Interpretation and Social Knowledge
isaac ariail reed
INTERPRETATION AND
SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE
On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences
the universit y of chicago press
Chicago & London
isaac ariail reed is assistant professor of sociology
at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2011 by The University of Chicago
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Reed, Isaac (Isaac Ariail)
Interpretation and social knowledge : on the use of theory in
the human sciences / Isaac Ariail Reed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-226-70673-3 (cloth : alkaline paper)
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isbn-13: 978-0-226-70674-0 (paperback : alkaline paper)
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1. Knowledge, Theory of. 2. Knowledge, Sociology of.
3. Social sciences—Philosophy. 4. Social sciences—Methodology.
5. Interpretation (Philosophy) I. Title.
bd175 .r37 2011
121—dc22 2011010293
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ansi z39.48-1992.
For HKB, hermeneut extraordinaire
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Introduction 1
chapter one Knowledge 15
chapter two Reality 39
chapter three Utopia 67
chapter four Meaning 89
chapter five Explanation 123
Epilogue 163
Acknowledgments 173
References 175
Index 191
Illustrations
1. The factual sign 21
2. The realist theoretical sign 51
3. Realist maximal interpretation—causal explanation as social
knowledge 51
4. Normative maximal interpretation—critique as social knowledge 76
5. Jürgen Habermas’s maximal interpretation in The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere 76
6. Leela Gandhi’s maximal interpretation in Affective Communities 80
7. Clifford Geertz’s maximal interpretation in “Deep Play” 97
8. Susan Bordo’s maximal interpretation in “Anorexia Nervosa” 101
9. Maximal interpretation in the interpretive epistemic mode 102
10. Meaning and motivation 152
11. Meaning and mechanism 155
12. Forming causes, forcing causes, and social action 160
Introduction
I
Our understanding of social knowledge is due for a massive transformation.
A generation’s worth of arguments about postmodernism
and science, relativism and objectivism, have obscured our view; a
consistent connection has been drawn between the study of discourse
and the adoption of philosophical skepticism and ironic distance; a
repeated disavowal of the possibility of causal explanation has crippled
the interpretation of cultures; an overwhelming tendency to frame
the problem of social knowledge as the problem of how social science
can be like natural science has eliminated essential questions from our
minds. The space of epistemological argument in social theory, then,
comes to be deﬁned by “posts” and their opponents: postpositivism,
poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism. Regardless of
what the “posts” actually are or are not, thinking about social knowledge
is, in this Manichean account, a dispute about whether science
(and perhaps modernity) is good or bad.
For the researcher intent on actually producing some sort of social
knowledge, the disputations of social theory and philosophy are often
experienced less directly, sublimated into distorted communiqués
2 introduction
about methodology: qualitative against quantitative; unscheduled
interviews against scheduled interviews; participant observation
against survey research; in a phrase, depth against generality. And so,
metatheoretical arguments about the construction and justiﬁcation
of social knowledge reappear as debates about lived social realities,
and the research design that is necessary to grasp them.
The debates about method are, without a doubt, real: they denote
signiﬁcant divergences in the practice of gathering and colligating
evidence in social research. But in their connotations, they encode
the same paralyzing epistemological dilemma. From one point of
view, there are clearheaded and rigorous producers of quantiﬁable,
veriﬁable truths about social phenomena, and those who, for whatever
reason, prefer to impose their own interpretive ﬂights of fancy on
idiosyncratic data gathered in idiosyncratic ways. From the opposite
point of view, “objectivists” or “positivists” do not work for their
objectivity but rather perform it. The ongoing scientism of large sectors
of the human sciences is, in this latter view, the bane of a true
understanding of social life, which can only be achieved through the
careful humanism of attending to what people actually do, say, think,
and tell their interviewer.1
But perhaps the heavy feeling of despair and déjà vu brought on
by such dilemmas is not necessary. We can reconsider. So let us begin
by asking: are all of our problems, as researchers and as theorists, understandable
in terms of differences in method, practically conceived
as that which we do to establish factual statements, broad or narrow,
1. The term “human sciences” has a historical referent in the intellectual project
of the Geisteswissenschaften, literally “sciences of the spirit,” and thus the nineteenthcentury
German philosophies of history that formed an important part of the intellectual
context for Max Weber’s deﬁnition of sociology. But it is also intended to
evoke more recent arguments about the (sometimes nefarious) effect of disciplinary
self-conceptions on research into how human beings live together in social groups. In
particular, the sociologist Mayer Zald has developed an incisive analysis and critique of
the ways in which the social sciences generally, and sociology in particular, can beneﬁt
from recognizing their historical-intellectual debt to both the humanities and the
natural sciences, and from correcting their overemphasis on the latter as a model for
the construction of knowledge. His open-ended paper invites, in my view, arguments of
the kind found in this book. See Mayer Zald, “Sociology as a Discipline: Quasi-Science
and Quasi-Humanities,” American Sociologist 22, nos. 3–4 (1991). For a historical account
of the conditions that led to the formation of the social scientiﬁc disciplines as
we now know them in the United States, and an argument that this organization of
intellectual labor is no longer appropriate, see Immanuel Wallerstein et al., Open the
Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social
Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
introduction 3
about social life? Or do disputes over method, when considered carefully,
reveal other problems, problems not reducible to measurement
and technique, problems that point to deep divides in our fundamental
conception of how a community of inquiry can expect to
know something about other human communities and their various
dynamics?2
I am continually left to wonder whether the world of social
researchers is really divisible into those who believe in the existence
of social facts in some quantitative sense and those who do not, or
whether this divide has lost even its heuristic utility. Is it at the level
of facts, in other words, that the great controversies over the nature
and purpose of research in the human sciences should be fought
out? In one sense, yes: before doing anything, we have to ﬁnd a way
to “establish the phenomenon.”3
But in another sense, no: debates
about method often carry implicit disagreements about the nature
and purpose of inquiry, the structure of social life itself, and the role
of the critical intellectual or social researcher in comprehending it. If
we render these disagreements explicit, we ﬁnd that they are not only
about method, strictly understood, but also about how knowledge
claims are built out of conceptual innovation, justiﬁed in publication,
and criticized as inaccurate and untrue (or, to use that infuriatingly
ambiguous word, “problematic”).
We have disagreements, that is, not only about how we establish
the sheer existence of this or that social phenomenon, but also about
how we can claim to correctly and effectively explain, criticize, or
interpret it. In my view it is these latter disagreements, rather than
disagreements about whether or not there are, in some sense, social
facts, that are at the core of controversies about social knowledge.
And so, it is to these disagreements that we must address ourselves if
we are to move beyond the world of posts.
2. Sandra Harding has usefully distinguished between method (“a technique for (or
way of proceeding in) gathering evidence”), methodology (“a theory and analysis of
how research does or should proceed”), and epistemology (“a theory of knowledge”).
The analysis of this book could be said to address the latter two, if we consider that
Harding’s deﬁnition of methodology includes how theory is used and applied in speciﬁc
disciplines and ﬁelds. But there is another way of framing this, which is to say that
evidentiary method must be accompanied by a conceptual method, whereby evidence
is ordered and comprehended as part of a larger knowledge claim. Sandra Harding,
“Is There a Feminist Method?” in Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues, ed.
Sandra G. Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1–14.
3. Robert K. Merton, “Three Fragments from a Sociologist’s Notebooks: Establishing
the Phenomenon, Speciﬁed Ignorance and Strategic Research Materials,” Annual
Review of Sociology 13 (1987).
4 introduction
II
In the discourses in and around contemporary social theory, postpositivism
has a somewhat clear historical meaning—the term refers
to the break with certain taken-for-granted assumptions about the
unity of the natural and social sciences that, like so many other breaks,
happened sometime in “the sixties.”4
Given the academic penchant
for overdramatizing our own intellectual disputations, it should not
surprise us that this break is narrated in vaguely heroic terms, especially
in casual academic conversation. “Positivist” is used pejoratively
in certain sectors of the human sciences because the positivist is the
antagonist to the heroic protagonist, the postpositivist, who broke
his chains and challenged the dragon. In this frame “positivist” refers
to someone whose addiction to reductive quantiﬁcation causes him
to miss the real stuff of social life—villains, in scholarship, are always
associated with untruth.
But what could positivism mean, in some general and yet practically
signiﬁcant way, if it is not just a pejorative signiﬁer, applied to
work that lacks the sacred values of the researcher who casually uses
the term? Probably postpositivists mean one of two things when
they say “positivist.” First of all, positivism can refer to an underlying
philosophical commitment to certain methods for ascertaining
social facts—descriptive positivism. Here the core positivist axiom
is that the social sciences are rendered scientiﬁc by the use of speciﬁc
methodological techniques for handling data, and in particular by an
agreement about the superiority of certain ways of establishing reliability
and validity through quantiﬁcation and statistical inference.
In the context of contemporary social research, the most immediate
objection to descriptive positivism is in terms of the methods used to
produce accurate descriptions of social phenomena. Is quantiﬁcation
and, more speciﬁcally, correlational analysis adequate to the task of
producing facts about social life? It is a quite common argument, in
fact, that social research should be empiricist, but that the methods
4. This break is documented and advocated for, in classic form, in Richard J. Bernstein,
The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1976). See also Sherry Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the ’60s,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History (1984). For a good analysis of “the sixties”
as it has become a construction relevant to intellectuals in the West more generally,
see Eleanor Townsley, “‘The Sixties’ Trope,” Theory, Culture, and Society 18, no. 6
(2001).
introduction 5
for achieving empirical validity differ signiﬁcantly from those found
in either the natural sciences or the (perhaps misguided) quantitative
branches of social science. For example, one could value the
descriptive production of truth above all else, but insist that this
description must be qualitative and particularistic. Thus the tendency
toward empiricism in social research extends far beyond quantitative
methodologies taken from the natural sciences.5
Positivism, as an
approach to method, and empiricism, as a resistance to theory, are
by no means coextensive. Empiricism can be “antipositivist.” Furthermore,
“positivism” can also refer to a way of building and using
theory to guide research.
In particular, the second meaning of positivism refers to how one
can use theory to construct explanations. Here we ﬁnd the philosophical
arguments of the logical positivists, the various attempts to
put their covering-law model of explanation to work in the human
sciences, and the increasingly sophisticated inheritors of the ambition
to construct a truly universal science of the social. Explanation, in
this view, is the logical result of combining a general law about social
life with particular circumstances, thus enabling the investigator to
predict or retrodict the resultant outcome. What we want, according
to what we could call theoretical positivism, is a social physics, with
theory leading the way by positing general laws of social behavior.6
Should we have a social physics? Can we have a successful one?
5. John Goldthorpe has written that ethnography, in so far as it is not “irrationalist,”
shares many of the epistemological assumptions of survey research. He then argues
for a “common logic of inference” across both qualitative and quantitative research in
social science, and indeed across the social and natural sciences, in John H. Goldthorpe,
“Sociological Ethnography Today: Problems and Prospects,” in On Sociology, Volume 1:
Critique and Program (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Goldthorpe’s own
vision could hardly be called empiricist, however. Rather, he proposes a compelling
synthesis of rational action theory and the quantitative analysis of data, which would
ﬁt the second meaning of positivism (“theoretical positivism”) I discuss below. For an
analysis, see Isaac Reed, “Review Essay: Social Theory, Post-post-positivism, and the
Question of Interpretation,” International Sociology 23, no. 5 (2008).
6. Jonathan Turner, drawing on the original vision of August Comte, argues that
the goal of social physics “is to uncover abstract laws, and the fewer laws the better,” and
thus that the goal of “science is to seek understanding of the universe, and the vehicle
through which such understanding is to be achieved is theory. Sociology has allowed
poor philosophers to usurp theoretical activity and ‘statistical packages’ to hold social
science hostage.” (Jonathan Turner, “Returning to ‘Social Physics’: Illustrations from
the Work of George Herbert Mead,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 2 [1981]: 188,
187). For Turner’s classic defense of theoretical positivism in sociology, see Jonathan
Turner, “In Defense of Positivism,” Sociological Theory 3, no. 2 (1985).
6 introduction
Successful or not, we have it: there are, in the contemporary social
sciences, extended and well-articulated attempts to develop a hypergeneralized
approach to social explanation. In theoretical positivism,
then, we ﬁnd highly general hypotheses and propositions that are
to be veriﬁed or falsiﬁed through empirical testing, and, simultaneously,
a strong argument that social research must ﬁnd a way to move
beyond merely producing correlations and instead produce theoryinformed
explanations. Theoretical positivism, in other words, has
deep suspicions about descriptive positivism. Perhaps the goal for
theoretical positivism is a set of social sciences, all of which look like
neoclassical economics, in which the basic assumptions are agreed
upon, and metatheoretical debate about human nature, social structure,
and the problems inherent in the very possibility of knowing
something about either is left to philosophers and the occasional
book on microfoundations.
It must be said: if one wants to understand, on its own terms, the
philosophical underpinnings of positivism, or logical positivism, or
the combination of the quantitative analysis of data with the testing
of universal propositions, the resources are ample. The empiricist
philosophy of science has developed in radically new directions since
Carl Hempel ruled the scene,7
and if one wants to grasp the presuppositions
and conceptual how-to of strictly “objectivist” quantitative
research, myriad books on research design in social science put previous
generations’ manuals to shame. And yet, simultaneously, such
research has been subjected to ongoing, relentless attack for what
is seen as its tendency to distort and reduce human social life—to
sacriﬁce understanding for a form of mathematical precision that is,
in the end, illusory. These arguments are, by now, exceedingly well
known.
Thus this book is not another attack on positivism, either in the
substance of its text or in the goals that it outlines for how we use
theory in research. Rather, it is a reconsideration of two fundamental
7. Consider how Wesley Salmon’s work extending the analytic tradition in the
philosophy of science has moved beyond the logical positivists’ initial aversion to
theorizing causality outside Humean conﬁnes, and thus brought theories of causality
and (neopositivist) theories of scientiﬁc explanation together. Indeed, the entire
conversation between Salmon and his critics reveals how the analytic philosophy of
science has had its own positivist/postpositivist conversation. See Wesley Salmon,
Scientiﬁc Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), and Wesley Salmon, Causality and Explanation (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
introduction 7
and interrelated questions: how do, and how should, theory and evidence
interact? For there is much objection, in postpositivism, to the
positivist answer to these questions (in short, that theory generates
hypotheses and evidences tests them), but little agreement as to how
this intersection should happen outside the positivist mold.8
What is
this so-called dialogue between theory and evidence? How are we to
construct and use theory if we are not formulating hypotheses? This
is the curiosity that led to this book: I want to know how nonpositivist
research works, and to build a constructive theory of knowledge
claims made by nonpositivists. To do this, I have constructed a text
that works at the intersection of practice and prescription: in-depth
textual analysis of actual truth claims in social research is combined
with epistemological reﬂection.
I call the different ways of bringing theory and evidence together
“epistemic modes.” The term is intended to indicate the relative autonomy
of these modes from substantive commitments to theoretical
programs, research agendas, or speciﬁc methods. Epistemic modes
dictate the conceptual method by which theory is brought into contact
with evidence, structure the expectations about what such contact can
accomplish, and provide more or less well-formed criteria of validity
that are used to evaluate the knowledge that is thereby produced.
Epistemic modes can also be articulated in abstract argumentation
about the possibilities and limits of social knowledge, and can be
interrogated about their premises. But they do not map neatly onto
substantive research programs, or onto any particular intellectual
history of social theory or any particular account of paradigms of
social research.9
Thus, while the epistemic modes I examine—realist, normative,
and interpretive—have elective afﬁnities with great thinkers and grand
traditions of social analysis (afﬁnities some readers will immediately
recognize, and which I discuss throughout the text and especially
8. Isaac Ariail Reed, “Epistemology Contextualized: Social-Scientiﬁc Knowledge
in a Postpositivist Era,” Sociological Theory 28, no. 1 (2010).
9. There is one work, however, whose mapping of social thought and social research
seems particularly relevant to this text. That is John R. Hall, Cultures of Inquiry:
From Epistemology to Discourse in Sociohistorical Research (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999). Certainly this book is written in a similar interpretive spirit to
Hall’s project and shares some of its arguments, as will become clear. I argue herein,
however, for a return to epistemology. I do not see this as incommensurate with Hall’s
map per se, but rather as a theoretical project for which Hall’s map of sociohistorical
investigation reveals the need, or calls forth.
8 introduction
in the footnotes), their truth and utility as terms for understanding
what is going on when a researcher constructs a knowledge claim
stand or fall with what makes up the core of each chapter in the book:
the analysis of, and reﬂection upon, actual truth claims made in the
human sciences. Here I brieﬂy introduce the three epistemic modes
that I examine.
III
In the realist epistemic mode (chapter 2), theory points to the fundamental
forces and relations of social life that lie beneath the surface
phenomena that we observe, narrate, experience, and/or measure.
Thus when the investigator uses theory, what she does is connect an
underlying social reality to the social phenomena or outcomes that she
desires to explain. The entities referred to by theory give order to her
data and a causal force to her conclusions. Revolutions are explained
by the fundamental processes that bring them about; conversations
and interactions, in which identities are established and dissolved, are
explained by the underlying tendencies of human cognition; moves
in a marriage market are explained in terms of the ways in which individuals
maximize utility; the emergence of a cultural phenomenon,
such as Star Wars, is explained by the way in which it hews to the
fundamental binaries that structure the human mind.
Realism reignites the possibility that social science, post-Kuhn,
is still an embodiment of a generalized scientiﬁc rationality. That
rationality, however, is deﬁned and guaranteed by the way in which
social theory directly references social reality, revealing the social
forces that structure the world. The core conceptual problem of realism,
then, is this: how can the efforts of the experimental scientiﬁc
laboratory be reconﬁgured and transformed for the science of society
and history? The opening text of the contemporary critical realist
intellectual movement, Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science,
begins with a philosophical analysis of what must be true about the
world if natural scientiﬁc experiments are intelligible and rational.10
Bhaskar’s next book, perhaps even more important for that movement,
considers how social science can and cannot imitate the logic of
natural science that he originally derived from the analysis of experi-
10. Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (New York: Verso, 2008), chap. 1,
esp. 23–26.
introduction 9
ment.11
The problem, of course, is the way humans bring a certain
“concept-dependence” to social reality, which is a nice way of saying
that subjectivity messes everything up. Human subjects, moreover,
have a rather irritating tendency to aspire to ideals, be motivated
by outrageously unrealistic ideas, and pass judgment on each other.
This issue—that human social life is full not only of concepts but of
judgments—is what brings the argument of this book to the second
epistemic mode I consider.
In the normative epistemic mode (chapter 3), theory is what enables
research to be a dialogue between investigator and investigated—
between an ethnographer and her subjects, between a historian and
the lives he recreates, between a critic and the text she reconsiders and
reframes. Theory brings to bear the critical force of well-articulated
utopia upon the empirical world, but in doing so, it brings together
the intellectual’s political philosophies with the utopian capacities
immanent in social life as lived and experienced. In normative social
knowledge, then, two modes of consciousness come to inform each
other, and thus theories of the good get better—while at the same
time striving for some sort of practical effect. The possibilities for
resisting a hegemonic cultural formation are revealed; the nascent
democratic instincts of volunteers are articulated and made sharper;
the deeply pathological implications of a seemingly liberatory set of
cultural practices are brought to light. And thus the conversation
about the good and the should is expanded.
What normative research does is reconﬁgure the terrain of normative
argument by producing interpretations of actual social life. Ideals
for a better social order are salvaged from conversations in coffee
shops, solidaristic town hall meetings, anti-imperial campaigns, and so
on. Visions of dystopia also anchor normative research, sometimes in
the genre of tragic irony: the normative projects of humanist reformers
are revealed to be norming projects in the service of a new format
of domination (for example). But the core conceptual problem, for
normativism, is how this operation of critique, which is grounded in
actuality and fact, can or cannot be grounded in a more explanatorily
powerful use of theory. A town hall meeting identiﬁes a problem, but
how can the solution be tested, if there is no laboratory? Normativism,
in other words, either points back to realism, or toward a different
11. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary
Human Sciences, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1998).
10 introduction
way to ground truth claims in social research. And it is to discerning
what this “different way” could be that the latter part of this book is
dedicated, in its study of interpretive social knowledge.
In what I call the interpretive epistemic mode (chapter 4), the primary
focus of the investigator is on the arrangements of signiﬁcation
and representation, the layers of social meaning, that shape human
experience. The investigator reconstructs the meaningful context
of social action, and to do so she draws upon a plurality of theoretical
abstractions; these different theoretical tools need not—pace
realism—add up to a coherent, general, and referential theory of
social reality in the abstract. Rather, the investigator combines bits
of theory with bits of evidence, and then these theory-fact pairs are
brought together into a meaningful whole. This meaningful whole is
the deep interpretation that the investigator constructs, and it gives
coherence to her case. Cockﬁghts are reinterpreted as a performance
of status, masculinity, and what it means to be human; a revolution is
analyzed in terms of how the advance guard constructed, and propagated,
a worldview; the actions of a whole cohort of politicians or
scientists is traced back to a formative experience and the narrative
construction of collective identity that emerged from it.
Interpretive social research, I argue, must push beyond the surface
reports of actors and the immediate meanings available in the
investigator’s evidence to grasp some deeper set of meanings that
inhere in the action under study. This is what the use of theory allows
the hermeneutically sensitive researcher to do. But even deep interpretations
are typically constructed—by friends and foes alike—as
interpretations and not explanations. Overcoming this problem is
the core conceptual difﬁculty for the interpretive epistemic mode.
Consider, very brieﬂy, an example.
An interpretivist sets out study the Salem Witch Trials. In his
interpretation, he attempts to grasp the meaningful world of Puritan
life and, in particular, how witches and witchcraft played an
emotionally charged role in the Puritan social imaginary, encoding
a socially powerful metaphysics of God, sex, and patriarchy.12
What
sort of knowledge claim is this interpretation? The point, with Salem
at least, is that this metaphysics was threatened in 1692 by the
possibility of witches meddling with the cosmos, thus turning the
12. Isaac Reed, “Why Salem Made Sense: Gender, Culture, and Puritan Persecution
of Witchcraft,” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 2 (2007): 209–34.
introduction 11
trials into a countrywide crisis, ending in the murder of nineteen
men and women. Who felt threatened by the witches? What did fear
motivate those people to do, and what social processes were they able
to trigger to get done what they were certain needed to be done?
What were the unintended effects of these developments? These are
causal, explanatory questions, and they force us to consider whether
or not, and if so how, interpretations of social meaning can possess
explanatory torque.
In other words, if realism derives from the logic of the lab, and
normativism from the logic of the democratic meeting or social movement,
interpretivism derives from the logic of reading and disputing
different readings of a text,13
which raises the question—reading for
what? How do symbols enter the social world, and have an effect on
social action—an effect, moreover, that the investigator can comprehend
and communicate by building an explanation? The idea of
interpretive explanation is the subject of chapter 5. In it, I continue
my attempt to recast the interpretive way of making social knowledge
claims. Meaning-centered research in the human sciences, I argue,
is not only theory-intensive (chapter 4) but also constructs causal
explanations, albeit in a way that departs from the typical ways of
thinking about social causality. By revealing the way social meanings
act as forming, as opposed to forcing, causes, the interpretive
epistemic mode can offer a synthetic approach to social knowledge,
and enable the researcher to build social explanations and deliver
social critique.
IV
These reconstructions of epistemic modes are intended to be an
intervention in, and a symptom of, what I view as a new epistemological
era for social research—the era after the posts. After debates
about culture, interpretation, and the linguistic turn; after innovative
13. The issue is how much reading a text can be fruitfully compared to analyzing
social action. Ultimately, in chapters 4 and 5, I move toward an image of the interpretive
social researcher as more akin to a theater critic than a reader of texts. However,
the whole question of action and text is one of the key debates of the cultural turn,
which opens up many of the questions that this book attempts to address. The classic
meditation on text and social action is Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text:
Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” Social Research 38 (1971). See also Susan
Hekman, “Action as a Text: Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Social Scientiﬁc Analysis
of Action,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 14, no. 3 (1984).
12 introduction
recastings of standpoint theory and the politics of knowledge; after
extended discussions of power/knowledge, interpellation, and subject
production; after all this, what is the producer of social knowledge
to do? Is it possible to believe a great deal of what is written and said
in postpositivist social theory to be true, and yet to proceed with the
goal of explaining social action? I think that it is, and this possibility
is what I intend my account of social knowledge to render visible.
Yet if this book is a symptom of a speciﬁc epistemic moment, and
the product of a certain generational experience—of being trained
in social theory long after the ﬁercest battles over “postmodernism”
had burned bright—its sympathetic engagements and reconstructions
are less aimed at the august history of social theory and philosophy,
and more at the inner workings of texts that have, often
very successfully, attempted to say something about the world—or
at least some small piece of it. For, when social theory is presented
in the form of competing schools, when research programs are assessed
for their fecundity, or when the basic traditions of philosophical
thought about social science are set out, the result is often exigetically
honest but repetitive. It is also bewildering. Not only are there
a plurality of theoretical positions and research programs, but every
such program of necessity involves combinations of methodological
tendencies, theoretical presuppositions, and political implications or
valences—along with answers to the more explicitly epistemological
questions considered here. When one includes, furthermore, the
codiﬁed empirical claims that often belong (or are seen to belong)
to this or that research program, the result is a sprawling catalogue
or encyclopedia of what are, ultimately, different subject positions in
a complex and dynamic discourse.
Training in social theory involves learning how to map this discourse
in useful ways, and to pay close attention to the way in which
theoretical discourses encode their own historical conditions of production.
Yet these maps, as they become their own extended apparatus
of intersecting denotations and connotations, can be exhausting. At
a certain point in my own intellectual biography, I came to view this
exhaustion about mapping the ﬁeld of social theory to be connected
to a different problem—the problem of the metatheoretical frame
within which one makes strong, empirically responsible, theoretically
informed knowledge claims in social research itself. For both myself
and the historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of communication
I trained with, our metatheoretical frames were much
introduction 13
more precise in their negative aspects. We did not have an integrated
Marxist theoretical structure to contain and connect social explanation,
political judgment, and the interpretation of cultures. We did
not have the calm and settled scientiﬁc frame of variables and their
various effects, or even the frame of a truly general sociological theory
(almost everyone I trained with was, in a rather disturbingly certain
way, a “postpositivist”). We did not have the warrant to simply head
out into the world (or into the archives) to pursue value-free social
research. I interrogated my friends, colleagues, and teachers on the
matter. We all knew for sure what we were not. We were not positivists,
not Marxists, not “reductionists,” and so on and so forth. But
what was the negation of the negation? What were we?
I have come to view this question as essential, and as answerable
only in an epistemological register. That register must resist the twin
temptations of formal logic, permanently distant from the messiness
of social investigation, and the reductive sociology of knowledge,
insensitive to how internal and impersonal imperatives, combined
with informal argumentation and scholarly communication, can
make communities of inquiry more than just clubs or networks.14
A
theory of social knowledge should, instead, be built through critical
reﬂection upon what it is that researchers do when they call on social
theory to help them comprehend their evidence. That, at least, is the
starting point for chapter 1.
14. For the classic criticism of formal logic as distant from the sorts of argument
that carry weight in different areas of inquiry, see Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a critique of how strong
programs in the sociology of science, and more broadly the sociology of knowledge,
themselves reify social structure in a contradictory way, see James Bohman, New Philosophy
of Social Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 40 –49.
Chapter One
Knowledge
I
The construction of social knowledge occurs at the intersection of
two meaning-systems, one of theory and one of fact. Let us begin,
brieﬂy, with the latter.
The problems that surround what Robert Merton called “establishing
the phenomenon”1
have long been the subject of methodological
disputation in social research. Methodology is a reﬂection on the efﬁcacy
of our various techniques for establishing facts—survey data and
in-depth interviewing, quantitative versus qualitative approaches to
the historical archive, and so on. All of these methodologies (and the
disputes about them) are, however, confronted by the problem that,
in the case of human affairs, many of the most essential facts of the
matter—the social facts—are not immediately observable. Rather,
they are observable through what Émile Durkheim called their “individual
manifestations.”2
1. Robert K. Merton, “Three Fragments from a Sociologist’s Notebooks: Establishing
the Phenomenon, Speciﬁed Ignorance and Strategic Research Materials,” Annual
Review of Sociology 13 (1987).
2. Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (New York: Free Press,
1966), 277.
16 chapter one
Why is this the case? Certainly much of what human beings who
live in societies do is observable, recordable, etc. And there are many
behaviors that we do not observe or record directly that we can,
nonetheless, be fairly sure happened. It is not our spatial or temporal
distance from social facts that makes them a difﬁcult category. It is that
reporting on the carryings on of human beings requires a reference
to the meaning of their actions, in a very minimal yet fundamental
way. The telling of the facts of the matter, in human affairs, already
involves a structure of meaning and intention, and, therefore, of inference
on the part of the investigator toward aspects of life that are not
visible, and never were nor will be visible. Social facts understood in
this manner can never be fully stated in protocol sentences that are
veriﬁable by literal observation, but must be inferred and understood
in a dialogue about what is happening or has happened, at a certain
time, in a certain space, in a given society.
For example, when one states that, in 1692, after examination
by the village doctor, it was determined by a set of adults in Salem
Village, Massachusetts, and its environs that the ﬁts and screams of
“afﬂicted” girls were due to their being under an “evil hand,” one is
stating a rather uncontroversial fact. We know this happened—that
these adults made this determination. But understanding this fact
already involves understanding the possible meanings for the people
of seventeenth-century Massachusetts of the physically observable
behavior of the girls, the meaning of the utterance “evil hand,” the
meaning of the term “doctor,” and the expectations that other people
had of doctors, and so on. It is in this way that social facts are
“thick.”
Dispute already reigns here. However, the “thickness” of human
facts3
—that is, the way in which they already contain inferences to
3. Concerning the gathering and interpretation of evidence in the human sciences,
Carlo Ginzburg writes that “It is one thing to analyze footprints, stars, feces, sputum,
corneas, pulsations, snow covered ﬁelds, or cigarette ashes; it is quite another to examine
handwriting or paintings or conversation. There is a basic difference between
nature, inanimate and living, and culture—certainly greater than the inﬁnitely more
superﬁcial and mutable differences that exist between individual disciplines.” Ginzburg
constructs an extended argument that the “evidential paradigm” in the human sciences
requires speciﬁc attention to the semiotics of facts. I agree. In particular, I agree
with Ginzburg’s embrace of an anthropocentric approach to evidence in the human
sciences, and thus his idea that there is a commonality in the way in which detective
work, art history and painting attribution, and psychoanalysis look closely at minute
traces that reveal the characteristics of a in individual, action, or historical moment.
In this book, however, I take a cue from a comment at the end of Ginzburg’s essay
knowledge 17
meanings that are, technically speaking, invisible—is but one aspect of
a much larger problem of interpretation in social research. For, while
establishing the phenomenon may be the most important and most
difﬁcult task a social researcher faces, it is neither the task that produces
the most controversy in social science nor the ﬁnal step in the
production of social knowledge. For, as soon as we have established
the phenomenon—or, some would say, thickly described it—then
we ask the next question: how are we to understand it?
In other words, it is the responsibility of the social researcher
not only to report the facts,4
but to propose a deeper or broader
comprehension of them. When investigators attempt to do this, we
reach for our theories. We do this because we need some way of
comprehending what is, to speak colloquially, “underneath” the facts.
We want to know what generates them, determines them, what their
consequences are, how we should think about them politically, what
their connection to the here and now is, and so on. To do this, it is
very seldom enough to continue to gather more facts, no matter how
“Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm.” There, he writes that “[t]hough pretentions
to systematic knowledge may appear more and more far-fetched, the idea of totality
does not necessarily need to be abandoned. On the contrary, the existence of a deeply
rooted relationship that explains superﬁcial phenomena is conﬁrmed the very moment
it is stated that direct knowledge of such a connection is not possible. Though reality
may seem to be opaque, there are privileged zones—signs, clues—which allow us to
penetrate it.” Ginzburg writes that this idea is the “crux of the conjectural or semiotic
paradigm.” What this indicates to me is the need to recognize not only the way in which
evidential reasoning relies upon an “anthropocentric” view of the human sciences,
but also how the success of those sciences depends upon the use of social theory to
penetrate the clues that have been gathered, so as to generate deep interpretations of
sociohistorical episodes. After all, to follow Ginzburg’s argument about the emergence
of the evidential paradigm in the work of Sigmund Freud, Arthur Conan Doyle, and
Giovanni Morelli, all three may have been interested in the clues left unintentionally
behind by humans, but their theories of what drives individuals to do this, and of the
relationship between the motives of individuals and larger forces and forms of social
life, are rather different. Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 118, 123.
4. Here I use the term “report” in direct reference to W. G. Runciman’s concept
of reportage. In a series of theoretical arguments beginning with a critique of Max
Weber’s epistemology, Runciman has developed the position that interpretation is a
problem for the human sciences at the level of description, but not at the level of explanation.
I disagree, and the argument of this book runs directly counter to Runciman’s
proposed solution to the problem of interpretation and social knowledge. See W. G.
Runciman, A Critique of Max Weber’s Philosophy of Social Science (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1972), and W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, 3 vols. (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). I take up the problem of interpretation and
explanation explicitly in chapter 5.
18 chapter one
thickly we comprehend them and present them to our colleagues. We
need theory to help us explain and evaluate social life.
Our theories are, by their very nature, meaningful human constructions.
They exist primarily in the heads of investigators and the pages
of their books and journals. Sometimes they consist of a vast, abstract
architecture of interrelated and highly consistent terms, sometimes
they attempt to specify in the abstract a single mechanism, sometimes
they propose a new way to think about something we all already think
about, such as democracy. But the world of social theory is meaningful
in the basic human sense of providing a coherent model for and model
of the (social) world. The hope is that this meaningful world is also a
useful one, so that our attempts to develop a deeper understanding
of social phenomena are sometimes successful.
Our facts are thus a set of meanings, and our theories are a set of
meanings. When we bring theories and facts together, then, we are
bringing two meaning-full worlds, or meaning-systems, together.
To a certain degree, of course, our theories may indeed inﬂuence
our use of evidence to construct the facts, or our emphasis on different
facts. But this happens less than we think, and at the level of
bare social facts—the level of understanding required to report what
happened—we quite often can achieve a good deal of consensus,
despite our theoretical, or even epistemological, differences. (This is
not always the case, and I will consider an example of a disputation
over facts below.) Rather, the inﬂuence of theory on our knowledge
claims most often comes in a much more conscious and controlled
form—when we deliberately bring terms foreign to our subjects of
study (e.g., “mode of production,” “episteme,” “ideological state
apparatus,” “habitus”) to bear on our facts, in an effort to grasp
some essential aspect of social life that is not given up easily by the
facts.
So, by bringing our theoretical terms to bear on what happened
at the Salem Witch Trials, we might come to understand that rather
horrendous set of actions as an expression of the economic transformation
of early America and the politico-economic interests of
the parties involved. Or we might grasp it as one of the last violent
episodes in the vast formation of early modern European patriarchy,
in which the inner resentments and fears of men found their grisly
public resolution. Or we might understand Salem as an early expression
of American populism, a willingness of some actors, some of the
time, to speak outside of the legal structures established by elites,
knowledge 19
whatever the risks—and thus as a story that should be recuperated
by those interested in the establishment of a more democratic United
States today. Each of these proposals gains in power what it loses in
obviousness, and each incorporates into its interpretation the basic
reports of what happened at Salem. The results of this incorporation
are very different, however, and that is what makes them exciting
and valuable.5
II
To say that theory and fact are both meaning-systems is not to say
that they are meaning-systems that work in exactly the same manner.
Indeed, the intellectual disciplines dedicated to the study of
meaning—hermeneutics and semiotics—are ﬂush with typologies,
dichotomies, and elaborate theoretical artiﬁces all designed to work
out the different ways in which language—or, more generally, signiﬁcation—can
work in its various social contexts. And needless to say
there are surely many ways of gathering evidence and thus producing
factual reports on what happened in social life, and many genres of
theoretical exploration and imagination. But let us stick to the basics,
at least at ﬁrst. What is the difference between theory and fact
as meaning-systems?
I think the central difference is that in the meaning-system of
fact, we expect evidence to function referentially or indexically when
indicating what happened, and in the meaning-system of theory,
we expect theoretical terms to function relationally or conceptually.
Some evidence is directly indexical—we think of it as a trace of a
physical act that happened at a certain point in time and space.6
But,
5. These different sorts of interpretations crisscross the literature on Salem and
on early modern witchcraft. See in particular Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum,
Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1974); Nancy Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial
of American Authorship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Evelyn Heinemann,
Witches: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Killing of Women (London: Free
Association, 2000). For a summary of the scholarly literature on witch hunts and its
relationship to feminist concerns, see Elspeth Whitney, “International Trends: The
Witch ‘She’/the Historian ‘He’: Gender and the Historiography of the European
Witch-Hunts,” Journal of Women’s History 7, no. 3 (1995).
6. Peirce writes that “an index stands for its object by virtue of a real connection
with it or because it forces the mind to attend to that object” (Charles S. Peirce, “Of
Reasoning in General,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1
[Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998]: 11–26, 14), and Roy Rappaport ex-
20 chapter one
as discussed above, most of the reality we are busy studying in the
human sciences is not reducible to its biophysical supports. Thus it
is safer to say that we expect the gathering, organizing, and presenting
of evidence, as an active and dynamic meaning-system, to serve a
primarily referential function—even if what it references is not (or is
not only) a material object or biological person. In the language game
of fact, there are myriad evidential signs—sentences, photographs,
quotations, assertions, graphs, tables, charts—and we expect these
signiﬁers to express a certain content that is or was in the social world.
This means that meaningful facts result from the connection of evidential
signs to a ground that emerges, from research, as the object
of investigation—the selected set of social actions that happened.
Evidential signs, colligated together, connect the sociological investigator,
and the people who read her text, to a set of social actions
that are the ground of factual signiﬁcation (see ﬁg. 1).7
The English locutions “evidence for” and “theory of ” hint at how
differently theoretical meaning works. In theory, meaning develops to
a great degree by the ways in which contrasts between expressions—
e.g., “forces of production” and “relations of production”—create
conceptual contrasts in the minds of researchers. This is not to say
that those concepts cannot, in turn, reference something else, perhaps
something in the world. But if they do (and this book is, in part, an
effort to ﬁgure out what, if anything, theory references) it is surely
reasonable to point out that we do not expect theory to reference the
social world in the same concrete manner that we expect evidence
to reference the social world. Indeed, the whole point of theory is to
be abstract and conceptual. The necessary result of this is that what
theory “references,” ﬁrst and foremost, is not really a referent at all
plains that “A true index is a sign that is either an effect of, or an aspect of, or a part
of its object” (Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity,
Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999], 63).
7. As I explain below, I think that all signs function both referentially and relationally,
and thus the difference between the tendencies of evidential signs and theoretical
signs is a matter of degree, not a strict distinction. To use Peircian language, most
signs have elements of the symbolic, the indexical, and the iconic (and especially the
ﬁrst two), and thus the difference between theory and fact is the tendency of the latter
to foreground the indexical dimension of signiﬁcation, and the former to foreground
the symbolic dimension. (As Rappaport comments, “The terms ‘index,’ ‘icon,’ and
‘symbol’ should be taken to be possible aspects of signs rather than labels for necessarily
separate and distinct signs.” Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of
Humanity, 66).
knowledge 21
in the concrete sense of meaningful social actions that actually happened.
Rather, the immediate reference of theoretical expressions is,
as far as I can tell, (1) other theoretical expressions and (2) imagined
societies, social actions, and social relations whose primary existence
is in researchers’ heads.
This may seem a strange thing to say, but anyone who has recently
had the experience of being initiated into a group of theoretically
informed social researchers (or, even worse, into a group of social
theorists) probably has an intuitive sense of its truth. The disputations
of the early and the late Wittgenstein aside, if there is one language
you cannot learn by asking, at each turn in the conversation, “can
you point to what that word refers to?” it is the language of social
theory. This does not, however, make theory irrelevant to or useless
for understanding social reality. Quite the opposite is the case. It is
precisely because theory is abstract that it enables analysis of facts, and,
ultimately, the construction of knowledge. Furthermore, this distinction
between theory and evidence is relative; there are relational
aspects of evidence as a language, and referential aspects of theory as
a language.8
As an example of the former, consider how gender history
must, even at its most empirical and evidential, use the binary of
male/female as source of meaning. As an example of the latter, think
8. For an explanation from the philosophy of science for how the theory/data
distinction can function as a matter of degree, see Mary Hesse, “The Hunt for Scientiﬁc
Reason,” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science
Association 2 (1980).
Evidence
(Representamen)
Investigator
and community
of inquiry
Social
actions
(Object)(Interpretant)
Reportage = interpretation of
social actions that happened( )
Figure 1: The factual sign
22 chapter one
of the referential importance of Speenhamland for Polanyi’s abstract
theories of economy and society. Here reference to a set of quite actual
processes enabled the development of highly abstract deﬁnitions
and elaborations of the historical prerequisites for the institutionalization
of a “market society”—a theoretical term understood in relation
to the abstractions of Marx, Weber, and others.
Still, the point holds, especially when push comes to shove: the
most effective way to criticize another researcher’s evidence is to suggest
that it fails to accurately represent the phenomenon it claims to
represent—that it is referentially incorrect; theory, when it is taken
to task on its own, separate from any evidence, can be devastated
if the critic can show conceptual incoherence. However, perhaps
more frequent than either of these criticisms is the critique of a social
knowledge claim as suffering from a disjunction between theory
and evidence: the evidence does not bear out the theory, the theory
does not ﬁt the evidence, this is the wrong theory to use to interpret
this evidence, etc. This sort of response, by an audience, to a failed
knowledge claim gives us a clue as to what happens when theory and
evidence do come together successfully.
III
In most of its contacts with actual happenings in the social world
(represented by evidence), theory is metacommentary. It proposes to
rethink, reframe, and recast facts that have already been established;
it proposes to set up a research question to be investigated; it hypothesizes
about a cause whose traces can be either measured quantitatively,
conﬁrmed comparatively, or perhaps veriﬁed via testimony
and interview; it creates the conditions for critique by denaturalizing
the inevitable, reopening the possible, and exhorting for the radically
democratic. All of these functions are invaluable, but they are also
supervenient upon the existence of referential evidence in a wellcolligated
meaning-system of fact. In this format, the sign-system
of theory combines with the sign-system of fact in an obvious way:
facts provide an “example of ” a theory, theory provides “a new way
to view” the facts.
The importance of these functions of theory should not be underestimated.
However, they refer to a kind of discourse in which the
difference between theory and fact remains obvious because the two
meaning-systems remain to some degree in disjunction. The stakes
knowledge 23
are higher when the meanings of theory and the meanings of fact
mix in a more extensive and effective manner to produce the social
knowledge claims that I will call maximal interpretations. In maximal
interpretations, theory and fact articulate in such a way that the referential
functions of evidence and the relational functions of theory are
subsumed under a deeper understanding. No longer is evidence used
merely to shore up a factual “example” of a theoretical expression.
