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Paper short abstract

I provide an outline of a theory of commitment as the dedication of action toward the realization of something in the world, over time, despite difficulty and struggle. Commitment is central to world-making; contextual and practical as well as a powerfully communicative of meaning.

Paper long abstract

In this presentation I provide an outline of a theory of commitment, understood as the conscious direction of action toward the realization of something in the world, over time, despite difficulty and struggle. Commitment in this sense constitutes a fundamental aspect of human action that deserves to be thought and studied in its own right. Drawing mainly on research on collective action, I provide some ideas about how to do so. I propose that commitment is central to world-making and involves the exercise of subjective capacities for recognition, evaluation, and realization of potentiality. Neither an individual psychological state nor a specific social or cultural form, commitment is contextual and practical as well as powerfully communicative, both as narrative and as example. Because a focus on commitment underlines how and why people struggle to make worlds meaningful, it renders visible forms of desire, care, and being that exceed those involved in conventional concepts of interested action. In doing so, it clarifies a perennial contradiction of capitalist modernity, which valorizes goal-directed, self-responsible activity, while bending its ends towards profit and “creative destruction.”