I remarked in passing that I had read and relished Roy Bhaskar’s Realist Theory of Science soon after it was published in the mid-1970s, and indeed that it was prescribed reading on my ‘conceptual foundations of modern sociological thought’ unit on the Intercalated B.Sc for medical students from London University well before the end of that decade. Gradually the under-labouring philosophy of critical realism joined Habermas’ critical theory as a major influence on my own thinking and writing. I have hinted at this without giving an account of critical realism or just why it informed by theorising, and it is time to make this good.
An expedient starting point is Bhaskar’s statement on the ‘epistemic fallacy’, which asserts that throughout history philosophers have typically reduced questions about what exists to questions aabout what we do, or can, know of what exists. In philosophical parlance, they have reduced ontology (the study of what exists) to epistemology (the study of knowledge). This has a variety of serious ramifications that have plagued attempts to make sense of the natural and social worlds we inhabit. Bhaskar went on to distinguish three basic strata of reality: the empirical, the actual and the real. The empirical is the world as apprehended by experience; the actual is the world of events; and the real comprises those structures or ‘generative mechanisms’ that must exist for us to experience events in the ways that we do. This is perhaps easiest to grasp in connection with the natural than the social sciences. Consider gravity: what scientists have learned, often as unwitting or unknowing critical realists Bhaskar would say, is that gravity must exist for us to experience events as we do. But how does this apply to social as opposed to natural scientific enquiry?
The natural and social sciences share a common goal, Bhaskar argues, notwithstanding differences in methodologies; both pursue causal explanations for phenomena of interest. Both search for those real objects or mechanisms that must exist for us to experience events as we do. Like other social scientists, however, sociologists cannot investigate phenomena of interest to them under laboratory conditions. Rather, they are compelled to conduct their enquiries in a dynamic, ever-changing or ‘open society’. Moreover, the mechanisms they seek are ’intransitive’, that is, they exist whether or not they are detected. It is simply not possible to map the effects of such mechanisms as these at the level of events and our perceptions of them. This is of the essence of the open society. These mechanisms, Bhaskar writes, act ‘transfactually’: once set in motion, they continue to exert an influence even if other countervailing mechanisms annul or prevent this influence from manifesting itself. In some contexts, for example, the influence of class is overridden by that of gender or race or age.
Ontology for Bhaskar is not only stratified but transformational. Agents do not create or produce structures out of nothing, but instead recreate, reproduce and/or transform a set of pre-existing structures. The total ensemble of structures comprises, indeed is, society. One of Bhaskar’s most quoted paragraphs reads:
‘people do not create society. For it always pre-exists them and is a necessary condition for their activity. Rather society must be regarded as an ensemble of structures, practices and conventions which individuals reproduce and transform, but which would not exist unless they did so. Society does not exist independently of human activity (the error of reification). But it is not the product of it (the error of voluntarism).’
A remark made at the very outset of these sketches is worth dwelling on briefly here. It is that although the social cannot be reduced to – ‘explained away’ in terms of – the psychological or biological, there undoubtedly exists both ‘upward causality’ (from the biological and psychological to the social) and, importantly for this discourse, ‘downward causality’ (from the social to the psychological and biological). This is why it was important to begin these sketches of my career as a sociologist with some background information about where I came from and how I became set on this as opposed to that trajectory. These are matters to which I will return in some detail towards the end of my account.
The GBH, I was beginning to articulate more clearly, was a function of the structural and cultural shifts that accompanied the transition from welfare state to rentier capitalism. The political or state power that ‘big capital’ could purchase to fashion policy in the interests of its further accumulation had grown, most notably since the Thatcherite 1980s, and, if stalling only marginally during the Blair/Brown New Labour years, gathered renewed momentum with the Cameron government post-2010. By the time I was writing in the early noughties it was readily apparent that it was a major failing of sociologies and sociologists of healthy inequalities merely to allude in passing to the salience of social structure and culture, having omitted them altogether from their analyses of data. Of special relevance is that many of them, betraying social-epidemiological inclinations, were constrained by their commitments to the quantitative analysis of secondary data sets to pose only research questions that the data available to them could hope to answer. They were, and are, also constrained by the lack of a philosophically and theoretically credible concepts of structure, and often even culture. This matters, and I shall argue, when returning later to the notions of corporate and neoliberal phases of university life and research, that these have now become part and parcel of an extended family of constraints on academic practice that are effectively taming the discipline of sociology.
