Replies by Elder-Vass and Hartwig to Cruickshank/Little

Two leading exponents of critical realism, Dave Elder-Vass (The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency) and Mervyn Hartwig (Dictionary of Critical Realism), have offered critical replies to my post presenting some of Justin Cruickshank's criticisms of CR and indirectly to my own post on "Bhaskar's Core Ideas." I have invited them to amend and extend their comments and to publish them here to facilitate a coherent reading and continuing discussion. Ruth Groff also replied, and her comments can be read here. Thank you, Dave, Mervyn, and Ruth, for contributing to this discussion! 

Replies to Cruickshank/Little on critical realism

From Dave Elder-Vass:

Cruickshank's argument might have some merit if it was true that Bhaskar is committed to an a priori understanding of metaphysics and denies the possibility that his transcendental arguments could possibly be wrong. But it just isn't so, and Cruickshank willfully ignores statements that make this clear. Perhaps the clearest I'm aware of is this: "It is important to remember that all cognitive claims, including claims to knowledge of necessities in any mode (whether logical, mathematical, transcendental, conceptual, natural, conventional, psychological, historical, etc.) are fallible; and that discourse, and perhaps especially philosophical discourse… is typically dialogical or conversational in structure” (Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, p. 15).

And this isn't an isolated quote, by the way: Bhaskar is thoroughly committed to the fallibility of all knowledge claims and even cites 'epistemological relativism' as one of the three cornerstones of critical realism (though 'epistemological fallibilism' might describe his position more accurately).

This interpretation might seem to be undermined by one of the quotes from Bhaskar included by Daniel in his earlier post. Bhaskar does say "It is not necessary that science occurs. But given that it does, it is necessary that the world is a certain way". But I think we have to be careful about what it is that he is ascribing necessity to here. What is necessary is that IF science occurs THEN the world must be such that science is possible and/or intelligible. This seems uncontroversial. But Cruickshank seems to read him as saying that IF science occurs THEN Bhaskar's own specific account of what is entailed by science must be true -- in other words, that the world consists of things with powers arising from mechanisms. Bhaskar certainly asserts that the world does consist of such things, but he does not assert that this is necessarily the case, or even that it necessarily follows from the existence of science. There is scope for error in claims about the specific features of the world that make science possible, and it is quite clear from Bhaskar's other statements that he accepts this.

From Mervyn Hartwig:

I agree. It's Cruickshank who makes dogmatic and quite false claims about Bhaskar not regarding his philosophical ontology as fallible. Bhaskar does of course make a priori arguments, but they're a conditional and relative, situated to a particular historical context. The reasoning could be faulty, the premises might change, or they can be disputed, so the conclusions are revisable and historically relative.

From Dan Little:

Hi, Dave, and greetings, Mervyn, thanks for your comments. This is all worth discussing carefully!
Dave quotes a relevant passage from RTS (cited in my earlier post):

"But given that science does or could occur, the world must be a certain way. Thus, the transcendental  realist asserts, that the world is structured and differentiated can be established by philosophical argument; though the particular structures it contains and the ways in which it is differentiated are matters for substantive scientific investigation."

Do you feel that this is not in fact representative of RB's philosophical reasoning?

Mervyn Hartwig:

The quote Daniel gives is a bald summary of the transcendental realist position. If you read the detail you will find that 'established' means 'corrigibly', 'conditionally', 'relatively', 'provisionally' etc. The conclusion of a transcendental argument follows with logical necessity from the major and minor premises (hence 'must'), but only if the premises are sound! The analysis establishing the major premises could  be faulty and the minor premise might be disputed or change. Here is a quote from The Possibility of Naturalism that runs completely counter to Cruickshank's (and Daniel's) attempt to assimilate Bhaskar's position to that of old-style metaphysics:

"According to [transcendental realism], there is no connection between (a) what lies beyond sense‑experience and (b) some special sphere of philosophy. For at least once a non‑reductionist account of science is accepted then some 'transcendent' entities, such as magnetic fields, may quite properly be regarded as objects of scientific investigation. But their 'transcendence' is a contingent fact about the world, and philosophy speaks with no special authority about it. The familiar conflation of (a) and (b) in a unitary concept of metaphysics must be assiduously avoided. It has proved a prop for a positivism that has systematically scouted the cognitive potential of both philosophy and science. Secondly, by making the possibility of philosophical discourse contingent upon the actuality of particular social practices it provides ... a way of reconciling transcendental and sociological analyses of social activities such as science ‑ and philosophy". (p. 7)

There are many passages to similar effect throughout Bhaskar's oeuvre.

There is nothing wrong with conditional and relative transcendental arguments! Science itself uses them, or a retroductive-analogical procedure that belongs to the same family, centrally. What must be the case to render these and these well attested results intelligible, e.g. Darwin.

Dustin McWherter, The Problem of Critical Ontology: Bhaskar Contra Kant, has recently made a very good effort at defending a reconstructed version of Bhaskar's argument for transcendental realism in RTS. He stresses its historical and provisional nature. He doesn't even mention Cruickshank, quite rightly too: as Dave implies, Cruickshank's 'critique' either willfully misrepresents Bhaskar or is ignorant.

A transcendental argument, on Bhaskar’s account (RTS 257), has the following logical form:

• Major premise: Only if Q, then P
• Minor premise: P
• Conclusion: Therefore, Q

Here is McWherter’s reconstruction of the basic form of the argument from experimental activity in RTS (The Problem of Critical Ontology: Bhaskar Contra Kant, 115).

• Major premise(s): Only if extra-experimental reality is an open system (Q1), causal laws are not constant conjunctions of events (Q2), and causal laws are the transcendentally real tendencies of generative mechanisms (Q3), then experimental activity is intelligible (P)
• Minor premise: Experimental activity is intelligible (P)
• Conclusion(s): Therefore, extra-experimental reality is an open system (Q1), causal laws are not constant conjunctions of events (Q2), and causal laws are the transcendentally real tendencies of generative mechanisms (Q3)

My main points are that (1) the argument is contextual and polemical – directed against a specific philosophical theory, the Humean account of a causal law, that it seeks to replace. It seeks to demonstrate that it offers, not the only possible theory consistent with (P), but ‘the only theory at present known to us’ that is consistent with it (RTS 260).  It anticipates its own supersession in due course. (2) The conclusions only follow if the minor premise is acceptable and accepted by Bhaskar’s interlocutors. (3) Both experimental activity and our understanding of it may change. Indeed, experimental science may cease to exist. Philosophy is in history, and critical realist philosophy is not a traditional philosophy. In sum, the argument is geo-historically relative and conditional.

Building on McWherter, the main argument of PON, the founding philosophical text of critical realist social theory and social science, establishing the possibility of a non-positivist naturalism may be reconstructed as follows. The same kind of considerations apply.

