Social And Economic Determinism Research Paper

1. Causality And Determinism

This idea that human beliefs, practices, and actions are the results of social and economic causes is often confused with the claim that these results are inevitable and predictable. However, results may not be predictable if either the conditions on which they depend are unknown or these conditions, even when they are known, are so complex as to make it humanly impossible to deduce their consequences. Also, although one may believe on deterministic grounds that the future course of events is inevitable, one may also believe in inevitability for mystical or spiritual reasons.

Causal deterministic laws have the form ‘under conditions C, effect E will result,’ in which C is said to be a sufficient condition for E, that is, in a deterministic law, the relationship between cause and effect is not merely probabilistic or statistical. However, putative causal claims put forth by those who are regarded typically as determinists usually fall short of being deterministic laws since the conditions C are almost never sufficient for E. Sometimes, at best merely necessary conditions are given. At other times, even less than that is given. This happens when a purported causal relationship between certain social or economic conditions and the beliefs and practices to which they are supposed to give rise is in reality a functional relationship, that is, the beliefs and practices in question are merely adaptations to, rather than results of, these conditions.

2. Durkheim And Social Causes

Perhaps the work of Durkheim best illustrates the need to separate carefully causal from functional hypotheses. In The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), he insisted that social facts are to be explained by social causes and that these social causes are to be carefully distinguished from psychological and other sorts of causes as well as from social functions. However, it is not clear that in practice he always followed these methodological prescriptions.

2.1 The Causes Of The Division Of Labor

For instance, Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society (1893) is often read as having made the deterministic claim that increasing labor specialization results from increasing population density. However, on a closer reading, he actually said that specialization results from an increase in what he called ‘social density,’ or the degree to which individual human beings form social relations with one another. He also seemed to suggest that population density, along with the rise of cities and means of communication, is merely a symptom or sign of social density. Because he made population and social density each the necessary and sufficient condition for the other, his interpreters have been confused about which is supposed to be the cause and which the effect. Durkheim then went on to explain that specialization is not caused by population or social density but is an adaptation to it, making explicit references to Darwin’s principles. Durkheim even mentioned alternative responses to population pressure, such as emigration. Specialization takes place only when the social bonds among individuals are so strong that emigration is out of the question.

Furthermore, nothing Durkheim said rules out the possibility that specialization could be a successful strategy for coping with other sorts of conditions besides social and population density. For example, hunter-gatherer tribes living under low-density conditions have been known to specialize in the natural products available in their territory, trading with other tribes for other things that they need. Hence, population density does not appear to be even a necessary condition for specialization. At best, it may be what Mackie (1974) has called an ‘inus’ condition, or an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition.

2.2 The Social Causes Of The Categories

Later in his career, Durkheim, along with Mauss and others, advanced a sociology of knowledge according to which our basic categories of thought, including space, time, causality, and substance, are to be explained by social causes (e.g., Durkheim 1912, Durkheim and Mauss 1903). For example, they claimed that a culture’s units for measuring time reflect the rhythm of its social life and its concept of space is patterned on the distribution of clans at tribal campsites. The very practice of classifying things in nature by a nested hierarchy of genera and species reflects an elementary social structure consisting of clans subsumed under phratries. However, their sociology of knowledge is ambiguous between the causal claim that these concepts result from social life and the functional claim that these concepts make human social life possible.

3. Marx And Economic Determinism

There are two different but related senses of determinism in Marxist thought. The first is historical determinism or materialism, according to which the course of history is to be explained through material or economic causes. The second is Marx’ theory that what he calls the economic ‘base’ of a society, which consists in the modes and relations of economic production, somehow ‘determines’ a ‘superstructure’ of laws, politics, religion, and other ideological beliefs.

3.1 Historical Materialism

‘Historical materialism’ is actually Friedrich Engels’, not Marx’s term. According to the materialist conception of history, there is an inevitable class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This belief has antecedents in earlier thinkers, most notably David Ricardo. For Ricardo, class conflict is the inevitable result of a population increase leading to the bringing of marginal lands under cultivation, which leads to wages dropping to a subsistence level. For Marx, on the other hand, class conflict was not a result of population growth but of changing modes of economic production. As new modes of production develop, they come into conflict with the social relations that existed under the previous economic system. The older social relations are encumbrances on these new modes of production. Eventually, these older relations give way to new ones that are more in line with the new form of production. Each major change in the social relations of production, from slavery to feudalism, from feudalism to bourgeois capitalism, and from capitalism to socialism, is accompanied by class conflict.

3.2 Base And Superstructure

Marx appears to have thought that there are irreconcilable differences in thought between the two classes due to their different economic positions in society. According to Marx’ famous ‘Preface’ to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines (bestimmt) their consciousness.

Although this passage has been read as suggesting that individuals are the mere puppets of economic and social forces, it is not at all clear that Marx meant ‘determines’ in any causal or mechanistic sense. The German word bestimmt means ‘determine’ in the sense of decide, define, set limits or boundaries to, or fix something (such as a price or time). Furthermore, the very building metaphor implied in the language of base and superstructure suggests that the form of economic life is at best a necessary condition and not a sufficient cause for that which rests upon it. On the mechanistic reading of ‘determines,’ Marx would have been guilty of an inexcusable non sequitor from premises about necessary conditions to a conclusion about sufficient conditions. Finally, Marx objected to the practice of taking the causal powers of human beings and projecting them onto mere abstractions such as god, the state, or capital. In his Theses on Feuerbach (Marx 1845), he had criticized the materialists for doing this, and yet this is precisely what the mechanistic reading of the ‘Preface’ does.

