Capitalism and Social Theory:

Essays and Inquiry

Rajani K. Kanth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781563240690
• eBook ISBN: 9781317475392
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This work examines the complex, detailed relationship between the theory of wealth and the theory of power, both subsumed as they are under the overarching mantle of capitalist ideology, ever distorting real connections and evading critical issues. It examines various theories of class, state, and power either explicitly or implicitly avowed in the diverse social science disciplines of politics, economics, and sociology. In illuminating the subtle machinations of ideology, it boldly reveals the realist ontology of capitalism which produces illusory theory. The essays employ transcendental realism, emphasizing the primacy of ontology over epistemology as a mode of critique, necessarily going beyond traditional Marxian arguments in many cases. Although intended only as an analytical critique, the project is emancipatory of necessity, for it allows, ultimately, for an increased purchase on reality.

FOUR

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ECONOMICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY:
TOWARD MATERIALISM

…Realism is not a theory of knowledge or truth, but of being—although as such it is bound to possess epistemological implications. Accordingly, a realist position in the philosophy of (natural) sciences will consist, first and foremost, of a theory about the nature of being, rather than the knowledge of the objects investigated by the science—to the effect that they endure and operate independently of human activity, and hence of both sense-experience and thought. So Realism is immediately opposed to both empiricism and rationalism, wherein being is defined in terms of the human attributes of experience and reason.

—R. Bhaskar, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation

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The Foundations of Economic Analysis:
Toward Realism

It is a remarkable index of the existing distance between models in economic theorizing, Marxist or neoclassical, and the social object that they claim to either describe, explain, or predict, that few questions are ever addressed to the realist content of their suppositions.¹ Even when these contending paradigms engage each other, rarely is attention directed to what Max Weber might have called “fundamental assumptions”;² instead, energy is usually dissipated in struggling over the attendant policy implications or the mechanics of the theoretical apparatus, without an examination of the infrastructure of suppositions upon which the edifice actually rests. Premises being taken as given, the struggle then is joined either over matters of internal consistency or over the policy directions indicated by a model. But models, more likely than not, tend on average to be true to their own presumptions, and thus the data and ideas they generate are similarly constrained by their initial assumptions. Accordingly, debates between paradigms turn out to be quite generally frustrating, with neither side convinced at all of the arguments of the other.³ Historically, this problem has been raised in the manner of Kuhn⁴ as the problem of “incommensurability” between different schools, without, of course, any clue as to how such problems can be adjudicated or surmounted. More than occasionally, this very real problem has been “resolved” in the manner of the postAlthusserians, suggesting that social truths can only be relative, and therefore that science is only a form of social partisanship where one declares at the outset one’s article of faith and then joins the fray, presumably against similarly endowed antagonists.⁵ In various degrees and in various guises this very Weberian idea has, as well, had the sanction of some mainstream writers, such as Myrdal, Schumpeter, etc.

The alternative to this perceptual relativism has been the positivist⁶ tradition, whether amongst the Marxists⁷ or the mainstream. In their domain, facts are alleged to speak for themselves without filters or assistance from theory, with the scientist usually defined as a passive sensor objectively recording reality, with little causal interaction between scientist and the object of study. In standard positivist discourse, the neutrality of the scientist and the scientific enterprise is taken as given, with the world conceived as a closed system such that invariant regularities can be both perceived and recorded. The monism and absolutism of positivism, coupled with an ingenuous naiveté about the social nature of science, have turned it usually into an ideology that does not recognize ideology as a thing-in-itself, whether in support of Friedmanite⁸ discourse or Stalinist dogmatism. Wedded to a narrow empiricism confined to an examination of surface phenomena (and epiphenomena), positivism has, quite notoriously, denied itself the need for a search for generative mechanisms or even for any desire for providing explanations for social phenomena, with prediction being defined as the more instrumental, and inclusive, function of science.

