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For Werner Bonefeld, strategic-relational theory, alas, is still very much structural-
functionalist. Jessop considers social relations in terms of disparate structural systems
and structures themselves as systems of causal mechanisms, though the very ex post
coherence of these mechanisms does not stem from in-built meta-mechanisms but
have a definitive foothold in empirical circumstances for any conclusive effect.
Jessop does not exactly rebut the fact that these social systems are relational
categories(that there is an inner relation to them); however, he studies that relational
ontology in terms of a positivist social theory. That is to say, the relational coherence
as coherence of social systems have its foundation in the concept of ‘natural
necessities’. The obscurant consequence of such positivistic understanding of
structures as naturalistic systems is that system-mechanisms are so many technical
diagrams for capitalism’s ‘natural necessities’, yet whose effects are ineluctably
contingent(1994:305). Positivism of Jessop’s deterministic sociology is acutely
taciturn about the determinant circumstances upon the ‘natural’ itself. ‘Natural
necessities’ thus touch upon some elusive(nevertheless plainly abstract) procedure of
causality. Not so elusive is the tacit resort to an analysis of the tendencial causal
mechanisms of the abstract structure of capitalism along a realist ontology in which
esoteric and exoteric contingency is never extinguishable. Thereby, the real
consequences of these mechanisms are ultimately recalcitrant to any conceptual
peroration; the twofold radical contingency indeed withstands any solemn heuristic
aboutissement, hence the tacit resort to abstract tendencial causal mechanisms.
Bonefeld is also reluctant towards the exoteric/esoteric(i.e. specific/generic) nuances
in Jessop’s theory and his resort to intermediate concepts. He argues that at the
abstract level, Jessop excogitates tendencial causal mechanisms together with ‘natural
necessities’; and the concrete is the consequence of many causal mechanisms.
However, positivist sociological analysis of the concrete importunes certain other
heuristic concepts so that ‘form’ of social relations rebounds as a thoroughly esoteric
fragment of analysis(ibid.:308).
For Colin Hay, the concept of ‘natural necessity’(more substantially ‘contingent
necessity’) in Jessop is not a subterfuge for nomothetic and/or positivist theory. With
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