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Social Science, Philosophy and Theology
in Dialogue

This volume explores the potential of employing a relational paradigm for the
purposes of interdisciplinary exchange. Bringing together scholars from the social
sciences, philosophy and theology, it seeks to bridge the gap between subject
areas by focusing on real phenomena. Although these phenomena are studied
by different disciplines, the editors demonstrate that it is also possible to study
them from a common relational perspective that connects the different languages,
theories and perspectives that characterize each discipline by going beyond their
differences to the core of reality itself. As an experimental collection that high-
lights the potential that exists for cross-disciplinary work, this volume will appeal
to scholars across a range of fields concerned with critical realist approaches to
research, collaborative work across subjects and the manner in which disciplines
can offer one another new insights.

Pierpaolo Donati is Alma Mater Professor (PAM) of Sociology at the University

of Bologna. He is the author of Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm for the
Social Sciences and co-author of The Relational Subject.

Antonio Malo is Professor of Philosophy of Mind at the Santa Croce Pontifical

University. He is the author of Gift, Guilt and Forgiveness (Elements for a
Phenomenology of Forgiveness) and The Limits of Marion’s and Derrida’s
Philosophy of the Gift”.

Giulio Maspero is Professor of Theology at the Santa Croce Pontifical University.

He is the author of Trinity and Man and the co-editor of Rethinking Trinitarian
Theology and The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa.
Social Science, Philosophy
and Theology in Dialogue
A Relational Perspective

Edited by
Pierpaolo Donati, Antonio Malo
and Giulio Maspero
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Pierpaolo Donati, Antonio Malo &
Giulio Maspero individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Pierpaolo Donati, Antonio Malo & Giulio Maspero to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Donati, Pierpaolo, 1946- author. | Malo, Antonio, author. |
Maspero, Giulio, author.
Title: Social science, philosophy and theology in dialogue: a relational
perspective / Pierpaolo Donati, Antonio Malo & Giulio Maspero.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018058670 (print) | LCCN 2019002124 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780429467738 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781138606326 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780429467738 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Social sciences–Philosophy.
Classification: LCC H61.15 (ebook) | LCC H61.15 .D66 2019 (print) |
DDC 300.1–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058670
ISBN: 978-1-138-60632-6 (hbk)
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Typeset in Times New Roman
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Contents

List of contributors vii

Foreword: Varieties of relational social theory viii
MARGARET S. ARCHER

Introduction: The relational paradigm as interface between the

theological, philosophical, and social sciences xxix
PIERPAOLO DONATI, ANTONIO MALO AND GIULIO MASPERO

PART I
Fundamentals of the paradigm 1

1 The enigma of relation and the theological matrix of society 3

PIERPAOLO DONATI

2 From the person to society and vice versa: What is the use of the
relational paradigm? 38
SERGIO BELARDINELLI

3 Subjectivity, reflexivity, and the relational paradigm 52

ANTONIO MALO

4 Trinitarian ontology and interdisciplinary research 74

GIULIO MASPERO

PART II
Applications and perspectives 95

5 Relations and “good reasons” 97

SALVATORE ABBRUZZESE
vi Contents
6 The relational paradigm and the family 112
GIOVANNA ROSSI

7 The relational paradigm and education 132

PAOLO TERENZI

8 The (complicated) relations between sociology and theology 150

IVO COLOZZI

Afterword 165
Index 167
Contributors

Salvatore Abbruzzese is Professor of Sociology of Cultural Processes at the

Faculty of Sociology of the University of Trento. He is the author of Monastic
Asceticism and Everyday Life; Tocqueville and the Analysis of Religious
Beliefs; Religion and the Post-War Generation in Italy; and French Sociology.
Margaret Archer is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre
for Social Ontology at the University of Warwick, UK. Her books include
Social Origins of Educational Systems; Culture and Agency: The Place of
Culture in Social Theory; Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach;
Being Human: The Problem of Agency; Structure, Agency and the Internal
Conversation; Making our Way Through the World; The Reflexive Imperative.
She has edited five books on Social Morphogenesis.
Sergio Belardinelli is Professor of Sociology of Cultural Processes at the
Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Bologna.
He is the author of Enhancement Medicine: Questions of Public Ethics and
Charity and Philanthropy. He is the co-author of Church and Education in
Europe.
Ivo Colozzi is Alma Mater Professor (PAM) of Sociology at the University of
Bologna. He is the author of Religion and Modernity and The New Social
Policies.
Giovanna Rossi is Professor of Sociology of the Family at the Faculty of
Psychology of the Catholic University of Milan. She is the editor of Reconciling
Family and Work: New Challenges for Social Policies in Europe; The Social
Generative Action of the Third Sector: Comparing International Experiences;
and Balancing Work and Family Care: European Experiences.
Paolo Terenzi is Associate Professor of Sociology of Cultural Processes at the
Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Bologna. He
is editor of Paths of Relational Sociology and Lexicon of Relational Sociology.
Foreword
Varieties of relational social theory
Margaret S. Archer

Introduction
A few years ago, I gave a presentation at the London School of Economics
about the politics of austerity in Europe. When we came to the questions and
answers, the first postgraduate to speak began by saying, “As a relational sociolo-
gist …” I stopped her there and asked her to clarify of which kind. Her response
was, “Well, of course, I base my work on Emirbayer’s ‘Manifesto’”. The book
Pierpaolo Donati and I published in 2015, The Relational Subject,1 was intended
to eliminate this cavalier “of course”, along with the much more sophisticated
contribution of the analytical philosophers, usually known as the Plural Subject.
Both of these opposing approaches will be examined here and constitute the reply
that the postgraduate should have been given.

We believe – but who are “we”?

In everyday life, as individual persons we often speak in the plural, referring to a “we”.
People say: “We had lunch together”, “We went on holiday together”, “We wrote a
book together”, “We had the same opinion about that”, and so forth. This “we” is a
term whose referent remains unspecified but its reality is taken for granted. If one
asks subjects to say what constitutes this “we”, the subject of the above everyday
statements, they usually indicate a number of individuals (or give a list of names)
that includes themselves. Thus, in ordinary language, use of the “we” appears to
refer to an aggregate of people, seemingly wanting, doing or thinking the same thing.
However, quotidian use also implies more than that; when a couple says “we want …”
they mean something more than “our personal wants happen to coincide”.
Most philosophers and social scientists agree that the “we” cannot be a sim-
ple aggregate of individuals who are supposed to share an idea, an action, or a
purpose. Yet, when they try to give an explanation of what lies behind the “we”,
they also differ greatly in their accounts of it. Analytical philosophers, such as
John Searle, Margaret Gilbert and Raimo Tuomela, have spent 20 years trying to
vindicate a concept of the “We”, one that gives rise to commitment, cooperation
and collective action; one that also generates deontic rights: obligations, permis-
sions, duties etc. Uniformly, they have worked on different versions of shared
 Foreword ix
intentionality, best illustrated by Searle’s “we-thinking” (the same thoughts are
inside two different heads, making for the Plural Subject). Whilst Donati and I
sought the same as they do from the “we” – commitment, cooperation, and col-
lective action – our co-authored book The Relational Subject departed from their
reliance upon common thought and, above all, upon shared intentionality.
Instead, we argued that relationships are ontologically real and have emergent
properties and powers: properties such as trust, concerns, and reciprocity; pow-
ers to generate “relational goods” and “relational evils”. “We-ness” derives from
subjects’ reflexive orientations towards these emergent relational “goods” and
“evils” that they themselves generate or have generated. Only their object is the
same; their thoughts about it may be quite different. But, their orientation towards
the effects of their relationality affects their actions, whether in a couple, a work
group, sport’s team, orchestra, voluntary association or social movement (without
“we thinking”, because in each head is one set of thoughts and the two – or more –
sets will not be identical). This relational “We-ness” – and its expansion – is seen
as the source of voluntary organizations, of civil society and, ultimately, of the
Common Good, all of which are emergents. All the statements in this paragraph
are predicated upon the adoption of the social ontology of Critical Realism.
Equally, there is a radical difference between our relational sociology, which is
premised on the stratified ontology of Critical Realism, and those sociologies that,
although they call themselves relational, are based upon a flat, unstratified ontol-
ogy that views the relation as a “transaction” taking place between individuals2 or
as “communicative exchange” that generates emotions.3 It is not contested that the
relation implies an exchange and, therefore a communication, but that does not
entail its reducibility to either exchange or mere communication. Those above,
who think otherwise, are termed relationists here.
The social relation, such as that of a couple (any kind of couple), is a reality
that emerges from their interchanges but has its own reality because it exists even
when the exchange is interrupted or the communication falls silent, thus having
a reality that goes beyond the contents of exchange and communication. What
endures and has enduring causal power is the capacity for the pair in question to
orientate themselves to their relationship when the two are absent and apart, and
hence still be affected by it. Thus, Ego may personally reject something she was
about to write, recognizing that this pair of co-authors had previously thrashed
out a conclusion incompatible with it, to their mutual satisfaction. Likewise, Alter
may not feel in the least inclined to press on with the chapter in hand but recog-
nizes that he owes it to Ego and himself in order to further their joint enterprise.
These are not contractual obligations nor “transactions” nor “exchanges”, but
rather acknowledgements of the worth of their collaboration itself, which tran-
scends personal disinclination at a given time. Perhaps the same is the case for
sporting duos who may sometimes feel reluctant to respect their scheduled prac-
tice sessions. In other words, what firmly distinguishes relational subjects from
relationalist subjects is that the former is meta-reflexive about their relations as
such. The latter, instead, tend to be individualists in thinking and acting in accord-
ance with their personal preference schedules.
x Foreword
“Me-ness”, “Thee-ness” and “We-ness”
Equally unjustified are contrary approaches whose universality is simply assumed
and which presume to eliminate any need to make reference to “We-ness”. The
two generic versions of this practice will be called “Me-ness” and “Thee-ness”
and will be briefly touched upon rather than examined in order to show the indis-
pensability of an acceptable notion of “We-ness”.
“Me-ness” is most clearly illustrated by Rational Choice theory, by homo eco-
nomicus used in neo-liberal economics and whose roots lie in classical utilitarian
thinking. Confronted with any social decision-making situation, each actor seeks
to maximize (or, if need be, satisfice) his or her own “preference schedule”. These
preferences themselves are not necessarily selfish or mercenary but they leave
their owners better off in their preferred terms. As an atomistic individual, “eco-
nomic man” has no social bonds that deflect him from instrumental rationality,
unless these enter by the door of his own “preference schedule”. Gary Becker4 has
maintained inter alia that maximizing individual utility governs a person’s choice
of a spouse and warns against consorting with poorer people since to fall in love
and marry a poor spouse would damage personal utility. This model cannot cope
with the human capacity to transcend instrumental rationality. Economic man
remains mute and puzzled by the fact that we can devote ourselves to Aristotelian
“final ends”, other than those inscribed in our preferences, which alone are held
capable of moving us.5 In sum, the “Me-ness” of homo economicus precludes him
from ever engaging in relationality proper; he remains a self-sufficient “outsider”
who simply operates in a social environment. As a subject, homo economicus only
ever has what Martin Buber6 called Ich–Es (I–It) relations with Others – those
based upon instrumental rationality.
It is understandable why some are attracted by the “Thee-ness” portrayed in
Buber’s Ich–Du (I–You) relations. Although Buber himself was critical of moder-
nity for reducing those relationships in which the two parties reciprocally treat
one another as “You”, this has not prevented generous claims being made for it
in terms of hermeneutics. With considerable simplification, the argument is that,
for instance, a couple can succeed in forging a life together (“our” life as a cou-
ple after graduation) on the basis of hermeneutically entering into one another’s
aspirations for what kind of life that would be, given appropriate detachment on
the part of both. Empirically – and assuming they are in love – it is quite likely
that their external conversations together will cover this ground to the best of their
abilities. But these discussions cannot be a necessary condition for the source of
“We-ness”. The best of their abilities are not good enough because as subjects
they cannot avoid the double hermeneutic. However hard the two try, they pro-
duce Alter’s interpretations of Ego’s self-interpretations and vice versa, doing so
seriatim with no way out of this trap.
Goodwill on both sides cannot extricate them from it, meaning that herme-
neutics cannot provide a secure basis for forging a life that captures what the two
people value most. In short, it cannot be a route to “We-ness” that is not distorted
by fallible interpretations and partial misinterpretations.
 Foreword xi
Contra the Plural Subject
The Plural Subject rests on the concept of “we think” and stands or falls with it.
Donati and I counterposed the “Relational Subject” in order to redress four major
criticisms of how the Plural Subject is conceptualized:

i. that its sociality is not held to generate emergent properties or powers

ii. that the concept is “presentist” because social relations have no past or future
iii. that reflexivity, both individual and collective, is completely absent
iv. that extrapolation are made on the basis of a presumed homology between the
micro- or dyadic level and the macroscopic societal level.

Instead, we maintained that Relational Subjects could achieve a “We-ness” with-

out the need to invoke “we thinking” as a necessary mechanism or mediating pro-
cess. Furthermore, it seems that a “beneficent bias” accompanies the Plural Subject
because “We-ness” accentuates sharing, consensual thought, mutual agreement,
a common ethos and joint commitment. Thus, Bratman7 stresses “coordination”,
Searle posits “co-operation”,8 Tuomela “consensus” based upon a common ethos9
and Gilbert advances joint “commitment” as “perhaps the most fundamental
concept”.10 One effect of this deontic consensuality is that the “beneficent bias”
banishes evil in all its many social manifestations; coercion, exploitation, dis-
crimination or exclusion receive little if any attention.
In contradistinction, Relational Subjects are credited with the ability to gener-
ate both “relational goods” (trust, reciprocity, reliability or the commons) and
“relational evils” (suspicion, zero-sum competition and antagonism). Each is nec-
essary to a full account of sociality because of the human liability to both suffer-
ing and flourishing. What prevents the social order from promoting the good life
for all are the evils that it also fosters for some.

