ABSTRACT
The causal-action bias in sociology, prevalent indeed in the broader social sciences, comes from a source much larger than its own disciplinarity. Its roots are sunk in the self-consciousness of modernity as a shared experience with all the social sciences and their cognate institutions. This disciplinary motivation for criticizing the conflation of the social and political is not realistically available to today's researchers. Corroboration of the causal-action bias in sociology can come from comparing these characterizations of the work of these canonical figures, each of whom either attributed to, or implied by, action a kind of unique causality, with the work of an outsider and a critic of the social sciences, namely, Hannah Arendt. The theme of productivity is apropos of today's social media norms and is, of course, a critical description of how actors turn their lives into expressions and actions for profit.
