Kevin Magill 113

Against Critical
Realism
• The concept of ideology has a pivotal position within It has been claimed
Marxist thought; as also does a related distinction between the that the onrological
appearances of things and their essential underlying structures. theories of Roy
If there has been little agreement on what these concepts may have Bhaskar can provide
meant for Marx, we all at least can agree on their importance and guiding principles
indispensability for Marxism. They have of late been the subject for social scientists,
of vigorous and sustained attack by post-Marxists, post- which can help steer
structuralists, and other kinds of relativists, who argue that to them through errors
describe beliefs and descriptions as ideological, distorted or false and misconceptions.
is mistakenly to imply that there is a non-discursive reality to This article argues
which these beliefs and descriptions fail to correspond. that neither Bhaskar's
Many theorists have continued, against the relativist tide, to 'critical realism' nor
see themselves as attempting to accurately describe their subject any overarching
matter, and to criticise and expose mistaken or illusory theories philosophical
and ideologies. Among these theorists some few have been ontology, can
impressed by claims that the ontological theories of Roy Bhaskar provide workable
can provide a philosophical basis for conceptions of ideology and guiding principles
false consciousness that have been put into doubt. According to for social scientific
Bhaskar, his critical realism' also supplies guiding principles for research, and that
the social sciences, which can help steer a path through various such principles are
errors and misconceptions that have hampered them. The aims unnecessary.
of this article will be first, to show that neither critical realism nor
any overarching philosophical ontology can provide workable
general guiding principles for the social sciences, and second, that
there is no need for such principles.
114 Capital & Class»54

With this aim in view it would be advisable to deal at the outset

with a possible objection to it: that critical realism does not claim
to be able to do what I argue it cannot do. There is good reason
to expect that this is what critical realists would say. Bhaskar for
instance remarks that

Realism is not, nor does it license, either a set of substantive

analyses or a set of practical policies. Rather, it provides a set
of perspectives on society (and nature) and on how to under-
stand them. It is not a substitute for, but rather helps to guide,
empirically controlled investigations into the structures
generating social phenomena. (Bhaskar 1989: 3)

Bhaskar, then, is cautious (and realistic) enough not to claim

that critical realism will guarantee success, but he does say, however
cautiously, that it can guide investigation. If it can do that, it must
also be true that it will minimise the investigator's chances of falling
into error: were this not the case it would have no value as a guide.
Bhaskar follows Locke, in seeing the essential role of
philosophy, and therefore of critical realism, as acting as 'under-
labourer' for the sciences (Bhaskar 1989: 1, 24 and 182), thereby
to clear the ground of some of the rubbish of wrong thinking and
error, and enable the master-builder scientist to do his work.
Elsewhere he refers to the 'propaedeutic work of philosophy' in
respect of the social sciences (ibid: 24).
Other supporters of critical realism have been less cautious than
Bhaskar, notably Lovering (1990) who I discuss later in this article,
and perhaps it is wrong to mistake their over-enthusiasm for the
views of Bhaskar and critical realism proper.^ Indeed, Bhaskar's
writings are so thick with qualification and caveat that it is often
difficult to know what he does think. One must be wary about
what one attributes to him.
In the interests, therefore, of avoiding tedious hairsplitting
about what Bhaskar or critical realism actually says, my claim is
simply this: that Bhaskar and his followers believe and have argued
that the ontological theories of critical realism provide principles
that can usefiiUy guide social inquiry. My arguments will be
directed at disproving this claim. Having said that, my
examination of critical realism will not be confined to Bhaskar's
writings. Critical realism is considered by Bhaskar and his
supporters to be a 'research programme', no less. Ink by the gallon
has been set to paper, marketing its virtues as an ontological guide
 Against Critical Realism 115

in several areas of social inquiry. An annual 'standing conference'

is devoted to its discussion and elaboration. As a position in
philosophy and social theory, therefore, it cannot be identified
exclusively with what Bhaskar has to say about it, nor with his
caution and qualification.

The indispensability of ontology

The importance of ontology and its primacy in theory has been

a dominant theme in Bhaskar's work. In A Realist Theory of
Science (Bhaskar 1978) he argues that the objects of scientific
inquiry exist independently of scientific theory, and of any pattern
of events by means of which they might be detected. Marx's
injunction that it is the task of science to look beyond appearances
and uncover the hidden structures that generate them is enlarged
into a threefold general ontological distinction between the
'empirical' (things as they appear), the 'actual' (the world of events)
and the 'real' (the underlying mechanisms that generate those
events and appearances).'
Bhaskar describes what he takes to be the two main rival
theories to 'transcendental realism' (as he calls his philosophy of
the natural sciences) in the philosophy of science, as neoKantian
idealism and empirical realism. Empirical realists, he argues,
properly recognise the real existence of the objects of science, but
wrongly believe them to consist in nothing more than events and
appearances. NeoKantians, by contrast, hold that scientific
explanation requires the use of models that go beyond
appearances, but wrongly take those models to be mere constructs
of the imagination rather than corresponding to real mechanisms.
Bhaskar describes his philosophy of science as transcendental
realism because of the transcendental character of some of his
arguments. Transcendental arguments are not new in philosophy,
having been used by Kant, who described his philosophy as
'transcendental idealism' (cf. Kant 1933). Kant attempted to show
that although certain concepts (cause, substance, and number, for
example) cannot be proved by experience, their applicability is
transcendentally presupposed by our being able to have intelligible
experience. Likewise Bhaskar argues that although it is not
possible to compare what reality is like in itself with the scientific
representation ofit, we can establish a priori that reality must have
certain features in order for scientific activity to be possible.
116 Capital & Class»54

