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Chris Wickham: A review of Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in
Social Theory.
This is an important book [Leiden: Brill, 2004], though not an easy one. It is the second edition of a work first published
in 1987, and this new edition has a chunky 30-page introduction reacting to new work and in some cases revising positions
taken in the main text. This means that one has to have a double image in one’s mind—after one has followed the
often complex arguments in the main text, one has to check that the author has not changed his mind. Callinicos has as his
main aim an exploration of how an understanding of structural analysis and an understanding of agency—why and how people
make the choices they make—can be compatible.
This is essentially
a theoretical issue, and Callinicos is a professional philosopher and political theorist, so the problem gets a highly theoretical
answer. In Callinicos’s introduction to the second edition (p. xix) he concedes that parts of the book, notably Chapter
3, may be ‘heavy going’; he’s right here, for sure. You would need a philosophy degree to find them straightforward—I
am a historian, so I certainly found I had problems. Even setting out the arguments of the book is going to be a fairly abstract
task.
Callinicos is trying, as Gerry Cohen did in the 1970s (G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence,
Oxford, 1978), to arrive at a Marxist analysis through a version of first principles, constructing a Marxist position anew
from the philosophy, political theory, economics and sociology of (in most cases) non-Marxists. Because Callinicos is more
wide-ranging than Cohen, one has to work more—one succeeds in unpicking one sort of argument and technical vocabulary,
and then one turns the page and he has started again with a different set of opponents cum building blocks. Sometimes I felt
that I was going though an unusually fast course in contemporary philosophy. It is worth it, all the same. Structure versus agency is an important issue in contemporary social theory. It is also
an important issue for anyone who is interested in where Marxism is going intellectually and how it can continue to offer
a scientific analysis capable of supporting political change. Seventeen years after the book first came out, it might risk
being outdated, but it is not—a tribute to its rigour. I will point out some more recent challenges, but overall the
book stands very well. Since it was written in the aftermath of the miners’ strike, it cannot be accused of being overoptimistic
about the political moment, as much 1970s Marxist theory was. Callinicos’s pessimism of the intellect, clear enough
in this book, is as valid now as then—but he also shows the optimism of the will which is the other side of
the coin for the originator of the image, Antonio Gramsci.
Chapter 1 of this book deals with how human agency works. Chapter 2 does the same for structures. Chapter 3 discusses
(among other things) language and the concept of interest. Chapter 4 focuses on ideology and objectivity. Chapter 5 analyses
the rationality of revolution. Chapter 3 is the most technical, while chapters 4 and 5 are probably the place to start if
you want to get a sense of where Callinicos is going, as they are less philosophical. Callinicos does build up his argument,
but it is possible to skip sections, as he always reprises. I will go through the text sequentially for this review, however—that
seems the best way to get at Callinicos’s argument, its occasional weaknesses, and its general, considerable, strengths.
In
Chapter 1 Callinicos wants to establish that human nature is ‘natural’—that it cannot be separated off from
the natural world and analysed with completely different methods to those of science (he comes back to this in Chapter 3 too).
He also wants to establish human agency as ‘real’—not just reducible to the position humans have inside
structures, as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault argued in their different ways. Finally, he wants to argue that human agency
is not the sole element that is worth studying in social action—that structures cannot be reduced to a set of individual
intentions. This is the start of an attack on one of the major targets of the book, the methodological individualism of Max
Weber and, most recently, of rational-choice Marxists, who argue precisely this last point. This is a necessary step for Callinicos
to take in preparation for Chapter 2, on structures, which is at the heart of the book and is in many ways its most satisfying
section.
Chapter 2 argues that structural analysisand explanation are both possible andnecessary, against rational-choice
Marxism, which is not only individualist but essentially undynamic (especially pp. 69-84). (Note that he does not define structure
here—but he does in his new introduction, p. xxiii). On the way, Callinicos seeks to criticise Cohen’s emphasis
on the primacy of the productive forces over the relations of production in the Marxist analysis of modes of production. Callinicos
is more interested in how to understand exploitation, which lies inside any analysis of production relations, and is hostile
to the teleology of ‘orthodox historical materialism’—the idea that the movement to a socialist society
is an eventually inevitable consequence of the contradictions between the productive forces and the relations of production.
He establishes his points very effectively in both arguments: ‘social systems do not have purposes’ (p. 91)—only
actors inside them do that. One therefore needs to have an theory of agency, but such a theory has to situate agents inside
social structures, above all inside production relations, in order for their actions to make sense and to be empowered. (In
his introduction to the second edition, however, especially p. xxxiii, he changes his mind, reinstating the primacy of the
productive forces, without really saying why. I do not follow him here, and I would need much more persuasion than he gives
us here to do so.) He ends the chapter with his own attempt (pp.102-106) at establishing a middle way between Cohen and rational-choice
theorists such as Jon Elster. He accepts that there will indeed be crisis situations in which the (slowly developing) productive
forces will come into contradiction with the relations of production, but says that how these are actually resolved will depend
on the way the class struggle develops in given situations, and this
depends on analysing agency.
