further than Althusser in showing why the empiricist programme is a non-starter.

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Bhaskar’s C ritique o f Em piricism

(I) ‘Actualism ’ Perhaps the best approach to Bhaskar’s work is through his criticism of two errors prevalent among empiricists, which he calls actuaiism and the epistemic fallacy. Actualism is connected with Hume’s analysis of causality in terms of constant conjunction: whenever A occurs it is followed by B, so A causes B. It has been taken for granted by most empiricists that such conjunctions occur in nature and constitute its causal order. Bhaskar points out that they are rare in nature: they occur in astronomy, but otherwise they have for the most part to be produced in the laboratory. This is not because natural events are not governed by causal laws, but because they are co-determined by a number of causal mechanisms, no one of which may be realised in the actual sequence of events. (‘Realised’ in the sense of producing in reality the effect which it would produce if other things were equal: very crudely, the law o f gravity is realised when the apple falls from the tree, though it was operating all along.) The task of a scientific experiment is to isolate one causal mechanism, to establish closure, creating artificially the conditions of the mechanism’s realisation. But the practical interest of the result of such an experiment is that the mechanism that is thereby identified in a closed system, also operates along with others in the open system which is the world outside the laboratory. Actualism consists in the idea that conditions of closure obtain spontaneously, i.e. that constant conjunctions are observable in nature, not only discoverable by experiment. Bhaskar argues that the need for and success of scientific experiment demonstrates the inadequacy of actualism. For if the sequence o f naturally occurring events were a sequence of constant conjunctions, we would only need to observe these conjunctions in order to postulate laws of nature; we would not need to produce experimental conditions and test whether constant conjunctions ocurred under constant circumstances. At the same tim e, the laws tested by our experiments would be of little interest if they only governed what happened in our experiments. We experiment in order to find out why things happen the way they do when we are not experimenting. Thus,

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any experiment which altered the operation of natural mechanisms in such a way that the processes it revealed were not the processes that would have occurred in the absence of the experiment, would defeat its own object. Attempts to study the instincts of animals by observing their behaviour in captivity foundered on this rock; it also presents a thorny problem for the study of human behaviour since people behave differently when they know they are being observed. So the fact that experiments are necessary indicates that ‘the Actual’, i.e. the series of events really occurring in the world, is an open system, governed by a multiplicity of laws, each of which may be tested experimentally by isolating the process it governs. The fact that informative experiments are possible indicates that, despite the rarity of constant conjunctions in nature, there are laws governing what happens. Bhaskar draws two anti-empiricist conclusions. First, that we require a theory of science that is realist, not only in that it asserts that the world exists independently of our knowledge of it (most, though not all, empiricists would agree with that), but also in that it asserts that the causal mechanisms governing the course of events are real, even though not always apparent. This view endorses a feature of Marx’s theoretical framework which has often come under attack from empiricists: the idea that there is an objective structure to the world, which is not immediately ‘visible’, but which is scientifically discoverable, and which explains appearances, even those which seem to contradict it: Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance o f things. (Marx, ‘Wages, Price and Profit’, in Selected Works in One Volume, p.209)

Bhaskar sums up this realist conclusion in the following table (RTS, p.13):

Mechanisms Events Experiences

Domain of Real

Domain of Actual

V

•/

V

Domain of Empirical

✓

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13

So Berkeley is wrong: unexperienced events are none the less actual; and Nietzsche is wrong: unexercised causal powers are none the less real.5 A word is necessary on the term ‘mechanisms’. Bhaskar is not primarily thinking of Newtonian mechanics, which indeed he argues is internally inconsistent at a certain point. Mechanisms are the structures of things by virtue of which they have the power to produce certain effects under certain conditions hence Bhaskar calls them ‘generative mechanisms’. So they are that in the world which correspond to laws in our explanatory theories. In fact the word ‘law’ (‘law of nature’, ‘causal law’) has sometimes been used to mean a generative mechanism in Bhaskar’s sense, sometimes to mean the formulation of such a mechanism in scientific discourse. Such ambiguities have always smoothed the path of those who wanted to treat the objects of science as our work, as ‘theoretical entities’ or ‘logical constructs’. The term ‘mechanism’ removes that ambiguity. Bhaskar neatly formulates his differences from actualism (or ‘empirical realism’) in term s of the three domains (Dr = domain of Real, Da = domain of Actual, Dc = domain of Empirical): These distinctions may be conveniently expressed by the formula D r > D , > D e, w here th e sp ecial case D r = D , = D e, assumed to be spontaneously satisfied by empirical realism, has in fact to be worked for in the social activity o f science. (RTS, p.229)

That is to say that in the normal run of things, (a) many events occur unperceived by anyone (Da > De), and (b) there are some real mechanisms in nature which never have effects, though they would under certain circumstances (wine can cheer, but not as long as it remains on the supermarket shelf) (Dr > Da). The domains are only exceptionally co-extensive, and to make them so requires great care on the part of the experimenter, to prevent other mechanisms interfering with the working of the mechanism under consideration, and to attend to that working. The value of this theory of the three domains for understanding the relation between open and dosed systems can be brought out by comparing these concepts with those in Popper’s interesting essay ‘O f Clouds and Clocks’.® Popper starts with the distinction made by ordinary language between ‘clockwork precision’ and the ‘vagaries of the weather’. Clocks

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represent ‘regular, orderly and predictable’ physical systems, clouds those that are ‘irregular, disorderly and more or less unpredictable’. Many things occupy intermediate positions on the spectrum between the accurate clock at one extreme and a particularly disturbed doud at the other. This distinction easily calls to mind Bhaskar’s use of the term s open system and closed system. Clouds are open systems, clocks approximate as closely as anything to closed ones. Popper goes on to characterise the physical determinism which was widely drawn as a conclusion from Newtonian srience, as the doctrine that ‘all clouds are clocks'. T hat is to say, that the allocation of certain phenomena to the cloudy end of the spectrum is based on no more than our relative ignorance of those things; that adequate knowledge would yield a clockish description of even the cloudiest phenomena. Now in so far as this form of determinism involves the doctrine that regular succession such as we expect in clocks occurs also in clouds, it is an instance of actualim in Bhaskar’s sense. However, Popper’s criticism of this determinism is also an actualist one. He points out that even the most precise of clocks is not - could not in prindple be - perfect. Hence, ‘all clocks are clouds', or in other words ... only clouds exist, though clouds of very different degrees of cloudiness’. That is quite true: there are no perfectly closed systems. But it is noteworthy that all the phenomena on Popper’s spectrum from very cloudy clouds to rather clockish clouds are denizens of the Actual; more or less spatio-temporally continuous things and processes. The question of underlying mechanisms is not raised in this connection. For this reason, something right about the ‘all clouds are clocks’ hypothesis is missed: that clouds are co­ determined by a num ber of mechanisms, each of which, were it isolated from the work of the others, would produce clockish results. If this were not so, clockish systems produced in the laboratory to test the behaviour of water vapour under definite conditions could not tell us anything about clouds. (ii) The social production o f knowledge and the epistem ic fallacy To return to Bhaskar’s formula: the phrase ‘the social activity of science’ marks another departure from classical empiricism, in

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addition to that involved in ‘depth-realism’. This is that knowledge is understood as the product of a social practice, not as a set of impressions inscribed by nature on the tabula rasa of the mind. Bhaskar refers to the ‘social production of knowledge by means o f knowledge’ - a phrase obviously suggested by the title of Piero Sraffa’s epoch-making work of political economy, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. The phrase also calls to mind Althusser’s account of theoretical practice as production; not creation out of nothing or with nothing, but production using existing knowledge to transform existing concepts into new, more adequate knowledge. The means of production may include theories of scientific method; types of explanation learnt from an existing science and applied to a new subject-m atter; knowledge of the working of one’s experimental instruments (microscopes, thermometers, etc.), and so on. It need not be a special type of knowledge epistemogenic knowledge, so to speak - for the question would then arise: how did we acquire the knowledge we needed in order to produce other knowledge? Rather, the case is as Spinoza describes it: The matter stands on the same footing as the making o f material tools, which might be argued about in a similar way. For, in order to work iron, a hammer is needed, and the hammer cannot be forthcoming unless it has been made; but, in order to make it, there was need o f another hammer and other tools, and so on to infinity. We m ight thus vainly endeavour to prove that men have no power o f working iron. But as men at first made use o f the instruments supplied by nature to accomplish very easy pieces of workmanship, laboriously and imperfectly, and then, when these were finished, wrought other tilings more difficult with less labour and greater perfection; and so gradually mounted from the sim plest operations to the making o f tools, and from the making o f tools to the making o f more complex tools, and fresh feats o f workmanship, till they arrived at making, with small expenditure o f labour, the vast number o f complicated mechanisms which they now possess. So, in like manner, the intellect, by its native strength, makes for itself intellectual instruments, whereby it acquires strength for performing other intellectual operations, and from these operations gets again fresh instruments, or the power o f pushing its investigations further, and thus gradually proceeds till it reaches the summit o f wisdom. (Improvement of the Understanding, Selections, p .ll, Gebhardt II/13-14)7

This rejection of the idea that experience is a purely passive

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process is common ground of all M arxist theories of knowledge, and most modem theories of knowledge of any sort. It is less common, however, to avoid the mistake of thinking that, since knowledge is our product, its object is our construct. (The word ‘construct’ and its derivatives are another rich source of confusions in this area, not least because they suggest not only building but also construed.) The relation between the passive conception of experience in classical empiricism, the active but anthropocentric conception of knowledge in Kant and others, and Bhaskar’s own realist position, is set out in the following diagram and commentary (RTS, p.145): Thus there is in science a characteristic kind o f dialectic in which a regularity is identified, a plausible explanation for it is invented and the reality o f the entities and processes postulated in the explanation is then checked. This is the logic o f scientific discovery, illustrated in the diagram below. I f the classical em piricist tradition stops at the first step, the neoKantian tradition sees the need for the second. But it either denies the possibility, or does not draw the full (transcendental realist) implications of the third step. I f and only if the third step is taken can there be an adequate rationale for the use o f laws to explain phenomena in open systems (where no constant conjunctions prevail) or for the experimental establishment o f that knowledge in the first place.

That is to say, classical empiricism observes, and takes note of regularities. The next step (moving down the broken line in the diagram) is to postulate models which would explain those events; sequences; invariance

result/regularity (1) classical empiricism

m odel-building

real

empirical testing

transcendental realism

imagined/imaginary (RTS, p.145)

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regularities. According to the view that Bhaskar calls transcendental idealism, (i.e. Kant and recent neo-Kantian philosophies of science), these models are necessary and are the stuff of our scientific theories, but do not really tell us what the world is like independently of us: they are devices enabling us to reduce to order what would otherwise be a disorderly mass of phenomena. Transcendental realism goes one step further: it says we are able to test these models experimentally, by setting up circumstances in which they, as it were, appear - but only if they really do represent some mechanism existing in nature. So for all that science is an active process, it must make room for a crucial point of passivity; in Bacon’s phrase, the experiment ‘puts nature to the question’; in other words, the scientist has ways of making nature talk. But the scientist must then listen. Nature may say, ‘You’ve got it wrong this time.’ This model of knowledge-acquisition might lead to the misunderstanding that, since science seeks objective knowledge of the real world, it aims to arrive at some final state of complete and unrevisable knowledge. I doubt whether any thoughtful person in the twentieth century has expected science to arrive at such a state, but philosophers of science still like to tilt at this windmill. Anyway, this is not Bhaskar’s position.8 Rather, he sees scientific progress as an endless process of deepening our knowledge of the world. I shall say more about this metaphor of deepening in the next chapter; for the present, it will serve to distinguish Bhaskar’s view of scientific change from two others: the empiricist view characterised by the metaphor of collection picking up new facts and adding them to the museum of knowledge; and the conventionalist metaphor of Gestalt switch finding a new way of seeing things, incompatible with and in some way better than the previous way, but not truer. Bhaskar argues that it is ‘necessary to distinguish clearly between the unchanging real objects that exist outside the scientific process and the changing cognitive objects that are produced within science as a function of scientific practice’ (‘Bachelard and Feyerabend’, p.32). He calls the former the intransitive and the latter the transitive object. A similar point has been matte by Lenin in terms of the distinction between absolute tru th and the relativity of our knowledge, which is an historically conditioned approach towards truth {Materialism

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and Empirio-Criticism), and again by Althusser in his discussion of M arx’s distinction between the real object and the object in thought. But unfortunately Lenin’s acute - if uncomradely attack on relativist readings of Marxism has been widely ignored in the West, while Althusser has been read as saying that knowledge has nothing to do with ‘things in themselves’. So perhaps Bhaskar is justified in claiming that these neologisms - ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’ in this sense - are unavoidable. The intransitive object is not an unknowable thing-in-itself; it is what the science in question is about, in the sense that biology is about life-processes, M arxist theory is about the mechanisms by which societies are reproduced and trans­ formed, logic is about the conditions of valid inference. It remains what it is whatever our theories say about it. The transitive object is what we can say about it at any stage of the history of science, and is an object in that it is the object of scientific labour, the raw material which it is the work of science to transform into new, deeper knowledge. Hence the two objects do not correspond to Althusser’s ‘real object’ and ‘object in thought’. The intransitive object is the real object, and it is this that the science is about. But the transitive objects correspond more nearly to Althusser’s notion of ‘Generalities I ’, i.e. the theoretical raw materials of theoretical practices (contrasted with ‘Generalities II’, the theoretical means of production, and ‘Generalities I I I’, the theoretical products; see FM , p.183 ff.). However, Althusser concentrates most of his attention on the initial ‘epistemological break’ which gives rise to a science where there was only ideology before. Hence ‘G .I.’ gets rather short shrift from the epistemic point of view. Bhaskar is also concerned with the transformations within the history of a science. Hence the transitive object is a knowledge, within limits, of the intransitive object, and cannot be understood except as the product of a project of deepening our knowledge of the intransitive object - and as the raw material of further work in that project. However it will always be subject to the constraints, not only of our finite cognitive capacities, but also of the ideological pressures of the class and culture of any given ‘scientific community’, of which more later in this chapter.

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The distinction between intransitive and transitive objects implies that ontological questions (questions about what exists) must always be kept distinct in principle from epistemological questions (questions about what we can know). O f course, at any given time the only resources we have available for answering questions about what there is are the resources of our current knowledge. But since we know that at any given time our knowledge is limited and open to revision, it is foolish to treat currently unanswerable ontological questions as no questions at all. However, Western philosophy since Descartes has had a persistent tendency - often avowed, and usually present even when not avowed - to treat all questions about what is as questions about what we can know. This is the second great error of empiricism (as of many other theories): the epistemic fallacy. Bhaskar defines this fallacy as ‘the view that statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge, i.e. that ontological questions can always be transposed into epistemological term s’ (RTS, p.36). The conception of the ‘empirical world’ as at once the world of our experience and the only world there is encapsulates this fallacy, and licenses the relegation of structures discoverable only by analysis, experiment and causal inference to a lower league of reality. As against this, Bhaskar urges that ‘we can allow that experience is in the last analysis epistemically decisive, without supposing that its objects are ontologically ultimate, in the sense that their existence depends on nothing else’ (RTS, p.38). This is not just a nod in the direction of unexperienced or extra-discursive reality, after which we can stick to talk of experience or discourse while claiming to avoid idealism. We cannot restrict ourselves to talk of the transitive object if we are to understand scientific change. Assuming that scientific revolutions are not motivated by boredom or vanity or terror or any such Feyerabendian motor of intellectual history, but by the explanatory superiority of the new theory, we need a notion of what both the old and new theories are about, i.e. of what it is that the new theory explains better. If the only object of a theory is its transitive object,9 there can be no such notion, and the motive for change can only be some defect other than falseness in the old theory. But what can that be? If we rule out

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‘defects’ like being unflattering to the human race, or displeasing to the ruler of the country,10we are left with internal inconsistency. But what is wrong with that? An inconsistent theory may be better than a consistently false one, or even better than a consistent and true but relatively uninformative one; inconsistent theories have been the basis of highly effective practical activities for many generations. Inconsistency is only a defect in a theory because an inconsistent theory cannot be true. We aim to replace an inconsistent theory with a consistent one because we want to know what is going on in the world outside of our theories. Hence, we do not, of course, replace an inconsistent theory with any old consistent one, but only with one that explains more than the old theory did. The epistemic fallacy, by denying the distinction between the two objects (transitive and intransitive), not only makes an account of the rationale of scientific revolutions impossible; it also puts obstacles in the path of potentially fruitful forms of research. For instance, it transforms the useful methodological rule ‘prefer the simplest hypothesis’, into a source of systematic blindess to certain kinds of reality (e.g. ‘overdetermined’ ones, in Freud’s sense).111 suspect it also eases the passage from the judgement ‘this is the best theory we’ve got’ to ‘it is perverse to look for a better one’, and thus licenses complacency with unsatisfactory theories at the frontiers of knowledge. It should be clear by now how Bhaskar’s theory of science is realist in a stronger sense than simply holding that the world exists independently of our knowledge of it. It further claims that the structures of things, which jointly generate the actual course of events, exist independently of us, can be discovered and - at least in some cases - experimentally checked by us; and that reality has an explorable but inexhaustible depth to it. Transcendental A rgum ents for R ealism

The term ‘transcendental realism*, by which Bhaskar denotes his theory, inevitably suggests a realist inversion of Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’; and indeed ‘transcendental argu­ ments’ figure very prominently in Bhaskar’s work.12 His fundamental question and Kant’s can be formulated in the

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21

same words: what must be true in order for knowledge to be possible? But it is not just their answers that are different. In the first place, because ‘what must be true?’ would mean for Bhaskar, how must the real world be structured? Whereas for K ant it meant: what structure m ust we impose on it? And consequently, in the second place, because the answers will not be a priori in the strict K antian sense; they will be contingently true, though presupposed by all other knowledge. We can conceive of a world so chaotic that knowledge of it would be impossible, and so no beings whose survival depends on knowledge, as ours does, could have existed in it. And we can say something about how our world must differ from such a world, in order for us to have the knowledge of it that we do. That ‘something’ will be logically prior to all the particular contents of our knowledge, but not necessarily true for any possible world. Finally, the premiss of Bhaskar’s transcendental arguments is not knowledge or experience in general, as for Kant, but the practice of the sciences. W ith these distinctions in mind, it is worthwhile looking at some objections that have been raised against Bhaskar’s transcendental arguments by M arxist critics. The belief that transcendental arguments must lead to synthetic a priori knowledge in Kant’s sense13has led to accusa­ tions of ill-founded speculation, and of dogmatic legislation for the sciences, in advance of their discoveries and to the detri­ ment of their freedom. Coupled with these charges is that of circularity; thus Cutler, Hindess, H irst and Hussain say that ‘Bhaskar’s “transcendental realism” argues from the success of scientific experimentation to the existence of mechanisms in nature which allow for knowledge to be gained by experiment’ and they paraphrase this (and a similar argument of mine) as ‘the epistemological project is a viable one because it is viable, and if it were not viable, it would not be viable’ (‘An Imaginary Orthodoxy’, in Economy and Society, vol. 8, no. 3, p.312). This looks like the sort of circularity which results in trivial conclusions rather than unwarranted ones - like our old friend from Molière: the dormitive powers of opium. But even such statements as that which Molière ridiculed are not completely worthless.14 Someone might have believed that God punished opium-takers by depriving them of consciousness; or might

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deny the distinction between causal powers and their exercise, as Nietzsche did. Ascription of dormitive power to opium directs research towards the chemical analysis of that substance, rather than obviating the need for such research, as Nietzsche’s actualism would, or appealing to the miraculous. In the case of the argument from scientific experiment, even the bare conclusion ‘the world is such as to yield results to experiments’ is contentful enough to exclude views which claim that experiments, being constituted within discourse, tell us nothing about extra-discursive reality, i.e. precisely the view of the aforesaid foursome. However, it is precisely when the non-triviality of the argument is recognised that the more serious type of charge of circularity comes into operation: that transcendental arguments assume contentious propositions which need to be proved. For instance David-Hillel Ruben argues that Bhaskar’s project of establishing realism by transcendental arguments is a non­ starter, and tells us that ‘mind-independent existence can never appear in the conclusion of a deductively valid argument unless m ind-independent existence is assumed in a premiss’ (Marxism and Materialism, p. 101). And according to Ruben, Bhaskar does covertly assume it in a premiss, as ‘to take science as immediate is to take real objects as immediate as well’ (ibid.). But surely it is this last statement of Ruben’s which is what needs to be proved. In Bhaskar’s argument, realism follows from the conjunction of two premisses: (1) If scientific activity occurs (or makes seme)15 then there must be real generative mechanisms in nature; (2) scientific activity does occur (m ates seme). The bulk of Bhaskar’s argumentation is concerned with proving (1). (2) is treated as uncontentious. Ruben’s argument seems to assume that if anything is contentious, it is (2), and that once (2) is conceded, there is no need for further arguments for realism. Let us concede to Ruben that if someone wants to shut their eyes to the achievements of the sciences, there is nothing more to be said to them. But the most interesting forms of anti­ realism take the history of the sciences very seriously, in particular that of scientific revolutions. Nothing is more natural, psychologically speaking, than to react to the overthrow of a scientific theory which we had come to regard as a

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paradigm of proven knowledge, by a bewildered feeling that there is no knowledge of the real world, just ‘our ideas’. It is then easy to succumb to the temptation offered by Nietzsche, and say, not (sadly) ‘it is only subjective’ but (with pride) ‘we did that’. Furthermore, whenever a new discovery throws light on some cognitive process, someone will always claim that it impugns the objectivity of the knowledge produced by that process. This inference is essentially similar whether it is drawn by Berkeley from discoveries in optics, by historicist Marxists from the theory of ideology, or by recent anti-realists fom psychoanalysis and linguistics.16 Both these motives for anti-realism assume that scientific activity is at least theoretically reputable and practically effec­ tive. If Bhaskar, starting from the same premisses, can show that scientific revolutions only make sense on the assumption that they yield deepened knowledge of structures which exist independently of us; and that scientific activity must be both a social process which the human sciences can investigate, and a source of objective knowledge, then he has undermined the interesting case for anti-realism, and left it only as an ‘impregnable blockhouse’ for the obscurantist. The fact that many forms of anti-realism are based on a genuine acquaintance with scientific practices, and sophisti­ cated - even if ultimately sophistical - arguments, does not however mean that such theories are practically innocuous, as leaving first-order knowledge intact. I would not go so far as Plekhanov and Lenin, who thought that comradely relations with non-realists were impossible, but I do think that such theories have effects, in that they block the (not necessarily empiricist) move of saying ‘but the facts are different’. The recent fashion of anti-realism on the Left has, I believe, licensed a growth of credulousness in those affected by it. Finally, with respect to Bhaskar’s transcendental arguments; he is not just arguing from the bare fact of knowledge to the bare fact of a real world, but from the peculiar nature of experiments such as those that have actually b eat performed in the history of the sciences, to the presence of a particular real structure of the world. To bring out the force of this point: there is nothing in Bhaskar’s work to suggest that actualism is an

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incoherent theory. We can perfectly consistently imagine a world in which causality manifested itself in spontaneous constant conjunctions. In such a world, knowledge could occur, and a simple empiricist account of that knowledge might be true. Observation and generalisation would suffice, without abstrac­ tion and experiment. But we know from the actual practice of the sciences that that world is not our world. We know that constant «injunctions are rare in nature; that they can be obtained by experimental techniques: that the mechanisms whose existence is verified by those techniques operate also in the open world outside the laboratory, where they co-determine the course of events with other mechanisms. All this indicates that Bhaskar’s premisses are as contingent as his conclusions; the theory is ‘a prior? only in the relative sense, that its propositions are presupposed by those belonging to other areas of knowledge. It does not purport, as Ruben alleges, ‘to tell the sciences the way the world must be* (op.cit., p.103). The quote by which Ruben supports this claim (‘It seems to me to be always a mistake in philosophy to argue from the current state of a science (and especially physics)’) comes from a passage in which Bhaskar is refusing to use the indeterminacy principle to argue against determinism - i.e. to make a very far-reaching ontological claim on the basis of one - highly parlous - sub­ theory of one science. Bhaskar argues, not from the current state of one science, but from general features of the history of the sciences. And that, surely, is correct. T he Tally on Em piricism It should now be possible to sum up what is wrong with empiricism. We have seen that it fails to give any ground for distinguishing experiences which are significant for knowledge and those which are not, since (as Bhaskar puts it): ‘the idea of insignificant experiences transcends the very bounds of its thought.’17 Theoretical practice is dissolved into the theoretical effect of practice in general; this would be all right if conditions of closure obtained naturally, and if the human mind really were a blank page. But neither is the case. It is worth noting that in one important respect, the error of

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empiricism is the opposite of that for which it is often attacked by its ‘radical’ critics. It is not ‘scientism’, but a neglect of the sharp distinction separating science from ‘commonsense’ knowledge based on practical experience. For empiricism teaches the continuity of commonsense and science, proposing a general theory of ‘knowledge’ - whether it be the knowledge that the cat has eaten the caviare or the knowledge that E=mc2. It neglects the specific differences of experiment as science’s means of reality-testing, and typically makes visual data the building-blocks of knowledge rather than those that the sciences use. Hence it assimilates science to everyday observation, rather as Thatcherism assimilates economic policy to doing the family shopping. Further, its ‘wax tablet’ theory of the mind gives little recognition that what precedes knowledge is typically not innocent ignorance, but false or inadequate ideas. O f course, in its fight against dogma, it contrasts knowledge ‘seen for oneself with received opinions. But since it fails to see how ‘seeing for oneself is itself moulded by received opinions, it is unable to follow up Blake’s insight that ‘Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falsehood continually,/ On Circumcision, not on Virginity, O Reasoners of Albion!’18 This is the heart of the criticism of the political effects of empiricism: while struggling for the right to learn by experience as against dogmatic authority, it overlooked the conservatism inherent in the uncriticised data of practical experience, in ‘common sense’. Hence it cannot make the distinction of principle between scientific knowledge and the ideological knowledge from which it is emergent. Throughout the texts of scientific socialism, one theme has been that it is not enough to rely on knowledge that one does not seek but finds while in the course of doing something else; science, which does seek, must carry on a constant struggle to expose the inadequacies of such knowledge, and if this is not done, we shall remain the dupes of tradition, politically as well as theoretically. Marx’s jibe at Weitling that ignorance never yet helped anybody, Luxemburg’s polemic against the reformists’ suspicion of theory since it might tell them that the immediate results after which they were running were not obtainable, Gramsci’s lines on philosophy to the effect that everyone has a

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world-view and the question is whether it is a passively imbibed one or consciously worked out, Lenin’s claim that the workers will spontaneously arrive at a bourgeois ideology, all make this point. In the next section I shall discuss the nature of this contrast, which empiricism cannot make, between science and ideology.19 First, though, it is important to make clear that empiricism is being criticised, not for appealing to experience against dogmatic authority, but for doing so in a way which is not sufficiently radical. The claim that empiricism is inherently conservative, if pressed too onesidedly, would make it quite incomprehensible why the great turn from the authority of books and institutions to the authority of experience, which took place above all in seventeenth-century England, whether in philosophy, science, religion or politics, should have been an unprecedented liberation of the human spirit, and not simply marking time. The age that gave rise to modern empiricism was also the age that beheaded a king who claimed divine right, put political democracy on the agenda, produced the first socialist literature (Gerrard Winstanley), issued the challenge to clerical religion: ‘You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say?’ (George Fox), and projected for the first time ever the progressive use of science for human liberation (Francis Bacon). If our critique of the authority of experience is not to be obscurantist, it must build on this achievement, recognising that experience is not untainted by the prejudices of the subject, but is nevertheless the only epistemic authority. That this authority is fallible like all others, does not mean that there must be some higher authority by which it is to be judged. Science/ideology If the trouble with empiricism is that it can’t make the science/ideology distinction, the question arises whether Althusser’s attempt to do so is any more successful, and, if not, whether transcendental realism can make good any of the deficiencies. First, a bit more needs to be said about the vicissitudes of the word ‘ideology’.

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In Marx and Engels, the term is most often used in a sense almost equivalent to idealism (of just the kind that they mean to reject in calling their theory ‘materialist’): ideology is thought that misunderstands itself as derived only from thought, as opposed to thought which is aware of its origins in practical interaction with nature.20 Later Marxists tended to use the term to mean simply the mental, cultural or intellectual superstructure of society, as contrasted with the material base. However, some of the pejorative tone of the word survived. One reason for this tone is, I think, as follows: ideas considered as ideology (in the second sense) are considered with respect to their social origin and function, etc. rather than their truth. When an idea is known to be true, we lose a lot of our interest in its origin: whether we consider it important that Darwin was influenced by the mis­ anthropic reactionary Malthus will depend largely on whether we believe Darwin’s theories true or not. Hence, though scientific ideas - just because they are ideas - are necessarily part of the superstructure and hence ‘ideology’, explanations of them as ideology will have purely anecdotal interest;21 ideas known to be false, however, will be studied purely and simply as ideology, and frequently explained in terms of class interest or class self-esteem. Althusser’s distinction between ideological practice and theoretical practice retains this feature, that science is an emergent form of ideology. A theoretical practice, producing new knowledge, will necessarily also be an ideological practice, in that it will (thereby) transform people’s consciousness. But whereas the interesting questions about ideological practices are class questions, the interesting questions about theoretical practices are cognitive or epistemic questions. Althusser does not always seem to recognise that his account of these practices has this consequence that theoretical practice is a special case of ideological practice; though he does see it as a feature of being in ideology not to admit to being in ideology, and of Marxist science to admit that one is in ideology, rather as for Lutheran theology the righteous know that they are sinners, while the sinners think that they are righteous.22 For the most part, though, I think Althusser commits the fallacy o f misplaced concreteness in his distinctions between

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various practices, i.e. thinks that we can distinguish separate practices as ideological or scientific, rather than separate aspects of the same practice.23 A given practice may produce science and ideology, not only in the truistic sense just referred to, but in that it may simultaneously bring into the world objective scientific knowledge and theoretical ideology that stands in the way of science and perpetuates class rule - just as a brewery will simultaneously bring into existence beer, surplus value and the ideology of the wage form. This is not just a question of there being mixed practices, producing science and theoretical ideology jumbled up in a single programme of work, such as socio-biology does. The point is that the primary distinction between science and ideology is not a distinction between separate (or potentially separate though actually mixed) prac­ tices at all, but between different kinds of relation between a practice and its environment. Not alternative kinds of relation every practice is related to its environment in an ideological way, only some in a scientific way. The study of, say, an economic research project as ideology will ask questions about its relation as superstructure to other social levels (its funding, control, selection of agents, terms of reference) and other ideology (e.g. the implicit ‘humanism’ of the agents, predispos­ ing them to think ‘it’s up to each agent what happens’, and so on). A study of it as science will ask what questions it asks about the world, where it looks for its answers, how its putative explanations explain, whether its deductive arguments are valid, how it handles statistics, how it fits in with existing wellfounded sciences, how it responds to apparent counter-examples to its hypotheses, and so on. The latter aspect is distinguishable as a set of mechanisms for testing the theory as a map of some aspect of the real world, which thus bring it about that, subject to human error, the transformed transitive object of the science is also a deeper knowledge of the intransitive object. The former aspect brings it about that, within the limits set by the require­ ments of plausibility and operationality, and subject to the sometimes courageously recalcitrant human will to truth, the transformed transitive object will be in conformity with the outlook of the configuration of class forces that produced the project. In short, the ideological relations of a theoretical practice are its social conditions of existence, its epistemic

How N ot to be a Bad Empiricist

29

relations by virtue of which it is a science are relations with its intransitive object. Hence a scientific theory has two ‘outsides’: the outside of its social production and the outside of its intransitive object. In both cases, its relations to them are causal in character, so both kinds of study of a science ask why (in a causal sense of ‘why’) such and such results are obtained by the science. If these amendments to Althusser’s theory are correct, it is legitimate to study the same practice as science and as ideology; but this does not mean that the two studies should be confused. O f course, if one were to give a detailed causal account of the origins of a theoretical result - how it was projected, financed, hypothesised, tested, amended, verified, disseminated, applied, and so on - such an account would refer to both epistemic and ideological mechanisms. But there are clear criteria (which is not to say they are easy to apply) for determining which is which: in so far as mechanisms are set up which allow the mechanisms present in the intransitive object to determine the result, it is science; in so far as mechanisms are set up which allow the relations of power in society to determine the result, it is ideology. Of course, there must be social mechanisms leading to the setting-up of research projects, just as there must be subjective motives for entering a scientific career. But while these may affect which area of reality is studied (and in that sense determine what the product is), they should not affect the conclusions about any given area, and do not in so far as those conclusions are scientific. This is not just (though it is also) to say that they do not affect the truth of those conclusions (anyone who thinks that class ideology determines what is true is quite simply not to be trusted). Scientific conclusions are not necessarily true, nor ideological ones false. But scientific conclusions are arrived at by a truth-seeking procedure, ideological ones by (in a very broad sense) social functionality­ seeking procedures. Once we know which disciplines are sciences, we may be able, by studying them under their ideological aspect and comparing them with disciplines which are merely ideological, to determine what social mechanisms are conducive to the production of objective science and what are not. Probably it can be shown that societies whose maintenance requires the increase of human power over nature (capitalism,

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socialism) will be conducive to natural science, whereas societies cemented by an ideology which regards such power as unnecessary or impossible or undesirable will not; and that societies which tend to eliminate oppression24 will be conducive to genuine social science, while societies which are based on oppression will not. These positions will have consequences for disciplines like the social study of science, and for slogans like ‘radical science’. Obviously, scientific institutions and practices can be studied sociologically. We can ask questions about who employs most scientists, why most practitioners of every science except psychoanalysis are male, whether scientists are highly or badly paid, how strong a pressure group they form on government policies, what social power relations govern their labour process, what their political tendencies are, and so on. Just as one can ask exactly the same questions about priests, lorry drivers or solicitors. But this sort of question will tell us nothing about their theoretical product. We can also ask questions about the relative role of scientific and ideological mechanisms in determining their product. This will have consequences with regard to their credibility or otherwise. The more ideological motives there are for arriving at a given conclusion, the more carefully we shall want to inspect the testing procedures that are said to support that conclusion; but also, the more rigorous and conclusive the tests, the less the ideological aspect will concern us from the point of view of assessing the credibility of the results. Crudely: if Lord Clench’s report on the industrial effluent poured into the sea by the firm of Raikoff and Foulham concludes that the effluent is harmless to fish, and we discover that Lord Clench has a million pounds invested in Raikoff and Foulham pic, we shall want to inspect the scientific evidence very closely indeed. But once we have good scientific support for a conclusion, the ideological aspect loses its cognitive interest. In the case of knowledge produced by well-established sciences and repeatedly tested in closed systems, it would be silly to start checking the research funding sources in Who Owns Whom before deciding what to believe. In short, studies of a science which are to pass judgement on it must be epistemological as well as social; the more ideological

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motives are present, the more the epistemic mechanisms require scrutiny, but if those epistemic mechanisms are good enough, ideological questions will drop out altogether from the credibility standpoint. Generally speaking, it is only in the social sciences and the applied sciences that social studies will have any epistemic relevance today (though this does not mean that scientific practices do not, like any other practice, secrete ideology as a by-product in the heads o f their agents). Theoretical practices may be ideological, then, in several senses: in the innocent and trivial sense that they affect people’s ideas; in the important non-pejorative sense that they have social causes; in the pejorative sense, that they may, to a greater or lesser extent, allow the social mechanisms to override epistemic mechanisms in determining their results; and that inevitably (but not innocently) they generate spontaneous, nonscientific ideas in their agents (‘nocturnal’ consciousness) in various ways depending partly on subjective predisposition (which could be thought of as a third, subjective, outside). This could be represented diagrammatically: Theoretical ideology

The unbroken arrows are necessarily all present in anything resembling a science. The broken arrows represent the theoreti­ cal effects of the different mechanisms, which can forestall each

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other, producing varying degrees of theoretical ideology and science in the outcome. If we take neo-classical (marginalist) economics as an instance, the diagram might be sketched as follows:

'Consumer free choice ‘Efficiency = profitability’ ‘Each factor o f production deserves its reward’

Market mechanisms

*1 have in mind, not just utilitarianism as a philosphical theory, but attempts to generalise ‘economic’ (marginalist) types of practical reasoning to marital counselling and other inappropriate areas.