Bhaskar identifies natural laws as grounded in 'generative

mechanisms', which are the tendencies of objects to behave in
certain typical ways in virtue of their essential structures, rather
than the constant conjunctions of events depicted in what he calls
'the Humean model of scientific law'. Constant conjunctions of
events, he argues, are rare in nature, mostly brought about in
conditions of experimental control"* (cf. Bhaskar 1978, chapters
1 and 2). Since the intelligibility of experimental activity pre-
supposes that the laws it identifies continue to operate when the
experiment is not taking place, causal laws must be ontologically
distinct from patterns of events.
A second transcendental argument is applied to changes in
scientific theory:

If changing experience of objects is to be possible, objects must

have a distinct being in space and time from the experiences
of which they are the objects. For Kepler to see the rim of the
earth drop away, while Tycho Brahe watches the sun rise, we
must suppose that there is something that they both see (in
difFerent ways), (op cit: 31)

In fact all this proves is that we think of something as being

common to the experiences of the two scientists, although what
they have in common might be just sensory information: it
establishes nothing about the ontological independence of objects.

Bhaskar identifies the failings of most other philosophies of

science with the mistaken ontological assumptions they make. Past
attempts to dispense with ontology in philosophy and concentrate
instead on what can be known or meant, are futile, according to
Bhaskar, and always presuppose what they attempt to exclude.
Both the neoKantian and empirical realist philosophies, for
instance, are committed to the view that the objects of scientific
investigation are the objects of actual or possible experience
(Bhaskar 1989: 13). Likewise if'a philosopher analyses scientific
laws as, or as dependent upon, constant conjunctions of events,
he or she is then committed to the view that there are such
conjunctions' (ibid.).
It is debatable whether ontology is as inescapable as Bhaskar
suggests. I will have more to say about the role of scientific
ontology, but for now it can be noted that the defender of constant
conjunctions of events can repudiate the ontological view Bhaskar
 Against Critical Realism 117

imputes to her. She can say instead that reality is such that it
allows us to experience and describe it in terms of constant
conjunctions. She can say that to ask what it is really like beyond
experience and description is meaningless. This would commit
her to acknowledging that reality exists independently of our
thinking about it, but would fall a long way short of the sort of
ontological commitment that Bhaskar regards as inescapable.

Ontology in social science

The objects of social science, according to Bhaskar, have

ontological characteristics in common with those of tbe natural
sciences, and some that are not shared. The social world like the
natural world must be structured, differentiated, 'open',' and
abounding with generative mechanisms. Society differs from the
natural world inasmuch as its continuation is dependent on
human activity that both replicates and transforms it, and also in
the lesser intransitivity of its structures. The social sciences, unlike
the natural, must include themselves as part of their subject matter.
Bhaskar argues, furthermore, that the flindamental subject matter
of social science is not either individuals or collectives but relations.
(Cf. Bhaskar 1979 1986, 1989).
Commitment to an ontology of generative mechanism, 'deep
structures' and so forth, will, Bhaskar believes, enable social
scientists and socialists to steer a course through a variety of
confusions and false dichotomies such as 'fiindamentalism and
revisionism, individualism and collectivism, or scientific analysis
and moral criticism' (Bhaskar 1989: 1). The not-so-new realism
of the Labour Party, for example, is

actually an empiricist or empirical realism. It is a form of

realism which fails to recognise that there are enduring
structures and generative mechanisms underlying and
producing observable phenomena and events. In other words
its realism is of the most superficial sort.(ibid: 2)

By contrast critical realists argue that

: we will only be able to understand - and so change - the social

. world if we identify the structures at work that generate ...
events or discourses...such structures may be hierarchically
118 Capital & Class»54

ranked in terms of their explanatory importance. Such an

approach allows us to avoid the pitfalls of both crude
determinism (for example, of an economic reductionist sort)
and undifFerentiated eclecticism, (ibid: 2-3)

Bhaskar uses these claims to develop a model for social science

that he describes as explanatory and emancipatory. Since
experimental controls are not possible in the social world, and since
predictions are usually made in experimental situations, the
method for testing social science theories must be 'exclusively
explanatory' rather than predictive (ibid: 5). Two sentences after
saying this, however, he claims that a 'powerful explanatory theory
will allow us to make conditional predictions about tendencies
which may manifest themselves in the future'. Surely if a theory
can licence predictions it must be possible to judge its success in
doing so; and aren't all predictions conditional? conditional, that
is, on the occurrence of the antecedent conditions that are
described in the grounds for the prediction. We may let that pass,
however, since there is a more fundamental objection to Bhaskar's
claims that the testing of social scientific theories must be purely
explanatory, and that is that the ontological argument on which
it is based — to wit, that the constant conjunctions of events that
make predictions possible only occur in experimental conditions
— is false. Constant conjunctions of events, which is to say certain
event types being regularly connected, are a ubiquitous feature of
the natural and social worlds: the Earth perennially spins on its
axis, so that points on the globe experience sun rise each day; my
home remains standing thanks to regularities in its materials and
structure; I press a button and the radio comes on; my bank
account accrues interest if it is in the black and charges if it is in
the red, just as I was told that it would when I opened it; and the
interests of big business and workers tend not to coincide. None
of these things in themselves would provide a basis for interesting
social scientific predictions, but they might do, for all we can tell,
when taken together or combined with other regularities. The
point is that they are regularities and our lives depend on there
being such regularities in some degree.

