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ABSTRACT
This paper strengthens Bhaskar’s case for the possibility of naturalism. Building on Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science and The Possibility of Naturalism, and on more recent contributions by Douglas Porpora, it traces the evolution of Bhaskar’s concept of 'intransitive' and follows his suggestion to treat social structure as an intransitive generative mechanism analogous to the generative mechanisms of the natural sciences. It is suggested, building on Porpora, that the constitutive rules of the market are usefully regarded as generating an intransitive 'basic social structure.' That this same intransitive object is reasonably regarded as continuing to exist and act under different descriptions is illustrated by citing how different scholars have approached it with different concepts and vocabularies. It expands on Bhaskar’s first example of an intransitive object of social science, the mass unemployment that provided a ‘motor’ for Keynes, and on Porpora’s examples of the causal powers of social structures.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Howard Richards was born on June 10, 1938, in Pasadena, and grew up in southern California. After undergraduate work at Yale where his first philosophy teacher was Richard Rorty, he graduated from Stanford Law School. He worked as a junior fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, and simultaneously earned a doctorate in philosophy at UCSB, until he and his wife Caroline settled in Chile in 1965, although they spent a year at Oxford in 1970–71, where one of Howard's tutors was Rom Harre. After the 1973 coup, they returned to the USA where both taught at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. They have now returned to Chile.
Notes
1. Also, on p. 17 in an Introduction that clearly introduces a book already written, Bhaskar says RTS argues for an intransitive dimension of knowledge that is about real structures or mechanisms that exist and act quite independently of men and the conditions which allow men access to them. In general, when I cite a page, it is often the case that Bhaskar makes the same point also on another page or pages.
2. See also, for example, the second paragraph of RTS, 182.
3. The intransitive world of things is contrasted to the social world of science.
4. Later in his postscript to the second edition of PON, he agrees with Ted Benton that more attention should be given to non-experimental natural science.
5. Ted Benton (Benton Citation1998) also notes that Bhaskar recoins ‘intransitive’ in PON and goes on to find that Bhaskar overstates the differences between the natural and the social sciences. Bhaskar replies to Benton in the Postscript to the second edition of PON.
6. A relational sociology might also be called a Marxist or post-Marxist sociology, given the ubiquity and centrality of Verhältnisse in Das Kapital. Or, reversing the labels on the circles of the Venn Diagramme, Marxist sociology might be classified among the relational sociologies.
7. ‘Constitutive’ rules establish the relations that create an institution or practice, for example, market exchange or the game of chess. For extensive discussions and applications of this concept see Searle Citation1969, Citation1995, Citation2009.
8. I have replaced ‘calculable’ with Weber's original German.
9. Foucault argued that madness (la folie) could not come into existence until the practices and discourses establishing its historical conditions of possibility came into existence.
10. The generic point that exchange relations remain part of the causal analysis even when the value equivalence of different products is said to be only possible because they all have in common being products of labour, does not depend, as far as I can tell, on the outcome of the controversies regarding the meaning of ‘abstract labour’ discussed, e.g. by Hostettler (Citation2012) in his chapter 7.
11. The point that capitalism as a specific mode of production develops with accumulation is found in section two of chapter 25. M-C-M is analysed in chapter 4, while the analysis of exchange begins in chapter 1.
12. For further discussion of Porpora's views on social structure, see, in addition to his own writings, including Porpora (Citation1998), Elder-Vass (Citation2010, 83–5 and 172–75). Porpora situates his own view, which I am adopting, among other views of the social structure, in chapter four of Porpora (Citation2016).
13. I find it hard to express myself here without being prolix or misleading or both prolix and misleading. I want to identify the basic social structure not with capitalism but with market economy, and to think of capitalism as only one form of market economy, i.e. the form driven, or to a large extent driven, by capital accumulation. The two are connected, not least because capitalism tends to be the historical outcome of the evolution of a market economy. ‘Market economy’ is a relatively rare phrase used by Polanyi. ‘Capitalism,’ coined by Marx, everybody knows. Here, I have settled for saying the basic social structure ‘underlies’ capitalism. Earlier I settled for ‘constitutive rules that make capitalism possible.’
14. Porpora: ‘Would-be advocates of a structural view are deprived even of the words with which to speak.’ (Porpora Citation2016, 96)
15. Indeed, there is a school of thought in management science which finds that managers rarely seek to maximize any objective. What they mainly seek to do is ‘satisfice.’ One of its classics is Simon (Citation1979).
16. I borrow the phrase ‘systemic imperative’ from Wood (Citation2003).
17. I myself have applied a concept of basic cultural structure, in various versions, to study the decline of social democracy (Richards and Swanger Citation2006), the rise of the global economy (Richards Citation2004), and the history of philosophy (Richards Citation1995).