File spoon-archives/seminar-14.archive/marx-bhaskar_2001/seminar-14.0104, message 8


From: Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-lists.econ.utah.edu>
Subject: For Structure: A Critique of Ontological Individualism
Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2001 10:29:33 -0600



   FOR STRUCTURE: A CRITIQUE OF ONTOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM


		     Martha E. Gimenez
		  Department of Sociology
	     University of Colorado at Boulder
		  Boulder, Colorado 80309
			   U.S.A.

Published in ALETHIA, the Newsletter of the International
Association for Critical Realism. Vol. 2, No. 2 (October)
1999: 19-25 and posted in this page with the authorization
of the publishers.


Introduction

In a recent article, King (1999) presents a critique of
Archer's (1995) morphogenetic social theory (which
postulates the ontological reality of structure and agency),
and a defense of interpretive ontological individualism, for
which structures are mere heuristic devices. Although
Archer's ontological dualism is not itself unproblematic, it
is very important and useful because it calls attention to
the necessity of incorporating the role of time in
sociological theory and offers a methodology useful for
disentangling the complexities and paradoxes of social
life. King's alternative, on the other hand, is very
unsatisfactory because it simply reproduces the truism, "no
people, no society," and does not offer a methodology
suitable for the study of the complex world in which we
live. I will argue, however, that a dialectical approach,
based on Marx's theories of history and human nature,
transcends the problems of ontological individualism while
preserving Archer's important theoretical contribution.

Archer's Social Theory

Grounded in the human condition, the relationship between
freedom and necessity has been and continues to be a source
of philosophical and political debates and the root cause of
fundamental disagreements among social theorists. How social
theorists conceptualize the relationship between individuals
and society or, in current terminology, agency and
structure, determines their methodologies and their
understanding of the nature of social reality and social
change. Three solutions to this problem have emerged:
individualism, which privileges agency while endowing it
with the properties of structures; elisionism, which
conflates the two while still privileging agency, and
collectivism, which privileges structure while endowing it
with the attributes of agency. For the first two, only
individuals, their dispositions and their properties are
have ontological reality. They differ, however, in their
concept of structure. For individualists, structure is
simply a metaphor for "other people," meaning it is fully
reducible to and coterminous with individuals and their
interpersonal relations. Collectivists, on the other hand,
fearful of the "sin" of reification, have no ontological
concept of structure. Critical of the limitations of
methodological individualism, they downplay the role of
agency, emphasizing the explanatory role of structural
factors independent from individuals' consciousness and
constraining their behavior. Unlike Durkheim, who posited
society as sui generis, transcendent and preexistent to
individuals upon whom it conferred their very humanity,
today's collectivists generally limit themselves to
demonstrating the importance of macro level factors to
supplement micro level, individualist research findings. The
hold empiricism has upon the development of the social
sciences has made it impossible, even for social scientists
convinced that social structures are real and have real
effects, to postulate their ontological reality; structures
remain a suspect concept, a heuristic or methodological
device (Archer, 1995: 33-64). Within the elisionist
alternative, only social practices have ontological
reality. Structure and agency are mutually constitutive but
fundamentally unequal, despite claims to the contrary,
because structures are virtual and become real only when
instantiated by agency.

Archer rejects all forms of conflation because they deny the
autonomy and independent effects of structure and agency,
calling for the reduction of one to the other or their
collapse into the duality of structure, meaning that agency
and structure are sides of the same unitary process. Her
theoretical alternative breaks away from empiricism and
presentism (i.e., the notion that society is what it is
because of the people who are now present, acting,
reproducing it or "constructing" it on an ongoing
basis). Her theory rests upon "analytical dualism," the
emergentist ontology produced by the realist philosophy of
science according to which social reality is stratified, so
that "the emergent properties of structures and agents are
irreducible to one another... and given structures and
agents are also temporally distinguishable" (Archer, 1995:
66). Given the historicity of emergence, this ontological
stance enables the examination of their interplay and
changes over time (Archer, 1995: 66): structures may stay
the same (morphostasis) or may change, new structures
replacing the old (morphogenesis). Archer's emphasis on the
importance of time for a theoretically adequate grasp of the
interplay between structure and agency leads her to conclude
that, in relation to individuals, structures are
"autonomous, or independent, pre-existent, and causally
efficacious;" individualist critics, for whom structures are
simply "other people," should demonstrate that structures
actually have none of those characteristics (Archer, 1995:
42-43).