Rather, the signs of evidence become themselves intertwined with the
signs of theory, such that both come to express a deeper social force,
a longstanding democratic imperative, or an underlying discursive
formation. They become part of a maximal interpretation.9
In other words, while “establishing the phenomenon” requires
interpretation at the level of evidence and method—the arrangement
of evidential signs—such work tends toward one end of a spectrum
that runs from minimal to maximal interpretation. At the minimal
end of the spectrum, the frequency of theoretical terms is slight (or
. . . minimal), and the claims tend to be less controversial—though
they can, on rare occasions, be startlingly new. The maximal end of
the spectrum involves statements that mix, in a consistent and deep
way, theoretical and evidential signiﬁcation, in an effort to produce
a powerful comprehension of the matter at hand. Here is a minimal
interpretation: ‘On the night of August 4, 1789, feudal privileges in
France were abolished.’ Here is a maximal interpretation: ‘ The French
Revolution was a social revolution with political consequences.’
To believe the ﬁrst statement to be true, one has to understand
the meaning of certain basic terms (most notably ‘feudal privileges’),
9. The concept of maximal interpretation could be compared to (and indeed
draws inspiration from) Arthur C. Danto’s account of “deep interpretation,” and in
particular his article of that name from 1981. However, while Danto works to situate and
comprehend a format of “deep interpretation” that is quite distinct from the “routine
acceptance of the term,” and even compares it to the “divination anciently practiced by
the Greeks,” I attempt to use the distinction between minimal and maximal interpretation
as more of a matter of degree, which enables me to comprehend the sorts of truth
claims actually made in texts written by social researchers. Still, Danto makes absolutely
clear something essential to understanding maximal interpretations, namely that “the
distinction between depth and surface cuts at right angles across the philosophically
more commonplace distinction between inner and outer.” It is precisely because the
distinction between minimal and maximal interpretation cuts across the distinction
between inner and outer (or “subjective” and “objective”) that I can distinguish
between maximal interpretations that pay a great deal of attention to subjectivity
and meaning, and those that pay less attention to these “inner” phenomena. But this
should become clear in my discussion of Marx below. See Arthur C. Danto, “Deep
Interpretation,” Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 11 (1981): 691, 695, 694.
24 chapter one
and one has to agree that a series of actions took place at a speciﬁc
time and place that can be adequately described as the ‘abolition’
of feudal privileges (and that that place can be adequately described
as something called ‘France’). This can, of course, be disputed in a
variety of ways, including looking empirically into what demands
aristocrats still made on the peasants who worked on their land after
August 4, 1789, and whether these demands were fulﬁlled. Still, this
statement can inspire a certain degree of agreement, primarily because
of its status as a relatively minimal interpretation—there is nothing
in the statement to suggest why feudal privileges were abolished, or
what it meant to the future of France that they were abolished.10
No
social research can exist without minimal interpretations, but very few
works in the human sciences limit themselves to them, and even those
have to choose some statements over others. Minimal interpretation
is necessary but not sufﬁcient for powerful social research.
To believe the second statement to be true, one has to understand
that the term “social revolution” is given meaning partially by the
language of social theory, and in particular one must understand the
contrast between ‘social’ and ‘political’ as a fundamental theoretical
disagreement about the causes and consequences of social action in
many times and places. Furthermore, to believe the second statement
one has to agree that all sorts of statements of the ﬁrst kind
(i.e., that feudal privileges were abolished, that a national assembly
was constituted, that the army began taking directions from the new
government) have their explanation in the underlying social conﬂict
between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy in France. And here
social scientists dip their pens in the venom of polemic; if we know
one thing from the scholarship on the French Revolution from the
last century, it is that the disagreements about explanations of the
Revolution always outrun the disagreements about its facts.
Maximal interpretations, then, are always organizing, explaining,
judging—in a word, interpreting—minimal interpretations, drawing
themselves into relationship with the facts, but also going “beyond”
10. I am aware that there are debates around the term ‘feudalism’ that could be
characterized as involving the sorts of theoretically informed interpretive disputes that
characterize maximal interpretations (see, e.g., Elizabeth A. R. Brown’s classic, “The
Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe,” American
Historical Review 79 [1974]). However, particularly in the context of debates about
the French revolution, I think the phrase ‘feudal privileges in France’ can be said to
have a relatively clear set of manifest historical referents.
knowledge 25
the facts. This is not to say that, given a maximal interpretation, one
cannot go out in search of minimal interpretations that support it.
Undoubtedly one can. It is only to say that, in engaging these maximal
interpretations, we are relying on a language that is not only the language
of fact—it is the language of theory fused with the language of
fact to produce the social knowledge that we tend to value highly.11
IV
Maximal interpretations result from bringing theory together with
minimal interpretations. They are what we want theory to get us
to—an explanation or evaluation of the phenomenon at hand, and
perhaps a proposal for explaining other, as yet unexplored, cases, outcomes,
events, etc. And so theoretical differences become more and
more relevant as we move up the spectrum from minimal to maximal
interpretation. Consider an example.
In the 1990s, an academic conﬂagration swept through American
anthropology concerning what happened in Hawai’i in 1778 and
1779.12
Was Captain James Cook received by the Hawai’ians as the
god Lono? And why did several Hawai’ians kill Cook when he and his
11. Thus the spectrum of minimal to maximal interpretation could be described
as an attempt to capture the degree of theory-ladenness of truth claims. In maximal
interpretations, then, one uses a relatively greater amount of abstract terms that could
be combined conceptually (“in theory”) but which are, in the maximal interpretation,
articulated with the minimal interpretations that describe, in a more indexical way,
people’s behaviors. The result of this articulation is an in-depth truth claim about
social life. This deﬁnition of theory-ladenness and its implications for the opposition
of minimal to maximal interpretation emerged in a conversation with Mayer Zald
about the issue.
12. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking
in the Paciﬁc (Princeton and Honolulu: Princeton University Press and Bishop
Museum Press, 1992). Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook,
for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For reviews of the dispute,
see Ian Hacking’s chapter “The End of Captain Cook,” in The Social Construction
of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), and Robert Borofsky,
“Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere, and Sahlins,” Current Antrhopology 38, no. 2 (1997). The
shorter reviews of Obeyesekere’s and Sahlins’s books are numerous, but for a brief
and strongly pro-Sahlins review, see David R. Stoddart, “Captain Cook and How We
Understand Him,” Geographical Review 87, no. 4 (1997). For a more ironic account
of the continuing battles over Cook’s memory, see Greg Dening, “Review,” William
and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997). Obeyesekere’s original article is indispensable
for understanding the precise nature of his objections; see Gananath Obeyesekere,
“‘British Cannibals’: Contemplation of an Event in the Death and Resurrection of
James Cook, Explorer,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992).
26 chapter one
sailors, due to a broken mast, returned to the island of Kealakekua Bay
shortly after they left it? Finally, what is the source of insight or obliviousness
that aids or hinders anthropologists who attempt to answer
these questions? In this controversy, minimal interpretations about
what happened in Hawai’i all those years ago were made controversial,
but that was not the end of the story. The dispute invoked and
relied upon the meanings of theory, and thus quickly became a dispute
about maximal interpretations, which is to say, a polemic about
why what happened happened and what its signiﬁcance is for “us.”13
“How did the Hawai’ians receive Cook?” is a question that can be
answered, initially at least, minimally. There is a great deal of evidence
that suggests that they referred to him as “akua”—sometimes translated
as “god.” But how the Hawai’ians related to “gods” is itself
a question that has to be established through interpretation and
inference—calling a person a “god” is a social fact in this case, and
indeed, debates over the translation of “akua” tend to center on
whether the social organization that results from recognition of an
akua is such that the better translation might be “chief.” Marshall Sahlins
had been questioned on this matter before Ganneth Obeyesekere
wrote The Apotheosis of Captain Cook,14
and he had responded then, as
he did in his reply to Obeyesekere, with a wealth of evidence—drawn
from many shipmen’s journals—concerning the terms the Hawai’ians
used when they received Cook, what these terms meant in that context,
and so on.15
In other words, he responded to some of the initial
criticisms of his work on Hawai’i by attempting to solidify his minimal
interpretation of the case.
But whether, ultimately, the term “akua” should be translated in
English as “god” or “chief,” or understood as meaning something
in between, the issue was not to be left there. Indeed, the battles
over Cook in Hawai’i had never been limited to the facts—in 1982
13. What constitutes the “us” as a community of inquiry dedicated to comprehending
social behavior and human history is precisely what much careful postcolonial
theory has rendered problematic. Conﬂicts over the authors and audiences of scholarly
work, as well as what sorts of knowledge they take for granted, are one of the underlying
tensions sublimated into the discursive battles of social theory, in my view. See Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
14. Jonathan Friedman, “Captain Cook, Culture, and the World System,” Journal
of Paciﬁc History 20 (1985).
15. Marshall Sahlins, “Captain Cook at Hawaii,” Journal of the Polyneisan Society
98 (1989).
knowledge 27
Greg Dening, and in 1988 Jonathan Friedman, challenged Sahlins’s
explanation of why the Hawai’ians did what they did16
—and, with
Obeyesekere’s book, the debate quickly moved beyond what could
be minimally established by, and argued about, using the evidence.
And this makes sense: when it comes to the relationship of Hawai’i
to the British Empire at the end of the eighteenth century, we do
not just want to know a small tidbit of what happened during that
time. We do not just want to know that the Hawai’ians killed Cook,
we also want to know why they killed him, and furthermore, what
this violent action means to us today. (For example: was it a valiant
adumbration of the anticolonial revolutions of the twentieth
century?) These “maximal” questions cannot be answered by the
evidence alone, though they can never leave the evidence behind.
Theory must be mobilized, and a fusion of theory and fact must be
attempted by bringing together theoretical signiﬁers with evidential
ones, in search of a new interpretation. In this case, two different
theoretical schemas became intertwined with the evidence and thus
confronted each other, as it were, on the beach in Hawai’i: Marshall
Sahlins’s theories of culture and mythology, and of structure and history,
and Ganneth Obeyesekere’s theories of practical rationality, and
of the knowledge-politics of colonialism and postcolonialism. Both
are highly abstract meaning formations that purport to say something
general about what drives social action. They are both meaningful
human creations that were brought to bear upon the evidence, in
the attempt to create new and deeper knowledge about the British,
the Hawai’ians, and “us.”
Sahlins ﬁrst explains the Hawai’ians’ friendly treatment of Cook
as an expression of the ritualized behavior called forth by Hawai’ian
mythology. He advances much detail to show that a series of unlikely
coincidences—including Cook arriving at the beginning of the time
of the season of the Hawai’ian akua Lono, and Cook sailing around
the island at a certain time in a certain direction—conﬁrmed empirically
to the Hawai’ians that their myth-guided interpretation of Cook
was correct, and suggested to the Hawai’ians that Cook and his men
were acting according to the same understandings as the Hawai’ians
16. Greg Dening, “Sharks That Walk the Land: The Death of Captain Cook,”
Meanjin 41 (1982); Jonathan Friedman, “No History Is an Island,” Critique of Anthropology
8 (1988). I owe these insights into earlier critiques of Sahlins, and my original
awareness of their existence, to Borofsky, “Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere, and Sahlins.”
28 chapter one
were. Then, argues Sahlins, Cook left at about the time when, in the
mythological interpretation of the calendar, the akua Lono’s season
was over. And so, when Cook returned, this return was unexpected
by the Hawai’ans in a mythological sense of the term ‘unexpected.’
Cook was outside the sense-making categories of their mythology,
and thus a profanation who had to be eliminated. So, they killed
him. But in doing so, they appropriated Britishness into their sacred
mythological system. This explains why many British symbols were
used by Hawai’ian chiefs after the initial encounter with Cook, and
why several Hawai’ian leaders named their sons “King George.”
Obeyesekere is incredulous about Sahlins’s maximal interpretation
of Cook’s arrival and subsequent death (i.e., that its cause was
Hawai’ian myth and the ritualized behaviors that enacted it), and
highly skeptical about the theory that organizes the evidence to produce
this maximal interpretation (namely, the structural study of
myth). This leads him to reread the evidence and provide a quite
different maximal interpretation. According to Obeyesekere, the
Hawai’ians, like all humans, possessed a certain amount of practical
rationality—that is, an ability to perceive the social and natural
world realistically and solve impending problems. The Hawai’ians
correctly perceived Cook as the representative of a colonial threat,
and, as a result, killed him. Obeyesekere also proposes, as part of his
maximal interpretation, an explanation for why many Europeans
thought that the Hawai’ians had received Cook as a god. In the midst
of constructing the colonial regime, Obeyesekere argues, Europeans
could comfort their conscience by pretending that colonized peoples
themselves felt Europeans to be superior. Finally, he offers a highly
charged political interpretation of Sahlins himself as a participant in
this Western ideology, which covers over the brutalities of the colonization
of Hawai’i and other parts of the globe. So, we have two
maximal interpretations:
‘The Hawai’ians killed Cook because he was matter out of place, and
they wanted to order the world according to their mythology. Ironically,
however, in reafﬁrming this mythology in their encounter with
the British, they also changed it. Such are the intersections between
structure and history.’
and
‘The Hawai’ians killed Cook because they knew the English were a
threat to do violence to them and exploit them. Ironically, however,
knowledge 29
because of colonial ideologies, Europeans and American anthropologists
have continued to believe that the Hawai’ians thought Cook was a god,
when the Hawai’ians knew quite well that he was a man. Such are the
fallacies of ideology in the service of power and domination.’
We could produce more and more evidence—as indeed Sahlins
did in his defense of himself—but the theoretical aspects of these
maximal interpretations would not go away entirely. Our knowledge
claims would continue to depend upon the successful resigniﬁcation
of a minimal interpretation into a maximal one. That is the bane and
glory of maximal interpretation in social research. It is only because
we, as investigators, have theory—or, better put, live in a meaningful
world partially constituted by our theories—that we can propose
to comprehend not just that the Hawai’ians killed Cook, but why
the Hawai’ians killed Cook, and that we can propose to reﬂect, in a
deep way, on how our knowledge of this episode from the eighteenth
century is twisted, clariﬁed, or unaffected by our politics. But how is
this fusion of theory and fact, this resigniﬁcation that takes us from
minimal to maximal interpretation, to be accomplished?
V
To begin our answer to this question, let us consider a piece of social
research that provides—for this author at least—the ur-example
of maximal interpretation. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, Karl Marx wrote:
When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history,
a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre,
St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses
of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time—that
of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society—in Roman
costumes and with Roman phrases. The ﬁrst one destroyed the feudal
foundation and cut off the feudal heads that had grown on it. The other
created inside France the only conditions under which free competition
could be developed, parceled-out land properly used, and the unfettered
productive power of the nation employed; and beyond the French
borders it swept away feudal institutions everywhere, to provide, as far
as necessary, bourgeois society in France with an appropriate up-to-date
environment on the European continent. Once the new social formation
was established, the antediluvian colossi disappeared and with them also
30 chapter one
the resurrected Romanism—the Brutuses, the Gracchi, the publicolas,
the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its
sober reality bred its own true interpreters and spokesmen in the Says,
Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants, and Guizots; its real
military leaders sat behind the ofﬁce desk and the hog-headed Louis
XVIII was its political chief. Entirely absorbed in the production of
wealth and in peaceful competitive struggle, it no longer remembered
that the ghosts of the Roman period had watched over its cradle.17
Written in 1852, this is a classic, well-known, and much toiled over
combination of theory and fact. And, in this paragraph, one can witness
how theoretical signiﬁers come together with evidential signiﬁers
to produce new social knowledge. On the one hand, we have minimal
interpretation of the most basic sort: the naming of individuals who
existed at a certain time and place (“Danton, Robespierre . . .”). The
reference to how French Revolutionaries used “Roman phrases” is
also a relatively minimal interpretation. We can, indeed, show that
those involved in the French revolution used such language. On the
other hand, there are clear and distinct theoretical signiﬁers throughout,
which stand out in their difference from the evidentiary ones:
“modern bourgeois society,” “unfettered productive power,” “social
formation,” “free competition,” “production of wealth.” The true
power of the paragraph, however, derives from the bringing to bear of
these theoretical signiﬁers upon the evidential ones, the combination
of phrases like “modern bourgeois society” with phrases like “cut off
the feudal heads that had grown upon it.”
This combination—so effectively researched and written—is what
makes this paragraph part of a maximal interpretation of the French
Revolution. Contained therein are the answers to a whole series of
why and wherefore questions. Why were feudal privileges abolished
and the heads of aristocrats removed from their bodies? (So as to
establish a capitalist mode of production.) Why did the new French
republic go to war so soon? (To create in all of Europe the conditions
it had just created at home, that is, social relations that were no longer
fetters for the forces of production, but rather enabled them.) Why
did the French leaders after 1815 forget the Roman rhetoric of the
17. Karl Marx, The Karl Marx Library, Volume 1 (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1977), 245.
knowledge 31
1790s? (Because in an established capitalist society, such ideas are of
no use; the effectiveness of rhetoric or ideology is conditioned by the
social situation.) For an explicitly moral and political evaluation of
the French Revolutions (1789–1814 and 1848–51) and for predictions
of what is to come, we must reach beyond this paragraph, but not far
beyond it. The evaluation of ’89 and ’48: “The ﬁrst time as tragedy,
the second time as farce.” The exhortation for the next revolution:
“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry
from the past but only from the future.”
The ﬁrst thing to note is the reliance upon theoretical understanding.
None of this explanation and evaluation makes sense unless
you understand Marx’s (and to some degree Hegel’s) theories—of
modes of production, of social revolution, of dialectical materialism,
of history, and so on. On the other hand, the theory here is almost
perfectly fused to the social facts being interpreted—to the point that
both fact and theory come together to say something about social
reality. This paragraph is far more powerful than those theories are in
and of themselves. Marx uses theory to understand a piece of social
reality in a deep way. We can amass more and more facts about the
French Revolution (and we have), but the gauntlet has been thrown
down by this text of 1852; there is a deeper sense in which we must
strive to know the French Revolution, or, for that matter, anything
else. In Marx the minimal, relatively uncontroversial, interpretations
of what happened in the French Revolution are resigniﬁed by the
use of theory so as to produce maximal interpretations. This process
of resigniﬁcation, on splendid display in Marx, is the essence of the
transition from the minimal to maximal interpretations, and is the
central object of inquiry for this book.
VI
The maximal interpretations that emerge over the course of Marx’s
oeuvre grasp fundamental social realities, and thus produce social
explanations; they anchor themselves in utopian aspirations, and thus
enable critique; and they propose sophisticated historical interpretations
of the twisting of human subjectivity by ideology. Perhaps such
a synthesis of explanation, criticism, and interpretation will always remain
the collective ego-ideal of social research. But there was a certain
disequilibrium to this fusion: “History itself is a real part of natural
32 chapter one
history—of nature’s coming to be man.”18
And so: “The social reality
of nature, and human natural science, or the natural science about
man, are identical terms.”19
Thus though Marx exempliﬁed all three
epistemic modes I examine in the chapters that follow, it must also
be admitted that his naturalist ambitions for sociohistorical analysis
tilted his synthesis in a particular direction. I think that because this
tendency—toward a naturalistic approach to social science inﬂected
by both scientiﬁc ambition and materialist sensibilities—is so well
known, well entrenched, and well worked through in contemporary
social thought, it is worth considering from a very general point of
view before delving into the speciﬁc problems associated, in each
epistemic mode, with producing maximal interpretations.
For much of the twentieth century—in both academic sociology
and in the more wide-ranging and majestic discourse of Marxist social
research20
—explanation, critique, and interpretation moved backward
from the synthesis proposed by Marx himself to a sheer separation
based on misrecognition. However, there are now signiﬁcant strands
of intellectual discourse in the social sciences that propose rather
explicitly to synthesize explanation and interpretation, and, in some
cases, to connect this new synthesis to the goal of social critique.
That the explanation of social life is the stated goal of the social
sciences can, in this emergent understanding, be squared with the
18. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The MarxEngels
Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 90.
19. Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 91.
20. Many of these issues were debated within the language of Marxism, since Marx
was, to quote Foucault, a “founder of discursivity” (see Michel Foucault, “What Is
an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: Pantheon Books,
1984], 114). In particular, the problematic of explanation, critique, and interpretation
expressed itself in the work of Georg Lukacs, and was taken up by successive generations
of Marxist theorists. But note the radical disparities that emerge over the course
of the twentieth century—between, for example, Athusserian “science” and E. P.
Thompsons’s approach to history, or between the “explanatory” study of the global
economy (e.g., Wallerstein) and the “interpretive” study of culture (e.g., Jameson).
Despite efforts to bring these aspects of Marxist discourse together (e.g., Harvey), it
remains the case, I would argue, that the Marxist synthesis has been broken apart. See
Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (New York: Pantheon Books,
1971), E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1978), Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York:
Academic Press, 1974), Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), David Harvey, The Condition of
Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell, 1989).
knowledge 33
idea that the human sciences require the interpretation of subjectivity
to accomplish their explanatory task. Thus John Goldthorpe
argues that the theoretical schemas of rational action theory provide
the most coherent approach to the problem of verstehen, and the
most powerful source of explanations of collective behavior.21
And,
in his foundational writing on the philosophy of social science, Roy
Bhaskar claimed, and other critical realists continue to claim, that the
explanatory program of realism in social science of necessity starts
with the hermeneutic task of interpreting the conceptions of the social
world that actors carry with them; only by moving through this
step can the social investigator ultimately grasp the real structures
of the social that explain why people do what they do.22
Meanwhile
cultural sociology has produced countless investigations into symbolic
structures as one aspect of the social that, supposedly having been
neglected by a century of positivism, and supposedly misunderstood
as ideology by a century and a half of historical materialism, are due
some respect. Hence a new set of debates concerning what people do
with symbols, how symbols intersect social networks and group processes,
and, generally, how the study of symbols and their meanings
for actors can help sociologists explain action. And symbols require
human subjectivity to give them meaning. Add to this all of the talk
about “habitus” and “structuration” in social theory, and we can say
that the subjective element of social life has become a central focus
of analysis for those who work in the human sciences.
However, there is something odd about this turn to subjectivity.
In many cases, it turns out, engagement with the subjective or with
the signs and symbols that humans use to make meaning does not
connect to an engagement with the problem of interpretation and
social knowledge. In rational choice theory, preferences are revealed
and observable. In the formalist strands of semiotics and communication
theory, the depth of meaning provided by human subjects
is eschewed in principle—communication is manifest and thus in
studying it we can avoid the entanglements of deep interpretation.
21. John H. Goldthorpe, On Sociology, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2007).
22. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the
Contemporary Human Sciences, 3rd. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1998); Andrew Collier,
Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy (New York: Verso,
1994).
34 chapter one
For much of cultural sociology, it is a question of measuring observable
culture, not interpreting “other minds.”23
And, when the
problem of interpreting others is recognized as part of the goal of
social research, this recognition usually arrives via an argument according
to which interpretation augments, enables, but ultimately
folds into the much more fundamental, and still separate, project of
social scientiﬁc explanation.
Thus we ﬁnd throughout these arguments the idea that, since
explanation uses understanding as one moment in a larger process,
we can ultimately conclude that the logic of social explanation recalls
and relates intimately to the logic of natural scientiﬁc explanation. To
paraphrase Thomas Nagel, subjectivity exists as part of the objective
world, and therefore to grasp the world objectively one must grasp,
among other things, the subjective.24
The turn to the subjective,
then, is but an expansion of the “objectivist” point of view, a fuller
comprehension of the social. This is the idea implicit in many of the
most compelling and well-argued social scientiﬁc epistemologies of
today: “critical realism”;25
“second-order empiricism”;26
and of course
“the objective limits of objectivism” and “reﬂexive sociology.”27
This view on social knowledge considers the new, stronger objectivity
to be the dialectical supersession of positivism and its critics.
23. In a move iconic for a whole generation of American cultural sociologists,
Robert Wuthnow argued that by interpreting discourse or communication, one could
avoid interpreting subjectivity. Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations
in Cultural Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). I discuss
the issue of interpreting talk as opposed to interpreting people’s motivations, with
reference to C. Wright Mills and R. M. MacIver, in chapter 5.
24. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986). This is similar to John Searle’s “one world” thesis. See John R. Searle, The
Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995) and John Searle, “Social
Ontology: Some Basic Principles,” Anthropological Theory 6, no. 1 (2006).
25. For a selection of the key writings of critical realism, see Margaret Archer
et al., eds., Critical Realism: Essential Readings (New York: Routledge, 1998). For an
account of its importance for comparative-historical sociology, see George Steinmetz,
“Critical Realism and Historical Sociology. A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 40, no. 1 (1998).
26. Geoffrey Brahm Levey, “Theory Choice and the Comparison of Rival Theoretical
Perspectives in Political Sociology,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 26, no. 1
(1996).
27. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays toward a Reﬂexive Sociology (Cambridge:
Polity, 1990); Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to
Reﬂexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Pierre Bourdieu
and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, Science of Science and Reﬂexivity (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004).
knowledge 35
And it expects researchers armed with the new, postpositivist epistemology
to arrive at intersubjectively veriﬁable explanations of why
people do what they do, the premises of which are not, ultimately,
different from those of any other truth-seeking activity whose primary
orientation is empirical. Understanding is thus included in the
project of explanation.
It is my view that this line of thinking—which elevates to a new
level of sophistication and reﬂexivity our understanding of the social
sciences as sciences—is exactly backward. Explanation, as a goal for
the study of human beings, can only function as a subcategory of
the larger category of understanding. And the strange human trait of
subjectivity has a much deeper effect on the forms of understanding
(including explanation) that are possible in the human sciences than
is granted by the purveyors of “reﬂexive science.”
Of course, it is the case that human subjects and human societies
exist in a wider world, and that that wider world can to a very
effective degree be comprehended under the schemas of the natural
sciences. No social explanation can be reasonably proposed that, say,
deﬁes physics as we know it. Yet to remain at this level of understanding
is to conﬂate the manifest fact that humans exist in, are of, and
work upon nature with the philosophical position that the premises
of the human sciences cannot be all that different from the premises
of the natural sciences. I think this is a conﬂation that does not hold
up under sustained reﬂection on what, precisely, social researchers
claim when they claim to know something about what other people
are up to. What if, before jumping to the naturalist metaphor, we
took seriously Hegel’s injunction that before getting to the “cognition
of what truly is,” we must ﬁrst of all develop an understanding
of cognition itself ?28
This proposal brings us directly to the problems of interpretation,
because in examining the process of knowledge production we are
attempting to comprehend a very speciﬁc, perhaps in some ways
privileged, form of meaning-making—the attainment and veriﬁcation
of knowledge. And since all knowledge involves human subjectivity
as its instrument or medium, no form of knowledge can be said to
exist outside of the problem of interpretation.
Thus I begin, here, from a position that recognizes the meaning-
28. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), paragraph 73.
36 chapter one
making nature of human endeavors to produce knowledge.29
From
this perspective, rather than seeing natural science as pure and true
knowledge that emerges from the encounter of an unblemished subjectivity
with unmediated Nature, we can see it as a speciﬁcation of
the interpretive process that, at a more general level, characterizes all
human thought and communication.30
It is a speciﬁcation, furthermore,
that required for its achievement a remarkable coincidence of
sociohistorical circumstances, and that requires for its continuance a
form of training and social organization whose details are still being
worked out in sociological research, and whose philosophical basis
has become the occupation of post-logical-positivist philosophy of
science.
The interpretive capacities of natural science, that is, are of a speciﬁc
kind. In natural science, the human capacity to interpret, to
grasp the meaning of phenomena, is pointed to the reconstruction
of sense-experience and observation in terms of a vast and precise set
of theories and laws about the natural world. These laws themselves
are constructed and justiﬁed through the work humans do on and
through nature—the practical interaction of human beings with their
environment, which is disciplined through scientiﬁc training.31
If,
29. The critical realists recognize prima facie both the hermeneutic problems
attending the human sciences and the possibilities and contingencies that “history”
introduces to social life. They thus arrive at their version of explanation only after
arguing their way out of the epistemic dilemmas of human knowledge. As I shall argue
below, however, the realist solution is in need of radical reform.
30. Kurt Hübner in Critique of Scientiﬁc Reason argues that Weber’s ideal types—
and, more generally, work in the human sciences—in fact exemplify the relationship
between a priori principles and facts that obtain in all of the sciences, both social and
natural. Thus he argues that “the so-called hermeneutic circle, which is discussed so
often today, does not really exist . . . this erroneously named ‘circle’ comes up not only
in the historical and human sciences, but in every empirical science, since the relation
between a priori assumptions and facts interpreted with their help is principally the
same everywhere. Hence we are not dealing with something inherent to the historical
and human sciences alone.” My goal here is, by examining closely truth claims
in the human sciences, to show that Hübner was wrong to ﬁnd essentially the same
“interpretive” operation at work when theory is used in natural science and in the
human sciences. It is not clear (to me at least) how Hübner’s philosophical account
of scientiﬁc reasoning would change what natural scientists do and write; I hope to
show that the peculiarities of interpretation for the human sciences are in fact of great
consequence for how we imagine and practice social research. Kurt Hübner, Critique
of Scientiﬁc Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 189.
31. Ian Hacking has considered these issues with extreme care, writing at the
intersection of realist philosophies of natural science, pragmatist-inﬂuenced epistemology,
and Foucauldian-historical studies of the human sciences. See in particular
Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of
knowledge 37
indeed, this speciﬁc sort of interpretation has managed to achieve a
certain kind of universality—to create forms of knowledge that can
be explicated and compellingly communicated to humans (or perhaps
one day, nonhumans!) who share very little linguistically, socially and
culturally, and psychologically with the communicators, this is a remarkable
achievement, but not one that belies the way that, at a very
general level, the enterprise is interpretive. It suggests, rather, that in
so far as the grammar of science is mathematics, and mathematics is
a human creation whose intersubjective validity can be established
with a remarkable amount of abstract certainty, science can have an
objectivist outlook as its working format for making and criticizing
knowledge claims, and a pragmatic-realist justiﬁcation as its working
format of philosophical self-reﬂection.32
This speaks to an essential
hermeneutic truth about science often ignored by positivists and antipositivists
alike, but grasped in some philosophies of natural science
and certain social-theoretical traditions: that the “scientiﬁc mindset”
is just that—a speciﬁc manipulation of the human ability to assign
meaning to certain manifest signiﬁers—and that scientiﬁc objectivity
is something earned through labor and social organization, rather
than something philosophically guaranteed. Certainly most natural
scientists would agree that they work for their objectivity.
For social research, it is not at all clear that the interpretive capacities
of the investigator can be channeled in the same way, and I will
ultimately argue in this book that the epistemic synthesis that can be
traced to Marx’s naturalist inclination must be countered. Metaphors
of standing on head or feet notwithstanding, this argument will not
ultimately hinge on an inversion, but rather on a differentiation between
ways of using theory, and a recognition of the limits, as well
as the capacities, of social knowledge. To preview the anti-antirealist
Natural Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Hacking, The
Social Construction of What?
32. The issues raised by the rather astounding way in which mathematics can serve
as the language for physics and some other natural sciences are outlined in Eugene
Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,”
Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no. 1 (1960). But the larger issue
here is the development of a sociological approach to natural scientiﬁc knowledge that
does not associate “rationality” with individual knowers or philosophical certainty, and
as a result oppose social determinants of knowledge to rational determinants of knowledge.
This I take to be the central project of Helen Longino’s philosophy/sociology of
science, which she traces to C. S. Peirce’s meditations on communities of inquiry and
the attainment of truth. Helen Longino, The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002), 4 –5, 77–96.
38 chapter one
argument that follows: I think realism is correct that social investigation
must reach beyond the surface of colligated facts to grasp causal
explanations of action, and I will follow the critical realists in suggesting
a connection between explanation and critique—I too hold
that the critique of social life and its cultural products requires, at least
implicitly, some sort of approach to social explanation. But I doubt
whether these connections can be adequately established via the mode
of theoretical resigniﬁcation that is at the core of the realist epistemic
mode. But to fully articulate both realism and its alternatives, we have
to look at how theoretical resigniﬁcation actually works.
How, in other words, does the use of the language game of social
theory enable the construction of compelling historical narratives
of cause, critique, and meaning? Let us pull apart these different
conceptual methods. For we now work without the fetters—and
thus without the supports—of the Marxian philosophy of history,
which could connect in one compelling logical circle the explanation
of society, the interpretation of culture, and the critique of systematically
distorted communication. We have not yet fully understood
the ways in which these intellectual tasks have become so radically
different from each other.
It may in fact be that the synthesis of these modes will not—or not
yet—be possible: that we live in an epistemically fallen age, yearning
for the ultimate whole that once was guaranteed by the metanarratives
of communism or modernization. However, consider this: the most
outstanding versions of that synthesis were based upon an illusory
equation of materiality and scientiﬁcity, the critique of which is by
no means complete, and thus it might be a mistake to wager the possibility
of synthetic social knowledge on their success.
Chapter Two
Reality
Philosophical men even have a presentiment that the reality in which we live
and have our being is also mere appearance and that another, quite different
reality lies beneath it.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
I
In the last chapter, I argued that the signs of evidence have a ground
in social actions that happened, and thus that these actions can be
reported upon in minimal interpretations. The question is, then,
how theory is brought to bear on this web of factual signiﬁcation to
resignify the evidence, and thus offer deeper knowledge of the “social
actions that happened.” When this is done, maximal interpretations
are created.
The fundamental premise of realism is that theory has a ground
in the basic structures of the social; and thus that theory draws its
coherence from its referent. In realism, the problem posed in chapter 1
(what brings theory and evidence together?) is solved by insisting,
realizing, or discovering that the language of theory, like the language
of fact, draws meaning primarily from reference, and only secondarily
from contrast. Theory, on this account, is an explicitly and exquisitely
designed exercise in referencing and describing social reality, whose
injection into the sign-system of evidence allows the discovery of the
fundamental social realities that underlie and explain the social actions
of interest. According to realism, the signs of theory come together
40 chapter two
effectively with the signs of evidence when and because they both
point to the same real social entities as their ultimate referent. The
ground of the theoretical sign becomes, in the course of turning a
minimal interpretation into a maximal one, the ground of the evidential
sign. The result of this process of resigniﬁcation is, in realism,
maximal interpretations that contain, as their central component,
(claims to) causal explanations. To comprehend how this works, it
is necessary to understand the way in which the realist philosophy of
social science understands itself.
“Realism,” as an intellectual movement of signiﬁcance for social
theory, the philosophy of social science, and, increasingly, social research
itself, emerged in contrast to both positivism and postmodernism
as ways of understanding social knowledge. From the point
of view of realist epistemology, there is one thing that both of these
“isms” suffer from: they dismiss, avoid, or condemn depth interpretation.
In positivism—at least in its strict forms—sentences that cannot
be checked by sensory observation are metaphysical nonsense. The
only possible referents for terms are manifest, detectible persons or
occurrences that can be measured. In postmodernism, the authority
of the interpreter to go beyond what he is presented with by the
social world is challenged as unwarranted and, often, reduced to an
exercise in power. According to postmodernism (or so say the realists
anyway), the use of theory—e.g., psychoanalytic theory, rational
choice theory, Marxist theory—as a way to get behind the “surface”
of social life is a way of dictating truth, not discovering it.
For realism, this emphasis on the surface and the corresponding
distrust of attempts to know what is “underneath” evidence, data, or
manifest social actions and events is an intellectual error of the highest
order. It is incorrect, argue realists, to think that social researchers
either do, could, or should stay on the surface, content to either
inductively generate hypotheses from their data or to offer interpretations
of that data that are “just” interpretations. It must rather be the
case that the social world is layered, and that what social knowledge
does is reveal the underlying layers of social life that explain the surface
outcomes, events, and phenomena we want to understand. Much as
it is the case that the natural world contains within it forces that we
cannot see, but that we know exist, and that help us explain empirical
events (e.g., gravity, electromagnetism), so it must also be the case
that in society, there are underlying mechanisms or structures that
explain what happens or has happened, thus granting social research
realit y 41
the possibility of in-depth knowledge, and, indeed, the possibility of
causal explanation.1
Realism is, then, a way of conceptualizing the construction of
maximal interpretations in social research. It proposes a framework
in which going beyond evidence is warranted and indeed necessary,
and it provides a clear and distinct set of arguments for how the use
of theory to interpret evidence can be guided appropriately, so as
to produce valid social knowledge. The core of that argument—
articulated in myriad ways by different sorts of realists—is that theory
must reference social reality (hence, “realism”), while at the same
time remaining general and abstract. The coherence and rationality
of social theory (and, therefore, of maximal interpretations) derives
from the correspondences developed between theory and social
reality.
Social theory, in its classical form, contained a strong tendency
toward this sort of theorizing—which we can call, in line with Roy
Bhaskar’s language, ontological. Durkheim explicitly and bluntly, and
Marx carefully and implicitly, set out in abstract theoretical terms the
nature of society or “the social” as such. In particular, Durkheim’s
ﬁnal study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, was premised on
ontology as the central project of social theory. Therein, Durkheim
proposes to study the most “simple” or “primitive” form of religious
activity because in doing so he will be able to grasp “the religious
nature of man.”2
This is clearly ontological language. This legacy
1. Perhaps this instinct—that one must, in social research, go beneath the surface
of both observable data and the invariant categories that are often used to name events
or outcomes—is best expressed by Charles Tilly’s attack on the implicit positivist logic
of much historical and political sociology. This logic is objectionable, Tilly argues, in
so far as it attempts to identify events and their invariant, easily observable properties
(e.g., all revolutions have characteristics X, Y, and Z, thus, if event A is revolution,
then it has characteristics X, Y, and Z). Instead, explains Tilly, “regularities in political
life are very broad, indeed transhistorical, but do not operate in the form of recurrent
structures and processes at a large scale. They consist of recurrent causes which in
different circumstances and sequences compound into highly variable but nonetheless
explicable effects. Students of revolution have imagined they were dealing with
phenomena like ocean tides, whose regularities they could deduce from sufﬁcient
knowledge of celestial motion, when they were actually confronting phenomena like
great ﬂoods, equally coherent occurrences from a causal perspective, but enormously
variable in structure, sequence, and consequences as a function of terrain, previous
precipitation, built environment, and human response.” Charles Tilly, “To Explain
Political Processes,” American Journal of Sociology 100, no. 6 (1995), 1601.
2. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free
Press, 1995), 1.
42 chapter two
from “the classics” has been passed on to social theory today. So,
for example, Anthony Giddens offers his “structuration theory” as a
“social ontology”—that is, an account of what, exactly, agency and
structure are;3
extended debates occur about whether the assumptions
of rational choice theory are methodological or ontological—that is,
whether actors really are utility maximizers;4
Bourdieu’s relational
sociology is interpreted, in American sociology at least, as a new
general theory of social reality that overcomes a hidden individualism
of sociological research.5
“Ontology” aside, this ambitious project for social theory can
be articulated via three guiding principles for the use of theory in
generating maximal interpretations. In the realist epistemic mode,
theory creates a picture of the social world that is expected to apply
widely (generality), be consistent with itself (coherence), and
describe directly social reality (reference). A good example of this
is the recent emphasis in certain sectors of sociology on theorizing
a ﬁnite set of mechanisms as the essence of the social. To take an
especially clear statement of this position: “A focus on mechanisms
tends to reduce theoretical fragmentation. For example, we may
have numerous different theories (of crime, organizations, social
movements or whatnot) that are all based upon the same theorywithin-the-theory,
that is, they all refer to the same set of mecha-
nisms.”6
While realism as an epistemic mode is certainly not reducible
to the search for mechanisms,7
this quotation shows well the
ambition that theory be general (“all based upon the same theorywithin-the-theory”)
and that it be referential (“they all refer to
the same set of mechanisms”). Later in his text, Hedstrom insists
3. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984); Anthony Giddens, Social Theory and Modern Sociology (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1987); Ira J. Cohen, Structuration Theory: Anthony Giddens and the Constitution
of Social Life (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1989).
4. Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique
of Applications in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
5. Mustafa Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,” American Journal
of Sociology 103, no. 2 (1997).
6. Peter Hedström, Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 28.
7. I will argue below, and in chapter 4, that “mechanism” is a very speciﬁc metaphor
for understanding social life that can be complemented and encompassed by other
useful metaphors. Thus, when I present the interpretive epistemic mode’s approach
to explanation, in chapter 5, I argue that interpretive explanations should, when appropriate,
theorize mechanisms.
realit y 43
that the theory used in explanations should form a single, coherent
ontology.8
Realism’s claim, then, is that theory refers directly to entities or
processes (or, to use that word again, “mechanisms”) in the world
that have the potential to cause events to happen. These entities have
a coherent structure that is reproduced in the coherence of the theory
that sets out what they are. Thus, in realism, social theory has in social
reality what C. S. Peirce would have called a “ground” for the sign,
which is stable and, for maximal interpretations, stabilizing. Now,
the idea that the words on the page in a theory book—or even in the
theory section of a research monograph—would conjure up, in the
mind of the reader, a picture of “social reality” in the abstract is not
what is at issue here. The point is, rather, that this signiﬁer-signiﬁed
relationship is backed up by the “ontological status of theoretical
entities”9
—that theoretical terms and the ideas they call forth in
our minds have real referents, and that, moreover, these referents are
essential pieces in the structure of social reality. Perhaps nowhere in
contemporary social science is this expectation that theoretical terms
have direct and real referents more viscerally and convincingly communicated
than in what is surely one of the most impactful paragraphs
in the history of comparative-historical sociology:
Social revolutions in France, Russia, and China emerged from speciﬁcally
political crises centered in the structures and situations of the old
regime states. The events of 1787–9 in France, of the ﬁrst half of 1917
in Russia, and of 1911–16 in China not only undermined autocratic
monarchical regimes but also disorganized centrally coordinated administrative
and coercive controls over the potentially rebellious lower
classes. The revolutionary crises developed when the old-regime states
became unable to meet the challenges of evolving international situations.
Monarchical authorities were subjected to new threats or to
intensiﬁed competition from more economically developed powers
abroad. And they were constrained or checked in their responses by the
institutionalized relationships of the autocratic state organizations to
the landed upper classes and the agrarian economies. Caught in crosspressures
between domestic class structures and international exigencies,
the autocracies and their centralized administrations and armies
8. Hedström, Dissecting the Social, 37.
9. Grover Maxwell, “The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities,” Minnesota
Studies in the Philosophy of Science 3 (1962).
44 chapter two
broke apart, opening the way for social-revolutionary transformations
spearheaded by revolts from below.10
Herein all the elements of the maximal interpretation that makes up
the ﬁrst half of Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions are present
in powerfully reduced and lucid form. The second sentence (“The
events of . . .”) states the social actions that happened, the evidence
for which is found throughout the book. But the paragraph as a whole
revolves around its theoretical signiﬁers, and the immediate reality
of the theoretical terms is afﬁrmed by the clear implication of the
text that, in every one of her cases (and also in the comparison cases
mentioned later where revolutions did not occur), there were such
things as an “old regime state”/“autocratic state organization,” a “domestic
class structure” and “landed upper class,” and “international
exigencies.” But it is not just that these underlying social realities
exist. Perhaps even more important is that the relations obtaining
between the entities referred to by theory drive the causal narrative of
each case forward. The “cross-pressures” of domestic class structures
and international competition “broke apart” the state. This breaking
apart, in turn, “open[ed] the way” for revolts from below.
When considering a statement with such obvious intellectual power,
it is difﬁcult (for this author, anyway) to avoid a sort of thinkingdilemma,
wherein either such a text refers to social reality or it does
not. But to think this way is to ignore the speciﬁc epistemic mode of
these sorts of research texts, which so effectively unify general social
theory with historical narrative.11
They do so in a very particular way,
10. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,
Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 47.