• Major premises: Only if the world, including the social world, is an open system (Q₁), causal laws are not constant conjunctions of events (Q₂), causal laws are the transcendentally real powers or tendencies of generative mechanisms (Q₃), society is a structure or ensemble of powers irreducible to people (Q₄) and people’s intentionality  is irreducible and causally efficacious (mind is an emergent power of matter and reasons when acted on are causes) (Q₅), then human intentional activity is intelligible (P)
• Minor premise: Human intentional activity is intelligible (P)
• Conclusion(s): Therefore, the world, including the social world, is an open system (Q₁), causal laws are not constant conjunctions of events (Q₂), causal laws are the transcendentally real powers or tendencies of generative mechanisms (Q₃), society is a structure or ensemble of powers irreducible to people (Q4) and people’s intentionality is irreducible and causally efficacious (mind is an emergent power of matter and reasons when acted on are causes) (Q5)

Dan Little:

Elder-Vass and Hartwig reject the core claims that I have attributed to Cruickshank in his critique of Bhaskar's philosophical method: that Bhaskar pursues an aprioristic philosophical method in arriving at the fundamental ideas of critical realism, and that he regards these ideas as having been established with  some kind of certainty by this method. (I should make it clear, of course, that this is my interpretation of Cruickshank; I hope I have not mis-represented him.) Against this aprioristic and infallibilist reading, Elder-Vass and Hartwig argue that Bhaskar's reasoning is not aprioristic and that he regards his conclusions as being fallible and historically conditioned.

I believe that both E-V and Hartwig concede that there are important passages in Bhaskar's A Realist Theory of Science that give an impression of aprioricity and infallibility in Bhaskar (for example, the passage I quote above), but they maintain that a fuller reading of Bhaskar's texts demonstrates that these passages should not be taken at face value. This introductory statement is a "bald" statement, in Hartwig's word. Both E-V and Hartwig assert that other formulations in Bhaskar's corpus serve to amend the "bald" statement and make clear that Bhaskar's final opinion on method is not dogmatic, aprioristic, or infallibilist. And they also assert that later versions of Bhaskar's theories demonstrate these non-dogmatic features of philosophical method as well. So to make out the claim that Bhaskar's method is philosophical, apriori, and prone to asserting the necessity of the conclusions reached, we are obliged to consider all of Bhaskar's comments about method, not just his summary comments, and consider them throughout the fullness of his development of the theory, not just in RTS.

This seems to concede the point that it is not wholly unreasonable to observe that Bhaskar does sometimes assert the features of certainty that Cruickshank attributes to him. The remaining question is whether that adequately represents his mature and complete view, and these critics are adamant that it does not.

Dave and Mervyn make a number of very important points here, and I expect to respond in greater detail in an upcoming post. Thanks to both of them for helping to push this inquiry forward!

Guest post by Ruth Groff on the ontology of critical realism

Ruth Groff is Assistant Professor of Political Science at St. Louis University. She specializes in the philosophical underpinnings of Western social and political thought. She is author of Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism (2012, with John Greco), Ontology Revisited: Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy (Ontological Explorations) (2012), and Revitalizing Causality: Realism about Causality in Philosophy and Social Science (2007). Here is her webpage at SLU. This contribution is a response to my prior post on the status of ontology and is also very relevant to my post treating Justin Cruickshank's critique of Bhaskar. Thanks for contributing, Ruth.

Response to Little on ontology in critical realism
Ruth Groff

As a preliminary -- I am confused by the locution "a theory of ontology." An ontology just is an account of the general features of what (one thinks) there is. Yes?  Beyond this, a meta-theory, relative to a given ontological stance, would either be an epistemological inquiry ("How do you know that things are that way?") or a work of meta-metaphysics ("What is involved or presupposed by saying that things are that way?").

The relevant claims in A Realist Theory of Science, I'd say, are as follows: if experimentation is what Humean and Kantian philosophers of science take it to be, then the Humean (and Kantian) ontology can't be right. The idea here is that there is an ontology -- an account of the basic features of the natural world, including e.g., its material existence -- that is implicit in the practice of natural experimentation, and that this implicit ontology is one that is at odds with the ontology endorsed by Humeans and Kantians.  Bhaskar may or may not be correct, either about what the implicit ontology of the activity of experimentation is, or about whether or not it is consistent with the explicit ontology of Humeanism and Kantianism re: laws (and other basic features of the world).  But I'm not seeing where he has over-reached, philosophically. If you tell me that you love improvisational comedy, but also that you are a hard determinist, I'd say "Dude, you can't have it both ways." I might be wrong in thinking that that's what it would amount to, but I don't think that I'd be over-reaching.

So that's one point. In terms of my example, we'd say that it is philosophical reflection that shows that you can't be doing what you and everyone else say improv is and also be a hard determinist.

A second point concerns the epistemic question: "How can you know that one general ontology is correct and another is incorrect?" [E.g., how do you know that the world does not contain wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts? Or how do you know that there is no such thing as a real causal power? Or an essence? Etc.]  Bhaskar has two completely different orders of response to this question. One is meta-theoretical, and it is mainly designed to dispel confusion. At that level, he says "Do not be tempted to think that the reflexive epistemic question (i.e., the question of the justification of the ontological commitments that one cannot help but have) -- do not be tempted to think that "How do I know that the world is x-like?" is the SAME question as "Is the world x-like?". To conflate the two is, straight-forwardly, a category mistake, he says. He calls this particular category mistake the "epistemic fallacy." He has a lot of terms that are not especially useful, but this one I think is. I will come back to it. But for the moment I just want to note that that is one order of his response to the reflexive question that you flag. The response is a cautionary, meta-theoretical one: "Don't make this very common post-Kantian category mistake, as you consider the matter." Ok.

The second way he responds to "How do you know that the natural world really does have the general features that it must have, if scientific experimentation is the sort of activity that what we agree it is?" obviously hinges on whether or not we think that science as a practice delivers theories that warrant our belief in them. Bhaskar thinks that belief in scientific theory is, indeed, generally warranted. (I think he also thinks that it is a lot easier to deny this in theory than it is to deny it in practice.) The next question we have to address, then, if we are tracking his thinking, is a general epistemic one about what justifies our belief in the superiority of one substantive explanation over another, this particular scientific theory over that one.  His answer here includes the following elements: (a) we can't ever be certain; (b) it is always possible that our best theory will turn out to be wrong [it is hard core Popperian fallibilism, here]; (c) scientific facts are are theory dependent; (c) the better theory will probably explain more of the data; (d) we are likely to eventually have a better theory than the current one.

Now, you might be tempted to say "Well, if that's all the epistemic certainty that you can give me re: our best scientific theory, then identifying the implicit ontology of scientific experimentation is about as significant to me for getting my ontology right as is identifying the implicit ontology of Santa's activities on Dec. 24th." But saying that belief in scientific theory is not rational, such that assuming the intelligibility of experimentation is to begin from a false premise, is a very different kind of objection to RB's argument than is saying that he has over-reached philosophically, or is somehow claiming infallible empirical knowledge of how the world is. It is terribly important to be clear about this. RB even has a term for the mistake of thinking that you can read infallible knowledge off of some purported set of "facts." He calls it the "ontological fallacy."

I'll be quiet in a minute, but I just wanted to go back to the meta-claim that it is a category mistake to conflate the questions: "How do I know if the world is x-like?" and "Is the world x-like?" It is worth noting -- as Bhaskar does -- that although these are logically at different levels of abstraction (so it's a category mistake technically speaking no matter what), nevertheless, if one is a subjective idealist (and probably also if one is a pragmatist) then nothing much hangs on having made this mistake. But that is also to say, of course, that to make it more or less with impunity one must adopt a particular metaphysics. I think that if there is one lesson to be learned from Bhaskar (though he is not alone in the history of philosophy in stressing this), it is that there is no metaphysically neutral ground. The minute you say anything, you have said something about how you take the world to be. Post-Kantians (though one might prefer Descartes as the marker) will emphasize that the minute that you say anything about the world, you have thereby thought something about the world. Bhaskar is not trying to get around this. As I said, he's even got a named fallacy for the effort. No contemporary realist would. Ok, maybe some kind of non-reflective empiricist would. But no dialectical thinker would. As I say, I think it's so important to be clear on what Bhaskar did and did not say. I disagree with some of the things that he said and has gone on to say, and I think everyone else should too . But we have to identify real points of difference. It's so great that you are encouraging this discussion!