It appears that Marx was attempting to say that the social and economic conditions choose or select rather than cause certain forms of thought. Marx was trying to find the right words in which to express what was then in fact a new form of explanation that Darwin, whom Marx much admired, had introduced in the Origin of Species, which was published the very same year Marx wrote this preface. Perhaps the clearest example of such a functional or adaptationist explanation in Marx is provided by his appeal to class interests in his account of the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

3.3 Class Interests And Functional Explanation

Under the capitalist mode of production, the bourgeoisie must strive constantly to maintain or increase their rate of profit to stay competitive. Since, to put it simply, the rate of profit is equal to the value of a product divided by the cost of its production, perhaps the best way to increase the rate of profit is to drive down the cost of production. However, part of these costs, such as raw materials and machinery, is fixed, according to Marx. Hence, the bourgeoisie must try to decrease the variable costs of labor, either by reducing wages or by replacing workers with machinery. However, as a greater and greater proportion of the costs of production go into the fixed costs of machinery and a decreasing proportion go into the variable costs of labor, it becomes increasingly difficult for the capitalist to find ways to cut costs. The capitalist is forced continuously to reinvest his profits in machinery in order to replace even more workers with machines and the remaining workers are reduced to a subsistence wage. According to Marx’ law of capitalist accumulation in Capital (1867), the greater the wealth invested in fixed capital, the greater the misery of the proletariat. Class conflict is the inevitable result.

Economic class interests are not necessarily consciously thought by social actors, but rather are ascribed to these actors by the social scientist observing the situation. This is what Marx meant when he referred to them as ‘objective’ class interests. For example, to say that it is in the class interest of the bourgeoisie to reinvest their profits in new machinery is to say that those capitalists who thus reinvest their profits will remain in the bourgeoisie while those who do not act in this way will drop down into the proletariat. When Marx said that the class interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat conflict, what he seems to have meant is that the capitalist remains a member of the bourgeoisie only as a result of acting in a certain way which directly conflicts with the ‘objective’ interests of the working class. He did not mean to say that being a member of the bourgeoisie causes one to think in a certain way, which is different than the way in which the proletariat thinks; indeed, it is not all that important or relevant what individuals may actually be thinking. Thus, to say that the capitalist replaces workers with machines because it is in his interest to do so is to give a functional rather than a causal explanation.

Indeed, the alternative, causal determinist interpretation of Marx makes him out to be an incoherent thinker. If our ideas were really determined by our class membership, what would be the point of writing manifestoes? One might object that his writings were addressed only to the working class. However, in The Communist Manifesto (1848 1955) he described— with obvious reference to people such as himself and Engels—how a portion of the bourgeoisie, ‘who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole,’ ‘cuts itself adrift’ and joins with the proletariat. On the determinist reading of Marx, these claims appear embarrassingly ad hoc. A functionalist reading suggests merely that people like Marx have chosen a path in life that will not make them rich.

However, as Cohen (1978) points out, orthodox Marxists tend to resist the interpretation that Marx was offering functional explanations due to their tendency to associate such explanations with the functionalist tradition in the social sciences that began with Bronislaw Malinowski. According to this tradition, a society or culture forms an organic unit, every element of which serves a function that helps to sustain the whole. Marxists regard functionalist social science as resistant to social change and thus as politically conservative. However, as Cohen argues, the use of functional explanations does not necessarily commit one to this brand of functionalism.

3.4 After Marx

Engels, Karl Kautsky, Enrico Ferri, Antonio Labriola, V. I. Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, and others have been read as posthumously transforming Marx’ theories into deterministic ones, but there is insufficient space here to examine all their theories. Nevertheless, Marx’ theories were certainly understood deterministically in their role as the official ideology of the Soviet Union.

4. Recent Determinism: The Strong Program

A group who defended a determinist approach with roots in Durkheim and Marx arose in the 1970s, calling themselves the ‘Strong Program in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.’ Bloor (1976 1991), a principal spokesperson for the group, laid out four tenets for this program. These are (a) that explanations of belief and knowledge should be causal; (b) that sociology should be impartial with respect to the truth or falsity, or the rationality or irrationality, of the belief to be explained; (c) that explanation should be symmetrical, in the sense that the same kind of causes would explain both true and false beliefs; and (d) that the sociology of knowledge should be reflexive, in the sense that the same principles of explanation should apply to sociology itself. The Strong Program regarded accounts of the beliefs and practices of scientists in terms of their social interests as satisfying the demand for causal explanation. Their concept of social interests included not only economic or class interests but political, religious, professional, and other interests as well.

The Strong Program was subjected to sharp criticism by philosophers and other social scientists. Philosophers insisted that scientists held the views that they did on the basis of reason and evidence. Furthermore, they argued that the tenets of impartiality and symmetry prevent the Strong Program from arguing for their position on epistemic grounds, that is, these tenets prohibit them from saying that their beliefs are any more well-founded than the alternatives. Among the social scientists who criticized them, some felt that in plumping for causal explanations, the Strong Program was trying too hard to model the social on the natural sciences. Others criticized them for taking the existence of social structure and social classes as given and not recognizing that these are constantly changing social phenomena brought about through complex human interaction. For these critics, social structure and class exist in and through the beliefs and practices of the members of society and are to be explained in the same way as any other beliefs and practices. To explain a person’s scientific beliefs in terms of social interests is thus in effect to privilege one sort of belief over another.

Finally, interest accounts are functional rather than causal explanations. To explain scientists’ intellectual commitments in terms of their social interests is to say that these commitments have the consequence of helping to maintain these scientists in their careers, whether or not this is their intended reason for holding these beliefs. However, when giving this sort of account, one must avoid the trap of simply pointing to what appear to be the obvious beneficial consequences of holding some belief or following some practice. One should provide actual evidence that these beliefs and practices actually helped the persons in question maintain themselves in their careers.

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