Critical Realism

The Difference it Makes

Justin Cruickshank

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134402816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Critical realism is a movement in philosophy and the human sciences most closely associated with the work of Roy Bhaskar. Since the publication of Bhaskars A Realist Theory of Science, critical realism has had a profound influence on a wide range of subjects. This reader makes accessible, in one volume, key readings to stimulate debate about and within critical realism.
It explores the following themes:
* transcendental realist
* the theory of explanatory critique
* dialectics
* Bhaskar's critical naturalist philosophy of science.

Part I

The self: method and ethics

1 The private life of the social agent

What difference does it make?¹

Margaret S.Archer

As realism gains ground in social theory, it seems fair to admit that it has made a greater contribution to the re-conceptualisation of structure than it has to that of agency. However, if the ‘problem of structure and agency’ is to be resolved, then equivalent attention has to be given to both terms. Moreover, realism’s stratified ontology, which has proved so useful in delineating the properties and powers that emerge at different levels of social structure, is just as pertinent to agency. This is what will be examined here. Specifically, it is those strata that pertain to every mature social agent, namely ‘selfhood’, ‘personal identity’ and ‘social identity’, which will be the focus of attention.² The implications of distinguishing these different personal emergent properties (PEPs) will be discussed throughout in relation to other theories that fail to make these distinctions. What difference a realist approach to agency makes to social investigation will be indicated in the conclusion.

There are two aspects to the ‘problem of agency’, and both are fundamental. Technically, the central problem of agency is to conceptualise the human agent as someone who is both partly formed by their sociality, but who also has the capacity partly to transform their society. Morally, the problem is to put forward a model that is recognisably human; one that retains Arendt’s notion of the ‘Human Condition’ as entailing a reflexive ‘Life of the Mind’. As agents, we are what Charles Taylor (1985:65) calls ‘strong evaluators’, and this must be recognised; for we do not take a detached, third-person, scientific stance to our own lives or to our societies.

Basically, I argue that two ‘models of man’ have dominated social theorising for the past two hundred years, and that neither can cope with the technical or moral problems raised by the ‘problem of agency’.³ These models can be called‘Modernity’s Man’ and ‘Society’s Being’.

In cameo, the Enlightenment allowed the ‘Death of God’ to issue in titanic man. With the secularisation of modernity went a progressive endorsement of human self-determination, of people’s powers to come to know the world, master their environment and thus to control their own destiny as the ‘measure of all things’. As the heritage of the Enlightenment tradition, Modernity’s Man was a model which had stripped down the human being until he had one property alone, that of instrumental rationality, namely the capacity to maximise his preferences through means-ends relationships and so to optimise his utility. In this model, Homo economicus stood forth as the lone, atomistic and opportunistic bargain-hunter—a completely impoverished model of man.

Technically, what this model of man could not deal with were phenomena like voluntary collective behaviour, leading to the creation of public goods; normative behaviour, when Homo economicus recognises his dependence upon others for his own welfare; and, finally, expressive solidarity, a willingness to share, or altruism. Crucially, this model could not cope with the human moral capacity to transcend instrumental rationality and to have ‘ultimate concerns’. These are concerns that are not a means to anything beyond them, but are commitments, which are constitutive of who we are and an expression of our identities. Who we are is a matter of what we care about most. This is what makes us moral beings. None of this caring can be impoverished by reducing it to an instrumental means-ends relationship, which is presumed to leave us ‘better off’ relative to some indeterminate notion of future ‘utility’.

Nevertheless, this was the model of man which 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 lives on not only as the anchorman of microeconomics and the hero of neo-liberalism, but also as 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, ‘[t]he economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all human behaviour’ (1976:8).

The rise of postmodernism during the last two decades represented a virulent rejection of Modernity’s Man, but it spilt over into the dissolution of the human subject and a corresponding inflation of the importance of society. The ‘Death of Man’ joined the ‘Death of God’. Now, in Lyotard’s words, ‘a self does not amount to much’ (1984:15), and in Rorty’s follow-up, ‘[s]ocialisation […] goes all the way down’ (1989:185). To give humankind this epiphenomenal status necessarily deflects all real interest onto the forces of socialisation, as in every version of social constructionism. People are indeed perfectly uninteresting if they possess no personal powers which can make a difference to shaping their own lives or their own society. Consequently, to Foucault, ‘[m]an would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (1970:387).

