French pragmatic sociology, German phenomenology and British pragmatic philosophy : convergences, differences, and cross-fertilization »,

For about fifteen years a new paradigm called pragmatic approach has been increasingly successful among francophone sociologists. The aim of the present paper is to locate it in the context of the philosophy presiding over the development of social sciences today. I first intend to consider the phenomenological origin of the pragmatic approach using some founding texts by its major theoreticians namely L. Boltanski and L. Thévenot (all available in English). Drawing on this school of thought, these authors aim to comprehend the “states of mind” and moral reasoning that accompany people’s actions. To this end, various “regimes of action” have been defined. Among them, the regime of “justice,” composed of “universes” (polities) of conventions upon which people argue for their action, is currently the most developed. (Frère, 2003) After a short discussion of these “universes,” I will discuss the reason for which Francophone pragmatics is in reality at least as inspired by Anglophone pragmatics as it is by phenomenology. Finally, to conclude, I will investigate the strengths and weaknesses of this “new pragmatic paradigm” in relation to cited movements as well as to the “traditional” philosophies of the social sciences that it critiques: ethnomethodology, Bourdieu’s structuralist school and the school of rational choice (also known as the positive political theory).