Abstract
Why seek a theory of action? There are, I think, two general motivating aims. Each has a long and familiar history within our intellectual traditions. I shall suggest that they are in tension, even contradiction with one another. Professor Thalberg’s admirable paper, in my view, illustrates this particularly well. I shall argue that pursuing the one subverts the pursuit of the other. I shall also argue for abandoning the first, the better to fulfil the second.
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Notes
Notably among ‘methodological individualists’.
Parfit, D.: 1984, Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 275.
Hobbes, Thomas: Elements of Philosophy: the first section concerning Body, I, vi, 2.
Hobbes, Thomas: Preface to the English translation of De Cive. See on this aspect of Hobbes’s thought and its historical background, Watkins J. W. N.: 1965, Hobbes’s System of Ideas, London: Hutchinson, Parts III and I V.
Taylor C.: 1979, ‘Atomism’, in: Kontos, A. (ed.), Powers, Possessions and Freedom. Essays in Honor of C. B. Macpherson, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 60–61.
Homans George C.: 1967, The Nature of Social Science, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, p. 106. For a similar argument, cited approvingly by Homans, see Barth, F.: 1966, ‘Models of Social Organisation’, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Occasional Paper no. 23.
Homans, ibid., pp. 85, 86.
Berelson, B. (ed.): 1963, The Behavioral Sciences Today, New York: Harper Torch-books, p. 3.
Locke, D.: this volume, p. 97.
Maclntyre, Alasdair: 1981, After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory, London: Duckworth, p. 195.
Ibid.,p. 192.
See ibid., p. 199.
Geertz, C.: 1973, ‘Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz, New York: Basic Books, pp. 15, 9.
Ibid., p. 9.
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© 1985 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Lukes, S. (1985). The Contradictory Aims of Action Theory. In: Seebass, G., Tuomela, R. (eds) Social Action. Theory and Decision Library, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5263-8_3
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