References: Change, Evolution and Power

1 Sometimes `determination' becomes another name for an objecti­vism that seeks to explicate conduct primarily via structural constraint. Wright, for example, seeks to identify `a series of distinct relationships of determination' based upon a `differentiated scheme of structural causality compatible with Marxist theory'. He distinguishes several modes of determination, but I shall mention only two to convey the flavour of what he has to say: `structural limitation' and `selection'. The former refers to ways in which the structural properties of societies set limits to what is possible within those societies. Thus, Wright asserts, the `economic structure' of feudalism limits the form of the state that appears in feudal systems. While a representative democracy with universal suffrage was `structurally impossible' within feudalism, a fairly wide variety of state forms are compatible with feudal orders. `Selection' refers to `those social mechanisms that concretely determine ranges of outcomes, or in the extreme case [?] specific outcomes, within a structurally limited range of possibilities'. Wright connects `selection' with the determination of `specific historical conjunctures'. In feudalism, economy and state relate in such ways as to shape the forms of class division which occur, these forms of class conflict becoming expressed as concrete struggles between definite groups.

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The notion of `determination' here is ambiguously formulated. When Wright speaks of the determination of `specific outcomes' or `historical conjunctures' he seemingly has in mind a very generalized sense of the term. Understood in this way, Wright's view would involve a full-blown species of structural determinism, a version of a `structural sociology' in which human conduct is to be explained as the outcome of social causes. But other remarks that Wright makes suggest that he does not wish to adopt such a standpoint. Structural features of social systems, as his first category indicates, set limits within which an indeterminate range of outcomes can come about. `Determination' here means `constraint' and does not discriminate between the several senses which, I have suggested, that term characteristically embraces. To repeat, `structure' cannot be identified with `constraint', and the constraining aspects of structural properties cannot be regarded as a generic form of `structural causality'. Since these points have been already dealt with, there is no need to labour them further. See Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978), pp. 15-18.

2 Cf. CPST, pp. 230-3.

3 NRSM, chapter 2.

4 Nisbet has pointed out, however, that social and biological evolutionism also developed separately and that 'it is one of the more serious misconceptions of much modern writing in the history of social thought that nineteenth-century social evolutionism was simply an adaptation of the ideas of biological evolutionism, chiefly those of Charles Darwin, to the study of social institutions.' Robert A. Nisbet, Social Change and History (London: Oxford, 1969), chapter 5.

5 Talcott Parsons, `Evolutionary universals in society', in A. R. Desai, Essays on Modernisation of Underdeveloped Societies (Bombay: Thacker, 1971); idem, Societies, Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966).

6 Cf. `Durkheim's political sociology', in SSPT.

7 Karl Marx, `Preface' to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Writings (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968).

8 Auguste Comte, Physique sociale (Paris: Hermann, 1975), p. 16.

9 Societies, Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, p. 2.