Abstract
This book offers both an overview of and a contribution to what could be considered a new phase of pragmatist sociology, hence its sober title: The New Pragmatist Sociology. Its subtitle, Inquiry, Agency, and Democracy, refers to three major pragmatist themes that also constitute the different parts of the volume.
The short introduction, written by volume editors Neil Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship, aims to describe the history in which this philosophical movement was born, in circles led by the figures of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James in Cambridge, Massachusetts around the 1870s as a reaction to European speculation. It also outlines its transmission to the North American social sciences (in particular, sociology) via different scholars (such as John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and, more recently, Hans Joas) and various schools of thought, such as symbolic interactionism, during the twentieth century. This historical insight helps the editors offer an educated assessment of the current situation, albeit a blurry one in which pragmatism finds itself in competition with supposedly more straightforward approaches to the scientific study of society, such as behaviorism. The different chapters of the volume thus aim at providing a more precise framework for the uses of pragmatism in sociology than the vague idea of “inspiration” could do.
The contributions gathered in the first part of the book are united by a question tied to the idea of inquiry. Mainly theoretical, they broadly offer some interesting insights on the following interrogation: “how can pragmatism be best used in sociological inquiries?” If the chapters differ in the ways they answer this question, the most convincing texts are those that manage to reconcile empirical evidence with the more theoretical statements. In this sense, Luis Flores and Neil Gross offer a potent argument by not only having an in-depth discussion of the Joasian concept of “problem situation assessment,” but also by testing their claim with an empirical study of the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Their analysis shows that the pragmatist (and more specifically Joasian) “habit-creativity” model of action needs some further work to fully explain how actors judge situations as habitual or problematic. In their case, an asymmetry of access to information between house buyers, sellers, and regulators may explain why the former overwhelmingly believed that the use of highly risked mortgage instruments could help them solve the problems they were then facing.
Chapters in the book’s second part are centered on the notion of agency. If not as explicitly rooted in pragmatism as the concepts of inquiry and democracy may be, agency nonetheless has strong ties with this tradition of thought via the related ideas of action, creativity, and behavior. More directly connected to empirical research than those of the first part, these chapters offer some useful findings. Thanks to interviews conducted between 2015 and 2017 with Uber drivers based in the Greater Boston area, Mazen Elfakhani argues that the work structure provided by the company triggered creativity among most of the drivers. A collective of four researchers tries to solve the paradox of a mismatch between words and actions found in communities of low-income African American mothers, who expressed distrust but in practice trusted some people in their everyday life. This collective explains this enigma by showing—thanks to interviews and a deep knowledge of the literature related to their subject matter—that practices of trust are always mediated by social institutions, such as churches, schools, and families.
Then, a subset of two chapters centers on the problem of scientific agency and creativity. While Natalie Aviles claims the superiority of a pragmatist account of scientific practices over institutionalist (meaning Robert K. Merton and Pierre Bourdieu) and Science and Technology Studies (meaning mainly Bruno Latour and Michel Callon) approaches via the empirical study of the development of human papillomavirus vaccine in the United States, Susan S. Silbey tries to explain the different reactions of biologists and chemists to the introduction of a new safety regulation. Silbey answers that question by showing that the differences are best explained by the history of each discipline and their relationships to the broader social space (Silbey employs the Bourdieusian notions of “fields” and “habitus”).
Part Three revolves around the Deweyian concept of democracy and returns to a more theoretical consideration. Among the various contributions—for instance, dedicated to pragmatist historical sociology, to the relationship between pragmatism and subaltern approaches, to the concept of public arena, or to pragmatist accounts of the concept of future—Christopher Winship’s chapter seems to be the only one to bring empirical material to the discussion. By first describing what seems to be an accidental partnership between the Boston police and Black ministers starting in the 1990s, the author develops an original reflection of a pragmatist theory of action, giving less space to the idea that problem-solving requires instrumental action than some of its main (Joasian) variants do.
In essence, this well-edited volume brings together an important number of leading sociologists, all of them contributing to and explaining in complementary ways what seems to be a new pragmatist sociology. Seen from France, this new development in North American sociology is not easy to understand. As previous works have shown, the history of the relationships between French philosophy (since the 1880s) and social sciences (since the 1980s) is a difficult one. In particular, French pragmatist and pragmatic sociologies have both portrayed themselves as a reaction against a sociological framework associated with the name of Pierre Bourdieu. One can thus be quite surprised by the closeness of North American pragmatist sociology with Bourdieusian notions, as the high number of contributions in this volume positively discussing the latter shows. Given this closeness with Bourdieusian field theory but also with other schools of thought (such as symbolic interactionism), one could question the unity of this new pragmatist sociology. A sociological inquiry about the international circulation of philosophical sociological ideas and theories surely could help give an answer to this question.