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. --- from list seminar-14-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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