At one level, therefore, social science seemed caught in a bind, between the Scylla of relativism and the Charybdis of positivism, between a denial of the objectivity of knowledge and the dogmatic assertion (without proof) of the neutrality of science conceived in empiricist fashion. At another level, a very definite polarity reigned between individualism and collectivism as approaches toward the study of social phenomena, this duality referring not so much to matters of epistemology (as in the relativist/absolutist dichotomy), as to ontological issues. Neoclassical theorizing, for example, in almost all its forms, has relied upon the atomized individual as the unit of social action and behavior, in the manner of methodological individualism à la Popper,⁹ seeing society as only the plural of the individual, with pre-given motives gratuitously ascribed to homo economicus, conceived as a universal historical subject, regardless of space-time referents. At the opposite end of the pole was Durkheimian¹⁰ sociology reifying the social and imposing collective determinations on individual spheres of social action. Variants of institutionalism and Marxism were prone to use this organicist and positivist model by way of a counterweight against the heroically “free” individual of neoclassical exaggerations. While the one model denied social agency (or “ interdependences,” as they might be called), the other reified it, leaving the human being a passive object of history. The “enlightened” Marxist occasionally tried to reconcile the antinomy between these two opposed views by trying to link them “dialectically”¹¹—implying that socially predetermined individuals nonetheless were able to react back and change society—succeeding only in reaping the errors of both models, retaining both voluntarism and reification rather than disposing of these twin errors of social formulation.

Organized social science—economics included—found itself in the prison of these apparently irreconcilable dichotomies with disputes routinely falling into the premeasured no-man’s land formed by this implacable rivalry. This is not to gainsay unorthodox efforts to break out of this moribund state by way of imaginative excursions, the work of Bachelard¹² and Feyerabend,¹³ for instance, in the direction of science as a matter of psychology and science as a matter of little consequence, respectively. While both these nonconservative departures from mainstream views have had considerable influence on recent discussions, neither perspective has been able to completely dislodge the central divides in science as already identified, for reasons that themselves belong to the area of the philosophy of science. The failure in these corrective visions is perhaps best located in their weak ontological visions of the nature of society, something that transcendental realism—as reflected in the work of Roy Bhaskar¹⁴—seeks to set right. As a vital new paradigm in the human sciences, Bhaskarian realism seeks to resolve the classical antinomies that have divided social science by offering a vantage point from which both individualism and collectivism can be corrected, such that neoclassical theory can be convincingly refuted, while orthodox Marxism and Stalinism can equally be rejected in favor of the original insights in the classical Marx, insights into the real ontology of societies, on whose irreducible basis alone we can hope to construct efficacious categories to explain and understand the dynamics of social existence. In what follows, in stages, the realist vision is described, encapsulating the varied intellectual moments of the oeuvre of Bhaskar.

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Realism itself, as a recurrent tendency in social philosophy, has had many varied referents. In its simplest form, realism asserts the independence of the objects of scientific discourse from the activity of science and the scientist. In this general sense, any perspective can bear the realist title for simply asserting the independent existence of the disputed entity in question, be that a universal, a material object, a proposition, etc. Consistent with this formulation, scientific realism is validated when we can demonstrate that the terms of the discourse are believed to possess real referents—independently of the theorizing. Actually, however, it is unnecessary to demonstrate that the scientists actually believe in that proposition, so long as it can be shown that their behavior lends credibility to it. This much, of course, did not require a Bhaskarian elucidation, being a readily identifiable position even if its significance has usually been underrated. The specific Bhaskarian supplement to this is in his bold theorizing of a metaphysical realism, an elaboration, in his words, of “what the world must be like prior to any empirical investigation of it and for any scientific attitudes or activities to be possible.”¹⁵ In this rendering, epistemologies must be both bound to, and referred to, ontology; for realism is seen not as a theory of knowledge or of truth, but of being. This is critical, for now both empiricism and rationalism can be rejected for defining being in terms of the very human attributes of experience and reason.

