Open AccessA Critical Humanist Intervention: Agency, Structure and Values
Author(s) -
Vanesa Amaris
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
international journal of science and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2715-8780
DOI - 10.54783/ijsoc.v3i1.297
Subject(s) - humanism , agency (philosophy) , epistemology , sociology , moral agency , critical realism (philosophy of perception) , intervention (counseling) , focus (optics) , social science , realism , philosophy , psychology , law , political science , physics , optics , psychiatry
The main aim of the article is to suggest what and how a contemporary, revised version of humanism, inflected with critical realism and Marxism, can contribute to sociology. I focus primarily on two areas in which sociology is often found lacking today: theorizing the relationship between structure and agency, and deciding what to do with moral evaluations in sociological analyses. I argue that the solution to both lies in attempting to finally transcend the traditionally hostile and mutually exclusive paradigms of “humanist” or “cultural” Marxism on the one side and “anti-humanist” or “scientific” Marxism on the other. This enables us to carefully reinstate the agency of human subjects and the moral dimension, both of which were and still are dismissed by anti- or post-humanist social science, without neglecting the objective and causally relevant existence of social structures at the same time.