Toward a pragmatist theory of action
John McGowan1998, Sociological theory
The central theme in this book is the claim that a third model of action should be added to the two predominant models of action, namely rational action and normatively oriented action. What I have in mind is a model that emphasizes the creative character of human action" (p. 4). This programmatic statement from the Preface of Hans Joas's The Creativity of Action indicates both the strengths and weaknesses of his book. What Joas has to say about creativity is both suggestive and promising, but his overall discussion is so oriented toward explicating, supplementing, and (at times) refuting the other two models of action that his own model must be inferred from all too fragmentary hints. Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, and Jürgen Habermas are the most cited figures in the book, not John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, the major sources of Joas's pragmatist theory of action. Jeffrey Alexander is discussed more thoroughly and frequently than William James. What I will attempt here, then, is to offer a distilled version of that pragmatist theory. I have been inspired both by Joas and the pragmatists, so my version is not exactly his, but I assume he would mostly endorse it. Our differences are very likely disciplinary. Joas's model is shaped in relation to the Weber-Parsons line in classic sociological theory (with prolonged nods toward Durkheim and Marx) and in relation to Niklas Luhmann and Habermas among contemporary theorists. My own model is more oriented toward problems of agency that stem from the Nietzsche-Foucault axis which yields poststructuralism and the Western Marxist tradition which leads to cultural studies. Put bluntly, poststructuralism and cultural studies focus more particularly than does classic sociological theory on ideology as unconscious determinant of agents' orientation in the world and on power as maintaining systemic relations of epistemological, economic, and political inequality. Classic sociological theory articulates the elements of social determinism rather differently; however, it is far closer in its analyses and its concerns to poststructuralism and cultural studies than it is to rational choice theories. Joas's goal is to bring pragmatism's insights to bear on action theory. He brilliantlyand I think convincingly-shows that creativity only shows up in continental thought of the twentieth century (from Weber, Durkheim, Horkheimer, and the existentialists to the poststructuralists) in garments inherited from turn-of-the-century "philosophies of life," the vitalism of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson. His argument is that pragmatism was the alternative turn-of-the-century philosophy of creativity, but that its vision never made an impact on European thought. Joas devotes some time here (and more time in his Pragmatism and Social Theory) to considering the European failure to grasp pragmatism. There were the usual associations of pragmatism with expediency and American boorishness, but the primary explanation is undoubtedly the fact that pragmatism (especially in William James's work) can look awfully similar to the positivism, empiricism, and rational choice accounts that European theorizing rejects. One key question, then, is the extent to which pragmatism is committed to methodological individualism. Certainly the pragmatist model of action starts with an individual in a situation. This individual acts habitually, minimally conscious of her routine responses within an environment. Matters only get interesting with the routine fails to achieve its usual (expected) results. The individual is pulled up short. An element of doubt has been introduced by the
