Will Davies made a typically good point yesterday when he tweeted that the "impoverishment of the 'sociological imagination' over decades" has left people "people unable to speak critically of systemic problems, without personifying them".

What we have today is a crude moralistic tribalism in which people divide simply into goodies and baddies. We see this in the "two minutes hate" against Shamima Begum - which is oblivious to the fact that one's rights do not depend solely upon one's moral character. We saw it in the silly debate about whether Churchill was a hero or villain, much of which effaced the fact that he was a complex character who happened to be exactly the type we needed in 1940. And we see it when lefties blame low pay upon greedy bosses and the financial crisis upon greedy bankers. I agree with Will that this mentality is also behind the rise of antisemitism on the left; antisemitism is the socialism of moralizing fools.

What such crude discourse misses is an aspect of the sociological imagination - the ability to see that society is shaped by structural forces which can cause outcomes to differ from the intentions and moral character of agents. It was this imagination - in fact, important insight - that Adam Smith was using when he wrote that ""it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

The converse can also be true. Marx thought that exploitation and low wages arise not from the greed of capitalists but from the forces of competition*:

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society...But looking at things as a whole, all this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist.

Chuck Prince, then boss of Citi, made a similar point in 2007 when he said:

When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance.

What he was driving at was that excessive risk-taking wasn't caused so much by "greed" as by men responding to incentives: each individual bank had an incentive to gear up for fear of falling behind others.

Prince, Smith and Marx all agreed upon the key point for my purposes - which is that structure trumps agency, that social outcomes cannot be reduced to individual morality or character.

But is this true?

A good reason to suspect not is the existence of monopoly and monopsony. These relax competitive pressures and so give bosses room for agency, to offer better wages. Jeff Bezos would not become a pauper if Amazon gave its workers better pay and conditions.

Even here, though, structure isn't wholly absent. When Amazon was a smaller company, higher costs and prices might well have attracted competition and thus hurt the company. Many ideas outlive their empirical base: it could be that Bezos's desire to screw down wages is one of these.

Also, of course, firms' ability to hold down wages and conditions is facilitated by weak aggregate demand. Is this a failure of agency - simple bad policy-making? Or is it instead structural - a result of capitalists' political pressures upon governments?

What's more interesting to me, though, are hybrid theories - ones which combine structure and agency. I'm thinking of two classes here, though there are no doubt more.

One is the role of social norms. These have structural origins but shape morality. We can think of the rise of neoliberalism as being in part a sign of an erosion of norms against rapacity, short-termism and rent-seeking: this is Jesse Norman's theory in Adam Smith: what he thought and why it matters.

A second category are selection mechanisms. It's very possible that bad character - psychopathy or narcissism - is selected for in at least some businesses, and that incompetent overconfident fanaticism is selected for in politics.

There is, I think, a good debate to be had upon these issues. What is unacceptable to me, however, is a simple-minded attempt to blame social problems upon bad people. Such silly moralizing is a barrier both to understanding and changing the world.