The Relational Subject and the generation of relational goods and evils
The term “Relational Subject” refers to individual and collective social subjects in
as much as they generate emergent properties and powers through their social rela-
tions. The conceptual difficulty resides in the fact that – properly speaking – only
individual persons “think” (reflect). Extending the concept of the single human
individual’s reflexivity to a social group (of primary or corporate agents) appears
to be problematic.11 Nevertheless, we maintained that in order to understand how
the reflexivity of a collective (social) subject – termed relational reflexivity – is
possible, it is necessary to adopt a specific sociological approach, namely “rela-
tional realism”. In this process, shared intentionality was displaced from being
the key defining and operative feature of “We-ness” and replaced by subjects’
orientations towards relational goods and evils.
Relational goods are emergent, being generated and sustained by the subjects
generating them and possess their own properties and powers: internally to moti-
vate, to facilitate and to constrain the parties involved in them and externally
xii Foreword
to affect matters beyond them. When reflexivity is relational, it does not differ
in kind from the modes practised by singular subjects and conforms to the gen-
eral definition: reflexivity is “the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared
by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts
and vice versa”.12 Relational reflexivity focuses upon that important tract of any-
one’s social context at any given time, namely that which is made up of human
relationships (as opposed, for example, to a person’s relation to his/her natural
environment, to the skills they seek to develop or the technology they use, about
which they can be reflexive but not in a socially relational sense). Social reflexiv-
ity refers to relational subjects being reflexive about their social relationships, as
distinct from their relations with other orders of natural reality.13
Nothing hangs on the term “context”, which is used for its neutrality given
that some term is essential because there can never be “context-less action”. If
preferred, “situations”, “circumstances” or “environment” can be substituted and
dispute about the ontological constitution of all four referents be postponed for
the time being. The term used is irrelevant to the main point, at least for all who
rightly eschew the “ontic fallacy”, namely that how things are determines how we
see, think and talk about them. The point being made is that people are necessar-
ily reflexive about their “context” or “circumstances” when they ask themselves
quotidian questions (in internal or external conversation) such as: “What shall we
have for dinner?”, “Do I need to visit the dentist?” or “Can one of us get back from
work in time to pick the kids up from school?”. Obviously, subjects’ reflexive
deliberations are exercised under their own epistemic descriptions, as is the case
for all thought and talk.
Epistemologically, agents can misconstrue their social relations, including fail-
ing to take them into account, in which case they pay the price uncomprehend-
ingly (in terms of deteriorating or broken relationships). Intrinsically, this is no
different from someone miscalculating the size of mortgage that they think they
can service every month, then falling into arrears and finally seeing the property
being repossessed. If this is not to come about, both contexts require learning and
applying new knowledge that could result in more satisfactory outcomes for the
subjects involved.
Dwelling upon how actors or agents come to learn about and then reflexively
work with the relational emergents they produce and have produced may sound
unduly abstract and a long way from people’s everyday behaviour. In fact, the
thought and actions involved are just as down to earth regarding reflexivity as
some of the homely examples adduced by the analytical philosophers when dis-
cussing the Plural Subject. Take John Searle’s example of the two people who
agreed to clear the yard together, in order to note some of ways in which it lacks
instances of “relational reflexivity” – and the consequences of these omissions.
First, once the compact to tackle the yard has been concluded, there is no men-
tion of reflexive monitoring of either the self or the other in terms of how they play
their parts. No helpful suggestions or critical comments appear to pass between
the pair. Yet, perhaps the tempers of both and the state of the yard would be
improved by changing their division of labour. Second, since human subjects are
 Foreword xiii
what Charles Taylor terms “strong evaluators”,14 our internal conversations pro-
vide a variety of unvoiced commentaries as the task proceeds. We evaluate the
other (“Why does he leave brooms and buckets all over the place?”), ourselves
(“I’m going to need a break soon.”), the working relationship (“We’re getting
through this faster than I expected.”), the outcome (“The yard does look much
better!”) and the impact of their collaboration upon their relationship itself (vary-
ing from “I’ll never do that kind of thing with him again” to “Didn’t we make a
good team”). In real life, crude co-operation is not enough and any old sloppy
performance will not do, because we are reflexive about ourselves, the other, the
relationship and its outcome, though nothing need be openly said.
Third, the two parties have to assume that each has an intention-in-action with
the same goal, the same “collective B”,15 but the story does not end there. The
relational experience they have been through together and the result jointly pro-
duced also have consequences with which Searle’s “presentism” cannot deal.16 If
the pair conclude that they have worked amicably together and made for a more
agreeable yard, they may both be ready and willing to “up” their “collective B”
(“Let’s tackle the junk room next”, which is met by “Sure, and then we could have
a go at the garage”). Conversely, a bad afternoon of snapping and snarling without
much to show for it could eliminate anything resembling “collective B” from the
plans they moot in the future and will not have enhanced their relationship.
In sum, non-reflexive portrayals of subjects and presentist accounts of their
relational activities exclude much that is important in their doings and forego cap-
turing anything about their relationship’s trajectory in the future. Yet, the example
used above was proffered by Searle as an instance of “we-thinking”, in which
for him the feeling of togetherness is “crucial”. Yet, joint action may have, or at
least contribute to, the opposite outcome and sentiments. That is, joint action can
also lead to deteriorating relationships, which serves to rectify the “beneficent
bias” that permeates the Plural Subject literature. Nevertheless, Donati and I are
actually in agreement with Searle about the importance of “We-ness” to all but
the most reclusive of subjects. (Even in their case, we would want to discover
whether or not the onset of extreme social withdrawal had some relational precur-
sor). However, both of us regarded “joint agreement”, “collective commitment”
and “shared intentionality” as unconvincing bases, not simply for the supposed
“we-think” phenomenon, but for explaining and understanding “We-ness” as real
and important in social life and not to be consigned to the status of “qualia”.
Consequently, the onus was on us to advance a different account and we offered
a realist one based upon the notion of relational emergence.

Relational goods and “We-ness”

Our concept of “We-ness” does not rest upon any version of “we-think” but,
rather, upon the concept of “relational goods” (“relational evils” will be intro-
duced later). These are goods generated from the relations between subjects, ones
that remain continuously activity-dependent and concept-dependent upon those
involved, but cannot be reduced to individual terms. Significantly, reductionist
xiv Foreword
philosophers of social science have often treated our relations as individual predi-
cates, as did Watkins, the modern doyen of Methodological Individualism, when
stating that acceptable individual predicates can include “statements of about the
dispositions, beliefs, resources and interrelations of individuals”.17 This has to be
an oxymoron since one property of a relational good is that it cannot be divided
and parcelled out among its generators. When a couple separates or divorces,
the parties can and usually do divide up their worldly goods – including their
­children – but ontologically their relational goods cease to exist with the separa-
tion of the two people responsible for generating them.
Relational goods have causal properties and powers that internally influence
their own makers. They are known – under their own descriptions – by the parties
involved. That is, by those diachronically responsible for their emergence and
synchronically for their reproduction, elaboration or destruction. The fact that
they can only be known under subjects’ own descriptions certainly implies that
relational subjects can be wrong about their relationships, as about anything else.
Nonetheless, their fallibility does not prevent them from reflexively orienting their
own actions towards relational goods – and relational evils.
The initial premise is that “relational goods” are desirable and desired by all
(normal) people to some degree, again under their own descriptions. Of course,
this does not preclude them from also seeking non-relational goods, such as
health or wealth, insofar as these can be obtained non-relationally. Friendship
is regarded as paradigmatic of “relational goods” and is one that people desire
nearly universally. Friendship varies in both degree and definition. Some talk
uni-dimensionally about “my Bridge friend/partner” and perhaps share little else
together beyond regularly playing this particular card game. Among their other
friends may be ones with whom their sharing is more extensive. Yet, regardless of
matters of degree, these relationships can prompt the same reflexive thought that
“I mustn’t let X down” or that “X would enjoy hearing this”. In short, emergent
features such as reciprocity, reliability and consideration come into play.
In other words, friendship relations are deontic: creating obligations (to bid at
Bridge according to conventions agreed upon by the partners), rights and duties,
authorizations and embargos. They are causally influential: friendship can banish
or mitigate feelings of loneliness, give the confidence or incentive to do some-
thing or go somewhere that a subject would not contemplate undertaking alone
and it can be divisively evil in prompting jealousy amongst others etc.
One feature that friendship possesses, like all “relational goods” and, indeed,
other kinds of goods, is that subjects can and often do orient their actions towards
it or in the light of it. Just as someone may reflect, “If I don’t sell this now, it will
be worth a lot more in the future”, so, too, the same person might also consider
“I won’t tell her that, it would be hurtful and damaging to our relationship”.
As opposed to “presentism” those relations that generate “relational goods” are
ones that developed morphogenetically over time. (Relations themselves can be
morphostatic, such as the Bridge partners who regularly play cards together but
their friendship goes no further, or they can be entropic, but these are not of con-
cern at present.) Relationships always arise in a context whose constitution precedes
 Foreword xv
them (e.g. “They met at university”) and the subjects involved come from their own
social contexts. In short, there is no contextless relationship and neither can the
context/s be relegated to Searle’s “background” because they are influential in the
present as expectations, hopes or aspirations, motives and fears and, importantly, as
networks of family and friends who may remain active in subjects’ lives. Important
as this is,18 we will dwell here on the generation of “relational goods”/“evils” and
their consequences within the dyad, in order to parallel the Plural Subject approach,
rather than upon how relationships are initiated, for which a full morphogenetic and
therefore historical analysis would be required.
Suppose that a serious relationship has developed between two students19 during
their time at university and that it is acknowledged between them. They wish to be
a couple after they graduate but also need to shape a life for themselves once they
leave university.20 One of their unavoidable problems is that both have some (per-
sonal) idea about the life each would like to lead as a couple. Supposing that these
ideas are not blatantly incompatible, the question remains about how they can be
forged into a life together. In this setting, Plural Subject theorists and relationalists
suggest that the couple gets down to the negotiating table and “transact” their way
forward. In short, there is no implication or indication that relational reflexivity is
involved or that either student orients their thinking by reference to the “relational
goods” they are already generating and that motivate their desire to remain together.
It is certainly not the case that everyone does do so. After all, the goodness of
anything neither compels its recognition, nor that it is received with gratitude, nor
that it prompts efforts to maintain or to extend it. Good health, usually presumed
to be an incontestable good, may be taken for granted and regarded rather like
one’s height as something relatively unchanging. However, the fact that relational
reflexivity is not universal – whereas “we-think” is presented as a universalistic
tendency – does not justify its neglect.

Escaping the dominance of hermeneutics

Let us approach “We-ness”, jointly but severally arrived at by a couple about to
graduate, as mediated through the reference both make to their relational goods.
By examining their attempt to answer the unavoidable question, “Where are we
going to live after graduation?” Most likely there will be contextual constraints
that have to be factored in: the geographical location of the first posts they have
obtained or hope to gain; where their family homes are located and the desires of
each to be close to these or far removed from them, which themselves may be dif-
ferent for the two; costs and availability of accommodation in various parts of the
country etc. Such contextual constraints are always mediated reflexively because
they never act as hydraulic pushes and pulls with deterministic consequences.
However, the outcome depends upon what form their reflexive deliberations take.
On the basis of “Me-ness”, each would engage in their dominant form of per-
sonal reflexivity, define their own “projects” and regard that of the other as another
constraint that has to be dealt with in the attempt to maximize (or at least satisfice)
their individual preference schedules. This formula is one that is likely to result
xvi Foreword
either in an outcome of “unequal utility” for the two parties or in a compromise
that is suboptimal for both because compromises entail concessions. It is certainly
possible that later one of them may admit to not having been enthusiastic at first
but now has come to like it, without this implying “making the best of a bad deal”.
Alternatively, it may serve to initiate a pattern of domination and subordination in
their relationship as a couple or of dissatisfaction on both sides.
On the basis of “Thee-ness”, let us assume that the hermeneutic understandings
of each attempt to regard the matter from the other’s point of view and to give this
parity of importance with their own through self-detachment. The trouble is that
given the double hermeneutic and there being no way of escaping from it, this
couple may end up living somewhere or somehow that satisfies neither because
their interpretive understandings of what matters to one another have both failed,
at least to some degree. Consequently, not only does the couple live somewhere
that both find wanting, but each remains puzzled at the discontent of the other
whose (interpreted) concerns they had genuinely sought to accommodate. Having
been through this hermeneutic process it becomes difficult for either to say “Why
on earth are we living here?” because each will think that it was the concerns of
the Other that were responsible. In Figure F.1, this is what happens if this couple
is confined to their hermeneutic interpretations (indicated by the central circle).
Conversely, on the basis of “We-ness”, where the couple is to live is approached
in a different manner. Although allowance still has to be made for the constraints

Future Form of life together

?O

His social context Her social context

SM SF
OF OM

OM OF

KEY
O = Object (the couple as a we-relation in action)
SF = (Subject, female) She as seen by him (as he thinks of her) SM = (Subject, male)
OF = the Object as he thinks that she sees it
OM = the Object as seen by him
SM = he as seen by her (as she thinks of him) OF = the Object as she thinks he sees it
OH = the Object as seen by her

Figure F.1 The We-relation of a couple based on hermeneutics

Source: Modified from Donati (2012).
 Foreword xvii
of work location and so forth, these do not determine the resolution of such issues
as rural versus urban living, the choice between an apartment or a small house and
garden, the importance of having shops and other facilities nearby and so forth.
Suppose, instead, they begin from relational considerations. That is, both tackle
the problem neither self-referentially nor by orientation-to-the-Other but through
deliberating on a different question, namely “When do we have our best times
together?” – those that they hope foreshadow their future life as a couple.
By reflecting upon “our” best times together, their reflexivity is necessarily
relational and its referent is to the common goods they have already produced and
thus know that they are capable of generating together. What the two summon up
in their own heads will not be identical, because just as there is no “we-think”,
neither is there a mental process of “plural reflexivity”. Nevertheless, their rela-
tional references will not be too disparate because the experiences that each evoke
were shared ones of mutual delight in what they did together and had probably
been reinforced by their reminiscences. Note that in Figure F.1 below, the couple
could in principle circumvent hermeneutics entirely, by directly orienting them-
selves to the thought of their relational goods (represented by the dotted triangle).
In this way – even though it is unlikely in practice for a young couple in love –
their orientation does not have to be the result of hermeneutic interpretations, as
in Figure I.1, and is not primarily so.
Suppose each separately concludes that their weekends of walking in the coun-
tryside were their high points, the times that sealed their relationship. On that
basis and with a view to extending their relational goods, she may tentatively
venture that they should seek rural accommodation. He hesitates, not because he
finds the project uncongenial, but he cannot drive and reflexively mulls over the
difficulties of getting to and from work. Her tentativeness in voicing the proposal
stemmed from her reluctance to remove herself from the proximity of her univer-
sity friends. As they talk it over,21 both are engaged in attempting to dovetail their
other concerns in the light of their relational goods. Not only has their future as a
couple (in this case) been promoted to become their ultimate concern, but it now
arbitrates on the ordering of their other concerns, subordinating them but also
evaluating them for compatibility with the furtherance of their relational goods.
His practical reasoning is preoccupied with whether or not he can pass his
driving test before their proposed relocation in the countryside. Her phronesis is
concerned with how to maintain contact with her university friends and to form a
network of “village friends”. In short, they are far from having the same thoughts
in their heads. Nevertheless, if both are wholeheartedly (Frankfurt: 1988) com-
mitted to their future together then their relational goods and the hope of extend-
ing them will be a motivational incentive for both to explore this rural modus
vivendi. Note, that in so doing they have promoted the salience of their relational
goods by allowing them to override the reservations stemming from “Me-ness”
and also that no “Thou” consideration outweighs or distorts the achievement of
“We-ness”.
Were all to go well, their “We-ness” would develop through the generation
of further relational goods. Perhaps they discover that the rural area chosen has
xviii Foreword
an active rambling club, which becomes a new network of “ours”. Maybe they
start to cultivate their garden, which represents a new and satisfying activity per-
formed together that also connects them more closely with village life. Possibly
they acquire a dog etc. If this is the case, they will have elaborated their relational
context into one buttressing their modus vivendi as a couple because it will also
have filtered out those old university friends who find their way of life uncon-
genial and filtered in some new friends to whom it is agreeable. If things continue
to go well for the pair, this will have nothing in common with the spot-welding of
Searle’s “we-think”; it will be unlike Bratman’s “meshing of sub-plans” because
that assumes such blueprints already existed, whereas this pair is learning and dis-
covering all the time. It does represent a collective agreement in Gilbert’s terms,22
although not one glued together by (static) contractual obligations, but one that
grows through relational morphogenesis.
However, the scenario they follow may differ from the felicific sketch above.
When he repeatedly fails his driving test and gets home from work late, she has
found the waiting tedious because the network of village friends and activities
she hoped for has failed to develop. As he begins to stay over with a colleague on
the nights before early work meetings, she becomes lonely, aggrieved and even
suspicious. The trust they had built up as part of their relational goods begins
to dissipate.
Correspondingly, their “We-ness” is wearing thin without this couple yet hav-
ing come to the point of generating relational evils. However, suppose then that
someone tells her that he is regularly seen with an attractive woman colleague and
he believes that he discovers how much she must be spending at the local riding
stables. The rows begin; she is dubious that he has a work project to complete

