I first met Maggie Archer as a philosophy student in my early 20s. I arrived at the University of Warwick for an MA hoping that the continental philosophy the department was renowned for would prove less stultifying than the analytic philosophy I had studied as an undergraduate. After this experience the core module she ran between the sociology and philosophy departments was a breath of fresh air, exposing me to an entirely new mode of thinking which I found intoxicating. Ironically, it was Maggie who introduced me to Richard Rorty, subsequently leading me to spend this year as a committed neopragmatist, arguing at length with her that philosophy was ultimately a self-defeating discipline which should ultimately be collapsed into literature and poetry. In spite of what I would come to learn was the absolute depth of her opposition to the stance I was taking, she was never anything less than encouraging. It was the first of many encounters I had with her intellectual generosity which shaped the course of my life and for which I will be forever grateful.
The next was when I came to her later that year, having made arrangements for a PhD in political philosophy which I was rapidly realising I could not face the prospect of. I did not know what I wanted to do but I knew that I didn’t want to do that. She took the time to talk this through with me, eventually helping me decide to do an MA in social research as a buffer year while I decided what, if anything, I want to do as a doctoral project. At this stage I was still a committed Rortyean possessed of a quietist zeal which prompted continual attempts to dissolve what I imagined were the pseudo-problems of the theorists around me. It must have been slightly irritating on some level but I never felt even a flicker of this from her. She approached her responsibilities as a teacher with immense seriousness; I’d like to think too that she perceived that underneath this hyperactive position-taking was a sincere attempt to think with a similar seriousness.
It was during my social research MA that I became a critical realist, though of course I had absorbed a lot of it osmotically the previous year. Oddly, I had almost no contact with Maggie during this period of time (if memory serves she was on research leave working on the early stages of the project written up in The Reflexive Imperative). I spent much of the year reading philosophers like Harry Frankfurt, Alisdair Macintyre and Charles Taylor (all of whom she had initially introduced me to) and vaguely getting to grips with critical realism while ingesting as much epochal social theory (Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens) as I could get my hands on. That was the point at which I read Making Our Way Through The World (which had been released in the summer before I moved to the Sociology department) and it was a revelation; the philosophical issues which had come to fascinate me could be articulated in a sociological register without losing their conceptual nuance or existential sensitivity. There was a rich account of the human subject here developed through careful engagement with an eclectic range of intellectual sources, such as Harry Frankfurt, Jean Piaget, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Sanders Peirce and Charles Taylor. I point to these thinkers in particular as examples of the range of intellectual sources drawn on by Maggie outside the tradition of critical realism, contrary to the tendency to position her as a sociological elaborator of Roy Bhaskar.
The problem I found as a masters student whose intellectual horizon had suddenly opened out through discovering ‘reflexivity’ as an object of study, was that the intellectual depth of this position immediately required reading backwards through Structure, Agency & the Internal Conversation and Being Human. These three books were 1017 pages between them, soon joined by The Reflexive Imperative to make up 1370 pages of densely argued work about human agency. Furthermore, to really understand this work you needed to read Realist Social Theory (370 pages) and Culture & Agency (390 pages). These six books which her friend Frédéric Vandenberghe once referred to as The Archers are a substantial body of work; in their length but much more so in their systematicity. It was after I started my part-time PhD with Maggie in 2008 that I committed to working through them systematically from start to finish and it remains the most formative intellectual experience of my life. My original copies of these books were rendered useless by the quantity of marginalia, highlights and stickers which documented my slow progress through them over a period of months. I’ve begun to go back to them now with a view to repeating the process, something which I hope others might want to join me in.
These six books were in a real sense one single project undertaken over twenty-five years. I was fascinated, if intimidated, by the clarity and systematicity of it all; it was only as I got to know her more as a person, particularly after the PhD when the student/supervisor roles faded into the background (which lends itself less comfortably to narrative of the form with which I began this post), that I realised how hard won that analytical clarity was. There was an intellectual bravery to her, in the sense that she refused to let intellectual problems go. Each of these books is a response to the problems left behind in the previous book. In the process of developing an answer to them the project as a whole became something ever more sophisticated and interconnected. She said to me years later that “I think if you start writing a book and you don’t feel as if you’re drowning it’s not worth doing”. It’s illuminating to go back to this work with that in mind, recognising the care with which she developed arguments. I was inspired by the form of these works then and I continue to be inspired by it now, leaving aside the obvious fact of my deep and enduring agreement with the content.
William Outhwaite talked in 2009 about the nascent canonical status of her work within British Sociology but this status seems much less assured than it once did. As he noted at the time, “the ‘theory boys’ tended to be … boys”. It’s hard not to wonder how her trajectory might have been different if she had been a member of this club. Instead my fear is that her place in intellectual history will be limited to an elaborator of Bhaskar and critic of Giddens, in spite of the countless external markers of recognition, such as the ISA presidency and the BSA lifetime achievement award. In the time I’ve taken a serious interest in analysing the reception of her work, I’ve noticed a range of the mechanisms of epistemic injustice identified by Jana Bacevic: bounding her work as a Catholic scholar or insular critical realist, appropriating it to critical realism more broadly & Bhaskar in particular, as well as the casual violence of non-attribution. I was astonished to be sent a book to review a couple of years ago by an author who cited the concepts of upwards, central and downwards conflation without mentioning her even once. The publisher to their credit immediately addressed the situation but the author would only add a clarificatory footnote, suggesting his concepts were entirely distinct. I wonder how many examples like this I’ve not seen and how many are going to occur over the coming months and years.
I learned many things from Maggie but foremost amongst them was taking thinking seriously. To never be content with platitudes. To hold onto the thoughts and see where they take you, especially when it’s difficult; the only way to find clarity is to follow to the destination. In the seventeen years I had the privilege to relate to her as an interlocutor, she was never anything other than encouraging about how the thoughts I was inclined to grip led me towards doing work very different to that which might have seemed likely during my doctorate. It occurred to me recently that most people didn’t see her vast intellectual hinterland. We used to have the most free-wheeling conversations about fiction, history, politics, animals and technology. But she would only publish on things she had really devoted herself to. This was an interesting corrective to me as someone who compulsively spews out text on whatever I happen to be thinking about at the present moment. But she was endlessly supportive even when she didn’t agree with what you were arguing. What mattered is that you explained the stance you were taking, whether that was me insisting that Bauman was a vital reference point in my PhD or that building professional cultures around technology in higher education was an urgent challenge. I experienced her as such a reliable source of intellectual support in my life that there were times when it simply faded into the background. I feel an enduring guilt that I never actually thanked her for this but I suspect she knew how thankful I was.
It also occurred to me how little awareness there was of the activism she was engaged in. From her initial discovery of sociology via CND through to the work on human trafficking she did with the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and the charity she set up and ran in Kenilworth. For someone whose deepest intellectual satisfactions came through often abstract inquiry, she was nonetheless inclined towards acting in the world, often in enormously effective ways. In this sense I think her intellectual achievements need to be seen alongside her institutional ones, from the ISA to Warwick’s Sociology department to the Centre for Social Ontology and the Pontifical Academy. Maggie was a genuinely unique person and I’m still coming to terms with the fact that I’ll never speak to her again. But the standards she embodied (intellectual, political and civic) are ones we should all be trying to live up to.
Mark Carrigan 