Is ontology an apriori field of knowledge?

The critical realists -- Roy Bhaskar in particular -- attach a great deal of importance to the question of ontology. A theory of ontology should describe the kinds of things, relations, and forces that exist in a realm. So the pre-Socratic philosophers were engaging in ontological theorizing when they asked the question, what does matter consist of -- atoms or a plenum?

The question I am raising here is one of philosophical methodology: what kind of epistemic basis is available for formulating and defending a theory of ontology? How can we claim to know various truths about the nature of reality?

There seem to be three possibilities.

• Apriori philosophical argument: derive conclusions about the necessary structure of the world from apriori philosophical principles. This is traditional metaphysics, and few philosophers would advocate for it today. (foundationalist theory)
• Transcendental philosophical argument: arrive at conclusions about what the world must consist of, in order to make sense of our cognitive abilities. This is Kantian metaphysics, which attempts to do without foundational assumptions and to derive conclusions from the prerequisites of epistemic achievements we are known to have. (internalist theory)
• Generalized empirical theorizing: all substantive representations of the world are hypothetical, justified by the contribution they make to our ability to formulate good, empirically supported scientific theories. This is the approach taken by naturalistic philosophers, who maintain that there are no apriori truths and the only vehicle we have for discovering the nature of the world is through scientific imagination and observation. (coherence theory)

Ontology appears to be about the world; but equally it might be considered to be about a set of particularly fundamental concepts and conceptual structures.  The question, "What does the world consist of?" can also be presented as the question, "What concepts serve best to represent the hypothetical structure of the world underlying observations?" Concepts are the intellectual tools or schemes through which we analyze the world; and if they refer to unobservable entities, they are unavoidably hypothetical constructs. As "knowing beings", it has been necessary for human beings to use their imaginations to come up with concepts in terms of which to analyze the world. Some conceptual systems are defective because they lead to expectations about the world that are not born out; other systems are more complex than necessary; yet others postulate entities or processes that we may have reason to want to avoid: magical forces, divine intervention, action-at-a-distance. And when we arrive at a conceptual scheme that appears to serve well as a durable basis for a range of scientific theories, we may want to conclude that the world actually has the properties attributed to it by the scheme.

Nelson Goodman takes a fairly radical view on this question in Ways of Worldmaking. He takes the example of two apparently inconsistent statements about the world: "The sun always moves" and "The sun never moves." And he points out that the statements must be framed within one or another frame of reference; they are not absolutely true or false, but rather true or false with respect to a frame.

Frames of reference, though, belong less to what is described than to systems of description; and each of the two statements relates what is described to such a system. If I ask about the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of reference; but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say? We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described. Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world or of worlds. (58)

Here is the conclusion that Goodman reaches that is most relevant to the topic of realism:

Many different world-versions are of independent interest and importance, without any requirement or presumption of reducibility to a single base. The pluralist, far from being anti-scientific, accepts the sciences at full value. His typical adversary is the monopolistic materialist or physicalist who maintains that one system, physics, is preeminent and all-inclusive, such that every other version must eventually be reduced to it or rejected as false or meaningless. If all right versions could somehow be reduced to one and only one, that one might with some semblance of plausibility be regarded as the only truth about the only world. But the evidence for such reducibility is negligible, and even the claim is nebulous since physics itself is fragmentary and unstable and the kind and consequences of reduction envisaged are vague. (59-60)

The philosophical position I am invoking here is also a key part of W.V.O. Quine's approach to empirical knowledge in Word and Object. His phrase, the "web of belief", captures the idea well. All real knowledge falls within that web, and it is held together only by observation (when statements have implications for outcomes that can be observed) and logic. The premises of quantum mechanics are some distance from the observational and experimental sentences that can be examined in the lab; and the premises of metaphysical theory are even more distant. But they are all dependent on the same kinds of requirements: simplicity, coherence, and (when possible), empirical observation. Quine referred to "Neurath's boat" as a way of describing the state of our knowledge of the world -- from the observable properties of coal to the fundamentals of time and space:

Neurath has likened science to a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it. The philosopher and the scientist are in the same boat. If we improve our understanding of ordinary talk of physical things, it will not be by reducing that talk to a more familiar idiom; there is none. It will be by clarifying the connections, causal or otherwise, between ordinary talk of physical things and various further matters which in turn we grasp with help of ordinary talk of physical things. (3)

...

Analyze theory-building how we will, we all must start in the middle. Our conceptual firsts are middle-sized, middle-distanced objects, and our introduction to them and to everything comes midway in the cultural evolution of the race.... We cannot strip away the conceptual trappings sentence by sentence and leave a description of the objective world; but we can investigate the world, and man as a part of it, and thus find out what cues he could have of what goes on around him. (4-5)

(Quine's participation in the Boolos panel above is a very good exposure to some of his thinking about meaning and concepts.)

It is perhaps surprising to invoke Goodman and Quine in the context of reflections on critical realism, since their philosophies are anti-realistic (or at least agnostic between realism and anti-realism), and the logical-positivist background of much their thinking is anathema to the critical realists. Moreover, both lend support to a certain kind of conceptual relativism: Quine through his arguments about the indeterminacy of translation and ontological relativity (Ontological Relativity), and Goodman through his view of "many worlds" in Ways of Worldmaking. This perspective doesn't necessarily commit one to anti-realism; in fact, Hilary Putnam's effort to create a defensible formulation of "internal realism" indicates one possible direction of argument towards realism from these premises. (Maria Baghramian's discussion in "From Realism Back to Realism" of Putnam's various positions on realism is very good; link.) But it is difficult to see how one could arrive at a strong philosophical realism within these epistemic constraints.

However, if these arguments on the limits of metaphysical reasoning are valid, then we need to acknowledge these limits and move forward. Fundamentally, the core of their position seems unassailable: there is no epistemic foundation possible outside the loose constraints of empirical observation and logic that can justify a set of beliefs about the fundamental structure of the world. There is no secret recipe for arriving at metaphysical knowledge through purely philosophical pathways.

The statement of realism in which I have the greatest confidence is this: we are justified in acknowledging the reality in the world of the things, processes, structures, and forces that are postulated or implied by the best scientific theories we have to date. And we acknowledge that these beliefs, like all scientific and empirical beliefs, are fallible and correctable.

(An upcoming post will discuss Tuukka Kaidesoja's very interesting critique of critical realism and his advocacy of "naturalized critical realism" in Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology.)

Cruickshank's central critique

Justin Cruickshank is a friendly critic to critical realism, not a hostile one. He criticizes the philosophical method but supports many of the substantive conclusions about realism. (Here is a prior post on the gist of Cruickshank's criticisms.) Cruickshank provides a useful analysis of critical realism and its anti-matter double, social constructivism, in “Positive and Negative,” a working paper at the International Migration Institute in 2011 (link).