At the time of writing, it has become commonplace for sociologists interested in health inequalities to include a reference to the salience of social structures in the concluding paragraphs of their articles. It has long been my conviction that this should more appropriately feature in their introductory paragraphs and be a dominant theme. The individual GB’s of my GBH are eminently replaceable. What counts are the often hidden but transfactual causal or generative mechanisms like class that enable them to take the fateful strategic decisions they take and constrain others to live or die with the consequences. Bhaskar’s philosophy offered new ways of conceptualising such processes, and I have spent two or more decades since the excursions noted here developing my own theories.
Health was not the only field in which my explorations took place in the noughties. Picking up on my love of sport which dated back to my early recollections of life and schooling in Worthing, I also published a second volume in Tim May’s ‘Issues in Society’ series entitled Sport and Society: History, Power and Culture, published in 2005. It was a tongue-in-cheek book since I was seen by colleagues – even if I’ve never seen myself – as a medical sociologist. In other words, I was concerned that I had wandered, was trespassing in fact, on an alien field. What would real sociologists of sport make of it all? In the event all went well enough and I was told my incursion was positively received. It may just be that being free of any baggage in the field worked to my advantage. What I tried to do was draw on a combination of Habermas’ critical theory and Bhaskar’s critical realism to posit a distinctive way of ‘doing sports sociology’. Resorting yet again to the proverbial device of ‘in a nutshell’, I espoused and illustrated an approach rather than a novel sociological theory of sport. After discussing the history of the ancient and modern Olympic Games in considerable detail, I devoted some attention to the principal sociological theories of sport, to linkages between exercise, sport and health and to sport and violence (suggesting a contemporary ‘de-civilisation of sport’), before commending a ’reflexive critical sociology’. I summarised as my conception of a reflexive critical sociology of sport in the following terms:
‘a reflexive critical sociology … should, first, become truly global, not just in its interests and reach but by encouraging the genesis of a transnational community of sociologists; and global does not here mean the propagation and spread of Anglo-Saxon perspectives. Second, it should focus increasingly on … the world capitalist system. Sociologists of sport have made solid progress in this respect (see, for example, the extensive work on the migration of elite athletes and on social aspects of world games and championships across many sports). Third, its practitioners should, in C. W. Mills’ telling phrase, ‘do it big’; that is, they should forego more specialist excursions to link their research to wider social change … Fourth, its descriptive and explanatory power should be transmitted to a reconstituted civil society/public sphere. Sociological endeavour and output should – logically and morally – inform public deliberation. And finally, it should not purport to be value- neutral, since it is logically and morally contiguous with communicative action, premised not only on the public use of reason, that is, the pursuit of an inclusive, informed and ‘argued-out’ consensus between a freely and equally participating – and increasingly transnational – citizenry, but, it follows, on the pursuit of – increasingly transnational – legal and social institutions capable of securing and underwriting justice and solidarity.’
I ended this paragraph with a statement that picked up on the theme of my 1996 paper in the journal Sociology, namely, that ‘a reflexive critical sociology necessarily has its roots in a reconstructed ‘project of modernity’.
There is a question here that needs to be addressed. If my thinking was influenced by both Habermas’ critical theory and Bhaskar’s critical realism, do these two perspectives make good marital partners? Or are there clear grounds for divorce, or at least for a period of separation? Obviously, I think not. The point I want to emphasise might seem like a sleight of hand. What matters, it seems to me, is that abstruse issues of ontology, epistemology or ethics need not yield obstacles to combining critical theory and critical realism; and, of special moment, do not in fact have any significant negative ramifications for doing sociology.
