Politics of power: Engaging with the structure-agency debate from a class-based perspective
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395717692346 |
| Date | 01 May 2018 |
| Author | Jon Las Heras |
| Published date | 01 May 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395717692346
Politics
2018, Vol. 38(2) 165 –181
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395717692346
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Politics of power: Engaging
with the structure-agency
debate from a class-based
perspective
Jon Las Heras
The University of Manchester, UK
Abstract
This article provides a historical materialist critique and response to Bob Jessop’s Strategic-
Relational-Approach (SRA) to the structure-agency debate. The critique is developed in four
steps and four class-based solutions are given. First, the SRA provides no ontological entry-point
to account for historically specific relations of power, while the researcher inescapably finds
herself within them (e.g. class relations). Second, the SRA provides no ‘method of articulation’
to understand and explain why particular disruptive agencies exist within the structure-agency
dialectic. Instead, Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of praxis’ locates the researcher as a potential ‘organic
intellectual’ in the confrontation and transcendence of class relations. Third, for the SRA, power
is meaningless because agency can always be ‘redefined’ so that it is explained through structural
determinations. In politicising power through historical materialism, this article provides a
concrete emancipatory operationalisation of Jessop’s dialectical ontology. Fourth, when studying
uneven historical change, adopting a partisan approach may well suggest focusing on contingent
action instead of structural necessities. Therefore, acknowledging the ‘politics of power’ may well
be social scientists’ first step when contrasting historical change with their own political views.
Keywords
structure-agency, Strategic-Relational-Approach, historical materialism, Gramsci, class power
Received: 3rd May 2016; Revised version received: 24th October 2016; Accepted: 6th December 2016
Silence is so accurate
Mark Rothko
Introduction
The structure-agency debate revolves around the dual nature of human societies, that
is the dialectic between the supra-individual and structural processes vis-à-vis the
Corresponding author:
Jon Las Heras, Politics Department, School of Social Sciences, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road,
Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Email: jon.lasheras@manchester.ac.uk
692346POL0010.1177/0263395717692346PoliticsLas Heras
research-article2017
Article
166 Politics 38(2)
individually autonomous and agential moments that shape historical change. This article
argues that while a thoroughly relativistic answer can be logically provided at a theoretical
level (e.g. the Strategic-Relational-Approach (SRA)), any attempt to explain historical
change will necessarily be based, either implicitly or explicitly, on political and norma-
tive presuppositions; hence, the politics of establishing who has power to do what, when,
and where is important.
‘First round’ approaches to the structure-agency debate have been characterised as
providing ontological supremacy to either structure or agency. Structuralism emphasises
that social structures determine individual conduct, reducing social action to a mere
appendix of the former (e.g. Althusser, 2005 [1969]). Voluntarism or methodological-
individualism underlines the ultimate autonomy of social actors and the divisibility of
social structures into their constitutive parts (e.g. neoclassical or institutional economics).
In order to overcome binary explanations for historical change, ‘second round’ theories
provide a dialectical account of structure and agency. Originally, Anthony Giddens
bridged the binary ontological gap by strictly superimposing structure over agency and
vice-versa. Later, Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer improved Gidden’s ‘structuration
theory’ by bringing time into the analysis so that structural and agential moments could
be distinguished appropriately (Archer, 1998; Sayer, 2010).
In considering ‘third round’ approaches, this article focuses, on Bob Jessop’s SRA as
an idiosyncratic relational theory of power in the structure-agency debate. Jessop (1996,
2005) claims that SRA transcends ‘second round’ approaches by thoroughly integrating
and relativising structure and agency dialectically. This is achieved by mirroring and
relating them to each other in a complex and multi-layered ontology, so that appropriate
analyses of structurally differentiated actors, within particular structure-conjunctures,
may be articulated.
There exist few critiques of SRA from within SRA. Hay (1994) criticised Jessop’s
silence on ‘what theory’ or ‘what methods’ the social scientist had to use to make the SRA
operational. Hay’s (2001, 2002) solution pointed towards the development of an institu-
tionalist framework in contrast to possible Marxist re-interpretations of SRA. Conversely,
those articles that have criticised Jessop’s ontology from critical and Marxist perspectives
have only targeted his more historically concrete levels of abstraction, namely capitalist
regulation and the production of space from both post-structuralist (Daly, 2004) and Open
Marxist perspectives (e.g. Charnock, 2010), the material basis of the capitalist state (Kelly,
1999), or, more recently, the role of semiotics in the study of Cultural Political Economy
(Staricco, 2016; Van Heur, 2010). However, none have engaged with Jessop’s SRA from a
historical materialist perspective that brings the dialectics of the structure-agency down to
a class perspective.1 The arguments of the article can be summarised as follows.
First, in providing a thoroughly relativistic but logically accurate account of the
structure-agency dialectic, SRA obviates that the researcher departs from a particular
structure-conjuncture in history, and therefore, she inevitably experiences multiple
historically concrete relations of power. Social sciences are immanent to historical
struggles from which they cannot detach and, hence, history cannot be thoroughly rela-
tivised as it exerts a real force upon the researcher. A historical materialist theory of
power foregrounds the importance of class to the investigation of historically specific
sets of power relations.
Second, within a complex and heterogeneous reality, SRA suggests a ‘method of artic-
ulation’ that leaves open the theorisation of historical power relations. Different theories
are useful for different purposes as structures have no meaning outside of their context.
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