The Unexpected in Action: Ethics, Rationality, and Skills 3031267923, 9783031267925

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Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences

Antonio Cocozza

The Unexpected in Action Ethics, Rationality, and Skills

Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences Series Editor Jaan Valsiner, Department of Communication and Psychology Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark

Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences will fill in the gap in the existing coverage of links between new theoretical advancements in the social and human sciences and their historical roots. Making that linkage is crucial for the interdisciplinary synthesis across the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, semiotics, and the political sciences. In contemporary human sciences of the 21st there exists increasing differentiation between neurosciences and all other sciences that are aimed at making sense of the complex social, psychological, and political processes. Thus new series has the purpose of (1) coordinating such efforts across the borders of existing human and social sciences, (2) providing an arena for possible inter-disciplinary theoretical syntheses, (3) bring into attention of our contemporary scientific community innovative ideas that have been lost in the dustbin of history for no good reasons, and (4) provide an arena for international communication between social and human scientists across the World.

Antonio Cocozza

The Unexpected in Action Ethics, Rationality, and Skills

Antonio Cocozza Department of Education Science University of Roma Tre Rome, Italy

ISSN 2523-8663     ISSN 2523-8671 (electronic) Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences ISBN 978-3-031-26792-5    ISBN 978-3-031-26793-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26793-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

Publishing a book on the “unexpected in action” and, above all, subtitling it “Ethics, Rationality and Skills” is a true knowledge-enhancing project. Even more than that, it has a pedagogical objective. Antonio Cocozza’s book consists, essentially, of explanations that favour a better understanding of the forms of rationality at work in social life – not a sole form of rationality only, as they are so many and varied… and complex, Edgar Morin would say – as well as ethical issues. In modern societies, citizens must act “responsibly” (be responsible for their actions and words, from the Latin word “respondero”, “I answer for what I do and say”!). The ethical dimension is studied, here, in its interactions with rationality and one might even denote a “dialogic” form, to use a concept dear to complex thought, which characterizes the author’s approach. It is philosophical, indeed, in both thought and “praxis” (concrete social life). No summary of his philosophy as in Epicurus. Little or no excessive and difficult theorization of interpretations, as in Plato. Everything unfolds as if the author were doing his utmost to return, usefully, to his own thought. This characteristic of the book is due, in large part, to the interlocutors that activate the demonstration. Too often, either due to folly or to an overly divergent conception of rationality, authors have sometimes prevented rationality, for example, that of Spinoza, from unfolding fully. In actual fact, analyses have hardly ever been followed! However, far from limiting himself to the classical rational approach, the author shows how the relationship between rationality, difficulties in thinking (simply), and irrationality is considered or, in any case, put in order by him. Antonio Cocozza’s book makes reason fully resonate and, therefore, in the end, rationality, in all its configurations, and irrationality as well. We understand, in filigree as it were, what can be decisive in rationality, and understand that the interpretation proposed here implies the following: (a) rationality appears in a very unusual light for present-day sociology, neither purely abstract (conceptual) nor simply concrete; (b) the idea of philosophy (and sociology features centrally in the book, as is epistemology!), which emerges from the chapters of the book, means that it is no longer necessary to oppose rationality (and ethics too), epistemology (problematic and concepts), and methodology (field and methods) to understand them; (c) this leads to a redefinition of rationality by prompting reflection on certain forms of v

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irrationality. The object of the book, as it is easy to intuit, refers to what philosophy calls the “dualism of practical reason”; and at the end of his project, the author aims at founding ethics. It seems that the dualism of practical reason is the most important problem of the ethics of modern societies. But how does this dualism of practical reason appear? In what terms does it present itself and what place should it be given in the author’s attempt to found ethics? In the following paragraphs, we would like, first, to explain the concept of the dualism of practical reason and emphasize its status in ethics. First, the author has shown that dualism appears only because its ethics does not distinguish clearly between practical rationality and moral rationality, but establishes, more strongly, a kind of equation between rational action and moral rationality. In short, one can find dualism of practical reason in the attempt to found the rationality of action – or even the rationality of a short-term or long-term plan – and the foundation of morality. By this dualism, one might argue, in keeping with Spinoza, for example, that it is just as rational to maximize one’s own well-being as to strive to produce, by one’s action, the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people affected by one’s action. Moreover, among the questions and reflections which we shall call “epistemological” and which prompt us to read this beautiful book, we shall recall the links between the real and the rational, an issue which led by the father of German sociology, Max Weber, especially when he analysed the “rational coherence of religious dogma”, to use a formula proposed by a sociologist, collaborator, and a great friend of Raymond Boudon’s, Mohamed Cherkaoui. This way, the Weberian thesis draws the attention of readers to the importance of changes in Calvinist theology, in an attempt to understand the coherence, but also the scope of dogma, of predestination in economics. Moreover, Weber recalled that the (Protestant) ethic and the spirit of capitalism were actually consequences, unforeseen and unintended by the reformers – truly perverse effects as R. Boudon might have said. However, is it possible to deduce, on the one hand, all the propositions relating to Protestant asceticism as a moral code from the dogma of predestination, and the spirit of capitalism, on the other, as unintended and unforeseen consequences? More generally, do these so-­ called “unintentional” effects form only by-products of human actions, epiphenomena, or do they, on the contrary, constitute a type of phenomenon of such importance that Max Weber assigns them a central place in his general theory of action? Does their existence not support, rather, the holistic explanation – Marxist or Durkheimian, in particular – according to which men are the product of social structures that pre-­ exist them, rather than the creators of society? In fact, in a famous passage from The Protestant Ethic, Weber argues that one could logically deduce from Protestant rationalism all that characterizes modern civilization. The contribution of this work by Antonio Cocozza, which is a schematic reconstruction of the demonstration, although unfinished maybe, that the mechanisms of the production of the unexpected consequences of actions are real. He was right, in our opinion, to dismiss from the outset an ontological position of Hegel’s which Weber considers a “philosophical dogma”, capable of impeding scientific knowledge insofar as reality is not intrinsically rational and as its rationalization cannot be separated from given human

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activities. In actual fact, according to Weber, rationalization is twofold: it is objective when the researcher tries to highlight and analyse the actor’s motives and the means s/he uses to achieve an objective s/he sets her/himself. It is subjective when the individual explains or motivates his/her actions by claiming a value, political, religious, ethical, or other for it. To render something rational means being able to produce procedures, rules, or techniques capable of introducing coherence and efficiency into human actions. Finally, we understand, reading A.  Cocozza’s book, that rationalism depends both on economic rationalism and on the inclination of human beings to adopt certain patterns of ethical behaviour. Finally, the book teaches as much as informs, and this, from a rare position of intellectual openness, an original problematisation and excellent bibliographical references (Weber, Marx, Durkheim, Morin, Bauman, Pareto, Maffesoli, etc.), European as well as Anglo-American, for the most part. We learn a lot and the reader will soon see the benefit she/he can derive from reading a book that questions all dogmas, including scientific ones, and provides a felicitous epistemological perspective of rationality that lies at the heart both of the sociologies of “action” and those of “structuring”. In short, a complex work of sociology, which does not present itself as such, at first glance… To be read without moderation! Ali Aït Abdelmalek Professor des Universités en Sociologie (E.A.-LiRIS, Rennes 2, France) Rennes, France Editor Chief of the Collection “Philosophie et Epistémologie des Sciences Humaines et Sociales” (Editions Modulaires Européennes/E.M.E.) Bruxelles, Belgium

Preface

The book, already published in Italian and Spanish, analyses the role played by rationality in the history of social sciences, in order to propose a basically problematic interpretation of human action. In this perspective, various theories of rationality connected to the various attempts to provide an “interpretative perspective” useful for a more adequate understanding of individual organizational and institutional action are examined. For this purpose, the works of numerous classics are examined including Dahrendorf, Mannheim, Marx, Popper, Weber, and, in a different perspective, the contributions of Habermas, Luhmann, Parsons, and Schütz. A reflection is then proposed on the concrete theoretical perspectives opened by the criticisms of the theory of rational choice, taking into consideration the observations and proposals advanced by Antiseri, Boudon, Sen, and Simon. The contributions of Ardigò, Alexander, Cesareo, and Machiavelli and Pareto are studied in depth, regarding the “extra rational” and value dimension in human action. Furthermore, the perspectives outlined by Bauman, Beck, and Sennett are analysed, in order to get to deepen the “liquid rationality”, the Risikogesellshaft and the Risikoleben, but also the development of uncontrolled flexibility and the consequences on personal life. Finally, we wonder about the reasons for unexpected action and through the contribution of Nussbaum and Piketty on the strategic role played by ethics, rationality, and skills in postmodern societies.

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Abstract  This book, availing itself of an interdisciplinary perspective, intends to examine the conceptual implications of several theories of rationality, associated with the various attempts made to provide an “interpretative perspective” of use to a more adequate understanding of the individual, organisational, and institutional action, in the light of contributions made by authoritative scholars of sociological thinking and, more in general, of the social sciences. Following this analytic route, we intend to examine, first, the role played by reason and rationality in the history of the social sciences, to propose a problematic interpretation of human action. This kind of examination – the classification of the various theories – as we are well aware, leads to a discussion of the canonical dichotic distinction, on the one hand, between the sustained objectivism of the holistic approach and, on the other, of the subjectivism that supports the traditional individualistic choice. Secondly, as mentioned elsewhere (Cocozza, 2005, 2014a, 2016a), we intend to analyse the evolution of rationality in the era of the “liquid society and flexible man”, which permits us to witness the transition from the modern to the postmodern society. As regards this passage, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by the modern era. Here the words of Dahrendorf (1968, p. 134) come to our aid: “(…)the modern era, here we designate the history following the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Modernity is essentially rationality. The rationale is self-conscious, emancipated behaviour determined by the personal interests and beliefs used to ponder choices.” On the same wavelength and of particular interest, we have several observations made by Cavalli and Perucchi in their Introduction to Simmel’s masterpiece, The Philosophy of Money (1984, pp. 14–15), when they wrote that (…) modernity is not defined uniquely as the domain of “organic solidarity” (Durkheim), or of contractual relations based on “arbitrary will” (Tönnies), or of capitalist relations of production (Marx), or exclusively in terms of rationalisation and bureaucratisation (Weber), xi

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Introduction but it is all these aspects together. Just as the process that leads to modernity is a complex interweave of interdependent factors, so modernity itself is a complex interlock of interdependent elements that find the common denominator and the most adequate symbolic expression in money (…) Money, therefore, is like a double-edged sword, whose effects can be both liberating and enslaving while modernity, of which money is the symbol, can also be viewed in an ambiguous light, there is no room for certainties that justify triumphal visions of progress, or apocalyptic fore-sights of decadence. Simmel does not share certain late-romantic nostalgia for the pre-industrial and pre-modern world, neither does he share the Kulturpessimismus of the time.

In line with this paradigmatic approach, when dealing with the first conceptual node concerning the dichotomous conflict “holism/individualism”, it is necessary to make clear that the conception of rationality in society, called holistic, refers to the Greek term ὅλως (whole, total), while the term individualistic comes from the Latin in-divide us (undivided) which has its etymological roots in the Greek ἅτομος (indivisible). The holistic model proposes a conception of social action – and of its relative rationality  – according to which social institutions and structures condition and determine the actions of individuals, as in the case of theories inspired by Marxist thinking, or that of functionalism in sociology or structuralism in anthropology. The second approach, on the contrary, argues that society is simply a sum of individuals, whose actions and relative rationality are channelled into social and economic behaviour exclusively according to their individual preferences and aimed at achieving maximum satisfaction and/or requiring the slightest effort; this is what is posited by the theories of classical economics and those of methodological individualism in the social sciences. These are the two perspectives which, at the current state of sociological thinking, “remain fundamentally antithetical”, as Vincenzo Cesareo argued appropriately (1993, p. 111). In this direction, the present book hopes to provide a critical interpretation of works by scholars who strove to sound the terms of the irreconcilability of this historical structural dichotomy, as well as of attempts by other scholars to supersede the problems involved (Giddens, 1976, 1990, 2000; Alexander, 1982, 1987, 1988). The first theoretical axis from which this analysis starts is from the theoretical contributions of Max Weber (1958a, b, 1965a, b, 1968a, b, 1993), Karl Mannheim (1970, 1974, 1998), Herbert Marcuse (1967a, b, 1968), and Ralf Dahrendorf (1971, 1988a, b, 1995, 2003) on the issue of formal rationality and substantial rationality, to arrive at the analysis of three thematic questions: the formal rationality of capitalist societies; the destiny of the individual in a rationalised world and the danger of reducing man to a sole dimension; social action in relation to the concept of opportunities in life. This analysis starts with a definition of the distinctive features of the rationalist model of western capitalist systems. This definition contains the following six distinctive elements: the increasing subjection of relationships to principles of rational control; the affirmation of Puritan ethics in life choices which we may call vocations (Beruf); the growing importance of technical knowledge and specialisation in economics, administration, and education; the objectification and standardisation of law, economics, politics, and consequent attention to the calculability

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of behaviour; the development of technically rational means that tend to control people and nature; the tendency whereby traditional, rational “value-guided” action is surpassed by intrinsically rational “goal-driven” action. We then continue with an analysis of Dahrendorf’s conceptual apparatus regarding the conflict existing within our societies between the availability of goods (provisions) and the right to access them (entitlement) (1988a, b, p. XIV) and the subsequent issue of the right of citizenship and life opportunities (1995). Regarding this issue, Leonardi (2019b, p. 8), while recalling another important concept of the Anglo-German sociologist, that of active freedom, stated that Dahrendorf’s active freedom was a tool which permitted us to grasp the dangers inside the dynamics of today’s social conflict, characterised by the non-recognition of diversity and pluralism, and which, accordingly, produces forms of social exclusion – it suffices to think of the problem of migrants and refugees. On the contrary, Dahren-dorf considered difference and plurality as the preconditions for the advancement of life opportunities.

Furthermore, to attempt an interpretation of rationality in human action according to Talcott Parsons (1979, 1986, 1995), Alfred Schütz (1974, 1979, 1995), and Jurgen Habermas (1970, 1976, 1980, 1986, 1991), we need to resort to the theory of voluntary action, to that of rationality as a function of the problems posed by everyday life and to explanations of social action in terms of communicative action. The theoretical aspects Parsons studied led him to frame the two main elements of his reference model: planning and the importance of normativity. His theory, as we know, was a response to positivist theories, which, in substance, failed to acknowledge that the two elements in question played any role in the conditioning of human action. At this point, it was deemed useful to discuss the contributions made by two other scholars (Schütz and Habermas) who, on the contrary, tended to demonstrate, respectively: that the actor does not always act with rationality aimed at carrying out a scientifically justifiable action, but acts “reasonably”, to address and solve problems of a daily and routine nature; that rationality is to be found in the logic of social action, which is rendered concrete through communicative action. With reference, instead, to the increasing degree of complexity of our post-­ modern societies, the book gives rise to a reflection on the relationships between rationality, environment, and complex systems, starting from the theses of Niklas Luhmann (1975, 1990b, 1991, 1996). The book intends to investigate the proposed analysis of the constant process of adaptation between the environment and the system, as well as the concepts of complexity, boundaries, and cognitive learning, indispensable to an understanding of the “structure” of Luhmann’s ideas. In particular, we examine the problems that have an impact upon the process of adaptation of the system to the environment, which tends to change its functions so it can dynamically stabilise its systemic structure. This analysis is conducted by examining the evolution of the role (and structure) of the law in our increasingly complex and globalised societies. After that, some of the main lines of research addressed by Karl Raimund Popper (1970, 1972a, 1975, 2002) concerning the interactions between rationalism, irrationalism, and pseudo-rationality are examined. Popperian thinking takes into

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consideration the problems posed by the clash between rationalism and irrationalism, indicating them as one of the oldest questions of scientific speculation, where willingness or unwillingness to “listen to critical arguments and learn from experience” are counterpoised. Furthermore, two of the central topics that Popper addressed are pinpointed. The first concerns the relationship between rationalism and Marxism; the second deals with problems relating to possible interactions between pseudo-rationality and utopian thought. As regards the first issue, Popper, in Conjectures and Refutations (1972a), in Open Society and its Enemies (1973), and in Misery of Historicism (1975), addresses numerous critiques of the Marxian theoretical system. Marxism – he says – can no longer be considered scientific, since it has been repeatedly falsified, it can only be described as non-science. Furthermore, on the other problematic issue, Popper observes that the utopian attitude runs contrary to that of reasonableness; it seems to present itself with characteristics of rigorous, extreme rationality. In reality, the unattainable social perspective pursued in this manner conceals a pathway affected by clear pseudo-rationalism (1972a, p.  612). The latter is a problem which re-­ proposes a classical form of opposition between open and closed societies, analysed in recent studies, too and which recalls the classical dichotomous distinction applied to societies (between two possible ideal types) and investigated by numerous scholars throughout the history of sociology (Cesareo, 1998, p. 16). This examination of the principal theories of the problems posed to sociological thinking by rationality involves an in-depth investigation of the theoretical perspective underlying the methodological individualism proposed by Carl Menger (1871, 1883), Ludwig von Mises (1949), Friedrich A. von Hayek (1967, 1988), and Karl Raimund Popper (2002), and more recently by Raymond Boudon (1970, 1977; Boudon et  al. 2002) and Dario Antiseri (1989, 1993, 2002a) who provide, albeit with different tones and emphases, epistemological reflections on the fundamental role of the individual in society and the perverse effects of intentional rationality. From methodological individualism, the book moves on to examine the theory of rational choice, to analyse its potential as well as its inevitable criticalities. As we know, this theory sustains that the rational agent acts solely driven by instrumental rationality (consequentialist and/or selfish and/or based on cost-benefit calculations). This means that given a purpose, it is simply a question of identifying the most suitable means by which to achieve it. This volume presents and examines, in particular, the fundamental theoretical propositions and the contribution made by this theory’s game theory, also known as the Rational Choice Model, used extensively in the economic and social sciences. The latter theory, in particular, by proposing different modes of interaction between the different players, as in the case of the famous prisoner’s dilemma (Dawes, 1980; Schütz et al., 1994; Yamagishi, 1995; Liebrand & Messick, 1996), highlights the fact that the actor is not moved necessarily by a sole individualistic and utilitarian intention, since in some cases this would not permit him/her to maximise the expected results. The book proposes an in-­depth study of the problems underlying the rational choice of the collective actor deemed one of the major criticalities inherent in this type of theoretical proposition, as demonstrated by Arrow (1977) when discussing public choices and by Olson (1965)

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when presenting an important reflection on the role of free-riders when seeking a rational explanation for collective conduct. Finally, we question ourselves about the possibilities and the concrete theoretical perspectives made available by adjustments to the rational theory that surpass the individualistic logic and its relative utilitarian choice upon which this theory is based. We then take into consideration the criticism of some authoritative scholars, including Herbert Simon (1958, 1984, 1986), who questions the classical formulation of this theoretical model when he formulated his theory of bounded rationality; Michel Crozier (1969, 1990), who advanced the interesting notion of strategic rationality; finally, Amartya Kamur Sen (1986a, b, 1988, 1990, 2004), who proposed an interesting interpretation of the role of self-interest and the theory of social choices within the context of orientations that were not necessarily dictated by an exclusively individualistic logic, but by a tendency towards commitment and altruism. These critiques sought to designate some of the theoretical areas of this model – though they required rethinking in some of its parts (or passages)  – as a logical structure and no mere definition, given the great credit it still enjoys today as a theory of rational choice used in many fields, including economics and the social sciences. After that, a reflection regarding the theses of Vilfredo Pareto (1964), Achille Ardigò (1980, 1988, 1990), and Jeffrey C.  Alexander (1982, 1987, 1988) is presented. These scholars dealt with the extra-rational dimension of human action, a problem still largely unexplored and of considerable interest to the development of research into theories of rationality (and their understanding). The analysis of the role of rationality in sociological thinking, therefore, follows a pathway that includes various insights by several authors. The purpose is to present not only a chronological account of the evolution of the theories of the rational in human action, but also the different points of view which highlighted, from time to time, the prevalence of a holistic or the individualist option, or important attempts made to supersede the holist-individualist binomial. This analytical pathway, as mentioned already above, starts in the second chapter with Weber’s elaborations on the main ideal types of rationality (zweckrational and wertrational) to focus on the debate fuelled by the contributions of two important European sociologists of the calibre of Mannheim and Marcuse regarding topics of formal rationality and substantial rationality and their congruence. It also dwells on the way this diatribe continues today within the ambit of sociological discussion, particularly in the works of Dahrendorf. In the third and fourth chapters, the contributions of numerous scholars on the evolution of the concept and role of rationality in very recent sociological theories are examined in depth, starting from Parsons’ voluntaristic elaborations and arriving at Schütz’s phenomenological ones, Habermas’ communicative action, and Luhmann’s systemic and autopoietic action. In the fifth chapter, the focus is on Popper who (after Weber) strongly re-advocated the point of view of individualism in scientific thought and, with von Hayek and von Mises, laid the theoretical basis for subsequent developments in this direction. In the sixth chapter, we see how Boudon and Antiseri probed deeper into this position, which gained considerable

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space within the specific field of sociology, particularly among authors from Homans to Coleman who referred to the theory of rational choice. To contribute to a resolution of the holism-individualism binomial, the analysis of recent sociological thinking on rationality carried out here ends with a heuristic hypothesis with a two-fold interpretative key. This key takes into consideration, on the one hand, the theories which sought to supersede the theory of rational choice proposed by Si-mon and Sen and, on the other, provides a critical reflection on the need to understand the extra-rational when seeking to explain human action based on what scholars like Pareto, Ardigò, Maffesoli, and Alexander posited, as well as on the precious theoretical and methodological contribution made by Giddens. This heuristic attempt belongs, therefore, to the joint effort made by several different authors, who intend to go beyond the limits set by the holism-individualism binomial, to advance an interpretative model capable of understanding the problematic nature of human action and its rationality more adequately. Moreover, as Tognonato (2019, p. 170) pointed out in a recent publication edited by Leonardi (2019b), in honour of Dahrendorf entitled Beyond borders: Ralf Dahrendorf’s legacy: Human reality presents a paradox: on the one hand, it expresses the perfection of electronic technology, the speed of computers, and the abstract purity of virtual reality, on the other hand, the inaccuracy and precariousness of human action. It is an asymmetrical confrontation guided by utilitarian and instrumental rationality between the individual and her/his creations. A confrontation where the subject is moulded more and more is the logical consequence of a process in which s/he feels more active than acting, while inertia seems to proceed unchallenged. The virtual world is a haven, unexceptionable, with infinite resources in which to stretch our imaginations effortlessly. However, it is difficult to deal with the real, with the imperfections, precariousness, and contradictions of individuals.

It is a question, therefore, of making a new investigative effort while remaining aware of the Weberian assumption regarding the value-free role of science, since, as Statera (1990, p. 14) observed, “Self-worth – in the sense in which Weber intended it, more later, John Dewey – does not mean the absence of values, but the absence of prescriptions, that is, of value judgments in the normative sense”. In line with this heuristic approach, it is, therefore, necessary not only to explore the phenomenon from a broader observation point but, above all, to adopt a more complex scientific research methodology, since, as Bruschi argued, “(…) the term ‘research’ means that set of activities that make up the productive process of science… activity characterised by affective and intellectual elements, that can be rational and a-rational, sometimes intuitive and imaginative, sometimes precise and binding” (1999, p. 13). Given that science is a historically and socially contextualised human activity, it can only be considered fallible, conjectural, and hypothetical, even if it is necessary to emphasise that its results (scientific knowledge) remain the most effective form of critical knowledge. These reasons lead us to consider the very rationality of science not as absolute truth, but as hypothetical and revisable scientific knowledge, limited and relative to the time and historical-social context in which it was developed.

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In other words, it is through one’s critical capacity that one can devise a series of hypotheses and theories that may be falsified empirically. As Popper argues, although in science we do our best to find the truth, we are aware that we can never be sure of having found it. We have learned in the past, from many disappointments, that we must never expect anything definite. And we have learned not to be discouraged anymore if our scientific theories are disproved; in fact, we can, in most cases, establish with great certainty which of two theories is the best. We can then know that we are making progress, and it is this knowledge that compensates most of us for the loss of the illusion of ultimate certainty. In other words, we know that our scientific theories must always remain hypotheses, but that, in many important cases, we can establish whether or not a new hypothesis is superior to another old hypothesis. For, if they are different, they will give rise to different predictions which can often be experimentally ascertained; and, based on such decisive experimentation, we can sometimes find that the new theory brings satisfactory results; while the old one falls apart. Thus, we can say that, in our search for truth, we have replaced scientific certainty with scientific progress. (1976, pp. 22–23)

Speaking of questions of method, it is necessary to highlight the fact that this volume has a mainly didactic purpose and, for this reason, in the course of the book it has been deliberately chosen to present the thinking of the authors treated, without tackling critical remarks. In line with this approach, concerning phenomena closer to our times, the last two chapters deal with the topic of the evolution of rational action, as problematic deeds, within the personal, collective, and institutional spheres, based on contributions by Bauman and Beck as well as Sennett’s “liquid rationality”. When analysing these important authors, we deal with the criticism associated with the flexibility and consequences of the new capitalism, as well as the extension of Risikogesellshaft and Risikoleben. This development is part of an innovative framework that witnesses the definitive emergence of a transition from modern to postmodern society and, simultaneously, the advent of globalisation. More specifically, we start from an analysis of the extremely pervasive phenomenon of market globalisation, which, when related to the development of technological and organisational innovation, strongly conditions professional choices and the determination of the conditions of quality of everyday life. This is a phenomenon of extreme importance when analysing the evolution of models of rationality, which the Italian online Encyclopedia Treccani (the Treccani Encyclopaedia) defines as: A phenomenon of unification of worldwide markets, aided by the spread of technological innovation, especially in the field of telematics, which has produced a thrust towards more uniform and convergent models of consumption and production. On the one hand, we are witnessing a progressive, irreversible homogenisation of needs and a consequent disappearance of the traditional differences between the tastes of consumers at national or regional level; on the other hand, companies are better able to exploit significant economies of scale in the production, distribution and marketing of products, especially of standardised consumer goods, and practise low-price policies to penetrate all markets. The company that operates in a global market, therefore, sells the same product all over the world and adopts uniform strategies, unlike the multinational company, whose objective is, instead, to accommodate the variety of conditions present in the countries in which it operates.

Within this new scenario, a process of continuous change begins. It transforms the systems of communication and relations, but, above all, modifies the logic of the

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rational deeds of the actors to create unprecedented social action that, simultaneously, includes the governance of a mix of relational modalities, until then differentiated, of a conflictual, negotiating, and collaborative type, aimed at achieving a shared result. This conceptual framework foresees negotiation, a new relational modality to be acquired, as “an economic and social process in which two or more actors (or parties) with common and conflicting interests meet temporarily and voluntarily to discuss, for the ultimate purpose of reaching an agreement of mutual satisfaction” (Cocozza, 2014a, b, c, p. 161). In other words, in the definition of the concept of negotiation, as Provasi (1987, p. 15) clarifies, negotiation exists whenever two or more subjects with diverse interests and values intend (or are forced) to reach a compromise regarding these differences. In other words, negotiation takes place whenever conflicting and antagonistic relationships are obliged to coexist with elements of cooperation or coordination. As we are aware, this kind of situation recurs in industrial relations where, even in the presence of divergences of interests and values, the parties are obliged – given their mutual interdependence and the impossibility of unilaterally asserting their points of view – to seek and reach agreements capable of guaranteeing that minimum of coordination indispensable for the survival of the system to which both belong and whose fate they share. It is, therefore, a complex economic and social process that has as its objective the acquisition of more advanced levels of progress, as an antidote to the maximum diffusion of inequality, in the passage from modernity to postmodernity. As Bourdier writes (Dahrendorf, 1991, p. 58): In the course of human history, modernity is nothing but the extension of life opportunities to an increasing number of people. Modernity makes the individual central at both ideological and factual level, it means that the individual is free to enter into contracts, enjoy social mobility, political participation and a minimum level of well-being.

In line with this perspective, it might be argued that, in this era of globalisation, we are facing a profound bouleversement, that is an upheaval or what Beck (2017) calls a process of “metamorphosis”. The German scholar Beck (2017) recalls that our world is traversed by a veritable process of metamorphosis: it is not social change, it is not transformation, it is not evolution, it is not revolution, it is not only discontinuity, it also is not a crisis. Metamorphosis is a way of changing the nature of human existence. It calls into question our way of being in the world. It is undeniable that we live in a world that is increasingly difficult to decode. It is not a simple change it is metamorphosis. What was previously excluded a priori, because inconceivable, happens. These are global events that generally go unnoticed and assert themselves, beyond the sphere of politics and democracy, as secondary effects of a radical technical and economic modernisation. In keeping with this heuristic vision regarding the transformation of the very “nature of human existence”, it is possible to hold that Simmel’s fundamental book, The Philosophy of Money (1984), originally published in 1900, provided a surprisingly topical analytical scheme and an extremely useful view of the interpretation of

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the process of “metamorphosis” that characterises the transition from modern to postmodern society (Beck, 2017). In his analysis and conceptual apparatus, the clarity of the vision of the crisis is particularly striking. He sees it as a complex and permanent event, determined by a set of interrelated contributing causes, which cannot be definitively surpassed, especially in a structuralist or deterministic perspective. Ultimately, the book seeks to demonstrate that, within a multifaceted and global scenario, affected by a process of continuous increasingly complex metamorphoses, it is no longer possible to understand the reality of human action and its interconnections with its associated worlds. Its vital conceptual scheme oriented towards the Rational Choice Model has as its main explanation the idea that in social action the individual (homo oeconomicus) constantly avails himself of a utilitarian logic. For this reason, we propose developing a new conceptual reference framework better suited to the paradigm of homo sociologicus. A social actor can understand the complexity of the innumerable variables involved, including the utilitarian type preference, based on a new conceptual apparatus inspired by the values ​​of responsible freedom,1 in the context of which the legitimate individual interest can only be acted upon in a logic of altruistic exchange, and the principles of Coopetition, which consists of a process of collaboration between business competitors, in the hope of mutually beneficial results.

 This concept was introduced by the philosopher and historian Adolfo Omodeo, who for several years was the closest collaborator of Benedetto Croce, until the end of their rapport due to differences regarding the evaluation of fascism. Their divergence manifested itself with the Matteotti murder, which took place on 10 June 1924. This event marked a point of no return in his relations with Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. 1

There are many shapes of divinity and many things the gods accomplish against our expectations. What men expect is not brought to pass but a god finds a way to achieve the unexpected.  – Euripides (Alcestis, 1159 (English translation from the Greek by David Kovacs, Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1994)) The twentieth century discovered the loss of the future, that is, its unpredictability. This awareness must be accompanied by another, retroactive and correlative: that according to which human history has been and remains an unknown adventure. Finally, a great achievement of intelligence will be to be able to get rid of the illusion of predicting human destiny. The future remains open and unpredictable.  – Edgar Morin

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues Vincenzo Cesareo and Marco Caselli of the Catholic University of Milan, Simona Andrini, Marco Burgalassi, Carmelina Chiara Canta, Roberto Cipriani, Cecilia Costa, Vittorio Cotesta, Federico D’Agostino, Luca Diotallevi of Rome’s RomaTre University, Andrea Bixio, Luigi Frudà, and Mario Morcellini of Rome’s Sapienza University, Massimo Baldini of the Luiss Guido Carli (in memoriam), and Mauro Palumbo of the University of Genoa for the valuable advice they gave me, so that I might improve the various editions of this volume. My thanks go also to Paolino Serreri and Emanuela Proietti, researchers at the Cress-Ielpo Centre of the RomaTre University, who carried out an attentive reading aimed, respectively, at revising and editing the text. Special thanks to Francesca Greco who edited the English version of the book.

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Contents

1 Reason  and Rationality in Sociological Thinking: Interpreting Human Action as a Problem ����������������������������������������������    1 1 The Evolution of the Concept of Rationality in Sociological Thinking ����������������������������������������������������������������������    1 2 Superseding the Structural Dichotomy of the Holistic and Individualistic Approaches: Attempts and Statements ������������������    7 2 Formal  Rationality and Substantial Rationality from Max Weber to Ralf Dahrendorf������������������������������������������������������   15 1 The Formal Rationality of the Capitalist Society����������������������������������   15 2 The Fate of Society and the Individual in a Rationalised World����������   24 3 Social Action, Provisions, Entitlement, and Life Opportunities ����������   27 3 The  Interpretation of Rationality in Human Action from Talcott Parsons, to Alfred Schütz and Jürgen Habermas������������   35 1 The Voluntarist Theory of Action����������������������������������������������������������   35 2 Rationality and Problems of Everyday Life������������������������������������������   40 3 Social and Communicative Action��������������������������������������������������������   43 4 Rationality,  Environment, and Complex Systems in the Theses of Niklas Luhmann������������������������������������������������������������   51 1 Environment and System: A Constant Process of Adaptation��������������   51 2 Selection, Communication, and Rationality�����������������������������������������   56 5 R  ationalism, Irrationalism, and Pseudo-­rationality in the Thinking of Karl Marx and Karl R. Popper��������������������������������   61 1 The Contrast Between Rationalism and Irrationalism: A Vexata Quaestio��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   61 2 The Diatribe Between Rationalism and Marxism��������������������������������   65 3 The Pseudo-rationality of the Utopians������������������������������������������������   68

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6 The  Theory of Rational Choice: Potential and Criticality��������������������   75 1 The Theory of Rational Choice or Methodological Individualism����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   75 2 The Main Theoretical Propositions of Rational Choice from George Homans to James Coleman ��������������������������������   80 3 Rational Choice and the Collective Actor ��������������������������������������������   87 7 Towards  the Supersedure of Utilitarianism��������������������������������������������   91 1 Herbert Simon’s Bounded Rationality��������������������������������������������������   91 2 The Role of Amartya Kamur Sen’s Theory of Social Choices ������������   95 3 The Extra-Rational Dimension of Human Action, from Vilfredo Pareto to Achille Ardigò, Michel Maffesoli, and Jeffrey C. Alexander ����������������������������������������������������������������������   99 8 The  Upsurge of Postmodern Society and the Contributions of Bauman, Beck, and Sennett������������������������������������������������������������������  109 1 From Solid Bodies to “Liquid Rationality”������������������������������������������  109 2 Risikogesellshaft and Risikoleben��������������������������������������������������������  113 3 The Flexible Man and the Consequences for Personal Life ����������������  116 9 Ethics,  Rationality, and Competences in Twenty-First Century Capitalism: The Perspective of Piketty, Nussbaum, and Morin������������������������������������������������������������������������������  119 1 Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century Between Utilitarianism and Social Cohesion������������������������������������������������������  119 2 Culture and Skills to Fight Barbarism��������������������������������������������������  125 3 A New Ethic of a Society of Capabilities ��������������������������������������������  128 Conclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  135 Post Faction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  151 Bibliography ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  155 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  169

Chapter 1

Reason and Rationality in Sociological Thinking: Interpreting Human Action as a Problem

The role played by reason and rationality in the history of the social sciences is examined to propose a problematic interpretation of human action and to discuss the canonical dichotic distinction between the sustained objectivism of the holistic approach and the subjectivism of the traditional individualistic choice. The purpose is to present not only a chronological account of the evolution of the theories of the rational in human action, but also the different theoretical which highlighted, from time to time, the prevalence of a holistic or the individualist option, or important attempts made to supersede the holist-individualist binomial.

1 The Evolution of the Concept of Rationality in Sociological Thinking The history of sociological thinking is a constellation of continuous intertwining and conceptual interchange with philosophy. Of the aspects belonging to this process of mutual exchange, two concepts that undoubtedly converge will be dealt with here; they are reason and rationality. The first concept, as Izzo recalls in one of his essays on the question of rationality in sociological thinking, dominated the entire course of philosophical thought for a long historical period, starting with the great philosophers of ancient Greece who held that the reason which guided human behaviour “constituted the certain and universal principle to which reference should be made to transcend the particularities of the sensible and the individually questionable” (1995, p. 11). The development of philosophical thought brought to light considerable differences over the last few centuries, which registered divergent theoretical positions. The two opposite poles are Hegel’s dialectical idealism (from which Marx’s

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historical materialism stemmed) and Comte’s positivism. However, the classical philosophical approach to rationality underwent a crisis especially when the development of the social sciences demonstrated, empirically, that reason (and the relative rationality of behaviour) could not be considered certain and universal but a phenomenon conditioned by changing historical, economic, and social conditions. A fundamental role regarding this crisis was played by the contribution made by sociological thinking. Sociology, starting from the theories of Comte (1967a, b, 1985) and Spencer (1967a, b, 1982) and arriving at those of Durkheim (1962a, b, 1969a, b, 1978), Weber (1948a, b, 1958a, b, 1965a, b, 1968a, b, 1970, 1993), Tönnies (1963a, b) and Simmel (1982a, b, 1983a, b), investigated the relationships existing between the kind of rationality adopted and the specific modalities using which certain evolutionary phenomena manifested themselves historically, in association with particular explicatory variables. From this position, some fundamental phenomena favouring an understanding of the rationality of social and organisational activities have been analysed from a sociological point of view. One such phenomenon is the creation of norms and values and the influence of religious beliefs as well as the development of the economic system, and its interdependence with the social structure. According to Giddens (2000, p. 15): Social structure refers to the fact that human activities are not random, but socially structured and that there are regularities in our behaviour and relationships. The social structure, however, is not the same as a physical structure, like a building that exists independently of human action. Human societies are continually rebuilt using the “bricks” that compose them: human beings. Structuring is, therefore, a two-way process. Although everyone is influenced by the social contexts in which they belong, no one’s behaviour is determined simply by those contexts. Our activities structure the social world around us while, simultaneously, we are structured by it.

As well as by “social role”, we need to understand (Giddens, 2000, p. 34): “the set of socially defined behaviour styles that we expect from those who enjoy a certain status or hold a social position”. The role of variables of fundamental importance and considerable explanatory significance was examined, within this paradigmatic frame of reference. These variables included social cohesion and anomie, or power and the various forms of command. The theories of the fathers of sociology (Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim) highlighted and provoked the crisis of classical rationality, which referred to a pre-­ established divine or natural order. Durkheim, Tönnies, Simmel, and Weber, in particular, extended this critique to cover other theoretical constructions based on the pre-established processes by dialectical logic (Hegelian) or grounded in the standpoint which believed in the evolution of society in terms of historical materialism (Marxian). The deterministic conception of history led Marx to argue regarding the social revolution of the bourgeoisie (the industrial revolution), that “the means of production and exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage of the development of these

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means of production and exchange (…), the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces. Those conditions, instead of favouring production, jammed it, they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder” (The Communist Manifesto, Penguin Classics, 1967, p. 225). In other words, both the founders of sociology and the classics of sociological thinking introduced a “constructivist” type logic, where the action of society or the individual human being, respectively, proceeded without pre-defined order or conditioning, and tended, therefore, to determine and freely “build” reality. During that period, Weber (as well as for Dilthey, Rickert, and Jaspers) made a fundamental methodological distinction whereby sociology proceeded down the pathway of understanding (Verstehen), while the natural sciences took that of explanation (Erklären). Referring to this point, Boudon reminds us that, “in the first case, it is a matter of analysing the relations between signs that are immediately significant for the observer; in the second case, it is a matter of deciphering the relations between things” (1970, p. 22). He then went on to add that this opposition was false and no longer made sense in the practice of sociology since Weber’s comprehensive approach failed to account for all social phenomena and concluded that “far from being a method characteristic of the social sciences, it corresponds rather to a moment or phase found in almost all sociological research, the importance of which varies from research to research, but which is never sufficient on its own so, therefore, does not constitute a method” (ivi, p. 24). For the philosophy and (above all) for the sociological thinking of the twentieth century, reason and rationality were no longer a “perfectly integrated binomial”. The crisis of the first construct also involved the second in a total debacle, which required a theoretical re-development of the one and the other. In this context, a fundamental role, as we shall see in greater detail in the following chapters, was played by original contributions made by authoritative scholars. Mannheim’s and Dahrendorf’s research, in the wake of Weberian thought, made a distinction between the formal and substantial rationality of capitalist society. Parsons attempted to devise a voluntarist theory of action. Schütz, Habermas, and Luhmann led a critique of the Parsonsian scheme in an attempt to surpass it, in terms, respectively, of phenomenology, of systems oriented by communicative or structural-functionalistic action. Simon and Sen contributed to a reworking of the theory of rational choice. Popper, Boudon, and Antiseri assumed a critical view of justifying rationality and based their theoretical framework on methodological individualism. Pareto, Garfinkel, Ardigò, Giddens, and Alexander, albeit with different nuances, drew the attention of scholars to the importance of extra-rational elements and the role of the subject and laid the foundations of a multifaceted theory. The themes of the crisis of reason and the critique of the rationality of the capitalist system are also present in the theories of the Frankfurt School, in particular in some highly significant works like Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason (1969), Reason and Revolution (1966), Marcuse’s The One-Dimensional Man (1970) and Adorno’s Negative Dialectic (1970). Horkheimer, Adorno and other scholars belonging to the

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Frankfurt school devised a critical theory of society and then published some works of notable interest for the studies of society, like Sociology lessons (1966a), Dialectic of Enlightenment (1966b), and the important Studies on Authority and the Family (1974). From a different position, the Italian Ferrarotti provided an interpretation of the crisis of reason in sociology. Not wishing to renounce the criterion of rationality, he indicated a way to seek a “non-rationalistic rationality“(1979–80, p.  11), which meant no longer considering the human being according to the logic of “thought-­ action” alone and the object of pure intellectualistic thinking; it was necessary to add instinct and feelings, to make it possible to observe a person in her/his totality (ibid., p. 15). Upon the plane of the methodology and epistemology of the social sciences, an authentic interpretative revolution took place, thanks above all to Popper who proposed abandoning the logic of “scientific certainty” and acquiring in that of “scientific progress” instead (1969, 1970, 1972a). In line with the Popperian approach regarding issues related to the rationality of scientific theories, in particular, Antiseri argues that “according to an ideology rooted deeply in our tradition, the rational are those who found what they propose, those who demonstrate their theories (scientific, ethical, political or metaphysical). In short, the rational were people who tell the truth, who know how to find – through demonstrative argumentation – a stable foundation, even incontrovertible, for their theories. This is the theoretical core of the justifications image of reason or, if one prefers, of robust thinking: rationality is associated with the discovery of the fundamentum inconcussum of what is affirmed in science or metaphysics or what is proposed in ethics or politics” (1993, p.  45). Following this assertion, however, this Italian scholar asks himself whether the quest for a basis and a certain foundation in ethics, politics, science and philosophy, is rational. Antiseri, recalling the teaching of Popper (1969, 1972a) and Bartley (1983, 1990), believes that “there is nothing certain in science, in neither general statements nor singular statements. Every theory, however much confirmation it may have obtained, remains deniable in principle” (ibid., p.  46). In support of this theoretical proposition, Antiseri adds, “We believed that ‘all swans were white’ until we saw the black swans of Australia. Until Poincarè, it was thought that Newton’s mechanics (the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation) was an indestructible theory. Today, after Einstein, we know that this is not the case. In short, it is logically impossible to prove that any theory is certain, true; while it is logically possible to deny a theory, by providing facts to the contrary. We cannot verify (make true) a theory, but it is possible to falsify it (make false). If we are concerned with the progress of science, if we care about that irrationally chosen goal which is the achievement of more and more plausible theories, which resemble the truth, are richer in informative content, (explanatory and predictive), then we must try to falsify all and every theory” (ibid, pp. 46–47). Within this theoretical framework, the concept of rationality in the social sciences has assumed different meanings over time and, as we have begun to see, it concerns three specific areas: beliefs, actions, and scientific knowledge. In this

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book, we shall consider the first and second domains in some depth. These characterise a possible sociological understanding of human action most effectively since they link the sphere of belief directly with that of action (and necessarily with that of decision making). The third area will be treated only along general lines. As Gallino argued, even if there existed beliefs not followed by actions, it was unlikely to hypothesise that action was not driven or oriented by beliefs, even if only implicitly so (1993, p. 531), or that some subjects, as agents or actors, were not fully aware of this rapport. An actor is a subject who assumes various social roles and acts according to them. Giddens specifies that it is social roles that generate a “set of socially defined expectations that are respected by subjects placed in a specific social status or position” (2000, p. 86). Here the reference to Goffman’s studies on social interaction is evident, whereby a large portion of social life might be represented, like in a theatrical work, with moments when one is in the limelight and moments when one withdraws into the background (1969, p.  149). A plurality of situations involves an alternation of behaviour directly related to the roles played, which can vary according to the changes of role (and position) the actor undergoes, on whether he is in the limelight or in the wings. As Giddens points out, the limelight is constituted by social circumstances or encounters during which individuals act according to formulaic or codified roles, in a sort of “staging.” When they are in the background and feel safe “off stage,” people are in a position to relax and give vent to feelings and behaviour that may not be socially acceptable and which they restrain and control on stage (2000, pp. 86–87). In these different spaces, an actor may behave at times in a dissonant manner, which might cause a scholar interested in analysing them to turn pale, from the point of view of rationality, precisely because of the profound metamorphosis and the considerable variety of behavioural styles observed. According to this approach, social action needs to be correlated to the different roles each actor plays in society and as Gallino explains with considerable precision in his Dictionary of Sociology, social action has a greater degree of rationality (concerning a purpose or a value) the more it satisfies the following conditions (1993, p. 531): 1. All the realistically possible alternatives in the situation in which subjects act are examined, and ranked in order of preference with regard to their usefulness from the point of view of the acting subject. 2. All the external variables that may affect the results of an action are identified, and the most probable outcome of the choice of each alternative calculated. 3. The consequences of the different alternatives in different fields, both in the short and long term, are identified based on logically and factually correct methods of induction and deduction. 4. The utility or value of each consequence is produced by cross-evaluating a certain internal and/or external variable, while the sum of each set of total consequences deriving from each alternative is compared, calculated and weighed.

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5. The choice of the alternative that, for the subject, presents the maximum degree of utility or value (no matter whether economic, emotional, political, etc.), is also the object of methodical decisional criteria, based on probabilities within the field and the greater degree of optimism or pessimism of the acting subject, etc. 6. The expected consequences of the alternative chosen, when the subject has carried out the previous operations, are not due to chance, but to an action actually and consciously undertaken. The above-illustrated approach might act as an effective model for an analysis of the rationality of a given social action (and, intrinsically, the degree of rationality of a given decision), seen not as an ideal model, but as a parameter for measuring the behaviour of a concrete subject, compared to that of another. Moreover, as we have already seen, it is never possible to analyse the rational line pursued to inform a given action and its related decision-making processes in an abstract, a-historical, and a-contextual manner. For these reasons, it is necessary to place the object of research within a specific historical-social context and use this model, as a parameter of measurement. However, the analytical approach presented here does not find linear confirmation in the history of sociological thinking, since the role (and the weight) of the actor’s action and the role (and the weight) of the environment as well as that of the social system within which the actor acts, have been the topic of controversy and different interpretations, to the point of giving rise to two different theories of reference. Alternatively, they postulate either the primacy of objectivism (determinism) based on the pre-eminence of conditioning by the social institution of the individual or vice versa or the primacy of subjectivism (voluntarism) based on the free unconditional choice of the individual. The former theoretical model sustains that action has an instrumental role concerning its ends, and that, therefore, all the means need to be adapted to favour the achievement of “predefined” ends. On the contrary, the supporters of the second model hold that individual choice contributes autonomously to the identification of the ends, and for this reason, it is founded on the autonomy of the ends. In other words, it might be concluded that we are faced with two different paradigms that propose alternative and irreconcilable “conceptual matrices”, meaning paradigms, as Kuhn pointed out, that are a “coordinated set of postulates, universal laws, and general theories that constitute the consolidated body of knowledge, categories and tools accepted by the scientific community” (1969, p. 49). These are paradigms that, in the social sciences, Kuhn observes, can also cause clashing – in disciplines like sociology, for example. For these reasons, the first model described here is characterised by a vision of external conditioning a form of objectivism which gives rise to a holistic paradigm; while the second is inscribed within a subjectivist perspective, endowed with the individual’s autonomous internal normative capacity which outlines an individualistic paradigm.