Stated differently, what is being maintained is that every theory of knowledge presupposes a theory of the objects of knowledge, i.e. a theory of what the world must be like for knowledge to be possible at all. This priority of ontology rejects the postHumean idea (which Bhaskar terms the “epistemic fallacy”) that ontological issues may always be transposed into an epistemological key. Of course, it is not being asserted that knowledge can be reduced to being, for that would be to subscribe to the “ontic fallacy,” something equally to be avoided. Epistemology provides us with the transitive dimension in our studies of the world around us. Ontology demands, on the other hand, recognition of the intransitive dimension of reality, a reality that predates and preexists this, without need for a human world of perception and experience. The sciences, especially the social ones, have been guilty of the taint of anthropomorphism, centering the universe on human atttributes as if—as in the Christian view—it were all designed so as to be perceived by the sovereign human subject.

Transcendental realism—to use the term favored by Bhaskar—involves a careful recognition of the various parameters of the transitive and the intransitive in the social study of society It necessarily involves the following predicates: an ontological realism implying that society is an intransitive, knowledge-independent, irreducible, real object of scientific knowledge; an epistemic relativity in the transitive domain, suggesting that knowledge about the social object cannot be but socio-historically limited and constrained; and the possibility of judgmental rationality, implying that, nonetheless, despite epistemic limitations, it is possible to sort the true from the false in the competing claims to knowledge. Additionally, Bhaskar posits a metacritical dimension allowing for a self-reflexive scrutiny of all the philosophical and sociological presuppositions presumed by the discourse, a metacritique being defined as a logical procedure seeking to identify the “presence of causally significant absences in thought,” or, in other words, to identify what “cannot be said in a scheme about what is done in the practice into which the scheme is connected.”¹⁶

Bhaskar claims neither uniqueness nor certainty for his approach, but hopes to show, nonetheless, that it is “demonstrably superior” to the various irrealist accounts in fashion today, the proof of the pudding resting entirely in the eating of it.

The central idea behind transcendental realism is the decisive importance of an ontology of the real for the practice of science. But the real is far from being the flat, “empirical” terrain beloved by positivism, for the very first recognition is one of ontological depth, a recognition of the multilayered stratification of a highly complex, differentiated reality. It is this ontological reality of a layered universe that demands that knowledge move, necessarily, from manifest phenomena to deeper or anterior levels of phenomena, the search being one of locating generative or causal mechanisms within the triple layering of reality, within the domains of the real, the actual, and the empirical (generally collapsed into one in positivist discourse, or denied independent legitimacy as with the subjective idealists). By way of illustration, the principle of gravity is irreducibly located in the intransitive realm of the real; it is actualized in the falling apple; and then, should a perceiving subject be proximate, becomes part of the empirically constituted experience of the latter. But nature is not, as in the vulgar positivist view, always so transparent (nor is the observer gifted only with a guileless innocence). In fact, contrary to Hume, constant conjunctions are only rarely visible in nature (if nature were easy to “read” there would be little need for a “science” of nature) but need, in fact, to be recreated in the laboratory. The point being made is a powerful one: causal laws (the real) are ontologically distinct from patterns of events; and events (the actual) are similarly distinct from experiences (the empirical). Positivist empirics is therefore guilty of two category mistakes: of reducing causal laws to constant conjunctions of events (confusing powers with their exercise), and the latter to experience, thereby making the real a property of the empirical, rather than the other way around. Gravity, as a property of the real, operated even when its several actualizations remained unperceived or uncomprehended by human subjects; it would, accordingly, remain operational even in a nonhuman world stripped suddenly of all human experience.

Transcendental realism asserts the nonidentity of thought and being, of the objects of the transitive and intransitive dimensions. In so asserting this, the Bhaskarian realist denies empiricism for limiting the concept of the natural order to what is given in human experience; it also denies id...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Capitalism and Social Theory: The Nexus of Praxis: An Introduction
• ONE Capitalism & Social Theory: Marxism and Pluralism
• TWO Marx & Political Theory: Theories of State, Class, and Power
• THREE Political Economy & Policy: The Foundations of Classicism
• FOUR Economics & Epistemology: Toward Materialism
• FIVE EuroMarxism & Third-Worldism: Toward Autonomism
• Bibliography
• Index