Bernard Lonergan’s theory of knowledge is not yet very well-known among social scientists. But it seems to me that it has implications of fundamental importance for the central problems with which they are concerned. In what follows, I shall try to explain why.

What is the nature of the explanation of human behaviour sought by the social scientist, and what relation does it have to the explanations which agents give of their own actions? It is characteristic of the sociological view which one might call ‘positivist’ that it eliminates as quite irrelevant to the scientific explanation of human behaviour the accounts given by the agents themselves. This is justified by the claim that the agent’s point of view is by its very nature individual and subjective; whereas science aspires to a form of explanation which is objective and publicly verifiable. Completely opposed to the positivist view is that which takes the agent’s explanation of his own behaviour as uniquely privileged. On this account, social science is pursuing a chimaera if it looks for any explanation of an action other than that which the agent gives or at least is capable of giving himself. This is a central contention, I think, of the ethnomethodologists; it has also been defended by Peter Winch.

A third view is the Marxist one, which differs from that just alluded to in that it insists that what human beings are up to on the one hand, and the justifications which they give of what they are doing, are two very different things ; but does not aspire to the kind of ‘reductionism’ which is practised by the positivist.

‘He this evening again recommended to me to perambulate Spain. I said it would amuse him to get a letter from me dated at Salamancha. Johnson. “I love the University of Salamancha; for when the Spaniards were in doubt as to the lawfulness of their conquering America, the University of Salamancha gave it as their opinion that it was not lawful”. He spoke with great emotion, and with the generous warmth which dictated the lines in his “London”, against Spanish encroachment’.

Boswell never got round to explaining precisely why it would have been so amusing for the Doctor to receive the letter from Salamanca, and Johnson never explained exactly what he meant by the University of Salamanca. Still, I suppose, not many Spaniards are very bothered about Boswell and Johnson, but they can still get mighty hot and bothered about the discovery and conquest of America; and they are not particularly happy about Wasps telling them where they went wrong. With all the logic of passionate indignation—which, of course, tends to brush aside the mere facts of history and geography—many is the irate Spaniard who has triumphantly produced in the form of a supposedly unanswerable question, what he thinks is to be the coup de grâce of any discussion on the relative merits of different brands of European imperialism, viz.: Where are the Indians in Protestant North America and why are they so numerous in Ibero-America? (And, by the way, that’s another thing you’ve got to be very careful about; none of your Latin America; our prickly, patriotic Spaniard, when aroused, admits of no contribution from the Italians and French in the Southern Hemisphere!)

‘It was a violent time’. Thom Gunn’s description of the Elizabethan age (‘A Mirror for Poets’) could equally be applied to the 1950s. Again and again the poetry of this decade returned to the central theme of violence, yet, constantly, shrank back from engaging with it. Gunn’s own poetry, replete with latent aggression,, nevertheless strove to contain its smouldering energy in couplets and formal stanzas and histrionic poses (‘Even in bed I pose’) as impersonal and self-disciplining as those nazi uniforms and leather-jackets with which his poems abound. The motor-cyclists of ‘On the Move’ seemed to offer an adequate parallel to his own poetic stance:

Much of the writing of ‘The Movement’ tried to explore the barbarous hinterland which recent history had shown lay behind the genteel littoral of western civilisation, but most poems had an air of ‘donned impersonality’ which seemed to brand them as exercises rather than explorations. The doubt was too profound, the revelation of depravity too recent and too raw, to make total candour possible. For many poets, an ostensibly empirical interest in the quotidian became, in fact, a rationale for escapism.