Possibility Of Freedom Research Articles

The Style Of Materialist Skepticism: Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste

Does fiction have unique philosophic potential? Can it help to make a reader free or more moral? Diderot certainly thought so, and Jacques the Fatalist is his fictional attempt to create the possibility of freedom and morality even in a materially determined universe. In this avant-garde novel, Diderot forges a literary style informed by his materialist skepticism. Upending readers’ expectations by confronting them with the most ordinary material reality, he provokes skeptical questioning and, ultimately, the independent use of one’s reason. In this way, Jacques ’s unorthodox style and form are crucial for creating the potential for a free and moral existence.

The Problem of Romanticism in Wyndham Lewis

IN 1918, AS THE BOOK VERSION of Wyndham Lewis's Tarr went to press, the young Carl Schmitt was putting the finishing touches to his Political Romanticism (1919). Schmitt would later develop a keen interest in Lewis, wondering in his diaries if he were not a ‘related soul’.1 Lewis never reciprocated the interest, but it is understandable why Schmitt may have felt a strong sense of kinship: both stressed the value of enmity; both directed their animus at representative democracy and liberalism; both had very public trysts with Hitler; and, most important for my purposes here, they had a mutual loathing of Romanticism. Their polemics may have been set against a Romanticism built largely of straw, but they nevertheless raise important and difficult questions about the meaning and possibility of freedom. Schmitt eschewed many of the usual definitions of Romanticism, all of which he took to be symptoms of an underlying metaphysics – namely, a ‘subjectified occasionalism’.2 The association of Romanticism with an ill-conceived model of subjective freedom was hardly new – Hegel, for instance, had repeatedly criticised it upon these lines – but the invocation of occasionalism was an enterprising form of re-branding. In the seventeenth century, occasionalists such as Malebranche had denied that there was any real causality within the world – God was the only true causal agent. Romantics, according to Schmitt, also believed that there were no real, mundane causes: the Romantic ego had supplanted the occasionalists' God as the sole cause of everything. The result was both a massive inflation and an impoverishment of human agency. All events were merely existential events – or mere ‘occasions’ for the ego's correspondence with itself.

The Complications of Exile and Belonging in Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return (1934) and Fawaz Turki’s Exile’s Return (1994)

This paper reconsiders the representation of exile in the memoirs of the American modernist Malcolm Cowley and modern Palestinian writer Fawaz Turki, arguing that against the privileged use of exile by Cowley, Turki represents exile as a catastrophic condition. In so doing, my paper asserts the necessity of accounting for the catastrophic aspect of exile as represented in the modern Palestinian canon for a wider understanding of the notion of exile in the modern discourse. I argue that the modern Palestinian experience of exile as delineated in Turki’s Exile’s Return has tragic, historical and political specificities that disrupt the view of exile as a desired position in the modernist American canon, which Cowley’s Exile’s Return capitalises on. However, this juxtaposition does not look forward to negating or dismissing American modernists’ glorification of exile as a space offering possibilities for freedom, resistance and creativity. Instead, I aim by this juxtaposition to reuse the concept of exile in ways that do not gloss over the differences between various exilic conditions.

Flaubert's Destiny: Freedom and Alienation in L'Idiot de la famille

As an attempt to formulate epistemological boundaries (“que peut-on savoir d'un homme, aujourd'hui?”), for which Gustave Flaubert becomes a test-case, L'Idiot de la famille (1971-1972) can be seen simultaneously as the exemplification of a method and as a re-assertion and further development of Sartre's theory of subjectivity. This article proposes to approach the issue of Sartre's notion of human subjectivity in L'Idiot from the particular angle of the idea of “destiny.” It will be argued that the term “destin” provides a focal point for multiple visions of subjectivity as it contains at least three layers of meaning: firstly, Sartre's representation of Flaubert's idea of his life as predetermined destiny; secondly, Sartre's analysis of destiny as a situation created by others; and finally, an understanding of destiny which is close to the notion of the project. It will be argued that precisely the mutual interdependence of these terms is an expression of Sartre's conception of alienation and the possibility of freedom.

