[Type text]

Social life as a D-I-Y project

Don Gardner
Australian National University

A review essay of
The transcendent individual: towards a literary and liberal anthropology
by
Nigel Rapport.
1997. Routledge, London. ix +220 pp, including references and index. $34.95 (Pb)
 I am acting entirely in the spirit of the book under review in reporting that I had not read
very much of it before I was reminded of a song by Ian Dury, “What a waste,” which contains
the following verses: 1

I could be a lawyer, with strategems and ruses,

I could be a doctor, with a poultices and bruises,
I could be a writer with a growing reputation,
I could be the ticket man at Fulham Broadway station.

I could be the catalyst that sparks the revolution,

I could be an inmate in a long-term institution
I could go to wild extremes, I could do or die,
I could yawn and be withdrawn and watch life gallop by.

The general position that Rapport defends in this book of essays is set out many times,
and he states it explicitly on the first page of the “Manifesto”, which precedes the ten main
chapters:

Here is a book of essays intent on the social scientific appreciation

of the individual who makes himself or herself ex nihilo in an
originary (sic) fashion—who comes to be, who achieves a
consciousness, outwith (sic) and beyond the socio-cultural
environment in which he or she was born and has been
socialised/enculturated. (1997:1)
Rapport, it should immediately be made clear, is not—explicitly, anyway—offering a
theory of “gifted individuals;” for him, self-consciousness and self-creation are ontologically
basic features of the individual as such, and these characteristics should not only be recognised,
and celebrated, but made the foundation of social scientific theory.

Inevitably--given that I read it in 1998, the year in which Frank Sinatra died--Rapport’s
book also reminded me of “I did it my way” (Arthur Daly’s favourite song, if memory serves),
in which the famous crooner celebrates in a more hubristic mode what Dury’s song evokes
ironically—an intution of life's openness, and the opportunities for self-direction and self-
transformation it presents. Nigel Rapport, closer to Sinatra than Dury, wants to say that life's
openness, and the subject's creative charting of a course through it, is the fundamental condition

1 Written by Ian Dury, Rod Melvin and Chaz Jankel, and performed by Ian Dury and the Blockheads (Rhino
Records under licence from Templemill Music Ltd). Dury’s 1979 album, Do it yourself, might have played some
part in the title of my paper, as may ‘Do-it-yourself understanding,’ chapter 3 of Dennett’s Brainchildren: essays on
designing minds (1998).
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of human existence. While some might quibble with the hagiographic associations of “creative,”
the stress on agency here would not necessarily draw censure from the most ardent structuralist
(even Althusser, for example, did not deny self-consciousness and intentionality to the subjects
he preferred to see as trager, even though he argued that subjectivity should be sidelined in the
project of explaining the course of large-scale social events). It is important to note, however,
that Rapport sees the first person perspective, with its emphasis on choice, self-consciousness
and self-direction, as constraining the metaphysical and methodological postulates of social
science. Moreover, such a perspective enjoins a particular ethical and aesthetic orientation to
individuals. Rapport’s world is one in which, as the novelist, Irvine Welsh, puts it, “every punter
[is] the star of their own show” (1997:76), and, accordingly, everyone should be accorded star
status. As we shall see, according to the logic of Rapport’s view, and as folk models hold, some
individuals turn out to be more worthy of this epithet than others.

The author, Nigel Rapport (Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the
University of St Andrews), continues and develops in this collection themes found in his earlier
works (1993 and 1994, for example), as well as in those of close colleagues such as A.P. Cohen
(1994; Cohen and Rapport 1995).

In 1980-1, Rapport carried out fieldwork in the Dale of Wanet, in Cumbria, in north-
eastern England. The focus of his research was a small network of individuals, amongst whom
he lived and worked (incognito, for the most part, as a casual labourer), and it resulted in a
number of fine-grained analyses of aspects of their lives and interactions. In fact, Rapport goes in
for very fine-grained analysis. His major ethnographic work, Diverse world-views in an English
village (1993), focuses on just three main protagonists (although, of course, much general
ethnographic material is also presented), “Doris Harvey, Sid Askrig and myself” (xi), the first
two being maternal first cousins (1986:40). Rapport’s interests, however, are not confined to the
micro-analysis of social life, nor even to a reflexive consideration of the nature of authorship in
the production of such analyses; like his supervisor, A.P. Cohen, he believes that the whole
orientation of social theory needs to be changed, and from the bottom up. As Cohen puts it, in a
formulation that Rapport uses as the epigraph to his monograph, “If we do not do descriptive
justice to individuals, it is hard to see we how could do it for societies” (1992; ***see also
1994:Chap 1).

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 A year later, Rapport produced a very interesting work, The prose and the passion:
anthropology, literature and the writing of E.M. Forster, a book “of heroes and villains: of poets
versus deconstructionists, edifiers versus systematisers, empathisers versus determinists”
(1994:ix). Rapport seeks to show the correspondences between literature (the English novel,
anyway) and anthropology. More broadly, and despite what might be inferred from his casting of
“deconstructionists” on the side of the villains, he seeks to blend postmodern sensibilities
concerning the process of writing and reflexivity with classical liberal humanism. He does this
largely through a process he calls zigzagging (between literary criticism and anthropological
theory, literature and ethnography, autobiography and biography, Forster’s characters and Sid
and Doris of Wanet), which often takes the form of the kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of different
authors and authorities with his own epigrammatic pronouncements. Although the work is highly
crafted, and contrives to be as persuasive as possible, the jackdawish colligation of claims and
perspectives never amounts to what might properly be called an argument. In fact, I found
myself imagining Rapport putting together his motley collection of intellectual sources in much
the way he and Sid Askrig built the stone walls around the farms of Wanet.

Rapport continues his iconoclastic project, and his modus operandi, in Transcendent
individual. The notes on the jacket quote James Fernandez characterising the book as “a virtuoso
set of arguments for an anthropology anchored in the complexities of the individual's experience
in a society of individual's experiences”. Actually, though, the reader expecting a sustained and
detailed engagement with the complex issues that have dogged the social sciences since their
inception will be disappointed. Fernandez must have been using the notion of “argument”
somewhat loosely, for what Nigel Rapport presents is not a consideration of the issues as they
have unfolded in social theory or philosophy, but a series of largely hortatory essays, leavened
with numerous references to, and quotations from, an enormously varied assortment of writers,
all of whom are interpreted as providing support for his position. Although most of the essays
2

are interesting, I found it hard to resist the thought that, quite frequently, windmills were being
tilted at and straw persons dismembered.

