CREATIVITY, PRAGMATISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES A Discussion between Hans Joas and Richard Sennett Moneration ay ANTE GIMMLER In this discussion, Richard Sennett and Hans Joas elaborate on the role of both creativity and pragmatism in the social sciences. They pursue these topics from different perspectives: the role creativity played in the history of ideas and in classical pragmatism, what creativity means in the practice of the arts and how a creative pragmatist sociology might be possible. Pragmatism, they conclude, may not be a new idea, but the practice of pragmatism offers a new political vision beyond the traditional frontiers of left and right. Keywords: Action theory; art; charisma; Chicago School; creativity; Dewey; ex- perience; innovation; James; pragmatism; symbolic interactionism. The following discussion between Richard Sennett and Hans Joas took place on January 26th 2006 in Berlin at the Wissenschaftskolleg and was not public. Iam very grateful to Hans Joas for providing the necessary facilities for the meeting and to Richard Sennett for coming to Berlin for this purpose. One doubtlessly has to admit that creativity is a fashionable catch phrase. Greativity courses for managers and researchers, lectures on creative writing and creativity training for children are well-known examples for the apparently high value of creativity in contemporary societies. In sociology Richard Flori- da had a tremendous and world-wide success with his notion of the so-called ‘creative class’; a class which according to Florida is able to meet the challenges and opportunities of knowledge- and information-based production. Creativity seems to be the appropriate virtue of late-modern societies and fits into neo- liberal capitalism under the conditions of globalisation. It is no surprise that both Richard Sennett and Hans Joas accentuate creativity rather in contrast to this current ‘creativity industry’ and its reductive understanding of creativity as innovation. Both emphasise the ambiguous results of the new capitalism, a new form of capitalism that formed, as Richard Sennett pinpoints, a culture of flex- ibility that threatens not only social integration and the integrity of individual life courses but in the end creativity as such. The discussion has its background also in a current revival of pragmatism in the social sciences. Thus, it was one of the aims of the discussion to mark the relevance of both creativity and pragmatism for the future understanding and development of sociological theory. One of the most interesting results of the discussion is how the pragmatist understanding of creativity not only allows us to conceptualize social action in a non-reductive way - a task Hans ‘© Distinktion No. 13, 2006: 5-31, 5