Character and history

How do features of character play into the fabric of history? The first has to do with psychology, motives, and agency; the second has to do with large events and processes.  So how might a better understanding of the domain of individual character contribute to better historical understanding?

When we talk about a person's character, we are usually thinking of a set of fairly durable characteristics of thinking and acting that go beyond the choices of a minute. The color of tie that I choose in the morning isn't a feature of my character -- though it might be influenced by character traits. The decision to stand up to a bullying colleague probably does express a character trait. So character is a feature of agency that seems more fundamental than motives or purposes. It is an embedded disposition of behavior, a way of looking at the world of action and choice. Will Kane, the sheriff in High Noon, makes his choices for reasons that are more fundamental to him than trying to bring about this outcome or that. 

There is also a suggestion of moral valuation involved in making assessments of character. We often describe people who act according to principle or who act out of virtue as having "good" character, whereas people who lie, betray, break commitments, or act viciously are thought to have bad character. Iago had bad character while Cincinnatus had good character -- courage, integrity, fidelity.  Here is a good article by Marcia Homiak on "moral character" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that makes the connection between character and virtue ethics. (Interestingly, it would appear that Kant’s ideal moral agent is one who has no character whatsoever, but instead acts purely out of rational recognition of the dictates of practical reason.)

So why would character be important in history? There are several possible reasons.

1. It might be held that a key actor's choices were crucial for a turning point in a historical sequence, and those choices were influenced or determined by his/her character. For example, "FDR’s steadfastness contributed to the end of the Great Depression"; "Hitler’s vicious antisemitism caused the Holocaust".
2. We might observe that a large population acted collectively in a critical moment -- say, the Solidarity struggles in Poland or ordinary African-American people in Montgomery during the boycott -- and their decisiveness was influenced or determined by a widespread feature of character -- courage, obstinacy, perseverance.
3. It is possible that important features of character are historically conditioned or instigated by key historical experiences -- the Great Famine in China creating widespread fearfulness about the future, the 1960s anti-war movement creating optimism about collective action. In this respect "character" is historically conditioned and collective rather than purely individual.
4. We might look at some historical events or episodes as being particularly important because they embody or exemplify certain features of character that we want to valorize -- the defense of Stalingrad or the protection of Jewish children in Le Chambon, for example (Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There).

This question about character and history reproduces an older issue in the philosophy of history, the question of the role of individuals in history. But this question is both more and less specific. It is more specific because character is only one factor in agency. So even if we have settled that actors make history, we are asking a more refined question by singling out "character" for specific attention. And it is less specific because it is conceivable that we might argue that collectivities had character as well as individuals.  So it might be held that the sans-culottes possessed a collective character that distinguished their behavior from that of other social groups.

Let's briefly consider a related question: what is character to a biographer? The biographer is trying to put together a truthful interpretation of the subject through his/her actions and expressions. What motivated the subject? What were his/her overriding beliefs and goals? What moral or religious convictions did the subject possess, and how strongly did these influence her actions and choices? Character comes into this mix when the biographer is obliged to answer questions like these: Did the subject possess courage and conviction? Or did threat and opportunism suffice to influence action? Can we interpret the narrative of the subject's life as a meaningful expression of his or her abiding character?

It seems that a reasonable answer to the opening question might come down to this: History is composed and propelled by socially embedded actors whose behaviors are themselves complex outcomes of an internally embodied system of reasoning, feeling, and acting.  As argued in earlier posts (link, link), we don't have particularly good theories of the actor on the basis of which to analyze them (desire-belief-opportunity theory, rational choice theory, practical rationality, pragmatism, ...). It seems reasonable to hypothesize that the features of individual thinking and behavior to which we refer with the concept of "character" are indeed important aspects of agency.  So "character" is relevant to history because it is a constituent of agents and a potentially important part of our theory of the actor.

(This discussion leaves a number of open questions. What is the relation between character and other important drivers of behavior -- interests, habits, or commitments? Further, we would like to know where character comes from in the individual’s development. Here is a contribution to a volume on the philosophy of action where I try to provide some additional details; link.)

Who was Leon Trotsky?

Leon Trotsky was something of a hero for a part of the anti-Stalinist left from the 1930s through at least the 1970s. Sidney Hook and John Dewey offered substantive support to Trotsky and his reputation during and after the end of his life through Dewey's role in the "Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials". Trotsky was a theoretician of communism, a strategist, a man of letters, and the merciless chief of the Red Army immediately following the success of the Boshevik Revolution (represented by the character of Strelnikov in Dr. Zhivago!). Expelled from the USSR by Stalin in 1929, he spent the rest of his life in exile in a series of countries and was assassinated by Stalin's agent in 1940 in Mexico City. The Trotskyist left opposed Stalin's policies long before other segments of the European left did so.

There is a narrative that places a lot of the history of the USSR into the framework of personality and character of its early leaders, including Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. The legend is that Trotsky was a principled revolutionary but a poor street fighter, and that Stalin was a power-hungry and ruthless opportunist who out-maneuvered his primary opponent after the death of Lenin. And Trotsky was too full of amour-propre to fully engage in the battle with Stalin. But it wasn't all about personality; Trotsky and Stalin differed substantially about the future course of Communism, and Trotsky's was the more radical view (permanent revolution versus socialism in one country). So who was Trotsky, and how would we know?

Trotsky himself addresses these topics in his autobiography, and indicates that he thinks they are unimportant: personality and character have less to do with his life than theory and the inevitable currents of history, in his own telling of his story. Here are a few lines from My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography:

My intellectual and active life, which began when I was about seventeen or eighteen years old, has been one of constant struggle for definite ideas. In my personal life there were no events deserving public attention in themselves. All the more or less unusual episodes in my life are bound up with the revolutionary struggle, and derive their significance from it. This alone justifies the appearance of my autobiography. But from this same source flow many difficulties for the author. The facts of my personal life have proved to be so closely interwoven with the texture of historical events that it has been difficult to separate them. This book, moreover, is not altogether an historical work. Events are treated here not according to their objective significance, but according to the way in which they are connected with the facts of my personal life. It is quite natural, then, that the accounts of specific events and of entire periods lack the proportion that would be demanded of them if this book were an historical work. I had to grope for the dividing line between autobiography and the history of the revolution. Without allowing the story of my life to become lost in an historical treatise, it was necessary at the same time to give the reader a base of the facts of the social development. In doing this, I assumed that the main outlines of the great events were known to him, and that all his memory needed was a brief reminder of historical facts and their sequence.

...

I am obliged to write these lines as an émigré— for the third time— while my closest friends are filling the places of exile and the prisons of that Soviet republic in whose creating they took so decisive a part. Some of them are vacillating, withdrawing, bowing before the enemy. Some are doing it because they are morally exhausted; others because they can find no other way out of the maze of circumstances; and still others because of the pressure of material reprisals. I had already lived through two instances of such mass desertion of the banner: after the collapse of the revolution of 1905, and at the beginning of the World War. Thus I know well enough, from my own experience, the historical ebb and flow. They are governed by their own laws. Mere impatience will not expedite their change. I have grown accustomed to viewing the historical perspective not from the standpoint of my personal fate. To understand the causal sequence of events and to find somewhere in the sequence one’s own place —that is the first duty of a revolutionary. And at the same time, it is the greatest personal satisfaction possible for a man who does not limit his tasks to the present day. (preface)

So it is all about ideas, political commitments, and the march of history (as well sometimes as the personal weaknesses of others). But biographers need more than this.