WE-relation/RG = relational good

(O = holidaying together)

social context social context

of him of her

RG = relational good as a we-relation

O = Object (the couple as a we-relation in action, generating a relational good (e.g.holidaying together)

Figure F.2 The We-relation (relational good) of a couple

Source: Modified from Donati, P., 2013, ‘Engagement as a Social Relation: A Leap into
Trans-modernity’, in Margaret S. Archer, A.M. Maccarini (eds.), Engaging with the World
(pp. 129–161). London: Routledge.
 Foreword xix
with his colleague and he doubts that her visits to the stables are cost-free helping
with Riding for the Disabled. Their long weekend walking in Snowdonia is not a
revival of their best student days but a prolonged opportunity to refine their pre-
sent grievances. Relational goods are turned into evils as the couple returns home
with nothing changed except their unshared doubt that they may have grossly
exaggerated the worth of their “best times” together. It is not simply that they
have “fallen out of love”, but that their deeds and words now generate destruction
and demotion of those collective relational goods that were once their ultimate
concern and governed the unity of their lives together.
In this section, I have remained at the level of the dyad in order to match the
exemplars that philosophers usually give of the Plural Subject. In turning to rela-
tionism, higher societal strata, conventionally treated at the meso- and the macro-
levels, will be introduced.

Contra relationalist sociology

It is rather surprising that those sociologists currently and unoriginally proclaim-
ing the “Relational Turn”23 replicate point for point the four criticisms addressed
above to Plural Subject although they pay no attention to those philosophers. In
the polemical works of Christopher Powell24 and François Dépelteau,25 it is no sur-
prise that that reflexivity is banished from active, everyday (not academic) life,26
given their allegiance to Bruno Latour and his “actants”, a position that seeks to
erase the significance of superior types of mental activity pertaining to the human
species, whilst not questioning the particular affordances of other types, such as
the capacity of birds to fly. Because we do not blur the distinctions between spe-
cies, let alone between the animate and the inanimate, Donati and I are dismissed
as “reactionary humanists”.27 The fact that these authors arrogate reflexive powers
to themselves in considering the past theoretical context in relation to their own
position never strikes them as a performative contradiction!
It is that, but matters become much worse when “reflexivity” is held up as the
standard of validity for scientific knowledge.28 Having written a trilogy of books
on the topic of reflexivity,29 all based upon empirical research (something absent
from their work), I can only wonder “whose” reflexive judgement and according
to which “modality”? Given I explicitly examined and endorsed the relational
sources of variations in the dominant mode practised,30 it is at least consistent
that Powell is a protagonist of epistemological relativism. However, that leaves
“scientific knowledge” unvalidated on any public criterion, but rather as an unre-
solvable battle of social backgrounds, schools of thought and so forth. In that
case, given something universally important such as climate change, the Paris
Agreement of December 2015, on the necessary limitation of carbon emissions,
is turned into a pointless act. Follow Trump or agree with the Pope according to
your own epistemic relativism and simply ignore the fact that planetary finitude
will be the real validator of their contradictory claims.
Equally damaging is their failure to appreciate the mediatory task that reflexiv-
ity performs; that of linking the features of the context in which any action takes
xx Foreword
place or is even contemplated – one that is the diachronic product of “ancestral”
relationality and is synchronically and relationally maintained by its contempo-
rary beneficiaries (and opposed by those whom it obstructs.) Searle appreciated
that historic influences shaping the circumstances now confronted (if not those
into which each human being was born) frequently needed reference to “the
Background” as he termed it. Yet this was wheeled in and out, like stage scenery,
when needed for comprehending the situation rather than it playing an ongoing
role in terms of causally influencing present relations, i.e. what people did and
thought they could do given the distribution of socially scarce resources they had
inherited. In other words, neither group took Auguste Comte’s aphorism seri-
ously, namely that “the majority of actors are the dead”.
Yet, resources, repute and representation (Weber’s original “Class, Status and
Power”) are not created today; although, being consistently “activity dependent”,
they may be changed during a succession of tomorrows. The impetus behind such
anti-historical theorizing is obviously, in both cases, a refusal to allow that they
are one source of emergent properties and powers affecting current relations (such
as the centralized structure of the French educational system). As I have repeated
many times, “structure” is never independent of “agency” but always interde-
pendent. For example:

Only a myriad of agential “doings” (including thinking, believing and imag-

ining) keep any given higher-level entity in being and render it relatively
enduring. In other words, whilst ever something like the centralized French
educational system lasts, then move a marker, second-by-second, from the
system’s inception until today, and each and every moment of its “cen-
tralization” depends upon agential doings (including intentional inaction).
However, this is not equivalent to some Giddensian notion that every such
doing on the part of everyone somehow contributes to maintaining

these distinctive relationships between the parts of French education.31 The latter
is conflationist and prevents explanation of who was (interactionally) responsible,
where, when and by doing what and why.
The same goes for the future; nothing our present relations generate, that is
the collective relational goods and evils already discussed, are allowed, as emer-
gent properties, to constrain, enable or motivate subsequent morphostasis or mor-
phogenesis. This is especially odd in someone who calls himself a “transactional
relationist”!32 Do our inheritances (in a variety of currencies) not influence our
bargaining power when current actors come to the negotiating table, or if they can
even get there and become a party to the relevant “transactions”?
Given these two similarities between Plural Subject theorists and Relationist
sociologists, all the remainder of this section could be devoted to is their differ-
ent forms of “presentism” and their distinctive difficulties with the “problem of
scope” – a futile contest between homology between all levels of the social order
(Plural Subject theorists) and indeterminate fluidity (relationist sociologists).33
Is this really worth repeating? Donati and I dealt with the latter as courteously
 Foreword xxi
as possible in the Introduction to The Relational Subject.34 In other words, we
refrained from noting their unfamiliarity with our works: their references to Donati
begin with his first book in English in 2011, without the manners to acknowledge
that they could not read his Italian promulgation of relational sociology as such
over 20 years earlier.35 I am cast as a disciple of Bhaskar (whose name is sys-
tematically misspelt), despite having both advanced the morphogenetic approach
and illustrated two morphogenetic cycles in the emergence of state educational
systems (1979) – about 15 years before I encountered either Roy Bhaskar or his
works. We likewise refrained from mentioning that we had both dealt with their
arguments in Sociological Realism,36 another unquoted source. Finally, and most
importantly, we refrained from not pointing out that the temporal “separability”
of structure and agency is not synonymous with our holding them to be “separate”
entities. Structure (Culture and Agency) develop from relational interaction and
are reproduced or transformed over time by relational interaction, although usu-
ally at least some of the actors involved are different and if structures (or Culture)
are transformed, then so are relations between agents – in the double morphogene-
sis.37 Incidentally, there is nothing whatsoever “dialectic” here; only a “presentist”
could make that assertion about the historical analysis of change in an educational
system or the law of any land and so forth.
This is why Donati and I found no difficulty in articulating the relational sub-
ject by making considerable use of the morphogenetic explanatory framework.
The latter is not a theory because, in itself, it explains nothing at all, as Porpora
correctly underlines:

the morphogenetic approach does not explain anything in particular. It

resides rather at the level of underlying philosophy or fundamental ontology.
The morphogenetic approach identifies the ingredients of any explanation of
social change, namely structure culture and agency, and the generic form of
their interrelation.38

Over the years, I have coined the acronym SAC (Structure, Agency and Culture)
and maintained that any satisfactory sociological explanation entails all three and
how they intertwine.39 Take the simple suggestion, “Let’s have a cup of tea”. In
England this entails S (the structure of trade routes, establishment of commercial
dealings and the market in tea futures, given tea does not grow indigenously); it
entails A (that someone wants a cup sufficiently for some reason) to suggest it to
anyone of any sex, age, gender or ethnicity; and C (that it is the conventional time
of day – hence the phrase “tea-time”.) This is why I am relaxed about using the
terms “context”, “situation” or “circumstances” in any dialogue that is not about
their precise semantic denotations and connotations – because all of these entail
the above SAC elements. If there is no “contextless” action, equally there is no
SAC free “context”.
To return to this explanatory framework: “Fundamentally the morphogenetic
argument that structure and agency operate over different time periods is based on
two simple propositions: that structure necessarily pre-dates those action(s) which
xxii Foreword
transform it; and that structural elaboration necessarily post-dates those actions”.40
The “analytical dualism” that meets with sneers from Dépelteau41 really is analyti-
cal because it is introduced by the investigator in relation to the problem in hand
as he or she deems useful. Given different interests, researchers could delineate
different morphogenetic cycles and their phases quite differently, potentially very
usefully, and without conflict between them. If they sought to explain how a couple
started to go out together, the history of this morphogenesis might be covered in the
course of one day; if the task was Weber’s search for the origins of instrumental
rationality, the history and cycles would need a history 3,000 years long.
To cite Porpora again, Dépelteau’s review of my The Reflexive Imperative
(2012)

complains that Archer continually trots out social structure in application to

every social situation [indeed I do], as if Depelteau thinks that even social
structure in the abstract – as opposed to any specific socio-cultural configu-
ration – is something that ought to come and go. In opposition, Depelteau
(2008) defends what Emirbayer (1997) calls “relational sociology” [Donati
and I call it “relationist”], but which in Depelteau’s hands, means that struc-
ture refers to “more or less stable effects of transactions between interde-
pendent actors [if so, he is referring to “morphostasis” and that has the same
SAC requirements for its explanation.42] Actually, in opposition to relational
sociology’s reduction of absolutely everything to relations, Dépelteau leaves
us with the kind of nominalist interactionism that relational sociology actu-
ally opposes.43

As the last word on these authors, it is very strange that as co-editors one
(Dépelteau) is preoccupied exclusively with ontology (whilst avowing that his
version of Relationist sociology lacks one), whilst the other (Powell) is concerned
only with a relationist epistemology, where his relativism means anything goes –
in the hope that it finds takers. What can the reviewer do, given such a manifest
lack of relationality between co-editors?

Conclusion
“Relational sociology” does not have a single or consensual referent, as I trust I
have shown. It has an obvious and generic attraction because everything but the
smallest particle (probably not yet discovered, and there is no way of knowing
when scientists have arrived at it) is “relational”. However, relations differ in
kind; only some are causal in their properties and powers. Aggregates are not
something to dismiss and can have causal consequences (too many people to get
through the exits) so it is important to differentiate between them. Holistic enti-
ties, exerting disembodied “forces” in some hydraulic fashion can, indeed, be
discountenanced and consigned to the historical cultural archive.44 Nevertheless,
what does not advance theoretical matters is simply inserting the adjective “rela-
tional” in front of any entity or phenomenon and assuming that will be productive;
 Foreword xxiii
this does not work in the natural order or much of the practical order and neither
throughout the whole of the social order (e.g. not for all road accidents). As to the
way forward, it seems to me that to avoid an interminable conclusion, my own
recommendation would be to sift the existing varieties of “relational sociology”
according to the four basic points of critique with which this chapter began and to
encourage those found wanting to undertake remedial action.
This would entail:

i. incorporating the emergent properties and powers engendered by sociality

and searching to identify their specific generative mechanisms. Obviously,
this entails considerable ontological adjustments for some self-styled “rela-
tional approaches”
ii. abandoning “presentism” and allowing that the results of past relational con-
testations condition (not determine) present contexts in which agents find
themselves involuntarily and that the future is forged in the present
iii. that reflexivity is how agents and actors (both individually and collec-
tively) mediate these contexts and through Discernment, Deliberation and
Dedication45 define (always fallibly) the courses of action that they will
pursue
iv. rejecting a flat ontology in which homology is assumed between the micro-,
meso- and macro-levels of the social order by virtue of the simplistic and
unrevealing assertion that “everything is transactional”.