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2 Superseding the Structural Dichotomy of the Holistic and Individualistic Approaches: Attempts and Statements In line with what was previously indicated it is possible to analyse the decision-­ making process that leads to a social action according to two major theoretical paradigms, which tend to be irreconcilable and driven, respectively, by a form of logic that privileges the objective rather than the subjective dimension. These represent the two major sociological traditions that have conceptually dominated the history of sociological thinking over the last two centuries, and which refer respectively to Durkheim’s social fact, which is capable of exerting an external constraint on the individual and her/his behaviour; or Weberian social action, which represents the result of the individual’s thinking, feelings and participation, activities that collectivities (state, economic organisation, social class, family) are unable to carry out since they are simply the sum of the social activities of individuals. In the first holistic model, social structure plays a prevailing role with respect to the orientation of the behaviour and conditioning of decision-making processes of individuals, while in the second, the individualistic paradigm, the subject acts and decides based on her/his own choices, independently or, better still, without direct influence from external social institutions. In other words, these two different models are characterised by two diverse ways of looking at the functioning of society and the relationships between two opposite poles that it contains which are structure (social system) and action, but also social integration/conditioning and the degree of freedom of the individual. The diagram drawn up by Cesareo (1993) shows an effective summary of the comparison between the two interpretative paradigms, which have given rise to two different approaches to sociological analysis. This table considers several explanatory variables that distinguish between the two approaches. The purpose is to make the following distinctive elements clearer: the anthropological premises on which the theoretical scheme rests; the individual-­ society relationship; the nature of collective reality and social acts; the origin of social action and social phenomena; the causal power that determines social action; the object of analysis, which identifies the conceptual and interpretative categories of reality; the main problem from which sociological analysis moves and towards which it tends; the methodology that inspires sociological research; the scientific nature that underlies the heuristic and methodological choice; the existential conception that orients the theoretical paradigm and on which the same scientific conception of the researcher is based. In the course of the historical evolution of sociological thought, the main thinkers who proposed, albeit with different accents, a holistic model can be divided into two main categories, which give rise, on the one hand, to a structuralist form of holism (Durkheim, 1962a, b; but also Marx, 1954, 1960, 1964, 1968, 1969; Marx with Engels, 1962, 1969) and, on the other hand, a functionalist holism (Parsons, 1965, 1979, 1995; Parsons & Smelser, 1970; to some extent Luhmann, 1975, 1983a, b, 1990a, b, 1991, 1996; Habermas, 1969, 1970, 1976, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1991 1994).

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These latter scholars believe that society or the system  – availing itself of its structures, more precisely its social institutions or economic structures  – orients individuals and necessarily determines their actions, normatively. For individualists, on the other hand, social institutions are the sum of the actions of single individuals and rationality oriented mainly towards goals (Weber, 1958a, b, 1965a, b, 1966, 1970), either of a phenomenological or subjectivist type (Schütz, 1974, 1979, 1995; Ardigò 1980, 1988; Ardigò & Garelli, 1989), or oriented towards symbolic interactionism (GH Mead, 1918, 1964, 1972; Blumer, 1969), or, finally, interpreted in an ethnomethodological key (Garfinkel, 1967, 1983). This second paradigm includes among others the supporters of methodological individualism (Menger, 1871, 1883; von Mises, 1949; von Hayek, 1967; Popper, 1970, 1972a, b, 1975, 2002; Boudon 1970, 1977, 1980, 1985; Boudon et al., 2002; Antiseri, 1989, 1993, 1996, 2002a, b) who, while claiming a fundamental role for the action of individuals, maintain that rationality aimed at maximising results often ends up by producing perverse effects. On the contrary, they emphasise the fact that social institutions are never the result of the intentional actions of the subjects, but rather, paradoxically, the unintentional consequences of intentional actions, as we can read in the famous story The Fable of the Bees, which will be discussed in greater detail in Chap. 5 (Mandeville, 1714; Popper, 1975; Antiseri, 1989). The irreconcilable tendencies mentioned here have led some scholars to question the possibility of superseding them. Among these, it is necessary to recall the theses of Parsons and his voluntaristic theory, later taken up by Alexander; those of Habermas and his theoretical scheme based on communicative action; finally, those of Giddens and Cesareo. The contributions of Parsons, Alexander, and Habermas will be examined in greater detail in the following chapters, while we shall proceed to analyse the theoretical hypotheses advanced by Giddens and Cesareo immediately. The former of these two authors, a scholar at the University of Cambridge, hypothesised a “third way” in between these two paradigms, through the delineation of the theory of social action and a concept which recalls the duality of structure, to provide further explanatory elements of the dimension of the action of social actors. In the Giddensian scheme, the structure is conceived as an instrument that permits recursive orientation and organisation (constantly over time) of human conduct, though, simultaneously, it is the outcome of similar conduct. It is dualistic by character because it permits, encourages, and interacts with human action, though, simultaneously it cannot exist without action of this kind but is constantly involved in its production and re-production. Giddens’ theoretical effort aimed at addressing the long-standing question posed by the two different sociological paradigmatic approaches, holistic and individualistic, regarding the explanation of the antinomic relationships existing between action and structure. As mentioned above, in a theoretical way, in the first scheme, the individual undergoes conditioning by the social structure and institutions, while in the second humans determine their destiny, based on individual choices. Giddens, in his Central Problems in Social Theory (1979), bases his theory on a series of critical assumptions, from which he started with a view to highlighting the main theoretical gaps inherent to the two theoretical positions sustained by supporters of

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the holistic and individualistic approach, and lays the foundation of one capable of superseding the theoretical scheme that proposes the existence of an irreconcilable duality between structure and action. In fact, for Giddens, holism, in its functionalist and structuralist versions, privileges the role of structure over action, and focus their heuristic attention on the object rather than the subject of the action. Individualists, on the other hand, focus their attention on the action of the individual, without taking into due account the role played by other actors with whom s/he interacts, and the interaction itself created with the social institutions. It follows that the rationality of action finds its explanation (and needs to be sought), for the former, exclusively in the “social whole”, represented by the conditioning of structures and processes of socialisation (Parsons) or adaptation (Luhmann), while for the latter it is inherent in intentionality (Weber), or the unintentional effects (Popper) of individual action. In this theoretical framework, Giddens identifies two fundamental variables to explain the phenomenon of social action. They are represented respectively by the knowledgeability of human beings, and the influence of social processes upon the action of the actor, who is not always aware of it. This is an approach that, as Cesareo also points out, “emphasises the active role of the actor as a conscious agent and creator of his destiny, without, however, falling into subjectivism, since it also recognises the existence of social phenomena that go beyond the human being’s capacity for intentional determination. He is, therefore, conceived as a socially competent actor because he possesses much knowledge about the conditions of reproduction of the society to which he belongs” (1993, p. 96). Ultimately, Giddens’s theoretical scheme posited the need to surpass the paradigmatic incompatibility existing between holism and individualism (and between the primacy of structure and that of individual action), and places at the base of the explanation of the phenomenon of rationality that guides the actor, the synthesis produced by an exchange between three fundamental variables (1979, p. 56): the subjectivity of the actor, the unconscious, and unforeseen consequences. In the Giddensian theoretical scheme, the subjectivity of the actor is expressed in terms of three different instruments (reflexive control, rationalisation, and motivation), while the other two variables considered (the unconscious and unforeseen consequences) escape the possibility of direct control by the actor himself. Reflexive control is linked to the intentional character of human action, which in its concrete implementation becomes a practical, routine action; rationalisation, on the contrary, acts as a support to reflexive control and permits the actor to “make public” his ability to explain the reasons for his actions; motivation intervenes only exceptionally, at the moment when the action to be taken and the rationality to be activated go beyond routine daily social activity, even if a sort of motivation is always present (even unconsciously) in social action. Action, therefore, is always expressed in a specific space-time environment and has characteristics of specificity, which cannot be reiterated mechanically. In this theoretical scheme, social structures intended as “an organised set of rules and resources”, assume an important role, as they interact positively with actions and, thus, guarantee the possibility that the latter be able to express themselves at

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different spatial-temporal intervals, in a recognisable (and acceptable) form through everyday action. In this case, we are talking about semantic rules, which provide ordered sets of meaning and interpretative schemata, or moral rules, which indicate how to evaluate the conduct undertaken; and resources, intended as a set of capabilities or advantages that actors bring to bear to influence a process of interaction. In other words, for Giddens, through this kind of interaction, the process of structuring is set in motion. On the one hand, it contemplates the role of the social structures that condition the action of actors using normative, technical and cultural constraints. On the other it envisages that of the actors who, by their mode of action, interpret and modify those same constraints, thus setting in motion a process of production and reproduction of social organisation. An effective explanatory metaphor for this concept is that of the spoken language, where language represents the structure, the set of rules and resources we use to speak, but which is also the result of our action, which is never the same. In fact, in this regard, Giddens states, “Every act that contributes to the reproduction of a structure also constitutes an act of production, a new initiative, and as such can give rise to change by altering that structure in the same way that it reproduces it, in the same way, that the meaning of words changes in the course of and precisely through their use” (1979, p. 179). As Cesareo (1993) also notes, Giddens’ theoretical scheme has been the object of much criticism. Callinicos (1985) argues that power relations between those with greater responsibility in organisations and their subordinates cannot be explained, as Giddens proposes, by using the implausible justification of possibility of “action other than that imposed”, which attributes a primary role to the choices made by individual subjects, and thus, to the action of the single actor, over the role played by the structure. Cohen (1989), on the other hand, emphasises the fact that Giddens envisions that in the interaction between action and structure there is some sort of constant balance and equilibrium. Archer (1982), for his part, sees in the Giddensian scheme a sort of neo-dichotomy, represented, on the one hand, by the actor and the high degree of freedom assigned to him/her by Giddens in every circumstance, and which presupposes considerable possibilities of social change; on the other hand, he claims the essentially routinised character of everyday action, well-established within the environments where people live. In other words, Archer and Callinicos reproach Giddens for his inability to answer “when” the actor acts based on a transformative logic, availing himself of a high degree of freedom, and “when” s/he risks being trapped in everyday routinised action (ibid., p. 459). Finally, Bernstein (1989), in an appreciation of the work of Giddens, notes that, with his theory of social action, he makes a relevant contribution not only at a theoretical but also practical level, favouring a better understanding of the complexity of social interaction between individual action and the influence of social structures. From a methodological point of view, as already mentioned above, the innovation introduced by Giddens into the examination of the interaction between action and structure, and of the duality of structure, is of fundamental importance to sociology (in particular to the sociology of relations and organisations). This innovative approach permits us to analyse correctly the interaction between the role of structures and the actions of actors and create a synergic rapport between the

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micro-­sociological study of the processes of everyday life and the macro-sociological study of the great social, political, economic and cultural transformations of organisations. For these reasons, alongside major quantitative sociological analyses, it is increasingly possible to propose analyses of social phenomena and processes grounded in daily life, but which turn out to be significantly explanatory of the intrinsic social complexity within which structures and organisations move. In this same direction, Bonazzi argues that the “Structuration theory opens up a fascinating new research perspective on everyday interactions that develop within the most varied social contexts. It is a perspective that lends itself well to being incorporated into organisational analyses by authors eager to explore ethnographically how recurrent patterns of action are applied and simultaneously modified by the subjects’ actions” (2002, p. 183). In this sense, some scholars (Manning & Van Maanen, 1978; Barley, 1996; Barley & Kunda, 1992; Kunda, 2000) have carried out interesting research into organisations – in a non-oppositional interpretative key of relationships between holism and individualism, within an ethnographic and interactionist theoretical framework – like the American police, into work practices in scientific laboratories and the formation of professional communities. Weick’s work (1988, 1993, 1997) – which proposes reading (and considering) structures using his concept of sense-­ making, intended as a continuous process of attribution of meaning to individual and social (organisational) action, not as a reality external to and pre-existing human action, but as an entity emerging from a course of action – is also situated within this interpretive logic. The second scholar we intend to consider in this chapter, Cesareo, on the other hand, notes that the opposition between objectivism (holism) and subjectivism (individualism) highlights the shortcomings of both theoretical models, since, as each claims the primacy of either structure or action, do not take into account the fact that both variables assume a character of coessentiality (1993). For this reason, he suggests that we “assume such coessentiality as a perspective of analysis, of the rapport between action and structure, as it seems to correspond more to empirical findings concerning this very nexus” (Cesareo, p. 111). In particular, the theoretical assumption on which Cesareo intends to base his hypothesis is based on three conceptual premises and four paradigmatic statements. The three conceptual premises, which are intended to provide the theoretical reference basis from which to start and on which to carry out the subsequent elaborations, provide that (ibid., pp. 112–113): 1. Social phenomena are a human product, which favours an anthropological view (compared to that of nature) and in this context, the concept now acquired is that humans present themselves as organically unstable beings, which are consequently pressured by the need to operate in a most stable context possible. Even in the light of these affirmations, it can, however, be affirmed that it is always a human activity that creates the social world and its order. 2. Social phenomena are an objective reality: although created by humans, using processes of interdependence and interaction (when intentional actions are ­performed voluntarily and directed by the subjects), they acquire an autonomous

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existence of their own. The objectification of these elements occurs thanks to a multiplicity of processes which, in ways that are not always uniform, tend towards the construction of those “social facts” theorised by Durkheim, or towards “typification” as hypothesised by Schütz. The latter constitute particular models of behaviour that tend to guide human action and to affect the relationships between subjects themselves. 3. The human being is a social product who through her/his conscience, the fruit of primary and secondary socialisation, represents one of the main outcomes of the objectified social world. In this context, processes of socialisation tend to forge the individual and provide him/her with her/his personality; they represent the result of a series of the more or less systematic influences of the social system. In consideration of these three theoretical premises, Cesareo formulated four paradigmatic statements, which are the following (ibid., pp. 113–114): 1. Having ascertained the existence of a dynamic relationship between humans and their social world, it can be inferred that this connection is also to be found between the main products of human beings: action, and social structure itself. 2. The action-structure relationship is configured in dialectical terms, meaning that the former creates, produces, modifies, and even extinguishes the latter, which, in turn, conditions the former. What humans produce (structure) impacts on people whom it conditions. 3. For the two reasons explained above, it is possible to establish the primacy, though genetic, of social action over structure, as it is the basis of its formation; but when the structure has been established, it tends to acquire a kind of autonomy of its own and condition (at times, guide) the action of the individuals who have constituted it. 4. However, this primacy cannot be considered a condition of the absolute dependence of structure on the action, since their relationship would be understood better within the context of an interpretative category tending to define their complete interdependence; this interdependence is verifiable and measurable using an accurate and precise analysis of the historical-social context within which the two variables considered here actually act. Ultimately, for Cesareo, the relationship between action and structure, and, therefore, between individualism (voluntarism) and holism (determinism), can only be analysed by sociology through an indispensable contextualisation and historicisation of the phenomena examined, to favour comprehension of the link of full dynamic and dialectical interdependence existing between them. In reality, the variables in question, find greater meaning and explanatory capacity only when related to two further fundamental sociological concepts, such as role and socialisation. In our opinion, these are two concepts of considerable explanatory significance, which play a fundamental role, and appear necessary if one wants to understand the “complex processes” that guide human action, one of the most interesting and stimulating topics for scholars of the social sciences, but also for those who are culturally

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interested in a deeper understanding of human behaviour and in questioning its significance. Moreover, as Weber argued, in The cognitive objectivity of social science: “Knowledge of the sciences of culture as we intend it is bound to “subjective” presuppositions in that it deals only with those elements of reality that have a relationship – albeit indirect – with the processes to which we attribute cultural significance” (1958a, b, p. 98).

Chapter 2

Formal Rationality and Substantial Rationality from Max Weber to Ralf Dahrendorf

1  The Formal Rationality of the Capitalist Society The issue of the role of rationality in intentional human and social action, related to the development of the capitalist society, finds in Weber one of the modern age’s major interpreters of the phenomenon, the first scholar to provide a precise and exhaustive classification and a harbinger of significant explanatory developments. Weber deals in depth with the relationship between rational orientation and social action, providing a very precise clarification of the meaning of each of the concepts used, so as not to leave “areas of shadow” capable of compromising an adequate understanding both of social phenomena and of the functioning of society in general. In his monumental work Economy and Society, he pointed out that action “insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behaviour – be it overt or covert, omission or acquiescence – if and since the individual who acts or the individuals who act attribute subjective meaning to it” (Weber, 1968a, p. 4). On the other hand, he claimed “Not every type of contact of human beings has a social character; this is rather confined to cases where the actor’s behaviour is meaningfully oriented to that of others. For example, a mere collision of two cyclists may be compared to a natural event. On the other hand, their attempt to avoid hitting each other, or whatever insults, blows, or friendly discussion might follow the collision, would constitute ‘social action’” (ibidem). This elegant explanation of Weber enables us to recall the conceptual difference between two important concepts, interdependence, the first one, and interaction, the social action following the event, which Weber classifies as natural. In other words, as already mentioned in part, interdependence manifests itself in those occasional relationships between subjects, regardless of their will; while interaction is the outcome of series of exchanges between two or more subjects, implying an intentional initiative, therefore, a voluntary action on the part of the subjects themselves. For sociological analysis, as Cesareo argues, “Interdependence © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cocozza, The Unexpected in Action, Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26793-2_2

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and interaction are two dimensions that need to be considered jointly in analyses of the relationships that give birth to different social configurations” (1993, p. 139). For Weber, therefore, social action “endowed with meaning and culturally oriented” was expressed using four different orientations and may be determined (1968a, b, I, pp. 7–8): (a) Intentionally rational (zweckrational), that is, determined by expectations as to the behaviour of objects in the environment and other human beings; these expectations are used as “conditions” or “means” for the attainment of the actor’s own rationally pursued and calculated ends. (b) Value-rational (wertrational), that is, determined by belief in the value, for its own sake, of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or another form of behaviour, independently of its prospects of success. (c) Affectual (especially emotional), that is, determined by an actor’s specific affection and states of feeling. (d) Traditional, that is, determined by ingrained habituation. Of these four orientations, two of those in which Weber believed are the most profitable from the point of view of sociological interpretation. They are a greater capacity for an “understanding” of the reality determined in a rational way concerning the purpose of an action and that regarding value. As regards the first type of orientation of social action, Weber stated that the person “who orients her/his action based on the aim, the means, and the concomitant consequences, rationally measures the means in relation to the aims, the aims in relation to the consequences, and, finally, the different possible aims in a reciprocal relationship: in any case, s/he does not act, either affectively (particularly not emotionally) or traditionally. The decision between competing and colliding goals, and among the relative consequences, on its part, can be rationally oriented concerning value: then action is rational concerning the aim only based on its means. Otherwise, the acting individual can – regardless of any rational orientation concerning value, given ‘imperatives’ and ‘needs’  – arrange concurrent and conflicting purposes, considered simply as subjectively addressed needs, on a ranking scale established according to their urgency as consciously measured by him/her, and consequently, s/he can orient her/ his actions in such a way that they are satisfied, if possible, on the basis of this succession (principle of ‘marginal utility’). The orientation of rational action with respect to value can, therefore, be in very different relationships with the actor’s rational attitude towards purpose. From the point of view of the rationality of purpose, however, rationality concerning value is always irrational – and it is more and more irrational the more it raises the value given the action oriented towards an absolute value – this because it takes into account the lesser of the consequences of acting, the more it assumes the value in itself as unconditional (pure intention, beauty, absolute good, absolute conformity to duty). But absolute rationality concerning purpose is also only a case of limitation, of an essentially constructive character” (ibid., pp. 11–12). Regarding the orientation of rational social action with regard to value, Weber, while recognising the importance of its important role, as we shall see, does not

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believe that it is a truly widespread modality and relegates it to the category of irrational choices. He believed that this type of rationality failed to respond to one of the fundamental principles upon which the society of industrial capitalism was being built at the time: the calculability of the consequences of social action and the predictability of behaviour. Acting concerning value was, therefore, irrational for Weber since it did not calculate, did not measure, and did not consider the consequences of individuals’ choices, did not seek the coherence (today we would say the optimisation) of the relationship between the means used and the ends pursued. Indeed, he argued, s/he “who acts in a purely rational manner concerning value is a person who  – without regard for the consequences  – works to serve her/his conviction concerning what s/he deems to be demanded by duty, dignity, beauty, religious precept, piety or the importance of a ‘cause’ of any kind. Rational action concerning value (according to its terminological connotation) always means acting according to ‘imperatives’ or in conformity with ‘needs’ that the agent believes are placed upon him/her. We intend to speak of rationality concerning value only insofar as human action is oriented based on these needs, a rationality which occurs to a very different extent, more often than not in a rather modest way” (ibid, p. 11). Even if it is necessary to recall that, as Weber himself argued that “Action very rarely, and social action, in particular, is oriented exclusively in one way or another. And so, these kinds of orientation do not, of course, constitute an exhaustive classification of how the action is oriented, though they are conceptually pure types – created for sociological purposes  – towards which real action approaches more or less, and which, even more frequently, are mixed. Only the result obtained can demonstrate the opportunity of our action” (ibid., p. 10). In reality, of the four different types of the rational orientation of social action referred to here and prospected by Weber, it emerges very clearly that the one that finds greater legitimacy and consequent diffusion is mainly the one oriented towards rationality concerning purpose: essentially formal rationality. It might be argued that Weber preferred this kind of orientation for two reasons: first, because it proved to be the clearest and most linear kind for an external observer, who wished to analyse and evaluate the rationality of another’s behaviour; secondly, because this orientation provided the process of evaluating the relationship between means and ends with the greatest amount of internal and external coherence. Moreover, one might add that this type of rational acting about purpose finds its highest expression in its epoch, that is in the era of the greatest development of the culture of money and the valorisation of the material dimension only of industrial capitalism. As pointed out in the previous chapter, this culture was analysed to great effect by Simmel in his The Philosophy of Money (1984), which, in the course of the twentieth century, was destined to assert itself all over the world. Money, therefore, became the common denominator and the most adequate symbolic expression of the culture of modernity in a world that witnessed the affirmation of industry. It was a double-edged sword whose effects revealed the versatility of the new reality that was advancing, which acted simultaneously as an instrument for the acquisition of comfort, dependence, and enslavement.

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On the importance of money, as a highly symbolic marker of value, in a perspective of rational action with regard to (utilitarian) purpose, Weber himself (1965a, pp. 105–106) summarised its principles using the well-known Benjamin Franklin’s well-known aphorisms and wrote “Remember that time is money (...) Remember that credit is money (...) Remember that money is fruitful and productive by nature (...) Remember that—as the saying goes—whoever pays on time is the owner of the bag of each (...)”. Starting from the significance of these aphorisms, Weber provided an explanation of the concepts of the social ethics of capitalism, of professional duty, and moral obligation. In this regard he wrote, “The concept of professional duty, so obvious to us today although in reality, it is not very comprehensible in itself; the concept of moral obligation, which the individual needs to feel also about the object of her/his professional activity, whatever it may be, and even though it may be commonly perceived as a simple enhancement of one’s ability to work or of one’s capital; this concept is characteristic of the social ethics of capitalist civilisation, indeed, in a certain sense, it is of fundamental importance to it” (ibid., pp. 106–107). As has already been anticipated in part, the distinctive features of the rationalisation model of western capitalist systems identified by Weber have given rise to six different basic social and cultural processes, each with broad ramifications, which tend to assume the following characteristics (Bottomore et al., 1997, p. 597): (a) The disenchantment and intellectualisation of the world, and the consequent tendency to conceive the world as a causal mechanism subject, in principle, to rational control. (b) The emergence of an ethos of impersonal worldly realisation, historically based on Puritan ethics in its profession as a vocation (Beruf). (c) The growing importance of specialised technical knowledge in the fields of economics, administration, and education. (d) The objectification and depersonalisation of the law, economics and politics, with the consequent increase in the regularity and calculability of action in these fields. (e) The progressive development of technically rational means of controlling human beings and nature. (f) The tendency to replace traditional action and rational action regarding value (wertrational), with purely rational action regarding purpose (zweckrational). From this description, one might hypothesise that, despite the presence of a certain historical diversity in the development of the phenomena described, they are bound by a common logic: on the whole, they tend to promote formal rationality rather than substantial rationality in a capitalist society. Insofar as they contribute to determining a social environment where the quest for homogeneity of action has increased and, has led, therefore, towards a greater tendency to calculate and predict the behaviour of the subjects involved. This predictability, based on a series of bureaucratic rules, according to Weber, would tend to assume the form not of a “thin cloak” but of a “steel cage”, from which no individual may free him/herself. In other words, an increase in the calculability of behaviour and its results, due to the

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prevalence of the orientation of social action concerning purpose, fails to question the goals or values that inspire action but focuses, rather, on the means used to achieve previously-established goals, according to a logic that is not, from this point of view, substantial, but formal, since it aims simply at regular compliance with the norm. From this point of view, bureaucracy represents a structure typical of the Weberian model of rationality. In this regard, it is useful to recall what Crozier (1969) wrote about the way the bureaucratic system worked and the strategies of the actors. He reported that the characteristics of this type of organisation were: (a) Domination of impersonal and abstract rules, and consequent widespread substantial weakness of hierarchy. (b) Lack of organic contact between the various professional categories and the consequent tendency of these to become watertight compartments where the conformist pressure of peers replaces hierarchical pressure. (c) Lack of competition in terms of professional skills and the consequent prevalence of purely psychological and affective interpersonal judgment of the human character of colleagues and superiors. (d) Widespread inability to change, to adapt to novelty. This inability does not depend on the absence of legal powers and technical and financial autonomy of intervention alone, but also on the diffusion of a mindset antithetical to change. Crozier also believed that an adequate analysis of human conduct inside organisations might only be strategic and investigate the rational strategies (individual and collective) that subjects pursue within the organisation. The phenomenon of bureaucracy is described as follows, “in a bureaucratic organisation, where everything is prescribed by regulations, individual interests pass through the protection of the discrete margins of one’s role. The ritualism of the bureaucrat should be seen not so much as a passive adaptation to the pressures of the system, as a strategy that the bureaucrat sets up to defend her/his freedom of action, her/his micro-power regarding her/his superiors and users. But ritualism is not the only possible strategy. There is also detachment, disinterest, and a conscious renunciation of participation. Indeed, non-participation is one of the most widespread strategies within bureaucratic organisations; subjects consider that to get involved is not worth the effort, that a strategy of evasion from responsibility is often the most convenient way to defend one’s independence” (1974, p. 271). A bureaucratic organisation is short-­ sighted; therefore, it is an organisation that fails to correct itself following its errors. It is unable to self-reform if it does not invest in human resources, starting from its very core, and bring about effective organisational change which needs to be accompanied and supported by true political, professional and cultural change (Cocozza, 2004b). In a concise but precise vision, Gallino, referring to Weber’s theorisation, clarifies the characteristics of a pure bureaucracy and lists its typical variables.

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These variables may be summed up as follows (1993, p. 81): (a) A stable and easily recognisable hierarchy of authority made visible through appropriate symbols. (b) An advanced functional specialisation of tasks, that is, the breakdown of production processes into its main functions. (c) A qualified technical staff is chosen on the basis of their specific competence. (d) Constant use of formal procedures for conduction of the office. (e) The rights and duties of each employee, therefore of each person admitted to occupy a position, are codified in detail. (f) Authority is limited: every superordinate is also a subordinate, up to the highest echelons of the organisation; each subjected to rigorous official discipline and regular checks. (g) Salaries are differentiated according to the positions and are normally fixed, they are independent of fluctuations in the volume of services. (h) The members of the organisation carry out their duties without consideration for the person to whom the activity refers, but only with regard to the technical situation considered. (i) The material means of administrative activity are separated from personal property. (j) Written communication is particularly important, as compliance with the organisation’s norms is essential, and the relative acts need to be written to be deposited in the organisation’s “memory”. (k) The disciplinary rules are strictly and permanently correlated to the nature and extent of infringement, given the purposes of the organisation. Other scholars like Bonazzi, with reference to the analysis of organisational models, also believe that the specificity of the ideal Weberian model of bureaucracy might be summed up in the following ten characteristics (2002, p. 32): loyalty to the office and the onus of obedience to one’s superiors; disciplined competence and charged with specialised and parcelled tasks entrusted to individual employees; hierarchy of offices and subordination to superior (office) authority; specialised preparation and predetermined educational level; public competitions for entry and access to higher posts, with universalistic criteria for evaluating the merit of competitors; career development in the administration on the basis of merit (often according to seniority); full-time activity, as a profession carried out on a continuous basis; official secrecy and strict separation between office work and the private life of the civil servant; fixed salary, no direct contact with the client, no fluctuation based on results; non-possession of the instruments of one’s work, which remain the property of the administration while the official is accountable for their use. Bonazzi (p. 52) defines the essential features of a pure form of bureaucracy as follows, “pure bureaucracy attempts to eliminate or at least control as much as possible any extra-organisational influence on the behaviour of its members. This control involves factors both internal and external to the organisation. Internally, the bureaucrat is selected, trained, and forged to act in a manner consistent with her/his role, in the exclusive service of the organisation. Her/his conduct is immune to

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feelings, intentions, or strategies that are not those of the organisation in which s/he serves. There is no individual rationality other than one independent of that of the organisation.” From this idealistic description of bureaucracy according to Weber, Bonazzi (ibid., p. 53) derives three specific characteristics of the pure bureaucratic organisational model: “a centralised structure, because critical decisions are the exclusive matter of the central summit, while routine decisions are delegated to lower or peripheral levels; (...) a standardised structure, which provides for precise operating procedures. The employees are required to comply with these procedures because (a) it is assumed that they are the most suitable to achieve certain goals; (b) uniformity of behaviour allows for the substitutability of employees: if all perform the work in the same way the same results are obtained, regardless of which official performs the task. The standardisation of procedures and results involves the depersonalisation of the service and is an integral part of bureaucratic rationality; (...) a rigid structure because it does not contemplate changes.” Bureaucratic rationality, therefore, does not envisage the possibility of change, since it always sees itself as itself over time: the future (foreseen and imagined in pre-industrial and industrial societies) ends up, to a large extent, being the projection of the present, and, in turn, the present the projection of the past. Historically, however, the hypothesis of having to manage strong and profound changes in political, economic, and social contexts had already been formulated by Weber himself when he identified the need to elaborate the concept of charismatic power, as an alternative or in opposition to that of bureaucratic power. In this regard, it should be recalled that it was precisely thanks to Weber, that the concept of the charismatic character of power was introduced, as a theory of the various forms and modalities by means of which the management of power manifests itself. This concept conditioned the thinking of all the social sciences of the west during the last century, and today, it still provides a useful theoretical basis for the comprehension of certain political and social phenomena. In one of his masterpieces, Economics and Society, published posthumously in 1922, Weber, having first distinguished the concept of power from that of authority – considering the former sociologically amorphous and only the latter useful for an understanding of social phenomena, as it required a source of legitimation (1968a, b, p. 52) – introduced a classification of power which he divided into three typologies based on different sources of legitimation of power itself: rational power, traditional power, and charismatic power. Weber (ibid, p. 210) argued that the first type “rests its legitimacy on the belief in the legality of statutory systems, and on the right of command of those who are called to exercise power (legal power) on the basis of them”. The second was based, he held, on an “everyday belief in the sacred character of traditions that have always been valid, and in the legitimacy of those who are called to assume authority (traditional power)”. The third rested “on the extraordinary dedication to the sacred character or heroic strength or exemplary value of a person, and of the systems revealed or created by him (charismatic power)”.

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The concepts of rational bureaucratic and charismatic power have turned out to be the most useful for our development (Crozier, 1969; Izzo, 1975; Addario & Cavalli, 1980; Bonazzi, 1993, 2002). According to Weber the concept of charisma, in particular, needed to be “a quality considered extraordinary (and originally conditioned in magical form as much in prophets and individuals provided with therapeutic or juridical wisdom, as in the dukes of the hunt and the heroes of war), which is attributed to the person” (1968a, b, p. 238). Charismatic power required no recognition other than the “spontaneous acknowledgement by the dominated, based on evidence (originally it was always a miracle), which arises from faith in revelation, veneration of the hero and trust in the leader” (ibidem). Even more interesting is Weber’s description of how the system of relations between the charismatic leader and his reference group works. He (ibid., p.  239) argued that “the power group of this species constitutes a community of emotional character. The administrative apparatus of the charismatic lord is not a ‘body of officials’, much less a body of officials with specialised training. It is not chosen according to class or criteria of domestic or personal dependence. On the contrary, it is based on charismatic qualities. The ‘prophet’ is matched by his ‘disciples’, the ‘leader’ by his ‘retinue’ and the ‘leader’ generally, by his ‘men of trust’. There is neither ‘hiring’ nor ‘dismissal’, there is neither ‘career’ nor ‘promotion’; there is only a call inspired by the leader, based on the charismatic qualification of those designated. There is no ‘hierarchy’ but only the intervention of the leader, even upon request, if the administrative apparatus proves insufficient, in general, or in particular cases, in the face of a certain task. There are no ‘circumscriptions of office’ nor ‘competencies’, nor is there any appropriation of the powers of office using ‘privilege’; there are only (and as far as possible) territorial or objective limits of charisma and ‘mission’. (...) There is no constituted ‘organ of authority’, but there are only those commissioned charismatically within the scope of the Lord’s mandate and charism. There are no regulations, no sets of juridical principles, no rational quest for laws based upon them; there are no juridical responses based on the precedents of tradition. Rather, what is decisive in the form are current legal creations, which, in each case are originally constituted by the judgment of God and revelations alone. From a material point of view, the principle applies to every genuine charismatic power: it is written – but as I say to you.” Ultimately, as Weber reiterated that “bureaucratic power is specifically rational in the sense that it is bound by rules that lend themselves to discursive analysis; charismatic power is specifically irrational in the sense that it lacks rules. Traditional power is linked to precedents it had in the past, and as such is equally rule-oriented. Charismatic power, on the other hand, overturns the past (within its sphere), and is, in this sense, specifically revolutionary” (ibid, p. 241). Likewise, Weber defended the choice of the orientation of rational action regarding the polemic between capitalism and Marxism. In truth, both Marx and Weber shared the delimitation of their investigation of the bourgeois-capitalist society. However, as we know, the former interpreted it as a form of historical alienation to be overwhelmed, while the latter considered it a fatal necessity. As was observed (Löwit, 1967, p.  48), “all of Marx’s theoretical work

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aims at clarifying and destroying this universal phenomenon, Weber’s work instead aims at understanding it.” More precisely, the real strategic and innovative role of Weber’s thinking compared to that of Marx lay in the fact that Weber did not deny the scientific contribution made by Marx – he appreciated the importance of his analytical approach when he correlated the conditioning of economics with cultural processes – though Weber aimed at demonstrating the relativity of Marx’s sole, exclusive explanatory attempt. As Izzo (1975, p. 109) argued “by reducing Marxism to a point of view, one among the many possible, Weber deprived it of that attractive force which, from the beginning, sought to be its distinctive and essential feature”. Weber, in a way very different from that of Marx, evaluated the characteristics of capitalism, arguing that (1965a, b, p. 67) “Thrift for profit, the aspiration to earn as much money as possible, has in itself nothing in common with capitalism. This aspiration is found among waiters, doctors, coachmen, artists, cocottes, corruptible clerks, soldiers, bandits, among crusaders, gamblers, beggars; it can be said of all sorts and conditions of men, in all eras of all countries on earth, where there was and is an objective possibility. It is a highly rudimentary element of historical education to abandon once and for all, this naive definition of the concept of capitalism. An immoderate lust for profit is not identical with capitalism at all; it corresponds even less to its ‘spirit’. On the contrary, capitalism can be identified with a discipline, or at least with a rational tempering of a similar irrational impulse. In any case, capitalism is identical with the tendency to gain using rational and continuous capitalist enterprise, to gain anew depending on saleability. And so, this is how it must be. In a capitalist order of the whole economy, a single capitalist enterprise, not oriented according to the possibility of achieving ‘saleability’, would be condemned to perish.” More precisely, Weber recalled that “some kind of capitalism (an economic complex) or individual capitalist enterprises, endowed with certain rationality of calculation, had always occurred historically in other epochs, in antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, in countries like China, India, Babylon, Egypt” (ibid., p. 68). In truth, even if he was always highly critical of Marxism, Weber, in his Political Writings published by the Das Neue Deutschland, recalled that, despite sharing some of the ideas concerning the economic policy of the German Social Democrats, he had not joined the party (Weber, 1970, p. 353) “because he could not renounce his independence regarding the right to express his opinions both in front of the demos and in front of the authoritarian forces”. But as we know, about the rationality that guides politicians, Weber left that activity at the mercy of the irrational, to a “heroic” vision of life. This activity, he held, was an important theoretical problem left open and unsolved, since politics by nature, − and for analogous reasons, rationality regarding the issue of value – cannot recur to the formal rationality (regarding purpose) typical of the economic development of capitalism and capitalist enterprises (1948a). Weber’s relationship with politics was controversial to the point that as Cantmori recalls (1948a, b, p. XXX), he decided not to participate in the Assembly for the constitution of the Weimer Republic because he did not consider himself a professional politician. Even if the practical reason for his non-election to the Assembly was his clash with the “notables” of the German Democratic Group, who,

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taking advantage of a formal matter, had not included him in the list of candidates. Weber adhered to the decision not to go against the norms of “internal democracy”. A few years earlier, to defend Neurath and Toller and bear testimony to their political honesty; while highlighting the latter’s idealism he called him Gesinnungsethiker (politically immature) and concluded added “God in his anger made him a politician!” (ibid, p. XXI). For Weber, therefore, political rationality, like rationality regarding value, unable to calculate the regularity of the behaviour of other individuals, did not take into account the consequences of a person’s actions. This classification does not include a type of professional politician like that identified by Weber, that of the politician who lives “by” politics, who tends to earn her/his income from it; the opposite type was the politician who lives “for” politics (ibid., p.). And even those who are not the one or the other need to forge a temperament of soul such that they can withstand even the collapse of all hopes even now, otherwise they will not even be able to accomplish what little is possible today. Only s/he who is sure that s/he will not fail even if the world, from her/his point of view, is too stupid or vulgar for what s/he wants to offer it, and is still able to say in the face of it all, ‘It doesn’t matter, let’s continue!’, only such a person has a vocation (Beruf) for politics (ibid., pp. 120–121).

2 The Fate of Society and the Individual in a Rationalised World Weber explains that the condition of a rational subject in modern society is, “What gives the situation of the ‘civilised’ human…, its specific ‘rational’ note, in contrast to that of the ‘savage’, is rather: 1. the generally acquired belief that the conditions of a person’s daily life – tram, lift, money, court, army, medicine, etc. – are fundamental, of a rational character, that is, human products accessible to knowledge, creation, and rational control; 2. confidence in their rational functioning, that is, in conformity with known rules, not already irrational—like the powers the savage seeks to influence through her/his sorcerer—and, therefore, in the possibility, at least in principle, that they may be used to ‘estimate’, ‘calculate’ their attitude”. In this direction, as Izzo argues efficaciously, “Capitalism is a historically specific phenomenon that needs to be distinguished from the desire for economic oppression, examples of which can be found in any period. It is based on rational calculation aimed at an ‘always renewed gain’. This calculation is proper to the capitalist firm in the strict sense and requires free trade, formally free labour, and ‘probability of peaceful gain’” (1975, p.  110). Weber recalls, however, that the ineluctability of the development of society, both in a capitalist sense and possibly in some form of socialism, is a prelude to the impending affirmation on the social scene of a sort of “steel cage”. An evolution of societies, as Bruno notes, is now devoted to “the inevitable rationalisation and organisation of all the social institutions in which the individual

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needs to collocate his actions. Unlike Marx who considers this rational objectification historical objectivity that can, therefore, be eliminated, Weber considers it the fatal destiny of the modern world, which not even socialism can elude; as a result, greater socialisation would not mean greater humanisation and freedom, but greater bureaucratization” (1993, p. 83). According to Weber, the logic of the ideal type of capitalism presents two different sides of the coin: the rationalisation of the economy, the separation of workers from the means of production; but also, its ethics, a spirit represented by Calvinist ethics, by Beruf, the vocation necessary to be able to create a kind of employment conceived not as an end in itself, but as a testimony of God’s grace. Weber believed that the fate of the modern world was marked precisely by the growing rationalisation of all areas of life, from the economy to administration, to education. This awareness led him to argue, on the occasion of a speech to the Assembly of the “Verein für Sozialpolitik” in 1909, that what threatened humanity then was precisely this “dismemberment of the soul”. Mannheim tended in this same direction when, inheriting and reworking Weberian and Marxian thinking, he made a distinction between the concepts of substantial rationality, functional rationality, and self-authorisation, to explain the evolution of the social system. Following this logic, Mannheim wrote that “The more a society is industrialised and the more the division of its labour and its organisation progress, the greater will be the number of spheres of its functionally rational human activities that may undergo prognostication. While in ancient societies the individual acted in a functionally rational way only occasionally and within limited spheres, in contemporary society s/he is forced to act like this in increasingly numerous spheres of life. This leads us directly to the description of a particular type of rationalisation, more intimately connected to the functional rationalisation of conduct, that is, the phenomenon of authorisation” (1959, p. 52). Within this logical scheme, according to Mannheim rationalisation induced the actor to set up a planned, systematic control of all her/his impulses, in such a way that every action is guided by a principle and is, simultaneously, directed towards an end that he intentionally intends to pursue. For this reason, Mannheim stated that “Modern society achieves, perhaps, its highest degree of functional rationalisation in its administrative staff, where the individuals those who belong to it not only adhere to specific prescribed actions – this kind of rationalisation of tasks may become more advanced in the Taylorisation of the workers in an industrial plant – but, furthermore, their plan for life is largely imposed upon them in the form of ‘career’, where the individual stages are specified in advance” (ibid, p. 53). This kind of rationalisation induced the same scholar to question what highlights the difficult relationship between freedom and social planning, where technology plays a role that conditions the choices of individuals more and more, giving rise to new forms of dependence. For these reasons, according to Mannheim, a sort of irrationality arises in the relationship between the individual and society and the functioning of the social institutions themselves. Croce (1945) was also of the same opinion, although he started from a different philosophical and methodological approach. He maintained that the rationality of

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an institution was not given by a rule of “abstract rationality”, but by its ability to maintain a bond and be able to satisfy, simultaneously (and together), individual and universal needs. Irrationality, according to Croce, stemmed, actually, from the extension of this contrast between individuals and institutions. Just as history produced them, so it corroded them, transformed them, and then devoured them. In this continuous evolution, the institutions tended to transform themselves into mainly “selfish” entities, and this process condemned them and led them to death. Providing several examples, he noted, “That’s how theocracy died, that’s how feudalism died, that’s how so many forms of the society we call bourgeois died, and so many others will gradually die”. Moreover, one of the most disturbing contradictions of the society we live in today is the more and more evident contrast existing between the power of impersonal, technical reason – present in all fields of contemporary life – and the powerlessness of the reason of the single individual, who is less and less able to pursue autonomous social action and develop independent thinking regarding it. In the societies of today, a situation has arisen where, as Mills observed, “there is rationality without reason. A rationality that does not increase freedom by increasing it but by destroying it” (1962, p. 181). The kind of rationality – Marcuse argued – tends to reduce man and society to a dimension where “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic non-freedom prevails in advanced industrial civilisations, a sign of technical progress. Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the course of the mechanisation of socially necessary but laborious activities; the concentration of sole proprietorship in more effective and more productive joint-stock companies; the regulation of free competition between economic subjects who are not equally equipped; the limitation of national prerogatives and sovereignties that prevent the international organisation of resources (…)? The rights and freedoms that were vitally important factors in the origins and early stages of industrial society are giving way to a new, more advanced phase of it: they are losing their traditional content and rationale (...) One-dimensional thinking is systematically promoted by the powerful in politics and by those who supply them with information for the masses” (1967a, pp. 21–22). Marcuse, the most critical exponent of the Frankfurt School, continuing along these lines, highlighted the characteristics of rationality in modern capitalist societies by saying, “At the base of rationality, there is the abstraction which, at once theoretically and practically, the work of the scientific and social organisation determines the age of capitalism: the reduction of the quality of life (…). Abstract reason becomes concrete in the calculable and calculated dominion over nature and men. This way, the reason outlined by Max Weber proves to be technical: production and transformation of material (things and people) using the scientific-methodological apparatus, built according to a calculable performance whose rationality controls and organises things and humans: factory, bureaucratic and clerical work as well as free time” (1967b, p. 213). This theoretical scheme led Marcuse to decree that “In the development of capitalist rationality, irrationality becomes formal reason” (ibidem).

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In this same direction, or when discussing the complete technical rationalisation of society, Darwin, in his Autobiography, wrote, “My mind has become like a machine, to perfect universal laws, abstracting them from a large collection of facts, but I can’t understand why this could have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain on which the higher functions depend (...) If I had to start life again I would make it a rule to read poetry and listen to music at least once a week because, perhaps, in this way, the part of the brain now atrophied would remain active. The loss of taste is a loss of happiness and this should be harmful to the intellect, even more, likely to the moral character, as it weakens the emotional part of our nature” (1964, p. 121). In our societies, therefore, problems arise that tend to make it increasingly difficult to identify the individual with the general interest, where bureaucracy and technocracy play a predominant role, and where the very character of the “general” prevents adequate recognition of the individual subjects. Ultimately, the prevailing tendency seems to be that of making political and social problems technical too, so as not to have to recall the dimension of “choice”, but only that of “practical management”. This way, one of the possible roles individuals might play is simultaneously excluded, along with that of political public opinion (Habermas, 1969), which should verify and control the working of public institutions, particularly social services, of which the citizenry is, after all, the main beneficiary, but also the main financial backer.

