Conjunctural analysis and the discipline of political judgment

Abstract

Matthew Thompson's paper asks a simple question: what is the point of conjunctural analysis? Thompson responds that it needs political purpose. Few would disagree. But Thompson's political grounding of conjunctural analysis ends up doing too much epistemological work. He shows convincingly that conjunctural analysis should not become a fashionable label for identifying complexity. Equally, the approach should not be policed as if it were the property of one historical-materialist tradition. I develop this argument by returning to Davidson and Ward's account of conjunctural analysis, the Popper–Adorno positivist dispute, the problems of judgment and uncertainty, and Stuart Hall's own conjunctural practice. My main concern is to ask how political commitments can orient inquiry without deciding in advance what inquiry will find. Hall's groundbreaking analysis is instructive here because his political force depends on investigation: he follows a label, reconstructs relations, and asks what kind of crisis has been formed. Conjunctural analysis should therefore be committed enough to matter, but fallibilist enough to learn.