I am very honoured to be included in this volume celebrating Andrew Sayer, whose work has mattered so much to the development of Critical Realism (CR). Sayer is one of the most prominent social scientists calling themselves critical realists, and as a social scientist myself, I look to him as a leader.
It has been commonplace to associate CR with Roy Bhaskar. Bhaskarâs A Realist Theory of Science (2013) and The Possibility of Naturalism (2014) are indeed both important and emblematic of CR as a brand. The truth, however, as I have argued elsewhere (e.g. Porpora 2015), is that CR was born of an entire community of progressive scholars that included at the time Bhaskarâs mentor in philosophy, Rom HarrĂ©, whose Causal Powers (HarrĂ© & Madden 1975) was equally formative. The formative CR community also included other philosophers like Andrew Collier and Peter Manicas. But the community was also interdisciplinary so as to include economists like Tony Lawson and Steve Fleetwood and, besides Sayer, sociologists like Margaret Archer, Ted Benton, William Outhwaite and Charlie Smith.
Although Manicas and Smith were Americans, they had strong British connections, and the community that gave rise to CR was mostly British. Thus, although I go back a long way in CR, actually through Manicas and Smith, as an American, I came to CR a bit later. When I did, for a long time, I would describe myself as 20 per cent of the critical realists in America, which was a bit of an understatement even then. Now, however, I am happy to report that I am likely less than one per cent of Americaâs critical realists.
In contrast with me but like Margaret Archer, Tony Lawson and others, Sayer was there from the beginning â even before, that is, CR was CR. Along with other similarly minded scholars like John Urry and Bob Jessop, Sayer was already at the University of Lancaster, where there was held the first of what would become the annual meetings of the International Association of Critical Realism (IACR). Even before that first meeting, Sayer had already published his Method in Social Science (1992), which would do so much, even now, to move people away from a positivist understanding of social research.
Before that first IACR meeting, in addition to Method, Sayer had already published several books from a political-economic perspective, for me, most notably, Radical Political Economy: A Critique and Reformulation (1995). I say most notable for me because I would likewise describe myself as coming from the tradition of radical political economy. In fact, in my first address as president of IACR (Porpora 2019), I suggested that a non-reductive political-economic approach is the basic theoretical orientation of CR, one that takes full account of Archerâs (2013) Structure, Agency and Culture (SAC). With the so-called cultural turn and practice turn and kindred other turns, most social science today effaces structure, especially what I would call material structure, and conflates agency with culture. It is with material structure, however, that on my understanding, the political economy begins.
In labelling political economy the basic orientation of CR, I likely overstate the case. Today, CR is a broad tent that includes many whose research has little to do with economy or politics â however applicable they should still find the SAC formula. When, however, I made my debut with CR at the second annual meeting of IACR, among CRâs major constituents were self-identified Marxists or fellow travellers like Collier, Fleetwood, Mervyn Hartwig, Rachel Sharp, Sean Vertigan and Colin Wight.
I still tend to think, along the lines of Bentonâs (2014) Three Sociologies, that CR articulates the philosophical underpinnings of Marxâs historical materialism. Although I do not have the space to make the case here, Marxâs adoption of causal mechanisms and narrative history contrasts with the statistical, nomothetic approach of Durkheimian positivism while Marxâs attention to material structural relations contrasts with Weberian individualism.
In any case, it has been important to me â especially now that I likely do represent near one per cent of the self-identified Marxists remaining in American academy â that Andrew Sayer stands as an important exponent of the political-economic approach. His more recent book, Why We Canât Afford the Rich (2015), continues in this tradition.
As a materialist orientation, non-reductive or not, the political-economic approach tends to be regarded as tough-minded, not usually associated with such humanistic matters as morality or ethics.1 Yet the political-economic approach is in fact motivated by deep ethical concerns. It has been a significant contribution therefore for Sayer to make those concerns explicit, first in his The Moral Significance of Class (2005) and then more broadly in his Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life (2011). The latter in particular has launched a salutary new attention to ethics, both in CR and beyond. It is truly seminal in this respect.
I perhaps should say upfront that I agree with and appreciate what Sayer says on most matters relating to CR. I judge, however, my saying so of less general interest than points of difference. Thus, I will also broach some points where I have a different point of view.
Why Things Matter to People
This heading is, of course, also the title of one of Sayerâs most significant books, a title I think is beautiful. As Sayer notes, despite its fundamental importance, the question it raises has gone largely unaddressed by social science. The question is of fundamental importance because it addresses the very meaning of importance.
