ABSTRACT
We need to take philosophy seriously because it is the discipline that has traditionally underwritten both what constitutes science or knowledge and which political practices are deemed legitimate. Indeed it could be argued that many of the confusions current on the left, exemplified by the acceptance of a series of false dichotomies, such as between fundamentalism and revisionism, individualism and collectivism, or scientific analysis and moral criticism, stem from unwittingly following utterly inadequate philosophies of science and society. Thus, among radical-chic intellectuals the dominant intellectual ‘fashionmeter’ has swung from the idealist structuralism and post-structuralism of the seventies and early eighties to the empiricist so-called ‘new realism’ of the mid and late eighties, Those who have resisted the pull of these fashions have nevertheless lost confidence in the face of them. My aim in this essay is briefly to develop the implications of a more adequate philosophy of science and society for socialism-where philosophy is conceived, in Lockean fashion, as an underlabourer for science and projects of human emancipation and, in Leibnizian mode, as an analyst and potential critic of conceptual systems and the forms of social life in which they are embedded-as part of the longer-term project of capturing the intellectual high-ground. An indication of the extent to which the right-echoed in the
labour movement-has managed to seize this ground is that it has not only succeeded in achieving political dominance; it has, under the guise of the ‘new realism’, even appropriated the very concept of reality and realism for itself!
