ABSTRACT
MH: Before we come on to the spiritual turn, I want to ask you about critical realism as a movement in the period leading up to it. The 1990s saw the entrenchment of critical realism in a wide array of areas of study within the academy around the globe, the inauguration of a major critical realism book series with Routledge and the emergence of critical realist organisational forms, in the establishment of which you played a leading role: the Centre for Critical Realism (CCR) in 1996, and the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) in 1997, together with the IACR newsletter Alethia (1998), which grew into the peer-reviewed Journal of Critical Realism early in the new century. A series of Realism and the Human Sciences conferences in the 1980s and 1990s was followed by the first of the ongoing IACR international conferences in 1997. Some commentators seem to think that there is something inappropriately evangelical or distasteful about a philosophy and social theory assuming organisational forms. How would you respond to that?