Thus it is perfectly possible to recognise the value of sociological study of scientific practices and institutions while upholding the distinction between science and ideology, provided only that one does not commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness in making that distinction. The possible positions on this issue are exactly parallel to those in the debate about body and mind: one can hold that they are distinct substances (fallacy of misplaced concreteness), or that we don’t need mindtalk since physiology explains both (reductionism) or that people are single substances which can be studied under either

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their mental or physiological aspect, the two studies being mutually irreducible. The third position (which is my own) is parallel to the view I have been defending about science and ideology. ‘Radical science’ usually means reducing the epistemic mechanisms to ideological ones, and so is parallel to physio­ logical reductionism. It sees science as an expression of its subject rather than an explanation of its object; hence its judgement of a ‘science’ will tend to depend on its judgement of its ‘subject’, i.e. it asks ‘whose science is it?’. Historically, this has been associated with several different political standpoints: Nazism (‘Aryan psychology’), Stalinism (Lysenko’s ‘proletarian biology’), Islamic fundamentalism (‘Islamic economics’) and, most significant in the West today, feminism. I have before me a publisher’s blurb25 on a collection of feminist critiques of ‘masculine’ science, which asks: ‘Does this less than fully human understanding distort our models of reason and of scientific inquiry?’ But any discipline which purported to be ‘fully human’ - i.e. to express humanity (in all its aspects - or at all!) would to that extent be ideological. Not that there is anything wrong with self-expression, but it tells us about the subjectivity of the person or group that express themselves, not about crystals, or howling monkeys, or black holes, or overproduction crises. Of course, science is a human activity, and its existence does tell us something about humanity; it bears witness to its objective curiosity, its desire to know the workings of things outside itself, or within itself but opaque to consciousness. But the blurb in question goes on to suggest that the conception of ‘objective inquiry’ is itself a ‘masculine’ one. If it were really true that women were so lacking in curiosity about the world around them, no doubt men would just have to get on with the job of science by themselves, but it is not a proposition I would care to commit myself to. The frequent claim that science (or existing science) is sexist in content and requires a feminist critique could mean any of several things, and a consideration of them will throw some light on the working of tbe science/ideology distinction. Nothing here is specific to the science-and-sexism issue; it could all be generalised to tbe science-and-class or science-and-

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race issues. But while Aryan psychology and proletarian biology are no longer taken seriously by decent people, the project of feminist science has acquired some academic and political respectability. (i) ‘Sexism’ could be interpreted in a purely ‘emotive’ sense, as meaning a subjective dislike of the idea of equality between the sexes. In that case, the question whether science was sexist could not even arise. Science would only be relevant to sexism in so far as it might be possible to explain scientifically why some people are sexists and some are not; possibly, such explanations might debunk sexism. But neither sexism nor its opposite would have anything to contribute to scientific discourse. (ii) Sexism as an ideology could constitute an obstacle to scientific advance, just as the commitment of the Church to a geocentric view of the universe did in the sixteenth century. Undoubtedly, sexism has had this effect in some medical and behavioural sciences. But this is not sexist science - it is sexist ideology disrupting the epistemic mechanisms of science. (iii) In so far as sexism is not merely an emotive attitude but has a propositional content, its propositions might be confirmed or refuted by the sciences. I suspect that it is no accident that as the prestige of science has increased, sexism has been less and less taken for granted, or that anti-scientific ideologies such as romanticism, Nazism or the various fundamentalisms have also been the most aggressively sexist. However, there can be no guarantee that this or that proposition belonging to sexist ideology might not be confirmed by a science. There is nothing whatever to be said for rejecting the science on that account anymore than for smashing a microscope which reveals bugs in the holy water. To ask in general terms ‘is science sexist?’ in this sense would not be to call science into question: rather, it would be to open the question whether sexism might not be true after all. But to return to the more plausible isolated instance: take the hypothesis that men are, on average, inherently better at grasping spatial concepts and skills than women, while women are better than men at linguistic ones. It is easy to construct alternative programmes of feminist educational reform based on the one hand on this hypothesis, and on the other hand, on the

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view that any such apparent differences are the effects of earlier education. Much as it would be nicer to believe that there are no innate differences between men and women other than the physical ones, if we ask which hypothesis it is in the interest of women to believe, the answer can only be: whichever is true. (iv) It might be claimed that the whole project of science is sexist; that some other form of knowledge of the same objects is superior, or that the whole project of objective knowledge is a morally objectionable one. There are of course non-scientific forms of knowledge, notably ‘phenomenological’ knowledge (not the introspection of the stream of consciousness, but the concrete knowledge which is inherent in everyday being-in-theworld). But ho amount of interrogation of this is going to tell us why the beings within the world - including human beings work the way they do. When such phenomenological know­ ledge is appealed to in the context of a feminist critique of science, the implication is: do not ignore this area at which women are particularly talented by focusing exclusively on objective structural knowledge at which men are particularly talented. While it is quite reasonable to call either sort of knowledge to mind if there is any danger of its being lost sight of through onesided attention to the other, the ploy of assigning objective science to men and ‘phenomenology* to women is simply an endorsement of that least plausible of sexist stereotypes: women as subjective, contemplative, relating to things in an aesthetic way, men as objective, calculative, relating to things in a practical way. If such a stereotype were true, the conclusion should be, not that science is sexist, but that women are not likely to be very good at science, nor men at art. I don’t believe a word of it.26 Finally, it could be argued that the scientific kind of knowledge is guilty from birth - that it desecrates the dignity and unity of nature, that it aims at power and power is a Bad Thing, and so on. This is not, of course, a specifically feminist view. Probably it has always existed in popular superstition as the idea that ‘there are some things that we are not supposed to know’, enshrined in mythology, interestingly enough in the present context, in the story of Pandora’s Box. This theme can be traced throughout the Romantic Movement, and its modem

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successors. The blame for this supposed cosmic crime has been variously assigned to the empiricists (by the English Romantics), the rationalists (by the German Romantics), the capitalists (by Marxist Romantics) and the Jews (by Hitler). Today, it is most often men that are scapegoated in this matter. In so far as this stance is a moral objection to the project of science rather than an internal objection to the claims of science to knowledge, upholding the science/ideology distinction is neither necessary nor sufficient to refute it. So this is not the place to deal with it in detail. But two brief political points about it are in order: (1) It is one of the most fundamental - and I think convincing - contentions of Marx’s theory of history that emancipation from oppression is absolutely dependent on increasing human power over nature, making it possible for everyone to have the leisure and education for seif-government and self-develop­ ment. As Rousseau said of the Greek democracies, ‘slaves did their work for them; their great concern was with liberty’ (Social Contract, p.79), the formula for a socialist common­ wealth would be that machines do their work for them, their great concern is with liberty. If this sounds utopian: even such human emancipation as has already taken place is dependent on increased power over nature through the application of science in industry. In the words of Marx and Engels: slavery cannot be abolished without the steam engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture . . . people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. ‘Liberation’ is an historical and not a mental act, and is brought about by historical conditions, the development o f industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions o f intercourse. (The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur, p.61)

To vote for relinquishing human power over nature through science is to vote for the permanent oppression of some people by others. (2) That might be a low price to pay for the survival of life on earth, currently threatened by the misuse of human power over nature. But that threat comes, not from the augmentation of that power as such, but from the division of that augmented

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power between competing capitals and antagonistic nation­ states. The world market and the arms race bring it about that, though our power over nature is increased, our power over that power is lost. Hence (to risk a metaphor from human power struggles) our relation to nature is not that of domination at all, but of raiding and plunder, with all the irresponsibility that that implies. Domination of nature, which requires careful tending of this ‘common treasury’ (as Winstanley called it), can only come about through the economic and political unification of mankind by international socialism. So the twin aims proposed by Trotsky as the basis of Marxist ethics,27 increasing the power of man over nature and the abolition of the power of man over man, are interdependent; not only that: the salvation of nature itself depends upon them. A final word on the attempt to reduce science to ideology, in justification of the brevity of my counter-argument. Its political motives aside, that attempt is an instance of the epistemological road to idealism, which I have suggested is essentially similar in Berkeley, historidsm or modern semiological idealism; the difference between these idealisms is simply that they reduce epistemology to different sciences; if the argument against any one of these reductions works, it works equally against all the others. And it is hardly profitable, at this time of day, to go to great lengths to refute Berkeley. It may not be amiss, though, to try to understand the persuasiveness of this fallacious inference from the premiss ‘science S explains cognitive process C to the conclusion ‘C does not give us objective knowledge of its putative object O’. In the sentences ‘S explains C’ and ‘C explains O’, C figures once as object, once as subject. Suppose that this innocent grammatical fact were to be interpreted in accordance with an ontology in which subjects and objects were mutually exclusive classes: a contradiction would be generated. It may be that this subject/object ontology is a very fundamental phantasy underlying everyone’s perception of the world, no doubt for good Freudian or Kleinian reasons. Any sentence of the form ‘subject - verb - object’ might then be unconsciously read as meaning ‘subject de-activates object’. This would explain the plausibility to many of the idea that objective knowledge is out of place in the human world, as well

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as explaining the idealist move. The subject/object ontology is of course explicit in some philosophies - in Sartre’s account of ‘Concrete Relations with Others’ in Being and Nothingness, for instance; the plausibility of some of the descriptions in that account testify, not to the truth of the subject/object ontology, but to its unconscious efficacy. N otes 1. From ‘The M asculine Birth o f Tim e’, in Benjamin Farrington, (ed.) The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, p.72. 2. After the authority o f ancient texts, Bacon’s chief bugbear was the haphazard nature o f knowledge acquired by practical experience; he saw the need to work systematically for knowledge, combining the skills o f scholar and artisan. H e did not regard him self as an em piricist: ‘The Empirics are like ants; they gather and consume. The Rationalists are spiders spinning webs out o f them selves. But the bee com bines both functions. It gathers its material from flowers o f garden and field, and digests and transforms them by a faculty o f its own. This is the type of true philosophy.’ (From ‘Thoughts and Conclusions’, op.cit., p.97) 3. Althusser even attributes Marx’s use o f the terms ‘appearance and essence, outside and inside, inner essence o f things, real and apparent movement, etc.’ to an ‘em piricist’ problematic inherited from Hegel! (RC, p.38). One wonders whether Althusser knows that real empiricists (those few o f them who write about Marx in an informed way) baulk precisely at this sort o f ‘essentialist’ language. 4. The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), p.197. Stalin was defending the idea that Russia could lead the way to socialism in the absence o f a proletarian revolution in the West. 5. One o f the most explicit statements o f actualist metaphysics occurs in Nietzsche’s Genealogy o f Morals: For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation o f a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions o f strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed - the deed is everything. (On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, p.45) N ietzsche’s moral, o f course, is that it is absurd for the oppressed and downtrodden to demand restraint on the part o f the strong, to ‘make the bird o f prey accountable for being a bird o f prey’. But he is also making a

How N ot to be a Bad Empiricist

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

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general m etaphysical claim: ‘science still lies under the m isleading influence o f language and has not disposed o f that litde changeling, the “subject” ’ (ibid.). Reprinted in Objective Knowledge. For all quotations from Spinoza I give the references both to the translation used, and to the volume and page o f the four-volume edition Spinoza Opera, ed. Gebhardt (Carl W inter, Heidelberg, 1925). These references are obtained from the margins o f Edwin Curley’s English translation The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. I (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N .J., 1985). N or is it that o f classical Marxism. It is a curious fact that modem em piricists, who on the one hand know that science and dogmatism are incom patible, and claim that Marxism is dogmatic and therefore not scientific, w ill on the other hand treat Marx’s claim to be scientific as proof o f his dogmatism. I f a thought can be discerned beneath this stereotyped response, it must be that before Einstein upset the applecart, the image o f scientific knowledge was o f a final state o f fully adequate knowledge, typified by a common - erroneous - reading o f Newton’s claim ‘I do not make hypotheses’. But whoever did hold such a view o f science, Marx and Engels did not. They were acutely aware o f the approximate, provisional and revisible nature o f all scientific findings. Thus Engels says that if one proceeds from a dialectical standpoint, ‘the demand for final solutions and eternal truths ceases once for all’ {Ludwig Feuerbach)-, cf. Lenin: ‘dialectical materialism insists on the approxi­ m ate, relative character o f every scientific theory o f the structure o f matter and its properties’ {Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p.249). Marx - less explicit about his method - showed in practice his willingness to revise his own hypotheses in the light o f new information: for instance, his abandonment o f his early view that the workers’ living standards would be increasingly impoverished by capitalism. Empiricist critics, o f course, see such open-m indedness as ‘slippery’, and so just as bad as its only alternative, ‘dogmatism’: ‘We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you and ye have not wept.’ Such a view follows from Kuhn’s position (in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), and from that of Cuder, Hindess, Hirst and Hussain (in M arx’s Capital and Capitalism Today). Feyerabend thinks these are as good as any reasons for changing one’s theory (see his Against Method). I see no point in giving my reasons for disagreeing with him. However, see Bhaskar’s essay ‘Bachelard and Feyerabend: Two Philosophies o f Science’ {New Left Review, no.94, 1975) for a critical assessment. See John Mepham’s essay ‘T he Structural Sciences and Philosophy*, in Structuralism (ed. Robey), p.109. ‘Transcendental arguments’, i.e. arguments o f the form: ‘what must be true in order for such and such an activity to be possible?’ U sually, the activity is a human activity which is indubitably actual, and the conclusion concerns some very fundamental ontological question. Thus

40

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

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Kant argues from the possibility o f experience to the spatio-temporal and causal structuring o f the empirical world; Bhaskar argues from the possibility o f scientific experiment to the stratification o f natural mechanisms, and from the possibility o f irieducibly social knowledge to the ‘transformational model o f social activity’. Transcendental arguments also figure prominently in the work o f Sartre and Strawson. ‘Synthetic a priori knowledge’, i.e. knowledge independent o f all experience {apriori), yet such that it does not merely draw out and make explicit ideas already contained in a concept (as does ‘all bachelors are unmarried’) but adds something new to it. Kant’s example is: ‘Everything which happens has a cause.’ H e tells us that ‘The concept o f a “cause” . . . signifies som ething different from “that which happens”, and is not in any way contained in this latter representation’ but that ‘the concept o f cause, though not contained in it, yet belongs, and indeed necessarily belongs, to it’ (Critique of Pure Reason, pp.50-1). Cf. Bhaskar’s remarks about this celebrated example on p. 175 o f RTS. Ted Benton, in a review o f Bhaskar’s work in Radical Philosophy, no.27, (1981) raises the issue whether it is the sim ple existence, the intelligibility or the rational justifiability o f the sciences which forms the premiss of Bhaskar’s transcendental arguments. As Benton him self points out, science, as a ‘cognitively meaningful sym bolic practice’, could hardly exist without being intelligible. But its intelligibility cannot be spelt out without mentioning that it aims to discover previously unknown features o f the world. It is rationally justified to the extent that its development is the progressive accomplishment o f this aim. A ‘science’ would be irrational to the extent that it would be vulnerable to an explanatory critique (see Chapter 4). Cutler, H indess, H irst and Hussain cite psychoanalysis as one o f the developments which undermined realist epistemology (I am one of their targets) - yet Freud twice split the International Psychoanalytical Association in defence, among other things, o f scientific realism, against the Platonism o f Jung and the constructivism o f Adler. They also accuse me of an insular conception o f philosophy, by which I presume they mean that not all the books I quote were written in Paris. R TS, p.8. Bhaskar actually says this o f positivism rather than o f em piricism , but I take it that in modem polemical use the terms are coextensive. From ‘Jerusalem’, Complete Works, p.687. See M cLellan’s K arl Marx, p. 157; Luxemburg’s ‘Reform or Revolution’, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p.87; Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, p.323; Lenin’s What is to be Done? Chapter 2. Thus Engels refers to ‘ideology, that is, occupation with thoughts as with independent entities, developing independently and subject only to their own laws’ (Ludwig Feuerbach, in Selected Works in Two Volumes, vol. I, p.465). A related point is made in his famous letter to Franz Mehring (14 July 1893): ‘Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive

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forces im pelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it would simply not be an ideological process’ (Selected Correspondence, p.459) 21. Admittedly there is a growing literature on such anecdotal topics as whether this scientist was a racist and that one believed in w itches, this one was probably celibate and that one probably slept with his sister-inlaw, and so on. But this can be treated as the academic equivalent o f the gutter press muck-raking about the private lives of public figures. 22. See Althusser’s essay ‘Ideology and the State’: . . . Ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is w ell known, the accusation o f being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a M arxist, which, in this matter, is to be exacdy the same thing). (LP, p.164) Compare Luther’s Theses for the Heidelberg Disputation: 7. The works o f righteous people would be deadly, if they were not feared to be deadly by these righteous people themselves in pious fear o f God. 8. The works o f men are all the more deadly when they are done without fear, and with pure and evil assurance. {Selections, p. 501). There is nothing necessarily morbid or mysterious about this doctrine; compare Simone de Beauvoir on the ethics o f revolutionary leadership: Kierkegaard has said that what distinguishes the pharisee from the genuinely moral man is that the former considers his anguish as a sure sign o f his virtue; . . . what distinguishes the tyrant from the man of good w ill is that the first rests in the certainty o f his aims, whereas the second keeps asking him self, ‘Am I really working for the liberation o f men?’ {The Ethics o f Ambiguity, p. 133) 23. Later, Althusser commits a similar mistake with respect to ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’; o f course, there are institutions which function mainly to produce ideology, but a theory o f ideology which focuses on these w ill m iss what is essential: the ideological efficacy o f institutions and practices o f a mainly non-ideological character. I discuss this more fully in the next chapter. 24. I use ‘oppression’ as a more general term than ‘exploitation’, which I reserve for surplus-value-extraction in Marx’s sense. By ‘oppression’ I mean simply the unilateral, structurally-rooted domination o f one human group by another. 25. The blurb (for Discovering Reality, eds Harding and Hintikka, (Reidel, Dordrecht, 1983) is chosen at random from a myriad o f blurbs for books

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on similar them es. I confess to not having read the book, which I am informed is rather a good one. 26. It might be claimed, if this sexist stereotype were accepted, that society is guilty o f a sort o f second-order sexism (what Russell Keat, in his paper ‘M asculinity in Philosophy’, Radical Philosophy 34, 1983, calls ‘genderism’) in valuing ‘masculine’ science rather than ‘feminine’ phenomenology. But does it? All the ‘ideological apparatuses’ - press, pulpit, popular songs, adverts, arts education, horror movies - combine to reassure us o f the superiority o f the phenomenological kind of knowledge, the shallowness, coldness, narrowness, etc. o f the scientific. After flying pickets, scientists are the folk villains o f the petty bourgeoisie. 27. In ‘Their Morals and Ours’, an essay with little else to commend it. I take it that ‘power’ here refers to unilateral domination, since people, being interdependent, cannot live without some form o f power over others.

2

Stratified Explanation and M a rx ’s Conception of History Continents or strata? In theorising the relation of revolutionary scientific advances to the philosophies to which they gave rise, Althusser uses the metaphor of theoretical continents ‘before Marx, two continents only had been opened up to scientific knowledge by sustained epistemological breaks: the continent of mathematics with the Greeks (by Thales or those designated by that mythical name) and the continent of physics (by Galileo and his successors)’ (LP, p.42). Althusser goes on to locate chemistry and biology, which achieved their ‘epistemological breaks’ with Lavoisier and with Darwin and Mendel, within the continent of physics. Marx is credited with opening a third continent - that of history; and it is ‘probable’ that Freud has discovered another. Now let us grant (for the moment at least) the unrivalled importance and novelty of the discoveries listed as continents, and also the idea of a philosophical lag. The question remains whether this metaphor of continents can be pushed any further. In fact, Althusser has already pushed it further by calling the various natural sciences regions of physics (loc. cit.): they presumably lie alongside of each other like Normandy and Brittany, parts of the same land mass, distinguished for historical and cultural reasons; but with no common boundaries with, or land routes to, other continents. The metaphor, so extended, suggests several questionable notions. First, it minimises the hiatuses between ‘regions’. According to Althusser, the discovery of the molecular basis of biology shows that biology is part of the continent of physics; rather as 43

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someone landing in Brittany might doubt whether it was part of the same land mass as the already familiar Normandy, and then, by making the journey, discover that it is. Surely, it is not quite like that. The discovery is not of a crossable boundary, but of a basis: we already knew various genetic laws; now we know more about how those laws operate, because we can identify some of the entities known through that science - genes - under a description drawn from another science - DNA molecules. We can then use our knowledge of the behaviour of molecules to understand why these particular molecules behave in the ways already mapped out by the biological sciences. Does not the metaphor of strata catch these features of the chemistry - biology relation better than that of regions? One may then ask, secondly, whether the same sort of ontological relation that obtains between chemistry and biology may not also obtain between the different continents. Am not human societies, for instance, dependent for their possibility on certain facts of biology, just as living organisms are on certain chemical facts? And is there not an asymmetry between the maths/physics divide and the physics/history one? That is, in that there is surely some ontological relation between nature and society; both are aspects of the real world, awaiting empirical discovery; nature is prior, both in time and in order of ontological dependence; society can only exist because nature is such that human life and social production are possible, and so on. But the continent of mathematics surely does not appear on the same map; it is in a sense constituted by its rules, not discovered by empirical investigation. This suggests, thirdly, that the metaphor of continents may also lead us astray in matters of epistemology and method. Althusser uses the unlikeness of methods in the natural and the mathematical sciences to lend plausibility to the idea of a similar unlikeness between the natural and social sciences. This makes it all too easy to limit experiment to the natural sciences, leaving the social scientist with much too clear an epistemological conscience. Finally, on the one hand, this metaphor leaves it quite unclear what, if anything, can be learnt about scientific procedure on one continent from what we know about scientific

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procedure on another; and on the other hand, it becomes falsely obvious that whatever can be identified as on one scientific continent can be investigated according to the methods of (other regions of) that continent. Such a view gives credence to an idea which has haunted Marxist researchers since long before Althusser: the idea that Marxism has the key to all knowledge, at least so far as the ‘continent of history’ is concerned. This idea has licensed ‘Marxist’ theories of the psychological, semiological and even biological sciences, on which some of the best minds of the Left have dissipated their energies. Lenin even coined a Russian portmanteau-word for this sort of error: 'komchvamtvd’, ‘communist swagger’.1 The direction of my remarks, I think, is clear: that what is required is an ordered hierarchy, a ‘tree’ of sciences, rather than the continent/region model. Oversimplifying a lot, it would presumably contain some such ordering as this: ? psychological and semiological sciences social sciences biological sciences molecular sciences ? There are several aspects to this ordering; let us start with what might be called ‘epistemological depth’. Bhaskar sees it as a common feature of the progress of the sciences that when some mechanism has been discovered which explains some event, underlying mechanisms are sought which explain the first mechanism. For example (RTS, p.169): Stratum I Stratum II Stratum III Stratum IV

2Na+2HC = 2NaCl+H2 explained by theory of atomic number and Mechanism 1 valency explained by theory of electrons and atomic Mechanism 2 structure explained by (competing theories of (Mechanism 3) sub-atomic structure)

This process of deepening an explanation may well involve revising and correcting the original explanation at certain

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points, and is also one way in which a theory can be confirmed or strengthened. Verification therefore takes place not only on the horizontal axis, by finding instances of the operation of a law, but on the vertical, showing how that law is possible. But there is no necessity that upper-stratum facts be discovered first. Tixis is worth saying for two reasons. First, because it indicates that the depth is not just epistemological, but has an ontological basis: there is a real ordering of the strata, not just a difference in ease of access to knowledge about them. And secondly, because it illustrates the inadequacy of reductive theories of the relations between strata. According to a reduc­ tive theory, we may well discover certain laws of psychology before those of neurophysiology, or of genetics before those of biochemistry, and that is just what gives provisional legitimacy to the upper-stratum discipline: for as soon as we can translate these laws into the terms of the more basic science, the raison d'être of the ‘upper* science disappears. But this familiar reductivist programme won’t do - in the first place, because, in Roy Bhaskar’s words, of ‘the need for a well-defined reductans’ (RTS, p. 181). In order to translate colour-concepts into light­ wave concepts, linguistic concepts into descriptions of marks on a page, psychological concepts into talk of brain-states, we need to know just what we are translating, and it is this that tells us why the translation is important. This is supported by the fact that there has never been a route even from a highly developed lower-stratum science to a science with a higher-stratum object. Only when the latter is independently theorised can we begin to correlate the two, and perhaps explain the upper by the lower.2 This all supports the view that the epistemological stratifi­ cation is not founded in contingent aspects of human cognitive capacities, but in a real ontological stratification of the object of the sciences. It is the real distinctions between the strata and their irreducibility one to another (of which more shortly), which explain the distinctions between the various sciences, the fact that ‘science’ does not exist except as a multiplicity of sciences. Hence Bhaskar, like Althusser, rejects what has become a popular orthodoxy about science: the idea that in itself nature is one, and the ideal science would therefore also be unitary; that the divisions between the sciences are arbitrary effects of some contingent human arrangement. There are

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reductive and romantic variants of this idea: the reductive one has as its project an ultimate translation of all sciences into the terms of physics; the romantic ones blame analytical reason, or industrialism, or capitalism, or some other cosmic bogey for the ‘fragmentation’ of our knowledge. Althusser’s metaphor of continents can be seen as a protest against this prejudice, but he leaves it unclear just what is wrong with it (the stratification of the objects of the sciences could be some necessary feature of our theoretical practices, rather than a contingent feature of the world we live in), and this metaphor also allows the reductive programme to go through within each continent. But for Bhaskar, the plurality of sciences is necessary because of the irreducibly stratified character of the mechanisms at work in the real world, so that the unity of nature is that of a laminate. Perhaps a little experiment in thought will illustrate this. Let us imagine a multiplicity of gods in Valhalla, each one of whom conforms to the popular image of an academic in that he is omniscient about his own subject, and absolutely ignorant about everything else. Thor, the physicist among the gods, will be able to predict the course of the world under a physical description, but this knowledge gives him no clues about the social realities on which Woden is the expert. Thor does not know there is a strike on. He knows only that certain arrangements of matter are not chugging away as usual, and that certain other more complex ones are sprawled on armchairs or kicking balls around fields instead of stationed in the factory. There are no gaps in his physical description of this, but in an important sense he does not know why certain of these events are occurring, and that sense is not analysable without residue in terms of the question: which descriptions are of interest to humans. A particular event which is certainly an event in the physical world and as such fully describable by Thor - let us say the chief shop steward’s visit to the local lorry depot asking them to black the plant - could not have taken place just as it did (even in purely physical terms) were it not for the existence of causal mechanisms at the social level, which of all the gods only Woden understands. There are, of course, events with purely physical determinants within the whole process which may affect its outcome, e.g. the police chief being struck by lightning on his way to arrest the pickets. So Woden’s

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knowledge is full of gaps, though he does at least know there is a strike on. In order to predict the outcome, collaboration would be necessary in Valhalla. Only when Thor and Woden get together with Frey, god of biology, and Loki, god of the unconscious, could it be learnt that the boss’s daughter is going to elope with the chief shop steward, the boss is going to die of apoplexy, and the daughter inherit the firm and turn it into a worker’s co-operative. For the purposes of simplicity I have treated physics as if it were a rock-bottom science in the sense that, so long as it sticks to its own terms, it can give an account of any process without causal gaps; in fact this appears not to be the case, though it is the most basic extant science. It may be doubted that there is any rock-bottom stratum. It is no more incoherent that the chain of vertical causality should extend forever downwards than that the chain of horizontal causality should extend forever backwards. I mention this only to take my distance from the epistemic fallacy which philosophical reflections on the frontiers of physics so often commit. In the most important of the senses in which the classical Marxist tradition has described itself as ‘materialist’, this theory is also materialist. That is to say, in that the lower strata explain the higher. This materialist direction of explanation operates as between mechanisms but not as between the concrete events governed by those mechanisms: it is the laws of chemistry which explain the laws of biology, but the presence of C2H 5OH (alcohol) in the demijohn is explained by the life-process of the yeast. Hence there is no tendency to play down the effectivity of mechanisms belonging to the upper strata of nature (using ‘nature’ here to include social and mental realities). Stratification in Open Systems Several features of this ontological stratification are worth noting. Let us distinguish between the area of reality governed by laws at a given stratum, and that affected by them. The human activities of the production and exchange of goods are governed by economic laws. The colour of moths is not governed by economic, but by biological laws. However, it is

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affected by economic laws, as the rise and fall of industrial melanism illustrates. Indeed, granted that a given law governs any stratum, there is nothing which cannot be affected by it. But this does not mean that all laws govern all entities. This can be illustrated by tire following diagrams: physics

Relation between the actions o f the mechanisms o f the various sciences. Symmetrical relations o f co-determination. The factory will work when the laws o f physics and economics permit, but either a mechanical breakdown or a recession will stop it.

Having made this distinction, it can be said that the areas governed by the higher strata laws always appear later in the history of the universe and remain smaller than those governed by more basic laws. Everything is governed by the laws of physics; since a few hundred million years ago, some of those but not all have been governed by the laws of biology; for a few hundred years, some but not all of those have been governed by the laws of capitalist economics, and so on. The above model of the relations between the strata enables us to say more about the idea of freedom-within-determinism.

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We have already seen that Bhaskar’s theory of multiple determination enables us to combine ‘ubiquity determinism’ (the notion that every event has a cause) with the denial of ‘regularity determinism’ (which treats the universe as if it were a closed system, within which a single causal mechanism operated, such that knowledge of that mechanism and of the state of the universe would make the future perfectly predictable). Once we have seen that the determination of events is not merely pluralistic but stratifiedy we can give an account of freedom which would, I think, lay to rest some of the fears that anti-determinists have had about ubiquity determinism, while retaining it.3 Each emergent stratum will effect alterations in the entities governed by the stratum from which it emerged, which would not have been effected had the new stratum not emerged. This is so even before the emergence of human life. The proliferation of bright colours at a certain point in evolutionary development, due to their survival value in many plants and animals, is a case in point. Although it is possible to translate colour-concepts into physicalistic terms, it is not pos­ sible to explain physicalistically why there were a lot more brightly coloured creatures about the earth at one time than there had been at an earlier time. And this, of course, has nothing to do with the phenomenology of colours, since there were no human beings around at the time. One feature of the stratification of nature requires mention because of its epistemological effects - both in accounting for ‘epistemological depth’, and in explaining the methodological problems specific to the upper-stratum sciences. There could be no laws of biological evolution if ‘random’ mutations of genes did not occur as a result of processes governed not by biological but only by physical laws (the randomness, of course, being relative only to concepts internal to biological theory); economic (and, more generally, social) laws could not operate if human beings did not, as a result of their biological nature, have a certain degree of adaptability in their maimer of producing the means of life. It is this ontological stratification that makes ‘vertical explanations’ possible, but it also means that every stratum which has another one below it must reckon with events which are accidents relative to its own laws: and not just

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accidental accidents - that is to say, it is not a matter of operating in contingently open systems, but of the impossi­ bility, not only in practice but in principle, of experimental closure or exact prediction. The higher the stratum, the more sources of accidents, the more distant the possibility of closure. Hence the gappiness of Woden’s knowledge in my little myth: gaps not just at the level of the Actual, where every science must recognise its limits and take its place among the multiple explanations of events; but gaps inherent in the generative mechanisms of the stratum. There is one more relation between strata which must be mentioned: the relation of structuration or composition. Entities inhabiting one stratum will be composed of entities inhabiting a lower one. Societies are composed (in part, at least) of people; living cells are composed of molecules, and so on. Bhaskar is explicit about the reality of the complexity of complex entities, whose powers are ‘emergent’ with respect to their components. In the Marxist context, the nature of die composition relation is crucial in the society/people instance. I shall discuss this whole question in the next chapter. Base and Superstructure

It may be useful at this stage to turn to an issue in traditional Marxist theory on which Bhaskar’s conception of the stratification of nature might throw some light, although he himself has been silent about it: the model of historical materialism as a system of explanation of the ‘superstructure’ (politics, ideology, etc.) in terms of the ‘base’ (economic, or more generally ‘material’). The number of ‘storeys’ in the base/superstructure model has always been somewhat indeterminate. Marx and Engels tended to think in terms of material (or economic) versus the rest. This fits in with what I take to be their view (and also that of Plekhanov and Lenin) that the materialist conception of history is an application to history of a more general materialist world oudook. Existence precedes consciousness, so social existence precedes social consciousness.4 Plekhanov and Lenin in particular are quite explicit about the fact that this view

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involves the primacy of the material, not merely of the economic.5 I think that this classical Marxist position is best understood if the ramifications of the superstructure on the one hand (particularly the interposition of a political level between the economic and the ideological), and the specifically economic character of the laws governing the base on the other, are taken as features of specific historical societies. These features are specifically denied to be present, for instance, in pre-class societies, though the polarity material/ideational of course applies there too. For modem societies, however, a useful starting point is the five-level model proposed by Plekhanov (working from the base up): (1) the state o f the productive forces; (2) the econom ic relations these forces condition; (3) the socio-political system that has developed on the given economic ‘base’;

(4) the mentality o f men living in society, a mentality which is determined in part directly by the econom ic conditions obtaining, and in part by the entire socio-political system that has arisen on that foundation; (5) the various ideologies that reflect the properties o f that mentality. (Fundamental Problems of Marxism, p.80)

Althusser, whom I shall discuss next, generally uses a threelevel model (economic, political, ideological), but all five levels in fact figure in his account. (He refers to the indeterminacy of the number of storeys in Marx’s work at ESC, p.182.) It may be noted in passing that the relation between levels (1) and (2) is that of structuration or composition, i.e. (2) is a structure of which (1) forms the elements. This is not so with respect to the other levels. This disanalogy between the relations between levels (1) and (2) on the one hand, and between these and the superstructure on the other, has important consequences, for the ‘forces/relations’ distinction can be made within the superstructural levels too. Althusser has drawn attention to this with his talk of ideology having its own materiality, and this notion has been interestingly applied to artistic production. However, the crucial application is to the materiality of the state - i.e. the armed forces - and the transformation of the modem state as a

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result of the technological development of the forces of production in what Marx referred to in this context as ‘the human slaughter industry’ Getter to Engels, 7 July 1866). The task of analysing the change in the relations of the nation-state both to possible insurgency within and to other nation-states, as a result of the development of this ‘industry’ is crucial, since the prospects, not only of socialism but of life on earth, are bound up with the resolution of the contradictions that have arisen at this level. Nevertheless, when I have pointed out some inadequacies of Althusser’s account, I shall argue that it is useful to see the levels as ontological strata, in the sense that Bhaskar argues that the distinctions between the sciences reflect distinctions between strata. I have already argued that Althusser’s basic error re the science/ideology distinction is that of attributing misplaced concreteness to the various types of practice which, for him, make up the hierarchy of social practices, and hence dis­ tinguishing them as practices, rather than as aspects of practices. It seems to me that he falls into this error, not only in drawing the science/ideology distinction, but also in his theory of the relations of the superstructural levels to the material base. And this is compounded by the fact that he writes not only of ideological practices but also of ideological apparatuses, which are alleged to produce ideology in an all-too-neatly functional manner. The ‘ISA’s’ (ideological state apparatuses) as Althusser calls them include schools, families, media, political parties, churches, sporting and cultural institutions, and so on. He does wryly admit that one such apparatus, the family, also has nonideological functions: ‘It intervenes in the reproduction of labour power’ (LP, p.l37n). He also admits that ‘ideological relations are immediately present in [economic] processes’ (LP, p.l41n). But this does not go far enough. As several commentators have pointed out, the economic apparatuses themselves are among the prime producers of ideology. Once this is seen, the idea of specifically ideological apparatuses begins to break down. We can then give full due to the pleasure­ giving functions of the media and cultural apparatuses, the presence of science as well as ideology in the educational apparatuses, and on the other hand die ideological effects of

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economic production, scientific research, sexual relationships, shopping, gardening, and so on. And this returns us to die classical Marxist position: that base and superstructure can be separated only in thought.6 None of this is meant to deny that there are, also, specialised ideological apparatuses in modem societies - though of course these have economic (etc.) aspects too. But the important point is that they presuppose an ideological stratum of social relations that they did not create. As Poulantzas remarks, religion produces the churches, not vice versa. And if we had not already acquired a certain ideology from the practice of doing the family shopping, Saatchi and Saatchi could not have presented Thatcher’s cuts as ‘good housekeeping’. Some allusions to the various things that Marx and Engels say about ideology may help to avoid confusion here (the main source of this is The German Ideology, Part I, but I shall avoid tedious textual analysis). We find at least four ways of describing the primacy of material production in Marx and Engels - ways which are not equivalent, and at first sight appear to fit badly together. (i) There is seemingly economistic talk of material production determining or conditioning ideas, or ideas being ‘sublimates of their material life-process’. (ii) There is talk of ideas as the form in which struggles generated at the level of material production are fought out. (iii) There is the assertion that the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class of that age. (iv) There is the notion that ideology has no history: it is developed by developments in the relations of material production; but it is developed out of raw ideological materials handed down by the last generation. Exclusive attention to any of these formulations can be misleading, as can the conflation of one with another. Let us look at each in turn: (i) It is clear enough that in any society, including those before the division between manual and mental labour had occurred, ideas are involved in the production process; it is this that

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distinguishes ‘the worst of architects from the best of bees’; and this mental aspect of labour is by no means annulled - even if it is impoverished - for the manual worker when this division of labour does take place. A worker is not an automaton. The metaphor of a ‘superstructure’ sounds rather odd if it is used to refer to a carpenter saying ‘Pass me that hammer, Bill, will you?’ - leaving the passing of the hammer and the hammering that ensued as part of the ‘base’. At this level it is best to say: ideas are an aspect of the process of production. But it is important to see that this doesn’t exhaust the account of the ideological life of mankind. It hardly even gets started. (ii) People think and talk about their situations. They ask: Why is it so? Could it be otherwise? These thoughts are not aspects of the production process, as the request for a hammer is. For this reason already, the idea of ideology as merely an aspect (however essential) of material production is not adequate. John Ball asked: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’, implying: the inequality of lord and peasant is sinful. The ideologists of the ruling class in turn could say: ‘private property and secular power are not themselves sin, but remedies for sin’ - a nice theological dispute, in the course of which the Savoy Palace got burnt, and Wat Tyler got his head cut off and displayed from London Bridge. Few would dispute that the peasants’ revolt was in substance a class struggle. Yet it didn’t take the simple form of the peasants saying: ‘we want land’ and the gentry saying ‘we’re hanging on to it’. And the form that it - or rather the class struggles of the Middle Ages in general - did take, was not without its effects; and not only on the form of the peasants’ demands, but also on the power structure of medieval society: an essentially ideological institution, the Church, acquiring immense political and economic power. Here we are concerned with the form in which class struggles are fought out, and therefore with the need for the ruling class to dominate in ideas if it is to be secure in its privileges. This takes us then to the question of specialised ideological apparatuses and their role in the reproduction of class relations, not merely in the production process.7 (iii) In all class society there is a division of labour between mental and manual which, as Marx and Engels say, really gives

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a certain autonomy to ideology. Law, religion, science, art, become the work of special groups whose interests are bound up with their branch of ideological production, and are generally tied to or dominated by ruling class interests in one way or another (class affinities, patronage, the market, state control). In analysing these ideological structures it is legitimate to ask ‘functionalistic’ questions about the ideological requirements of a given ruling class - what must occur if agents are to be fitted to the social positions assigned to them by the reproduction of existing relations of production. It is legitimate to speak of the ‘ideological apparatuses’ of the ruling class, and of the ‘dominant ideas’ of any age being the ideas of the dominant class of that age (always provided that this is not understood in a crude, conspiratorial way - kings and priests - or teachers and advertisers - deceiving the people). But it should never be forgotten that these mechanisms of ideological production are superimposed on, and presuppose for their effectiveness, the ideological effects of the institutions of material production and reproduction. Legal fictions, consoling illusions and journalistic lies are purveyed to people whose consciousness is already moulded by their experience in their workplace and their family. (iv) Great ideological changes take place under the impact both of normal development at the material level of society, and of great class struggles, where the rising class needs a new ideology. The transformation of sexual ideology in the present century, for instance (both the mitigation of the anti-sensual tendencies in bourgeois culture, and the partial breakdown of traditional sex-roles and male privileges), originates not in the widespread dissemination of the ideas of Ibsen or Wedekind, Freud or Reich, Marie Stopes or Simone de Beauvoir, but rather in the availability of contraception, the increasing job opportunities for women, better social services, the increasingly ‘consumeristic’ nature of capitalism, which finds both sexual freedom and female independence to its advantage, and so on. All of these factors belong to the development (technical or structural) of the economic base. If this had not occurred, these cultural

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developments would not have been assimilated by, and hence successful in, bourgeois society. On the other hand, great ideological revolutions can occur as a result of changes in class power. The Protestant Reformation or the secularisation accompanying the French and Russian Revolutions illustrate this. However, it is necessary to recognise the limitations placed on such transformations by the state of spontaneous ideology generated by relations at the material level. Thus, the imposition of Protestant theology and worship on people whose conditions of life remained pre-capitalist, gave rise to such phenomana as Pietism. Again, the Bolshevik attempts to eliminate religion - which despite the stated policy of the leaders, included violent persecution which could not be excused by the exigencies of civil war - were not successful. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, in their ABC of Communism, put forward a hypothesis which might have explained this: that only the experience of power over their conditions of life would provide the Russian people with the material foundation for a secular world-view. This theory was neither verified nor falsified since that experience did not come to pass. And what emerged were the phenomena of Stalinist pietism - the necrolatrous vows to Lenin, the idea that faith could move mountains and fulfil five year plans in four years, the diabolization of Trotsky, the muscular atheism of the Komsomol, the naming of cities after dead bureaucrats, and even live ones, and so on. All consciously enacted ‘cultural revolutions, end in such pietisms. A genuinely liberating cultural transformation could, from a Marxist point of view, only occur as a spontaneous long-term result of the reduction of the working day, the increasingly democratic control of economic and political life, increasingly needs-oriented distribution, and so on. The direction of such a transformation would be in all respects opposed to that of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or their Western admirers. These considerations suggest that the Althusserian theory has overestimated the effectiveness of distinct ideological practices and apparatuses', it does not follow that he is wrong to stress the distinct effectiveness of ideology in the making of history. I hope to clarify this statement in what follows.