It seems that Cruickshank's most basic concern in "Positive and Negative" is that CR posits a particular ontology as the unique precondition of all science (a move familiar from transcendental metaphysics), and that philosophical reasoning can tell us what that ontology involves. So Bhaskar places excessive reliance on an apriorimethod of philosophical reasoning in constructing his metaphysical ideas. By contrast, in "Positive and Negative" Cruickshank favors a more malleable and fallibilist stance on ontology.  Here is one fairly clear statement of his view of the central shortcoming of CR:

Finally it is suggested that the correct way to construe the post-positivist problem-situation is to focus on the fallibility of knowledge, as critical realism does and, unlike critical realism, argue that fallible knowledge claims should be revised and replaced through criticism, with the focus being on theories’ ability to solve explanatory problems rather than their adherence to a set of ontological assumptions that are posited as the condition of possibility of the social sciences. (4)

What is implied here is the view that all knowledge — both ordinary scientific knowledge and ontological knowledge — is fallible and revisable. This means that ontology should not be treated as part of a priori philosophy but rather as the more abstract end of the spectrum of scientific theorizing about the world. Bhaskar errs, then, in asserting that ontological knowledge is different in kind from ordinary scientific knowledge; it is transcendental knowledge — knowledge based on rigorous analysis of the necessary preconditions of ordinary scientific knowledge.

This is a serious criticism of the method that Bhaskar uses in developing his theory of critical realism; but it does not imply disagreement with the key substantive conclusions of Bhaskar’s developed theory. Cruickshank remains a realist, and leaves it open that we can coherently maintain the key substantive ideas of critical realism: Ontology is important, bad assumptions about ontology can lead to bad scientific theory, and we can indeed regard the statements of an ontological theory as being referential to the “real” structure of the world. (In Bhaskar’s terminology, we can look at ontology as being and account of non-transitive knowledge.) Here is the brief summary that Cruickshank offers in his introduction to CRITICAL REALISM: THE DIFFERENCE THAT IT MAKES:

Critical realism is realist because it holds, contra postmodernism and social constructionism, that research is about gaining knowledge of a reality that exists independently of our representations of it.... Critical realism is critical, as regards methodology, because it holds that the concepts which inform the meta-theory that defines structure and agency can only be developed via a critical dialogue with alternative social ontologies. (kl 568)

Cruickshank situates critical realism and its opposite, social constructivism, in terms of their different efforts to reject "positivism”. So positivism is the foil against which critical realism is unfolded. (Ruth Groff makes a slightly different choice in her choice of Humean causation theory is the foil. Humeanism and positivism have various similarities, but they are not identical doctrines.) According to Cruickshank, Bhaskar rejects positivism for several reasons; but its commitment to the idea of unified deductive theories underlying the full range of empirical observations is at the top of the list. He characterizes this approach to the relation of science to the world as one involving a “closed systems ontology” (7); whereas he believes an ontology that looks at the world as a “stratified open system” is preferable. The “stratified” part of the concept refers to the idea that causal mechanisms are “emergent” from the lower-level things of which they are composed; and the “open” part of the concept refers to the idea that there are substantial dimensions of contingency involved in any complicated social process. “The ontology [of a stratified open system] is held to be one of open systems because the underlying causal laws interact in contingent ways to produce change at the level of observable events” (7).

Cruickshank believes that this distinction between open and closed systems leads eventually to Margaret Archer’s concept of “morphogenesis” (8); link.

JC also offers an answer to a question posed in an earlier post: what is “critical” about critical realism (link)? Here is the heart of his answer:

For those critical realists who regard critical realism as a form of neo-Marxism, the task of social science is not just that of explaining how structures and agents interact but also that of criticism (see Bhaskar 1998 and Collier 1998). Their argument runs thus. Any scientific account of how the capitalist structure works will show how it is oppressive and exploitative. It will also show how this structure needs to generate ideological beliefs to mask its nefarious character. Ideological beliefs here are defined as beliefs which are not only false but caused by a structural need for obfuscation and which serve the interests of the capitalist class by obfuscating oppression and inequality.  (10)

So “critical” here has two meanings: exposing of undesirable characteristics of some social entities and exposing how certain formulations of ordinary belief have the effect of concealing those characteristics.

(Incidentally, Cruickshank explains one of Bhaskar’s most basic ideas, the notion of an “intransitive domain of reality”, in terms that suggest the terminology itself is misleading. Theory is transitive because “fallible theories are open to change” (8). This sounds like a definition of “transitory” or "changing" rather than “transitive” ("allowing inference from one proposition to another: if A is longer than B and B is longer than C then A is longer than C"). Here is the place where Bhaskar introduces the distinction in A Realist Theory of Science:

Any adequate philosophy of science must find a way of grappling with this central paradox of science: that men in their social activity produce knowledge which is a social product much like any other, which is no more independent of its production and the men who produce it than motor cars, armchairs or books, which has its own craftsmen, technicians, publicists, standards and skills and which is no less subject to change than any other commodity. This is one side of 'knowledge'. The other is that knowledge is 'of' things which are not produced by men at all: the specific gravity of mercury, the process of electrolysis, the mechanism of light propagation. None of these 'objects of knowledge' depend upon human activity. If men ceased to exist sound would continue to travel and heavy bodies fall to the earth in exactly the same way, though ex hypothesi there would be no-one to know it. Let us call these, in an unavoidable technical neologism, the intransitive objects of knowledge. The transitive objects of knowledge are Aristotelian material causes. They are the raw materials of science—the artificial objects fashioned into items of knowledge by the science of the day. They include the antecedently established facts and theories, paradigms and models, methods and techniques of inquiry available to a particular scientific school or worker. The material cause, in this sense, of Darwin's theory of natural selection consisted of the ingredients out of which he fashioned his theory. Among these were the facts of natural variation, the theory of domestic selection and Malthus' theory of population. Darwin worked these into a knowledge of a process, too slow and complex to be perceived, which had been going on for millions of years before him. But he could not, at least if his theory is correct, have produced the process he described, the intransitive object of the knowledge he had produced: the mechanism of natural selection.... In short, the intransitive objects of knowledge are in general invariant to our knowledge of them: they are the real things and structures, mechanisms and processes, events and possibilities of the world; and for the most part they are quite independent of us. (Kindle Locations 749-764) (italics mine)

It would appear that Cruickshank's interpretation is consistent with these remarks by Bhaskar.)

Cruickshank also edited a useful volume, CRITICAL REALISM: THE DIFFERENCE THAT IT MAKES, to which he contributed a useful introduction and an applied article, "Underlabouring and unemployment: Notes for developing a critical realist approach to the agency of the chronically unemployed". Another very useful collection edited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson, and Alan Norrie, Critical Realism: Essential Readings (1998), provides an excellent selection of readings on critical realism.

 

Bhaskar's core ideas

Critical realism has become an important topic within sociological theory, and several prior (and upcoming) posts have addressed the theory. As a point of reference for this ongoing discussion, consider a few key statements by Roy Bhaskar about transcendental [critical] realism in A Realist Theory of Science. Here is a simple and clear definition of Bhaskar's theory of realism:

The third position, which is advanced here, may be characterized as transcendental realism. It regards the objects of knowledge as the structures and mechanisms that generate phenomena; and the knowledge as produced in the social activity of science. These objects are neither phenomena (empiricism) nor human constructs imposed upon the phenomena (idealism), but real structures which endure and operate independently of our knowledge, our experience and the conditions which allow us access to them. Against empiricism, the objects of knowledge are structures, not events; against idealism, they are intransitive (in the sense defined). (p. 15)

And here is Bhaskar's statement of how he views the cognitive status of the theory of transcendental realism:

It is not necessary that science occurs. But given that it does, it is necessary that the world is a certain way. It is contingent that the world is such that science is possible. And, given that it is possible, it is contingent upon the satisfaction of certain social conditions that science in fact occurs. But given that science does or could occur, the world must be a certain way. Thus, the transcendental realist asserts, that the world is structured and differentiated can be established by philosophical argument; though the particular structures it contains and the ways in which it is differentiated are matters for substantive scientific investigation. (p. 19)

This passage makes it clear that Bhaskar believes the statements of ontology are philosophical statements, and they are established with a kind of necessity that differentiates them from ordinary empirical statements. This indicates Bhaskar's adherence to a philosophical method of discovery, inquiry, and justification.