Put
like this, Callinicos’s argument may not seem especially surprising, and on one level it is not—many people assume
that this is exactly what Marx intended, and it point is established with care and rigour here, against a large number of
counterpositions, which are themselves powerful in their own terms. Like the Red Queen, we have to run to stay in the same
place. I liked the result a lot. One thing that bothers me as a historian about complex structural analyses (it was particularly
problematic in the Althusserian tradition) is that the more complex they are, the harder it is to see how they can change,
except by equally cumbersome and implausible devices like the teleology of the Second International. The only way to solve
this sort of problem is by establishing complex models that contain dynamic but also open-ended elements, and this is what
Callinicos allows us to do. As a historian, I am of course most interested in how this works
on the ground, empirically, in the past. So, for example, I would like him to get into the vexed issue of what the logic of
development of individual modes of production is (not just the capitalist mode, but the feudal mode as well, an ill-studied
area) in their ‘normal operation’, not just in their crisis. But I also guess that is my job, not
his, and I will
be indebted to Callinicos’s rigour if ever I
manage it.
Chapter 3 is the hardest to characterise, as it is not only the most abstract, but also moves so fast across so much
terrain. Callinicos throughout the book takes sideswipes at all manner of theorists (Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas, Jean-Paul
Sartre and many others). In this chapter he deals with even more. Callinicos is here trying, perhaps above all, to defend
the proposition that one can understand the objective interests of human agents (including collectivities of agents), and
counterpose those to their empirically demonstrable wants. In other words, he wants to create a tenable philosophical underpinning
for at least a weak version of ‘false consciousness’, for the wants of the members of collectivities (including
classes) may not be the same as their objective interests. Callinicos is unsurprisingly happy with the idea of ‘class’
being an objective reality whether or not its members have any consciousness of themselves as a collectivity (it is odd that
he does not cite E. P. Thompson here—the most serious proponent, at least among historians, of the contrary position).
To push the argument on here, he neatly develops an insight of Giddens (p. 146) that an awareness of one’s interests
entails an awareness of how to go about realising them, which allows a structural analysis of the awareness of individual
actors (he is, here as elsewhere, worrying at the relation between structure and agency), and of the relationship between
this awareness and the actors’ class positions. This is convincing. But Callinicos also gets sidetracked by linguistic
philosophy in this chapter. This leads him to a discussion of how to understand language which is not only the most difficult
section of the book, but also the most dated, for it precedes the immense amount of work that has been done on language in
the post-structuralist tradition. Callinicos is hostile to that tradition, and has written against it elsewhere, but it would
need more attention than he gives it here (and did already in 1987).
Callinicos also rejects hermeneutic traditions
of understanding human motivations as being too tied up with the belief that human action cannot be explained by scientific
principles. But he does not put anything in their place, so as to help us understand the actions of people in other cultures,
which in practice are generally based on alien principles (and of course are also expressed in alien languages). As a historian,
who studies alien cultures by definition, I found this section unhelpful. I accept Callinicos’s naturalistic account
of human action, but have also found various methods more similar to Weberian ‘Verstehen’, ‘understanding’
(not at all a fluffy concept in Weber’s hands), essential in making sense of the actions of people in the past. I would
argue that one could get between them in a constructive and noncontradictory way by invoking the strategic analyses of Pierre
Bourdieu. He does not figure in this book (though, again, Callinicos has discussed him elsewhere), but his work is both rigorous
in its discussion of the strategic framework of human action and also not as romantic as much hermeneutic theory. That work
was already mostly in the public domain in 1987, and its absence here is
a flaw.
Chapter 4 comes back to consciousness, but it does so in a much more accessible form. This is the other chapter I particularly
liked, and, as noted earlier, anyone could start here. Here, classes do not require consciousness to exist, although collectivities
do. Ideologies do not have to be false. Traditional theories of dominant ideologies do not work, for there are always contrary
ideologies in working class or peasant culture, irreducible to ruling class values. All the same, as Gramsci showed, a weak
version of the dominant ideology theory is valid (Gramsci called it ‘hegemony’, though Callinicos does not), in
which the ruling class at least manages—very often, at least—to ensure that Subaltern ideologies do not get sufficiently
coherent to challenge the ruling class rules of the game (Callinicos also uses Michael Mann on asymmetrical relationships
to good effect—that the ruling class is usually better organised than any subaltern class). Callinicos then shows how
nationalism can be explained in Marxist terms (though he does not try the same with gender), and ends with a defence of the
base-superstructure model, inside carefully defined limits. I was with Callinicos all the way in all these arguments, and
he covers an amazing amount of ground in 50 pages. I might push him on the problems with commodity fetishism (p. 159), which
seem to me less great than he says, and, linked to that, I think he could develop the different role of ideology in the feudal
mode from that in the capitalist mode (cf. pp. 164, 176). But it would take more space than I have to go further on these
points. On hegemony, Callinicos also wrote before Jim Scott’s powerful work on the subject, which he would now have
to take on board (though he would not agree with Scott, I am sure, and
I would be with him there).
Finally, Chapter 5 discusses how revolutionary action can be seen as rational, transcending difficult philosophical
issues such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Amartya Sen is useful here), and that it is in trouble if it relies too much
on images of the past, against Walter Benjamin. Structure and agency fuse in revolutionary situations. This does not make
them unusual, or radically discontinuous to ‘ordinary’ life, all the same. Here Callinicos is on more familiar ground, but he sets the problems out with his customary rigour and verve.
This review cannot in the space do justice to the density of Callinicos’s argumentation, and to the multiple
directions he takes the reader in. He is always interesting. There are few omissions among rival theorists known to me, although
I’d like him to take on W. G. Runciman more (he does a little in the main text, and also in the later introduction,
but without much detail—Runciman’s main contributions postdated 1987), and also use Bourdieu, whose project is
in my view (though perhaps not that of Callinicos) not inconsistent with his own. The reader may well find this book a challenge,
but engagement with it is fully worth the effort.
First
published by International Socialism 110, Spring 2006.
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