ABSTRACT
In the fifth chapter, I offer an abbreviated exposition of Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism. Recognising that the challenge here is to show just how his esoteric and dense philosophical treatise has something to offer the sociological project, I concentrate on the ideas of absence and negating negation. Absence is a ripple on the ocean of being. The query ‘what is absent from the extant sociology of health inequalities?’ admits, I suggest, of a number of significant answers. One answer is pursued in some detail: a theory of what Bhaskar calls ‘power 2 relations’. In other words, it is a sociology reconciled to avoiding the causal force of social structures in general and class (and class struggle) in particular. A renewal via the absenting of absence and of ‘constraining ills’ is commended.
