Reading Wolfgang Streeck’s recent collection, Critical Encounters, I was struck by his brief account of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Why? Because Darwin’s stance on science seems to me to bear a strong resemblance to that espoused by critical realists (like myself). Let me start with a quote from Streeck:
‘taking a fresh look at Origin seems like the ideal treatment for social scientists suffering from the physics envy instilled by their colleagues from the economics department. Darwin’s is clearly a theory: it subsumes a vast number of disparate facts under beautifully simple general principles that remain resolutely open to being challenged by empirical evidence. But equally clearly, it is not a Newtonian theory, as it neither aims at nor claims to be capable of prediction. Instead it is a historical theory: it undertakes to explain how the real world as it exists today has come to be what it is, without predicting what it will be like next. Origin is living proof that a theory that explains the present by its past while leaving the future open can be a respectable, ‘scientific’, bona fide theory – even though it is a historical one that depends on ’storytelling’, just as is social science, which is precisely for this reason considered by many, even some of its producers, as lacking in scientific dignity.’
Social science, Streeck goes on to suggest, should be encouraged by the ‘unquestionable scientific character of Darwinian evolutionism to do what it urgently should do – namely, reintroduce history into social theory.’ This should not of course see a reintroduction of the teleological determinism favoured in nineteenth-century sociological theory. But, for Streeck at least, Darwin offers:
‘a model of a theory of history ‘as continuous, endogenous, self-driven incremental change regularly producing novel – in the sense of a priori unknowable – but never terminal, historical conditions, connecting novelty to continuity by emphasizing the gradual nature of change, that is, the dependence of the future on the present, and of the present on the past.’
Interesting eh? Streeck goes on to explore what this might mean for the construction of credible and compelling social theories.