Habitus, Reflexivity, and Micro‐Hysteresis: An Experimental Dialogue Between Bourdieu's Praxeology and Pragmatist Theories of Action

The article explores an analytical strategy through which Bourdieu's theory of practice and (neo)pragmatist theories of action, especially Dewey's, may be synthesised into an integrated model of the subjective motors of social conduct, one capable of granting due explanatory weight to both habitual dispositions and reflexive processes. On the one hand, pragmatists show that disjunctions between habitual dispositions and the social circumstances of action, which demand a greater role for reflexive deliberation in relation to habitual propensities as subjective motors of conduct, do not occur only in the scenarios of radical structural crisis that Bourdieu termed the ‘hysteresis effect.’ Situated along a continuum of greater or lesser intensities, including what we may call ‘micro‐hystereses,’ such disjunctions are part of agents' everyday relationship to their collective contexts of experience. On the other hand, as a theory of the ‘regulated improvisations’ of ‘practical sense,’ Bourdieu's praxeology not only captures the creative component of habitual dispositions themselves, but may also combine the non‐mechanistic notion of ‘habit’ proposed by Dewey's pragmatism with a concept of habitus as a system of habits or dispositions. Finally, the article explores different modes of reflexivity and the circuits of reciprocal influence they establish with habitual dispositions, including both the role of reflexivity in dispositional self‐transformation and the possibility that reflexive processes may themselves have dysfunctional effects.