3 Social Action, Provisions, Entitlement, and Life Opportunities Dahrendorf recognises and is grateful to Weber for the important distinction he made, among other things, between the concept of authority and power (or power and might) in the various forms of command, the concept of formal rationality that guides the evolution of the economic system, and that relating to the role played by bureaucracy in the political and social development of the capitalist society. To Weber Dahrendorf also owes one of his most important concepts, that of life opportunities, meaning those offered to the individual by the social structure (institutions), meaning options (chances) and not bonds (social obligations) (1981). Weber, according to this scholar, while his thinking was of fundamental weight in sociological thought due to the remarkable explanatory capacity of his concept of authority (acquired in the same form by Dahrendorf), it revealed, nevertheless, an obsessive interest in the role of bureaucracy, since, “Whatever argument he addressed, he never missed an opportunity to lash out at the perniciousness of bureaucracy. He mentioned the feudal lords and absolute kings and took the opportunity to talk about their administrative mechanisms, with their innate tendency towards separation and autonomous power. He mentioned Bismarck and conducted a detailed attack on the Beamtenherrschaft that surrounded him, bureaucracy in the

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emphatic sense, and the general ‘will to helplessness’ that accompanied it. He mentioned ‘rationalist’ understanding together with the logic of capitalist development; he dwelt on the institutional nature of modern organisation with its rules, office staff, and all the rest. He cited power and legitimacy and described the ‘rational’ or ‘legal’ model of legitimation thanks to administrative staff with certain characteristics of office, qualification, and career. There is, evidently, something of the Prussian experience in this obsession, but it is also a vision that has lost none of its menacingly constricting characteristics down through seven decades of history. This is the vision of bureaucracy as a ‘cage of bonds’ for future generations. Left to its own considerable devices, bureaucracy will become perfect administration, also total in the sense of the term ‘totalitarianism’, or Goffman’s ‘total institution’. People are mere cogs in a dependent and imposing ‘living machine’”. Dahrendorf, while sharing Weber’s hypothesis of the inevitable loss of the role of the individual during the development of bureaucratised society, asked Weber whether some residue of freedom of action and movement in some “individualistic” sense might still be saved. Confronted with this issue, the research pathway that Weber and Dahrendorf indicated was one of interest in politics and institutions, or better still, in democracy and various forms and modalities of leadership (ibidem). From this position, Dahrendorf held that the analysis of rationality needed to be directed towards a quest for various forms of social interaction that placed individual intentional action, but collective action, too, at its centre. In line with this approach, Dahrendorf argued that “individual competition and collective action are in principle mutually convertible, and are essentially equivalent expressions of the same great social force, competition” (1971, p. 504). Individual and collective competition, therefore, represents the prodigious social force upon which the evolution of modern societies is based. In his opinion, societies change and evolve as a function of the competition and conflict generated within them. Therefore, social action can be conceived as a conflictual type of action between the different social classes aimed at “maintaining and stimulating the change of entire societies and their parts (…). As a factor in the omnipresent process of social change, conflicts are profoundly necessary” (ibid., pp.  237–238). Class conflict, Dahrendorf went on to clarify, from a non-Marxist point of view, “is that form of competition necessary when very numerous individuals fail to realise their interests through individual effort (...) if for the individual it is not, it is necessary to seek the solidarity of total social groups, classes, to pursue one’s interests; then more limited and specific communities of interest will increase in importance” (ibid, p. 504). It is, therefore, “solidarity of action” that generates conflict between competing interest groups which, ever more numerous in our societies, strive to acquire advantages for their members, by lobbying policies. This conception of Dahrendorf’s led to a vision of a kind of “pluralist society”, far removed from that of the Marxist class-­ conflict theory. This is a form of conflict that is indispensable for development within closed, totalitarian, utopian and premodern societies; it is also necessary in an open society, since, as Dahrendorf argues, “the structures of authority restrict the individual’s possibilities of fulfilling her/his interests personally while solidarity is

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probably destined to remain one of the vehicles of competition even in an open society” (ibidem, p. 505). Conflict, therefore, for this scholar – in line with other sociological theorists like Marx (albeit with different concepts of class and conflict), but also Gluckman and Wright Mills – represents a very important social phenomenon for the social sciences. It might be defined as “the set of antagonistic relationships produced structurally by the gap between norms and expectations and by the ineffective (in some cases no) interaction between institutions and groups”. While, as we know, there is a contemporary current of sociological thought which, with Dahrendorf in the forefront, starts from Comte and Spencer to arrive at Pareto and Durkheim, but also Weber and, in particular, Parsons, who preferred to apply the theory of order to that of conflict and social change in societies to carry out sociological analysis (1971, pp. 237–238). In fact, with regard, precisely, to the role of the great sociological models proposed in the course of history, Dahrendorf, in his Escape from utopia (1971), was severely critical, as he held that these models envisaged “self-referential” societies, closed in upon themselves, where everything can be traced back to a functional logic as if they were truly utopian societies. In this regard, he accuses Parsons and his model of a functional society directly and specifically, when he argues that, “The Parsonsian concept of the social system, where everything is functionally coordinated in principle, is very similar to the closed world of utopia. The fact that here everything is right, that every phenomenon can be framed and coordinated, must arouse suspicion in those who appreciate the utility of doubt and the need to clarify situations, therefore societies” (1971, p.  4). Moreover, in the same direction, he added that it is difficult to imagine how a social system, which rests on an (‘almost’) consensus, can permit the emergence of structurally produced conflict. By all appearances, a conflict always involves some degree of dissent and disagreement over values. Christian theology had to resort to original sin to explain the passage from heaven into history. Private property, likewise, functioned as a deus ex machina in Marx’s attempt to explain the transition from a primitive society, where “a person feels as comfortable as fish in water”, to a world of alienation and class struggle. Both explanations may not be very satisfying, but, at least, they allow one to acknowledge the hard and, possibly, unpleasant facts of real life. On the other hand, the modern sociology of the structural-functional school has not done this either (unless we want to consider Talcott Parsons’ chapter on the turning point in The Social System, as strangely out of place as original sin regarding this approach). No flight of the imagination, not even the residual category of “dysfunction” can drive an integrated and balanced social system to give birth to serious and systematic instances of conflict within its structure. Certainly, the social system is capable of giving birth to the well-known disturber of the stillness of utopia, the “deviant”. But it too requires a lengthy argument and the introduction of a random or, at least, indeterminate variable – in this case, individual psychology, although the system is perfect and in a state of equilibrium. In this regard, Dahrendorf argued that in modern societies many conflicts of a different nature exist, but only one of them assumes a role of precise inter-class

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antagonism. This conflict relates to the contrast between wealth and citizenship, or as he calls it, between “the availability of assets (provisions) and the right to access them (entitlement)”. He recalled that he owed the introduction of these two concepts to Sen, who in his book on Poverty and Famines (1981) when he examined various concrete situations in various African and Asian countries, realised and demonstrated that famine was not due to a real decline in the availability of food (reduction of available foodstuffs), but rather to a question of entitlements set. It was, in other words, not the lack of food available but of the possibility and legitimacy of individuals to access these goods, or rather of methods by which to access to them (entitlements set) by certain social groups, at the risk of their reduction or even their disappearance. Dahrendorf noted that this study revealed that, in certain extreme cases, it was not the lack of goods that caused the deaths of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people, but the existence of social barriers. But what do these two concepts of entitlement and provisions signify and mean in our societies, and how can they help sociological research? As Dahrendorf suggested, “By a person’s entitlement is meant the set of different alternative bundles of goods that the person can acquire through the use of the various legal channels of acquisition open to each in her/his position” (ibidem). Therefore, these are rights the legal claims of which may be based on a series of qualities (endowments) or activities (exchanges). In this logic, a person may possess entitlements due to her/his work, entitlements due to commerce, entitlements due to education, etc., up to defining the set of entitlements known as entitlements set. Then he added (Dahrendorf, 1991, p. 58), “Within the evolution of human history, modernity is simply the extension of life opportunities to an increasing number of people. Modernity places the individual at its centre, both at the ideological and factual level, that is, it favours individual freedom to enter into contracts, social mobility, political participation, a minimum level of well-being.” The same conceptual apparatus is used by some scholars to define the benefits deriving from the Welfare State. Among these, Nozick, with his entitlements theory (1978), sought to outline individual rights in the “minimum state”, while L. M. Mead believed that, in addition to entitlements, it was necessary to establish a series of obligations related to citizenship (1986). But, as Dahrendorf observed, entitlements tend to assume a sort of “normative quality”, and become norms in our societies with a certain degree of stability, to the point of determining a real scale according to their importance and value. According to this logic, we can have fundamental entitlements (rights) that are constitutionally guaranteed, universal, open, and available to all, and entitlements linked to a given social position (for example, those deriving from income) that permits access to certain goods or services. By its nature, this second series of entitlements, those grounded in social (and working) status, can vary and its variation, like an “entrance ticket”, can consent the use of a product or represent a barrier that excludes someone. From this point of view, entitlements grow or decline in stages, not in a linear way. This is why they can be granted or denied, with regard to economic goods and non-economic goods alike, like political rights or citizenship.

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The entitlements related to the primary intervention sectors of the Welfare systems, such as education, health, and social assistance, belong to this context. The set of choices (and the objects of choice) that permit the use of tangible and intangible assets that can be acquired with entitlements, including those of a political and social nature, are called provisions, the package of possible alternatives. Ultimately, Dahrendorf recalled that the notion of entitlements included the concepts of privilege and deprivation, as well as that of Tocqueville’s democracy, as a condition fundamental to equality of status, or citizenship; while provisions included concepts like the provision of goods, innovation, incentives, competition, education and health care (ibid, p. 18). In line with this classification, it might be argued that the Industrial Revolution was, in the first instance, a revolution of provisions; the French Revolution was essentially a revolution of entitlements. The two revolutions then generated a social and economic situation that came very close to each other over the last two centuries, but in modern societies, it is easier to witness, paradoxically, provisions without entitlements and entitlements without provisions. Based on this paradox, two opposing schools were born in recent decades. We are witnessing a bitter clash between two parties or two factions. One supports the notion of provisions, whereby the supreme need is that of economic growth, the increase of goods and services and their quality and variety; the other believes that the growth of entitlements is closely linked to the idea of ​​progress. However, as Dahrendorf perspicaciously observed, “Progress is not a joint effort to move the frontier of scarcity, but a battle of groups for the opportunities of life. It is measured on the basis of the number of people who have access to markets and to active public and social life in general. The main themes, therefore, are political, in that they require deliberate action, aimed at establishing rights and redistributing goods” (ibid., pp. 20–21). This is, therefore, a paradigmatic change, which overturns the very idea of ​​social action and social progress, to enable comprehension of new opportunities, but also of the challenges that the development of our societies can launch. With this in mind, Dahrendorf warned that “In the concept of the life opportunities there is a taste of freedom at its basis. A society that seeks to bolster lifestyles, that controls people’s concrete life, is not free, whether Big Brother and his secret police exercise this control, or simply some moral tyrant through democratic social persuasion. There are differences between the two, but a free society offers opportunities and does not dictate how to use them. The task of freedom is, therefore, to work, and if necessary to fight for an increase in life chances” (ibid., p. 24). In this regard, Dahrendorf believed that it was a matter of finding the way by which provisions and entitlements might be advanced simultaneously, in such a way as to guarantee economic development and social progress, like some important reformers between the two wars, like William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes did and, in some way, even Max Weber (1993, p.  66). The latter reformers who could be counted among the great political and social innovators of liberal inspiration, to whom Dahrendorf intended to refer, and why he considered a revival of liberal democratic thinking necessary.

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In line with this approach, Dahrendorf recalled that “For some, the word ‘liberal’ has become synonymous with a lax attitude towards rules and norms in general. An equally serious mistake may be made in the name of freedom. On the one hand, institutional laxity does not work. Those who claim that we live or should live in the sweet world of Rousseau’s ‘Emile’, from whose vocabulary ‘the very words obey and the command will be excluded, and still more those of duty and obligation’, are much more likely to find themselves in the dangerous and brutal world of Hobbesian warfare of all against all, where people live in ‘continual fear’ and, a ‘no society’. If we do not cling to institutions, we are left with little to sustain us. In addition, institutions are the only means by which to increase everyone’s life opportunities. One can, perhaps, admit that some people could become richer by means of provisions in a pre-institutional world, although the great authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries all demonstrated that even the wealth of the few cannot last without the institution of property, therefore, without civil government. Certainly, the civilising force of entitlements requires that we pay attention to the norms and sanctions and the instances that establish and sustain them” (ibid., p. 210). In this same direction, Dahrendorf later (1995) made clear that faced with the challenge of the globalisation of society, the line of research concerned three great desires: prosperity for all, acceptance of the demands posed by the competitiveness of global markets; the affirmation of civil societies capable of remaining united and building the solid foundations of an active and civil life for all; the maintenance of the rule of law and of political institutions that permit not only change but also the critique and exploration of new horizons. This is necessary, since, according to this scholar, “The challenges of globalisation require responses that threaten civil society; the affirmation of anomie triggers a return to authoritarian temptations (…) what to do, then, to preserve a civil balance between the creation of wealth, social cohesion and political freedom? A feature of the Popperian approach to problems is to avoid any all-encompassing solution. Those who claim they have the answer to every problem, in reality, do not know how to answer anyone: far from improving things, total solutions aggravate them” (1995, p. 58). In agreement with this statement, Dahrendorf goes on to formulate six “suggestions”, to give consistency to the analysis he proposed regarding the concepts of provisions, entitlement, and life chances. The “suggestions” include the following possible interventions (ibid., pp. 58–68): (a) Change the language of the public economy, abandoning the economistic approach, already superseded by international organisations, and integrating the concept of “Gross Domestic Product” – an elementary, crude indicator of wealth – with other information deriving from measures aimed at quantifying other relevant social phenomena, such as lines of a tendency towards social inequality, measurable opportunities, human rights, and freedom. (b) Change the rules of the labour market to facilitate the greater flexibility required by the markets, but also by the workers themselves, and to favour concrete experiences of internships, stages, and school-work alternation.

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(c) Develop the business of training to avoid the social exclusion of large sectors of the new urban underclass. (d) Enhance local communities to respond adequately to the challenge of globalisation, centralisation, and individualisation, through forms of political identity, local taxation, direct election of the mayor, support to the local economy, and enhancement of civil society. (e) Develop the economy of stakeholders through the involvement of all those who have common interests (conscious or unconscious) in a given economic enterprise, since the absence of involvement does not increase competitiveness, especially if companies decide to follow the route of quality (highly specialised) production, rather than that of cost-grounded productive competition based necessarily on low wages. Encourage the participation of stakeholders in businesses, educational institutions, and local chambers of commerce. (f) Governments cannot be the only ones who establish the rules of the game: they need to make decisions aimed at determining the tone of the economy and society in general, intervening in improving the efficiency (and quality) of public services, and establishing a new state of balance, starting with the health services and medical assistance. On the threshold of the year 2000, Dahrendorf, in this volume of his, presented a programme of analysis and action, which he defined as liberal. in this volume, he proposed a difficult “squaring of the circle”, which permitted the combination of variables fundamental to our societies: economic well-being, social cohesion, and political freedom. More recently, he affirmed that in the face of the evolution of our societies in this era of globalisation, where the role and weight of public administration – sometimes democracy itself – is being placed increasingly in a “critical situation”, an effort needs to be made to understand and formulate proposals of reform while keeping faith with a fundamental ethical-political assumption that “after democracy, we must and can build a new democracy” (Dahrendorf, 2003). In other words, with regard to the functioning of democracy (and the role of conflict) as regards processes of change in modern and post-modern societies, Dahrendorf asked “What derives from the contrast between government and opposition? For the mere preservation of the existing system, one of the groups would suffice. If the opposition were only a pathological element, a factor of instability, it would not be necessary. But the evident meaning of the contrast between government and opposition is that of keeping the political process alive, discovering new ways of doing so through contradiction and discussion, and therefore preserving the creativity of human societies. This applies to conflicts in the economic field, but also in that of justice and all other organisations and institutions. Therefore, the meaning and consequence of social conflict always consist in keeping social change active and pushing the development of society forward” (1971, p. 240). On this topic, he added, practically conclusively, that “Anyone who wishes to introduce a conflict-­ free society must do so utilizing terror and police violence; in fact, the mere thought of a conflict-free society is already an act of violence against human nature” (ibid., p. 242).

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Ultimately, with this type of affirmation, Dahrendorf drew the attention of sociologists to one of the most critical aspects of the principles upon which our societies are based and which scholars can never forget. They essentially concern the need to ensure a fair balance between the freedom of action of individuals and what Tocqueville called “the legitimate human passion for equality” (1992, p. 56).

Chapter 3

The Interpretation of Rationality in Human Action from Talcott Parsons, to Alfred Schütz and Jürgen Habermas

1  The Voluntarist Theory of Action Parsons, starting from the contributions of the great fathers of sociology, such as Weber, Durkheim, and Pareto, but also of economists like Marshall, published his important volume entitled The Structure of Social Action (1986), first issued in the United States in 1937, and within that theoretical framework of a social system, outlined his theory of voluntaristic action. In this work, Parsons posited, in an integrally organic and “tendentially deterministic” form, a new social theory, since, as the author wrote in the preface to the first edition, “The main aim was not to present a summary of what these writers said or thought in relation to the problems their research dealt with. Nor has it been used to verify directly, for each proposition contained in their ‘theories’, whether what they asserted is acceptable in light of current knowledge in the field of sociology and related disciplines. These questions have been posed by scholars on numerous occasions, but what is of interest is not so much the fact that they are posed, but the context within which they are located. The element that needs to be emphasised is perhaps that which features in the subtitle of the book. It is a study of social theory, not social theories. It is not so much concerned with the isolated statements we can find in the works of these various scholars, but rather with a single body of systematic theoretical thinking, the development of which can be followed using a critical analysis of the works of these authors and their predecessors” (Parsons, 1986, p. 11). The fundamental unity of the system developed by Parsons is to be found in what is called elementary act which, like the system of units of classical mechanics, may be defined based on the properties they possess: mass, speed, location in space, the direction of movement, etc. The metaphor that Parsons chose to illustrate the functioning of his model of social system is, therefore, of a mechanical type with various gears that structurally perform certain functions (and only those). Then he explains that action, as an “act”, “necessarily requires the following elements: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cocozza, The Unexpected in Action, Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26793-2_3

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1. Someone who performs the act, the ‘actor’. 2. That the act by definition have an ‘end’, or a future situation towards which the process of action is oriented (in this sense and this alone the scheme of action is teleological). 3. A ‘situation’ from which it begins and within which the lines of development differ, to a greater or lesser extent; one from which the situation towards which the action, the end, is oriented. This initial situation can, in turn, be analysed based on elements of two types: those over which the actor has no possibility of control, that is, those which he cannot change without modifying it in relation to his purpose, and those over which he has a possibility of control. The former may be defined as the ‘conditions’ of an action, the latter the ‘means’ implicit in the very conception of this unity, its analytical uses, and certain relational modes between these two types of elements. They lie in the choice between alternative means to achieve a given end, and, insofar as the situation allows alternatives, there is a ‘normative orientation’ of the action” (ibid, p. 84). Within this theoretical framework, Parsons points out that “the element that characterises the vast majority of attempts aimed at intellectual developments of the concept of rationality is the point of view according to which an action is rational insofar as it can be said to have been dictated to the actor through scientific, or at least scientifically correct knowledge regarding the circumstances of his situation” (ibid, p. 97). Consequently, for Parsons, action can be defined as rational “to the extent that it pursues the possible ends within the context of a given situation, making use of means which, among those available to the actor, are intrinsically the most suitable for achieving the end, for understandable and verifiable reasons at positive empirical scientific level” (ibid., p. 98). In the voluntary theory of action, therefore, two major elements that characterise the actor’s conduct are to be found: planning and normativity.

In other words, the workings of this complex Parsonsian system might be summed up as follows: an actor acts to reach a certain end, within an initial situation different from the final one, based on (scientifically correct) knowledge, under certain conditions and availing her/himself of certain means, following a particular normative orientation. For Parsons, therefore, the subject who acts is an actor. He defines her/him as an ego or a self, not an organism, an actor who has her/his own body and mind, which, as such, condition the action. In this sense, the Parsonsian approach places the actor outside of both the biological and behaviourist paradigms, as a superordinate element concerning the environment and the situation. He places the actor within a logic of possible choices oriented simply towards mere adaptation, which he defines as positivistic theories, precisely because in them the actor is when all is said and done, conditioned by the environment (and/or by its nature). In other words, the Parsonsian theoretical scheme does not privilege the analysis of the conditioning of the environment-situation, or interaction between the system and the environment,

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as we shall see in the theories of Habermas or Luhmann. Instead, what is privileged is the behaviour of the actor concerning the orientation of a normative system and a combination between the mean and the end. However, as Parsons pointed out, the person who conducts the action can make mistakes, since: “the existence of a range of possibilities available to the actor, regarding both means and ends, together with the concept of the normative orientation of action, implies the possibility of ‘errors’, that is, the inability to achieve the ends or to make the right choice regarding the means” (ibid., p. 86). In reality, the North American scholar believed that complete adherence to a regulatory system could favour the achievement of goals. For this reason, this system tends to give rise, simultaneously, to two different types of actions, identifiable in the processes of socialisation and internalisation of social values. As regards the role of socialisation, it is useful to point out that it does not always have the power to force the individual, as one might be inclined to believe according to the perspective provided by Parsons. Indeed, in some ways, this stance represents a possibility useful to the acquisition of the skills necessary for the development of the individual’s personality and which allow her/him to become a “person” in the full sense, equal to but different from all the other individuals with whom s/he relates. After all, as Giddens meaningfully points out, language learning, while presenting itself as a process influenced from the outside and based on rules decided by others, ends up assuming a fundamental role in the self-realisation of the individual (2000, p. 88). On these issues, Cesareo observed that “This dual process of internalisation, at individual level, and socialisation, at structural level, gives rise, therefore, to interpenetration meaning that the individual internalises the structure and the structure integrates the subject. Using internalisation, the subject takes possession of the structure; by means of socialisation, it is the structure that takes possession of the subject” (1993, p. 165). In the conclusions to his work on The Structure of Social Action Parsons presents five theses – which provide his voluntarist theory of action – drawn from the analysis of the massive material developed by the four authors considered (Pareto, Durkheim, Weber, and Marshall) with substance. He advanced the following propositions, summarised here as follows (ibid., pp. 769–775): 1. From the works of the four main thinkers discussed here there emerged the outline of the generalised social theory, the structural aspect of what has been called the voluntary theory of action. The differences between these authors, relevant from a theoretical point of view, can be classified under three headings: (a) terminological differences, that is, the use of different names to indicate the same thing (e.g. Pareto calls “logical” what Weber defines “rational”); (b) differences in the levels at which structural analyses were conducted to arrive at an explicit distinction between all the main elements (in this respect Marshall began the process whereby the utilitarian position was supported); (c) differences in formulation, due to differences in empirical orientations and theoretical approaches by individual authors.

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2. This generalised system of theoretic categories shared by the thinkers studied here is, considered a total system, a new theoretical development not automatically derived from the cultural tradition to which they belonged. Naturally, this is no ex-nihilo creation, but it was reached by a gradual process of critical re-­ examination of certain aspects and elements of the previous systems, a process very similar to that involved in empirical observation and verification. 3. The development of this new theoretical system was carried out in close relationship with the main empirical generalisations formulated by each one of the authors. The relevant empirical interpretations of the thinkers under consideration could not have been developed and expounded within a positivistic or idealistic conceptual framework. 4. One of the main factors for the emergence of the voluntary theory of action is represented by correct observation of empirical facts of social life. While considering the differences due to the starting point of each author, the fact remains that a convergence towards a single theory is significant. Two explanations concur to justify this convergence: the first consists in the particular adequacy of the theories as an explanation of the facts; the second is to be found in the particular characteristics of all European thinking, regardless of the facts studied by individual scholars, which end up being common to all the intellectual traditions considered here and from which the voluntary theory of action emerges. The following points are worthy of note: failure to observe facts as an important element in the development of the theory of action means eliminating the action itself unless a purely fortuitous balance is established between the theoretical scheme and the facts to which it refers. The action itself is not conceivable without a quest for exactness during the observation of facts. This is the fundamental thesis of this study. Either the whole structure rests upon it, or all the bases fail. There is no possible explanation for the convergence into a single theoretical system of the authors in question if the assumption that the correct observation and interpretation of the facts constitutes an element of primary importance, is no longer valid. This does not mean that the concepts of the voluntary theory of action are, as currently formulated, definitive and that they are not susceptible to further development. They represent a good starting point for further theoretical endeavour. To hope for the adoption of this scheme, therefore, does not mean formulating a utopian programme of what the social sciences should do but they have been unable to do to date. On the contrary, it means saying that everything that proved of use in the past, and has contributed to the achievement of important empirical results will probably continue to perform this function in its future development. 5. Based on the above four conclusions it has been shown, in particular, that these processes cannot be interpreted as the outcome of (a) accumulation of new knowledge of empirical facts drawn from the initial theoretical systems; (b) purely “immanent” development of the initial theoretical systems, without any reference to facts; (c) elements external to science, such as the personal feelings of authors, their social position, their nationality, etc. The relationship of interdependence between the structure of theoretical systems and the observation and

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verification of facts assumes a position of fundamental, even if not exclusive, importance. Ultimately, it is possible to affirm that Parsons’ research is mainly oriented towards the analysis of the social system by employing the methodology of observation and interpretation of facts within a coherent theoretical framework Above all, it is directed towards the construction of a theory of social action constantly and organically interested in the fact that actors adhere to a normative orientation. It is also interested in modalities whereby it is possible to guarantee the stability and security of social order regarding given values. For these reasons, in all his publications Parsons (1979, 1986, 1995; Parsons & Smelser, 1970) believed that the problem of problems for sociological research was the “problem of the social order”, to which it was necessary to respond with a solution, based essentially on the role of culture legislation, as a factor of central importance for the orientation of individuals. This important attempt made by Parsons to build an organic theory of social action brought him to consider a scholar, as we shall see, in some ways acclaimed, in others strongly criticised. Smelser also reached similar conclusions in his theories, albeit starting from different positions, when he attributed a primary role in the guidance of human action and the behaviour of subjects to values which he also combined values in a strongly interrelated manner to legitimate ends (or rather the so-called desirable final situations) (1968, p. 48). Poggi, on the other hand, expressed a different opinion about one of the central points of Parsons’ thinking, regarding the mechanisms that guide the actor to act. In the introduction to the Italian edition of The Structure of Social Action, he presented the volume positively, but then complained that “the work never explicitly addresses the problem of what makes the actor act” (Parsons, 1986, p. 22). In the same critical manner, Poggi reproached Parsons for not having addressed some “concrete, historical, individual phenomena of action or some specific classes of action but only glimpses of the processes of effective action through exegetical efforts only regarding those three authors, or in very few anaemic didactic examples (such as the journey by car from Cambridge, Mass., to New York of which he speaks in the footnote)” (ibidem). Moreover, in a similar tone, Poggi accused Parsons of not having measured himself with two other important European authors whose positions differed from those he considered, such as Marx (in particular in his early writings) and Simmel, who also wrote important works on social action (and on theories of social action) (ibid., p. 23). Ferrarotti, on the other hand, formulated a critical judgment of Parsons’ main interpretative theories, but, with regard to the role the North American scholar attributed to social facts in sociological analysis, he underlined the importance of the contribution she made to the development of sociological thinking. In this sense, he claimed that “Parsons, whose interpretations do not always satisfy us, nevertheless has the merit of not evading these questions by taking refuge inconvenience, in the all too convenient, definitions and determinations bequeathed to us by the

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positivist and Durkheimian tradition” (1991, pp.  228–229). Ferrarotti tackled the question of the “relationship between facts and theory” head-on. Ferrarotti recognised Parsons’ merit of having conceded the analysis of the facts, treating them as issues compatible with the well-known methodological approach of Durkheim, and of having proposed, thanks to the contributions of Weber and Pareto, sociological analysis as a means for dealing with action and social action (ibid, p. 231). This meant recalling also to this regard that “Parsons embraces, as has been said, Weber’s conception not without important reservations deriving from the particular Parsonsian closure in the face of the problematic and anti-systemic need that animates all Weberian thought” (ibidem). This type of criticism converged with that advanced in particular by Dahrendorf who, as we have seen in the previous chapters, considered Parsons’ social system a sort of “promised land”, a utopian, perfect, and immutable place, where there could be no conflict and therefore no type of social change since everything flowed back into a logic of strong systemic integration (1971). In reality, we need to recognise, as Coser observed, that Parsons, having centred his attention and his theory of social action on normative structures, which have the structural function of maintaining social order, was induced to conceive conflict as deviant behaviour and a factor characterised by exclusively destructive, dissociative, and dysfunctional consequences (1956, p. 21). In line with this critical analysis conducted by Dahrendorf and Coser, Ferrarotti believed that among the various critiques raised against Parsons, the one regarding the role of conflict is the most founded. For these reasons, he argued that the utopian character of the Parsonsian theoretical model “would lead sociological analysis into a pre-scientific impasse of an analysis that is presumed to be ‘global’ and rigorously scientific, but which, in reality, reveals itself as being essentially a-historical, impassable to the understanding of human phenomena, which are historical phenomena, and which, in practice, translates into a rejection of any change, presented as ‘aberrant conduct’, and in an official defence of the status quo” (1991, p. 239).

2 Rationality and Problems of Everyday Life The Parsonsian theoretical system found a strong critic in Schütz (1974, 1979, 1995) who drew up a set of alternative theories, aimed at challenging the fact that individuals in everyday life rarely act as expected according to the voluntary theory of action. Schütz, starting from the teachings of Husserl’s transcendental philosophy (1960, 1965, 1968, 1997), made it clear that the actor acted on the basis of her/ his perception of reality, to which s/he her/himself attributed meaning also in the wake of a series of conventions, norms, and traditions which belonged to a logic of influence over the subject, and which did not permit her/him to implement Parsons’s rationality concretely. To support this approach Schütz referred to the phenomenological tradition, but also the Weber,

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• When, as we know, the latter defined reality as “a meaningless infinity”, to which the subject, according to Schütz, needs to attribute meaning; • When it defined its typification, starting from recognition of the Weberian ideal type. Based on this theoretical construct, Schütz believed that in everyday life the rationality of the actor was not to be sought either in the adequacy of the means-­ ends relationship or in the exact correspondence of conditions, but rather in the reasonableness of behaviour aimed at achieving a certain result. In other words, the actor is led by the need to solve a series of practical problems of everyday life that often fail to allow the acquisition of all the information foreseen by the Parsonsian scheme to rationally justify her/his work. In the phenomenological theory of Husserl and Schütz, the actor acquired knowledge and a set of living experiences from reality (and conferred on the reality) which, as Cesareo remarked, permitted her/him to act in a “competent”, even if not the necessarily rational way in the Parsonsian sense (1993, p. 185). In this regard, it is necessary to recall that Schütz’s phenomenological approach to social research did not deal with the functionalistic analysis of the system, but followed a contrary scheme, and presented in a very original way aimed at examining and describing as a priority the experience (Erlebnis) of the subject within the living world (Lebenswelt). A theoretical scheme in Italy was that of Ardigò, who advanced the following definition of the concept of the daily life-world: “the sphere of intersubjective relationships (and even before that the intentionality of the subject open to the living experience of the vital world) that precede and accompany the reproduction of human life and which, subsequently, also through symbolic communications between two or a few people, form the band of relationships of familiarity, friendship, daily interaction with full mutual understanding of the meaning of intersubjective action and communication” (1980, p. 15). More specifically, it deals with the free expression of subjectivity – individual and associated, with several subjects and/or small groups – as a way necessary nowadays, within our complex societies, for the development of an effective capacity for communication, understanding, and sharing, and, therefore, capable of encouraging the development of innovation and social planning, in opposition to the concept of a highly prescriptive, institutionalised and paralysing social system (Cocozza, 2004b, p. 11). Based on these reasons, for Schütz rationality was not to be sought in the conduct of the actor, since in this, if at all, reasonableness could be found. It was to be looked for in the observer, the social scientist, charged with analysing and evaluating a specific style of human behaviour and/or a specific social phenomenon. Indeed, Schütz, by privileging the subject as the object of analysis, came to affirm that rationality for the actor resided in the fact that any kind of action because it had been performed in a “competent” way, was reasonable. This model sustained that the utilitarian choice moved by economic calculation is rational the same as forms of religion inspired by expectations associated with the other world.

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Within this logical framework, the predictability itself of action – which Weber found in orientation towards a goal and Parsons in conformity with social norms – Schütz believed needed to be sought upon the different levels and different forms of experience accumulated by individuals since they permitted one to acquire the necessary skills and conditions while suggesting the behaviour to assume to address a certain event. This type of explanation of the rationality of human action led Schütz to argue that the actor is not inclined to use resources to obtain all the information necessary to guarantee perfect correspondence between means and ends, but tends to proceed according to a “step-by-step” logic without any predefined strategy. Ultimately, for Schütz the subject, during exchanges with other subjects within the world of the everyday, conferred common sense on her/his actions; he held that it was in this that the rationality of human action needed to be sought. This was a theoretical phenomenological approach which had a very strong impact upon ethnomethodology in sociological research (1967, 1983), arguing that science, in order to avoid reification, needed to create its own “second-level” constructs based on those of the “first level” already employed by actors in their ordinary daily lives. Husserl’s philosophical and Schütz’s sociological schemata had an influence also on Gadamer’s hermeneutics (1983, 1994), at least in its delineation of a “context of meanings” capable of associating the meaning developed by science and that provided by everyday daily life. Using this operation, one might supersede the considerable distance that separates the scientific approach from that of everyday activities. This way social science should be able to obtain a legitimacy of its own at human level. From this perspective, science had the possible tendency of becoming, as Schütz argued, a humanistic social science. A line of reasoning that harks back to this theoretical scheme is to be found in the idea of the “double hermeneutic” proposed by Giddens in New Rules of Sociological Method (1976). Although it is necessary to remember that the phenomenological scheme applied in the social sciences, in particular in sociology, detected areas of strong ambiguity, a sort of “Achilles’ heel”, when, as we have mentioned already, the construct of “second-level” was an empirically described concept. For this reason, Luckmann, in the wake of the theories developed by Schütz, argued that the phenomenological approach presented itself as a form of “proto-sociology”, aimed at revealing the universal and invariant structures of human existence at all times and everywhere (1983). The criticism of theoretical stasis made against Schütz was partly acknowledged in the volume The Structures of the Life-world, written in collaboration with Luckmann, though it was issued in 1974 after Schütz’s death (in 1959). This volume introduced new concepts that later gave rise to the development of the theory of “genetic phenomenology”. This theoretical approach was already present in reality as a social construct in a volume written by two of Schütz’s close collaborators Berger and Luckmann (1969). It is necessary to remember that in the design of the interpretative scheme presented in this last work, a fundamental work for the sociology of knowledge where Berger and Luckmann were also significantly influenced by G.  H. Mead (1918, 1964, 1972), an author who had a great following in the development of European sociology. This scholar made an important contribution to the study of human behaviour,

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when – starting from an approach based on social and behavioural psychology, in opposition to Watson’s theories of traditional behaviourism, he drew up his model tending towards a logic of symbolic interactionism – he pointed out that to study behaviour one also needed to analyse the “psychic world” of the individual, which is not formed according to an a priori logic. On the contrary, it was at that level that, through interaction and language, the world of the conscious psychic considered the individual as both subject and object, endowed with a self-reflective capacity (the Self), capable of development and reform (1972, pp. 154–156). Based on this logic, during the process of social interaction, the subject learns to see and to consider her/ himself as others do, availing her/himself for this purpose of two fundamental strongly interconnected tools: thought and language. Social interaction and society, for Mead, were (interaction with) in every form of thought. For this reason, though (and in some ways Self, language, interpretation, action) was possible only in society and through society.

3 Social and Communicative Action Habermas constructed his theory of social and communicative action (1969, 1970, 1976, 1980, 1986) upon a critique of all nomological theoretical systems (of a neopositivist, vulgar-Marxist, or neo-functionalist matrix), and drawing on interpretations from the systems theory (Bertanlaffy, 1971; Parsons, 1965; Luhmann, 1990b), in a phenomenological (Husserl, 1960, 1965, 1968, 1997; Schütz, 1974, 1979, 1995) and hermeneutical (Gadamer, 1983, 1994) manner. In his works – while starting from an approach that had its roots in the German sociological and philosophical tradition represented in particular by Hegelian, Marxian and Weberian thinking – concepts converge that are recollective of the fundamental role of Husserl and Schütz’s Soziale Lebenswelt (social living world), of Gadamer’s hermeneutic understanding, but also of theories that assign an important role to generative grammar, language learning and language in general (Chomsky, 1965, 1986, 1990; Wittgenstein, 1964, 1967, 1974). Similarly, Parsons’s theoretical structure, though based on different arguments and that of Luhmann act as targets of criticism, since Habermas, although he shared the systemic approach, did not accept their structural-­ functionalistic and functional-structuralist schemata, which tended to orient processes of communication and socialisation in an excessively functional, “almost dirigistic” manner and with them the behaviour of subjects. In this regard, he argued critically that “Sociological research is mostly maintained within the structural-functional framework of a theory of action that cannot be reduced to observable behaviour, nor can it be reconstructed according to the model of rational action regarding purpose. Finally, many projects of research into sociology and political science are historically oriented, without establishing an absolute relationship with general theories” (Habermas, 1980, p. 33). Based on this critical logic, he added that “Parsons conceives social systems as functional links of

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institutions. In it, certain cultural values are rendered obligatory for social action, which enters the system as it were from above” (ibid., P. 134). Regarding the scientific analysis of social action, Habermas identified two different theoretical models that had as their object (1980, pp. 100–101) the sciences of behaviour and those of the theory of action. The former, which found their application in ethology and social psychology, aimed at explaining human and social action based on an extremely simplified theoretical scheme, represented by two elements characterised by the stimulus-behavioural reaction exchange. This approach included important studies such as those regarding Skinner’s learning theory (1959, 1992), those carried out by Miller and Dollar, those on Festinger’s cognitive dissonance (1957), or those that tended to establish theories regarding group behaviour (Lippit). The second approach, on the other hand, which predominated in sociological theories and those of cultural anthropology, and which, according to Habermas, could count on the contributions of Parsons, Merton (1968) and Shils (1965, 1981, 1984), provided social action with greater explanatory capacity, while recognising that it had led to empirical generalisations, though not to real theories, even if their scope was medium. Within this descriptive framework of the behaviourist sciences, action is configured as a reaction where the actor responds essentially to a given external environmental stimulus or one from within the subject her/himself (the sensory or nervous system). From this point of view, action as the relationship between stimulus and reaction is an adaptive process that tends to restore a state of equilibrium altered by the relational exchange. In other words, the subject simply responds to a given internal or external environmental event by conforming to the acknowledged conditions required by the environment itself. On the contrary, in Habermas’s sociological analysis, along with systemic and cybernetic orientation, as we shall see also in the case of Luhmann, the actor who led the action was the system, the attention focuses, therefore, on the relationship between the system and the environment, based on a retroactive process, in the sense that the system reacted to the pressures-stresses of the environment using accommodation, thus giving rise to an adaptive reactive process. Starting from these positions and from the assumptions provided by other disciplinary approaches like cybernetics and the systems theory, Habermas developed his critical theory. In this regard, reinterpreting Weberian thinking, he recalled that “The theoretical approach to action has already been formulated by Max Weber. He intended social action as subjectively significant behaviour, that is, conduct oriented in a subjectively intended sense and motivated by it, which cannot be adequately understood except concerning the aims and values towards which the acting subject is oriented” (ibid., p. 101). According to Habermas (1986), we can distinguish three different types of activities related to their respective worlds of reference and which comprised his theoretical construct: teleological action (the actor acts, in a situation of solitude, without interacting with others, and pursues an aim using an adequate choice of means), acting regulated by norms (the members of a group activity based on common norms), dramaturgical acting (the actor interacts with an audience to whom s/he

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reveals her/his subjectivity). If the three different levels of action referred to here, interact effectively with each other, then the fourth type of action can also find room, that is connected with communicative action. This fourth level of communication for Habermas represented the most complete form of communication, a kind of “medium of mutual understanding”, where the speakers and the listeners refer to something in common and present in the subjective and objective social world, which has the foundational function of attributing the same meaning to certain expressions (1986, p. 170). For these reasons, among the different types of action communication represented the ideal model par excellence, to which the other three ended up being, to some extent, subordinate. Based on the Habermasian approach, “If action is linked to intentions in such a way that it can be deduced from propositions expressing these intentions, then the opposite thesis is also valid. A subject can only perform the actions whose intentions s/he is able, in principle, to describe. The boundaries of action are determined by the range of possible descriptions. This field is established by the structures of language in which self-understanding and the conception of the world typical of a social group are articulated. Therefore, the boundaries of action are outlined by the boundaries of language” (Habermas, 1980, p. 125). Habermas then made a distinction between instrumental and communicative action. The former referred to processes of transformation of the external reality, while the latter concerned the interaction and modes by means of which subjects succeed in understanding each other. Two forms of rationality corresponded to two modes of action: instrumental and communicative. With regard, in particular, to the second type of rationality, Habermas stated that “an action can be called rational only if the speaker satisfies the conditions that are necessary for the achievement of the allocutive purpose of understanding something in the world with at least one other participant in the communicative act. A purpose-oriented action can, on the contrary, be defined as rational only if the actor fulfils the conditions that indispensable for the realisation of the intent to intervene successfully in the world” (1986, p. 65). In reality, according to Habermas, following the aforementioned classic bipartition of the sciences that study social action, motivation and rationality need to be understood (and sought) as “a result of both reactive coercion and meaningful interaction. The relationship with which action is either simply stimulated from behind by motives dissociated or intentionally guided by the communication of meaning determines degrees of freedom of social action meaning degrees by which to soften institutions and individual identification. They can be seen from time to time in the states of aggregation of history, which reflects the emancipation of mankind from the coercion of nature as well as from its reproduction” (ibid, p. 146). According to Habermas an important role, relative to the study of the evolution of social formation and social action, is provided by the concept of crisis, which Habermas used in his theory of the crisis of rationality in mature capitalism (1976) to underline the fundamental transition from one era to another during the history of mankind. He wrote that “In classical aesthetics, from Aristotle to Hegel, crisis meant the turning point of a fatal process, which, despite all its objectivity, did not

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simply break in from the outside, nor did it remain external to the identity of the people involved. The contradiction expressed in the catastrophic exasperation of a conflict outlined in action is inherent in the structure of the system of action and the system of the personalities of the protagonists themselves. Destiny is fulfilled by the laying bare of conflicting norms, against which the identity of those involved is ruptured unless they are able to find the strength to regain their freedom by breaking the mythical power of destiny through the development of a new identity” (Habermas, 1976, p. 4). The concept of crisis thus acquired from classical tragedy, found its equivalent in Löwit’s (1963) concept of crisis and the end of history. The Habermasian interpretation of the evolution of society based on this latter paradigm led to the affirmation of the concept of a society characterised by elements of a post-­ capitalist and postmodern type. During the course of human history, there has been the advent of precultural social formations that predated the great civilisations of antiquity, that of traditional ones which represented the great civilisations of antiquity, that of those of capitalism, which we can divide into liberal capitalism and organised capitalism as well as the formation of post-capitalist and postmodern ones (Habermas, 1976, p. 21). Habermas argues, “By interpreting an event as a crisis, we tacitly attribute a normative sense to it: the solution of the crisis implies liberation for the subject” (ibid, p. 4). This concept is then reformulated by Habermas in sociological terms of the systems theory. Concerning this, he held that “Crises occur when the structure of a social system provides fewer possibilities for solving problems than it should take to ensure the conservation of the system. In this sense, crises are lasting perturbations of system integration” (ibid., p. 5). To reinforce this concept, Habermas highlighted the fact that, when society in crisis questions social integration to the point of compromising the consensual basis of its normative structures and, therefore, tends to give rise to a state of anomie, the states of crisis are configured as a real disintegration of social institutions. In other words, Habermas’s theses aimed at outlining a new interpretative paradigm of social action based on four main theoretical references, capable of guiding the sociologist to understand the rationality underlying it. He maintained that “The four theoretical positions that need to be examined here differ undoubtedly in their methodological aspects. From the point of view of the theory of social evolution that I have in mind, however, they are not mutually exclusive. The impression of eclecticism cannot be eliminated as long as a complex theory endowed with explanatory power is still in its embryonic state” (1980, p. 345). The new Habermasian interpretative paradigm was based essentially on the following four theoretical positions (1980, 1986): 1. The systematically distorted communication of parts that coexist but are mutually hostile (dialectical approach and historical materialism). 2. The role of the behaviour of the actor (theory of action and roles). 3. The behaviour of an organism stimulated by its environment (learning theory). 4. The self-regulated machine (systems theory).

