MAKING SENSE OF MAKING SENSE 279implications of taking “the preservation of agency” seriously, the empirical work thus produced
may contribute to a debate about the importance of this philosophical commitment.
NOTES
For helpful feedback and comments on earlier drafts, I would like to thank the editors, Rebecca DeWinter,
Kiran Pervez, and Maia Hallward.
- In the German Bundestag a bell is used to call the house to order, much like a gavel is used in U.S.
parliamentary bodies. - Seating in the Bundestag is by parties along a left-to-right scale, so shouts “from the left” are both
shouts from the left side of the hall and shouts from the more radical political parties—Social Democrats and
Communists, in this case. - In this chapter, “occupying Allies” refers to the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. By
1949, the Soviet Union was an “Ally” only in a very tenuous sense. - Bhaskar and other critical realists, however, fail to maintain a consistent focus on practical discursive
activities. As Patomäki and Wight argue, critical realists instead talk about “underlying structures, powers,
and tendencies that exist, whether or not detected or known through experience and/or discourse.” This leads
them to suspect that “the surface appearance of objectivity, although possessing causal power, is typically
distinct from its underlying—and potentially hidden, reified, or mystified—essential relations” (Patomäki
and Wight 2000, 223–35). Their empirical work shifts from a detailed tracing of the patterns of social
activity to a transcendental explication of the foundational principles putatively governing or underlying
those patterns. This metaphysical commitment produces several thorny problems (Shotter 1993a, 75–78),
but one need not adopt the whole critical realist package in order to appreciate its emphasis on active pro-
cesses of social construction. - Arguably, every political figure in every type of political regime faces this kind of problem (M. Weber
1976, 122–23). “Legitimation” in this sense has been a concern of philosophers for millennia, forming one
of those perennial subjects of interest to political and social analysts. But the problem is perhaps particularly
acute (at least in a technical sense) in a modern industrial democracy with a wide range of public media
outlets, inasmuch as a plethora of such outlets dramatically expands the arenas and forums within which
legitimation can take place. This is true even if the country is under military occupation. - This applies regardless of whether the patterns in question are “novel” or not; the reproduction of an
established convention or pattern of reasons is just as creative an action as the formulation of a radically
different pattern (Wittgenstein 1953, §232; Winch 1990, 57). - Weber’s argument is, in brief, that “the specific objectivity... which alone appears to be solely
realizable in the social sciences” is “at base a radicalized subjectivity” (Hennis 1988, 124; emphasis in
original). For whatever reason, many commentators miss this. - Social action thus has a “metaphorical” character (Ringmar 1996, 68–69), and specific actions draw
on resources that function not unlike the “policy frames” disclosed by other analysts (see Brandwein, chap-
ter 12, this volume, and Schmidt, chapter 17, this volume, for examples and elaborations). My focus on the
prosthetic character of action instead of on the disclosive character of resources is a deliberate effort to
prevent undue and unnecessary reification of those resources. - Note that scholars of the “role of ideas” also tend to shift the question from a “sociological” one about
the impact of social actions to an “economic” one about the motivation for those actions (P.T. Jackson
2002a). But this issue is not my central focus here. - This differs from neopositivist approaches to the extent that the abstract typology in question need
not involve cross-case correlations between independent and dependent variables. “Class” and “rationality”
aren’t necessarily variable attributes, and their use in a particular account may well involve less correlating
and more interpreting according to the decontextualized, abstract template that they provide. - The issue here is not whether notions like “class” or “rationality” can produce useful and illuminating
analytical insights; if handled ideal-typically, they can certainly do so. The problem is that such insights
ordinarily come at the cost of the preservation of agency understood as creativity and contingency. See
below. - Note that “reflexive” ethnography, which deliberately strives to avoid this kind of flat-footed empiri-
cism, can easily slip off into a kind of single hermeneutic in which the scholar is simply playing with her or