Sociological Realism 9781138798014, 1138798010

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Sociological Realism

Sociological Realism presents a clear and updated discussion of the main tenets and issues of social theory, written by some of the top scholars within the critical realist and relational approach. It connects such approaches systematically to other strands of thought that are central in contemporary sociology, like systems theory and rational choice theory. Divided into three parts, social ontology, sociological theory, and methodology, each part includes a systematic presentation, a comment and a wider discussion by the editors, thereby taking on the form of a dialogue among experts. This book is a uniquely blended and consistent conversation showing the convergence of European social theory on a critical realist and relational way of thinking. This volume is extremely important both for teaching purposes and for all those scholars who wish to get a fresh perspective on some deep dynamics of contemporary sociology. Andrea M. Maccarini is associate professor at the University of Padova, Italy. His research field includes social theory, the sociology of education and of cultural change in Western societies. He is the author of many books and articles, including, Human Reflexivity in Critical Realism: Beyond the Modern Debate (with Riccardo Prandini), in M.S. Archer (ed.), Conversations about Reflexivity, Routledge, London. Emmanuele Morandi is assistant professor at the University of Verona, Italy. His research field includes social theory and the sociology of Culture. He is the author of many books and articles, including, La società è un “uomo in grande”: Per riscoprire la sociologia degli “antichi”, Marietti 1820, MilanoGenova 2010, pp. 388. Riccardo Prandini is associate professor at the University of Bologna, Italy. His research field includes social theory, the sociology of family and of Third sector. He is the author of many books and articles, including, ‘Re-vealing (vs Un-veiling) Justice. Riflessioni sull’enigma della giustizia trans-immanente’, in Soziologische Jurisprudenz. Festschift fuer Gunther Teubner, De Gruyter, Berlin, 2009, pp. 131–148.

Ontological Explorations

Other titles in this series: From One ‘Empire’ to the Next Radha D’Souza Science for Humanism The recovery of human agency Charles R. Varela Philosophical Problems of Sustainability Taking sustainability forward with a critical realist approach Jenneth Parker Dialectic and Difference Dialectical critical realism and the grounds of justice Alan Norrie Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change Transforming knowledge and practice for our global future Edited by Roy Bhaskar, Cheryl Frank, Karl Georg Høyer, Petter Naess and Jenneth Parker Conversations About Reflexivity Edited by Margaret S. Archer Relational Sociology A new paradigm for the social sciences Pierpaolo Donati Sociological Realism Edited by Andrea M. Maccarini, Emmanuele Morandi and Riccardo Prandini

Sociological Realism

Edited by Andrea M. Maccarini, Emmanuele Morandi and Riccardo Prandini

First published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2011 Andrea M. Maccarini, Emmanuele Morandi and Riccardo Prandini The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Sociological realism / edited by Andrea M. Maccarini, Emmanuele Morandi and Riccardo Prandini. p. cm. 1. Sociology. 2. Social sciences–Philosophy. I. Maccarini, Andrea. II. Morandi, Emmanuele. III. Prandini, Riccardo. HM585.S6155 2011 301.01–dc22 2010034627 ISBN: 978-0-415-61456-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-09318-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis

Contents

List of Illustrations Contributors

vii viii

Part 1 Social ontology

1

1

3

The social ontology of critical realism ANDREW COLLIER

2

“In the understanding of the existing state of affairs, its negation is included”: a comment on Collier

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MAURIZIO FERRARIS

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Transcendental realism and critical naturalism in Roy Bhaskar: the return of ontology in scientific social research

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RICCARDO PRANDINI

Part 2 Sociological theory

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4

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Morphogenesis: Realism’s explanatory framework MARGARET S. ARCHER

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Towards a new European sociology: the morphogenetic approach between social analysis and grand theory

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ANDREA M. MACCARINI

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Critical realism, as viewed by relational sociology PIERPAOLO DONATI

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vi

Contents

Part 3 Methodology/epistemology

147

7

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Recovering causality: realist methods in sociology DOUGLAS V. PORPORA

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The future is behind us. Aristotelian causality and sociological realism

168

EMMANUELE MORANDI

Index

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Illustrations

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 6.1 6.2 6.3

Humean and realist models of causality. The difference between empiricism, actualism and realism. Bhaskar’s DREIC model. Four-planar social being encompassing the social cube. The basic morphogenetic sequence. Relationships between the cultural system and the socio-cultural levels. Cultural morphogenesis. Cultural system: types of logical relations. Cultural system integration.

The components of sociology as a knowledge system. The articulation of critical realist theory according to relational sociology.

39 40 46 51 62 72 73 75 80 83 86 87 91 125 129 132

Contributors

Margaret S. Archer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and a former editor of Current Sociology. She is an internationally respected theorist, and was the first woman to become president of the International Sociological Association (ISA). She has written more than twenty books, including Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge 1995), Being Human: The Problem of Agency (Cambridge 2000), and Structure, Agency, and The Internal Conversation (Cambridge 2003). Andrew Collier is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton and has previously lectured at Warwick, Sussex and Bangor Universities. His numerous publications include Critical Realism, Christianity and Marxism, and Being and Worth, all published by Routledge. Pierpaolo Donati is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bologna (Italy), and Past President of the Italian Sociological Association (AIS). He is the editor of Sociologia e politiche sociali, and the author of hundreds of books and articles. His publications include Relational Sociology. A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences (Routledge 2010) and Teoria relazionale della società (Milano 1991). Maurizio Ferraris is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Torino (Italy), and director of the LABONT (Laboratory of ontology). He has published extensively in the fields of hermeneutics and ontology, and is in the editorial board of Critique and Aut Aut. His books include A History of Hermeneutics (New Jersey 1996) and Documentalità. Perché è necessario lasciar tracce (Roma-Bari 2009). Andrea M. Maccarini is Associate Professor of Sociology and director of undergraduate studies at the University of Padova (Italy). He is in the editorial board of Comparative Sociology and Journal of Critical Realism. He has been secretary of the Italian Sociological Association – Section of Education. His research interests range from social theory to socialization processes, education policy, and cultural change in Europe. His publications include Cities, Civicness and Social Capital (Padova 2009) and

Contributors

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Human Reflexivity in Social Realism: Beyond the Modern Debate (with Riccardo Prandini), in M.S. Archer (ed.), Conversations About Reflexivity (Routledge 2010). Emmanuele Morandi is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Verona (Italy). His main interests lie in the philosophy of the social sciences, with special reference to epistemology, and the history of social thought. Among his many publications are “Introductory Outlines” to Pierpaolo Donati’s Relational Sociology in Journal of Critical Realism, vol. 9, n. 2, 2010, and La società “è un uomo in grande”. Per riscoprire la sociologia degli “antichi” (Genova-Milano 2010). Douglas V. Porpora is Professor of Sociology and former Head of the Department of Culture and Communication at Drexel University (Philadeplhia, Usa). His research field includes social theory, the methodology of the social sciences, as well as human rights and moral discourse in Western societies. He is the author of many books and articles, among which Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life (New York 2001) and “Sociology’s Causal Confusion”, in Ruth Groff (ed.) Revitalizing Causality: Realism About Causality in Philosophy and Social Science (Routledge 2007). Riccardo Prandini is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Bologna (Italy). He has worked and published extensively in the domain of family studies and social policy as well as social theory and social ontology. Among his publications are Le radici fiduciarie del legame sociale (Milano 1998); The Morphogenesis of Constitutionalism, in P. Dobner, M. Loughlin (eds.), The Twilight of Constitutionalism, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press, 2010; and Human Reflexivity in Social Realism: Beyond the Modern Debate (with Andrea M. Maccarini), in M.S. Archer (ed.), Conversations About Reflexivity (Routledge 2010). He edited the Italian translation of The possibility of Naturalism by R. Bhaskar (MilanoGenova, Marietti, 2010).

Part 1

Social ontology

1

The social ontology of critical realism Andrew Collier

There are several bodies of work describing themselves as “critical realism”. The critical realism whose ontology I shall discuss is that which arises from the work of Roy Bhaskar in philosophy, and is best represented in sociology by Margaret Archer and in economics by Tony Lawson.1 The bulk of critical realist work has been about the philosophy of social sciences, but some of the founding principles are derived from an analysis of the experimental sciences, which are a subset of the natural sciences (for some natural sciences, like meteorology and evolutionary biology, are not experimental and, for reasons to be discussed below, no social sciences are). In this first section I will discuss the ontology which critical realism learns from the experimental sciences, and whether and in what ways it underpins social sciences too. It will appear that critical realism does not follow the positivists in assuming that a positivist account of natural science can be copied by the social sciences: insofar as there are similarities between natural and social sciences, they are because the positivist account is mistaken even about the natural sciences. The argument starts from the nature of experiment, and the fact that it is possible, useful and successful in some natural sciences. Experiments are something we do; they are not something that nature hands us on a plate. Yet what they are designed to tell us is how nature acts when we are not interfering with it. If experiments only told us how nature acted when we were doing experiments, they would not be much use to us. On the surface, it might look as if passive observation of nature would be the way to get this information. Why do we need to intervene in nature to discover what it is like when we are not intervening? Now classical empiricism cannot answer this question. Hume assumes2 that by simply observing nature we discover constant conjunctions. In astronomy we do: whenever the sun sets at exactly six p.m. on the equinox, it rises at exactly six a.m. next morning. However, outside astronomy this doesn’t happen. It is not the case that every time an acorn falls an oak tree grows – some acorns get eaten by pigs; it is not the case that every time sexual intercourse takes place the woman gets pregnant, or that every time a dog barks a cat runs away. We confidently apply the concept of cause in these cases, yet

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there is no constant conjunction, which for Hume is what causality is. Outside astronomy,3 the only times we can be sure of constant conjunctions occurring are in our experiments: every time we heat pure water to 100 degrees at sea level, it boils. When water boils in nature, in hot springs, it never boils at 100 degrees because it is never pure and rarely at sea level. This shows us the nature of experiment: ensuring that irrelevant variables which would influence the outcome, like impurities in the water or lower air pressure due to height above sea level, are absent. If Hume were right we would not need experiments, but we do because cause equals constant conjunction only when other things are equal, and in nature, other things never are equal. Critical realism expresses this by saying that nature is an open system, and experiment establishes a closed system. So what must nature be like for it to be discoverable in its openness by artificially establishing closed systems? It must be governed by many causal mechanisms, conjointly producing events. It is an open system because there are many of these mechanisms; it can be studied experimentally because we can isolate any one of them, either by preventing others from operating, or keeping their operation constant, or calculating and making allowances for their operation. Experiment tells us the real working of natural mechanisms one by one, but in the spontaneous course of nature they are working conjointly to produce outcomes that are not, like the results of an experiment, strictly predictable. Several results follow: 1 The “real world” does not just consist of what we experience, or even of what happens; it also includes the mechanisms that make things happen. Critical realists express this by saying that the domain of the empirical (what we experience) is only part of the domain of the actual (what happens), which is in turn only part of the domain of the real. 2 The surplus part of the real consists of the causal mechanisms of nature which conjointly generate events. These mechanisms are powers which things have even when they are not exercised. For instance, an archer’s bow has the power to impel an arrow in a given direction. While the bow is strapped across the archer’s shoulder it is not exercising that power. When he shoots the arrow it is. The power, while effective, is not realized, for the arrow does not proceed forever in the direction it was fired. Its trajectory is co-determined by gravity and air resistance. Hence the law of inertia, which governs the effect of its initial impulsion, can only be truthfully formulated as a law of tendency: “bodies tend to remain at rest or in uniform motion in a given direction”. They tend to – that is, there is a mechanism leading them to do that – but there are other mechanisms deflecting them from that outcome. If the “tend to” were omitted from the law, it would simply be false. We have seen that in one way critical realism postulates greater depth to reality than some other theories: it postulates real causal mechanisms beneath events. There are two other ways in which critical realism is depth realism.

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These stem in part from the notion that what experimental science does is discover these mechanisms, as opposed, on the one hand, to simply registering the obvious, or on the other, to inventing them. Discovery implies that what is discovered was really there all along, but was really unknown before the discovery. In the history of science, one discovery generally presupposes earlier discoveries. Hence the empiricist metaphor of discovery as collecting items in a bucket, and the idealist metaphor of discovery as a gestalt switch, are both misleading: a better metaphor is of digging down to underlying layers, for instance by an archaeologist or a geologist. We have already seen that there is a multiplicity of mechanisms in nature; now it looks as if these mechanisms are ordered in layers. For instance, we had to discover at the level of biology that we must postulate genes, before we could discover at the level of biochemistry that we must postulate DNA molecules. Hence part of the ontology of critical realism is the stratification of nature. Physics, chemistry, biology are not just artificially differentiated academic departments, they are about really distinct layers of natural mechanisms, and there is an ordering whereby, though one cannot be reduced to another, one is more basic than another. This idea of stratification also affects the social ontology of critical realism. For psychology and sociology also denote real strata, founded on the natural strata, but not reducible to them. This theory of stratification is what has been called an emergence theory: one stratum is emergent from another when it is ontologically dependent on it, but not reducible to it. An emergent stratum has its own laws, which cannot be deduced from those of the stratum from which it is emergent. As an example of the use of this concept of emergence, let us consider how Roy Bhaskar tackles the problem of reconciling universal causality in the physical world, including human bodies, with rational human agency. There have been those who have believed that they could not be reconciled, and either postulate gaps in physical causality (Descartes, Sartre) or treat rational agency as an illusion in that they regard physical causation as a closed system (Hobbes, Laplace); others, like Kant, try to reconcile them by consigning the two views to different realms of being, where they cannot conflict. Kant has an ingenious metaphysical argument for this, which we may not find convincing. Rorty has not, but still wants to both accept physical determinism and find ways of ignoring it in practice. Bhaskar criticizes Rorty’s position in Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom. He uses a very simple illustration: Suppose A goes into a newsagent’s and says to the proprietor B, “The Guardian, please”, and B hands him a copy of it. On the physicalist thesis we must suppose that for any physical movement there is a set of antecedent (neurophysiological, or microstructural) states sufficient for it. (Bhaskar 2010: 48) We have to assume either that there is some set of antecedent physical states that cause B’s action without A’s speech act, or that A’s speech act caused B’s

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act. The former is absurd, since it implies that B would have handed A a Guardian “even if A had performed some quite different action, such as asking for the Independent or for a packet of chewing gum or B to marry him or dancing a jig, and even if A had not been present at all” (ibid.). However, the latter “involves an action of A’s, as understood by B, intervening in the allegedly closed circuit constituted by B’s neurophysiology (or microstructure)”. Of course the physicalist would reply that a physical description is possible of A’s speech act itself: the movement of A’s vocal cords, the sound-waves in the air, the sound striking B’s eardrums, and so on. This is true: doubtless there is a physical description of everything in the universe. But in order to understand why B gives A the Guardian and not the Independent, one has to know the process under a non-physical description – in terms of the meaning of words, A’s intentional communication of that meaning, B’s intentional response to that meaning, and so on. So the world of meanings and intentions has effects in the physical world which could not have been predicted from the physical world alone. This is an instance of emergence. The world of meanings and intentions is emergent from the physical world, i.e. there is a true physical description of all meaningful words and intentional acts, but intentional explanation cannot be replaced by physical explanation. The third way in which critical realism is depth realism is that it distinguishes between what it calls the transitive and intransitive objects of any science. Any science, at any given time, will have a concept of its object, an “object in thought” or “object of knowledge” as Althusser rather ambiguously calls it.4 However, no science remains static. So this “transitive object”, as critical realists call it, will change. It will be the raw material of scientific work which will result in a new transitive object. Idealist philosophies of science argue: all we can know is the transitive object, so it is pointless to postulate anything outside it. However, if that were true, we could not explain why we change this transitive object, why science progresses. We change it because the whole point of the transitive object is to explore the intransitive object, which exists independently of us. The result of scientific work is a new transitive object which gives deeper knowledge of the intransitive object. Idealists5 object: but after the discoveries, all you have is a new transitive object; you can never get outside it to any intransitive object. This is not true, though, because the intransitive object is not some kind of Kantian noumenon, opaque to knowledge. When a discovery is made, something that was previously part of the intransitive object but not part of the transitive object, becomes part of the transitive object too. The changing of the transitive object by scientific work is also the discovery of fresh aspects of the intransitive object. Now we must ask how these results derived from the natural sciences help us towards an ontology of the social sciences. First of all, the stratification of nature. This theory grounds a non-reductive naturalism. Take the example of

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DNA and genes. The chemistry of DNA explains how genes work, but if we did not already know why genes are important (that they explain the passing of characteristics from parent to offspring), that would be of no significance. Hence the chemical account does not replace the biological one, though it does explain it. The relation between biology and social science may be similar. Reductive programmes of socio-biology do not work. However, the biological fact that we are dependent on the products of our hands in order to live, that humankind is homo faber, may explain the fact that good social science starts with the question, “How does a given society produce its means of life?” In short, there may be one hierarchy of strata, with the objects of social sciences at the top, biological sciences in the middle, and physical sciences at the bottom. Each layer is emergent from the one below it, in that it is dependent on but not reducible to it. The stratification may continue through the social sciences in that there is more than one social science, and some may be emergent from others. Possibly Marx’s notion of base and superstructure could be slotted in to this hierarchy of strata.6 If this model is correct, then some conclusions follow for the nature of the social sciences themselves, and their similarities to and differences from the natural sciences. For instance, since social causes will co-determine the course of events with natural causes, social sciences must be causal in the same sense as natural sciences are. Since there are depths to be discovered, social sciences must be able to contradict appearances just as natural sciences can. Since social strata are unilaterally dependent on natural strata for their being, it will not be possible to establish closure in them, so genuine experiments will not be possible. For instance, economic events are affected by meteorological, political and psychological events, so any economic “experiment” is certain to have its outcome altered in unpredictable ways. Hence social sciences, though causally explanatory, cannot be predictive. Many of the ontological features of the natural sciences will apply to the social sciences too. For instance, the laws they discover will be laws of tendency, because the mechanisms, like those in nature, will be operating alongside others in an open system. So Popper’s criticisms of social science are mistaken (Popper directed these criticisms specifically against Marx and Freud, but they would apply against any possible social science). Popper thought that a science must make falsifiable predictions, which will refute it if they are falsified. Laws of tendency are not like that. So if Marx postulates a law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the rate of profit does not fall, the law is not refuted any more than the falling to earth of an arrow shot into the air refutes the law of inertia. For just as gravity and air resistance deflect the arrow, wage restraint or the expansion of markets may deflect the falling rate of profit. The truth is, only predictions in closed systems, that is, predictions of the results of experiments, are crucial to the credibility of a theory in the way that Popper says. However, while this means that Popper’s criticisms will not do as they stand, the problem does not go away, for it is true enough that any science requires some kind of reality-testing. In non-experimental sciences,

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though, the reality-testing is more complex. In the case of the falling rate of profit, for instance, it includes research into what other factors there are which counteract this tendency. The test will be power to explain what happens, rather than accuracy in predicting what we can make happen. However, because one cannot reduce the social sciences to natural ones, there may be ontological differences as well, due to kinds of being that the social sciences explain which the natural sciences do not – for instance, human minds. All sciences are theories, but social sciences are also in part about theories in people’s minds. Among the theories commonly held in any society, some will be about that society; and some of these may be false. So a scientific account of that society may include both knowledge about the theories held in that society, and knowledge that they are false. This enables social science to criticize a society, not in addition to explaining it, but by explaining it. This possibility is called an explanatory critique, and is held by critical realists to bridge the alleged gap between factual and practical arguments. Hence the principle sometimes called “Hume’s Law”, that you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is”, a value from a fact, or an imperative from an indicative, is rejected by critical realists. Of course some social scientists, particularly psychologists, do claim to make experiments. In saying that they cannot, I am saying that they cannot realize closure. They may be able to establish analogues for closure, for instance measuring and discounting factors that they cannot prevent from affecting outcomes, but many so-called experiments share an accidental feature of real experiments (their artificiality) while lacking the essential feature (closure). This can be seen not only in social science, but in the study of animal behaviour. If you study animals in zoos, that shares its artificiality with experiment, but so far from establishing closure it introduces irrelevant facts affecting the animals’ behaviour, namely captivity and the fear of humans. Good scientific practice is to observe animals while oneself unobserved, in the wild. A similar principle applies in the study of human behaviour. So far, this ontology merely gives us some idea of what to expect from the social sciences. We may expect to find a plurality of social mechanisms, belonging to different strata, all of them emergent from, but not reducible to, natural strata. We shall be able to investigate these mechanisms, not by isolating them experimentally, but by asking how actual events are possible, and disentangling their conjoint generators. Social sciences will be much more oriented towards concrete realities than will experimental sciences, since they cannot isolate abstract factors experimentally. Social sciences, while perfectly objective, may have practical as well as theoretical conclusions. The conclusions that I have drawn are derived from considering the experimental sciences, and what the social sciences share and do not share with them. In speaking of “social mechanisms” we are not implying that these mechanisms are “mechanical” in the sense of Newtonian mechanics. The term “mechanism” – often “generative mechanism” – is used by critical realists for features of things which produce certain outcomes given certain inputs, and is

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neutral as between different ontological layers. An example of a social mechanism would be the economic mechanism whereby, according to Keynes, a liquid market in capital (i.e. ease of buying and selling shares) leads to the dominance of speculation over enterprise. Here it is a structural feature of the economy which tends to produce a particular (publicly undesirable) outcome (hence Keynes suggests that a tax on share transfers would be desirable, or even to make share ownership “indissoluble, like marriage”). The causal relation here is not between two events, as for Hume, but between a structure or institution and a tendential outcome. So rather than say that there is a law by which whenever A happens, B happens, we say that there is a mechanism by which a particular structure or institution generates a particular tendency. Now to look at the ontology derived from the study of society itself.

1 People, societies and the relational model of social ontology Perhaps the fundamental question of social ontology is of what does social reality actually consist? Is there such a thing as a society, or are there just people? The extreme views are that there is nothing to society apart from a collection of people (social atomism), or that there is nothing to people except positions in society (social holism). The first view was famously stated by Margaret Thatcher, but has also been held by some social theorists, as represented by Jarvis’s statement that “army” is the plural of “soldier”. The second view is close to Durkheim’s, and in the political world was held by Mussolini (“Fascism conceives of the state as an absolute in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative”7). However, it has sometimes cropped up on the left too: a friend of mine who was close to the English Althusserians in the 1960s recounts that a feminist in the group who had raised questions about women was told “there are no women”. The point was not, of course, a misogynist one, but meant that “there are no women, and no men: there are bearers of social positions”. Althusser’s view on this was a little more complex, but the English Althusserians were always more extreme than their teacher. Now the best arguments for either of these two positions are in the form of counter-examples to the opposite position. The social atomists will tell you that “structures don’t take to the streets”, that all social events and structures are the effects (intended or unintended) of intentional human actions. This is true, and does seem to contradict the holist position. On the other hand, the holist can reply: individual actions make no sense outside of social institutions, for instance that one can’t cash a cheque unless there is a banking system, that one can’t vote unless there is a constitution, and so on. It is easy to make fun of Jarvis’s quote: if three soldiers off duty are having a drink together, are they an army? These points are as effective against the atomist position as the atomist’s points are against holism. This suggests that there must be some theory which incorporates the truth in both atomism and holism – which recognizes that there are no de-socialized people, and neither are there any de-populated societies. However, this does not mean that we

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should obliterate the distinction between people and society and merge psychology and sociology into a single science – a programme which is sometimes derived from Marx’s sixth thesis on Feuerbach. There really are things that can be said about society without talking about people (Durkheim, Althusser), or about people without talking about society (see especially Archer 2000). We need a social ontology which will support both the ontological inter-dependence of people and society, that is, that one cannot exist without the other, and the distinctness of social and personal causal mechanisms. Yet, of course, society does not exist separately alongside people. The beginning of a solution to the problem of social ontology can be seen in another of Marx’s statements: “Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand” (Marx 1973: 265). This view does not deny the existence of individuals, each with their own nature, but society is not just a plural of these individuals: it too has its own nature, in the set of relations in which the individuals stand. This is nothing like the caricature which atomists paint of the holist position, according to which a social whole is something in which individuals somehow merge and lose their identity, like a mob or an orgy. Even Freud is guilty of talking like this (see Freud 1967). Individuals do not lose their identity by standing in relations to one another, but their identity is partly constituted by these relations – one is an employer, a worker, a husband, a mother and so on. The social sciences properly so called – sociology, economics – study these relationships. The psychological sciences study the people who stand in these relationships. Each science discovers its own kind of mechanism. Rational agency, and also human irrationality as studied by psycho-analysts, are the concern of psychological studies. Attempts to explain social phenomena by “rational choice” as some economists do, are a mistake, as are, for instance, attempts to treat the unconscious as socially constituted. In short, people and societies belong to different strata, governed by different causal mechanisms, though like all strata, they have effects on each other. The third section of this essay will say more about the nature of the relations between people as agents and societies as sets of relations between people, while the fourth will look at the implications of the plurality of strata in the social world. This is the most purely ontological part of social theory; it asks: what is there in society? Only individuals and aggregates of individuals? Only society, people being mere aspects of society? Or both individuals and society? Critical realism answers the latter, but of course individuals and society do not exist in the same way. Individual people are concrete entities. Aggregates of people, such as mobs and orgies, which are the social atomist’s or “methodological individualist’s” nearest approximation to any other social entity, are also concrete entities: they exist in particular places, are observable, and so on. Societies are not concrete entities; they are sets of relations between concrete entities, that is, between people, and perhaps between people and their material resources. The statement, therefore, that societies exist is a rejection of the long-standing tradition of nominalism in philosophy, which stretches

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from William of Ockham in 14th-century England to Quine in 20th-century America. This tradition denies existence to anything except concrete entities, locatable in space and time and observable by the senses. The alternative, and this is one of the meanings of “realism”, asserts that some things are not concrete entities, but are nevertheless real. So far, we have referred to one example only: relations. Relations are real because they have real effects, and what has real effects must itself be real. This causal, rather than observational, criterion for reality lets in several other kinds of entity apart from relations, which the nominalist tradition would exclude. So that, while Quine defends his nominalism by a preference for “desert landscapes”, critical realism presents an ontology with the luxuriance of a rain forest. It will be useful to mention a few of these non-concrete entities here. First of all, critical realism asserts the reality of possibilities, for possibilities have effects on clearly real entities and must, therefore, themselves be real. For instance, in any parliamentary democracy with a professional army, that army has the possibility of staging a military seizure of power, even though in “stable” parliamentary democracies, this may never happen. Although this possibility is far from the conscious minds of most people most of the time, it has profound effects. It is probably the main reason why social democratic parties no longer have socialist aims. I think it would be fair to say that the British Labour Party prior to Tony Blair wanted to establish socialism, realized that it couldn’t be done without a civil war, so settled for managing capitalism a little more humanely than the Conservatives. (Since Tony Blair, this has altered: now it would like to manage capitalism more humanely, realizes that it can’t be done without raising taxes, so settles for managing it more bureaucratically than the Conservatives.) If this is true, then this possibility of a military coup has profound political effects, even though it is never realized in certain countries. A second kind of entity which must be recognized as real is absences, or negative facts. It is perhaps contentious whether there are negative facts in nature – Roy Bhaskar argues that there are, and I am inclined to think that this is correct – but there are certainly negative facts or real absences in society. Simple examples would be an overdraft at the bank, or negative equity on a mortgage. More significant for social science would be such examples as the absence of an adequate executive in the early years of the French Revolution, or the absence of a working class party in American politics. These absences clearly have real effects and, therefore, are themselves real. A third example would be the reality of values. To prove the reality of values themselves would require more space than I have here (I refer the reader to my books, Collier 1999, 2003), but as a half-way point, it is worth saying that the having of values by human beings certainly has effects in the world, and is therefore real. One of the founders of modern economics, W.S. Jevons, makes some mistakes in this matter. At the end of his introduction to The Theory of Political Economy (Jevons 1970), he discusses the relationship between economics and utilitarian ethics – two theories which have always

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been in symbiosis. He refers to two versions of the utilitarian theory: one (Bentham and Paley) according to which pleasures and pains are of one kind only so that (as Bentham puts it, though Jevons does not quote this) “pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry”; the other version (J.S. Mill) recognizes that some pleasures are higher than others, and ought to take precedence. Jevons favours the latter as an ethic, but says that the economist need not be concerned with the higher pleasures; the assumption is that the higher pleasures have no effect on the economy. Yet if, as he assumes when talking about ethics, they really do sometimes lead to sacrificing lower pleasures or enduring lower pains, they cannot be without effects on the economy too. Jevons tries to resolve this contradiction by assigning the process of production and distribution to the pursuit of lower pleasures, with the higher pleasures only coming in when the wealth has been distributed and the consumers decide what to do with their income. However, this is neither morally nor scientifically tenable: morally because once the product has been distributed most of the morally significant decisions have already been taken; and scientifically because, of course, how consumers choose to spend their money has effects on the production and distribution process. I have already made two points about how critical realist ontology has effects on the question of values in the social sciences, namely that explanatory critiques can yield practical or evaluative judgements on the basis of factual explanations, and that the fact that people have values has social effects and so cannot be discounted in social sciences. The relational ontology of society also has implications for another issue in social value theory. One of the attractions of methodological individualism for lovers of liberty is that it seems to entail that any good must always be the good of some individual (though of course this does not entail a free society or democracy – Hobbes was quite consistent in arguing for absolute monarchy on the basis of methodological individualism). The opposite, holistic view treats society as if it had its own goals independently of those of any individuals, and as if those goals were prior to any individual goals. I suggest that on the relational view, talk about the interest of a society as distinct from its members does make sense; however, there is no reason why we should promote that interest. For instance, capitalist society has an interest in reproducing itself, that is, in reproducing capitalist relations of production from generation to generation; this is distinct from the interest of capitalists, which is simply to make profits. However, there is no reason why anyone should promote the interest of capitalist society, except as instrumental to their individual interests. Indeed one could argue that the “teleology” of capitalist society was a “counter-teleology” with respect to the members of that society.

2 The Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA) The relational model of society explains the ontological relations between the individual and society – relations of irreducibility of one to the other, in

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ontological inter-dependence. However, it does not yet explain the causal interaction of these two levels of social being. Just as social science has traditionally been beset by a division between atomists and holists, accounts of how history is made have been beset by a division between voluntarists, who stress the fact that making history is something that men and women do, and structural determinists, who stress the fact that they do so in ways not of their own choosing, but enabled and constrained by the social structure. It is possible to write history in either way: as the record of the acts of great leaders, or of ordinary people; or as the necessary mutation of structures over time. Perry Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (Anderson 1974) comes close to an account of the transformation of Europe without needing to visualize individuals or their environment at all. It is not possible to make history in either of these ways, however. Attempts to “change society by changing yourself” always leave everything much as it was. At the same time, changes will not happen unless people act, and sometimes even a single individual is crucial to a major transformation. Roy Medvedev8 argues that Lenin was essential to the Russian Revolution, in that if he had drowned, as he nearly did, when the ice gave way as he was crossing the frozen Gulf of Bothnia in 1907, it would not have taken place. This is highly plausible: Lenin was practically alone among the Bolsheviks in thinking a soviet revolution was possible in 1917, and it was only his authority that convinced them; again, he was in a minority in advocating “peace at any price” at the time of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and if he had failed to convince his colleagues, the revolution would have collapsed. Critical realism, as in the case of its response to the dispute between atomism and holism, tries to accommodate the facts presented by both sides. It does this in the first place by accepting that social phenomena are entirely the effects (though not necessarily the intended effects) of human actions, and that human actions are typically intentional. There are, however, four limits on the consciousness of human actions: they may have unacknowledged conditions, that is, aspects of the world which are necessary for the action, but of which the agent is not conscious; unconscious motives, that is, motives which were effective in bringing about the action but hidden from the agent’s conscious mind (the sort of phenomena which Freud uncovered); tacit skills, that is, abilities that the agent makes use of without realizing it; and unintended consequences. Most of the first three of these will be features of society, or products of socialization in the individual. They are among the “conditions not of their own choosing” under which, according to Marx, we make history.9 The fourth will include some “accidental” unintended consequences, as when you switch on the light to look at the clock, and inadvertently alert a burglar. Most importantly, however, it will include the way in which we reproduce or transform the social structure, for the reproduction of social structures happens for the most part as a result of actions which have quite other intentions. One works in order to earn a living, and thereby contributes to the accumulation of capital; one pays in to a pension scheme to avoid

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poverty in old age, and thereby invests money in multinational corporations; one takes a holiday abroad for a rest, and thereby contributes to the touristification of the country visited. This is the basis of the fatuous claim of advocates of the free market that in a free market what happens is what people choose; it is in fact the consequence – unintended and perhaps contrary to all intentions, though not accidental but determined by the structure – of choices that were themselves intentional, but with different intentions. Likewise, there is a kind of utopian radicalism which tries to opt out of reproducing the system by opting out of the actions which have that reproduction as their unintended consequence; but all actions have this unintended consequence – working, spending, saving, paying one’s taxes. It is by virtue of the structure of society that these inevitable but unintended consequences occur. It is important to see that there is nothing mysterious either about the fact that the consequences of intentional acts are often unintended and sometimes diametrically opposed to what was intended, or that the reproduction of social relations are typically unintended, though the result of intentional actions. It is easy to see the mechanisms whereby the choices of many tourists, each of whom wants to see an unspoilt place, lead to the place being spoilt; or the choices of many motorists, each of whom wants to get to their destination quickly, lead to slow travel; or the choices of many farmers, each of whom cuts down trees in order to enlarge their holdings and thereby increase their produce, lead to the erosion of the soil and the consequent reduction of productivity. In each of these cases, the aggregate result of individual actions is opposite to the intention of all those actions. The intended result could only have been achieved by the individuals getting together and designing some sort of collective solution. In the case of social reproduction, the economy (in a capitalist society) works by everybody pursuing their own interests through market transactions; but the structure of ownership generates the structure of investment for future ownership, so that relations between employers and employees are reproduced from generation to generation even if no one intends this reproduction. Those who benefit from this reproduction may be happy that it occurs, but they don’t have to do anything to make it occur; by and large, they act for profit, not for the reproduction of society. A capitalist publisher, for instance, has no qualms about publishing Marxist literature, provided there is a profitable market for it. Of course, some people do have the conscious intention of conserving or transforming the social structure, but these intentions typically express themselves in political rather than economic action, and while the conscious, organized intention to transform the structure is necessary if the structure is to be transformed, such an intention to conserve the structure is not usually necessary in order to conserve it. Structures are, by and large, conserved spontaneously by actions at the economic level, without any intention beyond the immediate one of an advantageous market transaction. For these reasons, critical realist literature has emphasized the distinction between reforms

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which aim only at the amelioration of states of affairs, without altering the structure, and reforms which aim at the transformation of structures. The latter require actions over and above the everyday actions which reproduce social relations. There are limits to the extent to which one can ameliorate states of affairs without transforming structures, and no amount of ameliorating states of affairs can by itself transform structures. For instance, equality of opportunity and the breaking down of formal deference between social classes can to an extent be achieved without abolishing classes, but no amount of such reform will remove classes, which remain the main source of inequality in modern societies. In terms of critical realist ontology, the distinction between ameliorating states of affairs and transforming structures depends on the distinction between the Actual (states of affairs) and the underlying mechanisms which generate the actual course of events, and which, in the case of society, consist in the structures of social relations. To summarize the results of the TMSA: 1 the course of history consists in a series of intentional actions of men and women, and their (often unintended) consequences; 2 underlying this history and governing its changes there are relatively enduring mechanisms, which are constituted by the structure of relations between human agents, and between those agents and their material environment; 3 though for the most part these mechanisms reproduce these structures from generation to generation, through all the changes that occur at the level of the Actual, the structures can in principle be transformed, and sometimes are; such transformation is generally much more a conscious collective project than day-to-day social reproduction is. The great historical revolutions are instances of this. The TMSA shows how it comes about that, while history is nothing but the successive effects of individual human actions, the “motors of history” cannot be reduced to human motives, nor vice versa. Practically every critic of Marxism, with the honourable exception of Karl Popper, thinks that the materialist conception of history is, or implies, an account of human motivation. Nothing could be further from the truth. The TMSA is most fully theorized in the works of Margaret Archer. Her “morphogenetic model” is a more closely specified version of TMSA, with the differences from atomism, from holism, and from views which conflate agents and structures in some kind of neutral monism, spelt out in more detail. In particular, she stresses the importance of the actions of past agents in determining present structures, so that the fact that all social facts exist by virtue of the actions of human agents does not mean that they exist by virtue of this generation of human agents (see, for example, Archer 1995: 148). As Marx put it, people make one another, physically and mentally, but people don’t make themselves. (So to understand the actions of any generation, we need to understand the conditions they inherited from the last generation much more than we need to know what they intended. It is a commonplace that the leaders of bourgeois revolutions did not intend to establish bourgeois

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society; but given the situation they inherited, there was nothing else that they could establish.) Margaret Archer sums up the argument: Once Bhaskar has differentiated in his TMSA between the need to retain “No people: no structures” (in order to avoid reification) and the need to reject “these structures, because of these people here present” (in order to avoid the slide into Individualism), then the widening of the time frame to include the emergent and aggregate consequences of past actions and past agents, actually makes analytical dualism [between structures and agents – AC] a methodological necessity to the TMSA itself. (Archer 1995: Ch. 6)

3 Multiple mechanisms and explanation in open systems Earlier I distinguished closed systems from open systems. Closed systems, constituted in each case by a single mechanism or set of mechanisms, such that from a given input one could predict a given output, exist in reality only when they are set up by experiment. Nature – and history – are open systems, in which a multiplicity of mechanisms, belonging to the subject matter of different sciences, interact and conjointly determine the course of events. For instance, the course of events in society is partly determined by a number of distinct social mechanisms. Keynes pointed out that you could not make predictions in economics, not even probabilistic ones, since the economy could be deeply affected by non-economic mechanisms and events: political ones, such as wars and revolutions; natural ones, such as droughts and earthquakes; even psychological ones, such as a panic on the stock market. So the course of events, even purely economic events, is not uniquely generated by economic mechanisms. To explain economic events, one must appeal to other social, and indeed natural, sciences apart from economics. There is more than one social science, because there are a multiplicity of social mechanisms, and though the social sciences are genuinely distinct and autonomous from each other, no one social science can explain everything. Historical explanation must be inter-disciplinary. To give a possible application of this theory: there has been a long-standing problem in Marxist theories of history about what it means to say that the economic structure of society is “determinant in the last instance” of social change and institutions, though at particular times and places (for instance in the ancient world, or in times of revolution) politics takes precedence over economics.10 One account could be that the underlying mechanisms which explain society are economic ones in that these explain other mechanisms (for instance political ones), but that in the actual course of events, political mechanisms sometimes contribute more to the explanation than the economic ones – that is, the political factors have more influence over concrete events, but at the level of mechanisms, are themselves explained by economic mechanisms. For instance, at a time of

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revolution (or at all times in the ancient world) political class struggle may be the prime factor explaining events, yet the classes which are struggling are themselves constituted by economic structures. These points are due to the ontology of the social world: social mechanisms are not reducible to psychological mechanisms or vice versa, and neither is reducible to biological mechanisms, but all three, and others too, are at work generating social events. This ontology rules out a whole series of errors in the social sciences – the errors which are generally named by adding the suffix “-ism” to the names of a discipline: biologism, psychologism, economism, sociologism, and so on. There are those who want to explain the whole of human behaviour and social institutions by evolutionary biology, despite the fact that activities like, for instance, buying and selling shares, are quite unlike any activity of our ancestors throughout the period of some millions of years during which the genetic inheritance of Homo sapiens was being laid down. Biologism is by no means the only such “-ism”. There are economists who claim that economics is not just the science of the production and exchange of wealth, but the science of all human behaviour. So friendship and love are seen as investments which one makes in the hope of a return in terms of some future advantage. Insofar as economism makes such claims, it is not just “the gloomy science”, as economics was called in the 19th century, but a satanic science. Likewise, psychology has sometimes claimed to account for behaviour which can only be socially explained, and whenever Freud departed from his clinical material and wrote “applied psychoanalysis”, he fell into this trap. By far the most prevalent form of such “disciplinary imperialism” in the 21st century is sociologism – the idea that all phenomena in the human world are to be explained socially, without reference to biology, geography or individual psychology. An example would be the idea that needs are socially constructed, a view which ignores the fact that whatever else human beings are, they are also biological organisms, which share numerous needs with other species; and which makes it inconceivable that human societies could obstruct the fulfilment of human needs, and could be criticized for such obstruction. Postmodernism, which linguistifies all reality, and sociologizes language, is one source of contemporary sociologism. Critical realism, on the other hand, rejects all forms of disciplinary imperialism. It recognizes, for instance, that some phenomena are inherently social and cannot be understood starting from individual psychology, and that some phenomena are inherently individual and cannot be understood as socially constructed. Critical realism, then, is anti-reductive in its ontology of social science. Its conception of stratification differentiates it from the reductive materialism which reduces each level to the one below it, and hence, in the last instance, all other realities to those studied by physics. However, it also avoids other forms of reduction which have beset social science. For instance, many Marxists have tried to reduce all other realities to social realities, though there have been Marxists such as Sebastiano Timpanaro who have stood out against this reduction.11 The disciplinary imperialism which makes exaggerated claims for

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the scope of a given discipline is often just the arrogance of those practising that discipline, but it does lead the theoretical errors which in turn have harmful consequences both for politics and for concrete analyses of social phenomena. Such concrete analyses need to draw on more than one discipline. The best historians, for instance, do not draw exclusively on sociology or economics or psychology, but use the skills and resources of all these disciplines. Another example is feminist theory. Some feminists, for instance, have shown a hostility to biological explanation, while others have drawn too exclusively on that science. Critical realist feminists have argued that there are irreducibly biological, sociological, psychological and economic aspects to the differentiation between the sexes. These all have consequences for policy. Take the question of maternity leave and paternity leave, for instance. It is absurd to say that, because in a given country women have a right to a certain number of days’ maternity leave, men should have the same right by parity. It is absurd, because men do not undergo the same physical trauma of childbirth as women. On the other hand, there are social and moral reasons why it is desirable for men to have paternity leave, since the mother and child benefit from the father’s support. However, there is also a politico-economic reason why maternity leave and paternity leave should be equal: if paternity leave is shorter, employers will discriminate in favour of male employees, to whom they do not have to give so much leave. So in order to resolve practical questions like this – and all practical questions rest on concrete, many-levelled realities – we need to consult the findings of several disciplines. So the ontology of critical realism at once justifies the distinction between different sciences and the autonomy of each of them, and also shows the necessity for inter-disciplinary work in the social sciences. Indeed, the social or human sciences can have no practical use until they have been conjointly applied in an inter-disciplinary analysis of a concrete reality, that is, of an open system.12 Above all, critical realism shows the need for modesty on the part of any practitioner of social science; freedom from the arrogance of thinking that one’s own discipline can by itself explain concrete social realities: no discipline can.

Notes 1 The main texts on which this essay draws are Roy Bhaskar’s first two books, A Realist Theory of Science and The Possibility of Naturalism. The theories put forward in these texts are the foundation of all later critical realism. Later books have, however, ploughed new furrows: first, the so-called “dialectical turn” in Roy Bhaskar’s books Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom and Plato Etcetera, though it is my view that, in all important senses of the word “dialectic”, critical realism was dialectical from the outset; and then the “spiritual turn”, drawing on Indian philosophical ideas. The chief texts by Margaret Archer are Culture and Agency, Realist Social Theory, Being Human and Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, and by Tony Lawson Economics and Reality. 2 See Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Ch.VII.

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3 The reason why astronomy is exceptional in this way – in approximating to a natural closed system – is that there are normally no forces great enough to deflect heavenly bodies from their paths. The philosophers of the Enlightenment period were led astray by the assumption that astronomy was the norm, not the exception. 4 See Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, part I. 5 The idealists to whom I am referring are those who, influenced by the researches of Kuhn and Feyerabend in the history of science, have come to see reality itself as influenced by our theorising of it. I think that Kuhn himself is not, or not consistently, an idealist, though Feyerabend probably is. The critical realist response to Kuhn rests on the argument that two theories, even if incommensurable in their transitive objects, must refer to the same intransitive object if they are to be in competition at all. 6 See Marx’s “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859. 7 From The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, quoted by Milton Fisk in Ethics and Society, p. 11. 8 See Roy Medvedev, The October Revolution. 9 “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.” Marx, from the beginning of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 10 See Marx’s footnote 35, to Capital, vol. 1, pp. 175–76. Compare Lenin, “Politics cannot but have dominance over economics. To argue otherwise is to forget the ABC of Marxism”, quoted by Alec Nove in An Economic History of the USSR, p. 7. 11 See his book, On Materialism. 12 See my paper, “Unhewn Demonstrations”, Radical Philosophy, no.81, 1997, 22–26.

References Althusser, Louis and Balibar, Etienne. Reading Capital. London: New Left Books, 1970. Anderson, Perry. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: Verso, 1974. Archer, Margaret. Culture and Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ——Realist Social Theory: the Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ——Being Human. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ——Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Bhaskar, Roy. A Realist Theory of Science. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1978. ——Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom. London: Verso, 1993. ——Plato Etcetera. London: Verso, 1994. ——The Possibility of Naturalism. London: Routledge, 1998. ——Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. Collier, Andrew. “Unhewn Demonstrations”, Radical Philosophy no.81, 1997: 22–26. ——Being and Worth. London: Routledge, 1999. ——In Defence of Objectivity. London: Routledge, 2003. Fisk, Milton. Ethics and Society. Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980. Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. London: Hogarth, 1967. Hume, David. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902. Jevons, William Stanley. The Theory of Political Economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

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Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Lawson, Tony. Economics and Reality. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin (with New Left Review), 1973. ——Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in any volume of Selected Works. ——“Preface”, A Contribution to Political Economy, 1959, in any volume of Selected Works. ——Theses on Feuerbach, in any volume of Selected Works. ——Capital, vol.1. Harmondsworth: Penguin (with New Left Review), 1976. Medvedev, Roy. The October Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Nove, Alec. An Economic History of the USSR. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969. Timpanaro, Sebastiano. [in Italian] Sul Materialismo. Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1970. ——On Materialism. London: Verso, 1975.

2

“In the understanding of the existing state of affairs, its negation is included” A comment on Collier Maurizio Ferraris

The present note is not a discussion of Collier’s theses, with which I mostly agree, but rather a gloss, an attempt to reconstruct and, if possible, integrate and translate them into my own language.

1 Ontological theses Collier defends three fundamental ontological theses, which hold in every ontological domain, from physical reality to social reality. According to him, at the level of fundamental ontology there is no difference between the sciences of nature and the sciences of spirit, contrary to what was generally assumed by theoreticians in the 19th century (and partly in the 20th century) – namely that the sciences of nature deal with the res extensa, while the sciences of spirit deal with the res cogitans. An interesting consequence of his three theses is that social objects are higher order objects with respect to physical objects, and are endowed with irreducible properties with respect to the properties of physical objects. Such a position is an alternative both to postmodernism (social objects do not exist, and physical objects are socially constructed) and to non-critical realism (social objects are reducible to the underlying physical objects). 1.1 There are causal mechanisms underlying all events Such mechanisms display themselves. This means that their activity cannot be reduced to a collection of what is superficial, or to invention, which are the two postmodernist options – the second being more radical than the first. Weak postmodernists maintain that philosophers (or social scientists) are supposed to describe only the superficial outlook of events (they deal only with collections of superficiality), while natural scientists know a deeper reality. It is quite obvious that impressions alone are not very interesting, particularly because we cannot be certain that impressions are shared. For instance, a philosopher who, on the grounds of a simple impression of hers, or of some of her acquaintances, speaks about “the return of religion” would not behave differently from a philosopher who claims that – as far as she knows –

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the Earth is flat and does not move. Even worse, the latter has at least a shared sensible certainty on her side, which the former has not. Strong postmodernists think that reality is constructed by researchers. This idea is based on a trivial confusion between ontology (what there is, which does not depend on the researchers) and epistemology (the way we know it, which does depend on the researchers), and consequently must be dismissed. If what there is were constructed by the researchers, then knowledge would be devoid of any interest: everyone would be entitled to construct her own knowledge and there would be no criteria to prefer John’s knowledge over Michael’s, and to maintain that it is preferable to be cured by a physician than by a sorcerer or by a confessor. 1.2 There are objects of sciences Chemistry has molecules, physics has atoms, social ontology has promises, bets and recessions. Such objects are not simply constructed by their disciplines, as strong postmodernism claims, thereby collapsing the distinction between epistemology and ontology. Furthermore, the objects of each science are specific objects, and thus promises, bets and recessions are not reducible to molecules or atoms. This stance opposes critical realism to any form of reductionistic realism: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt in all our philosophies, and, as the whole does not reduce to the sum of its parts, social objects are higher order objects that cannot be reduced to their inferiora. Requiring the contrary would be tantamount to supposing we could explain the Italian Constitution via a molecular analysis of the paper and ink used to write it. 1.3 There is a difference between ontology (what there is) and epistemology (what we know about what there is) That sums up all the previous points, by translating in my language Collier’s point about the difference between intransitive objects (the fact that both I and Ptolemy see the sun) and transitive objects (the fact that according to Ptolemy the sun revolves around the Earth). Contrary to what the idealists maintain, this does not mean that we only know transitive objects or that ontology collapses into epistemology, and therefore when a Ptolemy follower and a Copernican looks at the sky they actually see two different objects – a completely counter-intuitive conclusion. The intransitive object (“ontological”, in my terminology) is not an inaccessible noumenon. Most of the time we have direct access to intransitive objects, even outside our conceptual schemes, which, according to transcendentalist philosophers such as Kant, pragmatist philosophers such as Quine, and postmodernist philosophers such as Foucault, are the very condition of any relations to objects, which thus are never given to us “as such”. Actually,

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the assumption that we never meet reality independently from our conceptual schemes derives from the merging of epistemology and ontology: if the object of knowledge is confused with our knowledge of the object, then it is obvious that we cannot have a relation with the object that is not mediated by our conceptual schemes. Indeed, this is a fallacy, although a very widespread one, which has vastly influenced the definition of realism as a naïve and philosophically unsustainable option, whereas what really is naïve and philosophically unsustainable is the collapse of ontology into epistemology.

2 Epistemological theses Besides the three ontological theses, there are two epistemological ones, as I would call them, which single out the difference, at the level of knowledge and methodology, between the ontology of social reality and the ontology of physical reality. Often social scientists adopt methods from the natural sciences, and in certain cases that is to be commended, because it avoids arbitrariness and impressionism. Nonetheless, we should not forget that there are at least two points of difference between the epistemology of social sciences and the epistemology of natural sciences. Outlining such a distinction is neither tantamount to claiming that (in accordance with the methodological discussions to be found in the 19th century) natural sciences explain, while social sciences understand or interpret, nor to claiming that the natural sciences discover laws (they are nomothetic), while the social sciences describe individuals (they are idiographic). Rather, the differences between the two epistemologies depend on the particular nature of their objects, and can be summed up in a double negation: in contrast with the natural sciences, in the social sciences neither Hume’s law nor Ockham’s razor hold. 2.1 Vs. Hume’s Law The main difference between social objects and physical objects is that Hume’s law – according to which we cannot derive “ought” from “is” – does not apply to social objects. Hume’s law warns us against the idea of a natural law: you cannot derive any moral laws from the dispositions that natural things have. For instance, you cannot condemn a sexual behaviour on the grounds that it is “against nature”. According to Hume, furthermore, nature does not contain anything certain or absolute. Therefore, we would make a metabasis eis allo ghenos (from nature to culture), without even gaining in certainty what we lose in freedom (because nature is not the sphere of absolute regularity, but rather of probability and contingency). However, this, obviously, does not apply to objects that are already to be found in the sphere of culture, such as social objects, which exist only because

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humans think that they exist. As for them, deriving “ought” from “is” is utterly legitimate. For all normative institutions, such as laws, permissions, prohibition, etc., the way they ought to be is derived from the way they are (from their specific being, that is from their being social objects), in overt (and legitimate) contradiction of Hume’s law. It would be a rather bizarre law that fails to stipulate that something ought to be the case (and, in principle, the “ought” here is apodictic). If you find the example of law circular, there are more abstract examples: it is implicit in a promise that it has to be kept: “is” here is intimately connected with (or identified with) “ought”, since promising while assuming that no duty follows from what we are doing is tantamount to lying or deceiving. It is worth noting that the derivation of “ought” from “is” in the social sphere is what warrants the critical side of realism: the critique of society is not an addendum to its explanation, it is its condition. This passage can be very risky, since, as a matter of fact, it allows for a hermeneutic element into social ontology; it is utterly obvious that our relationship with social objects – in contrast with natural objects – is necessarily mediated by conceptual schemes. Nonetheless, we should consider, first of all, that there being interpretations does not mean that there are no facts, as the postmodernist hermeneutics illegitimately conclude; and second, that the fact that things such as prizes or grades are strictly dependent on subjects does not entail that prizes or grades are “subjective” – as are, for instance, aesthetic judgements. (Again, this is an illegitimate conclusion of the postmodernists. Luckily, the postmodernist hermeneuticists are so incoherent they fail to realize that it would be in their own interest to reject Hume’s law. Instead, they fiercely defend Hume’s law, which they see as a bulwark against natural law.) 2.2 Vs. Ockham’s Razor The second difference between the epistemology of social objects and that of natural objects is that it does not seem to be advisable to use Ockham’s razor in the social sphere. To Quine’s desert we should prefer Meinong’s jungle, since it allows us to explain many things, and – even more importantly – to acknowledge the existence of many things. The fact that there is a jungle in the social world derives from Meinong’s consideration that it is just because of a limiting prejudice with respect to reality that we regard only physical objects as real. Meinong cites many other kinds of object: objects that no longer are (the ex-existent objects, such as the Roman Empire), objects that do not exist as a matter of fact (a golden mountain), objects that do not exist in principle (a round square), and objects that subsist (such as numbers or relations). My proposal comprises – for the reasons I have given so far – a threefold distinction between natural objects, which exist independently from subjects and occupy a position in space and time; ideal objects, such as numbers, theorems, relations, which exist independently from subjects, and do not

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occupy any position in space and time; and finally social objects, which occupy a small portion of time and space (think of the temporal extension of a contract, or of the physical extension of the paper or the hard disk on which it is written), and – as I have claimed – exist dependently on the subjects. As I have advanced and largely argued in other places,1 social objects obey the law Object = Inscribed Act. That is: social objects are social acts (involving at least two persons) and are inscribed on a piece of paper, or a computer file, or at least in the heads of the people involved in the act. Social objects can be subdivided in many ways. I believe that there are three main classes of them. 1. Archetypes, i.e. types, the a priori models that ground the formation of a social object, as the idea of the triangle grounds concrete triangles. For instance, and typically: promise and bet. 2. Ectypes, i.e. tokens, the different concrete realizations (regularly accompanied by an inscription) in which the archetype is realized. There is no doubt that a social ontology confined to types of social objects would be impoverished with respect to one that also encompasses tokens. 3. Lastly, we find physical objects that are immersed in a flux of relationships that confer social value on them. Typically, ordinary things and instruments, artworks, and natural objects that have acquired a social value, for instance copyrighted natural kinds. There is another distinction in our jungle: that between social and institutional objects. A social object is something that has value only within a society; typically, without a society, there would be neither masterpieces nor popular literature. An institutional object, though, is an object that can produce other social or institutional objects: for instance, a law, an official ceremony, a marriage, etc.

3 The consequences of realism From the intersection of the ontological theses and the epistemological theses four salient traits of Collier’s social ontology follow. 3.1 Both society and persons exist Both society and persons exist differently from what social atomists maintain (there are only persons) and social holists maintain (there is only society). Indeed, “Senatores boni viri, senatus mala bestia” is something that we constantly and directly experience, and that reveals the coexistence of both individuals and society; this is as obvious as it is that atoms, molecules and promises all exist. I think we can describe, at least partially, the relationship between individuals and society as a relationship between inferiora and superiora. Society is a higher order object with respect to the individuals. It posses characteristics of its own, which are independent from the individual who composes it, exactly as a melody preserves all its features even if all the notes composing it are shifted an octave up (in the social sphere, the character of the people from Turin, for instance, or certain characteristics of the Constitutional Court, or

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more extensively of the capitalistic world, remain the same while the individuals vary with time). Nonetheless, even in this case I think that the relation between inferiora and superiora in the social world is of a particular kind, since it possesses two specific differences with respect to what happens in the physical world (specifically, in the psychology of perception). First, individuals are inferiora with respect to society, but society in turn is an inferius with respect to individuals as social beings. That is, society is the outcome of individuals, but each individual is, under many decisive aspects, an outcome of the society in which she or he grew up. Second, while we can be sure that by shifting the notes of a melody an octave up we will not compromise its identity, we cannot rule out that a deep transformation in the individuals composing a society will alter the society as a whole. It is very likely that there were many more social similarities between Breslau in 1840 and Breslau in 1940, than between Breslau in 1940 and Breslau in 1950, when most of its former German inhabitants left, and the city was repopulated by Polish people. In certain cases, a single new element is sufficient for the society to change, for instance a charismatic leader. 3.2 Possibility is something real The possibility of a crack in the market can effectively produce a crack in the market, talk of an atomic attack can produce an atomic attack, and someone has even talked about “preventive war”. Why? Because we are dealing here with things that exist because subjects think that they exist. The postmodernists have maintained that possibility is a general ontological constant, and not just one of social ontology. On such grounds, they have advanced absurd claims, which are liable to easy refutation by naïve realists. Indeed, treating the possible as real in the physical domain is, at best, an alternative formulation of Murphy’s law. 3.3 There are negative facts, i.e. absences Also in this case, it is difficult to find an equivalent in natural sciences, given that even anti-matter is not definable in those terms. Collier gives two examples. The classical example of debts (or passive interests) and, more peculiarly, the lack of a government class up to the time of the French Revolution. I have doubts concerning the latter, since probably even the best government class ever (or at least a better government class) would have been unable to prevent what happened. After all, Necker was not a bad finance minister. However, those considerations aside, which are details with respect to my fundamental agreement with Collier on this topic, I would like to suggest a way to make the notion of “negative fact” more precise. A negative fact has nonetheless some sort of social positive appearance. What I mean is that the recording of a debt is a necessary condition for there to be a debt (a recording

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in the debtor’s and creditor’s heads, on a piece of paper, on a computer file). If all social actors were to forget about the debt, the debt would cease to exist (this is a capital difference between social objects and natural objects: if everybody forgot about Mont Blanc, it would not cease to exist). Therefore, a debt exists as a negative fact only if there is a positive fact, namely a record – as a neural modification, on a piece of paper, or in the computer blips. 3.4 Values exist It does not seem doubtful that values exist, since they condition choices and behaviours. Rather curiously, the question about their existence has been confused with the question of whether they are absolute or relative, which is a completely different question. By noting that values may vary in different fields, some have concluded that values do not exist. It is probably superfluous to note that this is indeed a bizarre conclusion: as if by noting that there are lots of recipes to cook pasta, that new ones are invented, and old ones are sometimes abandoned, someone concluded that pasta does not exist.