A key source for the past fifty years has been the magnificent biography of Trotsky in three volumes by Isaac Deutscher, beginning publication in 1954 (The Prophet: Trotsky: 1879-1940 (Vol. 1-3)). Deutscher was a Polish writer and historian who was more or less miraculously posted to England at the time of the Nazi conquest of Poland; so he spent the rest of his life in England, while almost all of his family perished in the Holocaust. Deutscher's work is an admirable piece of historical writing, with appropriate attention to historical detail and available historical sources, including a major archive at Harvard University. The book is favorable to Trotsky as a tragic and outcast leader, but is not sycophantic. It weaves together the biographical narrative with the great struggles in the USSR and Europe that took place during Trotsky's life and to which he was an important contributor. (Here is the Google Books link to the first volume, The Prophet Armed.)

Deutscher puts the arc of Trotsky's revolutionary leadership at the end of the Civil War in 1919 in these theatrical terms:

At the very pinnacle of power Trotsky, like the protagonist of a classical tragedy, stumbled. He acted against his own principle and in disregard of a most solemn moral commitment. Circumstances, the preservation of the revolution, and his own pride drove him into this predicament. Placed as he was he could hardly have avoided it. His steps followed almost inevitably from all that he had done before; and only one step now separated the sublime from the sinister -- even his denial of principle was still dictated by principle. Yet in acting as he did he shattered the ground on which he stood. (486)

This step was the decision to establish a system of dictatorship by the Communist Party. And this step led to some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, including Stalin's war on the Kulaks.

When Trotsky now urged the Bolshevik party to 'substitute' itself for the working classes, he did not, in the rush of work and controversy, think of the next phases of the process, although he himself had long since predicted them with uncanny clear-sightedness. 'The party organization would then substitute itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee would substitute itself for the organization; and finally a single dictator would substitute himself for the Central Committee.' The dictator was already waiting in the wings. (522)

In these three volumes Deutscher provided a detailed account of Trotsky's actions and theorizing as well as their impact on history. But what were Trotsky's motivations? Not much of the character, personality, or singularity of Trotsky emerges from Deutscher's treatment.

In 2011 Robert Service published a new biography of Trotsky (Trotsky: A Biography), making use of sources that were not available to Deutscher in the 1950s. This book of more than 600 pages presents itself as the most historically authoritative treatment of its subject yet.  But the book has created great controversy about some of its most basic claims. Service has previously published biographies of Lenin and Stalin.  But the Trotsky book has generated huge criticism. A well documented but scathing review of the book was published by Bertrand Patenaude in the American Historical Review (AHR (2011) 116 (3): 900-902), and the review is summarized in Inside Higher Education (link).  Patenaude asserts that Service makes dozens of important errors of fact in the course of the book, and that it sets out to "thoroughly discredit Trotsky as a historical figure;" and Patenaude concludes that the book falls woefully short of the standards of historical rigor that it should have met. "[The publisher] has placed its imprimatur upon a book that fails to meet the basic standards of historical scholarship." (902)  Patenaude also reviews David North's In Defense of Leon Trotsky. North is himself an American Trotskyist and Patenaude was prepared to find a hatchet job in North's treatment of Service. Instead he finds a powerful and well founded critique of the many errors, distortions, and bias in Service's treatment of Trotsky. So the partisan gives a more faithful account of the facts than the professional historian!

Patenaude's own treatment of Trotsky's life in Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary is restricted to the Mexico years, and is very detailed and interesting.  His narrative moves back and forth between Mexico and earlier periods as needed, but is focused on the final years of Trotsky's life. Trotsky's personality and behavior are made very clear in the narrative: socially difficult, harsh to those closest to him, dogmatic, committed, egoistic, and courageous. (Patenaude provides details of Trotsky's affair with Frida Kahlo that were unknown to Deutscher at the time of writing The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940. Deutscher doubts the existence of the affair, whereas Patenaude provides the evidence.)

So thousands of pages have been written, but we still don't really have a clear answer to the question, "Who was Leon Trotsky?". The Service biography appears to be thoroughly discredited for the most basic faults a historian can possess: lack of attention to the historical facts, and bringing an axe to grind to the subject matter. The Deutscher biography is less about the person than the actions he took. And the controversies about Trotsky persist.

Here is a fascinating discussion with Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service about Trotsky's life and impact.



(There are many other reviews of Service's book, and some are more favorable and some even more negative. Here is a detailed discussion by Paul Le Blanc in the International Journal of Socialist Renewal (link), and here is a review by philosopher John Gray in Literary Review (link). Baruch Knei-Paz's The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky is a generally respected treatment of Trotsky's thought as an organized system.)

Social embeddedness

To what extent do individuals choose their courses of action largely on the basis of a calculation of costs and benefits? And to what extent, on the contrary, are their actions importantly driven by the normative assumptions they share with other individuals with whom they interact? Mark Granovetter formulated this foundational question for the social sciences in his important 1985 contribution to the American Journal of Sociology, "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness" (link). He used the concept of embeddedness as a way of capturing the idea that the actions individuals choose are importantly refracted by the social relations within which they function. This is a topic we've addressed frequently in prior posts under the topic of the social actor, and Granovetter's contribution is an important one to consider as we try to further clarify the issues involved.

The large distinction at issue here is the contrast between rational actor models of the social world, in which the actor makes choices within a thin set of context-independent decision rules, and social actor models, in which the actor is largely driven by a context-defined set of scripts as he/she makes choices. The contrast is sometimes illustrated by contrasting neoclassical economic models of the market with substantivist models along the lines of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, and it links to the debate in economic anthropology between formalists and substantivists. Here is how Granovetter puts the fundamental question:

How behavior and institutions are affected by social relations is one of the classic questions of social theory. (481)

He argues that neither of the polar positions are tenable.  The formalist approach errs in taking too a-social view of the actor:

Classical and neoclassical economics operates, in contrast, with an atomized, undersocialized conception of human action, continuing in the utilitarian tradition. ... In classical and neoclassical economics, therefore, the fact that actors may have social relations with one another has been treated, if at all, as a frictional drag that impedes competitive markets. (483, 484)

But the extreme alternative isn't appealing either:

More recent comments by economists on "social influences" construe these as processes in which actors acquire customs, habits, or norms that are followed mechanically and automatically, irrespective of their bearing on rational choice. (485)

So action doesn't reduce to abstract optimizing rationality, and it doesn't reduce to inflexible cultural or normative scripts either. Instead, Granovetter proposes an approach to this topic that reframes the issue around a more fluid and relational conception of the actor. Like the pragmatist theories of the actor discussed in earlier posts (Abbott, Gross, Joas), he explores the idea that the actor's choices emerge from a flow of interactions and shifting relations with others. The actor is not an atomized agent, but rather a participant in a flow of actions and interactions.

At the same time, Granovetter insists that this approach does not deny purposiveness and agency to the actor. The actor reacts and responds to the social relations surrounding him or her; but actions are constructed and refracted through the consciousness, beliefs, and purposes of the individual.

The idea of embeddedness is crucial for Granovetter's argument; but it isn't explicitly defined in this piece.  The idea of an "embedded" individual is contrasted to the idea of an atomized actor; this implies that the individual's choices and actions are generated, in part anyway, by the actions and expected behavior of other actors.  It is a relational concept; the embedded actor exists in a set of relationships with other actors whose choices affect his or her own choices as well.  And this in turn implies that the choices actors make are not wholly determined by facts internal to their spheres of individual deliberation and beliefs; instead, actions are importantly influenced by the observed and expected behavior of others.

Their attempts at purposive action are instead embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations. (487)

Some of Granovetter's discussion crystallizes around the social reality of trust within a system of economic actors. Trust is an inherently relational social category; it depends upon the past and present actions and interactions within a group of actors, on the basis of which the actors choose courses of action that depend on expectations about the future cooperative actions of the other actors. Trust for Granovetter is therefore a feature of social relations and social networks:

The embeddedness argument stresses instead the role of concrete personal relations and structures (or "networks") of such relations in generating trust and discouraging malfeasance. (490)

And trust is relevant to cooperation in all its variants -- benevolent and malicious as well. As Granovetter points out, a conspiracy to defraud a business requires a group of trusting confederates. So it is an important sociological question to investigate how those bonds of trust among thieves are created and sustained.

