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Il mondo mistico del “Capitale”. Scienza, critica e rivoluzione in Lucio Colletti
Full text linkTaking the cue from some of Lucio Colletti’s unpublished letters and writings, this article will focus on Colletti’s work from the 1967-1973 period. Here, Colletti interprets Marx’s theory of value in terms of a «real abstraction» – i.e. in terms of the alienation of individual private labours. By turning this abstraction into an object and by reifying it, capital becomes for Colletti an inherently “upside-down” social reality, whose knowledge can only be acquired through the critique and upturning of its idealism. The originality of Colletti’s Marxism lies in the powerful link it establishes between political economy and critique, between Marxism and the critique of idealism, between science and revolution
Methodological Individualism between Explanation and Theory Building
No full textThe present work aims at criticising the foundationalist assumptions of Methodological
Individualism (MI) in the social sciences by showing that they depend on one, but notnecessarily the only, conception of the role of explanation in the construction of overall
sociological theories. Philosophical arguments have been supplemented with a bird’s-eye
survey of contemporary social research in order to identify such conceptions in common
strands of empirical research. This method tries to comply with the need for a tighter
interaction between philosophy of science and working social science [8, 9].
In current social research, a sophisticated restatement of MI, known as “structural indi-vidualism”, has been introduced by so-called Analytical Sociology (AS), which is gaining
more and more popularity among social scientists [5]. The main idea that characterisesAS is that explanations of social phenomena ought consist of detecting and detailing
the mechanisms that generate them, that is, by referring to individuals, their properties,
actions, and relations to one another [4]—the “social cogs and wheels” of the mechanism
[2]. As such, AS shares with more traditional versions of MI [12] the requirement thatall acceptable explanations of social phenomena be reduced to individuals and their
properties.
Sofar,mostdebateonMIhingedonestablishingthemostadequatelevelofexplanation
[11], either by deriving MI from social ontology or by explicitly defining causation—and
hence explanations—in terms of individual action. In contrast, we argue that MI could be
better assessed by shifting the focus from ontology and epistemology to the nature and
scope of sociological theories. Reductions to the individual level of the kind advocated by
methodological individualists crucially presuppose a particular conception of the role of
explanations in the construction of more general theories which is but one of the possible
alternatives. One of these is the model of explanation that, we contend, underlies many
surveyed empirical studies which draw on different sociological frameworks, such as
comparative-historical and comparative-institutional research programmes. Explanations
of this kind seek to establish causal relationships between the occurrence of a particular
event (the
explanandum
) and the earlier occurrence of certain historical or institutionalphenomena (the
explanantia
) without necessarily further reducing any of them to their
components. This model of explanation, we argue, is functional to building sociological
theories that make abstraction from the particular historical or institutional contextsof study in order to identify recurrent patterns of causation between general types of phenomena. Examples from comparative political economy provide a case in point:
although case-study based, such research provides social scientific explanations applicableto all instances of the same phenomenon—such as, say, the emergence of a certain variety
of educational system in Western countries with coordinated market economies [1].
According to AS, on the contrary, to explain a social phenomenon is to identify a social
mechanism. The stylized “social cogs and wheels” that make up the mechanism resultfrom the dissection of the
explanandum
into its constituent entities and their abstraction
fromthoseelementsconsideredtobeoflesserimportance[4]. Therefore, whatmechanism- based explanations actually refer to is a stylized version of the phenomenon; mechanisms
can thus be said to define an entire class of phenomena analogous to the
explanandum
.
Indeed, to the extent that mechanisms are made up of stylized entities, they might as
well be extended to explain phenomena belonging to different classes, insofar as thesecan be reduced to the same stylized constituents. This model of explanation supportssociological theories whose goal is to build models of causal mechanisms so general asto “cut across” the different types of phenomena and be therefore applied to explain
events of very different kinds. Individual-level reductions, in short, ought not be seen as
attempts to arrive at more exhaustive explanations of particular phenomena—or classes
of phenomena—than non-reduced explanations. Quite on the contrary, reductions of thiskind are best understood as the building blocks for more general theories whose scope liesin their abstractness and hence in their broad applicability. This argument is corroborated
by the actual analysis of various empirical studies run by AS scholars in order to explain
particular historical events by means of general models of mechanisms. Among the most
revealing, “rational imitation” models of mechanisms [4] have been extensively applied
to explain phenomena as diverse as the emergence of social movements [3, 6] and the
participation into a bank run [10].
In conclusion, reductions of explanations to the individual level—like those advocated byMI—arejustifiedbytheneedtobuildsociologicaltheoriesthatembracehetereogeneousvarieties of phenomena. Yet since this conception of sociological theories is far from beingthe only one, the methodological individualist assumption that all explanations ought be
altogether reduced to the individual level amounts to a form of what some authors [7]
aptly defined as “microchauvinism”
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