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Roy Bhaskar, Enlightened Common Sense. The Philosophy of Critical Realism. Edited with a
preface by Mervyn Hartwig. Abingdon: Routledge. xvi+225 pages. 9780415583794 P/B,
£26.99; 9780415583787 H/B, £90; 9781315542942 e-book, £18.99.
It is always instructive to see how the author of a massive and complex body of work
summarises it, and poignant when one knows it is the author’s last words on the subject. Roy
Bhaskar (1944-2014) intended this book, written with support from the Templeton
Foundation in Philadelphia, to be followed by further critical discussions of contemporary
philosophy and social theory. It was almost complete at the time of his sudden death; Mervyn
Hartwig, who collaborated on a retrospective book of 2010 and other parts of Bhaskar’s later
work, has filled out the text (mostly in chapters 6-8) with some clarifying material drawn
from Bhaskar’s other work and his own diagrams and expository discussions, as well as
substantially expanding the endnotes throughout.1
The result is both a superb summary of Bhaskar’s thought and a valuable development of
parts of it, on which I shall concentrate here. The overall shape of his philosophy has become
clearer in its central focus on ontology and its relation to Kant, something discussed in detail
by Dustin McWherter (2013). Habermas has stressed that we are descendants of the Young
Hegelians; in recent western philosophy the more relevant ancestor is Kant. In tweet format,
Hume begat Kant and Kant begat almost everyone else, however diverse their responses to
him. In Bhaskar’s first book, A Realist Theory of Science (1975), Kant has only a walk-on
part, though a crucial one, as a step in the presentation of the underlying argument with his
question: how is science possible? Where Hume had stressed experience and Kant the
categories by which we structure our experience, Bhaskar pointed to a further condition,
occluded in Western epistemology: the prior existence of a structured world made up of
entities and causal mechanisms which almost all long preceded the contingent evolution of
human beings who eventually learned to do science. This shift of attention to ontology is the
red thread which runs through Bhaskar’s thought, from the basic distinction between
perceptions, events (which may or may not be perceived) and underlying structures and
causal mechanisms (which may or not produce effects) to the more baroque categories
presented in his later work (p.9). A further continuity is the theme of emancipation; like Kant,
Bhaskar moves from what we can know, and the critique of false beliefs, to ethical concerns
and philosophical anthropology.2 In his case, however, the focus is less on the knowing
subject than on what Marx and Engels called ‘real active people’, active in the world. Hence
his focus on the common-sense dimension of realism as a philosophy continuous with
scientific practice, a philosophy for science, and his attachment to Locke’s image of the
philosopher as an ‘underlabourer’ clearing the ground for scientific practice.3
In the social sciences, Kant’s question about what makes science possible becomes moot: we
are less confident in the success and, in Giddens’ phrase, ‘revelatory power’ of sociology
than that of, say, chemistry. Here, in his second book, The Possibility of Naturalism (1979)4,
1
My thanks to Margaret Archer for the original text; see p. xiii for details.
2
Stefan Müller-Doohm (2016: 368-399) similarly traces these Kantian motifs towards the
end of his biography of Habermas.
3
See pp. 1-2. This motif also inspired the title of Reclaiming Reality (1989). (After the US
catastrophe, we can be thankful that he did not write of ‘draining swamps’.)
4
I remember that when the book was being printed Roy said he was a little worried that the
printer kept referring to it as naturism.
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Bhaskar changed tack from a transcendental argument from the possibility of science, while
recognizing that social scientific arguments also take a retroductive form (what causes the
regularities and systematic variations in suicide rates analysed by Durkheim?; why did
capitalism in Weber’s account take off in early modern Europe in areas dominated by ascetic
protestantism? and so on.) In The Possibility of Naturalism he mediated instead between the
dualisms of social theory to present a ‘critical naturalism’ which, he now stresses (p.12 and
chapter 3), could also be termed a ‘critical hermeneutics’, and a ‘transformational model of
social action’ with affinities to Giddens’ structuration theory and even closer to Archer’s
morphogenesis model. (This also, unlike Giddens’, takes account of temporal lags in action
(see pp. 54-5), as well as having a stronger conception of structure). As he presents it here,
Bhaskar embellishes the TMSA with a model developed in his third book, Scientific Realism
and Human Emancipation (1986), of ‘four-planar social being’, in which
…all social activity, and all social being, occurs simultaneously on the four
dimensions of:
a) material transactions with nature
b) social interactions between people
c) social structure; and
d) the stratification of the embodied personality. (p. 53)
Like Marx, Bhaskar defended a relational conception of the social located between individual
action and holistic structures (and he differentiates here (pp. 53-6) between the
agency/structure and individual/society dualisms5). He also adds, as he did in an edited book
in 2010, a differentiation between ‘levels of scale’ of individual and social existence (p. 56). 6
Critical realism has been influential in a number of disciplines, and chapter 4 of the book
focuses in particular on its implications for interdisciplinary research. Here Bhaskar also
brings in the model of multiple levels, using Andrew Collier’s metaphor of a ‘laminated
system’ of irreducible layers with distinct mechanisms operating within them (pp. 82-5). 7 As
he notes, discussions of interdisciplinarity have rarely addressed the ontological question
‘about what there was in the world that necessitated recourse to interdisciplinary as distinct
from disciplinary research’ (p. 85). The realist notion of the stratification of reality and its
attention to the question of emergence set the scene for interdisciplinary research. The notion
of rhythmics, of overlapping entities, times and spaces presented in Dialectic (1993) is also
relevant here (pp. 84-5).