To return to the “Manifesto”: Following Oscar Wilde, who is hailed as an insightful

2 I also felt that another of the dust-jacket reviewers—Allison James—used terms loosely in describing as “elegant”
Rapport’s idiosyncratic and archaistic prose.
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analyst of the relationship between the individual and the socio-cultural setting, and frequently
cited in the early pages, Rapport regards the individual as a thing of beauty, a source of wonder,
and worthy of celebration: “the individual is a work of art that has given birth to itself” (4). He
freely acknowledges that his aesthetic and ontological commitments involve “a moral quest,”
which is why he characterises his project as an attempt to write a liberal social science. This will
champion the individual against those views or circumstances that threaten or deny individuality.
Such views he brings together under the rubric of “communitarianism,” which he finds in many
aspects of contemporary thought, no less apparent in various sorts social theory than in religious
fundamentalism and contemporary bureaucracies.

The reader will by now be wondering what conception of the individual is at issue, in
particular, whether it is the one we encounter in various regions of the contemporary ideological
landscape. Rapport, sensitive to this question, opposes any suggestion that a stress on the priority
of the individual is a reflection of the world view of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie. The
individualism of this world-view sees “the social actor as ostentatiously and conventionally
'distinct', sovereign and autonomous,” and as inherently endowed with “dignity and social value”
(6), a conception that, or so he tells us, does not conform to his position (despite passages that
suggest the contrary and his many references to J S Mill, E M Forster, Popper, Hayek et al.). He
encapsulates his own view thus: “I state the universality of the individual as the fount of the
agency, consciousness, interpretation and creativity in social and cultural life” (6). (The source of
these capacities is what Rapport, anticipating a later discussion of the work of the neurobiologist
Edelman, calls “the individual's sole ownership of discrete, corporeal, sense-making
apparatuses.”) So, for Rapport, the liberal, moral agenda he pursues is entailed by the essential
(ontological) character of the individual (which seems to imply that Anglo-American bourgeois
liberals are unconcerned about the ontological grounds of their individualism). He says, citing
Nietzsche as his authority, “It is the essential, objective, inherent nature of the individual self...to
be self-caused and free” (3). My reading of the book, however, led me irresistably to the view
that Rapport's characterisation of his position is misleading: rather than these liberal moral
commitments being entailed by his ontology, they precede it and dictate its shape.

He reads Nietzsche and Wilde as justifying their view of the nature of individuality on
aesthetic grounds, and with this he concurs. Once all the old gods are dead (those of the

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philosophers and the scientists as well as those of the religions), the world can no longer be
interpreted monologically, for no interpretive ground can provide the breadth and solidity to
accommodate the perspectival world that is all that remains. So, ultimately, aesthetics is the only
realm of discourse of relevance to his enterprise (3). Hence, he tells us, the many different genres
represented by the essays in the book.

On this view, no individual life is “singularly determined or predetermined,” not by its

environment or anything else “hard and fast” (3). Each individual—and here he cites George
Kelly, inventor of personal construct theory—is “a scientist... an experimenter”(5). Rapport
interprets this to mean that each individual builds a system of “mental constructs...in terms of
which people and events come to be construed, encountered, plotted and anticipated” (5). And
since the individual subject is a main focus of those creative constructs, self-construction and
world construction are inseparable. Hence, Rapport suggests, the individual is “a divine
achievement”, as E. M. Forster put it (4).

Although Rapport does not explicitly say why, he holds that the existentialist conception
of individuality, with its stress on “creative responsibility,” implies an imperative for each of us
to recognise the individuality of others and to respect it. Accordingly, he has no qualms about
joining Nietzsche, Forster, and J. S. Mill on what he calls the same “path” (4).

Methodologically, these views imply that the gap between informant and ethnographer is
no divide at all: both “write” social reality. They also entail, he continues, the invalidity of any
view that sees the individual as “dissolved, decentered or deconstructed” (7), or as living
“unselfconsciously ‘amid unconscious systems of determining forces’” (6, quoting Rabinow
1977:151). Accordingly, Durkheimian, structuralist, and post-structuralist positions are all
equally ruled out. What they all miss, and what Rapport, following George Steiner (1975), is at
pains to bring to attention, is the meaning that lies beyond all social and cultural forms. This
meaning, the creation of the individual's consciousness, animates the otherwise lifeless social and
cultural forms, endowing them with what meaning and purpose they might have. (Here it is
worth pointing out, in view of the remarks I have made about Rapport’s method, that elsewhere
in the book, as well as in earlier works, he cites approvingly the views of Wittgenstein, whose
arguments against the possibility of a private language—so important to his general position in
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Philosophical investigations [1958]—are nevertheless left undiscussed. Indeed, Rapport seems

to hold an essentially Lockean view of language, in which linguistic elements stand for nothing
but the intrapsychic ideas to which they have been attached.)

In large part, the book is motivated, he tells us, by his inability to find himself in standard
social scientific descriptions. Like Anthony Cohen (1994: Chap.1), Rapport has qualms about
portraying others in terms that he cannot bring to bear on himself as a phenomenological subject.
What he will not consider is idea that the sociological imagination can transform one’s sense of
self, that the acquisition of social scientific understanding can transform one’s consciousness of
the world, and, thereby, of oneself. In the face of the verisimilitude of Rapport and Cohen’s
“self-created” subjectivities, the idea, as Hans Joas puts it, “that sociology is itself a
philosophical project” (1996:69) is hardly considered. Not only, then, does Rapport take himself
as “the measure, the precedent, the paradigm case” (7), but he also wants to argue that all social
scientific practitioners must do likewise. Such an argument immediately raises a problem
concerning those of us who can see ourselves in standard social scientific descriptions; for those
of us who find, for example, that our beliefs, desires and values were, precisely, not chosen like
so many delicacies from a smorgasbord.

In addition to the authorities already cited (to which list he also adds Bateson, Leach,
Fernandez, Wagner, among many, many others), Rapport marks out Richard Rorty, as having
been “especially inspirational” (9). Rorty, Rapport holds (on the basis of what seemed to me a
very partial reading of his work), has shown us how we may achieve a just and free society while
allowing its citizens to be as self-concerned and aesthetic as they choose to be, so long as they
cause no harm to, nor spoil the projects of, others. Rapport suggests that Rorty, in his choice of
heroes (especially Mill and Nietzsche), has shown us that as individuals we need not just “speak
the language of the tribe, that we may find our own words, that we have a responsibility to
ourselves to find them” (10). As members of society, on the other hand, Rorty reminds us that we
need to attend to our public institutions in order to ensure that they work as well as possible.
Rorty, through his anti-foundationalist arguments, has also shown us the futility of a search for a
single meta-vocabulary that can encompass both of these ambitions. It is worth noting that there
is an anti-essentialist, anti-humanist corollary of this, which Rorty discusses in essays (for
example, 1980 & 1982:Chap. 11), but which is not cited or discussed by Rapport; namely, that

7
the only test of a vocabulary is whether it works, not whether it is adequate to the phenomenon
(here, human subjectivity) as it is “in itself” (a notion that for Rorty is empty, serving only to
signal the old metaphysical yearnings). This highly partial presentation of the various authorities
Rapport invokes is, I have suggested, characteristic of the way he pursues his agenda. Perhaps,
though, he would not regard this as reprehensible, given his view that there are only aesthetic
grounds for choosing how a perspective should be presented.

