ESSENTIALISM, SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM, AND BEYOND

Anti-essentialism has criticised a range of targets, from cultural ess entialism and biological reductionism to causal explanation and founda tionalism, and concerning topics ranging from markets to 'race', ident ity 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 deterministi c essentialism is always wrong and often dangerously misleading, a mod erate, 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-essen tialism. Strong variants of social constructionism are liable to inver t rather than resolve the problems of strong essentialism, including t hose of its biological reductionist guises. While it may be best to av oid concepts of essences which assume that the distinguishing and gene rative properties of objects must coincide, we still need to distingui sh classes of objects and identify causal powers which enable and cons train what those objects can do.