Critical realists might object to this that most of the examples

are not constant conjunctions of events at all, but mere statistical
regularities, and not at all as regular as the cause and effect relations
we bring about in experiments. Houses sometimes fall down,
radios break down, and sometimes banks make mistakes or change
 Against Critical Realism 119

their rules. The objection, however, misperceives the amount of

regularity there is, by contrast, in experiments. No matter how
exact the controls, there will always be some variation in
antecedent conditions and therefore in results. Sometimes
predicted experimental results just don't happen at all. If we make
the conditions for what is to count as an empirical regularity too
tight, therefore, nothing will satisfy them. The reality is that there
are constant conjunctions of events/regularities taking place all
the time, in and out of experiments.
The idea that the business of social science is explanation rather
than prediction is likely to be attractive to economists refiecting
ori the persistent failure of economic predictions in recent years.
This has led critical realists such as Tony Lawson to argue for the
abandonment of econometrics because of its essential attachment
to prediction and its implicit ontological commitment to empirical
regularities in economic behaviour (See Lawson 1994a, 1994b).
Another source of appeal might be that it appears to provide an
answer to Karl Popper's argument that Marx's analysis of capitalism
has been falsified by its predictive failures (Popper 1972: 37).
What role predictions can have in social science, and why
accurate social prediction has proved so elusive are problems that
continue to require explanation. Perhaps there are reasons for
thinking that we are unlikely to improve our ability to predict
social phenomena, the obvious one being that at the level we have
been unable to predict there are simply too many variables for us
ever to be able to do so. Alternatively, our being able to predict
may have been hampered by mistaken assumptions about
universal rational self-interested calculation by economic agents.
But the critical realist explanation that prediction must &il because
regularities occur only in experimental situations, is simply false:
it is astounding that anyone ever took it to be true.
Bhaskar's argument that social science must be emancipatory
as well as explanatory, is again bound up with the notion that it
is the fiinction of science to move beyond appearances to uncover
the structures and hidden mechanisms that produce those
experiences. In Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation
(1986) and 'Scientific Explanation and Human Emancipation'
(in Bhaskar 1989), he argues that social scientists develop theories
that show certain beliefs to be false and explain how those false
or illusory beliefs are generated by, for example, certain social
relations. This he argues necessarily implies, ceteris parahus, a
negative evaluation of the causes of the false beliefs and a positive
120 Capital & Class»54

evaluation of action rationally directed at removing or trans-

forming those causes.
As a model of social inquiry this is well suited to theories, such
as Marx's analysis of capitalism and Freudian psychoanalysis, which
posit the existence of illusory beliefs and seek to explain them, and
whose authors are motivated in part by a desire to bring such
beliefs to an end. It is likely to be appealing to those theorists I
mentioned at the beginning, who want to reject relativist claims
that concepts such as ideology should be abandoned. But as a
model for social science in general this is skewed and inadequate.
Detecting and explaining illusory belief is a part of what goes on
in social science, but only a part. It might be possible, I suppose,
to construe the phrase 'detecting and explaining illusory beliefs'
so broadly as to encompass investigations into the relationship
between unemployment and wages cycles, or long term under-
investment in manufacturing, or sexual harassment in schools, or
the effects of fee-led expansion in higher education, but only at
the cost of rendering it meaningless. Even in respect of Marx's
work the model is inadequate. It is far from clear, for instance,
how the class polarisation thesis or the theory of the tendency of
the rate of profit to fall can be slotted into Bhaskar's model.
My purpose, however, is not perse to take issue with Bhaskar's
model for social science, but rather to criticise the critical realist
idea that commitment to an ontology of deep structures,
generative mechanisms and so on, can assist social inquiry.
Bhaskar reminds the reader often enough that critical realism does
not dispense with the importance of being attentive to the peculiar
features of one's subject matter, but his own model for social
science shows where attempting to serve two masters (critical
realism and the aim of the inquiry) gets you.

The role of ontology

That overarching philosophical ontologies will not serve to guide

social inquiry does not imply that ontology has no place at all in
inquiry. In attempting to account for either natural or social
phenomena it is inevitable that theorists make ontological claims,
whether explicit or tacitly assumed. Theorising involves attempting
to identify and account for what sorts of things exist, and it is
certainly important that a theorist is fully aware of the ontologicaJ
claims her theory commits her to.
 Against Critical Realism 121

Lovering, therefore, is partly right in arguing that

Every attempt to think about society involves some ontological

claims, or assumptions ahout what reality is like. The difference
that critical realism makes is that these assumptions are
brought to the forefront. (Lovering 1990: 38)

It is true that thinking about society involves ontological

assumptions, and doubtless also that mistaken ontological
assumptions can be damaging to investigation. Someone who
took to heart the methodological individualism of Karl Popper
and Margaret Thatcher, according to which only individuals are
real, would, to the extent that they did take it to heart, be less able
to produce adequate social theory. But the relationship between
ontology and theory, and its consequences, are a good deal less
straightforward than Bhaskar and Lovering take them to be.
Methodological individualism is a social scientific ontological
claim. It has similarities to ontological atomism in respect of the
natural world, but it is, nevertheless, social science specific.
Likewise each area of scientific inquiry has ontological problems
that are peculiar to it. Biology, for example, has its own
ontological problems about taxonomy, just as the relationship of
chemical conceptions of entities to those of physics is a problem
for chemistry and physics.
A theorist might, for example, adopt a general ontological
commitment to emergence and the autonomy of structures, as
critical realists seem to do, and that could well lead her to have
a guiding scepticism about reductionism. But the validity of
reduction in any particular science can only be determined by
concrete investigation and theorising within its field of inquiry
— it may be valid in some fields and invalid in others. No universal
ontology can resolve specific ontological problems within
particular sciences or social sciences.