11. Skocpol’s stated epistemology is Millsian. She claims to be strictly inductive
and thus could be labeled an “empiricist,” giving her approach afﬁnities with (some
forms of ) social scientiﬁc positivism. But, as many have noticed about her book,
Skocpol’s substantive investigations into the processes of social revolution and state
consolidation that follow on the heels of her ﬁrst chapter undercut any claims to a
strictly “observational” or “inductive” approach. Indeed, it is increasingly becoming
clear within comparative-historical sociology, I believe, that the implicit epistemology
of the classics of small-N comparison is realist. See George Steinmetz, “Odious
Comparisons: Incommensuarability, the Case Study, and ‘Small N’s’ in Sociology,”
Sociological Theory 22, no. 3 (2004). For the speciﬁc argument that the epistemology
of States and Social Revolutions is ultimately realist, see Philip Gorski, “The Poverty of
Deductivism: A Constructivist Realist Model of Sociological Explanation,” Sociological
Methodology 34 (2004).
If Skocpol was already a realist without knowing it, then the recognition that her
epistemic mode is in fact realism has come, in American sociology at least, with a shift
realit y 45
however: by revealing the general social reality that lies behind a series
of particular cases. Let us, then, delve further into the workings of
this semiotic for social knowledge.
Consider the following passages from the iconic text that preceded
Skocpol’s, Barrington Moore’s The Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy:
a. The ways in which the landed upper classes and the peasants reacted to
the challenge of commercial agriculture were decisive in determining
the political outcome [of Britain].12
b. There is widespread agreement among historians that the period from
about 1688 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars was the golden age of
the great landed estate. In important parts of the country, the estates
spread out over land, sometimes at the expense of the smaller gentry,
and more signiﬁcantly at the expense of the peasants. No one has yet
arisen to deny the general importance of the enclosures or that innumerable
peasants lost their rights on the common lands of the villages
as the great landlords absorbed these lands.13
c. Thus over substantial parts of England, as the large estate became larger
and was operated more and more on commercial principles, it ﬁnally
destroyed the medieval peasant community . . . the wave of parliamentary
enclosures during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
merely gave legal sanction to a process of eroding peasant property
that had been going on for some time. We know from the experience
of other countries that the intrusion of commerce into a peasant community
generally sets in motion a tendency toward the concentration
of land in fewer hands. This tendency had been noticeable in England
at least as early as the sixteenth century. In the heart of an area heavily
hit by enclosure, seventy percent of the land in one village had been
withdrawn from the peasant economy before the village was enclosed
toward theorizing mechanisms—not only in the analytic sociology of Hedström, but
most notably in the debates and commentary that exploded around Doug McAdam’s,
Sidney Tarrow’s, and Charles Tilly’s Dynamics of Contention, in which the authors advocated
the view that “to explain contentious politics is to identify its recurrent causal
mechanisms.” To me, their work evidences a similar set of epistemic imperatives as
found in Hedström’s approach, quoted earlier in this chapter, even if their ontology of
social process is different. Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics
of Contention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13.
12. Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and
Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), xxiii.
13. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 23.
46 chapter two
by act of Parliament. By 1765 only three families in ten occupied land in
this area of advancing industry. The rest were laborers, knitters, small
tradesmen.14
Statement A is theoretical, though it contains within it a promise
to—somehow—explain the “political outcome” of Britain and, as
the preface to Moore’s book makes clear, also France, the United
States, China, Japan, and India (with gestures toward Germany and
Russia). It sets out some abstract terms that will have to be deﬁned
and applied: “landed upper classes,” “commercial agriculture,” “determining,”
and “political outcome.” Indeed, as Jonathan Weiner’s
review of reviews of Moore’s book makes clear, each and every one
of these terms was questioned, criticized, and debated.15
Some criticized
Moore’s determinism, some criticized Moore’s assumption that
economically deﬁned classes are the primary collective actors that
make up society, and some criticized Moore’s (supposed) economic
determinism. But whether or not Moore is a Marxist in the substantive
sense of expecting the handling of material resources by men to
drive history is not precisely what interests us here. Rather, let us ask:
what is the logic by which Moore’s theoretical signs intersect with
his evidential ones?
Statement B is primarily evidential. It is a report about something
that happened, cobbled together from secondary evidence that was
cobbled together from primary evidence. It is one instance of a type of
writing that appears often in Moore’s book: a ﬁrst-order narrative of
something that happened in history, which can of course be debated,
but wherein the various signiﬁers of (1) words written by Moore,
(2) texts referenced by Moore, and (3) archival evidence referenced
by those texts referenced by Moore are all expected to point back to
the same set of human actions, movements of materials, events, etc.
Herein, certainly, there is dispute. But I would contend that statement
B is primarily part of a minimal interpretation, and uses mostly
factual signs. It is part of a report of what happened: there were a set
of actions called the enclosures, by which men who farmed small bits
of land (peasants) were prohibited from so doing by men who claimed
control of large tracts of land (great landlords).
14. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 25–26.
15. Jonathan M. Weiner, “The Barrington Moore Thesis and Its Critics,” Theory
and Society 2, no. 3 (1975).
realit y 47
But why did the enclosures happen and what was their signiﬁcance?
In statement C, theory and fact mix together: We know from the experience
of other countries that the intrusion of commerce into a peasant
community generally sets in motion a tendency toward the concentration
of land in fewer hands. That is to say, what happened in England is
explained by a mechanism that, once set in motion, produced the
result of “enclosures.” This mechanism is “commerce,” or, to take
the original theoretical formulation, “commercial agriculture,” which
is to say, the making of a market in land and the farming of land for
the purpose of turning a monetary proﬁt (as opposed to subsistence,
or some combination of subsistence and proﬁt). You could “notice”
this tendency in England in the sixteenth century (either a historian
or an Englishman of the sixteenth century, presumably, could do the
noticing). Thus a general social mechanism enables Moore to resignify
the evidence as a “process” or “tendency.”
Statement C clearly shows how much causal power is attributed
to this mechanism. Look at all of the things commercial agriculture
does/did: “destroyed the medieval peasant community,” “eroding
peasant property,” “sets in motion a tendency.” And there is a result—
we perhaps should say a clear causal effect—of all this process and
motion, attested to in this case by a telling evidential example: “In the
heart of an area heavily hit by enclosure, seventy percent of the land in
one village had been withdrawn from the peasant economy before the
village was enclosed by act of Parliament.” Note also that statement C
clearly and rather ironically disputes Parliament’s lawmaking as itself
the causal force in this case. Parliament “merely gave legal sanction
to” the results of the forces of commerce; by the time Parliament got
to the area that makes for Moore’s example, the “enclosures” had
taken place because of commerce, legality or illegality be damned.
Of course, the appeal and power of Moore’s book derives to a great
extent from the way in which this interaction of theoretical and evidential
signs is repeated case by case. This is an important clue to what
is going on in the realist mode. Comparative explanation, from within
a singular, complex framework, of a variety of political outcomes
(bourgeois democracy, fascist dictatorship, communist dictatorship),
is a perfect example of realism in action. In each and every case, the
evidential story (the reportage) is ultimately explained in causal language
that invokes the same set of theoretical terms, referring to the
same underlying social reality. To take just one further example:
48 chapter two
C2. As might be anticipated on the basis of the experience of other
countries, the new commercial relationships produced some tendency
toward the concentration of land in fewer hands and the breakup of
older familistic relationships within the peasant community. The signiﬁcant
point about Japan, however, is that these tendencies did not go
very far. After the rise of tenant farming as a solution to the problems
of agriculture, property relationships underwent very little change for
nearly a century. Despite a few incipient signs of an expropriation of
the peasantry, no such expropriation took place. Nor did the peasants
rise to expropriate the dominant classes in Japanese society.16
The partial absence or insufﬁcient strength of the mechanism of
“commerce,” in this case, explains the divergent outcomes of England
and Japan; Japan ended up with a coalition of the landed aristocracy
and the industrialist bourgeois class that led to fascist dictatorship
much like in Germany.17
England, on the other hand, had a
bourgeois/democratic revolution. In Moore, the same theoretical
terms repeat themselves as they intersect with the reportage of different
cases, providing in each case the causal joints upon which the
evidential narrative turns. The theoretical terms provide the explanation
of the events that happened and the outcomes of interest to
the researcher.
Our distance from the substantive debates that swirl around
Moore’s text allows us to notice in his work an epistemic logic that
is in fact found in a wide variety of social knowledge claims. It is
evident in Randall Collins’s construction of an interactional emotions-centered
microsociology, which is the basis for all social expla-
16. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 270.
17. In France, an initially weak (“in the latter part of the seventeenth century
and the opening decade of the eighteenth”) mechanism of commercial agriculture
ultimately intensiﬁed certain feudal relationships, thus “feudalizing” the bourgeoisie,
predisposing France, in Moore’s view, to “modernization from above” on the model
of Germany and Japan. The revolution, however, changed all this, as certain members
of the bourgeoisie—never as strong as they were in England—rode the radicalism of
the Sans-Culottes and peasant resentment into a position of partial power, resulting
in the “long” road to French democracy (1789–1871). Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship
and Democracy, 45, 109. It is important to recognize that such contingencies
can be accommodated by the realist mode, which is not reliant on a deterministic
philosophy of history so much as it is on a general ontological framework for analyzing
historical causality. See George Steinmetz, “Critical Realism and Historical Sociology:
A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, no. 1 (1998):
170 –86.
realit y 49
nation and into which all macro concepts can be translated.18
It is
evident in Claude Levi-Strauss’s ambitious willingness to frame his
investigations of myth as investigations into the timeless structure
of the human mind.19
It is evident in the Skocpol-led revolution
in comparative analysis to “bring the state back in.”20
That logic is
this: theory, when used in social explanation, points directly to the
underlying structures, mechanisms, or forces of the social world. It
is general, coherent, and referential, and these properties allow the
construction of maximal interpretations that are causal.
This underlying social world, which is represented/revealed by
perspicacious theoretical terms, becomes, in the research text, the
underlying causal source of that which requires explanation. The
claim is, implicitly or explicitly, that the theoretical signiﬁers used by
the researcher point to an essential aspect of the social as such, and
that this world exists underneath the time-space patch of social life
to which their evidence refers. In Moore, for example, the signiﬁer
of “the relation between town and country” is taken to refer to an
actually existing relation, which can vary in the direction and strength
of its imbalance, which exists or has existed in England, France, the
United States, China, Japan, and India (and Germany and Russia).
The adding of these theoretical terms to narrative history is a process
of weighing where and when they apply—as evidence is evaluated
for and against their existence and character. However, when the
theoretical signs pass this test—and it is, in some sense, a test, though
it is not an experiment—they then make an appearance among the
varied evidential signs. In doing so, they resignify that evidence in
a particular way. The theoretical signiﬁers do causal things in the
narrative of what happened: they “drive forward,” “destroy,” “bring
about,” “regulate,” “determine,” and so on.
The standard sociological account of “structural causation,” inaugurated
by Marx and exempliﬁed by Skocpol, takes on this textual
pattern. But, of course, the utilization of theoretical signiﬁers in this
18. Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2004); Randall Collins, “On the Microfoundations of Macrosociology,” American
Journal of Sociology 86, no. 5 (1981): 984 –1014.
19. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, vol. 1 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983).
20. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State
Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
50 chapter two
way is not only a textual effect. It is a textual effect that attempts to
reference and represent the social world; it is a truth claim. In so
far as these texts claim to be true, then it must be that they claim
that these theoretical signs drive forward the explanatory research
text for the precise reason that the entities to which the theoretical
signs point exist or existed, and, furthermore, that they do or did
cause the actions, events, and outcomes pointed to by the evidential
signs in the research text. In other words, for these texts to work as
producers of true social knowledge, then it must be that the theories
do what, implicitly or explicitly, these authors and their (sympathetic)
readers contend that they do—reference the nature of the social in
general, in a way that holds across time and space, and thus can be
“applied” and “tested” in certain cases. How might one epistemologically
justify this position on what theories do, and how they work
with evidence to produce explanations?21
II
To answer this question, let us ﬁrst propose a more formal account
of what is happening in the realist mode. First, we can say that theoretical
signs are “grounded” in a general and consistent social reality
(see ﬁg. 2).
Then (and here is the key point): in the realist epistemic mode, every
case or instance that grounds evidential interpretation is made to point
back to the singular referent—social reality—to which theory points directly.
That is, the cases are “regrounded” by social theory. Ultimately,
the social actions that happened become, as it were, signs that point
back to the social reality identiﬁed by theory, which also, in many cases,
is taken to have causally produced those social actions (see ﬁg. 3).
The implication is that, according to realism, the knowledge of
21. In what follows, then, I examine and criticize the speciﬁc way in which realism
develops and uses social theory to build these in-depth truth claims. This critique is
intended to be different than the overarching philosophical critique of representational
theories of truth. In this regard, I work with a modiﬁed representationalist theory of
truth, much like Helen Longino’s account of how various sorts of truth claims (including
models, speciﬁc explanations, etc.) can be understood according to a “conformist”
theory of truth that drops the strictly propositional theory of truth but preserves the
idea that truth claims involve more or less correct claims about the world. The question,
for me at least, is the degree to which very different ways of creating such truth
claims animate social research. Helen Longino, The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002), 117–21.
Theory
Investigator
and community
of inquiry
Social
reality
Articulation of
social ontology( )
Figure 2: The realist theoretical sign
(Causal explanation)
Theory
Investigator
and community
of inquiry
Social
reality
Evidence
Social
actions
Figure 3: Realist maximal interpretation—causal
explanation as social knowledge
52 chapter two
social reality embedded in the theoretical sign-system completes the
hermeneutic circle for the investigator. The referential meanings of
this sign-system allow her to discover what is underneath her data.
This does not imply that the interpretations produced proceed only
and singularly from theory to evidence. But a clear and coherent
framework for the evidence is provided, precisely because the underlying
structures that will do the explaining are drawn from a coherently
developed, general account of social life. And so, a highly effective and
compelling semiotic circuit is constructed, whereby theoretical claims
are posited and then tested in this or that case, and as a result are successively
reﬁned. It is easy, furthermore, to imagine that this circle of
interpretation is not an interpretation at all; to imagine that what is
happening is the veriﬁcation or falsiﬁcation of scientiﬁc hypotheses,
and the linear accumulation of scientiﬁc knowledge of the social.
One of the most lucid defenses of the scientiﬁcity of comparative
sociology evidences both this realist semiotic and the illusion of
noninterpretation. Jack Goldstone separates “comparative historical
analysis” (abbreviated CHA) from large-N statistical inferences,
arguing that
Analysts using CHA generally face a ﬁnite set of cases, chosen against
a backdrop of theoretical interests, and aim to determine the causal
sequences and patterns producing outcomes of interest in those speciﬁc
cases. Generalization is certainly a goal, but that generalization is sought
by piecing together ﬁnite sets of cases, not by sampling and inference
to a larger universe.22
So, given the ways in which CHA does not work with the assumptions
of large-N analysis, how is it that CHA can claim to accumulate objective
knowledge? (Let us leave to the side, for the moment, whether
large-N sociology does or does not accomplish this.) Goldstone answers
this by arguing that the logic of CHA is implicitly the logic of
Baysean analysis. That is to say, CHA also differs from large-N studies
because it “rarely starts from ignorance of causal relationships. Quite
the contrary; most CHA squarely targets strong prior beliefs about
causal relationships. Indeed what makes case analyses compelling
22. Jack Goldstone, “Comparative Historical Analysis and Knowledge Accumulation
in the Study of Revolutions,” in Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social
Sciences, ed. James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 43.
realit y 53
is generally not that they pluck unknown causal relationships from
behind a veil of ignorance, but that they are speciﬁcally designed to
challenge prior beliefs.”23
This attests to the importance of theoretical
knowledge, which stores in its signiﬁers such “prior beliefs” that are
to be challenged or tested by evidence.24
For Goldstone, then, the analysis of a case does not enter into
neutral intellectual ground constituted by a null hypothesis. Rather,
cases are designed to speak to the knowledge already embedded in
the research community. So how does this work? Here again, theory
comes in. For Goldstone—like the realist philosophers of social
science—eschews the mere citing of constant conjunctions. Rather,
a case must be broken down into a series of events, and these events
are then “plausibly linked given the interests and situations faced
by groups or individual actors.”25
Crucially, this linking of events
“involves making deductions about how events are linked over time,
drawing on general principles of economics, sociology, psychology, and
political science regarding human behavior” (emphasis added).26
This
linking occurs with the aid of quantitative and qualitative evidence
that is marshaled “within complex cases.” Then these processes are
compared across “particular cases of interest.”
This is a perfect, if entirely internal, account of how realist maximal
interpretations are constructed. Investigators come to a case bearing
theory—indeed, they may choose a case because it is judged to be a
sort of “crucial experiment” for a theory. These theories are general
principles of human behavior, which articulate the processes that underlie
and link together key events. Cases are then examined for the
“existence/absence”27
of causal chains or processes, on the basis of
which the theory is reﬁned. For this reason, argues Goldstone, the
overall development of CHA in any particular ﬁeld presents a research
program . . . At any one time, a ﬁnite number of cases deemed to be
23. Goldstone, “Comparative Historical Analysis and Knowledge Accumulation
in the Study of Revolutions,” 45.
24. On the integration of “theoretical and substantive knowledge” into case-based
work, see also Charles Ragin, Fuzzy-Set Social Science (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000), 316.
25. Goldstone, “Comparative Historical Analysis and Knowledge Accumulation
in the Study of Revolutions,” 47.
26. Goldstone, “Comparative Historical Analysis and Knowledge Accumulation
in the Study of Revolutions,” 48.
27. Goldstone, “Comparative Historical Analysis and Knowledge Accumulation
in the Study of Revolutions,” 46.
54 chapter two
of interest to a research community are under investigation. Using
process tracing, scholars seek to uncover sequences that produced the
results or cases of interest. Using congruence testing, scholars make
claims about the number of cases that “ﬁt” a particular causal sequence
or pattern (or “model”).28
Several things are worth noting here. First it should be clear that
realism can allow for a certain amount of ﬂexibility about the “empirical
scope” of its mechanisms, and can allow for causal complexity,
or what George Steinmetz called, in his review of critical realism,
“conjunctural determination.”29
Causal monism or strict universalism
is not necessary. Rather, theory is expected to be in principle
general, to work referentially, and to be consistent with itself in
the abstract. That is the essence of the realist epistemic mode. The
idea is that models are built and “tested” with cases. However, an
implicit assumption here is that the amount of cases and amount
of models is ﬁnite and manageable, and that the models that are
provisionally taken as true—at least concerning a given object of
study, like social revolutions—are not in contradiction with each
other.
Goldstone uses the language of Bayesian analysis to articulate the
logic of all of this. Comparative historical sociologists answer questions
like this: “What would you bet that you would ﬁnd certain
conditions in a given case before a CHA of that case, and would you
make the same bet after a CHA of that case?”30
Presumably, here,
Goldstone means to ask “would you make the same bet about the next
case,” after the CHA of the case at hand reveals, or does not reveal,
the conditions predicted by theory. But this is just the thing—the
commensurability of this case and the next is not a major problem for
Goldstone, because the commensurability of the cases is guaranteed
if they have the same object as deﬁned by general social theory. This
general social theory then proceeds gradually to reﬁne itself and to
store knowledge, thus creating the accumulation of knowledge that
characterizes a research program on revolutions, or on whatever the
theoretical object may be.
28. Goldstone, “Comparative Historical Analysis and Knowledge Accumulation
in the Study of Revolutions,” 51.
29. Steinmetz, “Critical Realism and Historical Sociology,” 178.
30. Goldstone, “Comparative Historical Analysis and Knowledge Accumulation
in the Study of Revolutions,” 47.
realit y 55
III
We can now see the central problematic for research in the realist
mode: although evidence provides a way to “test” for the presence
and strength of certain mechanisms or social structures, the insistence
on reference, coherence, and generality places tremendous weight
on the theoretical frame that the investigator brings to the research
situation. Theoretical “presuppositions” are in fact an incredibly consequential
general theory of the social object—they articulate what
exists in the social world, and how such basic social entities act.
But where should this general social theory come from? How
should investigators establish the basis for the productive semiotic
circuit outlined above? Where, according to Goldstone, is the ﬁrst
bet placed? Justin Cruickshank notes a common slippage in critical
realist argumentation about the theoretical framework with which
the investigator works—often referred to in realist circles as her social
ontology. “On the one hand,” Cruickshank notices, “ontology
pertains to what critical realists refer to as the ‘transitive domain’ of
fallible, theoretical interpretations of reality, whilst on the other hand,
ontology is taken to be a direct representation of the ‘intransitive
domain,’ meaning the reality beyond our knowledge.”31
This slippage
reveals a problem in realism as imagined by Bhaskar, Mario Bunge,
and others. If one did have direct knowledge of the “intransitive”
social realm,32
then one would be justiﬁed in offering that knowledge
31. Justin Cruickshank, “A Tale of Two Ontologies: An Immanent Critique of
Critical Realism,” Sociological Review 52, no. 4 (2004): 567. Cruickshank’s critique
is aimed primarily at critical realism as it exists in British sociology, and particularly
the realism associated with Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer, and Tony Lawson, among
others. But it could also apply, for example, to Christian Smith’s account of realism
and its importance for American sociology. Smith follows Bhaskar in prioritizing ontology
over epistemology, and thus writes that “That which is cannot be immediately
constrained by limits on the knowable of it. First we come to terms with what we
believe is and what it is like, then we examine the possibilities for knowing about it.”
Christian Smith, What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanitiy, Social Life, and the Moral
Good from the Person Up (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 93.
32. The original purpose and utility of the transitive/intransitive distinction in
Roy Bhaskar’s account of natural science, and its relevance for social science will be
discussed below. Brieﬂy, however, we can follow Smith’s summary: “Human knowledge
has both intransitive and transitive dimensions that should not be conﬂated.
The former concerns the real objects of scientiﬁc knowledge, the latter the content of
our human knowledge of those objects in reality.” Smith, What Is a Person? 94. The
intransitive is that which is, and the transitive is what we (scientiﬁcally) know about that
which is. Thus, to cite the Dictionary of Critical Realism, the intransitive dimension is
56 chapter two
as the theory of social reality upon which research programs should
be based. This would be the starting point for the quasi-Bayesian
research process that Goldstone outlines. But Cruickshank notes
that (critical) realists tend to avoid claims to metaphysically certain
knowledge, and argue instead that social theory “ought to be derived
from within current scientiﬁc knowledge about reality.”33
But then, if
this knowledge of social reality is as fragmented as the contemporary
human sciences are, how is one to ﬁgure out which ontology is the
correct starting point?34
To fully understand this key aspect of the realist epistemic mode,
we must return to the original arguments made for realism—and in
opposition to positivism and relativism—by Roy Bhaskar in the 1970s.
For contained therein are explicit arguments for two fundamental
premises of the mode as it was practiced both before Bhaskar wrote
his texts and as it is practiced today.
In A Realist Theory of Science, Bhaskar argued that, since natural
science exists and is successful, one can argue retroductively to the
existence of a world of natural mechanisms separate from the experiments
that manipulate or trigger these mechanisms—otherwise scientiﬁc
experiment would be an unintelligible human activity. There
must be a world of forces and structures underneath phenomena as
they are presented to the senses; otherwise, the elaborate setups of
scientiﬁc experimentation—designed to isolate the powers of these
forces and structures—would be both arbitrary and unnecessary. The
“synonymous with ontology” while the transitive dimension is synonymous with “the
epistemological process.” Marvin Hartwig, ed. Dictionary of Critical Realism (New
York: Routledge, 2007). (The entry for “intransitive dimension” contains a lengthier
discussion of the origins and uses of the terms.)
33. Cruickshank, “A Tale of Two Ontologies,” 568.
34. John R. Hall points out that while the overriding conviction of realism is that
social reality is deﬁnable or has a nature that transcends this or that historical case, there
is very little agreement as to what this fundamental social reality is. This gives certain
discussions around social scientiﬁc realism an “abstract and unreal air,” for “when
we move from philosophical positions to trying to analyze the sociohistorical world,
the ‘things’ and ‘relations’ that are awkwardly characterized as acts, norms, processes
and so forth all elude any straightforward realistic conceptualization . . . realists do
not agree with each other about the reality (e.g., of ‘intelligence,’ ‘class conﬂict,’
‘kinship’) that supposedly is knowable . . . In short, accepting realism metaphysically
cannot entail reducing the character of reality to any particular realist description (e.g.,
of ‘gender’). Thus, practically speaking, metaphysical realism is hard put to offer the
social ontology that it would claim to warrant.” John R. Hall, Cultures of Inquiry:
From Epistemology to Discourse in Sociohistorical Research (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 48.
realit y 57
experiment, then, functions as a pragmatic point of communication
between the “transitive” domain of fallible human knowledge and
the “intransitive” domain of nature (the latter exists and functions
regardless of whether there are humans who comprehend it scientiﬁcally).
As a result, a form of judgmental rationality prevails in natural
science, which moves theories—part of the transitive domain—closer
and closer to a direct description of the intransitive domain. In this
way, Bhaskar proposed to both account for the fact that scientiﬁc
knowledge is manifestly the creation of humans and is always revising
itself—it is never ﬁnished, and always ﬂawed—and argue that science
is ultimately a rational and effective way of comprehending nature.
In his next major text, The Possibility of Naturalism, Bhaskar proposed
what was, in effect, a set of analogies that—if taken to be accurate
and well worked through—would amount to a justiﬁcation of
a certain kind of naturalism for social research. Of particular interest
are the following:
—That the “social world,” though different than the “natural world,”
can also be thought of as an “intransitive” realm, to which the “transitive”
theories produced by social research attempt to correspond.35
35. Thus the whole question hinges on what can be included in the realm of
“intransitive” social objects. Fundamentally, Bhaskar makes a categorical distinction
between transitive and intransitive so as to argue that “knowledge is a social product,
produced by means of antecedent social products; but that the objects of which, in
the social activity of science, knowledge comes to be produced, exist and act quite
independently of men” (Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science [New York: Verso,
2008], 5–6). In simpler terms, the intransitive domain is that which is, and the transitive
domain is human beings’ various attempts to comprehend it. As one might
anticipate, the existence of human conceptualization as part of “that which is”—the
concept-dependency of social life—becomes, then, a major area of theoretical focus
for the realist philosophy of social science.
Many who have carefully considered this issue in the realist philosophy of social science—including
Margaret Archer, Bhaskar, and William Outhwaite—have concluded
that the “constructs” of meaning, belief, etc. can be considered to be part of this “intransitive”
social realm. But the problem with this is that then the transitive/intransitive
distinction that founded Bhaskar’s realist theory of (natural) science breaks down, since
that distinction was designed precisely to separate the transitive conceptions and beliefs
of certain acting human beings (scientists) from the intransitive structures of nature
that the scientists were interacting with through experiments (and whose existence
and workings are quite independent, at the ontological level, from what humans do or
do not know about them). In Bhaskar’s original philosophy of science, this distinction
is of utmost importance, because it provides the basis for his synthesis of “epistemic
relativism” and “ontological realism,” the realist aufhebung of the Kuhnian critique
of positivist philosophies of science.
Here the critiques developed by Anthony King are absolutely essential. King’s central
point in his critique not only of realism, but also of the structure/agency dichotomy
58 chapter two
—That though societies are “open systems” and thus subject to unpredictable
historical changes, they can still be studied scientiﬁcally,
despite the lack of experimental conditions for studying these systems.
The reason for this is that societies already contain—as a part of themselves—a
protoscientiﬁc conceptual account of themselves.36
As a result, argued Bhaskar, social research should function as research
on nature does, via ontological theory, which is to say theory
that deﬁnitively points to the structures of social reality. Notoriously,
however, Bhaskar termed his account of social science a combination
of “critical naturalism” and “transcendental realism,” which, when
combined, yielded “critical realism.” This meant that social scientiﬁc
naturalism should not be an unthinking or direct importation of natural
scientiﬁc methods and theories into the social sciences. Rather, a
critical reﬂexivity was necessary—particularly since social structures
are, according to Bhaskar, “concept-dependent” and also “emergent”
realities dependent upon agents and their actions for their existence.
What Bhaskar’s complex oeuvre represents, then, is an extended argument
that the differences between the social and natural worlds can
be taken on board in a consideration of what makes social research
feasible and justiﬁable, but that the basis for explanations—in natural
science and in social research—is the general, coherent, and referential
signiﬁcation of reality by theory.
Furthermore, Bhaskar proposes, in an appealingly counterintuitive
way, that the role of concepts in social life is in fact an asset to
naturalistic approaches to social research.37
He argues that, while the
open systems of societies cannot be experimented upon, the concepts
that exist as part of those societies provide a compensator for the
lack of experiment. Instead of experimenting, social researchers can,
through “retroduction,” move from an understanding of the concepts
in social theory as a whole, is that to map the intransitive/transitive distinction onto
the society/agency distinction, or to treat social structures as intransitive in the same
way natural structures are, leads to tremendous confusion. Anthony King, The Structure
of Social Theory (London: Routledge, 2004).
36. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary
Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1998), 48.
37. Many—and most notoriously Peter Winch, whom Bhaskar spends many pages
of his classic work arguing with—have argued that the role of concepts in society strictly
disables social scientiﬁc naturalism. See Peter Winch, The Idea of Social Science and
Its Relation to Philosophy (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), and Berel Dov Lerner,
Rules, Magic, and Instrumental Reason: A Critical Interpretation of Peter Winch’s
Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2002).
realit y 59
used by lay actors to understand their social reality to an understanding
of that social reality itself.38
In other words, all societies already
contain within themselves a protoscience of themselves, which the
investigator converts into a real science of society. This retroduction
is analogous to the previously mentioned retroduction that moved
from the success of experiments in natural science to the ontological
status of theoretical entities, which is to say, to the afﬁrmation of
the existence of a world of intransitive powers and mechanisms that
experiments access and manipulate.
Bhaskar’s example of such retroduction in the human sciences is
indeed one of the greatest arguments ever made in social research:
[Marx’s] Capital may most plausibly be viewed as an attempt to establish
what must be the case for the experiences grasped by the phenomenal
forms of capitalist life to be possible; setting out, as it were, a pure
schema for the understanding of economic phenomena under capitalism,
specifying the categories that must be employed in any concrete
investigation . . . for Marx to understand the essence of some particular
social phenomenon is to understand the social relations that make that
phenomenon possible.39
With reference to the process of retroduction, Bhaskar claims that
“Marx’s analysis in Capital illustrates the substantive use of a transcendental
procedure.”40
But note that there is some mud in the water here. In Marx’s critique
of the consciousness of the bourgeoisie (and especially of the
bourgeois economists), he posits that their understanding of capitalism
is incorrect and also posits the social reality that produced that
incorrect understanding. This is not analogous to the transcendental
derivation whereby it is argued that natural science could only be
intelligible and successful if it were the case that its theoretical terms
38. Jason Glynos and David Howarth place retroduction in intellectual-historical
context in the ﬁrst chapter of their book Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and
Political Theory (New York: Routledge, 2007). In particular, they connect it to Peirce’s
work on Aristotelean reasoning, translated as “abductive” or “retroductive” (24 –48).
The direction they take this illuminating intervention is, however, signiﬁcantly different
than the argument of this book, in particular in so far as they tend to view hermeneutic
interpretation as normative interpretation, and ultimately afﬁrm an “ontological
negativity or radical contingency,” which is to say an instability to social life, as the
conceptual source of their framework for critical explanation.
39. Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, 51.
40. Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, 51.
60 chapter two
have reference to an underlying reality. The latter, transcendentalrealist
argument is: that which science conceptualizes and manipulates
in experiments must, if the experiments work, exist. Prima facie, it
seems to be manifestly the case that a direct analogy to research on
the social world cannot be drawn. For, if it were, then one could say,
for example: in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, there was a social conceptualization
of “the witch,” which led to a set of practical actions
that were highly successful: witches were found and killed. Thus it
must be the case that the category “witch,” and more broadly the
theory of what witches do elaborated in witch-hunting manuals of
the time, must refer to a general social reality; there were (and are?)
witches. (Beyond the obvious, there is a more general problem here,
indicated in this case by the rather horriﬁc irony of “successful witch
trials”: what social practices are equivalent to the success of scientiﬁc
experiment?)
But of course Marx’s argument does not run in this manner, indeed
quite the opposite—he is arguing that the conceptualization of
capitalism available phenomenologically to everyday actors in capitalist
society is wrong—it belies, and therefore helps reproduce, the real
social structure, which is referred to directly by the theory of modes
of production. And indeed, Bhaskar suggests that the theories of
society that exist within a given society are prototheories (really, we
should say pseudotheories), which have to be transformed into real
theories. But how is this transformation done? And there is the rub:
to do it, one has to already know Marx’s theory of social reality.41
In
other words, the argument about the use of concepts-in-society to es-
41. Thus Justin Cruickshank has moved away from the realist position that he
articulated in his earlier work, and toward a new interpretation of Karl Popper’s philosophy
of science, which emphasizes the pragmatic dimensions of Popper’s work, and
Popper’s antiontological mode of thinking. In particular he is developing a theory of
social scientiﬁc knowledge that avoids starting investigation with strict ontological
deﬁnitions. Cruickshank is thus in the process of carving out a position that is neither
positivist, realist, postmodern, or hermeneutic. The best name I can think of for this
emerging project is “sociological pragmatism,” since Cruickshank seems both more in
touch with actual social research than were the neopragmatist philosophers, and to have
moved beyond some of the primary concerns of Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty.
See in particular Cruickshank, “A Tale of Two Ontologies: An Immanent Critique of
Critical Realism,” and Justin Cruickshank, “The Usefulness of Fallibilism: A Popperian
Critique of Critical Realism,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37, no. 3 (2007). For
Cruickshank’s earlier, realist work see Justin Cruickshank, Critical Realism: The Difference
It Makes (London: Routledge, 2003); Justin Cruickshank, Realism and Sociology:
Anti-Foundationalism, Ontology, and Social Research (New York: Routledge, 2003).
realit y 61
tablish a theory of social reality begs the question of what theoretical
knowledge enables the transformation of prototheory into scientiﬁc
theory; the analogy to transcendental retroduction does not hold.42
IV
The problem, ultimately, for the naturalist analogy is that social life
may not be “intransitive.” In realist philosophy of social science, a
key elision is made so as to put social investigation into the box of a
modiﬁed naturalism. That social reality exists outside the head of the
investigator, and indeed outside the heads of any subset of individual
humans engaged in it, is taken as evidence for the “intransitivity” of
society, social structure, etc.43
But—and Marx’s critiques of Feuerbach
are indeed the original reference here44
—the dynamism of social
life, its historicity, belies the philosophical anthropology of “man” or
“society.”45
One presumes that gravity was the same for Henry II as
it is for Barack Obama; the semiotic sources of legitimate domination
are not. This is of course a trivial example, and there are indeed natural
42. I have, here, focused on the work of Roy Bhaskar, but many of the same arguments
for realism, and against hermeneutics, postmodernism, positivism, etc. can be
found in the oeuvre of Mario Bunge. For a comparison of the two philosophers’ approach
to explanation in social science, see Chares Demetriou, “The Realist Approach
to Explanatory Mechanisms in Social Science: More than a Heuristic?” Philosophy of
the Social Sciences 39, no. 3 (2009).
43. Anthony King writes that Bhaskar “appeals to the concept of structure because
he takes a peculiar and inadequate view of it. Institutions are assumed to be autonomous
by Bhaskar only because he analyses these ‘structures’ from the perspective of a
single individual . . . From the individual’s point of view, social reality is objective; it
manifestly exists independently of what an individual thinks or does. From individual
experience, structure is prior, it is independent and it does have causal powers. Yet,
although compelling for the individual, this view is a solipsism. It takes the individual
perspective as the basis of sociological analysis.” King, The Structure of Social
Theory, 79.
44. For an account of social theory that sets the “realist” Marx against the “hermeneutic”
Marx, using Marx’s early writings on praxis as the basis for the latter, see
King, The Structure of Social Theory, 107–21.
45. The project of philosophical anthropology also takes as a reference point Marx
and Feuerbach. See Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, Social Action and Human Nature
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Some of the attempts to develop a
critical philosophy that have emerged from realism include work that takes quite seriously
the idea that specifying human nature is an essential ﬁrst step to an ethics. So,
Caroline New argues that critical realism can “offer philosophical grounding for ethical
naturalism” and thus help save feminism from the linguistic (wrong) turn. Caroline
New, “Feminism, Critical Realism and the Linguistic Turn,” in Critical Realism: The
Difference It Makes, ed. Justin Cruickshank (New York: Routledge, 2003), 57–75.
62 chapter two
sciences that seem to have a historical element (such as evolutionary
biology). But the force of the contrast remains, particularly when it
comes to the “ontological status of theoretical entities.” In what way,
really, is “society” or “social structure,” intransitive? Can we really
ascribe to the signiﬁers of social theory “ontological status,” if what
we mean by this is the sort of permanence that, say, the natural kind
“gold” has?46
Or is the continuation of scientistic epistemology in
the human studies both fetish and illusion?
The principle of realist signiﬁcation is that unity in theory can
bring together disparate cases under the same general scheme; theory
has direct referents in social reality, and these referents are what enable
evidence to be sorted and causal claims to be made. If, however, the
social object is unstable or “transitive,” then it is also possible that
cases could be incommensurable in the sense that they do not have,
underneath them, different arrangements of the same basic social
forces, or mechanisms, or relational entities. This throws into doubt
the premise of the realist epistemic mode—that at its core, the theoretical
meaning-system is grounded in much the same way the factual
meaning-system is: by reference to a reality that can be reported on.
Theory, according to realism, reports upon a deeper social reality.
In the end, it is precisely the supposed compensator for the lack of
experiment in social research that undermines this orderly understanding
of theory and fact. Meaning and subjectivity in social life—or, in
Bhaskar’s terms, the concept-dependence of social structure—provide
a great deal of dynamism to the social object, particularly in so far
as they are unrealistic. Subjectivity, understood literally as that element
of the world that continually exceeds its objective constraints,47
gives to the social object of study a distinct historical dynamism and
cultural difference.48
46. The reference here is to Hilary Putnam’s work on pragmatism, realism, and
natural kinds. The classic articles in this regard are Hilary Putnam, “Meaning and
Reference,” Journal of Philosophy 70, no. 19 (1973), and Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning
of Meaning,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 7 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1975). He then revised these views in Hilary Putnam,
“Why There Isn’t a Ready Made World,” Synthese 51, no. 2 (1982).
47. The original reference in this regard is Hegel’s discourse on lordship and
bondage. See paragraphs 178–96 in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology
of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
48. This emphasis on the effects of subjectivity, history, and culture on the human
being, and the resultant problems with realism and, more broadly, naturalism, is
one way to interpret Clifford Geertz’s epigrammatic statement that “If anthropology
is obsessed with anything it is with how much difference difference makes.” Clifford
realit y 63
That subjectivity and history render the naturalist approach to social
knowledge problematic has been the refrain of antiscientism arguments
for over a century in academic social studies in the West. It was
perhaps never more eloquently articulated than in H. Stuart Hughes’s
account of the revolt of European intellectuals against positivism in
the 1890s. These men—Weber and Freud among them—Hughes
writes, “displaced the axis of social thought from the apparent and objectively
veriﬁable to the only partially conscious area of unexplained
motivation.” They thus arrived at the conclusion that “it was no
longer what actually existed that seemed most important: it was what
men thought existed. And what they felt on the unconscious level
had become rather more important than what they had consciously
rationalized.”49
But what are the true implications of this intellectual
maneuver, this antinaturalism?
V
No matter how much we criticize naturalism, it is a mistake to take
away from this argument the implication that effective, empirically
responsible social research is impossible. The contradictions of realism
emerge in the attempt to apply the naturalist metaphor to the
process of using theory to build explanations. Thus to argue against
realism is not to deny the existence of facts, or even the possibility of
constructing social explanations. The core ambition of realism is to
take the risk of depth interpretation, or in the terms developed here,
to construct maximal interpretations that use theory to go beyond
the facts, but remain responsible to those facts. This was also the
ambition of Freud and Weber, even if they ventured outside of “science,”
as it was understood in their time, to achieve it. Perhaps we
should consider our position, vis-à-vis realism, to be somewhat similar
to that which Weber faced vis-à-vis nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury
positivism.
It is unfortunately the case that many of the most cogent reﬂections
on realism participate in the strange gambit of science or
nothing at all, expecting somehow the human studies to function as
Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reﬂections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 197.
49. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European
Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 66.
64 chapter two
effective natural sciences without experiment and with an object—
humankind—which is really a subject, and a notoriously plastic and
elusive subject at that. This is the naturalist error. However, social
life does, across certain swaths of time and space, work in patterned,
or even systematic, ways. There are aspects of social life here and
there, and perhaps especially in modern social organizations, that
function mechanistically. When we consider realism’s growing effect
upon truth claims made in social research, we do, then, ﬁnd a quite
clear contribution, namely that the theorization and identiﬁcation
of mechanisms provides causal torque to historical argument. Yet
the problem is that in realism, identifying some mechanistic aspects
of social life brings with it an entire framework for investigation,
wherein the basic mechanisms of the social are deﬁned in a general
social theory, and then the investigator tests for their presence or
absence, strength or weakness.
Thus we could perhaps say that, alongside its naturalist ambition,
there is a related, but more impressionistic, problem with realism. This
is a discursive effect: realism’s constant use of ontological language
makes it hard to keep in mind that mechanism is a metaphor, derived
originally from the mechanical clocks that surrounded the men who
launched the scientiﬁc revolution in the West. Those men concluded
that the processes they were uncovering in nature could (often) be
adequately conceptualized as working as an elaborate clock does—
producing regularities via hidden machinery that it was the job of
the scientist to discover. Since that time, the language of mechanism
has—all the way up through the foundational writings of Bhaskar and
Bunge for the realist philosophy of social science—provided a ready
counterpoint to the Humean critique of causality as a concept of the
mind imposed upon constant conjunctions. Causal theories refer, in
this language, to real mechanisms. And so one ﬁnds oneself importing
into social inquiry a whole set of expectations about the cross-cultural
and cross-historical efﬁcacy of mechanisms, and a whole set of procedures
for grounding a wide variety of evidence in one’s theoretical
articulations of social ontology. Mechanisms are expected to be found
in all sorts of times and places, and, when one identiﬁes mechanisms,
one expects to use theory to resignify evidence in a realist manner.
But the recognition that social life in some times and some places
evidences a regularity that can be likened to a mechanism does not
necessitate a commitment to the realist mode for building maximal
interpretations. For the mere fact that social life has regularity does
realit y 65
not mean that we have to model our understanding of social life on
the sciences that have attended to the regularities of nature.
Rather, we should look for a way to integrate the core ambition of
scientiﬁc realism (causal explanation) and its core insights into social
life (that social life does proceed, some of the time, with a rather
frightening regularity) into a different epistemic mode. There might
be other ways to go about using theory to interpret evidence; other
ways to comprehend the varying contexts of social action; other ways
to elaborate and utilize the exceedingly strange meaning-system that
is social theory.
If there are, it should not surprise us that the interpretation of consciousness
would be central to these other modes. For, if the social is
denaturalized, then the question of the institutionalization and maintenance
of social realities becomes connected to the question of how
the social life is normatively imagined. Another way of saying this is: if,
contra Bhaskar’s reading of Marx, one cannot identify a single social
theory of reality that both debunks ideology and explains why some
people would believe it, then both social criticism, and eventually
the understanding of social reality itself, must reconsider themselves.