Notes
1 P. Donati, M. Archer, The Relational Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2015).
2 M. Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a relational sociology,” American Journal of Sociology
103, n. 2, September (1997): 281–317.
3 S. Laflamme, Communication et emotions. Essai de microsociologie relationelle (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 1995).
4 G. Becker, Accounting for Tastes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
5 M.S. Archer, “Homo economicus, homo sociologicus and homo sentiens,” in M.S.
Archer, J.Q. Tritter (eds.), Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonization (London:
Routledge, 2000), 36–56.
6 M. Buber, Ich und Du (Berlin: Shocken Verlag, 1923, first translated into English in
1937).
7 Cf. M.E. Bratman, “Shared Intention,” Ethics 104:1 (1993): 97–113.
8 Cf. J. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995) and Id.,
Making the Social World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
9 Cf. R. Tuomela, The Philosophy of Sociality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
10 M. Gilbert, Living Together (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 366.
11 Cf. M.S. Archer, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012) and P., Donati Sociologia della riflessività. Come si entra nel
dopo-moderno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011).
12 M.S. Archer, Making our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social
Mobility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4.
13 I hold that human beings necessarily have relations with the natural order and the prac-
tical order as well as with other persons and groups (M.S. Archer, Being Human: The
xxiv Foreword
Problem of Agency [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]), but constituted
as we are and the world being as it is, this cannot be otherwise. Donati acknowledges
this, but it plays little part in his theorizing. However, theorists can disagree about the
relative importance of the three orders – as do subjects.
14 Ch. Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in his Human Agency and Language
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 35–76.
15 J. Searle, Making the Social World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 52. See
also his Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1983) and The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin,
1995).
16 Other analytical philosophers do make more reference to overt “negotiations” of
various kinds. For example, Bratman talks about the “meshing of sub-plans” and
Gilbert (“Shared Intention and Personal Intention,” Philosophical Studies 144 [2009]:
167–187) of both “compromise” and “fusion”.
17 J.W.N. Watkins, “Methodological Individualism and Social Tendencies,” in May
Brodbeck (Ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New York:
Macmillan, 1971), 270–271.
18 Especially for the formation of personal reflexivity, see M.S. Archer, “Morphogenesis:
Realism’s Explanatory Framework,” in Maccarini, Morandi and Prandini, Sociological
Realism (London and New York: Routledge, 2011) and The Reflexive Imperative in
Late Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); P. Donati, Sociologia
della riflessività. Come si entra nel dopo-moderno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011).
19 P. Donati, Relational Sociology. A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences (London and
New York: Routledge, 2011).
20 Ch. Taylor, “Leading a Life,” in R. Chang (ed.), Incommensurability (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997).
21 Internal conversations can be externalized – at the discretion of each relevant sub-
ject – in ordinary conversation, without the subjects in question being communicative
reflexives (M.S. Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003]).
22 M. Gilbert, “Walking Together: A Paradigmatic Social Phenomenon,” Midwest Studies
in Philosophy 15 (1990): 1–14 and Sociality and Responsibility: New Essays in Plural
Subject Theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
23 The fiftieth so-called “turn” that I have counted of late, with none matching the serious-
ness of the original linguistic contender.
24 Ch. Powell, “Radical Relationism: A Proposal,” in Ch. Powell, F. Dépelteau (eds.),
Conceptualizing Relational Sociology. Ontological and Theoretical Issues (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 187–207.
25 F. Dépelteau, “Relational Thinking: A Critique of Co-Deterministic Theories of
Structure and Agency,” Sociological Theory 26, n. 1, March, (2008) 51–73.
26 As was the case for Bourdieu, who only conceded the possibility of reflexivity as a
collective process of critique amongst academics that falls far short of recognizing its
necessity for social life (Archer, Making our Way through the World, 38–49).
27 Powell, Radical Relationism, 6.
28 Ibid., 202.
29 M.S. Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003); Making our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and
Social Mobility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and The Reflexive
Imperative in Late Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
30 Ead., The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, Ch. 3 “Reconceptualizing
Socialization as “Relational Reflexivity”.
31 Ead., “Morphogenesis: Realism’s Explanatory Framework,” in Maccarini, Morandi and
Prandini, Sociological Realism (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 67. Since rela-
tional contestation over education or any other social institution rarely leaves any interest
 Foreword xxv
group (corporate agent) with precisely what they wanted (because of compromises and
concessions), this is why struggles over morphostasis/morphogenesis continue.
32 Dépelteau, “Relational Thinking”, 166.
33 Who seem to be proponents of Bauman’s Liquid Society.
34 Donati, Archer, The Relational Subject, 23–25.
35 P. Donati, Teoria relazionale della società (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1991).
36 A. Maccarini, E. Morandi, R. Prandini, Sociological Realism (London: Routledge,
2011).
37 M.S. Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
38 D. Porpora, “Morphogenesis and Social change,” in M.S. Archer (ed), Social
Morphogenesis (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 26.
39 M.S. Archer, “Collective Reflexivity: A Relational Case for it,” in C. Powell, F.
Dépelteau (eds) Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical
Issues (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) 145–162.
40 Ead., Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 76.
41 Dépelteau, “Relational Thinking”, 274.
42 Ibid., 60.
43 D. Porpora, “Why Don’t Things Change? The Matter of Morphostasis,” in M.S. Archer,
Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order (Cham: Springer, 2015)
185–203, here 195.
44 M.S. Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988).
45 Ead., Being Human: The Problem of Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000).

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Tritter (eds.), Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonization (London: Routledge,
2000): 36–56.
Ead., Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003).
Ead., Making our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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Prandini (eds.), Sociological Realism (London and New York: Routledge, 2011): 59–94.
Ead., The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012).
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Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 145–162.
xxvi Foreword
G. Becker, Accounting for Tastes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
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A.M. Maccarini (eds.), Engaging with the World (London and New York: Routledge,
2013): 129–161.
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Ead., Living Together (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).
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Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
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L’Harmattan, 1995).
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Ph. Pettit, D. Schweikard, “Joint Actions and Group Agents,” Philosophy of the Social
Sciences 36:1 (2006): 18–39.
D.V. Porpora, “Four Concepts of Social Structure,” Journal for the Theory of Social
Behaviour 19, n. 2 (1989): 195–211.
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(Dordrecht: Springer, 2013).
Id., “Why Don’t Things Change? The Matter of Morphostasis,” in M. S. Archer (ed),
Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order (Cham: Springer, 2015).
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Conceptualizing Relational Sociology. Ontological and Theoretical Issues (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 187–207.
 Foreword xxvii
J. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1983).
Id., The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995).
Id., Making the Social World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Ch. Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in his Human Agency and Language (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Id., “Leading a Life,” in R. Chang (ed.), Incommensurability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997).
R. Tuomela, The Philosophy of Sociality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
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en sciences sociales: revue internationale de systémique complexe et d’études
relationnelles 4, n. 1 (2008): 77–106.
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(ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1971).
Introduction
The relational paradigm as interface between the
theological, philosophical, and social sciences
Pierpaolo Donati, Antonio Malo and Giulio Maspero

In contemporary scientific thought, there is an increasingly widespread need to

access a point of view that allows for coping with a growing bewilderment asso-
ciated with the fragmentation of knowledge, and relentless specialization of the
disciplines, which leads to the loss of human sense in scientific research and its
operative applications.
The deep detachment between the “science world” and the “life-world”
denounced by Edmund Husserl in 1937 not only remains topical but is exacer-
bated. A distance increases between “science” and “real life”, which undermines
human existence. It shows the dramatic problems that arise from phenomena like
the unregulated exploitation of the natural environment (think of global warming
and profit-driven genetic manipulation), the spread of new technologies and the
parallel emergence of posthuman and transhuman scenarios that trouble the whole
of humanity.
It becomes urgent to rethink all sciences from a standpoint that does not pre-
tend to unify them by tracing them back ad unum, but that sets out to find their
unity in a mutual relatedness by which they can communicate in a fruitful way,
maintaining and even promoting their specific autonomy.
The present volume arises from this need. It aims to respond to the great chal-
lenges of our time by presenting the project of a relational paradigm as an inter-
face between the sciences. The term “paradigm” must be understood here not as
just one of the many ways of pursuing knowledge or as reference to an epistemol-
ogy of a Kuhnian mold as opposed to Popperian falsificationism, but as an overall
vision of “doing science”. This does not concern a specific paradigm for one sci-
ence or another (for example, opposite the traditional division between the natural
sciences and the human sciences), but of an “interface” between them: that is, a
conceptual framework, which is simultaneously ontological, epistemological, and
methodological, and is capable of carrying out a dialogue between the disciplines
that allows for the illumination of reality better than other paradigms.
To begin this enterprise, the volume takes into consideration the theologi-
cal, philosophical, and social sciences. Why this choice? The underlying reason
lies in the fact that the proponents share the general presupposition according
to which “at the beginning (of reality, of every reality) there is relation.” Such
an assumption must certainly be submitted to scientific scrutiny, explanatory,
xxx Introduction
comprehensive, and also empirical with regard to the human and social sciences.
However, it implies in itself an essential reference to the metaphysical realm of
scientific research.
When we say metaphysical realm we mean to refer to that object of knowledge
that is the background and premise of the relations between the scientific disci-
plines historically cultivated by human beings: that is, we refer to the fact that the
ultimate meaning of human life, and of the “scientific knowledge” that investi-
gates it, cannot but have its roots or ultimate reasons in a discourse concerning the
theological matrix of society.
For instance, in the field of sociological studies, one asks: what is society? In
what does a family consist? What is the deepest foundation of social relation?
Such questions lie beyond the approach of sociology alone, embracing that of
anthropology and theology and, ultimately, ontology. The essential point is that
the object studied—the social phenomenon seen from different scientific disci-
plines—cannot be sectioned and divided artificially, but in its real unity refers
relationally to the various aspects of its being as a real unitary entity.
Thus, in search for an answer to the deep questions just mentioned, the study of
sociology has led to the recognition of the fundamental importance of the “theologi-
cal matrix of society” from the phenomenological datum itself. With this expression
I mean the symbolic complex that indicates where a culture—or a society—places
“God”, in the sense of indicating where the ultimate values and realities of exist-
ence are located and the way they should be managed by people in steering their
thoughts, beliefs, and behaviours. Every theological matrix decides what kind of
culture is prevalent in a society and at the same time decides on the kind of social
ontology to which the various sciences—which operate in that society—refer.
It is at the level of the theological matrix where we find the first and most
fundamental watershed between the modes of conceiving of reality. Today, the
sharp division passes between realism (we mean “critical realism”, not naive or
let-alone positivist) and constructivism (in its various forms, more or less radi-
cal). Their distance is marked, precisely, by the mode of understanding relation.
For realism, relation is a concrete reality that has its own organizational struc-
ture, which is undoubtedly subject to possible changes, but in such a way that the
changes have definite consequences in terms of causal effects; relation emerges in
existence, and therefore it contains a certain contingency but has its own neces-
sity. For constructivism, rather, relation is a “virtual” reality made from pure con-
tingency, does not respond to a necessity, and does not have a precise causality;
relation emerges procedurally, always remaining open to any possibility, that is,
“it can always be otherwise”.
This interpretation of phenomenological data can be put into relation with the
properly philosophical dimension, inasmuch as it recalls a relational ontology of
a realistic character, according to a critical, analytic, and relational realism. This
is put to the test in what it explains and allows for understanding in relation to
other ontologies, which follow other paradigms. The value of this perspective can
be fully appreciated from the anthropological side: we are, in fact, convinced that
it is only this type of ontology that leads to a humanistic conception of society.
 Introduction xxxi
This standpoint, starting from a conception of the human person as being-in-
relation and intrinsically relational, illuminates social phenomena like the family,
education, work, insofar as they are properly human realities.
For its part, philosophy obviously has its own autonomy, as a reflection on
reality and human knowledge in search of ultimate rational principles, which are
thus shared by all of the sciences. And so the social sciences have their theoretical
and methodological autonomy, accentuated by the fact that they presuppose an
empirical verification.
Yet these disciplines, if they want to communicate with each other, must find an
interface that connects them in a meaningful way. The interface must be a “com-
mon ground”, therefore one marked by freedom, correlativity, and an authentic
reciprocity. Therefore, it cannot be one-way, or leaning to one side or the other.
If we wanted to depict what we think of when we talk about a relational para-
digm, we might outline it as follows (see Figure I.1).
The outline suggests the following way of understanding the relations between
the different disciplines.

1 Ontology, which acts as a representative of the different disciplines, is rela-

tional inasmuch as it can avail itself of exchanges with a theological matrix
of society that must itself be relational if ontology must be such as to sup-
port the relationality among different types of knowledge through their
exchanges, communications, and dialogues that pass through the comparison
between their various ways of knowing the same reality (that is, the differ-
ent epistemologies). Only a relational matrix can allow for this complex of
interchanges.
2 Each discipline has its own epistemology, and yet the epistemologies are
not separate and incompatible, because they communicate by referring to
the relational ontology, where relationality arises as part of the very reality
so studied. For example, in order to study medicine, I must be able to apply

Theological matrix of society

Relational ontology

theological philosophical sociological

epistemology epistemology epistemology

theological philosophical sociological

methodology methodology methodology

Figure I.1 The relational paradigm as an interface between the disciplines

xxxii Introduction
biology, chemistry, and physics because the object itself refers to all of these
fields. In a similar way, the study of chemistry refers to physics and to biol-
ogy, starting from a series of connections that have also been recognized
thanks to medicine itself. And so it goes.
3 Obviously, each discipline has its own methodologies of investigation, which
follow and interact with the respective epistemology; however, precisely
by virtue of the relationality that connects the whole through the relational
ontology, also the different methodologies – similarly to epistemologies –
can communicate with each other.

