Chapter 2

 

                                                Making Invisible Causes Visible

 

 

            This second chapter will outline the epistemology that will be applied in the subsequent historical studies.[1]  

            One of us taught introductory courses in philosophy to first year college students for twenty-five years, and in the course of doing so became very familiar with the beliefs that:

 

            1) The rich run the world;

 

            2) The rich are up to no good; and

 

            3) Nothing can be done about it.

 

 

            This philosophy professor proposed for his students’ consideration a different set of beliefs:

 

            1) Ideas run the world;

 

            2) The history of humanity is a history of moral progress; and

 

            3) You and I can participate in the ethical construction of a better social reality.

 

 

            Over the years Howard Richards developed a moderately sophisticated epistemology to support his beliefs.  By “epistemology” we mainly mean an account of causality.   We take some account of the principle of cause and effect to be central to any epistemology.   Richards needed an account of causality because he needed to show that ideas like cooperation and sharing are not only good ideas, but also feasible ideas.  This is not to say that epistemology alone can make our case for us by demonstrating the feasibility of cooperation and sharing and the truth of each of the three beliefs stated above.  Rather, philosophy (epistemology included) sets the stage.   To switch to a chess metaphor, it opens the game.  Philosophy makes initial choices about how to go about thinking and talking, which predispose the eventual outcome to come out one way or another.

             Richards never explained his epistemology to his first year students because they would never have understood it.  We will explain it now.  His starting point is the distinction between brute facts and institutional facts made by John Searle in Speech Acts (1969).   Searle wrote:

 

A marriage ceremony, a baseball game, a trial, and a legislative action involve a variety of physical movements, states, and raw feels, but a specification of one of these events only in such terms is not so far a specification of it as a marriage ceremony, baseball game, a trial, or a legislative action.  The physical events and raw feels only count as parts of such events given certain other conditions and against a background of certain kinds of institutions.

            Such facts as are recorded in my above group of statements I propose to call institutional facts.  They are indeed facts; but their existence, unlike the existence of brute facts, presupposes the existence of certain human institutions.  It is only given the institution of marriage that certain forms of behavior constitute Mr. Smith’s marrying Miss Jones.  Similarly, it is only given the institution of baseball that certain movements by certain constitute the Dodgers’ beating the Giants 3 to 2 in eleven innings.  And, at even simpler level, it is only given the institution of money that I now have a five dollar bill in my hand.  Take away the institution and all I have is a piece of paper with various gray and green markings.

            These “institutions” are systems of constitutive rules.  Every institutional fact is underlain by a (system of) rule(s) of the form “X counts as Y in context C.”  Our hypothesis that speaking a language is performing acts according to constitutive rules involves us in the hypothesis that the fact that a man performed a certain speech act, e.g. made a promise, is an institutional fact (51-52).[2]

 

As if in anticipation of the frenzy of postmodern anti-realism that subsequent decades would bring, Searle added in a footnote: “Brute facts, such as, e.g. the fact that I weigh 160 pounds, of course require certain conventions of measuring weight and also require certain linguistic institutions in order to be stated in a language, but the fact stated is nonetheless a brute fact, as opposed to the fact that it was stated, which is an institutional fact” (51).

            Now we are willing to admit that there are contexts in which one ought to say that there are facts which are neither brute nor institutional; there are contexts in which facts should be described as at once brute and institutional; there are contexts in which the noun “facts” is  misleading and should not be used at all, however qualified.  Nevertheless, the contrast between “brute” and “institutional” is illuminating and helpful, for reasons we will now state.

            Although the very idea of “brute facts” can be considered a philosophical failure if it is taken as an attempt to salvage empiricism, it must be considered a philosophical success if it is taken as an attempt to score a point in favor of realism.   Pointing out that some facts can be called “brute” more properly than others serves as an illuminating and helpful reminder that the interpretation of experience by humans is not all there is.  There are facts that would be true even if they were not experienced.[3]  There are facts that would be true even if there were no humans at all –as indeed there were not until approximately two hundred thousand years ago.

            The word “brute” illuminatingly and helpfully connotes both its etymology and its standard uses.  It comes from a Latin root meaning “heavy,” “dull,” or “irrational.”   The brutes are distinguished from the humans.  The brutal is distinguished from the civilized.  The related notion that some facts are relatively more brute than others hearkens back to the ancient metaphysics of Aristotle, a metaphysics of matter and form, in which the lower is more material and the higher more formal.  It recalls the age-old human project of building cultures, and building selves, with the raw materials provided by nature.