Here, I begin with a consideration of the normative epistemic mode,
which, leaving realism behind, retains the engagement with facts, but
builds maximal interpretations in a very different way.
Chapter Three
Utopia
Mythical is that which never changes, ultimately diluted to a formal legality
of thought. To want substance in cognition is to want a utopia.
—Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics
I
We can recognize easily in contemporary social and political theory an
extended terrain of normative argument. Debates about modernity
and postmodernity, democracy and multiculturalism, ethics and gender,
and myriad other concerns form a whole layer of disputation
and theorization that—to a greater or lesser degree—orients how
social researchers choose their projects, publish their results, and
regulate themselves in their own lifeworlds. Political theory is part
of the theoretical meaning-system that, in a variety of ways, informs
the practice of social research. It is not difﬁcult, furthermore, to see
that this kind of normative argument is absolutely necessary. For, if
social actors orient themselves, at least some of the time, to ideals,
then, since social researchers and social theorists are social actors,
they too must orient their actions to ideals in some sense, some of
the time. In addition, there is a loose way in which social theorists
and researchers themselves constitute—discursively at least—a community
of actors. Thus it would be surprising—and indeed evidence
of almost willful ignorance—if such actors did not use their speciﬁc
tools (intellectual argument and elaboration) to reﬂect upon
68 chapter three
and dispute the validity of their norms, their understanding of the
good society, their theories of what, in fact, is a democratic decision,
and so on.
But at stake, in this book at least, is not just the mere existence
or necessity of political philosophy or political theory. It is, rather,
to a speciﬁc way theory is used in the thick of investigation that I
intend the term “normativism” to refer. For what normativism is, as
an epistemic mode anyway, is a way of producing maximal interpretations
that speak to the debates of political theory, but that speak
to these debates with an intellectual authority derived from both
theory and fact.
At the core of normativism as an epistemic mode is the understanding
that knowledge itself has a politics. From this premise, normativism
draws the following implication: that when an investigator researches
other people—even others long since dead—she constructs
a dialogue between herself and her subjects. This recognition of social
research as communication between subjects destabilizes the human
sciences: history, culture, and agency are not problems that must be
overcome or got around; they are the constitutive problematics of
knowledge that addresses itself to life animated by consciousness. In
classical social theory, the effect of expansion this has on what is to be
considered by the theorist or investigator of the social is most visible
in the work of W. E. B. DuBois. His work relegated the generalized
analytics of Durkheim (and perhaps even Marx) to one small piece
of a larger project of social knowledge. This project, moreover, was,
in DuBois’ case, deeply intertwined with the political project and
social movements of black Americans. Thus DuBois’ arguments tend
to contain layers of the dialogic, speak consistently to the need to
carefully make practical judgments, as well as articulate the fullness
of human life and suffering. They are thus full of connotations and
resonances of a type quite uncommon in the work of Durkheim or
Weber:
But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the
real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls
who have lost the guiding star of the past and are seeking in the great
night a new religious ideal. Some say the Awakening will come, when
the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the
goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes
utopia 69
life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked “For White
People Only.”1
The implications of DuBois’ magisterial oeuvre extend far beyond
the concerns of this text. But one of the implications surely is this:
in theorizing consciousness in society, one must resist the reduction
of consciousness to the cognitive—both in the sense that the
subjects of investigation are not, merely, cognitive beings, and in
the sense that investigators themselves, in trying to comprehend
others, act more than just cognitively. They may act ethically and
politically. They may pass judgment. This requires antinaturalism in
the human sciences (though certainly not—as DuBois’ work makes
clear—the abandonment of empirical responsibility, or of quantitative
measurement).
Which is to say that, in the process of comprehending action,
investigators can and perhaps should attempt a judgment of those
actions in a way that is entirely unrecognizable to the physical sciences
(no one passes judgment on the behavior of H2O). The interpretive
skillfulness of the scientist is directed at the phenomena of nature and
their laws; but the social investigator is ultimately interested in laws
in the normative sense. This perspective reﬂects something about the
social worlds we investigate: social movements are driven, in part, by
their utopian imaginations. Moral judgments made in a court of law
or in a psychiatric hospital can arbitrate life or death. Generally speaking,
if social life depends, to some degree, on the judgments, ethical
imperatives, and utopian ideals of the people who live it, then a deep
comprehension of the workings of such judgments, imperatives, and
ideals is called for. The normative epistemic mode has at its core a
conceptual method for achieving this goal, a process of theoretical
resigniﬁcation wherein the judgments of the investigator are formed
by the intersection of rigorous utopian theory and sociohistorical
fact. It is an epistemic mode that can produce what David Thacher
has called a normative case study.2
1. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
1999), 29.
2. David Thacher, “The Normative Case Study,” American Journal of Sociology
111, no. 6 (2006).
70 chapter three
II
The focus on the subjective, on consciousness and on consciousnessin-society,
was a recurrent theme of twentieth-century Western philosophy
on both sides of the Atlantic. The philosophies of consciousness
are wide ranging, but one of their recurring concerns is the
ways in which human beings appear to follow rules; to judge each
other’s actions for their appropriateness, rationality, or morality; and
to regulate themselves in groups, via norms. In other words, there is,
in some sense of the term, a normative dimension of social life. What
are the implications of this for the human sciences? The implications
are developed, in the abstract at least, in a classic argument of contemporary
social theory.
In a key early section of The Theory of Communicative Action,
Jürgen Habermas makes a startling theoretical move. He has, at this
point, established (to his own satisfaction at least) that there are
such things as “normatively regulated actions.” This appropriates a
good deal of analytic philosophy on the matter, for what Habermas
is relying upon is the idea that some descriptions of actions are in
terms of whether they “appropriately” follow a rule, or whether they
violate it. Habermas also accepts (perhaps surprisingly) that the social
researcher can produce an “objectivist” account of the prevalence of
a norm in a given time and place. However, says Habermas, in this
kind of description “the question of a rational interpretation does
not arise.” And, he argues, an interpreter satisﬁed with this sort of
description of norms will eventually have to admit that the whole
idea of normatively regulated action is “theoretically unsuitable” and
will ultimately resort to explanations given in “causal-behavioristic
terms.”3
In other words, for Habermas, objectivist accounts of normregulated
behavior do not understand consciousness-in-society. These
accounts do not engage the problem of subjectivity that gives realism
such trouble.
What comes next is important. Habermas then argues that the acceptance
of the idea that actions are norm-guided, and the ensuing
effort on the part of the social researcher to comprehend these norms,
leads to a quite different approach to the human sciences. “[I]f,”
Habermas writes, “the interpreter is convinced of the theoretical
3. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press,
1984), 104.
utopia 71
fruitfulness of the normative model of action, he has to get involved
in the suppositions of commonality that are accepted with the formal
concept of the social world and allow for the possibility of testing
the worthiness to be recognized of a norm held by an actor to be
right.”4
In other words, the “moral-practical appraisal of norms of
action” is the process of “understanding” norms, in so far as this
interpretive process goes beyond objectivism. The interpretation of
consciousness (or, as Habermas sometimes calls it, the practice of the
“historical-hermeneutical sciences”)5
involves getting caught up in
whether the norms that regulate actors’ behavior are right or valid
qua normative statements.
As a result, a parallel is set up that carries through all of Habermas’s
subsequent epistemological writings, in which there are (at least) two
different versions of “rational interpretation.” The ﬁrst—connected
to the human interest in controlling and predicting nature—is the
process by which speakers make claims about the “objective” or physical
world, and the validity of these claims is checked by other speakers
in terms of their correspondence to the state of that world. The
second—vital for Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy—is
the process by which speakers make a claim to regulate their own
and/or others’ action in terms of a collective norm, and the validity
of these claims is checked by others in terms of the rightness of the
norm—its moral worth, its fairness, etc. Habermas considers any
attempt to approach norms from the ﬁrst of these perspectives to be
an impoverished social science, which has succumbed to an ontologically
incorrect account of human action as cognition-based and
instrumental. A historical-hermeneutic perspective supersedes this,
according to Habermas, and in so doing engages with the validity of
the norms themselves. This hermeneutics, then, cannot be reduced
to an account of how norms that exist at a certain time and place do
or do not have certain effects or consequences. Rather, when it comes
to interpretation, questions of meaning and questions of validity
cannot be strictly separated.6
It is tempting to just take on this argument from the perspective
of analytic philosophy, and argue that there is simply a slippage, in
4. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 104.
5. See in particular, Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1971), 301–17.
6. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 106.
72 chapter three
Habermas, between understanding and agreement—and thus to
object that to understand the existence of a norm and to agree with
a norm are different operations of the mind. From a strictly analytic
point of view, this is, I think, true,7
but it massively misunderstands
the Habermasian project. The philosophical problem of “what is a
norm” is not what is at stake for Habermas in his extended contributions
to social knowledge. Rather, what Habermas articulates in
these passages from The Theory of Communicative Action is a philosophical
description of an epistemic mode for producing maximal
interpretations—a mode whereby the investigator involves herself
in a dialogue with her subjects that has as its subject normative validity.
Habermas’s work, however, is but one exemplary instance of
this epistemic mode, which in its fullness offers possibilities for social
research that extend far beyond his speciﬁc concerns. But to see how it
works, to understand the semiotic circuits of normativism, we have to
analyze actual examples of normativist social knowledge claims. One
might as well begin with a claim made by Habermas himself.
III
Consider the following quotation from Habermas’s The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere.
However much the Tischgesellschaften, salons, and coffee houses may
have differed . . . they all organized discussion among private people
that tended to be ongoing; hence they had a number of institutional
criteria in common. First, they preserved a kind of social intercourse
that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status
altogether. The tendency replaced the celebration of rank with a tact
beﬁtting equals. The parity on whose basis alone the authority of the
better argument could assert itself against that of social hierarchy and in
the end can carry the day meant, in the thought of the day, the parity
7. The philosopher of social science David Henderson has ferreted out the many
ways in which philosophers and sociologists use the normative evaluation of rationality
to do explanatory work. He has then proceeded to criticize these tendencies extensively.
For his general philosophical position, see David K. Henderson, Interpretation
and Explanation in the Human Sciences, Suny Series in the Philosophy of the Social
Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). For this particular issue,
see his exchange with Mark Risjord in the journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences, and
especially his extended article on precisely this matter: David Henderson, “Norms,
Normative Principles, and Explanation: On Not Getting Is from Ought,” Philosophy
of the Social Sciences 32, no. 3 (2002).
utopia 73
of “common humanity” . . . Secondly, discussion within such a public
presupposed the problematization of areas that until then had not been
questioned . . . Thirdly, the same process that converted culture into
a commodity (and in this fashion constituted it as a culture that could
become an object of discussion to begin with) established the public as
in principle inclusive. However exclusive the public might be in any given
instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated
as a clique: for it always understood and found itself immersed within
a more inclusive public of all private people, persons who—insofar as
they were propertied and educated—as readers, listeners, and spectators
could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to
discussion. The issues discussed became “general” not merely in their
signiﬁcance, but also in their accessibility . . .8
Herein, we see again the proliferation of fact-signs. The coffee houses
of Europe in the eighteenth century “organized discussion among
private people that tended to be ongoing”; in the coffee houses status
was disregarded; in the coffee houses, people questioned and argued
about aspects of life that they had not questioned and argued about
before. All of these are statements in the language of fact. They can
be disputed (and have been), but such disputation also occurs in the
language of fact.9
But these facts do not become signiﬁcant, for Habermas, until they
are interpreted by theory. Theoretical terms related to the normative
concerns that have animated Habermas’s career infuse this paragraph
with a second layer of meaning. Perhaps the key theoretical signs are
“the authority of the better argument” and “the public as in principle
inclusive.” With these terms, we start to get a maximal interpretation
of the coffee house, Habermas’s discovery of a “kernel” of reason and
8. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 36 –37.
9. Perhaps of particular relevance here are three excellent critiques of Habermas’s
work by Michael Schudson, Geoff Eley, and Mary Ryan, which, though they reach
into the realm of maximal interpretation in their theoretical work, also do tremendous
work in disputing the minimal interpretation upon which Habermas’s normative conclusions
rely. See Michael Schudson, “Was There Ever a Public Sphere? If So, When?
Reﬂections on the American Case,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Mary P. Ryan, “Gender and Public Access:
Women’s Politics in Nineteenth Century America,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere,
ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Goeff Eley, “Nations, Publics,
and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas
and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
74 chapter three
deliberative democracy immanent to (in this case Western) history
and society. The discussions of the coffee houses offer us a vision of
democratic politics that is all the more powerful since these discussions
actually existed. The principles implicit in these discussions are
also the principles of deliberative democracy as Habermas understands
it; the best argument carries the day regardless of who makes it, and,
in principle, anyone who can make such an argument is welcome to
do so.
It is, of course, this “in principle” that signals the modality we are
dealing with, and the speciﬁc logic of Habermas’s argument. For he
recognizes that, in fact, only propertied white men of certain distinction
and with a certain access to leisure and capital could participate
in these coffee house discussions, and that the very functioning of
the public sphere was thus dependent on a ﬁctitious equation of
“property owners” with “human beings.”10
But the maximal interpretation
worked out in The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere is not only about the facts. Rather, it is precisely the tension
between the “principle” of an inclusive public and the actually existing
public of the eighteenth century that is essential to Habermas’s
work. For his goal is to elaborate an ideal, a notion of democracy
and the good society, in conversation with the normative debates
of Habermas’s own time. This elaboration, however, is done via the
interpretation of actual societies and actual history. It travels through
and reconstructs a historically located piece of social life on its way to
normative argumentation.
The second half of Habermas’s case study of the public sphere
participates in a more familiar form of critique and negation, directly
descended from Adorno and Horkheimer. Therein, Habermas contrasts
the immanent ideals or principles of the coffee house to their
disappearance:
Along the path from a public critically reﬂecting on its culture to one
that merely consumes it, the public sphere in the world of letters, which
at one point could still be distinguished from that in the political realm,
has lost its speciﬁc character. For the “culture” propagated by the mass
media is a culture of integration. It not only integrates information
with critical debate and the journalistic format with the literary forms
of the psychological novel into a combination of entertainment and
10. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 56.
utopia 75
“advice” governed by the principle of “human interest”; at the same
time it is ﬂexible enough to assimilate elements of advertising, indeed,
to serve itself as a kind of super slogan that, if it did not already exist,
could have been invented for the purpose of public relations serving
the cause of the status quo. The public sphere assumes advertising
functions. The more it can be deployed as a vehicle for political and
economic propaganda, the more it becomes unpolitical as a whole and
pseudo-privatized.11
Here again, however, we see the same logic of normative resigniﬁcation.
The empirical trends in newspapers and journalism—the
inclusion of advertising, the turn to “human interest” stories, and
so on—are resigniﬁed as the transition from “critical reﬂection” to
“consumption” and “pseudo-privatization.”12
And as such, an evaluation
is implied, and an imperative to reawaken public deliberation. So,
in the second half of Habermas’s text, the normative resigniﬁcation is
a negation, an attempt to upset the taken-for-granted everyday life of
late modern capitalist societies, and to upset, also, the liberal notion of
progress that ideologically informs the people acting within them.
IV
In considering the epistemological basis for this sort of maximal interpretation,
we can start by noting that Habermas’s theory has a clear
utopian referent—rational deliberation, or, as he would later elaborate,
the ideal speech situation. In addition, the language of fact is
taken to be relatively unproblematic. The real action is in the dialogue
that is set up between fact and theory, with the clear implication that
this dialogue, itself, has, in the end, the same utopian referent. Thus
we have a hermeneutic circle in which the attempt to theorize the
good, in the abstract, is completed by the discovery of the good in
history and society. The formal representation of this is similar to the
representation of the semiotics of realism, but note that in this case
the “referent” or “ground” of signiﬁcation does not exist. Rather, the
ultimate ground of signiﬁcation is the ideal that is held in common by
11. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 175.
12. While one could deﬁne “consumption” at the level of fact or empirical trend,
this is not its meaning in Habermas, given that the text is written, as he himself admitted,
in the genre of Marxist ideology-critique. Consumption here takes on its meaning
in relation to other theoretical terms in the Marxist lexicon, e.g., production, surplus
value, and Habermas’s own “systematically distorted communication.”
(Critique)
Theory
Investigator
and community
of inquiry
Evidence
Social
actions
Utopia
Figure 4: Normative maximal interpretation—
critique as social knowledge
(Critique)
Theory of
democratic
communication
Habermas and
readers of
Structural Trans.
Inclusive
deliberation
Historiography of
communication
Discussions in
coffee shops,
eighteenth century
Media in mass
democracies
(Kernel of reason)
Figure 5: Jürgen Habermas’s maximal interpretation in
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
utopia 77
the signifying consciousnesses of investigated and investigator. The
utopian referent links history to critique (see ﬁgs. 4 and 5).
By following the semiotic circuit of Habermas’s argument, our
knowledge of “democratic deliberation” or “the ideal speech situation”
is made deeper because both his theoretical terms and the
social actions that happened refer back to these utopian ideals. This
is not only normative argument about democracy, but also normative
research on democracy. It is important, however, to understand
that this epistemic mode is not limited to, nor made possible by,
the particularities of Habermas’s position. For this reason, I want
to examine the semiotic workings of another, more recent exemplar
of normative signiﬁcation. This will allow the ensuing discussion of
the premises and possibilities of the normative epistemic mode to be
broader and better informed.
V
Leela Gandhi’s position in the ongoing normative arguments of social
and political theory is quite different from, and indeed antagonistic
to, Habermas’s position. Her search for a radically democratic politics
begins from the problematics of postcolonial theory, and in particular
the need to move beyond the “imperial manicheanism” that pits an
anticolonial (and often elitist) nationalism against the logic of empire.
This binary reproduces, inside postcolonial, anti-imperialist thinking,
a reliance on Western categories and politics.13
Previous attempts to
move beyond this binary trouble her as well, however, for she ﬁnds
problematic the determinism inherent in a certain version of hybridity
theory, according to which the West’s colonial project was always
already impossible in some philosophical and/or social sense, and thus
destined—eventually—to be overthrown. As she writes,
Faced with an ultimately unsatisfactory theoretical choice between
the oppositional but repetitive forms of cultural nationalism on the
one hand and the subversive but quietist discourse of hybridity or
13. Gandhi writes that “close cultural readings reveal in place of anticolonial nationalism’s
conﬁdent claim to edenic premodern antiquity a ﬁctive and orientalist-inspired
‘invention of tradition,’ in place of its bombastic assertions of radical difference and
originality a ‘derivative discourse,’ contingent upon the oppressive forms of imperial
nationalism.” Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-De-Siecle
Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 5.
78 chapter three
contrapuntality on the other, some postcolonial scholarship over the
last decade or so has begun the task of reengaging the colonial archive
for more selfconsciously creative forms of anti-imperialism, especially
in its western or metropolitan articulation.14
So, Gandhi wants to return to the archive to understand how agency
may or may not have played a role in the dissolution of empire.
The semiotics of her truth claims work in a manner quite similar
to those of Structural Transformation, since her work of normative
maximal interpretation is also two-pronged: engaging both the
“colonial archive” (the language of fact) and the possibility of an
“anti-communitarian communitarianism” premised on the “politics
of friendship” (the language of theory). Much as was the case
with Habermas’s text, I cannot attempt to represent the entirety of
Gandhi’s argument here, but that is not my purpose. Rather, I will
attempt to understand a bit more about the way theory and fact can
become fused together by examining how Gandhi uses both.
First, let us consider Gandhi’s language of fact. The investigated
subjects of her study are late Victorian Englishmen and women who
formed a variety of affect-laden afﬁliations with members of colonized
populations, while taking up in their writing and life-practice
explicitly anti-imperial politics. So, for example, the homosexual
writer Edward Carpenter not only challenged the heteronormativity
of Darwin-inspired sexology, he also traveled extensively to India,
developed a “lifelong friendship with the Sri Lankan P. Arunachalam,”
and, in his book Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, asserted that British
civilization was a disease that could only be cured with a “fresh inﬂux
of savagery.” This text was cited approvingly by M. K. Gandhi in Hind
Swaraj.15
She considers other cases like this, wherein the exclusion
of certain whites from British civilization led to the possibility of
“negative community with the nonwestern savage.”16
Gandhi brings to her engagement with the archive a signiﬁcant plurality
of theoretical language. Included among these are (1) a critique
of the Kantian project of linking morality and judgment to the radical
autonomy of a uniﬁed subject and, in an effort to provide a positive
alternative to this, (2) a theorization of the forms of sociality—with
particular attention to emotional solidarities—that found polities
14. Gandhi, Affective Communities, 6.
15. Gandhi, Affective Communities, 62–63.
16. Gandhi, Affective Communities, 61.
utopia 79
and collective decision making. Kant’s morality excludes the distractions
of desire and the dogmatism of worship as outside the limits of
reason alone. Gandhi relies on the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques
Derrida, and especially Judith Butler to point out that the Kantian
moral subject is asocial, and thus that, without the transcendental
guarantees imagined by Kant to unify white male Europeans, the
subject so imagined is a quite specious source of good action. In
response, Gandhi articulates a theoretical language in which aspects
of desire and divination become the basis for good communities
and good action. She thus reinvents the moral actor via a “politics
of friendship” that leads to “affective communities.”
Thus we have in this study interesting evidence drawn from the
colonial archive that points to social actions that happened; and we
have an important theoretical problem: how to reimagine the critique
of imperialism and the basis for the good society outside of
the Manichean drama of East v. West, and with a less individuated
political subject? The real ﬁreworks of Gandhi’s study, however, come
not from her adept theorization of anti-Kantian ethics, nor from
her historical narrative of certain late-nineteenth-century and earlytwentieth-century
Brits and Indians.17
It is rather at the intersection
of these two languages that the crux of her study lies. For example,
concerning Edward Carpenter:
Inverting the judgments of evolutionary psychology, Carpenter thus
reclaims the homosexual’s gender ambiguity as proof of his exceptionality.
And with similar consequences, he extends this privilege to the
sexually undifferentiated “savage,” also relegated, as we have seen, to
the bottom of Darwin’s phyletic ladder . . . linking the homosexual
and the “primitive” in a double encomium . . . the “savage” and the
“invert” are named as natural allies and collaborators in a shared battle
against (western) categories of sex: bound to a common cause through
uncommon gifts.18
Gandhi details Carpenter’s travels to the East and his various friendships
and correspondences with Indians that he developed throughout
his life. In doing so, she resigniﬁes Carpenter’s life and work in a way
that strengthens and expands the normative argument for hybridity.
17. Included in her study are compelling histories of the lives of Edward Carpenter,
Mirra Alfassa, Sri Aurobindo, Manmohan Ghose, and Oscar Wilde, among others.
18. Gandhi, Affective Communities, 59.
80 chapter three
In the context of oppressive Western civilization, Carpenter found
in the “invert” an exceptional subject position; Gandhi agrees and
develops the implications:
Liberated from the dull monochrome of sexual dimorphism, this constitutively
doubled and hybrid intermediary was endowed with variegated
sympathies and desires. His asceticism likewise equipped him for the
complex afﬁliative demands of friendship. Here, in a nutshell, we have
the raw materials for Carpenter’s critique of western civilization and
congruent afﬁnities with Europe’s subject races.19
Undoubtedly, one could construct a philosophical argument about
the politics of friendship, and one could retell stories about aberrant
Victorians. But that Gandhi’s study is neither of these precisely,
though it has elements of both, should help us understand what sort
of maximal interpretations are being constructed in the normative
epistemic mode. Her text shows how the transition from minimal to
maximal interpretations can create political possibility, and in particular
a new basis for the critique of empire (see ﬁg. 6).
19. Gandhi, Affective Communities, 62. I do not have space here to go into the full
extent of Gandhi’s argument, but I should mention one more important normative
implication of her study: an extended critique of the destruction of affective ties in
scientiﬁc socialism. See Gandhi, Affective Communities, 177–89.
(Critique)
Critique of
Kantian morality;
theory of
solidarity among
the excluded
Leela Gandhi and
readers of
Affective
Communities
Politics of
friendship
Colonial archive
and postcolonial
literature
History of
empire and its
opponents
Postcolonial
nationalism and
present-day
complicity with
empire
(Kernel of emotional
solidarity)
Figure 6: Leela Gandhi’s maximal interpretation
in Affective Communities
utopia 81
VI
The communication of utopia via semiotic circuit in these two texts
also shares a narrative structure. In both cases, the author delves into
relatively recent history to excavate a form of consciousness or a set
of political principles that are useful for addressing a political question
of present, past, and ongoing concern (for example, how do you
criticize an empire when you inhabit it and beneﬁt from its exploitations
of its—and your— others?). Narrative tension results, in part,
from the fact that in between the then that is being recovered and
the exigencies of critique now, there is a certain sort of displacement:
the rational kernel of the public sphere—deliberation of equals—is
lost in the twinned process of democratization-via-commercialization;
the utopian-anarchic imagination whereby one makes allies with
those radically different than oneself—“affective cosmopolitanism” as
a “politics of friendship”—is dissolved in the advent of “scientiﬁc”
socialism, the development of Freud’s science of sex, and the triumph
of nationalism in the original postcolonial moment. Though I do
not believe that this narrative structure obtains in all instances of
normative maximal interpretation, it does provide a nice segue into
a discussion of the premises of the normative epistemic mode. For
we can begin by asking, what is being recovered (if not discovered)
when a normativist maximal interpretation is constructed?
Presumably, it is bits and pieces of consciousness and action, moral
imperatives and utopian imaginings, that can inform our current
understandings of the good society. The existence of these bits and
pieces lies ultimately in the meaningful lifeworlds of those under investigation,
though the way in which they are drawn together is the
explicit intellectual labor of the investigator. In doing this drawing
together, the investigator accomplishes the resigniﬁcation of consciousness
via theory, and thus proposes to tell a historical story that
is true, evidentially, but whose major focus is not on underlying social
causes, but on political questions and problematics.
Maximal interpretations in the normative epistemic mode, then,
are the empirical articulation of utopian possibility, with carefully used
theory serving as the bridge from the latter to the former.
This research could be called critical sociohistory. But this raises
the issue of what it means to write “critical history,” and in particular
raises a question that has perhaps occurred to the reader: all these utopias
are well and good, but what of dystopia? Is it not a central lesson
82 chapter three
of social and political theory since “the sixties” that so many of the
normative projects articulated in political philosophy and actualized in
social life—from rationalized production to the talking cure—turned
out to be formats of domination or exclusion? One already ﬁnds this
sensibility in Gandhi’s critique of Kantian morality. But to address
the question—and the doubts it raises about the production of truth
in the human sciences, we should go straight to the source.
VII
Consider the following passage from an essay by Michel Foucault:
Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken
continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its
duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present,
that it continues secretly to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined
form on all its vicissitudes. Genealogy does not resemble the
evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people. On the
contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing
events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the
minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors,
the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those
things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that
truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we
are, but the exteriority of accidents.20
A short while later in the same essay Foucault unveils his famous
epigram: “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for
cutting.”21
Is this quote evidence that Foucault insisted on writing history
outside of the bounds of empirical responsibility, and thus outside
the bounds of truth itself (in some sense of the word “truth”)?22
A
20. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader,
ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 81.
21. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 88.
22. In his work on Foucault’s historical sociology, Mitchell Dean writes that
Foucault’s reﬂections in the Archeaology of Knowledge and the essay on Nietzsche
“suggest a form of critical historical study that leaves behind the methods and objectives
of conventional, empiricist historiography without recourse to sterile theoretical
schemas . . . [Foucault’s] statements are united by a fundamental rejection of the
naïve empiricist account of historiography as a reconstruction of the past, and an approach
to the use of historical sources to discover the reality of which these sources
utopia 83
careful reading of the ﬁrst quotation would suggest that the answer is
no—Foucault is arguing that previous approaches to writing history
have substituted metaphysics for careful minimal interpretation. But
what of the epigram—what is wrong with understanding?
To understand the implications of Foucauldian genealogy and the
critical histories that have been inspired by it, one must be very careful
to differentiate minimal from maximal interpretations. If we do this, it
becomes clear that Foucault, in his reﬂexive essays at least, disowned
the use of theory to discover the underlying social causes of actions
in the past. Theory, if it is to serve any use beyond obfuscation, can
only be in and of the present, directed at present problems. In this
view, we can compile facts from the past, and argue about minimal
interpretations, but when it comes to maximal interpretation, we
have to perform genealogy and mobilize the past for political purposes
in the present. Foucault’s distrust was directed at the sorts of
knowledge that reach beyond the facts to construct explanations that
express verisimilitude with deep structures. While I believe that this
epistemological argument is at odds with what some of Foucault’s
own research accomplishes (as I will discuss in chapter 5), it is not, as
his critics often complain, a performative contradiction.23
For Foucault
does not reject the possibility of truth in minimal interpretation.
What he rejects is the realist program for producing deeper
truths about history, via a general, coherent, and referential theory
of society. Epistemologically speaking, Foucault’s opponent was not
Habermas, it was Bhaskar.
are traces . . . Positively, these approaches to method are united by the insight that
history is above all a practice, a practice undertaken in a particular present and for
particular reasons linked to that present.” I suspect there are two ways to read such
arguments, frequently found in the secondary literature on Foucault: (1) as opposing
both empiricism and the use of theory to explain the past causally, and thus aiming
at a form of normative maximal interpretation—which is the reading I work toward
below; or (2) as rejecting empirical responsibility as it is normatively deﬁned within the
academy, and within the discipline of history in particular. I suspect that the ambiguity
of some of Foucault’s more radical statements about history and truth—on the basis
of which either of these two readings could be argued for—is one of the causes of the
extensive interpretive controversy that has always attended Foucault’s impact on the
human sciences. Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Methods
and Historical Sociology (New York: Routledge, 1994), 13–14.
23. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). For a discussion, see Martin Jay, “The Debate over
the Performative Contradiction: Habermas versus the Poststructuralists,” in Philosophical
Interventions in the Unﬁnished Project of Enlightenment, ed. Axel Honneth et al.
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 261–79.
84 chapter three
So, consider the possibility that the Foucauldian mode of writing
history—at least as it has been interpreted by “critical historians”—is
a speciﬁc articulation of a more general normative epistemic mode.
The “history of the present” is not the history of the determination of
the present, but rather history mobilized to address present problems.
What remains as a source of confusion is the way that, in many of
Foucault’s most well-known writings, the referent for the theoretical
sign in normative maximal interpretation is dystopian instead of
utopian. Foucault’s politics around modernity and modern societies
are frustratingly evasive, and for some even evidence of a hidden
conservative distaste for liberal democracy.24
This gets conﬂated with
Foucault’s supposed distaste for truth. Let us examine these arguments
for a moment.
Borrowing a term from Habermas, Andrew Sayer calls Foucault’s
position “crypto-normative.”25
By this he means that Foucault’s
theorization of knowledge/power not only upends more standard
philosophical accounts of an individual knower who possesses fallible
beliefs, but also undermines the attempt in normative argumentation
to articulate utopian possibility. Hence, echoing this argument,
Justin Cruickshank writes that “whilst it is implied [in Foucault’s
writing] that a described state of events is objectionable, no explicit
argument is put forward as to why this is the case, because the notion
of making truth claims about the world has been abandoned.”26
This
argument should be familiar to the reader, for the point Sayer and
Cruickshank make in their work is articulated in much less precise
terms in various conversations, conference presentations, graduate
classes in the human sciences, and perhaps almost anywhere references
to “Foucault” prevail. Informally, Foucault is always hero and villain
simultaneously, destroying truth as we know it (whatever that may
be), but refusing to articulate a new, deeper truth that everyone can
lean on. The argument conﬂates two issues, however. First, the way
24. Again, Habermas is the most well-known, though by no means the only, example.
Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique
22 (1981): 13. For a review of Foucault’s work, and interpretations of Foucault, that
focuses on different ways to read Foucault’s supposed rejection of modernity and/or
humanism, see Nancy Fraser, “Michel Foucault: A ‘Young Conservative’?” Ethics 96
(1985).
25. R. Andrew Sayer, The Moral Signiﬁcance of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
26. Justin Cruickshank, “The Usefulness of Fallibilism: A Popperian Critique of
Critical Realism,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37, no. 3 (2007): 266.
utopia 85
in which Foucault refrains from—or perhaps rejects the possibility
of—offering a positive vision as a counterpoint to his normative
critique of modern social relations and discursive formations. And
second, Foucault’s rejection of realist and/or scientiﬁc approaches
to the study of history and society, and in particular the sorts of ontological
uses of theory that would theorize the causes and origins
of generic social processes.
None of this denies the possibility of constructing true minimal
interpretations and the responsible use of evidence that is necessary
to construct them; I thus ﬁnd it is specious to argue that Foucault
rejects the very possibility that his evidential signiﬁers refer to
something that happened. Foucault, in almost all of his texts, makes
extended empirical truth claims, which is to say, minimal interpretations.
He is quite fond of evidential signiﬁers and relies on the signsystem
of fact frequently. What then is at stake in calling Foucault
“crypto-normative”?
One issue is the substantive use of dystopia as a theoretical anchor.
One can indeed argue—and argue reasonably, based on evidence
from his texts—that the master referents for Foucault’s normative
maximal interpretations are not utopias, but dystopias: the surveillance
society, the extension of sovereignty to the very production
of life and subjectivity, etc. And if this argument is extended a bit,
Foucault can be charged with lacking a progressive vision for social
change, and thus as evidencing some sort of failure of nerve or evasiveness,
I suppose. But this is an argument against Foucault made on the
terms of the normative epistemic mode. It amounts to a critique of
the potential practical effectiveness of Foucault’s maximal interpretations,
and of whether his texts can indeed produce something akin to
emancipation or progress. This is not an argument I wish to resolve
here, though it is worth noting how much Foucault’s writing has
inﬂuenced progressive thinking in such ﬁelds as queer studies.
The issue, however, that speaks directly to the problem of epistemic
modes is this: can one successfully write normative maximal interpretations
that do not, at least implicitly, attempt a deep and true rendering
of the social reality that sits underneath that which is minimally
interpreted? Do the interpretations of social life that point to utopia
require, to retain effectiveness, some sort of strong interpretation
of social reality—perhaps even an explanation of social life? Perhaps
because of Michel Foucault’s disavowals of the search for historical
origins and, in his early work, his unwillingness to explain how one
86 chapter three
discursive formation came to replace another, his name has become
a synecdoche for this issue in the human sciences. But in truth the
problem concerns the entire normative epistemic mode.
Investigations that augment critical theory do so by stoking the
utopian and dystopian imagination of the reader. But to use theory
normatively without at least implicitly having a deeper sense of the
workings of social life in a given time and place leaves the investigator
in an awkward position. In fact, in most texts written primarily
in the normative epistemic mode, a causal story about the social actions
under study is implied. In Habermas, during his Marxist days
at least, there was a causal account of the ideological formations
subject to criticism. “Systematically distorted communication” was
caused by objective power relations and economic system impera-
tives.27
Frederic Jameson’s extended meditations on and critiques of
postmodern culture also assume an explanatory, causal story about
capitalism’s development on a global scale.28
Amitai Etzioni’s vision
of the good society depends upon his theory of what communities
are and how they work.29
But so much of this is implicit, and we recall with nostalgia an era
when normativism and realism complemented each other perfectly
as different expressions of the same intellectual worldview. What is to
be done if this is no longer the case, if the connection between the
real and the good no longer obtains the philosophical clarity that it
did for Marx or Plato?
VIII
In normative maximal interpretation, the purpose of resigniﬁcation is
to work out and work through knowledge of the good society and of
human emancipation via empirical investigation. The master referent
for such interpretations is utopia, and the question is not so much
what is the good as how, when, and where the good can be or was
made actual, in actors’ minds or in social institutions. The narratives
27. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).
28. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Fredric
Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press and the British Film Institute, 1992).
29. Amitai Etzioni, “Creating Good Communities and Good Societies,” Contemporary
Sociology 29, no. 1 (2000).
utopia 87
of history are resigniﬁed with attention to the tension between a set
of social ideals and their empirical manifestation or lack thereof. This
organization of knowledge can be inverted, as dystopia can anchor
critique within the normative episteme mode. For, normative resigniﬁcation
can show how supposedly utopian consciousness contributes,
via its elaboration, to social power and domination. But what does
one need to know about social reality to make such a claim?
Hence the dilemma referred to above: normative work requires
some sort of deeper knowledge about how social life works. The
discovery of utopian possibility would be stronger if it was informed
not only by fact, but also by some sort of explanation. And yet, in
much of what we recognize as normative social research, the contours
of utopian resigniﬁcation are not directly guided and controlled by a
general, coherent, referential theory of social reality—functionalist,
historical materialist, rational-choice, etc. Normativist work that has
rejected realism—perhaps for reasons not that different than the
reasons articulated in chapter 2—appears, then, to be unmoored.
But this dilemma’s appearance of intractability is a result of conﬂating
the possibility of knowing something about social reality with the
necessity of the realist epistemic mode as it has so far been articulated.
There might be other possibilities.
Many social investigators—and especially ethnographers—value
dialogue with their subjects not only because of its normative dimension,
but also because investigators do not expect their theories to set
out how the social works tout court. Normative maximal interpretations
rely upon subject-to-subject dialogue so as to recover utopian
and dystopian consciousness, and ultimately construct compelling
social criticism. But there is another purpose for dialogue between
investigator and investigated—to get into the meaning of social life in
certain time and space.30
This very simple idea—that the investigator
must somehow “get to know” her subjects and produce an interpretation
of the meanings that infuse their lives—will serve as the basis
for the third epistemic mode I will examine. But an examination of
this epistemic mode will require us to consider the possibility that
theory was not quite what we thought it was.
30. For the philosophical articulation and defense of this idea, with speciﬁc reference
to the debate between Gadamer and Habermas, see Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics
and the Critique of Ideology,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on
Language, Action and Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981),
61–100.
88 chapter three
For, there is a formal similarity to the manner in which realism and
normativism square the hermeneutic circle—a similarity masked by
the supposed opposition, in scholarly discourse, between “facts” and
“values.” (As we have seen, normative resigniﬁcation not only makes
a place for facts but draws tremendous authority from them, since
to argue without facts would move a truth claim from the space of
social research to the space of political philosophy.) Both realism and
normativism use theory to produce ultimate and organizing referents
for the research text. Theory relocates the facts in a second conceptual
space, a larger world unknown to the facts themselves: a world of the
fundamental structures of the social (realism) or a world of the fundamental
problems and possibilities of critique (normativism). The
result of this resigniﬁcation can be precise and elegant.
But with normativism—and in particular, in the doubts cast upon
the rationalist utopias of Western political philosophy by thinkers like
Michel Foucault and Leela Gandhi—we begin to see how at least
some of this precision and elegance, perhaps most available in certain
strictly realist explanations, comes at a great intellectual cost. There
is, in the realist epistemic mode, and in the rationalist normativism of
Habermas as well, a disavowal of the meaningfulness of social life as
DuBois recognized it—seething with emotion, bound up in history
and culture, and organized by human beings whose “natures” are so
varied, so different, that the effort of the human sciences is perhaps
confounded more than it is aided by concepts like “human nature.”
For, in engaging the consciousness of others, normative maximal interpretation
opens up to the investigator the sheer variety of ways in
which human beings make their social worlds more or less coherent,
in ways more or less compelling to each other.
There is a dialectical process at work—or at least there was for
this author—in traveling from realism to normativism and ﬁnally to
interpretivism. To leave theories of social reality for theories of social
good has the effect of unleashing knowledge of human subjectivity
that, like Ulysses, had been tightly bound to its ship, and could only
hear the siren songs of sensuality, meaning, and emotion from far
away. Thus when one returns to social reality—which, as a social
researcher, one must—it does not look the same anymore. Gone is
the certainty that general theory, unmediated, can pick out the central
entities and relations in a society. In its place is the realization that
social life—and not just the production of knowledge about it—is
subject to the vagaries of meaning.
Chapter Four
Meaning
The central place of discourse—of the arts of communication and decision
making—in the treatment of problems today gives it the force of a new architectonic
art which transforms the methods of inquiry and discussion in all ﬁelds.
—Richard McKeon, “Discourse, Demonstration,
Veriﬁcation, and Justiﬁcation”
I
What was the texture of social life for a French Revolutionary? What
was it like to attend a Jacobin meeting or to barricade the streets
of Paris? What sorts of meaningful gestures and social risks were
involved in attempting to convince the peasants in your village to
give up their allegiance to the pope? Such questions spur a different
mode of resigniﬁcation in social research. To answer these questions,
the investigator must spiral out through the layers of meaning that
construe human experience.1
Her goal is understanding.
1. Though there are many reference points for the “what was it like” question
and the focus on human experience as a category of understanding for social research,
my speciﬁc ones, beyond the obvious reference to Joan Scott’s “The Evidence of
Experience,” are two. First, W. G. Runciman divides understanding into primary,
secondary, and tertiary levels, with the ﬁrst being reportage (what happened), the
second being explanation (why what happened happened), and the third being the
more interpretation-heavy, aesthetic, and emotional exploration of “what it was like”
to be the actors that were part of what happened. Runciman’s primary concern is the
second of these, and it for this reason, I believe, that he ultimately parts ways with
Max Weber, and with interpretive sociology, to afﬁrm mechanisms of selection as the
90 chapter four
By interpreting layers of social meaning, she may indeed address
questions familiar from realism and normativism. She may answer
the explanatory question of “Why did the French Revolution happen
when and where it did?” or the political question of “How can
we restructure radical social critcism by examining the sansculottes
of Paris?” But, in the interpretive epistemic mode, the investigator
mediates attempts to answer these questions with questions about the
meanings swirling through the experiences of social actors. She does
not begin with a general, coherent, and referential set of theorized
mechanisms, or by attempting to describe the fundamental social kind
referred to by the term “state,” or, for that matter, by deﬁning what
radical politics is, has been, or could be. This is not to say that she is
not interested in ancien régime states, what caused the collapse of the
French ancient régime state, or the possibility of a more democratic
France. It is rather to say that she does not expect the answers to
such questions as “What is a state?” or “What is radical criticism?” to
provide the kind of direct intellectual leverage that is needed to do the
work of the social analysis of evidence. Rather, these questions have
to be approached indirectly, mediated through the interpretation of
social meaning. She directs her efforts, then, to reconstructing the
explanatory reference point for social research, and the interpretation of meaning as
an issue of description.
In contrast, Andrew Abbott has recently championed the cause of “lyrical sociology,”
which he describes as relying upon ﬁgurational language to communicate a
concrete, emotional connection between the investigator and social life as experienced.
Abbott explains that this sort of sociological writing, often found in urban ethnographies
(a good example from historical writing being E. P. Thompson’s The Making of
the English Working Class), is opposed to “narrative” writing in sociology. The latter
includes both positivist, variable-based explanations, but also explanations of the
particularized sort, often found in narrative history—or, as Abbott explains, a variety
of work ranging from “oral histories of individuals to grand chronicles of classes and
ethnic groups.” Abbott insists that lyrical sociology offers a way to connect to social
life that sociologists should not sacriﬁce at the altar of explanation.
In this chapter, I take up a position in clear opposition to Runciman, but slightly
different than that expressed in Abbott’s paper. Although Abbott articulates quite
well a core aspect of hermeneutic sociology—the willingness to openly engage the
social actions of interest in all their strangeness and concreteness—I am of the view
that interpretive analysis can have a lyrical moment that is then elaborated into an
explanation—an explanation that attends to causes excluded by, and uses schemas
foreign to, the more standard explanatory projects of social science (see chapter 5).
Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991). W. G.
Runciman, A Critique of Max Weber’s Philosophy of Social Science (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1972), and W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, 3 vols. (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Andrew Abbott, “Against Narrative: A Preface
to Lyrical Sociology,” Sociological Theory 25, no. 1 (2007): 69.
meaning 91
textures of human subjectivity, and to the meaningful worlds of social
life in which subjects act in a certain place and a certain time.
This effort at reconstruction is also an attempt to build maximal
interpretations. All three of the epistemic modes examined in this
book take as their project the development of a deeper comprehension
of social life, a reading of the evidence that goes beyond the evidence
and yet remains responsible to it. In realism and normativism this is
done by counterbalancing the meaning-system of facts by positing,
via the meaning-system of theory, something other than the social
meanings that attend the social actions under scrutiny. In going beyond
the facts with theory, realism also goes beyond meaning—to
structures of the social as such.2
In this epistemic mode, then, maximal
interpretations are constructed via the use of a (general, coherent,
and referential) theoretical scheme to order and explain the facts.
In a similar way, though with a different purpose, normativism also
uses theory as a sort of window unto the meanings of facts, reframing
them as evidence for utopian possibility. In both cases, theory
provides the means to a resigniﬁcation of social action that is also a
displacement, moving the “social actions that happened” into a brand
new conceptual space. In realism this conceptual space (supposedly)
corresponds to a social reality that exists and has clear causal power;
in normativism this conceptual space is speciﬁcally nonexistent and
for that very reason the fount of critique. But both epistemic modes
share a certain aspect of the operation of resigniﬁcation—theory, by
referencing a new world, enables us to comprehend the evidence as
the expression of something both deeper and more general.
The third epistemic mode under consideration works with a different
notion of what theory is and can do. For, the aim of this
mode is to resignify the evidence by recontextualizing it into a set of
2. This locution raises the issue of whether there is such a thing as a “cultural
realism.” This phrase could mean different things. In the terms of this text, a single,
general, coherent, and referential theory of the social that focused on the fundamental
nature of culture “as such” would qualify as “realist.” Examples might include the work
of Talcott Parsons and Claude Levi-Strauss. But this is slightly misleading, because
the point of interpretivism is not only the focus on meaning and signiﬁcation in social
life, but also how the investigator uses theory to interpret meaning and signiﬁcation in
social life. I hope this will become clear as the text proceeds. If “realism” were to mean
simply the making of truth claims about certain social actions via the use of theory as I
outline it in this chapter, then I suppose the rather oxymoronic “interpretive realism”
could apply to the perspective developed here. But as I argued in chapter 2, in terms
of the use of theory in the human sciences, “realism,” or the realist epistemic mode,
means something more speciﬁc than that.
92 chapter four
deeper meanings that are also historically and socially limited. The
resigniﬁcation moves from one set of social meanings to another set
of social meanings: from the “surface” meanings easily inferred from
the evidence to the “deep” meanings that require much more interpretive
work to access. In the interpretive epistemic mode the work
of maximal interpretation makes claims about the symbolic order and
makes these claims in a way that remains within the orbit of the social
actions under scrutiny. The investigator moves from one set of meanings
that she ﬁnds in the evidential signiﬁers of her case to another
set of meanings that, she claims, are also existent in that case. It is
because of this meaning-to-meaning relationship that I call this mode
of resigniﬁcation interpretive, and refer to it as interpretivism.
Interpretivism also carries with it certain ontological commitments.
But these commitments sanction a very different use of theory in research,
and undermine the realist preference for a general, coherent,
and referential social theory, as well as undermining the tendency, in
certain sociological realisms, to get underneath meaning entirely, to
the hard structures of the social that are theorized ontologically. In
interpretivism, there is no social as such—at least not in the way there
is for realism. Instead, the social (and the possibility of criticizing it)
emerge on what I will call landscapes of meaning.* These landscapes
are historically particular (and often peculiar), and yet can, in some
cases, extend through large swaths of time and space, thus making
them discursive formations with tremendous inertia and power. In this
chapter, I look at the process by which theory is used by investigators to
reconstruct these landscapes of meaning. In chapter 5, I argue that this
interpretation of meaning can in fact form the basis for the investigator
to reach the goals central to both normativism (critique) and realism
(explanation), with a special focus on how precisely the interpretation
of meaning can contribute to the causal explanation of social action.
But ﬁrst things ﬁrst: invoking “interpretive” social research tends
to bring to mind a series of problems and skepticisms rather than a
positive program for knowledge. Winch’s impossibility arguments
concerning social science qua science, Rorty’s ironic antiessentialist
epistemology, and myriad other arguments for the impossibility or
even the sheer irrationality of social knowledge are often associated
*After this text went into production, I discovered that William Sewell Jr. uses this phrase
on the last page of his essay “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Logics of History: Social
Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 174. For
Sewell’s account of interpretive social science and history, see Logics of History, 318–72.
meaning 93
with any discussion of interpretation or hermeneutics. But this is
not necessary. To understand that interpretive social research makes
strong knowledge claims, one only has to look at some of its iconic
texts. Then, we will be able to understand the epistemic premises
and workings of such knowledge claims without the interferences of
a postmodern skepticism that merely rewrites in reverse the overconﬁdence
of a scientistic sociology.
II
That Clifford Geertz’s “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockﬁght”
is—despite the author’s occasional comments to the contrary—what
I am herein calling a maximal interpretation is easily gleaned from the
cries of his critics, whose objections to Geertz’s ability to provide a
deep interpretation of Balinese culture are many and well known.3
But let us set aside, for the moment, the extended debates about the
politics, epistemology, and philosophical implications of this rather
infamous essay and ask—as Geertz himself might have done were the
essay not his but a “note in a bottle”—what actually takes place in
this text? Undoubtedly, Geertz’s text is full of ethnographic detail, or,
in the terms being used here, evidential signiﬁers. However, it also
makes extensive use of theory. Consider an example:
Bentham’s concept of “deep play” is found in his The Theory of Legislation.
By it he means play in which the stakes are so high that it is, from
his utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all. If a
man whose fortune is a thousand pounds (or ringgits) wages ﬁve hundred
of it on an even bet, the marginal utility of the pound he stands
to win is clearly less than the marginal disutility of the one he stands
to lose. In genuine deep play, this is the case for both parties. They are
both in over their heads.4
This theoretical signiﬁer is plucked from its original intellectual
context, and is used to illuminate a phenomenon far from Bentham’s
concern—and indeed, far from his utilitarian social theory. Consider
3. See, in particular, Vincent Crapanzano, Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire:
On the Epistemology of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1992); Michael Burawoy, Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern
Metropolis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 278–83; Ann Swidler, Talk
of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 19–23.
4. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockﬁght,” in The Interpretation
of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 432–33.
94 chapter four
ﬁrst some of the evidential signiﬁcation pointing to the social actions
under study:
the general pattern is for the betting to move a shorter or longer distance
up the scale towards the, for the sidebets, nonexistent pole of
even money.5
(1) the higher the center bet is, the greater the pull on the side betting
toward the short odds end of the wagering system, and vice versa;
(2) the higher the center bet is, the greater the volume of side betting,
and vice versa.6
In other words, in cockﬁghts, the big ﬁghts are the ones in which
much money is wagered by the owners of the birds, indeed, too much
money. Here, then, is Geertz’s analysis of “what the Balinese are up
to,” in which theory and evidence are brought together:
despite the logical force of Bentham’s analysis men do engage in such
[deep] play, both passionately and often, and even in the face of law’s
revenge . . . for the Balinese, though naturally they do not formulate
it in so many words, the explanation lies in the fact that in such play,
money is less a measure of utility, had or expected, than it is a symbol
of moral import, perceived or imposed . . . in deep [games] where the
amounts of money are great, much more is at stake than material gain:
namely, esteem, honor, dignity, respect—in a word . . . status.7
Geertz uses a piece of theory to illuminate a piece of meaning that
underlies the actions of the men who engage in cockﬁghting in Bali.
Already, we can see that this is not realist resigniﬁcation, because
the term “deep play” is not expected to point to some entity that
underlies and explains men who gamble in all sorts of places. Rather,
it is used to “ferret out hidden meanings” and thus illuminate the
meaningful context of Balinese gambling.
However, before jumping to a consideration of the semiotic workings
and epistemological premises of this text—and the many texts of
cultural history and cultural sociology that followed it—we need to
notice something else. Geertz repeats this exercise of using a theoretical
concept to illuminate social context. And the theories he uses to do
this are quite different from each other. Consider another instance:
5. Geertz, “Deep Play,” 428.
6. Geertz, “Deep Play,” 430.
7. Geertz, “Deep Play,” 433.
meaning 95
the deep psychological identiﬁcation of Balinese men with their cocks is
unmistakable. The double entendre here is deliberate . . . Bateson and
Mead have even suggested that, in line with the Balinese conception
of the body as a set of separately animated parts, cocks are viewed as
detachable, self-operating penises, ambulant genitals with a life of their
own. And while I do not have the kind of unconscious material either
to conﬁrm of disconﬁrm this intriguing notion, the fact that they are
masculine symbols par excellence is about as indubitable, and to the
Balinese about as evident, as the fact that water runs downhill.8
Geertz here puts the (Freudian-anthropological) theory before the
evidence, following this paragraph with an extended catalogue of
the variety of ways in which Sabung (the word for “cock”) is used
in everyday speech. It is, Geertz shows, a signiﬁer of extended and
varied metaphorical use.9
So, at stake in cockﬁghts is not just status
but a certain sort of masculine status (this would not be as surprising
to anthropologists informed by feminist theory as it is to Geertz).
Then, after ﬁnishing his analysis of the cock metaphor with a quote
from his landlord that “we are all cock crazy,” Geertz moves to a third
meaningful dimension of the cockﬁght. He writes:
The madness has some less visible dimensions, however, because although
it is true that cocks are symbolic expressions or magniﬁcations of
their owner’s self, the narcissistic male ego writ out in Aesopian terms,
they are also expressions—and rather more immediate ones—of what
the Balinese regard as the direct inversion, aesthetically, morally, and
metaphysically, of human status: animality.10
This illuminates another aspect of his data, which is a binary that runs
throughout Balinese culture between human (sacred) and animal
(profane). Geertz again interprets a whole series of evidential signiﬁers
with this (Durkheimian) theoretical idea.11
In addition, he argues
that this binary is exquisitely produced, represented and transgressed
by the cockﬁght itself: “In the cockﬁght, man and beast, good and
evil, ego and id, the creative power of aroused masculinity and the
destructive power of loosened animality fuse in a bloody drama of
hatred, cruelty, violence, and death.”12
8. Geertz, “Deep Play,” 417–18.
9. Geertz, “Deep Play,” 418–19.
10. Geertz, “Deep Play,” 419.
11. Geertz, “Deep Play,” 419–20.
12. Geertz, “Deep Play,” 420 –21.
96 chapter four
Thus, contra the myriad commentaries on Geertz that refer in
one way or another to his writing style, his extraordinary rhetorical
abilities, or to his supposedly idiosyncratic academic personality,
there is in fact a structure to this analysis that cannot be written off
as “Geertz being Geertz.”13
That structure is this: different theories
are brought to bear on the evidence, in an attempt to comprehend
what begins as a relatively undeﬁned and un-understood meaningful
context. As each theory illuminates an aspect of this context, a fuller
comprehension of the context as a whole is developed. By the end
of the cockﬁght essay, Balinese cockﬁghting “makes sense” to the
reader, because it has been adequately contextualized—in this case,
by the comprehension of the meanings of masculinity, animality, and
wealth/status in Balinese culture. The social actions of cockﬁght are
situated within a larger context, and thus resigniﬁed as an expression
of that context (see ﬁg. 7).
13. Comments on his “literary ﬂair”—as the New York Times obituary for Geertz
put it—are common, and generally tend to be complimentary. And yet, there is a way
in which the repeated insistence on Geertz’s academic style has combined with his own
reticence to participate in theoretical disputation to suggest subtly that his work, while
deeply inﬂuential in many different disciplines, cannot be assimilated into the core
logic(s) of social science. The most recent iteration of this argument—compelling
and complimentary of some of Geertz’s unique abilities, to be sure, but ultimately
problematic in its conclusions—can be found in Fred Inglis’s editor’s introduction to
a collection of Geertz’s essays (for the New York Review of Books) and recent lectures.
There, Inglis, citing Geertz as a “great writer,” argues that “it is, however, precisely
Geertz’s concern to refuse and, if possible, paralyze the assumptions which direct
[courses in social-scientiﬁc methodology] and which pour concrete over the brains of
those who have to take them,” and thus that “the inimitability of Geertz’s style makes
it intractable to discourses on method.”
I think to draw a connection between Geertz’s genius as writer and his refusal of
methodology in the way Inglis does—concluding, then, that Geertz’s brilliance justiﬁes,
somehow, not reasoning about conceptual method in social research—is a mistake.
There is no doubt that Geertz resisted the kinds of methodological formalization that
he thought reduced interpretive sensitivities and the possibility of ethnographically
achieved understanding. But does this mean that Geertz was antimethod altogether?
And anti-conceptual-method in particular? This argument, oddly, has the tone of an
elitist approach to the human sciences (no one except for supergeniuses like Geertz
can do what Geertz did), and ultimately, I think, serves to marginalize Geertz’s contribution.
Why should we not scrutinize Geertz’s texts for clues to the epistemic mode
he was employing?
I want to avoid writing off Geertz’s work as “pure genius.” Instead, a central goal
of this chapter and this book is to see the highly inﬂuential work of ﬁgures such as
Geertz as manifestations of a broader articulation of the conceptual logic of the human
sciences. Geertz’s particular take on interpretive or symbolic anthropology should thus
be taken as something of an exemplar—not the only one, and with speciﬁc ﬂaws that
should be addressed and remedied—of the interpretive epistemic mode.
Theoryof
deepplay
Statusand
honorin
Balinesesociety
Gambling
at
cockfights
Field
notes
C.Geertz
and
audience
Theoryof
sacred/profane
binary
C.Geertz
and
audience
Field
notes
Filingof
children’s
canines,
etc.
Animality/
humanityin
Balineseculture
Balinese
masculinity
C.Geertzand
audience
Field
notes
Meanings
of“cock”
Theoryofsexual
symbolics,
unconscious
drivesandjokes
Balinesecockfight
Figure7:CliffordGeertz’smaximalinterpretationin“DeepPlay”
98 chapter four
So, Geertz is indeed in search of depth in interpretation. The point
of such resigniﬁcation is manifestly to resituate cockﬁghting as an expression
of a set of larger tensions and themes within Balinese culture.
This differentiates Geertz radically from Peter Winch; Geertz does not
stay “close to the ground,” nor does he just produce an interpretation
of the rules attending the cockﬁght. He does reconstruct these
rules, of course: the betting system surrounding cockﬁghts in Bali,
for example. But these rules are then resigniﬁed via theory. Reconstructing
the rules of the betting system is a minimal interpretation.
Resignifying these rules as involved in a masculine status game that
thematizes the distance every high-status man desires from animality
is a maximal interpretation.
But what is the epistemic status and knowledge-purpose of this
maximal interpretation? What intellectual work does it do? Geertz was
notoriously ambivalent about the answer to these sorts of questions.
There is no better evidence of this frustrating ambiguity than the
end of Geertz’s “thick description” essay, wherein he claims that the
purpose of interpretive anthropology is “not to answer our deepest
questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding
other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them
in the consultable record of what man has said.”14
At best, this is
evasive. At worst, it is an imperative to salvage the savage. Serious
effort, then, needs to be devoted to ﬁguring out how these sorts
of interpretations work, and what their claims to knowledge really
claim. Another example of such analysis—one with quite different
politics and a lot less dissembling about what is at stake in taking an
approach dedicated to elucidating the consequences of meaning-insociety—will
be helpful in this endeavor.
III
“Anorexia,” writes Susan Bordo, “appears less as the extreme expression
of a character structure than as a remarkably overdetermined
symptom of some of the multifaceted and heterogeneous distresses
of our age.”15
She goes on to develop her remarkable explanation of
14. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,”
in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 30.
15. Susan Bordo, “Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of
Culture,” in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 141.
meaning 99
anorexia as a behavior that results from three overlapping themes or
“axes” in contemporary (1980s) American culture. She takes as her
overarching premise a very interpretive, meaning-centered proposition:
“cultural practices have their effect on the body as experienced,”
but also on the physical body itself. This sets up her argument that
takes “the psychopathologies that develop within a culture, far from
being anomalies or aberrations, to be characteristic expressions of
that culture; to be, indeed, the crystallization of much that is wrong
with it.”16
In other words, both the body and the mind are situated
within culture, and what we do with our bodies and our minds is
overdetermined by the “cultural currents” we all swim in.
But, as with Geertz, this general proposition does not get you
very far—it is rather in the mobilization of theory for the project of
recontextualizing anorexia where one ﬁnds the action of her essay.
First comes the “dualist axis.” A longstanding theme in Western culture,
Bordo ﬁnds the division of self into mind and body, or soul and
body, or even into immaterial self and body as not-self, to be written
not only throughout Western philosophy beginning with Plato, but
also in the diaries of anorexics. The body is alien, a conﬁnement, and
an enemy. By setting these diaries against the classics of philosophy,
Bordo makes clear that “a highly conscious and articulate scheme of
images and associations—virtually a metaphysics—is presented by
these women.”17
Anorexic women struggle to overcome their evil
appetites, as if they were philosopher kings. They are trapped in their
bodies, much as Augustine’s soul was trapped in his.
Second is the “control axis.” Trapped these women may be. But
they draw not only from the longstanding division in Western culture
between mind (sacred) and body (profane). They also articulate a
hypermodern desire for a realm of complete control, separate from
need and practicality. Like bodybuilders, anorexics feel that while
their lives may be completely out of control, at least they can master
their bodies, over which they can achieve total domination. Every
bodybuilder, and every anorexic, is a local Stalinist. Each plan met,
each successful dietary restriction performed, goes further in denying
the inevitable decline of age, the development of “baggy” body parts,
and so on. As Bordo writes,
16. Bordo, “Anorexia Nervosa,” 141.
17. Bordo, “Anorexia Nervosa,” 147.
100 chapter four
The dream of immortality is, of course, nothing new. But what is unique
to modernity is that the defeat of death has become a scientiﬁc fantasy
rather than a philosophical or religious mythology. We no longer dream
of eternal union with the gods . . . we work on keeping our bodies as
smooth and muscular and elastic at forty as they were at eighteen. . . .
Finally, it may be that in cultures characterized by gross excesses in
consumption, the “will to conquer and subdue the body” (as Chernin
calls it) expresses an aesthetic or moral rebellion.18
Third, Bordo introduces the coup de grace, the “gender/power axis.”
These women are engaged in a rejection of their mothers—their
rounded bodies and the feminine mystique that went with those
bodies. Anorexics also revolt against the image of the female as needy;
repelled by this image the anorectic throws herself into the project
of thinness. This is a doomed revolt, however, because it happens on
the terms of sexist culture, and, importantly, under the male gaze.
Anorectics report carrying a voice in their heads—a male voice—that
objects to their eating. They thus both aspire to the traditionally
male ideals of spiritual discipline, and submit themselves to men in
so doing—many anorexics report going on their ﬁrst diet in response
to a comment from a male authority ﬁgure.
This rather terrifying analysis of cultural pathology, in which subjective
motivations are shown to be a crucible of social power precisely
in so far as they are formed by overlapping discursive formations, is
simultaneously an exercise in specifying historically the meaningful
context for a certain set of social actions. Each axis Bordo introduces
reduces the time-space swath to which she is referring, until she
is analyzing a speciﬁc generation of American middle-class (white)
women—all subject to the same commercials, the same diets, and the
same men. And, at each point, she uses different theoretical resources
to illuminate the axis she is focusing on: ﬁrst Western philosophy itself;
then theories of science, modernity, and control; then theories of the
male gaze (see ﬁg. 8).
The mantra of interpretive analysis, then, is plurality in theory,
unity in meaning. In the texts of Geertz and Bordo, there is a clear
sense in which a single theory is not supposed to carry the day. And
there is just as clear of a sense that, with the use of multiple theories,
a structure of meaning can be disclosed that—however fragmented,
18. Bordo, “Anorexia Nervosa,” 153.
Figure8:SusanBordo’smaximalinterpretationin“AnorexiaNervosa”
Theoryof
mind/body
binaryinhistory
ofthewest
Body-as-enemy
Anorexics’
hatredof
their
bodies
Anorexics’
journals
S.Bordo
and
audience
Theoryof
individualismand
desireforcontrol
inmodernity
S.Bordo
and
audience
Anorexics’
journals
Anorexics’
feelingsof
empowerment
Protestagainst
femininity;working
womennotlike
theirmothers
Themalegaze
inpost-1960s
US
S.Bordoand
audience
Anorexics’journals
andadvertisementsin
magazines
Anorexics’relationships
tofathers&boyfriends
Theoryof
gender/
power/
discourse
Anorexianervosa
Deepmeanings
Surface
meanings
Evidence
Investigatorand
communityof
inquiry
Theory1
1
1
Deepmeanings
Surface
meanings
Evidence
Investigatorand
communityof
inquiry
Theory
2
2
2
Deepmeanings
Surfacemeanings
Investigatorand
communityofinquiry
Theory3
3
3
Evidence
Socialactions
Figure9:Maximalinterpretationintheinterpretiveepistemicmode
meaning 103
contradictory, or labyrinthine—holds together into a sort of whole
with deep social consequences. The criteria, so central to the realist
resigniﬁcations of Skocpol and Moore, that theory be general, coherent,
and referential, have been jettisoned. Instead, theories are used
to illuminate aspects of a meaningful social context, regardless of
whether these theories are true as descriptions of the social in some
general sense, and the coherence of the maximal interpretation derives
from the coherence of background meanings interpreted to be surrounding
the social actions under study, and not from the coherence
of the social theories mobilized to achieve this understanding. The
coherence is in the case, not in the theorist’s head.
The ontological commitment, then, is to the efﬁcacy of social
meaning. The said and the sayable, the social imaginary, the symbolic
framework, the discursive formation, and so on: these terms have
quite different valences and different uses, but they are all impossible
to use without some notion of the social consequences of collective
representation. What is not necessary, however, is the idea that these
meanings always work in the same way with the same social effects—to
create solidarity, for example, or to exalt a charismatic leader. Meaning
has myriad, and perhaps inﬁnite, uses—the investigations of Geertz,
Bordo, and others are dedicated to tracing some of them.
Cultural sociology and cultural history, then, commit to the reality
of meaning. But, in so far as they work in the interpretive epistemic
mode, they dispense with the idea that a singular theory of culture
can master this reality. Instead, the reality of meaning is mobilized
in the service of a certain form of resigniﬁcation that draws upon
theories pluralistically (see ﬁg. 9).
IV
In the time since Max Weber called for—and worked through many
of the premises of—an interpretive sociology, myriad theories of
meaning-and-society have sprung forth, as have myriad theories of
the complex human subject, whose actions and motivations must
be understood by verstehende sociology. If each of these theories
were used in a realist way, they would be found incommensurable
with each other. For example, if one takes Julia Kristeva’s theory of
the abject as a general, coherent, and referential theory of the social
actor as such, then it of necessity will come into conﬂict with Weberinspired
theories about the historical development of a certain sort of
104 chapter four
agential rationality, wherein at least some agents, some of the time,
are not motivated by the horror of death embodied in the not-me,
but rather are motivated to make money via double-entry bookkeep-
ing.19
Each of these theories, that is, produce a very thick and detailed
account of the social actor and what makes them act, and the theories
are—if taken as general theories that refer directly to the reality of
social actors—massively incompatible with each other. To put them
together in a single general framework which references social reality
would render that framework incoherent. But just because the use of
a theory does not match the premises of realism does not mean that
it is not useful for investigating reality.
For, these theories are not, as we have seen in Geertz and Bordo,
mobilized in a realist way. Rather, the theories merge with the meanings
of the evidence so as dig up the “double meaning” of the social
actions under study—the hidden or tacit background within which
actors act.20
Reconstructing the meanings of social life that are not
consciously intended or obviously denoted by interviewees’ state-
19. Or, people are motivated to make manifest the disposition of their souls . . .
which leads, eventually, to double-entry bookkeeping, which is a practice useful to
those who are more instrumentally motivated. See the discussion of Weber’s Protestant
Ethic in chapter 5.
20. Harry Collins’s brilliant new work, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, clariﬁes many
of the essential philosophical issues surrounding the idea of “tacit” or “background”
knowledge as used by human beings. Collins divides tacit knowledge into three types:
(1) weak-relational tacit knowledge, which is knowledge that could easily be made
explicit but is not for logistical or strategic reasons (e.g., secrecy); (2) somatic tacit
knowledge, which is knowledge linked to the speciﬁcity of the substance of human bodies;
(3) strong/collective social knowledge, which is the property not of an individual
but of society, and is thus available to individuals only if they become “parasitical”
upon society. Though Collins, working in the philosophy of knowledge, focuses on
a term, “knowledge,” which is not in the end equivalent to what social researchers
mean by either “meaning” or “culture,” his examination of the way that collective
tacit knowledge is the most powerful sort of tacit knowledge is parallel to the line of
thought I pursue here. Just as the depth interpretation of meanings must go beyond
the ﬁrst-level rules that “knowledgeable agents” follow in interaction, so in Collins’s
work, the questions philosophers of tacit knowledge have asked about rule-following,
game-playing, and bicycle-riding are recontextualized into the strong, collective dimension
of tacit knowledge. As Collins writes: “In world championship chess there is much
more going on than what happens on the board—there is all the gamesmanship that
begins with the setting up of the challenges and the location of the tournament—at
which Bobby Fisher seems to have been an arch-exponent. Chess played under the
circumstances of the cold war does not follow the same conventions of aesthetics and
gamesmanship as chess in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, and it has probably
changed again with the victory of Deep Blue.” This points directly to the historicity
of landscapes of meaning that I will discuss at length below. Harry Collins, Tacit and
Explicit Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 120.
meaning 105
ments or archival documents, but that underlie, form, and structure
those very statements, is the primary intellectual goal of the interpretive
epistemic mode. The meanings come in various layers, with
various valences, and must be reconstructed using various theories.
In doing this reconstruction, the investigator will move beyond her
subjects’ conscious understandings of what they are doing, and beyond
her evidence, into the territory of maximal interpretation. But
when she does so, she must stay responsible to the depth understanding
of her case, using theory to dig out the underlying meanings.
This intellectual instinct toward the in-depth case study, enacted by
many ethnographers, has a deeply historicizing implication for social
research and social theory.
As many historians and sociologists inﬂuenced by Geertz and
Bordo (and Foucault) have realized, the commitment to the reality of
social meaning that orients interpretive analysis implies that all other
social ontologies must be historicized.21
The classic terms of debate in
social theory—agency, structure, mechanism, solidarity, rationality,
etc.—which are taken to be both general and referential, and thus
to transcend historical particularity in their ontological status, now
have to be analyzed relative to shared meanings, which are historically
variable. Geertz made as much clear in his classic essay on “Person,
Time and Conduct in Bali,” and historians such as Robert Darnton
have taken up this implication, in the sense that they articulate how
certain social forces (e.g., workers’ solidarity) emerge within and
through certain meaning-formations, informed by certain mythological
themes (e.g., the evilness and femininity of cats, the imaginative
possibilities of carnival).22
What we need, then, is a metaphor for the
21. This point, more than anything else, differentiates the interpretive epistemic
mode from attempts, in critical realism, to include meaning, concept-dependence,
conscious actors, etc. into the realist scheme. The historicizing implications of interpretive
sociohistorical inquiry, in my view, cannot be squared with the ontological
ambitions of realist social theory, wherein real mechanisms and structures are present
and interact with meanings or concepts in some way. As I argue in chapter 5, the
meaning-mechanism relation is not one of different social forces interacting, but rather
one in which meaning gives concrete form to the social forces that, in realism, are the
touchstones of social explanation. Without the form given by meaning, the theorization
of social forces remains a useful abstraction at best and a nonexistent illusion of the
analyst at worst. See chapter 5 for further discussion of the former possibility, and for
an account of how interpretive historicism constructs explanatory truth claims.
22. Clifford Geertz, “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali,” in The Interpretation of
Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 360–411. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre
and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
106 chapter four
interpretive goal of understanding the meanings within which social
processes take place, a metaphor that can capture the way in which
meaning is the ground upon which social life proceeds. One metaphor
has suggested itself in a particularly powerful way in the last thirty
years of social theory—the metaphor of ﬁeld.
V
The imperative for the investigator working in the interpretive epistemic
mode is to grasp a world of communicated sociality: the meanings
that make up relations, script rituals and performances, inﬂect
messages and gestures, and give weight to social ties; the meanings
that constitute the “space” upon which social action proceeds. That
is what all of this talk of layers of meaning, historical location, and
cultural difference ultimately references. Social life, rather than being
reducible to the will and intentions of its members and the mechanisms
that emerge from their interactions to constrain and enable
them, is instead infused with and formed by the concrete, available
symbols through which actors move, as they get on with their strategies
and manipulations, their rebellions and reproductions, their
struggles and jubilations.
In a good deal of sociological and anthropological literature, the
metaphor that has been used to take social research beyond individuals,
interactions, and social mechanisms has been that of ﬁeld.23
Associated not only with Pierre Bourdieu’s champ but also with a
variety of work in social psychology and institutional analysis, the
23. John Levi Martin explains that “ﬁeld theory . . . emphatically does not attempt
to give an explanatory account in terms of mechanisms” and thus points toward a realm
of explanation that addresses neither “lower level” mechanisms nor “higher level”
functions. “Somewhat formulaically, we may say that ﬁeld theories, like mechanistic
theories (and unlike functionalist theories), reach toward the concrete and propose
only local action, but like functionalist theories (and unlike mechanistic theories), they
insist that any case must be understood in terms of the global pattern.” Levi Martin
also hazards that ﬁeld theories are proposed when there appear to be no good mechanistic
explanations of a phenomenon on the horizon. However, while admitting the
provisional nature of ﬁeld theories, he also suggests that sociological theories need to
“refrain from privileging automatically a theory that can be linked to mechanisms.”
I agree with the latter argument, but I think ﬁeld is not the right metaphor to get at
the nonmechanistic, nonindividual, nonfunctionalist format of explanation that Levi
Martin is clearly interested in. John Levi Martin, “What Is Field Theory?” American
Journal of Sociology 109, no. 1 (1): 10, 12, 13.
meaning 107
idea is that there are certain social ﬁelds upon which action takes
place, and moreover—as the multiple meanings of the metaphor
would dictate—these ﬁelds make social life somewhat like a battle,
and somewhat like a game. The ﬁeld metaphor attempts to capture
the tacit dimension of social life, and in particular the way that the
habits of body and mind upon which actors rely end up aligning with,
and quite often reproducing, the social worlds they have to navigate.
There is argument here of tremendous theoretical intensity—over
whether Bourdieu’s development of the concept of habitus in relation
to ﬁeld is a fundamental key for sociological theory and explanation,24
or whether it is entirely ill deﬁned,25
or whether in its deﬁnition it is
contradictory because it relies upon an unsustainable idea of unconscious
strategy.26
Whether or not habitus is a sustainable sociological concept,
however, the metaphor of ﬁeld does other important work. First,
it construes the social world as a set of realms of struggle—from
academic careers to artistic recognition to politics and economics. A
ﬁeld embodies a set of rules according to which struggle takes place,
as well as struggles over the rules and regulations of the ﬁeld itself.
Here again theoretical argument over the utility of the metaphor
is intense. Does ﬁeld theory hide, underneath its account of different
overlapping ﬁelds, with different rules, a universal theory of the
actor as cynical and power-seeking? If so, it would appear that ﬁeld
theory does not live up to its claim to account for the way in which
subjective dispositions emerge from socialization into various ways
of being, and into the rules of certain ﬁelds—rather it has a universal
theory of the actor not entirely unlike rational choice theory.27
But to
this critique there is an answer: actors who struggle for position in a
ﬁeld almost always simultaneously evidence some sort of orientation
to the core values of the ﬁeld in so far as they struggle to embody
24. David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997), 95–142.
25. Peter Hedström, Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4.
26. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Fin De Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and
the Problem of Reason (New York: Verso, 1995), 152–55.
27. Craig Calhoun, “Habitus, Field, and Capital: The Question of Historical
Speciﬁcity,” in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma,
and Moishe Postone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 70 –72.
108 chapter four
them, approach sacrality, etc.28
So actors are both value oriented and
instrumental, simultaneously.29
But ultimately the theoretical torque of the metaphor of “ﬁeld”
comes neither from its implied ontology of the actor, nor from its
conception of social life as a struggle. It comes, rather, from the way
in which ﬁeld theory enables the investigator to grasp the tenor of
social life beyond and in between subjective perception, on the one
hand, and the relatively map-able (“objective”) social environment
on the other. Field theory grasps the tacit and the intersubjective as
the core medium in social life, and this, it seems to me, is why ﬁeld
theory represents such a tremendous theoretical advance over various
ontological dualisms in social theory. But the way ﬁeld theory does
this is by setting up a topology of social life in the speciﬁc meaning of
the term ‘topology’—the idea being that ﬁelds, if bent or stretched,
would look very similar to each other.
For, in attempting to grasp the tacit rules that make social order
possible, navigable, and reproducible, ﬁeld theory suggests that different
ﬁelds are, ultimately, isomorphic. The “relational theory” of
the social implied by ﬁeld theory suggests that ﬁelds are graspable
in terms of the reality of relationships that obtain between winners
and losers, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and so on. And because ﬁelds
are isomorphic, actors can move between them by converting their
ﬁeld-speciﬁc capital. If you diagram a basketball court on a piece of
malleable rubber, with enough stretching you can make it resemble a
soccer pitch; the struggle for territorial gain on an American football
ﬁeld can, from a bird’s eye view, look like the reenactment of a Civil
War battle. This isomorphism, furthermore, is what enables the close
connection between ﬁeld theory and a conception of social life as
what Sherry Ortner has called “serious games.”30
28. In this way, Bourdieu’s sociology, in particular, attempts to synthesize the
classical traditions stemming from Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber, a
point made clear by the interpretations of Bourdieu that have emerged in American
sociology.
29. A point made by Talcott Parsons. See, in particular, Talcott Parsons, The Structure
of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of
Recent European Writers (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1937; and Talcott
Parsons, Edward Shils, and Neil J. Smelser, Toward a General Theory of Action: Theoretical
Foundations for the Social Sciences, abridged ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 2001).
30. Sherry B. Ortner, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1996).
meaning 109
It is this element of ﬁeld theory—and not the elements of unconscious
strategy, or the emphasis on social power and domination in
Bourdieu’s writings—that I ﬁnd to be the most problematic. For, in
my view, the isomorphism of ﬁelds, and the conversions that, according
to the theory, actors make in moving from one ﬁeld to another,
belie the sorts of translations of meaning that are actually required
of actors when they navigate different spaces of social life. The overlapping
meaningful worlds of ritual, gesture, bodily comportment,
writing, speech, and deep mythological meaning that give social life
its texture cannot so easily be made commensurable. Is it not in fact
with a great deal of meaning-work that translations from one social
context to another are made?
To understand this meaning-work, the formalistic advantages of
the ﬁeld metaphor have to be sacriﬁced so that the content and
contours of meanings, and the phenomenology of the subjects who
use these meanings, can be reconstructed with more attention to
their peculiarities, their strange myths, their speciﬁc semiotic singularities,
their unusual regimes of signiﬁcation. The concrete effectiveness
of meaning upon social action requires a different metaphor
if the epistemics of the operation of interpreting it are to be fully
understood.31
VI
So, try this instead: what interpretive analysis does is reconstruct
landscapes of meaning. The analogy for social investigation, then,
is not the opening up of a mechanical clock (and thus looking for
a mechanism), nor is it the observation of a chess game or the diagramming
of the action on a football ﬁeld (and thus identifying the
31. This, then, is where one must depart from John Levi Martin’s quite brilliant
articulation of ﬁeld theory, and go down the hermeneutic rabbit hole, in which
the formal structures of social life, be they mechanisms or ﬁelds, are in fact given
concrete effectiveness by the meanings that, in many sociological perspectives, they
are supposed to produce. This problematic could also be expressed as a debate
about how to interpret and apply Bourdieu’s theories, and in particular as to how
meaning-full, and how historically speciﬁc, “ﬁelds” really are. For an example of an
analysis of ﬁelds that evidences this sort of historical sensitivity (and shows much less
fondness for formalized theory), see George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting:
Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest
Africa, Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2007).
110 chapter four
ﬁeld and its rules),32
but rather the painting of a landscape. When an
investigator reconstructs the layers of meaning in which the social
actions under scrutiny are embedded, what she does is paint a picture
of the meanings—historically located, fabricated by the human
imagination—upon which social life proceeds.
In other words, the core truth claim of maximal interpretations in
this epistemic mode is the disclosure of a landscape or landscapes of
meaning. Consider a classic Brueghel painting, such as The Harvesters.
On this vast and varied landscape, there are a variety of human actors,
which we can infer are motivated to do a variety of activities. Examining
the landscape further, we see that various hard “institutions” can
arise—trees, houses and a church, a city in the distance—and various
soft ones—the ﬁelds of wheat that have certain paths cut through
them, for example. The actors have certain capacities to interact effectively
with the landscape—tools with which to reap the ﬁelds and
repair buildings, etc. In these interactions, they activate certain larger
processes and mechanisms. However, ultimately the actors and their
related social processes are painted with the same paint, and painted in
the same style, as the landscape upon which they move. This landscape
is the concrete instantiation of meanings made by humans, to which
humans become subject, and through which humans must act and
interact. As actors position themselves in different places on a given
landscape, they take up different (subject) positions, and thus have
different views of it. The world looks different from the bell tower
than it does from the ﬁelds, takes on different meanings from within
the schoolhouse than from within the factory, and so on. Thus the
landscape metaphor captures the variety of ways in which meaning
and processes of communication provide the basis for, and give form
to, actors’ subjectivities and strategies.
The landscapes that surround certain actions are not necessarily
similar to, or easily transformable into, other landscapes that surround
other actions—or even landscapes that overlap and thus provide certain
actions with more than one meaningful context. A joke made in
one landscape makes no sense in another; a certain performance ﬁnds
an avid audience here, but not there; the technology of printing is
32. In Bourdieu’s ﬁeld theory, ﬁnding the investigator’s place on the ﬁeld is important
for understanding what can and cannot be seen, much as, for Niklas Luhmann,
observation of a social system or subsystem can be conceptualized as a function of
the system or subsystem itself. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1995).
meaning 111
useful for spreading the oral authority of ministers in one landscape
of meaning, and for spreading democratic demands for transparency
in another.33
And ﬁnally: the transformation of landscapes of meaning
takes work; it is precisely this that captures how social actors can only
do so much—even in tandem—to change underlying meanings. And
it is for this reason that actors who act at the intersection of more
than one landscape of meaning tend to invent clever ways of switching
between them rather than trying to overhaul one of them.
It must immediately be said that the social researcher’s metaphor of
landscape is in direct opposition to what landscape painting did ideologically
during the formation of the British empire. There, landscape
was supposed to naturalize and objectify a given relationship between
classes, and between human beings and nature.34
But the point is
quite different for the social researcher. The researcher reconstructs
a landscape that is ultimately fabricated by human minds and human
bodies. She reconstructs meaning as a landscape so as to capture the
way in which meaning is made by groups of humans, and yet exceeds
the grasp and manipulation of any subset of them.
Thus, in participating in landscape reconstruction—something
that, literally speaking, happens in the investigator’s text—the investigator
cannot reduce different social landscapes to isomorphic ﬁelds.
She has many theoretical tools to enable good painting. But no master
brush will reduce jokes about killing cats, religious demonstrations
about gay marriage, and the meaning of soul music to a fundamental
set of social antagonisms, cleanly set out in the master (theoretical)
painting of which all others are derivative. There is no master
painting—only scenes to reconstruct using different brushes.
What does this mean for social investigation? Many have concluded
that it means that theory is useless, or even that achieving verisimilitude
between the truth claims of social knowledge and what actually
proceeds in social life is impossible. But instead, consider this: on
the one hand, the interpretive investigator still does what social investigators
do: she must give an account of actors and the situations
they are in, the institutions they participate in, the mechanisms they
trigger. And yet, before this makes any sense, she will have to get the
33. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere
in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
34. Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1998 [1984]).
112 chapter four
landscape right. She will have to identify the contours and colors of
the ﬁelds, hills, and mountains upon which everyone has to move.
Actors and the occasional institution or historically located, highly
speciﬁc social mechanism may be the more proximate and singular
causes of this or that event, but none of this will make the remotest
bit of sense if the landscape upon which it all takes place is not reconstructed.
In Puritan America, a printing press enabled ministers
to bring their authority into the homes of those who did not hear
their sermons. In the Early Republic, it allowed pamphleteers to create
a protodemocratic public. Without understanding the concrete
landscape of social meaning, the investigator will only comprehend
a printing press without form or content (a machine with no purpose),
and distribution through a social network that is real but mute
(a mechanism without meaning).
But how, in the interpretive epistemic mode, does the investigator
use theory and evidence together to disclose these landscapes?
VII
Let us ﬁrst note that there is one way in which a given landscape of
meaning is “general.” It is general for the social actors that move
upon it. And, for this reason, in disclosing it, the investigator necessarily
generalizes from her evidence to posit a meaning-system or
discursive formation. Presumably, Geertz’s insights about Balinese
masculinity, the Balinese status system, and the repulsiveness of animality
to the Balinese are meanings that do not only hold for the
actual cockﬁghts he witnessed. And presumably, in addition to being
on display at other cockﬁghts that he did not attend, these meanings
hold during other concrete activities as well—not just during
cockﬁghts. (Though perhaps they are never so clearly expressed as
they are during cockﬁghts.)
But this is not what social researchers usually mean when they
refer to the generality of their concepts. Rather, as we saw in the realist
mode of resigniﬁcation, what “generality” means—particularly
when sociology and political science are contrasted with history and
anthropology—is that certain concepts are part of a general, coherent,
and referential theory of social life, which has wide applicability.
In the realist mode, of course, not all mechanisms are present in all
cases—if so, there would be no basis for comparison. But in principle,
the theoretical conceptualization of a causal mechanism could
meaning 113
apply anywhere, anytime. That is what makes them general, and, in
the realist epistemic mode, useful.35
In realism, the articulation of a
causal mechanism in abstract theory is what creates the intellectual
conditions for “testing” for its existence. So, maximal interpretations
are founded on a general, complex theory of the social world that
works itself out in the analysis of comparable and ultimately commensurable
cases.
In interpretive social research, however, the relationship of general
concepts to the production of maximal interpretations works differently.
The maximal interpretations emerge from the disclosure of a
landscape for action, but this particular landscape is not a general
feature of the social. It is historically located and culturally speciﬁc.
Thus in interpretive research a sort of hybrid sign tends to emerge
repeatedly, a sign whose denotations and connotations seem to exceed
the sum of what is indicated by the theoretical and evidential
signiﬁers that make it up: ‘deep play in the Balinese cockﬁght’; ‘the
male gaze internalized by the anorexic girl.’ These compound signs
mark out a certain dimension of the meaningful context for a set of
social actions. In them, abstract theoretical terms are brought to bear
on the evidence, and, mediated by the evidence, they help to disclose
a landscape of meaning that is effective for a certain swath of time
and space. The precise time-space extension of the landscape is itself
a case-based question.