The aesthete, the moralist, the existentialist and the liberal all, then, appear in Rapport's
essays; and if they are linked only by his own biographical experience, then we can ask for no
more. How distinct things overlap and interweave in an individual's own experience is all we can
reasonably hope to understand. It is for these reasons that Rapport concludes the first chapter by
praising the essay form. The book of essays, he says, can be as diverse and polythetic and
lacking in common themes as the individual.

Accordingly, he offers in these essays “the perspectival, the partial and the multiple”
(11). Yet, all of them focus upon some aspect of the individual, either in social life or in social
science, and—it is important to reiterate—for Rapport there is no distinction here. “The writing
of socio-cultural reality,” where “writing” is understood in its broad Derridean sense, is the very
essence of individuality (10). He lists his various themes in the final section of the introductory
chapter. They include liberal democracy, human rights, biological integrity, agency, self-
creation, interpretation and discourses, social structure, social scientific method, literature and
apology. Rather than giving them as a simple list, he presents them slithering down the page in
the serpentine fashion of an ee cummings poem, with “narrative” and “writing social reality”
occupying central places.

***

Upon receiving this intriguingly titled book, I read the first chapter, and skimmed at
random through the rest of the book, after which I was rather sorry that I had agreed to review it.
I had expected a sustained reassessment of arguments stemming from Weber and Durkheim
through to Giddens and Bourdieu (which, in truth, has been needed ever since Cohen and
Rapport began demanding the emplacement of the self-conscious individual at the centre of
social theory). And, even though I am very interested in Rorty, and his ambitious attempts to
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meld quite different, even antithetical philosophical traditions into an ironic anti-
foundationalism, it seemed to me, after that first skim, that I could look forward only to a motley
of motherhood statements, non-sequiturs and muddled characterisations. In fact, however, I quite
enjoyed the book, although I wouldn’t say my initial opinion was wrong. I also came to
appreciate the forthright nature of the way Rapport presented his case, for, it seems to me, he
makes explicit an anxiety subliminally present in many anthropological works: that concerning
determinism and the place in cultural anthropology for human creativity. What I found worrying,
though, is the level of scholarly engagement (as opposed to referencing and cataloguing). The
book seems to have as much to do with spin doctoring as the formulation of arguments. More
than once I was struck by the idea that reading Rapport's citation and quote-strewn prose was
rather like reading a web page—full of underlined and brightly coloured hyperlinks that instantly
transport one to somewhere else in cyperspace.

I will not say any more in criticism for the moment, but will wait until I have presented
some more information about exactly what Rapport has to say, and how he goes about saying it.
I will not aim to be exhaustive, and will not say anything about the essays on, for example,
Malinowski’s Diary or playing dominoes in Wanet. As the author rightly says, all the cloths
presented are woven from the same set of yarns, and it is the value of these that I would like to
examine.

I cannot, though, leave the central chapters of the book without mentioning the revealing
and—in the end—unsettlinglingly self-congratulatory account Rapport gives of his triumph over
an organised scam to sell time-share apartments under the cover of giving away free gifts (Chap.
8, “Hard sell or mumbling ‘right’ rudely”). Rapport, initially without immodesty, explains how
he saw through the Goffmanesque manoeuvering of the salespersons and resisted the scam (but
only by the skin of his teeth). He finds this resistance a telling datum against a motley selection
of theoretical positions (those of Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Lacan and Derrida as well as Goffman,
Garfinkel and Basil Bernstein), for it shows that he (as an “interpreting person”) was not
“determined” by the social experience. Yet, he has nothing at all to say about a certain Mr and
Mrs Chandler who, he reports, did succumb to the pressure (147), nor about all the other punters
who make such scams viable. In his fixation on his thrilling individuality it seems not to have
occurred to Rapport that he ought to have done something to block the implication of his analysis

9
that Mr and Mrs Chandler and the others were simply the victims of their own character defects.
It also occurred to me to wonder whether Rapport might blush at the thought that his very narrow
victory might not have taken place had he not been made to read Goffman, et al., in the course of
his training. As we shall see, the strange currents at work in this account recur at other points in
the book.

The first chapter is entitled “Writing individual knowledge and personal relations”. It
begins with an epigraph from A. M. MacIver, a philosopher of history whose work used to be
anthologised quite frequently, primarily for his exemplary statements of methodological
individualism, much as Durkheim's is anthologised for his exemplary statements of
methodological holism. The quote is as follows:

Generalisations are true or false in proportion as they represent or

misrepresent all the individual dealings and happenings. The book
of the recording Angel may be regarded as the ideal limit to which
social science approximates as generalisation tends to zero. (12)
Characteristically, though, MacIver's arguments (which are always engaging, if not
compelling) are not presented. Rather, William Blake, Kierkegaard and Aldous Huxley are all
quoted as pithily or poetically saying the same thing as MacIver. These views are then
juxtaposed to what Rapport presents as the standard social scientific position (actually—and to
put it mildly—extremely thin characterisations of Durkheim and Anthony Giddens), which has
tried to conceive (or “to know”) the world in general, impersonal terms. Having set two
perspectives in opposition in this way (a penchant for doing which Rapport shares with
Durkheim), Rapport suggests that we are faced with a choice: between one that suggests “that the
only real knowledge of the world is individual and particular and that it is of this that social
science should treat” (13), and another that would “deny or devalue the individual” (12). Since
there is no real choice here, as Rapport sees it, he has to offer an account of the apparent
plausibility of the standard social scientific position. He sets out, accordingly, to diagnose the
source of the crippling yearning for generalities that underlies our readiness to buy such
manifestly shoddy goods.

He begins with some thoughts provoked while reading a history of hanging in nineteenth
century England, which depicts in detail the absurdly arbitrary judicial processes that led people
to the gallows or to a pardon (13). This reminds Rapport of Albert Camus' remark that “one
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condemned to death the guilty man, but one always carries out the sentence on an innocent one,”
a thought that Rapport finds haunting because, he tells us, although he is inclined to believe it is
true, he also feels that some miscreants (“terrorists, Nazis, psychopaths”) are anything but
innocent. And, he feels, the issue of the impersonal versus the personal provides the right context
in which to make sense of Camus' claim, for “only distance and ignorance...confers a propensity
to fix things forever: to posit an absolute, fatal guilt; only on an impersonal level can someone
pass an absolute judgement and condemn to death” (13). By contrast, knowing the personal
factors involved inevitably produces a knowledge that it is a relative and situational—it “ever
confers the mitigation of contextualisation” (14). Having thus pointed out the grave dangers of
an impersonal view of life, Rapport begins the diagnosis of that impulse to generalise and
thereby to deny, or to occlude, our individuality.