Chapter 5 develops the account of ethics and critique first presented in Scientific Realism and
Human Emancipation (1986), pointing to a particular sub-discipline of sociolinguistics,
critical discourse analysis as practised by Norman Fairclough and others. Here, Bhaskar
suggests that his original differentiation in A Realist Theory of Science between the domains
of the real (structures and mechanisms), the actual (events) and the empirical (experiences or
preceptions) can be mapped onto language, with discourse or discursive structures
corresponding to the real, texts to the actual and interpretations to the empirical. (p. 103)
Thus, for example (and I am here adding my own interpretation to Bhaskar’s analysis), the
5
As Hartwig points out helpfully (p. 75 n. 18): ‘…”duality” signifies a totality or unity with
real internal distinctions, whereas “dualism” signifies split or diremption.’
6
See also Bhaskar et al 2010: 9-10.
7
See Collier 1989: 98-9.
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structures I am using in this review (briefly, academic discourse in English) make possible or
condition, though they do not determine, the text I am producing here, which may or may not
be read and interpreted (though ex hypothesi it is being read this far, by you). (Contra
realism, an empiricist might reject the existence of discourses in this sense, or an extreme
structuralist might see what I am writing and you are reading as purely an effect of discourse,
with no room for the agency of writer or reader.) More practically, Bhaskar suggests that
Discourse operates at three levels simultaneously:
(1) as text
(ii) as discourse practice (the process of producing and interpreting texts; and
(iii) as sociocultural practice, with the discursive activity occurring in a particular
immediate situation, a specific social institutional locale and a more general societal
context.
[Thus…]
A typical discourse analysis might take the form of the following three phases:
(a) description of the text, including its formal linguistic properties
(b) interpretation, in terms of the relationship between the (productive and
interpretive) discursive processes in the text; and
(c) explanation of the production, role, intended effect and force of the text in terms
of the relationship between the social and discursive processes. (p.105)
He goes on (pp. 106-9) to analyse a newspaper article in some detail to illustrate the ways in
which a critical discourse analysis may operate and criticises the empiricist metatheory
underlying the question often asked of climate scientists: whether a particular freak weather
event is a product of climate change – which is not of course the point. (p.110)
The next two chapters cover the phase in the early 1990s from which Bhaskar’s work took
what for many of us was a worryingly speculative turn.8 Chapter 6 broadly covers the terrain
of Dialectic (1993) and Plato Etc. (1994) and this has been very well analysed by Alan
Norrie in his Dialectic and Difference. (2010). In chapter 7 he presents what he calls his ‘so
called spiritual turn’ and his ‘philosophy of metaReality’ as more continuous with his earlier
work: ‘I believe that my philosophy has been strongly spiritual all along in its drive to
overcome dualism, alienation and split in practice as well as in theory.’ (p. 144) The more
theological language of From East to West (2000) gives way to a clearer differentiation
between spirituality and religion, while retaining ‘the ideas of the immanence of the divine
and the actuality of enlightenment’. (p. 145)
Having skidded off the road and abandoned the chase at the spiritual turn, I return to my
comfort zone in chapters 8 and 9, where Bhaskar restates in brilliant but highly compressed
form his critique of the irrealism and actualism of western philosophy, from Plato to
postmodernism, in the terms of his later philosophy. In chapter 9, which (unlike 7and 8) was
more or less complete at the time of his death, he builds on this critique of actualism, via a
brief reference to recent developments in realism, to a powerful restatement of the underlying
theme of the book and of his life’s work: the pursuit of a good society, grounded in a realistic
8
See for example Garry Potter’s discussion in Frauley and Pearce (2007).
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(in the everyday sense) conception of human capacities (including science) and needs, both
material and spiritual, and what is necessary for us to survive on the planet.
The term ‘common sense’ is always a health warning in academic texts, here no less than in
Bourdieu’s work published under the rubric of ‘le sens commun’. But although Bhaskar’s
language and thought are difficult, he was driven by a passionate desire, as in this book, to
communicate his ideas as widely as possible and in some measure to make the world a better
place. In this he undoubtedly succeeded.
William Outhwaite
Newcastle University
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References
Bhaskar, Roy et al. (eds.) (2010) Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change. London: Routledge.
Collier, Andrew (1989) Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought. Hemel Hempstead:
Harvester.
Frauley, Jon and Frank Pearce (eds) (2007) Critical Realism and the Social Sciences
University of Toronto Press.
McWherter, Dustin (2013) The problem of Critical Ontology: Bhaskar Contra Kant. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Müller-Doohm, Stefan (2016) Habermas. A Biography. Translated by Daniel Steuer.
Cambridge: Polity.