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However, the Habermasian paradigm did not take into consideration the theory of rational choice, game theory, and that reconstructive development (demolition and reconstruction of a building, a machine, or a system). The first theory concerning historical materialism, acted as an explanation of social evolution, as Habermas himself observed, “in such a way as to be able to clarify at least these three problems: the transition towards higher civilisations and, therefore, the origin of societies divided into classes; the transition into the modern era and, therefore, the origin of capitalist societies; finally, the dynamics of an antagonistic society on a world scale” (ibid, p. 346). The theory of action, on the other hand, provided the fundamental concepts for the definition of the sphere of the sociological object. Based on these assumptions, Habermas proposed providing Parsons’s action frame of reference with his theoretical framework of reference. He sustained that the Parsonsian theoretical construction had been superseded by three important and different contributions, respectively those of GH Mead (1918, 1964, 1972), of Schütz, and Wittgenstein. In this regard, he wrote that “Symbolic interactionism defined by GH Mead and the phenomenological theory of action linked to A. Schütz, have examined the constructive performances of the actor in situations that require legislation and are capable of interpretation. Wittgenstein’s ethnomethodology and ethnolinguistics posited a systematic link between language and interaction, while, finally, the critical reception of the role theory in more recent years has provided arguments that tend to identify the imperceptibility of the power embodied in systems of action, that is, structural violence. On the other hand, the theory of action is destined to remain a jumble of concepts as long as it cannot and remains unable to meet a fundamental pragmatic-­ universal requirement: it needs to reconstruct the general and necessary premises of communication, that is, the general structures of action oriented towards understanding and the universal capacity for action of socialised subjects” (Habermas, p. 346). The third theoretical reference, related to the behavioural theory, concedes the adaptation of the psychological theory of learning to the analysis of sociological issues and permits Habermas to introduce elements of control over social evolution and share the idea that social evolution is attributable to processes of learning. This theoretical approach – linked not to the traditional behavioural approach, but to the logic of development affirmed by developmental cognitive psychology  – favours distinctions between different levels of formally characterised learning and learning processes that are possible from time to time at similar levels. This introduces a concept that is necessary if one is to understand an evolving social system. The fourth theoretical reference to functional systems theory provided Habermas with the possibility of observing that, using this proposition, it was possible to create a framework where “contemporary sociology reconnects itself to the evolutionary theories of the nineteenth century, abandoning, however, the historical-philosophical assumptions concerning mono-causality, linearity, continuity, and the need for social evolution” (ibid., p.  347). This theoretical choice, in favour of the functional systems theory, was dictated by the fact that it allowed the use of the concept of complexity and adaptation to complexity. Habermas himself

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recalled that within it one might find the concept of possible development – in the sense of the growth of complexity – already enunciated, to some extent, by Spencer with his from an incoherent homogeneity to coherent heterogeneity formula. For Habermas, this theoretical formulation “becomes fruitful for a theory of social evolution only if the realm of the object can be specified, and if a learning theory specific to the realm of the object can be formulated. If the meaning of the wishes of a specific conceptual and theoretical formation in the conceptual field is not clear, the systems theory can degenerate into a verbal game without any explanatory strength” (ibidem). This last statement opened the way to a fierce controversy between Habermas and Luhmann regarding the role of the systems theory and its explanatory capacity. The diatribe arose, in particular, from a diversity of interpretation due to the exact and coherent identification of the sphere of the object by the sociologist who intended to study, on the one hand, the functioning and evolution of social systems, on the other, the rationality that guides action and social action, and which, according to Habermas, needed to be based on the analysis and understanding of communicative action. In this regard, Habermas believed that the theory of communicative action could and needed to be based on the following concepts, presented here in extreme summary (ibid., pp. 348–355): meaning, a semantic function of symbols used with the same meaning; pragmatic universals, systems of reference, verbal action, and intentional expressions; aspects of action: social (communicative versus strategic) versus non-social (instrumental); degrees of communication, symbolically mediated interaction, discursive communication subtracted from action; levels of normative reality, interaction, roles and norms, generative rules of norms; means of communication, which can be deduced from both the institutionalisation of the different ways of using cognitive, interactive and expressive language (truth, law, art) and from models of strategic action (exchange, struggle, money, and power); evolutionary learning, or the possibility of activating a control over social development by the analysis and measurement of the relations of exchange relevant to developments between systems of personality and society. This concept required the introduction of other concepts, related to the development of cognitive, linguistic and interactive competences, voiced by Piaget (1978; Piaget & Inhelder, 1974), such as developmental dimensions (cognitive, linguistic, interactive), learning mechanisms (accommodation/assimilation; identification with reference persons; internalisation of reference models; reflective abstraction), problems related to action (technical disposition on objectified reality; consensual regulation of conflicts of action), problem solving (autonomy towards external nature and internal); levels of learning development (for cognitive competence: sensorimotor/pre-­operation/concrete-operation/formal operational); levels of the ego boundary system (symbiotic/egocentric/objectivistic-socio-centric/universalistic); finally, the identification of the four evolutionary stages of our societies, where different social formations appear which, during the course of human history, gave rise to different organisational principles, represented respectively by the following

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types of social organisation: Neolithic societies, archaic civilisations, advanced civilisations, the modern age, followed by the current post-modern age. Moreover, it is known that modernity, as a historical period different from the previous one, was characterised precisely by the expansion and intensification of the role played by processes of communication between individuals, cultures, and societies. Piaget’s analysis of the individual as a rational, thinking being, who processes information in different ways capable of producing social outcomes, gave birth even to the new discipline of the cognitive sciences. Postmodernity emphasises these elements and places the three transcendental conditions that Habermas believed characterised every possible form of communication: truth, justice, and sincerity in a situation of critical development. This awareness led him to affirm that the conditions of communicative action, dictated by the principles of truth, justice, and sincerity, represented the regulating ideas of communication (Habermas, 1986). In other words, according to Habermas, at empirical level, regulative ideas indicated that before entering into the communicative game/ exchange, we are concerned with the probability of obtaining a useful result. Where the transcendental conditions and these three regulative ideas are respected, the probability of obtaining a useful result from communication (information, an explanation, a justification, an experience) increases. For this reason, we prefer them to other types of regulatory ideas, obviously placed in an oppositional logic. Ultimately, according to Habermas, each of the theoretical prepositions enunciated in his paradigm found specific application in one of the following phenomenological fields, rather than in another (1980, p.  356): historical materialism in the context of social movements and class conflict; the theory of roles in a context of intuitively guided daily action; learning theory in the context of externally directed (peripheral) learning processes; the systems theory of social sciences in the field of organisation and control. Within this theoretical framework, as already mentioned, Habermas stated, critically, that an interpretation characterised by “total functionalism”, tending towards an understanding of reality in the Weberian sense, like that provided by Parsons, in some ways by Luhmann, did not permit the acquisition of “a sufficient specification of the objective field and empirically sound assumptions on socially evolutionary learning processes” (ibid., p.  356). Using the same critical approach, Habermas discussed Luhmann and defined the assumptions of his theory of evolution as “redundant”. In particular, he objected to the claim that the “law can be the bearer of social evolution”, since there was (in Luhmann’s theories) no explanation of the foundations of the generation of learning and how this assumption was generalised (ibid., p. 360).

Chapter 4

Rationality, Environment, and Complex Systems in the Theses of Niklas Luhmann

1  E  nvironment and System: A Constant Process of Adaptation Luhmann’s theoretical contribution was an attempt at superseding a series of theoretical foundations that stemmed from the European sociological and philosophical tradition, and presented itself with a theoretical architecture of a post-Marxian, post-Weberian, but also post-Parsonsian type. Luhmann aimed at superseding the Marxian scheme by considering the evolution of social systems not from a perspective of historically determined conflict and materialism, but from a probabilistic perspective, which stemmed from a series of conditions of contingent reality and social issues that tended to fluctuate. Similarly, it tended to go beyond the Weberian analysis, since it considered the evolution of society in a completely de-­subjectivised key, not necessarily oriented, therefore, by the rational actions of the actors, but by those of complex systems. It also aimed at differentiating itself from Parsons’ structural-­ functionalism, highlighting the dynamic-processual elements of the scheme called functional-structuralism, to the detriment of the static-ordering and normative elements typical of the Parsonsian theoretical structure. In other words, Luhmann aimed at providing an innovative conceptual apparatus, capable of superseding the theories of Marx, of Weber, and of Parsons, using a multidisciplinary approach that tended to associate sociological with legal concepts, philosophical with cybernetic and biological concepts. From the latter, a fundamental concept “autopoiesis” was imported into his thinking. A concept introduced by Varela (1979) and Maturana (1982) to describe both the set of rules and modalities through which “systems” were capable of guiding their self-reproduction processes and series of processes characterised by self (Selbst) activation/promotion of functions and actions. As Luhmann himself wrote “Autopoiesis does not necessarily presuppose that the type of operations with which the system reproduces itself is absent from the environment of the system. In the environment of living organisms, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cocozza, The Unexpected in Action, Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26793-2_4

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there are other living organisms, in the environment of consciousness there is another consciousness. But in both cases, the system’s process of reproduction can only be used internally, and not to connect the system and the environment; therefore, one cannot, so to speak, affect another life or another consciousness to introduce it into one’s system (…) In the case of social systems this reality is configured differently in two senses. On the one hand, there is no communication outside the company – as a communication system: since the system is the only one to employ this type of operation, it is closed for objective necessities. On the other hand, this is not true for any of the other social systems, which must consequently define their specific way of operating, or, thanks to reflection, determine their own identity to identify the units of meaning that must be continually reproduced at all. Internal as they allow the self-reproduction of the system” (1990b, pp. 106–107). Therefore, Luhmann’s theory is based essentially on the functional analysis of the relationship between system and environment, and on the analysis of the difference in complexity between these two elements. However, with the acquisition of the concept of autopoiesis, it introduced a new form of the system, one capable of self-reproduction. Having reached this point of reasoning, Luhmann wondered whether such a theoretical theory might fall within the scope of the general theory of systems, or whether it was not better to frame it within a new scheme, that of the general theory of an autopoietic system. The answer was that “We believe that this general concept is not only possible, but necessary because it permits the unification of a series of propositions regarding this type of system, and also because it refers to an evolutionary context within which one, to some extent, developed all of its internal issues of delimitation” (ibidem). In reality, the cultural matrices that inspired Luhmann’s thinking – in the first (1963–1984), as in the second phase of its development (1985–2000) – are to be found, as suggested by Febbrajo, in the Introduction to the volume Social Systems, as well as in the great German philosophical tradition, “in the theory of organisation, in legal culture and the functionalist method” (1990b, p. 16). The theory of organisation provided Luhmann with a fundamental concept for his theses, that of “complexity”, intended as an “excess of the possibilities of experience and action in the world concerning a given system, which neither knows about nor can respond with adequate experiences and actions” (1975). One problem, that of complexity, which all types of formal organisations have to deal with, including those of bureaucracy, try to remain aloof from it though they derive their legitimacy from complexity. Within this theoretical framework, the system – in the Luhmannian sense of man-system and society-system (in turn, a set of subsystems) – has two possible alternatives of survival: that of increasing people’s learning capacity (experiences and actions) or reducing the complexity of the environment to make it bearable. The legal culture proposed by Gehlen and Schelsky, on the other hand, permitted an important concept like Luhmann’s regarding the relationship between “structures” (in a normative-formal sense) and “institutions” (in an empirical-realistic sense), to become one of the main objects of research. Luhmann owed his ability to

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combine all the previous concepts in a “general framework”, based on which he was then able to outline the concept of system and link it to the functionalistic method, acquired thanks to years of study and frequentation of Parsons. According to Luhmann’s particular conception of the theory of systems, systems were delineated by given “environments“and tended to act using particular “structures”, to render stable and constant a world that is extremely complex, uncontrollable and subject to continuous variations and fluctuations. This continuous process of adaptation (through innovative actions and the acquisition of new experiences, or attempts to reduce complexity) produced, he held, a series of actions tending to stabilise relations with their environments. The stabilisation of a system is an issue posed by the changing environment, which (concerning the system) presents itself in a sort of dialectical relationship. According to this logic, for Luhmann stabilisation of a system meant temporal, material, and social generalisation of behavioural expectations (1990b). This result was achievable, he believed, by changing the functions exercised (and the relative adaptation of internal structures), abandoning outdated modalities (made obsolete due to increasing complexity), and by learning new ones prompted by constant relational innovation – both internal and external to the system itself – of our environment. Within Luhmann’s theoretical scheme, the functions of a social system represented the performance that contributed to maintaining the stability of the system itself, such as schools and the market. The law, on the other hand, was a fundamental structure, capable of ensuring the exigency of balance and stability (consequent to the reduction of internal and external complexity), since it was able to guarantee adequate congruence within the three fundamental areas of the system which are, respectively, temporal, material, and social. In this regard, it is useful to remember that even for Coser, who referred to a theoretical framework quite dissimilar from Luhmann’s, the law (the rule that follows a specific conflictual process) assumed this value, as it represented a sort of rule that tended to prevent the recurrence of certain “abuses”, and therefore, capable of acting as a factor of social balance and stability (1983a, b, p. 651). The relationship between system and environment in Luhmann’s theory appeared, therefore, as a dialectical process of an adaptive type, where the system was engaged in a twofold selective strategy involving the reduction of internal complexity and, simultaneously, of the incorporation of the complexity of the environment. From this point of view, it was an innovative way of analysing and evaluating social action. For this reason, as Cesareo (1993, p. 170) also observed, Luhmann’s attention was not focused on the behaviour of the subject as a social actor but the system-environment relationship. This theoretical choice can be explained by the fact that, for Luhmann, society was divided into two large areas with differentiated functions: the micro-­sociological area of individuals and its affective-based micro-community (family, neighbourhoods, and friends), and the macro-sociological area constituted by organisational systems or by the various types of organisations (private and public), as well as by politics and the state. This theoretical scheme, as is clear, could not but confer on the second category of organisational systems the greatest possible capacity for social

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action capable of reducing complexity, since the social action of individuals was characterised by a limited capability and experience, but also by a fairly limited range of action. Within this framework, the action of the subjects was exercised, in a “voluntary and unconscious” way, within the strategies and objectives of organisational systems, considered truly complex social systems. Another particular characteristic of Luhmann’s thinking was because influenced not only by biology but also by cybernetics, he believed that the process of adaptation between system and environment was essentially a cognitive process, based on the transfer of information, or rather on the “learning of new knowledge and experiences, necessary for an innovative communicative action that permits us to reach (and maintain) the necessary stability to the system”. As already anticipated in part, according to Luhmann, the functioning of the social system belonged to a logic of a “self-referential” type as it presented characteristics of self-constitution (meaning the self-constitution of functional units  – structures  – and the elements of which it is composed); self-orientation (which activated reference to this kind of self-constitution in all the relationships existing between these elements); self-reproduction (self-constitution was constantly reproduced, and this function helped close the circuit giving rise to an open and continuous process). Luhmann, therefore, with these theses inaugurated a new season of studies of the systems theory and proposed one of his own, the “Theory of self-referential systems”, using a paradigmatic change – in the sense intended by Kuhn – which tended to revolutionise the general systems theory itself (Bertanlaffy, 1971; Parsons, 1965; Habermas, 1986). In this regard, Luhmann wrote that “If we start from the assumption of the possibility of a theory of self-referential systems and the problems posed by complexity, there are good reasons to simply reverse the limiting relation postulated by Weber and Parsons. Sociality is not a specific instance of action, but an action that is constituted within social systems, by communication and attribution, as a reduction of complexity and an indispensable self-simplification of the system” (1990b, p. 251). For Luhmann, therefore, the concept of communication, considerably distant from the metaphor of “transmission”, as well as from the concept of “information” (ibid., p. 253), assumed the concept of action on which to bestow meaning. It took shape and was transformed into “communicative action”, since “action is constituted at social level within two different contexts: as information, that is, as the subject of communication; or as communicative action. In other words, there undoubtedly exists non-communicative acting concerning which communication merely informs. However, the social relevance of actions like these was conveyed, nevertheless, using communication“(ibid., p. 283). All this led Luhmann to make the following statement, “a social system constitutes itself as a system of action by using communication as its underlying process and by resorting to its operational instruments” (ibidem.). In other words, communication became a “selective process”, “The selection activated by communication constitutes its horizon; what is chosen is already constituted as selection, that is, as information. What is communicated is not only

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selected but has already selected itself and is communicated for this very reason. For this reason, communication should not be seen as a selective bipolar, but as a tripolar process. It is not a simple question of issuing and receiving, carried out through selective mutual attention. The selective nature of information, on the other hand, is a factor belonging to the communicative process, because selective attention can only be activated in relation to it” (ibid, p. 254). To the two classical phases of the communications process, represented by the emission and reception of certain information (messages), Luhmann, opportunely added a third, that of the “comprehension” of the information itself, which, when all came to all, was what gave meaning to the communicative action. In this context, a series of concepts, including those of “social action“and “global social action”, typical of Luhmann’s theoretical network, assumed a role of fundamental importance, concerning which, Luhmann himself pointed out that “Acting is social acting in all those cases in which the social dimension contributes to the determination of its meaning, and, therefore, whether we take into account what others would think of it. But acting is global social acting only if it is understood and/or received as communication, because only in that case does it contribute to realising the social system formed by society” (ibid, p. 652). In the conceptual theses contained in his Soziale Systeme, whose original edition is dated 1984, Luhmann examined four different essential problematic aspects of every social system: identification, delimitation, coordination, and innovation. With his concept of identification, Luhmann intended to clarify why and how social systems, to survive, needed to provide their actions, as a “continuous updating of possibilities” with meaning (1990b, p. 153). As Febbrajo explained, “A self-­ reproducing and the self-limiting, self-reinforcing and self-correcting process is established through the conferral of meaning” (ibid, p.  27). In this theoretical scheme of his, Luhmann definitively posited in his Social Systems (1990b), a final self-correcting action of the system. From this perspective, there existed a process which tended to “de-subjectivise”, since the contribution of a specific author or bearer of meaning external to the system was not considered, but only a capacity for self-orientation and autopoiesis. With the concept of delimitation, however, Luhmann intended to make it clear that there existed delimitations between different historical periods, but also a sort of continuum of the evolution of the various modes of socialisation, from the face-­ to-­face forms of interaction found in primitive societies (based on perception) to the more advanced ones that characterise our society (based, instead, on communicative processes) (ibid., p. 635). Interaction and society were, therefore, he hypothesised, social systems of a different type, where the first had boundaries sufficiently delimited by “everything that can be treated as physically present”, while the second was asserted when “this dependence tends to be superseded and with it the boundaries of space, time, as well as that of relevant objects and themes”. In other words, society affirmed itself when it began to produce and regenerate meanings capable of connecting within spaces, places, and concepts that were no longer delimited and limiting.

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The element that connoted this paradigmatic passage was provided by the development of communicative processes when, with the spread of mass communication techniques developed in the twentieth century, they lost the constraints imposed by writing and printing and tended to assume a broader and more important social dimension. However, in reality, Luhmann’s theory contemplated a strong connection between the two functionally opposite concepts, since “ as society is not possible without interaction so interaction is impossible without society” (ibid, p. 640). Society was, therefore, characterised by the innumerable interactions that it favoured and that it included within its social system. But it was Luhmann himself who reminded us that the paradox of social evolution was due precisely to “the impossibility of interaction”, since by universally expanding the limits of perception it makes it inaccessible (ibid., p.  656). Society for this scholar  – who declared the supersession of the contrast between the concepts of “simple society” and “complex society”, since the latter incorporated the former – was represented by the “overall social system that includes everything that is social and not, therefore, knows no social environment. If something social is added, if new partners or communicative themes emerge, society grows with them in the same way that they grow as part of society. These innovations cannot be positioned externally, that is, treated as issues that concern the environment of society, because everything that is communicated in society. Society is the only social system in which this particular phenomenon occurs, which has far-reaching consequences and thus places several complex requirements on social theory” (ibid., p. 630). According to this logic, Luhmann stated that “In the presence of similar circumstances, the unity of the social system cannot be other than this self-referential closure. Society is the autopoietic system par excellence. Society implements communication and everything that implements communication in society. Society comprises the elementary (communicative) units of which it is composed, and everything that is constituted this way becomes society, a component of the process of the constitution itself. Within the system of society, there is no possibility of escaping this consequence; it includes negation itself (…) which serves to preserve, if not the structures, at least, autopoietic reproduction in itself. For this reason, it is also possible to define society as a self-instituting order, in that everything regarding it that needs to be modified or replaced, needs to be modified or replaced inside of it” (ibid., p. 631).

2 Selection, Communication, and Rationality As Luhmann argued with considerable efficacy when seeking to clarify his theories regarding the relationship between interaction and society, “thanks to the difference between society and interaction certain possibilities of selection are established. Systems of interaction can and must be continually abandoned and restarted. This necessitates a unifying semantics, a culture to guide this process in the direction of what is probable or has been claimed to be valid. It is in this sense that society exerts

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a selective effect on what is present at the level of interaction, without this reason excluding with certainty what is contradictory or deviant. (...) The strength of selection does not lie in a mechanism based on causal laws, nor in the design or control of complexity, but derives from the fact that the relative ordering models, despite being unlikely in themselves, work despite everything (if only under certain conditions) with a certain probability. However, society itself is the result of interactions. It is not an instance set up regardless of what it selects. He is not a god. Society is, in a certain sense, the ecological system of interactions that changes to the extent that it conveys opportunities for interaction. It succeeds in doing what interaction alone would not be able to do: making things more and more improbable probable” (1990b, p. 659). With regard to the social dimension of meaning leading to a process of differentiation within society, Luhmann pointed out that “The process of differentiation of the social dimension (and its separation from the material dimension as well as from the temporal one) is only one aspect of the development, through differentiation, of the social system itself. Similarly, everything that is expected or received as communication, integrates those who are actively or passively involved in society. Their behaviour is, therefore, socially predictable, whatever the natural causes or the hypothesised psychic motivations may be. The social dimension refers to a shared experience that may manifest itself in communicative terms, and the two aspects put together entail precisely the recursive self-reproduction of society. This is also, and especially, true when within society its antithesis is formulated” (ibid.). In reality, as argued by Luhmann, in a volume of his on Power and social complexity issued a few years ago, regarding the role of the means of communication and the selective actions carried out by subjects, “the processes of communication regulated by means of communication link together partners who perform, each for her/his part, their selective performances, being mutually aware of this situation” (1975, p.  5). These subjects called Alter and Ego have at their disposal certain choices characterised by a twofold type of selectivity, and as Luhmann wrote, “precisely in this lies the function of means of communication, that is, to regulate the processes that transmit choices in their selectivity from Alter to Ego. From this point of view, the initial problem is identical for all means of communication characterised by a symbolic generalisation: what is valid for love and truth is also valid for power. In all these cases, the communication that exerts influence refers to a partner whose selections one would like to influence” (ibid., p. 6). In line with this logic, the means of mass communication, according to Luhmann, established a typical relationship of power, in Weberian terms authority and not power (constraint according to Luhmann), with their partners, using a mechanism that tended to concentrate a maximum (in any case asymmetrical) of power in the Alter that carried out the initial selections. Indeed, Luhmann stated that “the function of a means of communication lies in the transmission of a complexity that has been reduced” (ibid, p. 9). In line with this heuristic approach, relative to the possible power relations that our societies may establish, in addition to those outlined above with relation to processes of mass communication, one might say, as Cesareo argued, that “a power relationship can derive from strength, from blackmail, from affection, from

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prestige, from money” (1993, p. 135). These are all relational situations that tend to guide behaviour. In these, the sociologist needs to seek the most coherent explanatory method by which to identify the rationality enacted by the subjects involved. In mass society, however, there may be cases of “solitary action”, that is action not chosen by society itself and by the systems of communication acting upon (and within) the possible array of interactions, since societies like these, as already mentioned, are strongly inclined to develop indirect means of communication (with characteristics far removed from the typical mechanisms of interaction). Even if these same “solitary actions”, as Luhmann recalled, became “social actions whenever the determination of their meaning contains references to society. One accelerates or slows down one’s actions by passing from one interaction to another; loneliness is used to let oneself go or perform actions that one would never carry out in the presence of others. We prepare for interaction” (Luhmann, 1990b, p. 652). On the role of solitary action and solitary social action in the development of societies, Luhmann provided an effectual explanation “Solitary action is rare and irrelevant in all ancient societies – simply because the house and the remaining living space offer few possibilities for isolation. Only in the course of evolution is an area created where solitary behaviour is initiated which, although external to the interaction, is social nevertheless. The sphere of writing and reading end up by affirming themselves and producing far-reaching social and semantic repercussions. The invention of writing, therefore, provides solitary social action with the opportunity of remaining global social action, of being communication, making it possible to contribute to the reproduction of society even when no one is present” (ibid., pp. 652–653). In this evolution of social systems, writing and printing assumed a fundamental role, because, as Luhmann argued, “they make it possible to withdraw from systems of interaction while continuing to communicate on a social level with far-reaching consequences. On the one hand, it is possible to reach a larger number of recipients for longer periods if one adopts the form of written communication; this, on the other hand, does not impose but strongly suggests a withdrawal from interaction. However, the development of this form of communication from the contexts of interaction using differentiation is not only of quantitative importance; it enables a functioning that would not be possible within the interaction and a consequent increase in the differentiation between society and interaction concerning which both the social system and the systems of interaction are subsequently oriented. On the other hand, such a development forces one to compensate for the non-presence of the partners and objects of communication with a more standardised, more disciplined use of language, aimed at highlighting, through language, many aspects that would otherwise have been evident in the situation. Perhaps the most penetrating analyses of this circumstance have been made by adopting epistolary seduction as an example, and they come not from sociology, but from the epistolary novel itself” (ibid., p. 653). Still, regarding the powerful role assumed by the written text, above all, by the press in our societies, Luhmann recalled that “Writing (and even more the press) also makes possible a series of procedures that we could bring together under the name of the technique of the fait accompli, by expressing in advance in writing,

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establishing positions and opinions that perhaps one would not be able to face or support through interaction. No reform without publication of the theses; if the price tags are missing, the sale becomes more complicated. If there is a written text, it is possible to refer during subsequent interactions to what is written, discuss it and find support in it, especially if the purpose is conflict” (ibid., p. 654). The theme of conflict, power, and predefined order leads us to the last topic of Luhmann’s thinking being analysed: the relationship between the self-reference and rationality of social systems. In this regard, Luhmann undertook a serious critique of the development of European rational thought in recent centuries and argued that “The judgment of rationality, for example, moved from the sphere of principles in the direction of historical progress, then described as progress. The rational/irrational scheme is resorted to. One moves what is essential into a material sphere where it cannot be reached by any kind of rationality into the matter, clothing, the amorality of the will to have and wield power. Or one ends up conceiving rationality only as the rationality of action, like an island surrounded by the waves of irrationality, only to waste this rationality on a deeper analysis of the decision-making process. Or, finally, we are interested not so much in rationality as in the damage it causes, in the heterogeneity of goals, or in the harmful consequences of correct action. All of this gives rise to the conviction, now established, that actual reality is not in itself rational, but must be led to be so (which may lead one to doubt the very possibility that this process of rationalisation is rational)” (ibid., p. 712). To this type of reasoning, Luhmann opposed some considerations aimed at demonstrating that the capacity of self-referral, as well as of self-direction and self-reproduction of social systems, naturally contain rationality of their own. He also observed that “Social systems are not only able to communicate their environment with each other, but can also use, in internal communication, their difference concerning the environment (for example the conception of their borders or constituent features of their elements). In other words, they can reintroduce into the system the difference between system and environments which permits them to implement the processes of self-observation, self-description, and reflection informally. This is still not enough for a system to earn the title of rationality. The only self-reference, as we said, is not yet rationality“(ibid., p. 713). For Luhmann, therefore, autopoietic social systems were capable of acquiring the status of rationality “when the concept of difference is used in a self-referential way, that is, if the reflection concerns the unity of difference. The requirement of rationality, therefore, implies that cases of orientation to differences are controlled because of their conceptual self-reference, drawing the due consequences from this control. This implies that systems determine themselves through their difference from the environment and are forced to give this difference, internally, an operational meaning, an informative value, a specific connective value” (ibidem). This type of affirmation, however, contributed to determining a paradigmatic change, which brought Luhmann to argue that “From a historical point of view, this theoretical deduction and relative conception of rationality are the consequence of the paradigmatic change described above, that is, of the passage from the theory centred on the binomial system/environment to the theory of self-referential

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systems” (ibidem). In other words, Luhmann proposed the affirmation of a sort of self-reflective rationality that each system, the man-system as well as the society-­ system, determined in logic (and through processes) of self-reflection centred on the enhancement of the unity of differences, both by considering the latter as advantages, with both aimed at exploiting their potential. He argued that to supersede Pascal’s famous paradox  – originating from the problems encountered in the activity of planning  – it was necessary to take into consideration the parts of the system itself to identify the system of the system. Based on this logic “Tracing this paradox to the pure form of self-reference, we, therefore, see rationality as the re-entry of the difference into the different, as the insertion of an open difference between system and environment into the system that determines itself thanks to this difference” (ibid., p. 714). In other words, for Luhmann the system, if it wanted to behave rationally, needed to control its influences over the environment by observing its repercussions on itself. Wilden of the London Tavistock Institute came to the same conclusion when he argued that “The system that disposes of its environment disposes of itself” (1972, p. 207). According to this logic, the relationships between system and environment were particularly crucial to our societies, where according to Luhmann, “At this point, social rationality would require that the environmental problems caused by society, insofar as they in turn concern society, be represented within the social system placed within the process of social communication” (ibid., p. 717). For Luhmann, the question of the analysis of rationality in our societies was only hinted at, as it was in its infancy. To address it, recourse to the concept of crisis suggested by the need for profound structural changes was not enough; it was better to rely on “the more ambitious perspective of the system’s self-reflection” (ibidem).

Chapter 5

Rationalism, Irrationalism, and Pseudo-­rationality in the Thinking of Karl Marx and Karl R. Popper

1  T  he Contrast Between Rationalism and Irrationalism: A Vexata Quaestio Popper argued that the terms “reason“and “rationalism“were too vague and were used by some scholars to designate very different concepts and that sometimes they were used not as the opposite of “irrationalism”, but of “empiricism” (2002, p. 507). He believed, instead, that the concept of “rationalism“should be broader and include “intellectualism” in addition to “empiricism”, so that it might comprise the experiments and thoughts that science availed itself of during its progress. By rationalism Popper meant “an attitude that seeks to solve as many problems as possible by an appeal to reason, that is, to clear thinking and experience, rather than by an appeal to emotions and passions (...) an attitude of willingness to listen to critical arguments and to learn from experience. It is, in essence, the attitude of one who is willing to admit that ‘I may be wrong and you may be right, but using a common effort we can come closer to the truth” (ibid., p. 508). In other words, it is an attitude that tends towards dialogue, confrontation, learning from mistakes and experience, the ability to solve problems and manage conflicts. It is an attitude that respects different points of view and has recourse to fairness, or rather to “reasonable ideas”. The irrationalist, on the other hand, for Popper is a person who is convinced that “human nature” is not, in essence, rational. A person, he says, is more than a rational animal, and even less. To convince ourselves that it is less so, we only have to consider how small the number of people who are capable of arguing is; this is the reason why, according to the irrationalist, most people must always be addressed by an appeal to their emotions and passions rather than by an appeal to their reason” (ibid, p. 511). According to this logic, therefore, a person should rely only on her/ his emotional capacity and on her/his irrational vocation. Faced with this statement, Popper did not deny the importance and scope of the emotional and passionate

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dimension, on the contrary, he affirmed that it might be useful for understanding human creativity since it was “an entirely irrational, mystical faculty” (ibid., p. 512). In reality, for Popper the contrast between rationalism and irrationalism had its roots as far back as classical antiquity, “Although Greek philosophy undoubtedly began with a rationalistic enterprise, one finds veins of mysticism even in its origins” (2002, p. 512). The open conflict occurred in the Middle Ages as opposition between scholasticism and mysticism; while in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, with the advent of the rationalist tide, intellectualism, and materialism, irrationalists had to expend a great deal of energy to counter this incredible advance. The irrationalists argued that the rationalists or “materialists”, as they called them, were “the poor in spirit, pursuing soulless and largely mechanical activities, and utterly unaware of the deeper problems of human destiny and philosophy” (ibid., p. 513). In this diatribe between rationalists and irrationalists, Popper made a clear choice in favour of the rationalists and distinguished two major types, referring, respectively, to “uncritical rationalism“and “critical rationalism”. His thinking belonged to the critical sphere, not based on a rational choice, seeing that both sides make use of rationality, but based on an essentially moral choice. As he explained, “One can define uncritical or radical rationalism the attitude of the person who says: ‘I am not willing to accept anything that cannot be defended by argumentation or experience’ (...) now it is easy to see that this principle of uncritical rationalism is incoherent; since, in turn, it cannot be supported by argumentation or experience, this principle implies that it too must be set aside” (ibid., p. 514). Uncritical rationalism, therefore, according to Popper ended up being branded with logical inconsistency, similar to the logic that explains the Liar’s Paradox, in that it is an assertion that asserts its falsity. Conversely, the rationalistic attitude is characterised by the importance it attaches to argumentation and experience. But people in their social action, in life as in scientific research, need to be able to count on their ability to face and solve problems, not using an inductive procedure, but through a procedure that we might define as “gradual and imaginative”. Popper argued that scientific discovery did not proceed through the inductive method, indeed in his Logic of scientific discovery, he stated that the use of the inductive method could not be considered as a valid guarantee of scientificity, since upon careful examination it turned out to be entirely “superfluous” and inevitably led to “logical contradictions” (1970, p. 7). To illustrate this concept, he resorted to the following explanation: “From a logical point of view it is far from obvious that one is justified in inferring universal from singular assertions, however numerous they may be; indeed, any conclusion drawn this way can always turn out to be false: however numerous white swans we may have observed this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white” (1970, pp. 5–6). Scientific activity, according to Popper, always began with a problem that was nothing more than the fruit of our disillusioned expectations. In this regard, Popper stated that “every animal is born with many expectations, usually unconscious, or, in other words, endowed from birth with something that closely corresponds to hypotheses, and thus to hypothetical knowledge. And I assert that we always have innate knowledge – innate in this sense – to start from, although it may well be that

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we cannot trust this innate knowledge at all. This innate knowledge, these innate expectations if disillusioned, will create our first problems, and the increase in knowledge that follows can be described as an increase that consists entirely of corrections and modifications of previous knowledge” (1969, p. 141). The acquisition of further knowledge on a certain type of phenomenon advances, as Popper continued to maintain, according to the following logic “we can say that our knowledge increases as we proceed from old problems to new problems using conjectures and refutations; by refuting our theories; or, more generally, of our expectations” (ibid., p. 143). Science, therefore, and the relative scientific rationality, could not but start from the theoretical and practical problems it encounters in the complexity of reality. By proceeding this way, the scientist, even the social scientist, could do nothing but try to solve the problems s/he encountered, using conjecture, which s/he immediately submitted to critical examination, by means of a thorough series of refutations. After all, for Popper, “the best method, if not the only one, to learn something about a problem, is to try to solve it, first by trying to guess, and then to isolate the mistakes we have made” (1970, p. 221). In this same direction, he argued that our knowledge increased to the extent that we learn from mistakes, as “In science, as in life, the method of learning by trial and error applies, that is, learning from errors. An amoeba and Einstein proceed in the same way: by trial and error and the only detectable difference in the logic that guides their actions is that their attitudes towards error are profoundly different. Einstein, in fact, unlike the amoeba consciously tries to do everything, whenever a new solution occurs, to detect a mistake and discover an error in it: he deals with or approaches his solutions critically” (1972b, p. 112). He posited that in this type of learning, as in the definition of a scientific research plan, the definition of the hypotheses was always the starting point, as the data (already available in literature or that acquired in the field) did not represent anything in and of themselves, but acquired meaning when they were illuminated by a theory, which permitted them to be framed and explained in a scientific sense. For these reasons, the quest for rationality and scientific explanation could never be founded on “brute facts” alone. In this logic, Popper stated, lay “the belief that we can start from pure observation, without anything like a theory, is truly absurd” (1972a, p. 83). In other words, according to Popper, in research one could rely on the self-­ evidence of data, but needed to be equipped with an adequate theoretical apparatus and have recourse to an adequate capacity for “critical imagination”. As Hempel argued, “the transition from data to theories requires creative imagination. Scientific hypotheses and theories are not derived from observed facts, but invented to explain them” (1969, p. 32). Similarly, Lukasiewicz observed efficaciously that “we live in an age when facts are actively collected. We build museums of natural science and construct herbaria. We catalogue the stars and draw maps of the moon. We organise expeditions to the Poles of our globe and the mountains of Tibet. We measure, calculate and collect statistical data. We accumulate prehistorical artefacts and samples of folk art. We scour ancient tombs for new papyri. We publish historical documents

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and bibliographies. We would like to preserve every piece of paper ever printed from destruction. All of these are necessary and valuable activities. But a collection of facts is still not science. Only those who know how to combine facts into a synthesis are true scientists. And to do this it is not enough to know the facts; the contribution of creative thinking is also necessary” (1970, p. 14). In line with this methodological approach, it could be affirmed that reality, therefore, was not only complex but structurally problematic, and an adequate understanding of it required a scientific approach based on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework. In this regard, Popper stated “there are no disciplines, no branches of knowledge or, rather, of inquiry; there are only problems and the need to solve them. A science like botany or chemistry (or, let us say physical chemistry, or electronics) is, in my opinion, only an administrative unit” (1994, p. 35). Furthermore, the German philosopher, unlike Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, and Descartes, as well as most of their successors, such as John Stuart Mill, does not believe that there is a method for finding scientific truth. He does not even believe that there is a method to find a true theory, but only to ascertain whether or not a given hypothesis is true, or (in an even more sceptical way) whether a given hypothesis is at least “probable” to some verifiable degree. Regarding the procedure for designating the degree of the scientificity of a theory, Popper believed that (ibid., p. 36): (a) There was no way to discover a scientific theory. (b) There was no method for ascertaining the truth of a scientific hypothesis, that is, no method of verification. (c) There was no method for ascertaining whether a hypothesis was “probable”, or probably true. In other words, for Popper, theories, for logical reasons, could not be verified, but only falsified. “As a criterion of demarcation – he wrote – one should not demand the verifiability, but the falsifiability of a system. In other words: from a scientific system I will not demand that it is capable of being chosen, in a positive sense, once and for all, but I will demand that its logical form be such that it can be brought out, using empirical controls, in a negative sense: an empirical system must be able to be refuted by experience” (1970, p.  22). According to this thesis, sociology, as an empirical science, which studies the interdependence, the dynamism, and the dialecticism of the relationships between social action and social structure/institution, finds considerable space and recognition since, as Popper himself affirmed regarding the autonomy of sociology from psychologism, “Men – that is, human minds, needs, hopes, fears and expectations, motives and aspirations of human individuals – are, in essence, the product of life in society rather than its creators. We must recognise that the structure of our social environment is, in a sense, man-made; that its institutions and traditions are neither the work of God nor of nature, but the results of human actions and decisions, alterable by human actions and decisions” (2002, p. 352).

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In reality, regarding the ability of human beings to design social institutions, perfectly Popper, argued elsewhere that, concretely, “Only a small number of social institutions are consciously designed, while the vast majority of them have simply grown as an unforeseen result of human actions” (ibidem). In a note in the chapter on the autonomy of sociology, he acknowledged that he was indebted to K. Polany (1974, 1978) for this important intuition, which by then had been highly developed in his thinking. Indeed, Polany himself, during private discussions, while underlining this aspect pointed out that Marx had been the first to conceive the social theory as a study of the unintended social repercussions of almost all our actions. This is a topic, as we shall see, which had already been anticipated in part by B. de Mandeville at the beginning of the eighteenth century with his The Fable of the Bees. In it, he had highlighted the perverse effects of social action by showing how catastrophic unintentional results, based on the intentional actions of individuals living in a community, might be.

2 The Diatribe Between Rationalism and Marxism Popper claimed that he had been a staunch Marxist in the spring of 1919. This ideological enchantment had lasted very little, however, since, at the age of 17 he had become an anti-Marxist. He became aware of the dogmatic character of communism and its incredible intellectual arrogance. As Popper himself recalled in his autobiography, the quest had no end “For several years I remained a socialist, even after I repudiate Marxism; and if there had been such a thing as socialism combined with individual freedom, I would still be a socialist today. And there could be nothing better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took me some time to acknowledge that this was nothing more than a wonderful dream; that the attempt to implement equality is prejudicial to freedom; and that if freedom is lost, there is not even equality among the non-free” (2002, p. 40). On this diatribe, Morin, too, in his essay on European Culture and Barbarism (2006), provided an interesting evaluation of the innumerable contradictions that Marxism produced and continued to reproduce today in the countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as in the People’s Republic of China. With regard to the political perspective of Marxism, in the era of post-socialism, he (Morin, 2006, p. 56) clearly stated that: (…) Marxism was blind and the revolutionaries themselves, who believed they were wiping it out in the Soviet Union, unknowingly prepared the return of nationalism, not only Russian but also Armenian, Uzbek, Lithuanian. They believed they were eradicating religion, which returned with renewed strength. They had believed to put an end to capitalism forever by liquidating the bourgeois and capitalism worse than that of the tsarist era has arrived.

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As mentioned above, Weber, in his numerous works, criticises Marx’s theories in several works, in particular in Conjectures and refutations (1972a), in The Open Society and its Enemies (1973, 2002), in The Misery of Historicism (1975). Marxism – he said – could not be considered scientific any longer, since it had been repeatedly falsified and could only be described as non-science. Therefore, neither dialectical materialism nor historical materialism was saved from the Popperian criticism. However, even in the presence of ferocious critiques of Marxian thought, of dangerous historicism and excessive sociological determinism, Popper too recognised the merits of the ponderous intellectual work carried out by Marx and its contribution to the development of the social sciences. First of all, he deserved credit for having attempted, to a certain extent, to use a rational type method. Indeed, Popper argued that “It is easy to give in to the temptation to point out the similarities between Marxism, the Hegelian left-wing, and its fascist parallel. But it would be unfair to overlook the difference between them. Although their intellectual origin is almost identical, there can be no doubt about the humanitarian weight of Marxism. Also, in contrast to the right-wing Hegelians, Marx made an honest attempt to apply rational methods to the most pressing problems of social life. The value of this attempt is not compromised by the fact that it, as I shall try to demonstrate, has largely failed. Science progresses through trial and error. Marx tried, and although he erred in his basic doctrines, he did not try in vain. He opened our eyes and sharpened them in many ways. A return to pre-Marxian social science is inconceivable. All contemporary authors owe a debt to Marx, even if they do not know it. This is specifically true in the case of those (and this is mine too) who disagree with his doctrines; and I am ready to acknowledge that my treatment, for example of Plato and Hegel, bears the imprint of his influence” (2002, pp. 337–338). All this did not, however, exempt Popper from attacking Marx head-on calling him a “false prophet”, and from affirming that “he was a prophet of the course of history and his prophecies did not turn out to be true; but this is not my main accusation. Much more important is the fact that he misled large numbers of intelligent people into believing that historical prophecy is the scientific method of approaching social problems. Marx is responsible for the ruinous influence of the historicist method of thinking among the ranks of those who want to advance the cause of the open society” (ibidem). In other words, it was precisely this total adherence of Marx to a historicist view of the evolution of society that did not convince Popper. Furthermore, Popper observed that “when Marxists see their theories attacked, they often fall back on the assertion that Marxism is, in the first place, not so much a doctrine as a method. They argue that even if some particular aspects of Marx’s doctrines, or some of his followers, were to prove to be outdated, the method would nevertheless remain unassailable. I think it is correct to argue that Marxism is fundamentally a method. But it is wrong to believe that, as a method, it must be safe from any attack. The truth is, more simply, that anyone who intends to judge Marxism must evaluate it according to its methodological criteria. In short, s/he must ask her/himself whether it is a fruitful or sterile method, that is, whether or not it is capable of favouring the task of science” (ibidem, p.  340). The conclusion

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Popper reached was that Marxism was an extremely poor method; he defines it as “non-science” (1975). After all, Marx himself argued that science needed to provide practical results and that one had always to look at the practical consequences of a theory to evaluate its degree of effectiveness. Based on this statement, Popper observed that “A philosophy or a science that does not yield practical results is limited to simply interpreting the world in which we live; but it can and must do more: it must change the world” (2002, pp. 340–341). Just as Marx himself had maintained, at the beginning of his career, in his very famous (the eleventh) of the Theses on Feuerbach, when he proclaimed that “Philosophers have limited themselves to interpreting the world in different ways; it is now a question of transforming it” (1960, p. 446). In this regard, Marx in the Misery of Philosophy (1954, p. 107) wrote that “as long as the proletariat has not yet developed sufficiently to constitute itself into a class, and consequently, the very struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not yet assumed a political character, and as long as the productive forces have not developed sufficiently as yet within the bourgeoisie itself, so much to provide a glimpse of the material conditions necessary for the liberation of the proletariat and the formation of a new society, these theorists are nothing but utopians, who, to satisfy the needs of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and chase the chimaeras of regenerative science. But as history progresses and with it, the struggle of the proletariat looms more clearly, they no longer need to seek science in their spirit; they just need to realise what is unfolding before their eyes and be the spokespersons for it”. The limit, however, lay in its theoretical use, since as Popper noted “This insistence on scientific prediction, an important and progressive methodological discovery in itself, unfortunately, led Marx astray” (2002, p. 341). Indeed, precisely in this direction, for Marx communism was a scientific necessity, the ultimate goal of an obligatory dialectical process which because it had within itself the conditions of its end, capitalism would have to give way to communism, as the final decisive stage of a historical clash between classes. History, he held, was a class struggle. Marx observed that there was a common thread linking the different historical periods of humanity; this common element was the division of society into two opposite, belligerent classes. Indeed, according to Marx, the history of mankind saw one part of the human race detain the means of production and use them to maintain power, while the other, deprived of these means, was forced to suffer and submit to the former. Addressing Marx’s prophecy, Popper observed that “the historicist Marxian conception of the ends of social science radically overturned the pragmatism that had originally led Marx to emphasise the predictive function of science. It forced him to change his earlier view that science can, and must, change the world. Indeed, if there is to be a social science and, therefore, a historical prophecy, the fundamental course of history must be predetermined and neither goodwill nor reason can alter it. So, starting from premises such as these, there remains no other possibility than that of becoming aware, through historical prophecy, of the impending course of development and removal of the major obstacles that hinder its pathway” (2002, p. 343).

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Ultimately, as Popper remarked with conviction, Marx’s thinking was, for better or for worse, the fruit of his times both as regards the historicist theoretical approach, which he shared with Stuart Mill, and as regards the conditioning that derived from the political situation, as bon grè mal grè, “the memory of that great historical earthquake that was the French Revolution was still alive” (ibidem). Popper always noted a close similarity between the historicism of Marx and that of Stuart Mill, since both essentially proposed a historicist kind of social science. Marx argued in the preface to his Capital that “the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society” (Marx, Karl. Complete Works. Minerva Classics. Kindle edition. Position 263). While for Stuart Mill the fundamental problem of social science was to find the laws according to which a state of society produces the state that succeeds it and takes its place (1968). There are also many other similarities between the two authors, as both were dissatisfied with the laissez-faire of liberalism, and from opposite positions tried to provide a better basis for the practical achievement of the fundamental idea of freedom. In a nutshell, Stuart Mill argued that the study of society needed to be based on an approach traceable back to a sort of psychologism, that is, that the laws of historical development were to be explained in terms of human nature and that for this reason, sociology needs to be traced back to social psychology. Marx, on the other hand, disputed this approach and affirmed that “Both the juridical relations and the forms of the state cannot be understood... due to the so-called general evolution of the human spirit” (1969, p. 4). This position led Popper to affirm that his “having contested psychologism is perhaps the greatest achievement of Marx as a sociologist. In doing so, he opened the way to the most acute conception of a specific realm of sociological laws and of a sociology that is, at least in part, autonomous” (2002, p. 345). It was in this direction that Marx had affirmed that “It is not the conscience of men which determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being which determines their conscience” (1964, p. 5).