Five factors are responsible: 1) the cognitive impulse, which is based on a failure to
notice that our coming to know is prior to the conceptualisation or representation of what we
know; 2) the social impulse, which arises because we misconceive the conventionality of social
forms and their roots in an individual’s personal world view; 3) the religious impulse, which
involves projections that allay anxiety, fear, disorder and so on, and then enmesh their creators;
4) the objective impulse: this, he suggests, arises from a desire to know others as we know
ourselves, and, since this is impossible, “we imagine objectivity”; 5) the “negatory” impulse
whereby we deny a complex humanity in the search for what we mistakenly take to be a “more
essential, more knowledgeable, more real” mode of being (14-23).

The discussion of these five factors, which between them manage to raise just about all of
the biggest issues in social and philosophical thought (from the nature of cognition to the nature
of religion), are presented in no more than ten quarto pages. The discussion also shows well the
feature of Rapport’s strategy I have already stressed: his intellectual bricolage, the way he
cobbles together different orientations and approaches providing only that they suit the purposes
to hand. For example, his discussion of the distortions inherent in the “cognitive impulse,” one
might observe, depends upon a deeply empiricist distinction between a cognitive engagement
with “the world” (a given) and a subsequent conceptualisation of that world-induced experience.
While I do not regard empiricism as a disreputable position, it seems strange that Rapport should
have recourse to such a position in view of the proclamations he makes elsewhere (see above)

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about the post-Nietzschean world. It is also worth pointing out that in discussing the fifth
(“negatory”) impulse Rapport introduces once more an invidious distinction, similar to that
pointed out in my brief discussion of “Hard sell or mumbling ‘right’ rudely”, between
individuals who recognise and act on their essential freedom, and those who do not. For, drawing
on John Berger (1975), he goes on to suggest that this particular obscuring impulse tends to
produce different effects in different people: it tends to induce in the powerful the illusion that
they act as sufficient causes, while in the powerless it generates both a denial of the humanity of
the powerful, and a blindness to the “theoretical” possibility that one could “strategically interact
[with others], to a greater or lesser extent, for [the purpose of] effecting practical changes to one's
own life and that of others” (21). The distinction I am drawing attention to here is not the explicit
one between the powerful and the powerless, but the implicit one between those who can and
those who cannot appreciate the true condition of their individuality. The inability, on Rapport’s
view, is not itself explicable by the prevailing conditions (as, to use a famous example, the
mirage is an objective and normal perceptual experience), but a function of a weakness—
suffered by most, but certainly not all, individuals—for self-blinding “metaphysical postulates”
(20).

The point of Rapport’s rapid outline of the five-fold path to impersonalisation is to

characterise the predominantly Durkheimian discipline of anthropology, and then juxtapose it to
—or, rather, trump it with—another, no less sketchy position: methodological individualism.
Here, once more, we get a scant presentation peppered with the names of people with names and
some of their quotable quotations. (In passing, one might note that this is one of the passages
where Rapport’s earlier disavowal of classical liberalism looks rather odd, given the list of
liberal philosophers cited here.)

I turn now to the second chapter, which is called “Going meta.” It begins, somewhat
oddly, with a long epigraph from Edmund Leach. In the text from which this quote comes (an
unpublished lecture, given in 1976, called “Humanism”), Leach discusses Harold Bloom's The
Anxiety Of Influence, a book that is also a focus for some of Rorty's essays that Rapport find so
inspiring. But these connections between Leach, Rorty and Bloom only serve as an introduction
to Nietzsche's notion of the übermensch, a term often rendered in English as “overman” or
“superman.” This hero is an archetype of what Bloom and Rorty refer to as a “strong poet”, who
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finds himself compelled to re-constitute the field in which he works. For Rapport the term refers
to the hero who transcends all existing arrangements, and can negate the controls, forces and
other determinants set in place by others, to make of himself an “original”. This Nietzschean
hero, “the self- invented individual”, is, of course, born into certain objective historical
conditions, but he remakes their sense, and can thus, as Sartre showed, “transcend their
brutishness, surpass a mere being-in-the-midst-of-things, by attaining the continuous possibility
of imagined meanings. His experience cannot be reduced to objective determinants” (33).

The key faculty, then, is the imagination, for it is the basis of the human capacity to go
beyond, to become other than one is. Since this is a basic human capacity, it is not in the
possession of imagination that the strong poet stands out. Humans as such are transcendentally
free, so the strong poet is just a person who uses this freedom, while others “decide” to conform
to the conventional; they do not, Rapport argues, conform mindlessly (34). So, those whose
activities have the effect of preserving the conventional are those who work to preserve it in a
context that is inherently conflicted. So much, then, for Bourdieu's notion of habitus and
Gidden's distinction between intention and outcome. Evidently, too, if all individuals are
“divine,” some are more divine than others: some choose in accordance with their true nature as
individuals, while others do not. The speed with which Rapport takes up and then leaves these
issue suggests that he is unaware of the contradictions lurking not far beneath the surface of his
position. These come out most starkly in the final chapter.

In support of these contentions Rapport gives three very short “excursuses” (on narrative,
migrancy and language), and mines aspects of the work of Turner, Leach, and Burridge, before
presenting ethnographic examples of self-inventing individuals from Shostak, Babcock, and
Fernandez. He takes this swift tour to indicate that individual creativity has remained a
submerged strand in anthropology, “buried under a vast weight of collectivities” (41). Yet, his
sources make it clear, “unless we work to keep creativity ever a part of our anthropological
world view, in a dynamic dialectic with structure, then our vision will not simply be
impoverished but severely impaired” (41). So scholars like Durkheim, Lèvi-Strauss, Radcliffe-
Brown, Fortes, Godelier and Gellner, in addition to many others, who have all seen social
structure “as a more or less sui generis mechanism which determines relations between elements
of the society—indeed, to an extent determines those elements (their being and behaviour) as

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well” (41), must be opposed. For, social structure is “not sui generis and does not exist through
inertia, but depends on the continuing, conscious, concerted activity of different individuals to
intend, produce and sustain it (‘language’, for instance, ‘is rooted in the individual's specificity:
in the finally irreducible personal lexicons, meanings and idiolects of individual speaker users’)”
(41, quoting Steiner 1975:46).

The next two chapters turns to the mode characteristic of individual creativity: the
narrative. In altering narratives about our world and ourselves (which, in the end, amount to the
same thing), we give meaning to experience and provide the basis upon which we live. This
rumination leads him eventually to the following fiercely voluntarististic conclusion:

Rather than according primacy to cultural or linguistic reality, à la

Geertz (Durkheim, Saussure, Lacan et al.), then, rather than
conceiving of the individual being inscribed into, necessarily
accommodating to, a pre-given sociocultural reality, an
appreciation of the way individuals ongoingly (sic) write their own
worlds must give onto a different picture. There are individuals
experiencing cultural and linguistic forms, and through this process
creating meaning in terms of their unique biographies and personal
histories of intrapsychic strategies and practices. To phrase this
differently, ‘the interpretation of cultures’ gives on to individual
world views; individuals consume cultural symbolic forms in the
construction of their own systems of meaning. Moreover, the
world views which individuals mentally and bodily inhabit are
matters of individual composition and often private practice, while
the context in which individuals fashion, speak and live their world
views are ontologically internal to themselves. Meanings are
psychologically particular, and diverse. (63)

This characterisation of the role of narrativity leads to a consideration of identity in the

contemporary “world in motion”. Rapport’s main point here is that the relatively recent
anthropological concern with the globalisation of culture, and the creolisation of identity that it
engenders, is an artefact of the communitarianism that has held the discipline in its thrall since
Durkheim. In fact, he counters, identity has always been a function of the narrativisation of the
movement of the individual (not, contra conventional social theory, the individual’s fixity within
a social structure).

