Habit: History of the Concept

Charles Camic, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

This article examines aspects of the history of the concept of habit in Western social thought. As an expression, the concept of
habit has generally referred to a disposition to act as one has previously acted, whether in regard to simple behaviors, more
complex forms of conduct, or broader characterological tendencies (habitus). Among social thinkers who have used the
concept, habit has generally been applied to recurrent forms of moral, economic, political, and religious conduct insofar as
these occur more or less automatically, thus differing from reective forms of human action that entail the deliberative
selection of means and ends by normative standards. While the history of the concept of habit has been roughly coextensive
with the entirety of Western intellectual history, four phases are distinguished. The rst phase, running from antiquity to the
early 1800s, was marked by the frequent discussion of the role and signicance of habit by thinkers ranging from Aristotle to
the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The second phase, extending from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century,
was characterized by two contending developments. One of these was the invocation of the concept of habit by a great many
European and American social theorists, including Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, and the use of the concept, in tandem
with models of reective action, to analyze human conduct in the social world. The second development in this period was the
effort on the part of natural scientists to restrict habit to more elementary human and subhuman behaviors. The third phase,
beginning roughly in the late 1910s, saw the successful appropriation of habit, narrowly conceived, by behaviorist psychol-
ogists and, in a strong countermovement, the abandonment of the concept by a majority of European and American social
thinkers, who for the next half century conceptualized all human conduct exclusively in reective terms. The fourth phase,
extending from the early 1980s to the present time, has witnessed steps by social theorists and empirical researchers to revive
and elaborate the concept of habit and to examine the relationship between habitual and reective forms of human action.

Found in ordinary languages the world over, habit and various
cognate expressions have functioned, for over two millennia, as
concepts in diverse intellectual traditions in the social sciences,
the humanities, and the natural sciences. As used in reference to
various recurrent and relatively automatic forms of human
conduct in the social world, the discourse of habit is one of the
great, albeit largely unacknowledged, cultural legacies of
Western civilization (Thomas, 1993: p. 8). Although the
history of the discourse has been roughly coextensive with
Western intellectual history itself, specic use of the concept,
and explicit recognition of the aspects of human action to
which it refers, have waxed and waned during different periods
in the development of the social sciences.
The Concept of Habit
In the course of its lengthy history, habit has led multiple
lives. Its origins lie in the unreective, indiscriminate,
quotidian use of habit in various popular discourses, which
are littered with offhand references to habit (or to what is
habitual, or done habitually) and which have historically
furnished a vocabulary that has been imported into more
raried discussions of philosophical and scientic subjects.
Students of biological life and the physical world have often
used habit with reference to non-human animals, the
dynamics of populations, the growth pattern of plants, and
the tendencies of systems. (For these quotations, see Sparrow
and Hutchison, 2013: p. 3.) Applied to human conduct,
habit has generally designated a tendency or disposition for
a person to act in ways that she or he has acted previously in
similar contexts, insofar as that disposition is activated
automatically by the context cues that co-occurred with the
relevant action in the previous situations (quoting Neal et al.,
2006: p. 198; see also Pollard, 2003: p. 411).
When these repeated actions are differentiated from one
another in terms of their content, distinctions then arise
between moral, cognitive, emotional, and motor habits. Of
greater historical importance, however, has been another basis
of differentiation. The actions whose repetition is designated as
habit may range from simple and circumscribed to complex
and generalized. Among the social thinkers who have used the
concept, habit has most frequently been applied to recurrent
patterns of action of moderate complexity and generality, i.e.,
to habits of economic, political, religious, and domestic
conduct; habits of obedience to rules and to rulers; habits of
sacrice, disinterestedness, and restraint; etc. At various
moments in the history of the concept, however, habit has
taken on meanings both narrower and broader: sometimes, it
has referred to simpler, or at least more elemental, behavioral
regularities, such as habits of talking, walking, eating, dressing,
routine problem-solving, etc.; at other times, it has been
applied to the generalized and durable mode of action that
a person may exhibit in one or more wider spheres of social life,
such as work, politics, and interpersonal relations (or in all of
these). When used in this more extended sense, the concept
of habit has been largely synonymous with character or
habitus the latter is a term that traces back historically to the
same linguistic roots as habit. The fact that habit has borne this
entire range of connotations serves as a precaution against
conating particular notions of habit with habit as such. The
assumption, prevalent in the middle decades of the twentieth
century, that habit is a xed, mechanical reaction to discrete
stimuli and thus devoid of subjective meaning is, for example,

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 10 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03084-1 475
476 Habit: History of the Concept
a view that has historically been associated mainly with habit
in the sense of simple behavioral regularities, not with more
complex habitual forms of action.
