Arendt Contra Sociology by Walsh Philip

Author:Walsh, Philip
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

This chapter has explored the implications of understanding Arendt’s LM as a ‘companion volume’ to HC, in the sense that both are concerned to draw attention to the distinctness of the various activities – both mental and worldly – of which human beings are capable. Both books may therefore be said to have in their principal lines of sight theories that ignore these differences, and thereby present dangerously facile views of what human beings are capable of. In HC, Arendt is primarily concerned with the tendency of Marxism and (to a lesser extent) positivism to conflate action with fabrication (the valorization of homo faber), as well as with the broader trend for people to conceive of all their own activities as labour (the hegemony of the animal laborans). LM is primarily directed against the refusal of theorists of mental activity to recognize thinking, willing and judging as genuine and distinct irreducible experiences. She also notes the centrality of the phenomenon of reflexivity in the experiences of thinking and willing, and her insights here, I have argued, have significant implications for how the concept of reflexivity has been treated within recent sociological theory, notably in the work of Margaret Archer. Finally, it should be noted that many of Arendt’s reflections on mental activity are inconclusive and that this is partly due to her practice of pursuing ‘thought-trains’, rather then systematic elucidations. It also makes her sometimes at her most effective when she acts as a Socratic gadfly to other more developed theories, such as Archer’s. But in its Socratic mode, Arendt’s thought can be more of an aid to the social sciences than she would, perhaps, herself have wished.

1 Dewey is ‘excellent’ when he ‘deals with analyses of the scientific mind and the functioning of scientific experience’ (EU: 196). However, his faith in the ‘myth of progress’ and the attendant project of ‘closing the gap between scientific and social knowledge’ (198) looks both naive and threatening, insofar as it advocates for social control and potentially ‘degrades man into a puppet’ (197).

2 Margaret Archer (2012: 10) points out that Lev Vygotsky ([1934] 1964) had articulated the need for a ‘history of reflexivity’ in 1934.

3 Stephen Turner (1994) has criticized Bourdieu’s general strategy of explaining structure and action in terms of practices, in terms that are quite continuous with the line of argument pursued here.

4 Archer suggests that we can designate socio-historical conditions under which reflexivity is more or less likely to take precedence over habit. Habit, or ‘relatively unmotivated’ action tends to be the predominant mode of thinking and acting where morphostatic social conditions prevail, that is, relatively undifferentiated hierarchical societies with ‘a high and lasting degree of everyday contextual continuity for the populations in question: repetitive situations, stable expectations and durable relations’ (2010b: 279). Under the opposite conditions – of ‘morphogenesis’ –social repertoires are exposed to disruption leading to the potential for reflexivity to be enhanced. The morphostatic versus morphogenetic binary corresponds closely to the contrast between tradition and modernity.

5 Archer

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