I turn now to the key last chapter, “Individual morality,” where the work of Richard
Rorty, Rapport’s “principal source of inspiration”, occupies a prominent position. Rapport draws
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on the response Rorty (1986) made to Geertz’s (1986) repudiation of his account of
“postmodernist bourgeois liberalism” (Rorty 1983). Rapport begins by telling us that he wishes
to work out:

an ethic for anthropology which will condemn Nazism, religious

fundamentalism, female circumcision, infanticide and suttee
because of the hurt they cause to individuals, because of the harm
which accrues in those social environments where an ethic of
interpersonal tolerance is not managed: the violation of individual
integrity, the threat to individuals' conscious potential, the
ideological prioritising of the community above and beyond the
individuals who at any one moment constitute it. Instead of a
relativistic making allowances for different cultures maintaining
different traditions—whatever the consequences to their individual
members—I want to outline a liberal basis for social science which
recognises individuals as universal human agents above whom
there is no greater good, without whom there is no wider society,
and in contradistinction to whom there is no control tradition.
(181)
The ethic Rapport derives from Rorty is, he says, a second best. First place would go to
the ethic that would generate E M Forster's “republic of love:” but this cannot be realised.
Nevertheless, novelists and ethnographers, whom Rorty values so much and calls “agents of
love,” cherish the particular and thereby help keep alive something Rorty and Rapport find
extremely important—what Kundera styled as the “very image of Europe:” the dream of a world
where the individual is truly respected. It is to these agents of love, then, that we must turn if we
wish to extend the range of moral discourse, to expand our moral imagination so as to include
people who were formerly beyond the ethical pale. But how are these ethical principles to be
protected and furthered? Well, they can best be protected by the principles of the liberal
democratic state, and they can be furthered by ensuring more narrative creativity—moral
discourse, ethnography, novels, poetry and so on. Liberal democracies embrace and nurture
diversity, and protect that diversity with various state apparatuses (182-5).

Rapport considers Rorty’s vision to be compatible with many strands in anthropology,

but acknowledges that many practitioners will find it unconvincing: some, he suggests, will feel
it embodies ethnocentric notions—not least about what a culture is, for what traditional
anthropologist could accept that a number of separate cultures could be politically organised
within a single social framework? Others, of a “positivist-realist” persuasion, will argue that such
a vision shows itself to be indifferent to the real nature of the world, and the role of western

15
hegemony within it, since it implausibly suggests that principles can be set up that will command
the respect of people from different cultures, who--disregarding the “western” provenance of
those principles--will accept them because of their compelling intellectual appeal (188-9).
Rapport, however, rejects both these “conventional anthropological responses” to Rorty; they
come down, in the end, to a reiteration of just the sort of communitarianism that “emphasises the
primacy of collective life over individual” (189). Such communitarianism (which, we should
remember, embraces classical social theory as well as religious fundamentalism and typifying
bureaucracies) holds that “to consider an ‘I’ is to elicit a ‘they’ who made and make the ‘I’ and
continue to contextualise its being” (189), a doctrine which Rapport then seeks to undermine in
favour of a view that sees people as “essential persons…partaking of societies of strangers”
(189). He does so because communitarian thought, in all its forms, is “finally totalitarian,” and:

Far from providing human beings with a sense of their basic selves
and identities, it misrepresents their ‘essential humanity’…: it
generalises and categorises and stereotypes them, it defines and
limits them, it deprives and impoverishes them. Communitarian
thought would determine (over-determine) its subjects and, where
this is not possible, it would deny them. (191)
Rapport, clearly, feels very strongly about these matters, and it is here, briefly, that he
gives us some glimpse of why he does so. For he turns, by way of an exemplification of his
point, to a pamphlet aimed at students put out by a Muslim group in Britain. The tract quoted is
stridently anti-academic and anti-Jewish. As an anthropologist—an agent of love—Rapport can
understand the context of this cry of frustration and disempowerment, and view it as expressing a
“justifiable outrage” (192). He can hear the appeals for Muslims to forsake the deceit of
democracy and embrace the martial values appropriate to fighting Israel and its allies as the
anguished cry of an orientialised other. Yet, he also finds an unpalatably communitarian basis to
the pamphlet’s counter-orientalism, which uses ethnic, religious and nationalist categories to
stereotype people. And, “thanks to Rorty” (193), Rapport can argue against communitarian
thought as it appears in Third and Fourth World polemics no less than in the orientalising social
sciences of the West, for it leads to “widespread hurt, cruelty, and humiliation, to mutual
stereotyping and denigration, if not worse” (193), which may happen even when such
stereotyping is prompted by sympathy. Rorty has shown Rapport the advantages of a
“postmodern” liberalism that facilitates “the ironising and relativising of all substantive
absoluteness” (193). If the triumph of such a perspective should “humiliate” those (like the
 Draft only – please cite published version

Muslim activists) who insist on mutually exclusive communitarian stereotypes, then this is a
“necessary cruelty,” the price that must be paid for “relative kindness”. Moreover, he adds,
almost as an afterthought, such cruelty is “commensurate with the hurt I feel, as a Jew,” faced
with the sentiments expressed in the pamphlet (193).

Even though much else in the book suggests that Rapport enjoys driving at breakneck
speed across difficult terrain, one is still shocked by the damage caused by the crash. For, after
the numerous assertions about the self-created nature of the individual--the sort of individual
Rapport has at several points suggested he is--what are we to make of the “hurt” he feels? Has he
not insisted that the Nietzschean strong poet is able to reconfigure himself? Cannot Rapport
“transcend the brutishness” of the historical determinants that produce him as a Jew and
therefore make him vulnerable to this “hurt”? Are we, perhaps, to construe him as having
“decided” to embrace this vulnerability, for, as he stressed (see above), with individuals nothing
happens “mindlessly”? While one is not surprised that Rapport is hurt by the expression of
vehement anti-Jewish sentiments—or inclined to censure him for reporting it—it is nonetheless
remarkable that he cannot see how much this subverts the main position he has been defending.
It is almost as though he had decided (in the spirit of ironism?) to provide us with a reductio ad
absurdum of his main thesis in drawing the book to a close.

