Introduction

I write this just after a year in which human life across the globe has been thrown into disorder by a particle ‘too small to be seen with a light microscope or to be trapped by filters but is capable of independent metabolism and reproduction within a living cell' (Oxford Dictionary of Biology 2000).

Beyond these issues of ethics and pragmatics there are other questions tied more closely to human social and economic institutions.

So, what do these brief reflections show? First, that some of the post-modernist and relativist philosophies we have mentioned in several parts of this book must surely be put on the defensive. That nature is mere ‘construct’, or, as one influential sociologist put it, ‘no longer exists’ is hard to defend in the face of a pandemic. At the same time, a certain sort of ‘modernist’ triumphalism, that celebrates advancing human mastery of the forces of nature is also seriously challenged by these events. Some have been reading, or re­reading, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722, 1960) with a new sense of recognition. An appropriately acquired humility has brought us closer to the vulnerable condition of our ancestors.

Beyond ‘sociological imperialism’ - Actor Networks or Critical Realism?

Advocates of the actor-network approach might find support for their recognition of ‘actants’ and ‘hybrids’ in the emergence, or ‘generation’ of a new virus from human/ animal interactions either in a biological research lab or ‘wet market’.

Latour’s deployment of actor-network theory in a radically critical understanding of the alliance of science with business, the state and, ultimately, the military (see pp. 66-71) is powerful, but over-general. It omits the independent science and research that, irrespective of its ‘alliances’, exposes the flaws and destructive tendencies of the prevailing ‘alliances’ of power. Many currents of environmental science (often supported by popular ‘citizen science’ initiatives), for example, have provided intellectual resources for climate change activism, opposition to ecologically damaging ‘developments’, industrialized agriculture and so on. Of course, the same new knowledge can be appropriated by the powerful, but the mere existence of political struggle over its appropriation tells against any simple assimilation of science to the armoury of the powerful. Even less acceptable is the extrapolation of this argument into a rejection of reason itself: ‘[W]e find the myth of reason and science unacceptable, intolerable, even immoral’ (Latour 1988: 147). In our present situation, somehow we have to find ways of celebrating the enormous scientific achievement of effective vaccines while remaining critical and alert in the face of the production and marketing of the results of their labour by huge industrial companies oriented to profit rather than need.

A recurrent theme in this book has been resistance to what we might call ‘disciplinary imperialism’. In its simplest forms, ‘positivism’ has been a (flawed) way of representing scientific method and to advocate it as a universally applicable key to understanding the world. More substantively, neo-Darwinism in the life sciences has pressed its claims into the domains of human psychology and sociology in the form of disciplines such as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.

In our different ways, Ian Craib and I saw in the early versions of critical realism a resource for both recognizing the specific character of each discipline, its methods, ontology and so on, and, at the same time, insisting on the interconnectedness of the many different domains addressed by the individual disciplinary matrices. In the rest of this chapter, I aim to use - in a fairly flexible way - some of the ideas produced by critical realists to think about how social scientists have and might confront the challenges that have been brought to the fore by the Covid-19 pandemic. These are the (at last!) increasingly acknowledged existential threats of climate change, biodiversity loss and their many interconnections and subsidiary consequences.

For critical realism (there is a clue in the name!) social science necessarily stands in a critical relation to its subject-matter. If the first, unavoidable, step in social scientific research is to grasp the meanings through which actors themselves understand their activities, the subsequent steps must be to investigate the sources of those meanings, the presence in their culture of alternative meanings, and the underlying structures and relations which those forms of understanding may represent or misrepresent (see Chapters 5-7). Since the meanings through which actors and societies understand themselves and their activities necessarily involve value commitments, to call those meanings into question is unavoidably to adopt a critical relation to the form of life which they sustain and give legitimacy to.

But there are stronger versions of critical social science, ones which move from critiques of specific social wrongs, such as racist policing, environmental injustices, health inequality and so on, to calling into question the fundamental institutional structures of a whole way of life. The various traditions of socialism and anarchism have been seen to pose such a challenge to modern capitalist societies, and Marxist ideas have been the most fully developed, as well as being both the most widely adopted and the most widely rejected. Earlier versions of critical realist philosophy sought to ground this sort of critical social science on the basis of the concept of ‘explanatory critique’. Initially, in the work of Bhaskar and Collier, especially, this was an attempt to show that certain social structures (notably the wage relation) tended to generate false beliefs (see Chapter 8). Given the necessity of the norm of truth-telling, this provided objective grounds to criticize the social structures in question, and legitimated the project of transforming/abolishing them. This was subsequently broadened to a critique of social structures which resulted in the frustration of human need and the experience of avoidable suffering, as well as widespread delusion.

Critics of this notion of explanatory critique, and the emancipatory view of social science grounded in it, have pointed out that on the critical realist view, societies are complex open systems, in which transformations in one set of practices may produce unexpected and often unwanted effects elsewhere. Further, the concept of emancipation stands in need of further development. If the proposal is for a deep-rooted transformation of the existing society, this could only be justified if an alternative that would resolve the abuses criticized in the current society is both desirable and feasible.