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The position I have outlined may be summarised in these conclusions: (1) there is an ideological aspect to all human practices in all human societies; it may be added that that aspect always extends beyond the ideas necessarily involved in the practice in question, and includes much more general interpretations of the world, secreted by everyday practices. (2) Specialised ideological practices and agencies exist in some societies, but their effectiveness depends on the spon­ taneous ideologies arising out of the totality of current practices. (3) The formula: ‘The ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class of that epoch’ will not do as a general account of ideology, except in so far as it is interpreted as a tautology, related to the Darwinian tautology ‘the fittest survive’. A ruling class cannot rule unless the ruling ideology enables it to do so. It is particularly important to reject the teleological account of ideologies as serving the purposes of the class in which they arise. For instance, ideologies of the oppressed often serve to keep them oppressed, and this is typically the case with all oppressed groups other than the proletariat. ‘D eterm inance in the L ast Instance’ as vertical explanation Althusser’s conception of a hierarchy of distinct practices, and the ‘functional’ production of ideologies by the ISAs, does not seem an adequate way of understanding ideological phenomena. The facts he points to are real enough, but they are not the crucial ones. This is compounded by a certain indeterminacy in Althusser’s formulation - perfectly correct so far as it goes - of the manner in which the economic level is basic. Those who are familiar with Popper’s criticisms of Marxism will recall the idea that Marx’s stress on the economic is a useful rule of thumb if left vague, but a false hypothesis if made specific. However, if a rule of thumb is useful in historical explanation, there must be some feature of real human societies by virtue of which it is useful; it ought therefore to be possible to find a more exact

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formulation which would be true, even if a particular attempt has come up with a false one. Indeed, the one supplied by Popper as an interpretation of Marx - that superstructura! revolutions occur later in time than the corresponding economic revolutions - is one that no Marxist could accept: it would imply that socialism would precede workers’ power. Another obvious candidate - the idea that economic factors are, so to speak, quantitatively predominant among the various factors that determine the course of history - has all the disadvantages: it is vague, it would itself require an explanation, and it is false. Althusser, taking a footnote to Capital as his text,8 puts forward a view that suggests that there are two kinds of causal relationship between the various levels: dominance and determinance in the last instance. Sometimes one level is dominant, sometimes another. In revolutionary periods, as Marxists have long recognised, politics is always dominant.9 In ‘theocratic’ societies, ideology may be dominant. In classical capitalism, economics is dominant. But whatever is dominant, the economic structure is determinant in the last instance. This does not mean that economics will prevail in the long term: ‘The last instance never comes.’ It does mean (at least) that the nature of the economic structure of any society determines which level will be dominant in that society (as Marx’s footnote had implied). This relation between the levels is said to be that of ‘relative autonomy’. I have already shown this to be an inadequate concept for theorising the science/ideology relation. As regards the base/superstructure relations, it is not, I think, actually false to say that the superstructure is relatively autonomous, but it is rather vague. Relative to what? Or does it just mean ‘somewhat autonomous’. It seems to me that Bhaskar’s theory of the stratification of nature, the explicability of the mechanisms of the upper strata in terms of those of the lower, and the irreducibility of the upper to the lower strata, provides a coherent and well-exemplified general theory, of which the base/ superstructure stratification can be seen as an instance. According to Bhaskar, stratification is between generative mechanisms not between entities: the predicates ‘natural’, ‘social’, ‘human’, ‘physical’, ‘chemical’, ‘aero­ dynamical’, ‘biological’, ‘economic’, etc. ought not to be regarded as

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differentiating distinct kinds o f events, but as differentiating distinct kinds o f mechanisms. For in the generation o f an open-systemic event several of these predicates may be simultaneously applicable.’ (RTS, p .l 19)

Applying this to society: it is generative mechanisms which are economic or political or ideological, not institutions or events or any other denizens of the Actual. This is in accordance with the classical Marxist position that these strata are separable only by abstraction, and the recognition that an institution may have aspects at all levels. On this view, the two questions of the relations of ‘dominance’ and ‘determinance in the last instance’ could be located in two kinds of explanatory discourse: ‘dominance’ in what might be called horizontal explanation - the explanation of events in terms of various generative mechanisms operating conjointly, of which those events are the output resulting from a given input; ‘determinance in the last instance’ as the vertical explanation of some of those mechanisms (the upper storey ones) in terms of others (the lower storey ones). In the discourse of explaining events, there is no need to claim that certain mechanisms - say, economic ones - are more effective than others - say, ideological or political ones. Their primacy is not a matter of their quantitative contribution to the process that in fact results from the conjoint operation of the various mechanisms, any more than, in a demijohn of fermenting liquor, chemical processes can be said to have contributed more than biological to the production of the wine. To say that chemistry is a more basic science than biology is to say that the mechanisms of chemistry explain (vertically) the mechanisms of biology; it is not to say that the act of adding ‘chemicals’ to the demijohn is somehow more effective in producing the wine than is the life-process of the yeast. Indeed, this use of the term ‘chemicals’ in this sense - as when a wholefood seller tells you there are no chemicals in their wares is a vulgar mistake. Mechanisms, not substances, are chemical; mechanisms, not apparatuses, are ideological. Thus at the level of horizontal causality (the production of events as a result of a prior operation upon a pre-existing complex of generative mechanisms), generative mechanisms of any stratum may play their part, and no one can say in advance

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that the relative weight of those various parts might be.10But at the level of vertical causality (the dependence of one stratum of generative mechanisms on another) it is true that the ideological and political mechanisms are what they are because the economic (and more generally, material) ones are what they are - and not at all vice versa. Here then we have at last a fully worked-out sense for the idea of determination by the base combined with the effectivity of the superstructures. The former is the one-way explanation of upper by lower mechanisms, the latter the contribution of the upper mechanisms to the course of events. For example, one can’t say in advance of concrete historical research how important the specific belief-systems of the Russian peasantry or intelligentsia were relative to the economic causes of the Russian Revolution or its subsequent degeneration; but one can explain the ideological mechanisms governing those beliefsystems in terms of the economic structure of the country. O verdeterm ination and m ultiple determ ination

Now if we leave aside for a few moments the issue of vertical explanation, we can describe Marx’s theory of history as I have interpreted it as a theory of multiple determination. I now want to ask whether this concept does the same work - perhaps even is the same concept - as Althusser’s ‘overdetermination’. One might expect that Althusser’s concept, purpose-built for use in Marxist conjunctural analysis, would be more specific, more closely defined in relation to social reality; while Bhaskar’s notion of multiple determination, belonging as it does to a general theory about the relations between the objects of all the various sciences, would require further specification before it could be applied to this distinctive subject-matter. In fact, despite Althusser’s commitment to the importance of rigour, clear definition, specificity of concepts, his practice has often been to water down what had been a clearly defined concept, and so to lose specificity. The concept of overdetermination, borrowed from Freud, is a case in point. For Freud, overdetermination does not just mean that a phenomenon has more than one cause. It does not merely mean that more than

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one factor has to come into play to produce the phenomenon, as more than one bale of straw has to be placed on the camel’s back before it breaks. And it does not mean at all that there was more causal force than necessary to produce the effect: the ‘over’ in overdetermination is not equivalent to that in the atomic warriors’ expression ‘overkill’, i.e. when megadeaths exceed megapeople. Overdetermination in Freud’s sense occurs when a phenomenon has two functions, which would otherwise have required two separate expenditures of energy to fulfil. The overdetermined phenomenon occurs rather than others because an economy of energy is thereby effected, rather as sheep farmers have cross-bred sheep to produce breeds which supply both good wool and good lambs for meat. Althusser’s use of the term is not so specific, and sometimes seems to mean no more than ‘superimposition’. But if we examine the example that he uses to illustrate the concept, and the political conclusions that he draws from it, it will become clear that the concept he needs is precisely multiple determination in Bhaskar’s sense. It is by now well known that Marx envisaged the possibility that the socialist revolution would first break out in Russia, since it was ripening for a democratic and agrarian revolution at a time when the example of proletarian politics and scientific socialist theory already existed in the West. For Marx himself, it is worth remarking in passing, this was combined with the belief that Russia might conceivably ‘bypass’ capitalism, since there are no general developmental laws of history, as opposed to laws of specific modes of production.11 Plekhanov, however, showed that Russia had already embarked on capitalist development. He also argued that the task of making a democratic (not yet a socialist) revolution would fall on the proletariat. This was because, of the classes confronting obsolete Tsardom, the peasants’ conditions of life were not conducive to organised revolt, and the bourgeoisie was weak in two ways: it was numerically small relative to the proletariat, partly because Russia, coming to industrialisation late, acquired large-scale industry from the outset; partly because many of the exploiters of the Russian proletariat were not Russian, but Western capitalists. And secondly, the bourgeoisie was weak in political resolve, partly due to consciousness of its numerical

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weakness, partly because it drew its own conclusions from the class struggles of the west. Trotsky went further and argued that the coming revolution, being vanguarded by the workers, would necessarily have a socialist character, telescoping the bourgeois-democratic-andagrarian and the proletarian-socialist revolutions into a single process. These theories about the ‘exceptional’ character of the Russian situation were all impeccably ‘Marxist’ in that they analysed politics in terms of classes (economically defined), their conflicts and their relative power. That is to say, the underlying mechanisms of this process are those of economic development and class struggle in the Marxist sense. The concrete possibility predicted, however - the most advanced revolution occuring in the most backward world power - might look paradoxical from the standpoint of a certain simplistic Marxism, which has occasionally existed and more often been imagined by anti-Marxists. How should we describe the error of such simplistic Marxism? Is it not precisely ‘actualism’, the idea that conditions of closure obtain naturally, such that causal relations manifest themselves spontaneously in constant conjunctions: Britain was the most industrialised country, so Britain would have the first worker’s revolution. Compare Althusser: are toe not always in exceptional situations? T he failure o f the 1849 Revolution in Germany was an exception, the failure in Paris in 1871 was an exception, the German Social-Dem ocratic failure at the beginning o f the twentieth century pending the chauvinist betrayal o f 1914 was an exception . . . exceptions, but with respect to what} To nothing but the abstract, but comfortable and reassuring idea o f a pure, simple ‘dialectical’ schema, which in its very sim plicity seem s to have retained a memory (or rediscovered the style) o f the Hegelian model and its faith in the resolving ‘power’ o f abstract contradiction as such. (FM , p.104)

That is to say, the effects of a single contradiction (Capital v. Labour) may be predictable, other things being equal, but other things never are equal. However, as in the case of all interesting ceteris paribus clauses, that is not all that can be said. the Capital-Labour contradiction is never simple, but is always specified by the historically concrete forms and circumstances in which it is exercised. It is

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Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought specified by the forms o f the superstructure (the State, the dominant ideology, religion, politically organised movements, and so on); it is spécifiai by the internal and external historical situation which determines it on the one hand as a function o f the national past (completed or ‘relapsed’ bourgeois revolution, feudal exploitation elim inated wholly, partially or not at all, local ‘customs’, specific national traditions, even the ‘etiquette’ o f political struggles and behaviour, etc.), and on the other as functions o f the existing world context (what dominates it - com petition of capitalist nations, or ‘imperialist internationalism’, or com petition within imperialism, etc.), many o f these phenomena deriving from the ‘law o f uneven development’ in the Leninist sense. What can this mean but that the apparently sim ple contradiction is always overdetermined} (FM , p.106)

What is this ‘overdetermination’ but ‘multiple determin­ ation? (Always with the proviso, of course, that it is stratified determination, that the various determinants stand in one-way relations of vertical causality.) The mechanisms of the various strata co-determine the course of events: ideological (in the case of Russia: the spread of ideas ‘ahead of their time’, learnt from Western experience), political (the place of Russia among the world powers, her military defeat) and from outside ‘society’ (e.g. geographical) as well as economic. This theory seems to meet all the requirements, sometimes thought to be inconsistent, of a Marxist account of historical process. It is certainly ‘deterministic’ as against voluntarist or subjectivist theories; it retains the one-way vertical explanation of superstructure by base; and it is certainly not a fatalistic doctrine of ‘historical inevitability’. There is no necessary ‘ceiling’ to the stratification of nature. So it is always possible that the entities governed by the mechanisms of any given level are also affected by those of a higher level. Living beings have effects on the inorganic world, society on nature, politics on the economy, ideology on politics, science and reason generally on ideology. This is surely all that was ever needed for a theory of human freedom that would vindicate the practical effectiveness of conscious thinking, and hence refute fatalism. A word is appropriate here about the alleged connection between fatalism and/or determinism and the ‘attentisme’ of the Social Démocratie parties of the Second International. The error of those parties was twofold: (i) they expected a linear

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growth of membership and support to lead to victory of its own inner dynamic, without the institutions of the existing order breaking down. While this view is certainly determinist in that the growth was held to be a law-governed process, what is wrong with it is the actualism, the reduction of historical causation to a single mechanism. But is it fatalist? If fatalism is simply belief in ‘prophecy’ in Popper’s sense, in actual processes having inevitable outcomes, then it is. But if fatalism implies the inefficacy of human activity, then it is certainly not. On the contrary, the power of the activity of the workers’ movement is overestimated. So far from holding (as a fatalist might) that victory would come whatever people did, it predicts victory purely on the basis of what (it predicts) people will do, and do by way of a conscious, rational, organised political practice. This error was compounded by the belief (ii) that the bourgeois state apparatus could simply be taken over and used by the working class to establish socialism once it had an electoral majority. Revolutionary socialists have avoided the latter error, but not usually the former. They frequently believe that once the workers were won over to their views in large enough numbers it would be possible simply to take power. Yet in reality revolutions have only ever been successful when, in addition to a revolutionary party with mass support, there is a breakdown in the old order - either a military defeat, or the isolation of a corrupt regime which cannot even command the loyalty of the ruling class. It must be recognised that in addition to the organisation and class consciousness of the workers, the transition to socialism requires something which it is not in the power even of the biggest and best organised workers’ movement to supply: political breakdown in the old order. The common confusion between the voluntarist/necessitarian debate on the one hand (a debate which need never have arisen in socialist thought since so long as it is not denied either that human actions have effects or that historical possibilities are constrained by laws, it is of purely speculative interest), and on the other hand, the practical question: what sort of action could bring about a socialist transformation under what conditions? - this confusion (starting, I think, with Gramsci) has kept debate about both issues at a consistently lower level

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than it reached in the theoretical literature of the Second International. Consider for instance Brecht’s cryptic saying: The master Sa taught: Liberation comes like the eruption o f a volcano. The master Lan-Kfl taught: Liberation is achieved through a surprise attack. M i-en-leh taught: Both elem ents are necessary - something that erupts and something that attacks. (Quoted by Timpanaro in On Materialism, p.226. Timpanaro points out that Sa is Luxemburg, Lan-Kii is Blanqui, and M i-en-leh is Lenin)

Mi-en-leh would be dead right if the eruption were taken as referring to the breakdown of the old order and the attack as referring to the political action of the workers (two events which will of course be causally related, but not so closely that one could be the necessary or sufficient condition of the other). But we are presumably intended to take the eruption to refer to the mass action of the workers, the attack to a coup planned by the party leadership. In either case, the views of the master Sa are seriously misinterpreted. She did not think an eruption could bring about socialism - capitalist collapse could equally well end in barbarism. And of course, she never made the careless mistake of thinking that workers erupted. A pplications: T he falling rate o f profit; the effectiveness o f politics

Let me conclude this section with two examples to illustrate the applications of this theory. The first will clarify the place of laws in explaining the open system of history. One of the more mathematically elaborated of Marx’s putative laws is the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, or more briefly, the falling rate of profit (FRP). This law-claim has been the subject of a lively ongoing debate in recent years, with different Marxist economists giving it different interpretations, and some rejecting it entirely. It would be quite out of place for me to try to pre-empt that debate by means of a purely philosphical argument. I shall merely make some points against one argument used against the FRP, Geoff Hodgdson’s:12 a canjunctural explanation o f the crisis, based on the dynamics o f class struggle and power, rests uneasily with the raw mechanistic and

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deterministic vision within [sic] Marx’s law, o f capitalism grinding down a pre-ordained path, by virtue of its inbuilt ‘logic’, towards an ‘inevitable’ demise.

He adds in a footnote: It m ust be noted that Ben Fine and Laurence Harris have a quite different conception o f this law, where the counter-acting forces are just as significant as the law itself, and the ‘law’ does not necessarily manifest itself in any empirically observable tendency for the rate o f profit to fall. The law is valid, whatever happens in the real world! Needless to say, the F ineHarris version o f the law cannot be invoked to explain the empirical decline o f the rate o f profit in the British econom y any more than it can be used to explain a rising profit rate elsewhere.

Here the FRP theory is being presented with a familiar Popperian dilemma: either it is interpreted in a fatalistic sense, or it is deemed to operate even when not empirically manifested. Both interpretations are supposed to be damning, for science abhors both unconditional prophecies and statements compatible with any set of facts whatever. O f course, if these were the only alternatives, no sort of science would be possible. N ot only the falling rate of profit, but the inverse square law would have to go. But if there is a multiplicity of generative mechanisms at work, science must necessarily abstract from some of them in order to formulate laws, while remembering that the concrete situation is always a conjuncture, i.e. a joint effect of several interacting processes. (This, of course, is precisely Marx’s stated method, with his talk about the power of abstraction replacing chemical reagents, and of the concrete as a union of many determinations.)13 As a result it is impossible to read off the result of any process outside of experimental conditions, from a conception of that process in isolation; not because if eludes determinism, but because it is multiply determined. So to say that there is a mechanism in capitalism which necessarily generates a tendency of the rate of profit to fall, is not to say that the rate of profit will fall no matter what else happens, any more than a doctor who says a patient is out of danger is saying that that patient can safely step in front of a bus. O f course, it is necessary to say what the other mechamisms

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are which co-determine events, if one wishes to explain why the rate of profit is falling here and rising there; but just such conjoint explanation is what we need and all we can hope for, unless we could reduce all economic laws to a single one, and isolate economic from non-economic processes; the former has not been done, and the latter is demonstrably impossible. This is, of course, far from solving the real epistemological problems of disentangling the mechanisms of economics; nor does it mean that we can’t forecast with some degree of confidence that capitalism will collapse: only such a forecast is not like the prediction that a billiard ball placed on an inclined plane surface at a carefully measured slope will roll down in a given direction at a given acceleration - it is more like the prediction that a drunken driver speeding along a precipitous and winding mountain road in the fog, in a car with no brakes and faulty steering, will come a cropper. And in such a case, we can have little confidence about what, if anything, will replace capitalism. The second application is also a response to a Popperian criticism, but this time at the level of political theory rather than epistemology. One of Popper’s most fantastic allegations about Marx is that he believed politics to be powerless. But we can understand how he could think this of Marx if we look at his own political prescription - ‘democratic interventionism’. This theory, as I understand it, consists of two explicit principles, backed up by two implicit assumptions. The explicit principles are (1) that piecemeal social engineering (reform) is the best most realistic and painless - way forward; (2) that violence is only ever justified to secure or defend parliamentary democracy. The underlying assumptions are: (a) that in a parliamentary democracy, the only obstacle to the implementation of technically possible reforms, is the opinion of the majority - and conversely, of course, that all one has to do to get such a reform implemented is to persuade the majority; (b) that the sort of reforms required are agreed by all ‘men of good will’, so that it is possible to speak in the first person plural and assume that ‘we’ are agreed about what is desirable, and are prepared to take the democratic steps necessary to achieve those ends. Politics becomes a matter of rational argument and voting.

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It is easy to see how Marx could, from this standpoint, seem to believe in the impotence of politics. If things are wrong with society and we have parliamentary democracy, thinks Popper, ‘we’ have the power to put things right. Having rejected a theory of the constraints of economic and political reality in a capitalist society, and failed to replace it by anything, leaving history as a zone free of scientific laws, Popper was perhaps bound to come to this view. But what happens if ‘we’ try to carry out Popper’s programme? There are many political parties dedicated to doing so, in particular ‘social democratic’ ones.14 Whenever these parties come to power, they find that there are economic constraints preventing their reforms from being effective. Easy as it might seem for the more prosperous of the world’s nations to provide adequate health, housing and education for all their citizens, or to bring together unemployed workers, unused resources and unsatisfied needs, the best-intentioned social democratic governments never manage to solve these problems. The obstacles are not technical; they are laws of economics and politics in a capitalist society, which trap the would-be reformers inside circles of constraint narrower than those set by the limits of the technically possible. Marxian economic theory explains the mechanisms of this constraint, and socialist politics offers a means to their abolition: it is explained how an optimum use of resources could be made, and why this is not possible under capitalism. Yet the social democrats never tire of telling their socialist critics: ‘You are doctrinaire; everything you can do, we can do better by a little state intervention without altering the system’, and telling the electors: ‘We are sorry we can’t fulfil our election pledges - the laws of the economy won’t allow it.’ Bryan Magee says that Popper provides the best possible grounds for ‘democratic socialist’ (i.e. social democratic) politics.15 He is only too right: Popper rejects historical laws as unscientific, and substitutes voluntaristic optimism; there could be no better justification of the social democratic practice of banging one’s head against a brick wall and calling people ‘doctrinaire’ when they try to find a way round it. Continuing with this metaphor of ‘circles of constraint’, i.e. sets of laws at one level which prevent the realisation of possibilities ‘permitted’ by the laws of another level, it can be

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said that one theme of Marxist thinking is that the Popperian model just described would actually hold in a socialist society, though it does not in a capitalist one.16 Luxemburg, for instance, sees economics as a science applicable only to capitalist society, whilst a socialist society would abolish economic laws, leaving only technical limits to the possible uses of society’s resources. The idea is that it is only the emergence of market forces which gives rise to specifically economic mechanisms, dictating what is produced and the division of the product, independently of any decision-procedure. Where there is a common plan, that plan is a more or less rational decision based on the people’s wants and the material and technical resources available; this collective decision replaces economic mechanisms, enlarging the area of human freedom. The idea of the withering away of the specialised state apparatuses envis­ ages a similar dissolution of specifically political mechanisms. There is nothing incoherent about these prospects, but we should not let these dizzying vistas of freedom blind us to the fact that history would still be a law-governed process - made, indeed, for the first time by the joint decisions of the human race, but still in conditions not of their own choosing. Not only is our power over nature necessarily limited, but we are necessarily born helpless, dependent and ignorant; every bit of consciousness, activity, knowledge and autonomy we have has to be won out of an original unconsciousness, passivity, error and dependence. Even if the economic and political strata of constraint could be removed, our descendants, like our ancestors, will still be governed by material and ideological laws.17 N otes 1. ‘Whenever any Marxist attempted to transmute the theory o f Marx into a universal master key and ignore all other spheres o f learning Vladimir Ilyich would rebuke him with the expressive phrase ‘Komchvanstvo’ [“communist swagger”]’ (Trotsky, Problem of Everyday Life, p.221). 2. Bhaskar does say (R T S, p.169), ‘It should be noted that the historical order o f the development o f our knowledge of strata is opposite to the causal order o f their dependence in being.’ But his point is not that the more basic layer is never discovered first, but that vertical explanation is not possible unless the explanans is known.

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3. Bhaskar’s own account o f the im plications o f m ultiple determ ination with respect to the freedom /determ inism debate can b e read on pp. 112-

13 o f RTS. 4. See for exam ple Lenin: ‘I f m aterialism in general explains consciousness as the outcom e o f existen ce, and not conversely, then m aterialism as applied to the social life o f mankind m ust explain social consciousness as the outcom e o f social existence’ (entry on Karl M arx in Granat Encyclopedia, in Marx and Engels Selected Works in Two Volumes, V ol. I

P-29). 5. For example: ‘w here have you read in the works o f Marx or Engels that they necessarily spoke o f econom ic materialism ? When they described their world outlook they called it sim ply m aterialism ’ (Lenin, Collected Works, vol. I, p. 151). 6. Plekhanov is especially in sisten t on th is, though this has been obscured by the com pulsion felt by all W estern M arxists to lie about him. In Fundamental Problems of Marxism he writes: A historico-social factor is an abstraction, and the idea o f it originates as the result o f a process o f abstraction. Thanks to the process o f abstraction, various sides o f the social complex assume the form o f separate categories, and the various manifestations and expressions o f th e activity o f social man - morals, law, economic forms, etc. - are converted in our minds into separate forces which appear to give rise to and determine this activity and to be its ultimate causes, (p.108) But however legitim ate and useful the theory o f factors may have been in its tim e, today it w ill not stand the light o f criticism . It dismembers the activity o f social man and converts his various aspects and manifestations into separate forces, which are supposed to determine the historical movement o f society, (p .l 10) 7. The layering o f these first and second strata o f ideology is neatly illustrated by George Thompson’s M arxist account o f the origins o f póetry, with sounds or words indicating the rhythm o f work alternating with social comment. For example the English sea-shanty from the late eighteenth century: Louis was the King o f France afore the Revolution, Away, haul away, boys, haul away together! Louis had his head cut off, which spoilt his constitution, Away, haul away, boys, haul away together! (T he Art o f Poetry’, in The Prehistoric Aegean, pp.435-62) 8. ‘T h e M idd le A ges cou ld not live on Catholicism , nor could the ancient w orld on p olitics. O n th e contrary, it is th e manner in which they gained their livelihood w hich explains why in the one case politics, in d ie other case C atholicism , played the chief part’ {Capital, Vol. I, p. l76n ).

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9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought Cf. Lenin, ‘Politics cannot but have dominance over economics. To argue otherwise is to forget the ABC o f Marxism’ (quoted by Alec N ove, An Economic History of the U .S.S.R ., p.7). Here we may have to correct Althusser and possibly Marx, i.e. if they were claiming that economics necessarily dominated in capitalist countries, ideology in feudal or politics in ancient societies. ‘Dom inant»’ here, unlike determinant», can only be a matter o f weight, o f one kind o f generative mechanism predominating over others, and, though Marx’s statement is broadly historically accurate, we cannot be sure a priori that, e.g ., all capitalist societies w ill be characterised by the predominance o f economic mechanisms. Most modem capitalist societies are not. Letter to the Editorial Board o f ‘Otechestvenniy Zapiski’, November 1877 (Selected Correspondence pp.311-13). From his article ‘On the Political Economy o f Socialist Transformation’, New Left Review no. 133, pp.57-8, M ay-June, 1982. See Capital, Vol.1, p.90, and Grundrisse, p.101. I use this term here, not in the pre-1960 sense (one who believes in the parliamentary road to socialism ), nor yet in the sense o f the British SDP, which has no serious commitment to real social reforms, but to refer to those parties or tendencies within parties which have a working-class electoral base and an interventionist programme for social welfare, but which oppose any substantial changes in ownership. In his book Popper, p.84. At the time o f his writing that book, Bryan Magee was a Labour MP. H e has since joined the SDP. By the ‘Popperian model’ I mean here sim ply the idea that the only obstacles to reform are technical or ideological ones. Cf. p. 52 above.

3

Structural Explanation and the Problem of Agency ‘Anti-humanism’ My first aim in this chapter is to clear up some confusions about the concept that has drawn heaviest fire onto Althusser’s thought: anti-humanism. This will lead into a discussion of the relations of a structure to its elements, and in this connection I shall follow up Althusser’s invocation of Spinoza. I shall conclude with some general remarks about the relations between societies and the people who compose them, and about the practical import of those relations. Althusser characterised his interpretation of Marxism as a ‘theoretical anti-humanism’; ‘theoretical’ - that is to say, anti­ humanism at the level of scientific methodology; no criticism of humanism as a practical ideology is implied. It is recognised that the young Marx’s humanism served both as a practical ideology and as a social theory, but the former aspect is left on one side; the latter is rejected. I have written elsewhere1 about the need to criticise the young Marx’s humanist morality as well, in that it is not just an affirmation of human well-being (such that its negation could only be interpreted as misanthropy), but an over-valuing of certain aspects of human life (roughly: the active, the public, achievement) at the expense of others (roughly: the passive, the private, pleasure). In what follows I shall, like Althusser, be exclusively concerned with theoretical anti-humanism. The error in the humanist position is perhaps most easily seen in the young Marx’s dictum: ‘although private property appears as the basis and cause of alienated labour, it is in fact its 73

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consequence’ {Early Writings, p.332). This remark could perhaps be interpreted in a sense which would make it acceptable - after all, the 1844 Manuscripts were jottings, not intended for publication, and therefore not requiring to be unambiguous. Marx is known to have hated the idea that any of his works should be published unless he had fully prepared them for publication.2 If his wishes had been observed in this respect, most recent marxological debates would never had arisen. But for good or ill, these Manuscripts are now public property, so I shall take what seems the obvious sense of the remark I have quoted - and it is an unacceptable one. For it seems to mean: we know that capital is the product of human activity, yet capital dominates human activity - and the cause of this fact lies not in the ownership of capital but in the character of the human activity. Alienated labour so interpreted is reminiscent of the Hebrew prophets’ account of idolatry: the bourgeois in his blindness bows down to steel and concrete. But since it is the worker who actually performs the labour, it looks very much as if the solution lies in the workers’ hands, or even their heads: they have only to open their eyes and give their labour a non-alienated character, and the world of capitalist commodities will fall smashed to pieces, like Dagon, god of the Philistines. One is reminded of Shelley’s poem: M en o f England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay ye low? Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear?

With its moral: Sow seed, - but let no tyrant reap; Find wealth, - let no impostor heap; Weave robes, - let not the idle wear; Forge arms, - in your defence to bear.3

No doubt Shelley knew it was not as easy as that, and could plead poet’s licence. But the idea that the workers are bound by no chains but their own attitudes is taken quite seriously by a number of theories and movements, from the syndicalist apocalypse of folded arms on the left, to Tebbit’s ‘Get on your

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bike!’ on the right, via the legion of recipes for liberation by consciousness-raising. The idea can be summed up in a slogan which sounds almost tautological: ‘Society is composed of people; so, if enough people change themselves, society will be transformed.’ But if this is read as a statement to the effect that individual changes could cumulatively be causally sufficient for the production of any possible social change, then it is by no means tautological. It is the view of Tolstoy, and has been implicit in much popular non-political radicalism, from the Beatles to the Guardian Women’s Page; also in die various export models of American Protestantism and Indian mysticism; but it is not the view of the mature Marx, who said: ‘society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of the relations within which individuals stand’ (Grundrisse, p.265). Anti-humanism is in large part a gloss on this statement of Marx’s. It asserts that the social effects of human activities depend on the relations between the social agents (and property, on Marx’s view, is such a relation). ‘Alienation’ is an effect of the capitalist ownership of the means of productive labour, not of the workers’ attitudes to it. In order to analyse the class character of a society, and hence its potential for conflict, its possible directions of development and change - we don’t need to know about people’s attitudes; we need to know about the relations of social agents to each other and to the productive resources. Of course, some of the social agents will be human beings, and those that are not - e.g. limited companies, government departments - will be staffed by human beings. But it is the relations in which they stand which determine their social powers, not vice versa. So far from ‘army’ being the plural of ‘soldier’, as Jarvie claims,4 we could not even understand what a soldier is unless we understood what an army is, anymore than we could understand cheques without a banking system. Jarvie would presumably see nothing strange about the story of the incompetent artillery recruit, whose commanding officer told him; ‘You’re no use to us - why not buy yourself a cannon and set up in business on your own?’

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H ow is history made?

The foregoing rather informal account of anti-humanism has already raised the issue of structural causality. I take it that, for Althusser, anti-humanism is simply the negative expression of a theory of structural causality in social processes. It is formulated in this negative way against the ‘humanist’ formula: ‘men5 make history.’ This humanist formula is, of course, used by Marx and Engels to take their distance from the view that there is a supra-personal teleology at work in history; but they are careful to qualify it: we do not make history under conditions of our own choosing. The rejection of the humanist formula could take either of two forms. It could be said: no, it is not men who make history, but some other kind of agency. Or we could say: there is no answer to the question ‘Who makes history?’; the question itself is a red herring; history is a process without a subject. It is quite clear that Althusser wants to take the second option, but he sometimes plays along with the question, and gives the impres­ sion of an answer. Thus the two ‘anti-humanist formulae’ quoted by John Mepham6 - ‘the masses make history’, and ‘The ‘subjects’ of history are given human societies’ appear to be answers to the question, not repudiations of it - and false answers at that. If we give that vague and patronising term ‘the masses’ a clear sense such as Althusser tries to (‘the exploited social classes, social strata and social categories, grouped around the exploited class capable of uniting them in a movement against the dominant classes which hold state power’, ESC, p. 46) - then we have to admit that the masses very rarely exist, let alone make history, since the exploited classes rarely are so grouped. O f course, history cannot be made by any class unless someone hews the wood and draws the water, minds the babies and fights the battles, and in that sense it is the working population that make history,7 but Althusser does not just mean this, as he goes on to say that in ancient Rome it was not the slaves that made history. So the formula ‘the masses make history’ has nothing to be said for it, unless it is just a sloppy way of saying: people make history in ways determined by their class positions. As for the second anti-humanist formula, Althusser

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obviously intends it as a mere stepping-stone to a no-subject theory, hence the scare quotes. But unfortunately, if we leave out the quotes, it is identical with a view which has in fact been held, which is sometimes wrongly attributed to Marxists, and with which Marx and Engels settled accounts in 1845: All-round dependence, this natural form o f the world-historical co-operation o f individuals, w ill be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery o f these powers, which, bom o f the action o f men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers com pletely alien to them. N ow this view can be expressed again in speculative-idealistic, i.e. fantastic, terms as ‘self-generation o f the species’ (‘society as the subject’), and thereby the consecutive series o f interrelated individuals connected with each other can be conceived as a single individual, which accomplishes the mystery o f generating itself. It is dear here that individuals certainly make one another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves. (The German Ideology, pp.55-6)

I conclude that these anti-humanist formulae should be seen as false starts. After all, Althusser also says that there is no subject of history, but there are subjects in history; that is to say: society is not the subject, people are subjects; but their agency as subjects is defined for them by the historical process in which they find themselves, rather than that process being the expression of their choices. This is surely the same point as that of the last quote. The temptation to see the denial of the ultimate social explanatory power of individual agency as the assertion of a supra-individual agency proves difficult to resist. I recall the difficulty of one of those ‘epistemological breaks’ of early childhood: as a child I used to love to watch trees waving in the wind, and was quite convinced that the waving of the trees caused the wind. One day my big brother told me: ‘You know, it’s not the trees that blow the wind, it’s the wind that blows the trees’. I accepted this on authority, but since something had to cause the wind, and since like any child I found the action of concrete individuals much more easy to grasp than the regional variation of air pressure, I concluded that somewhere there must be at least one supertree, which did cause the wind by its waving, and which I dubbed ‘Mr W ind’. In Althusserian terms, I thought that if ordinary trees were not wind-making subjects, there must be some big wind-making Subject; the real

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‘epistemological break’ came with the realisation that wind is ‘a process without a subject’, i.e. that there is no concrete agency that produces the wind; it is caused by a relation of inequality between atmospheric pressures. Structure and bearers

In coming to the explicitly ‘no-subject’ formulation of anti­ humanism, we also come to the positive side of the coin, the theory of structural determination. the structure o f the relations o f production determines the places and functions occupied and adopted by die agents o f production.... The true ‘subjects’ are these definers and distributors: the relations of production (and political and ideological social relations). But since these are ‘relations’, they cannot be thought within the category subject.*

Here the scare quotes around ‘subjects’ are, so to speak, given an exact meaning: the causally decisive features of society are not the sort of thing which could be subjects: they are ‘the definition and distribution of these places and functions’. (‘Definition’ of course should be taken in the general sense of ‘setting limits’, not in the dictionary sense.) Hence, in the last sentence, the category ‘subject’ is abandoned (at least as far as social explanation is concerned). In order to keep the formulation of structural determination succinct, I omitted a passage from the above quote (see note 8); in that passage, Althusser uses the Marxian notion of Trciger, ‘bearers’ or ‘supports’, to refer to the social agents in their relation to the structure of society. The methodological maxim implicit in the passage is: Don’t ask about the bearers, ask about the structure. It is not clear whether this is hypothetical imperative (understand: if you want to engage in social explanation) or a categorical one (implying: there is nothing to bearers but their function as bearers). This has caused a lot of trouble - or at least, it had given a grain of justification to attacks that Althusser’s Marxism would no doubt have attracted anyway. Humanist Marxists get very upset to hear people called bearers of social positions. If you talk about people like that, objects E.P. Thompson,9 you might start treating them like

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that. For my part, I have no idea what treating someone like a bearer or a ' social position might be. But this humanist indignation with Althusser is so widespread that it requires a second look. The point might be: anti-humanist Marxists will treat their opponents as class enemies, rather than as responsible human agents. It is then suggested that this will facilitate terrorist or totalitarian politics. I have heard Althusserian Marxism called ‘literally terrorist’ and accused of being a rationalisation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (which Althusser con­ demned); E.P. Thompson even insinuates that his ideas may have influenced Pol Pot.10 Yet terrorism rests theoretically on the assumption that the dedicated individual or clique can bypass class struggles by their action; and morally on the idea of personal guilt for political evils, and the justice of retribution. Althusser’s antihumanism could hardly be further from this type of political ethos. Alternatively, the point might be that people are not nothing but bearers of social positions. This is true, and on one interpretation of Althusser’s formulation (the ‘hypothetical imperative’ referred to above), compatible with it. This might be called the caryatid-interpretation of anti-humanism: we do not deny that the caryatid is a work of art, but we do not need to ask aesthetic questions in order to understand its function as a load-bearing pillar. Likewise, when we are asking questions about the social structure, we can forget about facts about human beings other than their places as bearers of social positions. I f the moral pathos of the point that we are not nothing but TrSger derives from a high valuation of human individuality, and hence is directed against what Sartre calls ‘the suppression of particularity’, though, it is worth noting that the humanist may be throwing stones from a glass house. For humans are not nothing but humans either. They are men or women, Jews or Gentiles, blonde or dark, monoglots or polyglots, Platonists or Artistotelians - and of course, bourgeois or proletarians. I f we want to do justice to people’s individuality, to the concrete uniqueness of each individual, we need to make more distinctions, not fewer, and at least the concept ‘bearer of a

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social position’, by virtue of the fact that there are different social positions, puts us on the track of what Althusser calls a ‘theory of the historical forms of existence of individuality’.11As Marx noticed, humanism can have a certain procrustean quality: consider his rejoinder to the humanistic socialists of his time: ‘All quibbles about names are resolved in humanism; wherefore com m unists, wherefore socialists? We are human beings - tous freres, tous amis.’ . . . Wherefore human beings, wherefore beasts, wherefore plants, wherefore stones? We are bodies!12

Nevertheless, I must admit that Althusser lays himself open to the charge of an ‘historicist’ account of human personality, which if elaborated could only mean the reducibility of the psychological sciences to the social. (Although we know from Althusser’s views on psychoanalysis that this conclusion would not be acceptable to him.) Structural causality: Spinoza or Leibniz?