Ontology in history

There have been notable historical instances of scientific

ontologies, which having proved successful in one area of inquiry
were adopted as guides and models in several others; thus
becoming universal ontologies, and even being taken as marking
the truly scientific approach. The corpuscularean ontology of
122 Capital & Class»54

17th and 18th Century mechanics and the concomitant resolutive-

compositive method, were widely adopted as guiding ontological
and methodological models, but with uneven success. Hume's
theory of mind and Hobbes's political theory, for instance, have
been primarily instructive as examples of how not to approach
their respective subject matters.
The temptation to adopt or adapt ontological principles and
methods fTom successRil sciences is understandable, and sometimes
useful, but there is no guarantee of success with it.' There simply
is no general ontological schema under which the specific onto-
logical problems of the various sciences can be classified; and yet
it is precisely such a schema that critical realism is intended to
provide.
That there can be no such schema is illustrated by historical
changes in scientific ontologies. One striking revelation of
Thomas Kuhn's work and that of other historical philosophers of
science, has been the discontinuities in the nature of the entities
with which science has populated the world. Kuhn argues that
the ontological claims of relativity physics bear more resemblance
to those of Aristotle's physics than Newton's (cf. Kuhn 1970).^
Bhaskar is at pains to stress that critical realism is committed to
social and historical relativity of scientific theory, but if science
does, as he suggests, progressively attempt to give expression to
extra-theoretical structures, there ought to have been greater
ontological continuity in the history of science than has turned
out to be the case.
This is not to say that philosophy can have no part to play in
resolving problems in science. When scientists debate about
ontological questions they engage in philosophy. They do so in
such a way that the specific assumptions and findings of their
inquiries are examined, contrasted, analysed and evaluated by
means of more general standards and concepts of rationality, such
as coherence, identity, contradiction, transitivity and so forth; all
of which falls within the domain of philosophy. Discussions of
this sort bring into play more abstract and generalised
philosophical questions about the nature of such concepts and
standards, and of their application.' Philosophy can also assist
scientific investigation by helping to expose mistaken or inadequate
ontological commitments and methodological principles, (or just
by suggesting difFerent ways of thinking about problems), as has
been done, for example, with methodological individualism in the
social sciences, or in Wittgenstein's examination of psychology'
 Against Critical Realism 123

Thus science has things to learn from philosophy (just as

philosophy has things to learn from science), but what it has to
learn and what it can make use of is not something that can be
determined in advance. With the relationship between science
and philosophy, as with anything else, context is all important.

Underlabouring

The purpose of the critical realist ontology is as I mentioned earlier

to 'underlabour' for science, in John Locke's sense. The notion
that philosophy can clear a path for the sciences, therefore, is not
a new one. Some philosophers by contrast have been apt to regard
philosophy's position more as the overseer of science. What is
common to both attitudes, and what has persisted in many
difFerent philosophies since, is the notion that philosophy can be
a guide to science: that it can either underwrite scientific
knowledge or provide it with principles that will enable scientists
to pursue their investigations more effectively.
There are many historical examples of such supposed
underlabouring, few if any of which are likely to inspire
confidence in this latest endeavour. I mentioned already some
of the unsuccessful historical attempts at generalising
corpusculareanism. To this can be added the attacks made on
Newton's theory of gravity because of its seeming commitment
to 'occult forces' that science was thought to have freed itself
from.'" In the nineteen-rwenties and thirties, logical positivists
set out to develop a simplified language based on the notion that
all meaningful statements are expressible as statements of singular
sense experiences or combinations of them, and that this would
enable scientific knowledge to be clearly distinguished from the
senseless metaphysics with which it had sometimes been mixed
up. It was subsequently abandoned by some of its major
advocates in the face of insurmountable philosophical difficulties,
and afi:er having a pernicious afFect on the development of social
science." Karl Popper has sought to distinguish the scientific
from the pseudoscientific by the principle of falsification,
according to which only those theories can be scientific that have
testable consequences that are capable, in principle, of being
proved false by contrary evidence. The difficulties with Popper's
falsificationism have been widely discussed (see for instance Kuhn
1970b).
124 Capital &Class»54

Marxists have also sought to elaborate philosophical principles

that might guide human practice, in science, social science and
political activity — the most infiuential and dominating example
of which has been dialectical materialism. Based on Engels's
attempts in Anti-Diihring (1934) and The Dialectics of Nature
(1954) to demonstrate the dialectical character of the science of
his day, this theory came to dominate the Marxism of both the
second and third internationals. Since critical realism, like
dialectical materialism, has also been described as a philosophical
foundation for Marxism (see Roy Edgley's comments, quoted on
the cover of Bhaskar 1989), it would be instructive to consider
the record of success of dialectical materialism's guiding ontological
principles. As with other guiding philosophies its adherents have
believed that with a proper grasp and application of its principles,
errors could be avoided or minimised. If any communist was
found to have erred in theory or practice, or fallen from favour,
the feilure was often attributed to a lack of dialectics: for instance
in forgetting the ubiquity of'the unity of opposites', or in ignoring
the 'primacy of being over thought'.
Of course, few imagined that dialectical materialism, properly
understood, was a cast iron guarantee against wrong thinking or
wrong doing, but it was thought of nevertheless as tending to make
a big difference. Stalin's errors and crimes, and those of Soviet
society under his leadership, when these became known and
openly discussed, were sometimes attributed to a failure to think
dialectically, or to lack of emphasis being given to one of the 'laws
of dialectics'. At the time he was alive, however, few doubted
Stalin's grasp of dialectical materialism - was it just that everyone
was too afraid to mention his philosophical confusion, or is there
some other explanation for the fact that it only surfaced later?
I want to suggest that the reason that dialectical materialism
proved so inadequate at keeping some of its major adherents on
the straight and narrow, is that its principles, even if true as stated,
are so general as to allow of a multiplicity of practical applications
in concrete situations. Its practical value in guiding thought and
action is therefore nil.
Nor could this problem have been avoided by making
dialectical materialism more specific, since that would have
undermined its raison d'etre as a general guiding philosophy
capable of being applied in a wide range of difFerent contexts. It
is the very notion of a general guiding philosophy that is at fault.
Whether in science, political activity or life in general, things must
 Against Critical Realism 125