This line of thought, and the theory of the actor that it suggests, is an important contribution to how we can understand social behavior in a wide range of contexts. The key premise is that individuals choose their actions in consideration of the likely choices of others, and this means that their concrete social relations are critical to their actions. How frequently do a set of actors interact? Has there been a history of successful cooperation among these actors in the past? Are there rivalries among the actors that might work to reduce trust? These are all situational and historical facts about the location and social relations of the individual. And they imply that very similar individuals, confronting very similar circumstances of choice, may arrive at very different patterns of social action dependent on their histories of interaction with each other.

It seems that this theory of the actor would be amenable to empirical investigation.  The methodologies of experimental economics could be adapted to study of the relational intelligence that Granovetter describes here. Recent works by Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt explore related empirical questions about decision making in the context of problems involving fairness and reciprocity (Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies and "The Economics of Fairness, Reciprocity and Altruism - Experimental Evidence and New Theories"; link).

(These topics have come up in earlier discussions here. Here is a post on Chuck Tilly's treatment of trust networks; link. Amartya Sen's discussion of "rational fools" is relevant as well, as is his account of the role that commitments play in action (link). It seems likely that Granovetter would argue that Sen's solution is still too formalist, in that it attempts to internalize he social relations component into the actor's calculations. This is true of the "identity economics" approach as well; (link).)

Dewey on habits

I've sought here to discover some of the origins of current neo-pragmatist theories of the actor. John Dewey's writings are certainly crucial for that quest. So what did Dewey contribute to a pragmatist understanding of how people act? one place to look for an answer is in a 1922 book, HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT: An Introduction to Social Psychology. It is a particularly interesting book to read, in that Dewey goes back and forth between a kind of descriptive psychology and some astute theorizing about morality as a constraint on action.

A particularly central part of Dewey's theory of action is the idea of habit. He believes that a large volume of our ordinary human conduct is not deliberative or plan-ful at all, but is rather based on habit. So what is habit? Here is a brief description in Human Nature and Conduct:

Habit means special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts. It means will. (kl 386)

The word habit may seem twisted somewhat from its customary use when employed as we have been using it. But we need a word to express that kind of human activity which is influenced by prior activity and in that sense acquired ; which contains within itself a certain ordering or systematization of minor elements of action ; which is projective, dynamic in quality, ready for overt manifestation; and which is operative in some subdued subordinate form even when not obviously dominating activity. (Kindle Locations 378-381)

In the tradition of deliberative rationality, the idea of will is central. The agent deliberates about ends and means and chooses (wills) a means that will bring about her ends. So the will is the fundamental element of action. But in fact, Dewey argues that the idea of "will" itself can be understood as a compound of habits, rather than a self-originating deliberation about ends and means.

By will, common-sense understands something practical and moving. It understands the body of habits, of active dispositions which makes a man do what he does. Will is thus not something opposed to consequences or severed from them. (Kindle Locations 403-404)

Dewey's discussion of habit and action is particularly sensitive to the relationship between the constraints and practices of the body and human patterns of action. He uses an extended example of "standing straight", and points out that "good posture" is a complex characteristic involving the environment, the body, and the will. But crucially, the unadorned will ("I will henceforth stand straight") cannot in fact determine subsequent behavior. In fact, he argues that the idea of standing straight can only come to us once we are bodily capable of good posture:

Only the man who can maintain a correct posture has the stuff out of which to form that idea of standing erect which can be the starting point of a right act. (Kindle Locations 302-303)

Given a bad habit and the " will " or mental direction to get a good result, and the actual happening is a reverse or looking-glass manifestation of the usual fault-a compensatory twist in the opposite direction. Refusal to recognize this fact only leads to a separation of mind from body, and to supposing that mental or " psychical" mechanisms are different in kind from those of bodily operations and independent of them. (Kindle Locations 312-314)

 He also emphasizes the point that habits in action generally presuppose a social context:

But since habits involve the support of environing conditions, a society or some specific group of fellow-men, is always accessory before and after the fact. Some activity proceeds from a man; then it sets up reactions in the surroundings. Others approve, disapprove, protest, encourage, share and resist. (Kindle Locations 167-169)

 Or in other words, we acquire our habits of behavior through exposure to other actors.

We often fancy that institutions, social custom, collective habit, have been formed by the consolidation of individual habits. In the main this supposition is false to fact. To a considerable extent customs, or wide-spread uniformities of habit, exist because individuals face the same situation and react in like fashion. But to a larger extent customs persist because individuals form their personal habits under conditions set by prior customs. (Kindle Locations 523-525)

This is a point made elsewhere in the blog in the context of the idea of methodological localism: the individual takes shape through the persistent fact of existing social practices and norms. Here is a representative example of Dewey's ideas about the social construction of the individual.

We come back to the fact that individuals begin their career as infants. For the plasticity of the young presents a temptation to those having greater experience and hence greater power which they rarely resist. It seems putty to be molded according to current designs…. Education becomes the art of taking advantage of the helplessness of the young; the forming of habits becomes a guarantee for the maintenance of hedges of custom. (Kindle Locations 571-573)

Moreover, individual habits in turn contribute to social patterns:

Our individual habits are links in forming the endless chain of humanity. Their significance depends upon the environment inherited from our forerunners, and it is enhanced as we foresee the fruits of our labors in the world in which our successors live. (Kindle Locations 207-209)

And habits are the foundation of ethical ideas as well:

Education becomes the art of taking advantage of the helplessness of the young; the forming of habits becomes a guarantee for the maintenance of hedges of custom. (Kindle Locations 578-579)

So the fact of habit in action is in fact a very fundamental part of Dewey's view of the social world and the individual actor's role in that world. And it is a role that suggests that Dewey differs very fundamentally from the Aristotelian view of deliberative rationality in action, where the actor identifies a set of ends, arrives at a set of beliefs, and reasons to a conclusion about what action to choose. (It seems to have more in common with another aspect of Aristotle's theory of action, the role that virtue plays in ordinary conduct.) Dewey doesn't say that there is nothing deliberative about action; but he appears to believe that habit is more common and more fundamental; further, he seems to believe that many examples of the exercise of will are in fact examples of the influence of nested sets of habits. Dewey seems to accept this implication about the subordinacy of reasoning to habit:

Habit, occupation, furnishes the necessity of forward action in one case as instinct does in the other. We do not act from reasoning; but reasoning puts before us objects which are not directly or sensibly present, so that we then may react directly to these objects, with aversion, attraction, indifference or attachment, precisely as we would to the same objects if they were physically present. (Kindle Locations 1724-1726)

This component of a theory of action seems valid with respect to a range of human behaviors and interactions, but it seems to seriously undervalue the fact of conscious deliberation in action. It cannot be denied that human actors do sometimes approach problems of action -- what to do? -- in a conscious and deliberative way.  This is the kernel that underlies rational choice theory, and it seems to be a plain and undeniable part of human problem solving and choice.  Dewey's understanding of action as the result of an ensemble of socially instilled habits seems in the end to be unsatisfactory as a full theory of action.

Actor-centered sociology

I've advocated many times here for the advantages of what I've referred to as "actor-centered" sociology. Let's see here whether it is possible to say fairly specifically what that means. Here is an elliptical description of three aspects of what I mean by "actor-centered sociology":

First, it reflects a view of social ontology: Social things are composed, constituted, and propertied by the activities and interactions of individual actors -- perhaps 2, perhaps 300M. Second, it puts forward a constraint on theorizing: Our social theories need to be compatible with the ontology. The way I put the point is this: social theories, hypotheses, and assertions need microfoundations. Third, "actor-centered sociology" represents a heuristic about where to focus at least some of our research energy and attention: at the ordinary processes and relations through which social processes take place, the ordinary people who bring them about, and the ordinary processes through which the effects of action and interaction aggregate to higher levels of social organization.