Archer's theory is a very interesting alternative to
conflationary modes of thinking; ontological dualism allows
for the conceptualization of different time scales within
which either agency or structure play a more salient
historical role, without a priori "privileging" one or the
other. At Time1, "structural conditioning" sets the
constraints within which processes of "social interaction"
occur at Time 2; these processes, depending on the nature of
the phenomena under consideration, may encounter resistance,
support or indifference to changing the pre-existing
structures in ways that become clearer by Time3. Time4 is
the time of "structural elaboration," meaning pre-existing
structures were reproduced or transformed and a new cycle
begins, as the outcomes at Time4 become, eventually, the
Time1 or starting point in a new process of interplay
between structure and agency. Methodological collectivism
and various determinisms (economic, cultural, political,
etc.) subordinate agency to structure and their mode of
analysis is that of structural elaboration ending at Time2;
agents are only the supports or "bearers" of
structure. Methodological individualists, on the other hand,
dwell on Time 3, postulating that the patterns heuristically
identified as "structural factors" are nothing but the
effects of individuals' dispositions, rational choices,
negotiations, imputed meanings, performances and so
forth. Elisionism, best exemplified by "structuration
theory," expresses what goes on between Times 2 and 3,
interaction processes through which structure and agency are
mutually constitutive though structure is outside time,
leading a virtual existence until it is instantiated by
agency. Rather than incorporating the role of time,
structuration theory has produced a conceptualization of
social reality as timeless and endless praxis because,
ontologically, only praxis is real while structures and
agents are only useful analytical constructs (Archer, 1995:
79-89).

This brief sketch of Archer's critique of the ontologies
presupposed by social science theories today, and of her
morphogenetic theory, should be helpful to set the
background for my assessment of the validity of King's
(1999) criticisms, and evaluation of Archer's views.

King's Case Against Structure

Writing from the standpoint of the interpretive tradition,
King acknowledges the truth of Archer's contention, that
adherents of individualism are reductionists for whom macro
level phenomena can be explained only by reducing it to
individuals; however, he argues Archer is wrong in claiming
that, therefore, individualists reduce everything to the
present practices of individuals, thus overlooking the past
and its constraining effects upon the present. The meanings
individuals use to make sense of their world are historical
in their origins, he argues, because "the past is the
meaningfully produced social relations between (now dead)
individuals which have an impact on the present through the
actions and interpretations of living individuals. The
interpretive tradition does reduce society to people (both
living and dead), but not to this people here present"
(King, 1999: 205).

King also claims that the interpretive approach demolishes
the characteristics of social structure Archer considers to
be irrefutable; i.e., that structures are autonomous or
independent, pre-existent and causally efficacious (Archer,
1995: 42-43). For Archer, structures are not synonymous with
observable groups and aggregates, which are indeed open to
reduction; they are not just "other people" (e.g.,
interpersonal relations open to interpretation and
negotiation), but sets of social relations, rules, roles,
etc. independent and autonomous from individuals'
interpretations, performances, and so forth (Archer, 1995:
43).

Methodological individualists, including King, assume the
reducibility of all macro level social phenomena. That
assumption is untenable. To explain why this is so, Wright,
Levine and Sober (1992) introduce the philosophical
distinction between tokens and types. Tokens are specific
instances of more general categories or types. For example,
the British miners' strike in 1984 is a token instance of
the strike as a recurrent event under capitalism. Social
science seeks to explain not only why particular events
(e.g., specific strikes, social movements, military coups,
etc.) occur but also the nature and causes of social types
(e.g., strike, class struggle, capitalism, feudalism,
etc.). Methodological individualists assume that it is
possible to reduce both, social types and social events,
whereas antireductionists only accept the reducibility of
the latter (Wright, Levine and Sober, 1992: 116- 118). The
reason for this conclusion is that the relationship between
social types or structures (in Archer's terminology) and
their realization or observable effects is one of "multiple
realizability;" for example, gender inequality as a
structural component of the social system is itself
irreducible to a single, identifiable set of individuals'
decisions, beliefs, intentions, preferences or dispositions
while, for each token instance of gender inequality, it is
indeed possible to identify a unique set of
microfoundations. Methodological individualists' apriori
insistence on the reducibility of all social phenomena,
including social types is, therefore, "plainly unwarranted"
(Wright, Levine and Sober, 1992: 119). Furthermore, they
(meaning Wright et al) acknowledge that their argument is
similar to those who, like Archer, invoke emergence to
bolster their antireductionist stance. Unlike Archer,
however, who unhesitantly posits the irreducibility of all
emergent properties, they view this as an empirical
question: "...It could be the case that type-reductions
actually are possible. But they almost certainly are not"
(Wright, Levine and Sober, 1992:119).