4 Valuation There is a fourth fundamental aspect in Collier, the fact that such a descriptive ontology is not void of valuation (which should already be clear from what I have said so far). Indeed, Collier advances a Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA), which he sums up in three theses. 4.1 Individual actions Social reality (I personally prefer this term to “history”, which is what Collier uses, since social reality is wider that social history) is the outcome of human actions, and their consequences, which are “often unwanted”. This point is linked to the fact that social objects exist only because there are subjects who believe that they exist. It would be a form of blindness, or – as Nietzsche has it – niaiserie, to deny that Hitler had a role in the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, and to maintain rather that the attack was only the result of superindividual laws, which would have taken place even without Hitler. It seems safer to maintain that without Hitler Germany would never have attacked the Soviet Union, without Napoleon France would never have tried to invade the Russian Empire, and without Alexander the Great Macedonians would never have reached Afghanistan. One could object that we are dealing here with extraordinarily charismatic people, but we should remember that during World War II in Bulgaria, a simple vice-minister, by simply refusing to sign an alliance with Germany, avoided the deportation of all the Jews who lived in his country. The notions of “responsibility” and “choice”, which are common in the moral lexicon and in everyday life, possess a meaning only in so far as it is

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assumed that individual action has an actual bearing on social life. The election would be a rather weird institution if we were to deny that individuals can have an influence on the social world. 4.2 Structural mechanisms Still, there are structural mechanisms in social reality, which are connected to interactions between humans and their material environment, but are not liable to modifications. With respect to that, I would rather underline the fact that the dependence of social reality on subjects does not imply that social reality can be subjectively and arbitrarily modified. This point accounts for there being social facts that are independent from human will and very often are not transparent to analysis (surplus value was discovered years after Economics had been acknowledged as an academic discipline). At the same time, there is no doubt that, for instance, canons of beauty depend on subjects, and that they often change over time, but this does not mean that anyone educated in a certain society and according to a certain canon can just re-condition her taste with a purely subjective action, for instance in order to force herself to like someone whom she is marrying for interest. 4.3 Voluntary transformation Structures, however, can be changed, through what usually is a voluntary collective project. I am not sure that a voluntary collective project can ensure transformation better than an involuntary project. What is certain, though, is that transformation is possible, and history provides us with innumerable examples of it. What I wish to underline, as a postscript to Collier, so to speak, and to finish, is the link between ontological realism and social transformation. It is an important point because the adversaries of realism, curiously enough, are persuaded that realism is a doctrine resigned to conservation. It is quite evident that a moment of reflection upon Marx’s thesis that “in the understanding of the existing state of affairs, its negation is included” shows that realism embodies criticism. Indeed, if we assume that irrealism, rather than realism, is supposed to change the existent, the difficult question remains about how irrealism can account for the difference between changing the world and believing it to change, pretending to change it, and dreaming of changing it.

Note 1 For a general presentation, cfr. Documentalità. Un catalogo del mondo. Laterza: Roma-Bari, 2009, and (more succinctly) “Documentality, or Europe”, The Monist, Vol. 92, No. 2, April 2009, Europa, eds M. Ferraris and L. Morena. There are partial versions of the theory in “Documentality Or Why Nothing Social Exists Beyond the Text”, in Cultures. Conflict – Analysis – Dialogue, eds Ch. Kanzian and E. Runggaldier, “Proceedings of the 29th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-

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Symposium in Kirchberg, Austria”, New Series 3, Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society 2007, pp. 385–401; “Ontologia dell’opera d’arte e del documento”, in Ontologie Regionali, eds A. Bottani and R. Davies, Milano: Mimesis, 2007, pp. 141–63; “Documentalità: ontologia del mondo sociale”, Ethics and Politics, IX, 2, 2007, pp. 240–329, www.units.it/~etica/2007_2/FERRARIS. pdf; “Scienze sociali”, in Storia dell’ontologia, ed. M. Ferraris, Milano: Bompiani, 2008, pp. 475–89. See also the proceedings of the conference organized by the Interuniversity Center of Theoretical and Applied Ontology, “Documentalità. L’ontologia degli oggetti sociali”, Rivista di Estetica, n.s, XXXVI, 3, 2007, ed. D. Tagliafico.

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Transcendental realism and critical naturalism in Roy Bhaskar The return of ontology in scientific social research1 Riccardo Prandini It is not necessary that science occurs. But given that it does, it is necessary that the world is a certain way. Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, London: Verso, 1975, p. 29 “For it is not the fact that science occurs that gives the world a structure such that it can be known by men. Rather, it is the fact that the world has such a structure that makes science, whether or not it actually occurs, possible.” Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, London: Verso, 1975, p. 30 To be a fallibilist about knowledge, it is necessary to be a realist about things. Conversely, to be skeptic about things is to be a dogmatist about knowledge. Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, London: Verso, 1975, p. 43

1 Anthropology. Science as a human accomplishment for the research of non-(only) human truths 1.1 The “vexatious matter” in science: the distinction between transitive and intransitive subjects of knowledge Let us suppose we are observing the daily routine of a research worker. He leaves his house and goes to work. He gets to his office in the research institute where he is employed, and enters the laboratory. Using his badge, he clocks in and, together with his colleagues, starts to work. The laboratory is a very interesting place, full of old stills (to recall the old ways of doing research) and leading-edge devices. All around there are lots of books and scientific reviews. Our worker wears a white lab coat and starts playing his role. Today he is doing an experiment to try and verify a working hypothesis, built on the theory that his team (scientists joining from all over the world to perform a common task, subsidized by state and private funds) is pursuing on the basis of a previous research. Everything is arranged: the team is ready; instrumentation is working. Bring up the curtain (hoping the instrumentation doesn’t conk out, because the things to be examined can’t be seen by the

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naked eye). The show transpiring is the experiment. As happens in every performance, specific situations have to be set up and performed. An experiment is not a “natural” show at all: it is a very complex and artificial set, which needs to be arranged and “built”. Before the experiment’s “grand debut”, however, let us stop for a while and make some reflections about the daily-routine situation that we have just portrayed. Words in italics refer to tacit aspects of a whole “world” that need to be explained, and are useful to attract the reader’s attention to the fact that scientists’ activity is socially built. Our individual is called a scientist because he has studied at university, a legitimate place and/or an institution where new scientists grow up and become socialized. He studied a corpus of theories and methods, inherited from precursors’ work: he had to learn new things, deconstructing common-sense ideas about “reality”. The knowledge he possesses has been processed by scientists who now, perhaps, live on only through their work. Our scientist has to reach an office to go to work in a workplace that is “socially certified” and registered in the land office; in this workplace he finds many colleagues and devices that enable him to see things and aspects of the world that would be invisible (or non-existent) to the naked eye. His job involves studying, preparing and carrying out experiments. He arranged an experimental design: based on a problem found by his research group, he has to test out a hypothesis and identify the causes that explain the phenomenon. However, even if he can find out such causes, what does he obtain? Outside of the laboratory, in natural conditions, does everything happen the same way? Can our scientist lay claim to having discovered a causal law or can he only say he has observed a (necessary or not?) regularity in some events? How can he predict that the same sequence of events will happen in the future? This “mise-en-scène” shows “the construction of conditions of possibilities of science”. A friend of our scientist’s, let us suppose a “constructivist” sociologist, will rub his hands with glee because he has everything he needs to demonstrate that science is a “social fact”, a social practice contingent on people’s categories and conceptual schemes2. Science itself is only a set of actions taking place in social institutions that are “labelled” in a particular way. Moreover, the laws that scientists put forward are only “social products” derived from the particular paradigm they use. Reality per se is noumenal: it is no use looking for it. Reality is only the reality of a particular observer (an individual or a system), therefore relative and influenced by the predominant culture. All possible scientific paradigms, and their results, are immeasurable. Confronted with such statements our scientist would surely take offence. He knows he goes to work every day; he also knows he has studied; he knows he observes reality through theories and schemes he has learned and that are not inborn; he knows he uses artificial, but necessary, devices and tools; he knows he arranges experimental designs. So, he knows perfectly well that he is really working and operating on reality, causing and producing it. On the other side, he is sure, or better, socially assured, that whatever he discovers (including

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learning from his errors) is not an “invention” of his mind: if he were even suspected of “inventing” the results of his research, he would surely change jobs, because he is a scientist. What he is struggling with is the “vexatious matter in science”. It is all about this: 1 On one side, men produce their knowledge, through their actions, their organizations, their sharing of information and learning about previous understandings. This knowledge is the “transitive” (and transient) object of knowledge, the material cause of scientific development. It includes the facts and theories, methods and techniques available to any scientist. 2 On the other side, this knowledge is the (collective) memory about “objects” that are not produced by men and that exist independently of them. These “objects” are the “intransitive” (and non-transient) objects of knowledge. 1.2 A realist theory of scientific practice: the transcendental argument and the epistemic fallacy Roy Bhaskar’s work tries to explain this “vexatious matter”. He tries to give us a realist explanation of science through an adequate philosophy and an adequate ontology:3 an adequacy that requires explaining both the historical, social, transient and changeable scientific knowledge and the “intransitive” objective and deep reality. Bhaskar’s thought is very complex and offers us an ontology with its related methodology for social sciences, for sociology in particular.4 Bhaskar’s works start in the 1970s, in Britain, where he studied philosophy of science with Rom Harré. This research field is in deep crisis, internally antinomic. It has been based for a long time on a positivistic view of science (and the word “science” today is commonly meant and understood in this way), on the Humean theory of causal laws, and on a typically Newtonian vision of the world: the general approach is monistic, anti-pluralistic (as far as the conception of scientific progress is concerned) and deductivistic (as regards the logical structure of science).5 Monism has been strongly criticized: first by Popper and his followers (like Lakatos and Feyerabend), who have identified scientific progress with revolutions in paradigms and with falsifiability of theories; later, by Kuhn and the sociology of science that followed (at least, in the “strong programme” version), which showed its transient and historical features; and finally, by countless demonstrations that scientific “facts” are always located in “doings” produced and set in a theory. This anti-monistic “wing” – which underlined the deficiencies of scientific observations – has sunk into a super-idealism (subjective or cultural), which is unable to explain the cumulative continuity of scientific progress. The other “wing” of criticism has attacked deductivism (in its Popper-Hempel version), showing the lack of sufficiency (and, in Bhaskar’s view, of necessity, too) in Humean criteria when trying to find causal laws (the famous “constant conjunctions” and their empirical perceptibility).

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These sound criticisms of the positivistic view of science ask for an entirely new ontology, but the scientists weren’t able to elaborate it, because they were soaked in a naïve “empirical realism” that legitimated them. Instead, ontology had to be non-anthropocentric and capable of defining a new place for humanity in nature and reality. In the kind of transcendental realism (from now on TR) proposed by Bhaskar, final “objects” in scientific research exist and act, independently of scientists’ observations and activities: this realism consists in elaborating how the world – including the real generative mechanisms and phenomena generated by them, events and states of affairs – has to be before the beginning of scientific investigation and in order that the very scientific attitude is intelligible. Bhaskar’s TR is a philosophical method that demonstrates the necessity of a realist ontology, if we want scientific practice to make sense. However, the content of such an ontology depends on the specific work of each particular science. TR is based on a “transcendental argument” that asks: “What conditions must exist for X to be possible?”, where X is an activity like “scientific research”, i.e. a social activity the task of which is to produce knowledge about the agency of objects acting and existing independently of an observer. The answer to such a question is called ontology. According to Bhaskar, realism is not a theory about knowledge or truth, but about being (although this statement has obvious epistemological consequences). Realism is not an epistemology, i.e. a study about how it is possible to achieve knowledge. It is a theory that is opposed to empiricism and rationalism, which are “epistemologically fallacious” because they re-write ontological issues under an epistemological light (statements on being have to be formulated as statements about knowledge of being). Thus, the epistemological fallacy is the idea that statements on being can be reduced to or analysed as statements of knowledge. Instead, according to TR, reality does not need to be known in order to exist; on the contrary, a reality must exist, if we are to have any knowledge of it. 1.3 Against empirical realism and scepticism: the empiricist and rationalistic fallacies The two main modern traditions in philosophy are based on an implicit empirical and realist ontology, according to which objects of science are those of an “actual or possible experience” (super-idealism proposes a realist subjective ontology, where objects are the products of mental activity). To superidealistic philosophers and/or scientists, social influences and/or categories of our intellect (the logic of distinction provided us by natural evolution) allow us to give an order, a form to the generic and per se unknowable “material continuum”. Second, according to positivism, nature impresses empirical data on our senses (which are like tabulae rase, perhaps with some innate pattern) through perception. In the former hypothesis, reality is an epiphenomenon of science (what is observed is generated by an observer), and reality does not

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possesses any “real” property or power (there are no forces or powers in reality). In positivism, science itself is an epiphenomenon of reality, and human beings do not possess any real properties or power.6 Both approaches, in different ways, endorse empirical realism, reducing reality to the actual (what is in existence, in action, in actu) and the empirical (what is perceivable and observable). In these reductions there are, at least, three serious mistakes: 1 The use of the category of experience (or distinction, or observation, or perception), to define what reality is. In this way, a particular epistemological notion (experience? observation? perception?), but which description of experience/ observation/ perception are we referring to (Berkeley’s? Cartesius’? Kant’s? Hume’s? Hegel’s? Whose?), improperly becomes a general ontological function; 2 Thinking that being perceivable/ observable/ sensible is an essential attribute of the whole world, while it is so only accidentally for some objects (the fact of “being experience-able” is contingent and depends upon the nature of the subject, of the object, of technological instrumentation, of theories: esse non est percipi); and 3 The ignorance of socially produced circumstances, in which experience is epistemologically important and crucial for the social system of science (the set and the activities in the laboratory), and where experience is transformed and adapted to an experiment. 1.4 Man’s place in the universe: leaving anthropocentrism and recognizing man’s reality TR is founded on a specific vision of man and his place in the universe. Unlike the sceptical and positivistic conception of science, this is clearly anthropocentric (reality is what “we”, the human, can learn empirically), TR affirms that the reality and existence of the “world” do not depend upon men’s existence. Reality does not need an observer to exist; rather, it is the “knowledge” of reality that requires the emergence of humanity, but requires it in a particular way. In other words, if science is possible as a social practice, then man has to possess some essential properties and powers that depend upon his nature: from his anthropological features. Paradoxically, we need a philosophical anthropology to demonstrate that, to be and to operate, reality does not need men to scientifically observe it.7 Man has the power to modify situations, conditions and sequences of events, generating effects that would not occur if man did not act on things; human beings can also consciously let changes happen or prevent their occurrence, projecting and foreseeing them. This “agency” is possible only because men are “creatures” with a very high degree of neuro-physiological complexity which allows them to observe their action, control it, observe this control (this is a reflexive action) and act intentionally, using useful tools and devices that make it possible to act at a distance, to manipulate, perceive and interfere with nature and mankind. As a

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very special creature, both for practical and for theoretical reasons, man has always tried to understand how things were and what there was beyond and behind them. The “paradox of science” results from these anthropological powers and their use: it is only through observation/ manipulation – i.e. interfering with nature – that men can observe, study and control generative mechanisms that work and exist regardless of human activities. Men deconstruct/ analyse natural sequences of events to identify underlying laws that do not depend on their constructions/ analyses. Scientific experiments are meaningful only because they give access to causal structures that cannot be seen and understood directly. Bhaskar summarizes his reasoning in this way: Science, then, is the systematic attempt to express in thought the structures and ways of acting that exist and act independently of thought. The world is structured and complex and not made for men. It is entirely accidental that we exist, and understand something about our bit of it. It is important to avoid the epistemic fallacy here. This consists in confusing the ontological order with the epistemic order, priority in being with priority in deciding claims to being, the question of what has relatively un-derived (or independent) existence with the question of what entitles us to regard some kinds of statements as grounds for other kinds of statements, etc. In particular the question of what is capable of independent existence must be distinguished from the question of what must be the case for us to know that something is capable of independent existence. Thus electrons could exist without material things; but we could not know this proposition, let us say P, unless there were material things. The truth-conditions for our knowledge of P are not the same as the truth-conditions for P. There could be a world without men; but there could not be knowledge without antecedents. (R. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, London: Verso, 1975, p. 250) Science is therefore intelligible and meaningful only if we assume that: 1 reality can exist without the presence of an observer; and 2 there is no scientific knowledge without the organized work accomplished by scientists (of course some individual knowledge is possible, but, in these cases we only have private discoveries that could never generate “science” as a system of knowledge). Science is a human activity that, moving from methodologically controlled observations, gains some “stable” knowledge of the essential character of its objects, which moving from the description of phenomena (within specific scientific frames depending on theories) seeks to reach deeper levels of reality. It is a dialectic between descriptive and explanatory knowledge, which requires the elaboration of new concepts and instruments. Therefore, the most suitable metaphor to represent science is neither discovering (suggesting the

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mere idea of unveiling something already given) nor building (implying something “made-up” by somebody), but researching (for which a map is needed) and investigating.

2 Methodology. Experiencing scientific experiments: the paradox of an artificially closed system used to explain the operation of a naturally open system 2.1 Experimentum crucis: how an experiment is possible and on what conditions it is scientifically relevant The most generic activity within the scientific system is the experiment. It represents and gives prestige to what laymen call “science”. However, under what conditions does this activity make sense? Not in those specified by empirical realism (positivistic empiricism) or neo-Kantian rationalism. Neither of the two approaches explains why experiments are necessary to discover the “causes” of events (i.e. the very goal of science). Indeed, experiments are necessary because some cognitions are not immediately evident through “constant conjunctions”. Experience built by means of experimental setting is totally “artificial”. Through experiments scientists seek to isolate a specific generative (natural) mechanism from an external context – where other mechanisms are also at work – in order to demonstrate (measure, reveal, specify) how it acts (by itself) and how it produces (causes) specific effects on reality itself. It is “an attempt to trigger or unleash a single kind of mechanism or process in relative isolation, free from the interfering flux of the open world, so as to observe its detailed workings or record its characteristic mode of effect and/or to test some hypothesis about it”.8 The generic setting of experimental observation is a “closed system”, actually closed by the scientist. Only hic et nunc, inside this closed system, are Hume’s statements on causal laws such as “if A happens, then B happens” valid. However, “in reality” we always and only have open systems, in which causal laws are so to say absent because we can never observe constant conjunctions (perhaps only in astronomy do we find something similar). Paradoxically, we must create an unnatural condition (closedness) in order to understand how nature (that is an open system) works. This paradox, however, does not block scientific observations, if we go through it. On one side, as a matter of fact, though hardly criticizing empirical realism, TR does not decry the importance of experience in science and in experiments. TR simply argues that the intelligibility of sensory perception and then scientific observation implies the intransitivity of the object perceived. To perceive always means to perceive something that is neither the act of perceiving itself (autoreferentiality) nor the laws that determine its conditions (etero-referentiality). Actually, the content of perception-observation, the result of experiment, represents a transitive object of science, and is always corrigible in that it is fallible. According to TR, perception does not seize atomistic events or states

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of affairs, exactly mirroring them and giving certain and perfect knowledge. Knowledge, instead, is always corrigible, contingent and transient, both historically and socially. Through investigation and developing research projects in science, a little at a time, we can know reality better and better, deeper and deeper. In some cases we can reach “alethic” truths, such as the assertion that planet Earth is a spheroid and revolves around the sun.9 The intransitive object of scientific perception/ observation, though not being a piece of knowledge definitively “registered” and “recorded” in the encyclopaedia, is not, however, a noumenon, i.e. “something” that can be subject to infinite and always valid interpretations. Rather, it is an object only asymptotically reachable by knowledge.10 Interpretations are limited by the nature, the “inner categories” of the object itself and not by our “human, all too human” categories of mind! On the other hand, the realist defence of knowledge is based on its intrinsic change. We can explain the existence of an independent reality only if we observe different and contending conceptions of it, battling for “empirical suitability” status. According to realism, the falsification of a hypothesis is never a twofold relationship, i.e. between a theory and data denying it: it is rather a three-way relationship between two theories and the data that disfavour one of the two. Clearly, each theory is historically situated and culturally embedded, as well as the instrumentation used to verify it, etc. Data themselves are dependent on theory and on instrumentation, too. However, these assumptions do not lead toward relativism, because two theories can have the same data that, however, might falsify only one of the two. That is why we can speak of scientific progress without having to imply that the foundations of knowledge are sure, or that experiments are pure experiences and not ones bound to theoretical frameworks. A scientific experiment is intelligible not only if it postulates the intransitivity of the object investigated, but also only if it is organized in a lasting and enduring structure. For example, causal laws, in empirical ontology, are seen as (dependent on) constant conjunctions (actualism) of events (and/or states of affairs), perceived as empiric constants (empiricism). A deductive system is completed by the idea that laws are strengthened or denied by their exemplifications. That is why Popper-Hempel’s nomologic-deductive model of explanation states that explaining an event means deducing it, starting from an initial set of conditions and universal laws.11 This model implies symmetry between explanation, prediction and falsification, which is held to be valid for all sciences. However, an experiment is necessary just because events happening under given experimental conditions (with their empirical regularity) would not take place without it. Thus, in experimental practice, man is the causal agent of the particular sequence of events (the observer has an influence on what is observed; otherwise, the experiment itself cannot take place), but is not the agent of the causal laws that the particular sequence of events, as it is produced, makes recognisable. It is in the very experiment that we have a distinction between:

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1 reality as it is really structured; and 2 the “reality” we experience in the experiment, that breaks the unity and the given-ness of “the empirical world”. The real distinction between objects that are scientifically identified, such as causal laws, and mere sequences of events, is the condition of intelligibility of scientific activity. If we identified causal laws with constant conjunctions/ empirical regularities, since the latter are produced by the scientist, then scientists really would produce causal laws and no science of the real would exist. 2.2 From closed systems to open systems, from causal laws to natural tendencies: the problem of transduction and the transition from law-like to normic statements Normally in nature, i.e. in an open system, we do not find constant conjunctions or they happen out of phase with respect to laws. To state that a particular kind of metal conducts electricity, only because all metals do, is not an explanation; we are only making an “atom” of knowledge a general matter, by re-describing it as “general”. The nomologic-deductive model of explanation cannot even distinguish between a casual sequence of events and a necessary one. As a matter of fact, many “associated” events can exist and/or co-occur (and actually exist), without being necessarily or causally linked (this is a typical problem for sociologists). So, there is a double question: 1 Why and how is an empirical generalization (considered as) true, relevant and sufficient in order to explain anything? 2 What kind of assurance can we have that X will always happen after Y has appeared? It is the classic “problem of induction”: how we can transfer experimental results from closed to open systems (Poincaré’s problem of trans-duction). According to TR, an A ! B sequence is necessary only if there exists a natural mechanism (M): and when this mechanism is stimulated, B is prone to happen after A. This mechanism is the intransitive object of science, independently of its being discovered or undiscovered, observed or not. Through experiments, scientists discover and disclose the structures of nature, the way in which the elements of a “whole” are connected and their particular way of operating. These structures can be classified into natural types and have causal powers: when activated or stimulated, they act as generative mechanisms with a natural and universal necessity, and co-cause and co-determine the phenomena that become manifest in the world. This event happens only if other mechanisms do not produce events or states of affairs that impede or stop it. So, when we refer to a causal law, it is in relation to a trans-factual (trans-phenomenal, trans-situational, trans-local) operation of mechanisms, without laying claim to its actual result (that is usually co-determined by

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other mechanisms and can therefore vary). Trans-factual means “also operating outside a laboratory, though in a different manner”. Here we have the process of trans-duction, i.e. of applying to open systems what was discovered in closed systems. Therefore, so-called causal laws have to be seen as natural tendencies that can be “not working” and/or “working but not acting” and/or “acting but not perceptible”. This range of possibility refers to “normic” universals, i.e. trans-factual statements with concrete exemplifications in laboratories.

3 Ontology. Stratification, emerging reality and the vertical/ horizontal organization of science 3.1 The real is wider than both the empirical and the actual: beyond actualism and observationism TR’s subjects are “generative mechanisms” and not events or perceivable/ actual states of affairs. Normally these three fields of reality are never perfectly connected and links between them are created by the social activity of science. For empirical realism, the real equals the actual, which in turn equals the empirical. Starting from an ontology pivoting on the category of experience – and on the idea that causal laws are actual and constant conjunctions that are omnipresent – the three domains of reality are made to collapse into one. Empirical realism implies a closed world (the Newtonian view of the cosmos) and a complete science. In point of fact, the actual and the empirical coincide only when events are known under theoretically meaningful description; the real coincides with the actual only if the examined system is closed in a laboratory. TR, instead, being able to conceptualize the ontological stratification of the real, considers science as an analysis of generative mechanisms (GM) and poses the following questions: 1 Is the considered GM enduring, lasting (i.e. real for me, beyond the event I am perceiving)? 2 Is the considered GM operating or not operating (i.e. actual, active)?

Figure 3.1 Humean and realist models of causality.

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3 Are the results of the activities of the considered GM influenced by the activities of other actual GMs? 4 Are the results of the considered GM perceived by men (empiricism)? These four questions show that objects have: 1 Un-exercised powers (real, but not actual); 2 Exercised but not-realized powers (actual, but counteracted); and 3 Realized but not-observed powers (real and actual but not empirically observed). The first point concerns the distinction between the real powers of objects and their actual exercise. This difference creates a first blow to the too compact, flat and anthropocentric idea of the “empirical world”. The second point tells us that some powers can be actual, i.e., exercised, but we cannot see their results because there are other counter-veiling powers at work. The third point turns empirical realism upside down and makes it possible to introduce into our discussion a lot of non-scientific, but rational, knowledge (the theoretical hypothesis; unobservable “entities”), for example, the belief in the existence of God. For empiricists, on the contrary, only reality made up of experiences – meaning as sense data – exists. However, very soon another reality comes into the picture, the one inferred by perceivable effects (e.g. gravitational fields). Besides – if events and states of affairs caused by some powers, even if not exercised, exist – we have also a third level of reality. We have to know the structure of that reality – and not merely its phenomenal manifestation, which is nevertheless fundamental12 – in order to know that some things could happen, but do not happen because they do not become active. It is a kind of knowledge that infers the powers of “nature” by the structures of reality. TR, therefore, studies a GM that generates events. Events are real and different from experiences through which they are seen, perceived, learnt. The sequence of events that happens, even though not perceived, can be called the actual. Actual events that are perceived constitute the realm of the empirical. Finally, the domain of the real includes, in addition to the empirical and the actual, also the GM, which are not simply theoretical entities, but rather realities that cause determined effects. Figure 3.2 The difference between empiricism, actualism and realism Empirical domain Generative Mechanisms Events Experiences

Actual domain

Real domain X

X

X X

X X

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The ontology of the real has often been reduced to the actual (actualism) or to what is directly experience-able (empiricism). In this way, however, scientific progress – which often imagines theoretical and non-observable entities to explain phenomena, and “empirically” discovers, through new instrumentation improving our sensorial perception, realities that before were only imagined, such as microbes – cannot be understood. This gap is really dramatic when we have to reconstruct an ontology made of non-empirical objects, as it happens in sociology. It is a “huge invisible ontology” if we use causal criteria for detecting reality.13 Bhaskar, when suggesting a stratified structure for reality, wants to show that the domain of the real is much broader than the actual and the empirical ones. So, as a rule: Dr  Da  De (D = domain; r, a, e meaning real, actual, empirical), while some exceptional cases in which: Dr = Da = De (that empirical realism takes for granted) can be reached through scientific work and the setting of experiments in a laboratory. The distinction between the three domains must be postulated if we want to understand the utility and the possibility itself of making experiments. Only in a world in which everything was perceivable and, at the same time, actual, would we not need experiments. But it would be a “real” world in a laboratory. 3.2 What is the object of science? Structures, powers and generative mechanisms Saying that “A causes B”, is saying more than “B regularly follows A”, but how can we observe and set out this “something”? The non-empirical factor in causal power is the structure that is discovered from its effects. TR suggests a quite complex theory of natural necessity that postulates the existence of structures, powers, generative mechanisms and tendencies. An object, given its structure, has particular powers to make something else happen. The object’s structures must be analysed independently of any of their powers, because structures exist even if powers are not exercised, or are blocked, or are exercised but not perceived. “Power” denotes what an object can do, given the right conditions. Objects have the power to act in a certain way, according to their structure. Therefore, “power” means the “possibility/capability” of acting and operating in a certain way. Generative mechanisms, instead, are different from (exercised) powers. “Generative mechanism” is a technical term that marks “something that is real” independently of the sequence of perceived events and which usually lasts longer than the events it generates. It is the sub-stantia, the latent model of the object. The generative mechanism is that aspect of the structure of an object by virtue of which it possesses some powers, its “way of operating”. This trait lasts and is exercised whilst ever the same characteristics and conditions remain. Laws are statements about how independently and trans-factually active things operate. In experiments we just isolate and stimulate some GM, in order to identify and measure them, but in open systems each mechanism operates together with the other, and its

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effects can be (and often are) influenced (and sometimes blocked). Therefore, GM’s “natural necessity” implies that causal laws can be thought of only as tendencies. The natural necessity of an object is the necessary operation of tendencies, once activated. Hence, we can say that things “tend to operate” in certain ways, even if tendencies can be exercised but not completely actualized, because of the coexistence of other mechanisms (plants tend to grow, but only if there is enough sun and water). Powers of things do not need the idea of an evident and uninterrupted operativity. Powers can be inactive or active but they cannot become manifest. In sum, explanation through tendencies does not imply that such tendencies are always and fully actualized.14 Therefore, laws are not statements about mere empirical generalizations, but about the distinctive way things operate given their causal powers. Since outside the experimental system it is possible for regularities not to become manifest at all, then in open systems we must speak of tendencies, i.e. capabilities that can be exercised or be actual without being manifest or perceivable. Owing to the notion of tendency, i.e. continuous activity in an open system, we can make the idea of lasting power more dynamic and we can explain the experiential phenomenology of the world.15 3.3 Stratification of the real, stratification of science: the order of knowledge As has been seen, Bhaskar theorizes a reality made up of different ontological levels. The metaphor of “levels” suggests the idea of sedimentation, of an ordered and “deep” structure of reality (thus introducing time in reality). Science moves from “visible/ superficial” to “invisible/ deep”, in order to explain the operation of reality. Mechanisms operate in different layers of reality and are, in a way, ordered, too. This order, however, does not make us turn to reductionist explanations, or “determination in the last resort”, or “fundamental elements”. From the current state of scientific knowledge, we can simply infer that some layers of reality are necessary for the emergence of other (“less basic”) layers, but the logic of emergence (with which we will deal soon) prevents us from saying that the most “superficial” layers are reducible to the prior ones. Bhaskar’s anti-reductionism is based on two principles: 1 Reality is layered, but also emergent; and 2 The layers of reality do not exclude one another, but intersect, giving birth to a sort of “bundle” of different generative mechanisms, only analytically disentangle-able. There are, therefore, both “horizontal” explications – i.e. explain some events through antecedent (but on-the-same-level of reality) mechanism and causes: a social fact is explained by another social fact; a psychological fact is

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explained by another psychological one, etc. – and “vertical” ones – explain a mechanism through another more “basic” one, which, in turn, becomes a new explanandum. As a consequence, science develops both in specific terms (horizontally) and in interdisciplinary terms (vertically) and realizes itself in a “progression” that brings an increasingly deep knowledge about the structures, powers and generative mechanisms of its objects. The right way to describe scientific progress is as an excavation, a deepening, that asymptotically gets closer and closer to the last fundament, to the alethic truth. The tree of science, with its ramifications and progressive historical growth, shows us that the structure of the real is really layered. 3.4 A theory of emergence: dependency, autonomy and causal retroaction In open systems, reality (objects of knowledge with their own events and states of affairs), generative mechanisms are mixed, one with the other, and experimentation is needed to separate them. Science tries to explain the existence of a reality, isolating the generative mechanisms causing it. Each explanation refers to the structure of reality and therefore science usually advances through “deepenings” and implications. Let us examine an example given by Bhaskar about the explanation of a chemical reaction: Layer 1:

2Na +2HCL = 2NaCL+H2

Explained by Layer 2:

theory of atomic valency numbers

Mechanism 1

Explained by Layer 3:

theory of atomic structure and of electrons

Mechanism 2

Explained by Layer 4:

competing theories of subatomic structure

Mechanism 3

In this example, a theory about atomic structure and electrons “explains” a theory about valency number. These theories explain the functioning of many different mechanisms, and their relationship explains the relationship between the mechanisms. Mechanisms are neither events nor objects localisable in space: they are simply tendencies of some natural genre. In “nature” each mechanism typical of ontological layers is concurrent with the others and not subsequent to them. Here we find the “vertical” explanation of science, which implies different layers of reality. Between “scientific layers” (physical, chemical, biological, psychological, social, etc.) there is not a “cause-effect” relation, in which deeper layers cause, one after another, more superficial

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ones. In the same discipline, instead, we can conceive direct “cause-effect” relations, with reference to “horizontal” explanations. If we applied the horizontal explanation between different disciplines, then we would have to suppose a “monovalent” ontology and a reductionist epistemology, in which one layer explains and produces all the others above. For this reason, we are never able, starting from a “deeper” mechanism, to predict a “more superficial” mechanism. On the contrary, we usually have to discover the deeper mechanism before, in turn, it becomes the phenomenon that has to be explained along with the deepening process of science. So, if the ontological stratification of reality does not involve any sort of vertical explanation at all – because each level has its own laws and rules – then we need to understand what kind of relation there is between different layers. The relation between deeper and more superficial layers is double: 1 of rootedness; and 2 of emergence. The more superficial mechanism is rooted in and emergent from a deeper one, but is irreducible to it. The theories of emergence, while acknowledging that the most complex aspect of reality (life, consciousness, etc.) presupposes the less complex ones (matter), nonetheless insist that the former have irreducible traits, sui generis, that cannot be conceived at a lower level. Theories of emergence fight on two fronts: 1 against dualistic or pluralistic theories that argue the more superficial layers are completely independent of the lower ones; and, 2 against reductionist theories that regard the more superficial layers as somehow fictional.16 Usually, any phenomenon presupposes many levels of reality, perhaps all of them, but it is rooted in only one or two, closer to it. In many cases of emergence, though not in all, or in many part-whole relationships (for example, between individuals and society) we have processes of composition. Each level is autonomous, i.e. governed by its own mechanisms that the appropriate sciences have to explain. The “temptations” of atomism and of holism have their origin here, but both of them are reductionist and “elisionist”. Realism and a theory of emergence can describe “wholes” made of “parts”, which are “irreducible wholes” themselves and are part of more comprehensive wholes.17 There are three kinds of relations between layers: 1 Ontological presupposition: a layer, in order to exist, ontologically presupposes another one, but it is not always the case that the one comes before the other: we can have co-emergence; 2 Vertical explanation: mechanisms of one level presuppose the mechanisms of another, presupposing it and ontologically presupposing everything that regards it. Ontological presupposition is transitive, the vertical one is not; and 3 Relation of composition: in this case, the vertical explanation not only proceeds from “parts” to “whole” (for example, from individuals to society), but can proceed from “whole” to “parts”.

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4 Epistemology. Historicity and change in science Against this first aspect of the “vexatious matter of science”, there is another one: the “irremediable” historicity of its contents. Indeed, we cannot in any way conceive of science as a historically unconditioned social system: on the contrary, we can observe its progress, based on men’s rational activity, precisely because it is historically conditioned. We can study science in a “sociological” way and look at its “history”, because it is an open system where social, psychological, economic, political and religious mechanisms all cause and create knowledge, in their own way. Knowledge is always a “product”, an “activity”, “operating” inside and towards previous events. Every scientist is a sort of “heir”. Bhaskar sees scientific discovery as a kind of “multi-phase” process. Normally, the explanation of an explanandum presupposes the construction of a theoretical model, which, in turn, depends on previous and handed-down knowledge. The GM that is isolated as a cause has then to be put through a final test (whose criteria of truth can be direct perception or causality – i.e. the faculty of an object of analysis to cause empirical modifications in another). We have a three-phase process. Science: 1 Identifies a phenomenon, starting from curiosity (or a question) that can also be pre-scientific; 2 Builds an explanation and tests it empirically, in order to isolate some GM in action; and 3 That GM, in turn, becomes a new phenomenon to be explained. TR is different from empirical realism because it considers the first phase, the selection of a phenomenon, as the invariance of a result rather than as a regularity; TR is different from idealism because what is imagined in the second phase is not only “imaginary”, but can also be real. In this process several layers of reality are discovered (deep ontology). Only in this way can we reconcile the growth of knowledge and the changes in its contents, continuity (Nagel) and discontinuity (Popper): in brief, the rationality of scientific changes. On the other hand, only the idea that reality is ontologically layered can explain the temporal stratification of science, its subdivision into “sciences” and its logic of discovery. Therefore, science proceeds from identification of invariances to the analysis/ classification of structures and the GMs explaining them. By maintaining a realist perspective, we can thus reconcile the “Humean”, the “Lockean”, the “Leibnizean” knowledge of the real, through Bhaskar’s “DREI(C) model” (see Figure 3.3) Within a “Humean” science, we can have a coherent description of a basic level of reality (Si), which starts from the observation of empirical regularities. Given these empirical regularities, (normal) science begins the construction of explanatory models and of experiments that can verify the possible explanations (in competition). In “normal” science, routine anomalies in theoretical

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Figure 3.3 Bhaskar’s DREIC model D: R: E: I: C:

Description of behaviour (empirical regularities); Retroduction, find an analogy with other known phenomena; Elaboration and Elimination of alternative explanations; Identification (ideally) of generative mechanisms at work; Correction (secondary revision of the facts observed).

models are eliminated or cleared. If anomalies are capable of challenging the coherence of the theory (the Popperian moment), then a period of “revolutionary science” begins, in which different research programmes are in competition (Lakatos and Feyerabend). New theories are built, and they try to retroductively find a new GM. This is the “Kantian” moment of science, in which new explanans are imagined. If the theory can be empirically tested, in a closed system, then inadequate theories are eliminated. In this phase, new measuring and observation instruments are invented and built, and are then used to make visible new GMs at a deeper level of reality (Sj). In this phase, scientists “referentially detach” the GM itself as the reason/ cause of the alethic truth of the phenomenon situated at the base level. At this moment of identification, the activities can simultaneously activate: 1 The retrospective correction of the basic-level description of a structure’s explanandum; 2 The analytic description of deeper level properties of the portrayed phenomenon, which starts a new “cycle” of scientific elaboration; and 3 Scientific vanguards can start to research the reasons/ causes of the phenomenon at an even deeper layer (Sk), transforming the explanans into a new explanandum. Five characteristics of the discovery of level Sj must be underlined: 1 If the reason/cause discovered at the Sj level can be empirically tested (empirical criteria) or induced from its effects on reality (causal criteria), and if, from this reason/ cause, we can infer the “normic” behaviour of the analysed object, observable at the Si level, then the most stringent criteria for our knowledge of natural necessity (synthetic a priori Lockean necessity) is fulfilled; 2 Therefore, we have the best reason (deductive) to ascribe truth and necessity to those observed phenomena. So we can say, for example, that “it is true that x is y” when we have a scientific explanation (given at the T1 time) and we simply believe there is such an explanation; 3 Scientific vanguards researching Sk can decide – at a Leibnizean level of natural necessity – to consider the characteristics of Sj structure as delineating the substance or the nature at issue. We are at the level of the real definition of substance (causal laws then appear as the tendencies of natural kinds,

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realized in closed conditions). That means considering those characteristics as analytic a posteriori and, since all knowledge is fallible, it also means that this analytic truth (true at T1 time), can be afterwards falsified; 4 In this explanatory dialectic, there is always a taxonomic and nomethetic, existential and normic dialectic. The knowledge of natural necessities stimulates research on natural essences that, in turn, stimulates research on their ways of operating. Starting from the general notions of reference and referent, such knowledge leads to a wider notion of existence and classification, so that transfactually active tendencies can be grouped into “natural kinds” (of causal laws); 5 There exists an epistemological dialectic, according to which the discovery of a theoretical incoherency leads to the research of more complete explanations, which, in turn, can make new incoherencies visible, etc. (for example, Godelian logic, according to which no formal system can be both coherent and complete). Through this description of scientific dialectic, it is finally possible to criticize both empirical realism and transcendental idealism. The criticism of empirical realism is based on the Lockean possibility of discovering a knowledge made of real essences (this assumption comes through the problem of induction); the criticism of idealism shows how knowledge of real essences is given in a dialectic of explanatory and taxonomical a posteriori knowledge, caused by the empirical and transitive progression of events.

5 Social ontology. The possibility of a science of “the social sphere”: critical naturalism and the Transformational Model of Social Activity 5.1 The necessary unity and diversity of science: possibilities and limits of naturalism Although not all sciences can make use of experiments, all of them – to be considered as “sciences” – must have a similar form and the same objective: to discover “scientific” explanations of determined facts.18 In other words, they develop explanations that are not already implicit in the initial questions: they discover something that “lies beneath” the phenomena. In The Possibility of Naturalism (1979), Bhaskar tackles this big question. As a matter of fact, the opening question in the essay is: In what measure can society be studied in the same way as nature? The answer is: to a considerable extent – on the condition that a positivistic view of science (and so also the empiricist ontology), used both in standard natural sciences and in the anti-positivistic criticisms used in the majority of social sciences (historicism, culturalism, hermeneutics in primis), is dismissed. The error in standard science lies in an ingenuous “naturalism” (empirical realism); the error in the social sciences lies in the fact that their criticism ingenuously “accepts” an empiricist theory of society and of causality. Bhaskar, rather, proposes a “naturalism” asserting

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the existence of a unity of method (neither a unity of subjects, i.e. “reductionism”, nor an identity of methods, i.e. “scientism”) between natural and social sciences. It is about an anti-positivistic naturalism that points out the difference in scientific method on the basis of the different ontologies of their subjects, but also observes their identity in so far as the kind of reasoning and the concepts used to produce “scientific” knowledge are concerned.19 In both cases it is about shifting from the “manifest” to the “latent”, i.e. from perceivable phenomena to the structures generating them, which are not always perceivable. Both types of research employ causal explanations, use theoretical frameworks, and move retroductively (not only inductively or deductively). However, there are precise ontological (i.e. what is social reality), epistemological (how can we know “the social”) and relational limits to the “identification” of natural and social science (absolute naturalism). Ontological limits: social structures are always dependent on people’s activities and concepts, and are always space-temporally contingent. Epistemological limits: social events and phenomena show themselves only in open systems, so that definitive experiments or tests to verify such hypotheses are not possible. In addition, social relations, i.e. the subject of sociological analysis, change in the course of time, so that theory is never established once and for all. Therefore, the criterion of progress in sociological knowledge is not predictive but explanatory. Relational limits: social sciences are part of their own field of research (auto-reference), so that theories, in turn, can be explained as objects (sociology of science). Critical naturalism, unlike positivism, claims the transfactuality of social structures, while insisting on their conceptuality (dependence on concepts); against hermeneutics, it claims the intransitivity both of beliefs and of meanings, while it insists on their possibility of being explained scientifically (as causes of action). Besides, it claims the total untenability of the “Humean” taboo that forbids the derivation of any “necessity” from a “state of affairs”. 5.2 The society as relation: against individualism, structuralism and dialectic The possibility of science is due to the traits of its subject matter. In our case, it is due to the ontology of society. Social objects are absolutely irreducible to natural ones. They have a “non-natural” surplus that makes them analysable only as social objects. Society as a scientific object is necessarily theoretical, i.e. not directly perceivable. It can be detected only by its effects on persons and their social environment. It is like a magnetic field. Society does not consist of individuals or groups but shows the sum of the perduring relations in which individuals and groups are involved. “The social sphere” is not the “group” or the “collective” or the “macro”. “The social sphere” is a perduring relationality (at all empirical levels of analysis). Society is a whole with specific emergent powers that are not predictable or explainable from the powers of its parts (individuals).20

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Society consists of quite enduring relations between persons and groups, and of relations between these relations and between these relations, the nature and the products of these relations. Hence society is made of first-, second- and third-degree relations (i.e. relations, relations between relations, and relations between relations and with their non-relational ambit). This relational conception of society does not suppose at all the irrelevance of individuals. Indeed, psychology and sociology refer to different layers of reality and thus to different GMs. In addition, the material presence of social effects consists only in persons’ changes and in changes made by individuals on other material objects. In order to explain individuals, society, and their connection and dynamics, Bhaskar created the Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA).21 TMSA is a transcendental argument against the ontological, epistemological and methodological requirements of three alternative models of sociological explanation. The first can be defined as “individualism”. In this model, action is everything, while structure is only a “name” or a mere aggregate. The second can be defined as “holism” or structuralism. According to it, social structure is everything and thus we do not need to know anything about persons to explain what happens, reinforced by “holists” also considering that persons are epiphenomena of structures. There is a third form of sociological explanation, the “dialectical” one. In this model, society shapes individuals, who, in turn, create society. This model puts together an idealistic voluntarism and a deterministic mechanicism. Society is an objectification or externalization of individuals and the latter are the result of an internalization or conscious reappropriation of society. According to this theory, a social process is a linear sequence of causes (some individual, others social). However, persons and society are not two moments of the same dialectical movement: they are two different matters because two different GMs must be considered, one social and one personal. Obviously social structure can be the result of previous objectifications, but, in each action, they are analytically irreducible and really indispensable to personal action.22 According to Bhaskar, therefore, there is a real ontological distinction between persons and structures.23 So we can say that “Society is both the ever-present condition (material cause) and the continually reproduced outcome of human agency. And praxis is both work, that is, conscious production, and (normally unconscious) reproduction of the conditions of production, that is society. One could refer to the former as the duality of structure, and the latter as the duality of praxis”.24 However, there is a specific asymmetry between the two “dualities”, in the way they refer to psychology and sociology. The duality of structure clings to social mechanisms (reasons explain production, whilst the social mechanisms proper, explain reproduction), while with the duality of action we have two mechanisms – one social and one psychological – that refer to two different layers of reality. Persons are not relations and societies are not self-aware agents. Practice represents both conscious production and unaware reproduction of the conditions of production, i.e. society. Agents act intentionally (it is

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a personal and not social power of theirs) to reach their objectives and, in this way, reproduce and sometimes transform society, unintentionally. They never create it, they reproduce or transform it. When social structures change, usually it happens as “unintended consequences” of action and seldom as direct aims. That is why many powers referring to “personal” layers are not relevant for a sociological explanation. Once we recognize this ontological difference, we need to introduce some notions that mediate between persons and societies, ones that mark their stable inter-relations, their “contact points”. These relational “forms” must simultaneously: 1 “pre-exist” individuals; 2 “last” longer than them; and 3 be “occupied by” individuals. Bhaskar identifies these forms of mediation in the positions (status-roles) occupied by individuals and in the “practices” that are activated in each position. This is called the “positions-practices system” and is a relational one. It is the subject of sociology, which therefore does not study the direct relations between individuals and society. In this sense, social structures are similar to natural ones, because they are GMs that limit and allow some kinds of action. However, according to Bhaskar there are real differences between social and natural structures. The former, in fact, as sui generis entities: 1 do not exist independently from those activities of which they are made up and which they govern (and are not empirically identifiable as different from those activities upon which they are “activity-dependent” or the “auto-poietic” trait of the conditions of acting itself); 2 do not exist independently from conceptions agents have about what they are doing while they are doing it (the “concept-dependence” of structures); and 3 can be only relatively lasting (the “geo-historically dependent” trait of structures, which eventually can change). Thus society can be seen as “an articulated whole of these relatively independent and lasting generative structures”. We can sum up what has been said through a theoretical elaboration of Bhaskar’s own. Social life (see Figure 3.4) is conceptualized as consisting of four independent “levels” (the “four-planar” social being): A B C D

the the the the

plane plane plane plane

of of of of

material transactions with nature; inter-/intra-subjective (personal) actions; social relations; and the subjectivity of the agent.

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Figure 3.4 Four-planar social being encompassing the social cube Source: R. Bhaskar, Plato Etcetera, London: Verso, 1994, p. 97

The “social cube” is formed of Planes B and C together with material reality, A on one side and with the reality of human subjectivity, D on the other. It is, therefore, important not to confuse C + B (lasting structures + actual interrelations) with human Action which has its own powers. On the other hand, the social cube must be contextualized in space/ time. So, social structures that pre-exist the acting of individuals enable/ constrain them, and action can have reproductive/ transformative consequences on structures, through temporal elaboration processes. Analysis could be more complex, if we opened the D level, by considering the stratification of subject, and the B level, by considering the stratification of action. We could also analyse the relation between A and B, or B and C, and so on, increasing the kind of relations to be explored, without confusing them. From this ontology and this sociological methodology, an important issue arises about agency and its explanatory status. Bhaskar attempts to make two important points clear: 1 that the reasons of agency are equal to causes; and 2 that agency is both irreducible to other modes of natural causation, and yet “naturalistic”, i.e. similar, but not identical, to them. Discovering reasons of agency is a kind of causal explanation that takes place between other and emergent social and non-social powers. About point 1, we know that there are different reductionist theories that explain action without

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referring to reasons. Other theories assume reasons and causes to be two incomparable kinds of explanations. According to Bhaskar, reasons are similar to the causal structures of nature and are empirically knowable. Intentional actions suppose the existence of beliefs and desires. In short, when an actor believes that by doing one thing, he can reach something else, and wants to do so, then reason is a cause of action. Reasons can also be causes of tendencies, i.e. they can become a habitus. As regards point 2, we know that the notion of reason comes from a mental lexicon that also includes notions such as beliefs, desires and intentions, which are full-blown emergent powers, which in turn are the specific subject matter of psychology. According to Bhaskar, all these notions presuppose a personal “power”, much more fundamental, the one of consciousness. Consciousness is a power, emergent from a more “fundamental” layer of reality. Bhaskar therefore elaborates a theory of “mind (consciousness) – matter”, referring to a non-reductive materialism. Emergent mental powers depend on the existence of matter but are not reducible to it. As Collier underlines, this theory leaves some questions unresolved: 1 Do these powers belong to some substance, or are they only emergent from some complex matter? 2 Do these non-material powers belong to some material power (for example, mind)? 3 Do these non-material powers belong to some immaterial power? It is, however, a “materialistic” explanation because the presence of some physical and material substrate is supposed. This is attributable to Bhaskar’s epistemological choice to identify causality (i.e. the capacity to produce effects on matter) as the criterion for the existence of any non-perceivable entity. It is also about a theory of synchronic emergence, according to which states of affairs that are rooted in and emergent from other states of affairs, can/have emerge(d) simultaneously because ontologically the one supposes the other. To sum up, sociology is: 1 an explanatory and not a predictive science; 2 with no possibility for experimental closure; and 3 with necessarily hermeneutic assumptions. Sociology cannot undertake experiments to decide between competing theories; it can only start from constant events. Therefore, if experiments cannot be made in sociology, is it a science all the same? Yes, because sociology: 1 can investigate open systems in the same ways natural sciences do, using the RRREI(C) model; and 2 can find something similar to the experiment, for example analysing exceptional and relatively closed phenomena. Only at the last level of the explanation do social sciences lack something – experiments. However, in special cases, such as revolutions or epochal social

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changes, when individuals want to change society, we can have something approximating experiments. Social sciences must proceed through the RRREI(C) model. This model is more complex than the previous one, because it is about science dealing with open systems, where lots of GMs influence each other and create the observable phenomena. Therefore explanations proceed through: R: Resolution (analysis) of a complex event into its components; R: Redescription of the components in a theoretically significant manner; R: Retroduction of the possible antecedent causes; E: Elimination of alternative causes; I: Identification of the genarative cause; and, if necessary C: Correction of the explanandum.

Notes 1 Transcendental realism and critical naturalism are the results of Roy Bhaskar’s research, culminating at the end of the 1970s. Since the 1980s this reflection has developed further into dialectic and meta-realism. In brief, we could say that transcendental realism is the basis of a general ontology derived from the analysis of scientific practice, whilst critical naturalism represents the possibility of elaborating a realist ontology in the social sciences. 2 The debate about philosophy and sociology of science, after the collapse of neopositivistic certainties, is so widely and well documented that it is not possible to summarise it in a few lines. For a general introduction, see M. Hollis and S. Lukes (eds), Rationality and Relativism, Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1982; M. Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstruction in Philosophy of Science, Brighton: Harvester, 1980; D. Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, London: Routledge, 1976, 2nd edition Chicago University Press, 1991; B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987; L. Fleck, The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979; K. Knorr Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge. An essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science, Oxford: Pergamon, 1981; G. Holton, Scientific Imagination, Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998; A. Pickering (ed.), Science as practice and culture, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992; S. Woolgar (ed.), Knowledge and Reflexivity. New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge, London and Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1988. 3 The aim of this essay is not to present the whole of Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy. I will mainly deal with his two works that are the base of critical and transcendental realism: R. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, London: Verso, 1975; and The Possibility of Naturalism, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1979. Bhaskar has developed his theory for 20 years, revisiting his philosophical positions toward “dialectical critical realism” and the “philosophy of meta-reality”. For this development see: R. Bhaskar, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, London: Verso, 1986; Reclaiming Reality, London: Verso, 1989; (ed.), Harré and his Critics, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990; (ed.) A Meeting of Minds, London: Socialist Society, 1991; Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991; Dialectic. The Pulse of Freedom, London: Verso, 1993; Plato, Etcetera, London: Verso, 1994; From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul, London and New York: Routledge, 2000; Reflections on Meta-reality: Trascendence, Emancipation and Everyday Life, New Daly, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002. Particularly relevant for

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Riccardo Prandini an introduction to his thought: Mervyn Hartwig (ed.), Dictionary of Critical Realism, London: Routledge, 2007. There already exists a rich literature about Bhaskar’s works. In particular, the following are fundamental for a sociological translation of Bhaskar’s theories: M.S. Archer, R. Bhaskar, A. Collier, T. Lawson and A. Norrie, Critical Realism. Essential Readings, London and New York: Routledge, 1998; A. Collier, Critical Realism. An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy, London: Verso, 1994. A. Sayer, Method in Social Science. A Realist Approach, London: Routledge, 1992; Realisms and Social Science, London: Sage, 2000; M.S. Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; A. Collier, Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. There are several works in the history and philosophy of science that are relevant to Bhaskar’s work: R. Harré, The Principles of Scientific Thinking, London: Macmillan, 1970; P. Manicas, “The Concept of Social Structure”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour X: 2, 1980; “The Social Sciences Since World War II: The Rise and Fall of Scientism”, in W. Outhwaite and S. P. Turner (eds), Social Science Methodology, London: Sage, 2007, pp. 7–31; A Realist Philosophy of Social Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; W. Outhwaite, “Philosophy of Social Science”, in B. Turner (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995. About the same “empiricist” root of the two “classic” anti-realisms, see: R. Harré, Varieties of Realism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986; W. Outhwaite, “Toward a Realist Perspective”, in G. Morgan (ed.), Beyond Method, London: Sage, 1983; New Philosophies of Social Sciences, London: Macmillan, 1987. For Italian debate, see: M. Ferraris, Il mondo esterno, Milan: Bompiani, 2001; “Inemendabilità, Ontologia, realtà sociale”, Rivista di estetica, 19 (2002): 160–199; Goodbye Kant! Cosa resta oggi della critica della ragion pura, Milan: Bompiani, 2004. For an anthropological foundation of sociological realism, see: M. Archer, Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. R. Bhaskar, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, London: Verso, 1986, p. 35. It is not only “simple” truths that are given by mere empirical observation (each of them has taken centuries to be “certified”). Now, after centuries of discussions, tests, experiments, after the invention of telescopes, of cameras (and of the spaceships to send them into space), we are sure about it. There exist many events and states of affairs that, though not perceivable by our sense apparatus, nevertheless exist (e.g. some audio frequencies). Knowledge is not complete and one can hypothesise that the class of unknowable facts and structures is not empty, and that the class of unperceivable facts and structures may be unempty-able. Also, some generative mechanisms can exist even if they are not operating at the moment, or are counteracted by other generative mechanisms and their effects are blocked. About the notion of cause and explanation, see: R. Harré, “Modes of explanation”, in D.J. Hilton (ed.), Contemporary Science and Natural Explanation, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1988; C.R. Varela and R. Harré, “Conflicting Varieties of Realism: Causal Powers and the Problems of Social Structure”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, XXVI, 3, 1996; R. Harré and E.H. Madden, Causal Powers, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975; D. Elder-Vass, “Emergence and the Realist Account of Cause”, Journal of Critical Realism, 4, 2005: 315–38. About the importance of phenomenology, see: R. De Monticelli, La conoscenza personale, Milan: Guerini e Associati, 1998. On the invisible ontology of society, see: B. Smith, “L’ontologie de la réalité sociale. Une critique de John Searle”, in P. Livet and R. Ogien (eds), L’enquête ontologique. Mode d’existence des objets sociaux, Paris: Éditions de l’Ethess, 2002, pp. 185–197; P. Livet and R. Ogien (eds), L’enquête ontologique. Mode d’existence

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des objets sociaux, Paris: Éditions de l’Ethess, 2002; C. Lawson, J. Latis and N. Martins, Contributions to Social Ontology, London and New York: Routledge, 2007; D. Koespell and L.S. Moss, John Searle’s Idea About Social Reality, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003; J.M. Berthelot, “Sociologie et Ontologie”, in P. Livet and R. Ogien (eds), L’enquête ontologique. Mode d’existence des objets sociaux, Paris: Éditions de l’Ethess, 2002, pp. 65–84; P. Livet, “Ontologie, institution et explication ontologique”, in P. Livet and R. Ogien (eds), L’enquête ontologique. Mode d’existence des objets sociaux, Paris: Éditions de l’Ethess, 2002, pp. 15–41; J. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, New York: Free Press, 1995; “L’ontologie de la réalité sociale. Réponse à Barry Smith”, in P. Livet and R. Ogien (eds), L’enquête ontologique. Mode d’existence des objets sociaux, Paris: Éditions de l’Ethess, 2002, pp. 199–207; R. Prandini, “La sociologia nei limiti della realtà”, Sociologia e Politiche Sociali, 3, 2004, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2006. According to Bhaskar: “mechanisms endure even when not acting; and act in their normal way even when the consequents of the law-like statements they ground are, owing to the operation of intervening mechanisms or countervailing causes, unrealized. It is the role of experimental scientist to exclude such interventions, which are usual; and to trigger the mechanism so that it is active. The activity of the mechanism may then be studied without interference. And it is this characteristic pattern of activity or mode of operation that is described in the statement of a causal law. It is only under closed conditions that there will be a one-to-one relationship between the causal law and the sequence of events. And it is normally only in the laboratory that these enduring mechanisms of nature [ … ] become actually manifest and empirically accessible to men”, A Realist Theory of Science, ibid., p. 46. The aim of the experiment is to activate a single mechanism, isolated from others, and to register its effects (relation between antecedent and consequent). Bhaskar concludes that “the world consists of mechanisms not events. Such mechanisms combine to generate the flux of phenomena that constitute the actual states and happenings of the world. They may be said to be real, though it is rarely that they are actually manifest and rarer still that they are empirically identified by men. They are the intransitive object of scientific theory. They are quite independent of men – as thinkers, causal agents and perceivers. They are not unknowable, although knowledge of them depends upon a rare blending of intellectual, practico-technical and perceptual skills. They are not artificial constructs. But neither are they Platonic forms. For they can become manifest to men in experience. Thus we are not imprisoned in caves, either of our own or of nature’s making. We are not doomed to ignorance. But neither we are spontaneously free. This is the arduous task of science: the production of the knowledge of those enduring and continually active mechanisms of nature that produce the phenomena of our world”, A Realist Theory of Science, ibid., p. 47. The literature about emergent properties is rapidly increasing. See: D. Elder-Vass, The Causal Power of Social Structures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; “For Emergence: Refining Archer’s Account of Social Structure”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37: 1, March 2007, pp. 25–44; “A Method for Social Ontology”, Journal of Critical Realism, 62, 2007, pp. 226–249. About mechanisms of emergence, see: R.K. Sawyer, Social Emergence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. About mechanisms and explanation, see: M. Bunge, Emergence and Convergence, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Maybe at this point it is better to dismiss the “whole-part” metaphor, and to use the “system-ambient” one. See W. Outhwaite, Concept Formation in Social Science, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983; “Toward a Realist Perspective”, in G. Morgan (ed.), Beyond Method, London: Sage, 1983; “Philosophy of Social Science”, in B. Turner (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985; M.