Let us look at Althusser’s formulation of the positive corollary of anti-humanism, the idea of structural causality, which he calls ‘Marx’s great theoretical revolution’. He claims that, aside from Spinoza, all modem pre-Marxian theories used one of two concepts of causality. It is necessary here to quote at length. Very schematically, we can say that classical philosophy (the existing Theoretical) had two and only two systems o f concepts with which to think effectivity. The mechanistic system , Cartesian in origin, which reduced causality to a transitive and analytical effectivity: it could not be made to think the effectivity o f a whole on its elem ents, except at the cost of extraordinary distortions (such as those in Descartes’ ‘psychology’ and biology). But a second system was available, one conceived precisely in order to deal with the effectivity o f a whole on its elements: the Leibnizian concept o f expression. This is the model that dominates all Hegel’s thought. But it presupposes in principle that the whole in question be reducible to an inner essence, o f which the elem ents o f the whole are then no more than the phenomenal forms o f expression, the inner principle o f the essence being present at each point in the whole, such that at each moment it is possible to write the immediately adequate equation: such and such an element

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(econom ic, political, legal, literary, religious, etc., in Hegel) = the inner essence of the whole. Here was a model which made it possible to think the effectivity o f the whole on each o f its elem ents, but if this category - inner essence/outer phenomenon - was to be applicable everywhere and at every moment to each o f the phenomena arising in the totality in question, it presupposed that the whole had a certain nature, precisely the nature of a ‘spiritual’ whole in which each element was expressive of the entire totality as a ‘pars totalis’. In other words, Leibniz and Hegel did have a category for the effectivity o f a whole on its elem ents or parts, but on the absolute condition that the whole was not a structure. If the whole is posed as structured, i.e. as possessing a type o f unity quite different from the type o f unity o f the spiritual whole, this is no longer the case: not only does it become im possible to think the determination o f the elem ents by the structure in the categories o f analytical and transitive causality, it also becomes impossible to think it in the category of the global expressive causality o f a universal inner essence immanent in its phenomenon. The proposal to think the determination o f the elem ents o f a whole by the structure o f the whole posed an absolutely new problem in the most theoretically embarrassing circumstances, for there were no philosophical concepts available for its resolution. The only theoretician who had had the unprecedented daring to pose this problem and outline a first solution to it was Spinoza. But, as we know, history had buried him in impenetrable darkness. Only through Marx, who, however, had little knowledge o f him, do we even begin to guess at the features o f that trampled face. (RC, pp. 186-7)

It is worth noting that in the atomism of classical bourgeois thought, the two are tacitly combined. Each human individual is seen as a ‘spiritual whole’, but their mutual relations in society are seen as mechanistic. It is, of course, society that Althusser is talking about here, and that he wants to explain as a structured whole. But if we follow up the allusion to Spinoza, we can say that, to Spinoza at least, a human being is also a ‘composite individual’ or structured whole. I shall now recapitulate Spinoza’s theory of composite individuals, and then return to this chapter of Althusser’s, for on the face of it, Althusser often seems to lean towards the Leibniz-Hegel view of the social whole, rather than the Spinoza-Marx view. Consider for instance this passage from Althusser: the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object, elem ent or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark-, on the contrary... the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its

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effects in the Spinozist sense o f the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination o f its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects, (ibid., pp. 188-9)

Now according to Spinoza, as is well known, ‘simple bodies’ (atoms) behave like perfectly respectable Newtonian or Cartesian billiard balls.13 Their ‘conatus’ is simply Newtonian inertia: they go on moving in the same direction until they bump into something. But composite individuals, which are made up of atoms (at the first-order level) or of other composite individuals, are governed by a sort of structural causality, which is however constituted by a particular equilibrium in the mechanistic interaction of their atomic parts. The latter part of the above passage from Althusser, therefore, is good Spinozism, denying that structures have any being apart from their parts. But these atomic parts, for Spinoza, did precede the composite individual of which they are components, and will survive it. With higher-order composite individuals the case is more complex. The cells of a multicellular organism, for instance, do not typically pre-exist the organism (at least with higher life forms), though under certain conditions they may survive it; their atomic components, however, both pre-exist and survive the more complex individuals of which they are components. In the case of people and society, an individual may indeed pre-exist their society and/or survive it, though typically we do neither. But certainly, an individual is not wholly constituted by their society: they have, for example, a biological structure, on which the social formation does indeed ‘imprint its mark’. Of course, by using the term ‘effects’ Althusser evades the issue, for it is trivially true that effects do not precede their causes. But I take it that the effects he is talking about are the elements of the structure: on p.187 he has posed the question in terms of ‘the proposal to think the determination of the elements of a whole by the structure of the whole’. If Althusser means to reduce the elements of a structure to its effects, he has slipped in a Leibnizian direction, and given legitimate cause for concern about his anti-humanism: for his conception of the society/person relation would be in­

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distinguishable from that which is characteristic of the political philosophy of absolute idealism - the tradition which leads from Hegel through Bradley to Mussolini and perhaps Roger Scruton, denying any co-efficient of adversity in human individuals vis-à-vis their social determination. This has always historically been a political philosophy of the Right, and although one can conceive of a socialist variant, it could hardly be a socialism ‘with a human face’ (a slogan that met with Althusser’s approval), or which set any store by ‘the free development of each’. The fear of such totalitarian uses of anti­ humanism is the basis of much of the hostility it has aroused, in so far as that hostility gets beyond a sentimental preference for ‘warm’ rather than ‘cold’ discourse, people-talk rather than science. It is necessary here to defend Althusser against himself: for I believe that he is absolutely right that Marx’s ‘great theoretical revolution’ was precisely the ‘Spinozan’ conception of structural causality applied to society, and that any return to ‘Leibnizian’ or ‘Cartesian’ causality means the end of scientific politics. This is perhaps the central achievement of Althusser’s work - yet he appears not to carry it through consistently, but to slip at crucial points into a ‘Leibnizian’ way of thinking. I shall be concerned in what follows with a general theory of the relation of components to composites within a general hierarchy of structuration; this is clearly more abstract than the question of the society/person relation, but I think mistakes about the latter can be avoided if we understand it as one instance of the hierarchy in which composite individuals are composed of composite individuals, which are themselves composed . . . etc. I am taking it that the theory of composite individuals is the part of Spinoza’s thought which is applicable here, though Althusser’s reference to the notion of a cause immanent in its effect is taken from another aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy: not the effectivity of a composite on its components, but oiDeus sive Natura on his or her creatures.14 Nevertheless it is clear what Althusser wants from Spinoza. As he says in the chapter on Spinoza in ESC: . . . t h e position of the Marxist Topography protects the dialectic against the delirious idealist notion o f producing its own material substance', it imposes on

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Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought it, on the contrary, a forced recognition o f the material conditions o f its own efficacy. . . . It is here that Spinoza served us as a (sometimes direct, sometimes very indirect) reference: in his effort to grasp a ‘non-eminent’ (that is, non-transcendent) not simply transitive (it la Descartes) nor expressive (¡1 la Leibniz) causality, which would account for the action of the W hole on its parts, and of die parts on the Whole - an unbounded W hole, which is only d ie active relation between its parts: in this effort Spinoza served us, though indirectly, as a first and almost unique guide, (pp. 140-1)

To recognise a real hierarchy of composite individuals is to reject both the methodological individualism inherent in the Cartesian notion of causality, and the holism inherent in the Leibnizian. If a methodological individualist is making a general methodological point that a composite is only understood when it is resolved into its components (rather than the ‘humanist’ sociological point described earlier as classical bourgeois atomism), then, as Bhaskar has pointed out, they ought to be physicalistic reductionists with respect to human individuals.15 On the other hand, the holist who reduces components to mere effects of the composite, must lose the ‘lower’ orders of hierarchy, and end with the monism characteristic of the absolute idealist. Hence we have four possible ontologies: 1.

2. 3.

4.

Mechanistic atomism: everything is reducible to the mechanical interaction of physical atoms: genuine explan­ ations of ‘higher-order’ entities must always be in terms of their atomic components: there is no structural causality. Absolute idealist monism: the elements of a whole are its mere effects: there can be no genuine explanations at the levels lower than that of the total whole. Humanist atomism: human individuals are irreducible spiritual wholes: everything at the subpersonal level must be explained in terms of the whole person - and everything at the suprapersonal level must be explained in terms of the mechanistic interaction of these individuals. Structural pluralism: composite individuals cannot be reduced to their components - they have a specific emergent causality of their own: neither can individuals be reduced to the mere effects of composite individuals of

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which they are components. Hence there is a real hierarchy of composition, and explanatory laws specific to each level. Of course, the ontologies that have in fact been maintained have not been pure forms of these alternatives. But in logic one must hold either that composites and their components are mutually irreducible (4), or that reducibility holds downwards (1) or upwards (2) or that there is a level up to and down to which other levels must be reduced (3). Spinoza and the dialectic

Now I shall consider Spinoza’s theory of composite individuals, and I shall (reluctantly) mark a certain distinction with a neologism, This will enable me to compare Spinoza and Althusser with respect to an unclarity present in both, and in the process compare both with Marx himself. We commonly use the term ‘structure’ equivocally: we speak of the structure of a building, a society or a molecule, a structure which can be shared with another such entity; and we call these structured entities themselves ‘structures’, including the parts (elements, components) whose relations constitute the ‘struc­ ture’ in the first sense. For this second sense of the word ‘structure’, I shall use the word ‘structuratum’. I reserve ‘structure* for the former sense: the set of causal relations between the ‘parts’ or components of a structuratum. In the context of Spinoza, it is tempting to use ‘structurans’ for the former sense of ‘structure’, on analogy with ‘natura naturans, natura naturata’, but I feel this could license Platonistic errors: there is not first a structure which then incarnates itself in a structuratum; every structuratum is made up out of elements which may exist independently of it, as either they, or their elements in turn, had done before the structuratum came into being; and there is nothing to a structure but the mutual relations of its parts. A structuratum therefore is a concrete entity, while a structure, as a set of relations, is abstract. But a structure is not a concept, nor yet a ‘theoretical entity*. Relations really exist, independently of our concepts of them; they are abstract in that they cannot exist except as relations between their relata.

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Spinoza’s expression for ‘structure’ is ‘mutual relations of motion and rest’, and for structuratum, ‘composite individual’. Now a composite individual, according to Spinoza, has a conatus, an endeavour to persevere in its being. If this were taken as a contingent claim, it would be open to the objection that it looks like teleology, which Spinoza explicitly rejects. I take it that it is intended as an analytic truth: if any composite individual did not have the tendency to hold together, it would fall apart. A heap of stones is a composite individual, tending to stay in being because of the mutual relations of pressure, etc. between the stones - this is clear from Spinoza’s definition of a composite individual and the ensuing axiom 3 (Part II proposition X III).16 Part III prop. V II, declaring that: ‘The effort by which each thing endeavours to persevere in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself (Wilde, p.215; Gebhardt 11/146) seems to support the interpretation of the conatus-thesis as analytic: the conatus of a structuratum is its structure. There is nothing more teleological here than in Darwin: the things that are are the things that have survived, and the things that have survived are the things whose structure exemplifies the conatus-thesis. Hence the notion of conatus can be accepted as a clarification of the theory of composition or structuration, without any mystery or animism being allowed in. Now it is a doctrine of Spinoza’s that there can be nothing contrary to a conatus within that of which it is the conatus: hence things can be destroyed only from without. Thus (Part III, props. IV and V): ‘A riling cannot be destroyed except by an external cause’; ‘In so far as one thing is able to destroy another are they of contrary natures; that is to say, they cannot exist in the same subject’ (Wild, pp.214 and 215: Gebhardt I I / 145). Yet it is a clear consequence of his theory of composite individuals that not only does a composite individual have its own conatus, but the parts of which it is composed have theirs which can presumably work contrary to the conatus of the larger individual. Perhaps this is clearest if we take the case of society as a composite individual. The structure of a society consists in the set of relations between the individuals composing it, and also various non-human elements, e.g. tools, environmental resources, ‘artifical persons’, etc. Each society

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definitely possesses a conatus, i.e. a tendency to reproduce a similar set of relations. Moreover, this occurs for the most part non-teleologically. Thus, capitalist production-relations com­ prise: (a) (b)

relations of possession, in separate units, between one set of agents and the means of production; relations of separation between another set of agents and the means of production.

And consequently: (i)

relations of the selling of labour-power by the latter set (workers) to the former set (capitalists); (ii) relations of competition for markets between capitalists; (iii) relations of competition for jobs between workers; (iv) relations of class conflict between workers and capitalists. Every capitalist society, short of an external catastrophe or a revolutionary upheaval, has reproduced these relations from generation to generation, through total changes of personnel and equipment, and substantial modifications in the detail of social organisation. For this reproduction to occur there need be no conscious intention of perpetuating capitalist relations of production, though by now this generally does exist in a minority. What there always have been, historically, is a set of institutions which in fact function to safeguard this process of reproduction, i.e. what Marx terms the superstructure. But before these can be understood, it is necessary to understand the manner in which the actions of the agents in pursuit of their own private ends serve, by virtue of the structure, to reproduce that structure. A capitalist society possesses a conatus which is not identical to that of any of its inmates - and indeed, if Marx is right, which is radically opposed to that of the majority of them. Even a capitalist will be driven by his own conatus to maximise personal consumption, while being constrained by the structure of capitalism to serve its conatus by re-investing. Notoriously, the interests of human individuals may conflict with that of society. This does not just mean that the interest of one individual may conflict with the interests of others, or the common interest; the interest of society, in the present sense, is

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not the sum of individual interests, but rather that which is conducive to the perpetuation of the set of relations which constitute it as the kind of society that it is; for the same individuals could constitute a quite different society, if the set of relations between them were transformed by a revolution. The recognition that a society has interests independent of those of its members does not of course commit us to the promotion of those interests in any given society. One might even formulate Marx’s idea of a communist society as one in which - unlike any society hitherto - there is no societal conatus distinct from the sum of individual conatuses: ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. At the other end of the political spectrum, the totalitarian ideal is of a society in which all individual conatuses are totally dissolved into or subordinated to the societal conatus. (I don’t believe either ideal is realisable, but at least Marx has got the direction right.) It follows that society, considered as a structuratum (i.e. as a concrete whole, complete with all the contingent features of its elements), does have internal counter-conative tendencies, i.e. the conatuses of its members. And clearly this is also the case with lower order structurata. Spinoza’s remarks about the dangers of excess in ‘localised pleasure’ (titillatio) are a recognition of this. The pathology of any structuratum could be characterised as its parts behaving in ways adverse to its conatus, and this implies that they have their own conatuses. And these counter-conative tendencies in any structuratum can, and typically do, ultimately destroy it. All structurata are mortal - and not just because they are vulnerable to the depredations of outside forces. Indeed, such vulnerability is only possible because the parts of any structuratum obey laws other than those which govern them by virtue of their place in the structuratum. Everything is composite, so everything can decompose. Or for Spinoza, everything except the simple bodies of which all other things are ultimately composed, i.e. atoms. But we now know that atoms are themselves structurata, composite individuals, and our confidence about saying that any entity is basic in the sense of internally unstructured should have been shaken. Maybe it is just that our cognitive equipment is

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incapable of penetrating below a certain level of the hierarchy of structurata, just as our eyes can only perceive light within a definite spectrum. There are counter-conative forces, then, within any structuratum. But in so far as those forces are due to aspects of its parts that are contingent with respect to its structure, they might be called external to the structure, though not to the structuratum. Spinoza’s propositions IV and V of part III of the Ethics - ‘A thing cannot be destroyed except by an external cause’, ‘In so far as one thing is able to destroy another they are of contrary natures; that is to say, they cannot exist in the same subject’ could then be interpreted as meaning that nothing can be destroyed except by something external to its structure. Not, though, necessarily external to the thing considered as a structuratum, in that those qualities of its elements which are contingent relative to the structure, may also be contrary to that structure. Spinoza’s view, even so interpreted, would, I think, still have been contested by Marx, from whom I drew my example. For Marx, a dialectical contradiction is precisely a counter-conative feature of a structure: the contradiction is written into the structure itself, not merely an effect of recalcitrant com­ ponents.17 Nevertheless, the possibility of such contradictions is dependent upon structurata already being vulnerable by virtue of the partial autonomy of their elements. If workers and bosses were, from the point of view of the capitalist system, perfect workers and bosses (i.e. nothing but workers and bosses), class struggle could never get off the ground. It is arguable that an important part of Marx’s claim that his dialectical conception of history is a materialist one, is that it is the nature of the ‘matter’ (i.e. the elements) of a structuratum, that ultimately determines its possibilities and limits. If (pace Spinoza - and indeed Aristotle) I may speak Aristotelian: the primacy of material cause over formal cause, and of formal cause over final cause (where, in terms of the present terminology, formal cause = structure and final cause = conatus). One might distinguish here, on the one hand a general theory of dialectic: all things, as composite individuals whose com­

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ponents are partly autonomous, will dissolve into those components (so that, in regard to particular things, Thanatos always prevails over Eros); and on the other hand a special theory of dialectic: certain things, e.g. capitalist societies, have the tendency to destroy themselves built into their structure. The special theory is the specifically Marxian one; the general theory, familiar from Engels’s writings, harks back to Spinoza, and indeed to Heraclitus. The theories are related, and probably both true, but not identical. Societies and People

I think that the conclusions from this detour through Spinoza should be as follows: (1) We must reject structural monism, i.e. the idea that the elements of a structure are nothing but its effects, and therefore not themselves structured. Social formations are structurata the elements of which - people, etc. - are themselves structurata. (2) The structure of a social formation can be studied in abstraction from the nature of its bearers, aside from those qualities by virtue of which they can be its bearers. Hence it is possible to write historical studies of a particular period, with a high explanatory power, without describing life in that period at all. Perry Anderson’s works on European history are a case in point. (3) Such studies will not however be total explanations, as the social formation considered concretely, as a structuratum, is an open system, in which features of the bearers which are underdetermined or even undetermined by the social structure, wiU have effects, unpredictable from the knowledge of the structure. Hence Althusser is wrong to take Plekhanov to task because he ‘ransacked Louis XV’s bed to prove that the secrets of the fall of the Ancien Régime were not hidden there’. Althusser goes on to comment: ‘As a rule, concepts are not hidden in beds.’ As I have said elsewhere: no, and they don’t start revolutions either. Plekhanov was working on a very real problem (which however I shall state in rather different terms):

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how can knowledge of the social structure have explanatory power when the social formation is inclusive of elements whose relations constitute the structure, and which are not themselves wholly constituted by the structure? This is a special case of the question: how can any science, being restricted to studying mechanisms of a single stratum of nature, explain what happens in the real world, which is an open system, i.e. co-determined by many strata of mechanisms? It is possible that Althusser’s apparent writing off of nonstructural effects may be the result, not of his anti-humanism, but of his metaphor of ‘continents’, which lends itself to the idea of history as a closed system. (4) The psychological sciences are not a mere region of the ‘continent of history’, but have their own irreducible level in the structural hierarchy to investigate. In order to explain what actually gets done by people in society, we need to apply social and psychological sciences conjointly. In doing so we may be confronted by demarcation disputes, perhaps irresoluble ones. But at the abstract level, there can be no conflict between social and psychological sciences, e.g. between Marx and Freud. These conclusions are, I think, in line with those of Roy Bhaskar in the section of P N entitled ‘On the Society/Person Connection’. He speaks of an ontological hiatus between society and people (p.46). ‘They do not constitute two moments of the same process. Rather they refer to radically different kinds of thing’ (p.42). There are categorical differences between human actions and changes in the social structure: For the properties possessed by social forms may be very different from those possessed by ¿he individuals upon whose activity they depend. Thus one can allow, without paradox or strain, that purposefulness, intentionality and sometimes self-consciousness characterize human actions but not transformations in the social structure. The conception I am proposing is that people, in their conscious activity, for the m ost part unconsciously reproduce (and occasionally transform) the structures governing their substantive activities o f production. Thus people do not marry to reproduce the nuclear family or work to sustain the capitalist economy. Yet it is nevertheless the unintended consequence (and inexorable result) of, as it is also a necessary condition for, their activity, (p.41)

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The connection between these two types of being is that: Society is both the ever-present condition (material cause) and the continually produced outcome o f human agency. And praxis is both work, that is conscious production, and (normally unconscious) reproduction o f the conditions of production, that is society, (pp.43-4)

Thus society has a different kind of being from people; its nature cannot be read off from the nature of people that compose it; and in turn, their nature cannot be read off from that of society. People are agents who work in and on the society they compose, reproducing or transforming it. They are not mere passive effects, but neither do they create it ex nihilo: they transform an already existing society with already existing means present in that society. And they do so for the most part unintentionally, in performing work with intended effects at another level (e.g. material production). How, they reproduce or transform society is determined by the structure of society, i.e. by the totality of social relations in which they stand; not by their personal character or intentions, or indeed ‘personal relations’.18 So that in accounting for human action it is necessary to use agent-talk, to talk about desires, purposes and intentions, about means and ends, success and failure, and also about unconscious wishes, repression, displacement, sublimation and so on. But in accounting for the way societies are reproduced/transformed by human actions it is necessary to use quite different concepts: forces and relations of production, exploitation, classes, base and superstructure, accumulation, crisis, etc. So far, this is all in accord with the following passage from Althusser: That human, i.e. social individuals are active in history - as agents of the different social practices o f the historical process of production and reproduction - that is a fact. But, considered as agents, human individuals are not ‘free’ and ‘constitutive’ subjects in the philosophical senses o f these terms. (ESC, p.95)

Here, Althusser is reasserting the essential ‘anti-humanist’ foundation of the theory of structural causality in the social

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sciences. He is certainly not denying that agents are subjects, though it is not made clear what this means beyond their being agents. He goes on to say: ‘agents can only be agents if they are subjects’ - presumably this holds in all possible societies. This offers no comfort to those who have loaded immense theoretical weight onto the back of Althusser’s rather lame pun about ‘subjects’ in the royalist sense. However, he goes on to generalise his attack on the concept of the subject: ‘For Marxist philosophy there can be no Subject as an Absolute Centre, as a Radical Origin, as a Unique Cause’ (p.96). No, but there can be subjects as relative centres, proximate origins, causes among others. This needs to be said because it is an important fact, at the psychological level, that human beings have got some degree of unity, centredness, co­ herence and conscious control in their personalities, that this degree is an index of mental health, and these features are desiderata of any acceptably psychotherapeutic practice. At this point perhaps a little Anglo-Saxon complacency would not be out of place, for our native tradition of philosophy has generally avoided high-flown claims for the autonomy of the subject of the sort made by Descartes, Kant and Sartre, and indeed has treated the concept ‘subject’ as a grammatical rather than an ontological or epistemological one.19 We do not need to unbend this particular stick, and hence are less at risk of breaking it, as the Left Lacanians have tended to do. ‘H um an nature’, ‘Personal p olitics’ and non-structural change Let us consider the implications of the foregoing arguments for three tendencies in recent Marxist thought. 1. Most recent Marxist thought has rejected the concept of human nature, and attributed such rejection to Marx as well. Norman Geras’s book on the subject has made clear the untenability both of this rejection and its attribution to Marx, so there is no need to elaborate that argument here.20 However, it is often thought that Althusser put the final nail in the coffin of the concept of human nature; Geras himself directs a good

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deal of his fire at Althusser, though he recognises that the denial of human nature is older and more widespread than Althusserianism. Now the nature of any entity is its set of dispositions, powers and tendencies, determined by its structure. To say that there is no human nature is to say that the human bearers of the social structure are not themselves structured entities (perhaps because they are the pure activity of Sartrean transparent consciousness, perhaps because they are the pure receptivity of the classical empiricist wax tablet); or, alternatively, that although individuals have structures, they have no common structure. Now Althusser’s attack on humanism and empiricism utterly undermines the first two views - the only ones that have been serious philosophical contenders. We therefore have to assume that he intends the third - a sort of radical anthropological individualism: individuals have natures, but not a common nature. The Marxist stress on the differences between people in different epochs and from different classes, and the Spinozan idea that conatus is individual-specific not species-specific contribute to this view, though neither Marx nor Spinoza denies that we have a common nature, and indeed both presuppose it. Althusser himself does not work out in any detail what is involved in such anthropological individualism, no doubt because it could not be worked out without wild implausibility. This anthropological individualism, though not actually inconsistent with the rest of Althusser’s theories, does not follow from them; unless, that is, his doctrine of social wholes is interpreted along the lines of the Leibnizian totality, in which case each individual would be a unique aspect of a society, but nothing else but that. I f ‘Spinozan’ structural causality operates at the level of society, that is no reason to suppose that it does not operate at the individual level. ‘Anti-humanism’ requires that it operates at the social level; denial of human nature requires that it does not operate, or operates in a random manner, at the individual level. So anti-humanism does not require the denial of human nature. The most promising general philosophical outlook for someone who wanted to defend Althusser’s anthropological

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individualism would be radical historicism of the kind espoused by some absolute idealists, and by some Marxists in the 1930s and 1940s. The uniqueness of each individual’s structure would then be exhaustively accounted for by the uniqueness of each historical situation. A common nature disappears - but with it, any limit to the power of historically determinate structures: the material limits of the social whole are lost sight of in this conception. Althusser’s extremely effective attacks on humanism, empiricism, holism and historicism make his version of Marxism uniquely accommodating to the idea of human nature, by discrediting the most serious attempts to dispense with that idea and portray human individuals as infinitely adaptable to social requirements. His rejection of the concept fits into his theory (to borrow Bob Dylan’s phrase) like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine. 2. In the late 1960s, the rediscovery of Marx’s early humanism, Mao’s ‘cultural revolution’ and the feminist movement combined to popularise an idea with an irresistible appeal to every petty bourgeois utopian: that ‘the personal is political’. The theoretical concomitant of this idea is that the psychological and even biological sciences become part of the arena of political polemic. Neither Althusser nor Bhaskar has come out against this idea, so far as I know, yet it is surely precluded by the recognition of the ‘ontological hiatus’. The recognition of that hiatus is the barrier against that moralistic reformism which is the worst of the dangers inherent in theoretical humanism: once again, the idea that ‘society consists of people, so if enough people are changed, society will be transformed’. To some extent, the appeal of the idea of ‘personal politics’ may 1« that it gives credentials of importance, in a community of the politically committed, to psychological or interpersonal concerns. But it does so in a mystifying way. Such concerns are not the stuff of politics, but they are the stuff of much of life, and must be confronted on their own terms. There is no guarantee of harmony between personal liberation and political liberation. They largely take place in different spheres of activity, and when they do interact, it is not necessarily a happy

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interaction. Indeed I would go further and say that when any individual or groups allows personal matters to enter into their political life, or political matters to enter into their personal life, the effect is always disastrous. And this is hardly surprising, since politics is about the struggle for power, in which material possessions are the stake, and the successful organisation of violence the decisive factor, and in which loyalty to principles must always take precedence over concrete loyalties. Only a psychopath could manage their personal affairs on such a basis - while any attempt to base political activity on the gentler attitudes appropriate to personal relations would make a gift of the world to tyrants. 3. Granted the explanatory pluralism which is entailed by the recognition of ontologically distinct structural levels, the rejection of ‘personal politics’ does not involve denying that important changes in the quality of life can be made without structural changes in society. Changes such as the Evangelical revival, or the ‘sexual revolution’, did not effect any structural changes in British capitalism, yet they certainly changed the face (‘face’ is a good metaphor here) of British society. A political commitment neither answers nor renders irrelevant the question what social style is desirable. It must be asked seriously, and not pre-judged on supposed political grounds. Of course, it should not be forgotten that the structure places limits on the ‘facial’ possibilities; nor that the ‘style’ of politics too can be important, as well as its class content. At times, perhaps, questions of ‘style’ may even influence the outcome of a political struggle (cf. Lenin on Stalin’s ‘rudeness’).21 It is arguable that the brutalisation of the sensibilities of the Bolsheviks by the civil war was a decisive factor in the rise of ‘Stalinism’. My point here is the distinctness and mutual irredudbility of the practices of politics on the one hand and ‘facial’ transformation (‘reformation of manners’, ‘cultural revolution’, call it what you will) on the other. I am not saying that either is unimportant, or that they have no effects on each other. However, recognition of the distinctness is of profound practical consequence. First, to counter proposals for cultural revolution from above, such as was foisted on the Chinese

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people with such dismal results. Secondly, to oppose the ten­ dency to let the combative and suspicious attitudes appropriate to politics spill over into other areas of life. It is quite arguable that the tendency to do so - precisely within radical circles facilitated that shift in social attitudes prevalent in Britain in that trollish direction that paved the way for Thatcherism.22 Personal and Social transform ations Let me conclude by reconsidering the pseudo-tautology which I formulated at the beginning: ‘Society is composed of people; so if enough people change themselves, society will be transformed’. The antecedent is correct only if it is interpreted as meaning that society is a Spinozan composite individual of which people are components (though even so, there are non­ human components too); the identity of the composite depends, not on the identity of the components, but on that of their mutual relations of causality and dependency. In what sense, then, is the consequent true? In two senses, I think. First, suppose that, while all die fundamental relations of production, power, etc. remained the same, two-thirds of the population of Britain were converted to Buddhism or to Catholicism: clearly the complexion of the country would be very different. People’s eating and drinking habits, sexual morals, artistic tastes and production, and many other things would be so different that national life would be unrecognis­ able. However, we would still be living in a capitalist society, and that would set definite limits to what could change, in terms of income distribution, employment, priorities, international alliances, education system, etc., even if changes in these areas had become desiderata from the majority. Now suppose that two-thirds of the people became Marxists. This of course would create an explosive situation. It would not however effect a transition to socialism without the explosion occurring. Capitalism could not change into socialism through the accumulation of minute changes resulting from changed beliefs and desires. Probably, capitalism could weather the storm, either by manipulating ‘democratic’ institutions or overthrowing them.

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Conversion to Buddhism or Catholicism would no doubt make greater changes to personal behaviour, customs, morals, culture, etc. than conversion to Marxism. Yet they would affect the reproduction of the system only marginally. They would not effect political changes. On the other hand, die only change in behaviour necessary for the transition to socialism would be precisely the change in political behaviour, i.e. a lot more people would have to participate in collectively organised activities that had as their aim the overthrow of the capitalist system. There is a second sense in which the formula is true, viz. if it is read as referring not to the causal pre-requisites of social change but to social constraints on personal change. People could not be changed into, say, characters like those portrayed in William Morris’s News From Nowhere unless the social structure had already changed. (Whether they could then is a different question.) However, arguments resembling the formula are usually meant to tell us that changing ourselves is a necessary and sufficient condition of changing the structure of society. ‘Wars will cease when men refuse to fight.’ Yes, but the majority will never refuse to fight until the institutions of international politics and economics have been radically transformed. Lam inated system s and horizontal em ergence

I think a clarification will now be useful on the subject of the different ways in which systems may be open. One thesis of this chapter (by no means an original one) which I think is fairly easy to grasp is that the world is stratified in what might be called a tree of composition: Society Individual Cells M olecules

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However, that is not the only way in which it is stratified. Strata are differentiated by distinct kinds of mechanism, not only distinct kinds of structuraium. A level of mechanisms depends unilaterally for its existence on lower levels - that is what it means to call it ‘higher’, and to call them ‘lower’. One way in which a mechanism may so depend, is that it is a feature of structurata that are composed of structurata governed by the lower-level mechanisms. But that is not the only way it may so depend. Language is composed of signs, not of people, but it is dependent on there being people, and people being governed by certain (biological, etc.) mechanisms. So there will be more strata in the hierarchy of vertical causality (dependence and emergence) than in that of composition. Now let us consider the open-system/closed system distinction. It might be thought that whereas the sense in which a closed system is a system is clear, an open system is not really a system at all. It is simply what there is when there is not a closed system. When we isolate a closed system experimentally, its systematicity is that of a generative mechanism which has been actualised by insulating it from the interference of other generative mechanisms. But that is not the only kind of systematicity. Any structuratum has a certain systematicity, but not all are closed systems. In a certain sense, of course, none is an closed system: a structuratum is open because its elements are governed by mechanisms other than those given by its structure; and because it is therefore vulnerable to outside forces. But a structuratum may also be an internally open system in that it is governed by a number of structures. For instance (at the risk of being charged with body/mind dualism) I think it is true that the human body is a structuratum with different elements from those of the mind (i.e. on the one hand, cells; on the other, cathected intentional objects) and that, in the hierarchy of dependence and emergence (vertical causality), there are two intervening levels (society, language), since these depend on the bodily organism, and are conditions of the emergence of mind. Yet a person is surely a system, one structuratum in two structures, a psychophysical laminate. O f course, in the concrete individual, these structures can no more exist apart from each other than can the two symbiotic organisms in a lichen.

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To return to social ontology: society is a structuratum with three structures: economic, political and ideological.23 In part, these structures have different components, but in large measure, the same components differently related. Councillor Jones may relate to Dr Hughes economically as proletarian to bourgeois, politically as Chairman of the Finance Committee to ratepayer, and ideologically as fellow Calvinistic Methodists. Three different sets of relations generate three different structural tendencies, and these tendencies co-determine the development of society. However, since none of these structures could exist without the others, and all exist as structures o f the society - a concrete entity of which they are abstract features, though real ones - we have to treat society as one structuratum in three structures. Here we are talking about a whole class of entities - societies - which have properties they could not have had without the conjoint operation of mechanisms at the several levels of which they are composed. This is a sort of emergence (already long since noted by emergence theorists): let us call it ‘horizontal emergence’ (to be elucidated below). It can occur also in one-off cases, where an entity may have unique properties due to the unique conjunction of mechanisms in it. It is worth noting at this point how depth realism can provide an understanding of a kind of phenomenon that some philo­ sophies (e.g. existentialism) have held to be a proof of the limits of scientific understanding. Existentialists tend to direct attention to concrete beings (particularly human beings, of course, but not only) and claim that the scientific kind of knowledge is necessarily incomplete in a way that other kinds of knowledge are not, because it cannot deal with concreteness. There are different aspects of this existentialist (or organicist, or personalist) critique, which are not always distinguished: (A) science is abstract because it deals with universals; a universal is never more than a part of any concrete being; (B) science is secondary to and derivative from more concrete forms of knowledge, to which it is related (as Merleau-Ponty says) as geology to familiarity with the countryside; (C) science as objec­ tive abstracts from that subjectivity which is always present in any act of knowing; (D) science as an intellectual activity abstracts from the emotional element in other knowledge,

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which is always directed to concrete beings. However, B, C and D all depend partly on A, and in so far as they do not, are easily answered. B is perfectly correct as an account of the origin of science-type knowledge and its place in everyday life. It often takes the form of the idea that science is required only when practical knowledge breaks down; but this does not prove that science cannot correct the results of everyday practical knowledge: indeed, it presupposes that it can, otherwise how would science resolve the problems that give rise to it? Science may still be the paradigm of knowledge, the judge and rectifier of other forms of knowledge, even though it develops only in response to the practical defects of practical experience. It may have epistemological primacy, even though it is historically and existentially secondary. What remains of the existentialist account of science is: the abstraction that science-type knowledge must make from the concrete conjuncture that gave rise to it, in order to discover the reiterable mechanism that generated the breakdown. Thus it comes back to A. (C). It is true that science abstracts from the subjectivity of its ‘subject’, that it is in essence knowledge ‘without a knowing subject’ (Popper), and that its practitioners must necessarily efface their subjective motives in their work. But this does not mean that science must stop in its tracks whenever it confronts subjectivity; it can make subjectivity its object (e.g. in psychology). Existentialists have a nasty habit of accusing the partisans of objective knowledge of shying away from subjectivity, implying a sort of bad faith or repression; it is the existentialists themselves who legislate that objective knowledge shall not enter the sanctuary of subjectivity. (Though to be fair, Kierkegaard did say that one should be subjective towards others and objective towards oneself, by which I take him to mean that one should see oneself as others see one, and others as they see themselves.) But when the epistemophobic elements of this objection are removed, the point remains that, since there is no single ‘science of people’ (or ‘persons’ as the police and the existentialists prefer to say) objective knowledge of subjectivity is always analytical in that it is the work of a set of distinct knowledges of aspects of people. Point A again.

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(D). In so far as this is a special case of C it is mere obscurantism; emotions can be studied as scientifically as any other aspect of human existence. Science does not have to be emotional in order to study emotions, any more than a student of canine behaviour has to bark. Nevertheless, in so far as it is abstract, science may be prone to overlook the extent to which emotions are irreducibly directed to concrete objects (or, like Plato, treat such directedness as irrational). Is it true that science can say nothing about concrete beings? In so far as they are its ultimate explananda, obviously it can. It explains these open and laminated systems as the results of conjointly acting generative mechanisms which can either be studied in closed systems or postulated on analogy with those that can. And in a certain sense, an open system just is the conjunction of these various mechanisms. But this ‘is’ is the ‘is* of composition, not of identity. In other words, the relation of concrete particulars to the generative mechanisms which account for them is analogous to the relation between a given stratum of structures and that of the components of those structures*(e.g. between society and people, or a living body and its cells). Since this is a relation of emergence, the higher stratum being emergent from the lower, one may call the irreducibility of the concrete particular to the mechanisms which conjoin in it ‘horizontal emergent»’. That some such irreducibility exists is implicit in Roy Bhaskar’s diagram reproduced on p. 12, in that the denizens of the Actual and the generative mechanisms are both real: generative mechanisms are not mere fictions by which we explain the Actual to our­ selves, but neither is the Actual a mere appearance, the reality of which is the multiplicity of mechanisms. Hence, in so far as scientific disciplines attain to ‘the concrete analysis of the concrete conjuncture’ (Lenin), they are liable to require concepts absent from their abstract parts, to deal with the horizontally emergent properties of the particulars. As a passing suggestion: I suspect that any adequate account of beauty will have something to do with the disappearance of the generative mechanisms behind the horizontally emergent properties of the beautiful being.