At no point has the vocabulary of habit been an autono-
mous discourse. To a signicant degree, its usage has shifted
over time because of the different ways in which habit has been
combined with, or distinguished from, other concepts. At one
important period in its history, habit functioned as the
antithesis of instinct, such that all noninstinctual behavior was
regarded as habitual. Prior to and subsequent to this period,
however, habit was ordinarily set over against purposive,
reective types of action characterized by the deliberate selec-
tion of means and ends according to various cognitive and
moral standards; in this case, habitual action served as the
converse of those types of action foregrounded in reective
models of human conduct, such as those favored by many
early- and mid-twentieth-century social scientists. At still other
(albeit briefer) moments, however, habit has been taken not as
the opposite of, but as the precondition for, reexive action.
The same exibility of association has appeared with regard to
moral conduct, which has sometimes been contrasted with
habitual action, other times viewed as dependent upon it.
Conceptual variability has been apparent as well at the
collective level, where the common habits present throughout
a social group have sometime been equated with custom,
whereas other usages dene custom in terms of practices that
result from adherence to established social prescriptions and
are, therefore, distinguishable from actions that have become
automatic owing to repetition or other habit-formation
processes. (For a fuller treatment of the issues in this section,
see Camic, 1986; Funke, 1958; Sparrow and Hutchison, 2013.)
Historical Development
Antiquity to the Early 1800s
The everyday discourse of habit was appropriated and rendered
esoteric by Greek philosophers as they opened pathways for
later social thinkers. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle laid it
down that none of the moral virtues arise in us by nature,
that we are adapted by nature to receive them and are made
perfect by habit (Book 2, Chapter 1) (Aristotle, 1973; for
discussion, see Lockwood, 2013). The same conceptual
vocabulary was incorporated into the philosophical and social
teachings of Plato, Plotinus, Quintilian, Aquinas, William of
Ockham, Luther, Montaigne, Pascal, Locke, and Wolff, among
a great number of other philosophers, theologians, and men of
letters; at the same time that generations of natural philoso-
phers applied the concept in studies of physical and biological
phenomena (Funke, 1958; Sparrow and Hutchison, 2013).
In the Age of the Enlightenment, as part and parcel of the
emerging movement to create a science of man, the concept of
habit received renewed attention from a range of social thinkers
who shared the belief that habit is a widespread and potent
phenomenon in social life, even as they characterized this
phenomenon differently. In France, Claude Adrien Helvetius
(171571) celebrated habit as the wellspring of public and
private morality and accepted it as a principle by which
[humans everywhere] are actuated (Helvetius, [1758]1807:
p. 57); in Scotland, Adam Ferguson (17231816) declared
habit as the force by which the good or bad actions of men
remain with them and become part of their characters
(quoting Hill, 1996: p. 210); while from Prussia Immanuel
Kant (17241804) held that all acquired habits are objec-
tionable that virtue is moral strength in the pursuit of ones
duty, which should never be a matter of habit (Kant, [1798]
1978: pp. 3234). David Hume, Thomas Reid, George Berke-
ley, Etienne Condillac, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Fichte,
Friedrich Schelling, and G.W.F. Hegel were among the many
thinkers who took part in this wide-ranging discussion (on the
thinkers named here and others, see Camic, 1986; Funke, 1958;
Sparrow and Hutchison, 2013).
An Age of Ferment
From the middle of the nineteenth century until the early
decades of the twentieth century, the language of habit was an
even more prominent intellectual presence. This was true in
European as well as in American philosophical, natural scien-
tic, and social scientic thought, sociological thought in
particular.
