Felix Kaufmann, Review: R. M. MacIver, Social Causation (1944)

Felix Kaufmann’s journal book review presents MacIver’s Social Causation as an important effort to clarify social explanation, while questioning its philosophical foundation. The review proceeds from the book’s classification of explanatory questions through its criticism of single-cause theories to its account of action and social interdependence. Kaufmann’s central distinction is between the practical value of MacIver’s demand for precise causal problems and the adequacy of his proposed differentiation between social and physical causation. He endorses the former but finds the latter insufficiently grounded in an analysis of scientific testing.

MacIver’s guiding thesis, as Kaufmann reports it, is that social phenomena exhibit a distinctive causal process operating within, without suspending, physical law. The book organizes this claim through different meanings of the question “Why?” Logical inference and normative obligation constitute noncausal questions. Causal questions concern four strata: physical invariance, organic function, psychological objectives and motives, and social conjunctures. Kaufmann explains how this scheme shapes the book’s engagement with sociological theory:

This broad classification of problems of explanation serves as a guiding principle in the organization of the work.

The classification does more than distinguish disciplinary subjects: it prepares MacIver’s argument that adequate social explanation must attend to the relations among circumstances, purposes, and actions. Yet it also establishes the stratification that Kaufmann will ultimately challenge. The review therefore treats the scheme both as an organizing device and as a claim whose methodological legitimacy remains to be demonstrated.

The first major target is causal oversimplification. MacIver criticizes explanations that nominate climate, economic production, or racial heredity as the single decisive cause of social phenomena. Kaufmann presents the alternative as a reformulation of causal inquiry: causes are identified through differences between comparable situations, not through competing declarations of a universally privileged factor. Establishing comparability is consequently a preliminary task, rather than something an investigator may simply assume. This shift turns disputes over dominant causes into more determinate questions about what changed and under which conditions.

Kaufmann next distinguishes three modes of causal attribution. A cause understood as a precipitant explains a transition from an established situation, such as a change in production, class order, or political power. MacIver prefers this term to disturbance of equilibrium because equilibrium language can privilege the status quo and encourage inappropriate assumptions that other conditions remain unchanged. A cause understood as an incentive, by contrast, explains action through subjective factors that initiate and direct meaningful conduct. Here Kaufmann highlights MacIver’s refusal of two opposing shortcuts:

The author is equally opposed to radical behaviorism, which would rule out as unscientific all explanations in terms of motives, and to intuitionistic doctrines of understanding, which claim that we can attain immediate infallible knowledge of the motives of our fellowmen.

Motives are thus legitimate objects of inquiry, but their recognition does not confer infallible access to another person’s experience. The third mode asks who initiated an act, bringing free will and responsibility into view. Kaufmann stresses the boundary between attributing an action causally and judging it normatively:

It is duly emphasized that the valuational quality implicit in the concept of responsibility cannot be derived from the causal imputation.

Moral or legal responsibility requires reference to a corresponding normative order. Identifying the initiator cannot itself supply the evaluative standard. This distinction recalls the opening separation between causal explanation and questions of obligation.

Despite their differences, these forms of inquiry share a comparative pattern: investigators contrast situations in which the phenomenon to be explained is present or absent. MacIver extends this pattern into action itself. Decisions and plans anticipate consequences and therefore contain causal attributions. His concept of dynamic assessment names a judgment that carries a decision to act. Such assessments bring factors belonging to different orders of reality into a single order of conscious conduct; their interrelations provide the terms for describing a social conjuncture. Kaufmann thereby shows why actors’ anticipations matter both as explanations they make and as factors social science must explain.

The book applies its approach to crime, birth rates, maladjustment, economic change, urban migration, and war. Kaufmann regards this breadth as particularly valuable to sociologists seeking methodological orientation for specialized research. His reservation concerns what counts as methodology in the stricter philosophical sense:

Moreover, his stratification concerns the subject matter of the different sciences, in other words, the meaning of propositions belonging to them, not their methods in the strict sense, that is, the procedures of verification, invalidation or falsification of these propositions.

Kaufmann doubts that emergence provides a firm basis for the four causal strata. More fundamentally, differentiating what sciences discuss does not establish how their causal claims are tested. A methodological account must examine the canons governing verification, invalidation, or falsification, including those shared across sciences and those specific to groups of disciplines. The review’s balanced verdict is that MacIver offers a strong corrective to imprecise and excessive sociological claims, while leaving unresolved the systematic relation between physical and social causation.