King rejects the claim that emergence entails irreducibility
and his aim is "... to demonstrate that in every case,
appeals to emergentism can be reduced to the practices of
other people, located at other places and times, and that,
therefore, the morphogenetic approach cannot defend itself
from collapsing back into an interpretive ontology" (King,
1999:207). He critically examines three types of structural
emergence Archer uses to illustrate her arguments:
numerical, relational and bureaucratic.

Numerical emergence refers to the structural distribution of
a property in a given population; e.g., a country's literacy
rate affects the time it would take to increase it, imposing
constraints independent of the individuals currently living
in the country at the time. If at T1 the literacy rate is 5
percent, during the time span between T2 and T3, individuals
actively striving to increase it will have to work longer
and harder than if the initial rate had been higher. Their
efforts will eventually coalesce, at T4, the time of
structural elaboration, in a new literacy rate which, in
turn, will be causally efficacious for future generations,
T4 becoming T1 in the next cycle of morphogenetic change.

King, however, challenges the notion that literacy rates and
comparable phenomena are pre-existing structures irreducible
to other people; "Archer herself demonstrates that these
putatively autonomous and prior structural conditions are
exactly only "other people" ... interacting in the
past".... (her) own model presupposes an interpretive
ontology which insists that social conditions are only other
people" (King, 1999: 210-211). Quantitative emergence can be
reduced, then, to other people because Archer's description
about what happens between T2 and T3 demonstrates that
structures, whether at T4 or at T1, are simply the
interaction between people in the past. Archer "ontologizes
time," transforming temporal priority into ontological
priority (King, 1999:211).

King's critique of emergent relational properties is
similar. To illustrate this kind of emergence, Archer used
the example of Adam Smith's description of the effects of
the division of labor upon pin makers, where the resulting
productivity, independent of each individual worker is, in
light of her analysis, the effect of emergent relational
properties. King's criticism is predictable: the division of
labor might be irreducible to any individual worker but it
is reducible to all of them together; "...the division of
labor consists of other people which means that it is
substantially autonomous of each individual but no more than
all of them." In other words, the division of labor is equal
to the aggregate of all the workers and has no emergent
relational properties of its own; it is simply other people,
present and past. The interpretive tradition, he tells us,
does not reduce social situations to "the" individual but to
"all" the other people involved in them. King rests his
argument on this point: that Archer wrongly deduced that
structures are "independent of everyone acting together"
from these premises which King accepts: "social conditions
confront everyone and are independent from anyone" (King,
213).

King's criticism of the third kind of structural properties,
those emergent from the role structures typical of
bureaucracies and other organizations which persist through
time, follows the same line of reasoning. Roles are not
autonomous from or independent of role incumbents; they are
the product of past intersubjective negotiations among
people which are continuously recreated in the present; they
are irreducible to any given individual but not to all
individuals (King, 1999:214-215).

Having reduced all types of structural emergence to "other
people" here and in the past, King proceeds to do the same
to the causal efficacy of structures. The interpretive
tradition, he points out, does recognize the importance of
social constraints and the effects, on individuals, of
material conditions such as, for example, the distribution
of material goods, the material structure of a society,
wealth, poverty, the market, and capitalism. In theories of
history and socio-economic development and in
macrosociology, these terms refer to structures; for King,
they simply mean, predictably, other people here and in the
past: "the differential distribution of material possessions
across society is dependent upon a myriad of past
interactions between individuals according to their
understanding of the capitalist market and the continued
employment of these beliefs to inform exchanges in the
present" (King, 1999:221). Defending the interpretive
tradition against Marx's critique of idealism in The German
Ideology, King argues that just as individuals will drown
whether or not they believe in gravity, individuals'
economic situation will not change if they cease to believe
in the market. The interpretive tradition, however,
maintains that "individuals will be poor or rich according
to the beliefs and the practices, which are informed by
those beliefs, of themselves and, crucially, other people"
(King, 1999: 221). Social constraints or material conditions
lack ontological reality and are not causally efficacious in
their own right, but through individuals' practices and
beliefs (King, 1999: 222).