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T he peculiarities o f personal agency

It is now possible to clear up a problem that has quietly emerged in the course of this chapter. I referred with approval to Althusser’s view that there are subjects in history, but no subject of history - i.e. that while human individuals do (within limits) make their own histories, there is no analogous agency which (like Calvin’s God or Hegel’s Absolute) makes history as a whole (thus, one might say, relieving the Absolute of an awful responsibility). I have also endorsed Bhaskar’s claim that there is an ontological hiatus between societies and people - not just in that they are mutually irreducible, but that they are unlike', that the kinds of explanation appropriate to social and to personal events are quite different, and in particular, that intentional action takes a central place in the explanation of personal behaviour, but a very marginal one in the explanation of the reproduction and transformation of social structures. Yet I have presented a general theory of structured agencies which makes people and societies look in many ways analogous. Both are structurata whose powers are explained by their structure; both have a conatus to persist in their being; both are laminated structurata with a material ‘base’ and a spiritual ‘superstructure’ (ideology, mind). In this section I shall discuss the unlikeness between these two kinds of structuratum. There are concepts which can be applied only to people, those which can be applied only to societies, and those which can be applied to both. Nobody thinks that the economy can be pretty and red-haired, or that a person can be in an inflationary spiral. But that is hardly at issue. A person can be drunk and disorderly; a society can only be drunk in the loose sense that all its members (or a lot of its members a lot of the time) are drunk; but a society can be disorderly; one way in which it can be so is if a lot of its members are disorderly a lot of the time, but that is not the only way. Even if law and order had not broken down so badly under the Thatcher government, I would describe Thatcher’s Britain as disorderly, in the sense that a lot of the functions the carrying out of which makes a society orderly, are simply not done. The word ‘disorderly’ here, unlike the word ‘drunk’, refers to a

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different set of phenomena when predicated of a society than when predicated of a person. Drunkenness can only happen to beings with a certain physiological structure, but disorder is a malfunction of any self-replenishing structure. The interesting issues about parallels and differences between people and societies relate to such conative concepts: concepts relating to the self-replenishing (or otherwise) tendencies of a structuratum; concepts like ‘function’, ‘purpose’, ‘intention’, ‘desire’, and so on: concepts which raise the issue of teleology. Society, like the self-replicating molecules that form the basis of life, reproduces itself without having the purpose, intention or desire to reproduce itself. O f course, politicians will sometimes talk about ‘preserving our way of life’, etc., but politicians’ talk means little. Their efforts to preserve a way of life may be the means of its destruction, and, even more often, the efforts of reforming politicians to charge society may enable it to survive without radical changes. In the works in which Marx and Engels registered their ‘epistemological break’ in 1845, they often stressed that ‘society’, ‘history’, etc. are not agents, in the sense that people are.24The presence or absence of conscious intention is clearly a crucial part of the ontological difference, but it remains to discuss how far-reaching this difference is. One view - Spinoza’s, on one interpretation might be that human purposes just are their tendency to selfpreservation become conscious. On this view, while conscious­ ness-talk would only be appropriate to human agents, there would be no radical breaks in the sort of conative concept which could be applied to human beings and to structurata at other levels.25 Indeed, those who reject conative talk about entities other than human individuals are often making the similar assumption that conative talk is just purposive talk with consciousness subtracted, and so is only attributed to the rest of the world by virtue of an anthropomorphic projection. As against these views, I think it is true that, so far from (»native explanation being appropriate only to conscious beings, human mental life is the one area where such talk is not appropriate. Of course, it is true that we have biological tendencies which function to preserve the individual, and others which function

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to preserve the species. This duality in itself - between what Freud called the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts - is already fatal to the sort of conative monism which is the biggest flaw in Spinoza’s metapsychology. This much Schopenhauer already pointed out in a memorable passage.26 However, Schopenhauer’s critique of Spinoza opens up aline of criticism of Schopenhauer’s own metapsychology, and a transition to Freud. For Schopenhauer conceives the rational aims of the self in conative monist terms (individual selfpreservation) while sexual desire is seen as a dirty trick played on the individual by the conatus of the species, with pleasure baiting the trap. One still encounters such ideas in socio-biology.27 The starting point of a theory of human purposes as distinct from conative mechanisms should be the Freudian recognition that: A. B.

C.

the natural input into human desires comprises a multiplicity of drives; since these are mediated by feelings of pleasure/unplea­ sure which can be pursuedi/avoided without reference to their biological function, they do not necessarily motivate ‘functional’ behaviour from the biological standpoint; the personal unity of a (sane) human agent is not something given by the unity of a conatus, but something achieved by our conscious faculties.

A theory of human desires and purposes on this foundation would present them as very much the exception in relation to a conative model with wide application over other levels of nature and history. One feature of this gap between conative-functional and human-purposive explanation is worth mentioning: while it allows talk about the good of society where this is in no way expressive of the good of any individuals, it leaves no reason whatsoever why anyone should pursue that societal good. Hence it generates axiological individualism without methodo­ logical individualism. That some action is for somebody’s good is a prima fa d e reason for doing it; that it is for society’s good is not. I am assuming here that ‘society’ stands for a structuratum, and not for a group. To complete these reflections on the

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relations of social structure to human agents, I shall now turn to the nature of groups. G roups

It is necessary to have some conception of both structural causality and personal agency before it is possible to discuss the ontology of groups, or, if you prefer a polysyllable, collectives. We saw that methodological individualism generally mis­ interprets structural explanation as explanation in terms of groups. Occasionally, one does encounter theories that regard the group rather than either the individual or the social structure as primary. Some forms of nationalism and racism are of this sort. Marxism is certainly not. Members of a class are distributed into their class positions by the economic structure before there can be any question of a ‘class for itself arising. Individual and social structure are ontologically inter­ dependent, but collectives unilaterally presuppose the existence of individual agents. They are ontologically secondary to the social structure and its individual bearers. This may look like a view of groups shared with methodologi­ cal individualists. However, if methodological individualism were true, groups would be nothing like so politically crucial as they are. Structures can only be transformed by collective action on a scale adequate to the structure, not as a cumulative effect of individual actions. Any ‘individualist’ playing down of collective action therefore inevitably serves conservative (i.e. structure-reproducing) ends. So it is of the first political importance that a theory of groups compatible with the ‘Spinozisf theory of structures be developed. In saying that structures are not groups, a certain ideal conception of a group is evoked: the group as consciously formed by its members in order to realise some common aim. And, of course, groups are sometimes formed in this manner. However, a theory of such ideal groups will not take us very far. It will be of most use in showing in what ways and for what reasons groups, by and large, are not and cannot be ideal groups. To anticipate: form an ideal group, and as soon as it begins to act, it starts to become a sub-structuratum of society. The ideal group (students of the history of philosophy might

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consider Rousseau’s general will, and Sartre’s fused group) has an ontological nature all of its own. Like a society, it has many members, but unlike a society and like an individual it has aims, it deliberates, carries out purposive actions, and so on. Unlike either, it lacks any internal structure: all its members are, so to speak, facing the same way. An account of an ideal group would list its members and say what common aim brought them together; an account of a society would tell of the relations constituting and the tendencies generated by its structure. One might say that an ideal group resembles a Spinozan ‘simple body’, divisible but unstructured.28 Actually, it is quite difficult to describe an ideal group with any concreteness. Perhaps the nearest is the way that the Sartre of Being and Nothingness interpreted Heidegger’s Mitsein: mute solidarity against nature, as in a towing team. In the context of an informal social gathering, which one might expect to be far enough from macro-social determinants to approximate to an ideal group, unstructuredness can only be maintained by some form of ‘terror’ (as in Sartre’s fused group), e.g. the imposition of party games or ear-blasting music by die host? otherwise a complex structure of ‘mutual relations of motion and rest’ tends to emerge. It is no accident that the ideal group is so litde incarnated, for in any group (a) the members occupy places in larger structures, which define their powers and supply them with motives for action; hence the larger structure permeates the group from the outset, (b) There are always mutual relations between the members of the group, which will tend to coalesce into a structure; and in any group of any size, there will be relations of leader to led and/or representatives to represented; and, generally, divisions, (c) In so far as any group acts, it affects and is affected by other social institutions. It thus becomes an element in the social structure. That is not to say that it becomes a functional ‘part of the system’; the system is not a functionalist unity, but a contradictory one. But the social structure is a structure of causally interacting parts, and the alternative to any agency’s being inserted into that structure is its being impotent. Nevertheless, these necessary features of any significant group differentiate it from the ideal group.

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Consider the case of those political parties that have programmes and internal democracy (i.e. generally the parties of the Centre and Left). Their supposed common aims and democratic constitutions might make them look like ideal groups. Of course, everybody knows that they are not: that it is far easier to change the members than to change the leaders, and that programmes are for propaganda in opposition, not for implementation when in office. But many think that parties could and should be ideal groups: ‘if only the party could get rid of those members who don’t really share its aims, and make the leaders responsible to and recallable by the rank and file’, and so on. The campaign for democracy in the Labour Party during Thatcher’s first administration is an obvious case in point.29 Such a view is fundamentally misconceived. Of course, it is better to have a party of sincere socialists (or liberals or ecologists of whatever the party in question is supposed to be) rather than of hypocrites and time-servers; it is better to have elected leaders than ones who ‘emerge’; but such reforms will not make the party into an ideal group. The determinants of a party’s real effectivity are different. In the case of the Labour Party, for instance, the important connections are not those between constituency parties and MPs, or conference and leadership; they are not its internal connections at all, but its external ones. For example: (i) between the party activities and wider (e.g. industrial) struggles; (ii) between the media which form public opinion and the electoral machine that follows it; (iii) between elected representatives and unelected institutions which limit what they can do. So long as the Labour Party (with many honourable exceptions) absents itself from wider day-today struggles in which a non-media-dominated public opinion might be formed, and formulates its policy in hopes of electoral success, the Tory press monopolies will always have more say in its policy-making than do its own members. And so long as the party confuses office with power, ‘re-selection’ can only mean a slightly higher turnover in the supply of unwilling recruits to the service of the ruling class. This point can be generalised: when any group becomes large enough to have serious effects, its external relations become dominant over its internal ones, by a sort of law of action and reaction. This is not a ground for pessimism; there is nothing

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wrong with this external determination of action - it is the mark of any party that is doing its job; the question is only: which external relations - those that involve the party with the class(es) or group(s) it represents, or those that accommodate it to the rules of the powers that be? A group which tries to avoid this fate and retain its autonomy may do so at the price of becoming a sect: a group with a homeostatic mechanism pre­ venting it from growing beyond a certain size or engaging with movements it does not control. It is a moot question which is least unlikely: for a sect to lose its fear of heteronomy and become a party; or for a party long committed to office-seeking for its own sake to become the party o f the people it claims to represent, in a deep, structurally rooted way, and not just in the sense that it wants their votes. On this question depends the choice for British socialists, between, let us say, the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Labour Party. N otes 1. In my paper ‘Scientific Socialism and the Question o f Socialist Values’. On the senses of ‘humanism’, see the Glossary at p. 187. 2. Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue says in his reminiscences o f Marx: ‘He could not bear to offer half-finished thoughts to the public. It would have been most distressing to him to show one o f his manuscripts before it had been finally revised. This feeling was so strong in him that he said to me one day he would rather burn his manuscripts than leave them behind him unfinished’ (in Marx and Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes, vol. I, p.91). 3. ‘Song to the M en o f England’. Poetical Works, pp.572-3. 4. Quoted by Bhaskar, PN , p.34. 5. Writers of earlier periods used the words ‘man’, ‘men’, ‘mankind’, not because they were sexist but because these words were, in many contexts, sex-neutral. German and Russian writers, o f course, used German and Russian words. ‘M ensch’ and ‘chelovyek’ are still sex-neutral. 6. In his article ‘Who Makes History?’, in Radical Philosophy, no.6. 7. This is the sense in which, for example, Plekhanov takes the ‘humanist formula’. 8. RC, p. 180. The former sentence, which I quoted in part, concludes: ‘ . . . who are never anything more than the occupants o f these places, insofar as they are the “supports” (Träger) o f these functions.’ The ambiguity in English of ‘in so far as’ (‘because’ or ‘to the extent that’) encapsulates the unclarity I discuss in the follow ing paragraph.

110 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought The Poverty of Theory, p.337 in the first edition. (N ot only does this book lack an index, but the page order has been changed in later editions, conveniently making the many atrocious passages doubly hard to trace.) Ibid., p.397, n. 181. RC, pp.111-12. The German Ideology, p.94 o f the abridged edition published by International Publishers, N ew York (New World Riperback edition, 1963). Or rather, is helps to think o f them as atoms for present purposes. Spinoza’s view of the ultimate constituents o f matter is not actually an atomic theory, since for him matter is infinitely divisible; only, beyond a certain point in the division, we reach sim ple in the sense o f unstructured bodies, which can be divided, but not decomposed. Spinoza also, of course, denied the possibility of vacuum. If our interest in Spinoza were as a guesser in the realm of physics, all this would count against him unless, like Bennett, we interpret him as holding that, at the most fundamental level, the physical world is not made up o f particles, but is a field (a hypothesis which has its scientific adherents). See Jonathan Bennett’s A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Cambridge, 1984), Chapter 4. But since we are concerned with the relation between levels o f reality at which something like push-pull explanations are more or less adequate, and levels which include things like emotions and reasoned action, the exact nature o f physical explanation can be bracketed off. Though this raises a problem o f Spinoza-exposition. In P t.II, prop. X III, Lemma V II, Scholium , where he sets forth the idea o f a hierarchy o f com position, he also suggests the idea of nature as a single composite individual, which indeed, in terms of his definitions, it must be. But if Deus sive N atura = the structure o f nature, then the character of his/her efficacy must be quite different from what Spinoza says in other places, in that his/her power could be successfully resisted. Perhaps the distinction between structure and structuratum shows up this problem, which Spinoza did not confront. If he were to opt for the interpretation ‘God = nature considered as a structuratum’, he would be left with a rather flat pantheism such as has often been attributed to him, differing from atheism only in a subjective attitude o f reverence for nature, warts and all. In this way, the orthodox theists’ ‘problem of evil’ returns to haunt Spinoza’s system, which had supposedly abolished it. PN , pp.37-8. ‘DEF. - When a number of bodies of the same or of different magnitudes are pressed together by others, so that they lie one upon the other, or if they are in motion with the same or with different degrees o f speed, so that they communicate their motion to one another in a certain fixed proportion, these bodies are said to be mutually united, and taken together they are said to compose one body or individual, which is distinguished from other bodies by this union of bodies.’ Axiom 3 defines hardness, softness and fluidity in terms o f these relations o f ‘lying on’ or ‘moving amongst’ between component bodies (Scribner, Spinoza Selections, ed. W ild, p.161; Gebhardt 11/99-100).

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17. Cf. Althusser (after comparing Spinoza favourably with Hegel as a philosophical forbear o f Marx): ‘whatever you do, you cannot find in Spinoza what Hegel gave to Marx: contradiction’ (ESC, p.141). 18. Cf. Althusser: ‘Social relations are however not, except for the law and for bourgeois legal ideology, “relations between persons” !’ (ESC, p.52). 19. Sartre too, in The Transcendence o f the Ego, says that the concepts ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are ‘logical’ (meaning grammatical, I think) not ontological; and in that text he sketches a theory o f consciousness as pre-personal and the ego as its imaginary object, rather than its subject, which is no doubt the unacknowledged source o f Lacan’s less rigorous account o f the same matters. Unfortunately, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre’s Cartesian education gets the better o f him. 20. M arx and Human N ature - Refutation of a Legend (New Left Books, 1983). 21. ‘Stalin is too rude, and this fa u lt. . . becomes unbearable in the office of General Secretary’ (Lenin’s postscript to his Testam ent’, 4 January 1923). O f course, the issue is not really Stalin’s personal boorishness, but the violent tone o f public life o f which it was a symptom. 22. ‘Trollish’ in the sense o f Ibsen’s Peer G ynt, where the human maxim ‘to thine own self be true’ is contrasted with the Trollish maxim ‘to thine own self be enough’. 23. According to the classical M arxists o f course, the political structure is only a feature o f class societies (see the end o f Chapter 2). This seems to me over-optim istic. The necessity for the publicly acceptable use o f force to be under a unified authority in any geographical area must hold in any human society, for reasons w ell known to Hobbes and Rousseau. 24. O f ‘society as a subject’, see the quote from the German Ideology, on p.77. On ‘history’, see Marx and Engels in The H oly Family (p.93): ‘H istory does nothing. . . ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to pursue its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.’ 25. Yet another word on Spinoza, for those who share my interest in him: it is quite wrong to link his panconatism with his pancogitationism and attribute panpsychism to him. The universality o f conatus follows from his account o f m otion, rest and composition; the universality o f thought from a ‘Fregean’ notion of thought as objective conceptual space, not Cartesian consciousness. Otherwise we can make no sense of his doctrines o f truth and error, of perception, o f the eternity o f mind, or of the intellectual love of God. Spinoza’s supposed panpsychism has had an influence even on Marxists; Plekhanov not only praised his supposed attribution o f consciousness to matter, but took consolation in death from the prospect o f becoming a birch tree. (Spinoza’s own attribution o f ‘souls’ to things refers to thoughts o f them .) 26. I am referring to chapter 44 o f Volume II o f The World as W ill and Representation, ‘T he M etaphysics o f Sexual Love’. 27. For instance, D avid Barash in Sodobiology: The Whisperings W ithin: ‘W hen we are sexually excited, reproducing our genes may be the last

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thing on our minds, but natural selection is under no obligation to let us in on its designs’ (p.78). Quite - nor, by the same token, we it. For after all this ‘secret o f nature’ has been common knowledge since Eve was a lass, while we really are ‘under no obligation’ to obey the ‘designs’ of instinct as if we had none o f our own. 28. Though this metaphor too is imperfect. An individual’s membership o f a group is only one aspect of that individual. 29. To avoid a possible misunderstanding: I am entirely in favour of compulsory reselection, involvement of extra-parliamentary organ­ isations in the election o f a leader, and so on. I find it hard to see how anyone can oppose these reforms in good faith. I say only that one should not expect too much from them, and that rectification of the relation of the Labour Party to people and practices and organisations outside it are many times more important.

4

Epistemology and the Epistemoids The last two chapters have, I hope, indicated that there is a rich harvest to be reaped by the human sciences from transcendental realist philosophy. However, it is an ontological harvest rather than an epistemological one. I have used this philosophy to out­ line a theory of stratified and structured being, and to apply this ontology to social being. As to epistemology however, there are a host of problems remaining. I shall now return to this issue. The criticisms of empiricism discussed earlier - those of Althusser and Bhaskar - set out to show that empiricism is unhelpful in the human sciences, not primarily because of the differences between these sciences and the experimental sciences of nature, but because empiricism gives an inadequate account of the latter sciences too. The whole ontology of stratified structural explanation appeals - as did empiricism - to the results of the natural sciences. However, the influential ‘non-naturalist’ position in the philosophy of the human sciences has generally argued: empiricism is all very well in natural science, but there is not much to/be learnt from the natural sciences when we come to study human society and behaviour. Suppose transcendental realism has shown that empiricism isn’t all very well, even for the natural sciences: has it thereby shown anything relevant to the human sciences? Not if the latter need take no notice of the natural sciences anyway, whether empiricist or transcendental realist. The ‘possibility of naturalism’ still needs to be shown. The strength of this criticism comes, I believe, not from any of the positive claims of non-naturalist philosophy of social science, but from the fact that a considerable amount of 113

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transcendental realist philosophy is derived from tran­ scendental arguments which take as their premiss scientific experiment - which does not occur in the human sciences. To anticipate: I think that there are real, and serious, epistemological problems in the human sciences (or ‘epistemoids’, i.e. scientific disciplines in which closure cannot be produced: see below and glossary), but that the carryover of ontological conclusions from natural to human sciences is legitimate and helpful. In this chapter I shall first say what I think is right and what wrong about Althusser’s and Bhaskar’s views on the subject. Then I shall set out my own conclusions about what the human sciences ran learn about method from transcendental realism. Althusser, regarding the natural sciences as belonging to one continent and the sciences o f‘history’ to another, does not carry over principles from one to the other in any direct way. Rather, this issue arises as one about the function of philosophy. The great problem about Althusser’s conception(s) of philosophy is that he wanted to maintain both the following propositions: (a) that philosophy always comes after science historically and only makes explicit what was implicit in the practice of existing sciences; and (b) that philosophy has the function of drawing a dividing line between sciences (‘true ideas’) and the theoretical ideologies (‘false ideas’). There is a tension between these two ideas, but no formal contradiction: nothing follows about the logical relations between two sets of ideas, from the fact that one is temporally prior to the other, even when the temporal priority is no accident, but in some sense necessary. Althusser clearly thinks it is necessary. He has consistently maintained that there is an inevitable lag between any scientific revolution and the philosophical revolution it generates, that Marx’s scientific revolution has yet to find its philosophy, that that philosophy exists ‘in a practical state’ i.e. was used without being spelt out by Marx in producing his scientific revolution and by Marxist parties in their political practice; and that it is now an urgent task to spell it out, and thus produce the requisite philosophical revolution. On how this is to be done, Althusser’s view changed: his earlier definition of philosophy was ‘the theory of theoretical practice’; later, ‘class struggle in theory’.

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‘T he theory o f theoretical practice5 The conception of philosophy put forward by Althusser in his earliest (and most substantial) works - i.e. in RC and in the essays collected in FM - is that it is ‘the theory of theoretical practice5. In itself, this term is ambiguous. It could mean ‘a theory about theoretical practice5, a science which takes theoretical practices (sciences) as its object and explains how they come about and what causal mechanisms are at work in them. Such a science would not be primarily concerned with the truth of the sciences: it would be a sort of sociology (perhaps also biology, psychology, etc.) of scientific knowledge or belief, a theory of the sciences as ideologies. I have already discussed the scope and limits of such a science in Chapter 1. I shall return to Althusser’s later slide towards this view. I hope it is clear that such a science would have no right to act as quality controller with respect to the other sciences, which it must if it is to fulfil the function ascribed to it by Althusser. It might give us reason to be suspicious of some theories, on the grounds that beliefs can be motivated by class interests or vanity. This might motivate careful checking, but not rejection, of such theories. Another interpretation is that philosophy acts as a sort of ‘Department One5 of theoretical production - the producer of the means of theoretical production.1 This is suggested by Althusser’s account of his own work in his essay ‘Marx’s Relation to Hegel5 in PH. Diagram I (p.169): G1 (Theoretical raw material)

...........i..........* I i i I i

G2 (Instruments of theoretical production)

...... i..... ..

Ricardo & French Socialism R to be possible?’ the conclusion, X , would be a fact about us and that 4> must invariably stand for som e universal operation o f mind. (PN ,

P-6)

This realist reference also puts ontology rather than epistemology in the foreground. It does not, however, abolish epistemology. It salvages what was right about Althusser’s first and second conceptions of philosophy, and avoids the quagmire of what might be called his third conception (though this third conception is never argued or even lucidly stated). This third position manifests itself largely in gratuitous irony in the use of epistemological concepts, ‘truth’, ‘error’, and so on; there are also, however, the claims that epistemology can only either be speculative, or be part of ‘Historical Materialism’ - presumably being reduced, in the latter case, to a Marxist version of the sociology of knowledge (ESC, p.l24n.); and the repudiation of ‘criteria’ of truth - not only Cartesian self­ evidence, but also Aristotelian ‘relation of adequacy between mind and thing’ (ESC, p.137). The former point is not just ‘self-criticism’: it dismisses all Althusser’s previous work as

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‘illusion and deception’. I have already made my case against it in chapter 1. The rejection of ‘criteria’ can only be understood as an over­ reaction to (and mirror-image of) Cartesian philosophy (just as the post-structuralist polemics against ‘the Subject’ are, on another matter). His use of Spinoza’s ‘Habemus enim ideam verarri suggests this: Spinoza, whose philosophical milieu was entirely Cartesian, was claiming that our theory of knowledge must start from the fact that we are in possession of knowledge. Surely this was simply a rebuttal of Cartesian doubt - an antisceptical point shared by all sensible epistemologists. Althusser (ESC, p.188) takes it as something far more far-reaching: a refusal to do epistemology on the grounds that (to paraphrase Johnson) ‘we’ve got knowledge, and there’s an end on’t!’. But since we have also got random experience and ideological mystifications, this end, like most ends in philosophy, is very shortlived. Spinoza distinguishes the ‘three levels’ of knowledge but rejects ‘every question of the Origin, Subject and Justification of knowledge’ (ibid.); but questions about the origin and subject of knowledge are precisely what the sociology of knowledge is about - and that Althusser now wants to retain. Questions about the justification of knowledge (if this clumsy expression means distinguishing what is knowledge from what is not - and what else could it mean?) are precisely what Spinoza poses under the heading of his theory of levels of knowledge. In fact we can sometimes distinguish knowledge from random experience, hearsay, imagination, dreaming, wishful thinking, propaganda, and so on. We could hardly do so without knowing what truth is. The Aristotelian definition of truth is not a ‘criterion’ of truth; the confusion of definition with criterion is a symptom of the epistemic fallacy. Kant, who accepted the Aristotelian definition, likened the search for a single criterion of truth to one man milking a billy-goat and another holding a sieve underneath. But the fact that there is no one universal answer to the question ‘how do we know?’ does not mean either that there are no answers, or that any answer will do. Even if we leave out scientific knowledges (which actually have quite a bit more in common than can be derived from any definition of truth), we shall find ourselves invariably

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applying some such definition as the Aristotelian in any satisfactory account of why ‘I saw it happen’, ‘Jenny told me and she’s usually reliable’, ‘the experts are agreed about it’ or ‘the Ministry of Defence found it necessary to issue a public statement denying it’ are good reasons for thinking something true, while ‘I read it in my horoscope’, ‘it makes me feel better to believe it’ or ‘it says so in the advertisement’ are not. If we ask how we progress from the distinction between relatively well-founded and relatively ill-founded belief at the everyday level, to the level of scientific knowledge, we have some fairly satisfactory answers in the case of the experimental sciences and mathematics. In order to broach the question with respect to the ‘human sciences’, I shall return to Althusser’s second conception of philosophy. The main philosophical battle, he tells us, ‘takes place on the frontier between the scientific and the ideological’ (LP, p.21). But what lies on each side of this frontier are two rather disparate entities: sciences consciously worked-out theories which give us knowledge of their objects; and - not primarily theoretical ideologies but ideology as the theory-laden but largely unspelt-out lived experience of human social practices. Althusser’s constant preoccupation is with the defence of the sciences; but what if their defenders win ground? O f course, it could be claimed that Althusser means the metaphor of battle to be applied only to the relations between the sciences and theoretical ideologies, leaving everything as it was at the level of ‘lived experience’ with its implicit knowledge. That may be the case, but I want to look at the other possibility. For while this terrain of lived experience or Being-in-the-World that the existential phenomenologists have explored in their various ways cannot (as Althusser certainly agrees) be made scientific through and through, it is not off-limits to scientific ideas either. We shall never taste the oxygen and hydrogen in water (as Aldous Huxley said of D.H. Lawrence), but we no longer experience the sky, as our ancestors appear to have done, as a solid vault. It is no less ideological to experience it as, so to speak, coloured space, but it is an ideology which has been transformed by scientific knowledge. The existential phenomenologists have regrettably closed their minds to the idea that scientific ontology might have any­

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thing to say to them. Their accounts of abstract science as arising only in response to breakdowns in everyday practice are convincing enough (I am referring to Heidegger and MacMurray)7, but they do not refute the claim of the sciences to have opened up ontological strata which would have been forever closed without them, and to provide, in accounting for breakdowns, fuller explanations of normal working too. The experimental sciences were able to break free of their existential moorings because they are experimental; what about the ‘human sciences?’ They too, I suggest, start when we respond to an epistemogenic breakdown (this time in a social rather than a technical practice) by interrogating structures which go beyond, and explain, our everyday experience. In the absence of experimental closure we cannot loose our m oorinp from the original practices in such cases, but we can learn to ask questions in a way informed by the ontology (and hence epistemology) derived from those knowledges that can. I shall discuss this in greater detail in the section after next, when I have discussed a remaining problem of Althusser’s epist­ emology, and Bhaskar’s rather more optimistic conception of the prospects of the ‘human sciences’. Here, to avoid further use of scare quotes, I shall introduce the term epistemoid for a theoretical discipline which originates from practical experience and epistemogenic breakdowns in it; which cannot break loose of its origin since it lacks the possibility of closure; but which puts to work a philosophy which has made explicit the ontology implicit in the experimental sciences (with its epistemological corollaries). As an example of these scientifically liberated zones in the ideological jungle of the everyday, let me first suggest psychoanalysis: Freud explicitly regarded psychopathology as more instructive than normal mental life; he explicitly espoused the ‘scientific world-view’, and it was this that led him to different conclusions from those of others who used his ‘talking cure’; his aim was: to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent o f the super-ego, to widen its field o f perception and enlarge its organisation, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work o f culture - not unlike the draining o f the Zuider Zee. {Complete Introductory Lectures, p.544)

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And he combined this Enlightenment aim with a salutary pessimism: ‘I would never have expected a psychoanalyst to be so taken in by the ego [as Adler was]. In reality the ego is like the clown in the circus, who is always putting in his oar to make the audience think that whatever happens is his doing* {The Freud/Jung Letters, letter 238F). In the case of psychoanalysis, in which the making conscious of the repressed is at once the source of knowledge and the means of cure, this weakness of the ego forms an epistemological obstacle as well as a therapeutic one. All the features of an epistemoid are present here: its raw material in lived experience, the methodological primacy of the pathological, the tiedness to a practice (the talking cure), the application of an experimental science-based ontology, and the severely limited prospects of knowledge-acquisition in this area. Now to the unresolved - indeed largely imposed - problem of Althusser’s second period: how can philosophy take up cudgels on behalf of the sciences against the ideologies unless it has the equipment for distinguishing the one from the other? The great problem here is that Althusser’s contrast between science and ideology ‘draws a line’ between science and ‘ideology’ in the uncountable and pre-theoretical sense, the unconscious assump­ tions of ‘common sense’ (with allusions to Gramsci), the self­ recognition and misrecognition of the subject (with allusion to Lacan), Spinoza’s ‘random experience’, the phenomenologists’ ‘lived experience’, pre-scientific know-how in general, with the mythology in which it always comes wrapped, and so on. The distinctions drawn by Althusser between science and this kind of ideology would be of use in identifying and debunking theoretical ideologies only if the latter were nothing but expressions of ideology in the more general sense, or at least retained the relevant features of such ideology (domination by practical considerations, hailing of the individual as subject, and so on). But behaviourist psychology, for example, eliminates the subject far more radically than any structuralism, and is rather less dominated by practical aims than psychoanalysis. It is probably further removed from commonsense assumptions than psychoanalysis, and this is reflected in its greater terminological alienness from common speech (though Freud’s

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English translators make him appear more of a neologist than he was).8 Indeed, one of the most notable features of the theoretical ideologies is their tendency to introduce superfluous neologisms under the pretence of ‘technical terms’. Anyone who has read Saussure should know that words get their meaning from their relation to other words, and hence that scientific language gets its rigour from the relation between its concepts, not the sequence of letters chosen. If we call snapdragons ‘antirrhinums’ and love-in-a-mist ‘nigella’, we lose some poetry, but we don’t gain any scientificity. Technical terms help only when they enable a genuine distinction to be made that was not made before. Saying ‘emitting verbal behaviour’ instead of ‘talking’ bears the same relation to scientific rigour as adding ‘-us’ to the end of English nouns does to knowing Latin. Quite often, ‘technical terms’ are introduced to create, not to eliminate, ambiguities. The term, ‘economically rational agent* for instance is tendentiously ambiguous; if ‘person who efficiently pursues monetary gain to the exclusion of all other ends’ is what is meant, it would be far more rigorously scientific and objective to use the term ‘moneygrubber’. This is a serious point because, even where neo­ logisms are not tendentious, they are used in ideologies of science to evoke scientificity where it is not, just as the advertising industry uses the images of white coats and test tubes. Lacan’s revision of psychoanalysis, for instance, which in every single instance substitutes ambiguous and confused discourse for Freud’s remarkably unambiguous and clear one, and makes a virtue of doing so, is seen by Althusser as more scientific than the original, despite its total neglect of evidence, argument, and even ordinary standards of scholarship.9 Why, if not that Lacan jettisons Freud’s relatively user-friendly language? In a note to English readers of his essay ‘Freud and Lacan’, Althusser refers to ‘the instance that Freud called “the unconscious”, but which should be re-christened as soon as a better term is found’ (LP, p.177). But belief in baptismal regeneration presupposes belief in original sin; Freud’s accounts of what he meant by the unconscious are as lucid and as disambiguating as any in the human sciences. Where is the original sin if not in the intelligibility to the lay person?. But if we cannot measure scientificity by distance from

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humanism or from commonsense (or what would be a more scientific theory that transubstantiation?), we may at least ask whether - in the absence of experiment - the features of an epistemoid as I have described them are present (including, importantly, the originating practice with its potential for reality-testing). When Althusser says that what Freud gives us has the formal structure of a science, since it includes 1. A practice (the analytic cure). 2. A technique (the method o f the cure) that gives rise to an abstract exposition with the appearance o f a theory. 3. A theory which has a relation with the practice and the technique (LP, p. 183)

he points in such a direction. There is also something right about his contrast between the technical disciplines that concern social reality, and the scientific approach to it. (FM , P, 171 and n).10 Scientific socialism really is more basic in its knowledge of capitalist society than are those technical disciplines.11 But I think there is a certain theoreticism about the way he makes this contrast. It is not that the technical disciplines have only the unity of their practice (ibid.), which is also true of the epistemoids; rather, it is like the relation between the operator’s knowledge of how a machine works, and the more basic knowledge possessed by the mechanic. At the theoretical level, this can be said to be because scientific socialism has learnt from philosophical reflection on the natural sciences that genuine explanation requires depthrealism; that ‘behaviourism’ in the sense of an account of how a certain class of entities behaves belongs to the pre-history of a science or to its explanandum; an account of what it is about the structure of those entities that makes them behave in that way is what turns descriptive knowledge (such as, for instance, Ptolemaic astronomy could provide) into scientific knowledge or a technical discipline into an epistemoid. In practice, Althusser does in fact apply knowledge derived from philosophi­ cal reflection on the natural sciences in this way - see, for example, his discussion of Engel’s comparison of Marx with Lavoisier (RC, p.l50ff). But his metaphor of continents of knowledge prevents him from theorising this practice. So much for the theoretical basis of the deepening of a technical knowledge into an epistemoid; at the practical level,

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this greater depth can be recognised as resulting from the methodological primacy of the pathological: we need mechanics and not just machine operators because machines sometimes go wrong; a technical discipline can be ‘behaviourist’ so long as it aims only to chart the normal functioning of some entity. Hence the businessman does not need a depth-explanation of the system he is operating, and so does not need Marxian economic theory; it is the contradictions of capitalism that motivate the investigation of its deep structure. The point against ‘behaviourist’-type theories here is not that they are untrue, but that they are surface-theories', they fail as science not because they have been refuted, but because the sort of thing they do is pre-scientific; Marx’s account of capitalism or Freud’s of the unconscious is doubtless in error at various points - but they do provide the sort of depth-explanations which, if well founded, merit the adjective ‘scientific’, even if not the noun ‘science*. This also means that their effectiveness is of a different order: they can guide a practice of radical self-transformation (of society or the individual respectively), and not just of symptom-suppression. In conclusion, it must be said that all these distinctions between surface and depth-explanation, between scientific and ideological grounds for believing theories, etc., would break down if we were just talking about useful fictions. They rest on the notion that some ideas represent the world more adequately than others, and can be tested for such adequacy. So the examination of theories for explanatory depth, formal similarities to science and differences from ideology and so on can only ever be part of the process of reality-testing, never a replacement for it. The theoretical input of an epistemoid is not a substitute for experimental input; at best it is a means of transforming the data acquired in its practical application into such a subsitute. Naturalism in Social Science: Bhaskar’s account

In PN, Bhaskar sets out to show that there is an essential unity of method between the natural and the social sciences; this is what he means by ‘naturalism’, But he also argues that there are

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three kinds of limit to naturalism (which he calls the epistemological, ontological and relational limits), and this part of his argument is in some ways as central to his project as the more positive part. One obstacle to naturalism is removed in advance by his criticisms of empiricist accounts of the natural sciences. For on the one hand, empiricist social science tends to imitate, not the practice of physics (which is littered with references to unobservable forces and entities), but the empiricist philo­ sophers’ misdescription of that practice. Behaviourist psy­ chology is a particularly clear example of this. And on the other hand, those who see the inadequacy of empiricist models to social science, often assume that they are adequate to the natural sciences, and so feel compelí»! to make a sharp division between natural and social science - i.e. to reject naturalism. However, Bhaskar does admit differences between natural and social sciences, of which he says: ‘it is not in spite of, but rather just in virtue of, these differences that social science is possible;. . . here, as elsewhere, it is the nature of the object that determines the form of its possible science’ (PN, p. 3). Here as elsewhere, yes. No stratum of nature would be a distinct stratum and require a distinct science if it had no differences from other suata. Nevertheless, the question remains open whether there is any special hiatus between the social and the natural sciences, or whether the social sciences are just particular instances of the stratification of science. The first difficulty that Bhaskar’s theory must face in its approach to the social sciences is an effect of the fact that they are a long way up the ladder of the strata. This drastically reduces both their experimental testability and their predictive value. For these sciences presuppose the operation of processes at the ‘lower’ levels, which will have their effects at all ‘higher’ levels; and these effects will be accidents relative to the laws of those ‘higher’ levels. For instance, evolutionary biology rests on the assumption of random genetic mutations, i.e. ones that cannot be explained with the concepts of biology itself, but only those of physics and chemistry. In its very essence, therefore, it presupposes events which are accidents relative to its own laws;12 and such accidents preclude closure or exact prediction. The further up the hierarchy you go, the more sources of

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accidents, the more distant the possible approximation to closure. And while Bhaskar’s philosophy of science, by its insistence on the rareness of conditions approximating to closure in nature, reduces the difference between nature and society at the level of ontology; by its stress on the experimental production of the conditions of closure as crucial to scientific practice, it seems on the face of it to give grounds for some pessimism about the social sciences at the level of epistemology. Two possible objections to these last remarks of mine should be mentioned, though they are not Bhaskarian ones. It might be said that there are in fact experimental procedures in e.g., behavioural psychology. But if we examine these procedures we see that, though they share one inessential feature of experiments in the natural sciences - their artificiality - and one secondary feature - their use of mathematics - they lack the essential feature - the establishment of closure. This is not to say that such disciplines are without any substitutes for or analogues of experimental closure. Such techniques as cross-cultural comparisons and statistical controls have their value. But they are particular techniques, among other equally legitimate ones, used in social research. The procedures of inquiry used by psychoanalysts or structural linguists, for example, are different from those of behavioural psychologists, but the difference is not that any one of them attains experimental closure whereas others do not, but rather that they employ different substitutes for a closure that none can attain. The precision of physics is in principle unavailable to the human sciences. Secondly, it might be claimed that the unattainability of closure is a problem shared by some natural sciences, so the social sciences have no unique epistemological disabilities. It is quite true that there are natural sciences operating with open systems, but is necessary to distinguish two kinds of reason for this. In the case of evolutionary biology, to which I referred, it is a function of the position of that science some way up the hierarchy. The higher you go, the further from the possibility of closure, and therefore the worse the epistemological outlook. This is a matter of degree, but the social sciences are all higher than any natural science. But in many cases of natural sciences without closure - for

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instance geology, which Ted Benton includes in his list - there are more fundamental reasons for the openness of the system studied: that system is not united by the generative mechanisms specific to it, but by an object at the level of the Actual (the history of the earth’s crust in the case of geology), or in some cases, by some human practice (e.g. medicine). The generative mechanisms operating in such areas will be the objects of a number of sciences; and disciplines such as medicine or geology can draw on the experimentally established knowledge of those sciences. The social sciences, on the other hand, concern themselves with irreducible, emergent strata of reality, and therefore require concepts and laws other than those of the natural sciences; and there is no experimental closure at the level of these strata. This seems to be - and I believe is straightforwardly a serious disadvantage for the social sciences. The only question is: have they got any compensating advantages? D o the ‘hum an sciences’ have any compensating advantages? Bhaskar argues that they have: ‘our analysis of the relational and ontological limits [of naturalism in the social sciences] will yield an analogue and a compensator respectively for the role of experimental practice in discovery’ (PN, p.59). About this I am afraid I am sceptical. Let us take the ontological limits first. These are listed on pp. 48-9, as follows: ( 1) Social structures, unlike natural structures, do not exist independently of the activities they govern; (2) Social structures, unlike natural structures, do not exist independently o f the agents’ conceptions o f what they are doing in their activity; (3) Social structures, unlike natural structures, may be only relatively enduring (so that the tendencies they ground may not be universal in the sense o f space-time invariant).

