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This thesis will be concerned with articulating and defending a form of realist social theory entitled "emergentist Marxism". As such its principal objective is less to investigate or review the voluminous literature on "social realism" and more to show the ways in which Marxian social theory can be legitimately "constructed" as a specific "materialistic" application of ontological and methodological realism in the human sciences. The significance of this research is that it functions simultaneously as a contribution to the social science component of Roy Bhaskar's philosophical realism and as a Marxist commentary upon and perhaps intervention against it. The latter is less certain, however, because Bhaskar's depth realism appears to be consistent with the form of anti-reductive materialism defended here. "Realism" or "emergentism" refers to an ontological position denoting a stratified social world of irreducible levels, of which persons, practices and structures are the most fundamental, all of which are efficacious by virtue of the properties and powers which pertain to each of them. "Materialism" denotes the ontological position that the material structures of social systems vertically explain social and cultural structures without "explaining them away". Thus "emergentist Marxism" is an anti-reductive socio-historical ontological materialism and attendant dialectical realist method. Translated into practical social research, it is applied concretely here to the task of theorising the interface between the properties and powers which pertain to human agents and those which pertain to social structures in shaping the constitution and dynamics of social systems. |
