I have just finished what I regard as an excellent volume of analyses and reflections on capitalism and its future by a group of sociology’s big hitters, namely, Immanual Wallerstein, Rndall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian and Craig Calhoun. It’s called Does Capitalism Have a Future? Ok, so theyre all ageing white males, but as I’ve insisted elsewhere, even ageing white males cam occasionally impress and get things right.
My purpose here is not to summarise a very nuanced set of analyses, with but a hint of consensus – though all see a likely closure for (financial capitalism at least) by mid-century – but rather to relay what I think it a perspicacious comment on approach and method. This is the paragraph, penned by all contributors, that I have in mind:
‘Are political hopes blurring our theoretical visions? Our answer is this: Reflexively admitting a connection between our hopes and our hypotheses is a necessary component of theoretical honesty in social science, especially when dealing with our own times. Social theory is often likened to lenses of various cuts that enable us to discern patterns in human action. When the lenses are cut solely to confirm one’s faith and denounce whatever opposes it, the resulting vision is strictly ideological. Such lenses, commonly worn in politics and public debating, function more like blinders. Theory is different because it has to be testable. What constitutes tests in social science has been a matter of controversy. We are methodological pluralists insofar as we doubt attempts to legislate the one right way of doing social science. Yet we are not complete relativists. Different kinds of problems and scales of analysis leave researchers the choice of investigative techniques. Experiments and statistical correlations have an important place in the toolkit of social science but their role cannot be universal. Disciplined ethnographic observation is often more revealing in studying localized social environments. At the macrohistorical level, which is where we work, the main method might be likened to connecting the dots in a big puzzle. Another test for macrohistorical theory are counterfactuals, the alternative roads that seemed possible at one historical juncture but were not taken. In other words, we must show both how we get from one historical situation to another and what are the actual range of structural possibilities and the factors on which events turn. This is perhaps as close as we can get to an experiment in our kind of research.’
And in the next paragraph:
‘Local events are inherently contingent even if in retrospect we can explain them by pinpointing which structures had shifted or broken down ,and what human action, emerging from specific positions, ended up taking the emergent opportunities. Predicting events in the longer run is futile, but predicting structural configurations is not.’
And a few sentences later:
‘Lack of precision in social forecasting means that collectively we face a certain freedom of action on a spate of structurally available options. The options are rather limited in normal times although even then there exists political choice between somewhat better and worse outcomes. But the options become vastly magnified in periods of crisis when the usual mechanisms of status quo are breaking down. Such times call for a conscious strategy of systemic transformation. Humans do make their futures, in conflict and association with other humans, even if not in the circumstances of their own choosing. Social science should clarify what are the circumstances and emerging possibilities, especially when the possibilities may be opening and closing rapidly.’
Interesting stuff, selected from an excellent collection.