Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory

Historical Materialism #3

by Alex Callinicos

Making History is about the question - central to social theory - of how human agents draw their powers from the social structures they are involved in. Drawing on classical Marxism, analytical philosophy, and a wide range of historical writing, Alex Callinicos seeks to avoid two unacceptable extremes - dissolving the subject into an impersonal flux, as poststructuralists tend to - and treating social structures as the mere effects of individual action (for example, rational-choice theory). Among those discussed are Althusser, Anderson, Benjamin, Brenner, Cohen, Elster, Foucault, Giddens, Habermas, and Mann. Callinicos has written an extended introduction to this new edition that reviews developments since Making History was first published in 1987. This republication gives a new generation of readers access to an important intervention in Marxism and social theory.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Sociology, Theory, History, Nonfiction

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Alexander Theodore Callinicos, a descendant through his mother of Lord Acton, is a political theorist and Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London. He holds both a BA and a DPhil from Oxford University.

Reviews

[Bill Crane · Rating 4 out of 5]

These days any leftist with a spine might feel a bit queasy about reading something by Alex Callinicos. However, as Trotsky once said of Plekhanov, "it does no harm to learn from him every now and then."

This is one of the professor's earlier, and very academic, works. The goal as I understand it is to present a theory of human agents in society that can both stand up to the rigor demanded by academic social science and conform to Marxist theory and practice. To do so the book takes on the state theorists who were contemporary at the time such as Giddens, Skocpol and Mann, as well as the attempt to frame Marxism in an analytic or rational-choice model as attempted by Cohen and Elster.

Making History is therefore very dense at points, and it's hard to see where Callinicos is going when (for example) he spends the second chapter disputing minutiae of linguistic theory. Nevertheless there are passages of theoretical brilliance here, including a takedown of methodological individualism that I'm sure I will return to.

Callinicos was influenced by Althusser early on, and this influence shows very clearly. Here he is not the dull man summoned to defend a decrepit party apparatus through boring repetitions of Leninist credos, but an incredibly eclectic thinker drawing on a number of sources outside Marxism to frame a better historical materialist explanation of society. This is far from the ultra-orthodox defender of "the IS tradition" and the view that everything done or said by that tradition was indubitably correct. How the mighty have fallen.

I read this book because I'm a grad student in the social sciences and I need some understanding of the underlying issues of philosophy that Callinicos addresses. If you have similar predilictions you will find it rewarding. If not, it will probably bore you and you are better skipping it.

[M L Delshad · Rating 3 out of 5]

نظریه "ساختن تاریخ" آلکس کالینیکوس با شرحی که تلقی¬های نابسنده از عاملیت به دست می دهند آغاز می گردد. کالینیکوس نشان می دهد که برای همساز کردن ماتریالیسم تاریخی مارکس با اثرگذاری واقعی عاملان در جهت¬دهی تاریخ، می بایست نظری تلفیقی به حیات اجتماعی داشت. از نظر او کنش فردی بدون فعلیت یافتن قابلیت¬های ساختاری امکان پذیر نیست. و از دیگر سو منافع عینیِ جمعی حلقه ای غیرقابل انکار در پیوند یافتن تجربه آگاهانه افراد و ساختارهای کلان است.

[Finnian Colwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very comprehensive examination of social theory which seeks to offer an account of social structures without denying the existence of human agency. Callinicos argues that structures give individual agents certain powers and limitations which they can then choose to use when they act, such as going on strike if they are workers or exploiting workers if they are capitalists. He dispenses with the notion of "methodological individualism," that all social outcomes can be explained with reference to the choices of individual actors, by showing that, however far back you go in the causal process, there is always some power granted to a certain actor due to an impersonal social structure. But he only does this after proving, contrary to pre- and post-modern notions, that humans are rational, unified actors. He examines some fascinating but obscure theories about how a notion of human nature is presupposed by all studies in sociology and history, and dismantles the view derived from orthodox economics that humans maximise their pleasure, drawing on Charles Taylor's theory about the way in which humans choose to prioritise or resist wants. Callinicos also provides a compelling summary of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, whereby the ability for the feudal lords to crush the peasants determined whether they could implement early capitalist agricultural techniques to compete with the other feudal lords, and provides a very good outline of ideology, which interacts with the trade union consciousness that workers already spontaneously possess and steers it towards a right-wing direction. Finally, he takes a somewhat critical attitude to the mysticism of Benjamin and Sartre and their writings on revolution, which he seems to appraise more positively in later writings.

I certainly came away from this book with much more to read or think about, but I was left wishing Callinicos had explored more thoroughly the issue of agency insofar as it determines the forms of organisation developed by the contending classes in society. His account in the final chapter seems to suggest that the various situations facing the Russian proletariat - first of organising under absolute monarchy, then the limited constitutionalism of post-1905 years and finally the vacillations of 1917 - selected for Lenin, whereas other histories have not. But if this is so, isn't the outcome of the class struggle inevitable, contrary to what Callinicos himself says? Part of the confusion comes from the double-meaning of the word "agency," which can be both action which realises one's own nature in the face of external social forces and action which is determined neither by one's own nature nor by social forces. Another source of confusion was Callinicos' use of the word "wants." He usefully critiques the idea that wants are equivalent to wellbeing, as we can want to want certain things and want not to want others. But then he suggests the interests of a class are the realisation of the totality of the wants of each member of that class. Does the working class have an interest in realising the desire some of its more alienated members have to murder other members of that same class, particularly women or people of colour? I think it's clear Callinicos is not just talking about basic needs, but also the category of wants seems too broad to figure in a definition of interests.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must confess I am not particularly drawn to analytic philosophy, nor towards its Marxist variant; nor am I much interested in the structuralist Marxism of Althusser. But Callinicos has built a very interesting dialectic around an old pair, agency and structure, where structure is represented by a common analytic position, methodological individualism—"the explanation of social events [and institutions] can only be in terms of individuals, their states and properties"—and structure by the Althusserian body of work—"conceiving history as a 'process without a subject', [treating] human agents as the 'bearers' or 'supports' of objective structures and subjectivity itself as a construct of ideology".

I'm not sure Callinicos has unearthed a new combinatory category with this work (that is, "the true is the whole," in Hegel's words), but I don't think that's necessarily the point. He was very good at finding the hidden connecting tissues that bind agency and structure together, and finding the rationale kernels of his extreme examples. And he did it in a way that leaves historical materialism as social theory intact.

[Ravi · Rating 3 out of 5]

After nearly forty years since it was first published, I finally had a chance to read it. While I am in no position to determine whether Callinicos is right regarding his assessments on analytical Marxism or indeed philosophers of language such as Davidson and Quine, it struck me as a useful book overall. The book becomes more readable as you move on to the later chapters.

[Waldez Da s. s · Rating 4 out of 5]

if this book has one problem is the author's reliance on a. giddens's work, but, by the second edition preface, it's something on that he himself agrees given he cites m. archer.