3 The Pseudo-rationality of the Utopians Popper’s critique of utopian literature and utopian thinking, starting from that of Plato, aimed essentially at highlighting the “closed” character of utopian societies, presented as “perfect”, static and unimprovable societies, where there is no room for critical ideas, confrontation and social experimentation of new projects of freedom. These considerations re-proposed an analytic parameter typical of the sociological approach and one of the themes relating to the classical dichotomous distinction between societies (between two possible ideal types) analysed by numerous scholars throughout the history of sociology. This dichotomous analytical approach which started from the famous dichotomy represented by H. Spencer’s distinction between military society and the industrial society (1820–1903) and appeared in E. Durkheim’s Mechanical society and organic society (1858–1917) continued with

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the comparison between community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft) made by F. Tonnies (1855–1936) and which had been present in different terms in the clash between capitalism and communism advocated by Karl Marx (1818–1883). In the twentieth century, according to Cesareo, recourse to dichotomous distinctions had faded, but, as he maintained “without completely disappearing, as shown by the use of the opposition between closed society – that is, totalitarian or otherwise resistant to change – and open society, which permits transformations in institutional structures, especially following free and critical discussion” (1998, p. 16). Taking a cue from this statement, one ought to remember that Popper had a negative view of the utopians, since, as we shall see in his criticism of Plato’s Republic, he considered them “pseudo-rationalists” (1972a). In this type of utopian society, as Dahrendorf too had argued in his essay Exiting Utopia, a character of isolation and autarchy was evident, “Utopian societies are monolithic and homogeneous constructions, disconnected not only in time but also in space, isolated from the outside world that might always become a threat to the appreciated immobility of their social structure” (1971, p. 199). In utopian societies, he believed, there was also a lack of recognition and inadequate awareness of the role of social conflict as a method of confrontation/competition and a source of progress. In this regard, Dahrendorf (ibidem) also sustained that we are dealing with “societies divided into castes and not into classes, in which the oppressed do not rebel against the oppressors” because there is no recognition of the role of social conflict as “the creative seed of all society and the possibility of freedom” (ibid., p. 280). In the present context, however, we should not forget the critical function that utopia tends to play, as one can almost always notice a sort of genuineness, generosity, and altruism in the action of subjects who propose utopian projects. As Ruyer observes in L’utopie et Les utopistes – an important text partially translated into Italian in a recent study (Cocozza, 2004a), “Utopia is almost always an error, but rarely a lie”. On the other hand, about the social function of utopia, Cassirer noted that “The grand mission of utopia is to provide space for the possible against any passive acquiescence to the present state. It is symbolic thinking that supersedes the natural inertia of human beings and provides them with a new capacity, the ability to bestow ever-differing forms on their universe”. Ultimately, as Horkheimer warned, in an extremely brief but exhaustive way, utopia had always got two faces “it is the critique of what is, and the representation of what should be” (1978, p. 63). This was a critique shared by K. Popper, who noted, in his The Open Society and its Enemies, how the “petrified” state was born with the ideal state outlined in Plato’s Republic (1973). In this regard, this epistemologist argued that “inherent in Plato’s programme is a type of approach to politics which, in my opinion, is extremely dangerous. Its analysis is of great practical importance from the point of view of rational social engineering. The Platonic approach to which I refer may be considered as typical of utopian engineering, as opposed to another kind of social engineering which I believe to be the only truly rational one, definable as gradual engineering. The

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utopian approach is all the more dangerous as it can present itself as an obvious alternative to a radical historicism, that is, to a historicist approach which implies that we cannot alter the course of history; but, simultaneously, it can present itself as a necessary complement to a less radical form of historicism, like Plato’s, which admits the possibilities of human intervention” (2002, p. 195). Popper considered utopian engineering, advocated by many authors, starting from Plato, up to Babeuf and Marx, as incorrect modes and opposed them through a form of reasoning that tended to affirm an alternative type of social engineering, that of a gradual kind. According to this scholar, the utopian approach was a pseudo-­ rationalist approach and has the following characteristics, “Every rational action needs to have a determined end. It is rational insofar as it pursues its end consciously and consistently, and insofar as it establishes its means in accordance with this end. Choosing the end is, therefore, the first thing we must do if we are to act rationally; moreover, we need to be careful to determine our real or ultimate ends, from which we must clearly distinguish those intermediate or partial ends which are only means, or steps along the way to the ultimate end. If we renounce such a distinction, we must also renounce the question of whether these partial ends are likely to bring us closer to the ultimate end and, therefore, we cannot act rationally. These principles, when applied to the field of political activity, require of us the determination of our ultimate political end, that is, of the ideal state, before any practical action is taken. Only when this ultimate goal is established, at least in its essential lines, only when we have a kind of model of the society to which we aspire, only then can we begin to consider the best means and methods for its realization and to draw up a plan for practical action” (Popper, 2002, p. 195). This description was subjected by Popper to a series of weighty criticisms, up to the theoretical proposition aimed at outlining alternative social engineering of a gradual type. In this regard, he wrote that “The politician who adopts this method may or may not have a model of society in his mind, may or may not hope that mankind will 1 day achieve an ideal state and achieve happiness and perfection on this Earth. But he must be aware of the fact that perfection, assuming that it is attainable, is extremely distant and that every generation of men, and therefore also life, has its needs; perhaps not so much the need to be made happy, because there are no institutional means to make a man happy, as the need not to be made unhappy, in cases where unhappiness can be avoided. Men feel the need to get all the help they can get if they are in pain. Gradualist engineering will therefore seek to adopt the appropriate method to identify (and fight against) the gravest and most urgent evils of society, instead of seeking (and fighting for) its greatest ultimate good” (Popper, 2002, p. 196). In line with this approach, even if those who advocated Marxism did not share this affirmation, it can be argued that communism and anarchism introduced typically utopian concepts and representations far removed from concrete reality and tended to greatly simplify social complexity which was not attributable to their few interpretative categories, such as the affirmation of the international revolution of the (industrial) proletariat, the ultimate dissolution of the state or the success of

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absolute egalitarianism. Marxist authors like Bloch maintained that “Marxism is above all the science of hope, the practice of concrete utopia” (1959, p. 16). Popper had already clarified that closed society might be understood as the magical, tribal or collectivist society, while we would be in the presence of a truly open society, only when individuals were called upon directly to make personal decisions. In the open, as opposed to the utopian society, which needed to be considered a closed society, “many members strive to elevate themselves socially and to take the place of other members. This can lead, for example, to such an important social phenomenon as a class struggle (...) that is, competition among its members for the attainment of higher status” (Popper, 2002, p. 216). For Popper the utopian attitude was opposite to that of reasonableness, it seemed to present characteristics of rigorous and extreme rationality, while, in reality, the unrealisable social perspective it pursued hid a pathway affected by clear pseudo-rationalism (1972a, p.  612). Regarding these critical aspects, in particular, Popper stated that “false rationalism is attracted by the idea of creating enormous machines and utopian social worlds”. Bacon’s ideal of “knowledge is power”, and Plato’s “government of the wise”, were both different expressions of this attitude which was, fundamentally, a demand for power based on superior intellectual endowment. “The true rationalist, on the contrary, will always be aware of how little s/he knows, and of the simple fact that, whatever critical faculty or reason s/he possesses, s/he owes it to her/his intellectual relations with others. S/he will therefore be inclined to judge people as fundamentally equal and to consider human reason a bond uniting them. Reason for her/him is exactly the opposite of an instrument of power and violence: s/he sees in it a means by which to subdue power and violence” (ibid., p. 615). Ultimately, it might be argued that, as can be deduced from the famous Fable of the Bees published by the anti-constructivist de Mandeville (1714), in England in 1704, real societies, not utopian ones, are never the fruit of the rigidly designed and the rigidly intentional. As we know, the fable tells the story of life in a beehive, where you can live in luxury and comfort, and where there is a community that permits you to offer a job to the numerous individuals who populate it; however, despite this, all end up by being unhappy. For this reason, the whole community, including the swindlers and gamblers, begin to implore the father of the gods to put a stop to dishonesty and make honesty triumph. When this desire is granted immediately, suddenly the whole community finds itself behaving virtuously. Then a situation arises leading to paradoxical results. The honest behaviour of ex-thieves, the rediscovered righteousness of rulers, doctors, gamblers and other subjects hitherto were unsavoury, cause judges, lawyers, guards, courtiers, servants, and soldiers to lose their occupation alongside weavers, hoteliers, merchants, and masons. Within that community, luxury and pride then give rise to millions of activities like fashion, the desire for unusual foods and changes in décor which then makes the “commerce move again” (Mandeville, 1714, p. 14). In this work, which represented the first major criticism of utopian theories, the author highlighted the incredible fact that vice can cause a state to flourish, giving

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rise to the well-known though the paradoxical formula of “private vices, public benefits”. He argued that institutions were the result of various attempts, of trials and errors, which took place over time, but, above all, of the unintentional consequences of intentional acts, due to people’s limited knowledge and their fallibility. Therefore, he sustained, institutions could not be seen (and understood from the Weberian point of view) as the intentional result of a rational human design, since, from the point of view of rationality, many human actions could end up by being incomprehensible. Indeed, as Antiseri (1989, p. 93) pointed out “It was de Mandeville who paradoxically proposed the idea that intentional human actions have unintended consequences. And here lies the theoretical value of his scandalous fable.” Therefore, there are frequent cases in which intentions give rise to actions that have unintended effects different or even opposite to expectations, even more so in the case of social interaction and social institutions. In other words, this perspective caused Popper (1975, p. 69) to affirm that “only a minority of social institutions are deliberately designed, while the great majority of them have arisen, grown, as a non-premeditated result of human beings”. The utopians for Popper, were, therefore pseudo-rationalists, because they were constructivists and supporters of omnipotent rationality, contrary to the principles of social gradualism. In other words, it can be argued that, on the basis of Popper’s logic, the affirmation of a new social reality inspired by constructivist and omnipotent rationality inevitably entailed the establishment of a totalitarian regime and the use of violence. This affirmation was emblematic confirmation of what Lenin sustained when he affirmed that during a revolutionary process one could not stop and consider too many objections since, as Popper quoting the Russian leader, said “You cannot make an omelette without breaking the eggs” (2002, p. 198). In this sense, Popper aimed his criticism not only against Plato but also and above all against totalitarianism, communism, and the Soviet model and argued that “The fascination that the future exerts on utopians has nothing to do with rational foresight” (1972a, p. 613). In other words, with reference to the necessity to give space and concrete actuation to individual action and “social gradualism”, in short, to a rational method, rather than pursuing utopian projects, Popper, pointed out that, “If I were to provide a simple formula or recipe by which to distinguish between what I consider permissible plans of social reform and inadmissible utopic projects, I would say: act for the elimination of concrete evils rather than for the achievement of abstract good. Do not aim at achieving happiness by political means. Strive rather for the elimination of concrete misery. Or, in more practical terms, fight for the elimination of poverty by direct means—for example, by ensuring that everyone has a minimum income. Or fight against epidemics and disease by building hospitals and medical schools. Fight ignorance as well as crime. But do everything by direct means: identify what you consider the most urgent problem in the society where you live and try patiently to convince people that it is possible to eliminate it (...). Do not allow the dreams of

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a perfect world to distract you from the claims of people who suffer here and now. Our fellow human beings have a right to be helped; no generation should be sacrificed for the sake of future ones, in view of an ideal of happiness that may never be realised.” (1972a, p. 610). On this latter subject, as we know, Popper believed that the achievement of human happiness was and needed to remain a matter of an exclusively private nature and could not be pursued at all through the means of politics (2002, p. 525).

Chapter 6

The Theory of Rational Choice: Potential and Criticality

1  T  he Theory of Rational Choice or Methodological Individualism Methodological individualism, as has already been discussed in part, stemmed originally from three great theoretical traditions, represented, respectively by the theories of the Scottish moralists Ferguson (1767, 1792, 1999), Hume (1955, 1957), Millar and the utilitarian theses of Smith’s classical economy (1776); of Weber’s sociology of action (1958a, b, 1965a, b, 1970); of the new epistemological and scientific paradigms proposed by Menger (1871, 1883), von Mises (1949), von Hayek (1967, 1969, 1987), and Popper (1970, 1972a, b, 1975, 2002). More recently, the works of Boudon (1970, 1977, 1980, 1985; Boudon et al., 2002) and Antiseri (1989, 1993, 1996, 2002a, b) have made their contribution. With regard to the theoretical foundations of this scientific and epistemological perspective, Boudon made it clear that methodological individualism represented the theoretical context in which the theory of rational choice as one of the possible variants was located and which we shall discuss in the next section. Methodological individualism wrote Boudon et al., “designates a paradigm or a global conception of the social sciences that may be defined on the basis of three postulates. The first presupposes that every social phenomenon is the result of the combination of personal actions, beliefs, or opinions (P1: postulate of individualism). It follows that one of the essential moments of any sociological analysis consists in the ‘understanding’ of the reason for the actions, of the individual beliefs or opinions responsible for the phenomenon we are trying to explain. According to the second postulate, ‘understanding’ the actions, beliefs, or opinions of the individual actor means reconstructing the meaning they have for her/him, which – at least in principle – it is always possible to do (P2: postulate of understanding). As for the third postulate, it presupposes that the actor shares a belief or that s/he undertakes an action insofar as they make sense to her/him; that is, that the main cause of the subject’s actions © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cocozza, The Unexpected in Action, Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26793-2_6

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and beliefs lies in the sense that s/he attributes, or, more precisely, in the reasons s/ he has for adopting them (P3: postulate of rationality). This third postulate excludes, for example, the possibility of explaining beliefs with recourse to the concepts of primitive mentality, wild thinking, or symbolic violence” (2002, pp. 15–16). In reality, as the French sociologist recalled, to these fundamental postulates – upon which the theoretical schemata of Tocqueville and Weber were based, in particular the development of the theory of rational choice – which it was necessary to apply in economics and sociology, others needed to be added. These referred to the following classification (ibid., 17–18): the consequentialist postulate (P4), according to which, the actor believed that the meaning of action always resided in the consideration of its consequences; the postulate of egoism (P5), for which only the consequences that affected the actor were the ones s/he took into consideration; the postulate of the cost-benefit calculation (P6), on the basis of which, considering that every action involved a cost, the actor made her/his mind up on the basis of the maximisation of this ratio. This scheme, distinguished by this second set of postulates, was resorted to mainly by economists and sociologists who referred to the theory of rational choice. In addition to this scheme, Boudon explained, sociologists of Nietzschean and/or Marxist inspiration postulated that the actor was driven by a will to power, giving rise to a postulate of power (P8), or by her/his class interests, thus creating a postulate of belonging to the class (P8). Popper referred to the fundamental postulate of rationality and the concepts of “primitive mentality”, “savage thinking”, or “symbolic violence” when clarifying his philosophical opposition to the different forms of pseudo-rationalism and irrationalism, he advised paying attention to mysticism and its approach to the study of ideas, since it always proposed “the lost unity of the tribe, the desire to return to the shelter of a patriarchal community and to make its limits the limits of our world” (2002, p. 531). Wittgenstein was also attuned to this wavelength when he affirmed that “To feel the world as on the whole is limited is a mystical feeling” (1964, p. 81). Ultimately, Popper said, “This holistic irrationalism is off the mark. The ‘world’ and ‘whole’ and ‘nature’ are all abstractions and products of our reason. (…) In short, the mystic tries to rationalise the irrational and, simultaneously, looks for mystery in the wrong place; s/he does so because s/he abandons her/himself to the dream of communities and unions of the elect because s/her does not dare to face the hard and practical facts which are addressed by those who know that each individual is an end in her/himself” (2002, p. 531). Similarly, as we have already seen in the previous chapter, Popper criticised the Hegelian and Marxian rationalist approaches, because they assumed that there is a reason (and only one reason) that conditions human rationality. In the Hegelian theoretical scheme, human rationality is moved prescriptively by tradition and national interests, while in the Marxian one it acts historically driven by class interests. In this regard, Popper wrote, “Marx was a rationalist. Like Socrates and Kant, he believed in reason as the basis of the unity of mankind. But his doctrine that our opinions are determined by class interests hastened the decline of this belief. Just as Hegel’s doctrine that our ideas are determined by national traditions and interests,

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Marx’s doctrine ended up undermining from the very foundations the rationalistic faith in reason. Threatened like this from both right and left, the rationalistic attitude toward social and economic problems could not resist when historicist prophecy and oracular irrationalism launched a frontal attack against it. This is the reason why the conflict between rationalism and irrationalism has become the most important intellectual and, perhaps, even the main moral problem of our times” (ibid., p. 507). Based on these considerations, it is evident that the theories that refer to the tradition of methodological individualism posed a series of fundamental questions to sociological thinking and research, relaunching the debate between the holistic and individualistic paradigmatic perspectives. In line with this heuristic approach, it is necessary to remember that even within the same school of individualism, different inclinations and accents exist. In this regard, it is important to note that the term “methodological individualism“coined by Schumpeter1 (1967a, b, 1972, 1977), based on an indication by Weber, established itself more effectively than that Menger  – who had defined a similar concept, calling it “atomism” – had created previously. We can say that, from an etymological point of view, this definition is more adherent and contains an immediate reference to the Greek concept of ἅτομος, a term recollective of the individual and individualism as the central motor of the universe. Conversely, from a cultural point of view, this concept conveyed a rather restricted meaning, which tended to be sociologically “amorphous” and provided with a very limited explanatory scope, one incapable of defining the complex social reality within which the individual resides. Moreover, the concept of “atomism” was not appreciated even by Boudon et al., who believed that it was “rather unfortunate in that it seems to ignore the fact that individuals belong to a context where there are institutions, rules, and traditions, and that they are endowed with variable resources, habits, and social and cognitive skills” (2002, p. 16). Along these same lines, Popper asserted that we need to concede an important role to social institutions as well as to research in the educational system, and we should not run the risk of confusing the concept of “individualism with that of egoism”. In footnote 23 of chapter VII of The Principle of Leadership in The Open Society and Its Enemies, he wrote that “Some may ask how an individualist can claim devotion to any cause, and especially to an abstract cause such as scientific research. But a similar question would only highlight the old error of identifying individualism and egoism. An individualist can be altruistic and can devote himself not only to helping individuals but also to the development of the institutional means by which to help others (apart from that, I do not think devotion should be demanded, but simply encouraged). I believe that devotion to certain institutions, for example, to those of a democratic state, and even to certain traditions, can manifest itself very well within the context of individualism, provided that one does not lose sight of the humanitarian aims of these institutions.

 Schumpeter himself introduced the distinction between methodological individualism and ethical-­political individualism. 1

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Individualism should not be confused with anti-institutional personalism. This is a mistake often made by individualists, who are right in their hostility against collectivism but make the error of mistaking institutions for collectives (which claim to be an end in themselves). This way they become anti-institutional personalists, something which brings them dangerously close to the principle of the leader (I think this partly explains Dickens’s hostile attitude toward the Parliament)” (2002, p. 741). In line with this particular interpretation of the Popperian individualistic theoretical scheme, it is useful to remember that, notoriously, the theory that refers to methodological individualism can also be traced back to the teachings of Bentham (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1793) and his logic of “cost-benefit calculation”. However, association with this approach, as Boudon et al., himself noted, was not at all necessary since various sociologists, who referred to this perspective, starting from Weber, did not base their analysis of human deeds solely and exclusively on the benefits deriving from utilitarian action (2002, p. 17). Concerning the idea that informs the concept of rationality and that of individualism in this methodological perspective, Popper argued that “In a certain way, one can say that our analysis of ‘reason‘resembles a little that of Hegel and the Hegelians who consider reason a social product (...) Certainly, there is some similarity, but there are also considerable differences. Hegel and the Hegelians are collectivists. They argue that since we owe our reason to “society“– or to a certain society such as the nation –"society” is everything and the individual nothing; that is, that whatever value an individual is endowed with, this gift derives from the collective which is the true bearer of values. In contrast with this attitude, the position presented here does not presuppose the existence of collectives; if I say, for example, that we owe our reason to “society“ I always mean that we owe it to certain concrete individuals – though, perhaps, to a considerable number of anonymous individuals – and our intellectual relations with them. Thus, when I speak of a “social” theory of reason (or of the scientific method), I mean more precisely that it is always an interpersonal theory and never a collectivist one” (2002, p. 509). In this logic, scholars who referred to the model of methodological individualism, the rationality of the action resided and needed to be sought in the behaviour chosen individually by the actor, since, as Boudon et al., pointed out that “According to this model, it is necessary to consider that the actor has strong reasons for doing what s/he does and for believing what s/he believes. In some cases, these reasons concern the consequences of the action, and the agent considers mainly those that concern her/his own interests. Or, in an even more restricted way, it is only in some cases that the actor may attempt to subject these consequences to a cost-benefit calculation. In other cases, the actor’s reasons are cognitive (as when s/he opposes a theory that does not affect her/his interests but seems weak to her/him) or axiological (as when s/he approves of an action that does not directly affect her/him because it obeys certain principles)” (2002, pp. 38–39). On the basis of this explanation, in our opinion, it is interesting to highlight the fact that the Boudonian scheme, to some extent, coincided with that of Weber, since it, ultimately, identified two great types of rationality: first, the rationality of an

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instrumental type, similar to that oriented towards purpose, second, axiological rationality, close to the Wertrationalität, value-oriented reason. Continuing this examination of the contributions made by scholars oriented towards the individualist paradigm, in the context of research regarding the role of rationality in human action, Antiseri, in line with the approach of von Mises (1949), stated that “human action is always rational, insofar as it is an attempt to solve a problem by an agent who employs the means that s/he considers the most suitable for the achievement of the goal” (1949, p.  106). For the Italian philosopher “Understanding an action is equivalent to describing it, explaining its causes or examining its consequences  – the same operations that are carried out in the physical-­naturalistic sciences regarding the behaviour of any aspect of reality. I also maintain that it is possible to affirm that what we call intention is the other face of action” (ibid. p. 107). This affirmation means that Antiseri agreed with those who believed that an understanding of human action (which for individualists was always the action of individuals) required a different method from that used in physical-­ naturalistic research. In this regard Antiseri (ibidem), analysing reasoning, argued that, if the analysis of the motivations of intentions (and therefore of actions) was the subject of psychological investigation, and if intentional action could give rise to unintentional effects, it followed that the analysis of this latter phenomenon should constitute the main object of the social sciences. This methodological approach was already indicated by Menger (1883) and Popper (1972a), while von Hayek (1967) even argued that this phenomenon should represent the exclusive object of analysis by the social sciences. Antiseri, to corroborate his thesis, in his Theory of Rationality, listed a series of cases in which the unintentional effects of intentional actions occurred, and described, among others, the following examples (1993, pp. 64–70): (a) A man goes to the market with the intention of selling a house. He certainly does not intend to lower the price of houses. But its appearance on the market will have the unintentional and inevitable consequence of lowering the price of houses (Menger, Hayek, Popper). (b) Popper describes how animal trails are created in the undergrowth. Hayek instead, describes as unintentional, the pathways by which people come to light. But before them, Carl Menger had already shown that cities come to light in an “unthinking way”. (c) What is true for the city, according to Menger, is also true for the genesis of law and the state. (d) One of the most important and most regulated phenomena known to human beings, like language, represents another sphere the effects of which are unintended, as research by linguists such as Von Humboht and Chomsky has shown. In this context, we think through speech, therefore, language cannot be the result of intentional human projects. (e) The gypsies who bother us at Rome’s Termini railway station begging for money can be useful in the long run. By begging they collect coins which, they

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then, exchange for the banknotes travellers need to change to buy tickets at the machines. This way travellers, as long as there are gipsies inside Termini station, can change their banknotes. And so, the gipsies make their day’s earning; and the travellers do not see themselves obliged, after a long queue, to go out and look for change themselves – and with considerable difficulty, at a tobacconist’s or café – to buy a train ticket. From this point of view, in our opinion, the perspective of methodological individualism launches a stimulating challenge to all sociology and invites scholars to confront themselves upon a scarcely ploughed terrain and with conceptual categories that are not easily implemented, to pursue, as Popper would have said, a kind of scientific progress and not the defence of an ultimate and definitive scientific certainty.

2 The Main Theoretical Propositions of Rational Choice from George Homans to James Coleman The Rational Choice Model (Model or theory of rational choice) is a theory widespread within both the economic sciences and the social sciences, which found its main explanation in the idea that the individual (homo oeconomicus) to undertake social action employed a utilitarian logic aimed at maximising the accomplishment of her/his goals. In this theory, as we know, the individual faced with a choice between different alternatives could, in theory, obtain all the possible information s/ he needed at no cost, was autonomous as far as decision-making is concerned, and tended to optimise her/his interests. This theory was developed in its classical form within the theory of decisions, as an axiomatic theory where the axioms collocated the a priori principles of rational choice. It was, therefore, an idealising theory based on the assumption that the actor never violated a priori principles and always behaved following the same utilitarian logic. Its behaviour was indistinguishable – and therefore predictable – when it was found to act both within different relational contexts and different environmental conditions. This theoretical construction has been subjected to several critiques, following the empirical verification of the true behaviour of the actor, which presented several possible variations compared to the classical scheme. In the economic sciences, the application of this theory was based on a series of axioms that tended to ensure a logical coherence to individual choices (Elster, 1983; Simon, 1984; Hindess, 1988; Sen, 1988). Similarly, this theoretical model used in sociological research and theory, as noted also by Bouvier and Oliverio (2001), tended to determine a situation in which the rational social choice ended up coinciding with the choice aimed at optimising results relating to personal utility. In reality, the development of the Rational Choice Model in sociology during the 1960s and 1970s was related to attempts to affirm a new sociological paradigm

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having greater explanatory capabilities at the international level. This attempt at a theoretical re-foundation of the sociological discipline, in our opinion, highlighted the need to pursue a series of objectives: (a) To supersede the prevailing paradigm that referred to the Parsonsian structural-­ functionalist theory. (b) To oppose the attempt to explain human action by resorting to irrational elements and schemes of a psychological tendency. (c) To devise a sociological theory capable of producing results commensurate with those of economic theories and analyses of public policies. In our opinion, a situation had arisen similar, in some ways, to that in which Pareto had already found himself at the beginning of the twentieth century, and from which his Treatise on sociology (1916) stemmed. The Treatise, as we shall see in greater detail in the next chapter, introduced the famous division of social action into logical and non-logical action and opened up new avenues for the sociological explanation of rational human action, considering also the role of extra-rational elements. Coleman – one of the main propagators of this theoretical sociological paradigm, as Boudon et al., recalled – agreed with the model of rational choice, since, as his adherence to this theory was belated, he aimed at providing the discipline with a more appropriate explanatory perspective, as a clear alternative to the exclusively descriptive one, to which the discipline was relegated until the 1960s (2002, p. 20). In truth, the theory of social action in sociology was initially referred to in the theories of Homans, who, although he departed from functionalist positions, his volume The Human Group (1948) had already advanced a series of critiques of the Parsonsian theorem. In this work, Homans introduced an important distinction, − when analysing the behaviour of subjects as continuity of the iteration between groups and society – between the external and internal system of the dual logic of integration and differentiation. It was in his The Elementary Forms of Social Behaviour (1975) that Homans, based on the theoretical framework developed by the marginalist economist Walras, based the theory of social exchange according to an essentially utilitarian-individualistic perspective. This was a utilitarian approach that not only leveraged the maximisation of economic results but expanded its sociological perspective, unlike the economist version of the Rational Choice Model, to include emotional and value-based rewards, such as social approval, sometimes greater than material rewards like money. In this regard, Homans wrote that “money is of little value if people are not confident that they can convert it into goods, and a person who anxiously wonders how s/he will secure her/his next meal, in all likelihood, will not find social approval particularly rewarding” (1975, p. 470). In other words, social exchange in societies, he held, took place when there was a certain accumulation of capital, not intended exclusively in an economic sense, and this accumulation led to the need to provide for an institutional change. For this scholar, all human history showed that the process of civilisation was constantly precarious, as was the role of institutions, since “institutions are not

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perpetuated by the simple fact of being consecrated by norms, and it seems extraordinary that there are those who talk as if they did. They are perpetuated only to the extent that they ensure profits, and ultimately useful to individual people” (ibid., p. 472). In reality, as Gouldner noted acutely, this preference of Homans’s for a utilitarian theory was also dictated by the fact that the American sociology, after the crisis of capitalism of the 1930s, was looking for theories capable of countering the expansion of Marxist theories in the universities of the USA, something the Europeans had been accustomed to for quite some time (1970, p. 225). From this point of view, Homans tried to provide an answer to the insidiousness of Marxism, by elaborating a theory that rested on utilitarian and individualistic assumptions, but he did not choose economic processes as the main generative triggers of social action, but rather those based, instead, on an accumulation of a capital that required social recognition. For these reasons, his analysis aimed, in our opinion, at focusing on one of the main problems of contemporary sociology: the relationship between institutions and individual creativity, or the deepening of the set of exchanges existing between institutional and sub-institutional levels. Based on this logic, Homans did not believe that necessarily conflicting relationships existed between the two levels, but that we might speak instead of a dialectical relationship, within which people played an important role in their choices. He broke with the Parsonsian functionalist model, which, as we have seen, left little room for the intentional social action of the individual. In this regard, Homans stated that “Anyone who seeks the secret of society long enough will eventually discover that it was there for all to see: the secret of society is that it was made by people and that there is nothing in it that people have not put there” (1975, p. 468). This is an important novelty at theoretical level as a function of escape from Parsons’s structural-functionalism, which led Gouldner to assert that this attempt contributed to “assigning an active role to people as users and builders of social structures and orders, and not simply as subjects who receive and transmit them” (1970, p. 578). The theoretical theories of Homas were followed, more recently, by those of Coleman expressed in his Foundations of Social Theory (1990), which, today, represent the most advanced level of sociological theory within a perspective of the rational choice of actors. In this work, he examined Mauss’s ethno-anthropological description of Potlatch and attempted a reformulation of that relational situation, in exclusively economic terms. He hypothesised that the exchanges of gifts, widespread as a behaviour among the tribal settlements the French ethnologist described, was due to the presence of a principle of a utilitarian type that inspired rational action. This tribal custom was identified as a practice in which individuals and tribes gave much more than they received, which Mauss regarded as irrational behaviour since it did not meet the criterion of maximising the results. Coleman, on the other hand, believed that this behaviour – characterised by the fact of giving more – did not aim at achieving economic utility, but that of establishing an obligation towards the donor. In other words, it aimed at creating a sort of debt on the part of the

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recipient of the gift, towards the donor, even more so if the gift received had not been requested. The rationality of this action, therefore, was not to be sought within the maximisation of the economic result, strictu sensu, but rather in the action that led to the creation of a situation of advantage or prestige of one subject (the donor), towards another (the recipient of the gift), who had to feel morally obliged. Following the same logical approach, Coleman transposed tribal transactional behaviour into modern societies and started from the observation of the fact that when receiving favours from others, an obligation arises, but if these are provided without a request, there is a tendency to configure a situation where an advantage or prestige of one subject (the supplier) is highlighted, compared to that of another (the user/customer). This behaviour, if intentionally repeated over time, might tend to affirm a strategy on the part of actors aimed at creating an obligation on the part of their interlocutors. To explain this phenomenon in terms of our societies, the author examined some habits found in the American Senate, in particular those of influential members of the “American Senate Club”. The members of this club provide goods and services to other senators, even if not expressly requested, and using this strategy, they create a series of obligations, which end up representing their share capital spendable when voting on issues of particular importance and/or usefulness (Coleman, 1990, p. 390). After all, trivially speaking, this strategy is akin to that which a non-European-­ Union national standing near traffic lights adopts, when, without our request, offers to wash our car windows, even the headlights (apparently an irrational act), and thus creates a moral obligation so that we tip her/him. In this instance, ours is an action (the tip) unforeseen by us but induced by the gift made by the improvised car-­ window cleaner. In reality, Coleman’s scheme was inspired both by Homans’ theories and, in particular, especially by those of Pareto, although the thinking of that Italian scholar was not assumed as an important reference by that author, except when using Pareto’s famous optimality axiom, also known as the economic optimum (Coleman, 1990; Coleman & Fararo, 1992). This concept, as we are well aware, recalls the situation in which it is impossible for one individual to improve her/his position, passing to a higher point on the indifference curve, without someone else being forced to worsen theirs. Coleman believed that the reason why the theory of rational choice had been so successful and seductive, as a theoretical basis for understanding human action, lay precisely in the fact that it was a conception of action that rendered all additional questions useless (1986). A utilitarian explanation of this kind tended to demonstrate how human action was more readily understandable if a pattern of reasoning was applied, one way or another and recalled the use of the classical explanatory model represented by cost-benefit estimates. Regarding the scientific scope of the Rational Choice Theory, as a theoretical model, Boudon asked whether it might be conceived as a general theory, and objected that several important social phenomena failed to be explained this way. In this regard, the French sociologist argued that the rational choice theory was

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incapable of explaining some well-known and important paradoxes. Among these (Boudon et al., 2002, pp. 29–55) was the paradox of voting, which meant that, based on consequential logic of individual action, as a single vote did not affect the results and the preferences of the individual directly, no one should or would prefer choose to vote, but would decide to spend her/his time better in more remunerative action. This is known as the paradox of corruption and boasted credit, whereby public opposition to a phenomenon tended to be all the more evident the less it was manifest, while the rational choice theory was to predict the opposite. The paradox of Allais (Nobel prize winner for economics) showed that in the case of certain lotteries, individuals did not conform to the principle of maximisation of utility, since they preferred less to more, not more to less (Allais, 1953; Allais & Hagen, 1979; Hagen, 1995). A similar critique also regarded another experiment, that of Kahneman and Tversky (1979), known as the “common quotient effect”, the paradox of the “ultimatum” game, in which, during an experimental game, one actor decided after imagining possible role reversals of the opponent, and did not choose, instead, based on an absolutely selfish type of logic (Harsanyi, 1955, 1977). The various paradoxes mentioned here, driven by the critiques of the Theory of Rational Choice, demonstrated an interesting comparison between different theoretical paradigmatic hypotheses, which tended to falsify given schemata and make an original contribution to the scientific explanation of rational human action, was arising. Concerning possible explanations of these paradoxes, one might refer to the first of those mentioned above, concerning the vote, which has now become the object of strong widespread theoretical objections that scholars who support the theory of rational choice need to address. The explanations provided from the perspective of this paradigm have not been sufficiently exhaustive, to date when it comes to the assumption that in the vote it is a matter of rational behaviour dictated by self-­ interest, since, as Hardin pointed out that n this is notorious for providing “a very unsatisfactory explanation of electoral behaviour, since it suggests that hardly anyone would vote voluntarily, for example, in national elections in the USA. It helps us to understand why half of all Americans who hold the right to vote do not exercise it, but it also helps us to understand the other half a little” (1982, p. 11). On this same topic, it is useful to remember that various scholars (Ferejohn & Fiorina, 1974; Lévy-Garboua & Blondel, 1996; Lévy-Garboua & Montmquette, 1996; Schuessler, 2000) tried to provide explanations of the theoretical model of rational choice. Their explanations were based on the schemata adopted in the famous “bet of Pascal”, and from that theoretical model, they deduced that the cost of the action (the vote) was so low, compared to the prospects (the revenues-­benefits) which were considered so high that the action could not be calculated based on the consequences. In truth, even the explanatory variable introduced by Overbye (1995), which tended to explain behaviour in terms of the loss of social reputation by the electoral abstentionist, did not seem so conclusive. The paradox of the vote, therefore, as we mentioned previously, remains unexplained and represents the real “thorn in the side” of the theory of rational choice.

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Instead, one might try to explain some of the other paradoxes examined here, based on what Boudon et al. (2002) suggested. One might argue that the paradox concerning corruption and boasted credit gave rise to a kind of behaviour that was not driven by a rational choice based on the evaluation of the consequences of the action, on sharing a certain value, whereby, even if you were not personally involved, you were willing, nevertheless, to ask that it be respected. On the other hand, the understanding of the dilemma of the “ultimatum” probably lay in the fact that, unlike what the basic assumptions of rational choice held, the actor might be moved by altruistic feelings and act not exclusively based on individualistic logic and the maximisation of selfish choices. Analysing these cases, one can deduce that, when all comes to all, the theory of rational choice does not appear to be endowed with a significant explanatory efficacy, except when it does not include the restrictions envisaged by the consequentialist postulate (P4), the postulate of selfishness (P5), and the postulate of cost-benefit calculation (P6). This consideration reduces the effectiveness of the theory of rational choice to a scheme that envisages only the use of the first three postulates (individualism, understanding, and rationality), which ultimately end up by coinciding with the theoretical perspective that refers to methodological individualism. This conclusion led Boudon et al., to affirm that methodological individualism represented “the only general rational model” (2002, pp. 38–50). Mills’s empirical sociology itself, in White Collars (1966), highlighted a fundamental paradox in the Rational Choice Model, that found in situations where many subjects, while sharing the same condition and options developed very different choices among them, thus placing themselves within a kind of conflictual logic. As Mills demonstrated, this theoretical model was unable to explain the rise of the innumerable conflicts between the employees of an industrial company, considering that, as befits a classical Taylor-Fordist company, they all had the same space and equipment and even the same individual expectations. The conflicting behaviour of the female employees described by Mills could be explained, it seems, not by resorting to the assumptions of the theory of rational choice (in particular P4, P5, P6), but by introducing the concept of a correspondence between performance and remuneration as “effective justice”. In other words, given the extreme correspondence (levelling and equality) between working conditions and remuneration, it was a question of investigating the degree of correspondence of the degree of “effective justice” (as perceived by the female employees) of the company’s personnel management policies, in particular with regard to the work performed and the actual pay structure. Starting from these critiques concerning the classical model of rational choice theory, two new theories arose which aimed at filling the gaps and compensating for the criticalities highlighted: game theory and utility theory. The first was born of the need to explain the actor’s behaviour in a context where s/he was not the only one to decide and, therefore, did not act in an ideal context, because her/his decisions, to some extent, were interrelated with those of other actors. The second, on the other hand, referred to the hierarchisation of the expected utility, where the actor made choices in a context characterised by the presence of various possible alternatives,

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above all, by structural decision-making uncertainty. A situation originally represented by Bernoulli (1738) and called the “St. Petersburg paradox”. Here the paradoxical fact was that nobody was willing to risk a small sum to play a game of chance, even though the expected result was the chance of winning an unbelievably high amount of money. Bernoulli hypothesised that the behaviour of the player, in this case, might be considered rational, because the decision not to play was made. After all, playing did not maximise the result of the game but only the degree of its expected utility. This type of process found a considerable fertile terrain, as anticipated above, in particular, in contexts of decisions made under conditions of uncertainty and in social and collective environments. Von Neuman and Morgenstern (1948), who first introduced the game theory, called it this because they considered parlour games (like chess, bridge, and poker, or more recent games of simulation) isomorphous to the decisions they involved. The actors were called upon to hire both in economic and social contexts. The game theory proposed a reading of the possible behaviour of actors, in a context where the outcome of the action of one depended directly on those of others, as is the cases of war, the negotiation of international treaties, competition for survival among animals or prestige among human beings and, to some extent, industrial bargaining or the workings of the market economy. The work of Von Neuman and Morgenstern (1948) introduced a two-fold classification of games and distinguished between non-cooperative and cooperative games. The first type was the best known and took into consideration the decisions made rationally by one person acting in conditions of complete isolation. To explain this context, the famous prisoner’s dilemma was used. Here two individuals detained separately were asked to confess the crime they had committed together and were each informed that the other had already confessed. Here, the actors were told that if they opted for a strategy of collaboration with the law, even denouncing and renouncing collaboration with their accomplice, they might benefit from a reduced sentence. Given these conditions, the single actor was induced to adopt an individualistic strategy, forsake her/his partner in crime, and collaborate with the law to obtain a personal advantage, also because cooperation with his fellow-­felon (non-confession of the crime) would have led to an increase of her/his sentence. This choice of conduct certainly did not permit the actor to achieve the maximisation of the result, while the theory of rational choice would. The non-cooperative version of the game theory was particularly effective and valid when there were only two players and the classical utilitarian rule applied. According to this rule, if one won, the other lost and vice versa; this gave rise to the famous “zero-sum” game. The type of behaviour described here was dictated by the actor’s selfish bent, which as literature informs us, could cause both actors to lose (Nash, 1951; Provasi, 1987; Spaventa, 1989; Binmore, 1990; Aumann & Hart, 1992; Israel & Gasca, 1996). If we take into account the other type of game, called cooperative, and we simulate situations already experimented using the previous model and introduce the concept of “variable sum” wins, as hypothesised by

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Axerold (1984), the results would determine differentiated situations and rewards, for all the participants in the game. In other words, this version tended to determine a situation in which, if a cooperative strategy was activated by the actors, there was no mandatory outcome with a winner and a loser, but all the actors involved could win (gain benefits). This theoretical approach to cooperative games conditioned other studies that tended to analyse conflict management and negotiation processes according to the “win-win” scheme proposed by Winkler (1981), Jandt (1985), and by Fisher and Ury (1985). Ultimately, the game theory, in particular in its cooperative form, demonstrated that behaviour oriented towards an exclusively selfish, punctual, and short-term logic, produced an irrational result, and, therefore, drew the attention of scholars towards the role of the system, values, norms, and habits that impacted considerably upon individual rational behaviour and induced actors to act consciously.

3 Rational Choice and the Collective Actor The example taken from Mills’ White Collars, described in the previous section, allowed us to analyse another significant limitation of the theory of rational choice, that relates to the explanatory inability of human behaviour when collective action enters the field. We refer, in particular, to the criticism of Arrow (1977) against public choices and Olson (1983), who introduced an important thesis regarding the role of free riders when seeking rational explanations of collective conduct. Arrow in his Social choices and individual values (1977) developed a theory, aimed at demonstrating how two significant phenomena related to the interaction between a multitude of actors could lead to the formulation of important criticism of the theory of rational choice. His analyses came to the following conclusions: (a) Individual preferences are not normally aggregable into a well-defined structure of collective preferences; furthermore, none of the outcomes may meet the criterion of maximising collective preferences. (b) Collective behaviour implies the strategic interaction of numerous rational individuals, who, in turn, act according to the possible effects of the actions of others. The new context defined by Arrow, within which the actor moved, required a theoretical framework, which went beyond the classical formula of the theory of rational choice and found greater explanatory capacity in game theory. This new theory developed by Von Neuman and Morgenstern (1948), as we have already discussed, permits us to address and respond more effectively to the theoretical (and operational) questions raised by the famous prisoner’s dilemma. However, the scheme proposed by Arrow applied in the political field of public choices, although endowed with significant explanatory capacity, is also subject to criticism, since, in a democratic system it is not a question of analysing preferences, as if it were a question of using a utilitarian paradigm to examine individual choices

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oriented by issues of an economic nature. In other words, when analysing public choices, rather than the concept of individual preferences (in the utilitarian sense), it is necessary to include individual rights, which underline the need to draw a theory of equality and justice to the attention of scholars. This also means guaranteeing that individuals enjoy “minimum” living conditions. Concerning this point, we can examine the theories of two US scholars who represent the summa of the theoretical development of contemporary political thinking, Rawls and Nozick. The volume A theory of justice written by Rawls, in 1971, focused on the future of democracy and, in a nutshell, argued that, in a situation of a social conflict of different interests, the state needed to act according to the principle of social justice and assume responsibility for the redistribution of wealth in favour of the poor and disadvantaged, using the Welfare state. This position is opposed by the work Anarchy, State and Utopia, written by Nozick in 1974. The thinking of Nozick – who as a young man had radical-left sympathies and gradually settled upon increasingly liberal positions thanks, above all, to consultation of works of conservative economists like von Hayek and Friedman  – has always been characterised by a marked heterogeneity of topics and interests which focus in particular on political philosophy. Contrary to Rawls, Nozick argued that the rights of the individual were primary and that there was no need for anything more than a “minimum state”, that is, state intervention barely sufficient to protect citizens from theft and violence and ensure the observance of contracts. For Nozick, any type of state that was more extensive, more coercive than the minimum one, could be justified, since it would violate the rights of individuals. The minimal state, according to the author, was “the only morally legitimate and morally tolerable one, it is the one that best of all fulfils the utopian aspirations of hosts of dreamers and visionaries (…). The minimal state treats us as inviolate individuals, who cannot be used by others in certain ways as means or tools or tools or resources; it treats us as people who have individual rights with all the dignity that comes with them. Treating ourselves with respect because the state respects our rights, and allows us, individually or with whomever we believe best, to choose our life and achieve our goals and the idea we have of ourselves, within the limits of our abilities, aided by the voluntary cooperation of other individuals invested with the same dignity. How could a state or group of individuals dare to do more? Or less?”. Another critical aspect of the rational choice theory was corroborated by the economist Olson (1983) whose analysis tended to take into consideration the presence of the collective actor in decision-making processes and highlight the criteria of the classical theory. Olson introduced the problem highlighted by the presence in the social game of free riders (literally, people who fail to pay their way), of opportunistic subjects, who exploit (take advantage of) the benefits made available to the collectivity (for the public good, like schools, health-care services, etc.), without sustaining the costs for their production-realisation. The concept of the public good, as the other economist Samuelson (1954) had already pointed out, was defined as “non-excludable“and “non-rival” benefits, in that: no citizen could be excluded from using them, and access to them and their consumption by a subject did not imply a reduction for other subjects. Olson’s particular merit was precisely that of

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transferring the scheme that Samuelson conceived for the public good, to that of the collective good. This meant that all those situations where a group of people was interested in availing itself of certain goods/services and access by one of its members activated possible access by all the other members of the group. When positing situations like this, Olson also presented his dilemma, which consisted in the fact that, if in a collective kind of action there were large numbers of free riders, the most likely result might be that the conditions upon which it was based might lead to the impossibility of implementing it at all. Olson’s hypothesis rested on the belief that in a context where all the members of a particular group shared an interest, this in itself did not imply that they would organise themselves to pursue the common interest, as when workers strike in support of a contractual claim. It was precisely in mechanisms of the industrial-­relations system that there had been and continued to be cases in which the presence of many free riders, individuals not disposed to bear the necessary costs (of protest action and strikes) leading to the production of new contractual regulations (the benefits of which free-riders would enjoy just the same), created situations where the collective good (the new contractual regulation) could not be established, thus damaging the entire group. In other words, the collective action of large groups (not small ones, which might tend to activate policies aimed at establishing greater internal social cohesion) was not automatically aimed at the pursuit of common interests. If anything, if it wished to be addressed in that sense, it would need to be based on a selective incentive policy. These incentives, activated based on selective logic, might induce each member of the group to mobilise, and, in certain cases, to act as constraints (internal or external to the group) (Olson, 1983). Conversely, interest groups with very few members, which gave rise to a sort of “oligopoly”, were in a better position to organise and coordinate their action, since they availed themselves of conditions better able to establish an “optimal” course of action. To remain within the metaphor of industrial relations, in this second case, we refer to circumscribed professional categories, characterised by particular professional specificities, which provides them with a high degree of contractual power. The same reasoning could be extended to particular financial groups, which present themselves on the market with clear and precise objectives, and a strongly shared strategy aimed at achieving common objectives. Ultimately, for Olson, individuals who acted based on utilitarian rationality, referring to the theoretical schemes of rational choice, or the maximum benefits-­ minimum costs axiom tended not to participate in the collective action required to produce a collective or public good. From this point of view, we can conclude, based on which it is possible to affirm that the basic idea that moved the supporters of the classical scheme of utilitarian rational choice, who believed that individual interest was fundamentally what guided collective choices, something which Olson falsified empirically. Collective action, therefore, in our opinion, cannot be confined to the limbo of irrational choice, as some authors have argued (Marwell & Oliver, 1993; Oliver, 1993), but it can be placed rightly among choices guided by values (wertrational),

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and not only by individual, utilitarian goals but by collective purposes, which have different characteristics. Ultimately, we could argue that probably the explanation of rationality in collective action did not assume the characteristics of “reification” or “personification” of the “collective” as denounced by Antiseri in his Treatise on the methodology of social sciences (1996), in a logic referring to methodological individualism. It certainly brought to the attention of scholars a phenomenon with characteristics that are neither comprehensible nor explainable exhaustively, within a model of rationality oriented by an exclusively utilitarian vision of human action.

Chapter 7

Towards the Supersedure of Utilitarianism

The analysis of recent sociological thinking on rationality ends with a heuristic hypothesis with a two-fold interpretative key to contribute to a resolution of the holism-individualism binomial. This key takes into consideration, on the one hand, the theories which sought to supersede the theory of rational choice proposed by Simon and Sen, on the other, provide a critical reflection on the need to understand the extra-rational when seeking to explain human action based on what scholars like Pareto, Ardigò, Maffesoli, and Alexander posited, as well as on the precious theoretical and methodological contribution made by Giddens.