As doctoral students facing their defences know, the most daunting question they can face is: So what? However methodologically perfect and theoretically grounded their research, the question asks why anything they say is of any interest or importance. The question is daunting both because doctoral candidates often have difficulty articulating a satisfactory answer and because should there be none, the implication is that their research is not worth discussing or having been done in the first place.
To say that something is of interest or important means that it matters to us in some way, and that the more it matters, the more interesting and important it is. To say in turn that something matters to us means that it affects us somehow.
From the critical realist perspective, something can matter to us even without our knowledge or awareness, that is, in a way that is purely objective ontologically. That is because our well-being is not purely a subjective matter, a matter of what we think or feel. Even if we are unaware of it, for example, or, as in America, refuse to acknowledge it, climate change or the pandemic can nevertheless undermine our quality of life. Both already have.
As agents, however, we react to what matters to us objectively only if it comes to matter for us subjectively, that is, we come to see or appreciate its mattering. It is this subjective mattering that Sayer explores. Following Archerâs (2000) usage, Sayer thinks of subjective mattering as a concern. I would agree but also think that concern is equivalent to care (Porpora 2001). I donât know that Sayer would disagree.
If I understand him correctly, Sayer unpacks care or concern in terms of emotions. Again, I would agree. Although Sayer again follows Archer (2000) in conceptualising emotions as commentaries on our concerns, I have alternately conceptualised emotions as more constitutive of care, as actually orientations of care or varieties of caring (Porpora 2001). It may come to the same thing, but I think of emotions as felt stances or relations of our entire selves to the objects of our emotions. To say that I had been outraged by the Trump administration is to say how I stood in relation to it and that I cared about it in this way as opposed to being merely annoyed by or frustrated with it.
If subjective mattering has to do with care or concern and if care and concern have to do with the emotions, then it matters or becomes important how and why we have the emotions we do. Thus, along with others of us who have argued similarly (Archer 2000; Porpora 2001), the next move Sayer makes is of great importance. It is to rebut the dominant view in social science, popularised in the United States by Arle Hochschildâs (2012) otherwise admirable The Managed Heart, that emotions are to be equated with feelings.
Our emotions certainly are often accompanied by feelings, but our emotions are not distinguished by them. Outrage, annoyance and frustration may all evoke feeling, but we do not distinguish among them by what we feel but rather by the nuanced relation each identifies between us and the object of the emotion. Frustration can span a wide spectrum of contexts and need not connote any moral blame as when we are frustrated with uncooperative weather. Annoyance may convey some moral blame but the blame it signifies is mild. We become annoyed by breaches of etiquette or perhaps when someone is behaving with less rationality than we expect of a human being. Although outrage simpliciter can convey just very strong anger, it more distinctly identifies aptly strong anger directed at a much more serious moral transgression.
In a sense, because, as above, emotions represent how actors stand in relation to the objects of their emotions, emotions are, as Sayer says, cognitive appraisals or evaluations. It follows, as Sayer goes on to say, that we can argue about the aptness of our emotions. I may be annoyed that you have arrived at my office late for an appointment, and if you are late, some degree of annoyance might be justified, might be rational. If, however, you point out correctly that my clock is running fifteen minutes fast, only then would my continued annoyance become unjustified and hence irrational. Emotions, in short, like beliefs, may be either rational or irrational and are certainly not, contrary to conventional prejudice, the correlative contrast to rationality.
The rationality of emotions is important to Sayerâs argument because he goes on to turn to moral emotions, that is, emotions about moral matters. As I have suggested above, outrage is one such.
Among the moral matters that emotionally engage us are our values, in which we are emotionally invested. Along with critical realists generally, what Sayer wants to say against positivism is that values and other moral appraisals are not utterly subjective but reflective of the ontologically objective, empirical world. So, although this may not be quite Sayerâs line of argument, it follows that if emotions generally are rational as reflective evaluations of ontologically objective features of the world, so are moral emotions in particular.
Many of our descriptive terms are hybrids, that is, thick descriptors or moral facts. Although it remains an empirical matter whether or not such descriptors apply to a particular case, they have values ineluctably built into them. Consider murder, rape or genocide. Whether any particular case instantiates any of these categories is subject to argument over empirical evidence. Still, there is no getting around that all carry a moral valence. Thus, if a rape or murder occurred in a particular case, it is a fact, but it is a moral fact. Given their empirical nature and given that, as Sayer s...
