William Outhwaite, Newcastle University, UK
An edited version of his presentation at the One-Day Symposium on the Legacy of Margaret Archer. August 3rd 2024, University of Warwick, England, UK
This is the second time I find myself celebrating Maggie’s life; the first was at her retirement conference at Warwick, where Roy Bhaskar was already in a wheelchair but in his usual excellent spirits.
My collaboration with her was both intellectual and practical. I first met her, I think, in 1986 when she, as ISA President, and Jim Beckford invited me to follow Jim as editor of the journal Current Sociology, in an informal interview in a Greek restaurant in Soho. She arrived saying that she had been walking up and down the street looking for the restaurant and wondered if people had suspected her of ‘cruising’. She had herself edited the journal, at Tom Bottomore’s invitation, from 1973 to 1981, and I served for a rather shorter time from 1987 to 1992. Reporting on the journal, I saw her at annual meetings of the ISA Executive (in late-communist Poland and Bulgaria) and the quadrennial conference in Madrid in 1990. This suffered both from the heat and the attention of pickpockets and from other local machinations, which she exposed to us at the Executive meeting with forensic precision and considerable dramatic verve. Thanks to her skill, the conference passed off successfully. Artur Meier, then chair of the Publications Committee, documented his own reflections on the period in his racy autobiography.
I had embraced critical realism a little earlier than Maggie, though she developed it into very substantial sociological work over the rest of her career, while I merely affirmed from time to time its value for sociology and its compatibility with hermeneutics and critical theory. She took, as it were, the Camino de Santiago all the way from Warwick to Galicia, whereas I occasionally strolled along bits of it. We diverged on structuration, with me tending to tar her, perhaps unfairly, with the brush of system theory, and had a friendly argument in 1990 in a book chapter on Giddens.
She was always enormously supportive, and keen to see me at Warwick. We met from time to time, notably at Gillian Rose’s funeral in 1995, but with many missed opportunities. I was unable to be at Sussex when she examined one of my PhD students, and I also had to miss Andrew Collier’s funeral, and Roy’s later the same year. (Roy’s was on the day I was delivering a memorial lecture on Gillian.) We had collaborated remotely on editing Andrew’s Festschrift, published in 2004, presenting preliminary versions to him in 2003 when he was already seriously ill, and were of course delighted to see him survive for another decade.
I wrote about reflexivity in that volume, not knowing that it would play such an important part in Maggie’s subsequent work. Others can comment on that better than I can, but it is perhaps worth saying that as we learn more and more about the cognitive capacities of other animals, and even insects, it may be that the internal conversation and reflexivity are one of the few things unique to humans.
At the end of The Reflexive Imperative (p. 312), Maggie announced ‘that homo academicus is dead and that what should appear on his death certificate is ‘morphogenesis’.1 It survives her death and her achievement will continue to inspire future generations.