What I have taken from Habermas is restricted by my needs plus what I have found acceptable. I have never accepted the speed with which he departed from his earlier commitment to a neo-Marxist theory of social order and change. But I have had less difficulty in accepting his insistence on the general Marxist neglect of communicative action, and his explication of a universal ideal speech situation. As will be more than apparent, I have also made extensive use of his lifeworld/system dichotomy, together with his account of their de-coupling in modernity and the accelerating colonisation of the former by the later. What I take from Bhaskar’s basic critical realism is a means of extending my own analyses of social phenomena – most obviously of health inequalities – via a search for those causal or generative mechanisms that must exist in the stratum of the real if we are to arrive at credible, testable sociological explanations for them. Bhaskar offers ontological depth to enquiries conducted within a Habermasian framework.
I was not at this juncture of my career venturing into the more complex world of Bhaskar’s dialectics, let alone his later meta-philosophy. I had gained much, I thought, from his Realist Theory of Science and his application of his thinking to the social sciences in The Possibility of Naturalism. I have never met Jurgen Habermas, although he had generously commented positively on my chapter in Sociological Theory and Medical Sociology when I sent him a copy. However, I did have the pleasure of getting to know Roy Bhaskar, then based at the Institute of Education (which was later to merge with UCL) before his premature death in 2014 aged only 70. This meant I was able to discuss common philosophical and theoretical interests, and I was also able to invite him to give a well-attended annual lecture, courtesy of our journal, Social Theory and Health. In the course of the next few years I was to tackle On Dialectics and to find much of value there, perhaps most especially the notion of ‘absence’. Being, he memorably wrote, is but a ripple on the ocean of non-being. I was to find this a profoundly important statement, arrived at from Hegel via Marx. I will comment on it briefly here as it seeps now and again into the chapters that lie ahead.
Bhaskar’s point was that to date most philosophers as well as sociologists and others have concentrated almost exclusively on what exists, on ‘presence’. This has meant that they have systematically neglected what might have been as well as what might yet be. The importance of spelling this out and attending to it instantly struck me. I was to come to interpret what the lack that absence signifies as crucial for a meaningful sociology. It has become routine for we sociologists to confine ourselves to what we see in front of us, not only the events we experience as opposed to the real structural, cultural and agential mechanisms that deliver them, but on the present presence, as a given, a set-piece somehow suggestive of inevitability.
One way of elaborating on this is to introduce Bhaskar’s concepts of ‘power 1’ and ‘power 2’ relations. Power 1 relations refer straightforwardly enough to the transformative capacity intrinsic to the concept of agency. Power 2 relations, on the other hand, encompass a more sociological notion of power: they are those relations that enable agents to defend their sectoral advantages by prevailing against either the covert wishes and/or the real interests of others. The significance of power 2 relations for Bhaskar is not that they grant agents the capacity to exercise control over the social and natural environments, that is, the capacity to intervene causally in the world; this is an unqualified good. It is rather that they organise or structure an uneven capacity of agents to exercise transformative power over their condition of existence. While power 2 relations can be enabling or empowering for some, they can be repressive for others.
Returning to the idea of absence, Bhaskar analyses dialectic as a process of ‘absenting absence’. Ok, his language might seem arcane and obscure, but I have generally found it profitable to hang in there with it: his arguments are generally very clear. Bhaskar’s dialectic of freedom is powered by the interface of absence and desire, since absence is a condition for desire (desire presupposes lack). We humans, the thesis runs, have an ‘inner urge’ to struggle against the lack that flows universally from a logic of elemental need and want; and this surfaces whenever power 2 relations hold sway. This is because power 2 relations negate needs, ranging from those of basic survival to those defined by culture, of most humans, leading to a desire for freedom from ‘absenting ills’. The unfolding dialectic of absenting absence on freedom – as agents struggle against successive forms of power 2 relations – taken together with expanding definitions of needs and wants constructed in part through this struggle, nurtures and fuels a logic of more inclusive and encompassing definitions of and aspirations towards freedom.
To reiterate what I think is an important point, I have had no difficulty drawing on both Habermas and Bhaskar in constructing sociological theories. It seems to me, to pick an obvious example, that Habermas’ critical theory provides an expedient framework for considering just how system rationalisation leading to lifeworld colonisation (the constraint of power 1 relations by ‘assemblages’ of power 2 relations) can be explored to advantage via a search for real and causally telling or generative mechanisms that in combination deliver this macro-social change.