Abstract
Contemporary social theory is dominated by two alternative concepts of rationality, associated with different forms of social explanation, and with competing views of consumption and citizenship. Both of the two dominant concepts of rationality arose as part of a general modernist culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The economic concept of rationality privileges utility maximization; it arose with neoclassical theorists, and has spread through rational choice theory. The sociological concept of rationality privileges appropriateness given social norms; it arose with modern functionalism, and today is associated with communitarianism.
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Notes
J. S. Mill, ‘Thornton on Labour and its Claims’, in Collected Works of J.S. Mill (London, 1963/89), 5, pp. 631–68.
For a survey of the varied voices see the oft maligned but still useful T. Hutchison, A Review of Economic Doctrines, 1870–1929 (Oxford, 1953). And, for an example of these voices debating public policy see Royal Commission on the Depression of Trade and Industry, Final Report, c. 4893/1886.
For various studies of different aspects of this broad intellectual shift, see W. Everdell, The First Moderns (Chicago, 1997);
T. Porter, Trust in Numbers:The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, 1995);
D. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991), chaps. 8–10;
M. Schabas, A World Ruled by Number: William Stanley fevons and the Rise of Mathematical Economics (Princeton, 1990); and
D. Ross, ‘Anglo-American Political Science, 1880–1920’, in R. Adcock, M. Bevir and S. Stimson (eds) Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1880 (Princeton, 2006).
‘The validity of the utility theory has been widely questioned on the ground that it relies upon a hedonistic psychology … There exists no theory of human behavior which commands professional consensus of opinion, but the various theories are sufficiently antipathetic to the utilitarian calculus to have reduced the utility theory of consumption to a minor and disputed status, capable perhaps of throwing light on the market demand for goods but incapable of explaining contemporary standards of consumption.’ P. T. Homan, ‘Consumption’, in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1930 1st edn), p. 294.
On the historical development of rational choice as a later, and somewhat independent, process see S. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, 2003).
D. Kahneman and A. Tversky (eds) Choices, Values, and Frames (Cambridge, 2000).
A. Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Weil-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Oxford, 2006).
The following arguments draw on M. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 158–71.
We are employing ‘belief and ‘web of belief, rather than culture or paradigm, as the unit of analysis in the light of Donald Davidson’s convincing (at least to us) objections to the idea of conceptual schemes: see D. Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, 1984), pp. 183–98.
Consider, to mention just a few prominent examples, A. Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda (New York, 1993);
R. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 2000); and
M. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent (Cambridge, MA, 1996).
For historical accounts of the place of such fears within American thought, and their relation to a primarily German sociology of modernity, see D. Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture (Amherst, 2004); and
A. Schäfer, ‘German Historicism, Progressive Social Thought, and the Interventionist State in the US since the 1880s’, in M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (eds) Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World (Cambridge, 2004).
For the mutation of a functionalist approach to organizations into commu-nitarianism see A. Etzioni, A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations: On Power, Involvement, and their Correlates (New York, 1961); and
A. Etzioni, ‘Toward a Theory of Societal Guidance’, in E. Etzioni-Halevy and A. Etzioni (eds) Social Change: Sources, Patterns, and Consequences (New York, 1973).
See J. March and J. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York, 1989). Governmentality theorists too neglect situated agency and local reasoning. They present the consumer as a passive subject-position. Consumers are merely acting out a role given to them by a discourse or a regime of power/knowledge.
See P. Miller and N. Rose, ‘Mobilizing the Consumer: Assembling the Subject of Consumption,’ Theory, Culture and Society 14 (1997), pp. 1–36. Indeed, while governmental-ity theorists adopt a critical tone when discussing social norms or social reason, they sometimes rely, like the other sociologists we have discussed, on modernist modes of knowing (synchronic analysis of the relations between signs within discourse) and hostility to a modern capitalism they conceive as totalizing.
Examples include M. Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London, 1991); and
A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge, 1991).