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Riccardo Prandini Bunge, Finding Philosophy in Social Science, London: Yale University Press, 1996; M. Hollis, The Philosophy of Social Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; T. Lawson, Economics and Reality, London: Routledge, 1997. M.S. Archer and W. Outhwaite, Defending Objectivity, London: Routledge, 2004. About the relationship between “the whole and the parts”, in line with realism, see: B. Smith, “An essay on Material Necessity”, in P. Hanson and B. Hunter (eds), “Return of the A Priori”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 18, 1992; Partes and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, Munchen-Wien: Philosophia Verlag, 1982. Generally speaking, sociologists have never seriously considered husserlian “mereology”. Only recently has this fundamental part of phenomenology been discovered. M. Archer has reviewed Bhaskar’s TMSA model, modifying those parts that were dangerously close to Giddens’ theory of structuration, i.e. to a kind of central conflation. For this discussion, see M.S. Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. In fact, Archer’s remarks are adequate to understand the relation between person and society. Archer develops her realist criticism against individualism, holism and “central conflation” in Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, and in Being Human: The Problem of Agency. The notion of central conflation characterises theorists such as Giddens and Bourdieu. There is also an interesting debate around the theme of structures. Realism is strongly interested in structuring processes in society, to protest against recent theories of destructuration or of liquid society. See, for example, H. Patomaki, “Concepts of ‘Action’, ‘Structure’ and ‘Power’ in ‘Critical Social Realism’: A Positive and Reconstructive Critique”, in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, XXI, 2, 1990; D. Porpora, “Four concepts of social structure”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, XIX: 2, 1993; “Cultural Rules and Material Relations”, Sociological Theory, XI, 2, 1993; C. New, “Structure, Agency, and Social Transformation”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 24: 3, 1994; M.S. Archer, “For Structure: its Reality, Properties and Powers: A Reply to Anthony King”, The Sociological Review, 2000, 464–72; Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. R. Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, ibid, p. 34 ff.

Part 2

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Morphogenesis Realism’s explanatory framework Margaret S. Archer

1 Introduction Philosophers of science or of the social sciences incline to one of two roles, although the dividing line is not strict. First, there are “commentators”, who largely restrict themselves to analysing the doings of others: be they scientists or investigators. Such commentaries – critical, clarificatory, cautionary, diagnostic, evaluative and sometimes hortative – may indeed prove useful to the worker-bees they study. Second, there are (a smaller number) of philosophers of science who explicitly define their role as “under-labouring” for a given discipline(s), by supplying an explanatory programme, a toolkit of concepts and, very occasionally, an illustrative model to guide practitioners. The latter has been the case with Roy Bhaskar, who has described his own role as under-labouring for the social sciences. His has been a generous contribution, consisting of three main elements: a realist social ontology, vindicating the propriety of attributing emergent properties and powers to the social world; a fallibilist epistemology, insisting upon the limitations of our perspectival knowledge and thus the invalidity of substituting what we (think we) know for the way things really are (even if that eludes us); and a judgemental rationality, advocating a constructive (though pro tem) method of arbitrating upon theoretical disputes.1 In social theorizing, this generous under-labouring has gone even further and Bhaskar advanced the illustrative Transformational Model of Social Action (TMSA).2 Nevertheless, none of the above does the sociologist’s (or any other social scientist’s) job for them. In a nutshell, the Weberian task of explaining why, in any given case, social matters are “so, rather than otherwise” remains to be undertaken. In practice, this means that specific accounts are required to explain how particular parts of the social order originated and came to stand in a given relationship to one another, whose actions were responsible for this, through which interactions, when and where and with what consequences. In all of this, the practising sociologist has to know a great deal about the historical origins and current operations of “x”. Such practitioners may feel drawn towards realism but, even with its under-labouring, realist philosophy of science cannot give them guidelines about how to examine the questions listed above.

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This is what the “morphogenetic approach” seeks to provide. It is an explanatory framework, which complements the realist philosophy of science and furnishes specialized practitioners with guidelines for explaining the problems they have in hand. Far from making such specialists (in the sociology of health, education, migration, etc.) redundant, it is they alone who are qualified to specify the relevant parts, relationships and mechanisms pertinent to problems in their areas of expertise. What the explanatory framework offers are guidelines for how to undertake morphogenetic and morphostatic analysis, whatever the problem may be. A hallmark of realist philosophy and social theory alike is that both are meant to be of practical use.

2 Structure One way to introduce this explanatory framework (the morphogenetic approach) and to bring out its close connections with practical social analysis is briefly to glance back at its own genesis. It is noteworthy that besides Pierpaolo Donati only two social theorists – namely, John Parker3 and Frédéric Vandenberghe4 – have recognized that I developed this approach (during the 1970s) in the course of confronting a substantive problem about social structure. The problem was the difference between the educational systems of England and France, in both of which I had studied. These, I maintained, were so different in their organization as to engender completely different processes of educational interaction and patterns of change in the two countries. At that time, the realist explication of emergent causal powers was lacking in the philosophy of social science.5 Nevertheless, thanks to David Lockwood’s seminal distinction between “system” and “social” integration,6 it was possible to conceive of the two (taken to refer to “structure” and “agency”) as exerting different kinds of causal powers – ones that varied independently of one another and were factually distinguishable over time – despite the lack of a well articulated social ontology. Thanks to Walter Buckley, my attention was drawn to “morphogenesis”, that is, “to those processes which tend to elaborate or change a system’s given form, structure or state”,7 in contrast to “morphostasis” which refers to those processes in a complex system that tend to preserve the above unchanged. However, Buckley himself regarded “structure” as “an abstract construct, not something distinct from the ongoing interactive process but rather a temporary, accommodative representation of it at any one time”,8 thus tending to “dodge questions of social ontology”.9 All the same, when taken together, these two theorists enabled the morphogenetic approach to be advanced in 1979, as a temporary, accommodative representation of realist social theory as it were. What it gradually aimed to do was to set out a framework for giving an account of the existence of particular structures (social institutions in this instance) at particular times and in particular places. In the concrete case in question, the phenomenon to explain was the existence of a decentralized educational system in England and a centralized one in France. Further research revealed that a more general

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structural phenomenon called for explanation, namely the existence of state educational systems at all. However, that is precisely what practical social analysis does. It leads us to detect relations between component parts that appear to have irreducible, relational properties, which realism calls emergent and the influence of which it regards as the exercise of emergent causal powers. Such was my definition of state educational systems.10 What the morphogenetic approach first set out to do was to explain where such forms of social organization came from – that is, how emergent entities in fact emerged. Retrospectively, it is clear why the confluence with what came to be known as critical realism – advancing a social ontology of emergence, and the morphogenetic approach – analysing the source of such relational properties, gelled well together. This is because, as Elder-Vass puts it, “any account of a specific case of emergence will include a temporal element, an explanation of how the entity concerned has come to exist”.11 In short, this was no marriage of convenience. If causal powers were to be attributed to any aspect of social structure, such a claim needed to be grounded in a social ontology that was earthed against reification. Equally, if emergent (social) entities were held to exist, whether or not their properties were exercised as powers, then an explanatory methodology was required to account for their social origins. It has been argued – albeit quite sympathetically – that this is as far as the morphogenetic approach goes. According to Elder-Vass: However, morphogenesis does not explain how an entity can possess emergent properties. Such an explanation always depends on the existence of a specific set of synchronic relations between the parts: morphogenesis explains the development of such a set of relations over time, but the operation of a causal power at any given moment depends upon the presence of those relations at that specific moment in time. Thus the temporal element in the explanation of emergence must always be complemented by a synchronic relational element.12 He is entirely correct in this statement, but not, I believe, in maintaining that the morphogenetic approach does not or cannot (it is not clear which he asserts) also furnish guidelines for synchronic analysis. That is, I believe him to be incorrect unless he insists that a “complete causal analysis” of the real powers or emergent properties of any emergent entity must proceed in the order he itemizes. That would be to start from a list of its characteristic parts and an explanation of how these must be related to each other to form a whole, prior to a morphogenetic account of how this state of affairs comes about and a morphostatic account of how it is sustained and thus proves relatively enduring. Sociology is much messier than that; it begins from hunches not from the naming of parts, and probably would not get anywhere if it were to start from there. However, I do not see that the adequacy of any causal analysis depends upon the order of its completion – nor do I think this

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is his argument, because it makes far too much ride on the nature of the context of discovery. By briefly re-visiting the morphogenesis of state educational systems and their distinctive forms of structuring, I hope to show that this framework can account for both the diachronic development of such systems and also for the synchronic presence of those parts in those relations at those specific moments over which they endured – with the bonus of being able to say something13 about the conditions under which such relations may cease to hold. Although all structural properties found in any society are continuously activity-dependent, it is possible through analytical dualism to separate “structure” and “agency” and to examine their interplay in order to account for the structuring and re-structuring of the social order. Fundamentally, this is possible for two reasons. First, “structure” and “agency” are different kinds of emergent entities,14 as is shown by the differences in their properties and powers, despite the fact that they are crucial for each other’s formation, continuation and development. Thus, an educational system can be “centralized”, whilst a person cannot, and humans are “emotional”, which cannot be the case for structures. Second, and fundamental to the workability of this explanatory methodology, “structure” and “agency” operate diachronically over different time periods because (i) structure necessarily pre-dates the action(s) that transform it and, (ii) structural elaboration necessarily postdates those actions, as represented in the following diagram (Figure 4.1). Full significance is accorded to the timescale through which structure and agency themselves emerge, intertwine and redefine one another, since this is the bedrock of the explanatory format employed in accounting for any substantive change in social structure. These three phases will be worked through, in standard fashion, in the next section on culture. However, allow me to revert to studying the structuring of educational systems in order to illustrate how a sociologist working on a substantive problem from a realist perspective would utilize analytical dualism to delineate the phases of the sequence, thus explaining the problem in hand. This will also provide the opportunity for clarifying certain misconceptions about the morphogenetic approach. Usually, our thinking, though generally not our writing, begins at T4 (the fact that it also returns there will be dealt with when considering the

Figure 4.1 The basic morphogenetic sequence

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synchronic aspect). In other words, we note some relational property in the social order (or a sector of it) that seems to exert irreducible causal powers of its own kind – as detected through their tendential effects – even though its components can be fully described. The implication is that generative mechanisms, which exist largely unexercised will not usually attract the attention of social scientists. Although emergent causal powers are judged to be such according to the causal criterion, social science does rely upon (something of) empiricism’s perceptual criterion for their detection. Although the social scientist is not reliant upon (or expectant of finding) Humean “constant conjunctions”, nevertheless, an established correlation coefficient is not a gift horse to reject but rather an impetus to causal investigation. After all, our hunches usually derive from our observations. This was the case for the English and French educational systems as I encountered them in the 1960s. They were made up of the same components – schools, universities, teachers, students, texts, etc. – but the organization of these parts represented “decentralization” in the former and “centralization” in the latter. “Centralization” and “decentralization” were not mere labels but ways of summarizing how the organization of these two kinds of system generated distinctive constraints and enablements as well as different processes of change (facilitating “internal initiation” by teachers and “external transactions” by outside parties in England, whilst constraining most educational change in France to be centrally and “politically negotiated”). Equally, vested interests in reproduction versus transformation were entirely differently distributed to the elites of other institutions because of the high level of educational standardization in France, compared with the much greater differentiation of English education. Finally, the patterns of change were (then) “incremental” in England, but governed by legislative “stop-go” and punctuated by outbursts of direct action in France. The fundamental question was “why this difference?” – accompanied by its subsidiaries: Who was responsible? What interactions brought it about? When did matters become this way? To answer questions such as these, I suggest that in practice the social theorist generally moves backwards to the T2–T3 period, in quest of answers that take the form of “who did what, with or against whom, with such an outcome?” Note several points here. To begin with, although the quest may be for les responsables, usually it is impossible to pin responsibility on any particular group. This is because what emerges is the result of compromise and concession amongst those involved and does not conform closely to what anybody wanted. Indeed, such general dissatisfaction is what keeps morphogenesis going.15 Incidentally, this does mean that emergent properties can indeed be unintended consequences and, in society, they generally are. The reverse is clearly not the case because many unintended consequences lack emergent properties and powers. Nevertheless, this means that in defining social structure(s), no strict demarcation can be made between the two, with all unintended consequences being classified as “resultants”, even though many of them are just that.

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Next, examination of the interaction taking place between T2 and T3 is pointed and focused; we are explicitly searching for what led to those relational features at T4 that are important because of the causal powers they can exercise. It would seem obvious that many things that develop over time (it is unfortunate that in English the verb “to emerge” can be substituted grammatically for the verb “to develop”) may have nothing whatsoever to do with structural (or cultural or agential) emergence. Neither, it should go without saying, does the historicity of anything – social or otherwise – mean that it is an emergent entity. If it did, I would have to endow my tea set, inherited from a long-dead great-aunt, with causal powers because it has become an antique. Nevertheless, every current emergent structural property does have a history and an important part of giving a complete causal account of it is to explain from where it came. However, Sawyer has recently produced the misleading comment that: “Archer argued that it is emergence over time – morphogenesis – that makes emergent properties real and allows them to constrain individuals”.16 Of course, if something did not exist it could be neither real nor constraining – accounting for existence is crucial – but it is not what accounts for the causal properties and powers in the italicized verbs above. What does will be discussed next when we come to examine the activity-dependence of emergent entities, such as educational systems, in the present tense. Past actions, importantly including those of the long-dead, are indispensable to explaining how structures came to be organized the way they are (at any momentary T4), but not to the fact that they have relatively enduring properties possessing causal powers. Before that, let us first finish outlining the phases of the morphogenetic cycle. If the relevant chains of interaction are followed backwards from T3 to T2, it becomes clear that one or more of the parties involved devotes its time, energy and resources to the attempt to increase its influence over education because it seeks changes in that part of the social order. It pursues educational transformation and, if we are to understand its motivation, we need to know what it is this group sought to transform, how and why. This could be and, indeed, at one time was the desire to replace an absence by a presence (no provision for education by educational provisions). However, in that case, were the active group to have been unopposed, one would want to know why instruction was a matter of indifference to other parties in society. However, especially after social institutions became progressively more interdependent and interlinked in the course of modernity, initiatives for educational transformation were increasingly likely to meet with opposition from parties defending the institutional status quo in education. Having backtracked to this point (wherever it was in history) and established the key agents, it could be tempting to believe one had gone back far enough. The process would then be reversed and, having identified the key agents, a detailed account would be given of their interactions – culminating in the development at T4 of educational change, such as the establishment of a state system. This

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would be the procedure typical of methodological individualist approaches, such as “conflict theory”. Such accounts may be rich and detailed about the cut and thrust between protagonists, about alliances and counter-mobilization, and about the compromises and concessions that brought about a particular instance of morphogenesis – such as the advent of a given state educational system. However, none of these can give a complete account. Neither the participants, nor the form, nor the content of the interaction will have been fully explained. They remain accounts of “what happened”, without a suggestion about “why”. Conversely, the morphogenetic approach maintains that completeness requires the structural contextualization of the interaction initiated at T2. In short, it is necessary to broaden the temporal frame and return to the state of (educational) affairs at T1. This further backtracking alone yields the source of motives, of positions prises, of ideological commitments, of strategies adopted but, above all, of precisely what was wanted (and, often more importantly, not wanted) sufficient to move agents to engage in (educational) interaction. None of that can be understood without introducing the prior structural context that conditioned interaction between T1 and T2. Substantively, the prior form of education (at T1) was privately owned by the Church (Anglican in England) and by the religious orders (Catholic in France); its various components – often unconnected with one another – were designed, funded and staffed to service religious requirements alone. Certain other parts of society found themselves (meaning the institutional operations with which they were proximately involved as role incumbents) as “adventitious beneficiaries” of the religious definition of instruction – they could make use of the educational outputs supplied, at no cost to themselves. Others were in a situation such that their operations were impeded, both positively (the educated had acquired inappropriate values) and negatively (they had not gained the requisite skills). Yet other institutional sectors of society remained indifferent because their operations (such as agriculture) neither stood in a relationship of complementarity nor of contraction to the doings and outcomes of the educational status quo.17 In other words, such antecedent relations between different parts of society (its social institutions) are indispensable to explaining the delineation of those agents who became parties to subsequent educational interaction (and those who did not) and to whether they aligned themselves for the defence of reproduction or the pursuit of transformation. Structural relations, transmitted to agents (as always) by shaping the situations in which they found themselves, are indispensable to accounting for their motivation. However, structural conditioning goes further than explaining who was involved, who was not, and which “side” the participants took. It also serves to explain the strategic action adopted. Why did this take the form of “substituting” independent networks of schools in England, which engaged in market competition with Anglican schooling, whilst in France all transformative action was focused upon “restriction” of religious control of education through the central apparatus of the state? Only by introducing the

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different relationships between State, Church and social stratification in England and France at the end of the 18th century can this be understood. Who had what resources to bring to bear? Again, it is necessary to consult the prior distribution of resources (various), anterior to educational struggles in both counties, but constraining certain participants to delay entering the fray and enabling others to make swift headway. (It is common to find such distributions represented as “mere” aggregate properties, which they are, but to neglect the structural context generating them). Given the above, it is unsurprising that outcomes too – the development of a centralized system in France and a decentralized one in England – are not fully explicable without reference to all these forms of structural conditioning. These are not (and are never) determinants, because agency too has its own properties and powers, both individually and collectively, one of the most important being to act innovatively in circumstances that were not of their making or choosing. So far, this section has sought to recommend the morphogenetic approach as an explanatory framework that helps to render structural change tractable to investigation by breaking up the flow of events into three phases, according to the formula . This carves out one morphogenetic cycle, but projection of the lines forwards and backwards connects up with anterior and posterior cycles. In fact, two such cycles were analysed in the educational study used for illustration here: the one prior to the emergence of state educational systems and the one posterior to it. Their delineation was due to the conviction that the advent of a state system represented a new emergent entity, the distinctive relational properties and powers of which conditioned subsequent educational interaction (and processes and patterns of change) in completely different ways – compared with “private ownership” in the previous cycle. The establishment of such morphogenetic “breaks” – signalling the end of one cycle and constituting the beginning of the next – is the business of any particular investigator and the problem in hand. Generically, what this requires has been neatly summarized by ElderVass:18 (i) a list of its [new] characteristic parts; (ii) an explanation of how these must be related to each other to form a whole rather than an unorganized heap; and, (iii) an explanation of the generative mechanism constituted by the manner in which its [novel] properties and powers are produced from that particular organization of its parts. To this, he adds, (iv) a morphogenetic account of how this state of affairs comes about, which I have just been discussing and with which he seems to agree, and (v) a morphostatic account of how it is sustained and thus proves relatively enduring. Here too, I agree, but we should note that with (v), as opposed to (iv), we have now moved into the present tense. Yet, as has been seen, he also claims that the morphogenetic approach cannot account for synchronic relations sustaining parts and their relations at a specific moment in time – upon which their possession and exercise of causal powers depends. I disagree, but will have to unpack the realist commitment to continuous “activity dependence” to show why.

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To realists, nothing social, whatever its origins, is self-sustaining, which is what inter alia distinguishes the social from the natural world. Only myriad agential “doings” (including thinking, believing and imagining) keep any given higher-level social entity in being and render it relatively enduring. In other words, whilst ever something like the centralized French educational system lasts, then move a marker, second-by-second, from the system’s inception until today, and each and every moment of its “centralization” depends upon agential doings (including intentional inaction). However, this is not equivalent to some Giddensian notion that every such doing on the part of everyone somehow contributes to maintaining the whole (in this case, institution).19 On the contrary, some doings are entirely irrelevant to sustaining centralization (keeping a dog), some are more important than others, and it is only because further “doings” exist in tension with one another that things remain the way they are (Catholic and now Muslim religious practices “provoke” centralization to exercise its powers in defence of the laïcité of education in the French Republic). Still further doings are intended to change the status quo, but have not yet succeeded in doing so. What the morphogenetic approach allows us to do is to avoid the synchronic banality and futility of asserting that if a relational property endures, this must be because of some net balance of sustaining agential doings at each moment in time (reminiscent of Merton’s “net balance of functional consequences”). Instead, in completing a morphogenetic cycle, by issuing in structural elaboration, not only is structure transformed but so is agency, as part and parcel of the same process – the double morphogenesis.20 (This point entirely fails to be understood in Dépeltau’s misleading discussion of what he calls “co-determination theories”.)21 As it re-shapes structural relations at any given T4, agency is ineluctably re-shaping itself: in terms of domination and subordination, of organization, combination and articulation; in terms of its vested interests and these in relation to those of other agents; in terms of the new roles and positions that some occupy and others do not; and in terms of the novel situations in which all agents now find themselves, constraining to the projects of some and enabling to the projects of others,22 yet of significance for the motivation of all. Very briefly, at any given T4 something radical happens, not only to structure but also to agency. In cases of macroscopic change this affects the “people” through transforming four “parts” or levels of the social order: the systemic, the institutional, the role array and the positional (the life-chances of different sections of the population). Where the emergence of an educational system (at T4) is concerned, one of its immediate effects consists in redividing the population, not necessarily exhaustively, into those with vested interests in (educational) maintenance and change respectively, according to the situations in which they now find themselves – involuntarily for the majority of people. To characterize an interest as a “vested” one is to associate it with a particular position, the implication being that if positions (roles, institutions) change, then so do interests. As Porpora puts it, “among the

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causal powers that are deposited in social positions are interests. Interests are built into a social position by the relationship of that position to other positions in the system [ … ] actors are motivated to act in their interests, which are a function of their social position. Again, this doesn’t mean that actors always with necessity act in their interests, but if they don’t they are likely to suffer”.23 Thus, “opportunity costs” are differentially distributed to different groups of actors for the same course of action – hence providing directional guidance vis à vis the course of action each group adopts. To illustrate this point equally briefly, the emergence of a centralized educational system creates new vested interests in maintaining that organizational form (i.e. those particular relations between its parts) as constitutive and definitive of national education. For example, at the institutional apex, consider the position of the Minister of Public Instruction. One of the rare empirical generalizations one can make is that no incumbent of this (new) role, or the government of which he/she is also part, will ever voluntarily cede “centralization” because of the bonus that derives from an educational system that is supremely responsive to state direction. Lower down, consider the (new) role of primary school teacher (successfully wrested from the hands of religious personnel and now constituting part of the corps enseignant). The instituteurs, whom Péguy accurately dubbed the “hussars of the Republic”, consistently played an important part in upholding the laïcité of French public instruction, by actively resisting the curé’s influence throughout the villages of rural France during the 19th century. Finally, consider the (new) educational situation confronting the population at large. The various levels of instruction were carefully calibrated with entry to appropriate grades of public service and access to each level effectively mirrored the contemporary form of social stratification, thus reproducing it. Indeed, the educational work of Bourdieu is an extended analysis of how the French system engendered dispositions, reproductive of the level of instruction received and the commensurate positions subsequently assumed. In sum, the new relational properties of national education exerted causal powers, influencing individual and collective motivation, sufficient for agents to act back synchronically in a manner that sustained centralization. What more does the morphogenetic approach need to do, other than to conduct such an analysis in a properly detailed fashion? One more thing that concerns the relatively enduring nature of structures, and which, in turn, serves to highlight the importance of the “double morphogenesis” of structure and agency. A frequent difficulty with persuasive synchronic accounts – and I believe Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” to be a case in point – is how to explain that a given relationship between parts is ever susceptible to transformation (indeed, he himself relied upon external intrusions, in common with normative functionalism). Instead, the double morphogenesis reveals how the synchronic “forces” (re-)producing morphostasis are an agential achievement, which is constantly threatened, rather than being ones conducive to eternal life for any structure.

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To begin with, the losers in a struggle for educational control, the outcome of which was the emergence of a state system, do not quietly fade away; on the contrary, they retain their organization and their objectives for instruction. They fight on and may win concessions (such as the Church re-acquiring the right to own and run schools under the Loi Falloux of 1850). Paradoxical as this might seem, morphostatic analysis cannot remain the same from one time interval to another. This is because the explanation of why something endures has to accommodate such changes in its constitution – changes that “punctuate” morphostasis diachronically. In other words, an emergent entity (such as an educational system) can retain its key relational properties and causal powers (those making it a centralized system), without it remaining exactly the same entity. Similarly, to simplify greatly, the new system also defines new groups of losers: those with limited educational opportunities but also, for example, industrialists concerned about the absence of technical training. All groups in the above situation have vested interests in bringing about transformation, though not of the same kind. With even greater over-simplification, the crucial question for endurance versus change is: “Can these groups work together?” This is an empirical question. What it means, however, is that we know where to look – and this is only contingently “outside” – to explain why time is eventually up for that which was only relatively enduring. When we then address the break-up of the tense balance of forces that had consistently maintained morphostasis, we also know what to do next, and that is to examine the next (potentially) morphogenetic cycle. Throughout this account it has been maintained that structural “conditioning” is necessarily mediated by (variable) agential responses to their circumstances. Without allowing for the personal powers of agents, it is impossible to explain the variability of their actions in the same circumstances. However, some question the notion of mediation itself. Thus, Manicas asks “why postulate the existence of structure or culture as causally relevant if, to be causally effective, these must be mediated by social actors?”24 Since he leaves the question there, it is presumably held to be unanswerable. However, structure and culture could only be deemed causally irrelevant if what were being mediated was, in fact, invented then and there by actors whose own personal powers were entirely responsible for it. This “ban” upon “mediation” seems as untenable as holding that the wires bringing electricity into my house are entirely responsible for the working of my lights and electrical appliances and that the existence of a national grid and electricity generators are causally irrelevant. This reflects a tendency among “weak” realists to require some kind of instantiation of structure properties by agents before they are accorded any role in an explanation. In other words, far from their impinging upon agents, it is human subjects who literally bring them into play. Such a voluntaristic bias obviously provides rather better protection against being charged with reification. Examples would include John Searle’s25 notion of “the Background”,

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to which back-reference is made, for example, by listeners to disambiguate statements that require contextualization. Similarly, Manicas26 relegates structural and cultural properties to being “materials at hand”, without the capacity to exert causal powers but also, from his standpoint, without any explanation of why some are within easy reach of certain actors but out of reach for others. (It is thus unsurprising that Searle’s favourite sociologist appears to be Bourdieu, whilst Manicas’s book is a virtual repetition of Giddens: these two authors thus favouring the theoretical stance I have termed central conflation.)27

3 Culture In developing a conceptual framework for employing analytical dualism in cultural analysis, culture as a whole is defined as referring to all intelligibilia, that is to any item which has the dispositional ability to be understood by someone – whether or not anyone does so at a given time. Within this corpus, the cultural system (CS) is that sub-set of items to which the law of contradiction can be applied – i.e. society’s register of propositions at any given time. Contradictions and complementarities are logical properties of the world of ideas, of World Three as Popper terms it,28 or, if preferred, of the contents of “libraries”. We use these concepts every day when we say that the ideas of X are consistent with those of Y, or that theory or belief A contradicts theory or belief B. In so doing, we grant that a cultural system has an objective existence and particular relations amongst its components (doctrines, theories, beliefs and individual propositions). These relationships of contradiction and complementarity are independent of anyone’s claim to know, to believe, to assert or to assent to them, because this is knowledge independent of a knowing subject – such as any unread book. However, the above is quite different from another kind of everyday statement, namely that the ideas of X were influenced by those of Y, where we refer to the influence of people on one another – such as teachers on pupils, television on its audience, or earlier thinkers on later ones. This is the sociocultural level (S-C) and it depends upon causal relations, that is, the degree of cultural uniformity produced through the ideational influence of one set of people on another through the whole gamut of familiar techniques, which often entail the use of power: argument, persuasion, manipulation, distortion and mystification. Thus, there are two distinct notions pertaining to two distinct levels (the CS and S-C), which should not be elided: 1 The notion of cultural coherence – or ideational consistency. 2 The notion of uniform practices – or a community with a common way of life. To run the two together, as when culture is defined as “a community of shared meanings”, conflates the “community” (S-C) with the “meanings” (CS). This confuses two elements, which are both logically and sociologically distinct. I

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criticized this position as the “Myth of Cultural Integration”,29 but the notion is tenacious and Elder-Vass repeats it: “the most fundamental feature of cultures” is that “culture is a shared set of practices and understandings”. To me, such sharing is always an aim on the part of a particular group and never a definition, much less a state of affairs “that tends to produce and sustain shared ways of living”.30 It seems to me that there is a crucial and useful distinction to be made between: 1 Logical consistency, that is the degree of internal compatibility between the components of culture (CS); and 2 Causal consensus, that is the degree of social uniformity produced by the ideational influence of one set of people on another (an S-C matter). Logical consistency is a property of the world of ideas, which requires no knowing subject, whilst causal consensus is a property of people and their interaction. The proposition defended here is that the two are both analytically and empirically distinct and, therefore, can vary independently of one another. Some, like Elder-Vass, object that “the archive contains not knowledge as such but only potential knowledge: that as a material resource it contains only marks on paper (or some other medium) and that there is no informational content to such marks in the absence of a reader or other interpreter”.31 This denial of “informational content” to our diachronically established archive and its reductive dependency for meaning upon contemporary “knowing subjects” can, I think, be shown to unravel.32 First, the items lodged in the “archive” must have the “dispositional capacity to be understood”. This is what makes them intelligibilia rather than mere markings, such as those made by the legendary monkeys-at-the-keyboard or, in the case of stones, by natural geo-physical processes. What then distinguishes between intelligible and random markings? Ultimately, it is their decipherability. Certainly the jury may not be convened for centuries (as with the Rosetta Stone whilst it was hidden under the sands), its members may disagree for a time (as with the Dead Sea Scrolls), and they may fail as decoders (which is why museum exhibits are often re-labelled). In addition, although there is certainly a need for “mediation”, there is no a priori reason why the intelligible content requires a “mind” to understand it – this task could be done by a computer and then put to use by mediating agents. Moreover, why does Elder-Vass consider it necessary that an idea has to be in someone’s head for it to have legitimate ontological status? Sometimes in everyday life an idea migrates from head to paper and back again. Suppose I make a shopping list, then it is misplaced, and I do the shop without it. I will forget some items that I do need. In that case, my full shopping needs were not in my head but on the list. Similarly, many of us keep the instructions to domestic appliances, accepting that these are more accurate guides to making them work properly than the rather vague ideas retained in our heads, which we do not trust as being correct. Then again, when we “look something up”,

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we are no longer a “knowing subject” but a subject knowingly in search of knowledge. Thus, I stand by my claim that a book that has “the dispositional capacity to be understood” means the same as “it contains ideas”. It follows that I think it mistaken to construe books simply as World I physical artefacts. As Bhaskar maintains, “books are social forms”33 and have the same ontological status as “structures”, “organizations”, “roles”, etc. In order to avoid reification he insists that “the causal power of social forms is mediated through social agency”.34 Thus, a book not only requires a mind to create it but also another mind(s) to understand it. This excursion merely reinforces the fact that mediation is always required, in culture as in structure. Relationships between the cultural system and the socio-cultural levels are summarized below. At any moment, the cultural system (CS) is the product of historical sociocultural (S-C) interaction, maintained in the present, but having emergent properties and powers which pertain to that level. Like structure, some of its most important causal powers are those of constraints and enablements. In the cultural domain these stem from contradictions and complementarities. However, again like structure, constraints require something to constrain and enablements something to enable. Those “somethings” are the ideational projects of people – the beliefs they seek to uphold, the theories they wish to vindicate, the propositions they want to deem true.35 In other words, the exercise of CS causal powers is dependent upon their activation from the S-C level. What ideas are entertained socio-culturally, at any given time, result from the properties and powers belonging to that level. Obviously, we social agents do not live by propositions alone; we generate myths, are moved by mysteries, become rich in symbols and ruthless at manipulating hidden persuaders. These elements are precisely the stuff of the S-C level, for they are all matters of inter-personal influence – from hermeneutic understanding, at one extreme, to ideological assault and battery, at the other. It is interaction at the S-C level that explains why particular groups wish to uphold a particular idea – or to undermine one held by another group. Once they do, then their ideational projects will confront CS properties (mostly not of their own making) and unleash upon themselves these systemic powers, which they may seek to realize or to contain. However, the S-C level possesses causal powers of its own kind in relation to the CS: it can resolve apparent contradictions and respond adaptively to real ones, or it can explore and exploit the complementarities it confronts, thus modifying the cultural system in the process. Moreover, it can set its own cultural agenda, often in Figure 4.2 Relationships between the cultural system and the socio-cultural levels Cultural level

Dependent upon

Type of relations

Cultural system Socio-cultural

Other ideas Other people

Logical Causal

Source: M.S. Archer, Culture and Agency, Cambridge: CUP, 1988, p. 134.

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relation to its structurally based interests, by creatively adding new items to the systemic register. In these ways, the S-C level is responsible for elaborating upon the composition of the CS level. In turn, the relations between them form the three phases of an analytical cycle made up of . In fact, the final phase may culminate at T4 in either morphogenesis (transformation) or morphostasis (reproduction). In both cases, T4 constitutes the new T1, the conditional influences affecting subsequent interaction. This explanatory framework, which uses analytical dualism for undertaking practical cultural investigations, again depends upon two simple propositions: that any cultural structure necessarily pre-dates the actions which transform it, and that cultural elaboration necessarily post-dates those actions. 3.1 Cultural conditioning (CS) This phase is concerned with the effects of people holding ideas which stand in particular logical relationships of contradiction or complementarity to other ideas. To hold such ideas is to activate the CS powers of constraint and enablement, but why they are held is an S-C question, the answer to which would require investigation at that level, involving historical recourse – however short. “Constraining contradictions” exist when there is an internal relationship between the ideas (A), advanced by a given group, and other ideas (B), which are lodged in the CS – which cannot simply be repudiated – and yet (A) and (B) are in logical tension. Durkheim provides a superb historical example of this in his analysis of the logical inconsistencies in which Christianity was embroiled, from earliest times, because its inescapable dependence upon classicism confronted the Church with “a contradiction against which it has fought for centuries”.36 Since the relationship between (A) and (B) is an internal one, their contradiction could not be evaded by the simple renunciation of (B): Christians could not repudiate the classical languages in which the Gospel was enunciated nor the classical philosophical concepts through which it was theologically explicated. Although substantively very different, the “constraining contradiction” also confronts any explanatory theory (A), which is advanced in science, but the observational theory (B) of which does

Figure 4.3 Cultural morphogenesis Source: M.S. Archer, Realist Social Theory, Cambridge: CUP, 2000, p. 193.

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not provide immediate empirical corroboration – that is, if scientists think they have good reason not to jettison (A).37 What the “constraining contradiction” does in practice is confront those committed to (A), who also have no option but to live with (B) as well, with a particular situational logic. According to this logic, given their continuing dedication to (A) (its abandonment is always possible because conditioning is never determinism), then they are constrained to deal with (B) in a specific manner. Since (A) and (B) are logically inconsistent, then no genuine resolution is possible between them, but if (B) remains unaltered, it threatens the credibility or tenability of (A). Consequently, the situational logic directs that continued adherence to (A) entails making a correction of its relationship with (B) mandatory. Corrective action involves addressing the contradiction and seeking to repair it by reinterpretation of the ideas involved. The generic result will be some form of syncretism that brings about union between the antithetical but indispensable sets of ideas.38 For protagonists of (A), their vested interest is in developing syncretic reinterpretations of (B), in order to make it compatible. However, they may be driven to more “generous” syncretic endeavours because the unificatory thrust of the corrective repairs can be deflected by their socio-cultural reception. Whether or not a syncretic formula can be made to stick depends upon how it meshes with the state of S-C integration in society. At the systemic (CS) level, the direct counterpart of the “constraining contradiction” is the necessary or “concomitant compatibility”, because it bears the same formal features in reverse and its conditional influence is that of enablement. In other words, invoking idea (A) also necessarily evokes idea (B), but since the (B) upon which this (A) depends is consistent with it, then (B) buttresses adherence to (A). Consequently (A) occupies a congenial environment of ideas the exploration of which, far from being fraught with danger, yields a treasure trove of confirmation and corroboration because of the logical consistency of the ideas involved. This was the generic feature that Weber analysed as linking the religious beliefs, rationale for status distribution and the economic ethos of Ancient India and China. A similar relationship obtained between classical economics and utilitarian philosophy. Modern examples are so abundant in natural science that Kuhn was tempted to portray the whole enterprise as a succession of paradigms, each of which constituted a cluster of “concomitant complementarities”.39 What emerges is an enlarged and highly consistent conspectus. It represents a substantial increase in cultural density, by which this sector of the CS becomes especially rich in fine and subtle distinctions and develops an elaborate vocabulary to describe them. The end-product of this extensive exploration is a growth in ideational systematization, that is, the “strengthening of pre-existing relations among the parts, the development of relations among parts previously unrelated, the gradual addition of parts and relations to a system, or some combination of these changes”.40 The intricacies of caste rights, the detailed protocols for “normal science”, and the bulging libraries of exegetical literature are produced by the same systemic conditioning.

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The more complex the internal organization of such a corpus of ideas becomes, the more difficult it is to assimilate new items, without major disruption to the delicately articulated interconnections. Tight and sophisticated linkages eventually repel innovation because of its disruptive capacity. This is the result of the situational logic of protection. Its implications within the conspectus are that it progressively accommodates fewer and fewer radical innovations until, in Kuhn’s words, it “suppresses fundamental novelties because they are fundamentally subversive of its basic commitments”.41 Weber, of course, made the same point about the effects of complex ritualization in Hinduism being incapable of the innovative “germination of capitalism in its midst”.42 The implication for relations between the conspectus and its external environment is protective insulation against disruptive incursions – the most notable example being the Chinese Edict of Seclusion. The situational logic of protection means brooking no rivals from outside and repressing rivalry inside. The former is at the mercy of contingent “international relations”; the latter depends upon the success of its main socio-cultural thrust towards cultural reproduction in the (relevant) population. Ultimately, whether or not this sticks and endures turns upon cui bono; non-beneficiaries have no interest in sustaining protection. The conditional influences of the two types of logical relations at the CS level (societal or sectional), just discussed, are summarized in Figure 4.4. 3.2 Socio-cultural (S-C) interaction The whole point of distinguishing between the cultural system and the sociocultural levels is because the orderly or conflictual relationships characteristic of the one can vary independently of the other, which is crucial to the explanation of stability or change. If conditional influences were determinants, the effects of “correction” and “protection” would both mean that cultural stability ensued. Yet this is not invariably the case. An economical way to explain why not is to ask what properties and powers may be possessed by agency and exercised during socio-cultural interaction such that the outcome is contrary to the conditioning. In other words, what accounts for discrepancies between the orderliness (or disorderliness) of the two levels? First, why can social integration persist despite the existence of tensions within a system of ideas? Second, what explains a syncretic set of ideas failing to take hold in society or accounts for a systematized conspectus failing to be reproduced?

Figure 4.4 Cultural system: types of logical relations. Source: M.S. Archer, Culture and Agency, Cambridge: CUP, 1988, p. 270.

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The answer to the first question (what explains the persistence of disproportionately high S-C integration), seems to lie in the effective exercise of cultural power. Where upholders of (A) have the position and the resources to control the diffusion of information, they can practice a variety of “containment strategies”, designed to insulate the majority of the population from dangerous familiarity with B. In this context, Lukes’s three-dimensional concept of power,43 seems readily transferable to the cultural domain. Power is used to control the social visibility of contradictions and thus to prevent the eruption of S-C controversy. Its applications can vary from the straightforward first-dimensional use of censorship to the more subtle third-dimensional strategies that may induce “misrecognition of symbolic violence” – perceptively analysed by Bourdieu,44 although always presumed by him to be lastingly successful. However, “containment strategies” are seen here as strictly temporizing manoeuvres, most effective against the least influential.45 Nevertheless, whilst a week may be a long time in science, exercises of cultural power can buy centuries of quietude in the history of a civilization – especially when ideal interests and the structural distribution of resources are closely superimposed. One answer to the second question (about disproportionately low S-C integration) is that independent socio-cultural discrepancies in orderliness occur when the social (or sectional) distribution of material interests does not gel with the situational logic of the cultural system (or sub-system) at any given time.46 Important as this is, if that were the end of the matter it would amount to saying, “cultural conditioning works ceteris paribus unless structural conditioning contravenes it”. It would be to retreat from advancing a theory of cultural dynamics because only countervailing material interests (and their promotive organizations) would be held capable of resisting cultural conditioning. Instead, two scenarios will be sketched, which give ideal interests their due – thus advancing a theory of cultural dynamics to parallel that of structural dynamics, without collapsing into it. On the “corrective” scenario, associated with internal CS contradictions, the unificatory thrust of the situational logic can be deflected in three S-C ways. Cumulatively, they spell a growing disorderliness in the cultural relations between people that may ultimately precipitate a corresponding clash in the realm of ideas. First, there is progressive desertion. At the socio-cultural level no one is compelled to take part in a syncretic enterprise. Exit is a permanent possibility and a steady stream of deserters attends the unfolding of any constraining contradiction. Ideational wranglings breed sceptics in the scientific as in the metaphysical domain and, as has often been remarked, the ex-member of a school of thought becomes its most virulent critic. This aggregate source of growing disorder then provides the impetus for a bolder syncretic manoeuvre – a more thoroughgoing correction, involving the interpretative adjustment of (A) itself. Ironically, these more radical syncretic moves themselves become bones of contention among the “faithful”. Those who were once united in their ideational difficulties fall into schismatism when

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they try to solve them. A copybook example is the relationship between the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which generated lasting sectarian conflict rather than restoring consensus in post-Renaissance Europe – despite both movements being equally concerned to prevent the actualization of secular classical rationalism. Finally, whenever the manifest systemic unity of ideas is reduced through public wrangling, their unificatory role in society falls disproportionately. Those with an interest in so doing can then harness social disorder in order to bring about a full actualization of (B), the contents of which have unintentionally become better and increasingly widely known as syncretic formulae made more generous adaptations to it. What is crucial in order for a social group to actualize a contradiction, by inducing a split along the systemic fault-line, is that it has no cross-cutting allegiances with other social groups to restrain it.47 This is why the French revolutionary bourgeoisie rather than the leisured aristocracy (allied with the clergy and constituting the two privileged estates) was responsible for actualizing secular rationalism, anti-clericalism and laïcization. The emergence of secularist republicanism is a replication, in the cultural domain, of the conditions Lockwood set out for profound structural change – where social disintegration finally superimposes itself upon systemic malintegration, forcing the latter asunder and actualizing the changes that had previously been strategically contained. On the “protective” scenario, linked with internal “concomitant complementarities”, a substantial drop in socio-cultural integration is the exclusive motor of change because there is no tension to exploit within the cultural system itself. However, the consistent conspectus does slowly generate a sufficient differentiation of interests to unleash social disorder. The root cause is the increase in CS density, as the complementary conspectus is explored and then systematized. Eventually, it becomes too great to be fully reproduced (societally or sectionally) because it has become too elaborate, expensive and time-consuming for all to share. Consequently, CS density turns into the enemy of S-C equality, and the resulting hierarchy of knowledgeability progressively delineates different interest groups in relation to the CS. As the cultural conspectus is gradually in-filled and as work on systematization reduces to mopping-up, the concentration of rewards and benefits among the S-C elite (typically the intellectual hegemony of old conservatives) means that more and more of the “educated” become a category of “marginals”. They have made a major investment in the CS, but are denied much return from it as it stands, yet are firmly discouraged from making cultural innovations to increase their rewards. The application of cultural power, which can maintain orderliness among subordinates, is ineffective against the marginals: culturally they are in the know and one of the things they know is that they are not rewarded for it. The disaffection of the marginals correspondingly reduces S-C integration, but CS integration still remains high. The disaffected do not kick it for they have invested too much in it, but they are opportunists, ready to migrate

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towards new sources of ideational variety in order to increase their pay-off. Impelled by their ideal interests, boundaries (geographical, disciplinary or paradigmatic) are crossed and the departure of these disruptive S-C elements is not resisted. In short, marginal migrants go out seeking new but complementary items (novel but consistent ideas, skills, techniques) to augment their ideal interests. From this a distinctive type of cultural change emerges, which is born of innovative amalgamation. 3.3 Cultural elaboration Although the above two scenarios have been presented as ones that may unreel autonomously within the cultural realm, there is no denying that in fact they are usually accelerated and decelerated by their interaction with structural factors. What is of particular importance is how far structure differentiates material interest groups that reinforce or cross-cut the socio-cultural alignments conditioned by the cultural system. This interplay between culture and structure is even more marked when we turn, in conclusion, to the ways in which cultural elaboration can be independently introduced from the sociocultural level. However, although such social conflict may well be fuelled by structural cleavages and divisions, neither the form of cultural interaction involved nor the type of cultural changes induced can be reduced to epiphenomena of structure. This is because there is considerable cultural work to be done by agents when the ideas with which they are dealing are only contingently related. Here, agency alone is responsible48 for bringing these ideas into conjunction and seeking to achieve social salience for them. It is also because, once they have done so, they have created new forms of situational logic in which the promotion of their own ideal interests are then enmeshed. In contrast to the “constraining contradiction” – where the alternative to a given set of ideas is also internally related to them, and thus constantly threatens them with its own counter-actualization – the accentuation of a “competitive contradiction” is a supremely social matter. Accentuation depends upon groups, actuated by interests, making a contradiction competitive, by taking sides over it and by trying to make other people take their side. In brief, opposed interest groups cause the “competitive contradiction” to impinge on broader sections of the (relevant) population; it does not ineluctably confront them, as is the case with “constraining contradictions”, the moment that anyone asserts (A). Perhaps the most important illustration of the “competitive contradiction” is ideological conflict. Were ideologies no more than passive reflections of material interests, then it would be impossible that they could advance, foster or defend such interests. To the extent that they succeed, they necessarily do so in competition with other ideologies, which perform the same task in relation to opposed interests. In the process, their ideational conflict becomes subject to its own distinctive situational logic. In contradistinction to the “constraining contradiction”, the situational logic of the “competetive

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contradiction” fosters elimination not correction. In the former case, agents were driven to cope with ideas that necessarily contradicted their own (compromising, conciliating and conceding much en route), whereas those involved (and drawn into involvement) over a “competitive contradiction” have every incentive to eliminate the opposition. Because partisans of ideas (A) and (B) are unconstrained by any internal relations between these ideologies, there is nothing to restrain their combativeness, for they have everything to gain from inflicting maximum damage on one another’s ideas in the course of competition. In principle, victory consists in so damaging and discrediting oppositional views that they lose all salience in society, leaving their antithesis in unchallenged supremacy. In practice, the cut and thrust between them has the entirely unintended consequence that, far from one ideology being eliminated, both contribute to one another’s refinement. Charge is not merely met by countercharge, but also by self-clarification and response (as is equally the case for competing scientific frameworks). Ironically, both sets of ideas undergo “progressive problem-shifts”,49 thus inserting much greater pluralism into the cultural system. Correspondingly, since both groups of protagonists seek to win-over uncommitted agents, the socio-cultural effect of their refined interchanges is to increase cleavage within the population, as was the case during the Great Age of Ideology. Finally, the existence of discoverable but wholly “contingent complementarities” at the CS level constitutes a source of novelty, with few strings attached, that is systemically available to human agency. Both the detection of these items and their synthesis are entirely dependent upon the exercise of agential powers of creativity. Certainly, the fact that such agents are on the lookout for such items is fostered by frustration of either or both their ideal and material interests, but there is nothing automatic about discontents yielding creative innovations. Certainly, too, the CS existence of “contingent complementarities” is a necessary condition for their exploitation, but the sufficient condition requires active agents to produce constructive, concrete syntheses from what is only a lose situational logic of opportunity. When and if they do so, newly elaborated items are added to the cultural system, which in practical terms represent novel areas of intensive specialization, such as new academic disciplines or research programmes. If and when they are successful (and defective syntheses are common), institutionalization usually follows and, as it does so, more and more people are attracted to work upon the new source of cultural variety. In turn, variety stimulates more variety because this interplay between the CS and the S-C constitutes a positive feedback loop. This is the exact obverse of the negative feedback mechanism that regulates the protection and reproduction of the “concomitant complementarity”. Not only are the logics of the two kinds of complementarities the inverse of one another, but so are their results. Cultural variety is the opposite of cultural density. Variety feeds on what looks promising but is ill-defined; density deals with what feel like certainties, but which are already over-defined. Variety pushes on to extend cultural horizons

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unpredictably; density stays at home to embellish the cultural environment systematically. These differences are equally marked in their socio-cultural effects – systematization fosters cultural reproduction, whilst specialization prompts ideational diversification. The proliferation of specialist groupings is fissiparous in its social effects, for as more and more sectional groups are carved out, they have less and less in common with one another and with the rest of society. Sectional groups, unlike polarized ones, are not defined by their opposition to others, but by their differences from everyone. The dialectics of specialization and sectionalism contribute to the progressive exclusion of vast tracts of the population from larger and larger portions of specialized knowledge. The division of the population into lay people and experts is repeated over and over again as each new specialism emerges. This is a horizontal form of sociocultural differentiation, quite unlike the vertical stratification engendered by the “concomitant complementarity”. The four relationships discussed are summarized in Figure 4.5. By distinguishing between the cultural system and the socio-cultural levels and examining their interplay, the myth of culture as “a community of shared meanings” – the heritage of early anthropology – has been challenged on two fronts. On the one hand, four different bodies of “meanings” (CS) have been differentiated, that is, organizations of ideas whose conditional influences upon the further development of ideas are respectively syncretic, pluralist, systematized and specialized. On the other hand, the influences of the cultural system on the socio-cultural level (those of unification and reproduction) and the independent effects of agents’ own pursuit and promotion of ideas in society (those of polarization and sectionalism) serve to replace the undifferentiated notion of “community” (S-C). They point to different sequences of causal interplay between the two levels, with different outcomes, thus challenging every version of cultural conflation.

4 Agency: the stratified model of people The central problem of theorizing agency is how to conceptualize the human agent as someone who is both partly formed by their sociality, but also has the capacity partly to transform their society. The difficulty is that social theorizing has oscillated between these two extremes. On the one hand, Enlightenment thought promoted an “undersocialized” view of man50 –

Figure 4.5 Cultural system integration Source: M.S. Archer, Culture and Agency, Cambridge: CUP, 1988, p. 226.

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Modernity’s Man – whose human constitution owed nothing to society and thus was a self-sufficient “outsider”, who simply operated in a social environment. On the other hand, there is a later but pervasive “oversocialized” view of man, whose every feature, beyond his biology, is shaped and moulded by his social context. He, as Society’s Being,51 thus becomes such a dependent “insider” that he has no capacity to transform his social environment. From the realist point of view, the central deficiency of these two models is their basic denial that the nature of reality as a whole makes any difference to the people we become, or even to our becoming people. Modernity’s Man is pre-formed, and his formation, that is, the emergence of his properties and powers, is not dependent upon his experiences of the world.52 Indeed, the world can only come to him filtered through an instrumental rationality shackled to his interests whose genesis is left mysterious. Preference formation has remained obscure, from the origins of the Humean “passions” to the goals optimized by the contemporary rational chooser. The model is anthropocentric, because man works on the world, but the world does not work upon man, except by attaching risks and costs to the accomplishment of his preformed designs. In short, he is closed against any experience of reality that could make him fundamentally different from what he already is. Similarly, Society’s Being is also a model which forecloses direct interplay with reality. Here the whole of the world comes to people sieved through one part of it, “society’s conversation”. Their very notion of being selves is merely a theory appropriated from society, and what they make of the world is a matter of permutations upon their appropriations. Once again, this model cuts man off from any experience of reality itself, which could make him fundamentally different from what social discourse makes of him. Society is the gatekeeper of reality and therefore all we become is society’s gift because it is mediated through it. What is lost, in both versions, is the crucial notion of experience of reality, namely that the way the world is can affect how we are. This is because both anthropocentrism and sociocentrism are two versions of the “epistemic fallacy”, where what reality is taken to be, courtesy of our instrumental rationality or social discourse, is substituted for what the world really is. Realism cannot endorse the “epistemic fallacy” and, in this connection, it must necessarily insist that how the world is has a regulatory effect upon what we make of it and, in turn, what it makes of us. These effects are independent of our full discursive penetration, just as gravity influenced us and the projects we could entertain, long before we conceptualized it. The emergence of our “social selves” is something that occurs at the interface between “structure and agency”. It is, therefore, necessarily relational, and for it to be properly so, then independent powers have to be granted to both “structures” and “agents”. This is what is distinctive about the social realist approach. It grants the existence of people’s emergent properties (PEPs) and also the reality of structural and cultural emergent properties (SEPs and CEPs), and sees the emergence of agents and actors as relational

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developments occurring between them. Conversely, Society’s Being presents “agency” as an epiphenomenon of “structure”, whereas Modernity’s Man regards “structure” as an epiphenomenon of “agency”.53 Realism entails several moves to account for the emergence of social subjects, who themselves must be conceptualized as stratified. The three basic strata involved can be summarized as follows: 1 Selfhood or the continuous sense of self, that is, of being the same being over time. 2 Primary Agents, differentiated by virtue of their relations to socially scarce resources, which may collectively transform themselves into Corporate Agents seeking to transform society or to maintain the status quo. 3 Social actors, whose social identities are secured by investing themselves in social roles, which they actively personify according to their “ultimate concerns”. Taken together, these yield the following stratified model of agency, which develops over the life-course of any individual. Human selfhood ) ) ) Social agent ) ) ) ) Social actor (Grandparent) (Parent) (Offspring) 4.1 Human selfhood Relations between humanity and the world are intrinsic to the development of human properties, which are necessary conditions of social life itself. Thus, I am advancing a transcendental argument, specifically for the necessity of a “sense of self” to the existence of society. The continuity of consciousness, meaning a continuous “sense of self”, was first advanced by Locke.54 To defend it, entails maintaining the crucial distinction between the evolving concept of self (which is indeed social) and the universal sense of self (which is not). This distinction has been upheld by certain anthropologists, like Marcel Mauss,55 to whom the universal sense of the “self” (Moi) is everywhere present. This constant element consists in the fact that “there has never existed a human being who has not been aware, not only of his body but also of his individuality, both spiritual and physical”.56 However, there has been a persistent tendency in the social sciences to absorb the sense into the concept and thus to credit what is universal to the cultural balance sheet. The best way of showing that the distinction should be maintained is a demonstration of its necessity, that is, a sense of self must be distinct from social variations in concepts of selves because society could not work without people who have a continuity of consciousness. Thus, for anyone to appropriate social expectations, it is necessary for them to have a sense of self upon which these impinge such that they recognize what is expected of them (otherwise obligations cannot be internalized).

