ABSTRACT
The theory of practice that human sciences operate, most often in an implicit way, when they have to account for the economy of practices, that is, the immanent logic of actions and the objective meaning of works and institutions, oscillates, beyond divergences between theoretical traditions, between mechanism and a generally intellectualist version of finalism. In the absence of recognising something other than different variations of rational action or mechanical reaction to a determination such as the constraint of prices mechanically set by the market, one bars oneself from understanding the specific logic of all actions which are reasonable without being the product of reasoned design or, all the more so, of rational calculation; inhabited by a sort of objective finality without being consciously organised according to an explicitly constituted end; intelligible and coherent without stemming from an intelligent intention and a deliberate decision; adjusted to the future without being the product of a project or plan. 2 The power of the alternative is such that those who expect to react against the mechanism of a certain economic tradition, without falling into the intellectualism of ‘economic calculation’ (or the ‘psychology’ a priori inherited from utilitarianism and pragmatism) with which it commonly alternates, rarely escape the naïveties of subjectivism with its personalist kits of ‘aspirations’ and ‘projects’; and that, conversely, those who expect to break with the naïveties of subjectivist theories of action fall again rather inevitably into a mechanism hardly any less naïve than that of the theory which, transposing to economics the axiomatic of classical mechanism, treats economic agents as indiscernible particles submitted to the laws of a quasi-mechanical equilibrium. Indeed, it is not enough to do away with the old alternative, to come back to a better concealed form of mechanism, similar to those of the structuralists who treat agents, amusedly reduced, through an over translation of Marx, to the role of ‘structural support’ (Träger), as redundant reflections of structure or to locate the principle of practice in an unconsciousness defined as a mechanical operator of finality. 3
