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In his discussion of the forms of legitimate domination Weber notes that rational, legal domination is frequently combined with an important element of plebiscitarian democracy. He also suggests that the fact that the chief may be represented as the servant or agent of the people "naturally does nothing whatever to disprove the quality of dominance" (Weber 1978, p. 215). The element of democracy, then, does not mean here that the people rule. Rather it serves in the legitimation of a distinctively modern form of rule that combines a bureaucratic state and significant elements of charismatic domination. Ideas of popular sovereignty and the considerably weaker idea of the mandate are certainly invoked in these societies, and not only when elections are in the air. They play a significant part in political life, but they do not describe it properly. Weber's argument on this point exemplifies an important cautionary thesis concerning the role of ideas in social life. There is a clear sense in which ideas about the workings of particular social institutions may be embedded in the social institutions themselves and may function as essential lubricants in their day-to-day activities, but it does not follow that those ideas properly describe the institutions in which they operate. The ideas of democracy and popular sovereignty are well-known examples. Another example is the idea of politics as class struggle, which has played an important part in socialist and labor movement politics for much of the modern period. This paper makes a similar point about the idea of the person as rational actor. It is a ubiquitous component of Western social thought, figuring prominently both in the life of modern societies and in our attempts to make sense of it. The first part of this paper identifies what is involved in that idea. Next I go on to use a more general model of the actor, considered simply as a locus of decision and action, to undermine the idea of the person as rational actor. It is necessary to distinguish 1) a capacity to employ conceptual tools and devices to construct a connected chain of reasoning or argumentation, and 2) the rationality (or otherwise) of the tools employed. What matters is to investigate what those tools and other devices are, rather than to make any prior assumptions about their rationality. The final section considers the implications of this argument for our understanding of what Weber calls the "specific and peculiar rationalism of modern culture" (1978, p. 26).

This paper criticizes the ways in which `power', `interests', and related notions are used in the analysis of social relations. Two broad approaches to power analysis are considered. The first involves `capacity-outcome' conceptions in which power is defined in terms of the capacity of an agent to secure particular outcomes. The second involves more general usages in which power is supposed to be effective not only as regards the outcomes of particular struggles, but also in the determination of the conditions of struggle themselves by the systematic exclusion or suppression of certain interests. I argue that both approaches operate to foreclose serious analysis of the constitution of arenas of struggle and the forces active in them by means of gross oversimplification of the conditions in which struggles take place.

This paper argues that interests have consequences in so far as they provide actors with reasons for action, and that actors may find reasons for action in interests they ascribe to themselves and in interests they ascribe to others. This argument undermines many of the ways in which concepts of interests have traditionally been used in social and political analysis. Section I is an introductory discussion of the uses of concepts of interests in political analysis. Section II discusses the place of interests in the explanation of action and Section III discusses connections between interests and actors' social location. A brief conclusion summarises the main arguments of the two central sections.

The rational choice approach to the analysis of political action takes as its starting point the need to construct a model of the individual actor and its choices as the basis for its investigations of the interactions of a plurality of actors. This paper questions the theoretical foundations of that approach, concentrating on its postulates of rationality, homogeneity, and individualism. It argues that the conceptualisation of actors, their decisions, and the conditions in which they are made, rasies important questions that cannot be posed within the rational choice approach. A final section indicates some of the problems with recent attempts to integrate elements of the rational choice approach into marxism.

It is sometimes possible, using census data and overall voting figures, to estimate the voting behaviour of various socio-economic groups. In particular this involves, under certain assumptions, the use of least square regression analysis. The results themselves provide a partial check on the validity of these assumptions. This study shows, taking the city of Liverpool as a whole, that there is no consistent relationship between socio-economic group and voting behaviour. But more consistent patterns are revealed if the city is divided into a number of areas according to their social composition.

There are four chief obstacles to graping truth, which hinder every man, however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to knowledge; namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by the ostentatious display of our knowledge. (Rogern Bacon) Theorising means ordering, structuring; as such it is an isomorphic correlate of material practice, its ‘alter ego’ in the Janus-faced human existence. Exactly like the productive activity, theorising consists in modelling reality. Theories are models. Any segment of universe we isolate in order to formulate its regularities presents itself to us as a cybernetic black-box: a processual going concern with only two points-inputs and outputs-open ot the investigators' inspection. (Zygmunt Bauman, 1972: 303)

This paper is an analysis of Husserl's theory of the nature of the sciences and of philosophy in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Husserl's position is shown to be structured around a central contradiction between his objective (a rational, non-subjectivist history of the sciences) and the problematic of transcendental empiricism in which that objective is to be realised. The effect of this contradiction is a discourse structured by a series of ‘discrepancies’ between its elements and a denegatory play on words which glosses over the discrepancies. Three major discrepancies appear in Husserl's discussion of: (1) the meaning of the pure geometry taken for granted by Galileo; (2) Galileo's mathematisation of the world; (3) the birth of scientific physics and its effect in the transformation of philosophy. Husserl's radical suppression of objectivism culminates in a speculative philosophy of history in which philosophy itself is represented as the self-conscious reflection of...

