Why Regimes Shift: On Suggestive Actions and Their Implications for French Pragmatism

French Pragmatism or the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique (PSC), offers a valuable framework to analyse the argumentations of ordinary actors within situations of public dispute. However, due to the PSC’s inherent (rationalistic) focus on providing a ‘practical grammar of the political bond’ (see Blokker & Brighenti 2011) the more disruptive processes of such disputes as well as the role of emotion(s), have remained under-explained in the overall PSC literature and hence the question as to ‘why regimes shift’. In an attempt to address these particular deficits, this paper extends the existing PSC framework by means of suggestive actions and emotive speech, offering them as additional analytical categories alongside the existing orders of worth.After operationalizing this extension into a semi-standardized neopragmatist discourse analysis, two case-studies that applied this new approach will be presented in its support. With this paper I am attempting to provide a semi-standardized PSC-based method that allows for the investigation of all ‘real-world’ (occidental) situations of public dispute, including those that cause ‘political breaks’.