(a) This means that sociological theory need to recognize and incorporate the idea that all social facts and structures supervene on the activities and interactions of socially constructed individual actors. It is meta-theoretically improper to bring forward hypotheses about social structures that cannot be appropriately related to the actions and interactions of individuals. Or in other words, it means that claims about social structures require microfoundations.

(b) The meta-theory of actor-centered sociology requires that all social theories, at whatever level, require a theory of the actor. Economics and ethnomethodology differ in the level of specificity they offer for their theories of the actor; but both have such a theory.  They both put forward fundamental ideas about how actors think and the mental processes that influence their actions.

(c) Actor-centered sociology suggests that careful study of local social mechanisms and behaviors is a worthwhile exercise for sociological research.  Ethnomethodology and the careful, place-based investigations offered by Goffman and Garfinkel move from the wings to the stage itself.

(d) It appears to imply that we may be able to provide an explanation of at least some higher-level social facts by showing how they emerge as a result of the workings of actors and their structured interactions. This is the aggregation-dynamics methodology (link).  Or in terms discussed elsewhere here, it is the micro-to-macro link of Coleman's boat (link).

(e) The actor-based sociology approach seems to imply that the regularities that may exist at the level of macro-social phenomena are bound to be weak and exception-laden. Heterogeneity within and across actors -- across history and across social settings -- seems to imply multiple sets of attainable aggregate outcomes.  Would fascist organizations flourish in Italy after World War I? The answer is indeterminate.  There were numerous groups of social actors with important differences in their states of agency, and these groups in turn were influenced by organizations of varying characteristics. So it would be impossible to say in advance with confidence either that fascism was likely to emerge or that it was unlikely to emerge (link).

(f) The actor-centered approach suggests that we can do better sociology by being more attentive to subtle differences in agency in specific groups and times. George Steinmetz's careful attention to the processes of formation through which colonial administrators took shape in nineteenth-century Germany illustrates the value of paying attention to the historical particulars of various groups of actors, and the historically specific circumstances in which their frames of agency were created (link). It implies that context and historical processes are crucial to sociological explanation.

(g) The actor-centered approach highlights the importance of careful analysis of the mechanisms of communication and interaction through which individuals influence each other and through which their actions aggregate to higher level social outcomes and structures.  Social networks, competitive markets, mass communications systems, and civic associations all represent important inter-actor linkages that have massively important consequences for aggregate social outcomes.

(h) Finally, the actor-centered approach has some of the advantages of the spotlight in a three-ring circus. The idea of actor-centered sociology points the spotlight to the parts of the arena where the action is happening: to the formation of the actor, to the concrete setting of the actor, to the interactions that occur among actors, to the aggregative processes that lead to larger outcomes, and to the causal properties that those larger structures come to have.

One thing that is somewhat troubling for anyone who has been reading this blog over time is that there seems to be a glaring inconsistency in two lines of thought emphasized repeatedly here: first, that social facts require microfoundations; and second, that meso-structures can have autonomous causal properties. Are these two ideas consistent?

In particular, one might interpret the imperative of actor-centered sociology as a particularly restrictive view of social causation: from configurations of actors to meso-level social facts.  So all the causal "action" is happening at the level of the actors, not the structures.  Dave Elder-Vass attempts to avoid this implication by arguing for emergent social causal properties (link); I've approached the problem by talking about relatively autonomous causal properties at the meso-level (link).  I continue to think the latter view works reasonably well.  In a post on "University as a causal structure," for example, I think a plausible case is made for both ideas: the tenure system is causally effective in constraining individual faculty members' behavior as well as being causally effective in influencing other structural features of the university; and every aspect of this system has microfoundations in the form of the structured circumstances of action and culturation through which the bureaucratic agents in the system behave. Or in other words: it is consistent to maintain both parts of the dilemma, actor-centered sociology and relatively autonomous meso-level social causation (link).

George Herbert Mead on the self

Sociologists sometimes come back to George Herbert Mead as a founder who still has something important to contribute to contemporary theory. This is especially true in ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism, but it comes up in current lively discussions of pragmatism and action as well. So what can we learn from reading Mead today?

Mead writes and thinks in a way that is both scientific and philosophical. His contributions are to the field of "social psychology," and he locates himself within a discourse that includes Watsonian behaviorism and William James's introspectionism. But much of his prose seems very familiar to me as a philosopher. You can hear the reverberations of earlier philosophical debates in his writing -- Cartesianism, Hegelianism, Dilthey's hermeneutics -- and his style of argumentation also feels philosophical. (I never read Mead during my training as a philosopher, though the pragmatist spirit surely infused the Harvard philosophy department, with its intellectual affiliations to James and Peirce.)

Let's take a quick tour through some of the topics in Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Works of George Herbert Mead, Vol. 1). The title is entirely descriptive; the core issue is how to characterize the "me" -- the personal, the conscious individual, the intentional actor, and to theorize about how the self is related to the social world. Mead's fundamental view is that the tradition of philosophy has gotten the relationship backwards; philosophers have built the social from the individual, but actually the self is in some important way the sum of its social relations.

The difference between the social and the individual theories of the development of mind, self, and the social process of experience or behavior is analogous to the difference between the evolutionary and the contract theories of the state as held in the past by both rationalists and empiricists. The latter theory takes individuals and their individual experiencing—individual minds and selves—as logically prior to the social process in which they are involved, and explains the existence of that social process in terms of them; whereas the former takes the social process of experience or behavior as logically prior to the individuals and their individual experiencing which are involved in it, and explains the existence in terms of that social process. (222).

Mead favors the "social first" approach. This doesn't rest on some kind of spooky Durkheimianism about irreducible social wholes, but rather the point that individuals always take shape within the ambit of a set of social relationships, language practices, and normative cues.

Our contention is that mind can never find expression, and could never have come into existence at all, except in terms of a social environment; that an organized set or pattern of social relations and interactions (especially those of communication by means of gestures functioning as significant symbols and thus creating a universe of discourse) is necessarily presupposed by it and involved in its nature. (222)

Mead's theory postulates that the self is built up out of imitative practices, gestures, and conversations over time. The individual forms a reflective conception of his / her self that derives from example and engagement with specific other actors within his / her social space. Here is how he puts his theoretical stance in the first few pages:

I have been presenting the self and the mind in terms of a social process, as the importation of the conversation of gestures into the conduct of the individual organism, so that the individual organism takes these organized attitudes of the others called out by its own attitude, in the form of its gestures, and in reacting to that response calls out other organized attitudes in the others in the community to which the individual belongs. This process can be characterized in a certain sense in terms of the “I” and the “me,” the “me” being that group of organized attitudes to which the individual responds as an "I". (185)

One thing that makes Mead's position here more distinctive is the way that it fits into his broader theory of symbolic manipulation. His ideas about rationality rotate around the human being's ability to use and manipulate symbols. This is what reflective thought involves, according to Mead: to assign symbols to features of he world, and then to choose actions based on reasoning about the relationships among those symbols.

Here is another clear statement about the self and the social:

The mind is simply the interplay of such gestures in the form of significant symbols. We must remember that the gesture is there only in its relationship to the response, to the attitude. (188)

This insistence on the primacy of social relationships for defining the self might imply a problem for the first human self; but actually the development of sociality presumably parallels exactly the development of language and action. We aren't forced to begin in a social contract, state of nature point of view.

So what do action and intention look like on Mead's approach? He asks the question, what role does thought play in action? He concludes that it does play a role; but that the role is not entirely inside the head. His example turns the rational actor model on its head. Rather than deriving outcomes from the bare calculating actor, he understands the actor's deliberations in terms of the values and attitudes of his/her social environment. Speaking of a hypothetical policy maker who identifies strongly with his/her community, he writes:

He is successful to the degree that the final “me” reflects the attitude of all in the community. What I am pointing out is that what occurs takes place not simply in his own mind, but rather that his mind is the expression in his own conduct of this social situation, this great co-operative community process which is going on. (187)

And here is a nice description of purposive action.