Dominant in the critical comment PCMP has received have been the charges of ‘formalism’ and ‘idealism’.1 These charges have their source in PCMP’s explicit rejection of epistemological forms of conceptualisation of the relation between discourse and its objects. What is at issue in these charges is not primarily the ‘substantive’ concepts elaborated in the text, the concepts of the different modes of production and associated concepts, but rather the manner in which positions elaborated in discourse are held to be related to the object or objects of that discourse. We have argued in PCMP and at greater length elsewhere that epistemological forms of conceptualisation of the relation between discourse and its objects are untenable.2 This chapter has two parts. Firstly, we outline the structure and effects of these forms of conceptualisation and show, in particular, that they entail corresponding forms of misrecognition of the conceptual order of theoretical discourse. Secondly, we examine the implications of a systematic rejection of epistemology for the conceptualisation of the relation between discourse and its objects.

PCMP is far from being entirely consistent in its conceptualisation of relations between discourse and the objects of discourse, but at many points, most especially in the Introduction, it advances the rationalist position that the theoretical elaboration of certain general concepts, the concepts of modes of production and relations of production, etc., provides the means of analysis of ‘concrete’ social formations and that this is the principal justification for abstract theoretical work in Marxist theory. In effect, it suggests that the concept of social formation is a means of appropriation of ‘concrete’ social formations conceived as existing independently of their appropriation in thought. It is a rationalist position in that it maintains that questions concerning Marxist concepts pertinent to the analysis of ‘concrete’ conditions existing independently of theoretical discourse may nevertheless be settled at the level of abstract theoretical argument. In this respect PCMP does not depart significantly from traditional Marxist modes of conceptualising social formations in relation to other objects of Marxist theory. The classical concept of social formation, developed and elaborated in Reading Capital, has the following crucial features: (i) It represents a definite existent combination of structural levels (economic, political, ideological) and modes of production that produces a determinate and distinctive ‘society effect’ and it has a mode of existence that makes it relatively autonomous from other existences. (ii) Modes of production represent sub-unities of this existence and they contribute to the ‘society effect’ with varying degrees of determination depending on their position of domination or of subordination. (iii) The ‘society effect’ of the social formation depends on the overall reproduction of its hierarchy of determinacy of modes of production and on the forms of the levels corresponding to that hierarchy. If the hierarchy is displaced it is replaced by a new hierarchy with a new ‘society effect’ and a new form of social formation emerges. (iv) However, that change of form and of ‘effect’ is not a change in all the elements of the social formation; subordinate modes become dominant or vice versa, ideological forms and state apparatuses persist with varying degrees of relative autonomy. At what point such changes of form and of ‘effect’ involve a change in the nature of the social formation is open to question.

PCMP stressed that the concepts of modes of production developed in the text were to be regarded as means in a larger process of theoretical work and not as primary objects of theorisation in themselves. These concepts were not produced as ‘tools’ or ‘models’ for application in the practices of economic anthropology or the writing of history. Why they were developed and written as they were can be understood only by reference to prior theoretical problems and, in particular, to the problems generated by and the deficiencies of Reading Capital. It is an attempt to overcome the theoretical impasse created by the failure of Balibar’s project for a general theory of modes of production without retreating into the empiricism and pragmatism so evident in Balibar’s own ‘Self-Criticism’.

IN contrast to the position examined in Chapter 2, the more orthodox texts on social statistics assume that, in principle, a true allocation of individuals into response categories is obtainable. Any given statistical distribution is to be evaluated with respect to its deviation from the presumed true distribution, that is, with respect to its net or gross response error. Survey methodology aims to obtain the minimum possible error within the limits set by time and available resources. The presumed true distribution is assumed to be independent of any investigation. I shall argue that such a conception of error is unacceptable as far as empirically given populations are concerned and that, in fact, the plausibility of this conception depends on ignoring the theoretical character of survey or census categories and of the instructions which determine how individual cases are to be assigned to them. These points are argued with the help of an extended example dealing with agrarian statistics.

CHAPTER 1 has identified two types of argument relating to the production of official statistics and their use by social scientists: that concerned with the making and recording of observations and that concerned with the processing and assembling of statistical materials out of observers’ reports. These appear to show that official statistics do not and cannot correspond to the structure of ‘real-world’ objects and events and that they cannot be taken as a more or less reliable account of some real situation. Following a short exposition, I shall argue that these positions must lead to an agnosticism with respect to what Douglas calls ‘real-world’ objects and to a complete and systematic relativism. These consequences are a necessary effect of their authors’ ‘positivist’ conception of knowledge as founded upon individual experience together with their effective denial of a pre-theoretical observation language by the sociologising of the categories of observation and description.