In using theory and evidence in this way, we are a long way from
the testing of hypotheses.36
So what are the constraints upon interpretation?
It appears—from our examples at least—that there
35. An exemplary version of this approach has been developed by the philosopher
of social science and comparative social researcher Daniel Little, whose early work in
analytic Marxism was followed by his account of social science as concerned with causal
mechanisms at the mesolevel. See Daniel Little, The Scientiﬁc Marx (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Daniel Little, Understanding Peasant China:
Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989);
Daniel Little, Microfoundations, Method, and Causation: On the Philosophy of the Social
Sciences (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998); Daniel Little, “Explaining
Large-Scale Historical Change,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30, no. 1 (2000).
36. Indeed in what follows I depart from the long tradition of ﬁtting so-called
qualitative analysis into a frame imported from natural science or from realist social
science. My point, in the following discussion, is to try to imagine (1) how theory is
used in the reconstruction of deep meanings, and (2) how the practice of “ferreting
out” these meanings is still one that seeks validity and verisimilitude. My conclusions
about how social analysis should be executed thus differ considerably from, for example,
Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientiﬁc
Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
114 chapter four
are two constraints operating on this process wherein investigators
“ferret out hidden meanings” and disclose the landscape upon which
action proceeds, two regulators of interpretation that hold epistemic
relativism at bay.
The ﬁrst is localized veriﬁcationism: a piece of theory (a subset of
the theoretical signs used in a given maximal interpretation) must
adequately and reasonably comprehend the surface meanings indicated
by a subgroup of evidential signs. Theory moves beyond data
toward deeper meaning, but in doing so the surface meanings still
have to make sense to the researcher and her audience as the deeper interpretation
develops. For example, the theoretical term “deep play”
allows Geertz to move beyond a surface understanding of Balinese
gambling as action guided by a speciﬁc set of rules and conducted—as
gambling generally is—in the hopes of making money. Yet, even as
“deep play” risks a deeper interpretation of Balinese cockﬁght gambling,
it remains nonetheless a concept appropriate to the practice of
gambling. Implicit in the idea of deep play—that some bets are for
so much money that it is beyond rationality to make them—is the
more mundane meaning of gambling (to take risks and make money).
Indeed, this is perhaps precisely why Geertz takes the concept from
Bentham. And: when Bordo goes beyond her evidence to conceptualize
the role of the male gaze as an aspect of post-1960s American
middle-class culture, it is nonetheless the case that her theory of the
“gender-power axis” ﬁts a certain bundle of evidence: the diaries of
anorexic women that attest to feeling spurred on in their diets by
an imagined male voice, or to have started a diet at the urging of a
father, brother, or boyfriend. Thus, in this aspect of building maximal
interpretations, interpretations are tethered to the meanings of the
evidence, but still underdetermined by them.37
Thus a nonvicious
37. Thus this moment in interpretive analysis parallels, though it does not replicate
precisely, the possibilities and problems of the Duhem-Quine thesis. To use Quine’s
terms, theories form a “web of belief ” that changes when confronted by facts, but
not via a process of rejecting a clearly testable hypothesis. The analytic philosophy of
science has worked through a variety of types of underdetermination and what their
consequences are for the rationality of the scientiﬁc endeavor. And, as Daniel Little
points out, these appear to be exacerbated in social science: “It would seem that social
science claims are even more subject to underdetermination than the claims of mechanics
and physics. In addition to the problem of unidentiﬁed interfering causes and the
need for auxiliary hypotheses, we have the problems of vagueness and speciﬁcation. We
commonly ﬁnd that social science theories offer general statements about social causes
and conditions that need to be further speciﬁed before they can be applied to a given
set of circumstances. And there are almost always alternative and equally plausible ways
meaning 115
hermeneutic circle ensues: having used a piece of theory to guess at
these deep meanings, the investigator then sets out to gather more
evidence for or against them.38
Localized veriﬁcationism is thus one constraint on interpretation.
It is a constraint “from below,” in which theoretical concepts must be
appropriate or adequate to the evidence. But there is pluralism here,
since different theories can be brought to bear on different bundles
of evidence within a case. There is, however, another constraint to
the interpretive reconstruction of landscapes of meaning, a constraint
“from above.”
For, in building a maximal interpretation, the hidden, depth meanings
posited by each theory-evidence interaction must be themselves
brought together in an overarching reconstruction of the meaningful
landscape. There must be some coherence to the reconstruction of the
case. Thus, as the investigator attempts to build a maximal interpretation
of a set of social actions, her localized theory-fact interpretations
must be brought together in some way that makes sense. From this
constraint, several of the most recognizable maneuvers of interpretive
analysis result. An investigator returns to a certain, problematic
bundle of theory-and-evidence and reexamines it in terms of her
of specifying the concept in a particular setting.” Daniel Little, Understanding Society,
879. Published electronically at http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com.
Here, I am suggesting that the reason why the problem of the speciﬁcation in explanation
is different (or “worse”) in the human sciences is the arbitrary and conventional
nature of signiﬁcation, and thus the idiosyncrasy of the impact of meaning on social
life. Ultimately, then, this underdetermination to interpretation is countered by the
second constraint on interpretation—holism or “making sense” of a case—discussed
below. See Sandra Harding, ed., Can Theories Be Refuted? Essays on the Duhem-Quine
Thesis (Hingham, MA: D. Reidel, 1976), especially Pierre Duhem, “Physical Theory and
Experiment,” 1–40, and W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” 41–64. For
an account of how the problem of underdetermination relates to current controversies
in the philosophy and sociology of natural science, see Helen Longino, The Fate of
Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 59–67, 124 –28.
38. This is, I believe, Richard Biernacki’s interpretation of how the investigator is
to construct and use ideal types in research. Biernacki writes that the search for truth in
social science involves an “ethics of interpretation,” and thus that “the inconvenience
of evidentiary ﬁndings for our ideal types and the pressure these ﬁndings put on the
value positions anchoring those types comprise the truth process as it is available to
Weber.” And he writes in a particularly provocative passage, “if we insist our conceptual
models originate in and remain in some sense creative fancies, explanation in sociology
does not consist of propositions about the interactions among these dreamt concepts.”
Richard Biernacki, “After Quantitative Cultural Sociology,” in Meaning and Method:
The Cultural Approach to Sociology, ed. Isaac Reed and Jeffrey C. Alexander (Boulder:
Paradigm Publishers, 2009), 119–207, 178, 179.
116 chapter four
emerging overall interpretation. Or, confronted with contradictory
deep meanings posited by different theory-and-evidence pairs, she
looks to her evidence for an indication of how the actors under study
manage such a contradiction or the way the contradiction is merely
apparent and in fact masks a deeper unity or whether there are, in fact,
different sets of actors in her case, with different meanings operating
for each of them.
The constraints on interpretation, then, are coherence from above
and adequacy from below. It is both of these constraints, working in
tandem, that make the pluralistic use of theory remain empirically
responsible to the case. Thus, in the interpretive epistemic mode, although
the investigator does not demand coherence of all her theories
taken in the abstract, she does work with the imperative that there
must be at least a minimal coherence to the case. Landscapes change,
and terrains can have hills, meadows, and even deserts. They have
cities, towns, and army barracks. But landscapes cannot be radically
incoherent. Neither can the hidden meanings of a case. Or at least
we must know: if, on the landscape of meaning, the church is across
the road from the liquor store, how do the agents who frequent both
manage this apparent contradiction?
If this account of how the disclosure of landscapes functions is correct
(and I believe that it ﬁts well the interpretations of both Geertz
and Bordo reconstructed earlier), then some important consequences
for social analysis follow. First, the sort of interpretive perspicuity and
selectiveness that makes for a compelling maximal interpretation of
the social actions under study should not be mistaken for theoretical
parsimony. The maximal interpretation may indeed present a parsimonious
or elegant reconstruction of a case, creating analytical
leverage with which to better comprehend certain social actions. But
the interpreter may use many theoretical terms or schemas to accomplish
this, and thus theoretical parsimony should not be a governing
criterion for what makes a good maximal interpretation. The task is,
ﬁrst and foremost, to make the meaningful landscape intelligible to
the reader, to render its contours clearly, and show its fault lines with
care. The actions under study must come to make sense, even if one
must use multiple theories to reconstruct the landscape of meaning
that enables our maximal interpretation to achieve this.
Secondly, a well-disclosed landscape may or may not give hints as
to what another landscape, from another time and another place, will
meaning 117
be like. A landscape, once disclosed, is not immediately generalizable.
For this reason, theories come to prominence not because they
are shown to explain directly many different instances or cases, but
because they have been repeatedly useful as part of many different
investigations into many different meaningful landscapes, each one
using a plurality of such theories. Maximal interpretations are better
or worse, in so far as they responsibly use evidence and conform to the
case at hand; theories are more or less useful, in so far as they allow
the interpretive investigator to do this reconstruction.
VIII
What does the pluralistic use of theory to reconstruct a meaningful
landscape do? What sorts of knowledge claims are these reconstructions
of the meanings of a case? In the next chapter, I will argue that
maximal interpretations of this sort are explanations. But I would like
to set up this question by returning to our beloved French Revolution,
and to the debate between William Sewell Jr. and Theda Skocpol
about ideology and the French Revolution, which took place in the
Journal of Modern History in the 1980s. This intellectual exchange
has become a reference point for debates about the relationship of
the “cultural turn” to comparative-historical sociology and to social
research more generally. But what it also reveals is an epistemological
question about causality and interpretation.
Sewell and Skocpol argued about the role that ideology played in
the run up to, and during, the momentous events that took place
in France—and especially in Paris and Versailles—between 1789 and
1799. Originally Skocpol admitted that “revolutionary ideologies
and people committed to them were undoubtedly necessary ingredients
in the great social revolutions,” but nonetheless found these
ideologies wanting in terms of their generalizability into her scientiﬁc
scheme. She thus wrote that “it cannot be argued . . . that the
cognitive content of the ideologies in any sense provides a predictive
key to either the outcomes of the Revolutions or the activities of the
revolutionaries who built the state organizations that consolidated
the Revolutions.”39
Ideologies, for Skocpol, were relegated to the
39. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,
Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University of Chicago Press, 1979), 170.
118 chapter four
unstructural, and thus unscientiﬁc, theories of revolution, alongside
“the purposive image of how revolutions develop.”40
Sewell, on the other hand, was part of a larger move in the American
historiography of the French Revolution toward a fuller engagement
with the symbolic in social life. He insisted in his critique of
States and Social Revolutions that Skocpol “has not made her causation
multiple enough—she has not recognized the autonomous
power of ideology in the revolutionary process.”41
A structural theory
of ideology, Sewell argued, could add explanatory power to Skocpol’s
framework. Empirically speaking, Sewell was interested in the existence
of monarchial, corporatist, and Enlightenment ideologies
among elite political groups in the years leading up to the revolu-
tion.42
So, in his critique, Sewell suggested that Skocpol needed to
include ideology in her multifactor approach to revolutions.43
But
Sewell also suggested a different, and somewhat contradictory, implication
of bringing a structural theory of ideology to bear in the
analysis of the French Revolution. He wrote that “doing this [i.e.,
bringing ideology in] . . . does more than add one more ‘factor’ that
can account for some portion of the change that took place. It also
leads to a fundamentally different conceptualization of the process of
revolution.”44
This is because, according to Sewell, “ideology must
also, as most recent theorists have insisted, be understood as constitutive
of the social order . . . It is not enough to treat ideology as a
possible causal factor explaining some portion of the change wrought
by revolution. If society is understood as ideologically constituted,
then adding ideology to the account will also mean rethinking the
nature, the interrelations, and the effects on the revolution of state,
class, international and other structures.”45
This is a much stronger
statement, and there is an important epistemic incongruity between
40. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, 17.
41. William H. Sewell Jr., “Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reﬂections on the
French Case,” Journal of Modern History 57, no. 1 (1985): 58.
42. Sewell, “Ideologies and Social Revolutions,” 62–66.
43. I am glossing here key issues of the difference between “culture” and “ideology”
in their many uses (see William H. Sewell Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in
Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Lynn Hunt and Victoria E. Bonnell. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999). I want to emphasize instead the difference between the inclusion
of some notion of “culture” in a realist explanatory framework, on the one hand,
and the development of an interpretive approach to social explanation, on the other.
44. Sewell, “Ideologies and Social Revolutions,” 58.
45. Sewell, “Ideologies and Social Revolutions,” 61.
meaning 119
Sewell’s two suggestions. It is precisely this incongruity that Skocpol
exploited in her reply to Sewell, with particular attention to the
extreme-sounding claim that ideology is “constitutive of the social
order.” She wrote that Sewell had an “unrealistically totalistic and
synchronous” understanding of ideology. She thus considered his
“anthropological” perspective as unable to comprehend the “complex,
changing, highly stratiﬁed sociopolitical orders” that are at issue
in comparative historical sociology and, presumably, in social research
generally.46
Instead, Skocpol suggested, we should follow a “more
historically grounded approach.”47
She thus wrote that “Historians,
sociologists, and political scientists are not well served by supposing
that sets of ideas—whether intellectual productions or cultural
frameworks of a more informally reasoned sort—are ‘constitutive of
social order.’ Rather, multiple cultural idioms coexist, and they arise,
decline, and intermingle in tempos that need to be explored by intellectual
and sociocultural historians.”48
If we examine Sewell’s own
work, however, we ﬁnd that he by no means assumes a totalistic or
synchronous understanding of “cultural frameworks.” For example, in
Work and Revolution in France, he describes how workers drew on the
corporate language of the ancien régime to articulate their claims in
the context of, and in opposition to, the liberal, individualist language
that formed the meaningful background for many postrevolutionary
institutions, especially the law.49
What to make of this now iconic exchange? The trouble was, and
is, with the verb “constitute.” Sewell argued that Skocpol needs an
46. Theda Skocpol, “Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary
Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell,” Journal of Modern History
57, no. 1 (1985): 89–90.
47. Skocpol, “Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction
of State Power,” 90. Given the reception of Skocpol’s States and Social
Revolutions by some historians, I am inclined to view the use of “historical grounding”
as a discursive maneuver, one that perhaps covers real differences in epistemic mode
by operating in the language of empiricism.
48. Skocpol, “Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction
of State Power,” 91.
49. William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor
from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). For a
further exploration of how this work exempliﬁes interpretive social research, see Isaac
Ariail Reed, “Justifying Sociological Knowledge: From Realism to Interpretation,”
Sociological Theory 26, no. 2 (2008): 101–29. For Sewell’s own theoretical reﬂections
on the epistemological contours of his work, see William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History:
Social Theory and Social Transformation, Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
120 chapter four
understanding of ideology as “anonymous, collective, and as constitutive
of social order.”50
The third term in this description of ideology
allowed Skocpol to criticize Sewell’s emphasis on the symbolic as both
simplifying and reductive. But the problem with Skocpol’s response
was not, or not only, that it did not correctly comprehend or evaluate
Sewell’s own work. Rather, in hindsight, it appears questions about
how one should build a social explanation were somewhat distorted
in so far as they were translated into a debate about “material” and
“ideal” factors. After all, in the end, neither Sewell nor Skocpol deny
the importance of either “material” or “ideal” factors in bringing
about the Revolution—though there is a lot of criticism back and
forth concerning how focus on one type tends to lead to an underestimation
of the role of the other.51
So what was really at stake in all
of this talk about ideology, and the “constitution” of the social
order?
Sublimated into the battle between “cultural” and “material” factors
were unacknowledged differences between Sewell and Skocpol
in epistemic mode. This was perhaps hidden by the way in which
Sewell and Skocpol both sought an “explanation” of the French
Revolution. But what is an explanation? The two scholars construct
maximal interpretations of the French Revolution in fundamentally
different ways. Indeed it is the case that for Sewell ideology is not
just one more factor. But this is not because he views ideology as the
only factor. It is, rather, that his interpretive work on ideology also
changed his fundamental approach to what makes for a good explanation,
and how to achieve it.52
Sewell’s critique of Skocpol, then, contains in pristine, historically
grounded form an ambiguity that runs through the entire cultural
turn: is meaning “one more cause” in a general model of the social,
or does the importance of meaning to social life imply an entirely
50. Sewell, “Ideologies and Social Revolutions,” 61.
51. Jeff Goodwin has pointed to chapter 4 of States and Social Revolutions in an
effort to argue that, while perhaps not attending to “cultural idioms,” Skocpol does
include an analysis of “political ideologies” in her explanation. See Jeff Goodwin,
“How to Become a Dominant American Social Scientist: The Case of Theda Skocpol,”
Contemporary Sociology 25, no. 3 (1996): 294. Reciprocally, Sewell himself admits that
ideology is not the only thing that matters—the exigencies of political situation and
access to resources contribute to determining the course of social action. So we are left
with the question of what, exactly, is the argument between these two researchers?
52. William Sewell Jr., Logics of History; Social Theory and Social Transformation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
meaning 121
different mode of social analysis? If the latter is true, then one is faced
with the question of how to comprehend causality in the shifting
historical world to which the human sciences must, according to
interpretivism, address themselves. How, that is, can we reconceptualize
causality once we have moved from robust correlations and/or
mechanism identiﬁcation into the interpretive epistemic mode, where
we reconstruct meaningful landscapes?
Consider, then, a fact that Skocpol makes a point of—that the
Russian revolutionaries knew about the French Revolution, and the
Chinese revolutionaries knew about the French and Russian revolutions.
What is the signiﬁcance of this? For Sewell, and for interpretivism,
the signiﬁcance would be great, because the landscape of
meaning upon which the Russian Revolution proceeded included the
outcome and subsequent interpretation of the French Revolution. And
the outcome and subsequent interpretation of the Russian Revolution
makes up part of the meaningful landscape upon which the Chinese
Revolution occurred. Different meanings, for different revolutions,
in different valleys . . . But how should we think of these landscapes
of meaning as effective?
Chapter Five
Explanation
A symbol whose interpretation does not reach into the production of physical
effects, bring its reasonableness into the universe, is a failure as a symbol.
—C. S. Peirce, unpublished manuscript 417, 411
I
The compelling fusion of theory and evidence creates a maximal
interpretation that, by power of intellect, reconstructs the critical
reader’s understanding of the social actions under scrutiny. How this
fusion happens can differ according to what I have called epistemic
mode. So, different notions of what theory is for, and how theory
does what it does, emerge: realist, normative, interpretive.
If one is inclined to the position developed in the last chapter—that
the human sciences are in some deep way interpretive, and that this
is reﬂected in how researchers use both evidence and theory—then
a key philosophical move awaits the interpretivist. It is sophisticated
and informed by developments in both Anglophone and Continental
philosophy, and it is draws upon a pluralism and liberal universalism
that feels familiar to many academics in the West. The move is this:
to argue that what realists call explanation is in fact redescription,
1. Cited in John R. Lyne, “Rhetoric and Semiotic in C. S. Peirce,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 66, no. 2 (1980), 163. Lyne’s recasting of the issue is: “Because it calls
out a habit of interpretation, the sign has a capacity for excercising a regulative force,
and for making things happen” (162).
124 chapter five
which is to say, the resituating of known facts and actions in a new
intellectual context. And what normativists call critique is, likewise,
redescription from a new perspective, according to which previously
acceptable actions become intolerable, old ways of being and acting
are revealed as domineering, and visions of what can and should be
acquire new life. Inquiry generally—perhaps even natural scientiﬁc
inquiry—can be understood as recontextualization.2
In this view, the earnestness of realism and of normativism—to
try to know what is really there, on the one hand, and to demand
and hope for what might be possible, on the other—are perhaps
necessary for our knowledge practices to proceed. But ultimately, we
have to recognize that the pretentions to superior and long-lasting
rationality that are implied by the knowledge claims of realists and
normativists are a bit much. The knowledgeable interpretivist may
indeed agree with many of the substantive claims made when social
knowledge is constructed by investigators working in the realist or
normativist mode. But he resists the frameworks that secure such
knowledge claims, for not only does he ﬁnd these frameworks indelibly
ﬂawed, but he also ﬁnds fault with the very idea that one needs
a sustainable framework to prop up social knowledge. In the end,
then, he is a metatheoretical ironist. As an expert philosopher and
epistemological insider, he upholds only a (neo-)pragmatic attitude,
inﬂected by postmodern hermeneutics. After all, most knowledge
claims are just interpretations.
This philosophical move is a terrible idea and should be resisted
at all costs.
The political problems of overdone irony and proliferating skepticism
have been much discussed and should by now be relatively
clear—it is an intellectual mood that can rend not only the possibility
of deep, and deeply held, truth in social research, but also the ways
that such truths might be brought to consequence, thus undermin-
2. The generality with which this thesis is sometimes stated can be startling. In
“Inquiry as Recontextualization,” for example, Richard Rorty suggests that his neopragmatist,
antiessentialist account of inquiry would understand the development of
a “new context” to accommodate new beliefs to cover, among other things, “a new
explanatory theory, a new comparison class, a new descriptive vocabulary, a new private
or political purpose, the latest book one has read, the last person one has talked
to; the possibilities are endless.” Richard Rorty, “Inquiry as Recontextualization: An
Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation,” in The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science,
and Culture, ed. David R. Hiley, James Bohman, and Richard Schusterman (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991), 59–80, 61.
explanation 125
ing the pragmatist ambition that supposedly supports it.3
But there
is another problem to this line of thought. If all sorts of knowledge
claims are, in the end, “just interpretation,” then the victory won
over scientistic philosophy and naturalist social research is a pyrrhic
one. We will have criticized the philosophical pretentions of positivist
or realist explanations, or the transcendental ambitions of normative
critique, but we will not have attempted to alter the mode by which
they produce their maximal interpretations. We will have left intact
the process that produces the actual, substantive knowledge claims.
The in-house goings-on of these maximal interpretations are left
unchanged if the interpretivist, stepping back from the study of social
action, resigns himself to philosophy as ill-fated commentary.
In contrast to this, one of the greatest intellectual contributions of
realism—especially clear in the writings of Rom Harré, Roy Bhaskar,
and Mario Bunge—is that social researchers can and should attempt
to construct causal claims about the social world.4
I have tried to show
how the realist mode of making such claims draws upon a metaphor
that connects social scientiﬁc theory to natural scientiﬁc theory, and
consequently that, because this metaphor breaks down, realism for
the human sciences has to be critiqued, reformed, and resituated. To
this argument I would now propose an addition: to throw away the
possibility of knowing social causes with the possibility of naturalism
is to conﬂate the goals of social research with its means.5
3. Perhaps the most cogent of these critiques is Thomas McCarthy, “Private Irony
and Public Decency: Richard Rorty’s New Pragmatism,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2
(1990): 355–70.
4. Bhaskar and Bunge still ﬁnd naturalism a useful frame for this project, while
Harré has rejected the ontological approach to social structure taken up by Bhaskar,
and has turned toward the analysis of narrative and symbol as ways to understand the
mind’s construction of the world instead. Rom Harré and Grant Gillett, The Discursive
Mind (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994); Rom Harré, “Social Reality and
the Myth of Social Structure,” European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002).
5. It is tempting to use Rorty’s critique of representational theories of truth as a
weapon against realism and naturalism in social research, but I think this is a mistake
and a conﬂation. One can maintain that to make truth claims involves making representations
of the world, but argue that the way that this works in the human sciences
involves the pluralistic use of theories to build better concrete, historically located
maximal interpretations of events, and thus that the naturalistic inheritance of realism
is highly problematic as a conceptual method for social research. This critical view
towards Rorty’s antirepresentationalism emerged in conversations with Neil Gross and
Benjamin Lamb-Books. For an account of the development of Rorty’s philosophy as
a case study in the new sociology of knowledge, see Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The
Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
126 chapter five
A similar point can be made when it comes to interpretation and
social criticism. If we must deeply engage the meaningful life experiences
of people in various social groups, variously deﬁned, when
developing social critique, should we not emerge from this process of
interpretation with a much ﬁrmer sense of commitment, as opposed
to a distanced irony about different ways of being? It is by no means
a logical ﬁnality that recognizing the ambiguities of interpretation
that attend to social criticism implies a dismissal of the use of theory
in producing it. Perhaps we must give up the system-building, false
universalisms of an earlier era and engage the spheres of justice and
different logics of justiﬁcation that are available to both actors and
philosopher-critics, and perhaps not.6
But either way, surely the shedding
of false universalism is a means to a more effective politics of
knowledge?
The position of the earnest, committed interpretivist is well known
and relatively well established in political theory, with clear and distinct
articulations made in explicitly hermeneutic registers by Georgia
Warnke, Charles Taylor, Alastair MacIntyre, and Michael Walzer.7
Through their work the argument for the interpretive basis of social
critique has shed the connection between the intellectual project of
hermeneutics and the conservative reliance on tradition and authority
as the source of morality. In their view, it is not the authority of
meaningful tradition but the possibilities granted by close interpretation
and thick description that allow the development of critique.
And so, the idea that the interpretation of social meaning can ground
normative social research is a synthesis well on its way for the human
sciences. And yet, there is something missing in the movement
toward meaning, experience, and discourse in political theory. For
if the engagement with meaning is going to found critique, it must
be the case that interpretation and reinterpretation are expected to
have an effect on social life. And it is the social effect of meanings that
is really the problem.
6. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New
York: Basic Books, 1983). Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justiﬁcation:
Economies of Worth, Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006).
7. Of particular interest in relation to the concerns of this text: Michael Walzer,
Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993), and Georgia Warnke, Justice and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1994).
explanation 127
II
Certainly interpretive sociology appears to answer the sorts of whyquestions
that call forth explanation.8
For example: why was a certain
volunteer church group in the American Midwest successful in
building bridges to other communities, and thus able to combat the
deleterious social effects of welfare retrenchment, while other groups
with the same goals and the same sort of motivated, anxious-to-help
volunteers failed? In his answer to this question, Paul Lichterman
8. I do not, in the space of this chapter, address directly contemporary work in
the philosophy of explanation, the beginning of which could be approximated by
the publication of Van Fraassen’s The Scientiﬁc Image. In that text, he proposed an
“erotetic” approach to explanation, wherein an explanation is understood as answer
to a why-question. Wesley Salmon, in turn, distinguished between modal explanations,
ontic explanations, and erotetic explanations, and much of the ensuing debate
focused on the difference between the last two. For Salmon, ontic explanation takes
place when an event is situated inside a network of patterned occurrences and causal
processes in the world, whereas erotetic explanation puts the emphasis on the interests
and linguistic context of the investigator.
Even if many philosophers feel that the success of an explanation must ultimately
hinge on its ability to say something true about what is in the world, the central insights
of the erotetic approach seem undeniable. In particular, a why-question about
a given event or occurrence has a topic (that which must be explained), a contrast
class or “foil” (often consisting of the counterfactuals that inform the why-question),
and a set of relevance criteria (which limit what sorts of true statements can be used
in the explanation). The contrast class is a useful tool in dictating how a social researcher
might go about constructing her explanation—so, for example, “Why did
the French Revolution happen (in 1789, as opposed to before 1780 or after 1800)?”
would require a different approach than “Why did the French Revolution happen (as
opposed to a late-eighteenth-century revolution in Prussia, England, Spain, or the
Austro-Hungarian Empire)?” Likewise, the relevance criteria can suggest which aspects
of the necessarily inﬁnite number of causes of an event or an occurrence are of interest
to a particular community of inquiry—indeed Mark Risjord has argued that the
sorts of relevance criteria and contrast classes that determine a speciﬁc why-question
for investigation are, to some degree, determined by what he calls the “constitutive
interests” of a discipline or community of inquiry. Mark Day argues that the synthesis
of erotetic and ontic explanation involves using the erotetic approach to distinguish
different sorts of why-questions from each other, and then, when two why-questions
are identiﬁed as essentially the same erotetically, ontic explanation would kick in, with
disputes focusing on which real processes best account for the event in question. But
what makes for the “best account in answer to a well-deﬁned why-question” involves
a series of questions about how theory is used in the building of explanations. Or at
least that is the argument of this book.
See Bas C. Van Fraassen, The Scientiﬁc Image (New York: Oxford University Press,
1980); Mark W. Risjord, Woodcutters and Witchcraft: Rationality and Interpretive
Change in the Social Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 83;
Mark Day, “Explanatory Exclusion, History, and Social Science,” Philosophy of the
Social Sciences 34, no. 1 (2004).
128 chapter five
points to the different meanings that molded the actions of each
group, accessed in his ethnography by reconstructing the “customs”
of each set of volunteers.9
His provocative conclusion is that it is the
development of a speciﬁc set of customs of social reﬂexivity—customs
that lead to extended discussions about what the group is and eventually
to the group’s self-transformation—that in the end allows “Park
Cluster” to succeed where other groups fail. What it means to be a
member of the volunteer group—and in particular the idea that to be
a member means extended discussions and deliberations with actual
members of disadvantaged communities—is deeply consequential
for what gets done, and how. Hence Lichterman has made a clear
explanatory claim and a claim with practical, political relevance for
those interested in changing American society (and in particular for
those who want to differentiate between the good and bad social effects
of religion in a way grounded in strong sociology). Lichterman’s
interpretive explanation grounds his social critique.
Interpretive explanation: Lichterman shows how the meanings
that deﬁne the social context of action in a speciﬁc way are tremendously
important in determining what, when, and where certain actions
happen, certain social relationships emerge, and certain sorts of
community arise as a result of these relationships. In particular, what
Lichterman’s explanation accomplishes is to show why some social
ties last and lead to much-needed public goods (such as provision for
a neighborhood nurse) and some do not. His interpretation of meaning,
that is, gives him leverage on the question why “Park Cluster”
created a vibrant slice of civil society and other volunteer groups, also
drawing on and constructing social ties, did not. This is leverage that
the Putnam-led social capital format of analysis, which examines networks,
norms, and trust without interpreting meanings, cannot attain.
Indeed, in some cases, the meanings attached to certain social ties
actually cut off the possibility of mobilizing action for the common
good. For Lichterman, network ties without meanings are empty, and
thus network analysis without interpretation remains blind.
Surely this is a causal argument. And yet, if one examines monographs
in the philosophy of social science and the pages of sociol-
9. Lichterman breaks down customs analytically into how a group marks itself off
from the wider world (boundaries), how group members deﬁne obligations within
the group (bonds), and the speech genres that deﬁne what is and is not appropriate talk
within the group. Paul Lichterman, Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge
America’s Divisions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 52–54.
explanation 129
ogy research journals, one will ﬁnd that the speciﬁcally interpretive
approach that Lichterman and many other ethnographers espouse
is often contrasted directly to explanation, to the point that the dichotomy
of understanding (through interpretation) and explanation
(through causal analysis) is taken to be foundational for the social sci-
ences.10
Thus, despite Max Weber’s imperatives in the opening pages
of Economy and Society,11
such contemporary Weberian interventions
as Richard Swedberg’s outline for an interpretive economic sociol-
ogy,12
and Jack Katz’s reﬂexive discussions of how ethnographies can
move from “how” to “why,”13
various theoretical obstacles have been
erected over the last century to understanding the social knowledge
gained through careful interpretation as consisting of, among many
things, social explanations.14
10. So, for example, Gurpeet Mahajan writes that “hermeneutic understanding is a
way of understanding, rather than explaining, a given occurrence. The advocates of this
view argue that causal explanation (Erklarer) is a mode of investigation that is suitable
to the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) where we try to apprehend objects as
they are given to us externally through sensory perception.” In contrast to this Paul
Roth has argued that psychoanalytic interpretation, at least, is explanation—though
this raises this issue of the ontological ambitions of Freudian theory. Gurpeet Mahajan,
Explanation and Understanding in the Human Sciences (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 51; Paul Roth, “Interpretation as Explanation,” in The Interpretive Turn:
Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. David R. Hiley, James Bohman, and Richard Schusterman
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). I discuss unconscious motives and their
relationship to interpretation and explanation below.
11. It is worth noting that Weber developed his vision of the intersection between
interpretation and explanation when the available models of explanation and philosophies
of causality derived almost entirely from nineteenth-century positivism. See Susan J.
Hekman, “Weber’s Concept of Causality and the Modern Critique” Sociological Inquiry
4, no. 4 (2007). The one exception is conceptions of causality and responsibility
developed in legal theory, which Weber did draw on extensively. I discuss these in the
footnote on Fritz Ringer and Weberian methodology, in section VI below.
12. Richard Swedberg, “Max Weber’s Interpretive Economic Sociology,” American
Behavioral Scientist 50, no. 8 (2007).
13. Jack Katz, “From How to Why: On Luminous Description and Causal Inference
in Ethnography (Part I)” Ethnography 2, no. 4 (2001): 443–73; and Jack Katz,
“From How to Why: On Luminous Description and Causal Inference in Ethnography
(Part 2),” Ethnography 3, no. 1 (2002): 63–90.
14. In what follows, I draw inspiration from the classics of hermeneutic theory from
the 1960s forward, and in particular from Charles Taylor and Paul Ricoeur whose work
in hermeneutic philosophy deﬁes summary. See in particular Charles Taylor, “Interpretation
and the Sciences of Man,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical
Papers, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Paul Ricoeur, “What
Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences:
Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1981). For a narrative about how the hermeneutic tradition of social thought
has, and has not, engaged the problem of social explanation, see Isaac Ariail Reed and
130 chapter five
For, investigation that moves through the hermeneutic circle has
not only been relegated to the less “scientiﬁc” side of the divide
between the humanities and the social sciences, it has been explicitly
theorized in a variety of nonexplanatory ways. “Interpretation” can
mean a philosophical exercise that reveals the existential conditions
of life for all humans. Or, it can be a literary exercise in which the
interpreter critically and creatively reinterprets the traditions handed
down via texts, and comes to understand herself “before the text.”
Or, it can be a psychoanalytic process by which the investigator, with
the help of an interlocutor, obtains a sort of self-knowledge. In this
way, two frequent hermeneutic arguments get tethered together:
(1) the healthy hermeneutic objection to the effacement, by certain
scientistic epistemologies, of the role of the investigator from the
process of investigation, and (2) a refusal of the possibility that the
hermeneutic social investigator’s interpretations could grasp something
causal about the world.
Is it really better to defend the hermeneutic citadel against naturalism
than to risk a counterattack? It seems an oddly Spartan position
for an intellectual tradition dedicated to the possibility (and, admittedly,
the difﬁculty) of mutual understanding. But then, even in Clifford
Geertz’s work, the distinction is conﬁdently announced in what
is perhaps the iconic sentence of the cultural turn: “Believing, with
Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of signiﬁcance
he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis
of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law
but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”15
When we contrast
this comment to the opening sentence of Max Weber’s Economy and
Society, in which sociology “is a science concerning itself with the
interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal
explanation of its course and consequences,” we come to the crux
of the issue. Causality, and the social explanations that causal claims
help produce, have to be reconsidered, not rejected, from within the
interpretive epistemic mode.16
Benjamin Lamb-Books, “Hermeneutics and Sociology: Deepening the Interpretive
Perspective,” in New Directions in Sociology: Essays on Theory and Methodology in the 21st
Century, ed. Ieva Zake and Michael DeCesare (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011).
15. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,”
in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 5.
16. The opposite operation, whereby the insights of hermeneutics or discourse
analysis is brought into the critical naturalism of the realist mode, is quite common.
explanation 131
III
Of course, Geertz had social scientiﬁc positivism (and perhaps Parsons’s
excessively abstract and general theoretical schemas) in mind
when he rejected the search for laws in social research. And the search
for laws was, in the middle of the twentieth century at least, essential
to the construction of social explanations. The point of explanation
was to subsume a particular set of social behaviors under a more
generalized schema. To use semiotic terminology, the goal was to
show that certain actions were tokens of a well-known type17
—if
they could be understood as such, then the universal hypotheses that
apply to that type of behavior would do the work of explanation.18
Explanation thus required the development, in social science theory,
of covering laws, which would then be combined with particular
conditions to deduce the actions that need explaining. According to
Carl Hempel and others, the social and natural sciences were united by
this structure of scientiﬁc explanation. In the terms developed in this
book, the semiotic circuit of positivist explanation was deﬁned by the
intersection of laws and general propositions (theoretical language)
with quantitative data gathered by methods transposable from one
setting to another, such as surveys (factual language).
The critiques of this model are extensive, and indeed postpositivism
can be understood, from one point of view, as a set of frustrations
with the Hempelian philosophy of science and with the various attempts
to modify and amend this philosophy to better ﬁt sociology
In the terms of the philosophy of social science, the classic in this regard is William
Outhwaite’s New Philosophies of Social Science: Realism, Hermeneutics, and Critical
Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). In terms of research programs, the examination
of mechanisms of semiosis in the program of Critical Discourse Analysis also
resituates hermeneutics inside critical realism. See Norman Fairclough, Discourse and
Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).
17. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1976).
18. William Dray argues that, for Carl Hempel, how, what, and why questions all
had their answers in universal hypotheses and covering laws. In other words, for Hempel
and for many other logical empiricists, any process of conceptual interpretation in
the human sciences that involved an “empirically respectable concept” was ultimately
understandable as the application of a covering law to a particular situation or series of
events. See William H. Dray, “‘Explaining What’ in History,” in Readings in the Philosophy
of the Social Sciences, ed. May Broadbeck (New York: Macmillan, 1968). Hempel’s
classic essay on the human sciences, “The Function of General Laws in History,” is
reprinted in Theories of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner (New York: Free Press, 1959).
132 chapter five
and political science.19
What is worth noting for our present purposes,
however, is how, at its core, the covering-law model of explanation
was agnostic about causality. Take the ubiquitous example given to
show the symmetry problem that attends this approach: from the
general proposition that light travels in straight lines and the rules
of trigonometry, one can explain the length of the shadow cast by
a pole in the sun, if one knows the particular facts of the height of
the pole and the angle of the sun in the sky. However, one could
just as precisely “explain” the height of the pole by the length of the
shadow. Hempel was well aware of this problem, but he maintained
that explanation and prediction were essentially the same. This causal
agnosticism should not entirely surprise us; the broad intellectual
constellation of the empiricist and positivist traditions in philosophy
and social thought has often been very uncomfortable with notions of
causality that go too far beyond Hume’s initial formulations.20
Frustration
with this philosophical unwillingness to consider the reality of
basic, if unobservable, causal forces—and thus to end this symmetry
problem in scientiﬁc explanation—was one of the key intellectual
sources of realist philosophies of natural science.21
Positivist sociology suffered from an ambiguity parallel to that
of philosophy: are prediction and explanation really just the same,
or do sociologists need a stronger, overtly causal understanding of
what constitutes an explanation? Andrew Abbott traces how the early
19. Perhaps the most impactful of these attempts is Ernest Nagel, The Structure of
Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientiﬁc Explanation (New York: Harcourt, 1961). It is
hard to underestimate the importance of Robert K. Merton’s sociological theory, and
his sociology of science, to this project of bridging the logical empiricist philosophy
of science to the social sciences in a way that kept the core principles of the former
intact, including Riechenbach’s distinction between the context of discovery and the
context of justiﬁcation. For commentary on this connection, see Alan Richardson,
“Robert K. Merton and Philosophy of Science,” Social Studies of Science 34, no. 6
(2004). For Merton’s reliance on the distinction between the context of discovery and
the context of justiﬁcation, see his chapter “The Sociology of Knowledge,” in Robert
Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, enl. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1968), and
especially his critique of Sorokin on 529–30.
20. For an elaboration and critique of the dominance of the Humean approach
to causality in Anglophone philosophy, see Rom Harré and E. H. Madden, Causal
Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1975).
21. It is interesting, in this regard, that the most recent challenge to positivism
made in the terms of rigorous mathematics—Charles Ragin’s development of set
theory and fuzzy-set methods for social science—also emphasizes asymmetric relations
in sociological explanations over the symmetries implied by studies of correlation.
See Charles C. Ragin, Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), 15.
explanation 133
twentieth century saw many American sociologists eschew causal
talk—rejecting, perhaps, certain crude causal notions inherited from
nineteenth-century social Darwinism. Starting in the middle of the
twentieth century, however, quantitative research brought causality
back in, occasionally through explicit epistemological reﬂections,
but more often through a sort of commonsense causal realism about
variables. In this view, certain social factors, understood as independent
variables, force changes in other social factors, understood as
dependent variables. The evidence for this variable-forcing form of
causality was developed by showing correlations to be robust—to
hold with controls for other variables. Such an approach—still hegemonic
in American sociology—tends to go by the name of positivism
because of its reliance on quantitative methods and its often
quite explicit commitment to the idea that the unity of the sciences
derives from the unity of their methods. But in contradistinction to
Hempel and others, it is quite liberal in its use of causal language and
causal modeling—and has developed a variety of highly sophisticated
philosophies of probabilistic causation.22
IV
It is this law-based and hypergeneralized model of explanation that
so many of the interpretivist reactions to positivism steel themselves
against. But then, it is not just interpretivists, but postpositivists in
general who seek modes of explanation that reach outside covering
laws and/or variable correlations. In social theory and the philosophy
of social science since the 1960s, there developed a widespread
tendency to, ﬁrst, draw a distinction between social explanations and
explanations that focus on the subjective motivations of individuals,
22. Andrew Abbott, Time Matters: On Theory and Method (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2001), 97–125. For a discussion of probabilistic causation in relation
to other formats of causation in the social sciences, see Julian Reiss, “Causation in the
Social Sciences: Evidence, Inference, and Purpose,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 39,
no. 1 (2009). For an extended discussion of the different sorts of causal claims that
tend to appear in the major journals of American sociology, see Brandon Vaidyanathan,
Michael Strand, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, and Thomas Bushman, “Causality in
Contemporary American Sociology: An Empirical Assessment,” unpublished manuscript.
For a realist critique of empiricist sociology that focuses directly on the issue
of causality, see Douglas Porpora, “Sociology’s Causal Confusion,” in Revitalizing
Causality: Realism About Causality in Philosophy and Social Science, ed. Ruth Groff
(London: Routledge, 2007).
134 chapter five
and, second, to seek some sort of postpositivist synthesis in the reconciliation
of these two sorts of explanation. This is, perhaps, what all
the fuss over agency and structure comes to in the end. As Margaret
Archer writes, “The ‘problem of structure and agency’ has a great deal
in common with the ‘problem of objectivity and subjectivity.’ Both
raise the same issue about the relationship between their component
terms, which entails questioning their respective causal powers. Once
we have started talking about causal powers, it is impossible to avoid
talking about the ontological status of those things to which causal
powers are attributed or from which they are withheld.”23
According
to this view—perhaps the quintessence of reﬂexive, well-constructed
realism—what happens in the world is explained as the result of a combination
of agentic projects for action, the unintended consequences
of these actions, and the social patterns in which agents are embedded.
Agents are creative and motivated, and structures are real abstrac-
tions24
that envelop human beings and causally inﬂuence social action
23. Margaret S. Archer, “The Trajectory of the Morphogenetic Approach: An
Account in the First-Person,” Sociologia: Problemas e Práticas 54 (2007): 41. Archer’s
critique of Anthony Giddens leads her to a structure/agency schema with much
more traction; others are even more skeptical of the utility of the language. John Levi
Martin argues that discussion of structure and agency tends to be a way to negotiate a
détente between warring micro and macro camps without necessarily introducing any
theoretical advances, and Anthony King argues that the opposition between agency
and structure sublimates into social theory the experience of the individual with the
modern state in the West. John Levi Martin, “What Is Field Theory?” American
Journal of Sociology (2003): 2. Anthony King, The Structure of Social Theory (London:
Routledge, 2004), 13–18.