            Qualifying a fact as institutional brings into play the meanings of the noun “institution” and the verb “to institute.”   The primary meaning of the latter (according to the O.E.D.) is “to set up, to establish.”   The examples Searle himself gives to show the meaning of the word he has chosen come trailing the clouds of the many times the same word has been chosen by others, among which we beg leave to especially take note of its use by Immanuel Kant in Perpetual Peace, where he wrote that since war among humans is natural, peace must be instituted (1939: 10).

            That humans are a kind of animal which establishes institutions is related to humans being animals who think--as is shown by, among others, Jean Piaget’s (1932) studies of the relationships between children’s acquisition of the ability to make up games with rules and their ability to perform logical operations.  Two thousand three hundred years before Piaget,

Plato, in the course of dialogues devoted to making a plan for a just society, identified the agency that could and should establish and implement the laws of a good city as the part of the soul that is logistikon as distinct from alogistikon–the rational part of the soul.[4]  Otherwise translated, we may read Plato’s references to the part of the psuches that has the logos as pertaining to the human capacity to bring motor behavior under verbal control.[5]

            Searle’s distinction stands in several traditions that distinguish nature from what today we call culture.  Nature gives us brutes.  Culture gives us institutions.  Much as we may love the brutes, and much as we may love our own deep animal impulses, at this stage in history we must confess that there is little we can do to change nature.  In an important sense, nature is, by definition, what we cannot change.  Therefore the path to a better social reality goes by way of the improvement of culture.[6]

            While invoking the larger traditions of the ethical construction of cultural structures, Searle gives us concepts to work with much more specific than the notoriously undefinable concept “culture”:   “These ‘institutions’ are systems of constitutive rules.  Every institutional fact is underlain by a (system of) rule(s) of the form `X counts as Y in context C’” (op. cit., 51-52).  Our project, however, is not so much to contribute to the study of the concept of constitutive rules by deepening understanding of what it is, as it is to contribute to the study of the concept of constitutive rules by broadening understanding of what can be done with it.  Much of our inspiration comes from an article published by Charles Taylor (1971).

            Taylor shows that it is artificial to distinguish between social reality and the language descriptive of that reality.  “The language is constitutive of the reality and is essential to its being the kind of reality it is” (op. cit.: 24).  He expands the concept of the constitutive.  “But just as there are constitutive rules, i.e. rules such that the behavior they govern could not exist without them, and which are in this sense inseparable from that behavior, so I am suggesting that there are constitutive distinctions, constitutive ranges of language, in that certain practices are not without them”  (Ibid.: 25).  Implicit in the practices thus constituted is a certain vision of the agent and the agent’s place in society.   “The meanings and norms implicit in these practices are not just in the minds of the actors but are out there in the practices themselves, practices which cannot be conceived as a set of individual actions, but which are essentially modes of social relation, of mutual action” (Ibid.: 27).[7]

            The notion of “modes of social relation” connects Taylor with Karl Marx.  As Newton’s Principia Mathematica is a tale of force (vis) from beginning to end, so Marx’s Capital is a tale of social relations (Verhaltnisse) from beginning to end.  We are infinitely grateful to Marx, in spite of the damage done by his mistakes, because he put irrevocably on the agenda for further critical discussion the basic social relations (constitutive rules) of capitalism: freedom, private property, contracts, commodities, production for sale, individual rights.  This short list of rules constituting capitalism shows that capitalism is in important ways a great moral advance over previous periods in history.   A failure of mainstream social science--especially in economics and in political science--is that it avoids engaging in dialogue on the complex moral issues involved in further moral advance, i.e. advance toward achieving social democracy while avoiding slipping backwards into barbarism.  By taking for granted the institutional framework of the behavior it studies, it makes the moral issues posed by capitalism’s first premises invisible.  Conversely, the work of cultural action is consciousness-raising to make invisible causes visible, in order to change them for the better.[8]

            Taylor’s extended concept of constitutive rules grounds a critique of mainstream social science.  Constitutive practices “do not fit into the categorical grid of mainstream political science” (op. cit.: 29).  Taylor's concepts speak to the critical omissions as well in the social sciences that have taken the postmodern turn.  George Sefa Dei writes, "Social movement politics must not only avoid the schism of the 'self/other,' 'old/new,' 'us/them,' but progressive politics must also critique the 'nostalgic of theory' which confuses ephemeral changes with more fundamental structural transformation.  Such politics must guard against the insularity and elitism of academic and discursive practices that fail to recognize heterogeneous, nuanced, complex, contradictory and subjective readings of social reality" (1999: 398).  A central problem is that the ontology of mainstream social science lacks a concept of collective meaning, community meaning, of the common meanings of a “we”; postmodernism, for all its liberating potential, has only exacerbated this problem.  Taylor writes, “The exclusion of this possibility, of the communal, comes once again from the baleful influence of the epistemological tradition for which all knowledge has to be reconstructed from the impressions imprinted on the individual subject”  (op. cit.: 32).[9]  We would add that the rise of the epistemological tradition in question was itself an integral part of the larger historical process of the constitution of the cultural structures of modern capitalist society (Richards 1996: 175-85).[10]

