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ABSTRACT
The article resituates critical realism within critical theory and proposes a tripartite articulation of British critical realism, German critical theory and French anti-utilitarianism. It suggests that the critique of positivism has to be enhanced with a critique of utilitarianism and makes the case that both critiques have to be grounded in a hermeneutic approach to social life. By taking the symbolic constitution of the world seriously, critical realist hermeneutics offers a via media between naturalism and anti-naturalism, explanation and interpretation, universalism and relativism, materialism and idealism, realism and constructivism.
Acknowledgements
The original title of my keynote address at the 2021 IACR conference was ‘Critical Realism: A Retrospective’. The original title explains (but does not completely justify) the many references to my own work. Due to lack of space and time, I did not include a section on the internal conversations of the alethic self. I thank the local organizers for the honour, the participants for the discussion and the editors of the JCR for the invitation to write down my oral presentation and publish the text. I have also benefited from the comments and suggestions of various members of the Sociofilo Lab in Rio de Janeiro.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Notes on contributors
Frédéric Vandenberghe
Frédéric Vandenberghe is professor of sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Distinguished Max Weber Fellow at the University of Erfurt in Germany. He has published widely on the history of ideas and various aspects of social theory in English, French and Portuguese. In English, he published A Philosophical History of German Sociology (2009), What’s Critical about Critical Realism? (2014) and co-authored with Alain Caillé For a New Classic Sociology (2021).