Agency and dialectics

what critical realism can learn from Althusser's Marxism

pp. 123-147

in: Kathryn Dean, Jonathan Joseph, John M. Roberts, Colin Wight, Realism, philosophy and social science, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the topic of human agency and emancipation from the point of view of a Marxist critical realism. In doing so, it sets out to correct the tendency towards theoretical ideology which, I argue, is present in Roy Bhaskar's work from The Possibility of Naturalism onwards (Bhaskar 1989a).² This tendency is manifested in the naturalisation of human agency as individual intentional and consequential action. It is a tendency which encourages neglect of the task of developing a philosophical anthropology in which a critical realist theory of emancipation can be grounded. The result is an a- or even anti-political account of human freedom. In what follows Bhaskar's philosophy of the experimental physical sciences (Bhaskar 1978) will be used as the basis of a philosophical anthropology capable of correcting the de-historicising, naturalising tendency which, in my view, marks his work. This philosophy is inadequate in itself, however, and will be found to need the theoretical nourishment provided by Althusser's work on the materialist dialectic and on ideology (Althusser 1990, 1984). The work on the materialist dialectic facilitates an understanding of the specificities of capitalist historicity and that on ideology enables us to grasp that historicity is within as well as outwith the human organism.