Reply to comments

Abstract

The main theme in most of the contributions to the symposium on Making Sense of Marx is methodological individualism. In the first part of my reply I consider the objections raised to this, in my opinion, trivially true doctrine. Against Taylor I argue that social relations, seen in abstraction from their relata, have no causal efficacy. Against Wood I argue that my defence of methodological individualism and my criticism of functional explanation are less closely related than he makes them out to be. Against Slaughter I argue that he holds two inconsistent views on the importance of individual desires and beliefs in social explanation. Against Meikle I argue that his view that entities are ‘real natures’ with a normal path of development needs to be restated in terms of dynamically stable processes. In the second part of the reply I deal with the individual contributions one by one. The replies to the ‘fundamentalist Marxists’ Slaughter and Meikle are relatively brief, because of the dismissive, unscholarly nature of their comments. Similarly I do not have much to say to North and Taylor, whose brief comments do not contain much with which to disagree. I reply at greater length to Wood, conceding the point he makes in the last section of his comment but rejecting his argument concerning functional explanation.

Notes

Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge/London/New York/New Rochelle/ Melbourne/Sydney: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1985, xv + 556 pp, £32.50, PB £10.95. Page references prefixed ’M’ are to this work.