Actually, though, Rapport’s embrace of Rorty raises difficult issues for him, even in the
absence of this final indiscretion. For, it is not at all clear why anyone with Rapport’s views
should concur with Rorty in calling novelists and ethnographers agents of love. For if, as Rapport
strenuously maintains, social scientists are wrong in thinking that an individual’s or group’s
socio-historical situation is causally relevant to the beliefs they have and the actions they carry
out (for humans are transcendentally free etc), then what relevance can knowledge of this
situation have for understanding them (in both senses of the term)? Rapport claims that as an
ethnographer—an agent of love—he can see the outrage felt by Muslim militants as “justifiable,”
even though—as an individual?—he condemns it. This strikes me as bizarre. What use could
someone have for a perspective that he felt he had good grounds for thinking was fundamentally
defective? If the Islamic writer of the offending tract “made himself or herself ex nihilo in an
originary fashion,” as Rapport insists all individuals do, what possible mitigating role could an
ethnographic understanding of the individual’s prior social circumstances play? One might even

17
wonder, given Rapport’s views on self-creation, what relevance he thinks attaches to the
information that the writer of the tract was a Muslim. Given what he says he believes about
individuals, what, beyond sheer sentimentality, could induce Rapport ever to don his
ethnographer’s hat?

Rorty, by contrast, is clear that the causal nexuses enmeshing social beings are relevant to
their actions, which is why knowledge of them is relevant to understanding those beings, and
why those who produce such knowledge and understanding are agents of love. Whatever else
Rorty does, he does not provide grounds for the sort of Sartrean mauvaise foi (to evoke a writer
Rapport also draws on) that seems to be in evidence in Rapport’s last chapter. If what Rapport
evinces is not mauvaise foi, but confusion, then this too must be laid at Rapport’s feet rather than
those of Rorty. Actually, although I cannot argue this in detail here, Rapport’s predicament bears
similarities to the one Geertz got himself into in his paper “The uses of diversity”, and to which
Rorty gleefully draws attention in the reply that Rapport finds so useful (1986).

Finally, before leaving this crucial part of the book, I would like to suggest that there
seems to be something revealing in Rapport’s characterisation of social scientific
communitarianism as positing that every ‘I’ elicits a ‘they’. For, if one were compelled to
simplify in this manner, I think I would characterise the social scientific perspective as positing
that every ‘I’ elicted a much less starkly opposed ‘we’: in the social sciences the true first person
is that of the plural rather than the singular. Rapport’s opposition of the ‘I’ and the ‘they’ in this
manner is also odd given the indications he gives elsewhere that Cartesian notions of personhood
are problematic (Cohen and Rapport 1995:Introduction).

In the penultimate section of the final essay, Rapport sets out to pull together the case for
accepting the idea that the individual is “divine.” Here he invokes Edelman’s work of popular
science, Bright air, brilliant fire, which Rapport takes as grounding the individuality of each
person in the facts of neurophysiology. Once again, though, Rapport appeals to an authority
whose starting point is precisely the conclusion that we are being asked to draw.

The final section of the book returns to that arch-communitarian Durkheim (“and his
apologists”). How different, Rapport speculates, anthropology would have been had it followed
“Mill or Simmel, or even Weber” (200). How different, one feels like adding, Rapport’s book
 Draft only – please cite published version

would have been had he meaningfully engaged the arguments of any of these three, especially
the last, whose subtle handling of virtually all the issues Rapport raises make the latter’s all the
more regrettable. The last paragraph of the book begins “contra Durkheim,” but here Rapport
repudiates his predecessor’s morality. It is this ending, coming as it does after his expression of
pain, that shows us what actually comes first in explaining Rapport’s project, and which justifies
my earlier suggestion that, contrary to his opening remarks, it is the moral tail that wags the
metaphysical dog.

***

Many with doubts about standard anthropological conceptualisations of culture or society

will welcome the forthrightness with which Rapport sets about his task in this book. (This book
could, I think, usefully be set beside Sahlins’s Culture and practical reason in courses on
approaches in cultural anthropology.) Yet, even these scholars will regret, I feel, that Rapport
chose to abjure a more serious discussion of the issues, preferring instead to counter—often
caricatured—“conventional” positions with a confection of special pleading, appeals to what
passes for common sense and an assortment of quotes and citations, at once meretricious and
unduly deferential, from those he sometimes seems to regard as the immortals. I would suggest
that Rapport, in his desire for a profound transformation of social theory, must engage those he
has merely dismissed in this work. One good, if obvious, reason for this suggestion is that
Durkheimian views about the sui generis nature of society embody a conception of individuality
too (Lukes 1975), which opens the possibility of engaging with and negating conventional
“holism” in different ways. I do not wish to appear to be as rash as Rapport in setting up
positions here, so let me acknowledge immediately that the metaphysics of the social world is a
forbiddingly intricate issue (see, for example, Ruben 1985; Gilbert 1989, 1996; Pettit 1993).
Nevertheless, I will venture the suggestion that Rapport seems to cleave to a conception of the
individual such that it is possible to think of someone as a person in abstraction from the
concrete process whereby she was socialised; as though it were merely a contingent fact—about
that very person—that she had learned a particular language, interacted with a definite range of
alters existing at a definite historical juncture, developed specific beliefs, desires and values, and
so on. Hobbes, in trying to motivate such a view for the purposes of developing his “as if” story
about the social contract, held that “the causes of the social compound reside in men as if but

19
even now sprung out of the earth and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity” (quoted
in Fay 1996:31). It is this conception of the individual that Lévi-Strauss spoke of as “that
intolerably spoilt child who has occupied the philosophical scene for too long now…demanding
exclusive attention” (1981:687), and which Goffman saw as cherished by those with a “a
touching tendency to keep part of the world safe from sociology” (1969:103). Against this, one
can place another conception of the individual (more central to Durkheim’s thought, and more
appropriate to a consideration of Rapport’s own personhood as and when we glimpse it behind
the drive to overwhelm us with sheer grandiloquence); one in which the person is constituted by
the specific historical processes that brought her into being and are always implicated in her
becoming. Such a conception accounts for both the narrative structure of individual human
identities and the convergences in narratives (persons of the same cohort and social location
being subject to significantly similar life trajectories) that underpin certain sociological
generalisations. On such a view, there is simply no necessary conflict between the truths of first-
and third-person perspectives. What then is the problem for Rapport: what animates him so?

