Human Action, History and Social Change: Reconstructions of Social Theory in Three Contexts

Abstract

This text appeared in German in a Festschrift —a collection of essays written to honour and in celebration of an eminent Scholar— to Professor Hans Joas on the occasion of his 60th birthday in 2010. It compares Stuart Hughes’ (1958) monograph Consciousness and Society: The Reconstruction of European Social Thought, 1890-1930 with Die Kreativität des Handelns [The Creativity of Action] by Hans Joas (1992). Since Hughes’s development can be paralleled with Talcott Parsons's contributions (especially the conviction that the reflection on human action is fundamental for a new social theory) and given that Joas’s critique of Parsons is key to his view on social theory, this paper points out a promising dialogue between Joas and Hughes that is not straightforwardly developed in former’s work. It starts out by analysing the basic structure of two of the most outspoken and polemical versions of a naturalist and an anti-naturalist account of human action that appeared in the years Hughes published his book. It then moves on to consider how the dilemmas, which were identified in the wake of the debates at mid-century, stand out in our own era in two versions of social theorizing and thought that have emerged out of an analytical-empiricist and a linguistic-interpretive tradition respectively. It argues both these current orientations have successfully overcome several of the shortcomings characteristic of earlier positions. These present-day orientations mark genuine scholarly advances in elaborating an action-based social science. In this context, It also repeatedly calls attention to works by Hans Joas and tries to indicate that they are characterized by strategic choices that hold out the promise for a social science that will be more consistently action-based but also more consistently historically reflective than anything that has existed since the age of profound reconstruction of social thought that forms the subject of Hughes’s Consciousness and Society.