Here is an example of Bhaskar's transcendental reasoning, applied to the analysis of experimentation.

The intelligibility of experimental activity presupposes not just the intransitivity but the structured character of the objects investigated under experimental conditions. Let me once again focus on the empiricist's favourite case, viz. causal laws, leaving aside for the moment such other objects of investigation as structures and atomic constitutions. A causal law is analysed in empiricist ontology as a constant conjunction of events perceived (or perceptions). Now an experiment is necessary precisely to the extent that the pattern of events forthcoming under experimental conditions would not be forthcoming without it. Thus in an experiment we are a causal agent of the sequence of events, but not of the causal law which the sequence of events, because it has been produced under experimental conditions, enables us to identify. (p. 23) (italics mine)

Essentially Bhaskar is making a classic Kantian move here: he is arguing that we cannot make intellectual sense of a scientist's use of experiment without presupposing that there are underlying objects and causal laws governing them which are the subject of the experiment. The phrase in italics identifies the necessary presupposition of the experiment: the presence of objective, theory-independent causal laws governing the objects of the experiment. And, as the subsequent sentence in the text makes clear, the causal laws in question are of a different ontological order than the events that manifest them. Here is how Derk Pereboom summarizes Kant's transcendental argument against Hume in his contribution to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (link):

In the Metaphysical Deduction (A66–83, B92–116) Kant intends to derive the categories [including causation] from the specific modes or forms of any human thought about the world, the logical forms of judgment. The Metaphysical Deduction has an essential role to play in the Transcendental Deduction, and we will discuss this argument at an appropriate juncture (when we reach §19 of the B-Deduction).

It is evident that Bhaskar's style of argument here parallels that of Kant. However, Kant's transcendental method is not in fact satisfactory. We have the example of non-Euclidean geometries to provide a reminder that Kant's reasoning fails. Kant used the same kind of transcendental argument from the possibility of experience to arrive at the conclusion that space is necessarily Euclidean, but the discoveries of the consistency of non-Euclidean geometry (and the physical geometry of general relativity theory) show that this conclusion is incorrect. This example reminds us that transcendental reasoning is not truth-preserving; we can proceed from a transcendental argument to a false conclusion.

Now back to Bhaskar and the transcendental conclusion that he draws from the argument concerning experimentation:

The intelligibility of experimental activity presupposes then the intransitive and structured character of the objects of scientific knowledge, at least in so far as these are causal laws. And this presupposes in turn the possibility of a non-human world, i.e. causal laws without invariances and experiences, and in particular of a non-empirical world, i.e. causal laws and events without experiences; and the possibility of open systems, i.e. causal laws out of phase with patterns of events and experiences, and more generally of epistemically insignificant experiences, i.e. experiences out of phase with events and/or causal laws. In saying that the objects of scientific discovery and investigation are 'intransitive' I mean to indicate therefore that they exist independently of all human activity; and in saying that they are 'structured' that they are distinct from the patterns of events that occur. The causal laws of nature are not empirical statements, i.e. statements about experiences; nor are they statements about events; nor are they synthetic a priori statements. (pp. 25-26)

So here Bhaskar pulls the rabbit from the hat: he argues that we can conclude that we must presuppose intransitive and structured objects subject to causal laws if we are to make sense of the intelligibility of experimentation. Here he repeats the finding:

In §3 I argued that only if causal laws are not the patterns of events that enable us to identify them can the intelligibility of experimental activity be sustained. But causal laws are, or have seemed to philosophers to be, pretty mysterious entities. What can it mean to say that they have a real basis independent of events? The answer to this question will be seen to necessitate the development of a non-anthropocentric ontology of structures, generative mechanisms and active things. (p. 35)

So philosophy allows us to conclude something substantive about metaphysics, according to Bhaskar: (if science exists) that there are real independent causal laws. Science does in fact exist; therefore there are real independent causal laws.

Finally consider Bhaskar's notion of things and powers:

The world consists of things, not events. Most things are complex objects, in virtue of which they possess an ensemble of tendencies, liabilities and powers. It is by reference to the exercise of their tendencies, liabilities and powers that the phenomena of the world are explained. Such continuing activity is in turn referred back for explanation to the essential nature of things. On this conception of science it is concerned essentially with what kinds of things they are and with what they tend to do; it is only derivatively concerned with predicting what is actually going to happen. It is only rarely, and normally under conditions which are artificially produced and controlled, that scientists can do the latter. And, when they do, its significance lies precisely in the light that it casts on the enduring natures and ways of acting of independently existing and transfactually active things. (p. 41)

So things (objects) possess powers, and we explain the behavior of objects (and ensembles) as a consequence of the operation of their powers. And powers and causal laws are linked; powers generate laws:

There is nothing esoteric or mysterious about the concept of the generative mechanisms of nature, which provide the real basis of causal laws. For a generative mechanism is nothing other than a way of acting of a thing. It endures, and under appropriate circumstances is exercised, as long as the properties that account for it persist. Laws then are neither empirical statements (statements about experiences) nor statements about events. Rather they are statements about the ways of acting of independently existing and transfactually active things. (pp. 41-42)

These statements and assumptions by Bhaskar illustrate a fairly clear philosophical methodology. It is a method that derives from Kant's transcendental metaphysics. And Bhaskar seems to be confident in arriving at definite and assertoric conclusions based on this method. Ontology is not an empirical discipline, according to Bhaskar; instead, it is a philosophical reflection on the preconditions of science, and it is grounded in philosophical arguments rather than empirical, scientific, or experimental arguments.

This implies that Bhaskar adheres to the idea that there are at least two kinds of knowledge that we can be interested in -- philosophical and empirical-scientific. He therefore plainly rejects the coherentist and general scientific view (espoused by W.V.O. Quine and the pragmatists) that all defensible beliefs are eventually empirical, whether more directly connected to experience or more distantly so.

This feature of Bhaskar's method lays him open to the kind of criticism that is offered by Justin Cruickshank and others.

Making institutions

The new institutionalists have largely focused on the maintenance and evolution of major social and political institutions. So Kathleen Thelen's excellent book, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan, examines the stability and change within the institutions through which skill is transmitted, Paul Pierson looks at issues of temporarily within institutional change in Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis, and Elinor Ostrom examines institutions through which communities solve common-property resource problems in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. In each case the analysis begins with the institution already well developed.

The tools of comparative historical research have proven highly useful in the context of these sorts of questions. Thus Thelen compares roughly a century of institutional history in Great Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to show that the same social and economic needs of an industrial economy have been satisfied with different sets of stable ensembles of training institutions, and she is enabled to consider (and sometimes reject) common theories of how institutional change and stability occur. For example, the theory of necessary functional convergence is refuted by her study.