In the type of temporary inhibition of action which signifies thinking, or in which reflection arises, we have presented in the experience of the individual, tentatively and in advance and for his selection among them, the different possibilities or alternatives of future action open to him within the given social situation—the different or alternative ways of completing the given social act wherein he is implicated, or which he has already initiated. (90)

This is a reasonable statement of the situation of purposive deliberation: the person entertains in thought the various behaviors he/she can undertake and the possible consequences of those behaviors. The person then chooses a behavior in consideration of which of those consequences is most favored. So this passage conforms loosely to the desire-belief-outcome model and provides an explication of an aspect of consciousness and reflexivity. What is perhaps somewhat more surprising, however, is that Mead's position here seems mildly inconsistent with the earlier expressed ideas of the self as a reflection of the social world in which the biological individual abides. This passage suggests more of a traditional individual-rationality approach to action.

Another common thread in Mead's various discussions of action and behavior is his use of the idea of "habit".  Mead places "habit" as an alternative to "intelligent conduct":

It is the entrance of the alternative possibilities of future response into the determination of present conduct in any given environmental situation, and their operation, through the mechanism of the central nervous system, as part of the factors or conditions determining present behavior, which decisively contrasts intelligent conduct or behavior with reflex, instinctive, and habitual conduct or behavior—delayed reaction with immediate reaction. That which takes place in present organic behavior is always in some sense an emergent from the past, and never could have been precisely predicted in advance—never could have been predicted on the basis of a knowledge, however complete, of the past, and of the conditions in the past which are relevant to its emergence; and in the case of organic behavior which is intelligently controlled, this element of spontaneity is especially prominent by virtue of the present influence exercised over such behavior by the possible future results or consequences which it may have. (98)

He turns to the concept of habit to explain language and to describe ordinary actions in the world.

One of the most interesting currents in sociology today is the new pragmatism -- I'm thinking of work by Neil Gross and Hans Joas in particular.  Several earlier posts have focused on their efforts to provide a new theory of the actor that draws upon pragmatism (link, link).  Mead's theory of the self provides some of the intellectual foundations of this approach; but it doesn't tell the whole story.  In particular, the provocative ideas that are foundational in the new pragmatism --

• "focus on the action rather than the actor", 
• "action is a flow of improvisational adaptations", and 
• "action is relational rather than individual" 

-- seem not to originate in Mead.  Mead's central contributions (in a Twitter-sized bite) seems to be that the self is constituted and created by its social context; and there is a large component of "habit" in ordinary social action.

Making Peter Berger

Peter Berger declared himself a humanistic sociologist throughout much of his career, including in his important book with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. This isn't exactly a common identification for an American sociologist in the 1950s. So how did he get there?

This is an interesting question in its own right, since Berger has had significant influence at various points in the nearly fifty years since the publication of Social Construction. But it is also interesting in the context of the theorizing offered by Neil Gross about intellectual itineraries and the situation of the intellectual within a social and personal context.  Gross's case study of the development of Richard Rorty's career as a philosopher is a brilliant case study within this approach (link).  So it is interesting to consider how this perspective might play out in a treatment of Berger.

An important source for considering this question is Berger's intellectual autobiography, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore, published at the latter end of his career in 2011.

A major part of Berger's intellectual development was his training in the PhD program in sociology at the New School for Social Research in the early 1950s. He describes this experience in a fair amount of detail.  The New School in the 1950s was a central locus for European sociology in the United States, and Berger absorbed much of the frameworks of thought associated with Weber, Durkheim, and phenomenology.  One important influence on him there was Alfred Schutz:

I suppose that the central concept I learned from Schutz was that of "multiple realities," including the manner in which a sense of reality is kept going in the consciousness of individuals. (19)

One sociological constant throughout Berger's self concept as an academic is his adherence and dedication to the ideas of Weber: "The only orthodoxy to which I continued to adhere was a Weberian understanding of the vocation of social science" (76).  Here is his thumbnail description of what Weber meant to him:

Thus I early on identified with the core elements of a Weberian approach: society as constituted by actions inspired by human meanings; sociology as the attempt to understand these meanings (Verstehen); the use of "ideal types"--theoretical constructs that only approximate social reality; the relation among meanings, motives, and actions; the institutionalization of the state, the economy, and class; and sociology as "value-free." (23)

By this feature perhaps we can say that Berger's thinking proceeded within one of the dominant paradigms or intellectual frameworks of European sociology; so not "counter-hegemonic".  But it is also the case that his early influences at the New School were not "mainstream" sociology in America.  Berger describes his own allergy to quantitative sociological research ("Years later I took a summer course in statistical analysis at the University of Michigan. It was a disaster;" 26), and he didn't fit neatly into the emerging contours of cutting-edge sociology in America in any of its versions.

Another aspect of his formation as a sociologist was his experience in the US Army as a draftee immediately following the completion of his PhD in 1954.  He asserts that the experience of living and training with men from a broad cross-section of American society gave him a sensibility to the variations of experience, values, and aspirations that exist in our society.  And the accidental experience he had of serving as a clinical social worker in the Army gave him an understanding of the power of extensive interviews in furthering sociological understanding of ordinary life.

What I had not anticipated was that my new assignment would turn out to be a unique learning experience -- not about the actual business of the clinic (though that too was quite interesting), but about America. Thanks to the US Army, I received precisely the education that I had sought in studying sociology and that the New School was unable to provide. (47)

A key part of Berger's originality in the field is the idea of a "humanistic" sociology.  What does he mean by this?  He consistently offers two ideas: debunking illusions and lies, and linking sociological research to the modes of reasoning in the humanities. Here is how he characterizes the "humanistic" version of sociology:

The term humanistic in the subtitle of Invitation to Sociology had two meanings. It suggested that the methodology of sociology should place the discipline close to the humanities -- specifically literature, history, and philosophy.  Of course that is the sort of methodology I obtained at the New School. But the term also suggested that the discipline could serve a liberating purpose -- to free individuals from illusions and to help make society more humane. … 

Sociology derives its moral justification from its debunking of the fictions that serve as alibis for oppression.  Significantly, I singled out racial persecution, the persecution of homosexuals, and capital punishment, the ultimate cruelty.  Sociology liberates by facilitating a standing outside one's social roles … and thereby a realization of one's freedom. At the end of the book I use a metaphor that has become widely known: Sociology suggests that we are puppets of society, but unlike puppets we can look up and discover the strings to which we are attached, and this discovery is a first step toward freedom. (75) 

Sociology is akin to comedy because it debunks the social fictions. By the same token it is potentially liberating. It shows up the "bad faith" by which individuals hide behind their roles and forces them to confront the reality of their own freedom. (72)

Berger attributes at least a part of his conviction about these two aspects of sociology to his experience of teaching as a young instructor in the segregated South:

These experiences help to explain why, a few years later, I wrote about sociology as having a "humanistic" purpose in unmasking the murderous ideologies underlying the death penalty, racism, and the persecution of homosexuals. (64)

His sociological research originated in the sociology of religion, and he continued to write on this topic throughout his life. Why so?  And how does this interest intersect with his frequent self-ascription of "theologian"?

The sociology of religion is certainly a core Weberian topic for historical sociology, so the fact that Berger identifies strongly with Weber may partially explain his choice of the topic.  But this doesn't seem right, given Berger's narrative in Adventures.  Berger's interest in the topic seems more religiously inspired; he refers frequently to his own "theological" approach.  He writes repeatedly about his own movement across the landscape of Christian belief:

I was writing [my first novel] at a time when my emancipation from my youthful neo-orthodoxy had made me consider seriously whether I would now have to define myself as an agnostic if not an atheist. (86) 

It was the question of theodicy that had brought me close to abandoning my Christian faith. (86)

So it seems likely that his own religious needs were an important part of his desire to write about religious experience.