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To reinforce the transcendental argument, it should be noted that both the impoverished sociological models of human agency mentioned earlier are also dependent upon a continuity of self-consciousness but of which they give no account. Society’s Being needs this sense of self in order for an agent to know that social obligations pertain to her, rather than just being diffuse expectations. She has to know that when they clash – as they did for Antigone – it is she who is put on the spot and has to exercise a creativity which cannot be furnished by consulting the discursive canon. Unscripted performances that hold society together need an active agent who is enough of a self to acknowledge her obligation to perform and to write her own script to cover the occasion. Similarly, this continuous sense that we are one and the same being over time is equally indispensable to Modernity’s Man. He needs this sense of self if he is consistently to pursue his preference schedule, for he has to know both that they are his preferences and also how he is doing in maximizing them over time. 4.2 Social agents Agents, from the perspective of realism, are agents of something. Baldly, they are agents of the socio-cultural system into which they are born (groups or collectivities in the same position or situation) and, equally, they are agents of the systemic features they transform (since groups and collectivities are modified in the process of the double morphogenesis). Fundamentally, this is a shorthand account of the morphogenesis of agency: the drama of interaction may be centuries long, but the storyline is a simple one of pre-grouping and re-grouping. The morphogenetic diagram for agency is presented below. Everyone is inescapably an agent in some of their doings, but many of the doings of human beings have nothing to do with being an agent. Agents are real and agency involves real actions by real people, which is why we legitimately talk about agents acting, because agency is not a construct, not another heuristic Homo sociologicus. In explaining the statement that everyone is ineluctably an agent, we have to make a crucial distinction between what have been termed “corporate” and “primary” agents. At first glance, which probably involves selective perception induced by several decades of literature on political pluralism, it may seem that the only important agents are articulate and organized interest groups. Organized interest groups are

Figure 4.6 Source: M.S. Archer, Being Human, Cambridge: CUP, 2000, p. 268.

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indeed special, and they pack a very special punch as far as systemic stability and change are concerned. This is because only those who are aware of what they want, can articulate it to themselves and others, have organized in order to get it, can engage in concerted action to re-shape or retain the structural or cultural feature in question. These are termed “corporate agents”: they include self-conscious vested interest groups, promotive interest groups, social movements and defensive associations. Their common denominators are articulation and organization. Who they are, where they come from, and how the full array develops will be discussed shortly. As far as primary agency is concerned, everyone is born into an ongoing socio-cultural system and has agential effects on stability or change, if only by merely being within it – physically and numerically. Moreover, the world – structured as they find it and are placed in it – is the one in which they live and move to have their social being; yet there is no being without doing and no doing without consequences. In short, the prior social context delineates collectivities in the same position (those with the same life chances vis à vis the major institutions) and within this context they have to carry on – “carrying on” being more broadly conceived than Wittgenstein’s rule-governed “going on”. Those falling into this category are termed primary agents. They differ from corporate agents at any given time by lacking a say in structural or cultural modelling. They neither express interests nor organize for their strategic pursuit, either in society or a given institutional sector. (Note that a primary agent in one domain may be a corporate agent in another at any given T1, because these categories are not fixed but develop over time.) Nevertheless, to lack a say in systemic organization and reorganization is not the same as to have no effect on it, but the effects are unarticulated in both senses of the word. Collectivities without a say, but similarly situated, still react and respond to their context as part and parcel of living within it. Similarities of response from those similarly placed can generate powerful, though unintended, aggregate effects. Corporate agency shapes the context for all actors (usually not in the way any particular agent wants but as the consequence of collective interaction). Primary agency inhabits this context but, in responding to it also reconstitutes the environment which corporate agency seeks to control. The former unleashes a stream of aggregate environmental pressures and problems that affect the attainment of the latter’s promotive interests. Corporate agency thus has two tasks: the pursuit of its self-declared goals, as defined in a prior social context, and their continued pursuit in an environment modified by the responses of primary agency to the context which they confront. At the systemic level this may result in either morphostasis or morphogenesis depending exclusively upon the outcome of interaction but, since social interaction is the sole mechanism governing stability or change, what goes on during it also determines the morphostasis or morphogenesis of agency itself. This is the double morphogenesis during which agency, in its attempt to sustain or transform the social system, is inexorably drawn into sustaining or transforming the categories of corporate and primary agents themselves.

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Two basic questions, therefore, arise in relation to social agency. What are the conditions for the morphostasis of social agency? This demands an account of the divide between corporate and primary agents and how some given pre-grouping is maintained during interaction. What are the conditions for the morphogenesis of social agency? This calls for a discussion of how corporate and primary agents are regrouped in the course of interaction. In a thoroughly morphostatic scenario, the two types of agents – corporate and primary – are starkly delineated from one another. The distinction between them is maintained through interaction and proves long-lasting – as in those “old and cold” systems which had at most two corporate agents who successfully confined the rest of the population to primary status for centuries. Morphostatic scenarios do occur in modern societies – totalitarianism being a prime example – as well as in institutional sectors, but are more complex, vulnerable and short-lived since morphogenetic influences impinge from elsewhere. The “old and cold” scenario was characterized by a conjunction between structural morphostasis and cultural morphostasis. Substantively, this meant that in the cultural domain there was one set of hegemonic ideas and a culturally dominant group of proficients, who had not (yet) encountered ideational opposition and were able to reproduce ideas amongst the collectivity of primary agents, thus maintaining a high level of cultural unification in society. On the other hand, structural morphostasis indicates a monolithic form of social organization with the superimposition of elites and heavy concentration of resources, which together prevent crystallization of opposition – this subordination of primary agents thus allowing the structure to be perpetuated. The reciprocal influence between the structural and cultural domains reinforces the status quo and in the process perpetuates the preliminary divide between corporate and primary agents by precluding re-grouping. By contrast, the morphogenetic scenario displays precisely the opposite features, namely the progressive expansion of the number of corporate agents, of those who are numbered among them, and a divergence of the interests represented by them, thus resulting in substantial conflict between them. Accompanying this process is a complementary shrinkage of primary agents, due in part to their mobilization to join burgeoning promotive interest groups and, in part, to the formation of new social movements and defensive associations as some of them combine to form novel types of corporate agency. This is represented in the Figure 4.7. The co-existence of a plurality of corporate agents seeking to push and pull systemic or institutional structure in different directions has profound effects on reshaping the context for primary agents and re-moulding the situations in which they find themselves. Collective reactions to the new context create new environmental problems for some corporate agents and constitute enabling factors for others, since corporate agency is no longer consensual. Collective counter-reactions also take the form of new corporate agents, thus complicating interaction. The interplay between primary and corporate agents could be applied to the wide social canvas of modernity or to more localized

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Figure 4.7 Source: M.S. Archer, Being Human, Cambridge: CUP, 2000, p. 268.

settings since it is meant to be generic to the elaboration of social agency – and agents themselves come in all shapes and sizes. The appropriate morphogenetic cycle is thus delineated according to the scope of the problem in hand. Nevertheless, each such cycle will contain the basic features of pre-grouping and re-grouping. Figure 4.8, therefore, draws out the typical constituents of the morphogenesis of social agency. Thus, from the morphogenetic perspective, Social Agency is embedded in interaction and, hence, is ultimately a relational property of people. This involves relations to the prior socio-cultural context (which effect pre-grouping) and subsequent interactions with others (which effect re-grouping). Simultaneously, the context itself changes since we are dealing with a double morphogenesis in which the elaboration of both structure and agency are conjoint products of interaction. Structure is the conditioning medium and elaborated outcome of interaction: agency is shaped by and reshapes structure whilst reshaping itself in the process. However, the complexity of this process remains hopelessly indefinite unless the interplay between them is disentangled over time to specify the where, the when, and the who. 4.3 Social actors An account of the social actor seeks to conceptualize a social self for an individual that, whilst dependent on society, also meets the strict criteria of identity as a particular person. It proceeds by eschewing two notions: that of an actor undertaking a pre-scripted part (too much of society – too little self), and that of one who merely dons and doffs masks behind which his private business can be conducted (too much self – too little of the social). The balance is struck by a concept of the social actor who becomes such by choosing to identify himself or herself with a particular role and to personify it in a particularistic way. One major result of the interactions between corporate agents, as discussed above, is to modify the array of roles available for incumbency. At the end of any given morphogenetic cycle, the positions that people can occupy as social actors are also transformed. Another way of putting it is that agency makes

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more room for the actor, who is not condemned to a static array of available positions in a changing society. This tendency has been marked throughout modernity. Its generative mechanism is the progressive mobilization and subsequent interaction of more and more corporate agents – see Figure 4.8. We become agents before we become actors. From our families, we acquire the properties of agents through belonging to particular collectivities and sharing their life chances – as males/females, blacks/whites, foreigners/indigenous, middle-class/working-class. Infant agents have a long way to go before they become mature actors. The kind of agents that they start out being without any choice, due to parentage and social context, profoundly influences what type of actor they can choose to become. Certain opportunities and information are open to the privileged and closed to the non-privileged. Options are not determined, but the opportunity costs of attaining them are stacked very differently for the two. However, even within a socially restricted section of the role array, choices have to be made. Questions then arise as to “who does the choosing – and, a little later, who does the personifying?” To answer these without slipping into social determinism we need to introduce personal identity. This is where we return to the crucial concept of “selfhood”. Selfhood, the capacity of subjects

Figure 4.8 Source: M.S. Archer, Being Human, Cambridge: CUP, 2000, p. 279.

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to know themselves to be the same person over time, is pivotal to the development of personal identity and thus of individuation. Since personal identity derives from subjects’ interactions with the world, its natural, practical and social orders, it is dependent upon the prior emergence of a sense of self. The latter secures the fact that the three orders of reality are all impinging on the same subject – who also knows it. Fundamentally, personal identity is a matter of what we care about in the world. Constituted as we are, and the world being the way it is, humans ineluctably interact with the three different orders of natural reality: nature itself, practice and the social order. Human beings necessarily have to sustain relationships with the natural world, work relationships, and social relationships, if they are to survive and thrive. Therefore, no one can be indifferent about the concerns that are embedded in their relations with all three orders. A distinct type of concern derives from each of these orders. The concerns at stake are respectively those of “physical well-being” in relation to the natural order, “performative competence” in relation to the practical order, and “self-worth” in relation to the social order. Our emotions convey the import of these different kinds of situations to us. Thus, emotional reactions are seen as “commentaries upon our concerns”57 and the raw materials of our reflexive responses to the world. However, a dilemma confronts all people. It arises because every person receives all three kinds of emotional commentaries on their concerns, originating from each order of natural reality – nature, practice and the social. Because human subjects have to live and attempt to thrive in the three orders simultaneously, they must necessarily, in some way and to some degree, attend to all three clusters of commentaries. Their problem is that nothing guarantees that the three sets of emotional commentaries dovetail harmoniously. It follows that the concerns to which they relate cannot all be promoted without conflict arising between them. For example, an evasive response to the promptings of physical fear can threaten social self-worth by producing cowardly acts; cessation of an activity in response to boredom in the practical domain can threaten physical well-being by leaving tasks unfinished; and withdrawal as a response to social shaming may entail a loss of livelihood. In other words, momentary attention to pressing commentaries may produce instant gratification of concerns in one order but it is a recipe for disaster since we have no alternative but to inhabit the three orders simultaneously and none of their concerns can be bracketed-away for long. It is only on rather rare occasions that a particular commentary has semi-automatic priority, as in escaping a fire, undertaking a test or getting married. Most of the time, each person has to work out their own modus vivendi in relation to the three orders. What this entails is striking a liveable balance within our trinity of inescapable concerns. Any given modus vivendi can prioritize one of the three orders of natural reality, as with someone who is said to “live for their art”, but what it cannot do is entirely to neglect the other orders. Yet, which precise balance we strike between our concerns and what precisely figures amongst a subject’s constellation of concerns is what give us our strict identities

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as particular persons. Eventually, our emergent personal identities are a matter of how we prioritize one concern as our “ultimate concern” and how we subordinate but yet accommodate others to it. Constituted as we are, we cannot be unconcerned about how we fare in any order of natural reality. Therefore, these concerns can never be exclusively social. That we all have concerns in the natural, practical and social orders is ineluctable, but exactly which concerns, and in precisely what configuration, is a matter of human reflexivity. We reflect on our priorities and evaluate them. The process of arriving at a configuration that prioritizes our “ultimate concern” and accommodates others to them is both cognitive and affective: it entails both judgements of worth and an assessment of whether we care enough to be able to live with the costs and trade-offs involved. We are fallible on both counts, but our struggling towards a modus vivendi between our commitments is an active process of reflexive deliberation, which takes place through “internal conversation”. In it we “test” our potential or ongoing commitments against our emotional commentaries, which tell us whether we are up to living this or that committed life. Since such commentaries will not be unanimous, the “internal conversation”58 involves evaluating them, promoting some and subordinating others, so that the concerns we affirm are also those with which we feel we can live. Since the process is corrigible (we may get it wrong or circumstances may change), the conversation is ongoing. Developing a satisfying and sustainable modus vivendi is an achievement; not one which can be accomplished immediately and not one which can necessarily be maintained. For children and young people, who undoubtedly have internal conversations, the establishment of a stable configuration of commitments is a virtual impossibility because they are still learning about themselves, the world and the relations between them. Furthermore, there are destabilized commitments, often resulting from changes of circumstances, some of which are predictable (for example, in the life-cycle), whilst others stem from the contingencies of life in an open system (for instance, involuntary redundancy). These are nodal points which prompt a radical re-opening of the “internal conversation” but for all people the dialogue is a continuous reflexive monitoring of their concerns, because human commitments are promissory, provisional and subject to renewal, revision or being revoked. The role assigned here to reflexivity focuses upon our voluntarism, because every version of the “oversocialized” view (Society’s Being), or the pre-programmed view (Modernity’s Man) traduces our personal powers to live meaningful lives – they dismiss the power of personal identity to shape our lives around what we care about most59 and to which commit ourselves. However, when we come to the next stage, that of examining the emergence of our social identities, we have to deal with our involuntary placement as social agents and how this circumscribes the social actors that different people can voluntarily become. We all have some choice about the roles we adopt, but few, if any, have a free choice to select from amongst the total role array when attempting to establish a modus vivendi for themselves.

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However, there seems to be a problem with this account. If social identity comes from adopting a role and personifying it in a singular manner, rather than simply animating it, then it seems as though we have to call upon personal identity to account for who does the active personification. Yet, it also appears that we cannot make such an appeal, for it looks, on this account, as though personal identity cannot be attained before social identity is achieved – through experience of social roles, endorsement of some of them and prioritizing amongst those selected. How, otherwise, can people evaluate their social concerns against other kinds of concerns when defining their ultimate concern? How can they determine that priority should be given to one role rather than others they occupy, when defining their modus vivendi? This is the dilemma. I suggest that it is only solved by conceptualizing the interplay between personal identity and social identity as a dialectical process, taking place over the life course of each individual – a dialectic the outcome of which constitutes our individuation. If we wish to uphold the active rather than the passive actor,60 what will not do is to allow sociological imperialism back in by letting social identity swamp personal identity. This cannot be the case for three reasons. To begin with, most of us hold several social roles simultaneously and most roles are greedy consumers. There are never enough hours in the day to be the “good” academic, the billing lawyer, or the company executive and the “good” parent can be on the go around the clock. Now, if all roles are “greedy”, then who or what moderates between their demands? Were we to leave this as a matter arbitrated simply by the strength of these competing role demands alone, we would again have reconciled ourselves to the passive subject. Second, if it is assumed that subjects themselves conduct the arbitration, then we have to ask who exactly is doing this? The answer can only be a person. However, if it is indeed the person who has these abilities, then we have to grant that if they have the capacity to “weigh” one role against another, they can also evaluate their social concerns against their other commitments – thus establishing a modus vivendi. This is precisely what it was argued that the “adult” internal conversation was about. Certainly, for recent role incumbents, new and socially derived information is brought into the internal conversation, but in relation to the claims of other ongoing concerns. Through reflexive inner dialogue their prioritization and accommodation is worked out. The resultant is a personal identity within which the social identity has been assigned its place in the life of a subject. That place may be large (“she lives for her work”) or small (“he’s only in it for the money”), but there is nothing which automatically ensures that social concerns have top priority. It is the subject who prioritizes, and even if conditions are constrainingly such that good reason is found for devoting many hours to, say, monotonous employment, nothing insists that subjects put their hearts into it. Third, in determining how much of themselves anyone will put into their various concerns, they are simultaneously deciding what they will put in. It has to be the person who does this and acts as he or she does in each role precisely because they are the

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particular person that they have become. In the process, their social identity also becomes defined, but necessarily as a sub-set of their personal identity. We can now represent this acquisition of social identity as a process of progressive individuation, which is underpinned by the self-conscious human being. This is the “I” whose continuous sense of self is needed throughout. The “Me” is the self-as-object who, in the individual’s past, was involuntarily placed within society’s resource distribution as a primary agent. The “We” represents the collective action in which the self engages as part of corporate agency’s attempt to bring about social transformation, which simultaneously transforms society’s extant role array as well as transforming corporate agency itself. This then creates the positions which the “You” can acquire, accept and personify thus becoming an actor possessing social identity. Figure 4.9 summarizes the argument presented in this last section. In a nutshell, the subject, in his or her concrete singularity, has powers of ongoing reflexive monitoring of both self and society. These are far outside the register of Modernity’s Man, who remains shackled to his own individualistic preference schedule. In parallel, this subject is also capable of authentic creativity that can transform “society’s conversation” in a radical way, which is foreign to Society’s Being, ever condemned to making conventionally acceptable permutations upon it.

5 Conclusion: being human The foregoing analysis aimed to secure a concept of the agent who was active and reflexive, as social realism requires: someone who has the properties and powers to monitor his or her own life, to mediate structural and cultural properties of society, and thus to contribute to societal reproduction or transformation. However, the process of being human is ongoing because throughout life we continue our reflexive work. The internal conversation is never suspended, it rarely sleeps, and what it is doing throughout the endless contingent circumstances it encounters is continuously monitoring its concerns. Inwardly, the subject is living a rich unseen life which is evaluative (rather than calculative, as is the case for Modernity’s Man) and which is meditative (rather than appropriative, as is the lot of Society’s Being). What this subject is doing is to conduct an endless assessment of whether what it

Figure 4.9 Source: M.S. Archer, Being Human, Cambridge: CUP, 2000, p. 296.

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once devoted itself to as its ultimate concern is still worthy of this devotion, and whether or not the price once paid for subordinating and accommodating other concerns is still one with which the subject can live. This is the sense in which each adult continually re-inspects the “I”, the “Me”, the “We”, and the “You” that have been part of his or her personal morphogenesis, and then applies his or her autonomous personal powers to pursue their replication or transformation. In the process, subjects actively contribute to their own ongoing personal development and to the continuous shaping of natural reality and its three orders – nature, practice and the social.

Notes 1 I leave it to others in this volume to introduce the broader context, specifically, the “stratified realist ontology”, “open systems”, “contingency” and the critique of “empiricism”. 2 See Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1979, pp. 25–26. This preliminary version was refined in his Reclaiming Reality, London: Verso, 1989, p. 77f. 3 John Parker, Structuration, Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000, Ch. 6. 4 Frédéric Vandenberghe, “The Archers: A Tale of Folk (Final Episode?)”, European Journal of Social Theory, 8: 2, 2005. 5 Significantly, Social Origins of Educational Systems, London: Sage, was published in 1979, the same date at which Bhaskar’s The Possibility of Naturalism first appeared. These are therefore two independent but complementary developments. 6 David Lockwood, “Social integration and system integration”, in G.K. Zollschan and H. W. Hirsch, Explorations in Social Change, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. This can be seen as a preliminary move towards a stratified social ontology. 7 Walter Buckley, Sociology and Modern Systems Theory, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1967, p. 58. 8 Ibid., p. 18. 9 William Outhwaite, “Agency and Structure”, in J. Clark, C. Modgil and S. Modgil (eds), Anthony Giddens: Consensus and Controversy, London: Falmer Press, 1990, p. 71. 10 “A state educational system is considered to be a nationwide and differentiated collection of institutions devoted to formal education, whose overall control and supervision is at least partly governmental, and whose component parts and processes are related to one another.” Social Origins, ibid., p. 54. 11 Dave Elder-Vass, “For Emergence: refining Archer’s account of social structure”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37:1, 2007: 25–44. 12 Ibid, p. 30. 13 However, this will necessarily be an incomplete and non-predictive account, given that all structures and the conditions of their existence are at the mercy of contingency in an open system. 14 Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, London: Verso, 1989, “People and society [ … ] do not constitute two moments of the same process. Rather they refer to radically different things”, p. 76. 15 For example, by obliterating the decentralized organization of the English educational system in the last two decades of the 20th century. 16 R. Keith Sawyer, Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 83 (my italics). 17 A very brief summary of this study can be found in Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 324–44; or La Morfogenesi della Società, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1997, pp. 369–86.

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18 Dave Elder-Vass, For Emergence, ibid. Note that for purposes of presentation, I have shifted his original point (v) to become point (iii), which appears to make no difference to his argument. 19 For example, as in his paradigmatic case of language: “when I utter a grammatical English sentence in casual conversation, I contribute to the reproduction of the English language as a whole”. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, London: Macmillan, 1979, pp. 77–78. 20 See Realist Social Theory, ibid., p. 74 and Ch. 8. 21 François Dépeltau, “Relational Thinking: A Critique of Co-Deterministic Theories of Structure and Agency”, Sociological Theory, 26:1, 2008. 22 See Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 1–16; La conversazione interiore, Gardolo: Erickson, 2006. 23 Douglas V. Porpora, “Four concepts of social structure”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 19:2, 1989, p. 208. 24 Peter T. Manicas, A Realist Theory of Social Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 72. 25 John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, London: Penguin Books, 1996, Ch. 6. 26 Peter T. Manicas, A Realist Philosophy of Social Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, “[P]ersons are the dominant causal agents in society – even while, of course, they work with materials at hand”, p. 75. 27 For a discussion of what I have termed “central conflation”, see my Culture and Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, Chs 2, 3 and 4. Also Realist Social Theory, ibid., Chs 3 and 4. 28 Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, p. 298f. 29 M.S. Archer, “The Myth of Cultural Integration”, British Journal of Sociology, 36:3, 1985: 333–53. 30 D. Elder Vass, “The Emergence of Culture”, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 2010, states that “culture by definition is shared by a group” (ibid., p. 6) and “culture is inherently shared” (p. 14). 31 Ibid. 32 Margaret S. Archer and Dave Elder-Vass, “Realists debate Culture”, (forthcoming). 33 Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, ibid., p. 40. 34 Ibid., p. 26. 35 For a theory of the formation of agents’ “projects” in the light of their personal concerns and consideration of their social contexts, see Margaret S. Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; La conversatione interiore, ibid. 36 Emile Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, p. 22. 37 Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes”, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, London: Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 99f. 38 Indispensability need not be symmetrical, that is, bilateral. 39 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1962. 40 A.D. Hall and R.E. Hagen, “Definition of system”, in Joseph A. Litterer (ed.), Organisation, Systems, Control and Adaptation, Vol. II, New York: Wiley, 1969, p. 36. 41 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, ibid., p. 5. 42 Max Weber, in H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills, From Max Weber, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967, p. 413. 43 Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, London: Macmillan, 1974.

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44 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, La Reproduction, Paris: Ed. de Muinuit, 1964. 45 See Archer, Culture and Agency, ibid., pp. 189–95. 46 See Margaret S. Archer, Realist Social Theory, ibid., Ch. 7. 47 A.W. Gouldner, “Reciprocity and Autonomy in Functional Theory”, in N.J. Demerath and R.A. Peterson, System, Change and Conflict, New York: Free Press, Collier Macmillan, 1967. 48 Clearly this implies the existence of irreducible properties and powers pertaining to agents. For a specification of these, see Margaret S. Archer, Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 49 Lakatos, “Falsification”, ibid., p. 158f. 50 “Man” and especially “rational man” was the term current in Enlightenment thinking. Hence, I reluctantly abide with the term “man”, as standing for humanity, when referring to this tradition, its heirs, successors and adversaries. 51 The generic view that there are no emergent properties and powers pertaining to human agents, that is, ones which exist between human beings as organic parcels of molecules and humankind as generated from a network of social meanings. The best example of this model is provided by the work of Rom Harré. The leitmotif of his social constructionism is the following statement: “A person is not a natural object, but a cultural artefact”. Personal Being, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983, p. 20. 52 This was the model of man that was eagerly seized upon by social contract theorists in politics, utilitarians in ethics and social policy, and liberals in political economy. Homo economicus is a survivor. He not only lives on as the anchorman of microeconomics and the hero of neo-liberalism, but he is also a colonial adventurer and, in the hands of rational choice theorists he bids to conquer social science in general. As Gary Becker outlines this mission, “The economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all human behaviour”. The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1976, p. 8. 53 This is dealt with much more thoroughly in my Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 54 Locke put forward a definition which has considerable intuitive appeal, such that a person was “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places” (Essay II, xxvii, 2). From Bishop Butler onwards, critics have construed such continuity of consciousness exclusively in terms of memory and then shown that memory alone fails to secure strict personal identity. See, for example, Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. A defence of a modified neo-Lockean definition is provided by David Wiggins, “Locke, Butler and the Stream of Consciousness: and Men as a Natural Kind”, Philosophy 51, 1976, which preserves the original insight. 55 Marcel Mauss, “A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self”, in M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 56 Ibid., p. 3. 57 Margaret S. Archer, “Emotions as Commentaries on Human Concerns”, in Jonathan H. Turner, Theory and Research on Human Emotions, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004. 58 Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, ibid. 59 Harry G. Frankfurt, The Importance of What we Care About, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 60 For this distinction, see Martin Hollis, Models of Man: Philosophical Thoughts on Social Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

5

Towards a new European sociology The morphogenetic approach between social analysis and grand theory Andrea M. Maccarini

1 Introduction: the morphogenesis of sociology beyond modern rhetoric 1.1 The crisis of sociology in the twilight of the 20th century and the emergence of the morphogenetic approach In sociology, the 1980s were a decade of great post-classical syntheses. As Parsons’s massively influential voice faded in the late 1970s, the time of the great modern authors could really be said to have come to an end; and such theoretical syntheses were at the same time critiques, radical turning points – at least in their authors’ intentions – and more balanced re-assessments. Habermas, Giddens, Alexander and the late Foucault provided the most important post-Parsonian theoretical and conceptual developments in social science that emerged within that time span.1 However, it is widely acknowledged that these were not able to build an acceptable degree of consensus within sociology.2 Since the early 1990s, theory has seemed to wane,3 or to take on a semi-literary tone, and sociology has been losing its self-esteem. The crisis looks dramatic. In a nutshell, it has to do both with the form and explanatory capacity of theory, on the one hand, and with its connection with empirical research, on the other hand. In addition, it seems to bear upon the very ways in which the sociological community selects concepts and theories, insofar as they often resemble changes in fashion rather than scientific selective processes. As a consequence, the discipline exhibits extreme fragmentation among paradigms and approaches, the originality of which is often far from obvious. Such fragmentation goes to fundamentals, that is, to the very way in which to make sense of the identity of the discipline on the part of those who teach it in the numerous courses that are called “sociology” in universities worldwide. Moreover, the status of the social and the role of sociology seem to be decreasing, too. Against this backdrop, Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach (M/M)4 – which came into the picture in the late 1980s, developed in the 1990s, and continues to develop – appears as sort of a unicum. I will try to explain why, and how.

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1.2 Between “grand theory” and explanatory power: the profile of a new European sociology My general thesis is that the M/M theory represents the spearhead of a vast movement which is slowly reconstructing sociology as a scientific discipline and as a form of self-consciousness in European societies.5 More precisely, I will maintain that its main scientific contribution consists of the capacity to create a new convergence between offering a general conceptual orientation for the discipline and working out a properly explanatory framework, i.e. one that is focused on meeting the challenge of developing concrete explanations for enigmatic social facts. To put it another way, the M/ M approach bears the promise of sociology coming to inhabit the empty intellectual space currently separating grand theory from one that claims to have cognitive-explanatory power.6 My argument will be centred upon a basic idea: that the M/M approach successfully meets the challenge thanks to its articulation of the tripartite connection between social ontology, methodology, and practical social theory, by means of suitable concepts. This formulation may be useful to clarify the structure of the present chapter. It consists of two elements: 1 articulating the tripartite connection of ontology, methodology, and theory … 2 … by means of suitable concepts. As to the first point, I’ll leave ontology for the relevant chapters in this volume.7 The guiding intention of my essay is to demonstrate how the M/M approach makes a difference in the development of social theory. Therefore, my argument explores the dimension Archer calls “methodological”, meaning the theory’s explanatory framework, the conceptual framework constituting the model that guides the scholar’s observation of social phenomena. As regards point 2, above, my main concern is to highlight the way in which the core concepts employed at crucial points qualify this theory to carry out its explanatory task successfully. My discourse will not unfold through exhaustive, genealogical or systematic theoretical reconstruction. Margaret Archer’s work is well known, and the dense theoretical account she puts forward in this volume would make such an approach to the matter even more redundant. In a rather different fashion, a particular path for reading through the M/M approach will be carved, involving a focused discussion of some crucial concepts indicating the strategic theoretical options it has advanced. Along this path I intend to sketch the profile of a “new European sociology”. Its basic elements could be identified as follows: 1 a non-conflationary sociology (section 2), denying all forms of reductionism. The key concept here is that of analytical dualism;

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2 a cognitive-explanatory theory (section 3). A discussion of emergent properties and of the “mechanisms” of emergence through morphogenetic cycles is called for; and 3 a scientific-humanistic sociology (section 4). I will show how the conception of human reflexivity, and its specific place within the theory, are capable of integrating the idea of a social science with that of being human as making a relevant difference in society. In the conclusion (section 5), I will summarize certain positive aspects and indicate some problems, pointing to possible research lines to be pursued in the future. My overall strategy has been to compare the M/M approach with those theories I regard as the most outstanding representatives in sociology of the two polarities – general visions and explanatory theories, respectively – mentioned above.8 For this reason, the recurring reference in the text will be to systems theory, to some formulations of the so-called “analytical realism”, and to Anthony Giddens’s work. These I will use as “reagents” to highlight some specific problems. A systematic comparison is out of the question, and I do not claim to be providing any thorough critical assessment of the M/M theory with respect to the whole corpus of contemporary social theory, which of course would call for book-length treatment. What I want to do is just to kick off such a task, with the aim of contributing to the emergence of the meaning and significance of the M/M enterprise as an advanced outpost of European sociology.

2 Non-conflationary social theory: analytical dualism 2.1 The methodological pivotal point of morphogenesis The principle of analytical dualism is the conceptual Archimedean point of morphogenetic theory, and thereby the mandatory starting point of our discussion.9 It stands on the boundary and represents the connection between the underlying ontological assumptions and the strictly sociological explanatory programme. First, we must clarify what is meant by analytical dualism. In broad terms, the idea is clear. The social is a stratified reality constituted by two different, mutually irreducible dimensions: structure and agency. It is useful to distinguish structure and agency for analytical purposes, that is, to be able to analyse social structures and agential doings as well as to grasp their interactions. In addition, drawing such a distinction is possible, since both are endowed with emergent properties of their own. In order to make sense of the really central position analytical dualism occupies in the theory, it is important to recall the first of the four basic statements underpinning the practical application of M/M analysis to social structures: “there are internal and necessary relations within and among social structures (SS)”.10

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This first proposition, Archer says, represents the foundation of analytical dualism, since it involves the possibility of producing statements about the elements of social structures without any immediate reference to agents.11 The three following theses correspond to the three phases of the M/M cycle. This in turn makes clear that taking the option of analytical dualism forms the basis of the M/M explanatory format, being its first conceptual “moment”, as it were. It is the point discriminating between and determining a crucial divergence – and thereby constituting the differentia specifica – between the M/M framework and: 1 contemporary grand theories, adopting either an ontology based on praxis (Giddens) or a “punctual” ontology based on communication (Luhmann); and 2 analytical realism (Hedström, Swedberg, Goldthorpe), insofar as it holds irrelevant – and therefore gives up a priori – the articulation of any kind of social ontology, be it dualistic or not. 2.2 The name of the social: dualism, ontology and simultaneity Despite its apparent clarity, the concept of analytical dualism hides some dilemmas we must now take into consideration. Readers of Archer’s work have sometimes claimed she has given analytical dualism two different meanings, since it was first employed within a Kantian epistemological framework and later according to Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism.12 What this really means is that dualism has first been regarded just as a useful analytical construct, which is good for theory building but is deprived of any ontological status, only to assume the ontology of emergence later on. We may hold this statement as basically correct, even though the turning point is usually located in Realist Social Theory, in 1995, while it would be possible to demonstrate it was well under way in Culture and Agency, seven years before.13 Be that as it may, the following formulations are crystal clear: “ … ‘the social’ is not one and indivisible, but is constituted by heterogeneous elements. The analysis of their interaction is thus central to every adequate social theory”.14 Likewise: “The ‘persons’ in society and the ‘parts’ of society are not different aspects of the same thing, but radically different objects”.15 In these citations the realist ontology appears complete and fully integrated within the M/M model. Nevertheless, this raises two distinct issues. We might call them the problem of unity and the problem of simultaneity. In the first place, the dualistic view seems to imply that “the social” just has no unity whatsoever. Archer is not just referring to different “states” of the social, of different conditions in particular moments – such as the “charismatic moment” or the periods of collective effervescence – but one of a strong ontological heterogeneity, entailing different elements and strata endowed with different properties and powers. Isn’t this a paradox for an approach aiming

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to “start again” from social reality, going back to the robust identification of “social facts”? Isn’t it a problem for any science which goes – realistically – for an object-oriented self-definition to end up with the idea that such object is not one, but two? Furthermore, what does it mean, then, to call such dualism “analytic”? This problem calls out another one. That separability assumed by dualism also explicitly refers to agency and structure being temporally out of tune, and therefore to their “non-simultaneity”. One can see they are separable since they operate along different time segments: agency is always preceded by conditioning structures and followed by the structures it elaborates and innovates, or keeps into being. This point is really crucial, and here the essay that the author has contributed to the present volume provides some very interesting clarifications. The issue comes to the fore within the long dialogue between Archer and Elder-Vass. The latter maintains that: morphogenesis does not explain how an entity can possess emergent properties. Such an explanation always depends on the existence of a specific set of synchronic relations between the parts: morphogenesis explains the development of such a set of relations over time, but the operation of a causal power at any given moment depends upon the presence of those relations at that specific moment in time. Thus the temporal element in the explanation of emergence must always be complemented by a synchronic relational element.16 Archer’s response is one of agreement about the relevance of the relational synchronic element, but she holds that the M/M framework “can account for both the diachronic development of such systems and also for the synchronic presence of those parts in those relations at those specific moments over which they endured”.17 How is this possible? In order to explain it, Archer again clarifies the steps characterizing her argument. They could be summarized as follows: 1 the direct experience of society and “social facts” may well be one of “fusion”; that is, it may imply facing an overwhelming complexity, which may appear to be an undifferentiated entity; 2 analytical dualism is then a form of complexity reduction that is necessary in order not to be “swept away” by this ongoing “flow”; 3 this, however, does not exclude, but incorporates assumptions about the continuity of agency and of the activity dependence of every social structure; 4 the combined effect of analytical dualism and activity dependence produces a more specific analysis of the nature of each emergent entity: structures, individuals and groups, and their interrelations; and 5 the emergent properties of structure and agency represent the ontological guarantee that this dualistic option is no mere fiction that is adopted for the purpose of observation, but draws on the reality of the social. In other words, they allow one to see how the sweeping stream of complexity

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generates (relatively) enduring forms, that are not mere illusions, but accomplish real (not just conventional) societal periodization and change. The crucial points are 3–5. Analytical dualism does not depart from, but indeed operates together with another principle realists deem important: activity dependence. Structure and agency are different kinds of emergent entities, but there is nothing self-sustaining within the social (contrary to the natural world). Only human agential doings constitute and keep a given social entity in being. This discussion allows us to draw three fundamental conclusions, thereby clarifying better what analytical dualism is, and what it does:18 1 Dualism is called “analytical”, though “structure” and “agency” are different kinds of emergent entities, because both elements are crucial for one another’s formation, continuation, and development. It would be impossible to understand one dimension without the other, but it’s precisely the analysis of their interaction that accounts for this situation. Analysis is only possible through distinction. 2 Activity dependence is not equivalent to the notion “that every such doing on the part of everyone somehow contributes to maintaining the whole … ”.19 As compared with this view, the M/M model exhibits two important differences, the one “local”, the other “temporal”. First, some doings are irrelevant, while others are more or less important, their relevance depending on the mutual tension they manifest. Therefore, it is not “doings” in general that sustain structures, but rather some doings by some given actors. Furthermore, one can see agency is being transformed along with structure in the course of social time, since “As it re-shapes structural relations at any given T4, agency is ineluctably re-shaping itself”.20 Agency is indeed continuous, but it is not an uninterrupted flow on the part of undifferentiated actors, within which no distinctive periods can be identified. Actors and groups are re-shaped along with the re-shaping of the structural context.21 Finally, an important consequence concerns the theory of social change. Emphasis on the “double morphogenesis” of structure and agency points out the relatively enduring nature of structures. Such a characteristic feature often remains concealed in the shade of “synchronic accounts” that do not offer endogenous explanations of how a given structure can be transformed.22 Instead, the double morphogenesis reveals “how the synchronic “forces” (re-)producing morphostasis are an agential achievement, which is constantly threatened, rather than being ones conducive to eternal life for any structure”.23 One possible conclusion would be that the problem of unity and that of simultaneity share the same solution. The “social” is emergence from agency. At the same time, this emergence does not result in a dense, recursive core that is impossible to see through. The key to this issue is to be found in the sentence emphasized in point 1, above: each element

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(structure and agency) is crucial to the formation, continuation, and development of the other. This formula means the two elements are somehow part of, and play a role in one another’s process of constitution, yet they are emphatically not mutually constituted. To sum up, the solution to the problem of simultaneity lies in mutual constitution being non-exhaustive. In other words: Giddens’s idea of mutual constitution entails that the reciprocal foundation of “agency” and “structure” leaves no residues, so there is nothing left outside the recursive core of the structured-and-structuring praxis. Instead, the M/M theory considers structure and agency to be real forms, that emerge through relations but do not “dissolve” in them, are continually reshaped through time but hold on to their difference and individuality, which is constituted by their own internal and necessary relations. If, at their intersection, properties and powers arise that would otherwise be fated to remain latent, and take on the character of (emergent) realities, something does remain outside this relationship. This “something” belongs to each respective pole, and they both “take” it “into” their interaction; this quid is the outcome of other relations, both social and non-social.24 Moreover, the notion of analytical dualism also differs from the themes of systems theory. In fact, it appears to be the decisive point upon which Archer breaks up with the systemic approach, which had been at the ground of her insight in the idea of morphogenesis. In the version represented by Walter Buckley, structure was held to be “an abstract construct, not something distinct from the ongoing interactive process but rather a temporary, accommodative representation of it at any one time, thus tending to dodge questions of social ontology”.25 In this framework, the dualism of structure versus agency is obviously wiped away from the theoretical field right from the start, both in its ontological and analytical meanings. The situation remains essentially the same in recent systems theory, appealing to the distinction between medium and form.26 As a matter of fact, the latter does not indicate any “entities”, but only different kinds of connections.27 As regards the approach known as analytical realism, its explicit individualistic option clearly excludes dualism.

3 Explanatory social science: generative processes and emergent properties 3.1 Morphogenesis and emergence I will now raise the question concerning what kind of explanation the M/M model can provide. Providing explanations represents an explicit aim for this model, one that constitutes its very reason for existing, since it is “an explanatory framework, which complements the realist philosophy of science and furnishes specialized practitioners with guidelines for explaining the problems

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they have in hand”.28 Accordingly, the theory will have to be assessed on the grounds of its specifically explanatory performance. In this frame of thought, “explaining” means producing theory-driven narratives that account for “how particular parts of the social order originated and came to stand in a given relationship to one another, whose actions were responsible for this, through which interactions, when and where and with what consequences”.29 How does the theory accomplish this task, and with what conceptual tools? The two foundational elements are the concept of morphogenesis, articulated in the analytical model of cycles and phases,30 and that of emergent properties. Emergence explains the properties to which causal powers are attributed. If one holds a given aspect of social structure (or the cultural system) to exert causal power, such a claim must have an adequate ontological foundation, so as not to engage in reification. As to the notion of morphogenesis, its task is to explain how those social forms originate. Such emergent entities, with their properties, must be understood from their social origins, and this requires a methodology explaining why and how they came to being. Let us deal with emergence first. The general meaning of the word is clear: those entities, properties or substances are called emergent that originate from more fundamental entities, and are new and irreducible to them. The idea first developed in the context of the sciences dealing with life and mind, which is still the prevailing field in which the concept is elaborated, together with physics.31 Interest in this notion has then spread through all domains of science (and reality), thanks to the growing sensitivity to complexity and related phenomena. Emergence has also been defined as “the central phenomenon of the social sciences”,32 since these are all supposed to be dealing with emergence – with more or less awareness.33 How is emergence defined within the morphogenetic theory? Here it is treated as ontological emergence. The emergent entity or property can only be observed at the higher level or stratum,34 while also referring to an ontological stratification of the social; properties and powers pertaining to some layers are prior to others, emerging from the former in time; they are relatively autonomous in the various layers; and these autonomous properties wield autonomous causal influence, the effects of which serve as evidence of their very existence. Further clarification of this notion could unfold as follows: 1 Emergence is based on time, in that it requires time, whilst not being identified with temporal dynamics, as Archer points out in this volume.35 Emergent properties are created when objects are internally related (structures). Then emergent properties originate, since this kind of combination creates reciprocal influence as to essential elements, thereby modifying the causal powers and the capacities of elements in a fundamental way. External (that is, contingent) relations instead produce aggregate effects. To sum up, it is relations that generate emergent properties in time.36

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2 Ontological emergence can be set against supervenience,37 since the former implies no necessity; this in turn is because the diachronic contribution of other, previously emergent properties plays a decisive role in determining what properties are instantiated at a given moment. 3 Emergent properties originate from combinations in which the latter element can have a feedback on the former, changing component elements fundamentally. This is a clear statement of downward causation, which most interpreters regard as characterizing an ontological, as opposed to an epistemological, view of emergence. 3.2 Explanation: generative processes and the emergence of the social I will now deal with the specific form that theoretical models attribute to social morphogenesis, that is with the explanatory format they adopt. Thus, we will also see what role the concept of emergence plays within them. We now live in a post-empiricist theoretical environment: those who have not given up a fully scientific definition of sociology have nonetheless abandoned a notion of causality – therefore of explanation – that can be assimilated to statistical correlation. The most refined versions are now converging on an idea of causation as a generative process.38 Within this frame of reference, a phenomenon is explained when the underlying process or mechanism39 is made explicit, such that it can indeed generate that phenomenon. Such a process is “underlying” in that it operates on a “deeper”, microscopic level as compared with available statistical data – and on that level it should be observed.40 Statistically identified regularities can therefore not serve as explanations, but as explananda, namely as indications that a phenomenon is there calling for explanation. The M/M theory appears to fit in with these developments. Furthermore, “analytical sociology” and M/M approach insist that people are the only entities who can act, and thereby the only real efficient causes in the social world:41 this is why statistical correlations (on a macro level) can only be explained through the level of social interaction. This implies that social processes/ mechanisms be described by narratives of the courses of action. However, from this point on the two roads begin to diverge, the crucial issue being precisely the conception of emergence. According to analytical realism, individuals in interaction generate the observed social regularities.42 Thus, all phenomena must be explained starting from the properties and doings of their sub-units. The morphogenetic theory also accepts the necessity of working through interaction, but assigns a crucial role to emergent properties (EP): for Archer, the “underlying” and “deeper” level on which generative mechanisms are to be found is that of EP and their complex interrelations. Moreover, the EP which act as generative mechanisms producing social forms – namely macroscopic effects and observable phenomena – are those of social structures (SEPs) and cultures (CEPs), as well as persons (PEPs). As was said in section 3.1, this view involves an explicit

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ontological stance. Emergence does indeed appear as a key concept for the explanatory process even within analytical realism. However, the latter considers them as nothing but macro-effects that cannot be imputed to individuals yet depend upon their actions and interactions.43 However, such effects do not seem to feature on the list of the causal factors, according to this version of methodological individualism. In other terms, we are dealing here with an idea of “weak emergence”,44 that is, of macroscopic states derived from micro-dynamics and external conditions modelled through simulations. The appeal to a “strong” notion of emergence and its central position in the explanatory programme are often met with harsh criticism by analytical realists, who consider the critical realist ontology to be obscure and arbitrary and deem it wiser to specify mechanisms instead of levels of reality: the critical realist explanation, hence the one characterizing the M/M model, allegedly entails attributing causal powers to such “levels of reality” through vague and generic formulations.45 On the contrary, the M/M approach maintains that sociological theory is not accomplished by the mere identification of social structures as emergent properties, but also has to work out an analytical history of their emergence that explains why things are so and not otherwise.46 Thus, Archer is emphatically not trying to explain social facts by simply “appealing to EP”, but with specific relations between SEP, CEP and PEP, and their transformation in time, which is modelling their relational constellations on various levels. The synchronic model of structural/ cultural conditionings must be completed with the analytic history of emergence, of the interweaving cycles of cultural, structural and personal morphogenesis – or morphostasis. Thus, the explanatory programme brings the M/M cycles to the fore, where structural conditionings are examined through their institutional and cultural configurations, with the related situational logics and derivation links.47 Such situational logics and their developmental trends (morphogenetic or morphostatic) in time are examined in full detail. Analytical realists have not explained to date what difference there is between these configurations – e.g. that of “necessary incompatibilities” – and the mechanisms they employ, such as the ones they call wishful thinking or cognitive dissonance, nor that these are any better from an explanatory point of view. We could summarize as follows: both the ontological and the explanatory critique of the M/M approach is focused upon EP in themselves, whilst institutional configurations and situational logics – with the related hypotheses about the possibilities of morphogenesis/ morphostasis – are never taken into consideration, though in sociological perspective they constitute the very core of the model.48 EP do indeed exert “an independent causal influence”, as Hedström says, quoting Archer, but such influence can only be activated and generate social forms (observable macro-effects) through interrelation with other EP, modelled by the M/M cycle.49 By way of example, a given enabling context cannot even be perceived as such, and does not actually have any causal power, if the plans social actors are making do not show any interest in

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the “enabled” activities, social positions and roles.50 In a nutshell, a social mechanism is not just an EP.51 We may now bring our argument to completion adding that the M/M model doesn’t try to explain complex social phenomena by means of single mechanisms. The M/M explanatory programme holds it very unlikely that a social phenomenon is produced by the freewheeling operation of one mechanism alone. Interaction is always complex and involves multiple processes, actors and morphogenetic cycles, which can be studied separately for analytical purposes, but the stories of which must then be recomposed in order to reproduce complex phenomena, e.g. the emergence of a new institutional complex such as the public educational system, within a given society. It seems possible to conclude that the “methodological gap” has been filled, and the M/M model is indeed an explanatory sociology in its own right. Its difference with respect to other explanatory programmes, such as that of analytical sociology, does not amount to its being unable to specify the generative mechanisms at work within society, but should be searched for somewhere else. It has to do with human reflexivity, hence with the role played by the agent in producing social phenomena. The M/M approach endows people with their own EP, which comes into play in relation to structural conditionings, and makes the boundary between structure and agency the object of intensive investigation.52 For a rational action theorist, this certainly implies striking against unpredictability and subjectivity to an intolerable extent. He assumes courses of action will unfold according to “rational” expectations. In this narrative, actions and interactions would express some “central tendencies”53 for the individuals’ agential doings, given the underlying constraints and opportunities. These tendencies would then be immediately actualized as actions, and through their intentional and unintentional consequences produce the regularities to be explained. The place of reflexivity has thus been evaded; the structure/ agency connection becomes an instantaneous event. This is the way various “rationales” of action are specified, though they most often pay for their theoretical parsimony by ending up with grossly oversimplified “actors”. This option sustains the methodological procedures of computational models and simulations of social life. Thought-provoking and heuristically stimulating as such models may occasionally be, sociology thus tends to drift towards the frame of reference of general systems theory and of naturalistic views of the social.54 These models conceive of interactions as repeated interactive events among virtual actors, the way these virtual entities are assumed to interact being neither real, nor realistic. Ironically, action theory risks being deprived of “real” actors. We may now draw a provisional conclusion about the difference between analytical and critical realism; in a nutshell, such a difference amounts to the distinction between the social generative processes and mechanisms, which I have been using as synonymous so far. Human society probably includes some mechanisms as well, but is essentially constituted by processes: nondeterministic, and mediated by “robust” agents, namely by ones endowed with their own personal EPs.55

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3.3 Grand theories and sociological explanation I will now use the concept of the generative process as a form of sociological explanation to illustrate what difference it makes for a “grand theory” to point to this particular way of theory-building or not. Luhmann and Giddens are two graphic cases in point. Niklas Luhmann does indeed plan to produce an explanatory sociology. However, the explanatory programme available to this sort of theory coincides with a particular version of evolution theory.56 In that context, what we have are variations in social structure that happen to be selected. Those deviations that are reinforced then come to stabilization. The problem lies in that such a démarche makes it extremely difficult for Luhmann to treat the event in question as historically specific and to highlight the selection mechanisms, namely to explain why society does not stop at rejecting a given structure, but binds itself in a certain direction. My thesis is that this explanatory deficit can be adequately treated within the M/M model. I will make my case with an example I regard as a vantage point to access the whole issue of generative mechanisms/ processes, namely the shift between different forms of social differentiation. Systems theory perceives the explanation of such transitions as one of its main problems. In the first place, it dismisses any idea of some single factor counting as a generalized mechanism: for example, the passage from segmentary to stratified societies cannot be explained by sheer demographic growth, since there have been societies accomplishing such a transition without that growth. Therefore, there are no universal regular correspondences that can be used in this sort of explanation. Luhmann then treads another path, and it is here that he comes close to an explanatory format one could profitably translate into an M/M account. The logical starting point is the observation that transitions take off where a break in the reciprocity regulating social relations within a segmentary society occurs. This can happen as a result of various, local and specific mechanisms. One example concerns resource distribution. At a given moment in time, the rule of reciprocity and equality – typically characterizing a segmentary society – comes into conflict with growing imbalances in resource distribution caused by wars, conquests or domestic developments. At a certain point, the feedback becomes positive: deviations from the behaviours that were previously held valid are no more perceived as disturbances and are not eliminated. Luhmann speaks here, in an inevitably unspecific fashion, of “uninhibition of an inhibited natural development”, producing catastrophe for a certain form of differentiation and the shift to a new one. This “mechanism” could be easily recast as a morphogenetic process.57 At time T1 a given society is based upon the norm of reciprocity and equality (SEP1), and on a certain structure of resource distribution (SEP2) concerning economy, power and symbols. The necessary complementarity between these SEPs constitutes a second order EP and explains the stability of segmentation as a differentiation form, since the situational logic is one of “protection” of

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existing arrangements. At time T2 an event or a prolonged series of events sets in: it may be war and subsequent conquest (achieved or suffered), or the domestic enrichment of some families and clans as compared with others, or something else. In any case, the way Luhmann describes these facts invites a reading in M/M perspective, which means treating them as elements on the interaction level – among individuals and groups. At time T3, such interactions modify the resource distribution, and thereby the relation between SEP1 and SEP2. An unequal distribution of resources is no longer internally related to a normative-institutional complex based on total reciprocity, but provides actors with the opportunity to disregard it and even establishes an advantage for those violating such norms. At time T4 a new form of differentiation emerges, as a result of these changes in the relations between EP.58 What I wish to emphasize is that the M/M account lives up to this level of complexity, while also clarifying and connecting some points that would otherwise remain obscure or generic. It is interesting to compare these formulations with those of Anthony Giddens,59 to gain some insight into the kind of representation of society a theory can offer if and insofar as it gives up an explanation oriented to generative processes. In Giddens’s frame of reference, even the concept of evolution is held to be fundamentally inapplicable to social dynamics.60 As is widely known, the notion of duality of structure is at the forefront in Giddens’s description of agency’s conditions-and-outcomes. To Giddens, the whole social order can be explained as a way to transcend the limited character of human presence (due to the limits of our bodily condition) through social relations extending in time-space. It is, however, difficult to get some indications about the way such processes should be properly modelled.61 Therefore, the various components that Giddens evokes in his “grand narrative” of modern society are not just “right” or “wrong”. The problem lies in the vagueness of their definition, and above all in the way they come on the theoretical stage, neither genealogically, nor systematically, nor even analogically. In other words, the relation connecting them is not clear. The concept of duality of structure appears to be too compact, and hardly as complex as it would need to be, to sustain the “generation” of a vast array of macroscopic phenomena that are there to be seen. A significant descriptive gap and explanatory deficit opens wide between the level of processes – here defined as praxis – and that of observable social forms. The various elements and principles of social life are not the outcome of an evolutionary process that can be analysed, nor do they derive from the unfolding of an abstract principle: they seemingly accumulate in a “stepwise” fashion, as the need arises to introduce more articulated principles than the ones assumed at the beginning. The theory tends to unravel as an ad hoc representation. This approach entails an impossibility that Giddens accepts and maintains, namely that it is impossible to develop a theory of social change in its historical dimension, since all social life is deemed to be fully contingent. Scepticism toward generalizing models may well be justified, but it

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is here extended to any mechanism or process, be it only locally valid. At the end of the day, the problem is not that Giddens describes “new” social structures, but that he sees them in their sheer “being there”, that is, as mere events. The various conceptual elements grow instead as “adjectives” of society as an analytically “unattainable” entity,62 one that is beyond reach of conceptual representations exceeding metaphor. To conclude: I have been arguing that the M/M explanatory programme is sufficiently complex and specific to be used in the domain of “grand representations” of society, and to account for macro-phenomena. Grand theories become more clear and consistent when they approach, or are modelled by, an explanatory format based on generative processes; the M/M approach can thus turn out to play a pivotal role in reducing the gap between conceptually fuzzy general theories that are useless on the explanatory level and explanatory models that are inadequate to treat real and complex social phenomena.

4 A humanistic scientific sociology: social morphogenesis and human reflexivity 4.1 Individuals, society, reflexivity. After internalization? Like all general theories in the social sciences, realist social theory tackles the central issue of the relationship between individual and society. What is the specific contribution that it gives to redefining this matter? In a nutshell, this contribution can be subsumed under the label of humanistic scientific sociology, which says what the M/M theory wants to be. This expression refers to a sociology that can provide a rigorous conceptual, analytical and explanatory framework, though adequately accounting for the characteristic features distinguishing human society from other complex, nonhuman phenomena. Thus, it differs both from the naturalistic theories, which reduce the human social phenomenon to other levels of reality, and from philosophical or literary humanism, which deals with society through nonscientific categories, by other forms of reason and communication, pursuing different aims from precise conceptualization and empirically tested explanation of social facts. The particular way the M/M approach tries to work out a humanistic social science can be phrased as follows: one can say it conceives of the relation between human and social dimensions of reality in a non-conflationary, connective, and “value-rational” way.63 The current theoretical and socio-historical background is particularly stimulating. Sociology has long criticized the “oversocialized” conception of man that was imputed to functionalism. For all the reasons behind this criticism, nevertheless Parsons’s model was a great attempt at theoretical synthesis64 and, after it was abandoned, the human/ social relationship has become even more crucial, and definitely more confused, in contemporary sociology;65 it could be said that the theory of this relationship is losing its complexity. Socialization theory has lost some of its

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key distinctions and turns out to be as partial as ever.66 This limitation can be divided into two main forms: a strict separation between human and social, individual and society, and a mutual constitution that leaves nothing out of the recursive bundle. The former is typical of both individualistic approaches, from rational choice to analytical realism, and systems theory in its most advanced sociological version. The latter characterizes all theories based on praxis, like that of Giddens.67 Central conflation blends individual and society together in a flow of praxis. The theories of strict separation can still take on the usual form of methodological individualism and of “modernity’s man” – to use Archer’s name for the Enlightenment views of the human being based on rationality and on pre-existing preferences that are independent of society. Instead, in Luhmann’s theory, the human/ social link becomes purely random by regarding social and psychic systems as autopoietic, self-referential systems running by their own operation – communication and consciousness, respectively. This being the case, social and psychic systems are structurally coupled through language; they are reciprocally fine-tuned a priori so as to work together in full co-ordination without it even being noticed, that is without “noise” or visibility. The human/social link is thus given an evolutionary solution. Against this backdrop, the realist morphogenetic social theory formulates the problem in quite innovative terms. Archer comes up with an ontologically stratified, dynamic, and connective theory of the human being and of his/her relationship with the social domain. I will just indicate the crucial steps: 1 the human being emerges through relationships with various layers of reality: nature, practice and society, developing in the first place a continual sense of self which is not socially derived; 2 practical relations have priority, and play a pivotal role in constituting the primary identity of the self and its fundamental categories; 3 the process of personification then undergoes various stages, and finally comes to constitute a personal identity including social identity; 4 the basic properties at work in this process are PEPs, both first order – emotions – and second order – internal conversation as the process of human reflexivity; and 5 these PEPs emerge as an outcome of our relations with the three strata of natural reality, since they generate care or “concerns”; the order we establish among these defines what we care about most, the “exchange rates” among various possible courses of action, ending up with the establishment of our own modus vivendi, that is, the way we inhabit this world, which is unique to each person. What we see here is a stratified concept of agency and the person, based on the human experience of reality, both social and non-social. Such experience is a relation with nature, practice and society, and is mediated by our PEPs.68

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Emotions are the first commentaries we make on the reality we experience. Later we reflect upon them, fixing our priorities and thereby establishing an order in our way of relating to the various aspects of reality. This entails deciding what our ultimate concern is, and how the other concerns that inevitably emerge from our relations with the world can dovetail with it. The stable outcome of this reflexive operation is the modus vivendi we establish with the world, namely our existential project. Ultimate concerns, therefore, establish a meaningful relation between the world as it is and our projects for life. It is only through this relation that our projects and the corresponding practices can come into being and find concrete realization. From these projects in turn depends the way in which we “make our way through the world”, moving through different social contexts, structures and roles.69 This view clearly has multiple and far-reaching implications. Three of them are particularly relevant for us here. First, the link between individual and society and its mediation take place in a connective way. The dreams, concerns and life projects of human beings are the place from which social conditionings receive their “specific gravity”, as well as specifically human “replies”. Thus, human beings “count” for society, not only as numbers or as the necessary suppliers of communication, and not even as bearers of “internalized” ideas and values that they are not aware of or do not control anyway. Archer has conceived of a systematic way to show how this happens and is integrated in the process of socio-cultural morphogenesis. Second, the human/ social connection is not a conflationary one, since human identity is not swallowed up by the social domain, is not the “gift” of society. Finally, realist social theory argues that evaluation, in the broad sense of the term, represents the basic existential attitude characterizing the human condition in the world.70 This point finds expression in the crucial concept of “concern” (Sorge), which bears a double meaning: what inescapably concerns us, calls for our attention and presses us to deal with (something we cannot simply ignore), and what we care about, what we are ideally engaged in. We can summarize both meanings by defining concern as “what is urging us”.71 In turn, this of course has many important consequences. Here I can only sketch its relevance for an idea of rationality. 4.2 Sociological realism and its Wertrationalität There are other theories emphasizing the importance of the human agent and his/ her interactions in building social forms. A refined version is that of socalled analytical realism. Nevertheless, as we have seen above it tends to assume an extremely simplified version of the agent. A brief comparison serves to illustrate the notion of the human agent as evaluator and his/her rationality, thereby accounting for what innovation the critical realist perspective makes. Analytical sociology presents itself as a theory of action and, more precisely, one of rational action. It is sensitive to the shortcomings of economic

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theories of rational choice and criticizes them exactly on the grounds that their psychological and sociological assumptions are not realistic.72 Such a lack of realism has to do with the form of actors’ rationality economists assume, ones that are deemed to be implausible. The sociological theory of rational action therefore dissents from this frame of thought, its criticism essentially unfolding along three lines: 1 It is necessary to weaken the rationality which is possible for the actor-insituation.73 The problem lies in that the real circumstances of social life prevent the requisites of ideal rationality, as they appear in formal models, from being actualized.74 2 The theory must consider only the rational side of action. Within the analytical-realist epistemological framework one can proceed by abstracting and selecting some aspects of action alone, that is, the rational ones. 3 The theory of rational action must be regarded as a partial theory. This is no statement about analytic dimensions of actions, but about domains of action. Some of them exhibit more rationality, some less or even none, hence the latter fall beyond the explanatory range of this theory. All these arguments share a basic rationale. They all assume that instrumental reason is the only form of rationality, whilst acting on the ground of valueand norm-commitments, not to mention emotions, is merely an interference – though frequent or inevitable – with genuine rational action. Moreover, valuecommitments being almost inflexible with respect to circumstances, are thought to be equivalent to traditional action (that is, non-reflexive and nonrational). All of this sheds a very instructive light upon the M/M approach and its originality, by showing that it calls into question the very form and the normative model of rational action as such. Archer treats human reflexivity as the locus where structure and agency are mediated and in which every social actor shapes his/her own modus vivendi in relation to existential priorities. This involves holding that the human being is naturally an evaluator. In turn, it implies a bi-directional relation: on the one hand, “rational” action is always moved by values, or better by emotions and evaluations guided by an ultimate concern; on the other hand, the way values and norms affect human beings changes dramatically, since the theory drops the concept of internalization and assumes that they are conveyed through a reflexive relation including the cognitive and rational aspect.75 In other words, the M/M theory refuses to set rational against norm- or value-oriented action, but sees evaluation as a relationship connecting these domains in ways and forms that are not pre-defined. Thus, the importance of what we care about even sets out an anthropological discourse that departs from the Enlightenment model of “modernity’s man”, and more generally from any psychology that excludes the symbolic factor or makes it into a residual category. Dealing with the various

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orders of reality (natural, practical and social), and assigning different values to the goods attainable in relation to each of them, as well as to the sacrifices they require, is a necessary task that it is rational to fulfil, since otherwise one would be unable to build a meaningful life. Preferences, costs and benefits leading to rational choices are only such because of the underlying “exchange rates” that have been so established. This approach does take into consideration all the limitations of rationality cited above. The realist idea of reflexivity is sensitive to fallibility. There are exogenous limits, like lack of information, or of ideational resources, since the cultural system fixes the boundaries of what is indeed conceivable. There are endogenous limits, that is the calculative capacity and discursive penetration displayed by the subjects. Be that as it may, action becomes intelligible when it is reconstructed not as instrumentally rational, but as rational in relation to some values, namely to those existential priorities that the subject has established for himself, given his/her structural conditionings and what he/she really cares about.76 For these reasons, it is possible to regard realist social theory and the morphogenetic approach as the new, emergent “strong programme” of a nonconflationary, connective and wertrational sociology, one which I have consciously run the risk of labelling as scientific humanism.

