Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 07:58:17 -0700 (PDT) From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: panel 2 Here is Panel Two: Please give your suggested corrections or comments as soon as possible -- in particular the title. I like the idea of "trajectory" which has its source in the idea of Ruth's paper, but it would be good also to highlight the problem of structure and agency without being heavy handed about it. Here I opted for trajectory in the title and structure and agency in the session description. Maybe that's good enough. Tobin, why not put up the reading session description as you last sent it to me (with "postmarxism," since that is part of Ruth's critique). Tobin and I will send these off no later than Thursday. SESSION TITLE: "The Trajectory of Social Theory: Critical Realism's Challenge to the Development of Marxist and Mainstream Social Theory." COORDINATOR: Howard Engelskirchen PANELISTS: Ruth Groff, Martha Gimenez, and Howard Engelskirchen CHAIR: TBA SESSION DESCRIPTION: Critical Realism has contributed to the development of both marxist and mainstream social theory. Emphasizing Critical Realism's presentation of the problem of knowledge, structure and agency, this session will explore Roy Bhaskar's resolution of the problem of the subject framed, but unsuccessfully resolved, by Althusser, the contribution of Margaret Archer's morphogenetics to critical realist and mainstream social theory, and the insight application of critical realist methodology offers for an understanding of Marx's analysis of commodity exchange and law. RUTH GROFF: "Who Knows What? Knowledge, Agency and Subjects in Althusser and Bhaskar" This paper argues that the anti-realist ontology and judgmental relativism of much postmarxism has its source in Althusser's theory of knowledge. By contrast Bhaskar's critical realism manages to preserve the enlightenment ideal of the internal connection between knowledge and human freedom without ascribing to an essentialist view of the subject, a voluntarist/methodological individualist approach to history or an empiricist theory of knowledge. In this sense, Bhaskar meets a challenge set, but unsuccessfully met, by Althusser. The extent to which Althusser reifies the social practice of knowledge-production is underscored by the comparison of the concepts of 'Generalities II' and the 'transitive domain' of science in Althusser and Bhaskar respectively. MARTHA GIMENEZ: "Realist Social Theory: Preliminary Implications for Sociologists." This paper is intended to assess the sociological relevance of Bhaskar's philosophy of science as elaborated by Margaret S. Archer in Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge, 1996). Integrating the views of students in her graduate seminar on theory, the author will examine the resolution of the problem of structure and agency in realist social theory and the challenge this poses to dominant presentations of the question. HOWARD ENGELSKIRCHEN: "'TACIT UNDERSTANDING' AND CONTRACT FORMATION." In his analysis of exchange Marx notes that agents of exchange must, "by tacit understanding," agree to treat each other as private owners. Using the techniques of Critical Realism, I develop the significance of this insight by showing how the structures presupposed by the social reproduction of exchange enable agents of the process to constitute their own autonomy and the autonomy the other, and also, how, in this dynamic, exchange comes to be constituted as not only an economic, but also as a legal relationship.
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