| Summary/Abstract |
This article reads Alexander Wendt’s Quantum Mind and Social Science as a work of social theory. A crucial element of any social theory is its account of action or agency. I explore Wendt’s quantum theory of social action by analysing two issues. First, Wendt argues that the success of quantum decision theory implies that human behaviour is quantum and therefore is likely to have been produced by a quantum brain. I interrogate this assumption and argue that it rests on the claim that mathematical descriptions map human and social reality in a realistic way. Second, Wendt combines quantum measurement, quantum linguistics, and quantum decision theory into a contextual account of human agency. On this image, social action arises out of connections to interwoven phenomenological, social, and temporal contexts. I suggest that this account of agency is appealing in some ways, but that social theorists have been working on a similar image outside the physics constraint for some time. I conclude that while insights from quantum social science should be an essential component of any post-classical social theory, the task of theorising social agency should not take place exclusively under the constraints of quantum physics or other mathematical descriptions.
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