be looked at according to their own specific features and

conditions. There are no universal ontological truths or principles
that can supplant, alleviate or guide the work of concrete
investigation.
That critical realism cannot hope for better success than
dialectical materialism as a guide for social inquiry and political
practice can be illustrated by considering its claims to provide a
philosophical perspective for steering a path between new realism
and fundamentalism. Recall Bhaskar's claim that new realism 'is
actually an empiricist or empirical realism' that 'fails to recognise
that there are enduring structures and generative mechanisms
underlying and producing observable phenomena and events'. He
subsequendy qualifies this formulation, admitting that it may tend
towards what he terms 'essentialist theoretical reductionism' (ibid:
191-192): quite so, but now we are left to wonder what he takes
the relationship between new realism and any ontological position
to be. As ever, qualifications serve to save him from being put
on the spot.
New realism can certainly be supported by arguments of a
superficial empiricist sort: arguments, that is, which dwell on the
transitory surface phenomena of capitalist society. There is no
reason, however, for a supporter of new realism to be committed,
explicitly or implicitly, to any sort of empiricism. A new realist
might readily allow for the existence of deep structures, and
contend, nevertheless, that politicians are constrained to operate
at the level of ideology and appearance. New realism might take
support from empiricist arguments, and from a range of other
arguments and commitments, some of which might stand in
direct opposition to empiricism. Empiricist social theory is
doubtless particularly well suited to new realism, but the
relationship between them is not one of implication or
dependence.
To further illustrate the point, try imagining, as a thought
experiment, that due to some freak train of events within the
British Labour movement, critical realism came for a time to
occupy a position of intellectual authority. Would that entail an
end to the twilight of the left? Would it so much as nudge the
Front Bench in the direction of socialist economics? It would not.
Consultation exercises would be conducted, policy papers would
be produced, and conferences would be addressed, all informed
by a surfeit of'underlying structures' and 'depth analyses'. Labour
politicians could as easily cloak themselves in the colours of critical
126 Capital & Class»54

realism, as any other theoretical pretension. Their doing so,

however, would not require any colossal deceit, just because an
ontology of deep structures, generative mechanisms, stratification,
and all the rest of it, has no clear implications for social analysis
and political practice (save in respect of the claim that there are
no empirical regtilarities in society, which, as I have already shown,
is false). No doubt, just as with dialectical materialism, there
would be no end of doctrinal squabbles and split hairs about what
is consistent with its teachings; because, like dialectical materialism,
critical realism is just too vague and general — as it must be to
operate as a universal ontology — to provide any real guidance or
clear implications. With that in mind, Bhaskar's claim that
'Within the capitalist mode of production critical realism is always
going to seem a luxury its agents cannot afFord' (ibid: 192) is just
naive. Like the critical critics castigated by Marx and Engels in
the German Ideology (1978): what sheep in wolves' clothing are
critical realists.

Economics

Having set out the case against thinking that a set of ontological
commitments can provide guidance in both the natural and social
sciences, I turn now to the particular case of economics, wherein,
as elsewhere, great claims have been made for critical realism. In
the pages of this journal two recent articles, by John Lovering
(1990) and Rajani Kanth (1992), have argued the case for the
efficacy of critical realism as a guiding ontology. Since Lovering's
article is the more substantial of the two, and more accurately
refiects the claims of critical realism,'^ my critical comments will
be directed at that.
Lovering follows Bhaskar in arguing that critical realism can
enable socialist economists to avoid the false dichotomy between
new realism and fiindamentalism. Lovering identifies new realists
as having a number of general commitments: to the social market
as the best means of fulfilling individual needs and preferences,
to individualism, and to the notion of a plurality of contingently
related processes at work within society, each with its own logic
or dynamic, as opposed to any single overriding determination
such as production.
Fundamentalists on the other hand tend to insist on the
overriding importance of the capitalist nature of contemporary
 Against Critical Realism 127

societies, and that the complex plurality of events at the level of

appearances are no more than ' "mediated efFects" of the inner
structure of capitalism' (op. cit: 32). They assert the primacy of
the class struggle and the need to take into account the class nature
of society in all policy formulation and political action.
Again echoing Bhaskar, Lovering sees new realism as
exemplifying a one-sided preoccupation with particular short term
events and appearances to the exclusion of the deeper structures
at work within society. Fundamentalists are guilty of the opposite
error of emphasising one structure (capitalism) to the exclusion
of all others, and ignoring what is taking place at the level of
events. In other words, new realists forget to look beyond the
facts, while fiandamentalists refuse to face up to them.
A critical realist approach, by contrast, would begin by
recognising the operation of other structures than capitalism, such
as the nation state and patriarchy, and attempt to trace the ways
these structures converge and are mediated in their determinations
by more nationally and historically specific mechanisms. The
mechanisms might include

the institutional structure of the economy (the specific

organisation of capital into units), the pattern of discrete
markets... the political apparatus and traditions, etc. (ibid.
1990: 4 2 ) "

The concrete analysis of the convergence of various structures,

mediated by these sorts of mechanisms, provides the basis for the
critical realist explanation of particular events in the economy and
elsewhere. Thus critical realism unites the new-realist stress on
the importance of empirical investigation with the fiandamentalist
emphasis on the determining effect of deep structures. It therefore
helps us to get things right where others have got them wrong.
Lovering concedes that

