On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >So again, Ockham's razor. The psychological explanation merely
> >duplicates the social explanation.
>
> No it doesn't. You have to have some way of demonstrating how the
> macro "social" structure manifests and reproduces itself on the
> individual or microsocial level, or you're lost in your agentless
> world of Big Forces with no persons or personalities attached to them.
>
> Doug
But in a very practical sense, the persons and the personalities are a mutually constituted product of the social structure! This is like the gene/environment bifurcation: it's not useful to divide agency and structure into two independent, autonomous elements. Agency is created and expressed in society, and social structure is produced and sustained by individual behavior.
So the world of Big Forces is what produces "personalities", and those personalities in mass create the emergent properties of the Big Forces. Note that this position does not deny the role of agency; it simply undermines the common-sense ideology of the individual as the ultimate, unique causal agent in society ("individuals are free to do as they please in a capitalist society", "poverty is due to the individual deficiencies of the poor", "wealth is due to individual talent and hard work").
Miles