1 Herbert Simon’s Bounded Rationality Studies on the efficacy of schema-oriented rationality proposed by the rational choice theory led to several critical contributions from economists like Simon (1958, 1973, 1982, 1984, 1986) and Sen (1977a, b, 1986a, b, c, 1988, 1994a, b) and sociologists of organisational theories like Barnard (1938) and Crozier (1969, 1971, 1974, 1990). These authors analysed the role played by subjects in the re-definition of the paradigm of rationality in organisations (bureaucratic and industrial, but also political, cultural, mutualistic and interest representation, religious, military) and delved into one of the most interesting topics of contemporary sociology: the reasons for altruism and cooperation in societies and organisations. It was Barnard’s theoretical development on cooperation in an organisation that strongly influenced the work and thinking of Simon, an economist, and sociologist, as well as the founder of cognitive psychology and the analysis of decision-making processes. With his book on The Function of the Executive (1938), Barnard contributed to the explanation of the reasons why people (in particular managers, shareholders, employees, suppliers, and customers) decide to take collaborative action within organisations. This, he posited, happened not so much because of either the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cocozza, The Unexpected in Action, Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26793-2_7

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orientation of the individuals towards essentially utilitarian goals (shares, profits, advantages, and benefits derived from status, remuneration, discount), or due to internalisation of the prevailing value system by the subjects (the Parsonsian functionalist approach), but rather due to a third reason: attempts made to reconcile the rationality (the needs) of the organisation with those of the individual subjects. This attempt, according to this scholar, might be made using a series of managerial tools, capable of bringing into play fundamental variables such as a policy of incentives and persuasion, aimed at reconciling, in a “structurally precarious” manner, a conjunction of interests, which “naturally” tend to follow a divergent trajectory. Barnard recalled that, from the point of view of the analysis of the rationality of tan actor’s action, “the net satisfactions that induce a person to contribute her/his efforts to an organisation derive from the comparison between the advantages and disadvantages that this entails” (1938, p. 17). The benefits, to which Barnard referred were material, as we have already seen above, but they can also be moral, that is, worthy of social and professional recognition, the result of a relational climate and career opportunities. In this regard he added, that “material rewards beyond the subsistence level are ineffective except for a limited percentage of people (…) even in strictly economic organisations where it is supposed to be true, money without distinction, prestige, and position is so ineffective that it is rare that greater gain can be temporarily used as a stimulus if accompanied by loss of prestige” (ibid., pp. 133–134). In other words, as Bonazzi noted, the legitimacy of the Barnardian theoretical scheme, based on a cooperative rapport between the expectations of individuals and those of the organisation, found its raison d’être in the logic of the equitable relationship between contributions, rewards, and incentives (2002, p. 69). Starting from this theoretical framework, stemmed the theories of Simon who, in his Administrative Behaviour (1958), emphasised how the decisions that characterised rational human action within organisations and the daily life of private individuals were essentially attributable to a logic of bounded rationality. This important concept emphasised the fact that actors, when making public or private decisions, could not resort to the scheme provided by formal and absolute rationality (oriented towards purpose, based on the evaluation of all possible alternatives), but resorted, instead, to limited rationality, which necessarily involved a margin of risk, calculated on the basis of acquisition and evaluation of alternatives (considering the costs associated with these operations), a conjecture, or elements of subjectivity. The limits that conditioned the rational decision, to which Simon referred, were not physical, but mental and cultural, since the human being was not, as the classical economic theory sustained, formally rational, informed about all of them. The possible alternatives and their consequences, above all, did not avail themselves of a system of preferences that was secure and unchangeable over time. As Simon noted, “Choosing the optimal alternative requires processes that are far more complex than ordinary processes for choosing a satisfactory alternative. Think, for example, of the differentiation that passes between rummaging in a pile of hay to find the sharpest needle and rummaging in the same pile of hay to find a needle-sharp enough to be seen” (1958, p. 176).

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In other words, in addition to the limitations due to the fact of not being able to have all the possible alternatives and, consequently, of not being able by exploiting them, to evaluate humans, as cognitive beings, the actor expressed her/his preferences, also based on a system of ethical and cultural convictions values and family traditions of her/his own, elements that tended to considerably reduce the number of alternatives contemplated. Above all, human choices (decisions), Simon held, were often the result of a compromise between the different expectations, not always logically coherent between them; in any case, they needed to take into account the contexts within which the actors acted. For these reasons, to effectively study decision-making processes in organisations (and in daily life), it was necessary to start from the action of the subject. In this Simon differed from Barnard since he did not contemplate the conjunction between two entities at the same level, as if organisations were a reified entity. He insisted on the primary role of the subject, as a human actor, who contributed to forming that of the organisation and determining its successes and failures. This way, Simon determined the birth of a new theory of the action (and management) of organisations, critical of the classical model, based on concepts of formal and absolute rationality. In other words, Simon held that to study the rationality in (of) organisations, it was not necessary to examine their roles, but rather the decision-making processes determined by the information. In Simon’s theoretical scheme, the actor made her/his own decisions by resorting to a sort of coherence and continuum between the means s/he employed and the ends s/he intended to pursue. The choice of means concerned what Simon called the field of factual judgments, characterised by controllable and verifiable events, in other words, scientifically ascertainable phenomena; while that of the ends called into question value judgments, notoriously the result of the complex intertwining of ethical, aesthetic and ideological factors, but also of people’s emotions, subject to possible variations (over time and space and depending on her/his reference environment, and relational climate). To explain the difference between these two concepts, we have chosen to use a metaphor capable of explaining the decisions we make in our everyday lives, that of deciding to go and see a film. The elements to consider are of two different types, those relating to judgments of fact and those involving value judgments: in the first case, we take into consideration the cost of the ticket, the screening times, the duration of the film, the length of the route to be taken and the relative traffic, the means of transport we intend to use, the capacity of the cinema, the presence or absence of air conditioning in the theatre, the number of people with whom we wish to go to the cinema, and if we consider it relevant, the presence of a pizzeria or restaurant (open) nearby. The second set of facts regards preferences, where our decisions depend on our system of values, our aesthetic tastes (so-called film education) and our ideological beliefs, in other words, our Weltanschauung and our lifestyle. All these variables condition the goal, that is the choice of the film and, consequently, the choice of the cinema where the film is showing. But if we decide not to go to the cinema alone (or with our partner only), but with a group of friends (even a large

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one), here the necessary decision-making process needs to be multiplied by the number of people who intend to go to the cinema. Consequently, each expresses her/his own preferences, which involve different decision-making plans, useful to arrive at some instrumental decisions (preventive and necessary to favour a final decision), including those relating to the choice of people whose company everyone likes, preferences regarding various film genres also linked with the familiarity and assiduity with which one goes to the cinema (the aforementioned film education), the choices dictated by personal inclinations due to enthusiastic admiration (like that found in fans which is simply a diminutive of fanatic) for a particular actor or actress or director. Once we have reached a decision based on value judgments, that is, having established the goal (the film we want to go to see), we need to verify the existence (or create the conditions) of an adequate level of coherence between the chosen goal and the means necessary to achieve it. Following this further logical step which requires the coherence of the means concerning the ends, we may even discover that we do not dispose of the means necessary to pursue our chosen end. For example, we may not have the means of transport capable of taking us to the theatre in time, or that we have not got enough money to pay for everything. Furthermore, an unexpected event, such as the seats not being available any longer (unfortunately this information may be available when the decision has already been taken, and the time available to examine alternatives may not always be available!). The set of these variables can be controlled only if an ex-ante check is of the availability of all the resources and means necessary is carried out, if we assess the consequences of our decisions preventively, concerning the (immediate and ultimate) goal we intend to pursue. In line with this theoretical approach, human rationality in decision-making, for Simon concerned “the selection of alternatives between modes of behaviour concerning a system of values ​​based on which it is possible to evaluate the consequences of behaviour” (1958, p. 137). As you can see, even in the case described above, reaching a decision is not a simple, automatic, linear act, but one with a certain degree of complexity. The decision-­making process can be activated more effectively if one takes into account personal (collective or organisational) knowledge and experience, which contribute to defining a sort of reduction of the uncertainty inherent in the growing complexity of reality by defining a modus decidendi (which in organisations are called procedures). This is a set of rules and norms (legal, organisational, scientific, communicative, relational, etc.) that needs to be observed during acts of decision making, which tend to reduce the state of uncertainty in which the decision-makers constantly finds themselves. In the case of public decisions that is, choices that involve (and interfere with) the preferences of large numbers of people, and whose consequences have a significant impact upon the lives (private, social, and professional) of the people involved, the procedures are more formal and tend to be more rigid. In particular, in the case of representative democratic organisations, like a Parliament or other elected assembly, these procedures have to be public, controllable, and modifiable by the various groups of political representatives belonging to both the majority and the opposition. For this reason, in elective assemblies, there are laws and regulations

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(in business statutes and regulations), that provide for certain procedures for ordinary (routine) decisions, and differentiated (special) procedures for extraordinary situations. A bit like what happens to the procedures required to reach consensus during exhausting condominium meetings. Decision-making activities, therefore, are not dictated by a linear type of rationality oriented by a logic aimed at maximising cost-benefit calculations. Their degree of complexity needs to be related to the constant growth of the number of people involved, each of whom has her/his preference system, and simultaneously different conditions under which these decisions are reached. Within this theoretical framework, Simon held that organisations (in some ways individuals) on the basis of their knowledge and experiences, could activate a learning process of use to the achievement of necessary decisions, from instrumental ones (intermediate decisions), to the final one, by means of analyses of the following elements: the examination of the results deriving from decisions already taken in the past (in conditions of comparable situations), the identification of the criticalities encountered and the errors committed, and, consequently, the evaluation the means and methods used to resolve them. Ultimately, based on Simon’s theoretical scheme, the rationality of human action, and even more so that of organisations, need to be sought in a kind of limited rationality, significantly influenced by the subjectivity of the actors involved (decision-­ makers and population involved in the decision-making process) and the degree of coherence between the means available and the ends chosen. Decision-making, in our opinion, can reach high levels of effectiveness, when it benefits from past knowledge and experience, which activate a selective learning process which tends to outline a modus decidendi or necessary procedures aimed at reducing the uncertainty and the intrinsic complexity of the reality in which we operate.

2 The Role of Amartya Kamur Sen’s Theory of Social Choices Sen (1977a, b, 1981, 1986a, b, c, 1988, 1990, 1994a, b, 2004) and his theoretical theories, aimed at redesigning the role of self-interest and the theory of social choice within definitions of human rationality, in particular, economic choices, also belong to the critical approach to the theory of rational choice. Sen, an economist and Nobel laureate in economics, belongs to the fortunately non-extinct race (on the road to extinction, however) of economists who deal not only with economic issues but also with the humanistic and philosophical aspects of society. This heuristic approach is a rich one. The author aimed at providing a theory of development that was not based exclusively on crude economic indicators (like GDP – Gross Domestic Product), but which also took into account the growth of society from a civil, social, and cultural point of view. In other words, this humanistic economist sought to

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outline parameters capable of measuring the well-being of a given society in the broadest sense of the word. The theory of social choices, to which Sen’s economic, social, and philosophical studies belong, has its historical roots in the Enlightenment though later it developed in two distinct directions: the study of economic well-being inaugurated by Bentham (1948, 1988) and the theory of voted decisions proposed by Borda, Condorcet, and Rousseau, which gave rise to theories regarding the science of politics. Sen’s contribution to the development of the theory of social choices aimed at contradicting the idea that economic thought needed to be governed by the utilitarian paradigm and proposes only, as Zamagni suggested, “the dual objective of indicating sterility to the economist from a theoretical point of view, from the perspective of the utilitarian discourse and to propose the design of a position to the moral philosopher – let us say – somewhere between the utilitarian doctrine and that founded on rights” (1986a, b, c, p. 10). In reality, precisely in the field of individual rights, utilitarianism was particularly fragile, for reasons essentially due to three theoretical aspects that characterised this paradigm: a narrow view of human personality; an inability to conceive rights as areas of discontinuity; the presence of a constitutive principle oriented towards a sum-ranking logic (Zamagni, 1986, pp. 28–29). Regarding the first aspect, as Sen pointed out, “Essentially, utilitarianism sees people as localisations of their respective utilities (…) once the usefulness of the person is considered, utilitarianism has no further direct interest in any information regarding it” (1986a, b, c, p. 9). With regard to the second, however, utilitarianism, based essentially on a logic endowed with its own internal continuity, cannot conceive of the sphere of rights, which by its nature represents an area of ​​discontinuity due to the unlimited trade-off between the alternatives at stake that one can rely on. Finally, with reference to the application of the utilitarian paradigm, in the context of the theory of social choices, it should be noted that it is not possible to simply add individual preferences and obtain an order based on sum-ranking, since, in the field of rights, it is not so much the sum of these that matters as the specificity of the elements that compose it and their identity. In this context, in actual fact, if one intends to carry out an effectual assignment of rights, it is necessary to make the criteria that represent the indispensable requisites to be able to benefit from them truly applicable. To do this, it is necessary to reconduct rights back to effective individuality and their separateness. In other words, a theory aimed at enhancing the choices (preferences) of the individual cannot fail to take only the sum of individuals into account, but also the specificity of the individual beneficiary of a particular right, on the basis of extra-­ useful information (Sen, 1986a, b, c, pp. 179–185). As regards the function of the concepts of reason and rationality, itself, Sen stated that “Rationality is not so much an idea as a class of ideas. The common element is the underlying notion of the use of reason in reflection, choice, and action. This common element might have been a unifying factor, and perhaps in some contexts and within certain limits, it is the element common to that role. However, the interpretation of how reason is to be used has varied so radically between different

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formulations of rationality that there is frequently very little in common between the different uses of the idea of ​​reason” (1990, p. 57). The concept of rationality (in the utilitarian sense) in economic theories has always played an important role, to the point that, as Sen pointed out, “It is not possible to understand why modern economic analyses proceed the way they do without having to grapple with the profoundly narrow interpretation of rational behaviour that seems to be invoked every time, explicitly or implicitly. Nor can we understand some of the major failures of modern economics without analysing its conceptualisation of rationality. Failures are particularly important in the ethical context, as one of the major consequences of the narrow view of rationality used in economics involves the elimination of the role of moral aspects in influencing behaviour” (ibidem). Sen’s theoretical thinking aimed at superseding the idea that people act only and exclusively according to a utilitarian logic, which for some meant precisely greater selfishness (Menger). However, based on a scheme that also took into account aspects that ended up having (knowingly or unknowingly) an altruistic impact, in the sense that, when calculating the consequences of an action, the actor also took into account the harm or benefits they might deliver to others (Sen, 1977a). Sen believed that the altruism found in human action, albeit within an individualistic tendency, could be understood within the context of two broad interpretative categories, which made a person act: sympathy and commitment. The former category, he posited, contained a set of elements that led the individual to become aware of the pain caused to others and realise that this fact might have an influence on a person’s behaviour and the choices s/he intended to adopt. The second of the two categories, on the other hand, explained the reasons why, the behaviour of an individual involved in the former phenomenon, moved by a logic of interest, which started from the ego and shifted towards the alter, even in situations where not only was there no maximisation of the benefits of action in a utilitarian sense, but maybe even some personal disadvantage. In other words, Sen criticised the rational choice theory and economic rationality, like Arrow and Simon, even though they started from different points of view, because it did not take into account extra-utilitarian elements, inspired by ethical and moral (axiological) variables or by cultural (anthropological) feelings and preferences. These elements contributed to defining individual (private) choices and even more so those made within the public sphere. Sen, in criticising economic rationality, recalled that the vision of rationality as “self-interest” had dominated contemporary economic thinking, even if “The origins of this approach are often found in the writings of Adam Smith, so that it is frequently stated that the so-called ‘father of economics’ considered every human being as person striving tirelessly to achieve her/his particular self-interest. As a fragment of the history of thinking, this is, at the very least, extremely dubious, since Adam Smith’s belief in the power of self-interest in some spheres of activity (e.g., in exchange) was further qualified by his belief that so many other motivations were important to human behaviour in general. But it is certainly true that a narrow view of rationality as the pursuit of

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self-interest and the characterisation of the so-called ‘economic man’ played a major role in the analysis of economic behaviour” (ibid., pp. 59–60). For Sen, the critique of this approach to the analysis of rationality and the use of restricted rationality (which did not include the extra-utilitarian elements) was fundamental, because economic rationality had conditioned and continued to condition the rational proceedings of other disciplines as well. It strongly influenced the evolution of human thought and the socio-economic development of our societies. In actual fact, a conception of rationality like this causes a sort of dissonance between theoretical behaviour and actual behaviour, since it is unable to explain the phenomenon of cooperation within organisations, as already pointed out by Barnard, and of public choices within society, as posited by Arrow, or by Olson’s in-depth collective action. “In reality  – Sen wrote  – it is difficult to explain, within a narrow view, how people work together in interdependent productive activities, or why behaviour aimed at the collective benefit are not entirely absent in many sectors of economic and social life, or why behaviour based on rules is systematically integrated with action aimed at the achievement of personal interest” (ibidem, p. 60). In this regard, Sen believed that the phenomenon of the success and stability of cooperation might be explained, also by reference to the thinking of Adam Smith, without having to resort to the identification and recognition of errors in classical economic theory, on the basis of hypotheses forwarded by different authors1 (Axerold, Basu, Kreps, Milgrom, Roberts and Wilson, Maskin and Fudenberg, Radner) (ibid., P. 65). In this sense, he argued that “Cooperation can be achieved and sustained through reasoning without errors, without any compulsory mistake or illusion, if the motivation includes the attribution of positive importance to social objectives and social rules of behaviour. There is no doubt about the importance of such broader motivations in social behaviour. Adam Smith himself, who is considered the grand “guru“ of the school of self-interest, had very clearly indicated that orientation” (ibid., p. 61). With this statement Sen who chose to remain within the theoretical framework outlined by Smith, provided a different interpretation when referring to what this scholar had written in The Theory of Moral Sentiment in 1790, which Sen analysed in two of his essays, Adam Smith’s Prudence (1986) and On Ethics and Economics (Italian edition 1987). In support of this interpretation, Sen wrote that “Naivety and analytical capacity spent in modifying the consequences of the model based on self-interest to address the hiatus between theory and observation has produced only limited results, as the modifications consisted in the introduction of shortcomings in the knowledge or  Sen referred to the studies promoted by the aforementioned scholars, who introduced a series of ingenious models, containing new interpretative hypotheses, without however abandoning the axiom of the pursuit of self-interest. These new interpretations, again according to Sen, did not lead to achievement of the desired results, except the introduction of some corrective measures, like elements such as ignorance or errors present in the reasoning of the people taken into consideration. 1

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reasoning, without abandoning the assumption of a continuous quest for personal interest”. The irrelevance of the results obtained demonstrates the limited role that the overwhelmingly narrow vision of rationality plays in the construction of modern economic models. For both a better predictive analysis and a more complete explanation of human nature in society, it is necessary to be more radical in conceding validity to a broad set of motivations. Ultimately, in our opinion, Sen assumed a consistent theoretical position, which led him not to go against (or do without) utilitarianism, since he did not intend to allow others to claim the theoretical legacy of the fathers of classical economics, like Smith. He certainly went beyond this interpretative paradigm of rationality in human action, since he considered its explanatory capacity too narrow and ineffective. This way, this position made an exceptional contribution and provided an important theoretical basis to those who, when analysing rationality in human action, intend to continue in scientific research aimed at superseding the narrow polarisation of holistic and individualistic choices.

3 The Extra-Rational Dimension of Human Action, from Vilfredo Pareto to Achille Ardigò, Michel Maffesoli, and Jeffrey C. Alexander In an attempt to explain the actor’s rational behaviour scientifically, we shall take into consideration in this section a series of elements that we might define as extra-­ rational. These are elements that seek to explain the human action and the conduct of single actors, starting not from rationality as exemplified in the link between means and ends or their degree of appropriateness under certain conditions, but rather on the basis of variables of a subjective type. This means that we shall examine the processes considered rational, from the point of view of the actor, which do not rest upon, or are not aimed at criteria of economic utility, but at bestowing/recognising meaning oriented by ideas and values. Within this paradigmatic framework, the rationality of the actor’s action does not always find a scientific explanation, using the identification of a series of logical actions. For this reason, Pareto (1916) argued that human behaviour might be classified according to two major conceptual categories: logical actions and non-logical actions. This important classification, which has seen several scholars engaged in the empirical use of Pareto concepts, starting with Parsons, for Pareto represented the theoretical architrave upon which his conception of the role of sociology rested, namely the discovery of possible elements of uniformity, by analysing experiences and the using the experimental method to determine sociological norms. In our opinion, Pareto’s Treatise on Sociology (1916) represents a theoretical development endowed with a broad explanatory scope which, well ahead of its time,

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introduced two extremely useful concepts which permit us to understand rational action: 1. The role of extra rational elements in the scientific explanation of human action, associated with non-logical actions. 2. The highlighting of the need to understand the subjective rationality, or the logic (or the point of view) of the actor (acting subject) when evaluating the rationality of action or social behaviour, as an alternative to explanations oriented exclusively towards objective rationality. This second analytic method is based on the point of view of the observer, who, however, in evaluating the degree of rationality of the action which possesses a greater quantity of resources (information, time, calculation capacity, etc.). For our analysis, Pareto’s thinking in the history of sociological theory is praiseworthy due mainly to two facts: having anticipated the hypothesis that human behaviour is not always guided by rationality (by logic) with respect to a purpose, as Weber and all the economic theory of the time argued, but often by non-logical actions, to be considered, therefore, irrational; having indicated the fundamental role of quantitative analysis as an explanatory method of real facts and social phenomena, well in advance of the development of the debate in the scientific community. Pareto held that the quantitative analysis method was endowed with greater explanatory skills, compared to the use of the qualitative method on its own, one upon which many social scientists had lingered, or to which they had returned. In reality, this methodological approach, which Pareto considered a stringent theoretical-­scientific necessity, was proposed as an experimental logical method (which proceeded using the inductive approach) aimed at achieving two important results: aversion of the “metaphysical risk”, to which the sociological discipline was subjected (and to which it was turning, according to Pareto); achievement of significant results in the empirical field, like those obtained by economics. Pareto himself affirmed that “Sociology has almost always been exposed dogmatically up to now. Do not be deceived by the term positive attributed by Comte to his philosophy: his sociology is as dogmatic as Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire Universelle. They are different religions, but they remain religions nonetheless; they are of the kind you will also find in the works of Spencer, de Graef, Letorneau, and countless other authors” (1964, I, p. 6). In line with this logic, however, Pareto drew up a general theory of society, and not of societies. For this reason, as Izzo also maintained, the theoretical approach of Pareto’s sociology, despite all the criticism it addressed, was linked “to the systematic tradition of the Comte and Spencer, more than to authors such as Durkheim and Weber who had grasped the impossibility of confining all societies and all reality within a single explanatory scheme” (1975, p. 280). In other words, in our opinion, the greatest error present in Pareto’s theoretical scheme was probably due to the fact that a possible radical change in society was not conceived, since it was based on a circular equilibrium, essentially due to the circulation of the elites. Pareto had not (and could not have) a systemic vision of society, where, most recent scholars

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recognise, when one of the parts changes, this causes repercussive changes to other parts and the whole system, so that stability and balance are a structurally critical and transitory condition, difficult to maintain. In an attempt to explain the evolution of social phenomena, the Italian sociologist took into consideration various theories including that of social Darwinism and historical materialism. With reference to the latter, Pareto noted that this had brought about considerable scientific progress “because it helped clarify the contingent character of certain phenomena, such as moral and religious beliefs, to which some recurred, and to which many would continue to refer as an absolute character. Furthermore, it certainly contains a part of truth, which lies in the interdependence existing between economic and other social phenomena; the mistake lies in having changed this interdependence into a relationship of cause and effect” (ibid, p. 501). From the point of view of method, however, the fact that Pareto suggested analysing the real facts, by means of a quantitative methodology, presented in an overly emphatic and monological manner, proposed an old diatribe, between the supporters of the primacy of fact and those who sustained the primary importance of theories when explaining sociological phenomena. In reality, today, in our opinion, it might be affirmed that two approaches can and need to proceed together: quantitative analysis and the multiple qualitative analyses. From this, an important indication might arise for the purpose of effectively re-­ orienting sociological research so as to provide a better understanding of social phenomena, in the light of the indispensable and inseparable link existing between theories-facts-theories. As already mentioned, according to Pareto, human actions could be divided into two broad categories: logical and non-logical actions. The former, he believed, assumed the characteristics of objectivity in that they sought to provide an account whereby reality actually consisted in relating the means to the ends in an appropriate manner. The latter regarded subjective aspects, ones which permitted us to understand reality from the point of view of the subject, and comprehend its lack of the characteristic of appropriateness. Pareto wrote about the definition of the rationality of logical action saying that “we shall attribute the name of ‘logical actions’ to those actions that logically link the means to the end, not only concerning the subject who performs the actions but also with respect to those endowed with more extensive cognition, that is, to logical actions having subjectively in the sense explained so far. The other actions will be called ‘non-logical’, which does not mean illogical (…) These two classes of action are very different depending on whether they are considered from an objective or subjective perspective. From this point of view, almost all human actions belong to the first class. For Greek sailors, the sacrifices to Positon and the act of rowing were equally logical means of navigation” (1964, I, p. 81). In line with this reasoning, Pareto pointed out that “logical actions are, at least for the main part, the result of reasoning; non-logical actions originate mainly from a given psychic state: feelings, sub-consciousness, etc. (1964, I, p. 81). It is up to psychology to deal with this psychic state; in our study, we move from this state of affairs, without wishing to go further” (ibid., p. 92). However, for the purposes of our analysis regarding the phenomena that guide human behavioural acts

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between the rational and the extra-rational, Pareto argued that “induction leads us to recognise how non-logical action plays a sizeable part in the social phenomenon” (ibid., p. 91). In this theoretical framework, Pareto introduced two further concepts he retained necessary to understand his analytical scheme: those of residues and derivations. His first concept, as we are aware, underlined the manifestation of feelings (not the feelings in themselves, but their manifestation) and irrational forces that conditioned human action (and simultaneously the way of thinking and evaluating one’s actions. by the subject). According to this scheme, the actor acted mainly on the basis of residues and, not being able to perceive her/himself as irrational with regard to the relationship between means and ends, s/he developed an a posteriori logical explanation of her/his actions. Consequently, the second concept meant, precisely, those principles of justification to which the actor resorted, when a posteriori s/he was forced to explain her/his action logically. Human action, therefore, according to Pareto, in most cases was at the absolute mercy of residues and therefore of the irrational which, as we have seen, did not mean illogical, since these were the factors that conditioned the conduct of the actor, as the means were not always suited to the ends, except in cases of scientific and economic action. From this, it follows that, for this scholar, action could be defined as rational only in some cases: when the means were suited to the ends and when the objective conditions coincided with the subjective ones. Pareto argued that the distinction between logical and non-logical actions was fundamental for the development of the social sciences and, to this end, he noted that “This separation is as important as that of logical and non-logical actions, and as induction, it shows us that not having done so was the main cause of the error, from the scientific point of view, of a considerable number of social theories” (ibidem, p. 530). Along these same lines, Izzo, commenting on Pareto’s work, wrote that “Since human behaviour depends largely on these irrational needs [to connect and combine certain episodes with others], every attempt to explain this behaviour while neglecting the irrational and confining it within rational schemes is doomed to failure” (1975, p. 279). For these reasons Pareto was led to assert that sociology needed to deal primarily with the study of irrational behaviour, or as we have defined them here, extra-rational conduct since these facts help one to understand the functioning of society better. In line with this logic, Pareto developed his concept of Pareto optimum, in which he recalled a situation where it is impossible for anyone to improve their position (passing to a higher point on the indifference curve) without someone else being forced to worsen hers/his. Over the last few decades, this concept induced many scholars to discuss it. We also need to remember that Sen, for example, argued that the Pareto optimum principle was irreconcilable with a liberal system, since “If you take the Pareto’s principle, like economists seem to, then, one needs to address issues of compatibility whenever one has to deal with liberal values, even with very feeble ones. Or, on the

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contrary, adherence to certain liberal values ​​can lead to renunciation of Pareto’s optimality. Although Pareto’s criterion has been considered an expression of individual freedom, it seems that, in choices involving more than two alternatives, its use can produce consequences that are, actually, profoundly illiberal” (1986a, b, c, p. 286). In this tough statement of his, Sen referred to the difficulties encountered when seeking to pursue optimality in the Paretian sense, in the presence of significant elements attributable to externalities, where the guarantee that the goal might be achieved did not depend on the laws of social choice, but, rather, on the development of individual values that respect the personal choices of each person. Regarding the role of extra-rational factors in human action, more recently, we need to take into account the thinking of Ardigò (1980, 1988) who in his Crisis of governability and vital worlds sustained the need to “throw stones along the course of the torrent that separates the two banks of sociology” (1980, p. 7), in order to create new paradigms. The contrasting sides, recalled in the above metaphor, were represented, on the one hand, by the phenomenological scheme based on the concept of the living world (Lebenswelt), introduced by Husserl and expanded on in the sociological field by Schütz, Luckmann, and Berger; on the other, by the theories of social systems of Habermas and Luhmann, who, as we saw, were dialectical to each other. These theoretical positions represented two possible polar explanation of the new social phenomena of the meaning (and possible consensus and dissent) of the processes of communication, action, and interaction among subjects as well as in organisations within society. Within this theoretical effort, Ardigò also referred to the theses of one of Schütz’s main followers Garfinkel, the scholar who drew up the theory of ethno-­methodology and describe the role of this methodological approach as follows: “it tries to consider practical activities, practical circumstances and practical sociological reasoning as subjects for empirical study, and, by attributing to the most common activities of everyday life the attention generally accorded to extraordinary events, it tries to learn something about them as such. His basic thesis is that the activities by which consociates produce situations of organised everyday relations and move through them are identical to the procedures used by those consociates to make them ‘explainable’”. In actual fact, the ethnomethodological schema represented the method used. by members of a group in the living world to confer common meaning and order on their relationships and actions. From this point of view, therefore, as Izzo also noted, for ethno-methodologists the social order should not be seen as a pre-constituted reality, but rather as a reality people constitute continuously by means of their interactions. For these reasons, he held, the reality was always characterised by elements of precariousness, was contingent, and had no stability whatsoever (1977, p. 351). On the opposite theoretical side we find the one to which Ardigò referred, that regarding the theory of social systems of Luhmannian origin. By acquiring the systemic construction and the concept of increasing complexity, the Italian scholar declared that he did not share Luhmann’s opinion, according to which “social evolution has gone too far beyond the situation in which it made sense to refer social

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relations to people”. In this regard, Ardigò specified that “even if this is a problem, that every society, especially those that have reached an advanced stage of technological and economic development, must obtain inputs of meaning and consensus from the subjectivities of the vital world” (1980, p. 28). Ultimately, Ardigò’s philosophy, as he himself wrote, was based on a “theory with a binary scheme (a synthesis that was neither monological nor triadic), where vital worlds and social systems, the internal point of view of the actors and, simultaneously, an objective point of view, internal and external, private and public, inter-­ subjectivities enriched by the contingencies, events, and role types, regulated as much as possible, and therefore repeatable – if possible – despite the contingencies and events” (ibid, 142). The need to adopt a binary scheme, as Ardigò recalled, had already been proposed by Bergson, in his L’Evolution crèatrice (1970), when he referred to the concepts of intuition and intelligence, where the former related (and corresponded) to the meaning of life, the second satisfied the regulatory exigencies of matter (ibidem). On the basis of this reasoning, Bergson underlined that “In the humanity to we belong, intuition is sacrificed almost completely to intelligence. It seems that in order to conquer matter and regain a hold over it, consciousness has had to exhaust the best of its forces. Intuition… is a lamp that is practically extinguished … But it is revived… when a vital interest is at stake” (1970, p. 722). Speaking of intuition, in this sense, as we know, Goleman conveniently argued that it should be appreciated (1996, p. 274): “The concept of emotional intelligence which indicates the ability to profitably manage one’s emotions: motivation, self-­ control, empathy, enthusiasm, tenacity. Surely these are not hereditary attitudes: the more it is possible to teach children, the more they will be able to make use of their intellectual abilities.” Ultimately, as Cesareo noted, for Ardigò the understanding of social action (and its rationality) needed to be sought within the dialectical relationship between “the living world and the self-conscious, introspective, empathising and communicative capability of the subject” (1993, p. 1905). A further important contribution in the direction of a subjectivist explanation of rationality was provided by Maffesoli (1983, 1988, 1989, 1990) who developed a theory aimed at privileging the materialist-naturalistic dimension of social action. On the basis of this theoretical and heuristic perspective (1990) he believed absolutely and deeply, that – since a new Dionysian paradigm was asserting itself among advanced societies – very ancient and tribal characteristics in which passions sought to reaffirm their centrality in a corporate game, no project or theory of enlightenment or of a utopia would ever be able to envisage an immutable, non-improvable, immobile, and ahistorical society. For Maffesoli, the logic of passion that guided social action tended to exclude the realisation of a society without scope for freedom, because it was already perfect, like Athena born from the head of Zeus. This reality of social action Maffesoli considered “a perspective that, with a somewhat barbaric term and level that we shall try to explain, we might define as ‘holistic’, which with its constant reversibility unites globality (social and natural) and the different elements (environment, context, and people) that compose it. In other words, in the wake of what I have been

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sustaining for years, helps to keep the two ends of the chain linked: an existential ontology, on the one hand, and simple banality on the other. The former, like a laser beam, illuminates the various manifestations of the latter” (1988, p. 9). In criticising the traditional approaches to sociological analysis, Maffesoli suggested an anthropological pathway that tended to discover that practically animal energy running in depth through the various manifestations of sociality. A reading of social action bases its theoretical scheme essentially on the assumption that it is no longer possible to sustain a rigid antinomy between scientific thought and ordinary “common sense”. For this reason, sociology needed to seek to re-develop the objects of its analysis, an itinerant sociology, according to Maffesoli, without an object, since “There are epochs that live in effervescence and need corroborating impertinence (…). There are also periods in which utopias are trivialised, realised, and in which daydreams swarm. Who said that these moments dream of the next ones? Perhaps it is not so much a question of projections, but rather of inventions made of scattered fragments, of unfinished constructions, of more or less successful attempts. Naturally, it is necessary to provide a new interpretation of these daily daydreams” (ibid., p. 16). To carry out this paradigmatic re-development, Maffesoli believed that it was necessary ​​“To reverse our view. Paraphrasing Machiavelli, one might say to take into consideration the notion of the public square rather than that of the palace. This concern has never died out; from the cynic of antiquity to the populist of the nineteenth century, many philosophers and historians shared it too. Sometimes even the primacy of the ‘village point of view’ over that of intelligence is proclaimed, but it becomes urgent to do so now, at a time when ‘villages” are multiplying in our megalopolises. It is not a matter of a state of mind, a merciful wish, or some other inconsistent affirmation, but a necessity that corresponds to the spirit of the time. It might be summed up as follows: the life of our societies today is determined by the ‘local’, by the territory, by proximity, by anything that refers to local knowledge, and no longer to a projective and universal truth” (ibid., p. 83). Maffesoli’s analytical attention is focused, therefore, on social action, on the symbolic, affective, and communicative processes typical of local tribes, which bestowed their own brand of rationality to action, a kind of rationality that had its roots in extra-rational aspects of the Weberian logic of the nineteenth century. Although the concept of a communality of emotions (Gemeinde), on which Maffesoli built his theory of the daily social life of metropolitan tribes, can be traced back to an intuition of Weber’s, indicated in his book on the Economy and Society. This is a category that has never existed in reality, but it was able to serve as a revelator of present situations (ibid., p. 23). Moreover, the topic of religion, as we are well aware, has been a very frequent object in the research carried out by the fathers of sociology from Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life) to Weber (The Protecting Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism), as well as by the father of psychoanalysis Freud (Totem and Taboo). As Maffesoli argued, “The rationality of the nineteenth century referred to history, to what I have called an extensive attitude (ex-tension); the rationality that is announced is mainly proxemic, intensive (in-tension), it is organised around an axis

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(guru, action, pleasure, space) which simultaneously binds people and leaves them free. It is centripetal and centrifugal. Hence, the apparent instability of the tribes. The membership coefficient is not absolute, and everyone can participate in a multiplicity of groups, investing in each one a considerable part of her/himself. This fluttering is certainly one of the essential characteristics of the social organisation that is taking shape” (ibid, p. 200). This development of society led the scholar to consider “individualism and its various theorisations to be obsolete. Every social actor is less an agent than an actor. Each person diffracts endlessly following the Kairos, the occasions and situations that arise. Social life is, therefore, like a scene in which, for a moment, a series of crystallisations takes place. Comedy can take place. But once the performance is over, the whole is diluted until another knot arises” (ibid., P. 201). Within this theoretical framework of the description of analytical approaches to the rationality of multidimensional human action, there is also the contribution made by Alexander (1982, 1987, 1988). He developed a theory of his own regarding the analysis of social action into which he inserted  – alongside the orientation towards efficiency (purpose-aimed) and that of the constraints imposed by the (functionalistic) condition – deeds performed by the actor driven by norms of an ideal, ritual, religious, affective, and aesthetic type. Alexander’s theoretical approach confirmed the idea that the logic of rationality did not reside in elements extraneous and external to the subject, but located essentially in the experience accumulated by the actor and in its inherent voluntaristic component. These assertions gave rise to the development of a theory of action in a voluntaristic sense, devoid of instrumental rationality. From this point of view, Alexander sided with those who sought to explain rationality in subjectivist terms, even if he did not spare scholars who also supported the same type of approach from criticism. In his criticism of other scholars, including Parsons, but also Schütz to some extent, Alexander questioned, respectively, the existence of orientation in social action, based solely on utilitarian calculations and on the relational correspondence between means  – up to certain conditions  – as the subjectivistic justification of action, which in any case tended to sum the action up in a reasonable subjective project. Starting from these considerations, he postulated the hypothesis that this conclusion produced an indeterminateness of the very concept of rationality, in that it produced a situation where any kind of action might be evaluated objectively or justified subjectively as a rational action. According to this logic, all actions were aimed at achieving some kind of goal, pursuing a utilitarian, ideal, affective, or value-driven goal, including unconscious or involuntary ones. Alexander also criticised Schütz, saying that his theoretical scheme led to a definition of the behaviour of subject as rational in any case, since, by means of the skills acquired from the experiences s/he was led (and justified) to act in a reasonable way to pursue some utilitarian purpose, as well as ethical and value-based ones. From this heuristic perspective, Alexander, in an attempt to revisit the theoretical logic underlying contemporary sociology, came to formulate a theory of his own that took into consideration a multidimensional approach to the analysis of rational

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social action. This new paradigm included both the rational dimension oriented towards a goal or, under certain conditions, towards the achievement of a utilitarian end and an extra-rational one of a normative type, guided by ethical, ideal, or value-­ based choices. This approach permitted him to examine jointly the internal orientation of the subject, that is, the degree of freedom of choice stemming from her/his Weltanschauung and skills (the result of experiences) and the variables imposed by the environment that condition her/his actions and give life to structural coercion. In our opinion, it is not easy to implement a heuristic pathway which aims at taking into consideration the convergence of two different paradigms and providing an effective synthesis, which cannot be separated from a reworking of the analytical and explanatory interactions possible between the plurality expressed by the behaviour of the subjects and the unity represented by the structures of the social order. In reality, Alexander’s multidimensional approach, while, in the end it might favour an understanding of two dimensions placed, historically, within a scheme of oppositional logic featuring objectivistic determinism and subjectivistic idealism. However, he highlighted a fundamental problem that affected sociological research, that is the modality by means of which one ought to analyse social action in relation to the social order. In other words, his theory re-posited an ancient and fundamental dichotomous diatribe contained in the history of sociological thinking, represented by the interaction existing between the concept of freedom and social order, or, in a certain way, between the need to acquire a greater degree of individual freedom and create social structures that permit aspirations towards appropriate levels of equity.

Chapter 8

The Upsurge of Postmodern Society and the Contributions of Bauman, Beck, and Sennett

The last two chapters deal with the topic of the evolution of rational action, as problematic deeds, within the personal, collective, and institutional spheres, based on contributions by Bauman and Beck as well as Sennett’s “liquid rationality” in this chapter. When analysing these important authors, we deal with the criticism associated with the flexibility and consequences of the new capitalism, as well as the extension of Risikogesellshaft and Risikoleben. This development is part of an innovative framework that witnesses the definitive emergence of a transition from modern to postmodern society and, simultaneously, the advent of globalisation. With the advent of the postmodern era, we live in increasingly multifaceted, dynamic, complex, globalised, interconnected, competitive, culturally plural societies, characterised by structural flexibility and continuous change that with extreme pervasiveness, affects every area of ​​our lives and gives rise to important phenomena of discontinuity, not easily decipherable or predictable.

1 From Solid Bodies to “Liquid Rationality” In this new scenario, Bauman was fundamental to the field of sociological analysis favouring an understanding of the dichotomous passage of our societies from modernity to postmodernity, from the solidity of economic and social institutions to a new personal and institutional dimension that we might see as characterised by an “increasingly fluid or liquid rationality”. It was in his famous essay on Liquid Modernity (2002) that Bauman coined a formula to explain the profound transformations of our societies and analyse the decisive shift towards postmodernity. This passage was characterised by the transition of its institutions from a “solid”, rigid state unchanging in space and time, to a “liquid” state, flexible and adaptable. To the rigidity of modernity is affirmed, therefore, a society characterised by a new system (economic, social, cultural, and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cocozza, The Unexpected in Action, Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26793-2_8

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relational) where, as Bauman (2002, p. VI) explains, a significant formless fluidity spreads, because unlike solid bodies: … Fluids travel with extreme ease. They ‘flow’, ‘overflow’, ‘scatter’, ‘seep’, ‘trickle’, ‘leak’; unlike solids they are not easy to stop: they can bypass obstacles, climb over them, or even infiltrate them. From the encounter with solid bodies, they come out unchanged, where the latter, if they remain such, are no longer the same, they become damp. The extraordinary mobility of fluids is what associates them with the idea of ​​‘lightness’.

The Polish sociologist, in this study of this rotation, opportunely highlighted the transformation of the orientation of rationality within individual, collective, and institutional human action in this new postmodern context of ours. He held it was a process of continuous change which, as we shall see, started from a transformation of the strategy and role of the actors of modernity and from the “fusion of solid bodies”, representatives of the characteristics of traditional capitalism, typical of the first and second industrial revolution. Regarding these complex processes of transformation, Bauman (2002, p. 166) made the following telling statement: Solid modernity corresponded in fact to the epoch of heavy capitalism: the link between capital and labour fortified by the reciprocity of their dependence. The survival of the workers depended on having a job; capital reproduction depended on the ability to hire labour. Their meeting point had a fixed address; neither of them could easily move elsewhere; the massive factory walls confined and barricaded both partners inside a common prison. Capital and work were united, one might say, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, and until death them did part. The workshop was their common habitat, simultaneously a battlefield for trench warfare and a natural home for dreams and hopes.

In this direction, with the aim of analysing how the culture and Weltanschauung of entrepreneurs of the second and fourth industrial revolutions, respectively, related to the characteristics of capitalism, Bauman pointed out that (2002, p. XXI): It is likely that Rockefeller’s desire was to build huge factories, railways, and oil pipelines and own them for as long as possible (for eternity, if you measure time by the life span of a person or a family). Bill Gates, on the other hand, does not hesitate in breaking away from what he created with so much pride the day before; today, it is the crazy speed of circulation, recycling, obsolescence, disposal, and replacement that creates profit, not the durability and reliability of the product over time. Reversing a millenary tradition, today, it is the rich and powerful who hate everything that is lasting and seek the transitory, while the poorest cling to the little they have and desperately try, and against all adversities, to make it last as long as possible.

As regards the culture of the capitalist economic system which, starting from the emergence and development of the second industrial revolution, it was influenced by the bureaucratic and military revolution, as Sennett observed (2006, p. 21): At the end of the nineteenth century the language of investment decisions took on the characteristics of military jargon for the first time. It was then that concepts like “investment campaign”, “strategic thinking”, or even “analysis of the results” (one of General von Clausewitz’s favourite expressions) appeared in this sphere. However, the world of modernity as described above, with minutia of sociological details like those expounded, no longer exists, because the historical space/time

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link has been broken. Continuous change has produced an expansion and multiplication of spaces. Just think of the variety of possible interaction thanks to recourse to ICT technology, and a readjustment of the perception of time, leading to the extension to excess of working time and giving rise to a new social system characterised by elements of non-linear innovation that is difficult to predict. This stems from the “Grand transformation” which, starting from the nineteenth century, Polanyi (2000), in the analysis of the economic and political origins of our time, argued that present-day society, now dominated by the laws of the free market, self-regulated by the system of prices, generated impersonal relationships and ended up by undermining the liberal order and social cohesion. In this direction, in an attempt to better understand the advent of postmodernity, Bauman (2002, p. 169) commented that: “This situation has changed today, and the main ingredient of the multifaceted process of change is the new mentality of the ‘short-term’ that has replaced that of the ‘long-term’ […]” Flexibility “is the order of the day, and when applied to the labour market it predicts the end of work as we understand it” and announces, instead, the advent of work with fixed-­ term contracts or without contracts, positions without any form of security, because the “until-further-communications” clause has saturated working life with uncertainty.

Within this new scenario, actually, it is necessary to deal with the appearance on the stage of new critical economic, social, and cultural variables that represent postmodernity such as individualisation, privatisation, increased risk, uncertainty, flexibility, vulnerability, but, above all, the difficulty of designing and planning actions and policies at individual and institutional levels. The individual is left alone in the face of “nothing”, or rather has to deal with a difficult-to-decipher reality of a “turbulent” type, as it is not very predictable, difficult to programme and plan, because it has now become structurally flexible and extremely unstable. All this recalls the need to give life to a new system of relationships, based no longer on individualism, but on the spirit of sharing – even of risks – on the desire to be part of, to belong to a community. Even knowing that in this quest for a different relational system, no longer based on utilitarian rationality, as Bauman argued efficaciously, in his The Desire of the Community (2008, p. X): In our increasingly globalised world we all live in a condition of interdependence and, consequently, none of us can be masters of our destiny. There are tasks that every single individual is confronted with, but which cannot be tackled and superseded individually. Everything that separates us and instigates us to keep our distance from others, to draw boundaries, and erect barricades, makes it increasingly difficult to manage these tasks. We all need to gain control over the conditions in which we face life’s challenges, but for most of us, that control can only be achieved collectively. It is right here, in the carrying out these tasks, that the absence of community is most felt and suffered, but here too occasionally, the community has the opportunity to stop absence. If ever a community can exist in the world of individuals, it can be (and it must be) only a community of a weave of common and mutual interest; a responsible community, aimed at guaranteeing the equal right to be considered human beings and the equal capacity to act based on this right.