Here is how he describes the intellectual framework that he and Luckmann conceived of in preparation for writing a book on the sociology of knowledge -- which eventually became Social Construction:

Specifically, we came to undertake a synthesis of several strands of theory that have often been understood as contradictory: the so-called voluntaristic approach commonly attributed to Max Weber, which emphasized that society is created by the meaningful acts of individuals; the approach, strongly represented by the Durkheimian school of French sociology, that emphasized social institutions as facets that resist the acts of individuals; and, finally, the tradition of American social psychology, mostly deriving from George Herbert Mead, which studied the way in which individuals are socialized into their roles. (81)

This gives something of an idea of Berger's core ideas as a sociological theorist and researcher -- his intellectual agenda.  But how did Berger relate to the discipline, and the status structure, of American sociology itself?  Berger writes frequently in Adventures about his distance from the mainstream:

I had realized by now how marginal I was to the mainstream of American sociology, and after all, I was nursing dreams of building an empire with our new approach to sociological theory. (85)

His marginality took various forms: a PhD in a decidedly heterodox and non-elite graduate program, teaching appointments in a series of non-elite institutions, and none of the early indicators of "star" status that the discipline of sociology had to offer (elite grants and fellowships, book prizes, etc.).  He notes that a book that he is especially proud of, Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, was ignored by the professional world of sociology when it appeared in 1963; and with evident satisfaction, he notes as well that it went on to sell well over a million copies.  And he is also frank about his aspirations:

I wanted out of Hartford, not because I was unhappy there but because (perhaps misguidedly) I wanted to be in a proper Sociology Department, with graduate students in sociology.  Thus Invitation to Sociology had a subtext, a plea to fellow sociologists: Please invite me! (76)

He is equally frank in describing the striking success and influence of Social Construction: "Someone suggested that it was the most read sociology book written in the twentieth century. That is doubtful. But the book was widely noticed right after publication in America and elsewhere as foreign translations appeared" (89).  The book had wide appeal, and Berger was gratified that this was so.  But it did not result in his becoming one of the leading stars of the sociology world.

Here is how he characterizes his intellectual location, within the field of American sociology in the 1960s. in a reflection on the possible influence of Social Construction:

For just a few years after 1966 there was a narrow window of opportunity for our approach to sociology, since especially younger colleagues were disillusioned by the double dominance of so-called structural-functional theory and quantitative methodology; hence the initially favorable reception of the book. But then, almost immediately afterward, there occurred "an orgy of ideology and utopianism" with which neither Luckmann nor I could identify. (91)

(Essentially he is referring here to the sweeping appeal of the New Left and Post Modernism in the academic world and among students.  These were movements to which he was strongly opposed.)

In other words, the intellectual framework which Berger and Luckmann hoped to create in the 1960s did in fact come into coherent focus in Social Construction; but the opportunity to genuinely shift the focus of the field came and went.  He disparages two offshoots that might be thought to be intellectual descendants or cousins -- ethnomethodology (Garfinkel) and constructivism (Foucault and Derrida) (93 ff.).

And he concludes that he never did become a part of the elite leadership group of American sociology:

As the years went by, I was even assigned the role of a grand (even if definitely out-of-style) old man. But I became an exile, not only from my parochial alma mater [the New School] but from the wider elite culture. Given the nature of the latter, this has not been such a bad thing. (108)

So there seem to be several important strands to this intellectual autobiography. First, Berger gives a strong impression of the importance of what Gross refers to as "self-concept" in the development of his ideas and theories in sociology.  His religious beliefs and questions, his personal rejection of racism and homophobia, and his original and guiding thought about "multiple realities" seem to have guided many of the choices that he made in his academic life.

Second, there is the strand of "academic field" and the constraints and incentives which the field creates for the young scholar -- the insight that drives Bourdieu's understanding of the development of an academic field.  These ambitions and aspirations are plainly important to Berger at various points in the narrative, and they led to some significant choices in his academic life.  But the opportunism that is associated with the Bourdieuian concept seems largely absent in the development of Berger's academic career through middle age.  Even the "exile" that he describes, from the New School to Rutgers, stemmed from choices he made that arose from his self concept in attempting to redirect the Department of Sociology when he became chair.

And finally, Berger never did reach the pinnacle of elite status that Rorty did in philosophy or Kenneth Arrow did in economics.  In his own assessment, the intellectual tides of the field passed him and his insights by.

In other words, Berger's intellectual trajectory seems to follow largely from his self concept, and the ideas and movements of thought that were personally important to him, and very little from his calculating assessment of how best to move upward in the status structure of the discipline.  He was fully aware of that structure; but he seems not to have deviated from the course his own values and convictions set him upon.

(Here's a very critical and worthwhile review of Adventures in The Global Sociology Blog. The review opens with these words: "Well, it is not often that I dislike a book as much as I did Peter Berger's Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist."  SocProf is highly critical of the conservative trend that Berger's thought and affinities took in the 1970s and later, and he argues that this turn leads Berger to eliminate the most crucial parts of the sociological challenge: race, class, gender, and power.  A lot of the Global Sociology review has to do with the later parts of Berger's intellectual course, which I haven't addressed here. I've been primarily interested in where Berger's foundational ideas came from in his own early development.  But I admit that the narrative I've provided here doesn't yet offer a basis for explaining Berger's turn to the right and away from moral and political engagement with the injustices that exist around us.)

A pragmatist action theory

A theory of action is one component of a meta-framework for sociology. It is an organized set of ideas about what individuals are doing when they engage in interactions in the world, and what we think at the highest level of generality about why they behave as they do. Individuals within social interactions constitute the social world; they do things; and they do things for reasons that we would like to understand. A theory of action ought to give us a basic vocabulary for describing behavior in the social world. And it ought to provide some framing hypotheses about the causes or motivations of behavior.

An important aspect of action theory is the idea of "intensionality" and mental representation. This is the conception of the individual as possessing consciousness, purposes, and a mental orientation to the world. He or she "understands" the events that surround him/her -- that is, the individual forms a mental representation of the swirling set of actions and events that surround him or her. And the individual places him/herself within this representation by conceptualizing wants, aversions, aspirations, and intentions concerning what might be achieved through intentional behavior.

This description may seem obvious. Or it may seem to reflect a set of assumptions about how to parse the social world that are substantive, consequential, and debatable. They are consequential because they push our sociological researches in a particular direction: who are the actors that make up a social ensemble? What are they doing? Why are they doing these things?

They are debatable because -- as we've seen in discussions of Abbott and Gross previously -- they privilege the actor over the action, the individual over the interaction. They push us in the direction of a social ontology that is individualistic and perhaps reductionist. Abbott proposes, in contrast, that we begin with the interaction, the flow of moves and responses. Tilly suggests that we start with the relationships and turn to the individual actors only later in the analysis. And Gross suggests starting with the creativity inherent in any complex flow of human activities and interactions.

Each of these thinkers point in the direction of a pragmatist theory of action. So what might a pragmatist theory involve?

One avenue for getting a handle on this question is to turn to the work of Hans Joas, who has contributed deeply to the question of how pragmatism intersects with sociology. His article with Jens Beckert in Jonathan Turner's Handbook of Sociological Theory is a good place to start, since he is specifically concerned there to give an exposition of a theory of action that acknowledges several important sources for such a theory while specifically developing a pragmatist account.  (The article covers a lot of the ground presented in Joas's 1997 book, The Creativity of Action. Also important is his Pragmatism and Social Theory.)

Joas begins his account by framing the standard assumptions of existing action theory in terms of two poles: action as rational choice (e.g. James Coleman) and action as conformance to a set of prescriptions and norms (e.g. Durkheim, Parsons). He argues for a view that is separate from both of these, under the heading of "creative action".

