I was born in 1948 [in Germany], so I was a postwar child. Now the shorthand way to put it would be to say I grew up with a Nazi father and a Social Democratic mother in a deeply Catholic environment…

I had a very strong interest in understanding the history of Nazism. Where did it come from? How could it happen? Why can people who are not devils believe such things and do such things? …

I had read an article by a German educational theorist, in which George Herbert Mead was mentioned, and his understanding of language. When I read it I fell in love with him, so to speak. As when you fall in love, you’ve got a rational thing to say, okay, I have to find good reason to be together with this woman. But it’s clear, maybe in the first 30 seconds or so of your encounter, that that’s the right person for me. So I would describe this as falling in love...

I think the social sciences are dominated by two ways of understanding human action: an overly rationalist one and what I call a normativist way of thinking. Now in a very short passage of the book on creativity, I tried to show that a model of creative action is not only more encompassing than the other two, but that it’s necessary even for the questions with which these two other approaches deal…

I decided to go to Berlin… That was in early 1971. I wasn’t sure that I should go to Berlin, but I knew that I wanted to leave Munich.

My vision is to say, no, a revised understanding of action changes our understanding of macro processes, on the society level, maybe on the global level. It’s not just the changed understanding of micro situations of interactions…

… the enormous influence of Luhmann’s systems theory, which does not bring systems theories into a fruitful confrontation with the character of human actions but completely demolishes the character of human action. So whenever you import or transfer a set of theories that did not originate in the social sciences to the social sciences, or to the humanities, I think one can only do that if it extends our understanding of the creative character of human action, not if one neglects this or if it leads us away from our attention on this. I think that happens in large parts of the theoretical debates in the social sciences.

The three features which are characteristic of my understanding of creativity and of the creativity of human actions are the non-teleological orientation; a different attitude to your own pre-reflective impulses, and pre-reflective perceptions of the worlds; and a different attitude to the symbolic boundaries.

Action always is a process. Action obviously is a dynamic process… Action in my sense is the way in which human beings exist in the world…

…the "I" in Mead’s model of the personality was intended to describe situations of creativity…. So the "I" is a pre-moral, pre-reflective instance of productivity, spontaneity, in the person…

The idea in Mead is you have an original interplay between these impulses, the "I" and the responses, or to be more precise, your perception of the responses, which have added consequences of your expression of your impulses. There is a connection between these.

All this brings me to your question of a fluid group, of a creative group. I think if a group wants to become creative, something has to happen on this level of symbolic boundaries around the self. It doesn’t become a creative group if it’s an aggregation of autonomous individuals. The problem for such a group is to bring the members to open up in that sense, and to enter into a sort of collective sphere of pre-reflective impulses.

Hans Joas grew up in postwar Germany "with a Nazi father and a Social Democratic mother in a deeply Catholic environment." Accordingly, Joas began a life-long struggle with the phenomenon of Nazism: Where did it come from? How could it happen? "Why can people who are not devils believe such things and do such things?"

The blind spot of theories of action in the social sciences, he believes, is that they fail to understand that creativity not only belongs to a particular type of action, but to the common ground of all forms of human action. There are different notions of human action in social sciences. On one hand, there is the so-called rational model that dominates the discipline of economics and vast fields of political science. On the other hand there is the normativist understanding of action that dominates sociology. Both of them are insufficient because they do not embrace the phenomenon of creativity. Joas develops his creativity-based notion of human action by building on the tradition of American pragmatism. The essence of pragmatism, says Joas, is everyday creativity.

"Action in my sense," says Joas, "is the way in which human beings exist in the world." Three common features characterize the creativity of action: (1) a non-teleological orientation, (2) a different attitude toward pre-reflective impulses and perceptions, and (3) a different attitude toward symbolic boundaries. Thus, the three features of (creative) action reframe the relationship between (1) body and mind, (2) action and reflection, and (3) self and world from a non-dualistic, pragmatic point of view.

I left the interview with three main impressions: that social sciences have fallen short of grasping the creative nature of human action (by proposing normative or logical frameworks); that if we take Joas’s notion of human action as starting point we need to come up with an entirely different (non-dualistic) conceptualization of all macro-social phenomena; and that maybe the biggest blind spot in the social sciences is that we know only very little, if anything, about how this deeper view of creative action applies to more complex and collective social entities such as groups, organizations, and networked relationships.

How does all of this relate to the initial key issue of Nazism. In the words of Joas: "The question is, how can we accept the creativity of every actor without coming to a totalitarian conclusion?"