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Recent debate over the merits of various realist perspectives on society, mostnotably the critical realist approach developed by Roy Bhaskar, has focused onthe ontological status of social structure. Social structure, critical realists maintain,is ontologically irreducible to people and their practices. This belief differentiatescritical realists from those theorists, such as Rom Harre, for whom social structureis immanent to people’s practices. On the latter view, structure is so intimatelybound up with agency that to accord the former a distinct ontological status wouldbe to reify it.Central to the debate is the issue of the causal efficacy of social structure.Critical realists contend that although social structure is unobservable it cannevertheless be known to be real because it makes a difference to observablehuman behaviour. In making this argument critical realists invoke the so-calledcausal criterion for existence, according to which unobservable entities can beknown to exist through their impact on observable events. The critique advancedby Harre and his supporters, most notably in Harre and Varela (1996), main-tains that an appeal to the causal criterion is illegitimate in the case of socialstructure, implying that critical realism’s claim that the social world containsontologically irreducible social structures cannot be sustained.My aim in this paper is to cast a critical eye over the debate betweenthe two varieties of realist social theory. To this end, having first outlined thebasic critical realist position together with Harre and Varela’s critique, thepaper will attempt to develop a critical realist response to the charges levelledagainst it. The objective of the response is twofold. First, it aims to advancethe debate by clarifying the key issues which divide the two perspectives andevaluating where the balance of the argument over these issues lies. Second,by suggesting how the weaknesses in critical realism highlighted by Harre andVarela might be dealt with, the hope is that the paper will prompt critical realists

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them (Bourdieu, 1996b[1989], p. 1).