            Taylor names modern Anglo-Saxon societies not as capitalism but as interdependent productive and negotiating societies, characterized by bargaining among autonomous agents.  Mainstream social science is, of course, aware that core modern Anglo-Saxon institutional facts have not always existed, and aware that its constitutive rules do not govern everywhere.  Taylor writes:

But, of course, such a massive fact does not escape notice.  What happens rather is that it is re-interpreted.  And what has generally happened is that the interdependent productive and negotiating society has been recognized by political science, but not as one structure of intersubjective meaning among others, rather as the inescapable background of social action as such (1971: 39).

Comparative politics degenerates into the study of the progress of other civilizations toward a correct (“empirical and pragmatic”) perception of the political process at the expense of “ideology.”   At home, social science cannot understand the profound sources of alienation.

            Our own project is, like that of Herbert Marcuse (1964), not so much concerned with comparative politics as with possible politics.[11]  The blindness of mainstream social science to the constitutive rules of the institutional facts it takes for granted is a problem not so much because it therefore cannot see others, as because it therefore cannot see itself.  It cannot subject itself to the negative dialectics needed to make the creative transformation of capitalism a conceivable field of scientific study. 

            Like Taylor, and like Alasdair MacIntyre (1971) who published a similar critique of mainstream social science at about the same time, we are concerned to show that social science does not discover causal laws like those of physics.  Unlike them, we are also concerned to show that social science does assert the existence of cause and effect relationships (although they are unlike those discovered by physics).   Social science discovers, precisely, effects, which are in large part caused by institutional facts, by constitutive rules.   Richards’ previous work Understanding the Global Economy (2000) analyzes the relationships of cause and effect presupposed, postulated, or found by the principal schools of economics.   The thesis therein is that causal explanations in economics crucially depend on the constitutive rules of the institutions economists study.  The present work is a sequel.   It illustrates the thesis with historical examples.   The historical examples deal with the much-desired and much-frustrated transition from capitalism to social democracy.

            We take the proposition that major causes operating in history are institutional facts, or, more broadly, cultural structures, to be an expanded version of the more colloquial, “ideas run the world.”   It is not, however, a proposition that supports a philosophy of idealism.  We agree with Wittgenstein that ideas are a part of natural life.   Ideas are not generically distinct from images, logical operations, and words.  These, in turn, are not separable from the activities people perform when they engage in speech acts.[12]  As Wittengenstein writes, “Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing” (1958: 12 (paragraph 25)).

            To make the approach to social science to be employed in the following historical studies clearer we will now compare and contrast it to some of the views of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault; and to the views expressed in four more recent but less well known works: Nancy Hartsock’s Money, Sex, and Power(1985), Robert A. Solo’s The Philosophy of Science and Economics (1991), Bent Flyvbjerg’s Making Social Science Matter (2001) and Heikki Patomäki’s After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (Re)Construction of World Politics (2001).

            In a well-known text, Habermas divided science into three regions: empirical-analytic science, historical-hermeneutic science, and emancipatory science.  “The systematic sciences of social action, that is economics, sociology, and political science, have the goal, as do the empirical-analytic sciences, of producing nomological knowledge”  (1971: 310).  So wrote the Jürgen Habermas of Knowledge and Human Interests, which was first published in1968.  A few pages earlier he explained what he meant by “empirical-analytic science” and by nomological (i.e. lawlike) knowledge:

In the empirical-analytic sciences the frame of reference that prejudges the meaning of possible statements establishes rules both for the construction of the theories and for their critical testing.   Theories comprise hypothetico-deductive connections of propositions, which permit the deduction of lawlike hypotheses with empirical content.   The latter can be interpreted as statement about covariance of observable events; given a set of initial conditions, they make predictions possible (Ibid., 308).

            Economics, sociology, and political science, together with the empirical-analytic sciences properly so-called, such as physics and chemistry, correspond to a certain kind of human interest, that of producing results, what Habermas calls “the behavioral system of instrumental action”  (191).  Together they are the same as what Marcuse calls “technological rationality” (op. cit., n. 16, pp. 11, 18, 158-59).

