A New Look at the Left Wing

More generally, qualitative methods such as interactive interviews and ethnography are necessary to abstract the causal mechanisms of which quantitative/statistical methods are oblivious. It should not be expected that these abstract causal mechanisms can explain events directly without any need for empirical research into the contingency of the concrete. To do so is to commit the error of ‘pseudo-concrete research’ that is common in radical structuralism such as Marxism (Sayer, 1992). Quantitative methods, on the other hand, are particularly useful to establish the empirical regularities between objects. Although these concrete regularities are not causal relations, they can inform the abstraction of causal mechanisms. Quantitative methods are also useful in drawing attention to the external and contingent relations between objects. Inferential statistical analysis can throw light on, for instance, the external relations between objects (e.g., employment and poverty) in society from a sample. One should bear in mind that these statistical generalizations are only ‘universal’ at a specific temporal-spatial intersection. A serious problem of reductionism is incurred if one attempts to treat these contingent generalizations as necessary causal mechanisms.

Finally, I also think we have to ask ourselves what kind of practices would follow if we accepted Barnes’ and Rorty’s arguments. One line of critique is that such views are critically disabling… Rorty’s favoured ironists cannot present descriptions of society as empowering or emancipating by claiming they reveal real structures of oppression or injustice. Yet emancipation in real social systems may clearly require more than redescription; it may require the transformation of real and enduring social structures whose mechanisms of oppression need to be accurately identified.

Even worse, it has been suggested, Rorty’s voluntarism encourages fleeting paradigm shifts and exotic redescriptions which are largely judged on aesthetic grounds. To Bhaskar (1985: 134–35), Rorty’s project smacks of ‘an ideology for a leisured elite … neither racked by pain nor immersed in toil – whose lives may be devoted to the practice of aesthetic enhancement’. Even more harshly, Haack (1994: 139) warns, ‘there would be no honest intellectual work in Rorty’s post-epistemological utopia’.

The underlying argument then is that critique and emancipation would seem to require some element of philosophical realism as a basis. The identification of real structures, powers and tendencies is necessary to enable us to uncover ideological distortions and forms of domination, and to carry out thought experiments to explore the possibility of different, and better, social organizations.