The problem of defining what will qualify as a structure and a

mechanism cannot be conduaed outside of a concrete scientific
problem. Critical realism does not attempt to adjudicate on
this in an /j^n'on'philosophical' manner, (ibid: 52)

Bhaskar's caution and qualification has not been lost on

Lovering after all. He does judge, however, that the schema of
structures and mechanisms underlying events will apply in any
128 Capital 6-Class»54

field of investigation, and that a commitment to that schema, a

priori, can assist the investigator.
Directing his argument towards particular cases, Lovering
argues that a critical realist perspective will look to the way that
other structures than capitalism operate, converge''* and are
mediated by specific mechanisms, to produce particular effects
such as the 'Crash of October 1987 and the turndown in Yuppie
jobs in London and New York' (ibid: 42). He compares this with
fundamentalism and new realism:

Each position represents a difFerent kind of oversimplification,

blotting out or ignoring parts of social reality, forbidding
certain kinds of thinking, and ultimately undermining its own
coherence as a result... Fundamentalism's attempt to explain
everything in terms of one structure and alleged mechanisms
alone... New Realism's focus on the empirical level of
'events'.(ibid: 43)

Those who are guilty of fundamentalism are the likes of Marx

and contemporary value theorists who attempt to show concrete
events in the economy and elsewhere as ultimately determined by
production. Repudiating this view, Lovering argues that, for
example, in a concrete analysis the value of any commodity must
be contingent on other social relations than relations of
production, and that it will be conditioned by diverse struggles
and inequalities including racism and sexism.
Lovering's arguments against fundamentalism in economics
may be right, but whether they are, or the degree to which they
are, will depend entirely on whether he has accurately depicted
the specific conditions of the modern capitalist economies he
mentions. They owe nothing at all to an a priori ontological
commitment to the view that all social events or phenomena must
be determined by a plurality of structures. If fundamentalists are
wrong, it will not be because they have failed to give proper weight
to a general ontological thesis, but because as a matter of fact what
they describe as taking place in modern economies is too
simplified. There is nothing in the general ontological nature of
things, either in the natural world or in society, that prevents
production from determining in the way that Lovering's
fundamentalists have suggested. For all we can know, before
detailed analysis and evaluation of actual cases, they could be
right."
 Against Critical Realism 129

Lovering is prepared to allow that they are at least partially

right, or that they see something that new realists miss (and vice
versa). Each is

partial and ultimately incoherent... [but] nevertheless draws

attention to social practices neglected in the opposing
perspective, which deserve attention, (ibid: 38)

This echoes the theme in Bhaskar's writings, of avoiding 'false

dichotomies', involving a perverse attitude that has been a
persistent and irritating feature of Hegelian and Marxist thought.
It is the idea that there is a virtue in being able to characterise the
two sides in any theoretical conflict as being one-sided - the
attitude that all oppositions are false or unreal."' Often enough
all we are offered by way of proof that a particular opposition is
false are caricatures of the parties to it. Despite its Hegelian
pretences the attitude is ultimately ahistorical in ignoring the
necessity and productivity of opposition in thought. In always
looking for a midway between oppositions it invariably misses the
truth in opposition. It aims for a safe or correct view, to be
attained by hoisting itself up by the philosophical bootstraps, and
then looking down in priggish disdain at the one-sided warring
factions. In so doing it quits the terrain where truth, if any, is
established. Had either Weber or Durkheim, for instance, as
representatives of 'one-sided individualism' and 'one-sided
collectivism' in sociology, opted for such a course, it is unlikely
that either would have had contributed anything of substance to
their discipline.
I have argued, in respect of dialectical materialism, that general
ontological principles are too ambiguous, just because they are so
general, to provide guidance in specific cases. This invariably leads
to ad hoc or post hoc associations being asserted in order to make
good the tie up between the philosophical schema and whatever
it is that is supposed to be guided by it. Thus, aft:er the event of
Stalin's crimes we could be advised that in some way they involved
a departure from right thinking dialectical materialism, even
though relatively few thought so at the time. Similarly critical
realists are apt to surest that fundamentalism (or any other wrong
headed opposition), has certain bad programmatic consequences,
although the connection between them is either not spelled out
or rather hastily gestured at. Lovering, for instance, asserts an
association of fundamentalism and Romanticism,''' because:
130 Capital & Class»54

If the working class cannot be defined analytically with any

precision, its surrogates have to be found in some visible group
of employees that is not too highly paid, or is on strike, (ibid: 46)

Which theorists might be guilty of this, if indeed any are, he

does not say. On such ad hoc associations must we rely when no
obvious consequences follow from commitments at the general
philosophical level. (Compare Bhaskar, who, wise afiier the event,
tritely advises us not to place an exa^erated emphasis on partictilar
fluctuations such as the 1987 Stock Exchange crash (op cit: 4-5).)
Ultimately critical realism, like dialectical materialism, becomes
a means of saying what is right and what is wrong without having
to do the hard work of properly explaining why. Hence we have
Lovering commenting that among those theorists of whose work
he does approve, few of them

are free from the weaknesses of Fundamentalism or New

Realism. For example, some regtilationists anchor their approach
in strong versions of the labour theory of value which ... is
incapable of providing the support they demand ofit. (ibid: 49)

In fact Lovering merely asserts rather than argues for the

inadequacy ofstrong versions of the labour theory of value. His
argument, as such, is no more than that the theorists he criticises
do not meet the requirements of critical realism. Even those he
endorses fall short of its standards. It therefore becomes an ideal,
which can explain everything, which nothing can match up to,
and which is never put to the test.