Another important question has not been so fully examined to date within this tradition is how major institutional innovations are invented in the first place. Here too the tools of comparison are very relevant. But the challenge is to find appropriate cases: instances where roughly similar institutions emerged in concrete historical settings where we can work backwards to trace out the structural and agentic events and processes that appear to be relevant.

For this reason the appearance of Wenkai HE's Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State: England, Japan, and China is a timely and interesting contribution. HE undertakes a comparative study of the emergence of what he calls the "modern fiscal state" in Britain, China, and Japan. He has undertaken to learn enough about these three cases in detail to be able to tell a reasonably detailed story of the emergence of this set of state tax and revenue institutions in the three settings, and he is thereby poised to consider some important institutional-causal questions about the innovations he observes. The book is a "cross-over" work, with political science methods and historical research content. The book combines new institutionalism, comparative historical sociology, and first-rate historical scholarship to make a compelling historical argument.

The subject is important for several reasons. First, as Chuck Tilly emphasized, the capacity of the modern state to increase and rationalize its ability to collect taxes is key to the extension of military and administrative power. So fiscal institution building is at the heart of modern state formation. Second, it sheds some light on the specific challenges China confronted on its road to creating a pervasive modern state at mid-19th century. Third, the granularity of the account permits rigorous explanation of some specific turning points in each nation's course of "modernization".

HE describes the path dependency of institution creation in these terms:

Institutional development is a highly political process as various institutional arrangements have quite different impacts on interest redistribution. Therefore, the creation of new institutions is a process rife with interactions between socioeconomic structure, in which institutions are deeply embedded, and actors with different ideas, interests, and institutional blueprints. These interactions generate multiple possible outcomes in institutional development. (1)

HE uses careful comparison of three cases to try to establish underlying causal mechanisms relevant to the invention and establishment of new centralized institutions of state revenue capture: England (1600-1630), Japan (1820-1860), and China (1820-1840).

A couple of findings are particularly interesting. One is the proximity this research has to the Tilly thesis linking war-fighting capacity and fiscal reform. HE finds that the linkage is not as direct or regular as Tilly believed in Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990 - 1992. Another interesting finding is a refutation of the view that there is some kind of necessary logic of modernization that guided this process and determined the outcome. Instead, HE finds that there was a great deal of path-dependence and contingency in these three stories -- not a determinate process of "modernization."

The combination of detailed historical knowledge of the particulars of the cases with the theoretical structure of institutionalism, path dependency, and contingency permits HE to tell a story that is satisfying both to the historian and the historical sociologist, informing both. (This was evident in the discussion of the book that occurred at the Social Science History Association meeting in November, where experts on Japan, China, and England largely supported HE's analysis of the sequence of changes that he outlines.)

One thing that I particularly appreciate about HE's work is his ability to combine structure and agency into a single coherent analysis and explanation. He writes about this effort in his conclusion:

In particular, [this book] seeks to demonstrate how an eventful approach to historical causation can integrate agency, structure, and contingency into one coherent causal story to explain the creation of new institutions through an uncertain and interactive historical process. Where the trajectory of institutional development is determined neither by socioeconomic structure nor by agents with bounded rationalities, a careful analysis of events can help social scientists uncover a causal mechanism without resorting to oversimplification or retreating to a naive form of "history as storytelling." (180)

Isaac Martin, Ajay Mehrotra, and Monica Prasad's very interesting The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspectiveis a valuable companion to Wenkai HE's study. Here is how Chuck Tilly summed up the ambitions of the new fiscal sociology in his preface to the volume:

Recently, a relatively small but creative group of social scientists and historians have been rectifying the long neglect of taxation in their fields. They have started to build a cross-disciplinary effort we can call fiscal sociology, with the qualification that nonsociologists provide an important part of the theory and research. Dis-playing some of the best recent work, this volume accents three major questions in the description and explanation of taxation: the social bases of tax policy, the determinants of taxpayer consent, and the social consequences of taxation. These chapters establish the vitality and importance of recent work on the social and political processes involved in taxation. (xv)

Relevant to what?

source: Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (cover)

source: Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, p. 15
An earlier post raised the question of the value of academic research and concluded that we shouldn't expect academic research to be "relevant" (link). That is a strong conclusion and needs some further dissection. Plainly research needs to be relevant to something -- it needs to be relevant to a recognized "problem" in the discipline or across disciplines; it needs somehow to be relevant to a tradition or thread of conversation within the discipline; and (as Tasia Wagner pointed out in a comment) it often needs to be relevant to a "hot" topic if the author wants to see it published. And of course academic research needs to be judged by a set of standards of rigor, method, and overall significance. Iit needs to be relevant to a set of standards of academic assessment. We want to be able to make comparative judgments about research contributions -- "not well argued," "derivative," "minor", as well as their opposites -- strongly argued, original, and important. That is what academic communities are for, and that is why we have confidence in peer review processes for publication and for advancement in the university.

All true.

The specific kind of relevance I was taking issue with is "practical utility" -- the demand for immediate problem-solving potential that underlies common critiques of research in the humanities and social sciences. The Proxmire "Golden Fleece" awards a generation ago caught this current exactly (link), and there is a similar current of thinking in the Congress today. For example, the current effort to exclude funding for research in political science by the NSF seems to fall in this category (link). This is the view I want to take issue with -- the idea that abstract research in the humanities or social sciences is frivolous, pointless, and without social value.

There is a related kind of relevance that I think I would discount as well: "accessibility to a wide public." Some academic research is in fact accessible to a wide audience in its primary form. But that is not generally the case. Take the mathematics of chaos theory. It is esoteric and technical, not readily understood by non-mathematicians. (The illustration and page of text above are taken from Benoit Mandelbrot's 1983 book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature.) But the theory can be translated by gifted science writers and communicators like James Gleick, whose Chaos: Making a New Science was read by a very wide non-specialist audience, in forms that significantly influence the imaginations and frameworks of non-specialists. Likewise, the primary research in archeology, ethnography, and economic history that underlies our understanding of the long-term material history of our species makes for a tough read for non-specialists. But then a Jared Diamond can write a wildly popular book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, that translates this research for the wider readership. Diamond is an accomplished academic. But  Guns, Germs, and Steel is not a primary work of original academic research; it is a beautifully executed work of translation.

So here is the scoring system I'd like to see guiding our thinking about social investments in research in the humanities and social sciences (which is probably relevant in the natural sciences as well):

• Is the problem an important one?
• Has an appropriate methodology been pursued with rigor, evidence, and logic?
• Is there an original or innovative discovery involved in the research product?

Significantly, these criteria will be familiar to any academic who has served as a reviewer for journal submissions, a grant proposal reviewer for a foundation, or a reviewer for a faculty tenure case.
Now let's score one particular philosopher, John Rawls, for a research article that was written before he became a household word with the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971. The article is "Justice as Fairness" and it appeared in Philosophical Review in 1958.

• The problem is, how should we attempt to assess the justice of basic institutions in a modern society? This problem is one of the big ones -- give it a 10.
• The methodology is analytic philosophy of ethics, with an innovative use of economic reasoning added. Most of the world of expert philosophers would say the arguments are carried off perfectly. Another 10.
• And what about innovation? For sure. Rawls insisted on a new way of framing ethical issues, distinctly different from the metaethical and utilitarian approaches of the 1950s. Another 10.