5 Conclusion: a new European sociology facing the future 5.1 The morphogenesis of social theory: short notes for a research programme Years ago an important sociologist wrote that social theory is not the thoroughly developed outcome of a single principle, but the result of the attempt to find a reciprocal tuning among a large number of different theoretical decisions. This belief lies beneath the surface of the reading path I have been breaking within M/M social theory. I have been trying to show that the M/M approach moves some decisive steps toward an explanatory sociology and one that can face the complexity of grand representations and macro-phenomena. In the first place, realist social theory wants to explain social phenomena, does not give up on causality and conceives of it as generative process. At the same time, its inner complexity is sufficient to confront the themes of “grand theory”. My argument was that realist social theory can do this owing to some basic theoretical decisions: its articulation in the domains of social ontology, methodology (the explanatory programme), and practical social theory, and its working through adequate concepts. I presented the relevant concepts, which can be considered to be privileged points of access to the whole theory, as the main characteristics of the latter shape up in correspondence to them: namely, to be a non-conflationary, cognitive or explanatory, scientific humanistic theory.

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Each section of this chapter can also be read as a part of a research agenda and implies specific problems and developments. They can be summarized as follows: 1 One working path to tread consists of the more systematic treatment of the relation between explanatory programme and technical aspects of methodology. In other words, it would be important to elaborate further on the theme of empirical research techniques – dealing with data collection and analysis – in order to clarify what their specific role might be within the broader conceptual framework and how, in turn, the M/M model can influence and change such techniques. Are all techniques fully compatible with this theoretical approach? Does the approach exclude some of them, or does their adequacy rather depend upon the role that is attributed to them in the research design, or again on the particular version adopted? How can they be integrated and co-ordinated, in the light of the M/M explanatory programme? 2 The social ontology of the M/M approach is clearly, though not completely, a relational one. EPs are defined as the outcome of relationships.77 In this domain some clarifications are in order, at the point where theoretical decisions become operative in sociological explanation. The structure/ agency connection, for example, and the mediation entrusted to reflexivity is undoubtedly one of the most stimulating points in Archer’s theoretical fabric. Its operation, though, has not been totally clarified yet in practical theory. One problem lies in making sense of whether, and how, the social networks in which subjects are embedded affect reflexivity. Until now, the issue has been confronted with regard to a single property of such networks, namely contextual continuity or discontinuity.78 Such a starting point is indeed promising, if only because it concerns one of the most disruptive dynamics of global society. It has, therefore, a high connection value, in that it allows the linkage to many possible developments, both theoretical and empirical.79 The study of reflexivity must, however, be further integrated into the M/M model, and this should be paralleled by an expanded analysis of networks. 3 Finally, in connection with point 2, above, the theory still has not been fully developed as a theory of society, although it inevitably tends to tap into this theoretical level. Responding to these challenges requires an ever-wider and -deeper dialogue with other approaches in contemporary sociology, but above all the accumulation of empirical research. As with every emergent reality, the morphogenetic theory also needs time. 5.2 European society and sociology, beyond the fin-de-siècle Critical realism in the social sciences represents, among other things, a way through which social theory is trying to dispel the lingering cultural and

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epistemological feeling that is typical of the fin-de-siècle.80 It is, by now, quite clear that the basic problems of European society can no longer remain in the limbo of discursive re-elaboration and reinvention. However, overcoming this situation is no easy task. Western society has come to look upon itself with scepticism, and to regard the human individual with bewilderment and obsessive interest. It is difficult to imagine that it is still possible to conceive of history, and of the unity of distinctions such as individual and society. It is difficult for individuals to find a sound foundation for their self-fulfilment, within or without society. The morphogenetic approach provides society and sociology with a suggestion of how to leave that sceptical attitude behind, and with a new paradigm with which to treat social problems. Its meaning for European – and Western – culture will only take shape through time. By now, it offers some innovative conceptual resources that need to be put to the test in both analysis and policy. As regards persons, the M/M approach conceives of human beings as social actors who can resist hyper-complexity and the related loss of meaning and keep their personal powers, whilst not yielding to any illusory “grand narrative” that orchestrates the whole world and its order. What this means for society is that history is constituted by multiple, multilevel morphogenetic cycles, not by one big evolutionary stream heading toward progress or catastrophe, nor by blind circularity. The morphogenetic cycles are always kept open by human reflexivity. Socio-cultural order will always be nothing but a provisional arrangement, fated to be undermined by time. “The social” will not cease to disrupt social forms. It is, however, possible to conceive of such order not as the result of chance, but as the outcome of human projects, though provisional and never matching our desires. We are well aware, by now, that human fulfilment does not lie within or without a given society, but in a specific relationship between being in this society and trying to transcend it. Playing this game time and again it is possible to become, be, and remain human. For this reason, it is important in contemporary Europe to keep feeding the scientific belief in reality – of social as well as of human entities – and to provide actors with scientific tools for meaningful self-reflection. In 1918 a master of sociological thought addressed those looking for great hopes or new prophecies with the chant of the Idumean scout, forecasting that it was “still night” and suggesting they should “come back another time”.81 The morphogenetic theory has heard this chant, and is not looking for prophecies. Nonetheless, the model of sociological analysis it puts forward is not only a “nocturnal flight”82 hanging about the old institutions of modernity, but one that tries to gaze at what lies beyond. This does not result in a “humanistic” sociology, meaning normative and nostalgic thought. However, it can reassert that humanity, freedom, equality, reason are not only themes of the selfdescription of society,83 but emergent realities that human societies perceive and describe. It can try to observe their conditions of existence, likely location and generative processes.

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Notes 1 As regards Luhmann, mature formulations go well into the following decade, until his opus magnum, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. Concerning Alexander, the case should be made more subtly, since his theoretical activity is currently proceeding with extremely interesting elaborations, but also showing a significant difference in his passing from the early neo-functionalist approach to the more recent “strong programme” in cultural studies. Readers might be surprised that I have omitted Pierre Bourdieu from this list. I do not mean to question his status as a “theorist”, but only to assert that his formulations appear to be less oriented to “general” theory than these other authors. Be that as it may, some of his most relevant theoretical work (except for Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, 1972) were published between the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s, thereby confirming my tentative time division. 2 After the 1970s, following Giddens’s resigned judgement, the “hopeless disarray” sets in. See The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Oxford: Polity Press, 1984. 3 But for rare exceptions, like systems theory. However, after becoming a successful theory in the 1980s, it seems that the latter has retired, or has been confined to the role of a remarkably “regional” approach, namely a more and more “German” theory. Apparently, most theorists think this approach has no more things to say. Whilst far from endorsing this approach myself, I am convinced that its interpretive relevance for some basic dynamics of contemporary European society cannot be easily dismissed. 4 This label stands for “morphogenetic/morphostatic”, and is used to emphasize that in principle neither of the two possible outcomes has priority over the other. Throughout this chapter I will use “realist social theory” as a synonym of the M/M approach, though I would readily agree that in principle there can be realist social theories that are not morphogenetic, as well as non-realist conceptions of social morphogenesis. What case can be made about their relationship lies beyond the scope of the present chapter. 5 See John Goldthorpe, On Sociology. Numbers, Narratives, and the Integration of Research and Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, who speaks of “something similar to a new mainstream” (a rare occasion in which this term is not used in an inherently disparaging meaning, as is usually the case), which he sees tentatively emerging in the European sociology based upon “rational action”. I will argue below that Goldthorpe’s intellectual enterprise can manifest some significant relationships with critical realism and the M/M approach that is treated here, and I will try to explain how. On the other hand, I believe we can currently speak of a convergence and of an emerging intellectual current, while it seems to be still extremely uncertain whether it can ever rise to the status of “mainstream”, and if so, how much time will be needed. 6 In this context, confusion may arise concerning the notion of a “general conceptual index for the discipline”, as related to the idea of “grand theory” that is used immediately below. I am aware of the difference between “grand theory”, that is a theory of society deduced from a few general assumptions, and “analytic theory” (in the Parsonian sense, for example), one that provides a set of concepts for the analysis of social phenomena, whilst not entailing any substantive claims about society “as a whole”, and its alleged direction of change. In the present essay, though, I am working from a different distinction, namely between social representations that are not oriented to produce scientific explanations and cognitiveexplanatory theories that do not tap into complex facts and social systems. That these two aspects can, in principle, be drawn together within the same theoretical framework is precisely the claim I am trying to make. Also, I know I will not be

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able to “demonstrate” this tentative thesis exhaustively here, but I will try to provide a clear illustration of the idea that the M/M approach offers a conceptual texture adequate to that task. Finally, I also think the very distinction of grand vs. analytic theory should be qualified, though not totally dismissed. See part I, with the essays by Collier, Ferraris and Prandini. As regards the relational theory formulated by Pierpaolo Donati, see P. Donati, Teoria relazionale della società, Milano: Angeli, 1991; (ed.), Sociologia. Una introduzione allo studio della società, Padova: Cedam, 2006. The complex connections linking this theory to morphogenesis are treated in the commentary Donati has written for this volume. Therefore, I will not deal with it systematically here. Beyond the essay published in this volume, analytical dualism is treated by Archer in Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, Ch. 6. A similar treatment, focused upon the cultural system, appears in Culture and Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, Ch. 5. M.S. Archer, La Morfogenesi della Società (Italian transl. of Realist Social Theory), Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1997, p. 193. Ibid. I’ll quote for all: M. Bortolini, P. Donati, “Approccio morfogenetico vs. teoria della strutturazione: la critica di M. S. Archer ad A. Giddens”, Studi di sociologia, a. XXXVII, luglio-settembre 1999: 295–315 (see especially p. 299); R. K. Sawyer, Social Emergence. Societies as Complex Systems, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 82–83. It may look difficult to defend this interpretation in the face of the following formulations, which are found in Culture and Agency (cit.): “there is no suggestion that we are dealing with separate entities, only analytically separable ones and ones which it is theoretically useful to treat separately” (p. xiv). A few pages below: “Clearly the Cultural System and Socio-Cultural life do not exist or operate independently of one another; they overlap, intertwine and are mutually influential [ … ] I am not asserting dualism but rather the utility of an analytically dualistic approach [ … ]” (p. xvii). In sum, dualism is “an artifice of convenience” (p. 143). If these quotes seem to witness a still incomplete realist turn, it should be recalled the way Chapter 5 of the 1988 volume argues for analytical dualism. It intends to resist the idea that the cultural system cannot be analysed separately from socio-cultural interaction, but then develops its discourse on three distinct levels, the former being precisely that of ontology. Archer argues that “There are logical relationships between components of the Cultural System” (ibid.). Particularly when she speaks of contradictions, a key concept in the chapter in question, Archer insists that there are logical relations of contradiction, independently of people’s awareness of them. The same thesis pervades all the subsequent discussion of “logical universals”. M.S. Archer, Realist Social Theory, cit., 1997, p. 122, emphasis mine. Ibid., p. 26. Dave Elder-Vass, “For Emergence: refining Archer’s account of social structure”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37:1, 2007: 30. Archer in this volume, Chapter 4. These three conclusions stand respectively in relation to points (3–5) cited above. Archer, in this volume, Chapter 4. This formulation is in direct opposition to Giddens and his concept of the “duality of structure”. Ibid. See especially La Morfogenesi della Società, 1997, cit., pp. 89–93. Therefore, they systematically appeal to exogenous factors, a flaw Archer ascribes to both “normative functionalism” and Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. Archer, in this volume, Chapter 4. Relations with other layers of reality that make society an open system.

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25 Archer, in this volume, Chapter 4. 26 N. Luhmann, R. De Giorgi, Teoria della società, Milano: Angeli, 1994, pp. 61–68. It is difficult to select quotes within Luhmann’s monumental work. For the limited scope of our discussion see Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Teorie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984; English translation: Social Systems, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995 (e.g. chapter VIII, “Structure and Time”) and the volume cited with R. De Giorgi. The latter constitutes the conceptual and thematic draft Luhmann thoroughly developed in his concluding work, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, cit., 1997. 27 The notion of medium indicates loosely coupled elements, that of form the same elements when coupled strictly. Elements couple strictly and produce a form, then are untied and the medium gets “free” again. 28 Archer, in this volume, Chapter 4. 29 Ibid. 30 I will not summarize it again here, as Archer’s chapter in this volume offers a fully adequate presentation. See also the book-length treatments in Culture and Agency, cit., 1988, and Realist Social Theory, cit., 1997. The former specifically concerns the morphogenesis of culture, the latter represents the most articulated systematic exposition of the whole M/M model to date, including the triple morphogenesis of structure, culture and agency. 31 The earliest use of the term is often attributed to G.H. Lewes, Problems of life and mind, vol. 2, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Turbner and C., 1875. For a conceptual, philosophical account of the subject see T. O’Connor and H.Y. Wong, “Emergent Properties”, in E.C. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2002, www.plato.stanford.edu. The profound reason for the development of the idea of emergence and emergent properties lies in the need to account for such phenomena as the human mind, which are clearly “not reducible” to their material underpinning, without positing the existence of “substances”, thereby preventing both radical dualism and reductionism, and reconciling the conflicting results of empirical and philosophical enquiries. Philosophical and neurophysiological accounts of human consciousness are a good case in point. This also requires an adequate metaphysics. See also P. Clayton and P. Davies, The Re-Emergence of Emergence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; T. O’Connor, “Emergent Properties”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 31, 1994: 91–104; T. O’Connor and H.Y. Wong, “The Metaphysics of Emergence”, Noùs, no.39, 2005: 658–78. 32 R.K. Sawyer, Social Emergence, cit., 2005, p. 189. 33 Often, also, with poor conceptual accuracy. Sawyer (cit.) is a case in point. He speaks of different models of emergence, and quotes authors ranging from Durkheim to Parsons, to methodological individualism. One can surely argue that some theorists’ notion of emergence is not fully satisfactory, but such a catch-all approach is in danger of endorsing extremely generic notions and of increasing conceptual confusion. Not surprisingly, Sawyer ends up applying the label “paradigm of emergence” in a quite ambivalent way, as the title both of a chapter comprising authors he classifies as individualist and holist, and of the section specifying the “correct” paradigm. It would be more appropriate to concede that many sociological theories do not involve any notion of emergent properties, mechanisms, or entities. 34 M.S. Archer, Realist Social Theory, cit., 1995, p. 38. 35 This thesis was already clear in 1995: “emergent properties are relational, that is they originate from combinations [ … ], in which the latter term can feedback upon the former [ … ] and can produce [ … ] effects that are impossible to reduce to agency and to the capacities of its components [ … ]. This indicates the stratified nature of social reality, in which the different layers possess different emergent properties and capacities”. Ibid., p. 20.

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36 This argument responds to two opposed kinds of criticism: that by R.K. Sawyer, who regards Archer’s theory as inconsistent with a realist position, and that by P. Hedström, who – as we will see below – accuses Archer and critical realism of reification, considering them as forms of holism. 37 When applied to social reality, a general definition of “supervenience” is as follows: a given social property S supervenes to a set of individual properties I if the same I result in the same S, which also implies that differing S properties entail differing I properties. At the same time, though, the same S do not imply the same I, since the former can be produced by different properties and combinations of I. The latter point makes supervenience compatible with an approach based on “macro-induction”, which deems it possible to identify regularities and predictability only at the social level. Hence we can say Archer disagrees with this approach. On this subject see T. O’Connor, “Emergent Properties”, cit., 1994; O’Connor and Wong, “Emergent Properties”, cit., 2002. Let me note, by the way, that analytical sociology too seems to reject supervenience, if I understand the formulations in Peter Hedström, Dissecting the Social. On the Principles of Analytical Sociology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 38 See John Goldthorpe, On Sociology, cit., pp. 231–47. This is his way to express his view of a social science that can be called “analytical sociology”, or “explanation based upon social mechanisms”. See P. Hedström and R. Swedberg (eds), Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. These authors, as well as Filippo Barbera, are my reference points in the present discussion when I mention “analytical realism” as a relatively coherent form of thought. For a critique of the antiscientific positions in sociology that reflect upon causality again see R. Collins, “Sociology: Proscience or Antiscience”, American Sociological Review, vol. 54, February 1989: 124–39. 39 These two terms I am here using in a generic way and without further distinctions are not synonymous. I’ll get back to this problem below. 40 Goldthorpe, On Sociology, cit., p. 55. 41 But not the only “causal forces” active in society, a claim Sawyer (Social Emergence, op cit.) mistakenly attributes to Archer. 42 P. Hedström, Dissecting the Social, cit., pp. 25, 33. 43 Ibid., pp. 85, 95. 44 See M. Bedau, “Weak Emergence”, in Philosophical Perspectives, 11: Mind, Causation, and World, Blackwell, 1997, pp. 375–99. 45 See especially P. Hedström, Dissecting the Social, cit., particularly pp. 87–92. 46 M.S. Archer, La Morfogenesi della Società, 1997, cit., p. 192. 47 Ibid., Chs 7–9; M.S. Archer, Culture and Agency, cit., Chs 6–9. 48 See P. Hedström, Dissecting the Social, cit. Not surprisingly, a significant part of that critique is based upon a philosophical text by Andrew Collier (p. 89), and the argument against the “arbitrary ontology” of the different layers of reality hinges upon T. Brante’s work, used as a proxy of Archer’s theses (see T. Brante, “Consequences of Realism for Sociological Theory-Building”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 31, 2001: 167–95). This “black hole” is quite widespread in the literature about Archer and the M/M model, which often forgets precisely about the sociological and explanatory dimensions of it. This characteristic is easily seen in some book reviews, and is paradoxically shared by enthusiastic joiners and radical critics. An example of the former is D. Regan’s review of Culture and Agency, in Social Forces, vol. 70, 1992: 828–29; for a sample of the “ruthless” critics see Jonathan Turner and his misleading review of Realist Social Theory, in Social Forces, vol. 76, no.1, 1997: 335–37. A partial exception is represented by E. Rambo and E. Chain, “Text, Structure, and Action in Cultural Sociology: A Commentary on ‘Positive Objectivity’ in Wuthnow and Archer”, Theory and Society, vol. 19, no.5, October 1990: 635–48, which reviewing Culture and Agency

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devotes at least some lines (no more) to the actual theory of cultural morphogenesis. This poor critical attitude doesn’t help much in confirming, correcting, supporting or advancing the theory. This is why the two notions of autonomous EP and structure/ agency interaction are emphatically not in mutual contradiction, as Hedström would claim (Dissecting the Social, cit., p. 90, footnote 7). The EPs pertaining to structure and those of agency interact with each other, thereby feeding social morphogenesis or morphostasis, according to the second and third order relational constellations they engender. I propose that the distinction between properties and powers can convey this conceptual point adequately. Of course, every EP emerges from other factors, that is, from a simpler “mechanism”. I would not even think of getting anywhere near to a satisfying discussion of this theme here. I will develop some considerations about human reflexivity and about the set of concepts serving as mediating devices between structure and agency in section 4. This notion conveys the idea of a presumed “compensation” among different individual tendencies. In this respect Goldthorpe provides a perfect example in his study of marriage choices; see On Sociology, cit., pp. 168–70. See below, section 4. This is, of course, not a totalitarian version. Even in the domain of analytical sociology some authors are trying to integrate qualitative research techniques, precisely to provide more realistic microfoundations for the theory. See for example F. Barbera, Meccanismi sociali. Elementi di sociologia analitica, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004, Chs 5–6. That naturalistic model, however, is expanding, even in the USA. See J.M. Epstein and R. Axtell, Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996; and the recent essays by J.M. Epstein, Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modelling, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007; J.H. Miller and S.E. Page, Complex Adaptive Systems. An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. It is remarkable that in these theories the concept of emergence receives a strongly reductionist interpretation, or is downright forgotten. Some recent examples of empirical studies conducted in the critical realist fashion are to be found in S. Ackroyd and S. Fleetwood, Critical Realist Applications in Organisation and Management Studies, London: Routledge, 2004; B. Carter and C. New, Making Realism Work, London: Routledge, 2004; J. Lawson, Critical Realism and Housing Research, London: Routledge, 2006; L. Savery, Engendering the State: The International Diffusion of Women’s Human Rights, London: Routledge, 2007. The differences within this field will have to be discussed elsewhere. The most articulate treatment of these points can be found in N. Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997, Ch. 3. See the presentation of morphogenetic cycles that Archer offers in this volume, Chapter 4. Another interesting example of systems theory oriented to the study of generative processes can be found in R. Stichweh, Die Weltgesellschaft. Soziologische Analysen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000. At the foundations of the new “world society”, the author claims, lie some remarkable innovations: organizations, functional systems, telecommunications. However, he understands these “innovations” or “discoveries” do not in themselves explain the emergence of a certain kind of society, which is produced in its dynamics by processes and mechanisms. He mentions three of them: 1 the global diffusion of institutional models; 2 the global interrelations, or networking (globale Vernetzung, global interconnectedness); and 3 the decentralization in functional systems. Although Stichweh explicitly mentions processes and mechanisms, distinguishing them from the resulting innovations, he

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never really describes the above points 1–3 as processes. In the present state of his theory, these remain explananda, the morphogenesis of which in turn begs for explanation. On this point see especially A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society, cit. Ibid., p. 227ff. For example, while speaking of constraints to action, the difference between material constraints, sanctions and structural constraints is not clear (The Constitution of Society, cit., pp. 173–74). Moreover, what do terms like structure, structural properties, structural principles, structural and existential contradictions, social systems, social totalities and inter-social systems really mean, and how are they to be distinguished? What are the relations among them? Peter Fuchs, Die Erreichbarkeit der Gesellschaft. Zur Konstruktion und Imagination gesellschaftlicher Einheit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992. I use this formula here for lack of a better one, though I do not want for a moment to underestimate the risk involved in the theoretical overload inherent in such Weberian wording. I will try to explain below what I really mean by “value rationality” in the present context. Let me observe that Archer never confronts Parsons directly. Her reference point for the oversocialized view of the human is essentially represented by Rom Harré. See especially Being Human, and Archer’s essay in this volume, Chapter 4. P. Fuchs and A. Goebel (eds), Der Mensch – das Medium der Gesellschaft?, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994. I cannot develop this argument here. The Parsonian contribution to the study of the relationship between human and social entities is spread over many pages of his monumental work, the most well-known being T. Parsons and E.A. Shils (eds), Toward a General Theory of Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951; T. Parsons and R.F. Bales, Family, Socialization, and Interaction Process, New York: The Free Press, 1956; T. Parsons, The Social System, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1951, Ch. VI; Social Structure and Personality, New York: The Free Press, 1964. Here again, the possible references would exceed the scope of this essay. By way of example, for the purposes of the present discussion, I will quote the following: N. Luhmann, Social Systems, cit.; Soziologische Aufklärung 6. Die Soziologie und der Mensch, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1995; Das Erziehungssystem der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002; A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society, cit. The attempt to escape these alternatives sometimes produces singularly hybrid forms. See P. Fuchs, Die Psyche. Studien der Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2005; Der Eigen-Sinn der Bewußtsein. Die Person, die Psyche, die Signatur, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2003. Which in turn are not pre-established, but emerge through this very relation. One of the crucial points concerns the consequences upon social mobility; see M.S. Archer, Making Our Way through the World. Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Douglas Porpora in this volume, Chapter 7, also calls attention to this point. What is important here is to mark the distance from the economic-instrumental semantics of interest. Archer takes up the expression “what we care about” from Harry Frankfurt, The Importance of What we Care About, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. See again P. Hedström, Dissecting the Social, cit.; J. Elster, Sour Grapes. Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; J. Goldthorpe, On Sociology, cit. This is what the rational theory of “good reasons” does, by rejecting the concept of maximization and employing that of “satisfaction” instead. The point is “achieving satisfying results”, given the objective and subjective circumstances. See

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Goldthorpe, On Sociology, cit., pp. 185–94. Briefly, the difference from the “orthodox” version of rational choice theory is that the latter proceeds through models, the “purity” of which allows some given formal properties to be attached. The models will then need empirical reinterpretation, indicating where reality deviates from the theoretical conditions of rational action. The theory of action we are now examining instead tries to make some of those deviations endogenous, building models of limited rationality. At the end of the day, the discourse is focused upon two essential issues: lacking or incomplete information, and/or the limits of the capacity to calculate on the part of human agents. The concept of internalization represents a crucial point and a theoretical watershed. Giving up this notion opens the prospects of an emerging paradigm of socialization. Some provisional considerations on this issue – which obviously calls for adequate treatment – can be found in A. Maccarini, “Il Sé nel pluriverso educativo europeo: autosocializzazione, apertura e limite”, in M. Colombo (ed.), Educazione e mutamento. Valori, pratiche e attori in un’epoca di trasformazioni, Acireale-Roma: Bonanno, 2005, pp. 37–61; P. Donati, La conversazione interiore: un nuovo paradigma (personalizzante) della socializzazione, Introduction to the Italian edition of M.S. Archer, La conversazione interiore, cit., pp. 9–42. This concept of reflexivity – and the whole cluster of concepts hanging around it (emotions, internal conversation, modus vivendi, ultimate concerns) – is then employed by Archer not only as a theoretical category, but becomes a substantive thesis concerning the social action of individuals and groups in a global society. M. S. Archer, Making Our Way through the World, op cit. As regards second order EPs, the “outcome of the outcome” of relationships. See Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, op cit. and Making Our Way through the World, op cit. About the consequences of the current stage of development of capitalism upon human existential plans see the considerations expressed by L. Boltanski and È. Chiapello, Le nouvel ésprit du capitalisme, Paris: Gallimard, 1999. In this connection the M/M model can come up with a concrete research programme. As evoked by J.C. Alexander, Fin-de-Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason, London: Verso, 1995. I am referring to the famous close of the conference about “Science as profession” that Max Weber held at the University of Munich. The flight of the Hegelian owl invoked by Niklas Luhmann (Social Systems, cit., p. 739). As Luhmann claims (in N. Luhmann and R. De Giorgi, Teoria della società, cit. pp. 399–400), concluding that “to make them the focus of discussion only results in conceptual confusion”.

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Critical realism, as viewed by relational sociology Pierpaolo Donati

1 The issue: what is social reality? A new season is dawning on sociology worldwide: it is witnessing the restoration and revamping of critical realism as the foundation of a sociological theory capable of escaping the dilemmas of constructivism and of its opposite, deconstructionism. Those are the two movements that, after the long domination of positivism, have led sociology to lurch into scientific paranoia1. On the one hand, constructivism (in its purest form) explicitly denies the existence of any knowledge independent of an observer. Such an assumption leads some to claim that reality is observation itself (as explicitly stated by N. Luhmann 2002), which means blotting out the distinction between knower and known. On the other hand, deconstructionism views reality as an expression of nothing, of the void, of insoluble paradoxes and, therefore, as a sort of optical illusion. Critical realism vindicates the possibility of knowing social reality, meant as a “fact”, which is not observer-dependent and is not built on quicksand. Certainly, realism does admit and provide for the possibility that knowledge procedures are fallible and provisional. However, the critical point lies in the answer to the question: what is “social reality”? or, what is real in the social? Critical realism is characterized by not regarding social reality either as a reified reality or a reifying reality, or as an arbitrary reality. However, it is neither a mix, nor a bridge nor a combination of those two positions. Simply, it is a “different” point of view; but that view is not merely one viewpoint among others, in the post-modern spirit of encouraging a million flowers to bloom. For critical realism, social reality is contingent, not deterministic. Hence it rejects positivistic realism, which investigates reality to detect deterministic laws. It also rejects the opposite point of view, by which reality would be arbitrary, artificial, subjective, modifiable at will, and its knowledge would necessarily be observer-dependent. Critical realism assumes that social reality is not made up of mere communications, nor of choices dependent on the observer’s subjectivity.

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Realist theory shows renewed interest in “social facts”, precisely at a time when sociology seems increasingly to fall prey to the image of communication society. Obviously, communication and collective imagination are also collective facts, but they represent only one of the threads in the social fabric. The latter itself is much thicker and richer than the observer can see and communicate “directly”. Over the last few years, sociology has often resorted to theories in which the relevance of social facts was founded on individual tastes and preferences, on collective imagination, attitudes, “values”, subjective choices, on the liquidity of structures and of “pure relations”, and so forth. Sociological realism, on the other hand, vindicates the “hard and irritating” reality of “social facts” (what Dahrendorf once called “the vexatious fact of society”). The existence of social phenomena does not depend on someone observing and/or communicating them. Social reality has its own order of properties and causal powers, which the sociologist is called upon to investigate. Observation and/or communication can modify the influence of social facts on individuals, can keep silent about social facts or divert their consequences (in accordance with the Thomas theorem2). This, however, does not prevent facts from having their effects, as hidden or – more often – as unseen or unspoken as they may be. In this essay, I would like to explain what kind of vision of critical realism lies at the basis of my relational theory of society. In brief, for relational sociology, social reality is social relationality. Society does not “have” or “include” social relations, but “consists of” social relations. The social relation/ ship is the “ultimate entity”, that is, the irreducible element or “molecule” of social reality (that which gives the social its qualities, properties and powers). For instance, a voluntary association is social by virtue of its members’ relations. To be crystal clear, these relationships distinguish such an association from, for example, “those donating money to a humanitarian crisis”, who are merely an aggregate. Facts are social inasmuch as they are made up of social relations. From the sociological point of view, “facts” like health care, work and employment, welfare, social services, money, food and all sociologically relevant entities, are social relations. They emerge from the (analytic) elements composing them and from their relations. Since we can observe social facts only in the morphostatic/ morphogenetic process, we must distinguish them as products of first, second … n-order relations. It is necessary for any social relation to be a real relation and not a nominal one, but it is contingent whether or not and how it occurs within the space-time of society (Donati 1983, 1991; Morandi 2009). In order to grasp this reality, what is needed is a critical realism that is both analytical and relational.3 For the kind of critical realism I call “relational”, social reality is the expression of a particular order of reality, which is neither material nor ideational, which ancient and modern science did not see in its specificity: that is, the order of social relations. It is the reality of “social facts (or phenomena)”,

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meant as relational products generated by unceasing cycles entailing: individuals’ social agency conditioned from the start by the structures present then, through an interaction between actors, to the development of new structural, cultural and agential forms. These cycles have been clearly expounded in the morphogenetic theory proposed by Margaret Archer (1995). I believe that Archer’s works are the expression of the most original and consistent form of critical realism ever presented in sociology so far.

2 The framework of critical realism, as viewed by relational sociology The most recent developments in critical realism indicate a needed breakthrough in social science by virtue of a new conceptual framework. Such a framework should be both explanatory (based on the causality principle), and interpretative (based on an understanding of the meaning of social agency). I offer my own interpretation of this historical breakthrough. We are dealing with an attempt to shift from the epistemic triangle centred upon “observerculture-observed (or observable) reality” to the “observer-culture-observed reality-ontological reality” quadrangle (Figure 6.1). The first “observer-culture-observed (or observable) reality” triangle (the upper one in Figure 6.1) does not cause any particular problems for understanding. Problems arise as soon as one attempts to connect this triangle with ontological reality, that is, with the other “culture-observed reality-ontological reality” triangle (at the lower end of Figure 6.1). Relational theory seeks to conceptualize the connections between the two triangles (the upper and the lower ones) making up the quadrangle (Figure 6.1). Explaining what this entails would take a lot of space. I shall confine myself to what follows. Within the upper epistemic triangle in Figure 6.1, the three relations between the three vertices depict different possible knowledge processes. Two of them are clearly differentiated. The first is the direct experience of reality (“lived out”) by the observer. The second is that by which the observer knows reality, indirectly through culture. This second pathway is the limited horizon within which constructivism is caught, by holding that the observer has no access to reality except through the conceptual framework offered by culture. Most sociologists take this second route, in which natural life is only interpreted through the cultural models available to the observer. That amounts to a hyper-socialized view of the human person. In this case, knowledge follows the route from the observer (his “mind”) to culture, and then to the observed object, thus assigning culture a determining mediation that cannot be escaped and which “imprisons” the subject as both observer-actor4. The constructivist triangle is short on reality itself (ontological reality), i.e. reality as it exists independently of the observer’s mind, of culture (cultural mediation) and of the direct experience of the observer/s involved. The

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Figure 6.1 Note: For relational sociology, critical realism is an approach that extends the epistemic triangle (commonly used in sociology: observer-culture-observed reality) to the epistemic quadrangle (observer-culture-observed reality-latent ontological reality).

absence of ontological reality blots out the possibility of transcending phenomenology, empiricism and cultural relativism as horizons of human knowledge and experience.5 If we introduce the fourth polarity (ontological reality), the whole picture changes. Now, the knowledge triangle (the upper one in Figure 6.1) has to take the nature (i.e. the intrinsic qualities and powers) of things into account, along with what ex-ists (that is, “stands outside”) independently of culture and of the observer’s own subjective experiences. The great benefit deriving from that is an appreciation of the real world of things. The fact that knowledge must be related to ontological reality sets all the quadrangle’s polarities (the vertices) in a new relationship. In other words, it generates other relations, including those between the vertices of the upper triangle. The observer is called upon to act on the basis of her reflexivity: she must move away from her own experience (from what she thinks, imagines, communicates) and from culture. She is called upon to analyse a social process

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(morphogenesis) in which she has to find out if and how social actors are reflexive and act reflexively on the structures conditioning them. The observer must reflect this quality in herself. The general assumption is that (ontological) reality is potentially much richer than the one appearing at the empirical level in social phenomena and, therefore, than the one that the observer can see and investigate. Relational sociology underlines the fact that, among invisible realities (intangible goods), there are social relations along with their own order of reality. A specifically realist operation characteristic of relational sociology consists in connecting the first three vertices (observer, culture, observed or observable reality) not only with each other, but also with the fourth vertex (the underlying reality generating them). Moving from the triangle to the epistemic quadrangle, realist sociology is not bound – theoretically and methodologically – to the limits of the empirically given but, rather, adopts that “generative” viewpoint opening up to the world of possibilities. Sociological knowledge (as “judgmental rationality”) can then come to terms with that latent reality, which has a “substance” of its own. When and if it exists, it has its own “value” – defined here as “reality’s latent dignity” (Figure 6.1). Dignity here means that anything that exists has “reasons” to exist, reasons to be that make it “good” because it has worth (Collier 1999) that is non-negotiable (most natural goods are so), and therefore must be respected (dignity refers properly to the human being, but in a broader sense it can be used as synonymous with “worthy of respect”: “that which deserves to be respected unconditionally”). The theory in question does not close, but actually extends the horizons of science. By proposing this conceptual framework, I would like to highlight two points: first, the distance separating constructivist and realist sociologies; second, the possibility of drawing a distinction between the different versions of critical realism on the basis of how they see the mutual relation between the upper and the lower epistemic triangles in Figure 6.1 (on the basis of what relations they establish between sociological knowledge and ontological social relationality). Constructivism, existing in various forms (more radical or more moderate ones), is always caught in the upper epistemic triangle (the upper triangle of Figure 6.1). In particular, it shuns any direct relations between the observer and the experienced (or observable) reality and especially between the latter and ontological reality. Sociological realism, on the other hand, is characterized by its full use of the quadrangle. There is, however, no single way of connecting the two triangles. The variety of potential links matches the variety within critical realism, as witnessed both by the differences between authors (such as Archer, Bhaskar, Elder-Vass, Collier and Gorski), and by each theorist’s own personal trajectory. For instance, Roy Bhaskar initially referred to ontological reality in connection with philosophical realism (philosophy of science), originating in Marxism and naturalism, but later took other paths.

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Precisely for this reason, relational sociology wants to focus on this issue, considering the way in which the two triangles of Figure 6.1 are mutually linked. Very often, and not excluding critical realist sociologists, the realist ontology triangle (“observable reality-culture-ontological reality”, at the lower end of Figure 6.1) is linked with the epistemic triangle above, without a clear understanding of how sociological knowledge can embrace the “social fact” as an emergent effect (understood as an effect of reciprocity, Wechselwirkung) involving ontological reality and its external manifestations at the empirical level The concept of emergence that I endorse and employ is based upon the idea that the reciprocal exchange between the elements in interaction produces a reality that is original because it presents a sui generis relational configuration. This is true at any level of reality, from the atom to what we call “globalization”. However, in the case of social forms, the relational character implies that structural factors cannot predominate over the agential factors, as Elder-Vass (2008) claims. This issue is related to an understanding of what employing the notion of “emergence” in sociology means: in the work of many scholars claiming to be critical realists, ontology is taken on board, but then it is not immediately clear what role it plays in morphogenetic dynamics. In other words, it seems necessary to clarify the latent rationality of reality, which has its own scientific worth. This is the proposal advanced by relational sociology. As long ago as 1983, I wrote that relational sociology is a new point of view, a new perspective “originating not from a new theory, but from social reality itself, which is assumed to be itself [ … ] the interpenetration of action and system” (Donati 1983: 15), as various authors have understood very well (Prandini 2004; Iagulli 2007: 99; Morandi 2009). From a relational point of view, realist theory is critical because it sees the distance (the relation!) between observer and observed reality, thereby avoiding the risk of confining the observer to the empirical level of mere perception of what he/she observes. It comprehends the distances between all the other vertices of Figure 6.1 in a similar manner. Therefore, it is critical of the difficulties created by an inadequate evaluation of the link between observation and the object observed. To solve the problem of epistemological inadequacy, realism can give way to empiricism (as is the case of positivism) or, instead, become analytical. The first to experiment with this strategy was Talcott Parsons (1937), with his analytical realism. Out of this, I myself extracted the AGIL tool, while formulating a new version of it, different from Parsons’s own, but still inspired by analytical realism (Donati 1991: ch. 4). Along those same lines, I believe it is possible to locate the explanatory device of analytical dualism (between agency and structure) introduced by Archer, which is an excellent tool for avoiding the “fallacy of a hegemonic empiricism” and which is a fundamental assumption grounding the morphogenetic logic6. The analytical character of sociological realism allows for a convergence between morphogenetic theory and relational theory. The relational variant of

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critical realism is distinctive insofar as it emphasizes that the distances between the vertices of Figure 6.1 are “relations”, and in that way it introduces greater complexity. Hence the appellation “relational sociology” is used. Sociological knowledge, just like social reality, possesses relational properties and powers (“key relational properties”), which have to be translated into equally relational concepts and observations. I would now like to explain relational sociology and its programme in more detail.

3 Critical realism’s explanatory theory and its articulations I believe that Margaret Archer made a unique and original contribution to sociological knowledge when she proposed the morphogenetic argument as an explanatory conceptual framework for critical realist sociology. We should remind the reader that the morphogenetic argument is divided into two “parts” (Archer 1995, 2000a): 1 a pars destruens, i.e. a critical review of theories based on methodological individualism and holism, leading to a critique of the three forms of conflation (from above, from below and central); and 2 a pars construens, outlining the substantive method of investigation that Archer has applied to her analysis of educational systems in the UK and France (Archer 1979), to the issue of human agency (Archer 2000b), to the internal conversation (Archer 2003) and to social mobility (Archer 2007a). In the present contribution, my main concern is to delineate the interpretation of the morphogenetic argument offered by relational theory. By providing this outline, I do not wish to claim that Archer’s theory acts as a sub-set of relational theory, but simply to describe where relational theory and the morphogenetic argument stand vis à vis one another. Relational theory begins by formulating a general sketch of sociological knowledge. As I have written in a number of places (Donati 1983: 34–37; Donati 1998: xii–xv), sociology’s scientific work revolves around four cardinal points (Figure 6.2): L) the approach (sometimes also defined as a “metatheory”, which expresses the general viewpoint – from an epistemological perspective – of society as a whole, bordering on constituting a social ontology (here I place the basic choice between realist and constructivist assumptions). I) a paradigm (i.e. a logic and a language, for instance, one interpreting society as a network). G) the single empirical theory (i.e. a response to the initial sociological issue – “why has Y happened (or why does it happen)?” – the answer can be descriptive7, or rather more explanatory, usually in the form of a generalization on an empirical basis about why and how a given social fact occurs, often stated in the form of a correlation, and with some predictive capacity.8 A) the methodology (i.e. a set of methods and empirical research techniques used as tools to investigate, understand and explain phenomena). Relational theory does not propose a monistic knowledge system, but conversely proposes a relational reading of the different investigative approaches,

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Figure 6.2 The components of sociology as a knowledge system (aimed at formulating a theory). Note: L–G = sociological understanding, or value relevance (based on: L = significance attributed to sociological reality which is assumed at the start, and G = understanding that is the “value enhancement” supplied by the social fact). A–I = a nomothetic explanation (based on: I = investigation rules that are causal or functional, and A = methods and techniques, used to assess the causal/functional regularities and deviations). 1: The fact that the terms paradigm and approach can sometimes be interchangeable is nothing to worry about. It is their place within the AGIL chart that provides them with meaning, content and function within the process of extending knowledge. 2: To understand the L function, I draw attention to Talcott Parsons’s remarks on Durkheim’s interpretation of religion (Parsons 1937, It. tr. 1968: 473), where he claims that, to his mind, it is clear that the importance of Durkheim’s fundamental “equation” between religion and society does not consist of a reduction of religious ideas to a “material” known entity (society), but that, on the contrary, it proves that the empirical and observable entity “society” is understandable only in terms of those ideas and active attitudes that human persons have toward the non-empirical world.

paradigms, methodologies and techniques, since, normally, each of them contains useful elements for constructing a descriptive or explanatory social theory, with certain predictive powers under contingent conditions that necessarily pertain given that “society” is an open system. The science of society means: 1 attributing a meaning to what one wants to investigate ( = the sociological issue adopted as the investigation’s starting point), and to what is expressed as a result of the knowing process ( = the theory about the issue that sparked off the investigation) (that is the L–G axis); and 2 ascertaining the dynamics and the empirical regularities through appropriate procedures (that is the A–I axis). Since social phenomena are by their very nature contingent, as they reflect the freedom of human agency

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though bound to social structures, the approach, paradigm and methodologies leading to sociological knowledge (empirical theory) need to take account of the contingent nature of social reality. Generally speaking, sociological research resorts to three types of explanatory logics: causal, functional or interpretative. The paradigm of causal explanation is found in physics, that of functional explanations in biology and that of interpretation (or intentional understanding) in hermeneutic sciences. Sociological work can never flatten itself out by confining its endeavours to only one of these logics, but has to reflect their mutual connections. The way of connecting them is crucial, and in particular it is essential that the logic of intentionality, characterizing humans, is not obliterated. Let us take an example. Should one want to try and understand why and how family changes take place, it will be found that in family dynamics there are very few deterministic elements, in the sense that this term is used in the study of physics; so too are there very few functional elements, in the sense that this term is employed in biology. The most appropriate explanations will be oriented towards interpretative explanations. Interpretations, however, cannot abstain completely from dealing with functional and causal aspects. A human family exists inasmuch as meaningful intentions are realized, whatever the outcome (including the unintentional). All this is taken into account by the relational approach, which highlights the importance of attributing a meaning to what is observed and to the way of observing it (i.e. of attributing meanings, of viewing knowledge as a construction of meanings), in the context of family studies. All the same, the objective outcome is not irrelevant to the meaning attributed by subjects to family life. In other words, we need a more comprehensive approach capable of connecting the orientations of actors and the properties and qualities, even causal and functional ones, of their actions and relations, i.e. the family as subjectivity (life-world) as well as an objective dynamic (social system, institution). It is a typical feature of the relational approach to stress the need for interpretation (Verstehen) and causal explanation (Erklärung) to be continuously intertwined. Explanation requires interpretation and, vice versa, interpretation requires empirical validation. On the other hand, every interpretative act necessarily requires a more or less coherent set of significant meanings and of instruments and rules for their correct use, that is a cognitive code9 allowing the observer to attribute meanings to what is observed and to be able to use it both in conversation with others (for a better chance of achieving mutual understanding), and in explanatory research employing formal causal procedures aspiring to achieve validity and reliability in the data produced10. Whenever we say “sociological theory”, by this synthetic term we embrace a complex framework of cognitive processes encompassing four components (general theoretical approach or social ontology, paradigm, methodology, single specific empirical theories: Figure 6.2). Bearing in mind the above, we can clarify the meaning of the morphogenetic argument. I would argue that the explanatory framework of morphostasis/

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morphogenesis uses a specific operational paradigm and a particular sociological methodology. The paradigm and methodology presuppose an underlying realist approach (a social ontology) and result in the formulation of single empirical theories (Figure 6.3). I am going to try and clarify this interpretation more in detail, by illustrating the four components (L, I, A, G) in Figure 6.3. L) Every theory possesses “general epistemological assumptions” through which the observer confronts phenomena. Those assumptions stand on the border between cognitive processes and metaphysics or social ontology (as clarified in a sociological context by authors such as A. Gouldner as “domain assumptions” and by J.C. Alexander (1982: 2–3) as “general presuppositions”), and they always, inevitably, form the stated or unstated (latent) starting point of that theory (Donati 1991). This is the general theoretical approach which always necessarily has to choose (and in fact necessarily always chooses, though implicitly) between realism and constructivism in approaching the object to be investigated. Here stands the choice (as a directive-distinction in Luhmannian terms11) between explaining social reality on the basis of individuals and their properties (methodological individualism) or on the basis of social systems and their properties (methodological holism), or again as an original reality (relational theory). The realist approach rejects the assumptions that the object to be investigated is a purely determined fact (as in the case for the law of gravity). Likewise, it rejects the belief that the social object is a mere artificial construction. The underlying assumption is that social facts are contingent, but they reflect, contain and express a non-contingent reality. Not all social facts may be configured at will; there are aspects of ontological reality that cannot be ignored. That is why critical realism entails a certain relationship with (philosophical, cultural, social) anthropology, for it assumes that social reality is generated by human actors/agents and that it, in turn, characterizes the person in so far as the person is an individual-in-relation. That does not mean that the individual can shape social reality in whatever way sought or desired or that any social reality (social relation) can entirely shape the person. What, though, is social reality, as viewed by critical realism? For some the answer is that it is an emergent effect endowed with its own causal powers that it derives from human individuals. For others, social reality is an emergent effect endowed with its own causal powers that it derives from social structures (systems). The morphogenetic argument/outline takes into account both the influences of social structures and the mediation of agency. To paraphrase this in my own language: social reality is the reality of social relations, exceeding individuals and, inasmuch as it is a social relationship, it always remains open to their influence (the relation becomes a closed system only in particular cases). My critical realism (CR) – which is relational and analytical – differs from other versions of CR on a few important points, but one of them is central. To me, there is a substantial difference between the ontology of nonhuman

Figure 6.3 The articulation of critical realist theory according to relational sociology Note: 1: As Gorski (2009: 191) states: “from a critical realist perspective, paradigm shifts could be understood as ontological shifts involving the theorization of new entities and/or the abandonment of prior representations of social reality”. Figure 6.3 articulates in analytical terms the relational character of the new paradigm I am proposing within critical realism. 2: The traditional classification of sociological (positivist, Marxist, phenomenological, structure-functionalist, hermeneutic ones, etc.) approaches seems more and more to have been affected by the age of ideologies. The globalization age, on the other hand, modifies the way of distinguishing the approaches because it changes their directive-distinctions by abandoning the old ideologies. 3: From relational sociology’s standpoint, the ontology of social reality is distinct and asymmetrical when compared with the ontology of nonhuman realities (including structural mechanisms). The ontology of social reality cannot accept the symmetry supposed by ANT (actor network theory), nor can it share the attempt to find a compromise between the “personalist” approach developed by Archer and the structuralist approach put forward by ANT (a compromise that has been suggested by Elder-Vass (2008: 469, 472: “We achieve symmetry in the treatment of human and nonhuman actors, not by treating them all in the same terms, but by treating each of them in the terms that are appropriate to its own particular structure and properties”; “… critical realism’s ontology provides a much more appropriate form of symmetry than the self-consciously naïve application of the same terminology to human and nonhuman actors advocated by actor network theory. Critical realism’s symmetry appears in the recognition that it is the possession of causal powers that is held in common by these two groups of actors, while the particular causal powers (and hence the particular terminology appropriate to their description) varies according to the underlying structure and mechanisms of each type of actor. Once again, it seems that actor network theory is hampered by its failure to see beyond the empirical face of reality”). As Gorski puts it: “actors are simply parts of causal mechanisms if, and to the degree that they a) act without engaging in rational reflection or communication (e.g. out of habit or out of self-interest); b) are highly constrained in or unable to act on their choices” (Gorski 2009: 191). To relational sociology, it is the very nature of social relations that does not allow a symmetrical treatment of human and nonhuman realities.

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reality (physical, biological, natural) and the ontology of social relations (what I call “the relational order”) (Donati 1991). The distinction consists precisely in the different nature of relations in the two domains: in the former, the relation is a generative mechanism which does not depend properly on human action; in the latter just the opposite is true. This has many relevant consequences. In particular, we cannot maintain that individuals are “parts of the social structure”, as some realist scholars seem to claim (viz. Elder-Vass, when he writes: “ … we must recognise that sometimes when individuals act, they do so as representatives of larger structures; that their action is not the action of an individual alone, but at least in part the action of a structure. This need not reduce those individuals to mere intermediaries: the structure concerned will only ever co-determine their actions in conjunction with other causal factors. But nor does it alter the fact that the individual sometimes deploys causal powers of the whole organisation, and not just those of their own person”; “In critical realism’s emergentist ontology, as we have seen, we recognise that social structures are composed primarily of human beings … ” – Elder-Vass 2008: 467, 469). To relational sociology, social structure is made up of/ consists of social relations, not of individuals and mechanisms. I) Once the sociologist has adopted a certain attitude (realist or constructivist), in order to investigate social facts empirically, s/he needs an operational paradigm allowing her/him to analyse social relations in their making. That paradigm is the explanatory morphogenesis/ morphostasis scheme, clarifying the logic and rules needed to analyse the processes through which social facts are generated (the three-phase model). The morphogenetic argument/ framework highlights the processes through which social facts emerge as effects generated by specific combinations of the factors involved. This occurs over time in the three phases of conditioning, interaction and elaboration (as elucidated by Archer). The effect may reproduce an already existing reality (morphostasis) or introduce an innovative one (morphogenesis). The important element here, according to Archer (1995), is for the observer not to mix (up) structural and agential factors, as Tony Giddens and many others do. There lies the original contribution made by Archer when she shows that social reality emerges out of processes in which the human being is an active and not a passive agent/actor. It is such not in a generic sense (as in most of current sociology), but in a very precise sense: the social relation is acted out by the reflexive self “bending back” upon itself by referring to the social context. Hence socialization is an asymmetrical relation, in which social identity is a sub-set of personal identity (personal identity precedes and exceeds social identity). In fact, this happens because internal conversation (i.e. the self ’s internal subjectivity) plays a mediating role between socio-cultural structures and agency’s free choices, from which the dual structural and agential morphogenesis unfurls. Here, we see why and how this paradigm (and not only the approach) is “personalistic”, i.e. sensitive to the flourishing of the human person (Archer 2003, 2006).

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A) To be empirically verified, the paradigm calls for a number of instruments, that is a methodology. Here one needs operational concepts that are consistent with the morphogenetic argument/ framework: this means operationalizing the concepts of social and system integration, those of reality layers, of reflexivity modes, and so on, to be used empirically to substantiate the morphogenetic argument/ framework through appropriate concepts. Relational theory, on this point, proposes defining the concepts in a relational manner. Concepts must be operationalized through relational indicators, indices, ways of establishing correlations, aggregations, interactions and so on. G) By applying the three above-mentioned investigative phases to a social phenomenon (the L ! I ! A sequence), one can come to explain why a specific fact has occurred out of a variety of abstract possibilities. This is the single specific theory (G). Archer cites as an example her own project on the emergence of educational systems, in which she has explained why they can be – at the time of their emergence – more centralized (as in France) or more decentralized and pluralistic (as in Britain). Readers can add their own examples, answering such questions as: why does a state adopt one form of democracy rather than another? Why do figures for religious affiliation increase or decrease? Why does unemployment increase even in times of economic growth? And so forth. There are various ways of classifying theories; these can be short-, medium- or long-term; they can concern the macro-, meso- or micro-levels. Critical realism is applicable to every level. A sociological theory is formulated this way. It consists in applying a general theoretical approach to a phenomenon observed through a paradigm and employing a methodology producing a specific theory, which can display a more descriptive mode or an explanatory quality in the form of a generalization. This way of presenting the sociological theory of critical realism is peculiar to relational sociological theory and is based on the relational character of cognitive processes (in its relational version, AGIL is a compass that is useful in order to see how the relations inherent in sociological thought match or do not match, and in what way, social facts as constituted by/ through/ with social relations). It must be added that any single theory, thus configured, is falsifiable.

