A reply to Nick Hardy

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Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to Tone Skinningsrud for punctiliously reading the first draft of this Reply and unerringly suggesting where examples would make my argument clearer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Margaret S. Archer founded the Centre for Social Ontology at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 2011, when she was Professor of Social Theory. She is now Visiting Professor at three European universities. Archer was elected as the first woman President of the International Sociological Association at the 12th World Congress of Sociology (1986–90). Pope Francis appointed her as President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences during 2014–19. She was a founding member of PASS and the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences and is a trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism. She has published 43 volumes and had six devoted to her work. She has been awarded two honoris causa by the University of Navarra, Spain and the Uniwersytet Kardynala Stefana Wyszynkiego, Warsaw, Poland.

Notes

1 ‘Archer’s morphogenetic approach caught on at least in realist circles, broadly enough to be equated with the realist approach to social theory. I myself have been one of its strongest supporters, describing it as a contemporary articulation of the pivotal principle underlying a non-reductionist Marxian approach to political economy (Porpora 2013). As such, morphogenesis is a meta-theoretical rather than a theoretical conception’ (Porpora 2013, 25–26 f).

2 ‘Phase 1’ or ‘Transcendental Realism’ owes most to Roy Bhaskar’s ‘A Realist Theory of Science’ and ‘The Possibility of Naturalism’.

3 As Bhaskar maintained, the ‘causal power of social forms is mediated through social agency’ (Bhaskar, PON, 25–26, cited in my Realist social theory, 1995, 195) and discussed in Structure, Culture and the Internal Conversation, 2003, Ch. 1.

4 There are occasional cases of ambiguity, for example today’s ‘Fake news’, where ‘fake’ singles its lack of veracity (as a C.S. property in conflict with other statements) but ‘news’ signals something nevertheless considered worth reporting (S-C property). Taken as a noun, ‘fake news’ belongs to the C.S. (as one or more erroneous propositions); if ‘fake’ is regarded as an adjective qualifying ‘news’ then it pertains to the S-C, along with phrases such as ‘blatantly ideological’.

5 Roy Bhaskar, Possibility of Naturalism, 1979, 25–26, cited in my Realist social theory, p. 195 and discussed in the Introduction of my Structure, Culture and the Internal Conversation, 2003.

6 The

embryo of education contained within itself a sort of contradiction .It was composed of two elements, which no doubt in some sense, complemented and completed one another. But which were at the same time mutually exclusive. There was on the one hand the religious element, the Christian doctrine, on the other, there was classical civilization and all the borrowings which the Church was obliged to make from it, that is to say the profane element … But the ideas which emerged from it patently conflicted with those which were at the basis of Christianity. Between the one and the other there stretched the whole of that abyss which separates the sacred from the profane, the secular from the religious. (Durkheim 1977, p. 25 my italics).

7 The Peterloo massacre in Manchester (1819) started from a peaceful pro-democracy event attended by more than 60,000 workers and ended with the mounted and armed yeomanry breaking up the demonstration with their sabres. At the time fewer than 2% of men had the vote.

8 See Realist Social Theory (1995, 257–265) for a full discussion of the concepts of Primary and Corporate agency and their linkage in the ‘Double Morphogenesis’, for which SAC has to be employed.

9 Hardy writes,

For Archer, social agents face the biggest problem in terms of the legitimacy they are able to generate about and around the cultural content they muster to enable (or to excuse) their access to certain goods, to attain social status, etc. In this manner, they appear somewhat as a broader version of Habermas’ ‘ideal speech situation’, where they are attempting to persuade other social agents of the legitimacy of their claims over something.’ (p. 11, my italics).

I doubt if this was the perspective of those being slaughtered at Peterloo!

10 I provided a critique of Habermas in the final chapter of the 1995 version of Culture and Agency.