Let us propose an image of the perspective proposed here. The ones who are try-
ing to communicate with each other to learn together about the social reality are
sociologists, philosophers—especially anthropological philosophers—and theo-
logians. Each of them is like a column of the facade of a Greek temple: all these
columns culminate in, and are united by, the architrave that represents relational
ontology, which emerges from the immanence of the same object studied and
is shown as the thought of relation (in reality) that allows for the relation itself
(between scholars). The whole culminates in the tympanum that represents the
theological matrix of society. Each column goes from the phenomenon, which in
the case of sociology is the observation (also empirical observation) of society;
for philosophy, it is the observation of the anthropological dimension generally;
and from the standpoint of the theologian, it is the history of salvation. Within
each of these fields there emerges a conception of relational identity; as happens
in sociology from the necessity of understanding the reality of the family and of
social relations in general; in anthropology from the search to characterize the
fullness of the human person’s being, as indicated by human desire itself; and in
theology from the Trinitarian reflection along the centuries, characterized by the
necessity of developing a principle of individuation of the divine Persons that was
not substance, with which Each of them is perfectly identified.
To say that the relational paradigm, so understood, is an interface is not exactly
the same as affirming, as some do, that this paradigm is “interdisciplinary” or
“transdisciplinary”. One speaks of interdisciplinary to mean, generally, that
which is common to various disciplines or can be placed in common by super-
imposing in some measure their limits, while the interface is a paradigm in itself.
Furthermore, if it is true that the interface allows each discipline to go beyond
itself (that is, it can be interpreted as trans-disciplinarity), it is much more than
this, because it is a knowledge that is in itself orienting and ordering with regard
to how the various disciplines can relate to one another.
In the essays published here, the reader will find laid out the way in which the
three disciplines indicated implement this paradigm and make it work from the
standpoint of a conceptual framework that allows otherwise inaccessible knowl-
edge to be reached, as well as innovative practical applications. Part I discusses
ontological and fundamental epistemological problems. Part II indicates some
innovative tracks of research and, in particular, presents applicative reflections on
some human realities such as family and education.
 Introduction xxxiii
The paradigm is potentially applicable to any human and social reality. Despite
the fact that each discipline inevitably has its own language, and that in today’s
cultural conditions a common logos is missing, it is possible, by, observing
together a specific reality, to recognize the relations between the different per-
spectives through a triangulation on the object in study itself. This triangulation
serves to identify the common conceptual framework that makes the different
disciplines synergistic when they speak of a concrete reality. In fact, precisely
because at the beginning of any reality there is a relation, through the same rela-
tionship inherent in the reality studied (and for this matter, lived by scholars in
a confident and mutual sharing of their own results), a common language that
allows for reciprocal dialogue can be reconstructed. The test of the efficacy of the
proposed approach will be, therefore, a posteriori. In fact, scientific reflection in
the various fields has validity only in its expression of a relation to reality. The
premise of one such work of an intellectual nature (a necessary condition even if
not sufficient) is that each discipline recognizes from the start that its gaze is not
able to speak all of reality, but that it captures only one aspect of truth, without,
however, being able to exhaust it.
For theology, this comes down to apophaticism, which from the fourth century
up to the reflection of Joseph Ratzinger in Introduction to Christianity affirms
the exceeding vastness of being as regards the expressive possibilities of man:
speculative research can never “com-prehend” (Latin: comprehendere, to take
together)1, but it can only pave the way for possible shortcuts of reasoning that
reduce mystery to a single concrete formulation, in such a way that even dogma
only has the value of an allusion, according to the vision of Ratzinger himself.
As regards philosophy, it expresses awareness of its own limitations when it
arrives at the understanding that “knowledge is knowledge of not knowing”. The
same is true for the social and human sciences, which, while giving essential con-
tributions on the level of factual knowledge, they know that, precisely when they
offer explanations of phenomena, what they know is only pro-fanum, which lies
ahead of fanum, that is, at the place where there lie the “sacred things” of life, such
as the dignity of the human person.
All of the sciences must recognize that their investigation of reality is never
complete but limited and subject to theorems of incompleteness that require refer-
ences to an other, to a dimension that refers beyond their own. Starting from this
framework can create the conditions of a profound and creative dialogue between
the different disciplines in order to illuminate the reality of human and social life
in contemporary society and in view of the future.
In publishing this text, the authors hope that it may prove useful for initiating
a research program that intends to focus on the role that the relational paradigm
might have in fostering a civil and political society that is capable of pursuing a
“good life” (eudemonia) and a “good society”. They are convinced that the sci-
entific paradigm that best lends itself to addressing this issue is the relational one
because it is the one that is most capable of evaluating the “personal and social life
as relation”. This expression is intended to place emphasis on the interpersonal
and organizational relations as source, place, and activation of social spheres
xxxiv Introduction
(from the family to the school, from business to foundations, from the means of
communication to the entire world of civil associations working in all fields of
everyday life) that animate a just and supportive society. At the heart of these
relations religion plays an essential role as the first institution of a civil society,
insofar as it provides the transcendent sense of action and of being-in-relation,
and simultaneously offers the most appropriate cultural matrix for configuring the
various social spheres according to a project of authentic growth of man and of
his social dimension.
The ultimate scope is, therefore, that of promoting a theoretical and empiri-
cal research program that is also capable of giving rise to practical applications,
to supporting the authors of civil and political society who work for the com-
mon good, for the good of each and every person. This task appears essential
and indispensable in the postmodern context, where the difficulty of relationally
analyzing the differences results in the radical negation on the ontological level
of the differences themselves, in a process that risks condemning man—and the
researcher—to a true and proper existential and scientific solipsism.
Pierpaolo Donati
Antonio Malo
Giulio Maspero

Note
1 Translator’s note: I included the Latin etymology because it was easier in Italian to
immediately grasp the etymological significance of com-prendere, because prendere is
the verb meaning “to take” in Italian.
Part I

Fundamentals of the paradigm

1 The enigma of relation and the
theological matrix of society
Pierpaolo Donati

The problem of the enigma and of its matrix

In the General Audience of April 15, 2015, Pope Francis wondered “if the crisis
of collective trust in God, which does us so much harm, and makes us pale with
resignation, incredulity and cynicism, is not also connected to the crisis of the
alliance between man and woman.” The Pope, of course, suggests an affirma-
tive reply. But how do we explain that the crisis of the man–woman covenant
is related to the crisis of collective trust in God? The leap is large and, without
an appropriate explanation, which is minimally rational and based on facts, that
phrase is beautiful, but remains an enigma.
The phrase puts us before something hidden, obscure, which we cannot
decipher: how can (and should) we think about human relations (in this case
between man and woman) in such a way that recalls the relations that we have
with God and vice versa? Where is God when we speak of human relations,
and vice versa? Or: what relationship is there between relations with God and
human social relations?
Theology gives a response as simple as it is problematic; it indicates the way of
love. Love for God is correlated with human love (for example between man and
woman) and vice versa. This concerns an important affirmation, which, however,
in order to be enlightening, must be understood, and in fact, it raises more prob-
lems than it solves if it is addressed from a standpoint that is external to religious
faith. In fact, that of which we speak, love, is completely yet to be defined.1
To respond to the question just mentioned, it is necessary to confront a cru-
cial, terribly difficult question, which is the following: whether or not, to support
determinate human and social relations (“horizontal relationships”, so to speak),
a theological matrix is necessary (that is, resorting to “vertical” or transcendent
relations). If not, why? If yes, which characteristics should it have? The more
general problem is: if the social ontology of the relations of which we speak (like,
for example, love, as an interpersonal relation and not as an individual sentiment
or passion) requires a metaphysics rooted in the theology understood not yet in
itself and for itself, but as a cultural matrix.2
In this contribution, I would like to say how my relational sociology seeks
to respond to the above question (whether social ontology needs to be rooted in
4 Pierpaolo Donati
metaphysics or not). This possibility, in its turn, depends on the fact of being able
to see and manage the enigma of relation, the enigma that lies in relationality
as such.3
In summary, the problem is the following: whether or not it is necessary—if
not, why, and if so, what is it—to have a symbolic matrix that allows us to face
the enigma of relation in such a way that it is possible to see how and why human
relations and divine relations are ontologically connected to each other (not by
simile or metaphor).

The enigma of relation

I will begin to analyze the subject by commenting on some quotes. The first is
from Pope Francis when he writes:

If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and
wonder [the same openness by Saint Francis of Assisi, Ed.], if we no longer
speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world,
our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to
set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united
with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.4

How is it possible that from an “inner (subjective) feeling” spontaneously derives

effective (real) care for nature and the environment?
In the encyclical Caritas in Veritate (no. 7), Benedict XVI writes:

To love someone is to desire that person’s good and to take effective steps to
secure it. Besides the good of the individual, there is a good that is linked to
living in society: the common good. It is the good of “all of us”, made up of
individuals, families and intermediate groups who together constitute society
[Gaudium et Spes, 26]. It is a good that is sought not for its own sake, but for
the people who belong to the social community and who can only really and
effectively pursue their good within it.

But what is this social good that goes beyond the individual good?
Another author, Saint Josémaria Escrivá, writes: “God wants us to be very
human. Our heads should indeed be touching heaven, but our feet should be firmly
on the ground.”5 It is an invitation to live on/with/through the relation between the
human and the divine. He then adds: “I am not convinced either when I hear people
making a great distinction between personal and social virtues” because “virtues
are therefore also radically personal, they pertain to the person” (ibid.). However,
he adds that solidarity and love are virtues that one does not pursue alone, because
“in some way we are always either helping or hindering each other.” He therefore
invites us to reflect on the meaning of the “social”. In another writing, he affirms,
“Christian freedom arises from within, from the heart, from faith; however, it is
not merely individual. It has external manifestations, one of which—among the
 The enigma of relation 5
most characteristic of the lives of the early Christians—is brotherhood.”6 We are
now asked: what is the relation between personal and social virtues?
Taken literally, these quotations indicate that certain intentions and inner feel-
ings of people create certain relations (of caring, benevolence, brotherhood, etc.).
In short, if people feel united, they achieve human solidarity and, as for Christians,
the communion of saints. This perspective certainly has many elements of truth,
but it needs to be enlightened and supplemented by new considerations, which
are not to be undervalued. In fact, they require a cultural matrix that personal-
istic thought has not developed so far and which the dominant culture of today
openly opposes.
In the above quotations (but so many others could be mentioned on the so-
called “personalist” perspective), we find a view of things that, to a first-order
consideration,7 seems to indicate that the internal life of the person, their intimate
union with God and with creation, is spontaneously and necessarily reflected in
the social realm. This causality is instead quite problematic, and it becomes more
and more so because of the mediations that a complex society like the hyper-
modernized one—high-tech and globalized—places between inner life and exter-
nal reality.
The consciousness of the person, her will and intentionality, her states of mind,
can create or not create social relationships. They can be reflected in so many
ways in relations, and with very different outcomes (various types of relational
goods and ills). The idea according to which, if the people seek the good and they
nurture good feelings (they are respectful of human solidarity and fraternity), then
even a good society is a naive idea that can lead to big disappointments, frustra-
tions, and failures. The point is that the necessary virtues for producing a certain
good are not only those of persons as such but also those of their relations. The
inner attitudes of the individuals are necessary, but not sufficient to generate a
“third” (relation) that reflects the attitudes, dispositions, and aspirations of per-
sons. We have to look at and carry out the virtues of their relations.
The defect of naive realism (inherent to traditional personalism) is that of
understanding social relations with others and with the world as a “manifes-
tation” which—sic et simpliciter—derives from the qualities inherent in the
human person and her inner life. This vision certainly does not ignore prosocial
virtues, like mercy and magnanimity, which are “the energy to break out of
ourselves and be prepared to undertake generous tasks which will be of benefit
to all.”8 However, to undertake a work on the basis of internal impulses does
not mean that a certain result follows. It poses the question: if it is true that
personal virtues urge a certain action, who or what ensures that the objective
intent is achieved? In other words: are the human social relations simply an
expression of experiences, of consciousness, and of internal conversations of
persons? Or are the social virtues also inherent in human nature?9 It is necessary
to give some insights and clarifications. In my view, in answering these ques-
tions (which are the enigmas that the oracle that is reality places before us) we
must face the challenges whose solution lays the path that can lead to a possible
neo-humanism that is open to transcendence.
6 Pierpaolo Donati
The idea that relations necessarily follow from the subjective consciousness
corresponds to what I call a naive conception, “un-mediatedly” human, of the
social (that is, not mediated by what “is in between” human beings), according
to which social relations and their effects are a sort of “prolonging” or result of
feelings (good or evil), of virtues (or of vices), of intimacy (or of estrangement)
of persons.
From the sociological standpoint, this derivation (induction) is problematic,
if understood sic et simpliciter. Sobriety and the care of creation, brotherhood,
and other social virtues are now, in fact, in crisis precisely because it is no longer
sufficient that the person wants them intentionally, whether it be a single person
or a “moral person” in the Thomist sense of the term,10 that is, as an association
of persons.
There is something that is “in the middle”; between the personal virtues of
single individuals to which we must give new focus. The social virtues, in fact,
refer to social relations.11 They do not arise in an immediate and spontaneous way
from within people, because, between the interior life of the person and social
reality, they emerge (and are increasingly multiplying) from mediations (made of
relationships) that make the immediacy and spontaneity of social outcomes com-
pletely uncertain and improbable. Moreover, in hindsight, this speaks to the social
doctrine of the Church, who regards the goodness (or lack thereof) of social rela-
tions as beyond the subjective intention of individuals.12
The humanistic vision that makes the social reality depend on the person’s
right conscience and goodwill could possibly have an effective comparison in
certain societies of the past (the ancient Gemeinschaft), and in theory could still
have validity in certain small social groups where there is a very strict causal
relationship between the interiority of the person and her external relations. This
happens in a family if there are vital relationships between its members, and
always provided that the familial relationships manage to effectively control their
boundaries with the external environment, which is generally complex and tur-
bulent. Generally, however, in an open society, the causal relationship between
individual subjectivity and the social context becomes increasingly lax and unpre-
dictable. The case of the family that lives in a chaotic environment like that of the
internet is emblematic of the difficulties that people have in firmly maintaining
boundaries and the identity of their familial relationships.13
In the new globalized environment, in order to create a certain social relation
equipped with certain qualities and causal properties (for example, a “good fam-
ily”), it is not only necessary to have a certain disposition and agency of individu-
als, but another condition becomes just as necessary: namely, that the persons
“see” the specific good of that relation, which is not the same thing as individual
feelings and virtues, and pursue that relation as “good in itself”, to which they
dedicate particular care. In the absence of this condition, the individual act, even
the most virtuous and best intentioned, can create—albeit unintentionally—a rela-
tional evil instead of a relational good. Daily life is full of cases in which people
who are in themselves good and “close” to each other create contentious and neg-
ative relationships. Not uncommonly, we see two “almost perfect” parents who
 The enigma of relation 7
have children that not only do not share their parents’ virtues, but manifest deviant
pathological behaviours, for example, drug abuse, committing acts of violence or
bullying, and so forth. What went wrong? What did not “work” (I use this term
only for ease of understanding) was the relation between the parents, who, while
being good persons individually, have not seen or cared for their relationships as
a good in itself, which has decisive influences on the people around, whether they
are aware of it or not.
The fact is that relation has its own reality, which is an emergent, and not an
outcome automatically derived from the dispositions of the individuals in relation.
This is nothing other than what relational sociology says. From this standpoint,
the relation appears as an enigma.

How can we confront the enigma?

