Bhaskar’s analysis of the dialectic, often simply called dialectical critical realism, offers a powerful tool of analysis for understanding the complex ontological relationships of the world through an analysis of becoming. In this presentation Bhaskar steps through the four stages of the dialectic using the mnemonic MELD signifying non-identity, negativity, totality and praxis.
Recently, we were able to hold a webinar in which Roy Bhaskar covered the first movement in critical realism, a Realist Theory of Science and transcendental realism. This covers the project of Lockean underlabouring, science, the revindication of ontology, the new ontology put forward by critical realism, induction, and retroduction, Here is part one, part two to follow.
Special thanks to Gary Hawke (Alethic coaching) for organising and hosting this event.
The 2014 IACR Annual Conference will take place on 18th to 21st July at the International Centre of Critical Realism (ICCR) at the London Institute of Education. Please visit the conference website for further details: www.ioe.ac.uk/iccr
The event will also be the inaugural Conference for the new International Centre for Critical Realism at the IoE.
Pre- and post-conference program:
16th-18th July: Pre-Conference workshop on critical realism
21st July (after lunch): An exploratory post-conference workshop on metaReality.
22nd July: A symposium on integrative metatheories
ICCR conference poster
Recently, the London post graduate reading seminar was fortunate to have David Graeber present an overview of his recent best-selling work. David is known for his involvement with the Occupy Wall Street movement and is influenced by critical realism. Debt the first 5000 years builds on the works of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi by providing an anthropological economic history of debt and seeks to answer a simple question, why do we feel we need to pay our debts? Taking aim at Adam Smith and classical economics, Graeber argues that the early barter-exchange society proclaimed by Smith has never existed. What anthropology finds is a system of social structures based on reciprocity and giving founded upon a common life – a form of primitive communism. From this Graeber provides a compelling narrative of the emergence of money connecting with military conquest, colonisation and slavery, the spiritualisation of debt and ‘paying one’s debt’ as a quantification of social relationships which inaugurates the homo economicus, an exploration of primordial debt theory, an analysis of the modern banking system as founded upon US war debt, as well as offering the suggestion that it is in fact a base line communism which sustains capitalist society including ‘the communism of the rich’ and the realisation that after all is said and done, it is only ever the poor who need to pay their debts. In light of this ideological rubbish, the solution is simple, we need to cancel debts and redistribute wealth – the cry of all revolutions since ancient times.
Unfortunately, this video is not from our post-graduate reading seminar, but provides a comprehensive introduction to his work.
Posted in Audio, Economics, Resources, Seminar
Tagged anthropology, capitalism, Debt, Economics, Graeber, history, occupy-wall-street, politics, revolution, slavery
Mathematical Models: Rigorously Testable, Qualitative Metaphors, or Simply an Entry Barrier.
In July 2012, the IACR conference was held in Grahamstown South Africa. One of the plenaries was given by Margaret Archer on the reflexive imperative and modern forms of social conflationism.
[Margaret Archer video]
Abstract: There has always been a strand in social theory that attributes importance to the non-conscious in the concept of agency and explanation of action (individual and collective): psycho-analysis, habitus, Latour’s ‘actants’ and now appropriations from Complexity theory. Critical Realism’s response has been ambiguous; quite ‘soft’ on unconscious motivation and habitual action, as exemplars of generative mechanisms, whilst requiring agential activity and awareness in its accounts of social transformation. I will refer only briefly to the first three instances above in order to concentrate on the incompatibility between complexity theory – its model of the ‘self-organizing’ social system together with the poverty of its (empiricist) ‘agent based modelling’ – and CR. The main argument will be that with the increasing speed of social change (morphogenesis), CR needs to acknowledge the ‘Reflexive Imperative’ in its account of the form the changing social order is taking in the ‘relationally contested organization’ of late modernity.