THE SOUL OF REASON

The material presented here is taken from a working paper titled The Soul of Reason:  An Argument for a New Post-Modern Realism in Social Theory and Philosophy.  (D. H. Bowles 2020)

II.  The Mutual Constitution Solution

The popular view of progressive socialist thought, relying as it does on the ubiquitous neoliberal critique of Marx, attributes to it the ‘social constructionist’ view of social ontology.  This attribution is not without justification, as is attested to by Norman Geras in his 1983 challenge to Marxian orthodoxy titled Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend:

You will not go very far in discussion either within or about Marxism before encountering the view that one of the things bequeathed to this intellectual tradition by its founder was a denial of the idea of a universal human nature.  (11)

Geras goes on to definitively debunk this view, and offers the following assessment:

. . . In the final section of the essay, I examine the reasons that dispose people to want to deny the existence of a human nature.  . . . To give one example, whilst I criticize the oft-expressed belief that the concept of human nature is simply reactionary, I acknowledge nonetheless that there are reactionary variants of it, as well as how frequently these are met with . . . Anyone who has tried to present socialism as a serious practical proposition before virtually any audience not already convinced of it, will almost certainly have had to contend with the pessimistic argument from ‘human nature.’

          And yet, to attempt to respond to that kind of argument, and to the weight of conservative culture supporting it, by denying that there is a human nature, is to meet a powerful ideological opponent with a weapon that is useless.  A proper regard for what are the real basic needs and capacities inherent in our human nature is the only adequate response . . .” (16)

What social and moral ontology constitutes the genuine foundation of the Marxian perspective?  The answer to that question had actually been provided a decade earlier by Anthony Giddens, in his acclaimed exposition of classical sociological thought, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: an Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim, & Weber (1973):

The recovery of the social character of human existence is integral to Marx’s conception of communism, as stated in the Manuscripts.  Communist society will be based, not upon the egoistic self-seeking which the economists assume to be characteristic of human nature in general, but upon conscious awareness of the reciprocal dependence of the individual and the social community.

          The social nature of man, Marx stresses, penetrates to the root of his being, and is by no means simply manifest in those activities which are conducted in direct association with others.  Communism will not, however, deny the individuality of each person.  On the contrary, the whole import of Marx’s discussion is that communist society will allow, in a way which is impossible under prior systems of production, the expansion of the particular potentialities and capabilities of individuals.  For Marx, there is no paradox in this.  It is only through the social community that man becomes individualized, via the utilization of the resources which are collective products.  (17)

In a rare expression of academic zeal, Giddens actually refers to this as Marx’s “exciting and brilliant formula.”

Giddens would go on from there to become a major player in the sociological ‘structure vs. agency’ wars, with the publication of his own effort to solve the problem of social ontology, called The Constitution of Society (1984).  Another decade after that, Margaret Archer (1995), building on Roy Bhaskar’s (1975, 1979) critical realism in the philosophy of science, characterized the poles of the structure/agency debate as upward & downward conflation, then critiqued Giddens’ structuration theory as central conflation, proposing her own stratified realist social ontology as an alternative.  Archer’s formulations, however, theorized agency only at the group, not at the individual level.

In the latter half of the 1980s, prolific academic sociologist Amitai Etzioni began to actively promote an interdisciplinary social theory project he called socio-economics, which explicitly called for the integration of sociological and economic theory.  At the foundation of this effort was something called communitarian social philosophy, which had evolved in a dialectic manner from the original publication of Rawl’s Theory of Justice (1971), Nozick’s seminal libertarian rejoinder, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), and a group of social philosophers in opposition to both Rawls and Nozick, whose arguments concerning the communal origins of individual identity and interest came to collectively be called communitarian.[1]

In The Moral Dimension (1988), Etzioni advocates for the development of a new socio-economics, grounded in a social and moral ontology he calls the I&We communitarian paradigm.  This is clearly intended as an effort to construct a social and (explicitly) moral ontology of mutually constituted groups and individuals.  It would be fair to say, however, that although Etzioni claims to give autonomous ontological individuality “the same principled, primary standing” as social order (The New Golden Rule, 1995), in truth he ultimately fails to assert any genuine ontological ground for that individual autonomy, and his ontological framework remains firmly situated within the functionalist-structuralist mode, with individual autonomy still relegated to secondary status as a variable social construction.  And it’s this failure that leaves him vulnerable to the charge, not uncommonly brought against him, that his framing is really nothing but a ‘kinder and gentler’ authoritarian construct.

Back at the beginning of this essay, in referring to progressive ‘socialist’ alternatives to neoliberalism, I explicitly included a reference to “the intellectual tradition of pragmatist and original institutionalist economic and social thought.”  That tradition, of course, originates in the work of Thorstein Veblen, who is generally well-known only among a relatively small and somewhat insular group of economists practicing in what are these days called the ‘heterodox’ fields of academic economics.  Veblen, as I have argued elsewhere (Bowles 2013), represents an under-utilized resource in social theory.  In The Evolution of Institutional Economics, Hodgson (2004) asserts that

“It may take one hundred years from Veblen’s death in 1929 for him to be recognized by social scientists as one of the leading social theorists of all time. . . . the philosophical weight and robustness of Veblen’s social theory exceeds that of, say, Max Weber or Talcott Parsons. . . . It is my conviction that among social and economic theorists, Veblen has not had his due.” (9)

Of particular interest to us here is one of Hodgson’s central claims, that Veblen provided a “highly sophisticated” theoretical approach to understanding the relationship between mutually constitutive individual agents and social structures (7, 179), which blended the philosophical pragmatism of Peirce (carried forward by Dewey), the instinct-habit psychology of James (also carried forward by Dewey), and a Darwinian methodology for explaining the co-evolution of both individual agency and institutional social structure.

The problem with Veblen lies not in his social ontology, but in the derived moral ontology of instrumental valuation, which–with Veblen–is clearly biased in favor of collective interest and against what he typically refers to almost exclusively (and disparagingly) as self-regard.  You would be hard-pressed to find anywhere in the entirety of Veblen’s prolific body of work any reference to self-regard that deviates from this bias.  This is not, ultimately, a tenable position.  We must be able to acknowledge that self-regard can have instrumental value, and we must be able to talk about what that instrumental value looks like.

Footnotes

[1] Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue 1981), Michael Sandel (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982), Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice, 1983), Charles Taylor (Sources of the Self, 1989 and A Secular Age, 2007).

III. The Moral Ontology of Mutual Constitution

Table of Contents

Conceptual Schematic of the Argument

Abstract

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