Simon Susen is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at City University London.

Bryan S. Turner is the Presidential Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York. Concurrently, he is the Director of the Institute for Religion, Politics and Society at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne.

The Spirit of Luc Boltanski

Essays on the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’

By Simon Susen, Bryan S. Turner

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2014 Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-296-4

Contents

List of Contributors, ix,
Preface Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, xxiii,
Part I. Introductory Remarks,
Luc Boltanski: His Life and Work– An Overview Simon Susen, 3,
Three Theories of Justice: Preliminary Reflections Bryan S. Turner, 29,
The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Chapter Outline Simon Susen, 49,
Part II. Luc Boltanski and (Post-) Classical Sociology,
1. Figures of Descent from Classical Sociological Theory: Luc Boltanski Bridget Fowler, 67,
Part III. Luc Boltanski and Pragmatism,
2. Did You Say ‘Pragmatic’? Luc Boltanski’s Sociology from a Pragmatist Perspective Louis Quéré and Cédric Terzi, 91,
3. Why (Not) Pragmatism? Tanja Bogusz, 129,
4. The Moral Idealism of Ordinary People as a Sociological Challenge: Reflections on the French Reception of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s On Justification Cyril Lemieux, 153,
Part IV. Luc Boltanski and Critique,
5. Is There Such a Thing as a ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’? Reflections on Luc Boltanski’s On Critique Simon Susen (Translated by Simon Susen), 173,
6. Strengths and Limitations of Luc Boltanski’s On Critique Rob Stones, 211,
7. A Renewal of Social Theory That Remains Necessary: The Sociology of Critical Capacity Twenty Years After Peter Wagner, 235,
8. Enlarging Conceptions of Testing Moments and Critical Theory: Economies of Worth, On Critique, and Sociology of Engagements Laurent Thévenot (Translated by Amy Jacobs), 245,
Part V. Luc Boltanski and Critical Sociology,
9. Pierre Bourdieu and the Early Luc Boltanski (1960–1975): Collective Ethos and Individual Difference Derek Robbins, 265,
10. Beyond Pragmatic Sociology: A Theoretical Compromise between ‘Critical Sociology’ and the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’ Mohamed Nachi, 293,
11. Towards a Dialogue between Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘Critical Sociology’ and Luc Boltanski’s ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’ Simon Susen (Translated by Simon Susen), 313,
Part VI. Luc Boltanski and Political Sociology,
12. The Promise of Pragmatic Sociology, Human Rights, and the State Kate Nash, 351,
13. ‘The Political’ in the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’: Reading Boltanski with Lefort and Castoriadis Paul Blokker, 369,
14. Axel Honneth and Luc Boltanski at the Epicentre of Politics Mauro Basaure, 391,
15. The Civil Sphere and On Justification: Two Models of Public Culture Irène Eulriet, 413,
16. Luc Boltanski in Euroland William Outhwaite and David Spence, 425,
17. Reflections on the Indignation of the Disprivileged and the Underprivileged Bryan S. Turner, 445,
Part VII. Luc Boltanski and Contemporary Issues,
18. Arranging the Irreversible: The Female Condition and Contradiction Bruno Karsenti (Translated by Peter Hamilton), 471,
19. Luc Boltanski and the Gift: Beyond Love, beyond Suspicion…? Ilana F. Silber, 485,
20. The World of Worth in the Transhuman Condition: Prolegomena to a Proactionary Sociology Steve Fuller, 501,
21. Luc Boltanski and the Problem of Time: Notes towards a Pragmatic Sociology of the Future Lisa Adkins, 517,
Part VIII. Luc Boltanski in Conversation,
22. An Introduction to ‘”Whatever Works”: Political Philosophy and Sociology – Luc Boltanski in Conversation with Craig Browne’ Craig Browne, 541,
23. ‘Whatever Works’: Political Philosophy and Sociology – Luc Boltanski in Conversation with Craig Browne Luc Boltanski and Craig Browne, 549,
24. Sociology of Critique or Critical Theory? Luc Boltanski and Axel Honneth in Conversation with Robin Celikates Luc Boltanski, Axel Honneth, and Robin Celikates (Translated by Simon Susen), 561,
25. The Fragility of Reality: Luc Boltanski in Conversation with Juliette Rennes and Simon Susen Luc Boltanski, Juliette Rennes, and Simon Susen (Translated by Simon Susen), 591,
Part IX. Luc Boltanski and His Critics,
Luc Boltanski and His Critics: An Afterword Simon Susen, 613,
Index of Names, 803,
Index of Subjects, 813,

