The Aristotelian Marx and scientific realism: A perspective on social kinds in social theory

This dissertation asks whether contemporary approaches to natural kinds in the philosophy of science can be extended to the study of social life. I test Richard Boyd's suggestion that they can by investigating Marx's analysis of the social relations of the commodity and capital as forms of labor. I find that attention to Marx's Aristotelian roots makes it possible to show the way in which his analysis does indeed allow us to offer real definitions of both the social forms of capital and the commodity consistent with today's scientific realism. For contemporary scientific realism the task of science is to study the causal structures of the world, that is, "the discovery of natural kinds and the causal relations among them" (Kornblith). For Marx, a clear comprehension of political economy depends on studying the causal structures of labor and their 'simplest determinations'. These may best be thought of by considering the lessons Marx drew from studying the middle books of Aristotle's Metaphysics: the social forms of labor are hylomorphic composites of Aristotelian inspiration joining labor activity and form. Labor's social form consists always in a relation of working individuals to nature and to each other grasped conceptually in the very act of production. That is, the social form of labor, labor's formal cause, is necessarily instantiated in the material conditions of production to form the economic foundation of social life. By applying Aristotle's distinction between the constitutive and attributive properties of a thing to the forms of labor, this view of Marx's contribution to social theory suggests an anticipation of the way in which scientific realism today might identify the kind constitutive properties of the homeostatic property cluster kinds of social life.