4 The advantages of critical realism and some open issues On the one hand, compared with other sociologies, the sociology of critical realism presents a number of advantages and, on the other hand, generates a number of problems. 4.1 A new insight into the relational order As far as advantages are concerned, it is worth underlining that the morphogenetic paradigm starts from structural factors (as sociology is generally meant to do, compared with other subjects such as psychology and economics,

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which start from the individual), but it is not caught up in structuralism. In fact, the notion of structure employed by critical realists is dynamic, in the sense that they maintain that all structural properties are continuously activitydependent.12 Second, I really feel it is important to highlight the restoration of “nature” as a vital experience by subjects-people and as a pre-social reality. This shift is essential to rebut the validity of constructivism and of its opposite, deconstructionism (without falling into positivism!). In Archer’s theory, nature is not a fixed, unmodifiable (and therefore negative) datum, as modernist and postmodernist sociologists think when they configure natural reality only as a limitation and a constraint for the individual, preventing any kind of personal creativity and social emancipation. Nature vis à vis social reality is not a dead thing, a conditioning influence “to be got rid of”, according to the bias of most social scientists. Nature, itself preceding the making of social reality and of cultural practices and subsequently interacting with them, is a reality that always accompanies human beings. It did so in the past, it does in the present and will do in the future. It is a living thing, it is a resource. Although the existence of “human nature” does not follow automatically from the natural world, we can say that the relational perspective can be applied to the human nature too, in so far as the latter is a primary component of people being (human!), and one that allows for creativity. To appreciate that, one needs to see its relational character, in a reflexive sense. The nature of human reality is reflexive in itself, it is not an immovable entity. Thus, we can say that agency’s natural reality carries a sort of ethical quality. Although ethics admits of historical development, it cannot sever its relational connections with nature as its ontological basis. If nature collapses, so does the human person, since the latter loses any ethical orientation (or rather: she finds no ultimate answer to her ethical concerns). Quite rightly Archer forcefully vindicates the importance of natural practices (the natural order), as a basis on which social reality’s practices are developed. This is because nature lies within the person, before standing outside him, and lies within the person and his relations, i.e. precisely those relations which constitute him as a human person. I believe that this conclusion converges with what other sciences, biological, cognitive and information sciences in particular, are now showing. Biologists Margulis and Sagan (2007), for instance, hold that “there is a development plan of nature, which is called relation”. The logic moving life, its meaning, is that of ordered relations. In a society this does not occur as the mere execution of an a priori project, but as an emergent morphogenesis including natural factors. Nature is not alien to the emergent phenomenon; rather, in sociology, nature is meant as a dynamic relational process. I would like to draw your attention to the final comments in my 1991 Relational Theory of Society, which were inspired by a similar approach: “For relational sociology, this means that truth remains an ordering form in relation to a reality that is itself relationally ordered” (Donati 1991: 544). That does not mean that social order is pre-existing or predetermined as is the biological one, but that the

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logic of reality is relational in both cases, although with different semantics (or symbolic codes). Society, inasmuch as it represents a tension between nature and culture, develops through the “relation’s order”. Nature plays an autonomous role in this, as autonomous nature incorporated in society (Murphy 2002). Were I asked to give a concrete example, I could mention the issue of reconciling work and family commitments, which strongly emerges as a social fact in view of the natural need felt by people to live in the family, a need that itself requires an appropriate relational (cultural) set-up in line with the job. A third strength of critical realism is the restoration of causality in sociology. By that I mean relational causality, not the positivistic (behaviouristic) action-reaction causality. Other advantages of the realist theory are the following: first, the fact that the theory is applicable at every level, micro, meso and macro, and that it does not require any particular adjustments when moving from one level to the other; second, and above all, it is important to mention the Copernican revolution introduced by Margaret Archer with the new socialization morphogenetic paradigm, by which socialization does not take place as an internalization of society into the individual (a view to which neo-Parsonians are still clinging), but as an autonomous construction of social identity that is produced on the personal identity side. 4.2 Open issues However, realism engenders certain other problematic issues. As regards those aspects of the theory that are still to be developed, I will mention only a few. Their common denominator is that the reality of social relationality as such still remains to be investigated, i.e. whether the reality of relations is a property of people in their mutual interaction or a reality exceeding individuals, and therefore an order of reality which is not reducible to them. The first point concerns the relationship between the internal reflexivity of human persons (as agents/actors) and the reflexivity of the social networks in which they are embedded. If relationality’s reality is a property of people,13 then it does not make sense to refer to the “reflexivity of social networks”. If relations possess a reality in themselves, then they have reflexive powers which are independent of individuals. Hence the term social reflexivity becomes applicable to relational networks, though not to social systems which can be reflective14 but not reflexive properly.15 The consequences of this are not insignificant. Let me give you an example: the issue of knowing whether values (e.g. civic culture values) of people are independent of their social networks or if they depend on the social networks in which individuals are immersed, and the connected issue of the consequences produced for the quality of social relations by one or the other being true. According to some (Raymond Boudon, for instance), adherence to values is an individual choice, is a fact pertaining to individuals, and the social glue is

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made of relations that are projections of individual choices (as Max Weber himself also maintained). In fact, empirical investigation shows that people’s civic values can be independent of their social networks, but in that case those values do not create a bond of trust, collaboration and reciprocity gluing the social fabric together (Donati and Colozzi 2007). Only when civic values express the reality of concrete and effective relations of trust, co-operation and reciprocity, do they make up that social capital upon which social integration depends. If they remain individual values, even though many adhere to them, they do not create genuine social integration, but only mass behaviour or collective action operating through aggregated choices, without yielding creative circuits of social relationality.16 This empirical evidence leads us to raise the question: is it possible to shift the concept of reflexivity from people as individuals (personal reflexivity) to social networks (social reflexivity)? Relational sociology highlights the need to extend the notion of reflexivity beyond the dialogical self (the internal conversation) to the configuration of social forms. Can reflexivity be a power of communicative networks beyond single individuals? To answer this question we need to introduce the notion of relational reflexivity, i.e. to apply relational semantics to reflexivity. Modernity only knows two kinds of semantics with which to treat reflexivity: the dialectical (including the dialogical) and the binary ones. Neither type deals with the relational character of reflexivity properly: as a matter of fact, the dialectical type sees relationality as a mere confrontation, and the binary type reduces relationality to an aut … aut distinction. A further related point yet to be explored is the relationality of individuals’ interactions in the second phase of the morphogenetic process, which depends on the conditioning of individuals produced by structures. This, in turn, depending on the way it occurs, entailing different outcomes in the newly constituted (that is, elaborated) structures. From a relational sociology standpoint, interactions between actors (ego-alter) are “relations in actu” (relations in progress), which depend on the existing socio-cultural structures, which are relations stabilized in a previous stage of the morphogenetic process and, as such, can be regenerated or modified. To understand how interactions modify relations, one has to resort to a more sophisticated vision of social relations as emergent phenomena. Take, for example, the reality of trust as a social relation. Trust is an attitude that allows for risk-taking decisions in order to control everyday interaction in the future. Some authors think that trust has the same reality constitution when it is observed in the couple (married or living together) and in the informal extended networks (of friendship, care, affection, etc.). For relational sociology, this is not a properly relational view, since the different nature of these relations entails different realities of trust. Trust within the relationship of a couple operates differently from trust in a friendship or care relationship due to the different nature (structures and processes) of these relations (which are “contexts” for the agents/actors): since trust is a modality by which agents/

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actors stabilize their reciprocal expectations, and the latter are different for a couple, a friendly or a caring relationship, then trust must operate in different ways in order to allow people to manage their everyday interactions in these different “contexts”. In general, we can distinguish between many different forms of trust: for instance, in empirical research on social capital, it is possible to distinguish between primary trust in familial and informal relationships, secondary trust in formal associations and organizations, and “generalized trust” in local civic cultures (Donati and Tronca 2008). Another open issue concerns the view of culture (of the cultural system). In the morphogenetic scheme proposed by Archer, culture (as “intelligibilia”) corresponds to Popper’s World 3. To my mind, such an approach to culture is not fully adequate to critical realism. In any case, Archer interprets the Popperian World 3 in a relational way. To her mind, the process through which people arrive at dovetailing their ultimate concerns, is cognitive, cathectic and symbolic as well. As implied in my Figure 6.1, the culture through which the observer looks at reality is not only “a system” containing more or less consistent and consolidated notions (World 3), but it should work in relation to the other vertices, which means that culture works through complex processes of symbolization, since the observer attaches personal feelings and personal interpretations to symbols (as, unlike signs, symbols require subjective interpretation). I am referring not only to representative symbolism, but also to the “appresentative” one,17 conferring a personal and social identity as distinct from “interests”. Actually, Archer’s approach to critical realism stands out not only because it clearly preserves the distinction between identity and interest, but also because it gives priority to identities over interests. In socio-cultural interaction, Archer claims, we social agents do not live by propositions alone: we generate myths, are moved by mysteries, become rich in symbols.18 In my relational view of critical realism, it is important to underline that “symbolism” cannot be treated simply as synonymous with “irrationality”. In other words, it is essential to see that, when morphogenetic processes occur (i.e. when persons redefine their ultimate concerns), the latter have a symbolic character which should be scrutinized in terms of the different forms of rationality “carried” by agents/actors and their social relations. Symbolic identity refers to a signifying meaning that cannot lie either in the cultural system, or in socio-cultural interaction, or even less in their greater or lesser consistency with the structure of social positions. In this respect, I believe that the morphogenetic framework set up by Archer has to be opened up to a relational view of symbolic development which is precisely the process connecting the two triangles (the upper and lower ones) in my Figure 6.1. Such a view should be developed in a relational sense, because symbols mean social relations (Gattamorta 2005). For instance, the symbol of “mother” means a “certain relationship” to the offspring as the origin of their own identity, biological first, but implying a number of relations with many other dimensions of their existence.19

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In my view, most sociology is still too constrained both by Durkheim’s analysis (of symbols) and above all by Weber’s concepts (of power, religion, ideology). In my view, one needs to revise Weber’s notion of Wertrationalität, which has caused so much trouble for 20th-century sociology and society.20 The concept of Wertrationalität is ambiguous since, on the one hand, it refers to the agents/actors’ own goals (preferences, options, tastes) not to their rational legitimacy (Wert here means a value which can be exchanged with other values and can have a price), and, on the other hand, it refers to what is an end in itself (Wert here means what is worthy in itself because of its dignity, and therefore cannot be compared or exchanged with anything else, since it has no price and no functional equivalent). Now, ultimate concerns can be of one kind or the other. In the second case, I think it is preferable to speak of a Würderationalität (a word I propose to mean the rationality of what is worthy in itself or has a right to be respected). As far as I am concerned, I think the solution lies in developing a relational notion of sociological rationality that may include symbolism, as viewed not simply as an “irrational” fact, but as a fundamental dimension of what I propose to call “relational reason” (Donati 2008). The notion of “relational reason” refers to the reasons inhering in social relations, which are different from the reasons held by individuals (although only individuals can activate them). For instance, in the couple’s dynamics, the couple relation has (or, more precisely, generates) reasons that do not coincide with the reasons carried by the two partners A and B. In order to appreciate these reasons, and have them operate properly, A and B should distinguish and combine the four dimensions of rationality: instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität), goal-oriented rationality (Wertrationalität), the rationality of the value legitimizing the goal (Würderationalität), and the rationality of the relations which connect these components with one another (Beziehungsrationalität), in order to allow their relationship as a couple to emerge as a relational good (instead of a relational evil) between them. The symbols employed and managed in the dynamics of the couple can thereby become more rational or at least less irrational.

5 Why it is worth adhering to critical realism’s sociological theory Sociological realism is first and foremost an ability to see reality as turned into a genuine, critical experience (neither virtual, nor imaginary nor purely communicative). Experience is critical if it uses meta-reflexivity. Metareflexivity refers to the enhancement of that judgmental reason that makes us tend towards better things. Critical realism’s knowledge, then, is marked by an ability to move away from what is manifest because it is able to relate to what is latent (potential) and potentially, therefore, emancipatory. Critical realist theory leads the sociologist to understand why human people, in spite of anything else, pursue “values”, in the sense that they tend towards given goals (usually a mixture of interests and identities) transcending things already given. Archer’s analyses clearly show how people variously

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conduct that dialogue with themselves (their internal conversation) capable of changing social structures. Margaret Archer’s insistence on the different modes of reflexivity accompanying morphostatic/ morphogenetic processes is decisive in order to be able to face the very future of sociology. Her claim that there is no society without a reflexive sense of self is an invitation to dream, but not the dreams that are the product of reason’s sleep, but the dreams of an awake conscience, which may be more or less awake but is always inevitably a human conscience. Critical realism in sociology is the sociological reason that enjoys a reflexive experience of reality. I have briefly attempted to say how this occurs and what reality it is. Sociological realism is first and foremost a critique (though not exclusively) of all the sociologies that do not see the reality of what is human. Those sociologies refer to “reality”, and yet only observe structural bonds and constraints, or, vice versa, only see imaginary things, myths, illusions, ideologies and many other contrivances, which are far removed from what people themselves feel. What they are wanting, without necessarily being able to articulate them, are those “ultimate concerns” for which they live, believe and hope, whenever they feel they are themselves and not something else. That is why critical realist theory is a great remedy against all those sociological approaches (structuralist, functionalist, imaginary) that effectively withhold the enjoyment of human experience from people. It challenges all those sociologies that bring men and women to mystify their own existence, both when they see themselves as society’s products (society’s being), and when they consider themselves self-made men (modernity’s man). Living experience, its enhancement, its manifestation, is what critical realism is interested in. It endows people with their own properties and powers, of which individualism and holism have stripped them. Critical realism does not lead to scepticism – so widespread in sociology nowadays – but is a humble and sensitive, rational account, not an ideological or imaginary one. Critical realist narrative shows us how social facts emerge through social subjectivities. It shows us how social subjects and social institutions are born and develop. In brief, it reveals the significance of the social organization in which we live, by disclosing its possible alternatives. Within such a framework, critical realist theory amounts to a powerful antidote against the risk of falling into empiricist realism. Furthermore, it is an example of how sociological realism, as opposed to positivism, is not a sad kind of science, which simply gets us passively to accept social facts, almost as though they were the outcome of an ineluctable fate, subject to the laws of some kind of “evolutionism”; rather, it interprets them along the practical lines of a possible perfectibility, embedded within a rational view which is ethical as well as aesthetic. The theory outlined here has indeed an optimistic backdrop for it admits that reality can go beyond the limited rationality of human individuals, beyond mere individuals. It holds the view that – and shows how – society can be modified by people, who hold a reservoir of

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potential abilities reflected in social relations through causal (agency) and structural powers. Society can create forms of sociability in which it is once again possible to express the latent nature of human reality, which is capable of developing in ways different from past conceptions that viewed nature as a fixed and binding force, unsusceptible to modification. Such is the distinctive reality order of human relationality, itself giving rise to a meaningful social relationality. We can experience it, for instance, in the new creative reflexivity of the “associational civil world” (usually called “third sector”, what I call “the social private spheres of society”), outside market and state structures. It is the field of what I have called “relational goods” (Donati 1991: ch. 3), i.e. those goods that emerge between people, in so far as they can be produced and enjoyed by them only together (through voluntary sharing). We can only see those goods, which consist in social relations, through a theory capable of shedding light on the relational order of reality by using a sociological reason that can distinguish between what is human and what is social (Donati 2009). One last remark must suffice. Relational theory conveys an original interpretation of critical realism inasmuch as it accounts for a new historical context. Globalization requires a new approach to realism. Realism itself is no longer a cognitive attitude “im-mediately” (un-mediatedly) natural, just as it might have been in a pre-modern or early modern society. Therefore, the concept of critical realism needs new “mediations”, well beyond classical philosophy’s realism stretching from Aristotle up to the Middle Ages. With the advance of modernity, human beings are no longer immersed in a physical and cultural environment that can be immediately natural, i.e. experienced by simple cultural and scientific mediations. There are two factors that radically modify the natural human condition: on the one hand, science and technology, which create an ever more artificial, “contrived” environment; on the other, ethical and cultural relativism, dissolving any interest in reality. Under these new conditions, reality becomes problematic, first of all because it is no longer naturally perceived as a problem. Post-modernity tends to remove “social facts”, marginalizes them as insignificant and replaces them with issues of communication, just as the virtual economy replaces the real economy. What now matters are “images” and “representations”, not facts. As a result, realism now has to be advanced in a “mediated” fashion, has to be “re-constructed” (if this word is not misunderstood or misleading), yielding the paradox of “having to construct realism”. This is why realism has to become even more critical, i.e. has to be equipped with a higher order reflexivity, which for relational sociology means a relational reflexivity. All the above entails a new mediation by a conceptual framework (the one I have summarized here in Figures 6.1 to 6.3), which needs to be capable of analysing ever more complex relations emerging between observer and reality. If constructivism, on the one hand, is a technique that neutralizes such relations (which are differences), critical realism, on the other, enables them to emerge. Such relations are certainly enacted by their subjects and yet precede them and exceed them in such a way as to remain dependent on them as far

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as the realm of “the human” is concerned. This is the interpretation of critical realism given by relational sociology.

Notes 1 Paranoia is the term openly used by Teubner (2003) with reference to authors such as N. Luhmann and J. Derrida. 2 W.I. Thomas in 1928 formulated the well-known theorem according to which “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”. In other words, the interpretation of a situation determines action. If interpretation is not objective, then actions are influenced by the subjective perceptions of the situation. Even if there were an objectively correct interpretation, it would not automatically be the most important guide to people’s behaviour. 3 For a deeper understanding of the meaning of this assertion, pointing to a new way of analysing “social facts” from the perspective of critical realism: cf. Donati (2006a). 4 As a typical example of this position, cf. Franco Crespi’s (1996) sociological thought, for whom sociological knowledge cannot escape cultural mediation. In general, this is the position held by those who believe that there is no chance of escaping the “hermeneutic circle” of knowledge. Archer’s sociological theory challenges this position as a hyper-socialized view of the individual (for instance in authors such as George Herbert Mead, Rom Harré and many others), because, in one way or another, it sees the individual as the product of society alone and not also of pre- and meta-social reality. 5 The case of Franco Crespi’s sociological theory is again emblematic because he has concluded his work with a book entitled precisely Contro l’aldilà (Against Transcendence) (Crespi 2008). Again, as specified in the previous note, a sociology based on critical realism expresses the opposite position, i.e. an opening to transcendence (cf. Archer, Collier and Porpora 2004). 6 Archer’s theory has criticized empiricism as its main opponent since the beginning. See the explicit statement made by Archer in the Preface to the Italian edition of Being Human (Archer 2007b: viii), where she points out the convergence between my relational theory and hers, although my argument was sparked by a different opponent, what she calls “the futility of neo-functionalism”. 7 For instance, as a result of the forces involved, as in Norbert Elias’ (1970) “figurational” sociology, which uses a relational argument mainly focused on aspects of social identity and powers. 8 The issue of distinguishing between descriptive and explanatory analyses of social facts remains unsolved: it involves the problem of demonstrating why a relational set-up “is like that, and cannot be any otherwise”. For instance, the analysis conducted by Pfau-Effinger (2009) is descriptive, as it uses Archer’s morphogenetic argument to demonstrate that there is a correlation between the variety of social policies for the family and the different family cultures of the actors on the national scene. On the other hand, a sociological analysis is explanatory if it shows how the family exists wherever there is full reciprocity between sexes and generations, because otherwise another kind of relation is generated (Donati 1991: ch. 5). 9 I conceive of a “symbolic code” as a way (modality) to interpret symbols by using rules that relate them to each other. For instance, take the symbols of “father” and “son”. Symbols are different from signs in so far as the latter do not require interpretation. A cognitive code refers to the cognitive aspects of a symbolic code. 10 It is well-known that validity refers to the signifying element truly matching the signified; whilst reliability refers to the fact that, on repeating the investigation, one should obtain the same empirical result.

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11 See Luhmann 2002. 12 Cf. Bhaskar (1989: 50): “ … the activity-dependent nature of social structures, viz. that the mechanisms at work in society exist only in virtue of their effects”. 13 Archer claims that, if collective reflexivity exists, it is a relational property of people and one that cannot be attributed to the systemic level of the social. She writes: “There is only one caveat to this frankly speculative conclusion, which has defended and even extrapolated the concept of collective reflexivity in an exploratory manner. However extensive its applicability proves to be, it must remain a relational property of people. It pertains to the social level and cannot be attributed to the systemic level, which lacks the prerequisites of subjectivity, commitment and a capacity to care, necessary to any practice of reflexivity. In short, no system can have an ‘ultimate concern’ that is genuinely systemically generated. Ultimately, systems can exercise increasing amounts of reflection but still fall short of reflexivity. Perhaps that does remain a residual difference between Anglo-American and Italian Critical Realism – in which case it would be a good cause for the collective exercise of Meta-reflexivity” (Archer 2009). 14 To be clearer, this is my vocabulary: Reflection is a self-referential operation of an individual mind which goes back on to itself within itself (e.g. the word reflection is used in computer science to indicate the process by which a computer program can observe and modify its own structure and behaviour). Reflectivity is the same operation done by a system. Reflexivity is a relational operation which is done by an individual mind in relation to an “Other” who can be internal (the Ego as an Other) or external (Alter), but taking into account the social context, and generates a relationship which is an emergent effect between the terms it relates. 15 “Social mechanisms” are at work in social networks and social systems, and we must be able to distinguish between social mechanisms that are reflexive and those that are non-reflexive, since only the former are relational. Gorski (2009) presents a model of mechanisms (called the “ECPRES” – emergent causal powers of related entities within a system – model), which, to my mind, could be useful if and only if we can elaborate it from the perspective of the distinction between reflexive and non-reflexive mechanisms (a perspective that Gorski does not take into consideration). As a matter of fact, social systems do possess mechanisms that are automatic and others that are structures stabilizing social networks acting as relational configurations. Empirical evidence of the difference between reflexive and non-reflexive networks can be given with reference to the role of networks in the virus epidemic. Until recently, network analysis could forecast the diffusion of flu viruses through mechanical models applied to probabilistic contacts between persons. The ‘A’ flu spreading all over the world from Mexico in April 2009, for example, following this model, could have caused a world pandemic with millions of deaths; but this outcome has not occurred. The reason for this outcome lays in the fact that the network of sanitary interventions has become much more reflexive than in the past. However, we must distinguish between the reflexivity of agents (both individual and collective) and the reflectivity of the national health systems and the world health system (World Health Organization). According to the relational framework, reflexivity needs human action (which is relational in its very nature, i.e. operates in relation to the social context), while reflectivity is a self-referential and autopoietic operation of a system (be it biological, psychological or communicative), which works according to its own directive distinction (the example of Luhmann’s re-entry is a case in point). 16 By “relationality” I mean the property of “being in relationship”, which has a Janus face: the property of being a relationship (social ontology), and the property(ies) that emerge from reciprocal action (the relationship is contingently generated by reciprocal action). By “relationality of relations” I mean the fact that relations can be co-related to (and can influence) each other, of course through the mediation of

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actor/agent’s actions. Let me give an example: from the viewpoint of network analysis, a family composed by a father, a mother and a child is equal to a network with three nodes and three linkages; but if we assume a relational perspective, the picture is much more complex: that family has three nodes and nine relations (three more relations are added since each member looks at the relation between the other two members, and the other three relations derive from the fact that each relation between two members influences the other relations). “Appresentation” is a word used in phenomenology (by E. Husserl and then by A. Schütz, N. Luhmann and others) to indicate the way in which the observer “makes present” an object that cannot be fully and immediately present, for instance, an object of which we only see the front (e.g. the moon), whereas “representation” is the way of describing an object that can be fully and directly apprehended. See Archer (1988: xvi–xvii). Of course, we must distinguish between myths and symbols as they are lived in the symbolization process (which is relational, and therefore activity-dependent) and myths and symbols as “propositions” (the subject of the cultural system according to Archer 1988) which are only logically relational. Because no one need endorse, accept or use the latter, their (continuing) existence is not strictly activity-dependent. I am referring here to empirical research on the issues of personal and social identity for children born out of heterologous assisted reproduction. Such research throws light on the hidden side of the same issue for children born through the natural processes of human procreation (I have no room here to expand the argument). Some readers could observe that, as a matter of fact, a mother can be good, bad or indifferent as a caring figure. Therefore, the symbol of the mother is empirically ambiguous. To them, it cannot mean anything beyond biological generation. To my mind, such a response does not fit with what is meant by a symbol as distinct from a sign. To claim that “mother” indicates only biological generation means to reduce the symbol (the mother as the origin of one’s biological identity – of course shared 50% with the father – which is a component of personal identity in so far as the biological level (DNA) has real connections with the psychological one and is questioned by the subject in order to define his/her own symbolic identity in the generational chain, as it has been discovered by the empirical studies on those persons who are born out of artificial insemination) to a sign (birth-mother). Such a fallacy (which I call the fallacy of misplaced symbolism) is clearly present in the way Max Weber deals with the mother-child relation, when he reduces this relationship to its biological dimension (see Weber, Economy and Society, vol. I, Ch. 3, §. 1). On the contrary, Max Horkheimer underlined the fact that, as a symbol, “mother” expresses much more than the biological generative event; he observed that, even within the bourgeois and authoritarian cultures (e.g. the Nazi period), it meant the hope and promise of “a better world” (see Horkheimer 1936: Part I, §. 3). That is why the worst mother is still a mother. Indeed, the process of symbol formation (and use) is a very complex relational matter (see authors like Mircea Eliade, Victor Turner, Franco Fornari and many others). In Angelo Fusari’s (2007: 103) words: “Weber, despite talking about rationality at great length, did not hesitate to proclaim the utmost impossibility of scientific analyses on values, thereby contributing to pave the way to the worst forms of irrationalism, which would bear the most genuine monstrosities infecting the first half of the last century, and which to date still deeply mark social thinking as well as modern epistemology and greatly trouble peoples’ lives”. For a critique of Weber’s notion of rationality, cf. Donati (2008: 97–109).

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References Alexander, J.C. Positivism, Presuppositions, and Current Controversies. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982. Archer, M.S. Social Origins of Educational Systems. London: Sage, 1979. ——Culture and Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ——Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 (Italian transl. La morfogenesi della società. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1997). ——“Homo economicus, Homo sociologicus and Homo sentiens”, in M.S. Archer and J.Q. Tritter (eds), Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonization. London and New York: Routledge, 2000a, pp. 36–56. ——Being Human. The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000b. ——Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (Italian transl. La conversazione interiore. Come nasce l’agire sociale. Trento: Edizioni Erickson, 2006). ——“Persons and Ultimate Concerns: Who We Are is What We Care About”, in M.A. Glendon (ed.), Conceptualization of the Human Person in Social Sciences. The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Vatican City Press, 2006. ——Making Our Way Through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007a. ——“La morfogenesi della società: qual è il posto di Essere umani?”, in R. Prandini (ed.), Essere umani. Il problema dell’agire. Genova-Milano: Edizioni Marietti 1820, 2007b. ——“The Morphogenetic Approach and Reflexivity: An account in three grammatical persons – ‘I’, ‘s/he’ and ‘we’”, Preface to the Italian translation of Archer (2007a), Riflessività umana e percorsi di vita. Trento: Erickson, 2009. Archer, M.S., Collier, A. and Porpora, D.V. (eds). Transcendence. Critical Realism and God. London-New York: Routledge, 2004. Bhaskar, R. The Possibility of Naturalism. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. Collier, A. Being and Worth. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Crespi, F. Manuale di sociologia della cultura. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1996. ——Contro l’aldilà. Per una nuova cultura laica. Bologna: il Mulino, 2008. Donati, P. Introduzione alla sociologia relazionale. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1983. ——Teoria relazionale della società. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1991. ——(ed.) Lezioni di sociologia. Le categorie fondamentali per la comprensione della società. Padova: Cedam, 1998. ——“L’analisi relazionale: regole, quadro metodologico, esempi”, in P. Donati (ed.), Sociologia. Una introduzione allo studio della società, Padova: Cedam, 2006a, pp. 195–251. ——“La conversazione interiore: un nuovo paradigma (personalizzante) della socializzazione”, Introduction to M.S. Archer, La conversazione interiore. Come nasce l’agire sociale. Trento: Edizioni Erickson, 2006b, pp. 9–42. ——Oltre il multiculturalismo. La ragione relazionale per un mondo comune. RomaBari: Laterza, 2008. ——La società dell’umano. Genova-Roma: Edizioni Marietti 1820, 2009. Donati, P. and Colozzi, I. (eds). Terzo settore, mondi vitali e capitale sociale in Italia. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2007.

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Donati, P. and Tronca, L. Il capitale sociale degli italiani. Le radici familiari, comunitarie e associative del civismo. Milano: Franco Angeli, 2008. Elder-Vass, D. “Searching for realism, structure, and agency in Actor Network Theory”, The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 59, Issue 3, 2008: 455–73. Elias, N. Was ist Soziologie? München: Juventa, 1970 (English transl. What is Sociology? London: Hutchinson, 1978). Fusari, A. “Razionalità dell’individuo e razionalità della scienza”, MondOperaio, no. 3, May–June 2007: 100–06. Gattamorta, L. Teorie del simbolo. Studio sulla sociologia fenomenologica. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2005. Gorski, Ph. “Social ‘Mechanisms’ and Comparative-Historical Sociology: A Critical Realist Proposal”, in P. Hedström and B. Wittrock (eds), Frontiers of Sociology. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2009, pp. 147–94. Horkheimer, M. “Familie”, in Studien über Autorität und Familie. Paris: Alcan, 1936. Iagulli, P. “La sociologia relazionale di Pierpaolo Donati. Una breve introduzione ‘meta-sociologica’”, in M. Pasquali and L. Scillitani (eds), Filosofia sociale. Milano: Mimesis, 2007, pp. 95–104. Luhmann, N. Theories of distinction: Redescribing the descriptions of modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Margulis, L. and Sagan, D. Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature. Hedgesville, WV: Sciencewriters Books, 2007. Morandi, E. “‘La relazione sociale’ come oltrepassamento di una sociologia del ‘nonumano’”, Preface to P. Donati, La società dell’umano. Genova-Milano: Marietti, 2009, pp. 7–60. Murphy, R. “The internalisation of autonomous nature into society”, The Sociological Review, 50, 2002: 313–33. Parsons, T. The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press, 1937 (Italian transl. La struttura dell’azione sociale. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1968). Pfau-Effinger, B. Welfare cultures from a European perspective, Paper presented at the Conference of the Italian Sociological Association on “Nuovi welfare, politiche e servizi per la famiglie”, Catholic University of Milan, 5–6 February 2009. Prandini, R. “La sociologia nei limiti della realtà”, Sociologia e Politiche Sociali, vol. 7, no. 3, 2004: 73–106. Teubner, G. “Economia del dono, positività della giustizia: la reciproca paranoia di Jacques Derrida and Niklas Luhmann”, Sociologia e Politiche Sociali, a. VI, no.1, 2003: 113–30.

Part 3

Methodology/epistemology

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Recovering causality Realist methods in sociology Douglas V. Porpora

In quite a few countries throughout the world – Japan, Russia, Germany and Italy, for example – the national population is in decline. The decline is a demographic fact, ascertainable by social scientific methods. Is it a matter of concern? In Italy, at least, the Government of Silvio Berlusconi seemed to think so. That Government was concerned enough to have instituted a “baby bonus” in 2005, which is still in effect today. Is such concern appropriate or misplaced? Concern was a key concept for Heidegger (1962). Care or concern, for Heidegger, was what connects us to the world, what distinguishes, he said, humanity’s specific way of “being in the world”. Heidegger was no positivist. If anything, he was an anti-positivist, whose name today is more associated with the post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida or Paul DeMan. Yet Heidegger’s key concept of concern entails causality. Actually, concern entails causality not just in a single sense but doubly. First, when we have a concern, it is about the way some feature of the world affects us – or those we care about. If, for example, we are concerned about our nation’s declining population, we are concerned about the consequences of this situation for ourselves or for future generations. Perhaps we wonder who will perform all the work that needs to be done or, more specifically, how a smaller employed population will be able to support an increasing population of the aged. To speak so of consequences is to speak the language of cause and effect. Thus, we see a first way in which concern entails causality. In concern, we relate to a world that confronts us as a causal complex with its own ways of working – ways that affect us, independent of our wishes. Our well-being requires that we understand the causal order of the world so as to alter it when necessary. Our ability to alter the causal order implies that that order is not necessarily inexorable or deterministic. We do not confront that order just as passive observers. What is to be Done? The question was the title of a famous book by Lenin (1963). Although demography was not what concerned Lenin, the question in general is fundamental to the being of those who relate to the world through care or concern. Because we can alter the causal connections in the world, situations of concern to us always make us ask what is to be done.

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Thus, the second way in which concern entails causality is that it relates us to the world as “doers”. For the sake of our own well-being, we act on the world, we intervene. In so doing, we are sources of causality in our own right. In critical realist (CR) terms, we ourselves manifest causal powers. Giddens (1979) and Emirbayer and Mische (1998) virtually equate agency with such power. Such equation is mistaken because human agency entails more than just causal power, which is also shared by many things in the world that are not really agents (see Davidson 1971 for the defining criterion of agency). The causal power to act on the world is nevertheless intrinsic to human agency. Concern, Heidegger went on to say, relates us to the world in a practical way. We primordially relate to the world as it is for us. Because the world causally affects us, we must concernedly act to causally affect it. The first causal knowledge we gather for this purpose is informal and ad hoc. Only subsequently do we adopt a scientific stance in which we consider the world as an independent object. Even then, we adopt such stance in part for practical reasons: to better predict and control the way the world works. This goal, perhaps positivist in origin, applies at least to the natural sciences. Does it apply as well to the social sciences, to sociology in particular? In the social sciences too, do we seek understanding in order to predict, and prediction in order to control? Auguste Comte and the early positivists certainly thought so. Today, some sociologists still cling to the early positivist vision. Others are not so sure. Many renounce completely the ambition to control social life; some deny even the possibility of prediction. Understanding, they say, can be our only goal. Understanding, however, to what end? Sociology appears to have lost its way here. Control is not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, definitely, we should not seek the kind of control over human lives that Michel Foucault brings to our attention. Is it also bad, however, to seek to control inflation or the adverse effects of a declining population? If Heidegger is right that concern is the human way of being in the world, then, at least as lay actors, we cannot avoid either causal analysis or causal action in the social world. When we consider, for example, the connection between a declining birth rate and a declining population, what is the nature of this connection if it is not causal? Our governments at least must both seek to understand this causal connection and causally act to prevent or mitigate any harm that a declining population in turn might cause. Although “control” and “causality” sound hard and anti-humanistic when applied to social affairs, humanist values themselves make causal analysis and causal action incumbent on us. Confronted with Rwanda and Darfur, humanist values oblige all of us as world citizens to better understand both what causes genocide and, once begun, what might more rapidly cause it to halt. Citizens of all countries – at least active, responsible citizens – must better understand both what causes their governments to behave as they do and what might cause them to behave better.

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In short, as activists, as citizens, as people, we cannot avoid either causal analysis or causal action in the social world. A concern with causality is essential not just to our “being in the world” but also, more specifically, to “our being in the social world”. The question is whether sociology will help us as activists, citizens and as people to determine what is to be done. Sociology will provide no help if it retreats from causality altogether. True, there are deep problems with the positivist conception of causality our discipline has inherited. Yet it will not do to reject causality wholesale simply because our received conception is wrong. What we need instead is to recover a better conception of causality, a conception of causality that fits the social world as well as the natural world. The remainder of this chapter will show how both supporters and opponents of causal analysis in sociology have shared a very faulty understanding of causality and how the apparent opposition between their methods dissolves when causality is better understood in CR terms.

1 The hegemony of the covering law model The “concept of cause”, Piergiorgio Corbetta (2003: 88) tells us, “lies at the very heart of science”. Yet, he goes on to say, “it is one of the most controversial from a philosophical standpoint”. Consequently, however central a concept cause may be, the leading textbooks on research methods all hurry to move past it. Consider, for example, how quickly Neuman dispatches the topic: Philosophers have long debated the idea of cause. It has been controversial since the writings of the eighteenth Century Scottish philosopher David Hume [ … ] Without entering into the philosophical debate, many sociologists pursue causal relationships. (Neuman 2000: 52) In Neuman’s treatment, we completely bypass the meaning of causality. In one move, Neuman takes us from philosophical controversy over the idea of cause to sociology’s pursuit of causal relations. With causal relations, Neuman plants us safely on empiricism’s familiar terrain of causal criteria. Corbetta, too, hesitates to spend much time on the idea of causality: This book will not enter into the philosophical debate on the concept of cause. Philosophers have wrestled with this concept for centuries. (Corbetta 2003: 88). In contrast with other textbooks, Corbetta’s Social Research does take at least a moment (p. 89) to tell us what causation means conceptually or intuitively – specifically, that it has to do with making something happen, i.e. with the production or engendering of something. Like Neuman, however, Corbetta

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directs us not to think too much about what causality means. Instead, via references to Herbert Blalock and Mario Bunge, Corbetta channels us immediately and without commentary from causality to causal laws: In general, “one admits that causal thinking belongs completely on the theoretical level and that causal laws can never be demonstrated empirically” (Blalock 1961: 6). As Mario Bunge (1959) puts it, in order to express the idea of cause, the following statement is not sufficient: If C, then E. (Corbetta 2003: 89; italics added) The above statement is insufficient, Corbetta subsequently tells us, because it expresses only co-variation and not also natural necessity. To fully capture causality, we need a statement more like the following: If C, then (necessarily) E. The question is how Neuman and Corbetta are able to usher us so summarily from the controversial nature of causality as a concept to causal laws of an “If-then” form. The answer is that if the concept of causation remains philosophically controversial, philosophers – or at least positivist philosophers – have reached consensus on the form that causal explanation takes in science. That form is called the “covering law model”. The covering law model conceives of causal explanation as a species of deductive argument in which the explanandum (that which is to be explained) is logically deduced from the explanans (that which does the explaining). The canonical form of the argument follows: If C, then (necessarily) E. C. ___________________ Therefore, (necessarily) E. More expansively, the above argument reads, If C happens, then E necessarily happens; C has happened; therefore, E had to happen. In this sequence, C an E are each events, although C might be a compound event, consisting of multiple individual events, so that the first line might read if C1, C2 … CN all happen, then E necessarily happens. E is the explanandum. Together, the two premises above the line – “If C, then E” and C – constitute the explanans. The if-then formulation, “If C, then E” is the covering law. If the two premises of the explanans hold (i.e. can justifiably be asserted), then E follows as a logical deduction. Its occurrence is therefore causally explained. Clearly, a covering law, taking an if-then form, is the vital component in a causal explanation following the covering law model. Hence, the very name of the model. Essentially, in the covering law model, causality involves a special kind of statistical co-variation among events, namely, a law-like co-variation. Bhaskar

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(1975, 1979) refers to such law-like co-variations or “covering laws” as “event-regularities”, that is, regular linkages of one event – or set of events – with another. With laws figuring so prominently in causal explanations, the job of the scientist becomes to discover empirically what those laws are. Durkheim’s Suicide (Durkheim 1957) and Division of Labor (Durkheim 1933) are exemplary. In Suicide, Durkheim attempts to document such causal laws as the following: If a group’s social cohesion becomes too high or too low, its suicide rate will increase. Similarly, in The Division of Labor, Durkheim tries to establish causal laws like the one below: If a group’s size increases, it will increase in differentiation. Notice that the casual laws entailed by the covering law model are abstract and decontextualized. They do not refer to any particular group at any particular place or time. Instead, they apply to “or cover” any and all cases because their form is universal. The causal laws entailed by the covering law model call for the use of quantitative research methods and statistics. Because the necessary laws must be universal, generalisability becomes a prominent concern. Specifically, it must be shown that any putative law applies not just to the cases considered but to an entire universe of like cases. Actually, it is an understatement to say that the covering law model simply calls for or favours statistical methodology. The covering law model positively elevates statistical formulations from evidence to explanation. Consider, for example, a regression equation linking group size and differentiation: Group differentiation = β * Group Size Such an equation offers not just evidence for a linear relationship between size and differentiation. As a candidate covering law itself, the equation becomes the explanation. In effect, for the covering law model, ideal explanations take the form of equations. A methodological split is thus engendered between nomothetic and idiographic explanation. Nomothetic explanation – explanation in terms of general laws – becomes the archetype of scientific explanation and generally entails the use of statistics. In contrast, idiographic explanation is explanation not in terms of general laws but in terms of social and historical particularities. Idiographic explanation is the explanation of history and ethnography. It is narrative in form. It is the way we explain why particular people in particular circumstances do the particular things they do.

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According to the covering law model, the idiographic explanations of ethnography and history are not causal accounts at all. They offer merely descriptions and consequently are appropriate at best only as exploratory precursors to a nomothetic analysis, which alone provides causal explanation. Thus in sociology do quantitative methods achieve their pre-eminence over qualitative methods. Of course, there is a fly in the ointment: a rather big one. The covering law model of explanation does not work. In A Realist Theory of Science, Bhaskar (1975) shows that the covering law model fails even in the natural sciences. It can more briefly be shown here that the covering law model certainly fails in application to the social sciences. Implicitly or explicitly, the candidate covering laws so far considered have all taken a deterministic form. That is, each law seems to say that if the antecedent event occurs, then the consequent must necessarily follow. It is the absolute fixity of the connection between the antecedent and consequent events that permits the logical deduction that is the heart of scientific explanation according to the covering law model. The problem is that no deterministic laws have ever been found to govern human affairs. Worse, nobody even expects deterministic laws to be found. To understand why, it is helpful to think in terms of a CR distinction between open and closed systems (Bhaskar 1975). A closed system is one in which a single causal mechanism operates in isolation. Because in a closed system there are no other causal mechanisms interfering with the mechanism under observation, it might be possible to observe law-like event-regularities. In such circumstances, without outside interference, the same input may lead regularly to the same output. Closed systems, however, are generally the artificial construct of a laboratory. The real world beyond the laboratory is rarely closed but, more often, radically open. In an open system an unlimited number of causal processes operate simultaneously, interfering with each other in changing and irregular ways. Hence, it is very unlikely that the same input to any one process will lead to exactly the same output. The most we can expect in an open system is a rough statistical relation between two variables. Clearly, as the social world studied by sociologists is an open system, we cannot expect to uncover any deterministic relationships there, and no one does. Corbetta (2003: 19) suggests that a shift toward a search for statistical rather than deterministic laws characterizes neo-positivism. In this sense, neopositivists are what many quantitatively oriented sociologists are since statistical laws are all they say they are seeking. What do neo-positivist sociologists mean by statistical laws? On this point, they generally hedge, and for good reason. If by a statistical law neo-positivists mean a formulation like, “If C, then there is an invariant probability α that E”, then statistical laws also will support a relaxed form of the covering law model. What will be deducible from the explanans in such case is not the actual occurrence of the explanandum but at least the invariant probability α of its occurring.

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Unfortunately for neo-positivism, no one has uncovered even any statistical laws of such form, and nor, again, is anyone likely to. The reason is the same as before. In any open system, like the social world, conditions are unlikely to stay sufficiently fixed to yield unchanging probabilities of anything – particularly in a social system, subject to historical change. Any observed statistical relation between two social variables is subject to modification by changes in the ways humans think. Human thought is itself an intrinsically open system without limits on the new thoughts that can be entertained, which potentially might alter any previously observed relationship among social variables. Such considerations preclude any strong statistical laws (Porpora 1987). At most, what can be found are what neo-positivist sociologists call “ceteris paribus” propositions, that is, propositions of the form, “ceteris paribus, if C, then E”. The ceteris paribus clause stipulates that the following relationship holds only with “all things being equal”. Ceteris paribus propositions are, however, a sham that do not legitimately support explanations conforming to the covering law model. If the factors referenced by a ceteris paribus clause can be specified and it is clear what it means for them to be equal, then a ceteris paribus proposition poses no difficulty. In such case, the conditions referenced could in principle be explicitly enumerated in the proposition, which would thereby be converted into either a deterministic or statistical law. On the other hand, if the ceteris paribus clause references an indeterminate inventory of factors, and it is unclear what it means for those factors to be “equal”, then the ceteris paribus clause renders vacuous the proposition it prefaces (Porpora 1987). To see this, consider that for any such “ceteris paribus” proposition formulated (e.g. “Ceteris paribus, if A then B”), a contrary ceteris paribus proposition could be formulated with equal validity (i.e. “Ceteris paribus, if A, then not-B”). It all depends on which factors are chosen for the baseline and which factors are relegated to the ceteris paribus clause. For this reason, if the factors referenced by the ceteris paribus clause are indeterminate and their condition of equality unspecified, the following deduction is invalid: Ceteris paribus, if C, then E. C. ______________________ Therefore, E. Instead, in order to determine whether E had to follow C in any particular case, the particular nature of the case would have to be examined. However, that – contrary to the whole point of the covering law model – is to explain E’s occurrence in an idiographic rather than a nomothetic manner – that is in terms of a case’s unique context rather than in terms of a general law. If the facts associated with each individual case need to be examined ideographically to determine whether some general relationship holds, it becomes unclear what value is added by the general relationship (Porpora 1987).

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In short, ceteris paribus relationships are the only kind of nomothetic relationship sociologists can find, but they do not support explanations conforming to the covering law model. Thus, the covering law model does not work. Sociology should accordingly cease looking for universal laws and begin thinking of statistics not as a privileged form of explanation but rather as one form of evidence for a proper explanation.

2 The further hegemony of the covering law model: understanding versus explaining The covering law model of causality exerts its hegemony not only among its positivist supporters but also even among those who oppose positivism. Corbetta (2003: 20) refers to positivism’s major opposition as interpretativism. Interpretativism is perhaps a suitable label for a whole range of sociological approaches that emphasize interpretative or hermeneutic methods. These approaches range from symbolic interactionism and phenomenology to ethnomethodology and even deconstruction, which is sometimes described as the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970). Interpretativists do not necessarily all share the same assumptions, but one assumption they widely share is that there is a distinction between understanding and explanation (see, for example, Hollis and Smith 1990). This distinction goes back to Wilhem Dilthey and of course was picked up by Weber with whom the concept of Verstehen is most associated. Interpretativism actually accepts the understanding of causality entailed by the covering law model. It accepts that causality involves universal laws and that such laws imply determinism – that is, a certain inexorability. Interpretativism simply denies that causality applies to the human sphere. Rather, for interpretativism, the covering law model of explanation is confined to the natural sphere. In origin, positivism roughly coincided with the “unity of science movement”, which advanced common postulates of science across the disciplines. Disciplines seeking to partake of scientific status adopted those postulates, including the covering law model of explanation. Economics, political science and psychology all adopted the postulates assiduously, as did sociology. In contrast, against any putative unitary scientific methodology, Dilthey posed his famous distinction between the Natur and Geistes Wissenschaften, that is, the natural and the human (literally spiritual) sciences. What the distinction marks is a fundamental difference in governing principle. Whereas the natural order is governed by the principle of causality and causal relations, the human order is governed by reason. Thus, whereas the natural order is a domain of determinism, the human order is a domain of freedom. Thus, as well, whereas the natural order can be studied objectively from the outside, the human order must be studied subjectively from within. In general, acceptance of these distinctions marks the point of view variously called interpretativism or the Verstehen school.

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Interpretativists were among the early opponents of reductionism. For them, the irreducible hallmark of the human sphere was intentionality (Brentano 1973) or the quality of “aboutness”. Humans in other words distinctively have thoughts and feelings about things, quite apart from the qualities of the things themselves. The things themselves – like unicorns – may not even exist. According to the interpretativists, this distinct human dimension of aboutness has no counterpart in the physical domain of the natural sciences and cannot be ignored. According to interpretativists, the human quality of aboutness means that what operates within the human sphere is reason, not causality. This distinction the post-Wittgensteinian philosophers made even more pronounced. Followers of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, the post-Wittgensteinian philosophers (Anscombe 1957; Melden 1961; Peters 1960; Winch 1958) distinguished between explanations in terms of causes and explanations in terms of reasons. A classic example of causal explanation is Durkheim’s previously mentioned explanation of suicide: if social cohesion declines, then the suicide rate will increase. Such an if-then proposition putatively explains in a causal sense why people commit suicide, but it does not at all help us understand the specific thinking that leads people to do so. To understand why people commit suicide, we need to comprehend their reasons. In contrast with explanations in terms of causal laws, which are mechanical, accounts in terms of reasons adopt a teleological language of motivation. Specifically, rational accounts involve reference to agents’ goals, to their desires, and to their beliefs. When we want to understand why people commit suicide, we want to hear what they believe suicide will accomplish and why they want or desire to accomplish that goal. Perhaps, for example, suicide victims just want to escape a state of deep depression, and in that state, believe suicide the best way to accomplish that end. Explanations in terms of reasons do not reference laws. If, for example, we say a particular somebody committed suicide because he wanted to end an unhappy existence, we are not necessarily implying any law-like connection between unhappiness and suicide. There are, after all, other ways to deal with unhappiness. One could wait out the unhappiness, talk it out with friends, consult a therapist, or try to change the specific source of unhappiness. Positivists sometimes suppose that explanations in terms of reasons must entail fragments of prospective causal laws that can in principle be fully fleshed out, but for any finite list of antecedent wants, beliefs, or other considerations that could conceivably be thought to eventuate with some fixed probability in some subsequent thought or action, it is always possible for a new consideration to arise that fundamentally alters the posited probability. It is just the non-deterministic nature of human thought that wants, beliefs, intentions and so forth do not conform to nomothetic explanation. Explanation in terms of reasons remains stubbornly idiographic. It may seem to follow from the irreducibly idiographic nature of human rationality that causality has no place in the human sciences. That was the

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conclusion advanced in Peter Winch’s (1958) seminal The Idea of a Social Science (ISS). Essentially, ISS dismissed the legitimacy of causal analysis in the social sphere, including specifically, the kind of causal analysis modelled by Durkheim. ISS thus did more than just challenge the privileged position of statistics in social scientific methodology. According to the argument of ISS, statistical analysis in the social sciences was not even legitimate. Privileged by ISS instead were the hermeneutic methods associated with history and ethnography. Instead of laws, each of these methods explains through the construction of a narrative or story, over the course of which reasoned action unfolds in a contextualized way that makes it understandable. Winch in ISS and other post-Wittgensteinians (Blum and McHugh 1971; Coulter 1989; Rubinstein 1977) went even further. They not only argued that explanations in terms of reasons were distinct from explanations in terms of causes; they also argued that it was mistaken even to think of reasons as states of mind internal to actors. Motivated behaviour, they argued, should not be thought of as behaviour caused by mental states, but as behaviour in conformity with social rules external to actors. With such an account, motivation as popularly understood virtually disappears. Indeed, motivation does disappear for Anthony Giddens (1977), whose New Rules of the Sociological Method continues to be a widely influential affirmation of the Winchean perspective. According to Giddens (1984: 6), “Motives tend to have a direct purchase on action only in relatively unusual circumstances, situations which in some way break with routines [ … ] Much of our day-to-day conduct is not directly motivated”. If our routine behaviour is not directly motivated, what is it? Only rule-following. Motivation is not the only thing to disappear from the Winchean account. In the end, the Winchean approach in ISS and post-Wittgensteinian thought generally lead to an almost exclusive concern with cultural rules. Rules now drive out everything else. Because rules are entirely cultural and thus inter-subjective, driven out from sociology are specifically any elements more material in nature. Excluded in particular are objective social relations, which used to be called social structure. Certainly excluded is the Durkheimian social structure, operating over the heads of individuals. Yet, equally excluded is the more humanistic, historical materialism of Marx, which poses a distinction between the objective material conditions of a society and what that society subjectively thinks about itself ideologically. In Giddens’s structuration theory, in particular, social relations are designated by the category “social system” and appear largely as epiphenomena of ongoing human behaviour. Although Giddens (1979: 64) himself admits that “social structure” traditionally has referred to patterns of objective social relations, he defines “structure” as rules and resources. This change in terminology so covers over the absence of objective social relations that their loss to sociology has gone by largely unnoticed. If what used to be called social structure is now methodologically out of bounds and we are not to think of most human behaviour as motivated in the

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ordinary sense, it is difficult to see how even ethnography or history are to proceed. Indeed, one major complaint lodged against Giddens’s oeuvre is that it does not lead easily to any concrete research projects (see Cohen 1989). Although there is no room here for a full-fledged critique of the postWittgensteinian or Winchean perspective (but see Archer 2001; Campbell 1998; Davidson 1963; Margolis 1979; Porpora 1983, 1997), some of its major deficiencies can at least be mentioned. First, does it really make sense to deny all causality in the social sphere? Let us reconsider the issue that opened this chapter: the declining birth rate in countries like Italy. The consequences of this condition – insufficient workers, for example – are not themselves either reasoned or rule-following behaviours. They actually are not even behaviours. At most, they are effects of reasoned behaviour that have their own effects to which reasoned behaviour may react. With the reintroduction of the word effect, causality makes some return. It is not only in terms of consequences that causality makes such return. Ultimately, we must also ask why it is that the birth rate is declining. Certainly, appeal to rules will not help here for what we are observing is a departure from past rules. Reasons will surely make their appearance as they do in anything having to do with human behaviour. Yet if people are now suddenly reasoning toward fewer children, something systematic is going on, something behind individual reasons that makes so many reason alike. What is prompting so many people suddenly to reason in the same way? Such a systematic shift in reasoning indicates a prior change in people’s objective interests, which itself bespeaks a major change in social structure, the ensemble of social relations in which we are enmeshed. We know that a drop in birth rate attends what is called “the demographic transition”, the move of a population from a largely rural to a largely urban setting. Economically, in that transition, children go from asset to liability. With an objective decline in the economic benefits of children and an equally objective rise in their economic costs, many people reason their way toward fewer children. If the birth rate has dropped, either the demographic transition is further advancing or some other such large-scale structural change is underway. Do we really want to do without the concept of interests and without any concept of social structure? If not, then, ultimately, we also cannot do without some concept of causality. Even in the most qualitative of historical accounts, in family history, for example, as practised by Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson, we cannot escape a causal understanding. After all, what Bertaux and Thompson (2005) say they are centrally seeking is the “transmission” of culture and identity. Transmission, in fact, is the very first word with which they begin their Between Generations: Family Models, Myths & Memories. It is a word of action and, hence also a word of causality. Transmission means to send or impart. In the case, of cultural transmission across generations, it means to impart ideas even prior to reasoned reflection. The values and beliefs we inherit from our

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parents we did not arrive at rationally ourselves. It is part of Heidegger’s concept of thrown-ness, that before we ever even begin to reflect on who we are, we find we already are somebody in particular. As that somebody, we find already in our heads ideas for which we are not personally responsible but for which we only might go on to take responsibility – ideas caused to be there by the process of transmission we call socialization. Even when it comes to reasoned behaviour itself, the post-Wittgensteinian view is problematic. It is really untenable, for example, to suggest that reasons are not states internal to actors but only external social conventions. Such a view makes an utter mystery of why actors behave in one culturally intelligible way rather than another. Giddens is simply wildly wrong to deny that routine behaviour is typically motivated. We routinely make all sorts of motivated decisions within the established rules: what and where to buy? To take the train or the bus? To talk back to the boss or keep our silence? For whom to vote? Only by forgetting Goffman almost entirely can we imagine that our routines are not filled with strategic, managed and hence motivated behaviour. Finally, it is difficult to deny as the post-Wittgensteinian position does that there is some kind of causal relation between reasons and actions. Explanations of actions in terms of actors’ motives support both counterfactuals and subjunctive conditionals, features generally regarded as the hallmarks of causality (Davidson 1963; Margolis 1979). We can legitimately say, for example, that if an actor had not had such and such a motive or purpose, then he would not have performed such and such an action. Similarly, we can legitimately say that if an actor had had such a purpose, then he would have performed such and such an action. The only real objection to a causal understanding of human rationality is that rational processes do not fit our understanding of causality as articulated by the covering law model. As has been intimated, however, the problem resides not in a causal understanding of rationality but in our reigning understanding of causality. The latter is what must be changed. CR’s articulation of an alternative model liberates us from the problems and offers the possibility instead of a new unity of method.

