ABSTRACT
In philosophy, determinism has generally been contrasted with free will. The latter holds that humans are able to make choices and act upon them, the former that our choices are determined by other forces, and our actions, therefore, can be accounted for in, for instance, causal terms. On a broader ‘cultural’ level, the concept of determinism is an analogous one: a determinist would be someone who argues that social and cultural activities are causally derived from more immanent forces (for example, the role of power relations in the constitution of subjectivity). A determinist may hold (as traditional Marxists do) that ideology and its accompanying cultural forms are a direct consequence of the base-structure of economic relations; or, as with social Darwinism, that there are basic underlying social laws which, as in the natural world, determine which social types are best according to the dictates of ‘the survival of the fittest’ principle; or that what language you speak determines what thoughts you can have. It might be added that any extreme causal determinism (such as that advocated by psychologist B.F. Skinner) flounders on an objection presented byMichael Oakeshott: namely, that the determinist, in order to be making a true claim, must also include the theory itself within their account (i.e. be selfreflexive), and thus an all-out theory of determinism is, on its own terms, something determined in advance (a problem linked to epistemology). At the social level, this view is mainly significant with regard to the question of how much autonomy individuals have.
