Occasionally you comes across a paragraph or two that afford an eloquent summary of an approach that you wish you had written yourself. I do so quite often when reading the work of Andrew Sayer. The paragraph I reproduce here comes from his The Moral Significance of Class (Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp.191-2), which is beautifully written and in which he adopts a critical realist orientation without ever seeming heavy-handed about it. I was especially attracted to this paragraph. He cites Bhaskar, Archer, Collier and Outhwaite in passing, each of which is of course a significant contributor to critical realist thinking and social science. To make for easier reading I have omitted these references. Here goes:
‘It is important here to appreciate that explanations of actions do not have to be deterministic in the sense of denying actors any autonomy and responsibility. A cause is merely that which produces – or rather co-produces – a change. Everything that happens is caused, invariably by multiple causes. This need not imply a negation of free will, for reasons and choices can be causes, regardless of whether they are good or bad reasons or choices. The world is also open, since many relations between objects are external or contingent, so that whether causal powers are activated and with what effects depends on contingently related contexts. Actors can therefore deliberately intervene in the flow of events and change them. The powers to think, reason and make judgements and decisions are emergent properties whose development depends on a long process of interaction between internal biological and psychological powers, and social, discursive and material processes, during which some of those powers are themselves transformed. The personal is not reducible to the social even though the social is a precondition of the personal. People are determined in the sense of constrained and enabled by various constitutive and limiting forces, but they have powers which are emergent from those forces and which can react back upon them, through interventions in the world. Thus we may become more powerful by replacing unwanted determinations with wanted ones.’
I would not dissent from this at all, and have argued much the same, if more heavy-handedly and with less style. I can’t recommend this and Andrew’s other works highly enough.