In England, the concept of habit entered, with varying
degrees of explicitness, into the work of a diverse range of
thinkers that included Jeremy Bentham, James and John Stuart
Mill, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Walter Bagehot, and
Alfred Marshall; in France, into the writings of Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck, August Comte, Alexis de Tocqueville, Frederic LeP-
lay, and Henri Bergson; and in Germany, into the work of
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ferdinand Tnnies, Georg Simmel, and
Edmund Husserl, among many others. In the United States, the
vocabulary of habit, which had long played signicant roles in
the teachings of popular social reformers, churchmen, and
educators, was mobilized in new ways by the founders of
philosophical pragmatism, C.S. Peirce, William James, John
Dewey, and George Herbert Mead (see Shook and Margolis,
2009), by Darwinian natural scientists like Charles Whitman
and Jacques Loeb, and by the rst generation of professional,
university-based social scientists. Among the latter were leading
economists such as Francis Walker, Laurence Laughlin, and
Thorstein Veblen, as well as all of the periods major sociolo-
gists, including Lester Ward, William Graham Sumner, Franklin
Giddings, Albion Small, and W.I. Thomas.
In this respect, the doctrines of contemporary American
sociologists accorded with those of the two towering European
sociological thinkers of the same era, Emile Durkheim
(18581917) and Max Weber (18641920). Durkheims life-
long position, for example, was that habits.are the real forces
which govern us (Durkheim, [190506]1956: p. 152). For
him, as for the American pragmatists, human reection is
a process that generally overloads or paralyzes action; only
when habit is disrupted, and the individual or collective
being is . at a cross-roads situation [facing] a whole range of
possible solutions, does reection emerge in order to restore
equilibrium and allow habits of all kinds to reassert
themselves (Durkheim, [191314]1983: pp. 38, 7980). Given
this understanding, Durkheim constructed a program for the
moral regeneration of modern society that relied heavily on the
force of habit: on developing in children the habit of self
control and restraint and habits of group life; on cultivating
in occupational specialists an absolute regularity in habits

and habits [of social interaction which], as they grow in
strength, are transformed into rules of conduct; and on
instilling in societys leaders a habitus of moral being
(Durkheim, 190203[1961]: pp. 149, 249, 1893[1984]: pp.
187, 302, 190405[1977]: p. 29).
Although engaged with very different intellectual questions,
Max Weber voiced similar views. Concerned with the analysis
of various forms of reective action, Weber nevertheless insis-
ted on the importance of habit, holding that the further we go
back in history, the more we nd that conduct, and particularly
social action, is determined in an ever more comprehensive
sphere exclusively by the disposition toward the purely
habitual; and that individuals are still markedly inuenced
by this force even today, when the great bulk of all everyday
action [continues to occur in the form of an] almost automatic
reaction to habitual stimuli which guide behavior in a course
which has been repeatedly followed (Weber, [1922]1978: pp.
320, 337, 25 (modied translation)). Understood in this way,
the concept of habit gured into Webers treatment of
economic, political, and religious traditionalism, into his
writings on economic, political, legal, and communal action in
the modern world, and even into his analysis of the process by
which ascetic Protestantism promoted the rational spirit of
modern capitalism. Regarding the spirit of capitalism as
a particular habitus, Weber credited the early Calvinists with
creating, out of their religiously conditioned family traditions
and from the religiously inuenced life-style of the environ-
ment, [a distinctive] habitus among individuals which
prepared them in specic ways to live up to the specic
demands of early modern capitalism (Weber, [1910]1968,
[1910]1978: p. 1124).
As Weber, Durkheim, and their sociological contempo-
raries used the concept of habit to refer to forms of action of
moderate as well as broader generality, however, natural
scientists of the period increasingly associated habit with
recurrent human and subhuman activities of much simpler
and more mechanical kinds. This, for instance, was the
practice of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (17441829), and Charles
Darwin (180982) following the example, regularly spoke
of the owering habits of plants, the feeding habits of
insects, and the ying habits of pigeons (Darwin, [1859]
1964: pp. 11, 183; [1872]1975: pp. 2931). This was also
the practice of many European physiologists and
psychologists as they turned attention to the study of the
neural foundations of simple animal and human reexes
to external stimuli, invoking habit to describe neural
pathways that were noninstinctual yet well established
(see Fearing, 1930). This circumscribed usage gained wide
currency among late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-
century American psychologists, who shared with William
James (18421910) the view that even the most complex
habits [are] nothing but concatenated discharges in the
nerve-centres, due to the presence there of systems of
reex paths (James, [1890]1950: p. 108). Taking up this
same formulation and substituting it for various broader
sociological usages, early twentieth-century American
social scientists came to dene the concept of habit in
terms of the physiology of the nervous system,
a formulation that led them to argue that education
and social control are largely dependent upon our ability
Habit: History of the Concept 477
to establish habits habits thus conceptualized in
ourselves and others (quoting Park, [1915]1969; see also
Camic, 1986).