Why we don't need critical realism

I said at the beginning of this article that critical realism will have
seemed attractive to Marxists and others who are anxious to defend
the applicability of concepts such as illtisoriness and ideology from
the attacks of post-structuralists and the like; and who see social
science as attempting to understand the ways things really are
rather than making up stories. Thankfully we can retain such
concepts without the help of critical realism.
When, for example, Marx claims that the commodity form has
the illusory appearance of possessing value as an intrinsic property,
the claimed illtisoriness of the appearance is not dependent on an
 Against Critical Realism 131

implicit commitment to universal ontological stratification and

structure in the extra-theoretical nature of things. Rather it follows
from Marx's depiction of value as a social relation, and his
argument that value cannot be detected in the physical structure
of the commodity. It might then be objected that if the claim of
illusoriness as inherent in the commodity form is dependent on
Marx's analysis of value, then the analysis of value as the under-
lying essence of exchange value must be given a footing in
philosophical ontology. Thus it is suggested that Marx's
distinction between the appearance of capitalism and its
underlying structure, requires an ontological support in the critical
realist distinction between the level of events and the level of
underlying structures. Marx's distinction, however, does not imply
or depend on a deeper philosophical ontology. The justification
of Marx's division between the surface forms/appearance and the
underlying structure of capitalism, is that the surface forms are
inadequate to a theoretical description ofit. When attempts were
made to deploy appearential descriptions theoretically in
explaining capitalism, as classical economics did, irresolvable
problems resulted (for example, in explaining how if labour is paid
for at its value it is capable of producing extra value): they were
unequal to the theoretical task that was asked of them.
If, then, distinctions between appearance and underlying
essence arise because the form in which appearance comes to us
are inadequate for a theoretical explanation of the phenomena,
does this commit us to saying anything about the extra-discursive
ontological nature of the reality our theories attempt to explain?
Only this: that reality (social or natural) is such that it is not
possible to describe and explain it theoretically using the forms
in which it immediately appears to us, without irresolvable
problems and contradictions arising. That is all we need to say,
and that is all we sensibly can say.
A minimal realism of this sort cannot guide us in the way that
critical realism vainly hopes to do, but it can provide an answer
to those who argue that theories are merely vocabularies" or
discourses, which in principle can claim no special authority over
other vocabularies or validly describe other vocabularies as illusory.
The attitude taken to vocabularies by such claims is superficial.
If the set of terms, and their usage, that describe the surface
appearances of commodity exchange, is a vocabulary, it is a
vocabulary that is necessarily difFerent in kind from a theoretical
vocabulary that is used to explain commodity exchange. The
132 Capital &Class»54

vocabulary of appearance may be valid and intelligible within its

natural limits, and it would be wrong to claim that as a vocabulary
of appearance it is necessarily false or illusory. But it is nonsense
to s u r e s t that it is, thereby, equivalent in explanatory worth, or
of no less worth, than a theoretical vocabulary, or that it should
in no way be treated as less worthy than a theoretical vocabulary.
If that is claimed we should rightly demand 'in what sense is it
equivalent in explanatory worth?'. It is certainly not equivalent
when it comes to explaining commodity exchange, since it
demonstrably leads to irresolvable problems and contradictions
when we attempt to do that with it. Theoretical vocabularies can,
therefore, claim special authority over vocabularies of appearance:
they can claim it in respect of their ability to explain their subject
matter.
As I said, a vocabulary of appearance is not to be considered
illusory simply in virtue of being a vocabulary of appearance. For
a vocabulary, or an idea, or a concept, to be illusory, it must make
a claim, or convey an impression, or imply a proposition, that is
demonstrably untrue. For that reason we can say that the
commodity form is inherently illusory in character: it carries with
it an idea that is demonstrably fidse. Demonstrating its falsity does,
of course, require Marx's theoretical analysis of value. At this point
the anti-realist might say that we have illegitimately made use of
one vocabulary to criticise a term in another (cf. Rorty 1989: 48,
and also Winch 1970). Alternatively, they might say that the
commodity form is only illusory within Marx's theoretical
vocabulary, but not within the vocabulary of appearance of
commodity exchange. That would stand up if vocabularies were
self-contained and self-subsisting rather than overlapping and co-
referential, but they are not. Remember that the vocabulary of
appearance is unable to explain commodity exchange. An
explanation of commodity exchange (which is the task of theory)
must therefore describe the commodity form as illusory. If the
relativist replies that we still need not describe the commodity form
as illusory when we are not engaged in explaining commodity
exchange, we can readily agree with them: but what ofit?
We can therefore retain a commitment to a distinction between
what is real and illusory, and reject the anti-realist claims of Rorty
and others, without a commitment to an ontology of deep
structures, generative mechanisms, etc. We can do many other
things in which critical realism would be our guide: without its
help. Think back to Lovering's arguments against new realism and
 Against Critical Realism 133

fundamentalism: supposing his claims against them are valid,

didn't he already know well enough how to steer a course between
new realism and fiindamentalism without any help from critical
realism? Lovering argues that new realism is preoccupied with
the transitory surface phenomena of capitalism, whereas
fundamentalism is blind to events and to other structures than
capitalism. Is that not enough to enable him to reject them, or
to maintain a course between them? In what way does it add to
this to perceive the true course as buoyed up by deeper ontological
claims? Lovering can get by without a guiding universal ontology
to tell him the difference between right and wrong, and so can
we all.
Finally, the danger with a universal ontology such as critical
realism, in addition to its uselessness as a guide, is that in the haste
to determine by a priori means what social science is and how it
must be carried out, it can tend to produce zealotry and a sectarian
inability to hear differing views other than on its own terms."
Social theory will be better served by pluralism and the necessity
of defending theories and models from critical voices, than a
guiding ontology.
General ontological schemas, therefore, have no practical
application: a fact that their adherents have to make good by ad
hoc means. As such, and in the a priori promise they hold out
of maximising the investigators chances of success, they are anti-
scientific. However their adherents might protest their innocence,
they ofFer the prospect of a universal key to the truth that can
minimise the hard work and unavoidable errors of investigation.
Neither social scientists or socialists have anything to gain from
such philosophies.

