Pragmatism’s Problem of Habit and Parsons’ Action System Solution: a problem suppressed and a solution eluded

• In Event: 3151 - Theory Section Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 2. Advancing Sociological Foundations – B

Abstract

This paper argues that a theoretically adequate and analytically rigorous concept of habit in sociology can and should be developed by synthesizing aspects of two theoretical lineages seemingly at odds – namely, the early American pragmatism of Pierce, James, Dewey, and Mead, on the one hand, and the action systems theory of Talcott Parsons, on the other. Through in-depth analysis of both, I show that each suffers from residuals that can be overcome most profitably by the other. The pragmatists provide what is arguably the strongest and most specific concept of habit (stronger than Bourdieu’s “habitus”), but they leave residual the structured social contexts of habit formation and recruitment, even though they acknowledge the latter’s importance. Socially-structured contexts of habits are best understood, conceptualized, and modeled with a notion of “action system,” of acts “organically” concatenated in a chain. To get there, however, we have to extend Parsons’ concept past logical bounds he imposed, unnecessarily on himself, not only with respect to the types of action systems he theorized, but also, in how he himself treated habit. In his early work, Parsons more or less systematically repressed habit. Ironically, he accepted, I show, the one-dimensional and over-biologized notion of habit countenanced by the behaviorists he argued against. This caused him to think of habits as the counter-agentic and counter-moral equivalents of mere reflexes, and resultingly, dismiss them as valid sociological categories. If we peel back some of Parsons’ theoretical/logical choices, take up the basic conceptual infrastructure of his action system notion, and synthesize it with the core of the pragmatists’ notion of habit, picking up where they left off, we can reconstruct a concept of habit that does what something like a Bourdieusian notion of structure and habitus only dreams of, and with the possibility for rigor beyond mere metaphor and insight.

Author

• Michael E. Bare, University of Chicago