Are these arguments powerful enough to undermine Archer's
characterization of structures, in relation to individuals,
as autonomous, pre-existent and causally efficacious? I do
not think they are. King argues that Archer's arguments are
selfcontradictory, for she herself acknowledges the genesis
of structures in human activity and solipsistic. Archer's
"signal error" was to claim that, just because structures
are irreducible to any given individual, they are
irreducible to all, thus solipsistically deriving social
theory from her own existential experience and assuming that
what is true for the individual is true for the group or for
society. But society is only the sum of individuals'
meaningful activities and interactions; we are constrained
only by other people (present and from the past) while, at
the same time, we constrain others (today and in the
future). (King, 1999: 216-217). To sum up, no people (living
and dead), no structure.

That Archer acknowledges the social genesis of social
structures is a strength, not a weakness of her model. She
does not engage in reification, postulating structures as
transcendent and independent from agency and rooted in
natural laws or properties of human nature impervious to
agency. To postulate the autonomy, preexistence and causal
efficacy of structures (in relation to the social agents
present at any given time and forced to cope with those
effects) does not entail solipsism but the recognition, and
incorporation in theorizing about social reality, of the
effects of universal material conditions of human existence;
i.e., the finitude of human life while the natural and the
social worlds go on existing, and the unique property of
human activity to become objectified in structures, social
patterns, distributions, artifacts, spacial configurations,
environmental conditions, etc. which exert lasting affects
on future generations. The vast gap between the life span of
human beings and the time span of nature and the social
world is the objective basis for the temporal discontinuity
between living social agents and the objectified results of
their activities and the activities of past generations. In
other words, Archer's insights are not purely subjective but
have a material base. King's objection, that the social
world is reducible to ALL individuals, present and past, is
a logically deduced truism which does not capture the
fullness of the human experience, because the social world
includes not only people but the objectified results of
human productive activities and transformation of nature.

>From the standpoint of Marxist theory there is, at the
metatheoretical level of analysis, a dialectical unity
between human activity and its material and social
products. This dialectics underlies the ontology of praxis
that characterizes elisionism and, perhaps in a more
attenuated form, the one-sided ontological individualist
approach that denies ontological reality to the objective
moment of the dialectic. It is inappropriate, however, to
theorize about "really existing" societies purely on the
basis of an abstract dialectical ontology of praxis or a
onesided ontological individualism; it is necessary to
ground theory upon, among other things, the material reality
of the difference in the time span of nature, structures
(the objectified effects of human labor, manual and
intellectual) and agents. This is the material basis for
Archer's ontological dualism and her critique of theories
which, like the interpretive tradition, view society as the
outcome of processes of interaction among individuals
"bulging with structure" (Archer, 1999: 38) within a "social
context" which, like Sartre's hell, is only other people.

For Structure

"Suppose they gave a war and nobody came."
1960s bumpersticker.