So "Justice as Fairness" scores a perfect 30 on my metric. And yet the article probably achieved a readership of 800 people in its published form in The Philosophical Review within a year of its publication. It was technical philosophy and would have been a quick rejection in The Atlantic or the New Yorker. But in hindsight, it was very important. It laid the ground for what became the most influential and widely read book of political philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century (over 300,000 copies according to its publisher), and substantially changed the terms of debate about issues of distributive justice.

All of this suggests that we can't judge the likely impact or even the practical importance of a work at the time it is undertaken. But we can make judgments about rigor, importance, and originality, and these are the best guides we have for deciding what research to publish and support.

Who made economics?

The discipline of economics has a high level of intellectual status, even hegemony, in today’s social sciences — especially in universities in the United States. It also has a very specific set of defining models and theories that distinguish between “good” and “bad” economics. This situation suggests two topics for research: how did political economy and its successors ascend to this position of prestige in the social sciences? And how did this particular mix of techniques, problems, mathematical methods, and exemplar theoretical papers come to define the mainstream discipline? How did this governing disciplinary matrix develop and win the field?

One of the most interesting people taking on questions like these is Marion Fourcade. Her Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s  was discussed in an earlier post (link). An early place where she expressed her views on these topics is in her 2001 article, “Politics, Institutional Structures, and the Rise of Economics: A Comparative Study” (link). There she describes the evolution of economics in these terms:

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the study of the economy has evolved from a loose discursive "field," with no clear and identifiable boundaries, into a fully "professionalized" enterprise, relying on both a coherent and formalized framework, and extensive practical claims in administrative, business, and mass media institutions. (397)

And she argues that this process was contingent, path-dependent, and only loosely guided by a compass of “better” science:

Overall,contrary to the frequent assumption that economics is a universal and universally shared science, there seems to be considerable cross-national variation in (1) the and nature of the institutionalization of an economic knowledge field, (2) the forms of professional action of economists, and (3) intellectual traditions in the of economics. (398)

Fourcade approaches this subject as a sociologist; so she wants to understand the institutional and structural factors that led to the shaping and stabilization of this field of knowledge.

Understanding the relationship between the institutional and intellectual aspects of knowledge production requires,first and foremost,a historical analysis of the conditions under which a coherent domain of discourse and practice was established in the first place. (398)

A key question in this article (and in Economists and Societies) is how the differences that exist between the disciplines of economics in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the US came to be. The core of the answer that she gives rests on her analysis of the relationships that existed between practitioners and the state: "A comparison of the four cases under investigation suggests that the entrenchment of the economics profession was profoundly shaped by the relationship of its practitioners to the larger political institutions and culture of their country" (432). So differences between economics in, say, France and the United States, are to be traced back to the different ways in which academic practitioners of economic analysis and policy recommendations were situated with regard to the institutions of the state.

It is possible to treat the history of ideas internally ("systems of ideas are driven by rational discussion of their implications") and externally ("systems of ideas are driven by the social needs and institutional arrangements of a certain time"). The best sociology of knowledge avoids this dichotomy, allowing for both the idea that a field of thought advances in part through the scientific and conceptual debates that occur within it and the idea that historically specific structures and institutions have important effects on the shape and direction of the development of a field. Fourcade avoids the dichotomy by treating seriously the economic reasoning that took place at a time and place, while also searching out the institutional and structural factors that favored this approach or that in a particular national setting.

This is sociology of knowledge done at a high level of resolution. Fourcade wants to identify the mechanisms through which "societal institutions" influence the production of knowledge in the four country contexts that she studies (Germany, Great Britain, France, and the US). She does not suggest that economics lacks scientific content or that economic debates do not have a rational structure of argument. But she does argue that the configuration of the field itself was not the product of rational scientific advance and discovery, but instead was shaped by the institutions of the university and the exigencies of the societies within which it developed.

Fourcade's own work suggests a different kind of puzzle -- this time in the development of the field of the sociology of knowledge. Fourcade's topic seems to be one that is tailor-made for treatment within the terms of Bourdieu's theory of a field. And in fact some of Fourcade's analysis of the institutional factors that influenced the success or failure of academic economists in Britain, Germany, or the US fits Bourdieu's theory very well. Bourdieu's book Homo Academicus appeared in 1984 in French and 1988 in English. But Fourcade does not make use of Bourdieu's ideas at all in the 2001 article -- some 17 years after Bourdieu's ideas were published.  Reference to elements of Bourdieu's approach appears only in the 2009 book. There she writes:

Bourdieu found that the social sciences occupy a very peculiar position among all scientific fields in that external factors play an especially important part in determining these fields' internal stratification and structure of authority.... Within each disciplinary field, the subjective (i.e., agentic) and objective (i.e., structural) positions of individuals are "homologous": in other words, the polar opposition between "economic" and "cultural" capital is replicated at the field's level, and mirrors the orthodoxy/heterodoxy divide. (23)

So why was Bourdieu not considered in the 2001 article? This shift in orientation may be simply a feature of the author's own intellectual development. But it may also be diagnostic of the rise of Bourdieu's influence on the sociology of knowledge in the 90's and 00's. It would be interesting to see a graph of the frequency of references to the book since 1984.

(Gabriel Abend's treatment of the differences that exist between the paradigms of sociology in the United States and Mexico is of interest here as well; link.)

The West and the East

Ian Morris has written a pair of books that are intended to contribute to a particularly important set of disagreements in comparative economic history: what accounts for the advantage in economic development that seems to be enjoyed by Western Europe at various points in history? The key arguments are presented in  Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, and he lays out the quantitative methods and evidence in The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations.

The basic argument is that current debates are critically flawed because they consider too short a timespan. Morris is an archaeologist, and he thinks the relevant differences between West and East only become apparent when we consider a timespan that extends backwards in time by at least 15,000 years.

The central analytical tool that Morris introduces is a "social development index" -- an index of four features that can be measured for various social locations at various points in time. The four features are: energy capture, urban development, war fighting capability, information handling capacity. Here is the basic graph that he develops:

This graph tells a simple story of a horse race: West has a slight but constant advantage from 14,000 BCE to 4,000 BCE, broadening a bit through 2000 BCE. East pulls ahead at the beginning of the Common Era while the West declines sharply and begins to recover only 1400 years later. The West pulls ahead again by about 1700 and maintains a very small lead through the present. This is not a very dramatic story, however. Durning most stretches of this 16,000 year period there is very close alignment between the two trajectories. So it seems hard to imagine that the differences discernible here are in fact decisive historical factors.

Here is one of the primary reversals that occurs on the graph, between 300 BCE and 1100 BCE.

The social development index is interesting in its own terms. The effort to pull prehistoric and ancient archeological data into a consistent system of accounting is interesting, and Morris makes a case for the idea that these four features can be measured with enough precision to permit comparison over long stretches of time. It is "macro history" and "shape of history at a large scale". There is one kind of truth the work supports: there is a generally rising trend in "social development" with occasional crashes and reversals. This is historical research at the most macro scale.

These four factors are significant material indicators of social development. But they do not exhaust the questions we might want to consider. Other measures we might find interesting in this kind of grand sociology include the rise / fall of religions and ideologies; ebb and flow of scope of control of political systems (Victor Lieberman on Burma and France); demographic regimes (high fertility/high mortality); stratification and exploitation (Marx); life quality for the median individual (Sen); and there certainly are others.

So the goal of measuring factors like the ones chosen here over a broad historical expanse is an ambitious and valuable one. However, I don't think the research has the consequences that Morris claims.