Society’s Being is social constructionism’s contribution to the debate, which presents our entire human properties and powers, beyond our biological constitution, as the gift of society. Our selfhood is a grammatical fiction, a product of learning to master the first-person pronoun system, and thus quite simply a theory of the self which is appropriated from society. As Harré puts it, ‘[a] person is not a natural object, but a cultural artefact’ (1983:20). We are nothing beyond what society makes us, and it makes us what we are through our joining ‘society’s conversation’. Society’s Being thus impoverishes humanity, by subtracting from our human powers and accrediting all of them—selfhood, reflexivity, thought, memory, emotionality and belief—to society’s discourse.

What makes actors act has now become an urgent question within constructionism, because the answer cannot ever be given in terms of people themselves, who have neither the human resources to pursue their own aims nor the capacity to find reasons good if they are not in social currency. Effectively, this means that the constructionists’ agent can only be moved by reasons appropriated from society, and thus is basically a conventionalist. The human dilemma has been eliminated from the human condition.

Reclaiming the human agent

It is maintained that the most basic of our human powers, beyond our biology, is our ‘selfhood’—a continuous sense of self or reflexive self-consciousness. Even the two defective models need it. Society’s Being requires this sense of self in order for a social agent to know that social obligations pertain to her, rather than just being diffuse expectations which would have no takers, and that when they clash, it is she who is put on a spot. Equally, Modernity’s Man 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 maximising them over time.

To the social realist, relations between humanity and the world are intrinsic to the development of human properties, all of which exist only in potentia, yet are necessary conditions for social life itself. Thus, I am advancing a transcendental argument, 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.⁴ 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, such as Marcel Mauss (1989:3), 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’ (1989:3). 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 through a demonstration of its necessity—namely, that a sense of self must be distinct from social variations in concepts of selves because society would be unable to 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, to the extent that they recognise what is expected of them (otherwise obligations cannot be internalised).

Hence, for example, the individual Zuni has to sense that his two given names, one for Summer and one for Winter, apply to the same self, which is also the rightful successor of the ancestor who is held to live again in the body of each who bears his names. Correct appropriation (by the proper man for all seasons) is dependent upon a continuity of consciousness, which is an integral part of what we mean by selfhood. No generalised social belief in ancestral reincarnation will suffice; for unless there is a self which (pro)claims I am that ancestor, then the belief which is held to be general turns out to be one which has no actual takers! Nor is this situation improved by vague talk about ‘social pressures’ to enact roles or assume genealogical responsibilities. On the contrary; this is incoherent. For it boils down to meaning that everyone knows what roles should be filled, but no one has enough of a sense of self to feel that these expectations apply to them. The implication for society is that nothing gets done, for without selves which sense that responsibilities are their own and which also own expectations, then the latter have all the force of the complaint that ‘someone ought to do something about it’. Thus, no version of socialisation theory can work with Durkheim’s ‘indeterminate material’; human beings have to be determinate in this one way at least, that of acknowledging themselves to be the same beings over time. In other words, Zuni society relies upon a sense of self, even though concepts of the self, within Zuni culture, are unlike ours.⁵

This sense of selfhood is necessarily reflexive. If Antigone did not know that she herself were both King Kreon’s niece and also Polynices’ sister, then she would have no dilemma about whether to obey the royal prohibition on burial of traitors, or to comply with the family duty to bury her brother. However, in this context, Antigone makes a moral decision. It cannot be a socially scripted one because she lacks normative guidelines; her dilemma arises precisely from the fact that those two sets of social norms clash. Nevertheless, she acts, and to understand how and why, we have to know who she is. The rest of the paper concentrates on this very issue; on how we become particular people (possessors of strict personal identity), but people whose personality is not divorced from their sociality, without which we would not be recognisably human. However, this sociality must not be allowed to re-swamp us, or we collapse back into Society’s Being. Therefore, I will proceed in two stages, differentiating between:

1. our personal identities, which arise from our citizenship of the whole world; and
2. our social identities, which are made under social conditions that are not of our choosing.

