Toward a psychoanalytically-informed critical social science suffused with Marxist sensibilities

“In practice, the targets of the critiques developed by substantive CSS [Critical Social Science] are not merely false ideas and their consequences, or lack of freedom, but injustices and avoidable suffering.” — Andrew Sayer

Without reading too much into the political consequences of the Iowa Republican caucuses, they serve as a reminder of the imminent and long-term social (if not existential) and political dangers to our Liberal constitutional democracy starkly presented by the possible Presidential victory of Donald Trump and his sociopathic MAGA cult (which most of the Republican Party supports). A preliminary argument is made in the piece linked here on behalf of a psychoanalytically-informed social science with Marxist sensibilities that hearkens back to the Red Vienna of both Sigmund Freud and Otto Neurath. While the seeds of this science were planted in Red Vienna and the so-called  Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory, I think Erich Fromm’s later distance from the latter’s most prominent members (including their specific psychoanalytic, social scientific, and philosophical viewpoints) allowed him to proffer a truly creative and humanist spiritual perspective which might serve as the starting point for a revived and richer “Critical Theory” or critical social science which can be part of the core of a psychoanalytically-informed social science (or sciences) with Marxist sensibilities (my preferences are for neo-Freudian and Kleinian traditions of psychoanalysis although no doubt others on the Left are fond of Lacan). Although we should bear in mind, as Andrew Sayer (see below) rightly reminds us, “if we go back to the Enlightenment and before, early social science was strikingly critical of the social arrangements it studied. Only with the great fragmentation of the study of society into disciplines and the divorce of philosophy from social science that occurred in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries did it become uncritical or disavow its critical elements.”

Such a social science need not crowd out any of the existing social sciences (save perhaps those species of economics—neoclassical and otherwise—severed from political economy), indeed, it may—and should—merely supplement, shape, or influence them. Here, as in philosophy and worldviews more generally, we benefit from many “pictures,” from a plurality of different perspectives, as seen by way of illustration, in the following models and exemplifications: the “perspectival realism” sketched in Michela Massimi’s philosophy of science; Michael P. Lynch’s philosophy of truth as “One and many;” Jain epistemology [a ‘standpoint’ epistemology or perspectival rationalism derived from three fundamental doctrines: anekāntavāda, syādvāda, nayavāda; I’m leaving aside the Jain belief in ‘omniscience’ or ‘supreme wisdom,’ i.e., kevala jnana, said to the intrinsic quality of all souls but its experience is actually quite rare, indeed, the persons in the tradition said to have experienced this has long passed]; B.K. Matilal’s essays; the Mughal emperor “Akbar’s sponsorship and support for adherents of different faiths,” in conjunction with his “visionary insistence on the need to have conversations and interchanges among holders of different beliefs and convictions,” which led to his establishing “the formal foundations of a secular legal structure and … religious neutrality of the state”(Amartya Sen); the late Hector-Neri Castañeda’s arguments on behalf of a “first-order philosophical pluralism,” that is, “a methodological and theoretical pluralism which seeks to develop ALL philosophical points of view in order to make them as comprehensive as possible, the goal of each being “maximal elucidation of the structure of experience and of the world;” and the reasons why Hans Vaihinger, in the words of Kwame Anthony Appiah, “can give us an explanation for why we might profit from mobilizing a set of theories that are inconsistent with one another.”

Today we face global threats from fascism, neo-fascism and forms of authoritarian populism that threaten the modern form democracy forged in the crucible of Liberal political philosophy and constitutionalism (with its corresponding commitment to the rule of law). Such social science can be as “objective” and methodologically sophisticated as are much of the best social sciences practices, while finding its warrant or justification in our wider and ultimately global social and political commitments to welfare, well-being and human flourishing; to common and public goods; to liberty, equality, and solidarity; to human dignity; to our sundry values and conceptions of “the Good” as found in our lifeworlds and worldviews, at least those with the potential to transcend (or already possessing the proven capability of transcending) sectarian ideologies that ignore or dehumanize “the Other” through propaganda and rhetoric that trivializes, disrespects, or demonizes inherited, traditional or chosen personal and collective identities (forms of group identity may of course also be imposed or forced upon subjects or citizens by the powers-that-be). As we should have learned some time ago, our facts and values are rather entangled (cf. Hilary Putnam’s The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays [2002], as well as Andrew Sayer’s Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life [2011]), and this means they are at the same time invariably and thoroughly mixed with our concepts and conceptions, as well as our theories, and thus the social sciences are thoroughly infused with and intimately related to values and moral and ethical roles, duties, obligations, commitments and ideals. 

Relevant Bibliographies

• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Beyond Punitive Liberal Capitalist Society
• Constitutionalism
• Democratic Theory
• The Deformation and Perversion of Education in a Capitalist Democracy
• The European Enlightenment
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Individual and Shared (or Collective) Responsibility
• Toward an Understanding of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy & Law
• Otto Neurath & Red Vienna: Mutual Philosophical, Scientific and Socialist Fecundity
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
• Social Security & the Welfare State
• Utopian Imagination, Thought and Praxis
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

See too: Donald Trump and Narcissistic Personality Disorder