CHAPTER 1

Figures of Descent from Classical Sociological Theory: Luc Boltanski

Bridget Fowler

Luc Boltanski, whose work is reaching a crescendo, has made an enduring contribution to sociology. His distinction lies chiefly in his inventive crossing of the approach to domination in the Marxist and Weberian traditions with the interest in moral and symbolic representations of the Durkheimian tradition. Yet, it also bears all the fascination of his early alliance with his master, Bourdieu, and his subsequent public break from him. In particular, we see the mature Boltanski wrestling productively with a fruitful conceptual framework for understanding the contemporary mode of production, and the reappearance within it of mass precariousness in relation to work. Within this framework, perhaps the main virtue of Boltanski’s sociology has been to enrich our understanding of subjective meanings at moments of indeterminacy. Thus, he puts under his microscope the rationales for subaltern actors’ private and sometimes secret actions, such as abortion (e.g. 2004), as well as the evolving ideological legitimation selected by the dominant class (e.g. with Ève Chiapello, 2005 [1999]) and the justifications for oppositional moments of mass resistance (2011 [2009]).

There are three phases to Boltanski’s writing. In his initial period, in which he sometimes co-authored articles with Bourdieu, even his independent publications possess close affinities with the latter’s constructivist realism (see, for instance, 1987). Yet, already at this stage, he shows signs of being a critical advocate of Bourdieusian theory, disagreeing occasionally on less important matters. In his middle period (1990s), Boltanski offers insights into different social universes (cités) or justifications, but now within a wider framework of a de facto relativist perspectivism (2006 [1991]; 2012a [1990]; 1999 [1993]). His last period elaborates an original critical theory and firmly eschews a normative relativism, combining sociological enquiry with political or ethical reflections.

Certain modes of analysis are constant throughout these three phases. These include, notably, his dissection of the ideology and doxa shared by avant-garde neo-liberal policymakers. This long-standing research underpins his early work (2008 [1976]), the mid-career On Justification(2006 [1991]: 313), and his later magisterial reading of managerial texts, with Chiapello, in The New Spirit of Capitalism(2005 [1999]; see also 2008: 197–208). I would also claim that, despite his later distancing from Bourdieu’s critical sociology, his own publications continue to bear many traces of his teacher’s distinctive analysis.

I. The First Phase: Boltanski under the Aegis of Bourdieu

In the wake of Bourdieu’s influential studies of social reproduction and education (Bourdieu and Boltanski, 1975a), their collaboration usefully extended Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism to linguistic fetishism (Bourdieu and Boltanski, 1975a). Summoning up the intimidating power of standard speech, this article first broached those themes that were to become familiar later to students of Bourdieu’s sociolinguistics (1992). The two authors chart how speech in the Parisian dialect, the most legitimate linguistic form in France, was rewarded from the fourteenth century on with the profits of distinction. Consequently, the dialects of the devalued strata, such as Languedoc peasants, were viewed as merely ‘vulgar’ modes of speech.