3 The critical realist alternative In contrast with the covering law model, the CR conception of causality does not lead to a search for event regularities because CR does not conceptualize causality in terms of any kind of sequence of events. In fact, CR does not conceptualize causality as primarily a relation among events. Instead, CR conceptualizes causality as a relation between causal structures or mechanisms and causal properties. Each of these terms needs explanation. It is first of all an immediate mistake to assume the word mechanism necessarily connotes something we would normally consider mechanistic; something, that is, necessarily sub-human. Of course, in the natural world, the

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word mechanism does refer to something like that. We perhaps quickly think of the mechanism of a clock. Today, that mechanism is a solid state configuration of transistors and micro-processors. In the past, it consisted of gears and springs and such. In both cases, the word mechanism refers to that which makes the clock work. In both cases, the mechanism is not best thought of as an event or even as a series of events. The mechanism is better thought of as a structure, in this case, a rather complex structure of different parts. When CR speaks of causal mechanisms, then, it speaks of what makes things work. Generally, that involves a reference to some kind of causal structure. In biology, for example, we might speak of the structure of the DNA molecule, a very special “double helix”. In physics, we might speak of the structure of an atom. One major consequence of this conception of causality is the realization that much of even natural science is qualitative. Among the major accomplishments of science are the structural descriptions of the atom and DNA. Hence, much of science is descriptive. With such understanding, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) is better appreciated as the scientific achievement it is, for what Smith does in this work is describe the market mechanism. What Smith famously called “the invisible hand” is an effect of the competitive relations that govern production. Those competitive relations – a social structure – are collectively the mechanism through which market efficiencies are caused. Smith’s description of the market is simultaneously a theory but not a theory in the positivist sense. The theoretical description of the market mechanism is an elaboration, not a list of axiomatic propositions. Already evident, therefore, is how separate for CR causality is from anything nomothetic and how recovered by CR is the value of theoretic description. There is another point to notice. As in the case of the market mechanism, not all generative mechanisms – sometimes called “powerful particulars” (see Harré and Madden 1975) – involve physical parts. The efficacious element of the market mechanism is more the competitive relations among producers than the qualities of the individual producers themselves. Indeed, Smith argued that the competitive social relations would in effect causally swamp the distinct qualities of the individual producers. Another mechanism that involves no material parts is that which generates biological evolution: blind variations and selective retention. Neither of these components is a physical part. Together, however, they comprise the mechanism that generated all life. It is not a mechanism incidentally that is at all deterministic. In fact, Gould (1989) argues that if the planet’s history of biological evolution were to be replayed a thousand times, it would be very unlikely to eventuate once again in human beings. Instead, according to Gould, our appearance depends on a long series of contingencies, unlikely to be repeated. Mechanisms, then, even in the natural sphere, are often far from deterministic. CR similarly understands human rationality as a generative mechanism without physical parts. In referring to rationality as a mechanism, CR means

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simply that humans operate rationally; rationality is the way human beings work. People behave according to reasons; they act on their wants and beliefs. It is people’s wants and beliefs that cause their actions – although, to be sure, not in law-like ways. Thus, it is to the coherent system through which mental states relate to each other and to action that CR refers when speaking of rationality as a mechanism. Yet, although wants and beliefs are states of an agent, they are not necessarily physical. Rationality again exemplifies a generative mechanism without physical parts. So much for what CR means by mechanisms. What about causal properties? What does CR mean by that designation? Actually, a broad range of things – from tendencies and dispositions to capacities and powers. We have already referenced a connection between causal tendencies and mechanisms in relation to the market. The invisible hand – the pressure each producer feels to operate efficiently – is a causal tendency generated by the competitive relations that comprise the market mechanism. The same market relations, Marx argued, would produce other, destabilizing tendencies in capitalist systems, namely tendencies toward insufficient aggregate demand and a falling rate of profit. These tendencies, too, are causal properties, albeit detrimental ones, exhibited by capitalist systems – at least according to Marx. Whether or not Marx’s analysis is correct, from a CR perspective, the descriptive derivation of these tendencies from a structure is, like Smith’s effort, important scientific work. Positivist critics of Marx always objected that neither of the tendencies he identified was causal because neither is law-like. Like the invisible hand described by Smith, the tendencies Marx posited can be counteracted. From a CR perspective, this positivist objection is misguided. It comes from thinking of causality in terms of event-regularities. Yet the tendencies of which Smith and Marx speak are not event-regularities. They do not even share the if-then form of event-regularities. The tendencies of which Smith and Marx speak are better conceptualized not as laws but as forces. Whereas laws imply determinism, forces are causal properties that can be counteracted. Consider gravity. Gravity, too, can certainly be counteracted in various ways. There are no events gravity produces deterministically. Nevertheless, the frequent need to counteract gravity already means that gravity exists as a force requiring counteraction. The same applies to the kinds of forces to which Smith and Marx refer. Tendencies or forces are not the only kind of causal property. There are also causal powers or capacities. Because of its atomic structure, water, for example, has a distinct power to dissolve things. Likewise, because of its atomic structure, carbon has a distinct power to combine in ways that afford life. At a certain point in the biological evolution of homo sapiens, the structure of our brains afforded us a distinct capacity for language, which in turn afforded all sorts of other causal powers, like the power to question or the power to issue commands. Causal properties actually encompass a very wide range. Think of all the words we use – and cannot help using – that tacitly imply making something

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happen: pushing, pulling, preventing, transmitting, giving, taking, exiling, escaping, offending, marrying, and so forth. These all relate to capacities and powers of various kinds. The covering law model of the positivists conceives of causality as something linear, almost skeletal. For CR, causality blooms into something full-bodied and diverse. It is again because causality is so much more complex for CR than for positivism that basic description becomes much more scientifically important for CR than for positivism. Whereas positivism searches simply for stripped down, linear laws, CR seeks elaborations of mechanisms. This change in emphasis accords a new, higher status to ethnography. For CR, good ethnography no longer is just exploratory but a scientific description of socially operative, causal mechanisms. Consider, for example, Karin Knorr Cetina’s (1999) ethnography, Epistemic Cultures. It is description, yes, specifically a description of laboratory work in microbiology and high energy physics. Yet to label Knorr Cetina’s ethnography a description is potentially very misleading. It may suggest the non-causal descriptions we might find in a novel or poem of a landscape, a face, or a character. On the contrary, the description Knorr Cetina provides is quite causal in nature. Her ethnography is subtitled How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Thus, what Knorr Cetina is trying to describe are causal mechanisms – the causal mechanisms of knowledge production in microbiology and high energy physics – mechanisms that, Knorr Cetina suggests, are fundamentally different. There are, of course, questions that can be raised about Knorr Cetina’s account. First, there is the question of internal validity: does she get the mechanisms right even at the specific sites she investigates? In particular, is her interpretation correct about the role of the world in knowledge production? Then there is the question of external validity: are the mechanisms Knorr Cetina uncovers at these sites generalisable to other such sites? The appropriate method to answer this last question may or may not be ethnography. Asking about the generality of a mechanism is different from uncovering the mechanism in the first place. Both questions have their scientific place and importance. To the extent that Knorr Cetina’s descriptions are correct at least in broad outline, she uncovers the existence of social mechanisms that quite likely are general. Thus, the scientific importance of Knorr Cetina’s work is not done justice by the current positivist opposition between idiographic description and nomothetic explanation. Actually, from a CR perspective, explanation itself is a form of description. We explain by re-describing what we observe in some theoretical language, a language that evokes a mechanism. Sometimes, as the post-Wittgensteinians point out, explanation may be as simple as citing governing norms. Norms, after all, are a kind of social mechanism that shape behaviour. In other cases, the mechanisms involved may be more complex. We may, for example, explain the failure of anyone in a crowd to come to the aid of a victim by redescribing what is observed in the theoretical language of the so-called “bystander effect”, that is, as conditions of pluralistic ignorance and the diffusion of responsibility (see Latane and Darley 1970).

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Ethnography is not the only qualitative approach to be rehabilitated by CR. History is rehabilitated as well. Because narrative history invokes no laws, positivism again dismisses it as “merely descriptive” rather than explanatory. It is due to the lingering reign of this opposition that we find Immanuel Wallerstein (1976) in all seriousness cautioning at the end of The Modern World System that his whole foregoing analysis adds up only to a single case – as if we would need to study world systems on other planets before we could be sure Wallerstein had truly explained anything. Again, the opposition here between description and explanation is a false one. In The Modern World System, Wallerstein explains by a particular kind of description, one that utilizes theoretical language to weave together the simultaneous operation of multiple social mechanisms. It is, in fact, only such an historical account that can accommodate the causally open system constituted by the real world. Historical narrative is found not just in the human sphere but in the natural sphere as well. Consider cosmology, with its account of an unfolding universe that begins with a big bang, then a period of “cosmic inflation”, followed by different phases of cool-down and formation of different elements, the formation of galaxies, and so on. Here, even in physics, we have a history. In geology, too, if we are to explain the current distribution of continents, we must do so via a narrative. Likewise in biology if we seek to explain the descent of homo sapiens. Because the social world is so open, because, as Heidegger tells us, humans are beings especially embedded in time, it should be no surprise that history becomes the paradigmatic form of explanation in the human sciences. Historical narratives not only capture the temporal dimension of human life, they are uniquely able to encompass the operation of multiple causal properties of all sorts. Indeed, because for CR causality is no longer deterministic, even the effects of social structure can be woven into a history without any implication that all is reducible to that one mechanism. Historical accounts by their very nature imply contingency, whether social structure is incorporated or not. Clearly, CR displaces statistical techniques from their current position of methodological privilege. Does CR rule out statistics entirely? Some accounts of CR methodology do argue against statistical techniques like regression as offering poor forms of explanation (Lawson 1997; Sayer 1989). This judgement is not one that I or a growing number of other CR scholars share (Amit 2002; Olsen and Morgan 2005; Porpora 2001). On the contrary, we would argue, from a CR perspective, regression equations are not a poor form of explanation because, properly, they are not explanations at all. Properly, a regression equation constitutes only possible evidence for an explanation, not the explanation itself. As noted, for positivism, a regression equation does simultaneously serve as both an explanatory covering law and as the statistical evidence of its own existence. Because for CR causal explanation involves mechanisms rather than laws, for CR, evidence and explanation become distinct. For CR, an

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event-regularity, even in the rigorous form of a regression equation, cannot ever serve as an explanation. It is at most one, fallible piece of evidence for an explanation. Demoting regression and other statistical techniques from explanation to evidence, CR has no reason to reject them as such. Of course, when critical realists use statistical techniques, they are searching for invariant relationships independent of social context. Instead, the statistics are employed to indicate the operation of a mechanism in a particular socio-historical situation. Let me illustrate the point by the use of statistics in my own research. I am currently engaged in a large project examining the debate that transpired in US newspapers and news magazines over America’s eventual decision to attack Iraq. One large question that concerns me is how the moral dimensions of the issue (the justness of the war, its legality and so forth) were effectively muted in favour of exclusively prudential concerns (e.g. the cost in American lives, the wisdom of acting alone, or the fear of becoming bogged down in a long war). To the extent that what I am asking is a “how” question, required is a qualitative analysis, specifically a discourse analysis of the rhetorical manoeuvres through which moral concerns were dampened or channelled out of discussion. Other aspects of the question, however, are quantitative. Specifically, did some publications – say America’s elite periodicals – practise such “moral muting” more than others? Did secular periodicals practise it more than religious periodicals? These sorts of questions – which ask not how, but how much, which, or where – are also important. In contrast with how questions, they are quantitative in nature, answerable by comparative counts. Not only must there be some measure of comparative prevalence, but there also should be some measure of the likelihood that any differences found are due only to chance. In short, such quantitative questions call for statistics. The statistics themselves will not explain the differences found, nor will they yield any kind of universal law. They will simply support a claim that for varied reasons – which, themselves are the explanatory mechanisms – moral muting was practised by some publications more than others. In the end, there are no specifically CR methods of research. Unlike both positivism and interpretativism, CR does not pose an opposition between qualitative and quantitative methods. It does not just reverse an order of inclusion and exclusion. It does not erect a new methodological foundationalism. Instead, CR reunifies sociological methodology. From a CR perspective, there is a valid and important place for all of the methods sociologists have employed – although not necessarily in the way they have employed them. Statistics, as mentioned, should function as a form of evidence for an explanation rather than as the explanation itself. Conversely, sociologists using qualitative methods ought to become bolder than they now are about asserting and pursuing the causal dimensions of their work as descriptive of mechanisms in natural settings. CR reclaims as well the unity of science that positivism was always after. Positivism sought that unity in a misconceived determinism and a model of

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causality built on it. Interpretativists were correct to resist, but the problem was not confined to the human realm as the interpretativists thought. The positivist doctrine did not even fit the natural realm; even there the covering law model of causality failed to apply. With CR, the epistemology of the natural and human sciences once again coincides. True, we do not “hang out with” or interview atoms, and nor do we use particle accelerators to study people. Specific methods will always differ across domains. Yet a common understanding of explanation is preserved. If the human sciences uniquely require hermeneutic methods, it is because hermeneutics is the way to access the distinct mechanism through which human actors behave. For CR, method is not something a priori but always appropriate to the research question and the object of study. Interpretation is not always the key issue in the human sciences. Sometimes at issue is an effect that is not altogether interpretative. The effect of a falling birth rate is one such example. We sociologists should be using all the methods available to us to confront such predicaments. As a non-foundationalist approach, CR philosophically justifies methodological diversity.

References Amit, Ron. “Regression Analysis and the Philosophy of Social Science: A Critical Realist View”, Journal of Critical Realism 1 (1), 2002: 119–42. Anscombe, G.E.M. Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957. Archer, Margaret. Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Bhaskar, Roy. A Realist Theory of Science. Leeds: Leeds Books, 1975. ——The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of Contemporary Human Sciences. Sussex: Harvester, 1979. Bertaux, Daniel and Thompson, Paul (eds). Between Generations: Family Models, Myths & Memories. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2005. Blum, Alan and McHugh, Peter. “The Social Ascription of Motives”, American Sociological Review 36, 1971: 98–109. Brentano, Franz. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, transl. by A.C. Rancurello, D.B. Terrell and L. McAlister, London: Routledge, 1973. Campbell, Colin. The Myth of Social Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Cohen, Ira. Structuration Theory: Anthony Giddens and the Constitution of Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. Corbetta, Piergiorgio. Social Research: Theory, Methods and Techniques. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003. Coulter, Jeff. Mind in Action. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Davidson, Donald. “Action, Reasons, and Causes”, Journal of Philosophy 60, 1963: 685–700. ——“Agency”, in Robert Binkley, Richard Bronaugh and Aussunio Marras (eds), Agent, Action and Reason. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971. Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labor. New York: The Free Press, 1933. ——Suicide. New York: The Free Press, 1957.

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Emirbayer, Mustafa and Mische, Ann. “What is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology 103 (4), 1998: 962–1023. Giddens, Anthony. The New Rules of the Sociological Method: A Critique of Interpretative Sociologies. New York: Basic Books, 1977. ——Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradictions in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. ——The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Gould, Stephen Jay. Wonderful Life. New York: Norton, 1989. Harré, R. and Madden, E. Causal Powers. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Hollis, Martin and Smith, Steve. Explaining and Understanding International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Hyman, John and Steward, Helen. Agency and Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Knorr Cetina, Karin. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Latane, Bib and Darley, John. The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help? New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970. Lawson, Tony. Economics and Reality. London: Routledge, 1997. Lenin, V.I. What is to be Done? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. Margolis, Joseph. “Action and Causality”, Philosophical Forum 11, 1979: 47–64. Melden, A.I. Free Action. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961. Neuman, W. Lawrence. Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2000. Olsen, Wendy and Morgan, Jamie. “A Critical Epistemology of Analytical Statistics: Addressing the Sceptical Realist”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 35 (3), 2005: 255–84. Peters, R.S. The Concept of Motivation. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. Porpora, Douglas V. “On the Post-Wittgensteinian Critique of the Concept of Action in Sociology”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 13 (2), 1983: 129–46. ——The Concept of Social Structure. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987. ——“The Caterpillar’s Question: Contesting Anti-Humanism’s Contestations”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27 (2/3), 1997: 243–64. ——“Do Realists Run Regressions?”, in Garry Potter and Jose Lopez (eds), After Postmodernism? Critical Realism. London: Continuum, 2001. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970. Rubinstein, David. “The Concept of Action in the Social Sciences” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 7, 1977: 209–36. Sayer, Andrew. Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach. London: Routledge, 1989. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1976. Winch, Peter. The Idea of a Social Science. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.

8

The future is behind us. Aristotelian causality and sociological realism Emmanuele Morandi

Social institutions are realist buildings, dissolved by nominalism. Nicolas Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implicito, Bogota: Villegas, 2005 Social scientists weigh, count, measure, instead of thinking. Nicolas Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implicito, Bogota: Villegas, 2005

1 Introduction The abundance of references and epistemological concepts in Douglas Porpora’s essay requires a precise methodological choice before making some brief remarks. Although Porpora grasps the Achilles’ heel of the positivist world view, nevertheless he appears much too tolerant of the scientifically nihilistic results to which it leads. Therefore, in the first part of this paper, I’m going to speculate about why, from positivism onwards, an ever more arbitrary choice has been made under false pretences: the choice of a model of sociological knowledge based on what Porpora calls “the hegemony of the covering law model”. The deep crisis of the last 20 years of ideologies, not least of that particular ideology called “scientism”, forces us to lay our cards on the table; it is no longer about a problem between the supporters of a scientific approach to the social domain and the melancholy supporters of a hermeneutic approach to knowledge. Criticism of positivism turns out to be also a defence of science. In this sense, causality introduces the problem of scientific knowledge in all its variety, revealing, at the same time, the fatal flaw in the world view of social positivism. The second choice we must make – as regards the rich references in Porpora’s essay – is between a commentary that would transpose his topics in the contemporary epistemological debate or, more simply, try to explore the connections between “critical realism”, to which Porpora belongs, and the thousandyear realist tradition in occidental philosophy, which has Aristotle as its starting and reference point. I have chosen the latter path. This tradition, not only historically but also symbolically, has established itself as “AristotelianThomistic realism”. A “certain” social positivism, the most impaired from an

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ideological point of view (fortunately, nowadays, in a minority position) tries to settle the matter, charging philosophy with this task. However, this is a bad move. Every convinced realist knows that “realism” means considering problems prior to and external to possible distinctions between different academic disciplines and sciences. Each particular science has its own method, because method has to conform realistically to the nature of the particular object being investigated (and not vice versa). This is why epistemological reflection cannot take place without the contribution of scientists dealing with a particular field of study. It is not only about a contribution, but maybe also about a confluence, because the reflection about science in general is set by particular sciences, or, to put it better, by reality that is in Aristotle’s sense discrete (and not a continuum); therefore, only starting from the experience of something specific we can discover the way to make it knowable.1

2 The modern way to sociology: Auguste Comte 2.1 Understanding the non-scientific reasons for the “covering law model” At the beginning of his essay, Porpora presents the current situation of empirical research in sociology: “Today, some sociologists still cling to the early positivist vision. Others are not so sure. Many renounce completely the ambition to control social life; some deny even the possibility of prediction. Understanding, they say, can be our only goal. Understanding, however, to what end?”2 This question, in its simplicity, poses one of the most relevant problems of sociology. A problem that was already present in the medieval Aristotelian tradition3 when, beside the distinction between theoretical and practical sciences, the “hybrid” theoretical-practical type was also considered. This distinction – theoretical, practical and theoretical-practical sciences4 – in the realist and medieval Aristotelian tradition depended on the object that knowledge tries to comprehend. Therefore, the theoretical dimension of knowledge is not a mere psychological attitude, but is based on the fact that there are objects that are knowable but are not “made” by man; this kind of knowledge is, for example, the one referring to the natural world: man finds it already “made” and can only know principles and laws governing it. Another kind of theoretical knowledge is also the one we meet in logic, which deals with the logical structure of mind: here the knowing subject meets an object he does not create (though using it) and that is organized in its particular ways and modalities. Practical sciences, instead, are connected to objects that man not only knows, but also creates; that is why they are sciences dealing with human actions, i.e. the study of all the elements that are at stake in agency-dependent processes, because it is through agency and its different possibilities that man not only knows what does not depend on him, but also what he creates and why he creates it. In this sense, Thomas Aquinas, commenting on Aristotle, used to divide practical sciences into “poietic” and “ethical”: in the former, the aim of the action is externalized beyond the actor, i.e. ends in an object

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different from the actor (transitive action). This includes all the “proactive” sciences, while in ethical sciences the “object” coincides with the agent himself and determines some ethical qualities.5 We are calling to mind these basic notions from medieval epistemology in order to point out the theoretical-practical nature of sociology,6 of agency, of “enablements”, of “projects” – as pointed out by Archer and critical realism. Sociology is a theoretical science when it deals with potential structures (constraining or enabling social action), is practical when it reflects on the planning, and anthropologically qualified, dimension of social action, and, finally, is a relatively autonomous knowledge when it studies the relations between these two constitutive dimensions of society. Surely, in the light of this distinction between theory and praxis, Parsons’s structural-functionalist theory and Luhmann’s systemic theory emerge as attempts that, losing this distinction, mainly depend upon a model whose force is both its coherence and its capacity to assume the reality which the model enforces: in this way the theory consistently becomes praxis and the praxis becomes theory.7 We would like not only to comprehend what happened, but perhaps, more ambitiously, to also understand the reason why – starting from Comte and reflected in the majority of contemporary sociological practice – this fundamental and elementary knowledge of Greek and medieval realist epistemology has been erased, wiping the slate clean. It is quite clear that, while it is possible to study the structural aspect of social reality in a “predictive” view, as “a species of deductive argument in which the explanandum (that which is to be explained) is logically deduced from the explanans (that which does the explaining)”,8 is not the same in the practical sphere of social action, the other dimension of sociological knowledge. Porpora says: “The canonical form of the argument is the following: If C, then (necessarily) E/C./Therefore, (necessarily) E. [ … ] The if-then formulation, “If C, then E” is the covering law. [ … ] Clearly, a covering law, taking the if-then form, is the vital component in a causal explanation following the covering law model.”9 Comtean positivism cannot easily be identified with the deductive method and its thousand-year tradition, but is rather the attempt to extend this method to human agency. Comte explains that “ … we can say that good and pure science is not constituted by simple observations, and, when possible, tends to avoid direct explanations, preferring to use a rational way, which represents the main character of the positive spirit [ … ] Thus, such positive spirit consists of foreseeing and studying what happens in the present, in order to discover what will be in the future, according to the general dogma of invariance of natural laws.”10 Although in the Cours there are many calls for a methodology of observation that would make the reasoning real, we must acknowledge that observation is always according to the reasoning (i.e. deduction). Long before the epistemological debate of the 1980s and 1990s, Comte wrote: “Thus, if on the one hand each positive theory must necessarily be founded upon observations, on the other hand it is equally evident that, in order to observe, our spirit needs a theory, whatever it may be”.11 Comte is saying that we can never have a pure

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observer, i.e. an observer who is not previously provided with a categorical theoretical system – sociologically a theoretical model – through which he observes. This theoretical outlook, prior to observation, constitutes the hypothesis, which, in connection with the observation, becomes a scientific hypothesis. In other words, the hypothesis is seen as the true scientific ground, long before the Vienna Circle and Popper effected respectively the neo-positivistic turn and the critical rationalist tradition.12 Comte, though preserving something of induction, projects a semantic of science that follows a deductive standard: “Good positive system avoids such a danger (i.e the preponderance of induction), because it never separates logic from science”.13 In spite of Comte insisting several times on a methodology that makes combined use of reasoning and observation – in epistemological terms, of deduction and induction – the actual ideal and aim of positive science is the revealing of the “real laws” of phenomena, numerical laws, i.e. laws that establish correlations between phenomena. The fact that Comte continuously states that laws are also and necessarily invariant has been over-estimated. Porpora, too, understands that the most typical feature of social positivism is not “faith” in the existence of necessary and invariant social “laws” – a law, according to positivism, can be only probabilistic and, in fact, due to the complexity of social life and the limits of human knowledge, it is only probabilistic – but is rather the necessary “connection” between an antecedent and a consequent event. Porpora writes: “It is the absolute fixity of the connection between the antecedent and consequent events that permits the logical deduction that is the heart of scientific explanation according to the covering law model”.14 The invariance of the “law”, at any rate, is not the essential point in Comtean discourse; it is the invariance of the connection that must be saved. It is this invariance that allows social positivism to claim the preeminence of methodology over ontology. The fundamental requirement of the Comtean revolution is the appeal that science – especially social science – abandons the notion of cause15 – typical of metaphysics – and establish itself as a knowledge of relations and correlations between antecedents and consequents. A discourse, according to Comte, is scientific when it can establish a relation, even a probabilistic one, between the fact A, the fact B and another relation between the fact B and the fact C. Given, always or probabilistically, A, we always meet B and consequently (not causally) C. Science must abandon (as they are non-scientific) the concepts of (human) nature, of soul and so on, i.e. concepts the weak point of which does not simply consist of their non-experiment-ability or non-verifiability – in this case the Comtean criticism would be the same as that mentioned by empiricists. As a matter of fact, according to Comte, these notions must be dismissed because they are not conceptualizations of relations between antecedents and consequents – in fact, they are categorical and substantial notions, and therefore imply the impossibility of their “manageability” inside the science of number (lois numériques).16 How can the positivistic dogma (that claims science is only made of relations and correlations, and is orderable with the language used in mathematics)

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be the most important criterion of scientific knowledge? It is not about a superficial infatuation with mathematical methods, as a consequence of the huge successes that such a revolution has brought in physical and natural sciences. This is the key point of positivistic science: science is not knowledge of the “why”, but is prediction. Science has its own truth in the capacity to predict.17 The future, in its essential and constitutive uncertainty, is made available for the present, which brings it about. This fact implies many requirements, the first of which is the concept of the future as something that, in some ways, is precontained in the present. Scientific research is research of those latent – potential – elements that are going to determine the future. In principle, everything, including social reality, is perfectly present, involving only a possible distinction between “in-act” elements and latent elements.18 Science is that specific kind of knowledge that, starting from in-act elements, can predict which latent elements will switch to in-act ones, in the near future. Such prediction is necessarily based on the relational structure of the world, both natural and human, which is understood through the laws that regulate the reciprocal determination of its parts. These laws are at best invariant – in a way we can say that, given A, we always and necessarily have B – or, at least, probabilistically – when it happens that, if A occurs, it is probable that B occurs. From a Comtean point of view, the notion of cause is useless – it is a fancy knowledge – since cause, in addition to presupposing substantiality, can at most show us the reason (formal, material, final, efficient) of a phenomenon, but not what it is going to become in its entirety.19 Scientific truth, then, verifies its statements in relation to the ability to foresee how the entirety will be – starting from the laws that determine the relations between the parts. What is true is not what (re-)defines itself by (re-)conforming to the manifold and inexhaustible attributes of a phenomenon (both natural and social), i.e. to what the phenomenon is per se and expresses; but what is true is what by prediction compares itself with the entirety, depending upon which the single parts are taken as indexes. The entirety must not be thought of in substantial terms – i.e. a whole, the society, and the parts, the individuals – but the entirety as a collection of mathematical laws that together form the scientific system. The more knowledge that is close to that “mathematical fabric” that constitutes reality – or better still that coincides with reality – the more the empirical domain and its observation becomes irrelevant. The vision that positivistic science goes against is the contingency and the unforeseeable becoming of human actions. In this sense it is necessary to conceptualize society within a scientific representation that makes use of the notion of “system” and, at the same time, implies its closedness:20 “The real world beyond the laboratory”, says Porpora, “is rarely closed but, more often, radically open. In an open system, an unlimited number of causal processes operate simultaneously, interfering with each other in changing and irregular ways. Hence, it is unlikely that the same input to any one process will lead to exactly the same output. The most we can expect in an open system is a rough statistical relation between two variables.”21

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A district where schooling, job opportunities and measures of social integration are low is a district the relational network of which is connected to criminality and violent phenomena. Such a statement has a scientific value if it can be expressed as follows: when, for example, half of the individuals sampled have not attended compulsory education, when the unemployment rate is high, and the majority of parents are separated or divorced, given these variables – considered as independent – it is probable that in such a district there will be a high rate of crime and/or violence. Based on a common moral code, we would describe such a district as decayed. From a positivistic point of view, the most important fact is not the discovery of correlations that are always true and invariant – it would not be difficult to find remarkable exceptions to these correlations – but the fact that through the statistical inference from these correlations it is possible to calculate the entirety (the district), and thus make possible interventions that could eliminate unwanted situations or promote wanted situations.22 This calculability provides the access, the way to, the method of reality, or better still is reality itself. What is worth underlining from this perspective is that sociological knowledge is already completely identified with praxis, i.e. its epistemic identity consists in its ability to turn itself into praxis.23 However, this aspect that, per se, would not be problematic, and would place the science of social agency within the ethical domain, becomes an alienating matter when we meet the other side of the issue, i.e. we give science the power to build a model, in conformity with which man becomes a product of society. In more Comtean words, humanity is the name that positivistic knowledge assigns to the capacity of society to make its parts, i.e. men. Sociology cannot be seen as the knowledge of the relational order that its primitive units – i.e. men – create and perpetuate in and through their common action, but is that knowledge which – just because it does not start from men but from an entirety coinciding with laws accessible only by knowledge or mathematical calculus (i.e. society or the social system) – represents men as manifestations of that order: such manifestations can exist only by being conformed to it. Men have a social existence only if considered in terms of the functions given to them by the social entirety, for its stability and vitality. Function is a relative definition, relative to a whole of which it is a function. The prediction is linked to the fact that positivistic knowledge accesses the entirety, the nature of which is regulated by mathematical laws, in such a way that laws of the social world are the same as the mathematical laws obtainable by and in the human mind. Here is the core of positivistic scientism and of its secularizing ability for prediction. The more we get inside the knowledge of the entirety – which, being mathematical, is regulated by laws – the more we can do without the observation of the parts, which cannot contain the logic of the entirety governing them: “The positive spirit, without forgetting the necessary and directly ascertainable preponderance of reality, always tends to overstate rational control, to the detriment of experimental control, increasingly replacing direct explanation with prediction of phenomena.”24 This sentence

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perhaps is the most explicit manifesto of the priority of methodology over ontology in social research. Comtian “factuality” – this statement is not banal as it can seem – is completely different from that of empiricism. Observation is a sort of “necessary evil” due to a weakness in our knowledge, which has to employ observation until it discovers, through laws of necessary correlation between antecedents and consequents, the coincidence between knowledge and social reality. Such a coincidence is utopian, also according to Comte, but the regulative ideal of sociological knowledge is to find laws of correlation between all social phenomena, not only because doing so would abolish the need for observation in order to foresee social events, but particularly because if such knowledge were reached, disorder and social evil could be eliminated. It is clear, at this point, that social science whose self-understanding is founded upon prediction – and such prediction is quantitative and allows us to calculate the values of variables – asserts itself as a positivistic science, i.e. one involving the systematic elimination of all those elements that impede its fundamental epistemic act, prediction; in other words, everything that would introduce contingent elements are seen as enemies of knowledge and of good and ordered social life, too. Contingency is the enemy of that entirety whose form is governed by lois numériques. It would be very interesting to deepen our understanding, in the light of the Comtean revolution, of the development of quantitative methodology and of research techniques stemming from it. Certainly, expectations that arose with the development of quantitative methods have to be included in this revolutionary horizon and, if such a horizon is not considered, these methods are indistinguishable from simple social statistics. From where is the inexhaustible source of contingency derived? From man and his ontological freedom, i.e. will. There is a kind of contingency that stems from the incredible number of possibilities social systems offer to human action, but there is also a more primal and fundamental contingency, relative to the ontological freedom of man. It is clear that, if we reduce human freedom to a choice between the possibilities that structural and systemic contexts can offer, they can possibly be calculated by counting the available alternatives (starting from a certain number of verifiable possibilities, beyond the rise of complexity in contemporary societies). “Positivistically”, we need neither deny nor affirm human freedom, because to foresee all possible consequences, it is sufficient to know the number of possibilities offered to single individuals by social contexts. But what if freedom did not reduce to a choice between possible alternatives, and created new possibilities, not-foreseeable from a given social context? I do not want to engage with such an age-old problem. What I want to underline is the fact that the methodological primacy in sociology has precise roots: the point of view of the entire social sphere is the one of the positive scientific method. The part has an existence thanks to the whole, and such a whole has the same structure as a system, i.e. the system of science. The price, apparently not too high, of this utopian

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harmony is a “de-humanization” of the social world, now seen under the formal aspect of a relative solidarity between the parts and the whole alone: “Such a preliminary aspect of political science, therefore, evidently involves that, quite differently from current philosophic practices, each social element is no longer considered absolutely and independently, is always conceived as relative and intimately connected to all other elements”,25 and besides “ … since social phenomena are so closely inter-connected, a good study of them must not rationally separate them … ”.26 To affirm that a district falls into a state of disrepair as the kind of man living in it is undermined by the passions of greed, of haughtiness, of ignorance, and so on, has no scientific value from a sociological point of view; but we have a scientific meaning from a positivistic view only if we can say that such a phenomenon happens every time there are significant variations in schooling, in job opportunities and/or in the family group. This structure is the foundation of a new semantics of science. Its power of verification is not affirmed through the empirical dimension – in which a realist ontology could also be involved – but merely through its predictive power. The formal, material, efficient and final structure in relation to social phenomena is not useful for the prediction of change in the social entirety, as formulated through the elaboration of a model. We do not need to theorize about man’s freedom in relation to the social entirety as such. We can argue indefinitely about man’s freedom, but from this reasoning we can predict absolutely … nothing. This new approach – in a Comtean way, this new scientific system – is perfectly calculable and predictive. It makes it possible to eliminate every transcendental trace from science, making reference only to “positive” data, with no reference to anything “beyond” the phenomena – and especially to that “beyond-ness” that is man – which could allow them to escape from their “positivity”.27 Science is not only knowledge of the immanent sphere but “immanentistic” knowledge itself. The world, both natural and social, is completely and unilaterally consigned or confined to itself, or still better, coincides with the schemes of a mathematic mind. Social science is science of a specific kind – dealing with Comtean “Humanity” – which has its own internal differences; such differences are the changeable ways its parts are put into a calculable relation. These parts, i.e. men, are not differences, but are differentiated by the set to which they belong and which contains the generative principles of change. It is no accident that in the Système de politique positive, in which Comte analyses sociology in its relations to biology, it is stated that the notion of “social existence” consists in nothing but movement, destroying every possibility of distinguishing between phenomena and their causes (formal, material, efficient and final) and between the set and its elements: “Towards every living being, we have to introduce, in addition to the connected notions of organization and of life, a concept that has been conceived too vaguely so far,

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whose name is existence. Such a name indicates the distinct and continuous activities of real substances. As regards biology, it consists of the fixed elements in each vital system: otherwise, life consists of the series of modifications its existence undergoes. Such a general distinction becomes increasingly remarkable, in so far as it refers to more complicated and changeable organisms. Its main application belongs to sociology”.28 As a matter of fact, if each being’s life consists in the series of modifications that its existence undergoes, it means that each social phenomenon is first defined from the bundle of relations it shares with the other social phenomena, and second has its own consistency only relative to them and not per se. Existence derives from relations – very differently from Aristotelian (and Thomistic) ontological and metaphysical thought, which explains that being is always in relation, i.e. is relational by virtue of its substantiality.29 From such a Comtean point of view, relations determine phenomena and give them existence, but only and necessarily a social existence. Men (the parts) are homogeneous, and their differences are built by the social set that makes them appear as its differences, and that produces them as social existences in continuous modification. Radically speaking, from such positivistic origins of sociology we can clearly see a primordial ejection of the social actor from social science. Such a radical view, though softened by the moralistic feel present in all Comtean works, cannot be avoided in its consequences. It is no accident that in the fourth volume of his Cours Comte writes: “Since every system is made of homogeneous elements, the scientific spirit does not allow us to consider human society as really made of individuals”.30 From a strictly epistemological and sociological point of view, an individual with social (relational) properties cannot exist, but for the existence of the social correlations that, by defining him, make him socially exist. To ascribe an ontological consistency to social actors beyond the relations defining them can be acceptable at most hermeneutically, but not scientifically. Comte radically ejects ontology from science, elaborating a semantic of science in which the notions of substantiality, individuality, singularity, nature and person become totally irrelevant concepts for a correlative science, seen as the only way that can lead us to the core of the social system’s structure. Epistemologically speaking, Comtean society is already devoid of men. Since its foundations in Comtean thinking, two centuries of sociological development have elapsed and many requirements have changed. Nonetheless, it is not rash to say that the great social theories of the 1960s and 1970s, and the successive crisis of those models, kept on sharing the same foundational principle that access to the social sphere – as a whole made up of parts – does not start from knowledge of such parts – i.e. men – but, on the contrary, comes about through the elaboration of a theoretical model. Such a model (which acts as a whole) orders the parts – men and their attributes, e.g. communication – according to the same logic used to create the model itself (the systematic approach in sociology is dominant). Habermas’s belief that

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today we live in a post-metaphysical “theoretical environment”, in which the notions of the whole, of entirety, of totality are impotent, may be corrected by saying that there is a crisis in deductive thought and in metaphysics, which is all the stronger and more explicit in a sociological context.31 In short, the crisis of deductivism is not the crisis of metaphysics but the conclusion of a certain experience of modernity. In this sense, the return to realism, much more aware and knowing than in the past, turns out to be quite interesting.

3 The ancient way of realism. Rethinking Aristotelian causality in relation to sociology The aim of this chapter is to give some simple reminders for discussion, which will be developed further in the future, using a more complex historical-theoretical background. Going back over Aristotle and his traditional theory of the four causes, to show its appropriateness in social theory and methodology, has as its only purpose in this context to show the worth of a realist perspective for coping with sociological issues, in view of the exhaustion of modern approaches to social theory. Let us notice, first of all, that the notion of causality in the general context of contemporary sociological debate is frequently given a common-sense meaning, without going beyond the simple meaning of efficiency (efficient cause), that constitutes only a partial aspect of it and, in addition, not the most epistemologically essential.32 Let us proceed by degrees. It is not a waste of time to recall certain considerations. The empirical dimension of social research implies two decisive distinctions, dictated by the nature of its object of study. The first one, very simply, is the fact that social science does not deal with natural entities but with processes connected to human social action. It is a science that deals with processes, not with essences. The second distinction is linked to the fact that we cannot speak of “processes”, pulling them up from the (not necessarily material) substrate upon which the process is exerted. As movement is not possible without something being moved, there cannot be social processes without a subject (substance) “in process”, or better still “in social process”. This means and implies that social processes are such because they are related to a subject that is per se social; such a subject changes, undergoes/produces changes/processes regarding sociality. In other words, if social phenomena studied by sociology were not “relationable” to that “measure” which is man, sociology, from a realist point of view, would lose its reality status and “society” would be no more than reification.33 So we must distinguish “social processes” from the “agent of a social process”. First of all, let us consider causes. Causes are “reasons why” that scientists entertain in order to gain a sufficient determination of their subject,34 i.e. processes that men do not simply contemplate but also cause. So, from the point of view of social sciences, among the four Aristotelian causes – material, agential, formal and final – the

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most interesting ones are formal and final. As a matter of fact, these two causes reveal change, and its explanatory principles. First of all, we have to see that form and aim are distinguishable only in intentional processes, while in physical processes the distinction between form and aim is not real. In other words, only within the domain of intentionality does the aim temporarily precede – in the mind of social agent – the form that process will carry out, as well as agents’ causes that will combine to produce such a realization. The social agent gives order to the sequence of actions necessary for the fulfilment of the desired aim. However, what did Aristotle mean by the term “formal cause”? 1 Form is an ordering principle that makes the totality of parts different from the simple sum of the parts.35 The passage from one form to another – i.e. change – means the introduction of a new order between parts composing the whole, an order that will give rise to a new stability between them. Process from one form to another creates the change of the order of single parts, i.e. is a new unity.36 2 Aim is the final state of an intentional or unintentional (physical) process (such a state is irreversible in physical processes, while as regards humans the question is much more complex). Thus, aim is the completion, the limit the process tends to and that coincides with the attainment of a new stability – i.e. form – of elements composing the whole. In physical processes “form” is inseparable from “aim”. As a matter of fact, the initial form irreversibly activates itself – under a multiplicity of efficient causes – for the attainment of a final state – through the unceasing motion of constituent material elements – coincident with the new form, which is the completion of the physical process. Such a new form is both the completion of the motion of the material constituent and this completion that irreversibly orders the physical process towards itself37 (we can observe an auto-reference of physical form, but such auto-reference is typical and exclusive to physical processes). In this sense, for physical process we can from an Aristotelian perspective talk of a “formal-final causality”. The passage of the “formal-final causality” notion from physical processes to social processes implies a paradigmatic re-formulation of the question. First of all, we can talk of “social structure” as a “formal cause”: in other words, it is an “ordering principle” that we can find both culturally and at the level of social roles, as well as in both psychic and organic life.38 The principle giving order to the parts of each structure must always and necessarily consider the nature of the components, in particular of material causality that – socially speaking – take account of both the natural context of a community and the organic constitution of its members. It is not possible to have the same working hours in Siberia and at the equator and, equally, it is not possible to organize a community without considering the biological needs of its members.

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Thus, to be effective, a form capable of creating causal effects must start from and be adequate to the material causality of the ordered elements. As a matter of fact, the material substrate of each society is determined by forces that are not self-adjustable by agents’ will (for instance, they cannot choose “to want or not” to be thirsty, hungry, sleepy). Now let us consider the central question. From what does social life draw its formal cause, i.e. the principle regulating the “elements”, or better still giving the elements a structure (its form and its causal strength)? All along, social “order” has been a constitutive question for sociological thought. What elements are “moulded” by the formal cause and by the ordering principle? The answer is: men. However, under what point of view does man emerge as the specific field of sociological knowledge? In what sense is he an “element” that is the origin of social reality and – at the same time – introduces an order in it? Man is an agent. Not only can he act – and this statement is empirically incontrovertible – but there is a reason why man has such an ability. In the widest sphere that defines his being as an agent, there is a specific dimension, i.e. interaction. Interaction – relation and action with others – is constitutive not only of the conservation of man’s biological life, but also of the understanding he has of himself. Interaction has two preconditions that make it possible (in a realist sense): a natural environment, sustaining a plurality of men, and the psycho-physical structure of man. As a consequence, man, considered in his capacity of acting in interaction with fellow men – as well as the conditions that make such interaction possible – is the constitutive element of social life and is the subject of sociology. The fact that man, every single man, is assumed to be “element” is not without risk from a realist point of view, because, starting from this assumption, it is possible to generate alienating and abstract representations that, making “the elements” conceptually homogeneous, create structures and systems that would confer on “the elements” (i.e. men) their own determinations. The “element-man”, on the contrary, already has his own ontological determinations, long before entering a theoretical model that would endow him with its assumed (scientific) attributes. In other words, man is already an ontologically determined “element”, though not complete. Reality is discrete and not continuous: it means that it is not waiting to be structured by forthcoming act (for example, a social model, a system, or anything else).39 It is important, in order to clarify this aspect, to make a brief detour. Eric Voegelin40 is probably the sociologist and the philosopher who, through his studies of Plato, ensured that sociology would not remain in the dustbin of the 19th century. Voegelin’s contribution is not restricted to this aspect, but underlines, starting from the Hellenic origins of philosophy, the specificity of sociological knowledge. It is obvious that both the biological sphere and the social structures that originate to satisfy the primary needs of men have to be included in sociological reflection, but the self-comprehending symbols through which social agents interpret and understand themselves through their relation to others and the world, are sociological issues strictu sensu. The

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creation of self-comprehending symbols pertain to some sets of experiences that men carry out interactively, trying to decipher the reality in which they are embedded and which they don’t know. This reality is not something confronting men as an object, or only as an object, but is something men question as they participate in it: what is man, what is community/society, what is the cosmos, what is divinity, or God? These are four dimensions that for men are intrinsically participative, in the sense that man has the certainty he is participating in them, though “not knowing” what he is participating in. He knows he is a man, and that he participates in “something” making him a man, but he neither owns nor knows this “something”; he knows he is part of a society and participates in some sort of society but he does not precisely know it; he knows he is part of a world because he participates in some “cosmos”, i.e. an ordered universe, but he does not know what that cosmos is; he participates in something transcending him but does not know what that transcendence is.41 Just because all along man finds himself participating in such realities – i.e. he is part of them and only perceives his being part of them – the relationship to them cannot be only objectifying, or better still, in relation to these four dimensions – and, in particular to the one we are interested in the most, i.e. the social sphere – man cannot act simply as an observer, but more specifically as an agent, because he alone has the only point of view of the part, enters in relation to the whole in which he participates, i.e. the social sphere, not just observing the unobservable, but also acting, i.e. taking part in social processes. If man participates in the social sphere only by acting in it, i.e. as an actor and an agent and not as a spectator, then he will be able to know the social aspect only from a participant’s point of view. This leads to the centrality of an adequate theory of agency in sociological realism.42 Hence, structures are the ordering principle of specific fields of reality, as, on the one hand, they are the products of self-understandings that agents have generated in their common agency – self-understandings of what is implied in being and acting, hinc et nunc, within the society in which they are to participate – and, on the other hand, are structures that order the material substrate of which the social world (organisms and environment) is made. Symbols of self-understandings, agency and material substrate are the elements constituting a structure, and that constitute the formal cause of the social world that all individuals find already constituted when they come into the world. Regardless of the agents that have created them through their common actions, structures keep exerting their causal – and, more specifically, formal – power on all agents that are born and grow up under them. It is necessary to distinguish the element giving origin to the structure from the causal power it keeps exerting regardless of the intentionalities that created it. The source of causal power lies in the nature of interaction that – bringing into play the aims, i.e. the desires, shared by the agents and through which the agents generate a self-understanding – impresses in the material substrate of society a form responding to such realization. After which, the material substrate becomes means of the self-understandings that their creators have impressed

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on themselves. Let us consider, for instance, how the family can become (or cease to be) the structure around which other structures redefine the times and modes for the accomplishments of their tasks. It is, however, necessary to consider that structure exerts such causality only until the ordering principle – i.e. form – is able to carry out in new generations the same selfcomprehension that was the raison d’être of those who created it. This is quite an important point, because it shows us that the formal causality of a structure cannot always produce the same effects. In order always to generate the same effects, we should a-scientifically postulate identical (homogeneous), and – above all – tabulae rasae-like, agents, to whom would be forbidden the possibility of having any other kind of experiences apart from social ones. On the contrary, the ordering force and then the causal power of structures, which leaves aside the singular agent, must enter into relation with selfunderstanding processes, implying the agency of a “generation” of new actors.43 Structures, i.e. forms, exert their causal power only at the same time that the members of a society become agents. At this point we must introduce the other causal element, i.e. final cause. Only agents are capable of finality, while structures are to be considered as results of finalistic processes that have already taken place. At a sociological level, between “form” and “aim” there is intentionality, therefore there is neither a deterministic relation nor continuity. A structure is an order, or better still an organizing principle, which steadies the ordered elements in respect to an intentional aim, desired by its creators. Aim, instead, is the engine of the action implying an anthropological structure, i.e. an ontology of the human sphere, and a capacity to elaborate social aims in relation to various kinds of experiences. If actors coming into the world after the creators of a structure do not enact the same aim of the preceding generation, the causal effect of the structure will change profoundly, to such an extent that form, i.e. structure, is questioned, and a process of change and instability of the existing structure is intensified. The causal power of a structure does not apply itself mechanically, but only when men become agents; and men becomes agents when they aim at something. It is not always easy to let this decisive aspect emerge. If we think of social roles, for instance, we have to acknowledge that individuals interpret their role mainly confining themselves to the related role expectations. In other words, we tend to decode the role and its social rules as a force passively impressing itself on individual agency, i.e. as a seal on wax, even if acknowledging a threshold ruled by a minimum and a maximum where the practice of role is left to individual personality. This view of the role is spoiled by a static representation that, through such objectification, erases the dynamic aspect that the notion of role has always preserved. Actually, a role exerts a causal (formal) power only at the same time that it is enacted by an agent(s) oriented to final ends, i.e. when it is desired as an aim or as a means to reach a goal. The latter is a specific attribute of agents.44 Thus, we can state that:

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1. Structures are endowed with causal (formal) powers, that originate from the aims intentionally shared by their creators; however, the formal causality of structures becomes a property that no longer belongs to their creators, but belongs to the order elaborated by them. As we explained before, formal causality also affects the material substrate of society (or an association of men), i.e. the natural environment and organism. 2. Agents have finalistic causal powers; in other words, aims – owing to their referring to agents’ experience – making the latter understand their “being part” of a society. Aims, because they are desired, do not only give rise to structures, but imply both their part in agential processes and their capacity to move from existing social forms/structures. Aim, once conceived, does not yet have a social valence, but it acquires it once it becomes the engine of an agency; and it can become the engine of an agency capable of exerting causal power only if it can translate itself into an action that has a structural causal influence (i.e. is capable of changing or stabilizing existing structures). While formal and final causes coincide in physical processes (because form contains aim), in social processes the duality between structures and actors halves causality, so that formal causality is attributable to structures and final causality to agents. It is about a duality, and not a dualism. Therefore, it is not possible to consider structures as if they were independent from the agents, though they are autonomous; likewise, agents do create aims simply by conceiving them, just because they are their generative source, but they have to enact them moving from structured contexts that make them socially real (and relevant). In other words, “forms” must become “aims” in order to exert their causal power, but in order to become aims they need human agency, whilst “aims”, intentionally generated, must become “forms” in order to produce causal effects and, in order to become forms, they must compare themselves with existing structure – even in the event that they are conflicting – through which they get into reality processes (and do not decay into mere aspirations). It is very important to understand that the causality of structures is formal (in the same sense as Aristotelian formal causality); in other words, it is an ordering principle of men living in society, but it does not exert a finalistic causal power on them, in the sense of theories of “over-socialization”. Causal finality is in relation to movement or action, and in intentional processes it implies a structure (a being) capable of auto-organizing in view of a specific aim (which is social insofar as through it actors can self-understand themselves as participating in a community/society). For this reason, to be born and to grow up in a certain structure does not mean to deterministically receive aims shaping and influencing our agency, unless the aims selfdetermined by agents coincide with the formal balance reached by a structure. Actually and first of all, aims depend on the kind of self-understanding (as a part of a society) that agents, acting together, intend to realize. Such causal characteristics belong only to agents and to their specific ontological

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structure. The capacity for self-determined aims is related, on one side, to human volitional ability, and, on the other side, to the possibility of undertaking sensible, social, intellectual, spiritual experiences. We could also say that if it were possible to imagine a society without agents, it would be like a form without aims – motionless – while agents, without society, would be like aims without reality (realization) – mere psychism). Therefore, form and aim must not be investigated within an “antecedent-consequent” framework, but just the opposite way. When we understand the form that keeps a set of men joined together, we still will not be able to understand the consequences it produces on them until we also understand the kind of self-understanding they have about their agency, i.e. about their taking part in society or in a specific social group. The distinction between social forms and action aims must be maintained because – being different causes – they contribute to the determination of the empirically obtainable social facts in different ways. We can consider, for instance, the Marxian view about the essence of modern societies as a form defined by a capitalist-bourgeois economic organization. I want to make it clear first that giving examples is often risky; moreover, this specific example refers to a macro-sociological view (i.e. the Marxian view). However, I think that, in this case, the flame is worth the candle. The formal cause, i.e. the ordering principle, in the Marxian view would be a division of labour on the basis of property ownership or means of production. Such an organizational form gives the material substrate a structure in order to make law protect property and punish any violation of it, making possible the construction of the productive sphere upon property relations. The social effect of such an economical order would be its division into two antagonistic classes. Such a structure, in the Marxian view, cannot but generate adversarial effects. We cannot think that – as in Marxian structuralism – such an organization impresses itself on the plurality of individuals in the same way every time, unless we deductively and a-critically assume individuals to be homogeneous elements. The capitalist and bourgeois organization of work will have some effects on agents whose self-understanding is on merely an immanent historical and social level, and will necessary have some different effects on agents understanding themselves on a meta-historical and on a meta-social level (as in the Jewish and Christian traditions), even if the structure (form) is the same. Such different self-comprehensions generate very different finalistic processes and such final causality, combined with the formal causality of an organization of work based upon the ownership of productive means, will generate differing social effects that will not be attributable either to the structure or to agents’ aims, but to the way formal and final causalities will mutually define themselves. In fact, Weber’s masterpiece, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, despite all its limitations as pointed out by later studies and research, is such because methodologically (and also in unawareness) it unites the mutual determination of form (i.e. capitalist organization of work) and finality (protestant self-understanding

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and the aims generated by it). If nowadays we can incontrovertibly ascertain that the capitalist organization of work – as Weber’s above writing showed, owing to its historical and sociological sensibility – compared with the Western world, yields completely different outcomes in Chinese society, this is due to the distinction between form and aim and to their mutual description. I want to underline that in social processes a formal cause is a principle that gives order to a non-identical material substrate (for instance, we cannot disregard obvious climatic differences), and will operate on agents that cannot be assumed to be homogeneous. If the same “form”, therefore, will give different results, then the “ordering process” will differ according to each specific “kind of man” and to his type of experiences (which will never be exclusively social). Capitalist-bourgeois economic organization will exert a very real causal power on social reality, but its effects will not be foreseeable if we do not refer to agents’ symbolic self-understanding – relative to their own shared experience – which will be the main source of finalistic processes. Therefore, efficient causality in social processes will have to be considered in a very complex way. In fact, neither agents nor structures will be able to exert their causal power without each other. As a matter of fact, agency must insert itself into a context made of age-old structures, and it must impress new meanings on them, or confirm the current ones. Only after this preliminary analysis will the ontological structure of man, in its agencial dimension, exert an effective power on structure, whilst, on the other side, structures will emerge only when meeting an agency oriented to an aim (manifesting themselves, as Archer writes, as obstacles or facilitations precisely in relation to some specific aims), thus acquiring their own efficient power on agents. In short, we want to show that it will not be possible to know and understand causal effects in a structure simply by studying its organization, because it will create different outcomes depending on different self-understandings. The description of the structure itself will never reveal its causal effects if agents’ causal and finalistic power is not understood. Thus, owing to a sort of analogy, we are very close to what Porpora claims is a “separation” between causality and law. The only constant, as a matter of fact, is the redefinition of formal causes as final causes, but such constancy which will always apply to new generations, will give rise to different effects that will be identified only inductively: “Smith’s description of the market is simultaneously a theory but not a theory in the positivist sense. The theoretical description of the market mechanism is an elaboration, not a list of axiomatic propositions. Already evident, therefore, is how separate for CR causality is from anything nomothetic and how recovered by CR is the value of theoretical description”.45 The theoretical description Porpora speaks about is an inductive act of knowledge that starts from the “relation between causal structures and properties”. Porpora wants to underline that data-gathering, from a realist perspective, does not aim at stating or discovering “laws” anymore, but at tracing the origin of the different causal components that have combined to bring about the determination of a specific social

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phenomenon: “Because for CR causal explanation involves mechanisms rather than laws, for CR, evidence and explanation become distinct. For CR, an event-regularity, even in the rigorous form of a regression equation, cannot ever serve as an explanation. It is at most one, fallible piece of evidence for an explanation. Demoting regression and other statistical techniques from explanation to evidence, CR has no reason to reject them as such. Of course, when critical realists use statistical techniques, they are not searching for invariant relationships independent of social context. Instead, the statistics are employed to indicate the operation of a mechanism in a particular socio-historical situation”.46

Notes [Translator’s Note: For full coherence with the author’s arguments, quotations have been translated into English by me, using the Italian or French original editions used by Emmanuele Morandi. In some cases, indicated in the text, the English version is quoted directly.] 1 See an important essay by G. Basti, Filosofia della Natura e della Scienza, vol. 1. Roma: Lateran University Press, 2002. 2 Porpora in this volume, Chapter 7. 3 See A. Maier, Scienza e filosofia nel Medioevo, Milano: Jaca Book, 1984. 4 As far as I know the only contemporary sociologist recalling this epistemological position in his own research is Pierpaolo Donati, Introduzione alla sociologia relazionale, Milano: Angeli, 2002, pp. 15ff. It is no surprise that relational sociology does not present itself as a new theory (the word theory in its “modern” connotation coincides with deductivism), but as an (inductive) reflection that, starting from experiencing the social sphere, elaborates its contents both in its structural elements (“essential” elements) and in those connected to social change. An author who would deserve much more attention – his biggest merit being the re-introduction of causality as the core-notion of a methodology adequate to the object-society – is E.M. MacIver, Social Causation, Boston, MA: Ginn & Co., 1942. 5 There is a very wide literature about such epistemological and historical problems. For a general view and bibliography, see J.J. Sanguineti, Scienza aristotelica e scienza moderna, Roma: Armando Editore, 1992 (and G. Basti, op. cit.); see also F. Laudisa, Causalità. Storia di un modello di conoscenza, Roma: Carocci, 1999. 6 We are convinced that an adequate historical and theoretical reconstruction of a realist epistemological context is one of the fundamental requirements in order to fully understand Donati’s and Archer’s sociological reflections. The difference between a structure/order that man knows but does not create and a structure/ order that man brings into reality (through agency and not through knowledge) is an important and distinguishing theoretical crucial point, which would imply a complete re-definition of the key concepts of contemporary sociological debate. Studying Parsons’s and Luhmann’s theories concerning the loss of such a distinction may provide important information about their oneiric dimension. The evident common traits shared by relational sociology and critical realism are differentiated according to their different targets: while relational sociology turns to continental social theories (such as macro-theories from Parsons to Luhmann), critical realism turns to empiricist tradition and its contemporary developments. Therefore, we

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meet two different languages and sets of problems, which share a similar theoretical aspiration. To this end, this thought by MacIver is very interesting (he is referring to Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action): “For instance, why should correlation be more intelligible than causation, when correlation does not maintain anything but the possibility of an indefinite connection, whereas causation is itself a sort of connection whose idea is extremely congenial to our experience? If we make logical relations the substance of things, we turn the world into a reign of insubstantial phantoms. Firstly, logical relations are everlasting relations. Nothing happens to them or inside them. Secondly, they are, in relation to the world of experience, hypothetical relations. They take the form: given A, then B. If the A-proposition is true, then also the B-proposition is true. They are not relations between facts, but relations between assessments.” (E.M. MacIver, Social Causation, Boston: Ginn & Co., 1942, p. 108). Porpora in this volume, Chapter 7. Ibid. A. Comte, “Cours de philosophie positive”, in Oeuvres d’Auguste Comte, vol. IV, lection XLVI, Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1968–71, p. 147. Comte’s passages, as regards writings after 1830, will be quoted and translated from: A. Comte, Oeuvres d’Auguste Comte, 12 vols., Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1968–71; for early writings we will refer to: Ecrits de jeunesse 1816–1828. Suivis du mémoire sur la cosmogonie de Laplace, P. E. De Berrêdo Carneiro and P. Arnaud (eds), Paris-La Haye: Mouton, 1970. A. Comte, “Cours”, op. cit., p. 6. For a general and bibliographic overview, see: E. Morandi, “La disputa sul metodo (Methodenstreit) della seconda metà del novecento: la ‘teoria critica’ della Scuola di Francoforte e il ‘Falsificazionismo’ di K. Popper”, in E. Monti (ed.), Sentieri del conoscere. Dibattiti metodologici in Sociologia, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1997, pp. 194–262; and “Il contributo di Popper alla conoscenza sociologica”, in S. Porcu (ed.), Ritratti d’autore, Milano: Angeli, 2000, pp. 215–83. A. Comte, Système de politique positive, 1. 1, in Oeuvres d’Auguste Comte, vol. VII, op. cit., p. 518. Porpora in this volume, Chapter 7. “The fundamental trait of positive philosophy is considering all phenomena subject to invariable natural laws. Their precise discovery and their reduction to the smallest number possible are the aims of our efforts, considering as absolutely senseless and inaccessible the quest for causes, both prime and final” (“Cours”, in Oeuvres d’Auguste Comte, vol. I, lection I, op. cit., p. 11); “In the Positive stage, human spirit, understanding the impossibility of obtaining absolute notions, waives the quest for the origin and the destiny of the Universe and for intimate causes of phenomena, in order to dedicate itself to the discovery [ … ] of their effective laws” (ibid., p.4). In his early Plan des travaux scientifiques, Comte deals with the application of mathematical analyses to social phenomena: “Within the range of phenomena that involve such application, it may never take place immediately. It always entails, in the corresponding science, a preliminary level of knowledge and improvement, whose natural result is the cognition of precise laws, revealed by the observation of the quantity of phenomena. As far as such laws are discovered, though imperfect, mathematical analysis becomes possible” (Ecrit de jeunesse 1816–1828, op. cit., p.308). Such passages describe the transition between data-gathering – i.e. questionnaires and interviews – and their statistical elaboration. Data-gathering is already conceived for a subsequent evaluation of the relations between two or more variables. Each variable is built upon the frequency distribution of the observed data, i.e. upon how many times the single categories of each variable recur. It is