            As compared and contrasted with Habermas and Marcuse, we wish to emphasize that it makes a great difference that the substance of social science is human action.  Whatever the similarities of certain natural sciences and certain social sciences might be at the epistemic level,  it is important to stress that they are different at the level of ontology.  One is about the institutional world set up by humans; the other is about the physical world.  The notions of “instrumental action” and “technological rationality” are systematically misleading, because they tend to make too much of superficial similarities between economics and engineering.  In the following chapters we will have several occasions to discuss the importance of emphasizing the differences between the moral substance of economics and the physical substance of engineering.

            Seen in historical context, the willingness of Habermas and others to concede in the 1960s that economists had learned to employ “instrumental rationality” (Zweckrationalitat) or “technological rationality” in ways that could make a modern economy achieve its objectives (i.e. the Zweck) came at a time when Keynesian macroeconomics seemed indeed to have solved the problem of stabilizing capitalism.  Economics seemed to have mastered the problem of assuring the constant growth of productive capacity.  It appeared that the remaining problems were in the areas of distribution and culture.  Today, however, in the wake of the failure of Keynesian macro-management of capitalism, it is much easier to see that the very idea that there is an “instrumental rationality” shared by economists and engineers, applied by both alike to manipulate inputs (independent variables) to produce desired outputs (dependent variables) is and always was an illusion.

            As a good Marxist, Habermas was, of course, aware that the economic machine was not a machine.  He went on: “A critical social science, however, will not remain satisfied with this [i.e. with establishing lawlike covariance among observable events].  It is concerned with going beyond this goal to determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed”  (310).  The latter determination defines a social science whose interest is emancipatory, also sometimes known as critical social science.  The ideal of emancipation is Kantian: mundigkeit, i.e. autonomy and responsibility.  Expressing a Kantian idea, Habermas (1971) writes:

[O]nly in an emancipated society, whose members’ autonomy and responsibility had been realized, would communication have developed into the non-authoritarian and universally practiced dialogue from which both our model of reciprocally constituted ego identity and our idea of true consensus [i.e. knowledge, following C.S.Peirce’s idea that human inquiry tends in the long run toward consensus, and that the consensus it tends toward is the truth about reality] are always implicitly derived.   To this extent the truth of statements is based on anticipating the realization of the good life (314).

            Our concept of the ethical reconstruction of social reality, in contrast, is pre-Kantian and post-Kantian as well as Kantian.   The Kantian ideal of autonomy is one, but not the only, ethic invented by homo sapiens sapiens in the long march from hunting and gathering societies toward the better society of the future.[13]

            In addition to empirical-analytic knowledge, whose interest is technical and instrumental, and in addition to critical knowledge, whose interest is emancipatory, Habermas proposes a third category, the historical-hermeneutic sciences, whose interest is practical.   It is practical in the sense that it establishes communication.   While the empirical-analytic sciences explain, the historical-hermeneutic sciences understand. 

            We want to insist that meanings act.  Meaningful human activities, employing the languages and other symbols that Habermas and others declare to be the proper objects of hermeneutic (interpretive) study, are causes.[14]  They produce real effects in the world.  They shape institutions and institutional behavior.   In particular, we will show that if explanation is a matter of answering the question “Why?” and if one wants to know why capitalism resists transformation and why social democracy is so hard to achieve, then the place to turn for answers is to the effects of the intersubjective meanings that Taylor (following Wittgenstein) finds to be constitutive of ways of life.

            We thus propose to remap the three-region map of knowledge that Habermas provided in Knowledge and Human Interests.  Economics, sociology, and politics do not belong with engineering.  Emancipation is only a part, or aspect, of the ethical reconstruction of society.   Meanings are causes.[15]  

            Michel Foucault famously denies that the study of a society ought to proceed by studying primarily the rules that govern it.  He much prefers to work with the category of “power.”  Power makes rules.  Rules do not make power.[16]  The bulk of his research traces transitions from older and cruder forms of power to what he chooses to regard not as the taming of power but as subtler, more intrusive, more precise, and more effective modern forms of power.  In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), for example, Foucault weaves into his genealogy of prisons and punishment a description from the early nineteenth century of large quantities of goods from all the world sitting on the docks of the port of London.  Too much was stolen.  Commerce required protection (85-87).  Foucault’s portrait of goods on the docks illustrates the broader point that the prison (and with it the penal codes that determined who would be incarcerated in it) was born of functional necessity. 