24. The concept is traceable to Marx’s Grundrisse, and has been the subject of
much interpretive dispute for over a hundred years in various theoretical circles. In his
discussion of labor and of Adam Smith’s concept of “labor in general,” Marx writes that
“with the abstract universality of wealth-creating activity we now have the universality
of the object deﬁned as wealth, the product as such or again labour as such, but
labour as past, objectiﬁed labor.” He then writes that this move, if interpreted as the
discovery of “the abstract expression of the simplest and most ancient relation in which
human beings—in whatever form of society—play the role of producers,” is “correct
in one respect,” but “not in another.” Marx hereby introduces a central problematic
for social theory, iterated today in the debates that take place in and around critical
realism. That is: how historical are the real abstractions that structure societies? And
how are we to approach these real abstractions? For Marx, the example of labor reveals
“how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity—precisely because of
their abstractness—for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the speciﬁc character of this
abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full
validity only for and within these relations.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin,
1973), 104–5. The question is what this historicity of abstraction amounts to, and
whether “abstraction,” as an increasingly prominent feature of socioeconomic reality
and thought about that reality, is itself a product of modern capitalism. The answer of
explanation 135
in a variety of ways, whether or not the actors doing the actions know
of, or want, that inﬂuence. Thus to synthesize agency and structure
is to recognize the interdependence of agentic projects and the social
conﬁgurations that exceed them. And so, maximal interpretations
must reference the causal force of both the interiority of social actors
and the broader patterns or mechanisms of social structure.
But let us examine more closely the rationale for thinking of actors’
interior states, on the one hand, and social processes, on the other, as
essential causal components of any social explanation. Doing so will
lead to a quite different conclusion than the usual “détente” between
structure and agency.25
My argument will be that meaning intersects
these two causal realities by giving their force concrete form, and thus
that the interpretation of meaning is central to constructing causal
explanations in the human sciences.
V
The philosophical basis for thinking about actors’ interior states causally
can be found in Donald Davidson’s essays on reasons and cau-
sality.26
Davidson argued against a keystone of the logical positivist
philosophical architecture: the idea that reasons have a logical relationship
to the actions for which they are the reasons. According to this
argument, because the relation of reasons to actions is “internal,”
reasons cannot be causes. The cause of an action must be something
else, something “external” to the action. Davidson argued that this
approach was misconceived, and that reasons are indeed distinct from
the actions for which they are the reasons,27
and thus that actions
this text, which I suppose comes from a combination of Weber and Saussure, is that
the historicity of real abstractions results not from the historical trajectory of human
relations contained in the dialectical-materialist philosophy of history, but rather from
their embeddedness of arbitrary and conventional systems of signiﬁcation.
25. Martin, “What is Field Theory?” 2
26. Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” in The Essential Davidson
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Donald Davidson, “Problems in the
Explanation of Action,” in Problems of Rationality (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004); Donald Davidson, “Causal Relations,” Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967).
For contemporary post-Davidsonian philosophy of social science, see in particular
David K. Henderson, Interpretation and Explanation in the Human Sciences, SUNY
Series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1993).
27. So, for example, the reason for turning on the light (wanting to see what is on
the kitchen table) and the action of turning on the light are in fact in causal relationship
136 chapter five
can be explained as the behavioral outcomes of reasons.28
So, if one
accepts that reasons and actions are not the same, then, there is no
discernable linguistic difference between proposing ‘the stove is hot’
as the cause of someone moving their hand and proposing ‘wanting
to get to Denver’ as the cause of someone turning right at a trafﬁc
light. Davidson thus simultaneously argued that mental reasons were
not reducible to some physical substrate upon which they depended
and that such mental reasons causally interacted with the behavioral,
observable world, thus making them the basis for explanation.
But what are reasons? Conscious intentions do help drive social
life, but the investigator must also grasp those “springs of action”
that result from interior states that are (relatively) opaque to the actor
himself. So, I would change “reasons as causes” to “motivations
as causes” and expand the focus on agent’s intentions to a more
encompassing account of the effect upon the social world of the
interior states of people. Furthermore, in thinking about motivations
as causes, what we want to imagine is not thousands of unit
acts, each consciously or unconsciously motivated, strung together
by the investigator to produce an aggregate outcome, but rather
what Mustafa Emirbayer and Anne Mische have referred to as the
“temporally embedded process of social engagement” in their theorization
of agency.29
The point is that motivated actors have projects
or lines of action-in-the-world that they pursue, and analysts who
ignore these projects put the validity of their explanations in peril.
For grasping the causal force of these projects, however, I believe the
term ‘motivation’ is appropriate precisely because in its generality
it refers to conscious and unconscious, and rational and irrational,
sources of action. As I explain below, it is a more encompassing,
inclusive concept of interiority that is needed for explanation in the
interpretive epistemic mode.
In parallel to the focus on “motivation,” there is reason to think
that “mechanism” has inherited some of the linguistic functionality
of “structure” for nonpositivist explanation. If we compare the
with each other, and not “logically” related, as is made clear in the event that the light
has short circuited and does not go on when the switch is ﬂipped.
28. This position involved Davidson in a series of more technical arguments about
the irreducibility of the mental to the physical. For the purposes of this text, however,
it is his argument about the conceptual structure of explanation that was crucial.
29. Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, “What Is Agency?” American Journal
of Sociology 103, no. 4 (1998).
explanation 137
writings of the realist philosophers Roy Bhaskar and Mario Bunge,
for example, it becomes clear that both terms refer to social realities
whose power can be triggered, and which then bring about certain
outcomes. As a way of grasping the emergent social processes that
confront, constrain, and in certain cases enable the willful actor, theorists
of mechanisms inherit the longstanding mantle of structural
thinking that runs back to classical sociology. In addition to the argument
that focusing on underlying mechanisms allows social research
to move beyond the descriptive-positivist focus on correlations, I
think that there is another reason that mechanism is a particularly
compelling way to think about “structure.”
For, specifying mechanisms is precisely what overarching explanations
derived from structural-functionalism and structural Marxism
often did not do. Looking to identify the mechanism, in other words,
shifts the meaning of the terms ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ because doing
so brings a level of concreteness and comparability to the causal
narratives that are constructed in nonpositivist research. The connection
between structural social theories and the current focus on
mechanisms is overt and clear if one considers the intellectual lineages
of realism, such as Bhaskar’s reinterpretation of Capital, or Hedstrom
and Swedberg’s use of Merton’s “self-fulﬁlling prophesy” as their primary
example of a mechanism.30
As a metaphor to think with, then,
“mechanism” allows the social researcher to conceptualize structural
causation shorn of teleological or functionalist reasoning.
So: motives and mechanisms push the social world forward. Yet
there remains a fundamental problem with this picture of social life,
with which so much postpositivist social theory is occupied: it impedes
the historicization of what sorts of motivations, and what sorts
of mechanisms, are effective at a given place and time. This was part
of the point of chapter 4—that mechanisms and motivations have
to emerge upon landscapes of meaning. But perhaps the language of
poststructuralism will be useful for making this point. What Ian Hacking
called “historical ontology” (an intentional oxymoron) and what
30. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary
Human Sciences (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 56 –58;
Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg, Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to
Social Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 18. For the relationship
of the concept of mechanism to the concept of structure, also see Hedström’s discussion
of Parsons: Peter Hedström, Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical
Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3.
138 chapter five
Foucault called “archeology” refers to a mode of analysis according
to which the mechanics of social life are given their concrete form
by the discursive formations, the meaningful spaces of possibility,
upon which they take place.31
Judith Butler articulated the antirealist
philosophical implications of this:
Clearly this project does not propose to lay out within traditional philosophical
terms an ontology of gender whereby the meaning of being a
woman or a man is elucidated within the terms of phenomenology. The
presumption here is that the “being” of gender is an effect, an object
of a genealogical investigation that maps out the political parameters
of its construction in the mode of ontology. To claim that gender is
constructed is not to assert its illusoriness or artiﬁciality, where those
terms are understood to reside within a binary that counterposes the
“real” and the “authentic” as oppositional. As a genealogy of gender
ontology this inquiry seeks to understand the discursive production of
the plausibility of that binary relation and to suggest that certain cultural
conﬁgurations of gender take the place of “the real” and consolidate and
augment their hegemony through that felicitous self-naturalization.32
The implications for social research of arguments such as these have
been massively misunderstood. Butler’s philosophical meditations
imply neither relativism in knowledge nor some sort of theory of
the radical ﬂexibility of everyday social life. Rather, the point is that
meaning inheres in the ﬂow and process of social life in such a way
that knowledge of social life must be based in its interpretation. To see
how this is the case, and thus to begin in earnest our reconstruction
of social explanation within the interpretive epistemic mode, we can
turn to a sociological classic.
VI
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber
wrote:
Above all, practical pastoral work, which had immediately to deal with
all the suffering caused by the doctrine, could not be satisﬁed. It met
31. Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002), 1–26. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
32. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1999), 43.
explanation 139
these difﬁculties in various ways. So far as predestination was not reinterpreted,
toned down, or fundamentally abandoned, two principal,
mutually connected, types of pastoral advice appear. On the one hand it
is held to be an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen, and to combat
all doubts as temptations of the devil, since lack of self-conﬁdence is the
result of insufﬁcient faith, hence of imperfect grace . . . On the other
hand, in order to attain that self-conﬁdence intense worldly activity
is recommended as the most suitable means. It and it alone disperses
religious doubts and gives the certainty of grace.33
This passage identiﬁes a key link in Weber’s overall argument about
the rise of capitalism—which is to say, rational-bourgeois capitalist
activities—in the early modern West, and it is this link that I want
to focus on here.34
If we suspend disbelief a little bit, we can imagine
how this paragraph could be understood in the (realist) language of
motivations and mechanisms. Thus a causal pattern of behavior is
triggered by a speciﬁc interest of certain actors (to be saved), and the
pattern “regularly generates the type of outcome to be explained.”35
It is also the case that Weber has opened up some “black boxes,” and
that this passage points to some of the “cogs and wheels” that led to a
new work ethic in certain parts of early modern Europe: an authority
relation between pastors and their congregants, for one, and perhaps
the more pernicious mechanism, gestured at elsewhere by Weber,
that competition with and surveillance of one’s neighbors played an
important role in institutionalizing the new work ethic.
This anachronistic interpretation of Weber as a sociohistorical
investigator of motivations and mechanisms is reasonable as far as
it goes.36
But one is inclined to point out that Weber’s causal argu-
33. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott
Parsons (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 111–12.
34. Thus I do not directly engage here the extensive literature on the “Weber
thesis” concerning Protestantism and capitalism as a whole, because, for the purposes
of this discussion, it is the logic of Weber’s argument that is of particular interest.
However, my discussion here does fall into the line of the interpretation of Weber
given by William Sewell Jr. in his criticisms of James Coleman. See William H. Sewell
Jr., “Theory of Action, Dialectic, and History: Comment on Coleman,” American
Journal of Sociology 93, no. 1 (1987): 6.
35. Hedström, Dissecting the Social, 25.
36. Richard Swedberg argues that “Though Weber does not use this term [mechanisms]
(which is common in contemporary sociology), one may nonetheless argue
that he lays bare a number of interesting social mechanisms in his work, not least in
his sociology of religion.” Swedberg goes on to discuss a variety of moments from
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism where Weber could be said to be ar-
140 chapter five
ment does not make any real sense—does not grasp, that is, the
concrete causal effectiveness of the pastors’ rather creative solutions
to a problem of practical theology—if we do not know the landscape
of meaning that formed the basic desires of actors and the mindsets
of the pastors, and that justiﬁed the authority relationship between
them. And indeed, a good part of Weber’s book—and in particular
the section that discusses the texts of Richard Baxter and the
theology of John Calvin—is dedicated to disclosing the landscape
of meaning of early modern Protestant life. It is on this landscape
that the motivations of the actors involved become effective forces:
people want to be saved, and pastors want to spread the Gospel.
Likewise for the mechanisms: interaction with pastoral authority, and
the development of both social surveillance and self-discipline about
working-in-the-world are also formed by meaning. Every forceful
cause that helps produce the social outcome is infused with, and
formed by, meaning. The mechanisms only make sense as models
for social behavior inside the meaning-system of Calvinist (and, more
broadly, Protestant) Christianity. They combine with certain desires
and intentions that also only make sense inside that meaning-system:
to be saved/receive God’s grace/know once and for all if one is elect.
As a desire, this subjective state is formed by the shared religious
meanings of the context. But then, the mechanism that it triggers is
inﬂected by this landscape as well—the authority of the pastors, and
thus the fact that people tended to do what the pastors told them,
also makes sense within the meaningful world of Calvinism. Finally,
the solutions offered by the pastors (removal of doubt/working in
the world), which, because of their authority in this context, result
in actual shifts in behavior, are themselves recognizable only with
reference to Calvinism’s this-worldly asceticism.
Thus, in Weber’s explanation, meaning appears as a cause that is
not a separate force in the world, over and against mechanisms and
motivations, but rather appears to inhere in them, to form the shape
and direction in which mechanisms work, and give meaning to the
thoughts, intentions, and desires of individual agents. The landscape
ticulating mechanisms (and motivations) as causal processes. Richard Swedberg, The
Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2005), 250 –51.
explanation 141
of meaning forms those entities that force social life forward. How are
we to understand the epistemic basis for such a claim?37
VII
“Causes are forces” and “causation is forced movement” remain, in
both the everyday understanding of cause and effect, and in much
social research, the primary metaphors for understanding what causes
are and how they work.38
There are experiential reasons for this, as
well as methodological ones. Our most fundamental experiences
of cause derive from our ability to manipulate physical objects of a
37. Weber’s own excursions into social scientiﬁc methodology have received a great
deal of attention, to the point that Weberian methodology is a language game unto
itself. Perhaps the most important hint, in the objectivity essay at least, that Weber
intended a different understanding of causality and explanation in social research than
that which has been set out by realism is the following: “even in the case of all so-called
‘economic laws’ without exception, we are concerned here not with ‘laws’ in the narrower
exact natural science sense, but with adequate causal relationships expressed in
rules and with the application of the category of ‘objective possibility.’” Max Weber,
The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949), 80. For a general
discussion of adequate and objective causality in Weber’s work, see Swedberg, The
Max Weber Dictionary, 27–31.
This particular quotation is signiﬁcant because the historian Fritz Ringer has taken
these two concepts of adequate causation and objective possibility as the center of
Weber’s methodology, and thus argued that “singular causal analysis” is the keystone
of Weber’s contribution. Ringer’s argument is that Weber, as he moved away from
the neo-Kantianism of Rickert, formulated a conception of causality appropriate to
the “sciences of reality” (Wirklichkeitwissenschaft) as opposed to “law-seeking science”
(Gesetzeswissenschaft). He then argues, with signiﬁcant textual evidence, that
Weber appropriated and transformed the legal philosophy of Johannes von Kries, and
in particular, the terms ‘adequate causation’ and ‘objective possibility.’ For Weber,
a social process could be identiﬁed as an adequate cause of a later development if it
could be shown, by the investigator, that the presence of the event or process increased
the objective probability of the later development (the “effect”). In this way, argues
Ringer, the investigator “is to locate the explanandum in its ‘interconnection’ with
other singular phenomena.”
Thus Ringer writes that what Weber’s methodology amounts to is an “image of causal
relationships—and causal analysis—that deals in courses of events, in counterfactuals,
and in divergences between alternate paths and outcomes (italics in original). Fritz K.
Ringer, Max Weber’s Methodology: The Uniﬁcation of the Cultural and Social Sciences
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 73, 77. For an account of the relationship
between Weber’s thinking about causality, the positivism of his time, and postpositivist
discussions of causality in social science, see Susan Hekman, “Weber’s Concept
of Causality and the Modern Critique” Sociological Inquiry 49, no. 4 (1979).
38. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind
and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 184 –87.
142 chapter five
certain size (not too large and not too small: moveable by the use of
a human individual’s muscles and nerves). So kicking a ball, putting
building blocks together and knocking them over, etc., reproduce
from childhood the sense that causality is inherent in humans’ ability
to intervene in the world. Thus our ﬁrst causal metaphors probably
derive from how we come to know the forces of nature via our own
bodies’ experiences of it.39
And there are intellectual-historical reasons
why this experience with what Aristotle would have called efﬁcient
causes was imported into various scientiﬁc epistemologies, in so far
as interaction with nature in a controlled way was essential to the
development of modern science.40
Simultaneously, the highly elaborated methodologies of quantitative
social science that Andrew Abbott has discussed as the “general
linear model” mode of social analysis have transferred this idea of
causes-are-forces from the interaction of persons with the world to
the interaction of variables with other variables.41
And in the realist
epistemic mode, the forcing conception of causality is afﬁxed to the
language of motives and mechanisms. Motives, within agents, “force
the action,” and mechanisms exert pressure on willful actors and upon
other (mechanistic) social processes. This is what we would ﬁnd in
the strictly realist reading of Weber—certain intentions and desires,
combined with certain social structures-qua-mechanisms, account
for that link in a long causal chain that has, as its analytically chosen
endpoint, the takeoff of capitalism in the West.
But as I have already suggested, though cause-as-force is clearly
in some way essential to social research, I do not think it will get us
far enough along in the task of explanation without a willingness to
39. Karl Popper argues that our initial deﬁnitions and sense of what is real derives
from the experience of objects of a certain size or, as he writes, “material things of
ordinary size—things which a baby can handle and (preferably) put into his mouth.”
Karl Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (Boston: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1977), 9.
40. Roughly speaking, the scientiﬁc revolutionaries of early modern Europe combined
two of Aristotle’s four causes into a conception of material efﬁcient causes as the
central occupation of scientiﬁc research. The history of how this happened is complex
and disputed, but the overall picture of early modern science engaging in a ﬁerce
repudiation of scholasticism, and thus throwing out some of Aristotle’s key ideas unnecessarily,
can probably still serve as a good heuristic. For more details on the matter,
see Lyn S. Joy, “Scientiﬁc Explanation from Formal Causes to Laws of Nature,” in The
Cambridge History of Science: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine
Daston (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 73.
41. Abbott, Time Matters, 44 –47.
explanation 143
understand how the forceful causes of social life are given concrete
form by the landscapes of meaning upon which they emerge and
proceed. Forcing causes cannot be understood in their effectiveness
without understanding the forming causes that mould them.
What, then, are these forming causes? Simply put: forming causes
are the arrangements of signiﬁcation and representation that give
forcing causes their concrete shape and meaningful character. This
idea—that force has to be given a form—originates, in the West at
least, with Aristotle.42
I therefore return to one of his texts here, in
an initial attempt to explicate the idea of forming causality and its
difference from forcing causality, which I believe sets the interpretive
epistemic mode apart from realism and normativism in the resigniﬁcation
of minimal interpretations into maximal interpretations.
Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes (material, formal, efﬁcient,
and ﬁnal) is well known; what is less frequently commented upon,
in the social sciences at least, is that he often explicated these causes
with reference to human action, and in particular a piece of creative
labor: the casting of a bronze statue.43
The bronze, perhaps obviously,
constituted the material cause or “substratum” upon which the ac-
42. For an explicit philosophical discussion of Aristotle’s philosophy of science
and its relationship to the erotetic theory of explanation, see Bas C. Van Fraassen,
“A Re-Examination of Aristotle’s Philosophy of Science,” Dialogue 19 (1980). To see
Aristotle’s approach to “natures” recuperated for postpositivist philosophy of science,
see Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). These essays are particularly important to
mention because they go against my argument, which is to say they bring Aristotle’s
texts into the disputations of contemporary epistemology and philosophy in a different
way. Both Van Fraassen and Cartwright recapture Aristotle’s modal realism, which I
am, admittedly, trying to avoid. Indeed, the connection between Aristotle’s and Marx’s
realism is well known and well drawn (e.g., George E. McCarthy, ed., Marx and
Aristotle: Nineteenth Century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity [Savage,
MD: Rowan & Littleﬁeld Publishers, 1992], and especially Howard Engelskirchen,
“The Aristotelian Marx and Scientiﬁc Realism: A Perspective on Social Kinds in Social
Theory” [Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2007]).
So, I am reading Aristotle’s philosophy of science against the grain to a certain
degree. In doing so, I draw inspiration from the connection drawn in political philosophy
between Aristotle and the hermeneutic tradition, by MacIntyre in particular, but
more generally in readings of Aristotle’s Poetics that suggest the sorts of philosophical
maneuvers made by Richard McKeon in the mid-twentieth century.
43. The original idea to turn to Aristotle—and in particular to bring Aristotle to
bear on the problem of interpretive explanation—is due to Lyn Spillman’s excellent
paper on causal reasoning in history and sociology. Lyn Spillman, “Causal Reasoning,
Historical Logic, and Sociological Explanation,” in Self, Social Structure, and Beliefs:
Explorations in the Sociological Thought of Neil J. Smelser, ed. Jeffrey Alexander, Gary
Marx, and Christine Williams (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 216 –34.
144 chapter five
tion of statue casting works. In social explanations, material causes
are recognized in so far as we understand that action proceeds within
certain physical limits and biophysical conditions.
Moving beyond material causes, in The Metaphysics, efﬁcient causes
are deﬁned in opposition to ﬁnal causes. The efﬁcient cause is “that
from which the change or resting from change begins,”44
while the
ﬁnal cause is “the end and the good of other things” and “that for
the sake of which other things are.” Although in certain places in his
work it becomes easy to dismiss Aristotle’s account of ﬁnal causes,45
in other places it is clear that he is referring to actors’ intentions, and
thus can be interpreted (liberally, to be sure) as referring to reasons
or motivations as causes: “health is the cause of walking. For ‘Why
does one walk?’ we say; ‘that one may be healthy’; and in speaking
thus we have given the cause.”46
So, ﬁnal causes can be thought of as
a precursor of motivations as causes.
Social mechanisms, on the other hand, can be thought of as the
articulation, by social science, of efﬁcient causes in the social realm.
For, mechanisms are triggered or set into motion, and thus become
“that from which the change or resting from change begins.”47
These
social mechanisms, moreover, emerge from and react back upon actors’
intentions and agency (ﬁnal causes), which in turn would take
place under certain biophysical conditions (material causes). Thus far,
then, we have causes that nicely ﬁt a reﬂexive, theoretical realism.48
Spillman’s interpretation of how the four causes map onto sociological and historical
analysis is different than mine, however.
44. This and the following quotations are taken from Metaphysics, especially
book 5, chapter 2. Aristotle repeats the arguments in Physics book 2, chapter 3. Aristotle,
The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House,
1941), 752.
45. For a general discussion of teleology in Aristotle, see Susan Sauve Meyer, “Aristotle,
Teleology, and Reduction,” Philosophical Review 101, no. 4 (1992).
46. Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, 752.
47. This requires letting go of the positivist notion of an efﬁcient cause as simply
that event (“cause”) that precedes another event (“effect”). But this conceptual work
has been done, and the inﬂuence of Aristotle on Marx, and of Aristotle’s conception
of “natures” on Marx’s realist epistemology, is well documented.
48. In contrast to what follows, the proponents of critical discourse analysis argue
that “semiosis” should be considered one mechanistic cause among the others
theorized in the realist mode, and reject the historicist and pluralist implications of
interpretivism as developed in chapter 4. Thus in “seek[ing] to show that semiosis
involves mechanisms that are intelligible from a critical realist point of view,” Norman
Fairclough, Bob Jessop, and Andrew Sayer argue that part of the critical realist account
of social structuration involves an examination of “the evolutionary mechanisms of
variation, selection, and retention that shape the relationships between semiosis and
explanation 145
And we have captured the core idea of the post-positivist debates
about ‘structure’ and ‘action’ in so far as we see both ﬁnal causes
(motivations) and efﬁcient causes (mechanisms) as forcing social life
forward.49
But what of Aristotle’s fourth category: formal causes?
Aristotle describes the formal cause50
as “the whole, the synthesis,
the form.” The concrete reference here is the way in which the plaster
cast gives shape to the bronze poured into it. I would submit, however,
that the plaster’s shape itself derives from meaningful practices.51
The plaster, which shapes the statue, takes the shape that it does in
relation to the shapes of other statues, and thus takes on meaning via
its relations within a system of signiﬁcation. The implication of this for
social theory is that, when considering social action, efﬁcient causes
cannot be adequately understood in their causal force without understanding
the formal causes that give them shape. There is evidence
for this idea in Aristotle, because at one point in the Metaphysics he
actually refers to the art of statue casting as the efﬁcient cause of the
statue: “Both the art of sculpture and the bronze are causes of the
statue not in respect of anything else but qua statue; not however,
in the same way, but the one as matter and the other as source of
movement.”52
Thus Aristotle actually considered the art of sculpture
to be the efﬁcient cause, and an individual artist casting a statue as
social structuration,” and that “these mechanisms are common to natural and social
evolution.” Norman Fairclough, Bob Jessop, and Andrew Sayer, “Critical Realism and
Semiosis,” in Realism, Discourse, and Deconstruction, ed. Jonathan Joseph and John
Michael Roberts (New York: Routledge, 2004).
49. The idea here being that while the positivist model involves variables forcing
other variables, the postpositivist turn (and especially the work of Giddens, Bourdieu,
and Archer) involves an account of social mechanisms of reproduction/change, and
subjective dispositions/motivations, as the forces that best account for social life.
50. In what follows, in emphasizing the form as a sort of concrete shaping of
causal forces, I venture toward an extremely anti-Platonist reading of Aristotle, for
better or worse.
51. Aristotle thus anticipates the entire basis of hermeneutic philosophy. While
Alaistair MacIntyre is the clearest representative of the scholarly line that runs from
Aristotle to contemporary hermeneutics (e.g., Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue:
A Study in Moral Theory [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981];
Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy
[London: Duckworth, 1971]), it is also the case that Aristotle’s comments on
form in The Metaphysics adumbrate Wilhelm Dilthey’s development of epistemology for
the human sciences. See Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Construction of the Historical World
in the Human Studies,” in Dilthey: Selected Writings, ed. H. P. Rickman (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), and Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Volume 4:
Hermeneutics and the Study of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
52. Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, 753.
146 chapter five
a manifestation of this cause in a particular case of statue making.
What does this mean?
It means that there is an intimate connection between efﬁcient
causes and formal causes, because the holistic, formal cause gives to
the artist’s direct actions on the statue their meaning and aesthetics.53
Statue making is a “form of life,” and as such, when an artist makes
a statue, she combines a formal cause (the artistic basis for the shape
of the plaster cast of the statue), an efﬁcient cause (the direct actions
of the artist in making the plaster cast and pouring the statue), a ﬁnal
cause (the intention of the artist to make the statue in a certain way),
and a material cause (the properties of bronze).
This four-dimensional understanding of causality is metaphorical
to varying degrees in so far as it has to be used as a heuristic for
thinking through the problem of social explanation. The essential
addition is formal causes. By thinking about the way in which a
well-designed plaster cast gives form to liquid bronze, I propose to
understand the way in which social life is arranged, in its concreteness,
by (arbitrary and conventional) formations of meaning. Social
life has an aesthetic or rhetorical dimension, and must be explained
with reference to this dimension, upon which the efﬁcient forces of
interests and unconscious aggression, forces of repeated interactions
and leveraged network connections, and so many other motivations
and mechanisms emerge. In the interpretive epistemic mode, the
forcing causes of social life—motivation and mechanism—are formed
by landscapes of meaning. But how does this work?
VIII
Let us start with motives. Consider George Steinmetz’s recent study
of the policies and actions of the German colonial state in the late
nineteenth century, The Devil’s Handwriting. Steinmetz begins by
insisting that a cultural and historical sociology also needs a psychology,
and in particular an account of unconscious motivation to
complement the emphasis on the strategic actor that creeps into many
sociological explanations. He thus develops a Lacanian account of
53. The clearest restatement of this Aristotelean position in the language of meaningful
social practices is Alasdair C. MacIntyre, “The Intelligibility of Action,” in
Rationality, Relativism, and the Human Sciences, ed. J. Margolis, M. Krausz, and
R. M. Burian (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986).
explanation 147
the social subject54
as unconsciously motivated toward two sorts of
identiﬁcations—symbolic and imaginary. Symbolic identiﬁcations
derive from the publicly sanctioned, “appropriate” sphere of law
and culture and “are linked to the construction of an ego ideal.”55
In other words, these identiﬁcations reenact and reinscribe norms.
Here the motivation is the desire for recognition, formed by the
cultural context. Simultaneously, however, subjects are driven to an
imaginary identiﬁcation with a fantasy: an ideal, whole, complete
self. These identiﬁcations run counter to the requirements of ofﬁcial,
legal, or “serious” society, and are often “organized at the level of
the body and bodily images.”56
Though the subject’s motivations toward
imaginary identiﬁcation begin in infancy with the mirror stage,
Steinmetz takes from Lacan the idea that “the contents of imaginary
identiﬁcations later in life are provided by suggestions coming from
the symbolic order.”57
For, in Steinmetz’s explanation, it is the representations of “natives”
from a previous generation of anthropologists that differentially
mould the motivations of German state ofﬁcials, which is what leads to
different colonial policies. Consider this example from the text, where
Steinmetz considers the policies set in Samoa by Wilhelm Solf:
Solf ’s images of the Samoans emerged as much from interactions with
European discourses about the colonized as from interactions with the
colonized themselves. It is notable that Solf embarked on his program of
salvaging and enforcing Samoan savage nobility almost immediately after
he assumed ofﬁce. Solf . . . had no prior experience in Polynesia.58
Thus it was the speciﬁc, concrete, available version of the “European
discourses about the colonized”—that is to say, the ethnographic
54. It is worth mentioning that Steinmetz’s speciﬁc subjects of study—German
colonial administrators—are overwhelmingly male. Needless to say, as the extended
discourse of feminist criticisms and interpretations of Lacan has made clear, Steinmetz’s
synthesis might work differently if his subjects of study were female, or both male
and female. For an overview of the relationship between Lacanian and feminist social
theory, see Deborah Leupntiz, “Beyond the Phallus: Lacan and Feminism,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. Jean-Michel Rabate (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
55. George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German
Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa, Chicago Studies in Practices
of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 57.
56. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 61.
57. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 60.
58. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 347.
148 chapter five
literature about Polynesia that Solf immersed himself in—that gave
meaningful form to Solf ’s forceful unconscious motivations. In a key
passage Steinmetz writes:
Solf styled himself as a Samoan chief . . . One might interpret these
practices as little more than a strategic bid to appropriate indigenous
symbols of power . . . But it is difﬁcult to discern a strategic rationality
behind the Solfs’ giving their daughter a Samoan name, Lagi (“heaven”)
and their son a Samoan middle name, Tupua . . . Nor is it likely that
Solf expected Samoans to respect him if he inserted himself into their
categories of authority, since his government was loudly declaring
those categories to be inferior. Solf seems to have formed an imaginary
identiﬁcation with an imago of Samoan notables, of the highest chiefs
and the holders of the most distinguished titles, such as Mata’afa and
Lauaki.59
This identiﬁcation, writes Steinmetz, “makes sense of Solf ’s strong
adherence to the Samoan noble savage perspective and the associated
native policies and of his equally impassioned rejection of the
settlers’ alternative.”60
In other words, Steinmetz uses the forming of
policy makers’ motivations by meaning to explain why, in Samoa, the
Germans implemented a salvage colonialism that mixed intervention
in power structures and exploitation with cultural preservationism.61
The landscape of meaning upon which colonial policy takes place is
the archive of anthropological representations of natives, and it is the
landscape that forms the motivations that force.
In considering the anatomy of Steinmetz’s truth claims about what
explains the different state policies in different German colonies, it is
important not to remain only at the level of arguing about whether
Freudian or Lacanian accounts of the subject can be given the universality
that Freud and Lacan claimed for them. Rather, the power
of Steinmetz’s explanatory claim is attributable to how he historicizes
Lacan’s terms via his reconstruction of the anthropological archive as
the meanings in which the colonial ofﬁcials were immersed. Desire and
drive are comprehended as they emerge upon a landscape of meaning
in which the savages appear differently, depending upon the archive.
59. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 353–54.
60. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 355.
61. Steinmetz puts this result in comparative perspective, and in particular with
the German colonization of southwest Africa, where the result was the ﬁrst genocide
of the twentieth century. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 75–239.
explanation 149
Hence different actions “spring from” certain psychic structures, but
only in so far as they are given concrete form by discourse.
Still, the very act of reaching into the motivational realm is—
as Steinmetz points out in his critique of Bourdieu’s avoidance of
psychology—controversial in sociology. I believe Steinmetz’s text
exempliﬁes how it can be done, since it is a formal cause, and not an
efﬁcient mechanistic one, that reaches in to mould motivation in his
explanation. But this issue—the relationship between sociological
and depth-psychological explanations—is an old one, and should
perhaps be examined in its most pristine form.
IX
For thinking about how social researchers think about motives, we
can contrast C. Wright Mills’s essay on vocabularies of motive from
the American Sociological Review with its intellectual counterpoints,
R. M. MacIver’s writing in the American Journal of Sociology from
almost exactly the same time, concerning the imputation of motives
and social causation. Mills, as is well known, advised a move away
from “the inferential conception of motives as subjective ‘springs’ of
action”62
and toward a sociology of vocabularies of motive, which is
to say, the analysis of how people talk about motives and give reasons
for actions, and how these given motives and reasons are deemed appropriate
or inappropriate depending upon the “societal situation.”
And so, “institutionally different situations have different vocabularies
of motive appropriate to their respective behaviors.”63
Thus motives
are a certain sort of words, used in conversations as justiﬁcation,
when questions are asked or implied. It is worth noting, however,
that in taking us outside of subjectivity, Mills nonetheless retained the
goal of developing causal accounts of social life: “To term [motives]
justiﬁcation is not to deny their efﬁcacy,”64
Mills writes, and so “the
motives actually used in justifying or criticizing an act deﬁnitely link
62. C. Wright Mills, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,” American
Sociological Review 5, no. 6 (1940): 904. See also C. Wright Mills, “Language, Logic,
and Culture,” American Sociological Review 4, no. 5 (1939): 670 –80.
63. Mills, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,” 906.
64. Mills, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,” 907. This is of particular
importance as the divide between actors’ justiﬁcation of the actions, on the one
hand, and the motivations for those actions, on the other, has become a signiﬁcant
issue recently in cultural sociology. See Christian Smith, Moral Believing Animals:
Human Personhood and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 125–45,
150 chapter five
it to situations, integrate one man’s action with another’s, and line
up conduct with norms.”65
Motives, then, are “common grounds for
mediated behaviors.”66
Mills’s essay has become an essential reference point for integrating
meaning into sociology, for it suggests a way that talk is a form
of effective action, in so far as it frames and conditions other actions.
However, part of the appeal of this approach, articulated by Mills himself
and picked up over and over again in various subﬁelds that have
turned toward “culture” and “framing,” is the idea that, in focusing
on vocabularies of motive the investigator leaves behind the problem
of inferring the subjective states of actors. In its consequences for
research this is not unlike the implications sometimes drawn from
poststructuralist theory that researchers should move away from the
why questions (whose answers might refer to motives and to structures
or mechanisms) toward how questions about the working of discourse
in very speciﬁc locales.67
But it is not clear that one has to accept Mills’s utter denial of the
possibility and/or utility of inferring subjective “springs” of action to
accept his idea that vocabularies of motive help deﬁne situations and
communicate institutional power. Nor is it clear that culture, deﬁned
as the frames people use, will somehow require less interpretation
than the subjective reasons, interests, drives, and desires that occupy
an actor’s mind. For if frames are effective, they are effective because
their interpretation by others is efﬁcacious—which raises the issue
of how those others interpreted the frames, which brings us back to
interpreting other people’s interpretations. Mills wants to avoid the
hermeneutic circle, to be sure, but perhaps more than anything he
wanted to avoid naïve Freudianism and criticize the language of egopsychology—common
among the American elite in midcentury—as
just another way to talk about other human beings. My argument
is that you can avoid naïve ego-psychology but cannot avoid the
and Stephen Vaisey, “Motivation and Justiﬁcation: A Dual-Process Model of Culture
in Action,” American Journal of Sociology 114, no. 6 (2009): 1675–715.
65. Mills, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,” 908.
66. Mills, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,” 908.
67. Leslie Salzinger, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global
Factories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For a critique of Salzinger’s
epistemological choices, and their consequences for the study of the global economy,
see Jennifer Bair, “On Difference and Capital: Gender and the Globalization of Production,”
Signs 36, no. 1 (2010): 203–36.
explanation 151
interpretation of subjectivity.68
This becomes quite clear when one
considers the arguments of Mills’s direct opponent, who did believe
that motives should be part of what sociologists investigate, but also
had skepticisms about ego-psychology.
In his article “The Imputation of Motives” R. M. MacIver argues
strongly that social investigators should attempt to grasp actors’ motives
as part of what generates actions. He ﬁrst points out that just
because imputing motives presents certain problems to the sociologist
does not mean that he should dispense with the task. This tendency
to dismiss the imputation of motives is usually justiﬁed by the empiricist
stance that the social scientist studies that which is manifest
and observable, thus leaving motives “for the novelist or the moral-
ist.”69
MacIver thus concludes, “if this art is still rudimentary it is
not because the evidences of motivation are lacking but because the
scientiﬁc study of these evidences has gone so short a way.”70
What does MacIver advocate? His critique of “the Freudians” is
that they make the distinction between conscious and unconscious
motives “sharp and decisive” and then claim to have the only technique
that can get at unconscious motives, which, they claim, are
the true and real springs of action. Instead, he prefers to think of
motives as (1) ranging from opaque to apparent to the agent who
possesses them, and (2) ranging in the degree to which they are apparent
or hidden to other social actors, including social researchers.
His point is that, for the researcher, some motives take more digging,
and more interpretive work, to decipher. He favors a sociological
perspective that allows a wide variety of motives to become part of
a social explanation.
MacIver’s focus on motivation is part of his more generalized
study of social causation, and so he does not exclude the possibility
that vocabularies of motive, and the various conventions that
they enact, would also be of causal signiﬁcance. In the terms I have
developed here, then, we might say that vocabularies of motive play
68. For a similar argument, made in terms of the opposition between interactionist
and Weberian perspectives, see Colin Campbell, The Myth of Social Action (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
69. Robert M. MacIver, “The Imputation of Motives,” American Journal of Sociology
46, no. 1 (1940): 4. See also Robert M. MacIver, Social Causation (Boston:
Ginn and Company, 1942).
70. MacIver, “The Imputation of Motives,” 9.
152 chapter five
a deeply important part of certain landscapes of meaning, but that
(1) these landscapes themselves have to be interpreted, which is to say
reconstructed via the use of theory, and (2) upon such landscapes,
human beings do emerge with subjective motives that force action
forward. The problem for interpretive explanation, then, is to do what
Steinmetz did—show carefully how the landscape gives form to the
motive, which applies force in causing social action.
What we have developed within the language game of social
theory, then, is a plurality of abstract accounts of how the human
mind is, in one way or another, a force in the world. We would be
well served to accept a spectrum of motives running from conscious
to unconscious—and set about examining how these possibilities,
granted by the plasticity of human nature, appear at different places
and different times, molded by signiﬁcation and representation. The
resultant explanations—as we can see from Steinmetz’s analysis—
would not “exclude motivation,” but they would radically historicize
and contextualize it. We cannot use the motivations of actors to construct
an explanation without understanding the meanings in which
these motives are immersed (see ﬁg. 10).
In delving into the problem of motivation, the interpretive epistemic
mode suggests a historicized dialectic, contrasting the emergent
motives, possessed by individuals, and the meanings that make
these motivations concretely effective. And so, the interpretive investigator
plays theater critic to her subjects’ performances. On the
Landscape of meaning
Actor’s reasons
Unconscious
desires and drives
Social action
+ -Intentionality spectrum
Forming causality Forming causality
Forcing causality Forcing causality
Figure 10: Meaning and motivation
explanation 153
stage, characters’ motivations emerge in the context of a set and
script, which are what give the playwright’s imagination of what
human beings are like, and what her characters want, the concrete
immediacy that pushes the play forward. Something similar happens
when we reconstruct motivation for an interpretive explanation, but
set and script are written by history and culture.
This interpretive dialectic cannot only be conceived as the interaction
of interiority with representation and signiﬁcation, however.
For there are productive forces in the social world that are not the
possession, more or less controlled, of individual subjects, more or
less rational. These processes or structures—and, in the end, it is best
to think of them as mechanisms—must also be part of interpretive
explanation.
X
After all, this talk of motivation and meaning should make not only
the realist-Marxist theorist of structural power, but also the good
Foucauldian uncomfortable. Is it not the case that this language of
desire that Steinmetz uses in the process of constructing his explanation
should itself be the topic of inquiry? Is not Steinmetz’s use of
psychoanalytic language complicit with the vast operation of discourses
that produce these human subjects with deep motives? Do not
motives emerge from a social process; do they not have, themselves,
a social history?
They do. Sometimes the mechanism produces the subject with the
motive. But this too is a process in which social force is given form
by meaning. This is the insight delivered in all its brilliance in some
of Michel Foucault’s most well known writings. Foucault writes:
The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is
also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a
power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or
virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the
authority who requires the confession, prescribes it and appreciates it,
and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile;
a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances
it has had to surmount in order to be formulated.71
71. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage
Books, 1990), 61–62.
154 chapter five
A ritual, a repeated set of actions embedded in a social relationship
of domination: confession is a mechanism, and a mechanism
that has, as its regular outcome, a certain sort of human subject.
The mechanism is social; it is part of our taken-for-granted, socially
produced reality; it exceeds any agent and indeed whole domains
of highly reﬂective and sophisticated discourse. It is “so deeply ingrained
in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power
that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged
in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface.” And only if we
are “taken in by this internal ruse of confession” can we really believe
that Freud has discovered some massive truth about human nature,
covered up heretofore by Victorian censors and, before that, by preEnlightenment
ignorance. This mechanism, moreover, is expanding
its reach—it is “relayed through so many different points,” and from
1215 AD to the present, procedures of confession go through “a dissemination
. . . a multiple localization of their constraint, a widening
of their domain.”72
And the focus, of course, was on sex, and on sex
as the location of the truth of the subject, thus drawing a deep connection
between sex and truth that is unique to Western civilization,
and especially intense in Western modernity.
But then, it is with the issue of modernity that this whole story of
a mechanism’s growth and dispersion becomes a story not only about
forcing causes but also about forming causes—the causes that mould
the productive mechanism of confession in a certain way, giving it a
certain meaning. For Foucault’s explanation is also concerned with
the transfer of the mechanism of confession from the discourse of
“sin and salvation” to the discourse of “bodies and life processes.”
Confession migrates from the landscape of meaning of Catholicism to
that of psychoanalysis, and in doing so it changes radically, especially
in its concrete effects (including the invention of homosexuality as
an identity category).
To say this is, of course, to suggest that in the writings of Foucault
one does ﬁnd, despite his protests to the contrary, explanations—
interpretive explanations, that is. His work is well known for introducing
a “capillary” approach to social power, and for presenting us with
certain dystopian interpretations of past and present social facts.73
And
72. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 61, 63.
73. For a discussion of Foucault’s work in the context of the normative epistemic
mode, see chapter 3, sections VI and VII.
explanation 155
yet, if we examine his work on social practices like confession—and
even more so, his early “archaeological studies”—I believe that what
we ﬁnd is the embedding of social processes into regimes of signiﬁcation,
which is to say, studies of how mechanisms occur upon
landscapes of meaning (see ﬁg. 11).