Given the assumption that social reality is nothing but
people, "the myriad" of past and present interpretations and
social interactions, it logically follows that large scale,
qualitative social change (e.g., the change from feudalism
to capitalism) could happen "if everyone or most individuals
begun to interpret their social relations differently and,
therefore, begun to engage in new social practices" (King,
1999: 222). This amazing conclusion reminded me of the
popular 1960s slogan cited above; it reflects the dominance
of individualist ideologies in advanced capitalist societies
and illuminates the limitations inherent in social theories
and worldviews grounded in ontological individualism. Are
structural changes, epochal or of lesser scale, solely the
product of changes in individuals' interpretations which, in
turn, lead to changed social practices? In the absence of
emergent properties of social structures, what would cause
such changes in individuals' views and activities? If
constraints and causality are simply the beliefs and
practices of other individuals, what would cause them to
change? Who would these changed individuals have to be? What
positions or roles should they occupy so that their new
views and behavior made a difference? King's answer to some
of these questions is that, although social constraints are
only other people, not structures, "a heuristic concept of
structure can be usefully maintained" because individual
practices must be placed in a social and historical
context. To avoid endless reduction backwards in time,
sociologists "need to assume certain background conditions
which are not reduced to their micro dimensions," as long as
these "structures" are not understood holistically, as
wholes greater than the sum of their individual parts (King,
1999:222). This means that interpretive sociology is then
parasitical on theories of structure, although structure is
retained only as a make believe, heuristic device;
sociologists should not inquire how structures constrain
behavior, for constraint only "flows from the expectations,
material and political positions of other people to whom we
are bound" (King, 1999:222). But, if only individuals, their
views and practices are ontologically real, why should
political and material position; i.e., structural locations,
matter? If structures, as heuristic devices are,
essentially, social scientists' interpretations, what is it
that makes those interpretation constraining? On what basis
are some individuals "bound" to others, if structures are
just categories or interpretations which are not really
real? Why should the expectations of some people be
constraining upon others? As these questions show,
ontological individualism is not a very good foundation for
theories of social systems, although it might be appropriate
for theories of limited range, focused on processes of
social interaction in very specific settings. But the
limitations of ontological individualism go beyond its
relative uselessness for theorizing social systems and large
scale social change. Structures are not synonymous with
"macro," as research in small groups discloses structural
patterns with their corresponding emergent properties. Even
as small a structure as marriage has its own emergent
properties, not always conducive to people's happiness, as
illustrated by the widespread phenomenon of couples who
marry after cohabiting happily for years, only to divorce
shortly afterwards. Why this skepticism about structures,
though their necessity as "background conditions" is
acknowledged? To answer this question and present a defense
of structure I will explore the relationship between the
interpretive tradition's assumptions about human nature and
social reality, as inferred from King's arguments, and the
tradition's rejection of the concept of structure. I will
argue that Marxist theory offers a more fruitful alternative
to the interpretive tradition.

King accepts the Durkheimian view about the thoroughly
social nature of individuals who are "always and everywhere
a product of and dependent upon society" (King,
1999:217). This is why he rejects Archer's characterization
of the interpretive tradition as based on atomism, a monadic
conception of the self and argues that, instead, it is only
by placing individuals in their social context that anything
meaningful can be said about them (King, 1999:22). According
to the symbolic interactionist conception of the individual
and social reality, we learn that "... human beings act
towards things on the basis of the meanings that those
things have for them... the meaning of such things is
derived from or arises out of the social interaction that
one has with one's fellows... these meanings are handled in,
and modified through, an interpretive process used by the
person in dealing with the things he encounters" (Blumer,
1969; 2, cited in King, 1999:220). In addition to "things,"
or perhaps exemplifying what "things" mean, individuals
encounter and deal with "material conditions:" e.g., the
material structure of society, the distribution of material
goods, the distribution of wealth and, one could add,
literacy and other rates, division of labor, bureaucracies
and so on. Material conditions are the result of "the
continuing interrelations between people and are
consequently the result of... other people's practices (and
beliefs)" (King, 1999:221).

Within the interpretive tradition, the object of scientific
investigation is reduced to the purely social, in isolation
from the other dimensions of the human experience which
implicate both the natural and the social worlds in the
process of the constitution and development of
humanity. There is a radical division between individuals,
their interactions, interpretations, beliefs, meanings,
etc. and "things" or "material conditions." Hence the
impossible, theoretically and empirically inadequate claim
that material conditions result from "interrelations between
people and of other people's practices and beliefs." The
logic of Marx's criticism of the notion that "labor is the
source of all wealth and all culture" applies to this
interpretive explanation of material conditions. As Marx
pointed out, "Labor is not the source of all wealth; Nature
is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely
of such that material wealth consists) (Marx, 1994 [1891):
316). At most, if Nature enters at all in interpretive
analysis, it does so as an inert "thing" that stands outside
the purview of the social. As structures emerge in the
context of social relations mediated by people's relations
to material conditions and are, therefore, thoroughly
relational and with a material base, it is not surprising
that they are precluded by the interpretivist reduction of
the social to thought about the social and thought about
"things"; i.e., to ideology and the circulation of
ideologies (beliefs, meanings, interpretations, etc.) among
individuals, interacting today and in the past. Archer, on
the other hand, stresses the material basis of structures;
"what differentiates a structural emergent property is its
primary dependence upon material resources, both physical
and human... the internal and necessary reactions between
its constituents are fundamentally material ones" (Archer,
1999:175). Like Humpty Dumpty, once the social has been
divided from its material conditions of possibility, they
cannot be put together again in thought or
interpretation. Recourse to "background conditions" cannot
restore the organic connections or internal relations
between forms of consciousness, systems of thought (beliefs,
interpretations, ideologies), social relations and their
material base. This is why, in the end, it all dissolves
into beliefs, interpretations, and the like, thus resulting
in a "suppose they gave a war and nobody came" view of
social change. But as Marx forcefully pointed out, to
restore the role of nature in the production of wealth or,
more broadly, the role of material conditions in the
emergence, development and eventual collective struggles
against structures, it must be kept in mind that