Negotiating the Challenges of Coerced Treatment: An Exploratory Study of Community-Based Service Providers in Queensland, Australia

The use of legal pressure to convince drug users to access treatment has become a popular drug-policy strategy in Australian and international jurisdictions. Providing drug treatment in this context necessitates partnerships between criminal justice agencies and drug treatment and support agencies, including community-based agencies. Drawing on data from qualitative interviews, this article explores the issues that coerced treatment presents for community-based service providers. We employ the analytics associated with Foucault's notion of governmentality to “make sense” of our research findings. We argue that these service providers negotiate the challenges of working in a criminal justice context by treating their clients as “informed choice-makers,” and by employing more liberal techniques of governance that rely on the possibility of freedom as well as the threat of constraint.

Microhistory and Movement: African American Mobility in the Nineteenth Century

Microhistory and MovementAfrican American Mobility in the Nineteenth Century Nicole Etcheson (bio) Janette Thomas Greenwood, First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Earl F. Mulderink III, New Bedford’s Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). Sydney Nathans, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012). Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012). Eva Sheppard Wolf, Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). Edlie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York: New York University Press, 2009). African American history may be one of the last fields to receive a micro-historical treatment. Nineteenth-century African American history has been favored with sweeping accounts of the black experience, ranging from John Blassingame’s classic The Slave Community to Ira Berlin’s more recent Many Thousands Gone. Studies on more focused topics such as slavery in the Chesapeake or free blacks in the North have certainly contributed to knowledge of the black experience, but scarce records, especially the lack of firsthand accounts for many aspects of black life, make microhistory’s tight focus on the “proudly small” difficult to achieve.1 [End Page 392] Microhistories are intensely concentrated examinations of topics that often appear narrow and insignificant until the microhistorian reveals how the subject illuminates greater issues. The microhistory falls between the grand synthesis or theoretical analysis that slights individual human actors and the antiquarian social history that ignores the larger meaning of the countless details it relates. Microhistories can test the conclusions of the grand synthetic histories as well as reveal the patterns of life in a particular place and time.2 Microhistory’s close relatives include biography and the community study. While biography relates the individual life, savoring its uniqueness, microhistory challenges conventional historical narratives by revealing how a life, often a very ordinary one, defied societal patterns or lived up to them in unexpected ways. Microhistory observes historical change up close and notes how historical forces operated on individuals.3 Similarly, examining a place can reveal the contours of the larger society by elaborating the different types of communities—rural or urban, agricultural or commercial, northern or southern—that people construct. There have been classic studies of colonial towns and nineteenth-century rural communities.4 Many microhistories of places have been what J. Matthew Gallman has called “city biographies,” but people inhabit places, and studies of those places connect their inhabitants to larger trends. John Mack Faragher used Robert Pulliam, “the pioneer of Sugar Creek,” as the iconic figure illustrating the nature of frontier Illinois.5 Studies of northern African American communities, such as James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton’s study of Boston, have generally focused on cities. Melvin Patrick Ely used county court papers to reconstruct the life of free blacks in the rural Virginia community of Israel Hill.6 The works under review include both genres of microhistory: studies of individual African Americans and accounts of the post-Civil War black diaspora that created new communities of freedmen in the North. If there is a theme that unites them, it is that of movement. White mobility is taken for granted, perhaps because whites chose to migrate, while slavery made black mobility far more constrained, but Africans and their descendants migrated in ship holds crammed with bodies or coffles of slaves, chained at the neck, walking toward the newly opened cotton lands of the interior South. The authors discussed here use microhistorical techniques to examine struggles over black mobility. Edlie L. Wong presents a nuanced history of sojourning cases in which a slave’s travels opened up the possibility of freedom. A scholar of African American literature, Wong draws from critical legal studies and race theory. She is...

Occupier/occupied

As military occupation increasingly informs the politics of both democracies and dictatorships, capitalist and socialist regimes, this essay asks why it is foundational for sovereignty and the post-war state-form. In particular, it questions the complicity of post-colonial theory with security discourses in reading movements for self-determination as threats to the state or as forms of terrorism rather than as alternate possibilities for freedom and liberty. It suggests not only that the ongoing twenty-first century relations between occupier and occupied reprise the racialised forms of identity that characterised relations between coloniser and colonised in the preceding two centuries, but also that relations between occupied peoples may produce affiliative poetics and shared terms of political reference or solidarity.

