Chapter 5: The Hermeneutics of Human Capabilities and the Theory of Structuration

The previous four chapters have gradually developed our view on the coordination of human capabilities and the means by which people act. I have made abundant use of insights from Ricœur’s hermeneutics, but I have also critiqued and completed his views, often taking recourse to insights drawn from other social theorists to do so. In this chapter, I proceed in a similar way, turning my attention to the broader social-theoretical frame of the insights gathered in the previous chapters. Here, I explore two major structuring features of Ricœur’s view on social action: the teleological structure of interaction and his understanding of institutions. My critical views on these two themes open the way for a detour through Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory and lead us back to a revision of the initially considered theoretical framework. Since the choice of Giddens as an interlocutor may not be immediately obvious, and to avoid misunderstanding, let me start by laying out my rationale for choosing him. As I pointed out in the Introduction, it is not the coordination between Ricœur’s hermeneutics and a social theory that poses the problem. After all, Ricœur was both a great specialist in the dialogue of traditions and an important philosopher of social action. Still, with some exceptions,1 he seems to have developed his thinking without taking into account the enormous body of thought on these topics on social theory written in English. Given the breadth and depth of Ricœur’s work, it would be ridiculous to present an absence of dialogue with this or that author or intellectual movement as sufficient reason to point out any inadequacy. Nevertheless, his work contains a multitude of possibilities that remain unexplored, to which a reconstruction of such omitted dialogues could