"The bourgeois have very good grounds for ascribing
supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from
the fact that labor is determined by nature it follows that
the man who possessed no other property than his labor power
must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave
of other men who have made themselves the owners of the
material conditions of labor. He can work only with their
permission, hence live only with their permission (Marx,
1994 [1891]: 316).


Ontological individualism unavoidably results in this
attribution of "supernatural power" to individuals, their
interpretations and interactions, while obfuscating the
material conditions of possibility of those interpretations
and interactions such as, for example, the exploitation of
labor power, class and other forms of structured inequality
to which correspond vast power differences, reflected not
only in economic inequality but also in the fact that some
meanings and interpretations and beliefs etc. are somewhat
more legitimate than others and set limits to the meaning
making and interpreting activities of individuals; after
all, "the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas"
(Marx, 1992 [1845]: 129).

It is useful, to highlight the limitations of the
interpretive tradition to compare King's views on the
division of labor with Marx's. For King, the division of
labor has no emergent powers and is fully reducible to all
the individuals in the workshop. The autonomous reality each
individual confronts is only the other workers. The novelty
of the division of labor resides in the new relations among
individuals, which amount to nothing but their relations. Is
this an adequate account of the division of labor? Marx
traces the development of the division of labor under
capitalist conditions to processes of socio-economic change
(e.g., changes in the forces of production, changes in the
ownership of the means of production, changes in trade,
etc.); it starts as a "spontaneous formation" but, soon
after it develops emergent properties (as Archer might say)
so that, in time,

"it attains some consistency and extension, it becomes the
recognized methodical and systematic form of capitalist
production...it increases the social productive power of
labor, not only for the benefit of the capitalist instead of
for that of the laborer, but it does this by crippling the
individual laborers. It creates new conditions for the
lordship of capital over labor. If, therefore, on the one
hand, it presents itself historically as a progress and as a
necessary phase in the economic development of society, on
the other hand, it is a refined and civilized method of
exploitation" (Marx, 1967 [1867]:363-364).


Marx has identified a number of emergent and contradictory
properties of the division of labor; it not only increases
the production (and accumulation) of wealth, growth in
productivity and abundance of commodities for sale and
consumption but also the alienation of labor; i.e.,
production of physical, spiritual and economic misery for
the workers, and the consolidation of the power of capital
over the workforce. The emergent properties of the division
of labor affected not only the workers inside the first
workshop where it historically started, but continue to this
day affecting the organization of manual and intellectual
work as well as the tailoring of human development to its
demands. To say of the division of labor only that it
"consists of other people, which means it is substantially
autonomous of each individual but no more than all of them"
(King, 1999: 213) is a meager, superficial account of a
complex and important phenomenon; it is not good social
science, for it offers a very limited understanding of the
actual material basis of its enduring power over people's
lives, not the beliefs and interpretations of individual
capitalists and workers but the combined effect of the
structures and processes of the capitalist mode of
production.