In line with this paradigmatic approach, as already mentioned, regarding a topic of considerable political topicality and relevant scientific interest and in relation to

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“security/freedom” dichotomy Bauman very opportunely commented that (2008, p. 20) “There is good reason to look at the course of history as a pendulum, although in other respects it might appear linear: the two elements without which human existence is very hard to bear, freedom and security, both equally pressing and indispensable, are very difficult to reconcile without friction and, most of the time, very strong friction. These two elements are simultaneously complementary and incompatible, and the likelihood of them coming into conflict has always been and will continue to be so high that they cannot be renounced. Although many forms of human aggregation have experimented throughout history, none has ever managed to resolve this real ‘squaring of the circle’. The acquisition of security always requires the sacrifice of freedom, while the latter can only expand at the expense of security. Yet, security without freedom is equivalent to slavery (and in the absence of even a minimum level of freedom, it is, ultimately, a highly insecure type of security); while freedom without security is equivalent to being left to oneself; in the absence of even a minimum level of security, it proves to be a type of freedom that is not very free.” In other words, it is necessary to highlight an important lack in the political and cultural dialectic, since the opening of a new global scenario, where the “fusion of solid bodies” prevails. This is a permanent feature of modernity, as sustained by Bauman, who often referred to Beck to argue his thesis, in Liquid Modernity (2001, p. XI): The task of building a new and better order that replaces the old and ineffective one does not currently appear on the agenda, at least not in that of the field in which political action is supposed to take place. The ‘fusion of solid bodies’, the permanent feature of modernity, has therefore acquired a new meaning, and above all has been redirected towards a new objective; and one of the main consequences of this redirection has been the destruction of the forces capable of keeping the question of order and system on the political agenda. The solid bodies for which today – in the era of liquid modernity – the time has come to end up in the crucible and be liquefied are the bonds that transform individual choices into collective projects and actions: the models of communication and coordination between life policies conducted individually on the one hand and the political actions of the community on the other. […] Beck cites the family, the class, and the neighbourhood as the main examples of this new phenomenon.

Ultimately, as Bauman (2018) argued in the volume The light at the end of the tunnel. Dialogues on life and modernity, globalisation also produced injustice and social inequality. Migratory phenomena have now taken on a global and, in some cases, epochal dimension. The twenty-first century, to date, has been characterised by conflicts that have increased poverty in different areas of the world. In the affluent societies of the west, the gap is growing between the frightened wealthy and the desperately poor. To supersede the challenges of this historical phase, it is crucial to regain the capacity for dialogue and the understanding of the value of human beings. The happy meeting, both personal and philosophical, between the Polish sociologist and Pope Francis was built on these grounds. During the international meetings for peace “Men and Religions”.

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In fact, regarding these three global social emergencies, Bauman argued that (2018, p. 46): 1. Dialogue, a word that we should never be tired of repeating. There is a need to promote a culture of dialogue in every possible way and thus to rebuild the fabric of society. We need to consider others, foreigners, those who belong to different cultures, people worthy of being listened to. Peace can only be achieved if we give our children the weapons of dialogue, if we teach them to fight for the encounter, and cooperate for negotiation and victory. This way, we shall give them a culture aimed at creating a strategy for life, a strategy that has as its goal inclusion, not exclusion. 2. Work. We need to understand that the fair distribution of the fruits of the earth and human labour is not pure charity, but a moral obligation. If we want to rethink our societies, we need to create decent and well-paid jobs, especially for our young people. It is essential to move from the liquid economy, which uses corruption as a way to profit, towards a solution that can guarantee access to land through work. Work is the means by which we can reshape our coexistence by sharing the fruits of the earth, precisely the fruits of human labour. 3. Education. Pope Francis argues that the culture of dialogue must be an integral part of the education and instruction we provide in our schools, in an interdisciplinary way, to give our young people the tools they need to resolve conflicts in a different way than we are used to. All of this is not easy and is a very long-term process. It is a way different from that followed by politics. Acquiring the culture of dialogue does not involve an easy recipe, a shortcut. Quite the contrary. A Chinese proverb says, “We have to think about next year by planting seeds, the next ten years by planting trees, the next hundred years by educating people”. Education is a very long-term process. Creating a peaceful world is not like making a cup of coffee, it is much more complex. If we are to follow Pope Francis’s advice we need, more than anything else, to develop qualities that are hard to find in this world: patience, consistency, and long-term planning. I am talking about a true cultural revolution, which must be the exact opposite of the world where people age and die before they are even born. Patience. We need to focus, therefore, on the long-term goals, on the light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how far away it may be when we look at it.

2 Risikogesellshaft and Risikoleben It was in the volume The risk society. Towards a second modernity (2000a) Beck introduced the concepts of Risikogesellshaft (Society of the risk) and Risikoleben (life at risk). This important essay which achieved global success questioned the nature of the social, economic, and political model that had characterised modernity from the eighteenth century to the present day, and a precise, punctual and stimulating analysis was conducted describing and questioning the six challenges of

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postmodernity: globalisation, individualisation, unemployment, the gender revolution, the global risks of the ecological crisis and the turbulence of the financial markets. Already, in the volume What is globalisation. Risks and perspectives of planetary society (2009), Beck had clarified that in the lexicon of the end of the millennium, a word emerged which in daily use and abuse risks resonating without a precise meaning: globalisation. Then the author asked, “what is globalization? How do you grasp its real complexity? And how do you measure up to its challenges?” After reviewing the various theories of globalisation, from Wallerstein’s world economy to Ritzer’s McDonaldisation thesis, Beck hoped for the development of a “globalisation policy” capable of responding to social, cultural, and environmental emergencies no longer governable at national level. These are risks that threaten world society, Beck held, can today mobilise new social and political energies, promoting, in the long run, rational development of the human condition and encouraging the birth of a “second modernity”. Returning again to the dangers facing people and institutions in the risk society, the German sociologist, in his volume Conditio Humana. Risk in the global age (2011), he warned us that, as we anticipated in previous chapters, from now on nothing that happened could be a purely local event. All the essential dangers have become world dangers, the situation of the single nation, the single ethnicity, the single religion, of every class, individual, is also the result and origin of the situation of humanity. The decisive point is that from now on the main task is the concern for the whole. This is not an option, but a condition. No one has ever foreseen, wanted, or chosen it, but it arose from the decisions, from the sum of their consequences, and became conditio humana. Nobody can escape it; we now live in a global society of risk. In the essay The metamorphosis of the world (2017), Beck recalled that our world is going through a real process of metamorphosis: it is not social change, it is not transformation, it is not evolution, it is not revolution, and it is not crisis. Metamorphosis is a way of changing the nature of human existence. It questions our way of being in the world. As has already been mentioned, it is undeniable that we live in a world that is increasingly difficult to decode. It is not simply changing: it is undergoing metamorphosis. Just think of the series of events that have taken place in recent decades and their effects on the global population and on daily life: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 9/11 attacks, catastrophic climate change all over the world, the Fukushima reactor disaster, the crises of finance and the euro and the threats to freedom created, as Edward Snowden informed us, by totalitarian surveillance in the age of digital communication. In his most important recent collection of essays The Global Risk Society (2018) Beck argued in favour of the need to seek new points of reference to better understand the global risk society. The German scholar outlined the ecological and technological aspects of risk and their sociological and political implications by discussing and responding to some of the criticisms evoked by his famous works on

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the risk society. In the face of this continuous metamorphosis, in order to mitigate the spread of economic, social, and cultural inequality, Beck called for the establishment of a “global policy”. This objective that was absolutely unimaginable and out of political reach until just a few years ago, today, however, has become an urgent necessity, to which governments need to be concretely commitments. The essays collected here dealt with several phenomena that are more exposed and therefore regard more the escalation of risks, such as the environment, nature, the natural state, and the human being. These are themes that must be addressed in a transnational context, but with a local logic. The book lay the groundwork for the publication of Beck’s “Cosmopolitan Manifesto”, which focused on the dialectic between global and local issues that do not belong to national politics. Recognition of the fact that diversity, individualism, and scepticism are characteristics of our culture, can lay the foundations of a new social cohesion, a new cosmopolitanism in which the creative uncertainty of freedom replaces the hierarchical certainty of difference. Using these interpretative indications, Beck intended to urge political experimentation aimed at creating a global morality of risk sharing that, in the future, could give rise to powerful cosmopolitan movements, which sank their ethical and social foundations into a culture of sharing (even of risk), in a perspective of a shared community spirit. With regard to these possible challenges, starting from Beck’s analysis of the old and new risks that postmodern society amplifies, Bauman, the other great German sociologist, stated in his volume Desire for community (2008, p. V) that: Insecurity grips us all, immersed as we are in an intangible and unpredictable world made up of liberalisation, flexibility, competitiveness, and endemic uncertainty, but each of us consumes her/his own anxiety by living it as an individual problem, the result of personal failures and a challenge to individual skills and abilities. We are led to seek, as Ulrick Beck caustically observed, personal solutions to systemic contradictions, individual salvation from common problems. This strategy has very little hope of having the desired effects since it does not affect the roots of insecurity; moreover, it is precisely this falling back on our resources and abilities that fuels insecurity in the world that we try to shun.

In this discussion it is necessary to consider that, as Bauman observed, quoting Beck (2008, p. 58–59): The “powerful and successful” may also be, unlike the poor and the defeated, intolerant of community ties, but like all other men and women, they believe that life lived in the absence of a community is precarious, often unsatisfactory and scary at times. Freedom and communitarianism can collide and conflict, but any solution devoid of both does not produce a satisfying life. The need for both ingredients is felt even more strongly if only for the fact that life is lived in our increasingly globalised and deregulated society which gave birth to the new cosmopolitan elite, a society which Ulrich Beck felicitously defined Risikogesellshaft (Society of risk), a Risikoleben (a life at risk), in which the very idea of controllability, certainty, and security […] collapses.1

 Beck U. (1999), What is globalization. Risks and prospects of the planetary society, Carocci, Rome.

1

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3 The Flexible Man and the Consequences for Personal Life We owe to Sennett the fitting expression “the flexible man”, which appeared in an almost interrogative and exploratory form in his volume (2001), The Flexible Man. It deals with the effects of new capitalism on personal life. The author reflected on these increasingly complex phenomena, asking himself how much “flexible capitalism” might affect people’s concrete life experiences. Based on this question, he began an in-depth analysis of the structural and cultural characteristics of the new capitalism of postmodern society, highlighting in the first instance that flexibility, mobility, and risk are the new categories of contemporary life. In postmodern society, welfarism ends, bureaucracy is reduced, the economy becomes more dynamic and unscrupulous, and personal life suffers. There is no longer any stability and loyalty to the company, the strength of the old capitalism; now uncertainty, perennial innovation, and greater, albeit different, forms of power and control and inequalities are valid. In other words, a relational climate is created that is not oriented towards transparency, involvement, and participation. As Sennett (2001) pointed out all this had important consequences for the self-­ esteem of workers: the sense of failure due to the inability to respond adequately to new challenges progressively eroded the integrity of the self. There was an ever-­ increasing distortion of character, whose requirements of stability, duration, and permanence were in contrast with the dynamism, fragmentation, and changeability of flexible capitalism. Based on analyses of various empirical cases of personal stories, the author presented some of the protagonists of this dramatic fresco of everyday micro-realities that are the product of the new capitalism. To frame the new phenomenon of the economy of flexibility and the new rationality of human and organisational action, which accompanied this transformation, Sennett stated that (2001, p. 9): “Nowadays, in America, the use of the term “flexible capitalism” is spreading to indicate a system that represents something more than a variation on an old model. All the emphasis is on flexibility. Bureaucratic rigidities are being blamed, and the same is true of the damage produced by blind routines. Workers are asked to behave with greater versatility, to be ready for change at short notice, to continually take risks, to rely less on formal regulations and procedures. The focus on flexibility is changing the very meaning of work, and also the words used to define it.” Indeed, as Sennett (2001, p. 50) precisely observes: What pushes modern capitalism towards decisive and irreversible changes, however disorganised or unproductive they may be, are deeper motivations. And in this, they are linked to the fickle character of consumer demand, which produces another distinctive feature of flexible regimes, the flexible specialization of production.

Flexible production specialisation. To put it simply, flexible specialisation seeks to make more varied products move faster to the market. In The Second Industrial Divide, economists Michael Piore and Charles Sabel described how flexible specialisation worked in the case of relations between small firms in northern Italy, a kind of specialisation that enabled those firms to respond rapidly to changes in

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demand. Companies collaborate and compete simultaneously, looking for market niches that each of them will occupy for a short period rather than permanently, adapting to the short productive life typical of clothes, fabrics, or mechanical components. (…) Piore and Sabel defined the system they studied as “a strategy of permanent innovation: we adapt to constant changes,2 rather than trying to control them”. Flexible specialisation is the antithesis of the production system embodied in Fordism. With the spread of these profound transformations at global level, organisational action appeared on the scene that no longer responded to prescriptive or utilitarian logic alone but presented itself as a new relational modality capable of permitting competition, dialogue and cooperation to coexist in the same strategy. In fact, as Sennett (2008, p. 39) stated, The history of cell phones is illuminating when discussing the superiority of collaboration over competitiveness. The cell phone was born from the metamorphosis of two technologies, that of the radio and that of the telephone. Before the fusion of these two technologies, telephone signals were transmitted through fixed cables, while radio signals were transmitted over the air. In the 1970s, there was a form of mobile telephony in the military field. These were large, bulky radios with bands reserved for reserved communications; some civilian versions of mobile phones were used in taxis, but they had a limited range and poor sound quality. The fixity of the cable phone was its flaw, the clarity, and the security of transmission its virtues. At the heart of this technology was circuit-switched technology, developed, tested, and refined over many generations of use. It was this technology that needed to be transformed so that radio and telephone might be combined. The problem was clear, so was the solution. The difficulty was how to link the two.

In examining the companies that first studied the transformation of circuit-­ switching technology, economists Richard Lester and Michael Piore discovered that in some of them, collaboration within and with other companies had made it possible to make decisive progress in the solution of the problem, while in other companies, internal competition reduced the urge of technicians to improve the quality of the switches. (…) Conflict between business sectors was deliberately ambiguous because access into the heart of the problem required more than just technical knowledge: it required lateral thinking. This challenge led Motorola and Nokia to adopt a method of involving technicians and engineers based on conflict-management and collaborative orientation. This way they achieved excellent results. On the contrary, Ericsson and other firms (Sennett, 2008, p.  39), “apparently proceeded with greater linearity and discipline by dividing the problem into parts. It was expected that the birth of the new switch would take place through ‘the exchange of information’ between one office and another, rather than ‘growing an interpretive community’. Ericsson’s rigid organisation resulted in failure. In the end, the problem was solved, but with greater difficulty: the various offices cultivated and defended their own vegetable plot.”

2  Michael J.  Piore, Charles F.  Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide. Possibilities for Prosperity, Basic Books, New York, 1984, p. 17.

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In other words, faced with these profound transformations, as well as with the many experiments in “unregulated flexibility”, a quest for meaning began3 according to the new behavioural modalities. Research aimed at a better understanding of this structural and cultural revolution-in-progress, whose existence was absolutely unpredictable, involved, on the one hand, the social and institutional actors – entrepreneurs, company management, workers-trade-unions, workers, and public institutions clash. On the other hand, sociologists as well as economic and social scientists set out to explain these emerging phenomena. These were innovative phenomena that were changing the rational logic guiding the redesign of work processes, the configuration of structures, the use of technology, and the skills necessary to carry out the new work roles. This latter activity was very different from the conduction of rigid, prescriptive tasks requiring basic operational knowledge and no specialisation, to which workers and bosses were accustomed in the twentieth century. It was an era dominated by the affirmation of the second industrial revolution which imposed the organisational and cultural model of the Fordist economy, a strongly prescriptive, stable, and immutable system, not at all capable of adapting to market changes. An innovative process, therefore, fed the need to activate new organisational roles and behaviour styles oriented towards the continuous learning of new skills, to contribute to increasing individual sense-making in organisational action and the need to be acknowledged as the bearer of a particular vision of the world of production. These reflections lead us to ask ourselves what the most effective ways to engage and actively involve people in the life and management of the company, in the new competitive scenario might be. This question, on the other hand, does not always find an effective answer in human resource management policies in postmodern society. Faced with this process of profound transformation of work and the logic of the culture of the craftsman, it was necessary to clarify that the goal was (2008): Knowing how to do things well for your own pleasure: a simple and rigorous rule of life that has permitted the development of highly refined techniques and the birth of modern scientific knowledge. Blacksmiths, goldsmiths, and luthiers combined material knowledge with manual skill. The mind and the hand worked by reinforcing each other, one taught the other and vice versa. But it was not only manual work that benefitted from the synergy between theory and practice. Because whoever knew how to govern her/himself and measure autonomy and respect for the rules, Sennett argued, would not only be able to build a wonderful violin, a clock with a perfect mechanism, or a bridge capable of resisting for millennia, would also be a just citizen. The history of the artisan tells the story of Roman engineers and Renaissance goldsmiths, of eighteenth-century Parisian printers and factories of industrial London. It was a historical journey used by Sennett to reconstruct the fault lines that separate technique from expression, art from craftsmanship, and creation from application. In this direction, the best example of modern “know-how” can be found in the group that created Linux, the artisans of the modern information cathedral.

 We refer to the concept of Sensemaking, introduced by Weick (1997) in the volume Sense and meaning in the organisation. 3

Chapter 9

Ethics, Rationality, and Competences in Twenty-First Century Capitalism: The Perspective of Piketty, Nussbaum, and Morin

In this chapter, the contributions by Piketty, Nussbaum, and Morin are explored to highlight the relevance of the cognitive and soft dimensions (environmental, social, cultural, and relational) in determining the personal, collective, and institutional action, leading not always towards rationality of purpose, of a utilitarian type, but also towards goals of an ideal, emotional, or value-sharing type. The understanding of the development of capitalism in the twenty-first century needs to be sought no longer in analyses of the economic and structural dimension alone, but in the socio-­ cultural and relational sphere, as well as in the dissemination of knowledge among large sections of the population.

1 Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century Between Utilitarianism and Social Cohesion In a number of essays, two important French economists Thomas Piketty (2014, 2019) and Jean Tirole (2005, 2013), particularly attentive to the interaction between economy and society, emphasised the idea that the development of capitalism in the twenty-first century presented a series of critical determinant variables, the understanding of which needed to be sought no longer in analyses of the economic and structural dimension alone, but in the socio-cultural and relational sphere, as well as in the dissemination of knowledge among large sections of the population. This statement was able to lead to consideration of the cognitive and soft dimensions (environmental, social, cultural, and relational) as strategic variables capable of determining the development of the economic system in postmodern society. This determination was able to orient personal, collective, and institutional action, not always towards rationality of purpose, of a utilitarian type, but sometimes towards goals of an ideal, emotional, or value-sharing type.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cocozza, The Unexpected in Action, Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26793-2_9

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In this heuristic direction, in his well-known essay Capital in the XXI century, Piketty (2014) argued, in an extremely well-documented manner, that, within the new scenario of modern economics, the growth and spread of knowledge had made it possible to reduce inequalities, though they had not changed the deep structures of capital, as prospected during the optimistic decades following the Second World War. The author made it clear that the main driving force was the tendency to privatise endowments of financial and real-estate capital to inflate the index of economic growth, exacerbating discontent and undermining democratic values. In the past, actions of policy had curbed inequality, now the author questioned whether current policies were capable of governing the profound and ongoing economic and social changes taking place. Similarly, Tirole (2005, 2013), winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2014, on the basis of a perspective different from the neo-classical one, in collaboration with Fudenberg and Tirole (1994), developed various economic theories on multiple themes, but he was rewarded for explaining how to understand and regulate, within an industrial sector, companies whose brands were not strong on the market. In other words, he explained ways of evaluating, stimulating, and promoting small and medium-sized enterprises in a market dominated by industrial oligarchies and global monopolies. These markets were often unregulated and dominated by a limited number of large companies. For this reason, they produced disagreeable results from a social point of view, like final prices higher than the costs of production and non-productive brands whose existence was justified only as “deterrents” to the entry of other brands into the market. Starting from the redevelopment of game theory, Tirole was able to define the essence of oligopolistic markets, describing the strategic interaction with other firms, since the “optimal choices” for a firm depended more and more on the choices made by competing firms operating in the market. The analysis carried out by Tirole highlighted the possible strategies connected with the differentiation of products – which aimed at reducing the intensity of competition or preventing access to a given market segment – with the role of incentives and investments in research and development, with systems of predatory behaviour and coopetition (a new form of cooperation and competition) aimed at competitors. Within this new framework of global competition, therefore, it might be argued that an essential role was played by the system of interaction and the cultural and relational models put in place by the various players. The Social and Value Bases of the Economy This is a particularly interesting and innovative heuristic perspective for economists, which sociology has placed at the centre of its scientific action since its inception. Indeed, it is precisely sociology, starting from the theories of its founders Comte (1967a, b) and Spencer (1967a, b), and arriving at Durkheim (1962a, b, 1969a, b), Weber (1948a, b, 1958a, b, 1965a, b, 1968a, b), Tönnies (1963a, b), and Simmel (1982a, b, 1983a, b) had the task of probing deeply into the analysis of phenomena fundamental to the understanding of rational action in the economic and social field such as the formation of norms and values ​​and the influence of religious beliefs; the

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development of different forms of society and the related socialisation processes but also that of the economic system and interconnection with the social and value structure. The theories of the fathers of sociology (Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim), therefore, highlighted and contributed to provoking the crisis of classical rationality (also in economics), which referred to a pre-established divine or natural order. Weber, in particular, extended this critique to other theoretical constructions based on pre-­ established processes of dialectical (Hegelian) logic or on the oriented perspective of the evolution of society in terms of historical (Marxian) materialism. In truth, both Marx and Weber had in common the delimitation of research to bourgeois-capitalist society, but, as we know, the former interpreted it as a form of historical alienation to be superseded, while the latter acknowledged that it was a fatal necessity. As was observed (Löwit, 1967, p.  48): “all of Marx’s theoretical work aims to clarify and destroy this universal phenomenon, while Weber’s work instead aims to understand it”. More precisely, Weber’s true strategic and innovative role in relation to Marxian thought lay the fact that Weber did not deny the scientific contribution made by Marx’s analysis. On the contrary, he appreciated the importance of Marx’s analytical approach, when it correlated conditioning of economic with cultural processes, though he demonstrated the relativity of this one and only explanatory attempt of his. As we pointed out already (Izzo, 1975) by reducing Marxism to a point of view, one among the many available, Weber deprived it of that attractive force which, from the beginning, sought to be its distinctive and essential feature. Simmel also tried his hand at these issues and in Money in Modern Culture (1998) he analysed the predominance of the objective over the subjective spirit, a role symbolically played by money, which tended towards the total alienation of the individual. Simultaneously, due to the marked division of labour following the invention and massive diffusion of machines, people became a part of a production process and no longer recognised themselves as authors of their work. In this heuristic perspective, with regard to the important role played by social action and the rules regulating the workings of the economic system, however, Durkheim in The Social Division of Labour, made it clear in a manner that remained topical, that “What is certain is that the lack of regulation does not allow the regular harmony of functions. Economists show – it is true – that harmony is spontaneously re-established when it is necessary, thanks to the increase or diminution of prices which, according to needs, stimulate or slow down production. (…) On the other hand, perturbations of this kind are naturally all the more frequent the more specialised the functions are; in fact, the more complex an organisation is, the more the necessity for extensive regulation is perceived.” This way, in the face of the advance of social complexity and the continuing diatribe regarding supersession of the holism-individualism binomial or, if one prefers, of the role of equality and freedom, the mission of the state and the market, the primacy of structure and action, Giddens tried to hypothesise a “third way” between these two paradigms by delineating the theory of social action and a concept

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recalling the duality of the structure, to provide further elements to explain human action and the social dimension of the actions of economic actors. More recently, several contributions made by new economic and neo-­ institutionalist sociology (Polanyi, 1974, 1978; Swedberg, 1994; Martinelli & Smelser, 1995; Cella, 1997; Mingione, 1997; Powell & Di Maggio, 2000; Esping-­ Andersen, 2000; Borghi & Magatti, 2002; Trigilia, 2002; Mutti, 2002; Regini, 2007; Bottazzi, 2007, 2009; Negrelli, 2007, 2013; Streeck, 2009, 2013; Bagnasco, 2010; Gallino, 2011; Cocozza, 2014a, b, c, 2016a, b, 2019) specified further that economic development always had a socially embedded character and was embedded, strongly interrelated, in the social, cultural, and institutional reality in which it operated, but they also analysed the excessive weight of the financialisation of the economy and the removal of decision-makers from the processes of the real economy. In this new perspective, it can be said that within today’s successful processes of development, a strategic role is played, more and more, by human and social capital, trust in institutions, cultural and social cohesion between economic and social actors and institutions, and networks of organisational relationships (Coleman, 1986). For these reasons, Bottazzi (2013), in particular, held that in similar processes “immaterial” factors played a role equally important as that played by traditional “material” elements like capital, facilities, and infrastructures. This a complex and heterogeneous set of elements also included technological innovation, characteristics of public spending, and so-called “territorial resources”, as determining factors for the activation of local development, whose action rested upon assets of an endogenous nature. Capitalism Between the Economic and Social Dimensions Regarding the need to rethink the negative consequences of the capitalist system, Piketty (2014, p. 11) argued, perspicaciously, that “Modern growth and the dissemination of knowledge have made it possible to avoid the Marxist apocalypse, but they have not changed the deep structures of capital and inequalities. (…) When the rate of return on capital regularly exceeds the growth rate of output and income – as it did until the nineteenth century and as risks happening again in the twenty-first century – capitalism produces unsustainable, arbitrary inequalities, which call into question, from their foundations, the meritocratic values ​​on which our democratic societies are based.” In reality, the topic of the stability and development of democracy is also treated by Streeck in his essay on Time gained: the postponed crisis of democratic capitalism (2013), when he argued that the crisis in which democratic capitalism found itself held everyone in suspense and provoked a widespread sense of helplessness. In an attempt to tackle previously unimaginable problems, measures were adopted as emergency operations and the situation was so serious that it was increasingly difficult to understand exactly what transformations were taking place. The author advanced the concrete hypothesis of a possible implosion of the social pact, the basis of capitalist democracy in the twentieth century.

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Piketty himself documented the fact that in the last three decades inequalities of income among citizens of OECD countries had been growing dramatically at a rate that, in the long term, might represent an unsustainable burden. In the new global scenario, in fact, various development opportunities exist, which, until now, have not been readily available for a similarly vast universe of population. Furthermore, the presence of a series of variables tended to produce greater inequalities capable of polarising and crystallising the scaffolding of the economic and social system of the European countries of the Mediterranean area, within a dichotomous oppositional dimension. As can be seen from the data recently published by Eurostat (2014), relating to the trend of inequality in the distribution of income and more generally of the wealth measured by the Gini Index,1 within a range oscillating between 0 and 1, the average of the 27 countries stands at an index of 0.30, with two important countries substantially scoring the same values: Germany at 0.29 and France at 0.30. If we look more closely at the 2001–2012 series, we discover how the economic and financial crisis, which brought in its wake high unemployment rates and heavy austerity measures, has impacted strongly on the distribution of income and represented a significant turnaround in other European countries, whose economic systems are a little weaker at the moment. The worst data concerned the countries most affected by the economic crisis and by a serious decline in job opportunities, especially for young people, like Italy, which passed from an index of 0.29 in 2001 to 0.31 in 2012 and Greece which passed from 0.33 to 0.34, while Spain and Portugal, which previously started from more marked inequalities, suffered a loss that brought their coefficients from 0.33 to 0.35. The United Kingdom, with an index of 0.32, despite the crisis, presented a picture of lower inequalities than in 2001 (0.35). To understand the nature of this trend and the different trajectories existing between European countries, the contributions of Sen (1986) and Dahrendorf (1988a, b, 2003, 2009) can be of great help. The latter, in particular, argued that in modern societies conflicts of a different nature existed, but, he held, that only one of these assumed a role of precise antagonism between the social classes: that relating to the contrast between wealth and citizenship, or as he defined it, between “Availability of assets (provisions) and the right to access them (entitlement)”. The Development of Capitalism and the Role of Education The analysis carried out so far has highlighted two fundamental assumptions: the market represents the precondition for activating the development of society, but the economic system is not able to regulate itself; it needs to share the rules necessary to guarantee legal practicability and the regular functioning of competition itself; the State needs to outline the rules within which the various actors can determine

 This is an interesting index introduced by the statistical Italian Corrado Gini which gauges the inequality in the distribution of income and wealth particular countries. It consists of a value between 0 and 1, where a low coefficient indicates a fairly homogeneous distribution while 0 corresponds to a “theoretical” condition of maximum equidistribution, while high coefficients denote a more unequal distribution. 1

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their actions and pursue their objectives; it can activate processes of support and promotion, but it cannot be a player. In reality, in the twenty-first century, affected thoroughly by the third and fourth industrial revolutions, development is based no longer on an optimal combination of traditional economic factors (raw materials, financial capital, and technologies), as was the case during the first and second industrial revolutions, but on three fundamental variables: 1. Innovative policies based on: eco-sustainability, smart technologies, creation of shared values (strategic vision). 2. Shared culture, skills, and values ​​(development of human capital). 3. Respect for the rules (legality) and effective interaction between institutions and economic and social actors (diffusion of social capital). Ultimately, it is not the structural dimension that is capable of determining a more equitable and lasting development, since in this new scenario, to address the phenomenon of rampant inequality, as Piketty (2014, p. 44) claimed, “The process of disseminating knowledge and skills is the only crucial element, the mechanism that permits the simultaneous, general growth of productivity and the reduction of inequalities both within each country and worldwide, as evidenced by the economic rebalancing achieved currently by many poor and emerging countries compared to rich countries, starting with China”. From this perspective, it is worth remembering that in our current societies, to be able to deal positively, successfully, and effectively with the growing complexity and continuous redefinition of economic, social, and relational systems, humanistic culture, education as well as the capacity for abstract theoretical speculation, represent indispensable strategic skills more and more. This is a process that certainly affects the whole western world, as analysed in a book of censure by Nussbaum (2013a, b) with the significant title of Not for profit. Because democracies need humanistic culture. In the essay, she described how countries, struggling with the economic crisis, through application of policies of spending review, were imposing heavy cuts to humanistic and artistic studies in favour of the development of technical skills and practical-scientific knowledge. This decision was not entirely wrong, but it was strategically inconsistent, since as the world became increasingly interdependent, globalised and borderless, the tools to analyse and understand it, in the wake of Weberian thinking, become poorer and more rudimentary, lacking in significant speculative capacity and critical-­ analytical skills. It is no coincidence that the author specified that “only humanistic culture educates a democracy”, and that the critical essence of politics risked being crushed by the economic logic of profit according to which the well-being of a country was measured exclusively on the basis of economic-numerical criteria (Nussbaum, 2012). For this reason, in the new increasingly globalised and interdependent economic and social scenario, as Giddens argued, when dealing with the institutional mission and the evolution of the role of education, in a perspective oriented towards a social inclusive logic (2006, p. 265), “… education is one of the most important issues for

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both politicians and citizens. The school system plays a decisive role in the socialisation of young people, in the promotion of equal opportunities, in professional training and in the creation of an informed and active citizenship.” These are very important indications for the start of a fair and lasting process of development and for an effective modernisation of the country, because as Sturzo (2005) already warned us, “the economy without ethics is diseconomy”. It is a project which was well defined by Sen (1988, 1990, 1994a, b, 1999, 2004), in the paradigm of the Capability approach, intended as the ability and competence to act/do within an integrated dimension of personal, economic, and social life, saying that “Capabilities are notions of freedom, in the positive sense: what real opportunities you have regarding the life you may lead.” In conclusion, it is appropriate for sociologists and economists to acquire a new heuristic perspective, also from the point of view of research methodology, since we are undoubtedly facing a joint challenge, as Piketty (2014, p. 925) perspicaciously observed, “Economists, if they really want to be useful, need above all, to learn to be more pragmatic in their methodological choices, to make a tabula rasa of their own certainties, if necessary, and place themselves in relation with the other social sciences. Just as, in their turn, other researchers in the social sciences must not leave the study of economic facts to economists only, (…) and limit themselves to recognising that every figure is a social construction, something very true but also insufficient. In the end, the two attitudes of substantial renunciation of the knowledge of others end up by identifying themselves, because they end up by leaving the field open to others.”

2 Culture and Skills to Fight Barbarism It is in the masterpiece The Well-Done Head. Reform of teaching and thought reform that Morin (2000) laid the foundations of an analysis and a proposal for the governance of a complex society, through the development of a new culture and the acquisition of new skills necessary to rethink the paradigm of rationality that guides human, organisational, and institutional choices. Morin (2000) invited teachers and students to reflect on the current state of knowledge and on the challenges characterising our age, stating that what was at stake were the new problems posed to human coexistence by an irreversible planetary interdependence between economies, policies, religions, the diseases of all human societies. To render these challenges manageable, a reform in teaching/ learning was indispensable. However, to achieve this, a reform of the organisation of knowledge was necessary. It is in this perspective that Morin placed at the basis of the school reform his hopes for the development of “complex thinking”. To illustrate the theoretical path carried out for the identification of the concept of “well-made head”, Morin (2000, p. 15) declared that, The primary purpose of teaching had been formulated by Montaigne whereby a well-made head was better than a full head.

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The meaning of a “full head” is clear. It is a head where knowledge is stocked, piled up, but lacks a principle of selection and organisation capable of bestowing meaning on the contents. By a “well-made head”, on the contrary, is meant one which instead of accumulating knowledge, needs to possess simultaneously: • A general aptitude for posing and dealing with problems. • Organising principles that make it possible to connect knowledge and bestow meaning on it. In other words, Morin (2000, p. 8) continued, Relevant knowledge is that capable of placing any information within its own context and, if possible, within the whole within which it is inscribed. It can also be said that knowledge progresses, primarily, not by sophistication, formalisation, and abstraction, but through an ability to contextualise and globalise. Therefore, economic science is the most sophisticated and most formalised human science. Yet, economists are unable to agree on their predictions, which are often wrong. This is because economic science has isolated itself from the other human and social dimensions that are inseparable from it. This is an epistemological question already anticipated in Piketty’s analysis, regarding the expansion of the role of the social dimension in economic activity, which, in turn, re-proposed the question of the congruence, always and in any case, of the utilitarian rational choice made by the homo oeconomicus. In fact, in this regard, Morin (2000, p. 8) aptly observes that. As Jean Paul Fitoussi argued, “Many dysfunctions, today, derive from the weakness of economic policy itself: the refusal to face complexity”. Economic science is increasingly unable to consider what is not quantifiable, that is, human passions and needs. Thus, economics is simultaneously the most mathematically advanced and the most humanly backward science. Hayek held that “No one who is just an economist can be a great economist”. He also added that, “An economist who is only an economist becomes harmful and can be a real danger”. The French scholar indicated the four precise challenges to which the educational systems of industrialised countries needed to respond if they intended to develop complex thinking effectively: the cultural, sociological and civic challenge, the challenge of challenges. In line with this paradigmatic approach, as regards the strategy to adopt to respond effectively to the “challenge of challenges” Morin (2000, p.  13), specified that: A crucial problem of our time is the need to respond to all the interdependent challenges we have considered. It is the reform of thinking that would allow the full use of intelligence to respond to these challenges and that would allow the bond of the two disjoint cultures.2

 It deals with the vexata quaestio of the forced separation between humanistic and scientific culture and the need to reunite them, in an interdisciplinary logic and a more advanced mode. 2

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This is a non-programmatic, paradigmatic reform, which concerns our attitude to the organisation of knowledge. (…) The reform of teaching needs to lead to the reform of thinking and the reform of thinking needs to lead to that of teaching. More specifically, with regard to the sociological challenge, however, Morin (2000, p. 11) observed that the field affected by the challenges concerned the following areas: 1. Information is a raw material that knowledge needs to master and integrate. 2. Knowledge must be constantly revisited and revised in thought. 3. Thinking, today, is more than ever the most precious capital of the individual and society. Considering the current criticalities of the Education system,3 it is possible to affirm that one of the main challenges lies in the operationalisation of the assumption, “today thought is more than ever the most precious capital for the individual and for society”. In reality, one might claim that the enhancement of this “precious capital” is neither automatic nor to be taken for granted, since it is necessary to activate, ex-­ ante, a teaching/learning approach based on a virtuous process in which complex thinking produces knowledge, which, in turn, should produce acting skills, problem setting, and problem-solving skills, in different contexts. But in making this re-­ development explicit it is necessary to pay particular attention to explanation, since one might run the risk of rationalising the empirical phenomena too much, to the point of describing the process as one tending towards deterministic and prescriptive activities, representative of a paradigm not consistent with the theses sustained here. In this regard, Morin warned scholars against the danger of the extreme rationalisation of thinking, never completely averted, and specified that (2006, p. 47): (…) These theories, apparently founded on coherent data, can be vitiated by “rationalisation”, by an overly logical vision that accepts only what confirms it. Laplace,4 for example, introduced rationalisation into science itself. He proposed an entirely deterministic vision of the universe within a totally secular framework, of course (…) When Napoleon asked him: “And what do you do with God?” Laplace replied, “I don’t need this hypothesis”. Laplace’s conception was an extreme rationalisation of Newtonian rationality. This conceptual scheme of extreme rationalisation is one which in the current historical-social context might coincide with a technocentric vision of society or an exclusive “virtualisation” of interpersonal relationships. In this perspective, it is with the essay The challenge of complexity that Morin (2017) explained that the challenge consisted in understanding that, today more  By education system we mean the set comprising education, training and lifelong learning.  Pierre-Simon Laplace (Beaumont-en-Auge, 23rd of March 1749 – Paris, 5th of March 1827), was a French mathematician, physicist, astronomer and nobleman, one of the leading scientists of the Napoleonic era. 3 4

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than ever, the term complexity had acquired an epistemological significance whose meaning has not yet been fully understood. It embodied a revolutionary power of ontological, logical, epistemological, and therefore also ethical-formative significance. This revolution invested and continues to invest in our way of understanding reality, in an image of reality outside of us, a vision of the world, a way of organising knowledge, establishing various disciplines, a horizon of general sense in which we move. Along with these solicitations, Morin brought together a series of theories in the volume Teaching to live. Manifesto to change education, intended to explain definitively that the mission of education or the so-called ultimate goal corresponded to the Latin motto: Non scholae, sed vitae discimus.5 From this perspective, Morin argued that it was a question of making a profound reform of education possible, one based on its essential mission, which Rousseau had already identified, that of teaching people how to live. It was a question of permitting each person to develop her/his personality and bond with others in the best possible way, but also to prepare themselves to face the many uncertainties and difficulties of human destiny. The challenge facing educational systems was, therefore, providing “Teaching to live” to students of all ages in our time, to enable them to deal with the choices to make regarding the Internet and social networks and with the globalisation and planetisation of civilisation as well as with the increasingly widespread feeling of often feeling powerless, disarmed and exploited. Ultimately, as Morin explained in the volume European culture and barbarism (2006), in the course of its history, it was Europe that gave birth to a barbaric domination of the world, with its Eurocentric vision, while, simultaneously, it was also the origin of the emancipatory ideas that undermined this domination. The ideas of Europe, in particular those of France in 1789, were taken up by the subjugated people, who built their struggle up upon these. It was, therefore, a question of understanding the complex, antagonistic and complementary relationship between culture and barbarism, in order to supersede the ever-present risks of the worst new atrocities. The tragic events of the twentieth century should have led to a humanist claim: that barbarism needed to be recognised for what it is, without simplifications or falsifications of any kind. We need to know what really happened, the work of memory needs to allow the obsession with barbarism flow back to us: enslavement, colonisation, racism, Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. Think of barbarism and help resist it.

3 A New Ethic of a Society of Capabilities With a view to investigating the reasons and the development of personal, collective, and institutional rational action in postmodern society and posit an alternative to the Rational Choice Model and go beyond an “economic-centric” vision, the

 We do not learn for the school, but for life

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theses of the philosopher Nussbaum, starting from the contribution provided by her volume Create capacity. Break free from the dictatorship of the GDP (2012) are presented. Go Beyond GDP and the Economic Dimension Alone This is a book which testified to the over 20-year-long commitment of the author along with Amartya Sen, to carry out research in academic centres and in the world of politics, economics, and finance, aimed at approving a new paradigm capable of measuring the wealth of a state on the basis of the needs it met and the opportunities actually offered to its citizens. The indicators of this paradigm were alternative to those of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), based on the economic dimension alone. They also measured growth and human development, such as the Human Development Index (HDI). A macroeconomic indicator of development created in 1990 by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and reworked by the Indian economist Amartya Sen. According to the human development index, the development of each nation should be measured not only on the basis of national income but also taking into account other variables related to the social quality of individual existence, such as life expectancy, literacy rates, multidimensional inequality, gender inequality, and poverty. In this direction, the action of Nussbaum and Sen led to the institution of international institutions such as the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to accept the Capability Approach as an indicator, that is as a means by which to measure the conditions available to the development of a person’s potential and abilities in a society that permitted them to be used as a criterion for assessing well-being. Nussbaum, in various versions of her work over the last few years, identified ten abilities considered indispensable to live a life “at the height of human dignity”. The following were the capacities deemed essential to human existence (Nussbaum, 2000, 2012, 2013a, b; De Luise & Farinetti, 2010): 1. Life. To be able to live a normal human life to the end; not to die prematurely, or before one’s life was reduced to a condition that made it undeserving of being lived. 2. Physical health. To be able to enjoy good health, including reproductive health; be fully fed; have adequate housing. 3. Physical integrity. To be able to move freely from place to place; to enjoy guaranteed sovereignty over one’s body, or be safe from all types of violence, including sexual assault, sexual abuse of minors and domestic violence; to have the opportunity of finding sexual satisfaction and make choices in matters of reproduction. 4. Senses, imagination and thought. To be able to use the senses fully, to imagine, think, and reason  – and to do so in a “properly human” way, that is, in an informed and appropriately educated manner, including literacy and basic mathematical-scientific knowledge, but not only these. To be able to use the imagination and thought in relation to one’s experience in order to produce works of self-expression and favour freely chosen manifestations of a religious, literary, musical nature, and so on. To be able to exercise one’s politically and

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artistically guaranteed critical sense, freedom of expression and worship. To be able to seek the ultimate meaning of life independently. To be able to enjoy pleasurable experiences and avoid unnecessary pain. 5. Emotions. To be able to connect with people and things outside of ourselves; to be able to love those who love us and are interested in us, to suffer for their absence; in general, loving, suffering, missing, gratitude, and justified anger. To have an emotional development that is not marred by excessive fear and anxiety or by traumatic events such as abuse or neglect. (Sustaining this capacity means supporting forms of human association that can prove crucial to their development.) 6. Practical reason. To be able to form a conception of good and engage in critical reflection on how to plan one’s own style of life. (This also implies safeguard of freedom of conscience.) 7. Union.



(a) To be able to live with others and respect them, to recognise and show interest in other human beings, to engage in different forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine another’s position and have compassion for that situation; to be capable of both justice and friendship. (To protect this capacity means supporting institutions that constitute and nourishing this kind of affiliation as well as protecting freedom of association and political expression.) (b) To have the social basis for self-respect and not be humiliated; to be able to enjoy a dignity equal to that of all others. This implies, at least, protection against discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, caste, ethnicity, or nationality. In the workplace, to be able to work as a human being, exercise practical reason, and enter into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.

8. Other species. To be able to live by caring for and being in relationships with animals, plants, and the natural world. 9. Game. To be able to laugh, play and enjoy recreational activities. 10. To have control over one’s environment.

(a) Political. To be able to participate in effectively the political choices that regulate one’s life; to enjoy the right to active political participation, as well as the protection of freedom of speech and association. (b) Material. To be able to own property (both land and movable property), not only in a formal sense but also in terms of concrete possibilities; to have property rights on an equal footing with others; to have the right to seek work on an equal basis with others; to be guaranteed against unjustified searches and confiscations. Towards the Experimentation of the Capability Approach and the Fair and Sustainable Wellness Index.

Regarding the possible operationalisation and experimentation of the Capability Approach, in the essay entitled Creating Capabilities: The Human Development

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Approach (2013), Nussbaum provided a solid, compelling account of the failures of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and described a framework for global development based on the concept of capacity. This was a new paradigm born on a solid basis to help us think how economic and individual growth might coincide. In this essay, Nussbaum provided an account of what an experience of prosperity really meant for a country and did so by analysing the life of a woman in India, closely examining the situations, possibilities, and the real opportunities she might find. In this direction, in recent years some studies were carried out in Italy that aimed at elaborating the country’s Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW). The Italian government also decided to meet the challenge and as foreseen by the reform of the Budget Law (Law 163/20016), a committee of experts identified 12 “Fair and Sustainable Indicators of Wellbeing”, (BES), starting from the work carried out in recent years by Istat and Cnel. Based on this, in 2016, BES became part of the economy. For a reduced set of indicators, an attachment to the Economics and Finance Document was provided to analyse recent trends and assess the impact of the policies proposed. Furthermore, in February of each year, the monitoring of indicators and the results of policy-impact assessment are presented to Parliament. The project to measure equitable and sustainable well-being was born to evaluate the progress of a society not only from an economic but also from a social and environmental point of view. The Fair and Sustainable Wellbeing (BES) indicator adopted in Italy is determined on the basis of 12 domains, within which a series of indicators have been identified. These are the following: health, education and training, a balance between work and private lifetime, economic well-being, social relations, politics and institutions, safety, subjective well-being, landscape, and cultural heritage, the environment, research and innovation, and the quality of services. As the BES 2018 Report An overview of equitable and sustainable wellbeing in Italy (Istat, 2019, p. 10) clarified, after 7 years, the concept of fair and sustainable wellbeing and its measurement found more and more space within the public debate, to the point of introducing a selection of indicators into the process of defining economic policies (see par. 5). The increase of attention to these issues suggested that a new consultation on the importance attributed by citizens to the different dimensions of well-being was opportune. Therefore, during 2018, a survey was conducted on the opinions of the population regarding the domains of well-being considered within the current framework, with a view to detecting the extent to which they were then considered significant modes of defining the quality of life. In general, the 12 domains were confirmed as relevant to people’s well-being and almost all received an average rating of over 8 (out of 10). The only exception was the domain of politics and institutions, which received an average score of 7.4, thus indicating a certain detachment on the part of citizens when it came to various expressions of public affairs, confirmed, moreover, by the BES indicators which revealed little trust in the judicial system, parliament and parties (see Chap. 6) while very high scores, equal to at least 9, are attributed to health, education and training, and personal safety, which emerge as the three cornerstones of individual wellbeing.

