Essentialism, social constructionism, and beyond

Anti-essentialism has criticised a range of targets, from cultural essentialism and biological reductionism to causal explanation and foundationalism, and concerning topics ranging from markets to ‘race’, identity and sexuality. The paper assesses these diverse lines of critique. Some social phenomena, like identities, clearly do not have essences, but it does not follow from this that other phenomena we study do not have essences or something like them. While a strong, or deterministic essentialism is always wrong and often dangerously misleading, a moderate, non-deterministic essentialism is necessary for explanation and for a social science that claims to be critical and have emancipatory potential. The concept of essence is problematic, but not for some of the epistemological and ontological reasons put forward by anti-essentialism. Strong variants of social constructionism are liable to invert rather than resolve the problems of strong essentialism, including those of its biological reductionist guises. While it may be best to avoid concepts of essences which assume that the distinguishing and generative properties of objects must coincide, we still need to distinguish classes of objects and identify causal powers which enable and constrain what those objects can do.