On the ‘undialectical’: normativity in Hegel

This paper addresses the question of normativity in Hegel by examining the role of ‘undialectical’ resistance to dialectical development. Beginning with a general overview of dialectical normativity and what it might mean to be ‘undialectical,’ the focus then shifts to a privileged example in Hegel’s writings: Sophocles’ Antigone. The central claim of the paper is the following: The very contradictions that fuel dialectical normativity can also trap individuals within an obsolete actuality, without immediate hope of escape. Indeed, the irreducible dependence of dialectical thinking upon the actions and decisions of individual consciousness expose it to the threat of continual stasis or regression. This ineliminable possibility of failure is what is here called the ‘undialectical’ moment of the dialectic, which Hegel understands rather as a negative condition of possibility of freedom and rationality.

Laughing all the way to freedom?: Contemporary stand-up comedy and democracy in South Africa

AbstractStand-up comedy raises questions about the quality of and limits to democracy in post-apartheid South Africa. It does so by telling a before democracy and after apartheid story in the mushrooming of comedians and comedy venues and in the generational differences between comedians and their approaches to comedy since 1994. This before-and-after story marks out boundaries between the old puritanical strictures and censorship of the National Party's apartheid and the new possibilities for freedom and enjoyment in a democracy riddled with profound social and political problems of extreme violence and poverty — and run by the ANC, a ruling party with a strong sense of entitlement to State power.

Surviving Wartime Emancipation: African Americans and the Cost of Civil War

Ask any Civil War historian about the cost of the Civil War and they will recite a host of well-known assessments, from military casualties and government expenditures to various measures of direct and indirect costs. But those numbers are not likely to include an appraisal of the humanitarian crisis and suffering caused by the wartime destruction of slavery. Peace-time emancipation in other regions (the northern U.S., for example) and in other societies (like the British West Indies) certainly presented dangers and difficulties for the formerly enslaved, but wartime emancipation chained the new opportunities and possibilities for freedom to war’s violence, civil chaos, destruction and deprivation. The resulting health crisis, including illness, injury, and trauma, had immediate and lasting consequences for black civilians and soldiers. Although historians are more accustomed to thinking of enslaved people as the beneficiaries of this war, rather than its victims, we cannot assess the cost of this war until we answer two important questions: first, what price did enslaved people have to pay because their freedom was achieved through warfare rather than a peacetime process; and secondly, in this war in which so many Americans paid such a high cost, to what extent did racism inflate the cost paid by people of African descent? In answering these questions, we reconsider this specific war, but we must also tie the U.S. Civil War to a larger scholarship on how wars impact civilians, create refugee populations, and accelerate harsh treatment of people regarded as racial, religious, or ethnic outsiders. We are reminded that war is not an equal-opportunity killer.

First lessons from the ‘Austrian patient questionnaire’ for chronic conditions in Austria

Aims and objectives: Integrated care presumes the chronic patient as its main target group. Data are sparse on demands and satisfaction of these patients with service delivery and system performance in Austria. Therefore, several surveys among patients with different chronic diseases were performed. The analysis and comparison of the patient questionnaires is aimed at collecting data on patients’ needs and their priorities in chronic care within the Austrian health system. Methods: The patient questionnaire is anonymous, structured and self-administered, with around 70 questions for each condition. The questions are standardised with the possibility of adapting them to fit the respective disease and adding additional disease-specific questions to the list. They are developed with patient focus groups in order to ensure relevance for the patients. The questionnaires are distributed nation-wide through doctor’s offices and out-patient clinics. The statistical analysis of the base line data is conducted with SPSS. Results: The analysis of the questionnaires highlights priorities for action in the care for chronic patients and will enable researchers and decision makers to target systems reforms and programmes more specifically. First preliminary results are now available for asthma, diabetes, chronic pain, anxiety/depression, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and age-related macular degeneration (AMD). An emphasis is laid on the cooperation between specialists and family physicians. Patients value the possibility of an extensive conversation with the attending physician higher than the possibility of freedom of symptoms. Other major issues are a well-informed physician and communication between doctors. Conclusions: For the Austrian integrated care community, the results give valuable insight into the priorities chronic care patients have concerning their interactions with the health care system and where to focus the efforts of developing new models of care.

Habitus, Psychology, and Ethnography

Habitus has become a conceptual anchor in work on the social study of the body in a range of disciplines, but also more generally in psychology proper. Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is one of a “structuring structure” or “system of dispositions” that generates practices by ensuring the presence of the past in experience. The papers in this section discuss issues arising from this notion, particularly its relevance to psychology, the problem of reductionism, and the possibility of freedom, as well as the methodological implications of Wacquant’s work for models of ethnography.

The global financial crisis and the post-Lisbon prospects of enlargement

The aim of this paper is to examine the transformative processes that are defining the region of south-east Europe in the context of global financial crisis and in the post-Lisbon era. It is also intended to illuminate the current challenges of the region’s EU integration process. Judged in terms of overall stability, European integration processes in the western Balkans have almost never been as promising as they are today. Recent events in south-east Europe are profoundly changing the old continent. The establishment of largely peaceful regimes throughout the region, along with the accession to the EU of the rest of the former socialist bloc, offers new possibilities for freedom, respect for human rights and genuine socio-economic improvement. Such developments as Kosovo’s independence and the admission to NATO of Albania and Croatia are of no less significance for a more prosperous and stable landscape.

Freedom and justice in Islam

B y common consent among historians, the modem history of the Middle East begins in the year 1798, when the French Revolution arrived in Egypt in the form of a small expeditionary force led by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte--who conquered and then ruled it for a while with appalling ease. General Bonaparte--he was not yet Emperor-proclaimed to the Egyptians that he had come to them on behalf of a French Republic built on the principles of liberty and equality. We know something about the reactions to this proclamation from the extensive literature of the Middle Eastern Arab world. The idea of equality posed no great problem. Equality is very basic in Islamic belief: All true believers are equal. Of course, that still leaves three "inferior" categories of people--slaves, unbelievers, and women. But in general, the concept of equality was understood. Islam never developed anything like the caste system of India to the east or the privileged aristocracies of Christian Europe to the west. Equality was something they knew, respected, and in large measure practiced. But liberty was something else. As used in Arabic at that time, liberty was not a political but a legal term: You were free if you were not a slave. The word liberty was not used as we use it in the Western world, as a metaphor for good government. So the idea of a republic founded on principals of freedom caused some puzzlement. Some years later an Egyptian sheikh--Sheikh Rifa'a Raft' al-Tahtawi, who went to Paris as chaplain to the first group of Egyptian students sent to Europe--wrote a book about his adventures and explained his discovery of the meaning of freedom. He wrote that when the French talk about freedom they mean what Muslims mean when they talk about justice. By equating freedom with justice, he opened a whole new phase in the political and public discourse of the Arab world, and then, more broadly, the Islamic world. Is Western-Style Freedom Transferable? What is the possibility of freedom in the Islamic world, in the Western sense of the word? If you look at the current literature, you will find two views common in the United States and Europe. One of them holds that Islamic peoples are incapable of decent, civilized government. Whatever the West does, Muslims will be ruled by corrupt tyrants. Therefore the aim of our foreign policy should be to insure that they are o u r tyrants rather than someone else's--friendly rather than hostile tyrants. This point of view is very much favored in departments of state and foreign offices and is generally known, rather surprisingly, as the "pro-Arab" view. It is, of course, in no sense pro-Arab. It shows ignorance of the Arab past, contempt for the Arab present, and unconcern for the Arab future. The second common view is that Arab ways are different from our ways. They must be allowed to develop in accordance with their cultural principles, but it is possible for them--as for anyone else, anywhere in the world, with discreet help from outside and most specifically from the United States--to develop democratic institutions of a kind. This view is known as the "imperialist" view and has been vigorously denounced and condemned as such. In thinking about these two views, it is helpful to step back and consider what Arab and Islamic society was like once and how it has been transformed in the modern age. The idea that how that society is now is how it has always been is totally false. The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or the Assad family in Syria or the more friendly dictatorship of Mubarak in Egypt--all of these have no roots whatsoever in the Arab or in the Islamic past. Let me quote to you from a letter written in 1786--three years before the French Revolution--by the Count de Choiseul-Gouffier, the French ambassador in Istanbul, in which he is trying to explain why he is making rather slow progress with

Worlds Transformed: Iranian Cinema and Social Vision

The Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf has suggested new ways of valuing human relationships and communities that move beyond particular ethnic and class divisions towards a world of human understanding, tolerance, and appreciation of otherness. For Makhmalbaf, this new vision is best represented through an awareness of natural beauty, the steadfastness of interpersonal relationships that overcome social stigmas and oppressive roles, and an inclusive vision of national history. The revolutionary agendas of the Islamic Republic must be turned towards the affirmation of a strong cultural identity that emphasizes openness towards nature and humankind through a compassionate skepticism. This positive critical understanding in Makhmalbaf's films avoids cynical withdrawal or aggressiveness by engaging positively with both Iran's rich past and the possibilities of freedom offered by Western cultural forms. By holding to this vision, Makhmalbaf confronts Iran's recent past, offering a positive opportunity for progressive change by rejecting neither traditional Persian cultural norms nor Western ways of thinking.

Experiencing globalization

Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, thisarticle aims to detail the specific ways in which the cultural experience of globalization impinges upon, and becomes integrated into, the changing lives of young women of different classes. The central arguments revolve around the significance of reflexivity: global TV, in particular, helps to create an important condition for the practice of reflexivity, by opening up a rare space where Korean women can make sense of their life conditions in highly critical ways and can imagine new possibilities of freedom – social mobility and individualization – within the multiple constraints of their social context. The imagination of freedom is however bounded by the pervasive main concept governed by local rules – sexual morality – which means young women's lives are made and remade through the dialectical negotiation between the locally governed rules and the globally defined fields of possibility.

Foucault on Freedom and Capabilities

Within recent scholarship, a long-standing tendency to view Foucault as pessimistic about the possibilities of activism is now being reversed. For many contemporary commentators who emphasize the themes of personal agency, transgression and radical freedom in their assessment of his thought, Foucault offers new possibilities for political practice and for the pursuit of self-determination. However, an examination of Foucault’s work, particularly in the transitional period preceding his so-called ‘ethical’ writings, indicates his appreciation of basic human needs and functions that complicates the current understanding of Foucault as a philosopher of freedom. Particularly in his discussions of the ideas of ‘desubjectivation’ and ‘limit-experience’, Foucault’s work recognizes that prior conditions of psychological, economic and social ‘well-being’ are prerequisites for any subsequent performance of freedom. Examining this dimension of Foucault’s work reveals interesting points of convergence between his thought and the capabilities approach advocated by philosophers such as Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Like them, Foucault’s work recognizes that there are some minimal levels of human functioning below which talk of self-determination is misplaced. As such, political philosophy needs to be concerned with the grounds of personal and political obligation, no less than the limits and possibilities of freedom.

Outcome assessment of hand function after radial artery harvesting for coronary artery bypass

The radial artery has gained widespread acceptance as a conduit for coronary artery bypass. Advantages include minimal donor site discomfort, ease of handling, excellent early patency rates, and the possibility of freedom from late conduit atherosclerosis. Although most series describe minimal morbidity, a significant incidence of radial sensory neuropathy and isolated instances of hand claudication and ischemia have been reported. We performed an outcome study utilizing the Short Form-36, the Upper Limb-Disabilities of Arm, Shoulder and Hand, and a modified self-administered hand diagram to compare 288 patients undergoing coronary artery bypass utilizing the radial artery with a control group of 174 patients undergoing coronary artery bypass without the radial artery. The data were analyzed by the t test for continuous variables and the chi-square test for categorical variables, and subsequently a multivariate regression model was constructed. No patients developed hand claudication or ischemia. Although there was an incidence of radial sensory neuropathy of 9.9% associated with radial artery harvest, it was not significantly higher than the incidence in the control group (5.2%, p = .16). Intrinsic patient factors such as obesity, age, diabetes, and peripheral vascular disease were the principal determinants of overall health and quality of life issues.

In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863

In the Shadow of Slavery: Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. By Leslie M. Harris. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 380. Illustrations. Cloth, $42.50.) Stories of Freedom in Black New York. By Shane White. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. 1, 260. Cloth, $27.95.)One need only reflect on the secondary sources cited in these two books to see that the history of the African-American population of early New York City has moved from the periphery to the center of historical consciousness. Once confined to specialized journals or niche-filling monographs from lesser publishers, New York's early African-American residents now appear as the topic of books on the lists of the finest scholarly presses. No longer does it matter that a once proportionately large black population in New York City was becoming ever smaller in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Instead, the various ethnic, class, ideological, political, and cultural transformations of antebellum New York are precisely what make it vitally important as a site to study the emergence from slavery of the North's largest community of Americans.By selecting a title that reflects neither his specific subject (New York's first African-American theatre and the performers it spawned) nor a specific time span (roughly the 181Os-SOs), Shane White invites the reader to see that his true story is a larger one: freedom, the quest to achieve it, and the obstacles that intrude. he aims at a broad audience, and thanks to the cleverness and vibrancy of his prose, he should certainly win it.When New York State passed gradual emancipation statutes in 1799 and 1817, it began a process of defining freedom's meaning, a process that Americans in New York City embraced enthusiastically. From newspapers, police records, manumission society documents, travel accounts, and court records White reconstructs how blacks viewed themselves and how others viewed them. Specific types of language, behavior, and dress created unease among whites but an exhilarating sense of testing limits among blacks. This was a time of experimentation. Theatre emerged as a new form of cultural expression for blacks, which, like other forms, was a proud and assertive claim to be part of the city's public life. In a chapter entitled Staging Freedom, White illustrates how the Company, which was formed in 1821, became a venue to try out Shakespeare and even to stage a play about slavery. Actor James Hewlett, after the company broke up in 1824, went on to stage one-man performances imitating Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean, among other performers, and even to sing Italian opera for racially mixed (and often rowdy) audiences. A trip to England was aborted when fellow actor Ira Aldridge went first and assumed Hewlett's African stage persona. Ultimately, Hewlett used his acting skills in ways that landed him in prison, while whites began to use the stage to parody black people in the minstrel show. White cleverly suggests the parallels between black and white cultures in the early republic as they experimented with each other's cultures and tested the limits to which they would go to experience that which was different and forbidden. Hewlett apparently ended his career in Trinidad, an indication to White that Americans had soured on the possibilities of freedom in New York City.White is a skilled writer whose credibility derives from his ability to explain and elaborate on Hewlett and other actors' actions, which are inevitably uncertain and even ambiguous, by considering them in relation to what he can discover about the larger black community. As actors, Hewlett and his confederates exhibited the same brashness as did all the newly freed as they contested for employment and social recognition on the streets of New York. White, an Australian scholar, has benefited from others who have preceded him and compiled references to Americans and the theatre in New York's myriad newspapers, but the imagination and creativity of his construction of these materials into a believable story is uniquely his. …

¿Quién teme al individualismo metodológico? Un análisis de sus implicaciones para la teoría social

Who is afraid of methodological individualism? An analysis of its implications for social theory Individualistic and holistic views have been opposing each other for a long time in social theory. This article aims to define clearly and to explore in some detail the theoretical implications of methodological individualism (MI), in order to argue that sociologists should accept it as an anti-metaphysical device. A first step is, therefore, to delimit pre- cisely what are we referring to when we speak of MI: several possible meanings which have been usually associated to that term are reviewed and rejected as misleading ones. Next, some implications of MI for social theory are explored, namely which kind of explana- tions should be considered as legitimate ones, which kind of subjects should be regarded as real ones, the possibility of freedom, or the issue of reification and utopian thinking. Finally, some criticisms to MI are addressed, and it is discussed to what extent do they undermine the intelligibility and tenability of this assumption.