The enigma can be simply expressed with this question: why should we live with
others? Why, in order to achieve what we love and desire, must we go through
others who we encounter along our way? Why can the human being not live her
life for herself and in herself, without having to deal with others?
When we have a hard impact with the world, it is then that we feel in a sen-
sory way the space that is “in the middle” between us and the world around us.
If we land in a difficult situation, we realize that, before this impact, there was
a distance that kept us away from this situation, and we did not think about its
consequences. It happens when an unsuspecting parent learns that his son is tak-
ing drugs, when we learn that a friend of ours is suicidal, when a loved one is in
a serious accident, when we meet someone who lives on the street due to abject
poverty, when a catastrophic event disrupts our ordinary life. Only then do we
realize, because we perceive in an immediate way, “we feel” in a dramatic way,
that there exists something like a “relation” with an order of reality to which we
have not paid enough attention.
If it happens that a person, a friend perhaps, has done us wrong (that is, slams
our Ego against a wall), we realize that—beyond the behaviour of the other—
there is something else in play; it is “that which is between us”. This something
certainly depends on how we behave in ourselves and how others behave, but
requires separate consideration, in itself and for itself, because it exists and goes
beyond our intentions. It is a reality that calls attention in itself and for itself. In
fact, when we ask ourselves, “What should I do?,” we are actually saying to our-
selves, “Should I continue to stay in this relation or should I leave?”, “What am
I to make of this relation?” “If I have to change it, what am I to do?”, or “How
should I treat this space-time between me and the other?” We react to individuals
and situations as singular entities, but the game is about relations, even if this usu-
ally happens in an unconscious way.
The western modernity has exalted the Subject (the I) at the expense of its rela-
tions. It thought it could forge social relationships at will. When it thought and
thinks in systemic terms, the “system” is understood as instruments of liberation
of the Subject, be it individual or collective. Since the beginning, it refused to
8 Pierpaolo Donati
answer that which I call the enigma of the relation,14 which consists in having to
understand if and how one can find a convergence between opposed positions or,
anyhow, if and how the differences can be composed, especially when the differ-
ences seem incompatible and insurmountable. When modernity sought to give an
answer, it created new problems, either because the answer was that of conflict, of
division, of confrontation, or stipulated and then betrayed contracts, or because it
pursued strategic games that have ended badly.
From Schelling and Hegel forward, there have been many attempts to think
about the differences within the logos. Aside from countless authors from the
twentieth century (especially M. Foucault and G. Deleuze), it is sufficient to cite
J. Derrida (who sees the difference as ambiguity)15 and J. Lyotard (who proposes
analyzing les différends qui nous opposent through a radical relationism).16 The
point is that, in all philosophy and culture that starts from the idealism of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into the present day, a reflection on the
relational matrix of society is still missing, or even better, this matrix has always
been treated in a distorted or misleading way.
In the end, modernity has removed the reality—that is, the proper space-time—
of social relations, in order to create an indefinite number of relations, all virtual,
all otherwise possible, in order to be able to play with them. Are these, as Jean
Baudrillard says, fatal strategies? Dynamic functionalist strategies, as Luhmann
says? Luhmann’s explanation, not surprisingly, goes back to Greek mythology,
that is, to a pre-Christian thought. The solution of the enigma of the relation
comes to be represented by Perseus, who managed to survive because he adopted
a precise relational strategy, consisting in avoiding the deadly gaze of the Gorgons
through a continuous change in his position, in such a way as to never directly
cross the gaze of the Gorgon. Luhmann calls him “eurialistic”.17 It is not surpris-
ing that the prevalent culture of today recommends precisely this way of life as
the solution to the enigma of relation; it is that way of relating to others that con-
sists in believing that one cannot and should not have any certainty in the face of
problems. It is believed that one cannot and should not speak of “truth”, because
the answers to problems are all provisional, indeterminate, uncertain, relative to
a moment and to a particular point of view. The solution to the problems, then, is
found in avoiding tackling problems directly, in the capacity to sidestep them, in
waiting for the problems (the enigmas) to dissolve on their own. Consequently,
our ways of life are in conflict with an increasingly radical crisis, made of exis-
tential and solipsistic voids, because we are not able to confront and to respond to
the enigmas of relations.
And now we ask ourselves: how is it possible to confront the enigma of rela-
tions? The answer that I propose is: through a cultural matrix, which has an onto-
logical basis in re, which allows a departure from the ambiguities and relativism
that are proposed by today’s dominant cultural matrices, which are devoid of any
positive solution.
If, on the one hand, we observe that modernity continues its path of eroding
human relations, on the other hand, we see the (re)emergence of the need for new
forms of sociability, in which we can live with trust, collaboration, and reciprocity
 The enigma of relation 9
between people. Some will say that these are fantasies, dreams, or utopias that
are hopeless and meaningless. However, they are not quite so. In a perspective
of critical and relational realism, these phenomena actually concern needs that
arise from the real world of people,18 or at least from those who do not allow
themselves to be fascinated by the so-called post-human, transhuman, cyborg
world, or specifically the world of technology—especially of the internet—which
replaces concrete inter-human relations with digital and virtual relations in which
the qualities of the human being are lost.19 This is not to relaunch some abstract
utopia (the concrete utopia is something else), but to read the signs of the new
historical dynamic that bring the concrete social relation back to the centre of the
era into which we are entering.
Relation becomes the solution rather than the problem. We can learn something
from the relationism of the postmoderns which, in a certain sense, leads us to see
the true sense of the theological matrix that makes humanity flourish instead of
alienating the human person in an evolution devoid of teleology. If it is true that
social relations present enigmas to us and that the enigmas contain paradoxes,
some solvable and some unsolvable, then we must learn how to handle paradoxes.
Unsolvable paradoxes can be confronted not only by accepting absolute relativ-
ism for which it is enough to continuously and endlessly change one’s point of
view to manage to confront the dilemmas, but also in other ways, for example,
adopting “counter-paradoxical” strategies.20 When we are taken in a double bind,
the counter-paradoxical response consists first in assuming an attitude of compas-
sion towards the double bind that oppresses us, and then in separating the two
binds that contradict each other, redefining them as relations to another term and
therefore completely modifying their initial relation.
For example, it is easy to ascertain that today’s culture imposes on us as a
moral imperative: “You have to be free”; “You have to free yourself from all
bonds”; and “You must not depend on anyone but yourself.” This prescription
constitutes a double bind because we arrive at a course of acting that catches us
in a trap from which we cannot escape; in fact, if we behave freely (with total
spontaneity), we are actually obeying the precept, and vice versa, if we fulfill
the precept (we act out of duty), we are not free. The strategy is then, first of
all, to smile at this injunction, and then to redefine freedom as a choice by the
one who depends instead of denying any dependence as, rather, commands the
semantic code of late modernity according to which Ego’s freedom consists
precisely in denying all that is not Ego according to the formula [A = non (non-
A)] (I am referring here to the binary code of Luhmann, and not to Hegel). In
fact, there is no individual human person who does not depend on other human
beings and obviously on many relations with them. A pure dependence on one’s
own I is called narcissism, which leads to self-absorption. Consequently, the
moral imperative becomes redefined as authenticity of the choice of dependence
that we make, and as acceptance of the relative consequences. Our action is free
insofar as it consists in choosing meaningful relations with the world with the
awareness that these relationships imply constraints but at the same time offer
resources that are necessary for us.
10 Pierpaolo Donati
To explain this point, we will look at two ways of expressing ourselves that are
formally the same but actually refer to two very different semantic codes. The first
phrase is “staying on Facebook does not mean not being free,” and the second is
“staying on Facebook means being free.” Formally, they are two statements that
are equivalent, because the double negative makes a positive. From the substantial
point of view, however, it concerns two completely different symbolic worlds. If
I say, “staying on Facebook means being free,” I make an affirmation of the type,
“A (staying on Facebook) = (means) A (being free)”. There is an unconditionally
positive indication. If I say “staying on Facebook does not mean not being free,”
I make an affirmation of the type “A (staying on Facebook) = not (does not mean)
not-A (not being free)”, whereas the double negative implies the affirmation that
staying on Facebook “can” also mean being free (or “being otherwise”), but not
necessarily, and still leaving the freedom of which we speak undetermined. The
second equation leads to a world of various possibilities, among which is that
of being free, but only as one of many possibilities (which, as Luhmann would
say, is improbable). The relational way then suggests another expression: “staying
on Facebook means a certain relation to freedom” [A = relation between A and
not-A]. In this case, the phrase invites us to examine which kind of relation (its
qualities and causal potential) those who stay on Facebook have with freedom.
It invites the subject to a reflexive action (relational reflexivity)21 that the other
two expressions do not involve because they are simply assertive affirmations of
presence or lack of absence of freedom. Moreover, it implies that a relational and
positive sense is given to freedom, that is, freedom as “relation to”, rather than as
absence of bonds.
We are dealing with exploring a new horizon, that of a culture of inter-human
relations that is able to create forms of social life such as to put people in condi-
tions of knowing and being able to creatively respond to the inevitable enigmas
of living together.
To confront the enigmas, we must answer some riddles.
What is the reality for which a person is someone (and not something)22 for
another person, but not as an individual? For example, in everyday language we
say: this person is my mother or my father, my brother or my sister, my friend,
my colleague, my neighbour, a member of my association, a person I met at a bar
or a garden, etc., referring to a meaning that is not about the individual qualities
of that person. What is the reality for which a certain person is significant for me,
but not because of his or her individual qualities?
It is, in fact, the riddle contained in each relation, even the relation with one’s
parents or children, with colleagues, with people we associate with or know well,
who are significant to me not only for their qualities as individual persons, but
also—and in a distinct manner—because of the kind of relation they have to me.
These are the qualities and causal properties of the relations with those persons
that make them significant for me, regardless of how I feel and judge their per-
sonal qualities. The enigma alludes to something that is difficult to understand, to
a reality that we do not see with the naked eye, but that exists. We are children of
two parents, beyond the personal qualities of our parents. We work with Tom and
Another random document with
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“It was Ed Stimson that come to me—that’s it. Ed bought the Eagle
House from old Bill Williams’s widder, and Ed and me was pretty
close pardners in them days. ‘Ebner,’ says he, ‘Doc Rand claims
number nine’s got the pneumonia. She’s been out of her head since
daylight. She’s been askin’ for you. Guess you’re elected, Eb.’”
He rambled on, unconscious that every word he uttered was far from
welcome to his listener, who sat before him helpless, dazed, and
indignant, unable to stem the tide of his worldly narrative. He
enlightened her to the fact that he and Little Nell had had supper
together only two days before in an oyster-parlor of a friend of his.
He insisted that she had taken a shine to him from the first, and that
now that she was ill and penniless in the Eagle House, the only
decent thing he could do was to pay the doctor and her board bill,
dilating on the detail that he was human and incapable of seeing any
woman in distress, without coming to her aid like a gentleman, and
ended this remarkable résumé by flinging himself back on the sofa
with a satisfied smile, stretching his lean jaws in a yawn, as if the
incident was only one of many in his wide experience.
“Warm, ain’t it—for March?” he declared, breaking the awkward
silence that ensued.
Miss Ann agreed that it was, the needles slowing down to their
normal speed.
“It ain’t a mite too warm for me,” he remarked, displaying a thick and
drooping sock above his cracked patent-leather shoes. “Warm
weather means plenty of business in the laundry line, Miss Moulton.
A feller can get along all right in cold weather, but take it in collar-
meltin’ time and clean shirts are a necessity. Ever stop to think how
many percales and fancy madrases are spoiled by cheap wringers?
Chewed to holes ’fore the iron touches ’em.”
Miss Ann laid her knitting in her lap in forced attention. Something far
graver than his visit had worried her to-day, a question of money, a
discouraging letter from her brother, which she had kept from her
sister, not having the heart to tell her that some property she had
counted on to relieve their present modest income had turned out a
failure.
“I don’t mind tellin’ you, Miss Moulton, a little secret,” continued Ford,
“seein’ we’re old friends and neighbors. It’s sort of lettin’ the cat out
of the bag,” he added thoughtfully, “but I’ve been thinkin’ it over,
neighbor; besides, I don’t know anybody I’d rather help than you,” he
declared, as he fished in his pocket and drew out a square chunk of
dark rubber.
“That’s pure Para,” he announced gravely, holding it up for her
inspection. “Take a good look at it, Miss Moulton; you don’t often see
it. It ain’t worth its weight in gold, but it’s close to it when it comes to
wringers. It’s them cheap rollers that does the dirty work. If you was
to know what they’re made of, I presume likely you wouldn’t care to
wear the clothes they come through. It’s the sulphur in ’em that does
the stainin’.”
Again his long hand fumbled in his pocket; this time it drew out a
folded paper with a mechanical drawing, a model of a clothes-
wringer, which he spread out flat on his knees.
“There she is,” he declared with conviction. “Looks pretty neat, don’t
it? That there layer of pure Para on the rollers does the trick, and
them two extra cog-wheels on the speed-accelerator keeps her
movin’, I kin tell you. Saves time! One turn of that crank’s worth ten
of any other household wringer on the market. Can’t jam, can’t
squeeze, can’t rust, every nut, screw, and rivet in it galvanized. Even
pressure on anything from a lady’s handkerchief to a baby’s bib. Got
any idea, friend, what it costs delivered to sufferin’ humanity? Four
dollars. Got any idea what it makes?”
“I haven’t an idea,” confessed Miss Ann, looking up, relieved at the
sudden and cleanly change in the conversation, and, despite herself,
becoming more and more interested.
“’Course you haven’t, Miss Moulton. Be a little surprised, wouldn’t
you, if I was to tell you that old Mrs. Miggs, one of our stockholders,
doubled her income; that she’s got already a couple of thousand
dollars laid aside for a rainy day that she’d never had if I hadn’t come
to her in a friendly way. I don’t know as if I’ve ever seen a woman
happier. Her mortgage on her house in Yonkers all paid up, nice little
new home for herself and niece, and a tidy little sum in the bank—a
sum that’s growin’ daily, friend, without so much as liftin’ her little
finger. As our head canvasser on the road wrote me yesterday, a
man of over twenty years’ experience sellin’ wringers—‘You needn’t
worry no more,’ he writes, ‘about the Household Gem holdin’ her
own; I’m averagin’ two gross a week right here in Elmira. I could sell
