Another piece of evidence to add to Fred Vandenberghe’s thesis that Margaret Archer should be interpreted as a heterodox post-Bourdeusian. In Ghassan Hage’s (very interesting) Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being he shares this memory of working with Bourdieu:
In a private chat Bourdieu once said to me something that stayed with me and that I later scribbled on a piece of paper. He said (not word for word): “I suppose it might be useful to start researching a space by thinking of some binary oppositions that one, as a researcher, thinks are crisscrossing it, as long as one then works to show why they are neither as binary nor as oppositional as they first seem, which, mind you, doesn’t mean they are not there.”
This was something Archer was already primed to grapple with, as you can see in my interview with her, through her frustration with the limitations of the empiricist demography she was initially trained in. There’s an immediate resemblance between what Hage reports here and Archer’s analytical dualism, formulated in the late 1980s but whose logic pervades her earlier work, particularly as it was developed through engagement with prevailing theoretical approaches in historical sociology in Social Origins of Educational Systems.
My instinct is to read this as a problem Archer was already unusually sensitive to, which she elaborated upon through engaging with Bourdieu’s work and ultimately critiquing it. But it’s one which Bourdieu himself was also attuned to. The difference being that Archer developed a lose sensibility into a systematic logic and analytical principle, running with it in a way that led her to transcend Bourdieu’s thought. The place for realism came in understanding why the binaries continually reassert themselves and cannot ultimately be dissolved into epistemic perspectivalism.
I feel a bit conflicted about my enthusiasm for the post-Bourdeusian thesis because I know she hated it. But the prevailing tendency is to read Archer as a sociological critic of Giddens and a sociological elaborator of Bhaskar. Whereas I would argue the main body of her thought was fully formed by the time she met Bhaskar, it was a matter of elaborating its philosophical foundations (and then through the reflexivity trilogy onwards filling in the gaps in the critical realist approach through pursuing the threads left in her earlier work). Instead I think she should be read as deeply shaped by the LSE of the 1960s (positively: Popper, Lakatos, Percy Cohen, Gellner + negatively: Glass, Watkins), an ambivalent engagement with systems theory, the Lockwood paper which she subjectively identified as the biggest influence on her work, a love of historical sociology and a deeply conflicted engagement with Bourdieu. These were the initial formative influences, with Bhaskar sitting alongside thinkers like Taylor and Frankfurt in the subsequent more philosophical phase of her work, before I think C.S. Peirce (whose work she loved in a way I don’t think was always completely apparent in the writing) was the last big systematic influence on her thought.
Mark Carrigan 