All these points seem to me to be misleading. As to the first: in a sense, natural structures don’t exist independently of the activities they govern either: for the generative mechanisms of chemistry to operate, there must be activities of the combining

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and splitting of molecules. It is true that the laws expressing these generative mechanisms, being, like all laws, conditional in form and therefore in a sense ‘timeless5, could be said to hold even if no such activities were occurring: but this is true of any law. The laws governing capitalist economies can, if it is so wished, be said to be true ‘timelessly’ in the sense that they will operate whenever capitalist relations of production are instantiated, and this is true whether there are capitalist societies at the time of utterance or not. There is no difference here between economic laws and biological laws, which likewise govern species which have not always existed. This also disposes of point (3). But the existence of structures, whether natural or social, must presuppose some activities that they govern. And in neither case can the powers of a structure be reduced to their exercise. For example, the power of capitalist corporations to sabotage left-wing governments, or of the coercive machinery of the state to overthrow them, is inherent in the structure of bourgeois democracies; even where not exercised, if modifies the policies of such governments, and it is partly because it does so that it often remains unexercised. But it is important to be able to say that it is not possible to establish socialism by purely parlia­ mentary means, even in a country where it is legally possible, and where the activities which would prevent it have never taken place. This situation is exactly parallel to that which obtains in the natural sciences. Certainly, Bhaskar does not try to reduce powers to their exercise, in the social any more than in the natural sciences; but then what remains of the alleged asymmetry? The second ‘ontological limit’ is real enough but should not be overstressed. That societies cannot exist without the activities of human agents, and that activities necessarily involve some conception of what they are doing on the agents’ part, no one would deny. But the emphasis should not be placed on this truism, but on what Bhaskar, in what I regard as one of the most valuable passages in PN , calls ‘ an ontological hiatus between society and people* (p. 46), and hence between the social and the psychological sciences. This means that the personal motives and self-understanding of the agents - even supposing them to be perfecdy adequate in themselves - are not

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the determinants governing the reproduction/transformation of social structures. The practical implications of this - that altering personal attitudes will not in itself change society - is perhaps the most fundamental, if also the most elementary, lesson of Marxism.13This relegates point (2) to a very marginal role in social science; and the psychoanalytical phenomena repression, displacement, rationalisation, unconscious moti­ vation generally - should teach us not to regard people’s self-conceptions as central to psychological explanation either. The fact that the objects of the social sciences include concepts has two other consequences in Bhaskar’s work. The first concerns methodology: it is the above mentioned ‘relational’ limit to naturalism: ‘The chief relational difference is that the social sciences are part of their own field of inquiry, in principle susceptible to explanation in terms of the concepts and laws of the explanatory theories they employ’ (PN, p. 59). Once again, I think this point is overplayed by Bhaskar. After all, scientific activities of all kinds, under certain descriptions, are also explicable in terms of the natural sciences, for they are also physical events. But knowledge of what is going on, physiologically speaking, in a scientist’s brain, tells us nothing about that scientist’s theories. And an economic study of the activities of economists (or indeed of physiologists) is both as possible and as epistemologically irrelevant as a psysiological study of the activities of physiologists (or again of economists). Certainly, the fact that ‘we’ (human beings) are ourselves among the objects of study may act as an obstacle in the human sciences, i.e. we may shy away from unflattering conclusions about ourselves. But then ‘we’ (physical beings) are also among the objects of study in the natural sciences, which accounts for some of the resistances to Copernicus and Darwin. So the occurrence of a similar type of phenomenon in a scientific activity and in its object provides neither a distinction between natural and social sciences, nor a ground for privileging the study by any science of its own activities. It remains true that only the human sciences have concepts as part of their object, but the question is: does this have any methodological import? Bhaskar’s claim that it does seems to rest on the possibility of taking as starting point (conceptual raw material) for the study of any social process, the concepts

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used by the agents involved in that process. I am not sure that this is different in principle from taking the concepts that animal-breeders use as the starting point for evolutionary biology, or those of seafarers as that of meteorology. In no science - natural or social - do we start work on a conceptual blank page, and in every case we can radically revise the initial concepts. The other consequence of the concept-ladeness of social reality is much more significant. This concerns the possibility of explanatory critiques. This is a term coined by Bhaskar and elucidated in his article ‘Scientific Explanation and Human Emancipation’ {Radical Philosophy, no. 26, Autumn 1980), though the elements of the theory are present earlier (e.g. PN, pp.80-3). The article starts with a condensed resume of the results of RTS and PN. But the crux of the arguments is as follows. Among the things studied by the human sciences are ideas. Ideas are products of the societies in which they occur; some of them are about those societies; and some of them are necessary for the reproduction of those societies. But some of them are also false. A correct account of a given social reality will include an account of those ideas about it that are part of it, and also of what they are about; hence its self-conceptions will be shown up as true or false. If a society contains false ideas which are necessary for its reproduction, two things follow: that to give a correct explanatory account of that society is to criticise it (in one respect at least), and that to disseminate that account would be subversive. Such is the central case of an explanatory critique. Marx’s theory of bourgeois ideology, and Freud’s account of displacement and rationalisation, are clear examples to which Bhaskar refers. There are others: perhaps the central idea in the moral philosophies of Spinoza and Nietzsche is that there are some beliefs that can’t consistently be held in conjunction with a true account of their origin (e.g. belief in free will, or in the moral value of self-denial), though neither Spinoza nor Nietzsche had the knowledge of social science that is now at our disposal. I think it is clear enough that this account specifies one way in which a purely explanatory social scientific theory can criticise a given social order. Bhaskar never suggests that it is the only

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way, nor does he deny that other considerations might outweigh these cognitive criticisms. The practical criticism follows from the explanatory account other things being equal, as he repeatedly says. One is not committed to pathological truth-telling14 - to blabbing the date when the Winter Palace is to be stormed, or behaving like Gregers Werle in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. But if one instance has been shown of a rationally justified derivation of a practical conclusion from factual premisses, a breach has been made in the wall by which bourgeois thought since Kant has segregated science and practical reason. The question is whether the breach can be widened, and a general theory of practical reason as founded on objective knowledge can be produced. I think Bhaskar mates his claim appear less far-reaching than it is by admitting that the sciences have evaluative premisses.15 For if they had, it would not be surprising that they had practical conclusions too. But it should be clear from the above account that the argument does not depend on any such premiss, unless it is that it is generally better to believe what is true than what is false. Nevertheless, Bhaskar is certainly right to say that science comes into a world already engaged in various practices in pursuit of various aims - it does not produce these practices out of itself; but it can produce knowledge of them, and that knowledge can be disseminated among their agents. The conduciveness of e.g. a given social order to illusions is only one of the characteristics that, once known to the agents, would constitute reasons for subverting and transforming that order though, of course, it must not be assumed that the mere dissemination of true ideas would secure conviction, let along social transformation. The special feature of cognitive contradictions is not that they override other contradictions in human importance, but that the others require their cover. Explanatory critiques can be applied in any area of human practice, not just society at large. This conception of the subversive and emancipatory potential of objective knowledge needs development in a whole range of areas, to the detriment both of the efforts of academic philosophy to preserve moral discourse as a science-free zone, and of the anti-objectivist rhetoric of many ‘radical’ thinkers, right and left. I shall discuss this matter at greater length in a sequel.

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Transcendental R ealism in the Hum an W orld

Now let us look at the implications of the transcendental realist ontology of nature as a stratified system of structured realities. The fundamental premiss of the transcendental arguments which give us this theory are the experiments of the natural sciences. The relevant features of these experiments are (i) that in them, theories are tested in artificially closed systems; (ii) that the laws that these experiments establish are those which co-determine the course of events in the open system of the world, together with other laws. On the basis of this various transcendental realist theories are built up: the reality and multi­ plicity of generative mechanisms; the reality of unexercised, and exercised but unrealised, powers; ubiquity-determinism without regularity-determinism; explanatory power of theories without predictive power in open systems, and so on. In addition to all this, on the basis of the history of the relations between the sciences, a theory of the generative mechanisms as not just multiple, but stratified in an ordered hierarchy where the higher can be explained by, but not reduced to, the lower, is elaborated. This theory requires that the higher-level generative mechanisms must themselves have been experimentally isolated before the nature of their relation of foundedness upon lowerlevel ones can be discovered. But all this assumes experiment. The question remains whether this has any implications for those ‘sciences’ which are far enough up the hierarchy to be unable to make experiments. What if these strata are structured in a totally different way? First of all it can be said that we do know that the strata which the human sciences try to investigate are indeed founded. They involve beings which presuppose for their existence, and indeed are composed of, entities whose governing mechanisms are known through the natural sciences. For this reason we can’t expect closure to occur naturally or to be secured by experiment in these sciences. For chemical, biological, etc. mechanisms do not just interfere with the structures studied by the human sciences, they govern the elements which constitute those structures. Secondly, we know that entities governed by natural mechanisms are also affected by irreducibly social and mental16

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mechanisms: the ‘natural world’ as a whole is not a closed system. We cannot doubt, therefore, that irreducible social and mental mechanisms exist and have effects. Thirdly, we know that since entities do not cease to obey natural laws by virtue of coming to be governed by social laws, we can be sure that social phenomena do not escape ‘ubiquity determinism’ (the principle of sufficient reason) whatever mechanisms of their own may co-determine them; but that they are even further from the appearance of ‘regularity deter­ minism’ than natural phenomena, since they presuppose a greater plurality of mechanisms, and hence have greater inherent limits to approximation to conditions of closure. In other words, we know that the ontological structure of the world discovered by transcendental realism applies to the social world too; that it (the social world) lies high in the hierarchy of that structure; and that is therefore lacks the feature of the lower strata which made them accessible to experiment. We are committed, I would suggest, to a radically naturalistic ontology for the human sciences, but to a radically pessimistic view of their epistemic prospects. Where does this leave us as regards the methodology of social science? Well, in the first place, if our practical knowledge of economics or psychology, linguistics or aesthetics, is no better than its equivalent in the natural world - the sailor’s knowledge of the seas and the weather, the gardener’s of the soil and plants, etc. - it is also no worse. And inevitably, this knowledge goes beyond ‘know-how’, acquired skills and accumulated experi­ ence (indeed experience does not accumulate unless in some measure theorised): it always involves ‘theories’, speculations, more or less compatible with the practices of which they form part, more or less adequate to deal with the epistemogenic breakdowns in everyday practice which Heidegger describes so eloquently. The question is, can one improve on this (often ‘mythological’, in the rather etiolated modem sense of that word) theorising, any further than logical analysis and ‘trial and error’ will take you? I think one can, precisely by bringing to bear on it the assumption of a realist ontology of stratified structural causality. And that, I would suggest, is what Marx did with the practice of working-class politics (which he did not, of course, invent), and also what Freud did with the prac-

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rice of the talking cure (which he did). Other epistemoids have worked in a similar way, but probably the classical Marxists came closest to making this practice explicit: not ‘the science of socialism’ but ‘scientific socialism’, i.e. the theoretical clarification of working-class politics in accordance with the scientific world-view; not ‘the science of Historical Material­ ism’ but ‘the materialist conception of history’, i.e. an application of a ‘world-view’ to the subject-matter of history, the world-view itself being a dialectical ontology, said to be verified by the practice of the natural sciences. Whatever may be thought of the content of the ‘world-view’ which later, following Dietzgen, came to be called ‘dialectical materialism’, 17 the status of this philosophy - an ontology justified by appeal to natural science and applied in social science - coincides with that which I am claiming for transcendental realism. Such theories are scientific, i.e. they could not be produced except on the basis of an ontology and style of thinking derived from the sciences; but I think it may be misleading to call such a theory ‘a science’ - hence my neologism ‘epistemoid’. Certainly, they have nothing in common with the aping of a postivistically misunderstood scientific method, which in ignorance of the real significance of experiment in the natural sciences, imitates only their inessential features. Thus, the artificiality of experiment and the use of mathematical formulae are studiously copied from the natural sciences, though in the absence of closure these are like a child scrawling on paper and imagining it is producing ‘grown-up’ writing, when it might have printed quite legibly in block letters. However, though I have contrasted experimental sciences and epistemoids as if this were a sharp distinction, it is in fact a matter of degree. Perfectly closed systems are not attainable at any level, it is only that the lower-stratum sciences get fairly near it, the approximation to closure getting less as you move up the tree of scientific levels. The distinction is not just the natural science/human science distinction in another guise: the human sciences are all further up the tree than the natural, but there is no special hiatus between natural and human realities or the corresponding sciences. There are hiatuses between all levels, and each step up is one step further removed from the possibility of closure.

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Thus biology is generally admitted to be a science (or cluster of sciences), though by comparison with physics and chemistry it has epistemoidal features. Scientific socialism, linguistics and psychoanalysis are epistemoids which retain pronounced scientific features; further still up the tree, the resemblance to conditions of closure becomes so remote, and the problems of unravelling multiple determination so acute, that the best that one can hope from a realist ontology combined with native wit is to avoid making a complete ass o f oneself. Areas such as parapsychology and semiotics fall into this category. Paths and M aps Perhaps a metaphor will illustrate the relations between experimental science and the epistemoids. Consider the object of our knowledge as a forest, ‘the forest of being’ in which, according to Heidegger, we are clearings. One sort of knowledge of the forest is that obtained simply by travelling observantly along its paths. Any regular walker through the forest will have a fund of information derived from this practice, without ever having strayed from the paths, about which paths join up and which peter out, short-cuts and long ways round, the types of tree and flower lining the paths, and so on. This sort of knowledge we all have from practical experience of both natural and social realities. It is the starting point of science, but it is not science. Suppose we try to map the forest. With such knowledge, one could produce a working path-users’ map, rather as the London tube lines are mapped in a manner cartographically inaccurate but easy to use to find one’s way. Only someone with an exceptionally good geometric sense could produce anything like an accurate plan of forest paths simply from familiarity with their turns and junctions. Consider any ancient map, made purely from travellers’ experience. Now on the one hand, if the woods between the paths are not after all impenetrable; if landmarks are visible at a distance from several vantage points, some of which can be sighted from each other; if paths are visible from the air, and so on - then we may make maps of great precision; eventually, orienteering maps

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such that, once we know how to read them, we can be certain where we are in relation to all the paths of the forest; we may be able to plot our position on an objective spatial grid, and not just in the ‘hodological space’ (in Sartre’s expression) of the traveller’s map. This may represent the position in a welldeveloped experimental science. Suppose, on the other hand, that the undergrowth is impenetrable, the paths wind so that only a short distance forward or back is visible, many paths are not even detectable from the air, and so on. Are we then thrown back on nothing but the rambler’s knowledge of the paths? The answer is no, because we may have other means of acquiring knowledge, not indeed of the actual layout and details of the forest, but of the general character of the terrain. We may know about the location of hills and rivers, the composition of the subsoil, the rainfall, and so on. This may give us a better idea of what to expect, and enable us to interpret and explain our rambler’s data much more fully than if we had no such background knowledge. This geological knowledge is the equivalent of the ontological knowledge we can elicit from the sciences and with the aid of which we can transform our empirical information derived from practices in the human world into epistemoids, which can in turn be used to improve the effectiveness of our practices. Thus when Lenin said that scientific socialism can only answer questions the workers’ movement is already asking, he was exacdy right - and this is quite compatible with his other claim, that without such a theory, ideas which would perpetuate exploitation would prevail. The content of an epistemoid is tied to the practice that gives rise to the initial empirical data in a way that a fully-fledged, experimental science is not: the knowledge of the clearer forest, once well mapped, becomes independent of ramblers’ tales; the knowledge of the denser forest never does. Scientific socialism is produced by the conjunction of the experience of the workers’ movement as it traverses its network of paths through the capitalist jungle, and the ‘dialectic’, that is, the ontology of structured wholes which develop, reproduce themselves, break down and are trans­ formed. ‘Nature is the test of dialectic’ (Engels), but that dialectic provides, so to speak, the geological background to the

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capitalist jungle. It does not give us maps - we can’t predict the date of the next economic crisis, or be sure that any given strategy is not a blind alley (though we can be sure that some are). But it does give us some clues as to whether we are heading for the mountains or the marsh; which beasts might survive in this jungle and which are certainly mythical, and so on. If someone tells us that high wages have made the workers bourgeois or that capitalists no longer seek profits, we shall be justified in treating these tales with the same scepticism as a natural scientist would treat claims to have made a perpetual motion machine or discovered a case of spontaneous generation. Whereas if all we had to go on were ramblers’ tales, who could say what we might not encounter round the next comer? No doubt I have already extended this metaphor too far, and I shall not do so much further. But it suffices to warn what should not be expected of an epistemoid. It should not be thought that epistemoids will be sciences when they grow up, as tadpoles become frogs. And if the paths in the metaphor stand for practices in the real world, this illustrates the nature of epistemoids as at once objective, and tied to specific practices: you may choose which path to take but you can’t choose what to find on any given path. The objectivity forbids any attempt to derive facts from values, as pragmatist and relativist views of social science often try to do. The tiedness forbids (for instance) scientific socialism from pontificating about art or psycho­ therapy or any other practices aside from working-class politics. This may seem a stem self-denying ordinance to those who have come to expect ‘Marxism’ (or more generally, socialism) to provide a distinctive viewpoint on every human activity. But it is a salutary remedy for the dilution and diversion of socialist thought, on the one hand, and on the other, the clumsy politicisation of everything, which so often bursts into the non­ political lives of political people, like a bull in a china shop. Naturally, other epistemoids should practice the same selfdenying ordinance. ‘Applied psychoanalysis’, straying from the path of the talking cure, usually lowers the credibility of the theory by its reports of positive sightings of all maimer of hobgoblins.18

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O bjective distinctions betw een epistem oids

This tiedness to practices on the part of the epistemoids raises the question whether there are real ontological hiatuses between them or whether in this case, even if not in the case of the experimental sciences, the epistemology of ‘God made the spectrum, we make the pigeon-holes’ might apply. Is it just our different practical concerns which set up the distinctions between disciplines of this sort? And if there are real hiatuses between then, how should be know? If, say, psychological mechanisms and social mechanisms are different in kind, how would we know, since we can’t study de-socialised people or depopulated societies? These questions can, I think, be answered by means of a kind of transcendental argument, though one which takes as its premiss, not experiment or science or any cognitive practice, but some other form of social practice. At the beginning of PN, Bhaskar holds out this possibility for ‘human activities (such as economic exchange), where these are conceptualised in the experience of the agents concerned’ (pp.9-10). Since all human activities are so conceptualised, I am not sure what the last proviso is meant to exclude. It might then be possible to argue from the non-identity of two kinds of social practice, to the non-identity of two regions of social being. Such an argument would only work, of course, if it could be shown that the non-identity of the practices was imposed by their respective subject-matters, and not an arbitrarily selected or merely conventional division of labour. I shall try to illustrate this with an imaginative experiment. It is perhaps possible, with a little ingenuity, to construct a logically possible world with no ontological hiatus between people and societies. Grafting bits of the social philosophies of Locke, Stimer, and Nozick onto some of Leibniz’s wilder metaphysical notions, we might imagine a society of - not indeed human beings, but some kind of ‘Rational Animal’ (‘Ratanis’ for short), which could form ‘societies’ exemplifying methodological individualism. In this fictional ‘society’ (let us call it ‘Monadopolis’), individuals are able to fend for themselves soon after birth (as after all some lower earth species do), and also have an innate

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tendency to speak a single, genetically-determined language, which is nevertheless as syntactically and semantically complex as human languages. They can find enough victuals to survive without cooperation, but do have some instincts leading them to seek relations with their kind. These relations are inessential to life and maturity, but are not simply for fellowship or communication by language. They involve the manipulable resources of the material world in ways that make the power of one Ratani over another advantageous to the possessor of the power. Hence socio-political institutions of a sort do arise, but are tentative, contractual, temporary, dependent on the continued conscious commitment of their members. They are more like clubs than like authorities or like structures. Among Ratanis, ‘army’ really is the plural of ‘soldier’. Armies arise when a number of militarily-minded Ratanis get together for some common purpose, and disband when the purpose is fulfilled or abandoned. Whether there are one or many armies in Monadopolis depends on the state of public opinion, which in turn is not dominated by any stable configuration of opinion­ making institutions. That this fluid military situation, in which no institution has the monopoly of legitimate violence, has not led to the extinction of the Ratanis is no doubt attributable to the special intervention of divine providence, since natural survival capacity would be low. The brighter side of this military pick-and-mix is that wars really do cease when Ratanis refuse to fight. Economic cooperation - drawn together by advantage, not driven by necessity, since necessities are ex hypothesi abundant - has the same fluidity. Some people prefer to cooperate, some to contract to work for others, some to be self-sufficient and lead a simple life. Prevalent relations of production change (if at all) by persuasion and fashion, when those who previously worked alone get together or vice versa, or the respective merits of collective responsibility and one-Ratani management come to be assessed differently. Hence ‘structural’ changes, if they can be called that - anyway, changes in the public life of Monadopolis - are brought about by the accumulation of private decisions. In sharp contrast to the way human individuals are related to their social structures, the Ratanipersonal really is the Monadopolitical. And if we can imagine

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Ratanis as sexual beings, the relations between both, or all, the sexes will be neither more nor less political (and neither more nor less determinant in the last instance) than economic and military relations. Visitors from Earth might describe particular periods of the history of Monadopolis as ‘capitalist’, ‘socialist’ or ‘indivi­ dualist’, according to the prevalence of one or other kind of contract between producers (exchange of labour-power, clubbing together, or exchanging individual products). But these terms could not have their earthly significance, since the ‘system’ would not constrain Ratanis to enter a particular kind of contract; it would itself simply be the summation of their preferences about this matter. O f course, lots more than I have said so far would have to be true of Monadopolis for this state of affairs to be maintained. There would have to be some reason why permanent groups whose collective power might overawe other, weaker groups or individuals, do not occur. There will have to be no means whereby one individual can make another permanently and unilaterally dependent. In other words, the conditions of Rousseau’s popular sovereignty (no factions, no personal dependence) will have to be realised without any sovereign people to enforce them, since the people decomposes when its members go home. As more and more of the conditions of the possibility of Monadopolitan society were spelt out, the Ratani species would look more and more biologically improbable. The institutions of a fiduciary currency and a credit system would also presumably be impossible, which is interesting, since it is just those human systems most pervaded by these institutions which give rise, in the heads of their less intelligent ideologists, to the illusion that we are in fact autonomous economic agents like the Ratanis. But I do not need to push the fiction any further. I hope it is clear that we are a species totally unlike the Ratanis. We are bom helpless, learn to speak and to reason and to fend for ourselves slowly, and by the agency and under the protection of others. We are mutually dependent for the means of life, which we can only acquire by entering into - or battening onto existing cooperative practices of material production. Hence we are preceded by relatively enduring structures which most of our

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actions either do not affect, or serve to reproduce willy nilly. So that the activity of transforming (or consciously perpetuating) the structures in which we live is a special activity, politics, the agencies of which are only in exceptional cases constituted by the grouping of individual agents. The point of this piece of sci-fi is to illustrate the relation between the distinctness of practices and ontological hiatuses. In Monadopolis, a change in one’s personal relationships (which would include economic and military relationships as well as those of friendship, family, and so on), would be a political event, since political change would simply be the addition of many such changes. This is because the ‘social structure’ of Monadopolis would simply consist of the sum of personal relations. There is no ontological hiatus here. In human societies, on the contrary, changes in personal relations have no political effects, except accidentally. Political acts are a special subclass of acts: acts that tend towards the taking over or destroying of special kinds of institution or alternatively, warding off such attempts. Institutions, that is, in which relations of material dependency are reproduced and managed. This is because the relations that constitute the social structure are not personal relations, but relations of dependency existing independently of the wills of individuals, and which define the places that individuals occupy. Changes which do not alter the configuration of these places - for instance, changes that involve the circulation of individuals between the places occupy a good deal of personal life, but fall right outside of politics. The autonomy o f the social, its non-reducibility to the personal, which may be called the first principle of Marx’s view of history, can thus be tested by examining the causes of the deep divide between the practices in the field of the personal and the practices in the field of the political. These practices are separate, not accidentally or by anyone’s choice, but by virtue of the objective difference between the terrains in which they operate. The effectiveness of non-political practices, and the structural limit of that effectiveness, is exactly expressed by Brecht’s poem A Bed for the Night'.

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Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought I hear that in N ew York At the comer o f 26th Street and Broadway A man stands every evening during the winter months And gets beds for the homeless there By appealing to passers-by It won’t change the world It won’t improve relations among men It will not shorten the age o f exploitation But a few men have a bed for the night For a night the wind is kept from them The snow meant for them falls on the roadway. Don’t put down the book on reading this, man. A few people have a bed for the night For a night the wind is kept from them The snow meant for them falls on the roadway But it won’t change the world It won’t improve relations among men It will not shorten the age o f exploitation. (Poems, p.181)

The autonomy of the social structure announces its reality, like wild beasts in Hegel, with tooth and claw. I am not saying that this argument from the distinctness of effective practices to the distinctness of objective structures is the only proof of the autonomy of the social structure as a distinct level of constraints. Marx himself appealed to biological facts about the material interdependence of human beings whenever he wanted to prove it, and I had to start with Ratani biology in order to state the conditions of a society without such a distinct level of constraint. Two points of clarification need to be added here. In referring to constraints, I may give the impression that the social structure is nothing but a limit to the individual’s or group’s power. The case, however, is more like that of language: one is constrained to (more or less) observe the rules of syntax or not be understood, but by the same token one is enabled to communicate. With this in mind, something more can be said about the distinctness of political practice. I characterised it as practice tending to take over or destroy certain institutions (politics of change) or to defend them from such attacks (politics of conserving).19 The

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transformation of social structures is necessarily a political act, but their reproduction is not; the task of politicians who defend the existing order is not to cause its reproduction, since the system in a sense reproduces itself; it is rather to ward off threats to that reproduction. The acts which reproduce the system are not political acts, but acts of working for one’s living, buying and selling, marrying and raising a family, etc. The social structure determines the conditions and effects of their being done, at once constraining and enabling them, and that structure is reproduced by virtue of these things being done in the manner determined by the structure. As a result of this, there is an asymmetry between conservative and transformative politics. The aim of conserv­ ative politics - the reproduction of the existing social structure appears ‘non-political’, and is commonly presented as such: ‘keep politics out of education’, i.e. keep education the way it is now. On the other hand, the fact that our everyday, non-political actions serve to reproduce the system can give rise to a certain misconception on the part of those who desire change: that we can change our everyday practices, and thereby not reproduce the system. This view involves the failure to see that the only way to abstain from actions that would reproduce the system is - literally - to stop living. The protagonist of the film Themroc would have starved to death after eating the last cop in Paris. Attempts at non-system-reproducing activity which fall short of ceasing to exist necessarily fall within the system’s constraints and form part of its self-reproduction. Their frustrated agents may then feel that their protest has been ‘co-opted’, but in reality there is no need for the system to co-opt anyone - we are all part of it. The practical meaning of the society/person hiatus is that there is no way to bypass political organisation and struggle if you desire transformation of the social structure. D ialectical and undialectical thinking

This takes us to the brink of the questions of the character of socio-historical laws: what sort of scientific laws can an epistemoid discover, using practical experience and a realist

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ontology, but lacking experiment and therefore accurate quantification? This will be the raised in the Conclusion below. To conclude this chapter, I shall mention some principles which I believe can be learnt from the ontology of stratified structures, and made use of in the study of the cloudier regions of reality, yet which are not laws of any sort. Rather, they are aids to thought, ways of avoiding common errors, pieces of advice about what to look for, exception-prone rules of thumb which can nevertheless make it less likely to get lost in the denser thickets of the forest of being. I think that when the classical Marxists referred to dialectic and particularly when they accused someone of lacking it - they quite often had some such ‘heuristic dialectic’ in mind, rather than either the general or the special ontological dialectics that I distinguished in the last chapter. For instance, when Lenin, in his ‘Testament’, called Bukharin ‘the most valuable theoretician in the Party’, and went on to say, ‘He has never learnt, and I think never fully understood, the dialectic’, if the latter comment referred to Bukharin’s theoretical work, the former would be unintelligible. In fact I think Bukharin’s grasp of the dialectic in social ontology is rather exceptionally clear (see his Historical Materialism). Unfortunately, his capacity for unravelling the crucial threads in various entangled political conjunctures was not so good, and it is to this lack of dialectic as so to speak a cognitive skill that Lenin was probably referring. (Cf. Lenin’s remarks about the inadequacies of his use of dialectic in the debate about the trade unions.20) Perhaps the heuristic dialectic, and its connection with the ontological dialectics, can be illustrated most clearly by Engels’ insistence, often reiterated since, that dialectical thinking sees interconnectedness and change where undialectical thinking sees separateness and constancy. For, on the one hand, everyone, however undialectical a thinker, admits that there are connections between things, and that changes do occur; and on the other, it is possible to exaggerate interconnectedness and change: perhaps the most common failing on the part of historians of ideas is that of thinking that two ideas necessarily ‘go together’; for instance, it is often repeated that Plekhanov’s views about freedom and necessity somehow led to his opposition to the Bolshevik Revolution, though it is

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demonstrable that there is neither a logical entailment nor an historical correlation between these two positions. And quite apart from such particular mistakes, there is a sort of anti­ thought along the lines of ‘You can’t say anything unless you say everything else too; and you can’t say anything true anyway, because everything changes.’ This sort of argument-stopper may be a sign of a pathological fear of knowledge, or just a mind bombed out by drug abuse: it is hardly a sign of skill in dialectical thought. I don’t think Engels meant his account of dialectic to be taken as a universally applicable principle ‘everything is connected, everything changes’ (and if he did he was just wrong). Rather, it is a warning about a common pitfall of (particularly social-scientific) thinking. It is as much as to say: ‘For any two phenomena, don’t too readily assume that they are independent variables.’ An example would be the organisation of production and the distribution of the social product: you can’t bring about an egalitarian distribution of income while leaving a capitalist ownership-structure intact, as some social democrats have wanted to do. And with regard to change, the maxim might be ‘consider the possibility that any phenomenon may be specific to a given historical epoch’. In particular, where something (e.g. labour) is present in all epochs, this maxim should warn us not to think that features of the form it takes in one epoch (e.g. wage-labour, the form that labour takes under capitalism) are necessary features of it in all epochs. This warning is particularly necessary in an intellectual environment in which belief in ‘conceptual truths’ is widespread. We have those concepts that we have because the world is like it is (or appears as it does). If the world were different, or changed, or were discovered to be different from what we thought, our concepts would have to be different - and of course concepts do change. However, believers in conceptual truths are prone to the fallacy of thinking that relations between concepts express necessary truths, and hence that the relations between the things to which those concepts refer are necessary. The greater part of recent philosophical debate about personal identity becomes entirely poindess once it is seen that, if brains could be cloned or if people habitually produced new information about their ‘past lives’ which was then corroborated, we would have a different concept of a person from the one(s) we now have.

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Although attention to interconnectedness and change is no more than a useful rule of thumb, there must be reasons why it is a useful one; the reasons lie in the ontological dialectic - the conception of the world as composed of a hierarchy of structured wholes developing in accordance with the laws of their structures, and thus co-determining the actual course of events. Another use of the term ‘undialectical thinking’ is for what can also be called, in a quite precise sense, one-dimensional thinking. This is characterised by the tendency, given any two pairs of concepts A and B, and C and D, to align the pairs, such that (say) A is associated with C and B with D. This is, I think, what Freud (after Silberer) calls the ‘error of superimposition’. According to Freud, narcissism, which dominates infant in­ stinctual life and remains as a hidden mechanism thereafter, involves the superimposition of the polarities: Subject (ego) - Object (external world) Pleasure - Unpleasure Unpleasurable inner stimuli are projected into the external world and pleasurable stimuli claimed as one’s own. Another error of superimposition mentioned by Freud and one with obvious wider implications - is that between the biological polarity Male/Female, the psychological polarity Active/Passive, and the social polarity Masculine/Feminine.21 To unravel the mutual causal relations of these three polari­ ties is to understand sexism: to superimpose them is to be a sexist. The most common misreading of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? also rests on an error of superimposition. A series of polarities run through that work, viz. Theory/Practice, Consciousness/Spontaneity, Intellectuals/Workers, Political Struggle/Economic Struggle, Party/Class. Apply the error of superimposition and you have the classical Blanquist theory of politics: the intellectuals, possessing the theory, form the party, and consciously use for political ends the spontaneous economic struggles of the workers. When it is taken into account that Lenin had a high estimation of the workers’ capacity for theory, aimed to build a party composed mainly of workers, and held that revolution could only be the conscious political act of the

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large majority of the working class, the neat alignment of the above pairs of concepts falls apart. It is then a question of how these pairs are articulated in a dynamic process: the task of the party to bring it about that theory is no longer the monopoly of intellectuals, the role of theory in explaining the need for politics if the economic aims of the workers are to be achieved, and so on. One special kind of case of the error of superimposition is the failure to see that a pair of concepts can be related in more than one way, such that one has primacy in one respect, the other in another respect. It is thus thought to be contradictory that the structure of the world should only be known through sensation (or language, or practice) and yet the structure of the world be independent and determinant of sensation (or language, or practice); hence idealism arises through the aligning of ontological primacy with epistemological primacy. Or it is though that if economics is determinant in the last instance over politics, political action cannot transform the economy - to which Engels retorts: ‘What these gentlemen all lack is dialectics. They always see only here cause, there effect’ (Selected Correspondence, p.425). Once again, this advice to be on the look-out for a particular kind of mistake can’t be taken as any sort of universally applicable formula. But it is advice which, if it had been heeded, would have saved a lot of first-rate thinkers from making firstrate blunders. And once again, its value rests on some features of the world recognised by dialectical ontology. If the atomistic ontology which sees causal power on die model of one billiard ball striking another, and social power on the model of person bullying another, were true, one-dimensional thinking would not lead to very many mistakes. Finally, there has been a tendency for dialectical thinkers to deny the law of identity, i.e. that (for any A) A = A. This is unfortunate in that it gives the false impression that they had scant regard for logic. They generally defended their position, though, by saying that in so far as the world is taken as static, frozen at a single point in time as in a photo, A = A applies; it does not however apply to identity through time, which has a quite different set of conditions and entailments. Thus if we take Leibniz’s law that if A = B, then everything that is true of A

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must be true of B, it clearly applies to identity at one time. If Mrs Thatcher = the Prime Minister, then if Mrs Thatcher lied to the house about the sinking of the Belgrano, it follows that the Prime Minister lied to the house about the sinking of the Belgrano. But apply the same reasoning to identity through time and you find yourself saying that if Freddie the tadpole = Freddie the frog, then if Freddie the tadpole has a long tail it follows that Freddie the frog has a long tail. Now most of the interesting philosophical discussions about identity are about identity through time. But they are interesting to precisely the extent that they forget about identity as such, A = A, and get onto questions about the real natures of the kinds of entity whose identity they are discussing. They are interesting, that is, in so far as they bring to light the ontological differences between a person, a species, a boat, a concept, a society, a political party, and so on - differences that show up in the different conditions and implications of identity in these cases. For instance, we may not apply the same rules for calling person A the same person as person B, and for calling Party A the same party as Party B. From ‘the Member of Parliament for Huntingdon elected in 1628 = the Member of Parliament for Cambridge elected in 1640’ and ‘the Member of Parliament for Cambridge elected in 1640 = the Protector of the Common­ wealth’ it follows that ‘the Member of Parliament for Huntingdon elected in 1628 = the Protector of the Commonwealth’. But does it follow from ‘the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party = the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviks)’ and ‘the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviks) = the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)’ that ‘the Bolshevik faction o f the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party = the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)’? I think not.22 The attacks on ‘A = A’ can be seen as a warning against assimilating the different manners in which different kinds of ‘structuratum’ persevere in their being. Once again, such assimilation would be quite legitimate for an atomist, or indeed anyone who believed that there was only one stratum of reality, whether that stratum was composed of atoms or some other kind of entity. Only if there is a real diversity in kinds of structuratum would talk about identity in general be potentially

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misleading. The morning star is the evening star; but is ‘The Morning S ta r\ ‘The Daily Worker? N otes 1. See Marx’s Capital, vol.II, pp.441ff., where he distinguishes between the two departments of production. Department One produces means of production, Department Two goods for consumption. 2. Cf. Maurice Comforth in M aterialism and the Dialectical M ethod, p.14: ‘Our party philosophy, then, has a right to lay claim to truth. For it is the only philosophy which is based on a standpoint which demands that we should always seek to understand things just as they are, in all their manifold changes and interconnections, without disguises and without fantasy.’