In answering the question why goods from all the world were sitting on the docks of London, tempting thieves, it would be unreasonable to omit institutional facts and constitutive rules from one’s etiology.   This link in the genealogy of the shift from crude power to precise power is best explained by the expansion of markets and trade.  Generally, the context of the rise of bureaucracies is the rise of commerce, on Foucault’s account as on Max Weber’s account.    Economic history, in turn, can be read as the history of the social relations and social practices that constitute markets.  It is about rules.  Therefore, it is about ethics.   

It should also be observed that in much of the social behavior of homo sapiens sapiens rules do make power.  The working class children of Geneva, whose games were observed by Jean Piaget (1932), normally exercised just as much power as the rules of the games allowed them, no more and no less.  Similarly, the president or prime minister of a modern democracy has only the powers that are conferred upon her or him by law, no more and no less.  Ethical behavior is not as frequent as it should be, but neither is it nonexistent.  It can be thought of as gradually constructed over time, in cultures and in individuals.  The endless details of the history of culture enumerated in Foucault’s genealogies, concerning the history of punishment, the history of medicine, the history of insanity, the history of science, of schools, of factories, of the military, and of sexuality, do not need to be viewed only through Foucauldian lenses as creeping normalization wrought by ever-more-pervasive power.   

The same endless details can also be viewed, instead or in addition, as histories of ethical construction, with setbacks and with advances.  Viewed in the latter way, through lenses suggested long ago by Socrates and Plato, these histories show: first, the increasing government of the irrational by the rational, i.e. of impulse by logos; second, the ongoing conversation of the species with itself, through which the logos is gradually refined and improved; and third, the irrational and yet divine inspiration of platonic love, classically depicted in Plato’s Phaedrus, through which impulse returns as beauty and joy.  Looking at life from this old-fashioned, benign, and optimistic point of view, the following chapters are not genealogies tracing the insidious normalization of individuals to suit the requirements of the modern capitalist state; they are sympathetic accounts of deliberate efforts to improve society by transforming capitalism into social democracy. 

Although Richards has written elsewhere about the good spirits needed to fuel and season the good works of a good society, the following pages, admittedly, say little about beauty and joy.  Nancy Hartsock (1985) says more.  For Hartsock, patriarchy is not a parallel form of oppression that accompanies capitalism.  It is older and more fundamental.  The inhumanity of man to man, that great and tragic puzzle which has baffled sages for centuries, has its deep emotional source in the inhumanity of man to woman.  Gender oppression precedes and lays the groundwork for class oppression.  At the heart of gender oppression, and thus at the heart of the domination of some people by others generally, lies a necrophilic, hostile deformation of human sexuality which Hartsock names as “the negative erotic” (155-209).[17]

Under the headings of “exchange theories” and “production as epistemology,” Hartsock analyzes in detail the norms we are calling the constitutive rules of capitalism.   She finds that they conceal as much as they reveal.   She quotes a famous passage from Marx:

. . . on leaving the sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities . . . we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae.  He who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer.  The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but--a hiding (Marx quoted in Hartsock 1985: 119-20). 

She contributes an analogous thought of her own: “[W]e can now begin to understand the significance of describing contemporary Western social relations as a capitalist patriarchy.  Beneath the polite language of sexual reciprocity we have uncovered not only one-sided relations of domination and submission, but also dynamics of hostility, revenge, and a fascination with death (op. cit.: 176).

A hypothetical reader might be tempted to ask, in the light of such considerations, whether it is worthwhile to focus attention on the polite rules of accounting (which ostensibly govern business) and the polite rules of mutual respect (which ostensibly govern social life generally) when the underlying reality is domination, submission, hostility, revenge, and fascination with death.  The temptation to ask this question might be strengthened by passages in which Hartsock seems to say that if the dominant class, or dominant sex, really wanted to, it could replace all the constitutive rules with a new and better set of rules (Ibid.:115, 129, 178). 

Inflation, unemployment, capital flight, falling rates of investment, exhausted pension funds, debt, budget deficits, and races to cut costs by cutting wages are--as will be seen in the following chapters--among the typical problems encountered when socialists try to change capitalism.  The same hypothetical reader might be tempted to argue--based on the concept of capitalist patriarchy--that all of these economic problems are nothing but consequences of the operation of the rules that the dominant class has imposed on society.  And one might be tempted to argue--based on the concept that the dominant class could change the rules if it wanted to--that as soon as a class willing to substitute new rules for old rules comes to power, these economic problems will disappear.  Knowing how to solve the problems would be unnecessary.  Otherwise put: the solution to all problems is already known: it is liberation from oppression. 

Hartsock, we are sure, would not yield to the temptations that we have described as tempting a hypothetical reader.  She would say, surely, that all three--the empowerment of the dominated, the transformation of eros from negative to positive, and learning how to solve social problems--need to advance together.  Building a world that works for everyone without ecological damage clearly requires both wanting to do it and knowing how to do it. 