three if I had ’em.’ Hold on. I’ve got it, if I ain’t mistaken.” He whipped
out the letter and read it aloud, including its postscript.
“You should see the pleased faces on Mondays—women
who have never had an easy wash-day before in their
lives. The new ad: ‘Let baby do the work,’ catches ’em.
Hoping your folks are well,
“Yours successfully,
“E. P. Redmond,
“Managing Salesman of The United Family
Laundry Association, Limited.”
He thrust the letter back in his pocket and waited for its effect,
beating a tattoo on the arm of the sofa, and though Miss Ann did not
reply, the nervous way she dropped her stitches assured him he had
made an impression.
“Anybody, my friend, with a little ready money, can double it,” he
resumed persuasively. “Just as sure as two and two makes four.
Take Mrs. Miggs, for instance. Six months ago she was skimpin’
along as usual—always ailin’, too—worry done that, as I told her,
worry; not knowin’ how she was goin’ to end one month and begin
another. Lookin’ sallower’n a peck of mustard—no appetite—worry—
and what for? Kept what little money she had in her bank, afraid to
invest a dollar of it in anything. Let it lay there in cold storage without
givin’ her a cent of interest. Spendin’ little by little her capital without
a dollar of it free to make another. ’Twa’n’t right, and I told her so
plainly. It’s all she had, she told me. It’ll be all you’ll ever get, I told
her, if you keep on leaving it in jail. Any dollar, my dear friend, that
ain’t worth more than a dollar, that can’t make a cent for itself, is a
pretty shiftless greenback, and ought to be ashamed to look its
owner in the face. Give every dollar a show. That’s common sense,
ain’t it?”
He shot out a frayed cuff and slapped his knee soundly.
“I ain’t the kind to believe in speculatin’, ’specially for women. They
wa’n’t never made to handle the heavy risks that men are. They ain’t
capable of shoulderin’ the enormous responsibilities that we have to.
How many women have come to me, beggin’ me to invest their
money in speculations that I’ve refused. Funny, ain’t it, how some
women like to gamble? That’s all speculatin’ is—gamblin’. Gamblin’s
agin my principles, friend, and always was. There ain’t no
righteousness in gamblin’. It’s an ungodly sin, worse vice’n the liquor
habit. Our gains, says the Bible, is to be measured by the sweat of
our brows. Honest business means hard toil and sound judgment.
Why, I’ve seen times when if it hadn’t been for my sound judgment—
business acumen, they call it—I’d been a ruined man. Sellin’ honest
goods ain’t got nothin’ to do with gamblin’. Sellin’ somethin’ that folks
need—honestly made and honestly sold; that folks who have paid for
it and used it swear by. An article that enters the home circle as a
helpin’ hand; that makes the home happier, and keeps the doctor
from the door. No more backaches for mother; a child can turn the
handle of the Gem. The accelerator tends to that. Easy as a fish-
reel, friction down to the minimum. Any wonder that it sells? As our
Southern agent wrote us the other day: ‘It wrings out the dollars, as
easy as it does a heavy day’s wash.’”
He laughed softly.
“Yes; it’s given the wringer trade a tough blow—patents all covered.
There ain’t an inch of it they kin imitate. When men like Hiram
Sudwell, president of the National Mangle Company, come sniffin’
round to buy,” he chuckled. “‘Sudwell,’ I says to him, ‘you ain’t got
money enough if you was to pile it as high as the ceilin’ to buy the
Gem.’ He sorter laughed. He knowed there wa’n’t no use.
“‘Couldn’t you let me in a little on the ground floor?’ says he. ‘How
about lettin’ me have ten thousand shares of your preferred? If it’s a
go here’s my check for it,’ says he. I let him talk. I see he was lookin’
kind er down in the mouth. Bimeby he begun to coax an’ whine. ‘See
here,’ says he, ‘there ain’t no use ’n our hemmin’ and hawin’ round
the bush. I’m plain-spoken. The Gem’s a gold mine, and you know it.
Tell you what I’ll do,’ says he; ‘if you’ll let me have ten thousand spot
cash, I’ll throw in five hundred of the Mangle’s preferred just to show
there’s no hard feelin’.’ ‘Sudwell,’ says I, ‘we ain’t sellin’ stock to rival
companies. First thing you know you’d want more. Next thing we’d
know you’d have us out in the cold....’”
Miss Ann had risen. She laid her knitting with a trembling hand in her
work-basket, went over to the window and stood there gazing out,
struggling with herself over a decision so stupendous to that
conservative little woman, that every quivering nerve in her was
strung to its utmost. As she stood by the window she seemed to be
praying.
Suddenly she turned to him, her hands clasped behind her, her eyes
downcast, one small foot slightly advanced toward a step that even
then made her tremble, her mind filled with doubt, that forerunner of
hasty decision.
“I’m going to speak to you very frankly,” she said, in a voice whose
strange weakness belied its courage. “My sister, as you know, is ill.
She has been ill nearly all her life, Mr. Ford. We are neither of us
young; what little money is ours I have always tried to manage for
the best. It is I who have always taken the responsibility of this, and it
is I who must continue to do it. I have no one to come to, either for
counsel or advice, neither for protection. I tell you this frankly, for I
want you to feel it and understand it. Had my sister and I all that is
rightly due us, we should be in far different circumstances.”
She raised her eyes bravely.
“My sister needs comforts, I mean real comforts, Mr. Ford, comforts I
have not dared risk the giving. A purer air than New York, long
summers in some pleasant country place, more luxuries than I feel
we can afford and live within our means, and people around her who
would take her mind from herself. You may not realize it, but far from
growing better, she is growing worse. I, who am constantly with her,
see it only too plainly. Her extreme weakness at times frightens me.
Now what I feel is this——”
Ford started, his shrewd eyes alert to her slightest word or gesture.
“If it were possible to invest safely, as you say, even the small
amount that I could dare give you—it is so serious, Mr. Ford, you
must understand just how I feel. If I were to give you this—and
anything should happen to it——”
Ebner Ford sprang to his feet.
“Can you doubt it,” he exclaimed earnestly, “in the face of plain
figgers? You don’t suppose, my dear friend, I’d lead you into a risk,
do you?”
“I don’t believe you would, sir,” said she. “That would be too cruel.”
He drove his thumbs into his armholes, and for a moment stood in
thought, tapping his fancy waistcoat with his long, bony fingers.
“Suppose I let you have a thousand shares?” he said with a benign
smile. “Think what it would mean to you. No more worryin’ over little
things; you’ll have money enough then to have some peace of mind.”
“I’ve had so little,” she said with a saddened smile, “that it would be
most welcome, I assure you. How much are the shares?” she asked
timidly. “I know so little about such matters.”
“Preferred?” he questioned briskly, elevating his eyebrows. “They
pay you considerable more, you know, than the common stock.”
“I’d like the best;” said she, “that is, if I can afford it.”
“That’s right,” said he. “It always pays to git the best. The best
always pays in the end. There wa’n’t never yit a couple of cheap
things worth one good one. I’d like to see yer git the best—somethin’
you’d be proud of ownin’, like our gilt-edged preferred.” He rammed
his long hands in his trousers pockets, and for some seconds paced
slowly before her, lost in thought. “Let’s see—let’s see,” he muttered.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said suddenly. “Let us say fifteen hundred
shares preferred. I’ll waive what they’re worth to-day. I’ll let you have
’em at par, my friend, at ten dollars a share, cash. That’ll make it an
even fifteen thousand dollars. You deserve it, Miss Moulton, if ever
any woman did,” he cried magnanimously. “I’d give a good deal to
see old Hiram Sudwell in your shoes right now.”
“But fifteen thousand dollars,” gasped the little spinster, “is half of all
we’ve got in the world, Mr. Ford!”
“I see,” said he gravely.
She started to speak, but he waved his hand.
“Hold on,” he resumed cheerfully, “We’ll do better than that,” and
again he paced before her. “I’m the last man in the world to ask
anybody to put all their eggs in the same basket. Suppose we say
half that amount?” He saw her hesitate, nervously fingering the long,
thin gold chain that circled her neck, and which all her life had served
her as guardian of her mother’s watch.
“I say half,” said he, breaking the silence. “Why, you’ll think nothin’ of
buyin’ the rest of that fifteen hundred with what you’ll make on that
half.”
“And you advise it?” she ventured. He assured her without speaking,
his expression one of kindly approval, unvarnished, without a vestige
of a doubt. “That would be seven thousand, five hundred dollars,
wouldn’t it?” she inquired, still struggling with herself.
“There ain’t no use of my advisin’ less to you,” he declared. “It
wouldn’t be worth your botherin’ about. I’d like to see you happy—
real happy. You needn’t thank me now, but you’ll thank me some
day, my friend. You won’t never regret it.”
“I—I feel so alone—so helpless,” she returned, “as if I really ought to
think it all seriously over; would you mind letting me do that? I’d feel
better, I think.”
“That’s just what Mrs. Miggs said to me. Now look at her. Do you
suppose Mrs. Miggs has ever regretted it? Her little nest-egg
beginnin’ from the very day she bought her shares; woke up the next
mornin’ knowin’ her troubles were over. Took her little niece straight
down to Stewart’s and bought her a new outfit from head to toe.
Suppose she’d er waited? I want to see you happy, friend. I want that
there happiness to begin now—to-day.” He put forth his hand to her,
forcing her own small hand into its grasp, where it lay as frightened
as a wren with a broken wing.
“Perhaps, then, I’d better decide,” she breathed, with a beating heart,
gazing at the floor.
“That’s right!” he cried. “That’s the right kind of talk. I know sich
matters are hard to think over, and decide. But we’ve done the
thinkin’ and we’ve done the decidin’, ain’t we? And all them gnawin’
little doubts is over.”
“Yes,” she said, looking up at him quickly, and withdrawing her hand,
a strange new courage in her eyes. “I have decided, Mr. Ford. I will
take the seven thousand five hundred dollars’ worth of shares.”
In precisely seven minutes by Ebner Ford’s watch Miss Ann Moulton
became the sole possessor of seven hundred and fifty shares of the
Household Gem, preferred, and its receipt, and before the ink was
fairly dry on her check it was tucked in Ford’s portfolio next to a five-
dollar bill that his stepdaughter had loaned him that morning. He had
feared the sister’s return. He had had experience with two women
deciding together. It was while he was engaged in exploiting the
millions contained in a vast hen industry in the Far West destined to
supply half the eggs to the world—at bottom prices—the army of A
No. 1 Leghorn layers being fed on imitation corn made by a secret
process, producing the best cold-storage egg on the market.
He had hardly reached his room before Miss Jane’s key opened the
front door. He stood screened back of his own ajar, listening to her
as she wearily climbed the stairs, her purple parasol aiding her,
stopping on the landings for breath. It still lacked twenty minutes
before his bank in Union Square closed at three. In less than fifteen
he had handed over to its silent but astonished receiving teller, for
deposit, a check for more money than he had ever had to his credit
in his life.
This done, he walked briskly over to the Everitt House, and through
a swing-door smelling of lemons and old Bourbon sours, feeling a
good deal richer than Hiram Sudwell, and of much more importance
in the world than the President of the United States. The bartender
noticed the change in him at a glance. He seemed younger, more at
his ease. There was already a certain indescribable air of geniality
and prosperity about his customer that sent the bartender’s quick
hand over the bottle of “ordinary” and on to the “special,” hesitated,
and settled over the neck of the decanter of “private stock,” which he
produced with a clean doily and a smile of welcome.
“Warm for March—ain’t it?” remarked Ford, pouring out for himself a
stiff drink.
“It sure is a grand day,” returned the bartender. “Ain’t seen you
around lately, mister—er—busy, I suppose, as usual—well, that’s the
way to be.”
“Busy,” declared Ford. “Ain’t had time to eat.”
Then he paid for his drink, recounted the fifty dollars in new bills he
had drawn, called a cab and went off to Koster & Bial’s, where he
managed to secure, late as it was for the matinée, his favorite seat at
a front-row table.
It was only when Miss Jane reached her room and learned the story
from her sister’s lips that she realized their great good fortune. For
some moments Miss Ann held her in her arms, petting her like a
child.
“I felt it was for the best, dear,” she kept repeating. They both wept a
little; all the worry was over now, her sister assured her. Miss Jane
seemed dazed. She could not fully realize it. She sat on the edge of
her bed, smiling through the tears, smoothing Miss Ann’s hand. Then
they set about making plans for the summer. They decided on Lake
Mohonk. Finally, exhausted as she was, Miss Jane went to bed, Miss
Ann waiting until she fell asleep before straightening out their
meagre accounts of the week before, some of whose items had
frightened her, especially the druggist’s bill which had come in the
morning’s mail with that hopeless letter from her brother. They were
nothing now—new hope, new courage had entered her heart.
 CHAPTER XI
Now it happened that Sue had come in fresh and rosy from a walk,
glowing with health this fine April afternoon, and had brought Pierre
Lamont home with her. There is no secret about where she found
him, nothing could have been more public or more innocent than
their chance meeting on Fifth Avenue before the Reservoir, that solid
and dignified monument with its wavy covering of ivy, which Joe
considered the most impressive mass of stone in the city, with Bryant
Park as its back yard, and enough Croton water soundly held within
its four solemn Egyptian walls to have satisfied the most rabid of
teetotalers, and before which Lamont’s patent-leather shoes and
English buff-colored spats shone resplendently almost every
afternoon between four and five. Indeed, he was so familiar a figure
on Fifth Avenue, that his absence was noticed by many whose daily
habit it was to see and be seen along the city’s most fashionable
highway. More than one man noted in passing the cut and pattern of
Lamont’s clothes before ordering his own. And though, unlike Beau
Brummel, he did not actually set the fashion, they could rest assured
that everything he wore was of the latest. The newest derby was his
the day after it appeared in the window of the best hatter. He was a
connoisseur as well in gloves and walking-sticks. He was said to pay
a formidable price for his clothes, and they were conspicuous in
return for their smartness and good taste. At least he dressed like a
thoroughbred and a gentleman, and his ease and good looks carried
him along triumphantly through many an escapade.
Like Bompard, that idle Norman of Maupassant’s, Lamont “was born
with an unbelievable aptitude to do nothing, and an immoderate
desire never to disturb that vocation.” This, however, did not prevent
him from amusing himself, or of taking a flier on rising stocks, or the
races now and then, with his wife’s money. It is safe to say, he
worked harder in amusing himself than any other New Yorker of his
time, and since there is no more strenuous existence than the daily
pursuit of pleasure, no wonder that the silver touch to his temples
was whiter for his years than most men’s, though even at thirty-five
he had the clean-cut, bronzed complexion of a boy and the hands of
a nobleman. Had Jean Valjean encountered him, he would have
given him some sound advice; he would have said to him, as he did
to Montparnasse: “Some day you will see others afar off working in
the fields, and they will seem to you to be resting.” A counsel that
clever footpad and criminal jeered at while the old ex-convict held
him by the collar—quite as Lamont would have jeered—for every
gentleman’s ways are his own, are they not?—and of no one else’s
business.
Lamont knew Fifth Avenue as well as any man could know it, and as
there is always one popular side to every thoroughfare, he chose
that flanking the Reservoir, his promenade carrying him as far up as
the Fifth Avenue Church, and as far down as the Hotel Brunswick,
which he invariably crossed over to for a cocktail and a look over the
coach horses, and where often several people from London of his
acquaintance were stopping.
Any one with half an eye could have seen how frequently society
women whom he knew stopped to greet him. He made a tall,
handsome figure as he bent over them, chatting about the dinner of
the night before, or the cotillon, or the play, or the new lot of
débutantes. They thought him fascinating—and he was. When a
woman spoke to him, she spoke directly into his brilliant black eyes.
In her presence he was always in a state of irrepressible good-
humor, agreeing with her in everything, and skilful enough, you may
be sure, never to criticise her rival. That he forced a would-be
friendly smile from others, in passing, of no acquaintance