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

T h is is because ‘every exploiting class, whatever its achievements, has always to find some way o f disguising its real position and aims’ (p.12), whereas the working class ‘has no interest whatever in disguising anything, but rather in understanding things just as they really are’ (p .ll). N ehem iah4.17-18: ‘Those who earned burdens were laden in such a way that each with one hand laboured on the work and with the other held his weapon. And each o f the builders had his sword girded at his side white he built.’ W hat Engels actually says is that once the sciences have becom e, not just independent o f philosophy, but clear about their own mutual relations, then all that remains to philosophy is ‘the science o f thought and its laws - formal logic and dialectics’ (Anti-Duhring, p.36). As Althusser correctly points out, formal logic is now an autonomous science, no longer pan of philosophy, but o f the ‘continent’ o f mathematics. But that still leaves ‘dialectics’ - presumably som e so n o f philosophical reflection an the nature o f scientific dunking. I allude to the ‘noble lie’ w hich was to make people accept the class structure in his Republic. O f course Plato was, in one sense o f the word, a realist - but not with respect to the world about us. See An Apology fo r the True Christian D ivin ity, p.74: ‘ . . . (as the proverb is o f those that seek to make straight a crooked stick) to incline to the other extreme.’ Heidegger, Being and Time, section 16, MacMurray, Interpreting the Universe, Chapter II. In ‘The Question o f Lay-Analysis’, Freud says: 'You w ill probably protest at our having chosen sim ple pronouns to describe our two agencies or provinces instead o f giving them orotund Greek names. In psycho-analysis, however, we like to keep in contact with the popular mode of thinking and prefer to make its concepts

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Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought scientifically serviceable rather than reject them. There is no merit in this; w e are obliged to take this line; for our theories m ust be understood by our patients, who are often very intelligent^ but not always learned.’ (Two Short Accounts of Psycho-Analysis, p.K)5)

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

The ‘simple pronouns’ in question were Tch’ and ‘Es’ (‘I ’ and ‘It’), which Freud’s translators have rendered into ‘English’, i.e. into Latin: ‘ego’ and ‘id’. As examples o f this sloppiness, consider (i) Lacan’s discussion o f the ‘Liar Paradox’ (Four Fundamental Concepts o f Psychoanalysis, p.139) which shows only that he has not understood what it is, i.e. a paradox about statements that seem to refer to them selves, not about people who do; (ii) in his account o f the Butcher’s W ife’s Dream, he first misremembers the situation (it was the butcher, not his w ife, whose expressive face the painter had remarked on), then puts into the butcher’s mouth a far more offensive, sexist expression than that which Freud recorded, and uses the unpleasant impression this creates to score a cheap point against the idea o f ‘genital character’ (Ecrits: a selection, p.261; cf. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, p .l47ff.). This is not a trivial matter, since it is the massed minutiae o f such misreadings that enables Lacan to present as Freudian a theory' and therapy with the opposite aim to Freud’s, in that it seeks to subvert, not to extend, the ego. ‘Left to itself, a spontaneous (technical) practice produces only the “theory” it needs as a means to produce the ends assigned to i t . . . ’ (FM , p .l71n .). The ‘ends’ remain uncriticised until theory is introduced from outside. What Althusser does not say here is that there would be no call for the theory from outside unless insuperable obstacles were already encountered in the ‘technical’ practice - insuperable, that is, in terms of its existing, ‘technical’ theory. Thus the rejection o f reformism is, in essence, ‘to defy anyone to make a real change in the effects without changing the cause, the basic determining structure’ (FM , p.l93n.). I am not assuming that there are accidents in any absolute sense. An event can be an accident only relative to a particular discourse - in this case, to the laws o f a specific science. N or is ‘anti-humanism’ any guarantee o f avoiding the tendency to bypass structural revolution; for reform o f language (or o f other signifying practices) can be substituted for reform o f personal attitudes as an idealist programme o f change. This is a strong tem ptation to socialists working in semiological fields. M y favourite illustration o f the inadequacy o f this approach is from Rom Harry’s book Social Being. In the French Revolution, he tells us, ‘one o f the more interesting expressive innovations was the insistence on driving and riding on the right. Traditionally the gentry had ridden on the le ft to bring their sword arms into convenient relation. The peasantry walked on the right, to face oncoming traffic so to speak.

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Riding on the left was aristocratic, -walking on the right, proletarian. T he expressive effect o f keeping to the right must have been considerable.’ (p.4Q2)

14. 15.

16.

17.

N o doubt: until the peasants realised that they still didn’t have carriages, and if they wanted to avoid being run over by the new bourgeoisie driving on the right, they had to walk on the left. The more the signifier changes, the more the signified remains the same. See Hugh McLachlan’s letter in Radical Philosophy (no.29, 1981) for an instance o f this misreading. In PN (pp.72-3) Bhaskar argues effectively against the view o f Myrdal that value-bias is inevitable, but harmless if avowed. I f the bias is unconscious, Bhaskar replies, it is distorting, and if it is conscious it is elim inable and should be elim inated. Yet he continues to maintain both that facts can be derived from values (V—OF) and that values can be derived from facts (F—V ), commenting that V—F is ‘often conceded’ but not F—V (p.70). I see no reason why his case against Myrdal should not work against any other V—F theory. On the other hand, his case for F—V seems watertight. In the Radical Philosophy article (p.21) Bhaskar does point out the asymmetry between V—F and F—V. In both cases the arrow indicates that the precedent predisposes to and motivates the consequent; but in the latter case there is also, ‘in favourable circumstances (and subject to the operation o f ceteris paribus clauses)’, a relation o f logical entailment. But this asymmetry assigns V—F to the sociology o f science, not the philosophy o f science. And I doubt whether even most hard-line segregators o f facts and values would find such a sociological proposition offensive. The term ‘mental’ is actually too narrow, since I don’t only mean ‘subjective mind’. ‘Spiritual’ would be better if it did not have spooky connotations for most English readers. The idea that ‘world oudook’ should be derived from existing sciences is perhaps most strongly stressed by Engels (see his Ludwig Feuerbach, Anti-Duhring and Dialectics o f Nature)', Lenin is most explicit about ‘historical materialism’ being an extension or application o f this world outlook. The term ‘dialectical materialism’ has been discredited by its association with Stalinism, and also because it has been used for the sort o f M arxism that (whatever its political line) claims to be a total world outlook, giving rise toKomchvanstvo (see pp.70-1). The neglect into which this tendency o f socialist philosophy has fallen is in my view much to the detriment o f recent thinking, which often shows itself incapable o f the rigour and subdety o f a Kautsky, a Plekhanov or (to come nearer home) o f the work o f George Thompson or Maurice Comforth. Real progress in philosophy is very rare and very hard-won; fashion is all too common. And it is the law of fashion to treat fashions o f the last generation as self-evidently ridiculous, and to ignore the existence o f any before that, facilitating a sort o f eternal recurrence in the realm o f ideas (and more particularly, o f fallacies).

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18. One such sighting that socialists may find amusing is presented in a paper by Elliott Jaques called ‘Psycho-analysis and the Current Economic Crisis’: ‘We have the spectacle o f apparently irrational and self-destructive impulses at work causing inflation . .. . Despite government exhortation, wage spiralling continues.’ A ll this is 1956! {Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, p.125). 19. This ‘conserving/transforming’ distinction is not the same as the R ight/L eft distinction. Many o f the activities o f the Thatcher government, for instance, have been those o f taking over institutions (closer central political control o f media, police, education) and/or o f destroying, or at least weakening them (social services, trade unions, education). 20. Lenin’s plea here was for the investigation o f the many sides to any object (its real qualities and relations) rather than only those inherent in some definition o f it. (The passage is reprinted in Selsam and Martel (eds), Reader in M arxist Philosophy, pp.115-16). 21. Freud’s discussion o f the superimposition involved in narcissism is in his metapsychological paper ‘Instincts and their vicissitudes’; the three sexual polarities are discussed in a footnote to the essay ‘The Transformations o f Puberty’; the concept o f the error o f superimposition is used in this context in the lecture on fem ininity in New Introductory Lectures. 22. Here '=’ has to be read as ‘is the same person as’ in the first case (viz. Oliver Cromwell), and as ‘is the same party as’ in the second. The dates o f the changes of name in the latter case were 1918 and 1925.

Conclusion: The Possibility of Scientific Socialism In 1884, Paul Lafargue, the French socialist who had married Marx’s daughter Laura, sent Engels a draft of an article he had written defending Marx against a critic. Engels’ reply contains the famous passage: Marx would protest against the economic ‘political and social ideal’ which you attribute to him. W hen one is a ‘man o f science’, one does not have an ideal; one works out scientific results, and when one is a party man to boot, one fights to put them into practice. But when one has an ideal, one cannot be a man o f science, for one starts out «nth preconceptions. (Correspondence, Frederick Engels and Paul and Laura Lafargue, p.235)

Perhaps it should be said that the tone of this whole letter is rather curt, probably for the untheoretical reason that Engels, who was on holiday in Worthing, was suffering from the unbearably hot summer of 1884. The letter concludes: Here we are dying o f heat, but we are pretty well nonetheless. Everyone sends Laura and you a thousand greetings. Unfortunately our stock of Pilsener is running out and it takes two days to replace it from Brighton! We live in a state o f com plete barbarism here.

Maybe if the beer had arrived, Engels would have found time to explain what was the relation between the fact that Marx was a ‘party man’ and his work as a ‘man of science’, without ideals.1 For it is obvious enough that it is not a purely external relation, such as that between, say, Einstein’s scientific work and his socialist political views. But since the beer had not arrived and Engels did not explain, I shall try to - for unlike 163

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many critics of Marx (including many Marxists), I believe it can be explained, and without abandoning the point Engels wants to make. The unclarity in Engels’ formulation is in the notion of putting scientific results into practice. In a natural science this would mean nothing at all, unless it meant to test them experimentally (which is part of the scientific work itself), or to apply them to some practice other than the science itself, which would require a motive other than the scientific result itself. The former is clearly not meant here; the latter is doubtless intended, but not all that is intended. For Engels can hardly be implying that Marx’s results could have been applied on either side of the class struggle, in the way that science can be applied to military technology by both sides in a war.2 If Marx’s scientific results are put into practice in politics, they are put into practice in socialist politics. What then can be made of Engels’ repudiation of ideals? The point, I think, is that ideals are out of place as determinants of the scientific work, as ‘preconceptions’. Of course, Marx had political motives for ruining his health by long hours in the British Museum. But if those motives led him to favour one explanation rather than another of the workings of capitalist society, then he was at fault. In fact, relative to his immediate predecessors in the socialist movement (including his own youthful writings) one can see Marx eliminating valuejudgements from his conceptual material (e.g. the separation of the labour theory of value from any claims about the workers’ being entitled to the full product of their labour; the removal from the conception of ‘productive labour’ of any implication of usefulness; rejection of the idea that capitalists make their profits by selling goods above their value or buying labourpower below its value). The result is that the political implications of Marx’s theory are not generated by the political motives for his theoretical work, but are genuinely new results of the theory. The political motives do not generate the social scientific explanations, but the social scientific explanations do generate political motives. This is an instance of the naturalistic conception of practical reason: you cannot argue from values to facts (‘ought’ to ‘is’), but you can argue from facts to values (‘is’ to ‘ought’). In a formula: V-^F, F—V.

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We have seen in connection with explanatory critiques that some F —V arguments work. And I claimed in Chapter 4 note 15 to that passage that no V—F arguments work (see pp. 141 and 161). Some people have thought that V—F arguments could be valid, but examination of the examples generally shows them to be either something else altogether, namely arguments about the part of values in the motivation of the human discovery of facts; or to be cases of wishful thinking (at best), or downright dishonesty. The idea that science expresses the human will to power is an example of the former; the idea that, since some actions are blameworthy, our actions cannot have causal explanations, is an example of the latter. However, if an explanatory (and hence - in the present sense - factual) theory has practical/evaluative consequences but no evaluative premisses, someone is bound to call foul play and ask how the value was smuggled in. In the following sections I shall suggest what sort of laws o f history could have practical consequences. But by way of a brief general answer:3 the explanatory theories we are considering are about the activities of purposeful agents - human beings. They will therefore have to tell us something about the aims of these activities. They may also tell-us that some of these activities are self-defeating, others could be successful in this way but not that way, that some depend for their occurrence on misconceptions about them on the part of their agents, and so on. They may thus be able to give us what Kant called ‘assertoric imperatives’, i.e. those that tell us, not ‘Do this!’ (categorical imperatives), nor ‘If you want this, do that!’ (hypothetical or technical imperatives) but 'Since you want this, do that!’ Socialist P olitics and Law s o f H istory

To show the possibility of scientific socialism, it needs to be shown what kinds of laws of history (since laws of history are the components of scientific socialist theory) could guide the workers’ movement4 in this manner. I hope it will at least be clear by now what such laws of history are not. They are not, as ignorant academics who write against Marxism sometimes imagine, laws dictating that

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humanity will arrive at a socialist destination come what may; they are not even (as some Marxists have quite plausibly argued5) laws dictating that if humanity continues to survive and develop its forces of production, it will arrive there. The laws of history reflect the generative mechanisms governing the reproduction and transformation of human societies. Some of these mechanisms involve directional tendencies (at the most general level: the tendency of technology to progress; more specific to capitalism: the tendency of capital to become concentrated, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). All these mechanisms may operate unactualised, since all take their place alongside not only each other, but also non-social mechanisms (geological, biological, personal, etc.) which contribute to the actual outcome. Hence, any specifications of the necessary effects of these generative mechanisms are other things being equal, and any concrete forecasts of future events are never more than informed guesswork. Marx was well aware of this: he used to take bets on the date of the next economic crisis, and was, quite rightly, in no way theoretically disconcerted by the fact that he usually lost. Anyway, such forecasts by themselves could hardly motivate socialist politics. We do not work for socialism because it will come anyway; it won’t, and even if it would, that would be no reason to promote it, anymore than our mortality is a reason for suicide. The way in which the laws of history motivate socialist politics is quite another thing. The laws governing the reproduction and transformation of societies are encountered in the human activities of reprodudng/transforming society, as enabling constraints, like the laws of syntax. We can reproduce or transform social structures in accordance with these laws, but not otherwise. There is a wide range of activities which they permit to occur, but prevent from having effects in the reproduction or in the transformation of society. Many of these activities are thought by their agents to be effective in e.g. transforming society, when in fact they are not. So in general, the effect of knowledge of the laws of history is to narrow the field of transformative activity, i.e. to expose blind alleys as to what they are. Hence it is the aspect of laws as constraints that obtrudes. They are best described as constraints on the reproduction and transformation of societies;

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but that should not make us think that if they were not there we could do as we liked. If they (or others like them) were not there, we could do nothing at all, just as if the laws of syntax were not there, we could say nothing at all. Particular laws, however, may be specific to particular social structures, and hence are as eliminable as the structures which generate them. They may be experienced as constraints in the bad sense, as fetters; but of course they also enable certain activities to take place. There are all sorts of things which could be done in a feudal or slave society which cannot be done in a capitalist or socialist society - and not always, and usually not primarily, because they are now illegal. There would be no more need for a socialist commonwealth to prohibit people from becoming capitalists than for a republic to prohibit people from becoming courtiers. It is the social structure which generates these possibilities, and in a different social structure, different possibilities are generated. All this does not mean that different social structures generate equal possibilities and equal constraints. It does make sense to talk about progress in the degree of human freedom. I shall elaborate on this in the sequel. My task now is to sketch out the sort of things that are laws of history - the constraints on the reproduction and trans­ formation of society. One last general point before turning to the actual claims of scientific socialism concerning these constraints. From the standpoint of depth-realism, it is possible to understand what constraints a structure will generate once one has understood the structure, even in advance of, so to speak, running up against those constraints. We do not always have to try to do something and fail in order to discover its impossibility, and if we do try it and fail, that may always be for some contingent reason; we may not have discovered a genuine constraint, but just been unlucky. Hence socialist theory is not just ‘the memory of the class’, and if it were it would be worse than useless - one of those traditions from the past that weigh on the mind of the present. Within such an empiricist practice, learning from past mistakes usually means committing new ones - just as the Bolsheviks, thinking of Napoleon, saw the threat of personal dictatorship as coming from the creator of the

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Red Army, Trotsky, not from the unassuming little bureaucrat, Stalin. It is possible to go beyond this accumulation of past experiences even in the context of an epistemoid, since the realist conception of science can give us a sort of ontological briefing about structures, strata and explanations. Thus Plekhanov, in his lectures on the materialist understanding of history (March 1901, in Selected Philosophical Works, vol.II, pp.596ff.) is able to consider and discard as inadequate several alternative theories of history without considering a single counter-example, simply because the explanations they give are themselves in need of explanation. For instance, of the ‘idealist’ view of the Enlightenment that ‘opinion rules the world’, he comments: we are entitled to say that opinions rale the world. But we also have the fu ll right to ask ourselves: are not opinions, which rule the world, controlled in their tum , by something else? . .. Consequently, the idealist understanding of history contains a portion of the truth. However, it does not yet contain all the truth. To know the entire truth, we m ust continue our research from the very point at which the idealistic understanding of history has discontinued it. We must try to establish with precision the causes of the inception and development of opinions in people living in society, (ibid., p.605)

Thus Plekhanov arrives at his conclusions by seeking out deeper roots for every explanation with some degree of truth: the roots of opinion in experience and interest, and of experience and interest in class position; the power of groat individuals in the needs of the masses, and the needs of the masses in the social structure of the time. Constraints on the transform ation o f society

Scientific socialism initially addressed a movement in which utopian socialism already had an influence; later in the lifetime of its founders Blanquism and anarchism were its main adversaries among the Left; in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the great issue within the socialist movement became whether socialism can be legislated into being through

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Parliament. In all these debates, scientific socialism contributes theses about the constraints on the transformation of capitalist into socialist society, rather than on the reproduction of capitalist society. The cases against utopian socialism and Blanquism are essentially the cases against the views that ‘opinion rules the world’ or that ‘great individuals make history’. Utopianism rests on the idea that the cumulative effect of change of outlook by many individuals will of itself change the structure of society; Blanquism on the idea that individuals can be great in their historical effectiveness independently of their answering the aspirations of great numbers of people.6 The case of anarchism is more complex: the classical Marxists were, in a certain sense, anarchists - i.e. they believed that the outcome of workers’ power would be the withering away of state power. Lenin’s writings of 1917 were seen by many of his opponents as anarchist, rather than Blanquist as later critics claimed. However, I shall not press this point, as I think they were over-optimistic in envisaging a stateless future. Those who have called themselves anarchists have sometimes been U topians in the above sense (Godwin, Tolstoy, pacifist and communitarian anarchism); sometimes Blanquist (conspira­ torial and terrorist anarchism), sometimes a well-organised mass movement of workers, tending to converge with the ‘council communist’ w in g of Marxism (anarcho-syndicalism in the Latin countries, the IWW in America, the pro-soviet anarchists in Russia). Clearly the major division today is over the ‘parliamentary road’, and it is equally clear that this is entirely a division about the constraints which exist on the transformation of society. It is not an issue of which road is preferred, out of two open possibilities; it is about whether it is possible, given a parliamentary majority, to legislate socialism into being. Neither is it an issue about violence; such power as Parliament has is entirely dependent on the willingness of groups whose profession is violence to obey it. No Parliament could resist a military coup by means of its own rhetorical skills; only where the people are well enough organised to drive the armed forces from the streets can a well-organised military coup be defeated once resolved upon. Hence the belief in a parliamentary

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revolution rests on a sort of ‘idealism’ in the sense that Plekhanov used the term in the above passage: the idea that belief in the rule of law is stronger (causally) than the power structure of society, with its economic and military materiality. Of course one can imagine a political structure which generated a unity of interest between the people and the armed forces that is why democrats from Rousseau to Marx argued for militias rather than standing armies. But - unsurprisingly - the political structure in capitalist states is such as to generate unity of interest between the capitalist class and the armed forces. If this is correct, the parliamentary roader is like the sorcerer who thinks he can summon up the forces of evil and harness their powers for good by means of a few ritual formulae. He sees nothing wrong with bureaucracy, a standing army, etc. so long as they enforce laws made by Parliament. But such forces are structurally incapable of going into action on behalf of socialist laws. You cannot gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. Although depth realism does not of itself generate these (or any) political conclusions, a hypothesis so implausible as the legislative road to socialism is most likely to convince the empiricist, who disbelieves in the constraints of social structures, and hence sees no reason why it should not happen, in a country like Britain that has had one-person-one-vote for nearly forty years, that the gentry should accept defeat like gentlemen. From such a viewpoint, only failed attempts to travel the parliamentary road would count as evidence against and no number of such failures would be conclusive. A realist approach would lead to the study of the internal structure of the state and its place in the wider structure of world capitalism, and of the tendencies (active powers, not only passive ones) generated by these structures. The experience that has been gained from time to time by the election of socialists to office is consistent with what I have said. They quickly find that they are steering the ship into the rocks (of confrontation between the elected legislature and the unelected state apparatus), and they almost always steer to the right of the rocks, i.e. drop their specifically socialist proposals, and with them (perforce) the concrete aims (in terms of welfare, full employment, etc.) for which they were elected. In order to

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steer to the left of the rocks, they would require a whole apparatus of grass-roots democracy i.e. (positively) workers’ councils, and (negatively) the disbandment of permanent armed forces, etc. - conditions which cannot simply be supplied by Act of Parliament, but only by organisation on the part of the working people. Indeed an electoral victory for a really serious socialist movement would only be possible as a symptom of such organisation - a thermometer, as Engels says,7 of the political development of the workers. This inevitable deflection of the parliamentary road to socialism explains why people with such different aims, so far as their personal convictions are concerned, as social democrats and parliamentary roaders work together effectively (if not exactly happily) in the same political parties: in office, advocates of the parliamentary road to socialism make excellent social democrats - just as failed poets write the best advertising jingles. (In this sense, there are two social democratic parties in Britain today: the Labour Party and the Communist Party.) This does not of course mean that transformations are impossible, or that they are inexplicable in the terms of the mechanisms governing the ‘old regime’. Systems are typically transformed by forces generated within the system, and many kinds of system (e.g. capitalism) necessarily transform themselves in reproducing themselves. It does mean that we must distinguish transformations that can occur piecemeal, and those that can only occur by means o f a sharp rupture. Even a transition from one mode of production to another (e.g. to capitalism from feudalism in Britain) can take place without a sharp break (though this change did not take piare without violence, from Bosworth Field via Naseby to Culloden). But this can only occur when each stage of the change is compatible with the class interest of the most powerful fractions of the possessing class - and no such transition to socialism can be conceived. It would be foolish to deny (as some on the sectarian left tend to) that while remaining within capitalism, changes can occur in (i) the balance of class forces: the British working class were far stronger in the mid-1970s than they are in the mid1980s; (ii) the superstructure: constitutions and moral codes may come and go; (iii) the circulation of categories of individual bearer among the social positions: the entry of women and of

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racial minorities into the commanding heights of power and privilege. These changes are by no means neglible, but ‘everything is what it is and not another thing’. Finally, there are constraints concerning the agents of transformation. Viewed in the perspective of the struggles for liberation of all exploited classes and other oppressed groups throughout history, scientific socialism can be seen as characterised by a doctrine of proletarian exceptionalism, i,e. that whereas all other oppressed groups have only been able to achieve partial liberation, and that under the leadership of historically progressive exploiting classes (as e.g. the labouring poor in the English Puritan revolution, the peasantry in the French Revolution) the proletariat can project, and under favourable conditions carry out, its own complete liberation,8 and therewith that of other oppressed groups. This is because the proletariat is unique in being at once: (i) free from personal dependence, (ii) exploited as a class, (iii) a class of producers, (iv) engaged in a cooperative work process, and (v) present at a technological level that could make substantial free time available to all. This is not to overlook the great achievements of non­ proletarian revolutions in China, Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere. But they all necessarily lack the institutions o f‘bottom-upwards’ self-government that are typical of proletarian organisations, and have consequently bequeathed to their societies - along with huge economic and cultural advances - political structures that do not belong to the people, and form obstacles to the development of international socialism. Nor is it to deny that the issues of Third World poverty, the probability of ecological disaster and the threat of nuclear holocaust are so immense in human terms as to pale all other political issues into insignificance by comparison. But it is to point out that movements aiming ‘directly’ at these issues can never storm the ramparts of capitalism. Scientific socialism directs us to the narrow pass of class politics as the necessary condition for conquering the system that inexorably generates these horrors as long as it lives. The place of a theory of the constraints on the transformation of society in political argument should be fairly unproblematic. In showing that particular apparent ways of achieving certain

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ends axe doomed to failure, it directs effort to other ways. Luxemburg’s remarks about the reformist wing of German Social Democracy illustrate this: What appears to characterise this practice above all? A certain hostility to ‘theory*. This is quite natural, for our ‘theory’, that is, the principles of scientific socialism , impose clearly marked lim itations to practical activity insofar as it concerns the aims o f this activity, the means used in attaining these aims, and the m ethod em ployed in this activity. It is quite natural for people who run after immediate ‘practical* results to want to free themselves from such lim itations and to render their practice independent o f our ‘theory*. However, this outlook is refitted by every attempt to apply it in reality. (Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p.87)

But of course, this assumes that one is already engaged in the practice of working-class politics, and so committed to certain ends, so that facts about what are and what are not possible ways of achieving those ends enter into the argument in technical or hypothetical imperatives: ‘If you want to abolish classes, you have to bring capital into common ownership’, and so on. In so far as scientific socialist theory is intend»! for an already existing working-class movement, such technical imperatives are sufficient to motivate appropriate action. But they are not all, not even the main part, of scientific socialist theory. If they were, quite an honourable political option would be to say: ‘If the difficulties of building a better society are so great, we had better make the best of the society we have got; if we look at the price the Russians had to pay for their socialist revolution, and consider a permanent, peaceable welfare/monopoly capitalism to be the alternative, no humane person could opt for socialism, however much it is preferable in itself.’ To answer this, we have to turn to the other set of constraints with which the theory is concerned. Constraints on the reproduction of society In addition to constraints preventing certain roads of change, there are also constraints on the reproduction of society, such that ‘staying as we are’ is rarely a live option, and, in so far as it is, it too has its price.

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Among the classic texts of scientific socialism, Marx’s Capital is overwhelmingly concerned with mapping this kind of constraint. Next to nothing is said there about transformation, except in the process of analysing constraints on reproduction, i.e. that capitalism produces the material conditions for, and the class of agents of, its own transformation, and supplies those agents with a motive by means of its periodic economic collapses. About constraints on transformation, it tells us nothing except for the elementary point that capitalism, since it does reproduce itself, does not spontaneously transform itself into socialism. The whole theme of Capital is that capitalism, in the process of producing goods for profit, also reproduces its forces of production (with expansion) and its relations of production (with increasing socialisation, i.e. concentration and interdependence of units), and therewith its developing contradictions. Constraints on the reproduction of society fall into various categories which it is worth briefly listing and exemplifying. (A) There are conditions that must be satisfied by any society if it is to reproduce itself. The ‘law of value’ (in the sense of this phrase in which it applies to any society, not only to ones in which market mechanisms prevail) is an instance: the masses of products corresponding to the different needs require different and quantitatively determined masses o f the total labour of society. That this necessity o f the distribution o f social labour in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particularform o f social production but can only change the mode o f its appearance, is self-evident. N o natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert them selves. (Letter from Marx to Kugelmann, 11 July 1868, Selected Correspondence p.209)

(B) There are conditions that must be satisfied by a given kind of society (e.g. capitalism) in order to reproduce itself as that kind of society. Capitalism must, at the end of the day, leave a possessing class with the newly produced means of production, and a non­ possessing class with the means of life but no means of

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production, such that the classes of buyers and sellers of labourpower confront one another anew in each generation. (C) There are, in capitalist and many other societies, constraints against reproducing itself unchanged - dynamic constraints impelling development in a definite direction. Thus market competition (even between initially equal producers) compels technical progress which compels larger units, which (under conditions of private ownership) compels class division. So an egalitarian market society will reproduce the market relations but transform the egalitarian ones.9 (D) There are constraints against certain changes occurring without certain others. In the case of capitalism, it is economic competition between capitals (and also military competition between nation states) which makes change in a certain direction inevitable. But these changes have necessary consequences at other levels. Capitalism has to progress, and cannot progress without tearing up whatever political or cultural institutions or environmental amenities stand in the way of more profitable use of resources. ‘You can’t resist progress’ is a truism under capitalism. One of the new freedoms that socialism would secure for the human race is the freedom to resist progress if it didn’t like it. As it is it very often happens that progress generated by the economic structure is disastrous in its effects on all other levels of social being. (E) There are unavoidable side-effects of the operation of the mechanisms of reproduction. Thus the coercive machinery of the state is essential to the reproduction of class society, but also constitutes a threat to the liberties of all citizens; capitalism (and the nation-state in general) cannot exist without an arms industry, but once in being, a capitalist arms industry in its drive for profits has a political dynamic of its own, in no one else’s interest; the ideology necessary for the smooth running of class society involves falsehoods that deceive the bourgeois as much as anyone else. (F) There are ineradicable tendencies of these mechanisms to produce certain effects. Capitalism tends to produce racial discrimination, though it can survive without this, in principle.

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(G) There are inherent vulnerabilities in the mechanism of reproduction of a particular social structure, which are not inherent in every mechanism of social reproduction. Thus a capitalist economy is vulnerable to certain kinds of crisis with which a socialist society could cope, even when these crises are not generated by the mechanisms of the system themselves. (H) There are contradictions in the fullest sense: necessary features of the process of reproduction which endanger that same process. These include the classical Marxian contradictions: the class struggle itself, and the self-generated periodic crises of capitalism; the ecological contradictions of capitalism fall into this category, though their recent intensification is due to an ‘external’ factor, the limits of planetary resources. (I) Some of these contradictions are necessarily reproduced on an expanded scale. Marx and Engels believed this to be true of economic class struggle and periodic crisis; this is questionable, but political class division (the exclusion of the exploited classes from political processes), and ecological crises do seem set for permanent worsening within capitalism. Finally, against a certain kind of Marxist essentialism, it should be said that historically specific laws are not limited to those specific to modes of production (e.g. capitalism); there may be mechanisms which come into being only at a particular stage of capitalism, and these stages need not be limited to those that form part of capitalism’s natural progression (e.g. competitive or monopoly capitalism). For instance, the racial structure of South African society is ‘contingent’ in the sense that capitalist societies can avoid it, and most have. Nevertheless, it is clearly a self-reproducing structure, and so firmly glued to the capitalist structure that it is difficult to conceive of one of these structures being transformed while the other is reproduced; this laminated system may produce laws unique to itself (though they could of course, in principle, occur elsewhere): constraints on its reproduction and transformation unlike those existing in other capitalist societies. Likewise, developments in the ‘human slaughter industry’,

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both in its ‘forces of production’ (nuclear weapons) and, consequently, in its ‘relations of production’ (the Cold War with the consequent erosion of sovereignty with both blocs) have not only produced a sinister new constraint on the reproduction of society (the ever-present possibility that the USA will fight the USSR to the last European, and thereby subject the rest of the world to a nuclear winter). They have also made the transition to socialism immensely more difficult, in that it could not be achieved anywhere without the break up of the Western Alliance - an event which could not be accomplished by any single country. International politics becomes dominant as never before, putting the peats movement right in the foreground of any realistic socialist project. The constraints both on reproduction and on transformation today are not merely the constraints of capitalism, but of nuclear, Cold War capitalism. Like the constraints on transformation, these constraints on reproduction set limits to reformist politics, but in this case even to quite moderate social democratic reforms. Aims like permanent full employment or the near equalisation of incomes can be shown to be impossible within capitalism, while others like houses for all and the prevention of pollution have the cards heavily stacked against them. Given that staying where we are is not an option, and that conservation of the system often means destruction of the benefits hitherto available in it, this part of the theory can demonstrate the untenability of conservative politics too. A philosophical book is not the place to argue that this or that constraint on social reproduction exists; but it is on precisely such arguments that the case for socialism rests. Preening ourselves on the humaneness o f ‘socialist values’ is not only in bad taste, it is also unnecessary; what is necessary is to demonstrate the mechanisms excluding other options than ‘socialism or barbarism’ (in Luxemburg’s slogan) available to the human race today. Once this is done, no one but a rich childless egoist with a defective aesthetic sense (and/or a dogmatic libertarian rightist) could choose barbarism. Though naturally, good arguments will not pierce the ideological armour of many.

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Starting from contradictions

The dialectical concept of contradiction is the locus within scientific socialist theory at which scientific investigation becomes political prescription, and does so by virtue of the facts discovered, not anything added by the investigator. It has nothing to do with logical contradiction: the shared name is no more than a left-over from an untenable aspect of Hegel’s philosophy. Contradictions are real aspects of real systems, stemming from the nature of the system in question, yet endangering it, and impelling change in it. In other words, a contradiction is an inherent constraint on the reproduction of a self-reproducing system; a mechanism which generates conflict, dysfunction, crisis, and the likelihood of destruction in the structure of which it is a mechanism. The structures we are concerned with here are structures of human societies; what is structured in them is a set of human practices; and human practices necessarily have goals, generate values, and so on. So the answer to the question where the practical motives come into the scientific account of society, is that they don’t have to come in, they were there all along, and in the object studied, not the investigator’s mind. Nothing is more characteristic of Marx and Engels, or of more permanent value in their work, than this derivation of practical imperatives from the contradictions at work in the social process itself, rather than from the ideals of ‘this or that would-be universal reformer.’10 This is the meaning of their rejection of utopian for scientific socialism. And utopian socialism is rejected, not only as unrealistic (which Utopians have often passed off as an amiable fault), but as arrogant, imposing ideals from without. When great cruelties are committed by a political movement, it is usually because that movement is out of its time,11 trying to defend a long obsolete system, or inaugurate one whose time has not yet come, perhaps may never come. The utopian need not consider whether the people of their time want the projected utopia, or even whether human nature is capable of it. Scientific socialism starts from the contradictions of its time, and the efforts of the people of its time to resolve them. I hope, in a sequel to this book, to work out the political philosophy implicit in this idea. Let me

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conclude with a long quote from Rosa Luxemburg, which expresses it exactly: Far from being a sum o f ready-made prescriptions which have only to be applied, the practical realisation o f socialism as an econom ic, social and juridical system is something which lies com pletely hidden in the mists of the future. What we possess in our programme is nothing but a few main signposts which indicate the general direction in which to look for the necessary measures and the indications are mainly negative in character at that. Thus we know more or less what we must eliminate at the outset in order to free the road for a socialist econom y. But when it comes to the nature o f the thousand concrete, practical measures, large and small, necessary to introduce socialist principles into econom y, law and all social relationship, there is no key in any socialist party programme or textbook. That is not a shortcoming but rather the very thing that makes scientific socialism superior to the utopian varieties, (from ‘The Russian Revolution’, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p.390)

N otes 1. Bhaskar comments on this (former) passage o f Engels, which he quotes in a different translation: ‘O f course what Engels om itted to mention was the possibility that Marx’s scientific results should imply a political commitment’ (PN , p.98). The present discussion is in much the same spirit.

M y reference to Engels’ beerless brevity is not entirely flippant. In tire previous letter to Laura he had said: ‘N o Lager Beer as yet, but Percy is hunting som e up at Brighton - as soon as that is to hand, I w ill try whether I can digest Leroy-B’ (the author to whom Paul Lafargue’s article was a reply) (p.228 o f the same collection o f letters). 2. It has sometimes been claimed (for instance, by Rudolf Hilferding) that since Marx’s scientific work is objective, it is in principle neutral, and could assist politicians of all parties. It is noteworthy that Tory Marxists are very hard to find, though the right-wing journalist, Peregrine W orsthome, has said: ‘W ithout Marx, I might even have been a liberal. As it is, I am a Tory-M arxist, in the sense o f accepting the need to take sides in the class war, even if, so to speak, on the other side’ {Marxism Today, March 1983). However, such a position is only possible for one unconvinced by the theories about constraints on the reproduction o f capitalist society. These, while objective, cannot be neutral. 3. I hope to give a fuller answer in a sequel to this book. I have already written something about it my papers ‘ Scientific Socialism and the Question o f Socialist Values’, ‘Positive Values (reply to Brenda Cohen)’, and ‘M ilton Fisk, Marxism and Ethics’ (in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, supplementary volume V II, 1981, Aristotelian Society,

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

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supplementary volume 1983, and Radical Philosophy, no.36, 1984, respectively). I am assuming that scientific socialism is uniquely linked to the workers’ m ovement, in the manner described in the last chapter as characteristic o f epistem oids. If someone asks about its relation to other forms of oppression than class exploitation (since scientific socialism speaks of human emancipation, not only of proletarian emancipation) it can be said that the theoretical point I am making about theory and practice leaves that question open. This epistemoid is uniquely generated by the workers’ movement, but it may discover laws o f history which explain other forms o f oppression. It might be that all forms o f structural oppression in modem society are generated by capitalism, so that their abolition would follow socialism as a necessary concomitant; or it might be that, for example, the oppression of women was generated by independent mechanisms, the discovery o f which would be the work o f an independent epistem oid, ‘scientific feminism’, produced by a movement independent o f (though perhaps in some sib-like relationship with) socialist politics. I am inclined to favour the former account. The most interesting recent example being Scott M eikle in his book Essentialism in the Thought of K arl M arx. W ith some variations: utopian socialists have also sometimes appealed to existing ‘great individuals’; W instanley organised the communal digging o f St George’s H ill, Cobham, but he also wrote to Cromwell. ‘Thus, universal suffrage is the gauge o f the maturity o f the working class. It cannot and never w ill be anything more in the present-day state; but that is sufficient. On the day the thermometer o f universal suffrage registers boiling point among the workers, both they and the capitalists w ill know what to do’ (Engels, ‘Origin o f the Family, Private Property and the State’, in Selected Works in One Volume, p.589). ‘Complete liberation’ so far as structural exploitation and oppression are concerned. The idea that all forms o f oppression o f one person by another could be elim inated by structural changes and accomplished politically is utopian. The possibility o f personal oppression is inherent in the human condition. Though no actual capitalist society has developed spontaneously from an egalitarian market society. This fact is o f no importance for socialists, but is useful in polem ics against ‘theories’ like N ozick’s, which makes just distribution depend on development by honest transactions from a just initial state. Easy as it is to prove such theories internally inconsistent, it is perhaps easier to squash them under the facts chronicled in the chapter o f Capital on primitive accumulation. ‘The theoretical conclusions o f the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer’ {Communist Manifesto, in The Revolutions of 1848, p.80). ‘Tim e’ in the sense o f kairos, to use a term introduced into the socialist lexicon from the Greek o f the N ew Testament by Paul Tillich. O f course, the worst political atrocities have been committed in the

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name o f dogmas that can never have a kairos, since they take no heed o f demands made other than in the name of the dogma. The starving o f one and a half m illion Irish people in the name o f liberal econom ic dogma, and the Nazi holocaust, are the most obvious examples.

