File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1996/96-09-26.073, message 92


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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