I think it would be wrong to underestimate the motivating force of the hurt Rapport
reports he feels in the face of certain prominent currents in comtemporary politics. Ordinarily, I
would also argue that it would be wrong to try to make too much of this hurt in a review. All
social scientists, I imagine, experience ordinary human emotions in the face of the broad and
narrow currents of social life (Durkheim, Marx and Weber all provide illustrations of this point),
and it does not seem that we can draw any definite conclusions from this, at least in general. In
this case, though, Rapport’s final chapter sheds an altogether different, and chastening, light on
his earlier statements of position, many of which have no more cogency, and considerably less
charm, than Auden’s stark commandment (in “Under which lyre”), “Thou shalt not sit with
statisticians nor commit a social science.” After the confession of the last chapter, however, I felt
slightly guilty about the incomprehension and irritation I had experienced earlier on. For until the
last chapter, the whole project seemed under-motivated, even grounded in misunderstandings
about social science. Consider something I have pointed out several times already in presenting
Rapport’s position, the tendency to imply that the difference between “strong poets” and others
inheres in their purely “intrapsychic” qualities, so that mortals choose, and, hence, are
responsible for the unfreedom in their lives, a view that seems unavoidable given the unrelenting
stress on the fundamentally self-creating nature of individuals. Indeed, and despite the sense one
 Draft only – please cite published version

has that he would be appalled by the suggestion, I could not avoid seeing Rapport’s perspective
as congenial to the views of ex-British Prime Minister, John Major, who once stated that “we
should condemn more and understand less” (quoted in Welsh 1996:x), or those of his
predecessor, who infamously declared that there is no such thing as society.

If I can be forgiven for playing the amateur psychologist for a moment, it is as though the
phenomenological impress of the “hurt”, and his professional (and existential) commitment to
the experience-distant, objectifying terms of conventional social science, had produced a
cognitive dissonance that Rapport simply had to resolve. Not content with the thought that, given
his own socio-historical trajectory, his pain in response to the vilification of the pamphlet was
both comprehensible and defensible, he simply had to find grounds for feeling his response
could be justified on a more profound plane (which, incidentally, is another reason why Rorty
was a poor choice of ally). I cannot say if it would have been possible for Rapport to reduce the
dissonance by objectifying his pain in the terms of social science discourse (perhaps
Wittgenstein was right when he remarked, of somewhat similar circumstances, something to the
effect that “a hypothesis cannot bring peace”), nor would I wish to be thought to be blaming him
for feeling as he did, or for being subject to the impulse to respond as he did (although I have
expressed the wish that he had not yielded to it), but I would urge Rapport to consider the
proposition that social science is internal to the ethical history of the West, and not merely an
empirical or scientific adjunct to ethical practice, in which case the conundrum he faces in
considering his response to the literature of Islamic activism was “always already” ethical. Not
the least virtue of such a view is that being beset by ethical conundrums is a familiar—if always
difficult—experience.

Be all that as it may, it seems clear that something in Rapport’s case has to give, if I am
correct about the contradictions into which his position leads him. I simply cannot see how he
can turn to his own unchosen history as Jew in explaining his reaction to the activists’
fulminations, and yet deny such resources to those who would, for example, explain the
susceptibility of Mr and Mrs Chandler to hard-sell scams.

Beyond these matters, though, there is enough in this book, as well as in his earlier
works, to suggest that another of Rapport’s real—and connected—concerns is what he refers to

21
as “determinism.” What he finds alarming is any form of social theory that denies freedom as an
ontological condition of personhood. Hence his refusal to countenance any “descent” (7) into
determinism, (Cohen too takes this view: it is a matter of “self-direction versus social
determination” [1994:23]). Now, as everyone knows, this is an ancient, venerable anxiety, one
that social theory incorporated from the broader philosophical milieu from the beginning; it is
evidently sometimes still at work in contemporary discussions of structure and agency.

Rapport apparently has a quick libertarian argument to rule out determinism: human
beings are manifestly creative and free, which they could not be if they were determined by
external forces; ergo they cannot be subject to such deterministic forces. It is interesting to note
that this shares with the opposed position (hard determinism) the assertion that if humans were
determined then they could not be free. The difference between the two positions is that whereas
the libertarian sees it as obvious that humans are, in fact, free, and concludes that they cannot be
determined, the hard determinist concludes from the incompatibility of freedom and
determinism, and the proposition that determinism is universal, that humans cannot possess free
will. Opposed to both are compatibilists, who see no reason to accept the claim, common to both
libertarians and hard determinists, that humans cannnot be both determined and in possession of
free-will. This is no place to argue the case. Not only are the terms in which the dispute is framed
very vague (Rapport, for example, rejects the idea that humans are “determined or pre-
determined,” as though there were little difference between the two notions), but also the
passions evoked by the arguments have made “determinist” something of a term of abuse. Yet
there is no reason to believe that a cogent compatibilist position is unavailable (Dennett 1984;
Fischer 1994), as has been argued since Hobbes (Watson 1995:176). Suffice it to say that in the
absence of a conclusive argument for the sort of incompatabilist view assumed by Rapport, there
is no reason to think that the first-person verities he wishes to exalt and the third person
perspective of social science are in conflict, except on a rather superficial consideration of the
issues. Take, for example, the quote from Cohen that Rapport finds so compelling, which
suggests that we cannot do justice to society until we are able to do justice to individuals. Let us,
for the sake of generating a more concrete argument, replace the rather vague notion of “doing
justice to” with that of “explain,” and allow the implied thesis that individuals are
straightforwardly the components of society (which is anything but uncontroversial, see Ruben
1985) to the same extent, say, that molecules are components of a gas (to choose an example that
 Draft only – please cite published version

does not raise any ethical issues), so that we can pose a somewhat clearer question: what warrant
is there for supposing that one cannot explain the properties of a thing (gas or society) until one
can explain the properties of its components (molecules or individuals)? The answer—on the
face of it—is “none,” whether one considers the matter from the point of view of logic or of
history. The behaviour of gases was formulated in, and explainable by reference to, Boyle’s and
Charles’s Laws long before Clerk Maxwell developed his kinetic theory, which, through a
characterisation of the behaviour of molecules, provided an account of why the gas laws held. Of
course, much more could be said about the notion of explanation at work here, and there is
manifestly much room for dispute about laws, the relation between levels of explanation,
reductionist agendas, and so on, even before one raises the issues of consciousness, intentionality
and ethics in which Cohen and Rapport are interested. But that is the point: not only is so much
that could be said absent from Rapport’s work, but there is little indication that he is aware of
this.

The most striking feature of the book is the hyperbolic tone it adopts in relation to the
individaul. As I hope the quotes given earlier indicate, Rapport, most of the time, cannot forbear
to depict ordinary human capacities in any but the most exalted terms. That human beings are
agents—that they believe and desire that, worry about, deliberate on, ponder about, choose
between and so on—is not only uncontroversial enough, but, on any reasonable view of the
matter, their being so is a necessary condition for the existence of the sorts of social interaction
and societal processes that form the subject matter of much social science. What, then, compels
Rapport to want to transform these everyday human characteristics into the be-all and end-all of
our existence (for even if, like photosynthesis, these capacties can be viewed as miraculous, they
remain quotidian miracles)?

The answer, it seems, is his obsession with a highly-charged notion—creativity. Again,

though, we need to isolate the narrowly ethical, hagiographic connotations of this term. That a
human life introduces novelty into the world is, in certain respects, trivially true. Indeed, even
everyday material causal processes produce novelty in this restricted sense. For example, every
leaf (extraordinary coincidences aside) that drifts to, or is blown to, the ground from the gum tree
outside my window tracks a new route, in that no other leaf has arrived at the ground in just that
way. Note that in this case we not only have novelty, but also radically unpredictable novelty;

23
for, under ordinary circumstances, nobody can compute where a given leaf will end up or how,
precisely, it will get there. Yet, nobody (I presume) wants to see this as anything but a
deterministic outcome.

Moreover, if events are individuated temporally as well as by their other characteristics,

then it is trivially true that every event is unique. And even when we turn to the realm of action
and experience, there is a Pickwickian sense in which every action or experience is unique, and
produces a novelty. That the sense is Pickwickian is apparent from the reflection that each of my
experiences is unique—in being mine—but only in the same way that my bicycle is unique in
being mine, for if I give it away then it ceases to be mine: in short, such novelty is simply an
artefact of indexicality. But, of course, humans produce novelty in a more profound sense in that
they take specific courses of action that, in any given instance, are “never the only ones
possible,” to use a formula much used by Sahlins. (Even here, though, we need to exercise some
caution in drawing implications: for who would want to say of the actual path the leaf takes that
it was the only one possible?) And, if, for example, I decide to learn Polish, and successfully
achieve my aim, there is a sense in which I have transformed myself in transforming, as a result
of my decision, my capacities. I might even succeed in transforming aspects of my character, by,
for example, learning meditation techniques that make me less volatile. To take a more radical,
and more famous, example, one used by Hume in disputing what he took to be Locke’s
unrealistic conception of the social contract, one can imagine that a poor peasant or artisan might
exercise his “free choice” and leave his country of birth for another even though “he knows no
foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day by the small wages which he acquires”
(Hume 1948:363). It is cases like this, it seems, that induce people to speak of the radical
freedom of human beings, even, perhaps, of their being self-causing or self-creating. But is there
enough in such examples to warrant the metaphysical hype about human beings?

Certainly, we have no reason to deny that the capacity to have beliefs and desires
concerning one’s own future states, as well as, of course, the power to act upon them, are vital to
the ordinary exercise of human agency. Moreover, as has been pointed out repeatedly (most
famously, perhaps, by Frankfurt 1971), the human ability to formulate beliefs and desires about
our beliefs and desires, i.e., the capacity for second order beliefs and desires, seems especially
crucial to both our mutual interaction and our projects of “self-creation,” as well as to the ethical
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frameworks in which these are embedded. Unique as this capacity appears to be, it does not
involve forms of explanation that escape the framework of causal understanding. Nor does this
capacity normally involve us in a refusal to acknowledge sub-personal, contingent psychological
states (our perceptions, understandings, hopes, expectation, beliefs and so on) as causally
relevant to our decisions. But while my deciding upon some course of action may be necessary
to my achieving my ends (learning Polish, say), it will not usually be sufficient (e.g., there are no
Polish teachers around, or they are charging more than I can afford). The world, in the shape of
living and non-living things, is an enormously important factor in how things turn out for me.
Accordingly, such factors are relevant to the causal analysis of my actions, including those
Rapport wants to glorify as “self-creating”: and, of course, many of these factors fall under the
rubric of what social scientists since Durkheim have called social facts. In regard to individuals,
moreover, we should note also a point made by Weber: that the choices made, and the “self-
creating” actions taken, by individuals (excepting, perhaps, the radically insane) are for the most
part predictable, or—at least—retrodictable, once we know enough about their psychological
states (many of which are in turn explicable only in terms of social conditions) and the relevant
features of their social and non-social milieu.

So, the fact that human individuals are, standardly, intentional, conscious, self-conscious
and self-directing (in short, enjoy freedom of will) provides no rationale for the suggestion that
they ought to be spoken of as “divine,” or as uncaused causes (on any but the crudest conception
of cause, anyway). And it seems sheer perversity to ignore or marginalise the supra-individal
social regularities that, since the era of “political arithmetic” (Hacking 1990), have been found to
obtain empirically. Moreover, the modest reminders of the social science perspective I have
assembled above would suggest that acknowledging the validity of both the first- and third-
person perspectives is a necessary condition of a proper understanding of the individual.
Repressing, in the name of an under-motivated ethical perspective, the causal patterns that
emerge in social life, and which structure the experiences of individuals, seems to amount to
something less than a mature conception of human being. (As though their tendencies to form
gases with determinable properties was somehow less of a fact about molecules than their
chemical composition.) As indicated above, it can plausibly be argued that the social sciences
grew out of and remain part of Western ethical dialogues, so that dismissing their “standard”
forms, in the way Rapport does, has ethical as well as methodological implications. Furthermore,

25
in the absence of a decisive argument showing the incompatibility of free will and deteminism,
we have no grounds for doubting that supra-individual social regularities supervene on other
causal processes, including those that constitute the realm of human freedom.

Certainly, Rapport has produced no such argument, nor has he indicated where he
believes his readers might find one. By contrast, there are compelling arguments to suggest that
the interest of standard social scientific perspectives in phenomena ranging from the micro- to
the macro- is conceptually well-founded (for a detailed and rigorous consideration of the issues,
see Jackson and Pettit 1992a & b).

What Rapport has produced, as I have tried to argue, is an entertaining but deeply flawed
book. This, in itself, is not really grounds for complaint: many have produced books that are
deeply flawed without even being entertaining. What I think does provide grounds for complaint
is the metamessage the book can be read as embodying. Nobody could justifiably reject out of
hand the suggestion that many—perhaps all—strands of mainstream social science are
fundamentally inadequate, incoherent, or in need of drastic revision; conversely, such a bold
suggestion would, to be taken seriously, require appropriate arguments and demonstrations.
Somebody who undertook such a task would have enriched intellectual affairs, even if the
arguments produced did not, in the end, carry the day (think, for example, how much
contemporary psychology owes to B.F. Skinner). Rapport’s book, by contrast, makes
enormously sweeping claims, yet provides almost nothing by way of a serious argument. It
suggests that conventional social science, and much contemporary theory, is fundamentally
flawed, but implies that this can be established by presenting a set of counter-claims liberally
garnished with quotes from figures of great standing, as though their stature were sufficient to
vouchsafe what they say. I acknowledge that in the current climate one more frequently than
formerly finds scholars adopting positions based on something perilously close to rumour-
mongering (people advert to, or hint at, without stating or defending, what Derrida has shown or
Nietzsche established, and so on), but, I submit, opposing the all too real pressures that induce
these tendencies to crypto-journalism is a matter of some importance. In short, and despite the
very obvious learning of its author, Rapport’s book ultimately comes across as an anti-
intellectual tract; and that is regrettable. To invoke an Ian Dury song once more, “there ain’t half
been some clever bastards,” and some of them have, over a long period, contributed to what
 Draft only – please cite published version

Rapport characterises as “standard” social science. At the very least, their views are worthy of
serious engagement, even those that we have reason to reject.

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