Earlier drafts of this article were read and commented on by Jonathon Acknowledgement
Michie, Tony Lawson and Chris Arthur. My thanks to them and to
colleagues and students who discussed earlier versions given as papers.
134 Capital & Class*54

Notes 1. Nottobeconfusedwith the critical realism of R.W. Sellars and others,

in the early twentieth century (cf. Passmore 1966, ch.l2).
2. Commenting on an earlier draft of this article, Tony Lawson,
suggested that Lovering's claims for critical realism are too hold. What
critical realism can do, according to Lawson, is to criticise theories
within the social sciences that postulate or rely on the existence of
'constant conjunctions of events'. I deal with critical realist claims
ahout constant conjunctions later in this article.
3. Elsewhere he refers to the empirical as a 'suhset' of the actual, and
the actual as a suhset of the real (Bhaskar 1989: 190).
4. Thus, 'invariances (constant conjunctions of events) depend, in
general, upon human activity' (Bhaskar 1978: 34).
5. By 'open' Bhaskar means 'not subject to experimental controls'. He
describes experiments as 'closed' or as 'closed systems'. The usage' is
aberrant: closed systems are standardly those that are free from any
external influence, e.g. the universe or God. Experiments, hy contrast,
actually require external input, and in quantum physics they include
external control as a factor in equations.
6. Critical realists cannot even say for their ontological claims, what was
true of corpusculareanism, that they were abstracted and generalised
from a successful area of science, in which context at least they would
have proved their value, since they are inferred, putatively, by a priori
reasoning ahout what must be the case either for all science or all social
science to he possible. There is at least, in a genuinely scientific
ontology such as corpusculareanism, a metaphorical and palpable
model of little billiard balls or particles for the theorist to work with
and try out. Deep structures and generative mechanisms, however,
leave the theorist with precious little to work from.
7. Bhaskar misreads Kuhn as claiming that there can be no rational
grounds for choosing between theories (Bhaskar 1989: 32). In fact
Kuhn acknowledges that there are rational criteria for choosing
herween theories, but none that are absolutely conclusive (cf. Kuhn
1970a, 1970c and 1977).
8. I therefore disagree with Gunn 1988, who appears to leave philosophy
with no role to play at all in relation to problems in science. To he
fair to Gunn, his argument is that philosophy cannot claim for itself
the privileged role of being a second-order validator of first-order
scientific categories. I agree, but would argue that second-order
philosophical discussions about the nature of categories and their
application can usefully feed into ontological discussions within the
sciences. The validation of scientific categories is as Gunn rightly
argues as much a practical as a theoretical matter, but this does not
necessitate a unity of second-order and first-order theorising in the
way he claims. Ever since Kant, philosophers have accepted that pure
second-order theorising cannot be sustained, but the degree to which
second-order theorising relies on or requires first-order theorising,
varies: the relationship being sometimes close and sometimes weak.
 Against Critical Realism 135

9. Critical realists have attempted this more modest task as well,

mistakenly as I have argued, in their claim that theories and
philosophies should not rely on the existence of empirical regularities.
10. It has been suggested to me that since physics subsequently
abandoned Newton's belief in action at a distance, his critics have
been vindicated. The abandonment of action at a distance for
Einstein's conception of curved space, however, was not occasioned
by the ontological arguments put forward by Newton's critics, but
because Einstein's conception was able to resolve certain key
anomalies in the physics of his day: anomalies that were unknown
to Newton and his critics. I suspect that Newton's critics might have
found much more of occultism in modern quantum mechanics than
they did in Newton's theories.
11. Contrast this in turn with the positive influence Einstein reported
Mach's philosophy as having on the development of relativity physics,
despite Mach's idealist ontology.
12. See for instance Kanth's inference from Bhaskar's claim that society
is an 'open system', that it is not subject to laws (Kanth 1992: 104).
As I pointed out above, the claim that experimental closure is only
intelligible on the assumption that laws apply in open systems as well,
is one of Bhaskar's key 'transcendental arguments' (cf. also, Bhaskar
1989: 83, 'the mode of application of laws is the same in society as
in nature').
13. Lovering's use ofthe term 'mechanism' is different from that of
Bhaskar, for whom it means the tendency of an object to behave in
a certain way in virtue of its essential structure.
14. Bhaskar, by contrast, argues that there may be a hierarchy among the
plurality of structures in operation (cf. Bhaskar 1979: 43 and 1989:
188).
15.1 daresay that critical realists will see evidence of empiricism on my
part, in this. In preemptive reply then: I do not claim a priority of
facts over theory (even ontological theory), only that empirical
evidence must be identified and accounted for in concrete social
investigation.
16. It is not an attitude that Hegel or Marx themselves were often guilty
of.
17. This is also taken from Bhaskar (1989: 191), who, however, offers
no argument in support of it.
18. The idea that theories are merely 'vocabularies' with no special claims
to truth or validity over any other vocabularies, is taken from Richard
Rorty(1989).
19. Although I would not wish to be taken as implying that this is the
case with any ofthe theorists whose work I have discussed in this
article.
136 Capital & Class»54

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