The Demise of Habit
This important shift in usage was part of a broader social
organizational change that occurred as the subject of habit
became the object of ownership battles among university-
based scholars situated in specialized and competing
academic disciplines. Indeed, as members of different
disciplines engaged in turf wars to differentiate their
emerging academic elds from one another, habit assumed
the role of a conceptual pawn, a role unknown to it in earlier
pre-professional writings where proprietary rights to the
concept were not yet in dispute.
The watershed in this development was the behaviorist
movement, which engulfed American psychology in the early
and middle decades of the twentieth century. Launched by
John B. Watson (18781958) in an effort to invest the
discipline of psychology with the prestige that then inhered
in the application of concepts drawn from the natural
sciences, behaviorism claimed the realm of habit as its core
topic of investigation, asserting that every mode of acting .
not belonging to mans hereditary equipment must be
looked upon as a habit habit understood in physiological
terms as muscular and glandular changes which follow
upon a given stimulus. For Watson and his disciples, the
corollary of this argument was that a mechanistic habit-
psychology provided the way to guide society.toward the
control of group and individual behavior (Watson, 1919:
pp. 270, 14, 23) from which corollary it followed that the
academic discipline required for the genuine scientic study
of the social world was not [a social science like] sociology,
but psychology, as it derives from biology, chemistry, and
the other natural sciences (Allport, 1927: pp. 167168).
Because these sweeping ownership claims directly chal-
lenged the bases of their own academic disciplines, social
scientists (as well as humanists) from the period almost
immediately recoiled from the language of habit, ceasing
their use of a concept that had been central to their analysis
of human conduct since antiquity. Eager to stop the
behaviorist campaign to eliminate, as a valid object of
scientic investigation, the reective forms of action that had
previously commanded recognition alongside habitual
forms, sociologists of the era undertook an aggressive
countercampaign to rescue purposive human conduct from
assault. To accomplish this, they deliberately abandoned
their prior use of the discourse of habit, thereby abruptly
purging habitual phenomena from their conceptualization
of human conduct in the social world. This purge was
inaugurated by (a one-time proponent of the concept of
habit) W.I. Thomas (18631947) and Florian Znaniecki
(18821958), whose work attacked the behavioristic
school for its indistinct [application] of the term
habit to [all] uniformities of behavior and insisted that
habit . be restricted to the biological eld, [since] it
involves no conscious, purposeful regulation of [conduct],
but merely . is unreective, [whereas] the uniformity
[characteristic of social life] is not a uniformity of organic
478 Habit: History of the Concept
habits but of consciously followed rules (Thomas and
Znaniecki, [1918]1958: pp. 18491852).
Within a generation, this formulation became social
scientic dogma, eliminating all sociological talk of habit
and replacing it with the language of attitude, which
Thomas and Znaniecki had simultaneously ushered onto
center stage and which subsequently furnished American
social scientists with a new vocabulary for describing recur-
rent tendencies in human conduct but without sacricing
reective action models as the behaviorists had done (Camic,
1986; Fleming, 1967). Analogous movements away from the
concept of habit occurred in European social thought, as
Durkheim and Weber themselves subtracted the concept
from their work; and they occurred as well as in European
and American humanistic literatures (Fisher, 1973; Thomas,
1993).
Following this conceptual sea-change, the discourse of habit
lay dormant in the social sciences from the late 1910s to the
early 1980s, a few isolated exceptions notwithstanding.
