This article attempts to assess Mario Bunge’s important but widely neglected criticisms of dialectics. It begins by providing a contextualized interpretation of Friedrich Engels’s metaphysics of the dialectics of nature before embarking on a detailed discussion of Leon Trotsky’s and contemporary “dialectical” scientists’ views on materialist dialectics. It argues that while some of Bunge’s criticisms are eminently sensible, the principles underlying the works of dialectical scientists are compatible with Bunge’s emergentist and systemic approach and can shed light on such issues (...) as the levels of organization, the diachronic and synchronic aspects of emergence, and the individualism-holism-systemism trilemma. This article also submits that dialectics is best interpreted as a guideline for a philosophy of change instead of a magical wand that liberates the investigator from study of facts. Understood as something that serves heuristic purposes, dialectics can be sensibly utilized by scientists to shore up or refine their methodological principles and thereby to facilitate empirical research. (shrink)

George Orwell has often been accused of articulating a naive version of empiricism in his writings. Naive empiricism can be said to be based on the belief that an external objective world exists independently of us which can nevertheless be studied and observed by constructing atomistic theories of causality between objects in the world. However, by revisiting some of Orwell's most well-known writings, this paper argues that it makes more sense to place his empiricism within the contours of Deleuze's empiricist (...) philosophy. By recourse to Deleuze's ideas the paper argues that far from being a naive empiricist Orwell in fact engages in a reflexive exploration of his virtual affects through the particular events he writes about. The assemblage that is ‘George Orwell’ is thus comprised by a whole array of affects from this unique middle-class socialist as he crosses through particular events. Orwell subsequently acts as a ‘schizoid nomad’ who transverses the affects of others. As a result Orwell takes flight from his own middle-class surroundings in order to reterritorialise his identity within the affects, habits and sensations of others. By becoming a schizoid nomad Orwell is able to construct a critical and passionate moral standpoint against forces of domination. (shrink)

In recent years, actor-network theory (ANT) has become an increasingly influential theoretical framework through which to analyse economic markets and organizations. Indeed, with its emphasis on the power of social and natural concrete ‘things’ to become contingently enrolled in different networks, many argue that ANT successfully draws attention to the complex intermeshing of new technologies and social actors in organizations and markets across spatial divides from the local to the global. This article argues, however, that within its own method of (...) abstraction and research methodology, ANT separates ‘concrete’ and ‘contingent’ economic markets and organizations from their abstract, necessary and virtual capitalist form. This means that ANT will tend to over-identify with how concrete-contingent actor-networks are performed in empirical economic markets and organizations at the expense of analysing how such empirical contexts are also internally mediated through abstract capitalist processes such as that of surplus value extraction. This, in turn, creates a number of difficulties in how ANT investigates economic markets and organizations. These critical points are made by recourse to the Marxist poststructuralism of Deleuze and Guattari as well as through conventional Marxist ideas. (shrink)

The present article takes as its point of departure the recent tributes to Bhaskar published on the occasion of the latter's death. Laudable and understandable though it was to prioritize the career trajectories of younger scholars, one of the unforeseen consequences was to marginalize those of their more mature colleagues. The latter perforce arrive upon the scene of critical realism already burdened with their own overdetermined legacies, which demand rather more in the way of complex renegotiation. Taking as exemplary his (...) own career path, from a traditional ‘lit crit’ of empiricist and Hegelian extraction, through psychoanalysis, to structural marxism, the author of the present article focuses upon his own ‘Bhaskarian moment’, upon the benefits accrued therefrom, but finally upon the difficulty in reconciling structural marxism with critical realism, insofar as the former prioritizes the notion of a social formation, structured on the basis of a mode of production, the latter the individual/structure dichotomy. Bhaskar's subsequent spiritual turn, it is argued, further aggravated the paradigmatic incommensurabilities, with damaging consequences for those younger scholars attempting to steer a course between both traditions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe recent rise in popularity of nurture groups in British schools appears to be aligned with a broader shift towards therapeutic education. With initial origins in attachment theory, nurtu...

In Part 1 of this wide-ranging interview Heikki Patomäki discusses his early work and career up to the Global Financial Crisis. He provides comment on his role as a public intellectual and activist, his diverse academic interests and influences, and the many and varied ways he has contributed to critical realism and critical realism has influenced his work. In Part 2 he discusses his later work, the predicament of humanity and the role of futures studies.