When seen in context, as outcomes of history, as born in and from conflicts and passions, systems of rules will nevertheless be seen to have their own logics, their own consequences.  We hope it will make our philosophy clearer to note that our emphasis on the consequences of capitalism’s constitutive rules is meant to complement, not to replace, Hartsock’s emphasis on the gender-specific roots of ill will. 

Our emphasis upon the blindness of mainstream social science to the constitutive rules of capitalism merits a comment upon the particular social science known as economics.  When Robert A. Solo was a graduate student in economics at the London School of Economics in the mid-1940s, studying under Karl Popper among others, he learned that the watchword for the science of economics was: Be like physics.  Solo writes, “Thus the development of methodology in economics and the development of the modern philosophy of science have followed parallel paths.  For both the rule behind the rules has been to BE LIKE PHYSICS” (1991: 38).

Many years later, after a distinguished career as an economist, writing as emeritus professor of economics at Michigan State University, Solo took the view that economics being like physics, or trying to be like physics, had never been a good idea.   He stated that economics should be a policy science:

Let the discipline be defined by its problems. . . .  Rather than on an established set of assumptions and theories, let it find its continuity in focusing on the same, open-ended set of problem areas, e.g. on the quest for full employment, for price stability, for higher productivity, for a rising real GNP, on the problems of trade imbalance, of resource depletion, of income distribution.  Let it find its identity not in the presuppositions and analytic apparatus with which the cohort begins, but in the policy problems on which they vector.  And let any statement that is demonstrably relevant to the solution of those problems or to the formation of a policy geared to the solution of those problems be admissible into the discourse (Ibid.: 81).

Solo thus favors neither a pseudo-physics nor a constitutive rules approach to economics, but a wide-open acceptance of whatever proves to be relevant to whatever problem is currently under study.  But it would be well to remember a point stressed by Hartsock: that the pseudo-physics of mainstream economics and political science (which she analyzes under the heading “exchange theories”) is not simply false.  It reflects in economic theory the institutions that structure capitalism in practice.  Thus she writes:

. . . the circularity contained in the concept of rational economic man, the assumption that to be rational is to maximize one’s own utilities, can now be recognized as a statement from the perspective of the capitalist that it is inconceivable that one could act in any other way.  And of course, it is a materially defining feature of the existence of the capitalist firm that it must seek to maximize utilities (profits) or go out of business.  The isolation of individuals from each other in a world structured by institutions can now be understood as rooted in the experience of exchange, and the inadequate account of human community that results from such an understanding must be seen as replicating at the level of theory the real poverty of communities constructed by exchange (1985: 125-26). 

Consequently, in practice, it may not make much difference whether economics calls itself a policy science as Solo recommends, or calls itself social physics.   To a considerable extent, the wide-open acceptance of whatever proves to be relevant, may just serve to demonstrate that pseudo-physics was a pretty good approximation to the truth after all because, for example, firms really do have to seek to maximize utilities, or else face going out of business.  Calculating the second derivative of a utility function to make it equal to zero is not formally different from doing the same for any function studied by engineers.  

What would, however, make a major difference for a policy science would be making it wide-open to consider the restructuring of the institutional structures that at present define the problems.  What is it about modern cultural structures that makes unemployment even possible?  What sorts of communities have been built, or could be built, mainly around gifts instead of around prices?  In what ways are issues that appear on the surface as issues of price stability really questions about what Bowles and Gintis (1986) have called the exit power of capital--a power conferred on capital by the constitutive rules of the system?  What, after all, does the GNP measure, and is it worth measuring?           

Making visible the constitutive rules, instead of taking them for granted, would spell the difference between pseudo-pragmatism and real pragmatism, between regarding capitalism as an immutable framework and regarding capitalism as an evolving mutable framework on its way to becoming social democracy. 

An ethical construction approach is not in principle opposed to Solo’s concept of a policy science defined by its problems and not by its paradigm.  Yet it includes the problematique (the set of problems defined by the dominant discourse) among the problems.  It recommends thinking of “policy” in an old-fashioned way, as Plato and Aristotle thought of it when in books called “Peri Politeia” (“about the polis”) they engaged in an ongoing search for, and in principle a continual revision of, the great architectonic principles that should structure the lives of people who come together in justice and in friendship to pursue the good of each individual and the good of the community. 