First, it isn't really posing the same kind of question as that confronted by Pomeranz and Bin Wong. The comparative economic history question is superficially similar to the one the author asks -- how do Eurasian cores perform 1500-2000? But the real questions are quite different. Fundamentally they want to open the  black box of institutions, ideology, and circumstance to account for 50- or 100-year shifts. Historians like Perdue and Pomeranz really want to know about the contingencies of history, and that seems to imply a shorter timescale.

So I don't think it's really on the subject suggested by the title. Its real subject is this: "there are very longterm differences between the two large cores in terms of material levels and rates of development." But it doesn't offer an explanation of why this should be so: earliest timing, material advantages of one core over another, contingent path dependencies, ... Likewise the suggestions about projection onto the coming century are overblown.

Moreover, the analysis is not explanatory; really it is a redescription of the phenomena. It doesn't even invoke explanatory factors. Geography? First comer advantage? Morris believes he has the key to a large scale explanation:

Why had the West got the Maxim gun [technology and war fighting advantage] when the rest had not? (Kl 286)

But I don't find that his "long tendencies of social development" picture actually helps in answering this question; rather, it simply repeats the phenomenon to be explained.

Morris categorizes existing theories of comparative economic development as "long-term lock-in" and "short-term accident" theories. And he suggests that his own approach doesn't fall in either category. It is indeed longterm; but it shows variation over the longterm, so it doesn't postulate "lock-in". And it disagrees with the accident theory because, essentially, he doesn't think there is a lot of contingency and path dependency in the story he tells. The material factors that drive the shape of the master graph are primary, and trump the effects of lesser factors like institutions and culture.

The question [of why the West rules] requires us to look at the whole sweep of human history as a single story, establishing its overall shape, before discussing why it has that shape. This is what I try to do in this book, bringing a rather different set of skills to bear. (Kl 460)

In fact, Morris's account literally doesn't tell us a thing about culture or institutions. But these are the things historians want to understand. For Morris, however, these are dependent variables in the long story of problem solving the author wants to tell. (See KL 4377)

So my overall reaction is that this is an interesting piece of research that answers a different question than the one its author highlights. It provides a very interesting view of the "shape" of human history in the two mega-regions; the attempt to measure what the author calls social development is one interesting cut on longterm historical development. But it really isn't a good way of understanding the relationship between East and West when it comes to comparative economic development. It doesn't identify the more proximate factors that led to surges and plateaux of development in the two trajectories. And yet that is really what the debate is all about.

Guest post by Elizabeth Anderson on race in American politics

Elizabeth Anderson is John Dewey Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author most recently of The Imperative of Integration. This contribution extends a question posed in a recent post on the conservative war on poor people (link). Thanks for contributing, Liz!

American Conservative Politics and the Long Shadow of Slavery

Elizabeth Anderson

An “outright Marxist!”  That’s what Rafael Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz’s father, declared of President Obama on the campaign trail in April 2013.  His accusation is common on the right.  Google “Obama Marxist” and you will get about 4.95 million results.  “Obama communist” yields 40 million.  It’s a strange charge against a man who vigorously supported the bail-out of Wall Street banks as a Senator, and expanded it to other major firms as President.  Yet the charge is nothing new.  Conservatives have long accused anyone to their left of communism or fellow-traveling.  Rick Perlstein traces this practice back to the 1950s.

In fact, it goes back a century before.  George Fitzhugh, author of the famous proslavery tract Cannibals All! wrote a letter to William Lloyd Garrison in 1856 declaring that “every theoretical abolitionist at the North is a Socialist or Communist.”  J. H. Thornwell, one of the most distinguished ministers of the antebellum South, delivered a sermon in 1850 on “The Rights and Duties of Masters,” in which he characterized the conflict over slavery as one in which slaveholders, Christians, and the “friends of order and regulated freedom” stood together against “abolitionists, atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, [and] jacobins” who were united on the other side.

This fact about the origins of one aspect of conservative rhetoric opens a window to the larger structure of American conservative thought.  Consider Romney’s notorious 47% speech:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president . . . who are dependent upon government . . . who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing . . . . These are people who pay no income tax . . . . I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

This was spoken by a presidential candidate who supported the Wall Street bailouts, who did not complain about massive state subsidies to wealthy farmers or the oil and coal industries, and who paid 14.1% of his income in federal taxes—less than the 15.3% effective payroll tax for Social Security and Medicare that falls on wage workers, over and above the income tax.  Counting state and local taxes, which are highly regressive, we have good reason to believe that the 47% he resents pay substantially higher total tax rates than the top 1%.

Romney, however, knew his audience. Tax breaks and subsidies for better-off whites are not what most conservatives oppose.  Their core objection is “free stuff” thought to disproportionately benefit blacks, Latinos, immigrants, and other traditionally subordinated groups.  As Lee Atwater explained, the Republican party’s “Southern Strategy” for winning white voters is all about opposing policies that disproportionately help blacks and promoting policies that disproportionately hurt them:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "N-ger, n-ger, n-ger." By 1968 you can't say "n-ger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

While conservatives, even those belonging to or sympathetic to the Tea Party, support Social Security and Medicare, they condemn programs such as means-tested welfare, which are perceived as disproportionately benefiting blacks and Latinos, whom they see as undeserving.  A key driver of public opinion on domestic policy in the U.S. is racial resentment: in particular, the idea that blacks are too lazy to take responsibility for their lives but want to live off the hard-earned wealth of whites, either through crime or the public dole.

My current research on abolitionism and the struggle for free labor finds that this idea has been a deep theme of American conservative opinion since before the Civil War.  Although in the antebellum era, racists typically supposed that blacks were incapable of taking care of themselves, while today they are thought to be willfully refusing to do so, the complaints about black behavior are remarkably similar.  In response to an emancipation petition submitted to the Virginia legislature, hundreds of citizens submitted proslavery petitionsin 1795.  Echoing other petitions, this one from the free whites of Lunenberg County worried that emancipation would bring

Want, Poverty, Distress and ruin to the free Citizen; the Horrors of all the rapes, Robberies, Murders, and Outrages, which an innumerable Host of unprincipled, unpropertied, vindictive and remorseless Banditte are capable of perpetrating; Neglect, famine and Death to the abandoned black Infant, and superannuated Parent; inevitable Bankruptcy to the revenue; Desperation and revolt to the disappointed, oppressed Citizen; and sure and final ruin to this once happy, free, and flourishing Country . . . .

Thomas Dew, in his 1832 article “Abolition of Negro Slavery,” predicted that abolition would lead blacks to idleness, drunkenness, destitution, and thence to crime.  William Harper predicted in Cotton is King, an 1860 compendium of proslavery thought, that emancipation would reduce blacks to paupers and lead them “from petty to greater crimes, until all life and property would be rendered insecure,” and that if they got the vote, they “would be used by unprincipled politicians” to advance dangerous schemes.

White conservatives saw their fears confirmed during Reconstruction.  This cartoon reveals their view of the Freedman’s Bureau, described as “an agency to keep the Negro in idleness at the expense of the white man:

Then it was the Freedman’s Bureau.  Today it is food stamps, Medicaid, and Obamacare.

Not only the content, but the style and emotional register of conservative politics have been constant.  The hysteria, apocalyptic sensibility, and intransigence of Tea Party conservatives on full display in the recent government shutdown crisis (complete with a confederate flag) mirrors that of the South in the run-up to the Civil War through the Reconstruction Era.  American conservatism continues to operate under the long shadow of slavery and its legacy.