The marriage of critical realism and Marxism : happy , unhappy or on the rocks ?

ions, if you like) of a specific set of social relations we can then comprehend how these social relations are reflected and refracted within the concept ‘population’. Only now the concept ‘population’ can be understood as inhering within a specific determining totality. Thus the concept ‘population’ is not the beginning of the analysis but its result. That is to say, the diverse determination(s) embedded within the concept ‘population’ can only be fully derived after it has been placed within the more determinate concepts comprising a systematic totality. Thus abstraction moves ‘forwards’, as progression (‘population’ is placed within a systematic closed totality), and ‘backwards’, as a retrogression (‘population’ is complexified and concretised as a moment, or social form, of the diverse forms of that totality). What we create, therefore, is a circular movement in method (Arthur 1998). We can now see why the critical realist method of retroduction is incompatible with the Hegelian-Marxist methodological position. This can be seen more clearly through the manner in which the relationship of ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ is understood. For example, critical realists insist that we first isolate the simple and abstract structure of a causal power