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This is a clear and precise indication, supported by research in the field (Istat, 2019, p. 10), which highlights an awareness of the real relational services to which people aspire in postmodern society, which seems to be far removed from the policies of national and supranational governments (European Union, UN) in recent years. In other words, as mentioned above, citizens hope to be capable of forming a conception of good and engage in critical reflection regarding how to plan their own lifestyle. Also, to be able to live with and have respect for others, to recognise and show interest in other human beings, and to engage in various forms of social interaction. In this regard, as Nussbaum observed in her essay Not for Profit. Why Democracies Need Humanities (2014), we were witnessing a gradually advancing crisis of enormous proportions and global dimensions, one that was all the more unnoticed the more damaging it was for the future of democracy. This was the crisis of education. Seduced by the imperative of economic growth and the short-term logic of accounting, many countries inflicted heavy cuts to the detriment of humanistic and artistic studies in favour of technical skills and practical-scientific knowledge. And so, while the world was growing more and more complex, the tools for understanding it were getting poorer and more rudimentary; while, as we saw in previous chapters, innovation demanded flexible, open, and creative intelligence, education was falling back on a few stereotyped notions. This is an epochal battle since it is a question of maintaining access to knowledge that nourishes freedom of thought and speech, autonomy of judgment, and the power of the imagination as preconditions for a mature and responsible humanity. A further important contribution made by the American philosopher is contained in the volume The intelligence of emotions (2009), in which she argued that emotions – understood as extra-rational action – did not constitute a residue of knowledge, an impure element of which it needed to free itself in order to coincide with the purest and coldest speculation. Emotions  – pain, fear, shame, love, compassion – pervaded, “were” actually thought. Starting from the assumption that emotions were. at the centre not only of individual life but of social life, too, as the motor of interpersonal relationships, in this book Nussbaum intends to lay the foundations of a theory of emotions, without which no ethics or political philosophy can be considered adequate. The sage examines pain and mourning, emotions on the public stage and in politics, and finally, the role of love. In her quest for a society as cohesive as possible, Nussbaum in her most recent volume The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis, examined the current political crisis, developed an analysis of the new variables of the political debate represented by fear, anger, disgust, and envy, but also by sexism and misogyny, with a broad range of examples drawn from literature and the regulatory framework while providing some recommendations regarding how to “fix” a divided country. This was the political crisis that polarised America following the 2016 election. Nussbaum’s analysis focused on what so many pollsters and pundits had overlooked and brought to light a simple truth which lay at the heart of the problem: the fact that globalisation had produced feelings of helplessness in millions of people in the west, a sense of helplessness that became resentment and guilt. This caused

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blame to be placed on the shoulders of immigrants, Muslims, other races, or cultural elites. According to Nussbaum, within this extremely simplified presentation of the reality, which is as we know, increasingly complex, politicians in the USA, as in Europe, almost always assume an emotional attitude to convey their messages, relying on highly emotional elements and behavioural issues of a symbolic and extra-­ rational nature. She referred to a policy that was easily adaptable to the understanding of the cases of Trump, the Brexit vote, or the positions of European populist and sovereigntist political movements. Given the rigour used to explicate the phenomena, this volume might be considered a manifesto of hope and mutual sympathy, the formulation of a new interpretative paradigm indicating a decisive change in the dystopian and dis-educational tone of many contemporary political analyses and commentaries, which enter, at times, occupy our media.

Conclusions

Abstract  Ultimately, this essay seeks to demonstrate that, within a multifaceted and global scenario, affected by a process of continuous increasingly complex metamorphoses it is no longer possible to understand the reality of human action and its interconnections with its associated worlds. We propose a new conceptual framework better suited to the paradigm of homo sociologicus, in which a social actor can understand the complexity of the innumerable variables involved, including the utilitarian type preference, based on a new conceptual apparatus inspired by the values of responsible freedom, in the context of which the legitimate individual interest can only be acted upon in a logic of altruistic exchange, and the principles of Coopetition, which consists of a process of collaboration between business competitors, in the hope of mutually beneficial results. The solicitations encountered during this examination of the theories of numerous masters of sociological thinking regarding the development of the concept (and role) of rationality, as intended in the various senses assessed here, were many, perhaps too many, for those who should summarise the countless problems examined but not on the basis of a definitive type of logic. This perspective was made even more difficult and, to some extent, due to the acquisition of basic concepts capable of favouring an understanding of the evolution of our societies, like those of complexity and the theory of social systems of Bertanlaffy and Parsons, and developed, albeit with different nuances by Habermas and Luhmann. Similarly, this perspective plays an increasingly important role, in an attempt to understand the rationality characterising the processes of social evolution. This concept we defined, along with Popper and Antiseri, as the set of unintentional effects of intentional acts that belong to a succession of events, and to the delineation of the evolution of institutions, as well as, in different ways, to the development of systems of inter-personal social interaction. These were the problems addressed by Simon and Sen, in a critical reading of rationality, alongside the questions posed by Pareto, Ardigò, and © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cocozza, The Unexpected in Action, Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26793-2

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Alexander regarding the extra-rational dimension in human action. The latter are problems that have remained largely unexplored and which are of considerable interest for the development of critical theories of rationality, considered at both the theoretical and methodological levels of research, capable of favouring an understanding of the main empirical phenomena involved. From this heuristic perspective, the analysis and understanding of the evolution of rationality in complex systems leads to the delineation of a series of open problems, represented by the following propositions: (a) The crucial role of the dialectical relationship between individual action and social rules, as in our societies these two variables have (and will continue to have) the task of ensuring the guidelines within which behaviour is considered legitimate – in the Weberian sense, but more recently the Habermasian sense – that is, endowed with authority. (b) The importance of the new relationships existing between legitimacy and rationality, which assume a problematic frame of reference in the postmodern and post-capitalist era, in particular, to define the action of complex organisational systems, when these two concepts tend to diverge on the basis of a separate logic rather than act interdependently. (c) The role that communication processes play in the orientation of behaviour (and therefore of underlying values), in relation to the influence of the mass media and technological innovation, both extremely pervasive in the sector of information and telecommunications, therefore in our daily lives. In reality, McLuhan was approaching different disciplinary point of view, when he argued that the upsurge of a new medium in society involved a transformation of the various forms of association (or as Habermas posited of the social formations themselves), and a change in the relations between the different social statuses, since “the message of a medium or a technology is in the change of proportions, rhythm, or patterns that it introduces into human relationships. The railway did not introduce into society movement, transport, the wheel or the road, but it accelerated and enlarged the proportions of already existing human functions by creating totally new cities and new forms of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway operated in a Nordic or a tropical environment, and regardless of the weight of the medium, that is, of its content. The airplane, on its part, by accelerating the speed of transport tended to dissolve the cities, political organisations, and forms of association as proposed by the railway, regardless of the use to which it might be put (…) The meaning of electric light is, like that of electricity in industry, totally radical, permeating, and decentralised. Light and energy are actually two different things because of the uses made of them, but in human society they eliminate factors of time and space like the radio, telegraph, telephone, and TV, producing an in-depth participation” (1967, pp. 12–13). From this point of view, therefore, new spaces of research and theory are opening up for sociology, at two different levels: the phenomenological that affects the analysis of social action and control over the degree of complexity of the relationships existing between the actor and the system; the revision of the theoretical schemata

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that have not yet re-defined the role of the subject as a non-formational part of the aforementioned organicist vision of society. In this direction, as Luhmann argued, we are witnessing a paradigmatic shift, “The sociological theory of social systems breaks with this tradition as it sees humans as no longer a part of the social system, but simply as its problematic environmental. If this conception is transferable to the whole of society, whether society itself can be considered as a social system and people as its environment, is a basic problem that has not been addressed yet by sociological theory. Its solution will constitute the test capable of inspiring systems theories to become general sociological theory” (1990a, p. 66). An attempt at endowing sociology with a general theory was carried out by Parsons with mixed results. Nevertheless, it certainly played an important role in the history and development of the discipline. However, as we know, Merton believed, in opposition to Parsons, that a possible explanation of the conduct of human beings might be provided not only by the objective data that a given social situation presented but, above all, by the meaning it assumed within their culture, which consequently conditioned their actions (1968, p. 599). Just as, Merton always recalled, with regard to the famous “self-fulfilling prophecy”, the “public” definitions of certain interpretations or predictions provided by an authoritative source (such as the news or the opinion of a respected person) became an integral part of the situation (and its meaning), and ended up by conditioning the action of actors and the development of the situation itself (ibid., p. 660). However, if the action of subjects in our societies is more and more communicative, it must be recognised that, in general, communicative processes acquire a fundamental role in the orientation of intentional and meaningful human action. In actual fact, with regard to the necessary coherence between the object of research, its methodology, and its theoretical reference paradigm, what Luhmann wrote is significant: “Today, ‘public opinion’ is a concept whose object has become doubtful, perhaps even non-existent. The intention of studying it empirically contributed to its dissolution, and this is significant. The empirical investigation had to replace both elements of the concept. The element of opinion was replaced by the answers given to the researcher’s questions. The element of publicity has been replaced by the selective interest of politicians in similar ‘opinions’, or by the influence of some groups regarding the formation of opinion. By combining the substitutes of the two elements of the concept, the problem of these investigations is delineated. The indisputable success of these investigations cannot, in any case, be founded on their theoretical premises” (1990a, p. 83). The arguments recalled by Luhmann, relating to the rationality that can be found in public opinion, induce us to introduce another theme, which assumes a significant importance in the discussion regarding the role of rationality in the political and social evolution of our societies, namely that regarding the position existing between a feeling of equality and the need to guarantee freedom first of all. In this regard, as we have already mentioned, the critical theories of Dahrendorf and Popper drew the attention of sociologists and political scientists to a dilemma which remained unsolved in the history of humanity, that based on the following axiom, “the strengthening of equality implies a reduction in the freedom of action of

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individuals, while the strengthening of freedom implies, simultaneously, a decrease in equality between individuals and social classes”. This affirmation, therefore, re-proposes the need to confront the founding principles and choices of a given society, within which one cannot but address the difficult and unstable balance between equality and freedom. This is a dilemma that was opened up with the advent of the political modernity inaugurated by the American Revolution, continued by that of the French and which exploded with the Soviet Revolution and the attempt to establish a communist society (maximum equality), by means of an authoritarian regime (absence of freedom). In reality, the blatant failure of this latter type of society does not allow us to forget the importance and weight of the dilemma in question even in our globalised and post-modern societies. It regards levels of internal social cohesion and the imbalances between the different degrees of development (economic-social and technological) and the distribution of wealth in the world. In this new international scenario, the principle of equality, far from needing to be interpreted as a “levelling” of conditions, might be understood as the “equality of opportunities” the institutions provide to citizens. Life opportunities are intended as a kind of “right of citizenship of the person”, which does not intend, even indirectly, to limit or reduce the spaces of freedom and action of individuals in society. This way, this principle might tend to be incorporated in societies governed by a rigorous method of democracy, through its institutionalisation in a logic aimed at favouring the creation of an effective welfare state, so that it can be monitored and evaluated through the measurement of the effective fruition of the main social services (health, education and social assistance). It is therefore a question of attributing a new role to institutions as instruments through which it is possible to guide individual behaviour and support and favour the development of social cohesion. Institutions which, as Dahrendorf recalled, end up by being “bastions against the wickedness of men” (1971, p. 332). In this sense, as regards a quest for a new role for institutions in the field of the Welfare State/Welfare Community, capable of favouring social progress, Leonardi (2019b, p.  9): recalled that “Social policy, for Dahrendorf, is functional to the expansion of life opportunities, it is the pivot of social citizenship, the component that makes the rights of freedom effective. Social policy is the tool that makes it possible to tackle the problem of social inequality, intended as a ‘minority’ state in terms of social and political governance. He sees the problem of inequality in the twenty-first century as a question of rights, not just of available wealth.” Therefore, the academic world, social actors, agents of development, and institutions need to reflect on the need to launch of a new season of public policies, aimed at providing greater degrees of freedom and better opportunities. Sen returned to the same topic more recently and pointed out that “the importance of freedom fits need for equity in the pursuit of freedom perfectly. The freedom of different people is affected, and the focus on freedom requires that attention be paid to the freedom of all, and this ties in with considerations of fairness. Given its broad scope, it is critical to keep the issue of equity in mind at all times. There is no basic tension – as may sometimes be assumed – between freedom and fairness. Equity can be seen in terms of the equitable advancement of the freedom of all

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people (rather than simply as the distribution of income), or in the even more limited perspective of “redistribution”, a fundamentally arbitrary starting point. From this perspective, it is possible to consistently use both fundamental concepts of freedom and equity in the act of assessing the claims of inclusion and the contingent merits of cultural diversity” (2004). Sen’s considerations permit us to affirm that the political and social dilemma, mentioned here, can be addressed by modifying the terms of the comparison, whereby freedom cannot be opposed to the concept of equality (equality), but rather to that of equity (equity). Only within this new logic of the development of the freedom-equity paradigm is it possible to reconsider the rationality of social action and the development of societies within an evolutionary perspective, involved in growing complexity, and dictated by an increasingly necessary interaction between the individual subject and the social system. A subject needs to be intended in her/ his entirety as a person, with her/his history and culture, values and ​​ beliefs, but also her/his material objectives, that through this dense interpretive plot of reality bestow meaning to her/his social action. On this subject, Touraine, in an extremely clear and peremptory way, argued that “Equity is the equality of opportunities, which presupposes measures in favour of the disadvantaged: and requires, in particular, the will to combat social dualism and cultural dissolution. Equality, on the other hand, is not a principle of social organization; when it becomes one, it is in order to impose on the population the absolute power of a State” (1996, pp. 58–59). From this point of view, for the purposes of our research, we can conclude that social structures, institutions, cannot play a role that tends to condition human action, or rather the social action of actors, because this activity would damage society itself. In fact, Touraine, regarding the role exercised by institutions in support of policies of equality, recalled that “It cannot be put into practice through measures of levelling or standardisation [of actors’ actions], but only through action aimed specifically against the effects of social inequality: equality and equity are complementary, but only a distinction between them ensures the link between equality and democracy” (1996, p. 59). Ultimately, it might be argued that the reasons for acknowledging the primacy of institutions as a restrictive function of degrees of individual freedom, and not as a function of guarantees of equal opportunities in terms of life opportunities, are few and difficult to argue. These considerations call for the need to outline a new theoretical framework which, endowed with greater explanatory clarity, is capable of proposing a reconsideration of the link between the choice of an end and the use of suitable means by which to pursue it. Therefore, it is necessary to reinterpret the role of reason and the ways in which rationality is expressed. In this regard, we believe that it is no longer easy to support the assertion, attributed to Machiavelli, according to which “the end justifies the means.” In actual fact, if we carefully re-­ read The Prince, in which we believe this assertion is contained, instead, in chapter XVIII dedicated to Quomodo fides a principibus sit serranda, [How the word of the Prince can be kept] the Florentine scholar not only did not make the famous statement but said, “ … let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody

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because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on” (Machiavelli, 1969, p.  90). In other words, human reason tends to justify the means used, at the moment when (ex-post), it can be demonstrated that these means were just. However, even for Machiavelli a similar justification could not be granted a priori (ex-ante) and in any situation, one acts, because it is victory (the achievement of the end) that permits one to justify the means used. These are the strength of the lion and the cunning of the fox but also the virtue of loyalty (ibid., p. 88). For Machiavelli, in keeping with the idea of the time, victory was due half to fortune (divine providence), the other half needed to be attributed to the actions of men, achieved thanks to five virtues: piety, loyalty, humanity, integrity, and religiosity (ibid., p. 113). It was evident that for him, therefore, there was no justification for any behaviour (and the relative means used) dictated by force or cunning, but only that attributable to successful behaviour that took into account the five virtues considered as social norms. Ultimately, reinterpretations of Machiavelli might suggest the hypothesis that if rationality were an ex-post rationality and achieved by conduct that respected the governing arts (cunning and force) and accepted social norms, then it was not true that the end justified the means. It was rather that the means should be considered rational only if coherent with the two variables identified here: success and coherence between the arts and virtues of governance. A reasoning of this kind could be reassociated with our days, and referred to the functioning of the market and the rationality that is applied within this context, in particular as regards the relationship between means and ends, not in an ideal situation of a free market based on absolute parity between individuals, but in concrete situations characterised by an asymmetrical distribution of the power of information. In this regard, Zamagni recalled that the liberal scholars of the Chicago school believed that situations of similar asymmetry “do not represent a failure of the market, but a failure of the institutions, in the sense that a correct allocation of property rights among individuals interested in the public good in question would solve the problem. But it is clear that in this way the problem is only postponed and not resolved” (1990, p. 44). The resolution would involve taking a series of decisions regarding the functioning of the free market, in particular regarding situations in which there was a clear asymmetrical distribution of information, as in the case of the doctor-patient relationship, or that between the mechanic and the driver of a broken-down vehicle. In these situations, the strongest subject, who detains the most information, is often led to “tell a falsehood”, because s/he receives an incentive following a kind of behaviour that tends to violate the professional code. Certainly, in these cases, as Arrow pointed out, “adhering to a Kantian code of professional ethics can remedy these specific forms of market failure” (1973, p. 303). In this context, which might represent critical everyday issues, Zamagni argued that “The fact that there is a need for non-utilitarian ethical behaviour in situations in which the market and personal interest, left to their own mechanisms, would produce undesirable results, related to overturns of the notion of benevolence (…) the opposite of results to which ‘benevolent action’ leads. The action inspired by the

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familiar criterion of economic rationality – the criterion popularised by the rational choice model – not only obliges us to revise the latter (what kind of rationality leads to sub-optimal results?), by also casts serious doubts on the logical possibility of keeping the judgment of rationality separate from the judgment circumscribed to the relationship between choices and preferences” (1990, p.  45). In this scheme, Zamagni proposed a reading of rationality starting from the evaluation of the degree of coherence verified between choices made and preferences expressed: the latter can be subject to an ethical evaluation since they may contain morally unjustifiable preferences. This is a logic where the formula that leads to justification of the link between means and ends has no validity since the ends stem from acceptable social interactions. From this point of view, reason did not certainly help to identify (and maintain) the rational conduct of the actor – as Pareto also pointed out – when identifying a significant series of human behaviour patterns traceable back to non-logical actions, but to value judgments that come into play (Simon, 1973). This was Simon’s position, when he argued, in his Reason in human affairs (1984) that reason had an essentially instrumental function in the decision-making process leading to the establishment of certain ends to be pursued. Indeed, in this regard, he argued that “While reason can provide a powerful aid to finding the means to achieve the ends set forth, there is little to be said about the ends themselves. We are clearly aware that reason is purely instrumental: it cannot tell us where to go, at most it can suggest how to get there” (1984, pp. 37–38). Similarly, Elster, in his Ulysses and the Sirens (1983) – while recalling that the rational actor moved in a long-term context, and for this reason, was not inclined to act punctually with regard to single events, by means of a logic of maximisation of the benefits – assumed a critical position towards the theory of rational choice. He favoured imperfect rationality and maintained that “Rational choice is instrumental: what drives it is the result of the action. Actions are evaluated and chosen not for themselves, but as more or less efficient means for another purpose (…) The rational choice concerns the search for the best means for given objectives” (1983, pp. 33–35). Human behaviour, therefore, is not always understandable by means of an analysis of the objective rationalĭtas, of that orientation towards purpose identified by Weber, or of the reason inherent in individual choices, since rationalĭtas is not always capable of fixing and establishing logical connections between the various behaviour styles assumed by the actor. In other words, it is necessary to take into account the explanatory theoretical models of the rational choice of the actor, while, at the same time, checking their scope at empirical level, since, as Berger and Luckmann argued, the sociological understanding of reality lies roughly halfway between that of the man in the street and that of the philosopher (1969). It is a matter, then, of hypothesising a kind of sociological research not isolated in its golden monodisciplinary academic world, but social science, as Popper would have put it, interested in facing and solving concrete problems, following an interdisciplinary logic (1994, p. 35).

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Today, in actual fact, in many scientific fields – in sociology, as in economics – it is not possible to address the real problems that arise in everyday life using a monodisciplinary or even monological approach. In this sense, what Hayek argued when referring to economists was valid: “he who is only an economist cannot be a good economist” (1988, p. 465). Hayek then urged that the economist should never lose sight of the philosopher, whom he defined as “a kind of prince among intellectuals” (ibid., p.  336). Zamagni ventured into this perspective when, with regard to the relationship between utilitarian economic theory and the theory of social choices, he held that “Ultimately, any attempt to introduce rights into moral calculations must break with utilitarianism. The latter cannot limit itself to affirm the thesis of ethical individualism according to which everyone counts and everyone counts equally. Acceptable ethical individualism implies more than respect for individuals; it also implies respect for the individual” (1986, p. 29). In an analysis of the rationality that guides human behaviour, therefore, it is absolutely necessary to proceed not using a specialised and monodisciplinary, or worse, monological approach, but by means of an interdisciplinary theoretical model, which includes a frame of reference where sociological are connected with economic theories and, inevitably, with those of moral and social philosophy. In line with this approach, Hicks, with amazing foresight for the times, in his Education in Economics, written in 1941, stated peremptorily that “In the field of economics, overspecialisation is doubly disastrous. A man who is a mathematician and nothing more than a mathematician does no harm to anyone. An economist who is nothing more than an economist is a danger to his fellow man. Economics is not a thing in itself; it is the study of one aspect of man’s life in society (…) The economist of tomorrow (and sometimes of today) will certainly be aware of what to base his economic advice on; but if, because of increasing specialisation, his economic knowledge remains divorced from any background of social philosophy, he is in real danger of becoming a seller of smoke, endowed with ingenious stratagems to overcome various difficulties but unable to remain in touch with those fundamental virtues on which to base a healthy society” (1941, p. 6). The same reasoning can be extended to sociology and the interrelationships that sociology ought to weave with other areas of knowledge, if it really intends to understand the increasingly complex social reality, and become the interpreter of an explanatory multidimensional model, of human action and the rationality that governs human behaviour, in the perspective proposed by Sen and interpretable sociologically using the theoretical schemes indicated by Giddens, Simon, and Alexander. For Giddens most of social activities, which express themselves through both non-verbal communication and the various forms of verbal exchange, are routine and occur in daily life. For this reason, sociology should be more concerned with this sphere of events, which ends up by containing the vast majority of social interactions (2000, pp.  74–84). In this logic of conceptual and methodological re-­ development, Giddens affirmed that it was necessary to re-establish a proper balance between sociological research which tends to investigate phenomena of micro-­ sociology, and those connected with the questions posed by macro-sociology, to better understand the interpenetration existing between the study of daily behaviour

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in face-to-face situations, and that oriented towards an understanding of the evolution of complex social systems, such as businesses, political systems, and the economic order (ibid, p. 94). In other words, for Giddens, the problematic nature of the rationality of human action could be understood better, if we took for granted that the interaction in micro-sociological contexts affected broader social processes, and in turn, that the macro systems influenced the more circumscribed areas of life (ibid, p. 95). Simon, on the other hand, as Easton recalled, when addressing the age-old diatribe between holism and individualism, positioned himself within a perspective that we might call pragmatic holism, without overlooking the suggestions proposed by the individualist methodology in order to bridge the gap separating the two positions (Easton, 2001, p. 418). Easton himself, recalling Bourdier’s teaching argued that the problem would not exist if, given that all phenomena can be reduced to individual actions (individualistic reductionism), the concrete heuristic possibilities of analysing the action of superordinate structures existed in terms of individual action. However, this is not possible, because the structures of a higher order (political parties, authority structures, legislative bodies, and other macrostructures) are analysable as “products not of an individual in isolation, but of individuals in multiple and complex reciprocal relationships. If so, we need to be able to recognise the limitations of available ways by which to get to know them, given the present state of our technology of research. It is not a question of being methodological individualists or holists, but rather whether our current research tools are such as to permit us to understand the properties of structural macro by reducing them to individual or micro levels. If they do not succeed, as I believe, we cannot avoid macrostructural analysis” (2001, pp. 419–420). Easton referred to the properties that macro structures and not individuals possess, and which were generated precisely by the set of reciprocal relationships that individuals themselves develop. This new perspective outlines a very promising and interesting field of sociological research. In this direction, what Alexander wrote in the introduction to an unpublished book by Parsons, Prolegomena to a theory of social institutions (1995), a collection of Parsons’ early writings were collected and a new interpretation of his (early) thinking provided, when he argued that today even this work might teach us something, “on the one hand the morality of human action, together with what this implies for any sociological theory of institutional life, and on the other, the complex interrelation between rational and non-rational elements within social action” (1995, pp. 18–19). This description corresponded better to the empirical world and endowed it with a greater explanatory capacity of social action and its rationality. These were properties that not individuals but macro structures possessed and which were generated precisely by the set of reciprocal relationships individuals themselves developed. In this regard, with respect to the debate on the rationality that “conditions” human and organisational action during the transition from a modern to a postmodern society, as already anticipated in the previous chapters, two results of singular importance arise from Bauman’s reflections. These have contributed to his worldwide reputation and are represented by a clear and penetrating analysis of the

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transformation of processes, and the development of a new social theory. This is the “liquid society” theory which breaks with traditional sociological theories, to describe in a meticulous and precise way, the transition from a modern society to a postmodern society, and highlight four particularly critical social and cultural variables, to be kept under observation. Concerning (Bauman, 2002, 2008, 2018): (a) The relational dimension, or the need to relaunch dialogue at a global level and keep it constantly alive. (b) Education, which should be founded on dialogue, respect for diversity, and interdisciplinarity, so as to make it the main tool by which to overcome conflict in a way unlike the current one. (c) Work and investment in work, in such a way as to aim at the creation of decent, well-paid jobs, not as an act of charity, but as a moral obligation for society. (d) The ethics of responsibility should guide personal, professional, and institutional behaviour. As explained in previous chapters, a contagious sense of insecurity is spreading through postmodern society, which hinges on inequality, especially among the working classes. This is a sad reality that ought to be investigated better, since, as Piketty wrote in his Inequalities (2019), it is necessary to ask whether inequality is a consequence of the concentration of capital in a few hands, when taxation and redistribution of capital could put an end to it. Simultaneously, he asked, whether wage inequality reflects, more or less, the play of supply and demand for different types of labour? Is it likely that inequality is mainly transmitted at family level and by social classes? With regard to the positive role of knowledge and skills, can the increase in expenditure for education and training reduce inequality of opportunity in a fundamental manner? Have high-income taxes reached a level where any additional redistribution would reduce incentives to work dangerously or are these effects negligible in magnitude? Do modern withdrawal and transfer systems ensure substantial redistribution or would it be worth reforming them profoundly? In this summary of Bauman’s thinking, an analysis was developed to highlight the real social priorities of the new era of postmodernity which, in order to be understood effectively, in compliance with the Weberian principle of self-worth, require a strongly empathic and interactive methodology. This is a methodology in which the researcher must have at her/his disposal a cultural apparatus and a scientific paradigm capable of grasping the multidimensionality of the processes, the innumerable interactive links between different actors, and the inevitable involvement of values regarding the personal, collective, and institutional human action examined. In other words, it is a matter of having data capable of fostering an understanding of the trend of the phenomena associated also with the spread of inequality. In this regard, it is necessary to remember that – as appears evident in the BES 2018 Report An overview of equitable and sustainable well-being in Italy (Istat, 2019, p.  10) already mentioned  – in the survey on the opinion of the population towards domains of well-being considered in the current framework, the highest scores (equal to at least 9 out of 10) were attributed to health, education and training, and personal safety, as the three cornerstones of individual well-being. This is

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a clear and precise indication, supported by field research, which fits perfectly into the explanatory scheme provided by Bauman (2002, 2008, 2018), which highlighted awareness of the real relational good to which people aspire in postmodern society, which seems very far removed from the policies of recent national and supranational governments (European Union, ONU) in recent years. In other words, on the basis of the results presented here, it is a question of contributing to the creation of a heuristic pathway that, by taking into consideration the various theoretical and paradigmatic propositions of the authors analysed here, provides a series of critical ideas, on which we intend to build an interpretative model based essentially on the following assertions: 1. In the study of the relationships between the individual and society, which, in order to be effective, needs to be interdisciplinary in character, it is not possible to establish a priori any primacy that the action of the individual may claim over the influence that society exerts on it, since at the moment in which the action occurs, albeit on the basis of an individual drive, the actor is not always and not only utilitarianly oriented (Sen, 1988, 2004; Nussbaum, 2012, 2014, 2018), because s/he also tends to satisfy ethical needs or emotional impulses (Ardigò, 1988; Pareto, 1916/1964; Maffesoli, 1986, 1989) consciously or unconsciously, and finds her/himself interacting with other thinking and culturally oriented individuals. 2. For this reason, this interaction might be read according to a systemic vision, as a process in continuous evolution in which the action of the individual and the influence of society is present at the beginning of the process (as its input), but even at its conclusion (as an integral part of output). These two elements, however, no longer possess the original characteristics, attributable to the typical (and separate) properties of the individual or society, since they have undergone a transformation as the subject and main object of the process itself. 3. In this logic, the study of rationality cannot remain “trapped” in the holism-­ individualism binomial, but must be “framed” better in a theoretical framework that goes beyond these now inadequate boundaries, in order to understand better and explain more adequately the interdependencies inherent in the relationships between the individual and society, or, rather, between individual action and the affirmation of organisational principles based on collaborative and, sometimes, on cooperative methods, in relation to the evolution of social rules (Simon, 1958, 1984). Social rules are those that individuals themselves contribute to determine, through intentionally defined actions, or as a result of the unintended effect of intentional actions (Merton, 1968 and/or Popper, 2002). 4. In line with this heuristic approach, the economic and social-historical context (materialistic approach) dialectically conditions events and individual conduct, though not in a deterministic and historically predetermined form, since the weight of individual preferences and the thrust of ethical needs, or of the ­emotional impulses (idealistic perspective), tend to play a coessential role in the explanation of human action.

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5. On the basis of what has been stated above, the object of sociological analysis of rationality in human action is represented by the numerous systems of social interaction and socialisation, as well as by the structures, including the various forms of communication (formal and informal) that they tend to produce as a result of the individual’s behaviour – understood as an unintentional act – but also of the social action that s/he, individually or aggregated with other entities, brings into play. In other words, it deals with the analysis of the dialectical reaction to a continuously evolving sociological discourse of the subject/system, which constantly interacts with its reference environment (Habermas, 1986, 1991; Luhmann, 1983b, 1990b). 6. Human action is, therefore, the result of all the interdependencies and dialectical interactions referred to here, which contribute, daily, to determining that a complex entity like the human person which would not be such without belonging to a society of similar and simultaneously different cultural beings. These interdependencies contribute to creating (and modifying) rules and structures of communication and socialisation absolutely necessary for the birth, evolution, and development of the cohesion of society, an unlikely activity without the contribution of the socialised individual but also oriented in acting. From his system of preferences and values. As underlined in the first point, the interdisciplinary character – from a theoretical and/or methodological point of view – f the investigative action influences the advancement of scientific knowledge positively and represents one of the indispensable conditions for improving the quality of scientific research. In line with this paradigmatic approach, Leonardi (2019b, p. 10) underlined the fact that “Dahrendorf’s ability to weave relationships of open confrontation and mutual recognition even with scholars distant by theoretical approach. This attitude is uncommon in the academic world, where, on the contrary, the quest for consensus and the tendency is to find oneself in agreement with one’s peers, in terms of theoretical and methodological orientation. Dahrendorf, on the other hand, has always been aware that confrontation and conflict are productive of change even within the intellectual sphere. His friendship with Jürgen Habermas is emblematic of this tendency.” Ultimately, with this essay, we intend to make some contribution to the definition of a theoretical model of analysis and interpretation of rational, empirically oriented action, beyond the classical dichotic “holism-individualism” binomial and the Rational Choice Model and identify a new paradigm of greater use to an understanding of the development of postmodern society, by investigating the role of personal, organisational and institutional action, aimed at the governance of flexibility, pervasive innovation, discontinuity and the space/time relationship in everyday choices. This new paradigm included both the rational dimension oriented towards the purpose or, under certain conditions, towards the achievement of a utilitarian end and the extra rational goal of a normative type, guided by ethical, ideal, or value-­ based choices. This approach permitted one to jointly examine the internal

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orientation of the subject, the degree of freedom of choice originating from a person’s Weltanschauung and skills (the result of experiences) and the variables imposed by the environment that condition their actions, which sometimes give life to a sort of “structural coercion”. The challenges of the future could not, therefore, concern only the economic dimension, the quest for the achievement of a useful benchmark, however appropriate, but needed to be measured against the need of our countries to rebuild a cultural heritage capable of placing shared values like ethics, skills, and responsibilities ​​at its centre. It was, therefore, as Sen and Nussbaum claimed, as well as Bauman and Sennett, to define a paradigm favouring an understanding of the rationality that guided choices aimed fostering the desire to live “a life worth living” in today’s postmodern society fraught with risks, critical issues, but, as Dahrendorf observes, also full of opportunities. This paradigm needed to be capable of understanding the ratio of actions (personal dimension) and policies (institutional dimension) that might be implemented, to support the development of three of the cornerstones of individual well-being: health, education, and training, and personal safety (Istat, 2019). To effectively correspond to this novel paradigmatic approach, it was necessary to acquire new awareness, which did not ask one to take refuge within all-inclusive solutions of a technological, economic (macro or micro) or legal prescription nature, but to activate a more respectful relational system of neighbourliness, based on altruism, dialogue, sympathy and mutual human understanding. Indeed, as Sen pointed out (1977a), the altruism found in human action, albeit within oriented individualistically, could be understood within the context of two broad interpretative categories, which prompted the actor to act: sympathy and commitment. (I commit). This is a model that aims at understanding human action in depth seeing it as a problematic, discontinuous and less and less predictable phenomenon with the advent of postmodern society. Similarly, the intrinsic versatility of reality, and the personal-subjective-social-institutional multi-dimension that surrounds it, interacts with, conditions, directs and causes us to suffer or rejoice. They can tire us or foster the rationality of our daily human actions. In this sense, as Morin observes regarding the characteristics of the rationality of postmodern society in the volume The seven-knowledge necessary for the education of the future (2001, p. 81):1 Though we have not yet assimilated the teaching of Euripides: to expect the unexpected, the end of the twentieth century was propitious in helping us to understand the irremediable uncertainty of human history. In previous centuries there was belief in a repetitive or progressive future. The twentieth century discovered the loss of the future, that is, its unpredictability. This  The seven necessary kinds of knowledge identified by Morin are: the blindness of knowledge: error and illusion; the principles of relevant knowledge; teaching about the human condition; teaching about terrestrial identity; addressing uncertainties; teaching understanding; the ethics of mankind. 1

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awareness needs to be accompanied by another, retroactive and correlative: that according to which human history has been and remains an unknown adventure. Finally, one major achievement of human intelligence will be the ability to free itself of the illusion that it is capable of predicting human destiny. The future remains open and unpredictable. In other words, with the spread of these profound transformations at global level, a kind of rational action that no longer responds to utilitarian, prescriptive, or bureaucratic logic not only appears upon the scene but presents itself as a new relational modality, inspired by the paradigm of homo sociologicus, capable of establishing a plurality of personal, social and community interaction, aimed at have conflict, competition and cooperation coexist along with dialogue within the same strategy. In conclusion, in line with this paradigmatic approach, Bauman also explains that old and new forms of individualism cannot act as an effective solution on a large scale, since if we wish to address systemic problems, it is necessary that we have a vision that takes into account the social and the community within the current socio-historical context (2008, p. V): What we need today is a community because we lack security, a fundamental element for a happy life. Today’s world is increasingly less capable of offering and more and more reluctant to make promises. Yet, a community remains stubbornly absent, constantly getting out of hand or continuing to disintegrate, because the direction in which this world thrusts us in the attempt to realise our dream of a safe life does not bring us any closer to that goal. On the contrary, instead of diminishing, our insecurity increases day by day, and so we continue to dream, try and fail. Were we to manage to create a friendly collectivity, this community would require unconditional loyalty which we would cause us to lose our “freedom and autonomy.” This is the dilemma of the postmodern era we have to live with; it is intertwined with a second dilemma relating to the dichotomy of freedom/equality, analysed in the previous chapters. In other words, confirming the assumption that “reality is increasingly multifaceted” and “the future remains open and unpredictable”, while the society of risk and uncertainty is asserted, simultaneously a new type of personal, organisational and institutional action is beginning to spread; it finds space within the learning organisation, the lean organisation and network organisations, which means going beyond the utilitarian, conflictual and prejudicial oppositive logic of the tradition and opens doors up to a virtuous path of Coopetition.2 It is a question of defining a new paradigm, within which conflict, like competition, both produced by diversity and pluralism, for the acquisition of life opportunities. This is argued by several important scholars (Coser, 1956; Dahrendorf, 1963, 1988a, b; Wright Mills, 1973, 2001, 2018) and represents an important social phenomenon in social science since they favour processes of innovation.

 A process of Collaboration between business competitors, in hopes of mutually beneficial results.

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In fact, regarding the role of conflict in the evolution of social systems, Ferrarotti argued that (1991, p. 239): Now, it has been shown that social conflict can also have positive effects. Considering the consequences of conflict as pure and simple pathology means ignoring the concrete reality of historical experience and arbitrarily limiting one’s analysis of a very complex and universal phenomenon. There is no collective or true social process that does not provide relevant aspects of cooperation alongside aspects of conflict for critical analysis. This means that both cooperation and conflict perform essential social functions.

Within this perspective, which attempts to formulate a new paradigm on personal, organisational, and institutional action, as the leading American sociologist Wright Mills (2018) argues effectively, there is a need for something more than “abstract interpretative models” and “sterile empirical data”: there is a need for sociological imagination. Within this new panorama, to understand the new parameters of the rational, symbolic, affective, or communicative type fully, it is necessary, therefore, to pay attention to the analysis of the relational processes of negotiation, which should include, simultaneously, a potential for conflict and a competitive, collaborative orientation (Cocozza, 2012). A novel way of analysing the behaviour of actors, who start from a “problematic” situation characterised by different objectives and the shared need to reach an agreement, is to seek a possible solution in behaviour oriented towards the principles of responsible freedom (Cesareo & Vaccarini, 2006) and finalised experimentation with social inclusive governance (Cocozza, 2014a, b, c, 2019). It is a question of studying a new relational modality and a different kind of organisational action, which could be analysed by “measuring” the degree of confrontation between the actors, the weight of responsibility towards other actors and the community, as well as the effectiveness of the coordination of degrees of personal, organisational and institutional action. This view of social action, regarding organisations and institutions, in particular, might improve the relational climate, reduce behaviour oriented solely towards individualistic logic, increase the rate of mutual trust and favour the achievement of results of mutual satisfaction, up to this moment, unthinkable. Here people are placed at the centre of processes that relaunch a new humanism that invests in the cultural dimension in favour of a new anthropocentric paradigm.

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Abstract  For Vincenzo Cesareo, Cocozza’s book makes a useful contribution to a rereading of the history of sociology by contextualising it. This means that it also makes a sociological contribution to sociology through the key of rationality. There is a need, on the part of us sociologists, to question ourselves critically about how we actually practice sociology. To this last need. Therefore, Cesareo invites young people in particular, though not them alone, to take into serious consideration the contributions made by the classics which continue to provide valuable elements of analysis and theory that prove useful when seeking to understand our present historical period also in the light of this book on unexpected action. The purpose Cocozza sets himself with this new book is to reconstruct how, over time, the social sciences, in particular sociology, have addressed the crucial question of rationality, in light of its several theoretical variations and the importance attributed to it at both individual and social level. This undoubtedly important undertaking has been carried out by the author using a critical reading of numerous contributions starting from that of Durkheim who, as Cocozza reminds us, sustains the existence of a close link between modernity and rationality in the sense that the former guarantees the triumph of the latter. The author’s research focuses on the specificity of numerous previous approaches, grasping the specific originality of each one but also its limits: it is therefore a truly critical reading and no mere review of other scholars. Cocozza starts his analysis by taking into consideration Durkheim and Weber, homing in on distinctions between formal and substantial rationality. He then focuses on Parsons’s structural-functionalism as well as on the contributions made by Schutz and Habermas, highlighting for each of these three scholars their respective interpretations of how rationality is manifested in human action.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cocozza, The Unexpected in Action, Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26793-2

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The author then goes on to investigate the question of rationality in the light of Luhman’s theoretical contribution, that is, the dynamics existing between the environment and the complex system. The analysis continues by making an original comparison between rationalism, irrationalism and pseudo-rationality in the light of the thinking of Marx and Popper. In this timely and exhaustive survey, reference to theories of rational choice (Homans and Coleman) and those of limited rational choice (Simon) could not be ignored. Neither could the author fail, and rightly so, to refer to other authors, in particular Ardigò (but also Pareto and Alexander), who studied the extra-rational dimension human action as well as the issues of liquid rationality (Bauman, Beck, Sennett). Having briefly recalled Cocozza’s demanding examination of how the social sciences, sociology, in particular, have addressed the question of rationality, I now add two brief considerations of my own. The first one addresses the issue of the differences existing between holistic and individualistic approaches, to which the author dedicates considerable attention, also honouring me by referring to a text of mine, written as far back as 1993, in which I sustained and documented the irreconcilability between the two approaches. Today, I confirm that position to a large extent but, for the sake of intellectual honesty, I am obliged to declare that by continuing to study that antithesis I have also discovered the existence of some degrees of approximation, albeit partial and limited, between the two perspectives. Now, I hasten to point out that I certainly do not intend to go so far as to state that this dichotomy has been surpassed. The distinction remains and is clear, but I believe that something is moving in the direction of a partial reconciliation between the two positions: from an indubitable either-or to a rather bashful et-et. In this regard, I refer in particular to some contemporary sociological thinking referring to Corcuff’s social constructionism (1995) which is located along the path already traced by scholars such as Simmel (1983b) and Schütz (1979), as well as by exponents of symbolic interactionism, committed to emphasising the need to consider the action of human beings as well as the dynamics arising from their symbolic exchanges, their representations and their categorical systems. What I want to highlight here is a twofold shift in their respective research pathways. More precisely, some scholars have tried to develop theoretical models capable of linking systemic and structural approaches with sociologies of action and social interaction, thus opening up to a recognition of the relevance of action. I refer in particular to the contributions made by Giddens (1990) and by Bourdieu (2003, 2004, 2013). Starting from the analysis of structure, they have gradually landed, to some extent, on the side of action, conceding a certain degree of importance to the latter, so that we can speak of “structuralist constructionism”. Other scholars, Elster (1983) and Berger and Luckmann (1969), for example, have moved in the opposite direction, conceding some importance to structure, thus giving life to what we might call “phenomenological constructionism”. The second consideration I wish to address concerns the object of this book specifically, that is, rationality. In this regard, I wish to point out that the Harvard

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cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker in a recent book translated into Italian as “Razionalità” (Mondadori) argues that it will be rationality that saves the world which has a growing need for objectivity and truth. In his opinion, rationality might also help combat the spread of fake news. Pinker’s thesis is that there is an urgent need to strengthen rationality. After this short bibliographic reference I shall now return to Cocozza and his painstaking examination of Weber, whose well-known typology of social action he recalls: (a) rational evaluation of the means and consequences which involves choosing the most effective ways to achieve a specific purpose; (b) rational action regarding values, when people are inclined to operate according to ethical, religious or aesthetic convictions without taking the consequences into account; (c) affective action, that is action driven by affection and emotions; (d) traditional action, when the actor behaves according to acquired habits. In light of this distinction, Weber argues that historians of the social sciences, when carrying out their interpretative tasks, should attribute relevance to rational evidence rather than to sympathy. In short, in his opinion, rational action regarding the purpose is higher in intelligibility and accessibility than other types of action whose degree of evidence is progressively lower when it comes to interpretation and understanding. Undoubtedly, the German scholar argues that rationality is an important dimension of action, but he also recognises the fact that affectivity and tradition need to be kept in mind if one wishes to understand human action. I also recall that recently there are several studies that emphasise the importance of emotions, which contribute to influencing people’s actions. I find it interesting, therefore, that Cocozza actually entitled this book “unexpected action” precisely because the unexpected assumes indubitable importance not only at individual but also at collective level. Cocozza also and rightly so, makes Keynes’s statement his own: “the inevitable never happens, the unexpected always” (p.  195) and history clearly demonstrates this. At this point, I ask the question: does some degree of the downsizing of rationality cause problems for sociology? More precisely, if we try to go beyond deterministic structuralism, is it still possible to establish sociological laws? In my opinion, the answer is affirmative but with one point that requires clarification: if, as empirically verifiable, the human being though always and in any case conditioned, is not determined and therefore no puppet, our necessarily probabilistic laws, will remain laws to all effects. With his analysis, Cocozza clearly highlights the problematic nature of human action which is and remains an open question, but I hasten to add that, in my opinion, it is good that this be the case. In fact, there is always something in our actions that escapes determinism. This leads us obviously to consider the elusive issues of freedom and free will. In my opinion, Cocozza’s book makes a useful contribution to a rereading of the history of sociology by contextualising it. This means that it also makes a sociological contribution to sociology through the key of rationality. There is a need, on the

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part of us sociologists, to question ourselves critically about how we actually practice sociology. To this last need, I wish to add another which is cause for concern, namely the lack of attention paid to the history of sociology. Therefore, I invite young people in particular, though not them alone, to take into serious consideration the contributions made by the classics which, in my opinion, continue to provide valuable elements of analysis and theory that prove useful when seeking to understand our present historical period also in the light of this book on unexpected action. Vincenzo Cesareo Catholic University of the Sacred Heart Milan, Italy

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Index

A Adaptation process, 9, 51–56

F Flexible man, 116–118 Forecasting, 17, 18, 42, 67, 80, 111, 126 Formal rationality, 15–34

B Barbarism, 65, 125–128 C Collective actor’s rational choice, 87–90 Communication, 20, 41, 43, 45–49, 52, 54–60, 103, 112, 114, 117 Communicative action, 8, 43–49, 54, 55 Competences rationality, 119–133 Complex systems, 51–60 Culture, 13, 17, 39, 49, 52, 56, 65, 110, 113, 115, 118, 121, 124–128 D Daily life problems, 41 E Entitlement and life chance, 27–34 Environment, 6, 9, 10, 16, 18, 36, 44, 46, 51–60, 64, 86, 93, 104, 107, 115, 130, 131 Ethics, 4, 18, 25, 98, 105, 119–133 Extra-rational human action, 81, 99–107

H Holism, 7, 9, 11, 12 Human action, 1–13, 17, 35–49, 64, 65, 72, 79, 81, 83, 84, 90–92, 95, 97, 99–107, 110, 122 I Individualism, 9, 11, 12, 75, 77, 78, 85, 106, 111, 115 Irrationalism, 61–73, 76, 77 L Limited rationality, 92, 95 Liquid rationality, 109–113 M Marxism, 22, 23, 65–68, 70, 71, 82, 121 Methodological individualism, 3, 8, 75–80, 85, 90 Modernity, 17, 30, 49, 109, 110, 112–114

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cocozza, The Unexpected in Action, Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26793-2

169

170

Index

O Organic solidarity, xi

Risikogesellshaft, ix, xvii, 109, 113–115 Risikoleben, ix, xvii, 109, 113–115

P Personal life, 116–118 Postmodernity, 49, 109, 111, 114 Postmodern society, 109–119, 128, 132 Problematic action, ix, xi Pseudo-rationality, 61–73 Pseudo-rationality and utopians, xiv, 68–73

S Selection, 54, 56–60, 94, 126, 131 Social action, 5–10, 12, 15–17, 19, 26–35, 37, 39, 40, 44–46, 48, 53–55, 58, 62, 64, 65, 80–82, 104–107, 121 Social cohesion, 2, 32, 33, 89, 111, 115, 119–125 Society of capacities, 128–133 Sociological thinking, 1–13, 39, 77, 91, 107 Structural dichotomy, 7–13 Substantial rationality, xii, xv, 3, 15–34

R Rational choice theory, 83–85, 88, 91, 97 Rationalism, 61–73, 77 Rationality, 1–13, 15–17, 19, 21, 23–26, 28, 35–49, 51–60, 62, 63, 71, 72, 76, 78, 79, 83, 85, 89–101, 104–106, 110, 111, 116, 119–133 Rationalized world, xii, 24–27 Reasons, 1–13, 17, 23, 25, 26, 36, 37, 39–43, 45, 49, 53–57, 61, 63, 64, 67, 68, 71, 75–79, 82, 83, 91–94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 112, 120, 122, 124, 128–130

U Utilitarianism, 91–107 V Voluntaristic action theory, 35