In Culture and Agency, I distinguished between the ‘Cultural System', namely all items logged into the universal cultural archive, and ‘Socio-Cultural' interaction, na...

This paper addresses the question of why democracy is desirable in terms of a relational theory of democracy. The theory draws on concepts from Aristotelian, critical realist, and psychoanalytic th...

Employability has developed into a key component of the policies of higher education institutions worldwide, whereby students convert into consumers and knowledge morphs into a marketable co...

This essay considers the two-way relation between critical realism and psychoanalysis. Critical realism vindicates and deepens our understanding of ontology by drawing on the sciences for which it...

This paper is an expanded version of a paper presented at the 22nd meeting of the International Association for Critical Realism at Southampton, England. The paper presents a critical realist take...

In this paper, I argue that it is possible to have an account of shame and guilt as mature concepts in moral psychology that sit alongside immature ones. In arguing for this, I adopt the critical r...

We are living through a time when simplistic notions of good/bad, right/wrong, and us/them, have come to dominate our encounters with each-other and our planet. Against this ‘persecutory’ backdrop,...

Volume 19, Issue 4, August 2020, Page 309-313.

Volume 19, Issue 3, June 2020, Page 217-221.

This paper develops a theory of how democratic governance is possible. It analyses democracy as a laminated system consisting of three interdependent levels – the political/institutional, the socia...

In this article, Andrew Collier explains why the ideas of revolutionary thinkers, such as Jesus, Marx and Nietzsche, often degrade into violent ‘gangsterism’ in the hands of revolutionary leaders,...

In this article, Andrew Collier critiques the method, but not the aim, of Rerum Novarum, the Catholic argument against socialism, as interpreted by G.K. Chesterton. He holds that Rerum Novarum may...

This analysis is informed by the notion that there is a real world ‘out there’ existing independently of our representations of it. This allows us to identify misrepresentations; we cannot simply c...

This article illustrates the process of applied critical realist research using a case study of political decision-making in transport. Critical realism is often used to analyse socio-political cha...

Volume 19, Issue 3, June 2020, Page 304-307.

Volume 19, Issue 3, June 2020, Page 207-216.

I begin this article by arguing that it is justified to believe in the real presence of a civilizational crisis in the contemporary world; and that this crisis is a real, emergent phenomenon. In so...

Consent can only be voluntary, freely given and uncoerced. Can this legal adult standard also apply to children? High-risk surgery is seldom a wanted choice, but compared with the dangers of the un...

In this wide-ranging interview Professor Margaret Archer discusses a variety of aspects of her work, academic career and influences, beginning with the role the study of education systems played in...

In this article, Roy Bhaskar suggests how critical realism might facilitate the understanding of persons and improve their lives. He considers the implicit potentialities of persons and how they ca...

Volume 19, Issue 2, April 2020, Page 201-205.

The naturally occurring complexity of the social and natural worlds, along with rising challenges in the social, health and environmental domains, makes retroduction a compelling mode of inference...

A foundational axiom about flux and impermanence from Heraclitus, alluding to the river, has been an important reference point for the philosophy of critical realism. This article begins with this,...

Andrew Sayer and Dave Elder-Vass are both advocates of ‘moral economy’. To this end, Elder-Vass offers a theory of appropriative practices that enables us to evaluate the enormous variety of forms...

ABSTRACT‘Subjectification', the cornerstone concept of Biesta's philosophy of education, refers to how autonomy should be realized in educational settings and to the fact that explanation is irrelevant to emancipation. In this article a critical realist reading is provided of how Biesta links narrative learning to emancipation and of the shortcomings that spring from this connection. The central thesis of my argument is that truth and values should take center stage in an educational philosophy of emancipation and that these two concepts (...) are left out of Biesta's conception of emancipation. It is suggested that Biesta's philosophy of emancipation has no criteria for distinguishing what is true from what is false and valuable from invaluable. This happens because it cannot adequately address how one passes from ‘is' to ‘ought’ the ways in which rational thinking could be emancipatory and the grounds on which emancipatory living is better than non emancipatory living. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 78-88.

ABSTRACTThis brief paper builds on my recently published work on financial capitalism. My objective here is to sketch an account of the primary social features of post-1970s financialised capitalism, to identify select dynamics or mechanisms that have resulted in these features, to outline a programme of research to enhance our explanatory understanding of the ‘fractured society’ via the sociological concepts of structure, culture and agency, and to broach, characterize and assess likely prospects and triggers for the accomplishment of a credible, (...) defensible post-capitalist societal formation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRowland’s message in Morality by Design mirrors Kant’s ‘moral argument’ for God. As such, he is part of a global trend in philosophy towards a ‘religious renaissance’, also reflected in the work of orthodox critical realists, especially those who are drawn to Jurgen Habermas and/or John Dewey in addition to Roy Bhaskar. Many orthodox critical realists may not realize that their approach – which assumes the existence of an absolute, innate, embedded morality – ultimately requires the idea of God to (...) be consistent. By conflating faith with reason, this religious renaissance offers a progressive-sounding discourse that can be used to legitimise activism to achieve socially conservative, yet politically left wing, policy outcomes, norm formation and judicial interpretations. It therefore threatens the hard-won rights of women and members of the LGBTQ community. This review essay offers Bhaskar's original critical realism as an antidote to the religious renaissance in philosophy. (shrink)