Glossary The aim of this glossary is partly to clarify one or two neologisms, but mostly to disambiguate my use of a number of terms which are commonly used in a variety of senses. D eterm inism

Roy Bhaskar distinguishes ‘regularity-determinism’, which regards the universe as a closed system characterised by naturally occurring constant conjunctions, and ‘ubiquitydeterminism’, which simply holds that every alteration has a cause. Attacks on determinism in general are widespread, but rather unhelpful, since ubiquity-determinism has none of the consequences that anti-determinists object to, and regularitydeterminism is easiest to refute once identified as such, since its implicit use in some of the social sciences’ imitations of natural science gains what respectability it has from the plausibility of ubiquity-determinism. However, in non-philosophical usage, ‘determinism’ is almost always short for some ‘imperialistic’ regional deter­ minism, i.e. some particular kind of reductionist programme which places all (or too many) causes within a single stratum of reality. Examples are: biological determinism in social theory (e.g. many socio-biologists), economic determinism in history (of which Marx is often accused), unconscious determinism (alleged against psychoanalysis), theological determinism (Calvinism), and so on. It is best always to specify which determinism one is talking about, otherwise we get treated to 182

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bits of nonsense such as: M arx and Freud are incompatible with each other since both are determinists; or Freud’s determinism makes his theory close to Calvin’s. The idea of the stratification of nature makes it possible to accept ubiquity-determinism, as both M arx and Freud did, without falling into the single­ stratum determinism which would make their two theories incompatible. Dialectic Any attem pt to inventory the uses of this term would stretch even the notion of ‘family resemblance’. When M arx, in the time-honoured metaphor, cracked the Hegelian nut to extract its rational kernel (the dialectic) he actually fragmented the kernel, such that even the bits he retained cannot be reassembled into one piece. I use the term of three related ideas: (i) General Theory of Dialectic: the idea that the world is composed of developing structured whole entities (‘structurata’, Spinoza’s ‘composite individuals’), the parts o f which are themselves whole entities composed of parts, with any whole and parts being subject to mutually irreducible laws, such that any whole smaller than the universe is vulnerable to the possibility of dissolution and open to the possibility of incorporation in a larger whole; (ii) Special Theory of Dialectic: the idea that certain whole entities (e.g. capitalist societies) are not merely vulnerable to, but necessarily generate by virtue of their internal structure, forces tending towards their dissolution; (iii) heuristic dialectic: a set of rules of thumb for interpreting the world given the truth of (i) and (ii). Emergence The term ‘emergence’ refers to the occurrence or coming to be of entities with properties irreducible to and unpredictible from those of the entities from which they were formed. It seems to have been first used in this sense by G.H. Lewes, and was popularised in the emergent evolutionism of C. Lloyd Morgan. The concept is suspect to many analytical philosophers, since

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emergence-theories are thought to be (and sometimes have been) vague, mysterious and wildly speculative. But there is nothing necessarily mysterious about emergence. Any ontology may be called an emergence-theory if it postulates mutually irreducible levels, some of which are unilaterally dependent for their existence on others (e.g. there can be life without consciousness but not consciousness without life; and consciousness has properties that could not be understood from a knowledge of life as such). Dialectical materialism is an emergence-theory, but physicalistic mater­ ialism is not; Teilhard de Chardin’s theology is an emergencetheory, but Leibniz’s theology is not. Clearly, emergence is a category that is compatible with a wide range of metaphysical views. Emergence-theories may emphasise the emergence of new levels in time (diachronic emergence) or relations of ontological dependence without reducibility at any time (synchronic emergence) or (usually) both: emergent evolutionism both stressed the discontinuities in natural history, and offered an alternative to vitalism and reductionism in biology. Emergencetheories may differ about the reality and irredudbility of particular levels (e.g. a methodological individualist might be an emergence theorist with regard to the biological sciences, but deny emergent status to social reality); some emergencetheorists have given teleological accounts of the tendency to complexification, others not. Freud’s theory of Eros and Thanatos could be seen as a dual teleology: a tendency to produce more complex unities (Eros) and a tendency to disperse them and flatten the edifice to fewer and lower levels (Thanatos). The theory of the stratification of nature developed by Roy Bhaskar and defended in this book is obviously an emergencetheory. In RTS, Bhaskar described a higher level as rooted in and emergent from a lower (p .l 13). In PN he characterises his philosophy of mind as Synchronic Emergent Powers M ater­ ialism (SEPM). Synchronic, in that it does not involve denying that the initial emergence o f a level has causes, and that these may be in a lower level. Given his view that prediction and explanation are not symmetrically related in open systems, he can consistently maintain that the coming to be of a higher level

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may be explained by the mechanisms of a lower, though it could never have been predicted from them. (This asymmetry caused trouble for some earlier emergence-theorists.) It is an emergent powers theory in that it claims that mental events have effects which would not have occurred without them; on the basis of this claim, he rejects central state materialism and behav­ iourism. It is materialist in that it regards mind as an emergent stratum rooted in biological (etc.) strata. This is a very openended sense of ‘materialism’; Bhaskar explicitly states that SEPM does not decide the issue between ‘thinking m atter’ and immaterial substance. All the above examples of emergence could be said to be of ‘vertical emergence’ in that emergence is a relation between higher and lower strata, which strata, in Bhaskar’s theory, are comprised of mechanisms, rather than concrete entities. I use the term ‘horizontal emergence’ to mark the case in which a concrete entity has emergent properties requiring the conjoint action of several mechanisms. I suggest that such rational kernel as there may be in the idea of a ‘fallacy of analysis’ (usually an obscurantist notion) can be theorised in this way. E pistem oid

A theoretical discipline which is scientific in so far as it uses knowledge about the structure of the world derived from the sciences, to guide its understanding of the data derived from a practical discipline (e.g. politics) but which has no means of testing its theories other than in their application. It learns from the experimental sciences what counts as a adequate explanation, and from practical experience, what is to be explained. The sdence/epistem oid distinction may be illustrated by the following diagram from my paper ‘Scientific Realism in the Human World: the Case of Psychoanalysis’:

1%

Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought

The arrows on the left side are absent in the epistemoids. However, since experimental closure is, on the one hand, never perfect, and, on the other, never without some analogue (however remote), the distinction must be seen as one of degree, not all-or-nothing. Epistem ology

I take this word as an exact synonym for.‘theory of knowledge’, and use it only because it is easier to form adjectives from. (Althusser refers to epistemology as a ‘surrogate’ of theory of knowledge (ESC, p.189) but says nothing about how these apparent synonyms are to be understood as different enough for one to be a surrogate of the other.) In the Critique o f Pure Reason, Kant says that we are ‘indebted to the celebrated Locke’ for opening up the enquiry into the explanation of our aim ing by knowledge; and, using the legal distinction between question of fact and questions of right, declares the Lockean method imcompetent to answer questions of right; Descartes had already emphasised the latter: by what right do we claim for our beliefs the status of knowledge? M odem scientific epistemology (a term wide enough, I think, to cover the Popperian, Althusserian and transcendental realist

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positions) replaces these questions with a third: how do we test our theories, how do we match them with their objects? Whatever of the Cartesian question is not absorbed into this one is put aside as the product of a perverse desire for unobtainable degree o f certainty; whatever of the Lockean question is not absorbed into it is relegated to the interesting but nonepistemological disciplines of the social, psychological, bio­ logical, etc. studies of science. Various answers are given to the question how these studies are relevant to epistemology, if at all. My own answer is: only in so far as they may alert us to the areas where unscientific practice is likely. H um anism In view of the fact that the word ‘humanism’ can mean many things from classical scholarship to organised irreligion, a note of clarification is perhaps required. When Althusser rejects humanism, there are four things he might have meant by the word: (i) the view that there is such a thing as human nature; (ii) the view that ‘man’ or ‘human nature’ is the (or a) fundamental concept of social science; (in) the humanist ethic of the young Marx; (iv) concern for human welfare, ‘humanitarianism’ as a practical goal. He is often thought to have rejected all four. In fact, he rejects (i) and (ii) and says little about (iii) and (iv). From what he does say, it seems likely that if pressed he would reject (iii) and accept (iv). My own view is that (ii) and (iii) should be rejected, (i) and (iv) accepted. I think that that was also probably the view of the mature M arx, though the only thing that ought to be beyond controversy is that he rejected (ii): ‘My analytic method does not start from man but from the economically given period of society’ (M arx’s notes on Adolf Wagner’s textbook, quoted by Althusser, ESC, p.201).

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M arxism

Quite properly, this term is normally taken to refer to a set of political movements. However, the modem use of it as an honorific or pejorative title for any movement left of some arbitrary point in the spectrum should be resisted. W hat distinguishes M arxists from other socialists is a theory, a theory scientific in intention (see ‘Epistemoid’), whose subject-matter is human societies, and the conditions of their reproduction and transformation, and in particular capitalist society, and the conditions o f its overthrow by the workers’ movement. The scientific intention means that strong claims are being made about the objectivity of the theory, and its rapacity to produce knowledge not available w ithout it. It also means that it is limited in scope (not a ‘total world-view’), and independent of the opinions of its eponymous founder. One may be a M arxist without sharing M arx’s passion for Aeschylus, his atheism, his Russophobia, or his taste for fish. M aterialism

I hope it goes without saying that none of the philosophical senses of this word has anything to do with the sense it has in common usage, i.e. overvaluation of material goods. But the senses used in the M arxist tradition are also distinct from the sense given to this word in most academic philosophy. In the English-speaking academic world, at least, ‘materialism’ tends to be used to mean the belief that talk about mental, personal, social, etc. entities can be replaced by talk about physico-chemical entities, and that the latter alone tells us what is really there in nature. From this reductive materialist standpoint, ‘epiphenomenalism’ - the view that mental events are effects of physical events but do not themselves have physical effects - would appear not quite materialist. However M arxists, one and all, would regard epiphenomenalism as a crudely mechanistic version of materialism. Unfortunately, modem Marxists have got into such a panic about being mistaken for reductive materialists that they have made a habit of exculpating themselves by accusing other

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M arxists of being reductive materialists. So by now everyone believes that some Marxists are reductive materialists - but always in another time and place. The one M arxist at whom almost everybody, even official Soviet philosophers, points this accusing finger is Plekhanov. Yet his accounts of the effects of mental realities would look idealist to contemporary materialist philosophers of mind. He himself describes Marxism as a species of Spinozism. M arxist materialists have sometimes been reductive, but that does not make them reductive materialists, anymore than if the bones o f someone’s ancestor become my property they become the bones of my ancestor (apologies to W.S. Gilbert). Sociological or political reductionism in aesthetics, for instance, has infected some M arxists, but has also had opponents among the most pronouncedly materialist (Engels, Lenin, Trotsky). Soviet psychology (as opposed to philosophy or social theory) has often been reductive m aterialist, but that is due to the influence of Pavlov, not Marxism. The classical M arxist formula for materialism is: existence precedes consciousness. But this has been used to encapsulate three distinct doctrines (all held by the present author): (i) realist epistemology - the thing known precedes the knowing mind; (ii) that in stratified nature, lower strata can (and once did) exist without the higher, but not vice versa - e.g. there can be m atter w ithout life, and life without consciousness, but not vice versa; (iii) explanatory materialism: there is a one-way chain of vertical explanation o f higher-level generative mechanisms in terms of lower-level ones (e.g. biological in terms of chemical). I take the term ‘the materialist conception of history’ to mean simply this, applied to human history. ‘Dialectical materialism’ is a term coined not by Plekhanov as commonly asserted, but by the German worker-philosopher Joseph Dietzgen for his own pantheistic world-view, and later adopted by the Marxists of the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals.

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M ethodological prim acy o f the pathological

Heidegger and M acMurray argue convincingly that objective knowledge originates in the breakdown in the practical interaction with nature that preceded it; prior to such breakdown, knowledge is simply the storing of unexplained practical experience (rather: practical experience explained only mythologically, i.e, in terms drawn from the subject’s experience of the world, not from the real connections of nature). The experimental sciences need no longer take account of this origin; where experiment is impossible, we tend to remain at the level of mere stored practical experience (cf. Althusser’s account of the ‘technical disciplines’) unless epistemogenic breakdowns force us to start asking more far-reaching explanatory questions. Such breakdowns not only motivate such questions, they also facilitate their answer, since by learning what is missing we may learn what is required for normal functioning. We do not have any deep knowledge of the normal working of the objects of our study until we investigate their pathology. As Freud put it: ‘neurotic human beings offer far more instructive and accessible material than normal ones.’ The principle of the methodological primacy of the pathological presupposes that the notion of pathology am be applied quite objectively; breakdown in a structuratum can occur and be described quite independently o f any relation to human interests. The presence of pathology, while it is always a cognitive opportunity, is not always a reason to change anything. The contradictions of capitalism, for instance, do not give reasons to everyone for trying to change the system. Nevertheless, many breakdowns occurring within the human world are such as to constitute reasons for many people to want change; hence the historical connection between depthexplanation and practical radicalism, and between untheorised data-collection and conservatism. N ature, naturalism

The concept ‘nature’, except when used to mean ‘the universe

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as a whole’, acquires various senses as it is contrasted with various opposites. W hen we talk about art imitating nature, ‘nature’ may well include human activities, etc. being contrasted only with art; in some other contexts, nature is whatever is not human consciousness or activity or its product. Sometimes the two meanings are superimposed. W hen Zola, in the preface to Thérèse Raquin, defends his ‘naturalism’, he means both realism and treating human passions, etc. as if they were forces of (inhuman) nature. There is a certain ingenuous disingenuousness here: ‘You can’t call my novel obscene, I ’m only telling it like it is’ (naturalism as realism); yet what is obscene if not the presentation of the human in a way that degrades it to the subhuman (naturalism as reductionism). Similar ambiguities occur in the use of ‘nature’ and ‘naturalism’ in epistemological contexts. I use the word ‘nature’ in both senses, and hope the meaning is clear in context. By ‘naturalism ’ though, I never mean ‘reductionism’, but do mean more than just realism. Here I follow Roy Bhaskar, who says: Naturalism may be defined as the thesis that there is (or can be) an essential unity o f method between the natural and the social sciences. It must be immediately distinguished from two species o f it: reductionism, which asserts that there is an actual identity o f subject matter as well; and scientism, which denies that there are any significant differences in the methods appropriate to studying social and natural objects. (PN p.3)

However, I think that some of the ontological differences that he discusses are unreal (see the section ‘Do the human “ sciences” have any compensating advantages?’ in Chapter 4), while the epistemological difficulties of studying the human world are greater than he maintains. In practical reasoning, ‘naturalism’ generally means the view that the best way to talk about values is by talking about facts the facts being about (special aspects of) the real world (i.e. not about Platonic Forms or Kantian noumena). Bhaskar’s notion of an ‘explanatory critique’, i.e. an explanatory account of something which entails objective reasons for transforming that something opens up the possibility of a revival of naturalism in this sense. I hope to w rite a sequel to this book in which I shall defend naturalism in political reasoning.

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O ntology Theory o f being; answers to questions about what there is, i.e. what basic, irreducible kinds of things there are. Are there minds, or are they merely brains? Are there sub-atomic particles, or are they merely theoretical constructs by which we explain what atoms do? Are there the Ego, Super-ego and Id, or are they merely theoretical constructs to explain what people do? Are there societies, or only collections of people? Are there languages, or only people talking? and so on. The ontology underlying the present work is a rather luxuriant one (none of the reductions referred to in the last sentence would be accepted). Perhaps the most important non-reduction, however, is the non-reduction o f ontology itself to epistemology. For example, we cannot answer the question ‘Do dreams exist?’ or ‘What are dreams?’ by answering the question ‘How do we know about dreams?’. This non-reduction is part of what is meant by ‘realism’; the fallacy involved in making such reductions is ‘the epistemic fallacy’. opinozism P m n . n . i l n m

No one should be too confident of interpreting Spinoza right, and I am not. But I use ‘Spinozism’ to mean: (i) in epistemology: the doctrine that the ideas we have already got (‘random experience’) form the necessary starting point of knowledge, but are not authoritative, since we can move to more rigorous degrees of knowledge (the move from hearsay and personal experience to science being the only such move considered here, though Spinoza also wrote about a higher form of knowledge); (ii) in ontology: A. the idea that there are composite individuals, composed either of lower-order composite individuals, or of ‘simple bodies’, themselves unstructured; and that each composite individual is governed by a tendency to persevere in its being, but is (as composite) liable to decomposition (see ‘Dialectic’).

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B. Spinoza also held that God is immanent in nature, that nature can be considered as one composite individual, and that ‘God or N ature’ has infinite attributes, o f which he knew only two (thought and extension); (iii) Spinoza’s theory of the role of reason in ethics is based on the ideas (a) that one emotion can only be driven out by another emotion, and (b) that emotions can be based on inadequate or adequate ideas, and hence less or more rational. One could describe the moral thinking of a Spinozist as the ‘explanatory critique’ (Bhaskar’s concept) of their emotions. Structuratum

That which is structured, i.e. any structured entity. I use this term to eliminate the ambiguity of ‘structure’, which is sometimes by extension applied to a structuratum . Properly speaking, a structure is a set of relations of causality and dependence between the elements of a structuratum ; we need the latter term for the concrete entity that has the structure. ‘Structuratum ’ is more or less a synonym for Spinoza’s ‘composite individual’, and for Althusser’s ‘structured whole’ when he is contrasting such wholes with Hegelian ‘expressive totalities’, though not when he occasionally slips into a Hegelian forgetfulness that the elements of a structuratum have their own, independent materiality (are, in fact, structurata). Atoms, molecules, cells, people, societies, the solar system all these are structurata. Probably there is nothing that is not a structuratum , if we leave out arbitrary entities such as all the rice in China. System s, open, closed, lam inated

Systems-theory is often said to derive from Von Bertalanffy, though of course the concept o f a system is central to many earlier theories - consider its use in Bukharin’s Historical Materialism, for instance. Anyway, systems-theory has passed so much into common intellectual currency (with the dilution and diversification attendant on such passing) that it escapes affiliation to any one thinker.

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I use the terms open and clo sed systems in the way Bhaskar does: in a perfectly closed system, one generative mechanism would operate in isolation from others; causality would therefore be manifested in constant conjunctions, and outcomes would be predictable from initial conditions and input. Perfectly closed systems do not exist, but experimental conditions are approximations to them. In open systems, outcomes result from the conjoint operation o f a multiplicity o f generative mechanisms. I introduce the term ‘laminated systems’ (for which I am indebted to a conversation with my father) for systems in which the conjoint operation of several generative mechanisms belonging to different strata o f nature are essential. l am inated systems are structurata whose dem ents are necessarily bonded by an irredudble plurality o f structures (e.g. human individuals have mental and physical structures; human societies have economic, political and ideological structures).

Bibliography Althusser, Louis, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969). -------- Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New Left Books, London, 1970). --------Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New Left Books, London, 1971). --------Politics and History, trans. Ben Brewster (New Left Books, London, 1972). --------Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Graham Lock (New Left Books, London, 1976). Bacon, Francis, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, ed. B.Farrington (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 1964; Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1966). Barash, David, Sociobiology: the Whisperings Within (Fontana, London, 1981; Harper and Row, New York, 1980). Barclay, Robert, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity (William Irwin, Manchester, 1869). Beauvoir, Simone de, The Ethics of Ambiguity (Citadel Press, New York, 1964). Bennett, Jonathan, A Study of Spinoza's 'Ethics’ (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984). Benton, Ted, ‘Realism and Social Science’, in Radical Philosophy no. 27 (1981). Bhaskar, Roy, ‘Bachelard and Feyerabend’, in New Left Review no.94 (1975). --------A Realist Theory of Science (Harvester Press, Hassocks, 1978). --------The Possibility of Naturalism (Harvester Press, Brighton, 1979). --------‘Scientific Explanation and Human Emancipation’, in Radical Philosophy no.26 (1980). 195

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Blake, William, Complete Writings (Oxford University Press, London, 1966). Brecht, Bertolt, Poems (Eyre Methuen, London, 1976). Bukharin, Nicolai, Historical Materialism (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1969). Collier, Andrew, ‘Scientific Socialism and the Question of Socialist Values’, in CanadianJournal ofPhilosophy, Supplementary Volume (1981); and Issues in Marxist Philosophy, vol.4, eds John Mepham and David-Hillel Ruben (Harvester Press, Brighton, 1981). --------‘Scientific Realism in the Human World: the Case of Psychoanalysis’, in Radical Philosophy, no.29 (1981). ------- ‘Positive Values’ (reply in symposium with Brenda Cohen), Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume LVII (1983). ------- ‘Milton Fisk, Marxism and Ethics’, in Radical Philosophy no.36 (1984). Comforth, Maurice, Materialism and the Dialectical Method (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1952). Cutler, A., Hindess, B., Hirst, P. and Hussain, A., Marx's ‘Capital’ and Capitalism Today (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1977). --------‘An Imaginary Orthodoxy’, in Economy and Society, vol.8, no.3 (1979). Engels, Frederick, Anti-Duhring (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1947). --------Dialectics of Nature (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1954). --------See also under Marx and Lafargue. Feyerabend, Paul, Against Method (New Left Books, London, 1975). Freud, Sigmund, Interpretation ofDreams (Allen and Unwin, London, 1954). --------Two Short Accounts of Psycho-Analysis (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1962). --------Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Allen and Unwin, London, 1971). --------The Freud/Jung Letters, eds William McGuire and Alan McGlashan (Pan Books, London, 1979). Geras, Norman, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (Verso, London, 1983). Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1971). Harre, Romano, Social Being (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1979). Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1967). Hill, Christopher, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Panther Books, London, 1972). Hodgson, Geoff, ‘On the Political Economy of Socialist Trans­

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formation’, in New Left Review, no. 133 (1982). Jaques, Elliott, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Current Economic Crisis’ in Psychoanalysis end Contemporary Thought, ed. John D. Sutherland (Hogarth, London, 1958). Kant, Immanuel, Critique ofPure Reason (Macmillan, London, 1964). Keat, Russell, ‘Masculinity in Philosophy’, in Radical Philosophy, no.34 (1983). Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962). Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Hogarth, London, 1977). --------Ecrits (Tavistock, London, 1977). Lafargue, Paul and Laura, and Engels, Frederick, Correspondence (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1959). Lenin, Vladimir, Collected Works, vol.I (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972). --------What is to be Done? (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964). --------Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970). --------Selected Works in One Volume (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1968). Luther, Martin, Selections, ed. John Dillenberger (Anchor Books, New York, 1961). Luxemburg, Rosa, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (Pathfinder Press, New York, 1970). McLellan, David, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (Macmillan, London, 1973). MacMurray, John, Interpreting the Universe (Faber and Faber, London, 1936). Magee, Bryan, Popper (Fontana, London, 1973). Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Works in Two Volumes (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1942). --------Selected Works in One Volume (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1968). --------Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965). --------The German Ideology (abridged edition) (International Publishers, New York, 1963). --------The German Ideology (Part One and selections) ed. C.J. Arthur (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1970). --------The Holy Family in Collected Works, vol.4 (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1975). Marx, Karl (Pelican Marx Library, Penguin Books and New Left Review):

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The Revolutions of 1848 (1973). Grundrisse (1973). Early Writings (1975). Capital, vol.I (1976). Capital, vol.II (1978). Meikle, Scott, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx (Duckworth, London, 1985). Mepham, John, ‘The Structuralist Sciences and Philosophy’, in Structuralism, ed. Robey (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1973). --------‘Who Makes History?’, in Radical Philosophy no.6 (1973). Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann and R J. Hollingdale (Random House, New York, 1969). Nove, Alec, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969). Plekhanov, Georgi, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1969). --------Selected Philosophical Works vol.II (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976). Popper, Sir Karl, Objective Knowledge (Oxford University Press, London, 1972). Ruben, David-Hillel Marxism and Materialism (Harvester Press, Hassocks, 1977). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Transcendence of the Ego (Noonday, New York, 1957). --------Being and Nothingness (Methuen, London, 1957). Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation (Dover, New York, 1966). Selsam, Howard and Martell, Harry, Reader in Marxist Philosophy (International Publishers, New York, 1963). Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Poetical Works (Oxford University Press, London, 1968). Spinoza, Baruch, Selections, ed. John Wild (The Scribner Press, New York, 1930). --------Collected Works trans. Edwin Curley, vol.I (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1985). Sraffa, Piero, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1960). Thompson, E.P., The Poverty of Theory (Merlin, London, 1978). Thompson, George, The Pre-historic Aegean (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1978). Timpanaro, Sebastiano, On Materialism (New Left Books, London, 1975).

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Trotsky, Leon, ‘Their Morals and Ours’ in The Basic Writings, ed. Irving Howe (Mercury Books, London, 1964). --------Problems of Everyday Life (Monad Press, New York, 1973). Zola, Emile, Thérèse Raquin (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1962).

Index abstraction, 2 ,4 , 2 4 ,6 0 ,6 7 ,7 1 ,1 0 0 ,

Bradley, F. H., 83 Brecht, Bertolt, 66, 151, 152, 196 Bukharin, Nicolai, 57, 154,193, 196

101 actualism, 11, 1 3 ,1 4 ,2 3 ,2 4 ,3 8 ,6 3 , 65 Adler, Alfred, 40,131 Althusser, Louis, ix-xi, 1 ,2 ,4 -1 0 , 15, 1 8 ,2 6 ,2 7 ,2 9 ,3 8 ,4 1 ,4 3 -7 , 5 2 ,5 3 ,5 8 , 5 9 ,6 1 -4 ,7 2 , 7 3 ,7 6 8 3 ,8 5 ,9 0 -5 , 103, 111,113-28, 131-3,159,160,186, 187, 190, 193,195 Anderson, Perry, 90 Artistotle, 2, 89,125

Calvin, John, 103,183 capitalism, ix, 5,29 ,3 6 ,4 7 ,5 0 ,5 6 ,5 9 , 6 2,64,66, 67-70,72, 7 4 ,7 5 ,8 7 , 96,97,134,138, 146,147,150, 155, 164, 169, 170, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 180, 183, 188, 190 classes, class struggle, 1 8 ,2 7 ,3 3 ,5 4 6 ,5 8 ,6 2 ,6 3 , 6 5,6 7 ,7 5 , 76,87, 89,92,106, 109, 114, 118-26,127, 164, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 180 composition, composite individuals (see also stmcturatum), 5 1 ,5 2 ,8 1 , 8 5,97-9, 102, 110,183,192, 193 contradictions (dialectical), 53,63, 64, 134,174,176, 178, 190 Copernicus, 139 Comforth, Maurice, 159,161,196 Cutler, Antony, 2 1 ,3 9 ,4 0 ,1 9 6

Bacon, Francis (Lord Verulam), 1, 2 ,4 ,1 7 ,2 6 , 38,123, 195 Bail, John, 55 Barash, David, 111,195 Barclay, Robert, 126,195 base/superstructure, 6 ,2 7 ,2 8 , 516 1 ,6 4 ,8 7 ,9 2 , 100, 103 Beauvoir, Simone de, 41,56,195 Bennett, Jonathan, 110,195 Benton, Ted, 40, 137, 195 Berkeley, George, 3 ,1 3 ,2 3 ,3 7 Bhaskar, Roy, ix-xi, 5, 10-24, 39, 40, 45-7,50, 51, 53, 59, 60,62, 71, 84, 91,92, 95, 102,103,109, 113, 114, 126, 127, 134-41, 148, 161,179,182,184, 185,191, 193-5 Blake, William, 25,196 Blanqui, Auguste, 66

Darwin, Charles, 2 7 ,4 3 ,8 6 , 139 Descartes, René, 19,8 0 ,8 4 ,1 8 6 determinism, 14,24,50, 64, 65,67, 71, 142, 143, 182, 183 dialectic (see also contradictions), 16, 63,85-90,144, 146, 153-9,178, 183,184, 189,192 Dietzgen, Joseph, 144,189 Dylan, Bob, 95

200

Index Einstein, Albert, 39,121,122,163 em ergen«, 2 5 ,2 7 ,5 0 ,5 1 ,8 4 , 98, 99, 100,102, 137, 183-5 empiricism, 1-40,94, 95,113,135, 167,170 Engels, Frederick, 27, 3 6,39,40, 51, 53,54,76,77,90,104,109,111, 122, 124, 133, 146, 154, 155, 157, 159, 161, 163, 164, 171, 176, 178, 179, 180, 189, 1%, 197 epistemic fallacy, 1 1 ,1 4 ,1 9 ,2 0 ,4 8 , 128,192 epistemoid, 113, 114, 130, 131,133, 134,144-8, 153, 168,180, 185, 186,188 epistemology (theory o f knowledge), 1-5, 16, 18, 19,21, 25, 30, 37,40, 4 4 ,4 5 ,4 6 ,5 0 ,6 8 , 101, 113,114, 121, 127, 128,136,148, 186,187, 189, 191,192 existentialism (see also Heidegger, Kierkegaard, MacMurray, Sartre), 100-1 experiment, 4, 9,10, 1 1 ,1 2 ,1 3 ,1 6 , 17, 1 9,22,24, 2 5 ,4 0 ,4 4 ,5 1 ,6 7 , 99,114,133, 134, 136, 137,142, 143, 144, 145,148, 154,164, 185, 186,190,194 explanatory critique, 40,140,141, 165,191,193 fallacy o f misplaced consciousness, 2 7 ,3 2 ,5 3 feminism, 3 3 -5 ,9 5 ,1 8 0 Feyerabend, Paul, 19,39,196 Fine, Ben, 67 Fox, George, 26 Freud, Sigmund, 20,40, 43, 56, 6 1 -2 ,9 1 , 105,130,131,132, 134, 140, 143, 156,159,160,162, 183,. 184, 190, 196 Galileo, 2 ,4 3 Geras, Norman, 93,196 Gilbert, W. S., 189 Godwin, William, 169 Gramsci, Antonio, 25,40, 65', 131, 196

201

Harré, Romano, 160,196 Harris, Laurence, 67 Hegel, G. W. F., ix, 4 ,5 ,3 8 ,8 0 ,8 1 , 83, 103,111, 115,116, 152, 178 Heidegger, Martin, 107, 130, 143, 145, 190, 196 Heraclitus, 90 Hilferding, Rudolf, 179 Hill, Christopher, 2,196 Hindess, Barry, 2 1 ,3 9 ,4 0 ,1 9 6 Hirst, Paul, 2 1 ,3 9 ,4 0 ,1 9 6 Hobbes, Thomas, 111 Hodgson, Geoff, 66-7,196-7 humanism/anti-humanism, 8 ,2 8 , 7 3 -8 0 ,8 2 ,8 3 ,8 4 ,9 1 ,9 2 ,9 4 ,9 5 , 109, 133, 160, 187 Hume, David, 11,127 Hussain, Athar, 21, 39,40, 196 Ibsen, Henrik, 56, 111, 141 ideology, 6, 7 ,8 ,1 8 ,2 3 ,2 5 -3 7 ,4 0 , 41, 5 1 -8 ,6 1 ,6 4 , 70-3,100,103, 1 1 4 ,1 1 5 ,1 1 7 ,1 1 9 ,1 2 0 ,121,124, 125, 126,129, 131, 132, 175, 177 Jaques, Elliot, 162,197 Jarvie, I., 75 Jung, Carl, 40,131 Kant, Immanuel, 1 6 ,1 7 ,2 0 ,2 1 ,4 0 , 119,120,122, 127,128,165,186, 197 Kautsky, Karl, 161 Keat, Russell, 42,197 Kierkegaard, Sören, 41,101 komchvanstvo, 45,71,161 Kuhn, Thomas, 39, 197 Lacan, Jacques, 111, 131, 132, 160, 197 Lafaigue, Paul, 109, 163, 179, 197 Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent, 42,133 Leibniz, Gottfried, 80-4, 148, 157, 184 Lenin, Vladimir, 8, 1 0 ,1 7 ,1 8 ,2 3 , 2 6 ,3 9 ,4 0 ,4 5 , 51, 5 7 ,6 6 ,7 1 ,7 2 , 96,102, 111,119, 120-5,146,154, 156,161,169, 189,197

20 2

Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought

Lewes, G. H., 183 Locke, John, 3 ,4 ,1 1 9 ,1 4 8 ,1 8 6 Luther, Martin, 41,197 Luxemburg, Rosa, 25,40,66,70, 124,173,177, 179,197 Lysenko, Trofim, 33,120 Macciocchi, Maria Antonietta, 118 McLachlan, Hugh, 161 McLellan, David, 40,197 MacMurray, John, 130,159, 190, 197 Magee, Bryan, 69,72, 197 Malthus, Thomas, 27 Mao Zedong, 5, 57,95 Marx, Karl, 4 ,5 ,8 , 12, 18,25,27, 3 6 ,3 8 ,3 9 ,4 1 ,4 3 ,5 1 , 52, 53, 54,55, 5 8 ,5 9 ,6 1 ,6 2 ,6 6 ,6 7 ,6 8 ,6 9 ,7 2 7 ,8 0 ,8 3 ,8 5 ,8 7 ,8 8 ,8 9 ,9 1 ,9 3 , 94,95, 104,109, 111, 114, 115, 116,118, 120,126,133,140,143, 151, 152, 159, 163,164,166,170, 174,176, 178,179,182,183,187, 188,197,198 materialism, 2 7 ,3 9 ,4 8 ,5 1 , 52,71, 8 9 ,1 1 9,122,144,161,168, 184, 185, i » , 1 » mechanisms, 4 ,6 ,1 1 ,1 2 ,1 3 , 14,16, 1 7 ,1 8 ,2 1 ,2 2 ,2 4 ,2 9 ,3 0 ,3 1 ,3 2 , 3 3 ,4 5 ,4 7 ,4 8 ,4 9 ,5 0 ,5 1 ,5 6 ,5 9 , 6 0 ,6 1 ,6 4 ,6 5 ,6 7 -7 0 ,7 2 ,9 1 ,9 9 , 1 0 0 ,1 01,102,137,138,142,143, 1 4 8 ,1 66,171,175,176,177,178, 185,189,194; epistemic, 10,28, 29 30 31 34

MeiMe, Scon, 180,198 Mendel, Gregor, 42 Mepham, John, 39,76,198 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 100 Michelangelo, 3 Molière, Jean-Baptiste, 21 Morgan, G Lloyd, 183 Morris, William, 98 Mussolini, Benito, 83 Myrdal, Gunnar, 161 Nehemiah, 119,159 Newton, Issac, 39

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1 3,22,23, 38, 140.198 Nove, Alec, 72,198 Nozick, Robert, 148,180 object of knowledge, 2 ,3 ,4 ,5 ,1 3 , 1 6 -2 0 ,2 8 ,2 9 ,3 3 ,3 7 ,6 1 ,1 1 5 , 119,121, 129,139,145,190 overdetermination, 2 0 ,6 1 ,6 2 ,6 4 Pavlov, Ivan, 189 phenomenology (see also Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre), 35,42, 50,129,131 Picasso, Pablo, 8 Plato, 102, 122,159 Plekhanov, Georgi, 2 3 ,5 1 ,5 2 ,6 2 , 71,90, 109,111,161,168, 170, 189.198 Pol Pot, 57,79 Pooper, Karl, x, 13, 14, 5 8 ,5 9 ,6 5 , 6 8.69.101.198 Poulantzas, Nicos, 54 Preobrazhensky, Evgeny, 57 psychoanalysis (see also Freud), 23, 3 0 ,3 7 ,4 0 ,8 0 ,1 3 0 -3 ,1 3 6 , 139, 145,147,159,162,182 realism, ix, x, 1 2 ,1 5 ,1 6 ,1 7 ,2 0 , 21, 2 2 ,2 3 ,2 6 ,4 0 ,1 0 0 ,1 1 3 ,1 1 4 , 122, 1 2 7 ,1 « , 143,144,145, 153, 168, 170,186,189,191,192 Reich, Wilhelm, 56 Ricardo, David, 115 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 36,107, 111, 150,170 Ruben, David-Hillel, 2 2 ,2 4 ,1 9 8 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3 8 ,4 0 ,7 9 ,9 4 , 107, 1 1 1 ,146,198 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 132 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 105,198 Scruton, Roger, 83 sexism, 3 3-5,4 2 ,1 0 9 ,1 5 6 ,1 6 0 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 74,196 Spinoza, Baruch, 1 ,8 ,1 5 ,3 9 ,7 3 , 80-90,94,104, 105,110, 111, 117, 128,131,140, 183,192,193, 198

In d ex

Sraffa, Piero, 15,198 Stalin, Joseph, 9 ,3 8 ,5 7 ,9 6 , 111, 120,168 Stimer, Max, 148 Stopes, Marie, 56 stratification of nature, 4 4-51,53, 5 9 ,6 0 ,6 1 ,7 1 ,9 1 ,9 8 ,9 9 ,1 0 2 , 113,135, 142, 143,144, 183, 184, 189 Strawson, Peter, 40 structuratum (see also «imposition), 8 5 -9 0,99,100,103-6,110,158, 183,190,193, 194 superstructure (see base/su perstructure) systems, open/closed, 11-14,16,30, 5 0 ,5 1 ,6 0 ,6 6 , 9 0,91,9 9, 102, 137, 142,143, 144,182,184, 193, 194; laminated, 4 7 ,9 8 ,9 9 ,1 0 2 , 103,176, 193,194 Tebbit, Norman, 74 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 184 Thales, 42

2 03

Thutdicr, M. H., 54, 103, 108,158, 162 t heoretical practice, 6 -1 0 ,1 5 ,1 8 , 24, 27, 31, 47,114-19,126 Thompson, E. P., 78,79, 110, 198 Thompson, George, 7 1 ,7 2 ,1 6 1 ,1 9 8 Tillich, Paul, 180 Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 66,198 Tolstoy, I.co, 75,169 'IYotsky, I.eon, 3 7 ,5 7 ,6 3 ,7 1 , 168, 189,199 lyicr, Wat, 55 vertical and horizontal causality and explanation (see stratification of nature and base/superstructure) Wedekind, Frank, 56 Wcitling, Wilhelm, 25 Winstonley, Gcrrard, 2 6 ,37,180 Worsthorae, Peregrine, 179 Zola, Emile, 191,199