Bent Flyvbjerg, in Making Social Science Matter, agrees with Solo that social science made a wrong turn when it chose to identify itself as a novice aspiring some day to become a real science like natural science.  Flyvbjerg asks the question, “Is theory possible in social science?” (2001: 25-37).  In developing an answer to this question, which he takes to be equivalent to the question of whether social science can discover scientific laws like those discovered by natural sciences, he relies on several recent writers, of whom the most prominent are Michel Foucault, Hubert Dreyfus, Anthony Wilden, and Pierre Bourdieu.  The answer he gives to his question is, in briefest summary, “No.”   

What is of particular interest here is the reason Flyvbjerg gives for his negative answer: “The core of their argument is that human activity cannot be reduced to a set of rules, and without rules there can be no theory” (op. cit.: 46).  He quotes Pierre Bourdieu: “[P]ractice has a logic which is not that of logic”  (Bourdieu cited in Flyvbjerg 2001: 48).  Flyvbjerg goes on, “The problem in the study of human activity is that every attempt at a context-free definition of an action, that is, a definition based on abstract rules or laws, will not necessarily accord with the pragmatic way an action is defined by the actors in the concrete social situation. . . .  Moreover, while context is central for defining what counts as an action, context must nevertheless be excluded in a theory in order for it to be a theory at all”  (op. cit.: 42).  This last point is supposed to be true because a real theory, like the theories of physics and chemistry, is true in all contexts, as there are light waves, silicon, carbon, and other forms of electromagnetic radiation and other chemical elements on distant planets and stars just as there are on earth. 

We and Flyvbjerg appear to be working at cross-purposes.  We want to say there is a logic of exchange built into the constitutive rules of capitalism, and that we need to think about that logic and those rules in order to achieve transitions from capitalism to social democracy.   He and others find it important to say that human practices cannot be reduced to rules, or to logics.  Agreed, human activity cannot be reduced to a set of rules.  

Agreed, without rules there can be no theory.  It does not follow, however, that there are no rules, nor does it follow that no useful theory can be built on the rules that there are.  The facts are not in dispute--nobody denies the facts about human behavior that Foucault, Dreyfus, Bourdieu and others cite to support their claims.  The problem, rather, is to untangle conceptual puzzles and to show the utility of using the ideas of institutional facts, constitutive rules, and ethical construction to shed light on the causes and cures of social problems.  Rather than making a full-scale attempt to untangle conceptual puzzles, by showing in detail how the same words (“rule” “theory” “science” “logic”  “cause”) are used in overlapping but not identical ways for overlapping but not identical purposes, it is probably better simply to proceed with our historical studies.  They will show that in a series of contexts--Spain, Sweden, Austria, South Africa, Indonesia, Venezuela, in the operations of the World Bank on a global scale, and in other contexts mentioned but not treated in depth--the same constitutive rules of capitalism pose the same obstacles to the construction of social democracy.  Nevertheless, before proceeding to the first case study, that of Spain, we will make a few points directly in response to Flyvbjerg.

Among the examples Flyvbjerg gives of practices that depend on tacit skills, expertise, excellence, and virtuosity, which cannot be explained or predicted by rules, are the example of the clever businessperson and that of the instinctual financier (op. cit.: 34).  They can only be clever and instinctual, however, if they can buy and sell.  They can only buy and sell, in turn, if there are rules that constitute and regulate buying and selling.  There are such rules.  They are not  hard to find.  They are found in the law of contracts, which is found in statutes enacted by legislatures and in the reported decisions of judges.  Without this background of institutional facts that prescribe the rules of buying and selling, the virtuoso businesspeople and financiers whose conduct cannot be explained by rules would not be able to do their practical wizardry whose logic is not logic.

Flyvbjerg also considers the status of economics.  He writes, “What people consider to be money, property, economic behavior (for example, maximization of profits), etc., are taken as given.  One thereafter seeks out laws, which relate these socially defined concepts to each other.  And so long as there is a degree of constancy in the practices which define the objects and goals for a group of people or a society, economic laws can, in principle, predict just as well as physical laws” (Ibid.: 44).  On this basis, economics could be considered an historical science, as several prominent economists (including but not only those of the so-called “historical school” active in Germany in the early 20th century) have considered it to be.  Its validity would be bounded by the beginning and the end of the historical period during which the institutional facts it assumes hold true. 

Yet Flyvbjerg is not content to recognize the claims of economic theories to be true scientific theories, even if they are admittedly limited to those times and places where the institutional framework they assume is established.  He goes on: 

Moreover, as stated, economic theories exist by virtue of the practices by which people define the concepts of money, property, economic behavior, etc., and these can change at any time and thereby undermine the theories’ ability to predict.  We do not have, and probably never will have, a theory, which can predict the changes in these practices.  “An economist,” it has therefore been observed jokingly but acutely, “is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday did not happen today” (Ibid.: 44).