Marx was a foremost critic of reification and no one has
inveighed more powerfully against the dangers of reification
and fetishism; most of his work is dedicated to elucidating
the social relations underlying the social fetishes or
structures that rule our lives so much so that our
commonsense categories of thought and the social sciences
themselves take those social fetishes for granted: "Man's
reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently,
his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course
directly opposite to that of their actual historical
development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the
process of development ready to hand before him...(Marx,
1967 [1867]: 75). But he never denied the reality of these
social forms nor did he concluded that just by demystifying
their objectivity by disclosing their social origins
(Archer's social times of interaction and structural
elaboration), they would slink away and die; on the
contrary, given that structures -- e.g., the structure of
the mode of production, its tendencies and contradictions,
gender and race stratification, kinship, etc. -- are
ontologically real, he argued not for a change in the
categories with which we interpret the world but for
changing the world itself; i.e., their social and material
conditions of existence.

Underlying this admittedly sketchy Marxist critique of
ontological individualism and its denial of structure are
the basic principles of historical materialism according to
which human beings are self-produced, active creatures who,
by their very nature, are compelled to transform nature to
satisfy their material needs; in the process of doing so,
they change nature and change themselves, producing and
reproducing themselves physically, socially and
intellectually as they acquire new needs, powers and
capacities and the outcome of their activities become
objectified in enduring changes in nature and in the social
structures which then become, together the material
conditions facing successive generations. Labor is at the
very center of this historical and dialectical account of
human nature and, as people develop their powers and
capacities through labor, the conditions under which people
work acquire ontological significance as well. It follows
that the relationship between people and their material
conditions is not external, not a relationship to "things"
mediated by meanings developed by other people in
relationship to "things", but an internal and necessary
relationship. This is why I would agree with Archer's view,
that agents have emergent properties of their own, although
my reasons for agreeing do not coincide with hers. As
material conditions change, new opportunities open up for
human development and individuals develop new needs and
powers irreducible to the structures within which they were
born. In turn, this is possible because of the effect of the
emergent properties of existing structures whose effects
cannot be predicted because they are irreducible to the
individuals whose lives they affect. For example, an
ontologically individualist understanding of class
consciousness assumes that the barriers to the development
of class consciousness lie in individuals' beliefs or
dispositions leading them to behave as "rational egoists."
This leads, then, to research agendas designed to explore
the conditions necessary to resolve the freerider problem
(Wright, Levine and Sober, 1992: 122). Even though such
research might yield useful findings, it is also necessary
to consider the possibility that changes in individual's
consciousness, interpretations, and social relations
including the willingness to engage in class struggles might
be the emergent property of structural changes facilitating
the choice of "assurance games."

Conclusion

Does it make a difference whether social theories accept
ontological dualism or ontological individualism, as long as
they introduce structures as background variables or social
contexts? My answer is that it does make a profound
difference. To deny the ontological reality of structures
produces an impoverished social science, one which
artificially divides the social from its material conditions
of possibility and is therefore unable to theorize the logic
of social systems and modes of production, and their
contradictions, processes, and tendencies. Such perspectives
might yield good descriptions and partial explanations of
circumscribed social phenomena, but little
else. Politically, ontological individualism cannot,
therefore, be the basis of an emancipatory social science
though its research findings might contribute to
emancipatory projects. Archer's theory, on the other hand,
offers a useful model which, with modifications, is
compatible with a dialectical and materialist reading of
Marx; one which does not reduce his work to an idealist
dialectic. Archer's ontological dualism and depiction of the
different social times linked to stages in the interplay
between structure and agency seems awkward and
undialectical, but is an important advance over
conflationary social theories. In the end, no defense of
structure will be convincing to ontological individualists
and collectivists who deny its ontological reality, for the
debate about structure and agency is not just about
"science"; it is a political debate reflecting, at the level
of ideological struggles in academia, class divisions and
muted class struggles in the real world.

REFERENCES

Archer, Margaret. S. (1995) Realist Social Theory: The
Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University
Press.

King, Anthony (1999) "Against structure: a critique of
morphogenetic social theory." The Sociological Review 47
(2), 199- 227.

Marx, Karl (1967 [1867]) Capital, Vol. I. New York,
International Publishers.

__________ (1994 [1845] The German Ideology in L. H. Simon,
ed. Selected Writings. Indianapolis/Cambridge, Hackett
Publishing Co., Inc.

__________(1994 [1891]) Critique of the Gotha Program in
L.H. Simon, ed., op. cit.

Wright, Erik O., Andrew Levine and Elliot Sober (1992)
Reconstructing Marxism. Essays on Explanation and the Theory
of History. London, Verso.


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