Our appeal to local reasoning captures a type of agency and a type of his-toricism that are often neglected by postmodernists. Compare Bevir, Logic; and, more recently, M. Bevir, J. Hargis and S. Rushing (eds) Histories of Postmodernism (New York, 2007), esp. chap. 1.
K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2000);
P. Huang, ‘Development or Involution in Eighteen-Century Britain and China? A Review of Keith Pomeranz’s The Greater Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy’, Journal of Asian Studies, 61(2) (2002), pp. 501–38.
M. Berg and E. Eger (eds) Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke, 2003),
M. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005);
J. Brewer and F. Trentmann (eds) Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford, 2006).
D. Winch, ‘The Problematic Status of the Consumer in Orthodox Economic Thought’ in F. Trentmann (ed.) The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (Oxford, 2006).
Compare Y. Gabriel and T. Lang, The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and its Fragmentation (London, 1995); and Trentmann (ed.) Making of the Consumer.
Offer, Challenge of Affluence. Also see J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston, 1958); Packard, Persuaders-, and Horowitz, Anxieties of Affluence.
D. Miller, The Dialectics of Shopping (Chicago, 2001);
N. Gregson and L. Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures (Oxford, 2003); and
A. Warde and L. Martens, Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption and Pleasure (Cambridge, 2000).
D. Miller, ‘The Poverty of Morality’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 1(2) (2001), pp. 225–43; see also
M. Banerjee and D. Miller, The Sari (Oxford and New York, 2003).
E. D. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women and the Making of London’s West End (Princeton NJ, 2000).
Compare M. Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2003); C. Beauchamp, ‘Getting Your Money’s Worth: American Models for the Remaking of the Consumer Interest in Britain 1930s-1960s’, in
M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (eds) Critiques of Capital in Modern Britain and America: Transatlantic Exchanges 1800 to the Present Day (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 127–50.
See V. de Grazia and E. Furlough (eds) The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, CA, 1996);
J. Gronow and A. Warde (eds) Ordinary Consumption (London, 2001);
F. Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 1996); F. Mort, ‘Democratic Subjects and Consuming Subjects’ in Trentmann (ed.) Making of the Consumer, pp. 225–48; and
I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption 1939–1955 (Oxford, 2000).
See P. Maclachlan and F. Trentmann, ‘Civilizing Markets: Traditions of Consumer Politics in Twentieth-Century Britain, Japan and the United States’, in Bevir and Trentmann (eds) Markets in Historical Contexts, pp. 170–201. S. Garon and P. Maclachlan (eds) The Ambivalent Consumer (Ithaca NY, 2006).
See for example F. Scharpf, Games Real Actors Play: Actor Centred Institutionalism in Policy Research (Boulder, CO, 1997).
For studies of the fortunes of voluntary associations and civil society (or at least recognition of them) prior to, and then in relation to, the welfare state (and also modernist dichotomies) see J. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1993);
J. Harris, ‘Society and State in Twentieth-century Britain’, in F. Thompson (ed.) The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, Vol. 3: Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge, 1990); and
R. Lowe and N. Rollings, ‘Modernising Britain, 1957–64: A Classic Case of Centralisation and Fragmentation’, in R. Rhodes (ed.) Transforming British Government, Vol. 1: Changing Institutions (London, 2000).
For diverse examples of the turn to practices in the human sciences, see T. Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity (Cambridge, 1996);
G. Spiegel (ed.) Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York, 2005); and
S. Turner, The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge and Presuppositions (Cambridge, 1994).
C. Barnett, N. Clarke, P. Cloke and A. Malpass, ‘The Political Ethics of Consumerism’, in Consumer Policy Review, 15(2) (2005), pp. 45–51; and
J. Clarke, J. Newman, N. Smith, E. Vidier and L. Westmarland, Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Identities in the Remaking of Public Services (London, 2006).
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© 2007 Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann
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Bevir, M., Trentmann, F. (2007). After Modernism: Local Reasoning, Consumption, and Governance. In: Bevir, M., Trentmann, F. (eds) Governance, Consumers and Citizens. Consumption and Public Life. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591363_8
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