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.BOOK REVIEWS theorists. Simon's attempt to make human action the fundamental subject matter of social science is worthy of investigation, even if his discussions of action are not always as carefully conducted as one might wish. About his treatment of the other main premises in the central argument of the book, claims about free action and its relations to causality and empirical science, I can only say that it contributes little to the current study of these issues. ALFRED R. MELE Davidson Oollege Davidson, North Oarolina The Human Center: Moral .Agency in the Social World. By HOWARD L. HARROD. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981. Pp. x + 150. Cloth, $14.95. Reading a book on the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer during the income tax season suggests two different aspects of ordinary experience. Vermeer renders ordinary people, usually women, in everyday situations, such as reading a letter or pouring milk. His renderings are clear and distinct, as thougli he was trying to do in painting what his contemporary Descartes wanted to do in philosophy. But there is also a sense in Vermeer of something deeper and more mysterious. There is a luminosity not only of the colors but of ordinary human experience. Nothing could be further from this aspect of ordinary experience than filling out the income tax form, which is, whether we like it or not, a part of our common, ordinary experience. The income tax form itself, as well as instruction booklet, render ordinary experience opaque; worse yet, they render ordinary experience prosaic. All this is by way of introducing Howard L. Harrod's The Human Center: Moral .Agency in the Social World. Like Vermeer, Harrod offers to illuminate ordinary experience. The opening sentences of his book are: " Ordinary moral experience often goes unnoticed and unanalyzed, and yet it exhibits some of the most marvelous instances of human transcendence. One fascination motivating this work is precisely the luminosity of the small, the common, and the mundane." Perhaps my expectations were too high, but as I read further I got the feeling I was reading a philosopher's version of an income tax booklet. In a way, one might not unreasonably expect stylistic problems in a work that is a phenomenological description of moral agency in the social world. Let's face it, phenomenologists not infrequently write in an expressive style dubbed by Thomas Hanna the "Teutonic plague". Harrod 's book does not suffer in this way, though. He does not overwhelm i26 BOOK REVIEWS the reader with terminology (jargon). His vocabulary is not the problem; he'd never make it writing sociology. His problem is that he writes like a bureaucrat: He says the most banal things in tortuous circumlocutions. Let me illustrate. I take the following to mean that in the process of socialization a male learns his roles as father and husband, and these roles are seen as ' right '. By the time a male child has become an adult, for example, the typical and symbolic meanings surrounding the social roles of father may be sedimented as part of personal history and identity. At the point in personal life when the social project of constituting a family and becoming a father comes into view, the foundations for the personal project of getting married and having children has become a taken-for-granted meaning structure orienting the agent's action. The typical sequences of action which are necessary to realize the project are fantasized in the future perfect tense; and when the act is completed in the social world, it is retained in memorial experience as a significant personal event which becomes the subject of various acts of recollection and interpretation and may, under certain circumstances, become a symbolic vehicle in experience. The context within which interpretation and reinterpretation proceed includes not only typical understandings at the level of law and the broader social system; there are also important normative elements that derive from the symbolic mediation of value meanings in experience. Unfortunately, this is not atypical. Consider this key passage. As I read this passage, Harrod is ' describing ' how human freedom arises because we can reflect upon and learn from our past. This last point opens toward a fundamental...

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