However, the alternative that reaches even further beyond the routinized exchanges between rationalist and normativist theories of action seems to us an action-theoretic conceptualization that focuses on the notion of the creativity of human action. Such a theory can be based primarily on the tradition of American pragmatism that originated in philosophy and psychology but also has a significant sociological tradition. (270)

Common to both traditional views, Joas argues, is the assumption of purposiveness: that action proceeds to bring about explicit pre-articulated goals subject to antecedently recognized constraints. The pragmatist view of action rejects this separation between goals, action, and outcome, and focuses on the fact that goals and actions themselves are formulated within a dynamic and extended process of thought and movement. (Dewey is the chief source of this view.) Tactics, movements, and responses are creative adaptations to fluidly changing circumstances. The basketball player driving to the basket is looking to score a goal or find an open teammate. But it is the rapid flow of movement, response by other players, and position on the floor that shapes the extended action of "driving for a layup." Likewise, a talented public speaker approaches the podium with a few goals and ideas for the speech. But the actual flow of ideas, words, gestures, and flourishes is the result of the thinking speaker interacting dynamically with the audience. Joas puts his view in these terms:

At the beginning of an action process goals are frequently unspecific and only vaguely understood. They become clearer once the actor has a better understanding of the possible means to achieve the ends; even new goals will arise on the basis of newly available means. (273)

For the theory of creativity of action the significance of the situation is far greater: Action is not only contingent on the structure of the situation but the situation is constitutive of action. (274)

So what are the features of the situation that intersect with the thinking actor to create the temporally extended action? Joas refers to corporality and sociality. The body is not simply the instrument of the agent. Rather, the physical features and limitations of the body themselves contribute to the unfolding of the action. (This aspect of the theory has much to do with phenomenology.) And the other persons involved in an action are not simply subjects of manipulation. Their own creativity in movement and action defines the changing parameters of the actor's course of action. (Again, think of the analogy of 10 players in a basketball game.)

Joas thinks that this interpretation of action as extended intelligent adaptation to shifting circumstances helps to account for complex social circumstances that rational-actor and normative-actor theories have difficulty with. He illustrates this claim with the extended examples of reciprocity and innovation.

This is a rich and nuanced theory of action, and one that has the potential for offering a basis of a much richer analysis of concrete social circumstances than we currently have. At the same time it should not be thought to be in contradiction to either rational-deliberation or normative-deliberation theories. These creative actors whom Joas describes are purposive in a more diffuse sense, and they are responsive to norms in action. It seems to me that the chief tension Joas offers is between stylized, mono-stranded models of action, and thick theories that incorporate the plain fact of intelligent adaptation and shaping of behavior that occurs in virtually all human activities.

Sociology of ideas: Richard Rorty

Where do new ideas and directions of thought come from?  Is it possible to set a context for important changes in intellectual culture, in the sciences or the humanities?  Can we give any explanation for the development of individual thinkers' thought?

These are the key questions that Neil Gross raises in his sociological biography of Richard Rorty in Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (2009).  The book is excellent in every respect.  Gross has gone into thorough detail in discovering and incorporating correspondence with family and friends that allow him to reconstruct the micro setting within which the young Rorty took shape.  His exposition of the complex philosophical debates that set the stage for academic philosophy in the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s is effortless and accurate.  And he offers a very coherent interpretation of many of Rorty's most important ideas.  Any one of these achievements is noteworthy; together they are exceptional.

Gross is not interested in writing a traditional intellectual biography. Rather, he wants to advance the emerging field of "new sociology of ideas" through an extended case study of the development of a particularly important philosopher. The purpose of the book is to provide a careful and sociologically rich account of the ways in which a humanities discipline (philosophy) developed, through a crucial period (the 1940s through the 1980s).

My goal is to develop, on the basis of immersion in an empirical case, a new theory about the social influences on intellectual choice, particularly for humanists—that is, a theory about the social factors that lead them to fasten onto one idea, or set of ideas, rather than another, during turning points in their intellectual careers. (kindle location 95)

The argument I now want to make is that the developments considered in chapters 1–8 reflect not Rorty’s idiosyncratic and entirely contingent biographical experiences but the operation of more general social mechanisms and processes that shaped and structured his intellectual life and career. (kl 5904)

Here is how he describes the sociology of ideas:

Sociologists of ideas seek to uncover the relatively autonomous social logics and dynamics, the underlying mechanisms and processes, that shape and structure life in the various social settings intellectuals inhabit: academic departments, laboratories, disciplinary fields, scholarly networks, and so on. It is these mechanisms and processes, they claim, that—in interaction with the facts that form the material for reflection—do the most to explain the assumptions, theories, methodologies, interpretations of ambiguous data, and specific ideas to which thinkers come to cleave. (kl 499)

The goal is to provide a sociological interpretation of the development of thinkers and disciplines within the humanities (in deliberate analogy to current studies in the sociology of science).  Gross acknowledges but rejects earlier efforts at sociology of knowledge (Marx, Mannheim), as being reductionist to the thinker's location within a set of social structures.  Gross is more sympathetic to more recent contributions, including especially  the theories of Bourdieu (field) (Homo Academicus) and Randall Collins (interaction ritual chains) (The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change).  These theories emphasize the incentives and advantages that lead strategically minded professionals in one direction or another within a discipline or field. But Gross argues that these theories too are insufficiently granular and don't provide a basis for accounting for the choices made by particular intellectuals.

One does not have to be a methodological individualist to recognize that meso- and macrolevel social phenomena are constituted out of the actions and interactions of individual persons and that understanding individual-level action—its nature and phenomenology and the conditions and constraints under which it unfolds—is helpful for constructing theories of higher order phenomena, even though the latter have emergent properties and cannot be completely reduced to the former. (kl 158)

To fill this gap he wants to offer a sociology of ideas that brings agency back in.  He introduces the idea of the role of the individual's "self-concept", which turns out to be a basis for the choices the young intellectual makes within the context of the strategy-setting realities of the field.  A self-concept is a set of values, purposes, and conceptions that the individual has acquired through a variety of social structures, and that continues to evolve through life.  Gross emphasizes the narrative character of a self-conception: it is expressed and embodied through the stories the individual tells him/herself and others about the development of his/her life.

The theory of intellectual self-concept can thus be restated as follows: Thinkers tell stories to themselves and others about who they are as intellectuals. They are then strongly motivated to do intellectual work that will, inter alia, help to express and bring together the disparate elements of these stories. Everything else being equal, they will gravitate toward ideas that make this kind of synthesis possible. (kl 6650)
...
There is good reason to believe that such stories or self-narratives are not epiphenomenal aspects of experience but influences on social action in their own right. Indeed, few notions have been as important in social psychology as those of self and self-concept. (551)

Simply stated, the theory of intellectual self-concept holds that intellectuals tell themselves and others stories about who they are qua intellectuals: about their distinctive interests, dispositions, values, capacities, and tastes. (kl 6487)

And Gross thinks that these stories are deeply influential, in terms of the choices that a developing intellectual makes at each stage of life.  In particular, he thinks that the academic's choices are often inflected by his/her self-conception to an extent that may override the strategic and prudential considerations that are highlighted by Bourdieu and Collins. Bourdieu and Collins offer "no attempt to think through how the quest for status and upward mobility in an intellectual field may intersect and sometimes compete with thinkers’ cognitive and affective interests in remaining true to narratives of intellectual selfhood that have become more or less stable features of their existence" (562). In his view, identity trumps interest--at least sometimes.

Here is how he applies this analysis to Rorty:

My central empirical thesis is that the shift in Rorty’s thought from technically oriented philosopher to free-ranging pragmatist reflected a shift from a career stage in which status considerations were central to one in which self-concept considerations became central. (576)

Or in other words, Rorty's early career is well explained by the Bourdieu-Collins theory, whereas his later shift towards pragmatism and more heterodox, pluralistic philosophy is explained by his self-concept.

