ABSTRACT
Today ‘action’ is a central concept of philosophy and of almost all the disciplines that concern themselves with human beings. In economics, for example, the theory of rational action is undoubtedly the paradigmatic core of the discipline, in spite of the fact that the exact logical status of the assumption of rational action has always been the object of controversies. In psychology early in this century the radically reductionist notion of ‘behaviour’ replaced the earlier dualism of physiological research, on the one hand, and introspective studies of human consciousness, on the other. But during the last decades, the cognitive turn of behaviourism has increasingly opened up the perspective of founding psychology on a theory of action instead of behaviour. In sociology the mainstream classics like Max Weber or Talcott Parsons dealt extensively with the action-theoretical foundations of their discipline. The same is true for the originators of competing sociological approaches, like G.H.Mead and Alfred Schütz. In many recent debates of social theory the topic of action is absolutely crucial. Let me just mention debates like that on the general social-scientific importance of economic models of rational action, on a possible revival of Weber’s or Parsons’ theories, on Habermas’ theory of communicative action or on Giddens’ theory of structuration. In philosophy twenty years ago Richard Bernstein attempted to show that the most important approaches of modern thought, namely analytical philosophy, pragmatism, existentialism and a Marxism which is no longer understood as a teleological philosophy of history are united in their attempt to conceptualize the active character of the human being. In our days, in which poststructuralism and the revival of Nietzsche and of Heidegger’s later writings articulate a skeptical and ambivalent attitude toward human agency, it may be less plausible to see a convergence of philosophical currents in the topic of action. But those approaches can be characterized by their attempt to emphasize the pitfalls of an activist bias in western culture, and hence they are not without an essential connection to the topic of action itself.