In Flyvbjerg’s comments on economics, the possibility that the constitutive rules might change appears as a problem because it shows that economics cannot make reliable predictions.  In another light, the possibility that the constitutive rules might change could also appear as a solution because it shows that capitalism might be transformed into social democracy.  Seen as a problem, as a decisive reason why economic predictions can never be reliable, it contributes to skepticism about causality. 

With respect to the principle of cause and effect, Flyvbjerg and his principal sources can be read as post-positivists.  The positivists, named broadly as those “of the positivist temper,” [18] identify causality, or some substitute that does the work of causality, with scientific laws.  The post-positivists deny that there are scientific laws in the social sciences.  On standard positivist accounts, explanation and prediction are supposed to be symmetrical, so that the same regularities codified in scientific laws (i.e. in equations) both explain the past and predict the future.  It follows that if social science cannot make reliable predictions, it cannot discover scientific laws.  Accepting the categorical grid implicit in the covering law accounts of causality that they deny, post-positivists deny that the principle of cause and effect operates in the social sciences.    

Both positivists and post-positivists can be charged with committing the epistemic fallacy.  The question should not be whether the principle of cause and effect operates in the social sciences, but whether it works in the world the social sciences study.   Ontology should determine epistemology, but the positivists and post-positivists have it the other way around.   They determine what is strictly on the basis of what can be known.  (Or, with much the same result, they ignore ontology altogether, or classify it as a meaningless enterprise.)   A case can be made to the contrary: first, a realist ontology should be adopted by the social sciences; and second, causes do produce effects in society, in ways that are not generically different from the way causes produce effects in nature. 

That case is made by Heikki Patomäki in After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (Re)Construction of World Politics (2001).  Society does not invent physical reality.  It adjusts to it.  Without food a people perishes; if homo sapiens sapiens destroys the biosphere, its habitat, it will destroy itself.  Society does invent institutions.  Institutions have consequences.   They produce effects.  Admittedly, if causality requires knowledge of constant conjunction of observed regularities, then when knowledge of constant conjunction of observed regularities goes, causality goes.  The better philosophies of causality, however, are the critical realist views that do not commit the epistemic fallacy.  Whether there are causes does not depend on whether people can know with certainty, or know at all, that there are causes.  While Patomäki holds that all beliefs and knowledge claims are socially produced, contextual, and fallible, he also insists that truth-claims have to be about something.   It is possible to distinguish those truth-claims which are rational judgments, from those which are not.  What truth claims about causes are about is causal powers. Patomäki writes, “[A] realist conception of causality does not equate causality with constant conjunction but with structured powers capable of producing particular, characteristic effects if triggered.  In this regard natural and social sciences are similar.  There are real causal powers both in natural and in social systems. . .”  (2001: 8).[19]

The burden of our argument is that constitutive rules are social facts with causal consequences no more and no less real than the consequences of stones or waterfalls or DNA.   Moreover, the great ideals that inspire humanity--justice, love, freedom, democracy, peace--are also, like constitutive rules, ideas, forces that act.[20]  They do things.  The problems of construct validity involved in trying to specify operational definitions of them for purposes of social science research are problems for social science research--but they do not subtract one whit from their causal efficacy as forces at work in the world.  Ideals are cultural resources, which, like natural resources, are available for the ethical construction of society.  We are impressed by the work of great ideals in history, and we adore the causal powers of working class deities: Krishna born in a jail; Jesus born in a manger; Moses, the Prince of Egypt, who remembered his captive people and led them to freedom; the prophet of Allah walking and leading the camel while his camel driver took his turn riding the camel; the compassionate Buddha declining to enter Nirvana and choosing instead to turn back to earth to cast his lot with suffering humanity.     

This chapter has been a concentrated dose of remarks on epistemology.  Additional discussions of issues in the philosophy and methodology of science are scattered through the other chapters.  An additional point perhaps already evident from the preceding chapter is that we do not think it is necessary to unify discourses into a single meta-discourse.  To talk about cooperation and sharing, it is not necessary to agree to define the terms in the same way--as the dialogue among the various participants in Chapter One was intended to show.  The world is as it is.  One planet, many language games.   It is true, as Alexander Wendt (1999) says, that homo sapiens sapiens is an interdependent species which shares a common fate.   It is also true, as Wendt says, that to cope successfully with the common challenges of the species there must be ideological labor to facilitate the emergence of ideas that will guide functional behavior; but this does not mean unity at the level of talking alike.  It means actions that mesh to solve the problems.[21]

 

               

               

 

               

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes