Capitalist Totality and Developmental Explanation

This article proposes that social scientists have not appreciated how argumentative practices—the way we make claims with the aid of concepts and distinctions—can assume an invariant form. This invariant form raises difficulties for arguments that appeal to totality and other broadly critical notions. To illustrate and critique this state of affairs, the article sketches this invariant form and contrasts it with a form of argument involving appeals to capitalist totality. This effort relies on the account of capitalist totality in the work of Moishe Postone. But the article includes reasons that this analysis of totality and forms of argument can yield lessons for other treatments of totality as well as for the broader effort to forge a coherent and robust alternative to methodological positivism.