ABSTRACT
This chapter is an attempt to address a fundamental and traditional problem central to the concerns of most philosophers, social scientists and historians, indeed to most of us at some time or other. It emerges at a number of levels. At the most general, metaphysical level, it takes the age-old form of the conflict between voluntarism and determinism. At the methodological level, it emerges as a dispute between theoretical frameworks, explanatory paradigms or problematics over whether the historic~l 'subject' has or has not an ineradicable and perhaps crucial explanatory role. This is an issue very much alive within contemporary Marxism, dividing so-called Hegelian 'historicists' and 'humanists' from their structuralist adversaries. It also underlies the division within contemporary sociology between, on the one hand, all those who are concerned to study social actors, their modes of symbolic interaction, their definitions of situations, their modes of constructing and negotiating social reality, and, on the other, those whose foeus is upon systems and objective co-ordinates, on what Durkheim called 'social facts' and Marx 'definite relations that are indispensable and independent of [men's] will'.1 And at the most common-sense and mundane level, the issue is simply this: to what extent and in what ways are social actors, whether individuals or collectivities, constrained to think and act in the ways they do? To what extent is an American President prevented from achieving desired outcomes by constraints, whether
4 PolWcs and Sodet)' external or intern al ?2 What difference can a determined Cabinet Minister make in a time of economic crisis, faced with the inertia of the governmental system and obstructive civil servants?3 Why did Bukharin consistently fail to stand up to Stalin?4 To what extent can the elites of modernising societies conjoin possibility with will: to what degree in any given case are they constrained to follow a single path (a la Rostow) or a narrow range of possible paths (a la Barrington Moore) or are able to cut out new paths?5 Why have the increasingly deradicalised Social Democratic parties of Western Europe made so little impact on the b<l;lance of class advantages?6 What enables social movements, such as blacks in the United States, to transform objective possibilities into concrete results?7 I shall formulate this issue as that of the relation between power and structure.
