Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 18:59:43 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: RE: Sociology or epistemology?


I don't want to sidetrack this discussion, but rather to suggest that there
seems to be a giant misunderstanding on the meaning of my post resulting in
a needless argument.  I thought Jukka knew me better than to misread me so
completely.

At 02:02 AM 9/17/98 +0300, j laari wrote:
>Well, shame on Marx if he believed that social scientists and
>philosophers can manage without such "anthropological" questions we
>have been tackling with the past 50 or so years. (100 years?)

I've not made any claims about Marx.  I'm discussing other people's
arguments over Marx.

>Marx might have believed there's no need for
>"extrapolation" and filling the holes that were in his visions. But
>that was then.

I never made such a claim about Marx.  Nor have I claimed that I don't think
it's necessary to fill in holes.  I'm making one minor concession to the
faction which states that Marx was concerned with history not nature: one
can go some way down the road of historical materialism without pausing to
argue over dialectics of nature and such matters.  But perhaps not very far,
for after all, Engels soon found it necessary to get into this terrain, in
order to confront new forms of obscurantism that were popping up.

>Third point: PB's theories are *loaded* with all these issues. He
>knows it very well and tries to swim in the sea of structuralist
>sharks ("objective idealists" as you probably would call them) and
>existentialists ("subjectivists" as you probably would call them).

Quite so.  I'm still a novice, but I do admire his efforts so far.

>Which means that for you substantive social theory lacks all the
>crucial questions except those of phil. of history? But then it
>couldn't go any further than to claim that It's All History and that's
>it?

I think for you to understand what I mean requires a familiarity with
discussions on the Bhaskar list, a familiarity which I believe you have.  I
mean that the character of individual behavior and social structure demand
an investigation that goes beyond just trying to pinpoint the ontological
status of individuals and societies as entities, steering between the
extremes of methodological individualism and mystical organicism.  Not that
such hairsplitting is not important at all, it is that if that's all you do,
you could spend the rest of your life refining your definitions of the ontic
character of individuals and societies and never do anything else.
Historically, does sociological analysis begin with establishing strict
definitions of fundamental entities and then building upon them in deductive
fashion?  Or is it the reverse?  That larger claims are made about the
relation of individuals to social groupings and then the fine points of
their ontological status get nitpicked later on?  Let me ask the Bhaskar
people a question, to which I do not presume to have an answer.  Have any of
them come up with a social science concept of any richness, say on the level
of the "habitus", which claims to do some work in linking structure with
agency? 

Oh, and there's a comment in your other post:

>Their point of departure was based more on Husserl's phenomenology
>than on Kant and Hegel and the like. Marx never discussed Husserl -
>that would have been impossible. However, in more orthodox marxist
>cicrles they were quite straightforwardly denounced as traitors or
>somesuch (like idealists) because of this. For example, sometimes
>Ralph echoes these more orthodox marxists. Though I believe he really
>don't mean it.

You mean like the Comintern's denunciations of Lukacs and Korsch, and the
later Stalinists' denunciations of Marcuse and Sartre?  I don't believe
Ralph has ever echoed these "orthodox marxists".  As I see it, Marxism must
incorporate all available scientific knowledge, as its goal is not to be
just a doctrine that defines an identity and guards its purity in opposition
to all others, such as happened in the USSR even before Stalin.  There's no
reason that even idealistically distorted theories could not capture aspects
of the truth, as was the case with Freud and the thousand other doctrines
that people have attempted to amalgamate with Marxism in the past century.
The question is who incorporates whom and how?  Nowadays the doctrines that
one seeks to combine with marxism become ever more convoluted and obscure
and even more duplicitous. And the issue has never been marxist purity but
rather mystification by intellectuals following a certain decadent
narcissistic bent, which is basically a way of their maintaining their own
privileges rather than providing the clarity that the rest of society so
sorely needs.  This most certainly is a form of treason, though one must
admit that, in a society in which all classes participate in self-delusion,
there are no loyalists to the truth, only traitors.

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