One could cite other examples of mechanisms embedded in meaning.
Once we recognize forming causality as a different kind of social
causality, we can see how it is repeatedly a part of social explanations,
even if it is not presented in the terms of the Aristotle-inspired metaphor
I am using here. Corrections to the new economic sociology
suggest that that market mechanisms are not only embedded in social
ties, but in social meanings;74
political interests and ideologies are
spread and consolidated via elaborate meaning work;75
the decisions
of female corporate executives are made on the terms of schemas of
devotion.76
74. Fred Block, Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990), 31–32; Frederick Wherry, The Culture of Markets
(Cambridge: Polity Press, forthcoming); Lyn Spillman, unpublished manuscript.
75. Matthew Norton, “A Structural Hermeneutics of ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’” Theory
and Society 40, no. 3 (2011): 315–46.
76. Mary Blair-Loy, Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Landscape of meaning
Trigger event X
“Black box”
mechanism Z
Forming causality
Forcing causality
Outcome Y
Forcing causality
Figure 11: Meaning and mechanism
156 chapter five
Both motivations and mechanisms, then, are given concrete form
by signiﬁcation. As a result the analysis of their causal effects is embedded
within the interpretation of meaning. An implication of this
is that landscapes of meaning, upon which mechanisms and motivations
occur, are for the investigator a different (and prior) dimension
along which causal arguments must be made. The effects of formal
causes are, like other effects, drawn out through comparison and/or
counterfactual reasoning (“it could have gone differently”). But the
interpretation of landscapes of meaning, through the pluralist use
of theory (as examined in chapter 4), historicizes these counterfactual
arguments and renders them dependent, ultimately, on the indepth
knowledge of cases. For, in the interpretive epistemic mode,
the counterfactuals of a given case or set of cases emerge from the
holistic knowledge of the meanings active in a case. The interpretation
of the history of a given landscape of meaning is itself the source
of knowledge about what other meanings might have been available
to certain motivated actors or what other discursively embedded
mechanisms would have “worked.” In other words, the development
of counterfactual and/or comparative argument as a part of causal
argument is itself a hermeneutic process.77
Having suggested this triad
77. The implication of counterfactual reasoning in causal claims is accepted in
many, vastly different, epistemologies for social research (see, e.g., James J. Heckman,
“The Scientiﬁc Model of Causality,” Sociological Methodology 35 [2005]: 1–97; James
Mahoney, “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology,” Theory and Society 29, no. 4
[2000]: 507–48). In the view presented here, the historicity of social relations implied
by forming causes means that social dynamics cannot be captured by the concept of an
“open system,” because such a conception could not capture the meaningful aspects
of a given historical trajectory. This returns us to Fritz Ringer’s account of Weber’s approach
to causality. Ringer identiﬁes the direct connection between Weber’s “singular
causal statements” and his theory of subjectivity and social action. This is because
Ringer takes seriously Weber’s language about the unreality of ideal types. He thus
argues that in Weber’s form of causal analysis, the investigator draws upon theory to
help construct the imaginative counterfactuals that allow singular causal claims to be
made. The purpose of ideal types is precisely to set up an account of the course of
events from which actual events diverge, thus allowing the investigator to consider how
ideal-typical process A→B was modiﬁed by various events and interactions with other
processes, to produce what actually happened, A’→B’—all within the same case.
Note here the contrast to Goldstone’s realist method (discussed in chapter 2). In
Goldstone, A→B would be differentiated from A’→B’ only in so far as theory pointed
directly to a mechanism or process that was present in the latter and absent in the former.
In Ringer’s interpretation of Weber, however, while ideal types can provide the
basis for comparing cases (either by contrasting differing ideal types, or by showing
how two cases deviate in different ways from a given ideal type), the “singular causal
analysis” takes place precisely in the moment when the case is compared to the ideal-
explanation 157
of meaning, motivation, and mechanism as a metaframework for historicized
explanation in social research, it is perhaps now appropriate
to consider the idea of interpretive explanation in relationship to the
argument of this book as a whole.
XI
Gary Alan Fine once described culture as an “amorphous mist.”78
He
and other sociologists of culture have, in the process of bringing the
interpretation of cultures into sociology, repeatedly insisted upon
the intangibility of meaning, and thus on the necessity of grounding
the study of culture in the aspects of social life that are more obvious,
observable, or familiar to sociologists (and thus are supposedly more
real).79
But the arguments made in this book would suggest that
typical version of itself. Thus causal explanation emerges from deep knowledge of a
given case and the theoretical development of ideal types.
A similar argument—about counterfactuals deriving from detailed historical knowledge
of the case under scrutiny—can be found in Geoffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds:
Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991). For an adumbration of this view, one which perhaps connects
the work of Weber and Dilthey, see Georg Simmel, The Problems of the Philosophy of
History: An Epistemological Essay (New York: Free Press, 1977).
78. Gary Alan Fine, “Small Groups and Cultural Creation: The Idioculture of
Little League Baseball Teams,” American Sociological Review 44 (1979). See also
Amin Ghaziani, “An ‘Amorphous Mist’? The Problem of Measurement in the Study
of Culture,” Theory and Society 38, no. 6 (2009).
79. This issue ranges far and wide in sociology, and is a point of focus for debates—
both written and oral—that occur between members of the large section on the
sociology of culture of the American Sociological Association. A variety of grounds
for the study of meaning have been proposed—the practicalities of action; the social
circumstances in which ideologies develop; the demographic shifts to which changes
in literary form respond; the social networks that shape belief; and so on. There
seem to be two things going on in these discussions. First, a very strong impetus to
return meaning to some sort of institutional ground, which perhaps seems real or
“harder” for the simple reason that the theoretical articulation of “social structure”
and “institutions” is so deeply embedded in sociological theory, method, and informal
sociological lingo (despite various ingenious theoretical attempts to overcome the
opposition between social structure and culture, or to posit a bidirectional causality
between the two). Second, an intense desire to avoid the uncertainties that attend to
interpreting subjectivity, and thus to move the study of culture toward supposedly
more observable entities, even if these entities are themselves “culture” or “discourse”
or “communication.” See Isaac Reed, “Book Review: Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How
Culture Matters,” Theory and Society 31, no. 6 (2002); Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action:
Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (1986); Ann Swidler,
Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Robert
Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation,
the Enlightenment, and European Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
158 chapter five
it is the motivations and mechanisms, or to use those terms again,
“agency” and “structure,” that are better compared to an amorphous
mist. Motivations and mechanisms are real, but their identiﬁcation in
theory is not enough to enable social explanation. For, the ontological
components of the social only become concretely effective when they
are given form by systems of signiﬁcation and meaning. Landscapes
of meaning are formal causes in so far as they give motivations and
mechanisms shape and color, concreteness and character.
Consider again Lichterman’s church volunteers. They all have biographies
that have led to them having motivated projects in the
world, in historical situations deﬁned by structures. Confronted with
welfare reform (a structural constraint if there ever was one!), they
are motivated—they “want to help.” And there may be some ways
in which these motivated projects draw upon the religious biographies
of those who possess them, and thus already differ in a way
that Lichterman has to be careful to allow for.80
But the truth of
the matter is that these motivations are like melted bronze before
it is poured into a cast and allowed to harden into a real statue. The
cast is the meaningful context in which amorphous motives become
effectively performed actions. Motives only harden into effective
social forces—forces that, for example, create the social capacity to
work for the public good81
—when they are given a concrete form by
meaning. The same point applies to Foucault’s ritual of confession.
Press, 1989). Wendy Griswold, “The Devil’s Techniques: Cultural Legitimation and
Social Change,” American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 668–80. For a criticism of this
tendency in American sociology and the articulation of a “structural hermeneutics”
in opposition to it, see Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith, “The Strong Program in
Cultural Sociology: Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics,” in The Meanings of Social
Life: A Cultural Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). For an overview
of the whole problem, with particular attention to how culture intersects with practice
and with institutions, see Roger Friedland and John Mohr, “The Cultural Turn in
American Sociology,” in Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice, ed. Roger
Friedland and John Mohr (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–68.
80. Lichterman’s examination of a group of evangelical volunteers addresses this
issue. He considers how, in a fuzzy way, the motivations that evangelicals brought to
the problem of welfare reform may have been different, and relied perhaps on different
beliefs, molded by a lifetime of different experiences and discourses. However, even
here Lichterman ﬁnds that the explanatory leverage given by something like a commitment
to a “personal inﬂuence strategy” for social betterment is better conceptualized
as “a style of evangelical group life” that “shaped the volunteers’ way of reaching out.”
Lichterman, Elusive Togetherness, 144.
81. Paul Lichterman, “Social Capital or Group Style? Rescuing Tocqueville’s Insights
on Civic Engagement,” Theory and Society 35, nos. 5–6 (2006).
explanation 159
Certain things can be said, in the abstract, about how power works in
the repeated ritual of confession, and thus about how the mechanism
of confession works. But confession is given its lifeblood, its shape
and effectiveness, by the discursive formation through which it takes
place. An investigation into confession that does not account for the
meanings that attach to it may produce a highly precise model, and
a model that is heuristically useful. But these models should not be
mistaken for the reality to which they supposedly refer. For without
an understanding of formal causality, the theorization of a mechanism
only grasps a formless force, an amorphous mist.
And so, for interpretive social research our conclusion is this: it is not
necessary for ethnographers observing interaction and talk, historians
embedded in archival details, cultural sociologists pouring over newspapers
or through LexisNexis, communications scholars of a humanist
bent, and others usually described as “interpretive” to reject mechanistic
causality, or to reject the much-maligned attempt to interpret “what
is inside people’s heads.” But they must realize that what our theories
tell us about how mechanisms work, and how people are motivated to
do what they do, will only tell us about clouds and fog that have yet to
become a storm. For the issue, in the end, is not whether or not social
life is or is not “mechanistic.” The issue is the conceptual method by
which an interpretive investigator could posit a mechanism or a motive
when analyzing her evidence. On the one hand, mechanisms—those
powerful, repeated social processes that help us explain so many social
outcomes—and motives—those human desires, drives, and interests
that accompany almost any action-situation—provide a clear sense
that generalized social theory can be useful for building explanations.
Social mechanisms, when abstracted from meaning and modeled effectively
in sociotheoretic discourse, offer a way to schematize social
process. Motivations, when considered as the sorts of projects actors
take into the world, offer a way to grasp the involvement of individual
humans in the processes that determine their lives.
But these theories will not deliver the goods of explanation until they
are combined with the theoretically pluralistic process of the interpretation
of meaning, to which chapter 4 was devoted. Indeed that process
must be primary if we are to move from generalized theory to explanation,
because in social life, unlike in nature, the force of social life must
have a form—an aesthetic, an emotional valence, a reference point, a
trope, in short, an interpretable meaning—to be effective (see ﬁg. 12).
Social life does develop certain repeatable processes—order emerges
160 chapter five
in a neighborhood, in a commodity chain, in a world-system. And
actors bring certain motives to situations—sometimes very predictable
ones. But do we want to say that these social regularities and
predictable aspects of the human mind, which emerge in certain times
and certain places, are but the empirical expression of the underlying
properties or tendencies of a social being, whose ontology is revealed
to us in theory? I think not, because the intellectual operation of the
theoretical formalization of mechanistic processes and motivational
projects that takes place within the community of inquirers is, in the
end, the development of heuristically useful abstract ﬁctions to get
at historically located truths.
Perhaps ethnographies provide the classic example of this. Even
in highly localized, thickly descriptive ethnographies, we ﬁnd that
the regularity of social life is to be found in meaningful settings, and
indeed emerges there. Often what makes an ethnographic anecdote
useful and representative is that it reveals in a particularly perspicuous
way some recurring aspect of social life in a given setting, and
certain aspects of ethnographic settings are indeed quite regular and
predictable. What is tragic about Tyree’s violent “campaign for respect”
in Code of the Streets is just how predictable it really is; how the
actions of Tyree and the gang of boys he eventually joins are scripted
by the code; how, though there may be contingencies about when
and where the violence occurs, that violence is coming to Tyree is a
near certainty, for that ﬁfteen-year-old, at that time and place. Just
Mechanisms
Social action
“Agency” intersects with “structure”
Forming causes
Forcing causes
Landscapes of Meaning
Motivations Mechanisms
Figure 12: Forming causes, forcing causes, and social action
explanation 161
because we have (justiﬁable) hesitations about how generalizable
Tyree’s experience is, or how, exactly, it connects to changes in the
political economy of the USA, does not mean that his experience was
radically contingent, dependent entirely on chance, creativity, and
agency. Quite the contrary—Tyree’s trajectory upon moving in with
his grandmother comes about as a result of his various motivations
(to seek respect, to avoid further injury) and the regularized behaviors
of violent gangs (defending turf, negotiating social relations through
physical violence), embedded in the code of the streets, an encompassing
semiotic system of masculinity, style, and honor.82
The point, then, is that the investigator must show the workings
of forcing causes with constant reference to the meaningful context
in which they occur. For, the processes of social life, the “how” of
everyday interaction and negotiation, the organization of humans
into effective working units, the development of speciﬁc capacities and
powers to move the world, are formed by meaning. This is the underlying
epistemological commitment of methodologies often deemed “interpretive,”
and to consider these methodologies as fundamentally set
against the possibility of explanation is a mistake. Quite the opposite:
methodologies are “interpretive” precisely in so far as they guide us
toward this meaning-reconstruction, whereby social mechanisms are
ﬁnally comprehended in their concrete, sometimes vicious power because
the meanings that form them are brought to light. If to engage in
this process of truth-making is going to be labeled a new sort of science,
so be it. For the point is not to explain how interpretive epistemics lives
up to the image of knowledge projected by the natural sciences and
internalized by the social sciences, but but rather to comprehend how
such an epistemics allows us to get the causal explanation right.
XII
The ultimate argument, then, is this: an essential aspect of social life as
such is its dependence upon arrangements of meaning and representation,
which themselves arrange and form the forceful causes of social
action. But the possibilities for how meaning can construe or “form”
social life are inﬁnite, and can, in some cases, be highly idiosyncratic,
because the meanings of symbols are arbitrary and conventional.
82. Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the
Inner City (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 80 –87.
162 chapter five
Thus, because social life enacts meanings, its basic nature can never
be fully speciﬁed, and instead must be understood as historically variable.
So, theories of the social are at best heuristics that articulate
the amorphous ontological mist of agency and structure in perspicacious
ways. Only the theoretically informed interpreter of meanings
can bring these terms out of abstraction. And so, perhaps instead of
asking “What is the relationship between structure and agency?” we
should ask how certain motivations and certain mechanisms enact
and interpret the landscapes of meaning upon which they move, and
by which they are formed. For, the nature of the social as such is that
it is impossible to theorize, once and for all, the nature of the social
as such. One must use theory to interpret meanings instead.
There is a fundamental connection between the investigator’s interest
in the causal dynamics of concrete sociohistorical reality,83
the
process of meaning-interpretation, and the plurality of theories of the
social available to the working researcher. We have to interpret meaning
to be able to specify our general theories of the social into true explanations.
But to interpret meaning, as I argued in chapter 4, we need
a plurality of social theories. The end goal of explanation can only be
approached via an understanding of social causality as both historically
speciﬁc and multidimensional. Hence the fate of the human sciences,
wherein investigators must, sooner or later, deal with meaning. Plurality
in theory, unity in meaning, historicity in explanation.
To the social researcher trained in naturalist ambition, meaning
may appear elusive and epiphenomenal. But to the social actor, meaning
is massively, unavoidably real, no matter how ultimately unrealistic
its constructs, referents, or imaginings. The problem for the social
researcher is, then, to interpret this meaning according to its causal
consequences for social action. Max Weber set this out as the project
for social theory and social research, in an era before realism and
mechanism, and discourse and signiﬁcation, were part of the language
game of social theory. Perhaps we now have the conceptual resources
to make this project our calling.
83. The idea of the human sciences being concerned with concrete social reality,
in opposition to the more abstract natural sciences, appears in Hans Rickert but takes
its classic form in Max Weber: “The type of social science in which we are interested
is an empirical science of concrete reality. Our aim is the understanding of the characteristic
uniqueness of the reality in which we move. We wish to understand on the
one hand the relationships of the cultural signiﬁcance of individual events in their
contemporary manifestations and on the other the causes of their being historically so
and not otherwise.” Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 72.
Epilogue
I
The word ‘theory’ has its origins in the Greek theoria. Theoria was
practiced when a person (the theoros) “made a journey or pilgrimage
abroad for the purpose of witnessing certain events and spectacles.”1
The theoros traveled outside the boundaries of his city-state and
attended—sometimes as an ofﬁcial civic representative—religious
celebrations or athletic competitions. He (and it was, then, a he)
observed these events and returned home, sometimes to discuss them
with his own community. ‘Theory,’ then, has its various contemporary
denotations and connotations at least in part because Plato and
Aristotle drew metaphorical links between the practice of philosophy
and the practice of theoria. In the twentieth century, the use of this
link to the ancients, and discussion about the possible meanings of
‘theoria’—both as a Greek practice and as a modern philosophical
imperative—became part of the language of continental social theory,
a sort of cipher by which to indicate the overall scope of a writer’s
1. Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy:
Theoria in Its Cultural Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3.
164 epilogue
intention.2
Jürgen Habermas did not refrain from the temptation to
engage in this updated (and in some sense inverted) version of the
querelle des Ancients et des Modernes.
In his inaugural lecture in Frankfurt in 1965, Habermas used an interpretation
of theoria to reframe the distinction inherited from Max
Horkheimer between “traditional” and “critical” theory. By linking
theory to different human interests, and in particular by emphasizing
the way the theoretical imagination could be connected to the human
interest in emancipation, Habermas articulated the resistance to
scientism that we now recognize as an essential characteristic of the
revolution in social theory that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. In
Habermas’s view, the ancient ideal of speculation had been distorted
in modern European philosophy when it was interpreted as disinterested,
asocial thought. Echoing Horkheimer, he argued that modern
advocates of radically antiempirical speculation were but the mirror
images of positivism and scientism. But he went further, suggesting
that the core impetus behind positivism—the distanced, objective
gaze—had conquered almost all of the human sciences, even outside
of behavioristic political science and neoclassical economics. “Historicism
has become the positivism of the cultural and social sciences,”
he claimed.3
At its root, for Habermas, this problem stemmed from the “severance
of knowledge from interest,” and thus the loss of an essential
piece of philosophical wisdom originally articulated in the theoros
metaphor.4
In Weberian language, his argument was that the total
embrace of value-freedom in both empirical and theoretical work in
the human sciences had vitiated the connection between values and
truth that theory had once stood for. Thus “what was once supposed
to comprise the practical efﬁcacy of theory has now fallen prey to
methodological prohibitions.”5
Both modern speculative philosophy
and social scientiﬁc positivism had missed the essential point that,
for the great Greek philosophers, abstract speculation was a process
2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum Publishing
Company, 1989), 124 –29, 453–56. Martin Heidegger, “Science and Reﬂection,” in The
Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 282–87.
3. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press,
1971), 303.
4. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 303.
5. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 304.
epilogue 165
deeply connected to humans’ desire for emancipation from the forces
that control them. Why should we know the world of pure forms?
So that we can live better.
Habermas’s speciﬁc contribution, then, was to cast doubt not
only upon “bourgeois sociology,” but also upon the ambitions for
pure thought that stretched, in German philosophy, from Schelling
to Husserl. Habermas extended and redeployed Horkheimer’s position
in two essential ways: he expanded its conceptual base to include
a full analysis of communication and culture, and he extended the
critique of “disinterested” theory to include the entire tradition of
transcendental idealism and the “objectivist self-understanding of
the hermeneutic sciences.” The latter, he wrote, “defends sterilized
knowledge against the reﬂected appropriation of active traditions and
locks up history in a museum.”6
In other words, human scientists
had only interpreted the world . . . and thus their theory was not
praxis.7
I believe that this argument became iconic as it iterated itself,
in varying versions, through an entire generation’s worth of social
theorists and their students. Consider literary theory in American
universities, wherein the dominant ﬁgure was, for some time, Jacques
Derrida. In the same years that Habermas was reworking his understanding
of critical reason and social theory, Derrida engaged in
an intellectual project radically different in its attitude toward the
Western philosophical tradition but eerily similar in its attempt to
revolutionize philosophy and the human sciences. In Derrida’s view,
formalistic and positivistic approaches to texts and to societies would
be upended by the very exclusions that made them seem authoritative;
the coherence of philosophy and of science was founded on
contradiction. But a rupture was imminent, a rupture that would
end the transcendentalist illusion that our best theoretical languages
could point to pristine signiﬁeds that sit outside the play of life and
language.
6. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 316.
7. Austin Harrington has shown, conclusively in my view, that both Habermas and
Gadamer misread Dilthey. As he writes with reference to the methodology of verstehen,
“the fact that traditional interpretive methodologies do not generally thematize the
researcher’s relation to the object-domain in terms of normative ‘dialogue’ still provides
no reason for regarding these doctrines as somehow misleadingly unreﬂexive and naïve,
much less as covertly objectivist.” Austin Harrington, “Objectivism in Hermeneutics?
Gadamer, Habermas, Dilthey,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30, no. 4 (2000): 493.
166 epilogue
Derrida and Habermas have been subject to multiple interpretations,
but one rather obvious implication of their work is that it
was the duty of the theorist to resist the collapse of the critical possibilities
granted by abstract thought into the advancing scientism of
knowledge production in the postwar Western academy. For if this
were allowed to happen, the critical capacity for the theorist to be a
theoros who not only sees the world but also engages it would disappear.
Hence the dispute about theoria: was the theoros, as distanced
observer, the harbinger of objectivism and thus of a quiescence of
thought, unable to disrupt the smooth functioning of a homogenized,
ideologically justiﬁed, overrationalized modern world? Or was the
theoros, as a fellow human being swept up in religious celebration,
primed to become a political force upon his return home? Certainly,
for Plato, the philosopher’s ability to contemplate—and then verbalize
imitations of—the Ideal Forms prepared him for political leadership.
But what would this mean for radical democratic theory in a
waning modernity? How, in a consumer society, would the real and
the good be reconnected? How, in societies immersed in mass communication,
could the virtuous life be lived, and with what political
consequences? And so on.
It is in the context of this crisis of theory that the emergence and
appeal of critical realism must be understood—and in particular the
eloquent articulations of the emancipatory impulse by Roy Bhaskar,
and the effective argumentation, by Margaret Archer and others, that
the social sciences must resist colonization by rational choice theory.8
Finally! Critical realism provides a perspective that links the capacities
of science to the intellectual will necessary for the production of
social critique in an overmediated, hypercapitalist world. And yet one
wonders, at the same time, if this entire structure—of critical and
traditional theory, praxis and scientism, disruption and reproduction,
resistance and rationalization, pleasure and discipline—given to us by
’68 and rearticulated in conferences around the globe, has outlived
its utility. We might even consider the possibility that it is, at least in
part, grounded on a misunderstanding of what research inspired by
the “historical-hermeneutic sciences” is all about.
8. Roy Bhaskar, Scientiﬁc Realism and Human Emancipation (New York: Verso,
2009); Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter, eds., Rational Choice Theory:
Resisting Colonization (New York: Routledge, 2000).
epilogue 167
II
In this book, I have tried to show that theory is a world of meanings,
and useful meanings at that: when articulated with evidence
it produces the maximal interpretations that, in my view, form the
ultimate goal for knowledge in the human sciences. The semiotic
scheme I developed for understanding these maximal interpretations
was designed to comprehend realism and normativism as formats
of interpretation that perform the fusion of theory and evidence
in different ways, with different goals, and different results. But in
applying this scheme to the meaning-centered mode of social investigation,
I came to the conclusion that not only was “interpretivism”
a different way of using theory, but also that our overall
understanding of what theory can and should do for us is hampered
by the classic opposition between theory-as-science and theory-as(critical)practice.
In terms of the Greek origins of the term ‘theory,’
then, what I am suggesting is that in focusing on the theoros as either
observer or political force, we have missed an important aspect of the
metaphor.
For the theoros is a stranger in a strange land. She has travelled
across oceans, and ﬁrst and foremost needs to understand what she
sees. She brings with her the webs of meaning that constitute knowledge
in her own community and the curiosities of her relations,
friends, and colleagues, formed in countless dialogues that preceded
the trip. She can share her curiosity with other strangers, from other
city-states, who share her task. Prepared in this way by immersion in
the meanings of theory, she observes and participates in the event.
Upon her return, others in her community ask her to recount and
interpret what it was she saw, and rearrange their webs of meaning as a
result. Thus the theoros is the agent of understanding, the translator,
the human avatar of Hermes, the hermeneut. I would submit that this
is the ultimate purpose of the pluralistic, contentious language game
of social theory—to allow the investigator to travel in mind and in
text and through the analysis of evidence, and thus to comprehend
and communicate the way social life works in other times and other
places. Theory is the abstract construction of a mental ship; with it
we can travel, with the explicit purpose of understanding. Curiosity
and the will to understand must be primary, with explanation and
critique to follow, for the actualization of understanding will rely on
the traveler’s sensitivities to idiosyncratic meanings, and not just on
168 epilogue
her logical brilliance. Theory, then, has to enable the comprehension
of other signiﬁcation systems, other social formations, other mechanisms
pushing around other men and women, in other valleys.
One implication of this move toward the interpretive use of
theory—and thus toward the idea that explanation and critique can
both begin from the interpretation of meaning—is that we will have
to dispense with one of the most common, almost taken-for-granted
oppositions in contemporary social theory. In this opposition, the
postpositivist, post-Marxist space of high theory is constituted by
a division between work that is concerned (perhaps naïvely) with
“meaning” and work that is concerned (perhaps obsessively) with
“power.” Some investigators dig into meanings and relegate power to
outside the lifeworld, preferring, for example, to ignore the dynamics
of colonial power in favor of comprehending the inner logic of a
cockﬁght. Others are more suspicious, ﬁnding in minute shades of
meaning the production of subjects. But this opposition—between
Geertz and Foucault, between commentary and suspicion, between
reproduction and disruption—depends conceptually upon the opposition
between interpretation and explanation that I have tried
to unravel in the previous two chapters. For only if we consider the
interpretation of meaning to be somehow separate from the analysis
of social causality can we justify the idea that to focus on power and
practice is to avoid interpreting meaning. The concept of “forming
causes” is designed, among other things, to make exactly this
point. Power and causality are closely intertwined concepts for social
research. For, effectivity in social life—for a person, organization,
discursive formation, or whatever historically conditioned social force
emerges upon and is formed by landscapes of meaning—is at its root
the key to social power, whether that power is an emergent, capillary
network of relations or the prerogative of the directors of a command
economy. Thus if there are interpretive explanations—investigations
into how meaning has concrete social effects—then there are interpretive
studies of social power. Studies that show mechanisms actualized
through meanings, the production of subjects via discourse and
practice, the concretization of wills to power and moneyed interests
through cultural formations: what do these studies do but grasp how
meaning actually works upon people?
But this is, then, to suggest that the comprehension of how causality
works in social life has to be thrown wide open if we are to
comprehend the workings of social power. “Forming causes” are, in
epilogue 169
my view, only the very beginning of a project of historicized social
explanation and theoretical pluralism.
III
But if meaning and power are to be interpreted together, what about
the problems of interpretation itself ? The very possibility of interpretive
explanation is doubted by the hermeneutic tradition, and this
doubt fuels the ﬁre of those who would separate out the analysis of
power and practice from the interpretation of meaning.
For if the metaphor of theoros as traveler captures the central point
of hermeneutics, namely that the purpose of investigation is to “get to
know the other,” there are good reasons to be uncomfortable with the
hermeneutic imperative so stated. On the one hand, in the epistemic
crisis of Western anthropology, going into the ﬁeld to comprehend
the “native’s point of view” has been identiﬁed as historically, socially,
and intellectually entwined with Western colonialism. Getting
to know the other was always already an act of power, and in so far
as knowledge was successful, it aided domination. The traveler is, in
a word, complicit. On the other hand, the tradition of hermeneutic
philosophy has imprinted upon interpretation the existential nearimpossibility
of true understanding—suggesting that knowledge,
particularly knowledge of human beings that claims scientiﬁc status,
is deeply ﬂawed at best. For hermeneutic philosophy, we cannot know
or fully occupy another’s horizon; interpretation is ﬂawed and always
in some sense a misrecognition. One of the overarching conclusions
drawn—incorrectly, I believe—from this hermeneutic obsession with
misrecognition and misunderstanding is that the best knowledge in
the human sciences is dialogue and not explanation.
Release from these doubts will only come through the development
of a plurality of abstract theoretical schemas, schemas that will
succeed insofar as they augment the theoretical toolkit available to
investigators who seek to construct deep interpretations of others’
meanings. But to embrace this theoretical pluralism, it is necessary
to reverse the tendency of thought that associates pluralism with
epistemic relativism, for it is only because it is possible to construct
better explanations that we need more theoretical tools with which
to do so. It may indeed be impossible for the interpretivist, with her
emphasis on concreteness, to differentiate with ﬁnality between the
truth of two different theoretical schemas considered in the abstract.
170 epilogue
But she can indeed differentiate between better and worse explanations
of a certain set of social actions, and she can notice which
theoretical schemas were particularly useful in constructing the better
explanation, and for what conceptual reasons they were useful—what
aspects of that meaningful swath of social life those theories allowed
her to grasp. Such is the practical rationality of interpreters in search
of maximal interpretations whose intellectual torque derives from
their grasp of the forms and forces of social life.
IV
The philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright has developed the
concept of a dappled world to describe how different philosophies of
cause could be appropriate to different sciences; working primarily
with reference to the natural sciences and to neoclassical economics,
she has suggested that a given discipline or subdiscipline hunts for
causes and explanations with the aid of laws that are simply not true
when stated abstractly, but that serve as constructed “nomothetic machines”
that allow analysis of concrete causal sequences to proceed.9
The concept is suggestive of something slightly different from how
she uses it, however. It suggests that the social world itself might itself
be dappled because of the way signiﬁcation is both arbitrary and
conventional. The plurality of landscapes of meaning constructs a
dappled world, one that has to be comprehended, and explained, via
the interpretive use of social theory to create maximal interpretations.
Is it any surprise that we would need multiple theoretical constructs,
and a pluralistic conceptual method, to comprehend these multiple
social realities?
The theoros traveled to other city-states and religious oracles; we
use theory to travel throughout the dappled world of social life. It
is this ability to travel and comprehend that makes Geertz’s writing
on cultural difference so deep and resonant, Bordo’s critique of the
discursive conditions for anorexic behavior so incisive, and Foucault’s
analysis of historical discontinuity so compelling. Pluralist in theoretical
appropriation, interpretive analysis constructs meaning-centered
explanation and invites rhetorically effective social criticism. But to
achieve this pluralism, we must articulate our theories of social life
9. Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
epilogue 171
without the sort of ontological ambition that overrides hermeneutic
sensitivity, and without the supports of either an account of human
nature or a philosophy of history. Perhaps these ambitions and supports
were the scaffolds without which we would not have social
theory as it developed in the nineteenth century. In the latter half
of the twentieth century the great deconstructionists and skeptics
proceeded to take these scaffolds down. But in doing so did they
debunk the utility of abstraction? Did they destroy the very possibility
of causal explanation in the human sciences, or of the critique
of ideology? Perhaps instead they merely revealed the way in which
theoretical innovation could give dynamism to our comprehension
of social life, even if theory’s original ambitions and epistemic conﬁdence
derived from an unprovincialized Europe, an overconﬁdent
imagination set on universalizing our knowledge of “man.” We work
without this conﬁdence, but what emerges in its place are myriad new
possibilities for social knowledge.
For if it is the fate of the interpreter to be caught up between the
universalist ambitions of each new theoretical scheme and the endless
idiosyncrasies of human life as lived and experienced, so be it. It
is not such a bad position to be in. The instructions for the traveler
are, in the end, rather simple: build a good ship, bring as many books
and maps as you can, and try to understand the people you meet, as
a way to explain why they do what they do. That, in the end, is the
all-too-human purpose of the human sciences.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jeffrey Alexander, teacher and mentor, for elucidating
what metatheory is and how it works; for teaching me that the tasks
of empirical sociology, social theory, and intellectual exploration can
come together in a meaningful whole; and for introducing me to
Dilthey and Saussure.
Julia Adams showed me the depth of historicity that could accompany
sociological analysis; evidenced the intellectual capacities of
theoretical pluralism; and taught me to read semiotics, Weber, and
feminist theory together.
Braulio Muñoz and Robin Wagner-Paciﬁci started me down the road
to this book at Swarthmore College.
Several colleagues, teachers, and friends engaged with the ideas
expressed in the text during their development: Paul Lichterman, Lyn
Spillman, Nina Eliasoph, Ron Eyerman, Philip Smith, John R. Hall,
Peter Simonson, Emily Erikson, Seth Abrutyn, and Erika SummersEfﬂer.
Thank you for your incisive criticism and conceptual labor.
Jake Lundberg, Sonali Chakravarti, and Daniel Gilbert were loyal
companions in life and intellect.
My colleagues at the University of Colorado were exceptionally
174 acknowledgments
supportive, especially my senior faculty mentors Janet Jacobs and
Jason Boardman.
Benjamin Lamb-Books provided excellent research assistance, and
Danielle Lamb-Books turned my pen and pencil drawings into the
diagrams herein.
Douglas Mitchell provided intellectual inspiration and energy as I
moved the text to completion. The reviewers of the text for University
of Chicago Press, as well as other anonymous reviewers, also provided
important input. Katherine Frentzel provided excellent copyediting
of the text.
Parts of this project were presented at the Sussman Lecture at Yale
University, in colloquia in the sociology departments of the University
of Colorado and the University of California, Davis, and to the
Assistant Professor Sociology Working Group at the University of
Colorado. The Department of Sociology and the College of Arts and
Sciences at the University of Colorado generously provided the research
semester that allowed me to complete the initial manuscript.
My parents Michael Reed and Jacqueline Ariail provided, and continue
to provide, support and love. Ernesto was a constant canine
companion throughout the writing of the text. Helen Reed will always
be, via the memory of her strength and intellect, an inspiration.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
To my wife, Jennifer Bair, is owed the gratitude that can only be directed
at one’s dialectical other, an intertwining of opposition and
recognition that resonates to the core of the soul and enhances the
meaning of love. Intellectual argumentation with a loved one is the
bread of life in an otherwise overaccelerated world; it makes it all
worthwhile.
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Index
agency: antinaturalism and, 68, 105;
as causality, 144, 160 –62; dissolution
of empire via, 78; structure
and, 42, 57–58n35, 134 –37, 158
anthropology: complicity with
Western colonialism, 169; contrast
with other social sciences, 112;
dispute between Sahlins and
Obeyesekere in, 25–29; Geertzian,
62n48, 96n13, 98; philosophical,
61
antinaturalism, 62–63, 68–69,
125n4
Archer, Margaret, 55n31, 57n35, 134,
166
Aristotle, 142–45, 155, 163
Bhaskar, Roy: approach to emancipatory
social science of, 166; contrast
with Foucault, 83; contrast
with Harré, 125n4; distinction
between transitive and intransitive
by, 55–63; naturalism of, 8–9,
55–63; reading of Marx by, 58–59,
65, 137; social ontology of, 41;
views on hermeneutics of, 33
body, 95, 98–100, 107, 147
Bordo, Susan, 98–101, 103–5, 114,
116, 170
Bourdieu, Pierre, 34, 42, 106 –10,
145n49, 149
Brueghel, Peter the Elder, 110
Bunge, Mario, 55, 61n42, 64, 125, 137
Butler, Judith, 79, 138
Capital (Marx), 59–60, 137
capitalism: critical theory and, 166;
French Revolution and, 30 –31;
global, 86; Marx’s theory of,
59–60; public sphere and, 74 –75,
134 –35n24; Weber’s interpretation
of, 138–42
192 index
causality: forcing vs. forming, 11,
160 –62; ideology and, 117–21;
link to social power, 168; philosophy
of explanation and, 127n8;
realism and, 43–50; reasons as
causes, 135–37; signiﬁcation and,
170 –71; social and historical
explanation and, 28–32, 83–85,
125, 135–58; underdetermination
of theory and, 114n37
class, 43–44, 48, 56n34, 90n1, 118
comparative-historical sociology,
43–49, 52–54, 113n35, 117–21, 156
confession, ritual of, 154 –55, 158–59
consciousness: in Marx’s critique of
capitalism, 59; normative epistemic
mode and, 9, 68–71,
77, 81, 87–88
Cook, Captain James, 25–29
counterfactual reasoning, 127n8,
141n37, 156 –57
covering laws, 5, 130 –33, 141n37
critical history, 81–86
Cruickshank, Justin, 55–56,
60n41, 84
cultural sociology, 33–34, 94 –103,
149n64, 157–58n79
Davidson, Donald, 135–36
Derrida, Jacques, 79, 165–66
Dilthey, Wilhelm 145, 156 –57n77, 165
discursive formation, 23, 85–86, 103,
112, 159, 168
DuBois, W. E. B., 68–69, 88
Durkheim, Émile, 15, 41, 68, 95,
108n28
dystopia, 9, 81–87, 154
ethnography: as dialogue, 9, 87;
Geertzian, 93, 96; in-depth case
study and, 105; as interpretive
explanation, 128–29, 159; role in
colonialism of, 147; as science, 5
experience: bodily, 99, 141–42;
of capitalism, 59; of causality,
141–42; interpretation of meaningful,
89–90, 126, 158n80, 161;
relationship to social structure,
61n43, 134n23; sense-experience,
36; social life as lived and experienced,
8–10, 171
experiment: crucial, 53; lack of in social
science, 49, 56 –62, 64, 130; in
natural science, 8, 56 –62; underdetermination
and, 114 –15n37
facts, social, 3–4, 15–18, 31, 154
ﬁeld theory, 106 –9
forces, social, 8, 62, 105, 158. See also
causality
Foucault, Michel: critique of
Western philosophy by, 79, 88;
genealogy and approach to critical
history of, 82–85; interpretive
explanation and, 105, 137–38,
153–58; purpose of theory and,
168–70
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 87, 163–65
Gandhi, Leela, 77–82, 88
Geertz, Clifford, 62–63n48, 93–105,
112–16, 130 –31, 168–70
gender: ambiguity, 79; history of,
19, 21; interpretative approach to,
138; as local and particular, 150;
power and, 100 –101, 114
Goldthorpe, John, 5, 33
Habermas, Jürgen, 70 –78, 83–88,
164 –66
Hegel, G. W. F., 31, 35, 62n47
ideology, 28–29, 31–33, 65, 117–21,
171
interpretive explanation, in Max Weber:
on causality, 129–30, 141n37,
156 –57n77; real abstractions and,
134 –35n24; reality of meaning,
index 193
162; Runciman’s critique of, 17n4,
89–90n1; use of theory in, 103–4
landscapes of meaning, 92, 109–17,
121, 137–62, 170 –71
Lichterman, Paul, 127–29, 158
MacIver, R. M., 149–53
Marx, Karl: analysis of the French
Revolutions by, 29–32; Bhaskar’s
reading of, 59–61, 65; inﬂuence of
Aristotle on, 143n42, 144n47; naturalism
of, 37–38; real abstractions
and, 134; social ontology and, 41;
structural causation of, 49
Marxism: Bourdieu and, 108n28;
Habermas and, 75, 86; post-, 168;
as realist social theory, 40, 46,
153; scientiﬁc, 113n35; structural,
137; as synthetic theoretical structure
for social science, 13, 32n20
mechanisms: interpretive explanation
and, 136 –37, 139n36, 155–60;
interpretivism and, 106, 109–13;
realism and, 40, 42n7, 45–49,
52–55, 62–65, 90, 105. See also
causality
Merton, Robert K., 15, 132n19, 137
metaphor: causality and, 141–42,
146; ﬁeld and landscape as,
105–11; in Geertz’s ethnography
of cockﬁghting, 95; mechanism
as, 42n7, 137; of natural science
for social science, 35, 63–64, 125;
theoros as, 163–71
Mills, C. Wright, 149–51
Moore, Barrington, 45–48, 103
motives, 16 –17n3, 137–53, 158–60
myth, 26 –29, 49, 67, 100, 105, 109
naturalism, 57–63, 125, 130n16
observation: inductive approaches to
social science and, 44n11; location
of the social scientiﬁc observer
and, 110n32; participant, 2; senseexperience
and, 16, 36, 40
ontology: of the actor, 108; historical
(Hacking), 137–38; one world
thesis and, 34n24; ontological
status of theoretical entities, 43;
realist social theory and, 41–45,
51, 55–56, 64, 160
Peirce, Charles Saunders, 19n6,
37n32, 43, 59n38, 123
performance, 10, 106, 110, 152
positivism: antinaturalist revolt
against, 63; causality and, 6n7,
131–33; contrast with cultural
sociology, 33–34; contrast with
realism, 40, 44n11, 56, 61n42;
descriptive vs. theoretical, 4 –7;
Habermas on, 164; Weber’s opposition
to, 129, 141n37
postcolonial theory, 1, 25–29,
77–81
postmodernism: contrast with
hermeneutics, 124; contrast with
realism, 40, 60n41, 61n42; vs.
scientism, 1, 12, 93
postpositivism: disagreements
within, 1–13; interpretive explanation
and, 131–37, 168; philosophy
of science and, 143n42; realism as,
35, 145n49
poststructuralism, 1, 137–38, 150
rationality: historical speciﬁcity
of, 105; of interpretive social
knowledge, 124, 170; normative
evaluation of, 70, 72n7; practical
or strategic, 27–28, 104, 114, 148;
scientiﬁc, 8, 37n32, 57
realism, critical: approach to social
research, 54 –63; appropriation of
hermeneutics and semiotics by,
130 –31n16, 144 –45n48; contrast
194 index
with interpretivism, 105n21, 166;
contrast with positivism, 34;
Marx as forerunner of, 134 –35n24
relativism: interpretivism’s avoidance
of, 114, 138, 169; realism’s
response to, 56 –57; vs. science, 1
representation: efﬁcacy in social
life of, 10, 103, 143, 152–53; of
“natives” by colonial discourse,
147–48; normativism and, 75;
realism and, 55; representational
theories of truth, 50n21, 125n5
retroduction, 56 –61
Revolution, French (1789): debate
between Skocpol and Sewell
about, 117–21; interpretive
approach to, 89–90; Marx’s
explanation of, 29–31; maximal
vs. minimal interpretation of,
23–24; Moore’s explanation of,
48n17; philosophy of explanation
and, 127n8; Skocpol’s explanation
of, 43–44
ritual, 27–28, 106, 109, 153–59
Rorty, Richard, 92, 124 –25
science, natural: as model for social
science, 1, 8, 32; realism’s model
of, 36 –37, 55–59, 132; underrepresentation
and natural scientiﬁc
theory, 113–15; Weber’s approach
to, 141n37
semiotics: formal, 33; of normativism,
75, 78; of theory and facts,
16n3, 19, 131
Skocpol, Theda, 43–45, 49, 103,
117–21
state, the, 43–49, 117–21
theory, critical, 86, 163–71
transitive vs. intransitive, 56 –62
unconscious, 63, 95–97, 136, 146 –48,
151–52
Weber, Max: capitalism, 138–41; facts
vs. values, 164; human sciences
and, 2n1; ideal types, 36, 115n38;
opposition to positivism, 63;
Pierre Bourdieu and, 108n28; realist
reading of, 139n36, 142; symbolic
interactionism and, 151n68
realism, critical (continued)