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important to note that Comte is saying that observation is connected to the quantity of phenomena: it means that through observation we can know which categories of a variable are relevant, i.e. if their frequency is relevant. This is due to the fact that a category of a variable exists only if a certain frequency corresponds to it; otherwise, such a category does not exist according to the sample. The frequency of a category is a sort of law giving existence to the category itself – and such frequency is obtained from observation: only afterwards can we apply statisticalmathematical criteria to the variable. In other words, it is about data-gathering aimed at a statistical-mathematical application. In another passage, praising Condorcet, Comte says that positivism relieved sociology of the old and metaphysical habit of taking an interest in political and sociological studies with no specific preparation – which in other sciences never happened. Such “positivization” in social science is attributable to mathematical thought and to mathematical formation of new social scientists: “Such personal nearness confirms this philosophical development, on both sides, with an equal self-abnegation, a continuous tendency to transpose a scientific spirit in the social domain, on the basis of a good mathematical preparation” (A. Comte, Système de politique positive, 1. 3, in Oeuvres d’Auguste Comte, vol. IX, op. cit., p. XV). 17 It is about the Comtian motto Science, d’ou prévision; prévision, d’ou action. It is important to observe that in medieval theology pre-science is an attribute of God, who knows past, present and future events. The secularizing roots of positivism and, especially, the gnostic roots of its semantic epistemology, are undeniable. Some writings about this problem, revealing one of the most important axis of sociology in its modern aspects: H.-C. Puech, Sulle tracce della gnosi, Milano: Adelphi, 1985; A. Magris, La logica del pensiero gnostico, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1997; M. Eliade, Mito e realtà, Torino: Borla, 1985; Il mito dell’eterno ritorno, Torino: Borla, 1968; E. Voegelin, La nuova scienza politica (original title: The New Science of Politics: An Introduction), Torino: Borla, 1968 (pp. 175–271); Trascendenza e gnosticismo in Eric Voegelin, Roma: Astra, 1975; Caratteri gnostici della moderna politica economica e sociale. Quattro saggi di E. Voegelin, Roma: Astra, 1980; E. Samek Lodovici, Metamorfosi della gnosi. Quadri della dissoluzione contemporanea, Milano: Ares, 1979; “Dominio dell’istante, dominio della morte. Alla ricerca di uno schema gnostico”, Con-tratto: rivista di filosofia tomista e contemporanea, 1, 1992: 89–98; M. Introvigne, Il ritorno dello gnosticismo, Milano: Sugarco, 1993; G. Filoramo, L’attesa della fine. Storia della gnosi, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1987; Il risveglio della gnosi ovvero diventare dio, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1990; I nuovi movimenti religiosi. Metamorfosi del sacro, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1986. A full-blown gnostic approach is visible in C. Castoriadis, L’istituzione immaginaria della società, Torino: Bollati-Boringhieri, 1995; and C. Formenti, Immagini del vuoto. Conoscenza e valori nella gnosi e nelle scienze della complessità, Napoli: Liguori Editrice, 1989; Prometeo e Ermes, Napoli: Liguori Editrice, 1986. See also G. Garelli, Forza della religione e debolezza della fede, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996. 18 This is, essentially, the idealistic roots of positivism: the fact of being a philosophy of history, self-fulfilling through sciences. All in all, the idea of human progress (marche de la civilisation) itself, implies a similarity with Hegelianism, as confirmed by Comte’s praise of Hegel’s thought. The fact that both idealism and social positivism share the idea that history contains a specific immanent eschaton is much more relevant than their difference in identifying the aim of history, respectively, with the self-consciousness of the absolute spirit (Hegel) and the total transparency of the world to the intellect (positivism); see O. Negt, Hegel e Comte (original title: Strukturbeziehungen zwischen den Gesellschaftslehren Comtes und Hegels), Bologna: Il Mulino, 1975. A very important essay, though not directly tackling the Comte-Hegel connections, very close to our perspective is: G. Padovani, “Il senso

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della sociologia per A. Comte”, in Problemi della ricerca sociale, Urbino: Quattroventi, 2001, pp. 35–64. Padovani writes about Comte: “Having renounced analyzing the causes of phenomena, positive explanation refers to the study of the circumstances of production of phenomena, putting them in relation. So that positive philosophy arrives at a knowledge about phenomena that is always relative to, on the one hand, the organic structure of human nature itself and, on the other hand, the specific circumstances of their rising. It is not possible to know phenomena separated from these relations; also, it is not possible to know human nature ‘contemplating it per se’”, G. Padovani, Il senso della sociologia per A. Comte, op. cit., p. 64. We avoid using the notion of system as conceived in Luhmann’s systems theory: the concept of “operative closedness” referring to a system does not coincide with the concept of “closed system”, as used by myself and Douglas Porpora. Porpora in this volume, Chapter 7. “Without a doubt, when considering the whole of the human actions, the study of nature must be conceived as destined to provide the purely rational base for the action of man on nature, since the knowledge of phenomenal laws, whose result is to make us able to foresee events, can lead us to modify them to our own advantage” (“Cours”, in Oeuvres d’Auguste Comte, vol. I, lection II, op. cit., p. 51). In this sense, there is a very strong meeting of minds with Marx and his immanentist radicalization of praxis, seen as a pure transforming praxis of the social sphere. See E. Morandi, “L’irreparabile come condizione: metodologia e prassi in K. Marx”, in G. Guarnieri and E. Morandi (eds), La metodologia nei classici della sociologia, Milano: Angeli, 1996, pp. 19–77. “Cours”, in Oeuvres d’Auguste Comte, vol. VI, lection LVIIII, op. cit., p. 647. Ibid., vol. IV, lection XLVII, op. cit., p. 259. Ibid., p. 281. See H. Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998 (in particular, the chapter: “The Vita Activa and the Modern Age”). A. Comte, Système de politique positive, 1. 2, Oeuvres d’Auguste Comte, vol. VIII, op. cit., p. 339. In order to fully understand relational sociology as carried on in Italy by Pierpaolo Donati, such different views about relations cannot be ignored. Donati’s relational sociology is aimed at a re-formulation of the social relation in its ontological and metaphysical aspects. Any social relation implies the substantiality of agents creating and perpetuating it. By “dedicating themselves” to their relations social actors put in their ontological contribution; on the other hand, relations “return the favour” by realizing the personal capabilities of the actors involved: “Social relations can exist in actu only in, with and through agents enacting them. Relations are not put into effect by systems, but are effected by agents, persons or social groups [ … ] Man cannot exist without relations to others. Such relations are ‘constitutive’ of his being-a-person, as air and food are. Suspend the relation-withthe-other and you will suspend the relation-with-the-self.” (P. Donati, Teoria relazionale della società, Milano: Angeli, 1994, pp. 25, 69). It is correct and legitimate to argue that “relation” is the central notion in sociological thought and it is perhaps impossible to find an author not dealing with it, but here it is possible to observe a strong difference between a modern relational sociology (in the strong meaning of modernity), and a metaphysical relational sociology, which is not modern (or is modern only from a chronological point of view) and is the one carried out by Donati. The relation in modern relational sociology is intrinsically formalistic, with no substantiality, as in Comte, while in Donati’s view it is an ontological notion and recalls the Aristotelian categories that assume relation (pros ti) as a mode of being of the substance. The only common characteristic shared by these two factions in sociological tradition is the name, because the difference is so

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strong that the one is unable to recognize and admit the other: probably, we find ourselves facing two different and alternative sociologies. See also P. Donati, “Sulla distinzione Umano/Non Umano. Per una sociologia del duemila”, Il Mondo 3, 1, 1994: 158–77. About these fundamental problems, see also G. Padovani, “Per una teoria relazionale della società”, in Problemi, op. cit., pp.129–45. A. Comte, “Cours”, in Oeuvres d’Auguste Comte, vol. IV, lection L, op. cit., p. 345. See J. Habermas, The philosophical discourse of modernity, MIT Press, 1987. Ascribing an effect to something or somebody is not yet having understood the “kind” of relation between them. As a matter of fact, an agent has a structure/ form, and often a material structure; in some agents there is also an intentional structure, and all these dimensions are included in the efficient relation, so that in the effect a type of agential immanence in different ways and levels is given. Understanding the kind of immanence between the agent and the effect provides us with further knowledge, not detectable by a phenomenal observation of effect. To say that A and B are C’s parents would not represent an important cognitive increase, if it were not that offspring receives – through an efficient relation – a level of parental immanence that (in some species, like man and without determinism) inscribes itself on all the other causal dimensions. In empirical research, moreover, such a requirement is always implicitly assumed when trying to reconstruct so-called socio-demographic data. The hypostatization of society is notoriously one of the criticisms of Durkheim. Besides, the whole Durkheimean approach inevitably shifts from a positivistic perspective to a consequent sociological idealism (i.e. collective representations), just because parting with the notion of a “bearer” of a social ontology – i.e. men – it necessarily has to ascribe such ontology to an idea, i.e. society. See T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, Illinois: The Free Press, 1949. Also the notion of “structuration” in Giddens’s view, though considering the proper distinctions, is not far from such an “idealistic trap” (because of its temporalization without substantiality, see A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). See also: M. Rosati and A. Santambrogio (eds), Durkheim: contributi per una rilettura critica, Roma: Meltemi, 2005. Aristotle, Metaphysics, A 3 983 a 25: “Causes have four different meanings. In one of these we mean the substance, i.e. the essence (for the ‘why’ is reducible finally to the definition, and the ultimate ‘why’ is a cause and principle); in another the matter or substratum, in a third the source of the change, and in a fourth the cause opposed to this, the purpose and the good (for this is the end of all generation and change). We have studied these causes sufficiently in our work on nature … ”. The bibliography on this problem is immense. For a partial overview, see G. Basti and A. Perrone, op. cit. (especially for metaphysical realism’s impact on contemporary mathematics and physics); a complete bibliography is in R. Radice and R. Bombacigno (eds), Aristoteles, 2 voll, Milano: Biblia, 2005. See: G. Basti and A. Perrone, Le radici forti del pensiero debole: dalla metafisica, alla matematica, al calcolo, op. cit., p. 41: “ … the pronunciation of a word, for instance ‘cat’, is more than the simple sum of pronouncing its single letters ‘c-a-t’. To say that a body made of elements consists of the simple ‘sum’ of its components would mean that individual components (i.e. atoms) remain independent individuals ( = atomism) even after becoming material components of a more ‘complex’ and ‘ontologically perfect’ being (a molecule, for instance)”. For an introduction see: G. Reale, Il concetto di filosofia prima, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1984. Very important methodological implications for social sciences can be found in T. Irwin, Aristotle’s First Principles, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. As regards Italian sociology, the delay with regard to the recovery of Aristotelian realism (such a recovery is taking place inside logics, linguistics, physics and mathematics; see, for instance: R. Penrose, La strada che porta alla realtà. Le leggi fondamentali

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dell’universo, Milano: Bur) was probably caused by its complex cultural course and by the ideological bad habits that characterized its first academic institutional entourage. The only sociologist theorist in the Italian context showing a deep awareness of realist implication in Aristotelism is P. Donati, Teoria relazionale, op. cit. Aristotle, Metafisica, Z 17, 1041 a 5 ff: “The object of the inquiry is most easily overlooked where one term is not expressly predicated of another [ … ] because we do not distinguish and do not say definitely that certain elements make up a certain whole [ … ] Evidently, then, in the case of simple terms no inquiry nor teaching is possible; our attitude towards such things is other than that of inquiry. Since that which is compounded out of something so that the whole is one, not like a heap but like a syllable – now the syllable is not its elements, ba is not the same as b and a, nor is flesh fire and earth (for when these are separated the wholes, i.e. the flesh and the syllable, no longer exist, but the elements of the syllable exist, and so do fire and earth); the syllable, then, is something – not only its elements [ … ] but also something else, and the flesh is not only fire and earth or the hot and the cold, but also something else [ … ] But it would seem that this ‘other’ is something, and not an element, and that it is the cause which makes this thing flesh and that a syllable. And similarly in all other cases. And this is the substance of each thing (for this is the primary cause of its being) … ”. See G. Basti and A. Perrone, Le radici forti del pensiero debole, op. cit., p.43ff. One of the main meanings of the Greek work aitia is “structure”. It would be very important to tackle the genesis of Parsons’s and Luhmann’s social theories. The assumption of society within a systemic model implies a continuous representation of reality and society, which becomes intelligible owing to distinctions “coming from” the theory. See: G. Zanetti, La trascendenza e l’ordine, Saggio su Eric Voegelin, Bologna: Clueb, 1989 (see also G. Lami, Introduzione a Eric Voegelin, Milano: Giuffrè, 1993); an excellent bibliography about Voegelin, updated to 2000, is G.L. Price, Eric Voegelin. International bibliography 1921–2000, München: Fink Verlag, 2000; I tried to promote this fundamental author within social theory in my work La società accaduta. Tracce di una nuova scienza sociale in Eric Voegelin, Milano: Angeli, 2000. Voegelin taught political theory and sociology at the University of Vienna after his habilitation there in 1928. He was forced to flee from Austria following the Anschluss in 1938; he arrived in the USA and taught at a series of universities before joining Louisiana State University’s Department of Government in 1942. His magnum opus is the multi-volume (English-language) Order and History, which began publication in 1956. In 1964 he accepted an offer by Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität to fill Max Weber’s former chair in political science, which had been empty since Weber’s death in 1920. Voegelin returned to America in 1969 to join Stanford University (he had taken American citizenship in 1944). He died in 1985. I quote this passage from Voegelin that, in my opinion, constitutes a full-blown manifesto for a re-foundation of social science upon Aristotelian and Platonic grounds: “God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being. The community with its quaternarian structure is, and is not, a datum of human experience. It is a datum of experience in so far as it is known to man by virtue of his participation in the mystery of its being. It is not a datum of experience in so far as it is not given in the manner of an object of the external world but is knowable only from the perspective of participation in it. The perspective of participation must be understood in the fullness of its disturbing quality. It does not mean that man, more or less comfortably located in the landscape of being, can look around and take stock of what he sees as far as he can see it. Such a metaphor, or comparable variations on the theme of the limitations of human knowledge, would destroy the paradoxical character of the situation. It would

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suggest a self-contained spectator, in possession of and with knowledge of his faculties, at the centre of a horizon of being, even though the horizon were restricted. But man is not a self-contained spectator. He is an actor, playing a part in the drama of being and, through the brute fact of his existence, committed to play it without knowing what it is.” (E. Voegelin, Order and History: Volume 1, op. cit., p. 1). In fact, it is about Margaret Archer’s effort to focus on the problem of sociological realism through the problem of agency. See, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (Italian translation, La conversazione interiore, Trento: Erikson, 2006); Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 (Italian translation, Esseri umani. Il problema dell’agire, Genova-Milano: Marietti 1820, 2007: in this Italian version a serious introduction to Archer’s thought by Riccardo Prandini is included, with a rich bibliography: pp. XVII–LXXVII). About the notion of generation, see P. Donati and I. Colozzi (eds), Giovani e generazioni. Quando si cresce in una società eticamente neutra, Bologna: il Mulino, 1997. Archer focuses on such aspect, when stating that constraints and enablements are structural properties only at the time that they come into relation with an agent: “In other words, it is essential to distinguish between the existence of structural properties and the exercise of their causal powers [ … ] As these examples show, it is not mere co-existence of structural and cultural properties with any kind of project held by agents that realises the powers of constraints and enablements. Instead, the projects have to be of such a nature that they activate particular causal powers [ … ] The answer to the question, “what is required for structural and cultural factors to exercise their powers of constraint and enablement?” can be summarized as follows. Firstly, such powers are dependent upon the existence of human projects [ … ] Secondly, [ … ] there has to be a relationship of congruence or incongruence respectively with particular agential projects. Thirdly, agents have to respond to these influences” (M. Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, op. cit., pp. 61–62). Porpora in this volume, Chapter 7. Ibid.

Index

absolutes: monarchy 12; naturalism 48; regularity 23; in spirit, selfconsciousness of 189n18; values 27 Ackroyd, S. and Fleetwood, S. 120n55 action: activity dependence 100–101; analytical sociology and 111–12; constraints to 121n61; human actions and critical realism 13–14, 174; narrative of courses of, explanatory power and 104; rational expectations and 106; see also rational action actual and empirical, reality and 39–41 actual and real powers, distinction between 40 agency: agential cause 179–80; conditions for morphostasis of social agency 85; continuity of 100; emergent entity of 62; explanatory status of 51–52; human agency and social reality 181; intentionality of 49– 50; morphogenesis and 80–91; relations and 102; social emergence from 101–2; in sociological realism, centrality of theory of 182, 193n42; see also social agency agents: emergent properties of powers of 94n51; formation of agents’ “projects” 94n35; immanence in 191n32; irreducible properties and powers of 94n48; reflexivity of agents and systems 144n15; see also social agents AGIL analytical tool 128, 129–30, 131– 32, 133, 135 alethic truths 37, 43, 46 Alexander, J.C. 96, 116n1, 122n80, 132 Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. 19n4 Althusser, Louis 9, 10 Amit, Ron 166

analytical dualism 100–101; systems theory and 102 analytical realism 128; critical realism and 105; explanatory power 104–5 analytical sociology 119n38 Anderson, Perry 13 Anscombe, G.E.M. 159 ANT (actor network theory) 133 antecedents, consequents and 173–74 anthropology 30–36; anthropological foundation of sociological realism 54n7; being, realism and 33; critical realism and 132; deductivism 32; empirical realism, scepticism and 33–34; epistemic fallacy 32–33, 35; experience 34; experiments 30–31, 35; generative mechanisms 35; monism 32; observation 34, 35; ontology 33; perception 34; rationalistic fallacies 33–34; reality of man’s place in the universe 34–36; science, paradox of 34–35; science, positivistic perspective on 32, 33–34; science, realist theory of 32–33, 35–36; science, social construction of 31–32; sensibility 34; super-idealism 33–34; transitive and intransitive subjects, distinction between 30–32 anti-realisms 54n6 anti-reductionism 17–18, 42 appresentation 145n17 Archer, Margaret S. viii, 3, 10, 15–16, 18n1, 56n22, 59–95, 96, 97, 99–100, 100, 102, 103, 105, 110, 114, 117n12, 121n64, 121n69, 125, 127, 129, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140–41, 143n6, 143n8, 144n13, 145n18, 161, 172, 187n6, 193n42, 193n44

Index Archer, M.S., Collier, A. and Porpora, D.V. 143n5 archetypes 25, 155 Archimedes 98 Arendt, Hannah 190n27 Aristotle 142, 170–71, 179–87, 191n34, 192n36; agential cause 179–80; Aristotelian-Thomistic realism 170– 71; causality in thought of 179–80; final cause 179–80; final state, aim of 180; First Principles, methodological implications in 191–92n35; form as ordering principle 180, 182–83, 184– 85; formal-final causality 179–80, 183–84; material cause 179–80; realism, ancient way of 179–87; social life, formal cause in 180, 181, 182, 185, 186; social order 180, 181, 182– 83, 184–85; sociology, causality in relation to 179–87 astronomy 3–4, 19n3, 36 atomists and holists, division between 9– 10, 13 auto-referentiality 36 autonomous causal influence 103–4 Barbera, Filippo 119n38, 120n54 Basti, G. and Perrone, A. 191–92n35, 192n37 Basti, Gianfranco 187n1 Bedau, Mark A. 119n44 being: knowledge about 33, 34; realism and 33 Bentham, Jeremy 12 Berlusconi, Silvio 151 Bertaux, Daniel 161 Between Generations: Family Models, Myths and Memories (Bartaux, D. and Thompson, P.) 161 Beyond Method (Morgan, G., Ed.) 54n6, 55–56n18 Bhaskar, Roy 3, 5–6, 11, 16, 18n1, 30– 53, 59, 72, 99, 127, 143n12, 154–55, 156; anti-reductionism, principles of 42–43; DREI(C) model 45–46; literature about works of 54n4, 54n5; stratified structure for reality 41 biological evolution 163 biologism 17 The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (Turner, B., Ed.) 54n5, 55– 56n18 Blair, Tony 11 Blalock, Herbert 154

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Blum, A. and McHugh, P. 160 Bortolini, Matteo 117n12 Boudon, Raymond 137 Bourdieu, Pierre 56n22, 68, 70, 76, 116n1 Brante, Thomas 119–20n48 Brentano, Franz 159 Buckley, Walter 60, 102 Bunge, Mario 55–56n18, 154 Campbell, Colin 161 capitalism 11, 75, 122n79; capitalistbourgeois economics 185, 186; capitalist society 12, 14; development of 122n79; market relations and capitalist systems 164 Carter, B. and New, C. 120n55 Castoriadis, Cornelius 189n17 causality: agential cause 179–80; in Aristotelian thought 179–80; autonomous causal influence 103–4; causal consensus 71; causal logic 130; causal structures and properties, relationship between 162–63, 164–65; causation as generative process 104–5; cause, concept of 3–4; cause, notion of 174; cause-effect relations 43–44; critical realism and 186–87; emergence of causal powers 63; empirical ontology, causal laws in 37– 38; events and causal mechanisms 21– 22; explanation and cause, notion of 54n11; Humean and realist models of 39; investigation in social sciences of 63, 159–60, 173, 179–80; law and, separation between 186–87; physical and universal 5–6; social life, formal cause in 180, 181, 182, 185, 186; in social processes, efficiency of 186; sociological realism and 170, 179–81, 183–86; in sociology and critical realism 137; tendencies, causal laws as 41–42 central conflation, theoretical stance of 56, 70, 93n27 central tendencies of actions and interactions 106, 120n53 centralization 60–61 choice, notion of 27–28 classical empiricism 3–4 Clayton, P. and Davies, P. 118n30 closed systems: open systems and 4–5, 16, 38–39, 156; predictions in 7–8 closedness 36

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Index

cognitive-explanatory power 97, 98, 102–9 Cohen, Ira 161 collective reflexivity 144n13 Collier, Andrew viii, 3–20, 21, 25, 26, 28, 119–20n48, 127 Comte, Auguste 152, 171–79, 189n18, 190n19; antecedents, consequents and 173–74; contingency, entirety and 176; deductivism 172–73, 179, 187n4; ethical sciences 171–72; factuality of 176; humanity of 177–78; logical deduction 173; medieval epistemology 171–72; observation, methodology of 172–73; perfect presence 174; poietic sciences 171–72; positivism of 170, 172, 173, 188–89n16; positivistic science 174, 175, 176–77; prediction, control and 152; prediction, science and 171, 174–75, 176–77; reason and observation, combined methodology of 173; relations, existence and 178; science, immanentistic knowledge in 177; science, perspective on 173–74; semantics of science 177; social actors, ejection from social science 178; social entirety 175–76; social existence, function and 175–76; social existence, notion of 177–78; social positivism 170–71; social positivism, probability and 173; social science, relations and correlations in 173; social sciences, perspective on 177–78; social world, harmony in 176–77; sociological development in thinking of 171–73, 178–79; sociological knowledge, praxis and 175; sociology, modern way to 171–79; sociology, positivistic origins of 177–78; structuralist-functionalist theory 172; systemic theory 172; systems, open and closed 174; theoretical-practical sociology 171–72 conditions: closed conditions, causal laws and 46–47, 55n14; experimental conditions and scientific relevance 36– 38; inherited 15–16; modification of 34; for morphostasis of social agency 85; natural 31; preconditions for interactions 181; of production 49; truth-conditions 35; unacknowledged 13 consciousness 13, 44, 52, 82, 94–95n54, 110, 118n31; self-consciousness 83, 97, 189n18

consequences: of realism 25–27; unintended or unwanted 13–14, 27 constructivism: critical realism and 127; and deconstructivism, critical realism and 136; realist theory and constructivist sociology 127 contingency: entirety and 176; social reality, contingent nature of 130 Copernicus 137 Corbetta, Piergiorgio 153–54, 156, 158 cosmos 182 Coulter, Jeff 160 Cours de philosophie positive (in Oeuvres d’Auguste Comte) 172–73, 178, 188n10, 188n15, 190n22 covering law model: critical realism alternative to 162–68; hegemony of 153–58, 170; non-scientific reasons for 171–79; understanding vs explaining 158–62 creative reflexivity 142 Crespi, Franco 143n4, 143n5 critical experience 140–42 critical naturalism 53n1; social structures and 48; TMSA (Transformational Model of Social Activity) and 47–53 critical realism 22, 61, 99, 116n5, 119n36, 172; advantages of 135–37; analytical and, difference between 106; anthropology and 132; antireductive nature of 17–18; biological evolution 163; causal structures and properties, relationship between 162– 63, 164–65; causality in sociology and 137, 186–87; constructivisn (and deconstructivism) and 127, 136; covering law model, alternative to 162–68; culture, symbolization and 139–40; dialectical critical realism 53– 54n3; disciplinary imperialism, rejection of 17–18; emergentist ontology of 132–34; epistemology of natural and human sciences, coincidence in 168; ethnography and 165; European society and 114–15; experimental sciences and 3; explanation and description in 165; explanatory sociological theory of 129–35; feminist critical realists 18; generative mechanisms 8–9, 163; history and 166; human actions and 13–14; human nature and 136–38; human rationality as generative

Index system 163–64; human reflexivity and 135, 137–38; Hume’s Law 8; individuals, interactions and relationality of 138–39; individuals, society and 10–11; interactions, relations and 138–39; internal reflexivity of humans and 137–38; market relations and capitalist systems 164; moral muting 167; nature, open system of 4; ontology of 11–12, 15, 18; ordered relations 136– 37; philosophy of social sciences and 3; positivism and 164–65, 166–67; problematic issues 137–40; realist traditions 170–71; reforms of social structures, perspective on 14–15; relational sociological perspective on 124–25, 125–29, 132–34, 187n6; representative symbolism and 139; social reality and 123–25; social reflexivity, social systems and 137–38; social relationality, reality of 137; in social sciences 114–15, 125–29; sociological methodology and 167–68; sociological realism and 127, 140–42; statistics and 166–67; stratification of nature 5, 6–7; symbolic identity and 139–40; transitive and intransitive objects 6; trust and 139; values, individual choice and adherence to 137–38; values, societal values, question of 12; Wertrationalität and 140 culture: conditioning through 73–75; cultural coherence, notion of 70; cultural elaboration 78–80; morphogenesis and 70–80; sociocultural interaction 75–78; sociocultural order 115; symbolization and 139–40 Culture and Agency (Archer, M.S.) 99, 117n13, 118n30 Dahrendorf, Ralf 124 Davidson, Donald 152, 161, 162 De Giorgi, Raffaele 118n26, 122n83 decentralization 60–61 deductivism: in anthropology 32; Comte’s perspective 172–73, 179, 187n4 Defending Objectivity (Archer, M.S. and Outhwaite, W.) 56n19 DeMan, Paul 151 Dépeltau, François 67

195

derivation of “ought” from “is” 23–24 Derrida, Jacques 143n1, 151 Descartes, René 5 descriptive analyses 143n8 diachronic development: morphogenesis and 62; synchronic and diachronic development, argument for 100–101 dialectical critical realism 53–54n3 Dilthey, Wilhelm 158 disciplinary imperialism 17–18 Division of Labor (Durkheim, E.) 155 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) 5, 7, 145n19, 163 Donati, P. and Colozzi, I. 138, 193n43 Donati, P. and Tronca, L. 139 Donati, Pierpaolo viii, 60, 117n8, 117n12, 123–47, 187n4, 187n6, 190– 91n29 double morphogenesis 67 dualism 117n13, 118n31; analytical dualism 16, 62, 70, 73, 97–98, 99, 100–102, 128; duality and 184; nonconflationary sociology and 99–102 Durkheim, Emile 9, 10, 73, 131, 139, 155, 159, 160 economics: events in 16; Keynes, speculation and enterprise 9; utilitarian ethics and 11–12 economism 17 ECPRES model of social mechanisms 144n15 Ecrit de jeunesse 1816–1828 (Comte, A.) 188–89n16 ectypes (tokens) 25 Elder-Vass, Dave 61, 66, 71, 93n11, 93n18, 93n30, 100, 127, 128, 133, 134 Eliade, Mircea 145n19, 189n17 Elias, Norbert 143n7 emergence: critical realism, emergentist ontology of 132–34; of morphogenic approach (M/M) 96; theoretical notions of 43–44, 118n33, 128 emergent properties (EP) 118n30; autonomous EP and structure/agency interaction 120n49; literature on 55n16; origins of 104; of powers of agents 94n51; relational nature of 118n35 Emirbayer, M. and Mische, A. 152 empirical observation 54n9 empirical realism: criticism of 47; scepticism and 33–34; transcendental realism and 45–46

196

Index

Epistemic Cultures (Knorr Cetina, K.) 165 epistemic fallacy 32–33, 35 epistemology 45–47; archetypes 25; Bhaskar’s DREI(C) model 45–46; derivation of “ought” from “is” 23– 24; ectypes (tokens) 25; epistemological reflection 171; epistemological theses 23–25; explanans and explanandum 45, 46; historicity and change in science 45– 47; Hume’s Law, social objects and 23–24; ideal objects 24–25; institutional objects 25; medieval epistemology 171–72; of natural and human sciences, coincidence in 168; Ockham’s Razor, natural objects and 24–25; ontology and 22–23; physical objects 24, 25; realism, critical side of 24; reality, discovery of deeper levels of 46–47; retrospective correction 46; science, anomalies in 45–46; science, three-phase process of 45; scientific elaboration, cycles of 46; social objects 24–25; transcendental and empirical realism 45–46 Epstein, J.M. and Axtell, R. 120n54 etero-referentiality 36 ethical sciences 171–72 ethnography 155–56, 160, 161, 166; critical realism and 165 European society: critical realism and 114–15; profile of a new European sociology 97–98, 113–15; sociology of, contemporary perspective 114–15 evolution theory 107 experiences 34; and events, distinction between 40 experiments: anthropology 30–31, 35; and closed system, establishment of 4; experimental sciences and critical realism 3; intelligibility of experimentation 37–38; irrelevant variables, absence of 4; methodology 36–38; nature of 3–4; in psychological sciences 7–8; in social sciences 52–53 explanans, explanandum and 45, 46, 172 explanation: and cause, notion of 54n11; and description in critical realism 165; explanatory science, morphogenesis and 59; nomologic-deductive model of 37; in psychological sciences 42–43 explanatory analyses 143n8

explanatory framework: explanatory power and 102–3, 104, 105–6; morphogenesis and 59–60, 131–32, 134–35; technical methodology and 114 explanatory power 97, 102–9; action, narrative of courses of 104; action, rational expectations and 106; analytical realism 104–5; analytical realism, critical realism and 105; autonomous causal influence 103–4; causation as generative process 104–5; emergent properties, origins of 104; evolution theory 107; explanatory framework 102–3, 104, 105–6; generative processes and emergence of social 104–6; generative processes and grand theories 107; Giddens’ social order and 108–9; grand theories and sociological explanation 107–9; interaction, emergent properties and 104–5, 106; morphogenesis, emergence and 102–4; ontological emergence 103–4; resource distribution, example of 107–8; systems theory and 107 explanatory sociology 104–6, 107, 129–35 fallibilist epistemology 59 family dynamics 130 feminist critical realism 18 Ferraris, Maurizio viii, 21–29 Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas 10 Feyerabend, Paul Karl 19n5, 32, 46 Filoramo, Giovanni 189n17 final cause 179–80 final state, aim of 180 Fisk, Milton 19n7 form as ordering principle 180, 182–83, 184–85 formal-final causality 179–80, 183–84 Formari, Franco 145n19 Formenti, Carlo 189n17 Foucault, Michel 22, 96, 152 Frankfurt, Harry G. 95n59, 121n71 free markets 14 Freud, Sigmund 7, 10, 17 Fuchs, P. and Goebel, A. 121n65 Fuchs, Peter 121n62, 121n67 functional logic 130 Fusari, Angelo 145n20 Garelli, Franco 189n17 generative mechanisms: anthropology 35; critical realism 8–9; critical

Index realism and 163; ontology 41–42; open systems, reality and 43–44; transcendental realism and 39–40, 41– 42, 45–46 generative processes: emergence of social and 104–6; grand theories and 107 generative statements, science as analysis of 39–40 Giddens, Anthony 56n22, 67, 93n19, 96, 98, 99, 102, 107, 110, 111, 112, 116n2, 117n12, 121n67, 134, 152, 160–61, 162, 191n33; social order, explanatory power and 108–9 God 40, 182, 189n17, 192n41 Godel, Kurt 47 Goffman, Erving 162 Goldthorpe, John 99, 116n5, 119n38 Gómez Dávila, Nicolas 170 Gorski, Philip 127, 133, 144n15 Gould, Stephen J. 163 Gouldner, A.W. 94n47, 132 grand theory 96, 97, 113; notion of 116– 17n6; sociological explanation and grand theories 107–9 Guardian 5–6 Habermas, Jürgen 96, 178–79 habitus 52 Hall, A.D. and Hagen, R.E. 94n40 Harré, R. and Madden, E. 163 Harré, Rom 32, 143n4 Hedström, Peter 99, 105–6, 119–20n48, 119n36, 119n37, 121n72 Hegel, Georg W.F. 189n18 Heidegger, Martin 151–52, 162, 166 hermenuetics 24, 47–48, 52, 72, 130, 133, 143n4, 158, 160, 168, 170, 178 historicity: and change in science 45–47; morphogenesis and 64 history: critical realism and 166; human motivation in 15; interdisciplinarity and 16 Hitler, Adolf 27 Hobbes, Thomas 5 Hollis, M. and Smith, S. 158 Hollis, Martin 55–56n18, 95n59 Homo economicus 94n52 horizontal explications 42–43, 44 Horkheimer, Max 145n19 human, ongoing process of being 92 human nature, critical realism and 136– 38 human rationality as generative system 163–64

197

human reflexivity 89, 122n76, 126–27, 141, 144n14; collective reflexivity 144n13; creative reflexivity 142; critical realism and 135, 137–38; meta-reflexivity 140; morphogenic approach and 98, 106, 109–11, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120n52; voluntarism and 90 human selfhood 82–83, 98 humanistic scientific sociology 109–13 humanity of Comte 177–78 Hume, David 3–4, 8, 9, 22–23, 45–46; causal laws, theory of 32, 36, 40; Hume’s Law 8. 23–24 Husserl, Edmund 56n20 hypostatization 191n33 hypotheses 30, 31, 33–34, 36, 40, 48, 51n10, 105; falsification of 37; observation and scientific 173 Iagulli, Paolo 128 The Idea of a Social Science (Winch, P.) 160 ideal objects 24–25 idealism and transcendental realism 45 immanence in agents 191n32 Independent 6 indispensability 94n38 individual actions: in social reality 27– 28, 132, 134; valuation of 27–28 individualism 12, 16, 48–53, 141; methodological individualism 105, 110, 118n33, 129, 132 individuals: interactions and relationality of 138–39; society and 10–11, 50; society and reflexivity of 109–11 induction, problem of 38 institutional objects 25 intelligibility of experimentation 37–38 interactions: emergent properties and 104–5, 106; preconditions for 181; relations and 138–39 interdisciplinarity 16, 18, 43 internalization, concept of 122n75 interpretation: interpretative logic 130; limits on 37 intransitivity 36–37; see also transitivity Introvigne, Massimo 189n17 invisible ontology 64–65n13 Irwin, Terence 191–92n35 Jeavons, William S. 11–12 judgemental rationality 59

198

Index

Kant, Immanuel 5, 6, 22, 46, 99; neoKantian rationalism 36 Keynes, John M. 9, 16 Knorr Cetina, Karin 165 knowledge: incomplete nature of 54n10; order of 42–43; social reality and, coincidence between 176; sociology as knowledge system, components of 131; transience of 37 Kuhn, Thomas S. 19n5, 32, 74–75 Lakatos, Imre 32, 46, 94n37 Lami, Gian Franco 192n40 Laplace, Pierre 5 Latane, B. and Darley, J. 165 Laudisa, Federico 187n5 laws: causal laws as tendencies 41–42; causality and, separation between 186–87; invariance of 173; normic statements, transition from law-like statements to 38–39 Lawson, Julie 120n55 Lawson, Tony 3, 18n1, 55–56n18, 166 Leibniz, Gottfried W. 45, 46–47 Lenin, Vladimir I. 13, 151 Lewes, G.H. 118n30 Locke, John 45, 46, 47, 94–95n54 Lockwood, David 60, 77 Lodovici, E. Samek 189n17 logical consistency 71 logical deduction 173 Luhmann, Niklas 99, 107–8, 110, 116n1, 118n26, 120n56, 121n67, 122n82, 122n83, 123, 132, 143n1, 172, 187n6, 192n39 Lukes, Steven 94n43 Maccarini, Andrea M. viii, 96–122 MacIver, E.M. 187n4, 188n7 Magris, Aldo 189n17 Maier, Anneliese 187n3 Manicas, Peter T. 69, 70 Margolis, Joseph 161, 162 Margulis, L. and Sagan, D. 136 market relations, capitalist systems and 164 Marx, Karl 7, 13, 14, 15, 160, 164, 190n23; literature of 14; macrosociological perspective of 185; society, perspective on 10 Marxism 15, 16–17, 17–18, 127 material cause 179–80 Mauss, Marcel 82, 95n55 Mead, G.H. 143n4

mechanisms: Bhaskar on 55n14, 55n15; ECPRES model of social mechanisms 144n15; events and causal mechanisms 21–22; open systems, multiple mechanisms in 16–18; of psychological sciences 17, 45; social reality, structural mechanisms in 28; structural mechanisms in social reality 28; trans-factual operation of 38–39, 41–42; valuation, structural mechanisms in 28; see also generative mechanisms mediation 50, 69, 71–72, 111, 114, 125, 132, 142, 144–45n16; cultural mediation 143n4 medieval epistemology 171–72 medium, notion of 118n27 Medvedev, Roy 13 Melden, A.I. 159 Merton, Robert K. 67 meta-reality, philosophy of 53–54n3 meta-reflexivity 140 meta-social reality 143n4 Metaphysics (Aristotle) 191n34, 192n36 methodology 36–39; auto-referentiality 36; causal laws in empirical ontology 37–38; closedness 36; eteroreferentiality 36; experiments 36–38; explanation, nomologic-deductive model of 37; hypotheses, falsification of 37; induction, problem of 38; intelligibility of experimentation 37– 38; interpretations, limits on 37; intransitivity 36–37; knowledge, transience of 37; morphogenesis and 97; normic statements, transition from law-like statements to 38–39; perception-observation 36–37; theory, data and 37; trans-factual operation of mechanisms 38–39, 41–42; transduction, problem of 38–39; transitivity 36–37 Mill, John Stuart 12 Miller, J.H. and Page, S.E. 120n54 The Modern World System (Wallerstein, I.) 166 modernity’s man 80–81, 82, 83, 90, 91, 92, 110, 112–13, 141 monism 32 monovalent ontology 44 moral muting 167 Morandi, Emmanuele ix, 124, 128, 170–93

Index morphogenesis 59–92; agency 80–91; agency, emergent entity of 62; causal consensus 71; causal powers, emergence of 63; centralization 60–61; cultural coherence, notion of 70; cultural conditioning 73–75; cultural elaboration 78–80; culture 70–80; decentralization 60–61; diachronic development 62; double morphogenesis 67; emergence and 102–4; emergence of morphogenic approach (M/M) 96; explanatory framework 59–60, 131–32, 134–35; explanatory science 59; fallibilist epistemology 59; historicity 64; human, ongoing process of being 92; human reflexivity and 98, 106, 109–11, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120n52; judgemental rationality 59; logical consistency 71; mediation, requirement for 72; methodological pivot point for non-conflationary sociology 98–99; methodology and 97; morphogenetic/morphostatic (M/M) model 116n4, 119–20n48; motives, source of 65; realist social ontology 59; scientific commentaries 59; selfhood 82–83; sequence for 62–64; social actors 82, 86–91; social agents 82, 83–86; social ontology and 97; social order, origins of 59–60; social theory and 97, 113–14, 115; socio-cultural interaction 75–78; structural contextualization 65; structure 60–70; structure, emergent entity of 62; synchronic relations 61–62; timescale for 62; TMSA (Transformational Model of Social Activity) and 59; tripartite connection (ontology, methodology and social theory) and 97–98; uniform practices, notion of 70 motives: source of 65; unconscious 13 Murphy, Raymond 137 Murphy’s law 26 Mussolini, Benito 9 Nagel, Ernest 45 Napoleon Bonaparte 27 natural and social structures, differences between 50 natural necessity, theory of 41–42 natural sciences and social sciences 7–8, 23, 152

199

naturalism, possibilities and limits of 47–48 nature: actions of man on 190n22; causal structures of 52; open system of 4 Necker, Jacques 26 negative facts 26–27; reality of 11 Negt, Oskar 189n18 Neuman, W. Lawrence 153–54 New Rules of the Sociological Method (Giddens, A.) 160 Newton, Sir Isaac 8, 39 Nietsche, Friedrich 27 nominalism 10–11, 170 non-conflationary sociology 97, 98–102; activity dependence 100–101; agency, continuity of 100; agency, relations and 102; agency, social emergence from 101–2; analytical dualism 100– 101; analytical dualism, systems theory and 102; diachronic and synchronic development, argument for 100–101; dualism and 99–102; morphogenesis, methodological pivot point 98–99; non-exhaustive mutual constitution 102; object orientation 100; ontology and 99–102; simultaneity and 99–102; structure, emergent properties of 100–101, 101– 2; synchronic relations 100; time, specific moment in 100 non-exhaustive mutual constitution 102 normic statements, transition from lawlike statements to 38–39 Nove, Alec 19n10 objects: object orientation 100; powers of 39–40 observation: in anthropology 34, 35; methodology of 172–73; reason and observation, combined methodology of 173 Ockham’s razor 22; natural objects and 24–25 O’Connor, T. and Wong, H.Y. 118n30 Olsen, W. and Morgan, J. 166 ontology 39–44; actual and empirical, reality and 39–41; actual and real powers of objects, distinction between 40; alethic truths 37, 43, 46; anthropology 33; Bhaskar’s antireductionism, principles of 42–43; Bhaskar’s stratified structure for reality 41; causal laws as tendencies

200

Index

41–42; causal mechanisms, events and 21–22; causality, Humean and realist models of 39; cause-effect relations 43–44; of critical realism 11–12, 15, 18; emergence, theory of 43–44; epistemology and 22–23; experiences and events, distinction between 40; explanatory power and ontological emergence 103–4; generative mechanisms 41–42; generative mechanisms, open systems, reality and 43–44; generative statements, science as analysis of 39– 40; horizontal explications 42–43, 44; knowledge, order of 42–43; monovalent ontology 44; nonconflationary sociology and 99–102; objects, powers of 39–40; ontological presupposition 44; ontological reality 126–28; ontological stratification 39– 40, 44; ontological theses 21–23; reality, levels of 44; reductionism 44; relation of composition 44; science, object of 22, 41–42; science, stratification of 42–43; social atomism 44; social holism 44; of social sciences 6–8, 17; of social theory 10–11; stratification of the real 42–43; structures and powers of objects 41–42; vertical explications 43, 44 open systems 36, 41–42, 48, 52–53; closed systems and 4–5, 16, 38–39, 156; multiple mechanisms in 16–18; reality within 43–44 operative closedness 190n20 ordered relations 136–37 “ought” from “is,” derivation of 23–24 Outhwaite, William 55–56n18, 92n9 Paley, William 12 Parker, John 60 Parsons 172, 187n6, 188n7, 191n33, 192n39 Parsons, T. and Bales, R.F. 121n66 Parsons, T. and Shils, E.A. 121n66 Parsons, Talcott 96, 109, 121n64, 121n66, 128–29, 131; neo-Parsonian thought 137 Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (Anderson, P.) 13 Passeron, Jean-Claude 94n44 Penrose, Roger 191–92n35 people and society 9–11

perception: in anthropology 34; perception-observation 36–37; psychology of 26 perfect presence 174 personal identity, empirical research on 145n19 Peters, R.S. 159 Pfau-Effinger, Birgit 143n8 phenomenology, importance of 54n12 philosophical method, transcendental realism as 33 philosophy: positive philosophy 188n15; of social sciences 3, 59, 60 Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (Rorty, R.) 5 physical and universal causality 5–6 physical objects 24, 25 Plan des travaux scientifiques (Comte, A.) 188–89n16 Plato 181–82 Plato Etcetera (Bhaskar, R.) 51 poietic sciences 171–72 Poincaré, Raymond 38 Popper, Sir Karl R. 7, 15, 32, 45, 46, 70, 139, 173; Popper-Hempel deductivism 32, 37 Porpora, Douglas V. ix, 67–68, 120n70, 151–69, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 186–87 positivism 170; of Comte 170, 172, 173, 188–89n16; critical realism and 164– 65, 166–67; criticism of 170; of psychological sciences 158; roots of 189n17, 189n18; social positivism 170–71 positivistic science 174, 175, 176; freedom and 176–77; human actions and 174 positivization in social sciences 188– 89n16 possibility, reality of 26 The Possibility of Naturalism (Bhaskar, R.) 47–48, 53–54n3 postmodernism 17, 21, 22, 24, 26, 136 Prandini, Riccardo ix, 30–56, 128, 193n42 praxis: society and duality of 49; theory and 172, 187n6 pre-social reality 136, 143n4 prediction: in closed systems 7–8; control and 152; in economics 16; experimental basis for 7–8; falsification and 37; science and 171, 174–75, 176–77; self-understanding and 176

Index Price, G.L. 192n40 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, M.) 185–86 psychological sciences 5, 10, 49, 52; assumptions in 112; experiments in 7–8; explanations in 42–43; mechanisms of 17, 45; perception, psychology of 26; positivism of 158; subject matter of 52 psychologism 17 Puech, H.-C. 189n17 Quine, Willard Van Orman 11, 22 radicalism, utopian 14 Rambo, E. and Chain, E. 119–20n48 rational action: narrative model of 112; theory of 112, 121–22n73 rational man 94n50 rationalistic fallacies 33–34 rationality, limitations of 113 Reale, Giovanni 191–92n35 realism: ancient way of 179–87; antirealisms, “empiricist” root of “classic” 54n6; consequences of 25–27; critical side of 24; negative facts 26–27; possibility, reality of 26; realist methods in sociology 151–68; relationship between “whole and parts” in 56n20; society and individuals, relationship between 25– 26; traditions of 170–71; values, existence of 27 realist social ontology 59 Realist Social Theory (Archer, M.S.) 99, 117n9, 118n30 realist theory: constructivist sociology and 127; relational perspective on 128; of science 32–33, 35–36; social facts and 124; social theory 109–11, 113–14 A Realist Theory of Science (Bhaskar, R.) 30, 35, 53–54n3, 156 reality: causal criterion for 11; discovery of deeper levels of 46–47; levels of 44; of man’s place in the universe 34–36; orders of 112–13 reason and observation, combined methodology of 173 reciprocity 107–8, 128, 138, 143n8 reductionism 22, 42, 44, 48, 51–52, 97, 118n31, 120n54, 159; antireductionism, principles of 42 reflexivity 89, 122n76, 126–27, 141, 144n14; of agents and systems

201

144n15; collective reflexivity 144n13; concept of 120n52, 122n76; creative reflexivity 142; critical realism and 135, 137–38; internal reflexivity 137– 38; meta-reflexivity 140; morphogenic approach and 98, 106, 109–11, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120n52; reflection and 144n14; social reflexivity, social systems and 137–38; voluntarism and 90 reforms of social structures, perspective on 14–15 Regan, Daniel 119–20n48 relational sociology 187n6, 190–91n29; critical realism, perspective on 124– 25, 125–29, 132–34, 187n6; social reality and 128–29, 132; social sciences and 125–29 relational theory: of society 124, 125–26, 127; sociological knowledge and 129– 30; stress, approach to 130–31 Relational Theory of Society (Donati, P.) 136 relationality 144–45n16; social relationality, reality of 137 relations: composition, relations of 44; existence and 178; inter-relations between individuals and society 10– 11, 50; interactions and 138–39; ordered relations 136–37; realist theory, relational perspective on 128; relationships within society 10–11; society, relational ontology of 9–12; “whole and parts” in realism, relationship between 56n20 representative symbolism 139 resource distribution, example of 107–8 responsibility, notion of 27–28 retrospective correction 46 Ricoeur, Paul 158 Rorty, Richard 5 RRREI(C) model 52–53 Rubinstein, David 160 Sanguineti, J.J. 187n5 Sartre, Jean-Paul 5 Savery, Lynn 120n55 Sawyer, R. Keith 93n16, 117n12, 119n36, 119n41 Sayer, Andrew 166 science: anomalies in 45–46; Comte’s perspective on 173–74; debate about philosophy and sociology of 53n2; generative statements, science as

202

Index

analysis of 39–40; historicity and change in 45–47; immanentistic knowledge in 177; objects of 22, 41– 42; paradox of 34–35; positivistic perspective on 32, 33–34; realist theory of 32–33, 35–36; scientific commentaries 59; scientific elaboration, cycles of 46; semantics of 177; social construction of 31–32; of spirit, res cogitans and 21; stratification of 42–43; three-phase process of 45; transcendental realism and scientific method 33 scientific-humanistic sociology 98, 109– 13; action, analytical sociology and 111–12; individuals, society and reflexivity 109–11; rational action, narrative model of 112; rationality, limitations of 113; reality, orders of 112–13; sociological realism 111–13; Wertrationalität 111–13 scientism 170 Searle, John R. 69–70 self-understandings (or comprehensions) 176, 182–83, 184–85; symbolic 186 selfhood 98; morphogenesis and 82–83 sensibility: in anthropology 34; in sociology 186 simultaneity 99–102 situational logic 74–75, 76, 78–79, 107–8 skills, tacit 13 Smith, Adam 163, 164, 186 social actors: ejection from social science 178; morphogenesis and 82, 86–91 social agency 180, 181–82, 183–84 social agents 82, 83–86 social atomism 9–10, 44 social being, four-planar model of 50–51 social entirety 175–76 social existence: function and 175–76; notion of 177–78 social facts: contingency of 132; realist theory and 124; sociology and 124 social holism 9, 44 social identity, empirical research on 145n19 social integration 60, 75, 138, 175 social life, formal cause in 180, 181, 182, 185, 186 social mechanisms 8–9, 144n15; events in society and 16–18 social objects 21, 22, 23, 24–25, 27, 48, 132

social ontology 47–53; absolute naturalism 48; agency, explanatory status of 51–52; agency, intentionality of 49–50; consciousness 52; critical naturalism 48; elements of 9; habitus 52; individualism 49; inter-relations between individuals and society 50; morphogenesis and 97; of morphogenic approach 114; natural and social structures, differences between 50; naturalism, possibilities and limits of 47–48; nature, causal structures of 52; praxis, society and duality of 49; RRREI(C) model 52– 53; social being, four-planar model of 50–51; society 49–50; society, ontology of 48; society as relation 48– 53; structure, society and duality of 49; synchronic emergence, theory of 52; TMSA (Transformational Model of Social Activity) and 49; unity of method 48 social order: Aristotle on 180, 181, 182– 83, 184–85; origins of 59–60 social phenomena 10; mathematical analysis, application to 188–89n16 social positivism 170–71, 173; probability and 173 social processes 49, 104, 126–27, 179– 80, 182, 184, 186; causality in, efficiency of 186 social reality 9, 21, 23, 48, 100, 118n35, 119n37, 123–25, 133; capitalistbourgeois economics and 186; contingent nature of 130; critical realism and 123–25; human agency and 181; individual actions in 27–28, 132, 134; knowledge and, coincidence between 176; meta-social reality 143n4; order of properties and causal powers of 124; perfect presence of 174; pre-social reality 136, 143n4; relational sociology and 128–29, 132; social facts, contingency of 132; structural aspect of 172; structural mechanisms in 28; voluntary transformation in 28 social reflexivity, social systems and 137–38 social relationality, reality of: critical realism 137 social relations: generation of 126–27; social facts and 124–25 social reproduction 14, 15

Index Social Research (Corbetta, P.) 153–54 social sciences 10, 11, 16, 32, 47–48, 94n52, 156; analytical sociology 119n38; Aristotle’s First Principles, methodological implications in 191–92n35; atomists and holists, division between 9–10, 13; causal investigation in 63, 159–60, 173, 179– 80; Comtean perspective 177–78; critical realism in 114–15, 125–29; experiments in 52–53; explanatory sociology 104–6, 107; generative processes and emergence of the social 104–6; human selfhood 82–83, 98; humanistic scientific sociology 109– 13; inter-disciplinarity in, need for 18; morphogenesis and emergence 102–3; natural sciences and 7–8, 23, 152; ontology of 6–8, 17; philosophy of 3, 59, 60; positivization in 188–89n16; post-Parsonian developments 96; prediction, self-understanding and 176; realist social theory 109–11; relational sociology 125–29; relations and correlations in 173; sciences of spirit, res cogitans and 21; social processes 179–80; sociological explanations, grand theories and 107– 9; stratification, concept of 17–18; values in 12; Voegelin and manifesto for re-foundation of 192–93n41 social structures: conservation of 14–15; past agents in determination of 15–16; reproduction of 13–14 social theory: morphogenesis of 97, 113– 14, 115; ontology of 10–11; realist social theory 113–14; socio-cultural order 115 social transformation 28, 91 social world, harmony in 176–77 socialism 11 society: hypostatization of 191n33; individuals and 10–11, 25–26; invisible ontology of 64–65n13; Marx’s perspective on 10; ontology of 48; people and 9–11; as relation, social ontology of 48–53; relational ontology of 9–12; relational theory of 124, 125–26, 127; relationships within 10–11; social mechanisms and events in 16–18; social ontology 49–50; structuring processes in 56n23 socio-cultural interaction 75–78 socio-cultural order 115

203

sociological knowledge 48, 127–28, 129– 30, 143, 170, 175, 176; development in thinking of Comte 171–73, 178–79; explanations, grand theories and 107– 9; praxis and 175; specificity of 181– 82 sociological realism 124; agency in, centrality of theory of 182, 193n42; analytical character of 127, 128–29; anthropological foundation 54n7; causality and 170, 179–81, 183–86; critical experience and 140–42; critical realism and 127, 140–42; scientifichumanistic sociology 111–13; see also social reality sociologism 17 sociology: causality in 179–87; crisis in 96; critical realism and sociological methodology 167–68; emergence, notion in 128; European society and, contemporary perspective 114–15; explanatory framework, technical methodology and 114; as knowledge system, components of 131; modern way to 171–79; positivistic origins of 177–78; profile of a new European sociology 97–98, 113–15; realist methods in 151–68; social facts and 124; social ontology of morphogenic approach 114; theoretical-practical sociology 171–72 On Sociology (Goldthorpe, J.) 116n5, 119n38, 120n53, 121–22n73, 121n72 state education, system of 92–93n10 statistics and critical realism 166–67 stratification: concept of 17–18; of nature 5, 6–7; of the real 42–43 structuralist-functionalist theory 172 structure: emergent entity of 62; emergent properties of 100–101, 101– 2; morphogenesis 60–70; and power of objects 41–42; social reality, structural aspect of 172; social reality, structural mechanisms in 28; society, structuring processes in 56n23; society and duality of 49; structural contextualization 65; valuation, structural mechanisms in 28 Suicide (Durkheim, E.) 155 super-idealism 33–34 supervenience 119n37 Swedberg, Emanuel 99 symbolic coding 143n9 symbolic identity 139–40

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Index

synchronic relations: morphogenesis and 61–62; in non-conflationary sociology 100; synchronic emergence, theory of 52 Système de politique positive (in Oeuvres d’Auguste Comte) 177–78, 188–89n16, 190n28 systemic theory 172 systems, open and closed 174 systems theory 116n3, 120–21n58; explanatory power and 107 Teubner, Gunther 143n1 Thatcher, Margaret 9 theoretical-practical sociology 171–72 theory: agency in sociological realism, centrality of theory of 182, 193n42; analytical dualism, systems theory and 102; ANT (actor network theory) 133; causal laws, Humean theory of 32, 36, 40; central conflation, theoretical stance of 56, 70, 93n27; data and 37; emergence, theoretical notions of 118n33; evolution theory 107; explanatory sociological theory of critical realism 129–35; generative processes and grand theories 107; grand theories and sociological explanation 107–9; grand theory 96, 97, 107, 113, 116–17n6; natural necessity, theory of 41–42; ontology of social theory 10–11; praxis, theory and 172, 187n6; rational action, theory of 112, 121–22n73; realist social theory 109–11, 113–14; social theory and morphogenesis 97, 113– 14, 115; structuralist-functionalist theory 172; synchronic emergence, theory of 52; systemic theory 172; systems theory 102, 107; tripartite connection (ontology, methodology and social theory) and 97–98; see also realist theory; relational theory The Theory of Political Economy (Jeavons, W.S.) 11–12 Thomas, W.I. 143n2 Saint Thomas Aquinas 171–72 Thompson, Paul 161 time: specific moment in 100; timescale for morphogenesis 62 Timpanaro, Sebastiano 17 TMSA (Transformational Model of Social Activity) 12–16, 27, 56n21, 59;

morphogenesis and 47–53, 59; social ontology and 49 transcendental realism 53–54n3, 53n1; being, knowledge about 33, 34; criticism of 47; empirical realism and 45–46; foundation of 34–35; generative mechanisms and 39–40, 41–42, 45–46; idealism and 45; natural necessity, theory of 41–42; as philosophical method 33; scientific method and 33; transduction and 38–39; transitivity, intransitivity and 36–37 transduction, problem of 38–39 transitivity: intransitivity and transcendental realism 36–37; in methodology 36–37; objects, transitive and intransitive 6; transitive and intransitive subjects, distinction between 30–32 tripartite connection (ontology, methodology and social theory) 97–98 trust 139 truth: alethic truths 37, 43, 46; truthconditions 35 Turner, Jonathan 119–20n48 Turner, Victor 145n19 uniform practices, notion of 70 unity of method 48 validity 143n10, 157; of constructivism 136; of data 131; external and internal validity 165 valuation 27–28; choice, notion of 27– 28; consequences, unwanted 27; individual actions 27–28; responsibility, notion of 27–28; social transformation 28; structural mechanisms 28; voluntary transformation 28 values: absolute values 27; existence of 27; individual choice and adherence to 137–38; reality of 11–12; in social sciences 12; societal values, question of 12 Vandenberghe, Frédéric 60 vertical explications 43, 44 Voegelin, Eric 181–82, 189n17, 192n40; and manifesto for re-foundation of social sciences 192–93n41 voluntarism 90 voluntary transformation 28

Index Wallerstein, Immanuel 166 The Wealth of Nations (Smith, A.) 163 Weber, Max 75, 121n63, 122n81, 137, 139–40, 145n19, 145n20, 158, 185–86, 192n40 Wertrationalität: critical realism and 140; scientific-humanistic sociology and 111–13

William of Ockham 11 Williams, Bernard 94–95n54 Winch, Peter 159, 160 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 84, 159 Zanetti, Gianfrancesco 192n40

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