Shortly after the start of the behaviorist revolution in
psychology, John Dewey (18591952) insistently harked
back to a broader conception of habit (1922), as Norbert
Elias, Martin Heidegger, Jean Piaget, and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty would subsequently attempt to do in Europe
(Kestenbaum, 1977; Sparrow and Hutchison, 2013; and, for
Elias, [1939]1994; see also Berger and Luckmann, 1966). But
these philosophically oriented interventions failed to stem
the behaviorist tide or the social-scientic rejection of the
concept of habit that had emerged in reaction. Only among
psychologists working in the behaviorist tradition, and
among a few economists concerned with consumer behavior,
did habitual phenomena remain the focus of empirical
research during the long mid-decades of the twentieth
century (Deaton and Muelbaur, 1980; Smith, 1986).
Otherwise, social scientists simply dispensed with the
concept, opting to conceive all human action as though it
were a reective process of selecting means to ends in accord
with normative standards.
Recent Developments
The period from the 1980s to the 2010s has brought the onset
of another reversal, however. Behind this recent development
has been a change in the social-organizational conditions that
led to the demise of social-scientic interest in habit during
the previous historical era. By the closing years of the twen-
tieth century, the intellectual turf warfare among disciplines
that had marked the early to middle decades of that century
was long ended, and its waning rendered increasingly anach-
ronistic the behaviorists proprietary claims on habit. The
obsolescence of these claims, and of the counterclaims that
they had called forth, freed up the concept of habit to reas-
sume some of the broader connotations it once possessed and
to reenter, with scarcely any resistance, the social-scientic
analysis of human conduct.
To be sure, this revival of the language of habit has thus far
been spotty and gradual, and it has left untouched many areas
of the social sciences where the language might arguably be put
to use. Even so, references to concept of habit and a renewed
appreciation of the signicance of the phenomenon have
begun to reappear throughout the social sciences and the
humanities, notably in the work of contemporary philosophers
(Ostrow, 1990; Pollard, 2003; Shook and Margolis, 2009),
social psychologists (Charng et al., 1988; Neal et al., 2006;
Ouellette and Wood, 1998), and economists (Campbell and
Cochrane, 1995; Carroll et al., 2000; Dynan, 2000; Fuhrer,
2000; Kahneman, 2003; Li, 2005; Shachar, 2003).
Moreover, just as they had previously spearheaded the
assault on the discourse of habit, so sociologists have been
particularly active in the current resurrection of the discourse.
To varying degrees, this about-face has been evident in the
writings of sociological theorists of several different
persuasions, all of them of the view that habitual forms of
action warrant inclusion along with reective forms (Archer,
2012; Calhoun et al., 2012; Camic, 1986; Emirbayer and
Mische, 1998; Giddens, 2009; Gronow, 2011; Joas, [1992]
1996; Schatzki et al., 2001; Martin, 2011; Sewell, 2005;
Turner, 2010). Both explicitly and implicitly, this same view
has come to inform research in the specialty areas of
economic sociology (Biggart and Beamish, 2003; White,
2004), the sociology of organizations (Adler, 2010), the
sociology of science (Collins, 2012), the sociology of
morality (Hitlin and Vaisey, 2012), and the sociology of the
body (Shilling, 2008). In a further development, sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu (19302002) drawing on a previously
neglected strand in the work of Weber and Durkheim, has
resuscitated and elaborated the notion of habitus ([1980]
1990), setting it in place as one of the foundation stones of
his oeuvre. Among scholars inuenced by Bourdieus
writings, habitus has also crystallized as a major locus of
theoretical inquiry and empirical investigation (Gorski, 2013;
Hillier and Rooksby, 2005).
Although these numerous lines of recent work remain
generally disconnected from one another after the rst decade
of the twenty-rst century, their simultaneous emergence and
likely future cross-pollination augur the return of the concept
of habit to a position of centrality in social-scientic theory
and research, and, accompanying this development, the
transformation of exclusively reective models of action into
analytical approaches concerned with the complex and
changing relationship between reective and habitual forms
of human conduct in the social world.
See also: Attitude: History of Concept; Conceptual History:
Begriffsgeschichte; Discipline Formation in the Social Sciences;
Enlightenment: Impact on the Social Sciences; Habitus: History
of a Concept; Scientic Disciplines, History of; Sociology,
History of; Weberian Social Thought, History of.
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