The emergence of personal identity

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 three different orders of reality: the natural, the practical and the social. Humans necessarily have to sustain organic relationships, work relationships and social relationships—if they are to survive and thrive. Therefore, we cannot afford to be indifferent about the concerns that are embedded in each of these three orders. Our emotions convey the imports of these different orders to us. A distinct type of concern derives from each of these three orders: ‘physical well-being’ in the natural order; ‘performative skill’ in the practical order; and ‘self-worth’ in the social order. Emotions are seen as our reflexive responses to all three, because they are ‘commentaries on our concerns’.

However, a dilemma now confronts all people. It arises because every person receives all three kinds of emotional commentaries on their concerns, originating from each of these orders of reality—natural, practical and social. Because they have to live and attempt to thrive in these three orders simultaneously, they must necessarily, in some way and to some degree, attend to all three clusters of commentaries. This is their problem. Nothing guarantees that the three sets of first-order emotions dovetail harmoniously, and therefore it follows that the concerns to which they relate cannot all be promoted without conflict arising between them. For example, evasion in response to the prompting 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; and withdrawal as a response to social shaming may entail a loss of livelihood. In other words, momentary attention to pressing commentaries might literally produce instant gratification of concerns in one order, but it is a recipe for disaster since we have no alternative but to inhabit these 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 the act of escaping a fire, undertaking a test or getting married.

Instead, each person has to work out their own modus vivendi in relation to these three orders. What this entails is striking a liveable balance within our trinity of inescapable concerns. This modus vivendi can prioritise one of these three orders of reality, as in the case of someone who is said to ‘live for their art’, but what it cannot do is to neglect entirely the other orders. Yet which precise balance we strike between our concerns, and what precisely figures among an individual’s concerns, are what gives us our strict identity as particular persons. Eventually, our emergent personal identities are a matter of how we prioritise one concern as our ‘ultimate concern’, and how we subordinate but yet accommodate others to it; for, constituted as we are, we cannot be unconcerned about how we fare in all three orders of reality. Because our concerns can never be exclusively social, and since the modus vivendi is worked out by an active and reflective agent, personal identity cannot be the gift of society.

The challenge of constructing a modus vivendi out of our many commitments is an active process of reflection, which takes place through an ‘inner 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 the commentaries will not be unanimous, the inner conversation involves evaluating them, promoting some and subordinating others, so that the ultimate concerns we eventually affirm are also those with which we feel we can live. Since the process is fallible (we may get it wrong or circumstances may change), so the conversation is ongoing. I believe that our ‘interior conversations’ are the most utterly neglected phenomenon in social theory, which has never examined the process of reflection that makes us the particular active subjects that we are. This I have begun to unpack as an interior dialogue between the acting ‘I’, a process of forging personal identity by coming to identify the self as the being-with-this-constellation-of-concerns.⁶

As a result of this act of identity formation, a new source of imports comes into being. We now interpret and articulate imports in the light of our commitments that define us, and this brings with it a transformation of emotional commentary. In short, our new commitments represent a new sounding board for the emotions. For example, if marriage is one of our prime concerns, then an attractive opportunity for infidelity is now also felt as a threat of betrayal; its import is that of a liaison dangereuse because we are no longer capable of the simplicity of a purely first-order response. Our reactions to relevant events are emotionally transmuted by our ultimate concerns. This is reinforced because our commitments also transvalue our pasts: the vegetarian is disgusted at once having enjoyed a rare steak, and the ‘green’ inwardly shudders at once having worn a fur coat. This provides positive reinforcement for present commitments. But the same process also works prospectively, because our lives become organised around our ultimate concerns. We consort and concelebrate with those sharing our commitments. ‘Discomfort’ is the transvalued feeling that keeps us apart from those with countercommitments. For instance, feminists report unease in predominantly male gatherings, which struggle for political correctitude.

The resulting modus vivendi, which depends upon durable and effective transvaluation, is an achievement. For children and young people, who undoubtedly have inner dialogues, the establishment of a stable configuration of commitments is a virtual impossib...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV