Margaret S. Archer

We are gathered here today in Casina Pio IV to remember and pay tribute to the memory of our dear friend and colleague, Margaret Scotford Archer, a Founding Member of PASS, who died in Kenilworth (UK) at the age of 80 on 21 May of the past year 2023, the day of the Ascension. We remember her above all as the generous and inspiring President of this Academy from 2014 to 2019, when she acted as an advisor to the Pope, particularly by putting the topics of human trafficking and Artificial Intelligence on the agenda of the Holy See.

Professor Archer spent most of her career at the University of Warwick, from which she retired in 2010. She was a formidable social theorist in her own right. Maggie (as she liked to be called) studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Cambridge. She obtained a PhD in sociology from the London School of Economics in 1967. Then, in 1968, she joined Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski at the Centre of European Sociology in Paris as a postdoctoral researcher. Her work is best known for her association with critical realism. In a series of highly influential books published by Cambridge University Press, she developed the morphogenetic approach as an overarching theoretical framework for the analysis of social, cultural and personal change in late modernity. She got two honorary doctorates, one from the University of Navarra and another one from the University of Warsaw. She also ran a charity for trafficked women in her hometown in the British Midlands.

I met Margaret Archer in New Delhi during the ISA congress in 1986. At that time, she was known for her first important work (Social origins of educational systems, 1979), in which she explained the origin and development of different educational systems, in particularly in France and Great Britain – as well as Denmark and Russia – on the basis of different cultures and social structures (hierarchical and centralized vs pluralistic and decentralized). In our conversations, she often reiterated to me that, for her, this first work was decisive for all her subsequent production, for at least two good reasons: firstly, because the relationship between individuality and sociality is crucial in education; and then because she wanted it to be clear to the academic world that the morphogenetic scheme had already been born in that work, even if she would only fully theorize it later. In fact, precisely in this research she distances herself from Bourdieu, criticizing structuralist constructivism to show that social processes are based on the interplay between agency, culture and structure (the SAC scheme).

Beyond the early works, her scientific production had a first fundamental stage in the book Culture and agency (1988), which can be considered as the first milestone in the development of a general social theory in epistemological terms. In this work, I believe, we notice a Weberian streak which leads her to contrast all those structuralist theories which forget or underestimate the connection between personal action and values. This position becomes very clear in the following book Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (1995) in which she criticizes a whole series of scholars, and in particular Tony Giddens’ structuration theory. In her opinion, much of social theory suffers from the defect of conflating agency and structure, due to the reluctance or inability to theorize the emerging relationships between social phenomena, so that causal autonomy is denied to one term of the relationship. If the causal efficacy of action is privileged, the autonomy of the structure is reduced (“upward conflation)”. If we confer causal efficacy only on the structure thinking that it determines the action, we run into “downward conflation”. Finally, if action and structure are seen as co-constitutive, in the sense that structure is reproduced through action which is itself simultaneously constrained and enabled by structure, then “central conflation” occurs. This work, which I think should be counted among the great classics of sociology, presents the general scheme of social morphogenesis, applicable to all social processes, and therefore to the change of the entire society. The book is internationally known because in it Archer coined the term elisionism, which indicates any theory for which the social and the individual are not separable and therefore characterizes any paradigm that opposes both individualism and collectivism.

Her sociological theory is fundamentally inspired by critical realism, the central core of which can be summarized as follows: (a) the rejection of Hume’s “constant conjunctions” as a deficient, because empiricist, basis for conceptualizing social reality and causality; (b) the use of a layered ontology of social order, which supports the emergence and causal consequences of second- or third-order interactions between properties and emergent powers; in turn, this implies the acceptance of ascending and descending causality between strata; (c) the refusal to assign automatic priority to structure (or culture) over agency when accounting for causality in the social domain; (d) explanatory adequacy must be based on the “three pillars” of critical realism (CR), i.e. ontological realism, epistemic relativism, judging rationality.

“I will try to show – so she writes in an essay – how my explanatory program Morphogenetic/Morphostatic (M/M) usefully integrates the above with an interdisciplinary approach to explain change and stability in all social forms and institutions. This framework is obedient both to the four principles above, but also provides a toolkit for those seeking to theorize about the development of particular social processes, practices and policies (and resistance to them) wherever this is situated historically and geographically”. With Roy Bhaskar and a circle of other critical realists, Archer created the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) in 1997, whose manifesto can be considered the volume Critical Realism: Essential Readings (1998). On her own initiative, she then founded the Center for Social Ontology (CSO) during a teaching period at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (2011); the CSO was then transferred to the University of Grenoble, where it is currently based.

Between the 1990s and the first decade of the new century, Archer developed her research program by carrying out exceptional work, which, in my opinion, can be properly understood by combining three key words: critical realism, social morphogenesis and reflexivity as internal conversation. A cornerstone of these developments is Being Human: The Problem of Agency (2000), which was followed by investigations into reflexivity: Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (2003), Making our Way through the World (2007), The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity (2012). In this period, the theme/issue that has always been central to Archer’s work powerfully emerges: the reclamation of the uniqueness of the human person and yet, at the same time, the refusal to give centrality to the individual as such. A perspective that is not easy to support and investigate sociologically, due to a certain apparent internal contradiction, but which constitutes, in my opinion, the heart of her message. In Being Human she took a stand against the idea of the hyposocialized individual proposed by the theory of rational choice (in the volume Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonisation), while at the same time rejecting any hypersocialising approach. In her opinion, the identity of the individual human person is formed as self-consciousness, thought and emotion, albeit in an elementary way, before the acquisition of social identity, and therefore is not a product of society. I believe Maggie has always fought her own scientific battle working on this point. She did it first by seeing in society above all a vexatious reality towards the individual, and therefore taking the individual’s side, at the risk of appearing individualistic, and subsequently, starting from the end of 1990, seeking in relational sociology the antidote to individualism (as demonstrated by the book co-written with P. Donati, The Relational Subject, 2015).

The insistence on the uniqueness of the human person and at the same time on her sociality constituted the heart of her research program in the years 2013-2021, which resulted in two major projects pursued with the group of scholars of the Center of Social Ontology. First of all, the project on the morphogenesis of contemporary society, which produced five volumes edited by herself in a Springer series (Social Morphogenesis, 2013; Late Modernity: Trajectories towards Morphogenic Society, 2014; Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order, 2015; Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity, 2016; Morphogenesis and Human Flourishing, 2017). And then the Post-Human Futures project which produced four volumes between 2019 and 2021, edited by various members of the CSO, but always animated by her (Post-Human Institutions and Organisations: Confronting the Matrix, 2019; Realist Responses to Post-Human Society: Ex Machina, 2019; Human Enhancement, Artificial Intelligence and Social Theory, 2021; What is Essential to Being Human? Can AI Robots Not Share It?, 2021).

From these titles we can see Archer’s persistent vocation to investigate the human in the context of new technological realities (AI, robotics), to which she attributed a positive quality, that of being able to become ‘friends’ of people. Perhaps this was the most discussed phase of her work, when she argued that the most sophisticated AI robots could become ‘human’ and relational subjects if and to the extent that they were equipped with the ability to act in the first person.

To conclude, I would like to talk about some aspects of her figure as a scholar and a woman endowed with profound humanity. Her sociology, which she always characterized as an antidote to English empiricism, is a paradigmatic example of how empirical analysis needs a robust social theory, based on a critical realistic social ontology, if one wants to be adherent to reality, but also open to a meta-theory to grasp meta-reality, as her friend Bhaskar would say. That is, a sociology capable of investigating the horizontality together with the verticality of the social, in openness to the transcendent (as we read in Transcendence: Critical Realism and God, 2004, written together with Andrew Collier and Doug Porpora).

Maggie was able to express such an ambitious project because she had a very strong, independent character, demonstrated since she fought against nuclear weapons at the age of 15 and when, upon reaching adulthood, she converted to Catholicism, in contravention of the family’s Anglican tradition, without losing her love for her parents and above all for the Anglican nuns who had educated her. Throughout her life she often made choices that went against the grain because she had in her head what she called a concrete utopia, that is, the utopia of a society capable of making the human subject flourish, threatened by postmodernist thought which declared not only the “death of God”, but also the “death of man”. She reclaimed the potential of the human person as such, assuming that the person forms the sense of the Self before her sociality and beyond society, developing a self-awareness that has a practical, non-linguistic foundation, and which proceeds through that “inner conversation” which constitutes the foundation of the person’s transcendence. She remained faithful to her initial research program aimed at showing that the person’s identity arises from her own internal dialogue in the context of the identities that social institutions attribute to her and against all social injustices. The book recently published posthumously (Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics, 2024) testifies to her lifelong commitment to promoting human dignity always and everywhere.

Pierpaolo Donati