In Gross's telling of the story, much of Richard Rorty's self-concept was set by the influences of his remarkable parents in childhood and adolescence, James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush.  The parents were politically engaged literary and political intellectuals, and they created an environment of social and intellectual engagement that set aspects of Richard's self-concept that influenced several key choices in his life.  Gross's depiction of the social and intellectual commitments of James and Winifred, and the elite milieu in which they circulated, is detailed and striking. This "social capital" served Richard well in his course from the University of Chicago to Yale into his academic career.

Gross believes that the key turns in Rorty's development were these: first, the decision to do a masters thesis on Whitehead at Chicago; then his choice of Yale as a doctoral institution, with a Ph.D. dissertation on "The Concept of Potentiality" (a metaphysical subject); his shift towards analytic philosophy during his first several years of teaching at Wellesley; his deepening engagement with analytic philosophy in the early years at Princeton; his eventual critique of analytic philosophy in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; and his further alienation from analytic philosophy in the years that followed towards a contemporary pragmatism and a more pluralistic view of the domain of philosophical methods.  In other words, he began in an environment where pragmatism and substantive metaphysics were valued; he shifted to the more highly valued field of analytic philosophy during the years in which he was building his career and approaching tenure; and he returned to a more pluralistic view of philosophy in the years when his career was well established.

Rorty's turn to analytic philosophy makes sense in a Bourdieuian way. Gross describes his Wellesley-era and early Princeton philosophical writings in these terms:

They represent Rorty’s attempt to make contributions to analytic thought of a piece with those that other bright, young analytic philosophers of his generation were making. They were, in other words, part of Rorty’s efforts to position himself even more squarely within the mainstream philosophical establishment. (kl 4642)

Those observing Rorty’s career from afar might have interpreted this spate of analytic publications, coming on the heels of The Linguistic Turn, as evidence that Rorty had joined the ranks of the analytic community and saw his work as of a piece with that being done by other analysts. (kl 4853)

But eventually Rorty shifts his philosophical stance, towards a pluralistic and pragmatist set of ideas about philosophical method and subject matter.  Here is how Gross summarizes Rorty's turn to pragmatism:

On this understanding, a pragmatist is someone who holds three beliefs: first, that “there is no wholesale, epistemological way to direct, or criticize, or underwrite, the course of inquiry”; second, that “there is no . . . metaphysical difference between facts and values, nor any methodological difference between morality and science”; and third, that “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones.” (kl 719)

As Rorty went about developing a historicist, therapeutic alternative to the analytic philosophy he saw being practiced by his Princeton colleagues and others, no one’s work was more important to him than that of Thomas Kuhn. (kl 5054)

And Gross dates Rorty's impulses towards pragmatism to a much earlier phase of his intellectual development than is usually done:

Far from it being the case, as some Rorty interpreters have claimed, that Rorty’s interest in pragmatism arose only after he made a break with analytic philosophy, his earliest work is characterized by a desire to harness pragmatist insights in the service of a revised conception of the analytic project. (kl 4037)

Rorty rode both of these intellectual waves, becoming caught up in the rigorism of the analytic paradigm in the 1960s and then emerging as a leading figure in the antirigorist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. (kl 7058)

The book repays a close reading, in that it sheds a lot of light on a key period in the development of American philosophy and it provides a cogent sociological theory of the factors that influenced this development.  It is really a remarkable book. It would be fascinating to see similar accounts of innovative thinkers such as Nelson Goodman, John Rawls, or (from literary studies) Stephen Greenblatt.  That's not likely to happen, however, so this book will probably remain a singular illustration of a powerful theory of the sociology of ideas.

Theories of the actor

I'm attracted to an approach to sociological thinking that can be described as "actor-centered."  The basic idea is that social phenomena are constituted by the actions of individuals, oriented by their own subjectivities and mental frameworks.  It is recognized, of course, that the subjectivity of the actor doesn't come full-blown into his or her mind at adulthood; rather, we recognize that individuals are "socialized"; their thought processes and mental frameworks are developed through myriad social relationships and institutions. So the actor is a socially constituted individual.

If we take the approach to social explanation that demands that we understand how complex social processes and assemblages supervene on the actions and thoughts of individuals, then it is logical that we would want to develop a theory of the actor.  We would like to have a justifiable set of ideas about how individuals perceive the social world, how they think about their own lives and commitments, and how they move from thought to action.  But we have many alternatives available as we attempt to grapple with this task.

We might begin by asking, what work should a theory of the actor do?  Here are a set of questions that a theory of the actor ought to consider:

1. How does the actor represent the world of action -- the physical and social environment?  Here we need a vocabulary of mental frameworks, representational schemes, stereotypes, and paradigms.
2. How do these schemes become actualized within the actor's mental system? This is the developmental and socialization question.
3. What motivates the actor?  What sorts of things does the actor seek to accomplish through action?
4. Here too there is a developmental question: how are these motives instilled in the actor through a social process of learning?
5. What mental forces lead to action? Here we are considering things like deliberative processes, heuristic reasoning, emotional attachments, habits, and internally realized practices.
6. How do the results of action get incorporated into the actor's mental system?  Here we are thinking about memory, representation of the meanings of outcomes, regret, satisfaction, or happiness.
7. How do the results of past experiences inform the mental processes leading to subsequent actions? Here we are considering the ways that memory and emotional representations of the past may motivate different patterns of action in the future.

Aristotle guides much philosophical thinking on these questions by offering an orderly theory of the practical agent (The Nicomachean Ethics).  His theory is centered on the idea of deliberative rationality, but he leaves a place for the emotions in action as well (to be controlled by the faculty of reason).  Deliberation, in Aristotle's view, amounts to reflecting on one's goals and arranging them into a hierarchy; then choosing actions that permit the achievement of one's highest goals.

Formal rational choice theory provides a set of answers to several of these questions.  Actors have preferences and beliefs; their preferences are well ordered; they assign probabilities and utilities to outcomes (the results of actions); and they choose a given action to maximize the satisfaction of their preferences.

Ethnographic thinkers such as Clifford Geertz or Erving Goffman take a different tack altogether; they give a lot of attention to questions 1 and 2; they provide "thick" descriptions of the motives and meanings of the actors (3); and they indicate a diverse set of answers to question 5.  (Geertz and Goffman are discussed in other posts.)

Other anthropologists have favored a "performative" understanding of agency.  The actor is understood as carrying out a culturally prescribed script in response to stereotyped social settings.  Victor Turner's anthropology is a leading example of this approach to action (Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society).

Mayer Zald recommends the work of Karl Weick on the first question (Sensemaking in Organizations (Foundations for Organizational Science)).  Here is how Weick explains sensemaking:

The concept of sensemaking is well named because, literally, it means the making of sense. Active agents construct sensible, sensable events. They "structure the unknown". How they construct what they construct, why, and with what effects are the central questions for people interested in sensemaking.  Investigators who sensemaking define it in quite different ways. Many investigators imply what Starbuck and Milliken make explicit, namely, that sensemaking involves placing stimuli into some kind of framework. The well-known phrase "frame of reference" has traditionally meant a generalized point of view that directs interpretations. (4) (references omitted)

It's worthwhile addressing this topic, because it would appear that we don't yet have a particularly good vocabulary for formulating questions about agency.  As indicated above, Aristotle's theory of the mind has been dominant in western philosophy; and yet it feels as though his approach is just one among many starting points that could have been chosen.  Here is an earlier treatment of this question (link).

I'm reminded by my friends that not all sociologists accept the actor-centered approach.  Some (like Andrew Abbott and Peggy Somers) prefer what they refer to as a "relational" understanding of the basis of social activity.  It is not so much the actor as the action; it is not the internal state of the individual agent so much as the swirl of interactions with others that determine the course of a social activity.  This is part of Abbott's objection to the idea that sociology should aim to uncover social mechanisms (link).