The Creativity of Action and the Intersubjectivity of Reason: Mead's Pragmatism and Social Theory

Abstract

Pragmatism and sociology are children of the same epoch. That was the assertion made by Emile Durkheim, the French founder and classical theorist of sociology, in a series of lectures on the relationship between the two intellectual movements that he delivered shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, during which his life came to its end.2 By that comment he meant more than the trivial fact that the representative philosophy of the United States of America originated in the same period in which sociology made the transition from being an idea of academic outsiders and of social reformers to being an institutionalized academic discipline. Rather, he saw in both enterprises the same spirit at work, a spirit that was striving to formulate in a new fashion philosophical problems with a long tradition and to find a solution for them through a changed relationship to the methods of empirical science. It is true that for Durkheim pragmatism, which in his eyes was represented chiefly by William James, was an irrationalist attack on rationality that had to be warded off by sociology for the sake of reason and of rationalist French culture. While holding that position, however, he did not regard sociology itself as a simple continuation of previous traditions of thought, but as reconstructed rationalism. In Durkheim's opinion, sociology and pragmatism had both made a break with the older philosophy; his own program of sociology, though, was intended also to circumvent the dangers that pragmatism engendered. Sociology was thus not just an empirical discipline, but in Durkheim's view also a specific philosophical project. It remains in the interest of both sociology and philosophy to recall