whatsoever, was purely his own affair—and theirs. He always knew
what to say instantly, no matter who she was, or where he imagined
they had last met. No Italian could have been more gallant, and no
Frenchman more courteous or experienced.
He had seen Sue’s trim, slender little figure ahead of him step from
the overcrowded stage, gain the sidewalk, and turn rapidly down
Fifth Avenue. Instantly he quickened his pace, drawing up to her,
Sue unconscious that he was following her, until he smilingly lifted
his hat.
“Hello, little playmate!” he laughed. “And where are you going, pray
tell?” Sue started and turned.
“Why, Mr. Lamont! Why, I’m going home,” said she. “Isn’t it a glorious
day! The stage was so noisy and stuffy I couldn’t stand it any longer.
I just had to get out and walk.”
“Home,” he ventured, with the vestige of a sigh. “May I come?”
“Why—why, yes, of course you may,” she laughed back, “if you’d
really like to,” swept off her feet by their sudden meeting and his
quick proposal.
“Like to!” he smiled. “If you only knew how good you are to ask me.
I’m so wretchedly lonely to-day.”
“Now, Mr. Lamont, that’s a fib and you know it. You don’t mean to tell
me you’re lonely on a day like this? It’s too glorious. Did you ever
see such a sky?”
“I hadn’t noticed it,” he confessed, slipping deftly to her left side.
“Wonderful!” he exclaimed, looking up. “Marvellous! It’s blue, isn’t it?”
“You didn’t think it was green, did you, like the moon? They say it’s
really made of green cheese,” she laughed mischievously. “Isn’t it
just the most adorable blue? Don’t you think New York skies are
wonderful? Didn’t you ever wish you were a swallow, and could go
skimming about in that exquisite space? Think of it.”
“But I don’t want to be a swallow,” said he, swinging his stick. “I
cannot imagine anything more deadly dull than being a swallow. I
enjoy my flights of imagination much more, I assure you. How well
you look.”
She glanced up at him with an embarrassed little smile, her pretty
teeth gleaming whiter than the single small pearl at her throat.
“It’s wonderful how New York agrees with you,” he declared, as they
strode on past the white marble balustrade of the Stewart mansion,
his eyes taking in at their ease the dimples in her rosy cheeks, and
the full color of her lips. “Do you know there’re lots of girls here
who’d give anything for your color. They’re faded out, poor little
dears, with too much rich food and dancing; never get to bed until
morning, and seldom out of it until noon. I never give a débutante
more than six months to look as old as her chaperon.”
“I think we’d better cross here,” she said, as they reached Madison
Square; “it’s shorter.”
“Careful,” said he.
His hand grasped her soft arm tenderly. She felt his strength as he
guided her firmly between the passing carriages, his grip relaxing
again to a gentle pressure that was almost a caress as they reached
the opposite curbstone in safety.
“Thank you,” said she, a little flushed. His lighter prattle had
subsided. On their way through the square they fell quickly into their
bond of common sympathy—music—of which he knew and talked as
fluently as a professional—a wider knowledge sadly lacking in Joe,
whose limitations were confined to the tunes he could whistle. He
filled her eager ears with a host of interesting remarks about the true
value of the diminished seventh, explaining to her how it was often
overdone meaninglessly, like many pyrotechnic displays in chromatic
scales meant to épater the audience, and which no sane composer
would think of letting run riot in his orchestration. “Meaningless
pads,” he called them, and Sue clearly understood. By the time they
had cut through Fourth Avenue and Union Square, he had explained
to her the difference between the weird, cold harmonies of Grieg and
the subtler passion of Chopin, carrying her on to the orchestral
effects of Tschaikowsky, and how he produced them. Then in lighter
vein he spoke of Planquette and his merry “Chimes of Normandy,”
and of Planquette’s snug little villa among his pines and flower-beds
on the Norman French coast, which he had been to and had had
many a good day’s shooting from Planquette’s snipe-blind close by
on the dune, in ear-shot of his piano—of what a genial host he was.
Sue strolled on by his side, absorbed as a child in the midst of a
fairy-tale. By the time they reached Waverly Place, she had had the
most delightful walk of her life. “How could he ever be lonely,” she
thought, “with all those memories? Why had he not told her more of
them before?” She began to feel sorry for her treatment of him that
brilliant tragic evening at the Van Cortlandts’, and almost confessed
it to him as they went up the stoop together and she opened the
dingy black walnut door with its ground-glass panels, one of which
depicted Fortune hugging a dusty sheaf of wheat, and the other,
Mercury in full flight through a firmament of sand-blasted clouds. He
followed her up the stairs. Nothing escaped him, neither the mat
which Ebner Ford had placed himself in front of his threshold, with a
deep “Welcome” branded on it in red letters, or the Rogers group
which Mrs. Ford had generously given to the niche in the hallway,
and which portrayed a putty-colored father reading the evening
paper to the spellbound delight of his wife and five putty-colored
children.
Mrs. Ford, who had just put her hat on and caught sight of them as
they came up the stoop, rushed instantly to the piano; she flew at the
most difficult part of her chef-d’œuvre, “The Storming of Sebastopol,”
with a will, as if nothing had happened, as if Mr. Pierre Lamont was
not only then actually ascending the stairs to her door, if he had not
already reached it; whereas the delighted expectancy of that lady
was so intense, that she mistook the loud pedal for the soft, opening
a broadside from the English fleet at precisely the moment Sue
opened the door. Her surprise as her small, pudgy hands left the
keyboard in the position her “Manual for Beginners” decreed, can be
imagined!
“Why, Mr. Lamont!” she exclaimed effusively, forgetting she had
never met him, oblivious to her daughter’s hasty introduction. “How
good of you to come.”
“We met at the Reservoir,” declared Sue frankly, laying aside her hat
and jacket, and patting her fair hair neatly in place before the mirror
over the mantel.
“By chance, I assure you, Mrs. Ford,” explained Lamont, his Parisian
code of delicacy in such matters tactfully coming to the rescue.
“Well, I’m glad you did,” beamed the mother. “Don’t you think she
looks splendidly, Mr. Lamont?”
She slipped an arm lovingly about her daughter’s neck.
“I’ve already complimented Miss Preston upon that,” he returned
graciously.
“Now, Mr. Lamont, you know how I hate compliments,” protested
Sue.
“But when they’re true,” he laughed, seating himself upon the new
gilt chair Mrs. Ford had offered him.
“Mr. Lamont, I tell her she is much too modest, with all her talents,”
the mother declared, framing the rosy cheeks in her hands, much to
Sue’s embarrassment.
“After all, Mrs. Ford,” returned Lamont, “is there anything more
charming than modesty in a young girl? Isn’t that a talent in itself?
Most girls are so ridiculously conceited nowadays—often over
nothing, I assure you.” He sat gracefully at his ease, his ringed
hands still gloved, still holding his stick and hat, much to the mother’s
surprise and anxiety—another Parisian method—a formality he
carefully observed in calling upon young girls in the presence of their
mothers. Had she been his fiancée he would have done the same in
France. Had she been alone, married or widowed, with the door
liable to open at any instant by husband or friend, at least they would
have found his presence correct and above suspicion, since it can
be logically argued by the French that a gentleman whose hands are
enslaved with his gloves, hat, and stick cannot possibly make love
any more than the ostrich can pursue his mate with his head in the
sand.
Mrs. Ford’s anxiety was noticeable.
“Do let me take your stick and hat,” she ventured, unable longer to
repress her fears of his possible sudden departure. He seemed to
give them to her almost unwillingly, peeling off his dogskin gloves
and expressing himself as deeply touched by her welcome, and
adding that he feared he was “very much de trop,” as he noticed that
she was about to go out.
“You must be frank with me, Mrs. Ford; I fear I am keeping you,” he
declared, rising briskly.
“You see, darling,” she explained to Sue, “I was just going around to
see the little Jones girl; she’s been desperately ill, you know. You
mustn’t think of going, Mr. Lamont. You’ll excuse me, won’t you?—
and you’ll make yourself at home, won’t you? You’ll stay to tea, of
course. Just one moment while I tell the maid.”
“Won’t you please go on telling me more of the wonderful things of
your life, Mr. Lamont?” pleaded Sue, as her mother returned. “Oh,
mother, I have had such a glorious walk. If you could only have
heard all the interesting things Mr. Lamont has been telling me. Do
tell me more about Planquette. Think of it, mother—Mr. Lamont
actually knew him.”
“Oh, do!” exclaimed Mrs. Ford. “How interesting—oh, dear! I wish I
could stay, but I must see the Jones girl. They’ll be hurt if I don’t, you
know, deary,” she smiled, nodding to Sue. “But you’re coming again,
aren’t you, Mr. Lamont?” she insisted, grasping his hand warmly.
“I should be charmed to,” said he, and bowed over her hand; in fact,
he lifted it to his lips, a gesture Mrs. Ford had read about in novels
and seen on the stage, but had never experienced. Her startled,
embarrassed delight did not escape him.
“Then you can tell me all about Planquette,” said she, beaming over
the honor he had bestowed upon her finger-tips. “Planquette! What a
wonderful man he was, wasn’t he? Of course, we’ve all read his
books, his ‘Miserables’ was one of my father’s favorites. Grand, isn’t
it, Mr. Lamont? So full of quaint pathos and humor. I’ve simply
shrieked over it when I was a girl.”
“But, mother dear,” exclaimed Sue, “we were speaking of Planquette,
the composer—not Victor Hugo!”
“Why, of course—how stupid of me.”
“I was just telling your daughter,” he explained, “that I happened to
know Planquette, you see, because my mother and I used to rent a
little villa in Cabourg for the summer, not far from his on the
Normandy coast. We lived in France several years, Mrs. Ford, long
after my schoolboy days there.”
“Think of it! Well, I never; and you really lived in France. Of course
you speak the French language fluently. They say the French are so
excitable. Cora Spink ought to know. She lived a whole month right
in Paris, among the French. She said they pull and haul you about
so.”
The smile he had been able to repress for the last few minutes got
the better of him. He grinned.
“I never found them so,” he confessed quietly. “They’re the kindest
and calmest people in the world.”
“S’pose you’ve seen everything,” she affirmed, edging, to Lamont’s
intense relief, toward the door. “The guillotine, and the Opera House,
and where Napoleon is buried.”
Her small, pudgy hand hesitated on the big, white-china knob, while
she added:
“How well I remember my father’s engravings of these. They hung in
the hall of our ancestral mansion in North Carolina. Mr. Snyder, an
artist neighbor of ours, told my father—I remember so well—it was
just after he became judge—that they were quite valuable. Father
was a great admirer of the French. I recall him now going down into
the cellar himself to decanter some old French brandy we had, the
finest, they used to say, in the State of North Carolina, Mr. Lamont—
as they always said,” she declared proudly, “what the judge didn’t
have under his roof, no other North Carolinian did. Now I must be
going. That little girl’s ears are tingling, I know, to hear more about
your wonderful discoveries. Good-by—or, rather, au revoir I should
say, shouldn’t I?”
She waved her hand lightly toward them both.
“Au revoir, madame,” he returned, with a low bow.
The door with the china knob closed. She was gone, her step
growing fainter down the stairs, and when at last she opened that
half of the front door bearing Fortune hugging her sheaf of wheat,
closed it with a click, and had stepped over the whirling dust and two
circulars of a dentist celebrated for his cheap prices, and had made
her way safely down the stoop, and Sue, with her back to her
precious Chippendale table, started to break the awkward silence
that had followed her mother’s departure, Lamont stretched out both
hands to her pleadingly.
“Come!” he exclaimed, softly. “Let us have a good talk. I have so
much to say to you. Won’t you sit there?” he entreated, nodding to
the sofa.
He saw, with sudden delight, that her lips were quivering, and felt
half the battle won.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, tenderly, his hand hovering
temptingly over her smooth shoulder, the pink flesh veiled by the
thin, dark-blue sheen of her blouse.
“Nothing,” she returned faintly, her voice trembling. “Oh! Mr. Lamont,
please don’t ask me.”
“Are you lonely, too?” he asked. “Something has happened—
something I’ve said, perhaps——”
He bent over her.
“Tell me. Have I hurt you? Tell me, dear—have I?”
She did not lift her eyes. Two big, hot tears blurred them, and went
their own way down her burning cheeks. His word, “dear,” had had
its effect.
“I can’t tell you,” she protested painfully.
“But you must,” he insisted. “I’ve seen a lot, little girl. There’s nothing
that you could ever tell me that I wouldn’t understand.”
She made a brave effort to meet his eyes candidly.
“It wouldn’t be right,” she declared. “That is—it wouldn’t be loyal of
me. Oh! can’t you understand? I should hate myself—afterward.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed. “Then it is more serious than I supposed.”
“You couldn’t help me, if I did tell you,” she managed to say at
length. “No one can help me. I’ve just got to go on and bear it, I
suppose.”
“But I wouldn’t tell a soul,” he insisted, his lips close to her cheek.
“And perhaps I could help you. Little girl—whatever it is I’ll never tell
a soul. There—do you believe me? Ah! my poor little playmate—you
were so happy this afternoon when we met.”
“I’m never really happy,” he heard her murmur. “I’ve never been
really happy for a whole day in my life,” she continued, twisting her
handkerchief nervously into a hard moist knot. “Oh, can’t you
understand?”
“And who has?” he argued cheerily. “Happy for a whole day! Ah, no,
my dear! One is never happy for a whole day. Happiness is never
more than a question of seconds, and even they are rare. Happy for
a whole day! Parbleu! you do not ask much, do you, little
gourmande.”
“So many people are happy,” she faltered.
“You’re not ill?” he ventured. “Bah! Not with that splendid health of
yours. Then what? Tell me, are you in love?”
She started.
“If you are, you’d better get out of it—love’s a terrible game. It
doesn’t pay. It’s about as stupid a pastime as being jealous. Your
eyes are too blue to be jealous. Come, be frank with me—am I
right?”
“Your life’s so different,” she weakened to explain.
“My life? Ah! my poor little playmate, and so you consider my life’s a
happy one—married to a woman who never loved me from the first.”
“Oh, please!” she protested.
“Whose indifference,” he continued, “has taken the heart out of me at
last, whose entire interest lies in her club and her women friends. I
did love her; I loved her madly—madly, do you understand?—but,
what’s the use? Ah, non, mon Dieu!” he cried. “Real happiness in life
lies in a good comrade,” and would have gone on further to explain,
but checked himself. “I see,” he said after a moment. “It’s this,” he
ventured, sweeping his black eyes dramatically over the ugly little
room.
She gave him a startled look in protest.
“I don’t blame you, my dear.”
She feared he would continue. He had guessed the truth, and to her
relief ceased speaking, not daring for the moment to touch even as
skilfully as he could upon her impossible mother, or her stepfather,
whom he could imagine by hearsay but had never seen. Nothing, in
fact, escaped him; neither the sordid commonness of the apartment,
with its hodgepodge of bad taste, its dingy semblance of comfort, or
the mother’s effusive ignorance. He had reached that period in his
suit when he felt that he was wasting time, when he longed to take
this little rose that had tumbled into all this common débris of the
boresome and the ordinary into his arms.
She was again on the verge of confessing to him, innocently enough,
at least how much pretty things appealed to her. Deep down in her
young heart (though she was too loyal to confess it) she saw clearly
her mother’s ignorance and her failings; still deeper down she
abhorred Ebner Ford. Even her respect for him had vanished shortly
after her mother’s marriage. He had even lied to her about the little
money she had earned and had given him. And yet she ended by
saying simply:
“Mother is so silly at times.” Even this she softened by the fact that
she loved her dearly.
“You seem so out of place in all this,” he declared tensely, and so
suddenly that before she knew it he had seized her swiftly in his
arms. “Sue—listen to me!”
“Don’t!” she gasped faintly, every nerve in her quivering in a helpless
effort to free herself.
“Sue! Listen to me—you poor darling!” She strained away from him,
covering her lips with her clenched hands while he sought her fresh
young mouth.
“Don’t!” she pleaded. “Oh, please! Please! Plea——”
He stifled her words with his lips, in a kiss that left her trembling and
dazed. Only when he saw the fear in her eyes, did he open his arms