In their view, although the child’s familial linguistic ‘heritage’ is early marked on the body as a corporeal hexis, this could be expanded and changed within the educational arena:

We seek to lift the lid which bears down on the heads of the poorest. Just as medicine has liberated us from infantile mortality, once seen as an unconquerable frontier, so our education ought to avoid the mutilation that the current social system inflicts from generation to generation on the underprivileged. (Bourdieu and Boltanski, 1975a: 11; my translation)

Yet, even in the 1970s, these two sociologists developed certain divergences. One such difference is over popular art. Whilst Bourdieu always writes about the concept of popular art as a form of populist illusion, Boltanski quietly applies Bourdieu’s own analysis of the processes of artistic consecration to the popular art form of bandes dessinées (comic strips) (Boltanski, 1975; see also, for instance: Fowler, 2012; Hesmondhalgh, 2006). Thus, he points to the 1960s emergence of a ‘field’ within this junior branch of art, i.e. a set of structures that developed aspects of a scholarly culture. Indeed, the innovative elite whose work he discussed at the time – Gotlib, Druillet, Fred and Claire Bretécher, Schulz – was in the process of acquiring lasting reputations, as we now know (1975: 47 and 50). Here, his cogent arguments contrast with Bourdieu’s dismissals of the artistic pretensions of such popular comic strip artists, which the older man saw as tragically ill-founded.

Perhaps their best-known collaboration was La production de l’idéologie dominante (2008 [1976]), an initial sketch in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales for the subsequent New Spirit of Capitalism. The early article is a brilliant content analysis of key texts of social policy (‘new vulgate’) and a sociological scrutiny of its sources. The emergent managerial structure of feeling is distinguished both from the Vichy government and from post-war orthodoxy as an ‘enlightened conservatism’. Launching a modernizing agenda, this claimed to be yet another Third Way, appearing after MacMillan’s 1938 Middle Way tract and anticipating Giddens’s 1998 intervention of the same name. This influential cell was drawn from the Right and the Left, including prominent figures such as Poniatowski, d’Estaing, Crozier, Bloch-Lainé and Delors. They aimed to retain Keynesianism yet to promote rational progress under the control of a plan (2008: 61). As Bourdieu and Boltanski detect, however, this elite also had radical plans for ‘unblocking’ French society, including the abandonment of the small peasant and artisan classes in favour of larger-scale enterprises, and the removal of employers’ union commitments, the long-established heritage of workers’ struggles. Revealingly, their fêting of both the market and Americanism alternated with a more prophetic self-image as a pioneering ‘avant-garde’. Hence, these reformers’ fight against the ‘dinosaurs’ of French bureaucracy and trade unionism mirrored, in the eyes of the two sociologists, that of modernist painters against an obdurate academy. As they argue, the aesthetic plays a double role here both as a long-term investment that can lead to economic rewards and as a form of ‘spiritual supplement’ (supplément de l’âme; 2008: 102–103 and 152).

This was the last major work on which the two collaborated. Boltanski was to pursue many similar concerns to Bourdieu after the late 1970s. Nevertheless, he now ploughed his furrow without him.

II. The Middle Period: Boltanski’s Neo-Weberian Typology of Social Worlds

Boltanski has argued that Bourdieu came to focus too much on symbolic violence at the cost of a detailed phenomenology of actors’ subjective experience, too narrowly on the domination of ‘agents’ at the cost of critically resourceful ‘actors’, and too restrictively on scientific sociology to the exclusion of any openly normative analysis (2011 [2009]: 18–23). In particular, it was premised on a gulf between the everyday world of agents and the objectified scientific understanding of the sociologist. To redress these gaps required substituting a ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’ for Bourdieusian ‘critical sociology’ (2011 [2009]: 23–29 and 45–49). Founded on American pragmatism, and pragmatism’s French heritage in Gilles Deleuze, this new sociology views actors as possessing and implementing their own critiques, whilst also going beyond mere ‘domination’ to address intricate questions about its forms and intensity (2011 [2009]: 47–49).

In Boltanski’s middle period, this initially required addressing the multiple worlds contemporary actors inhabit, each of which possessed its distinctive ethos, intellectual tradition, and practical consequences (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006 [1991]: 349). This is less a break with than an elaboration of Bourdieu’s long-held concern with the divergent fields of modernity (see Bourdieu, 1996a [1992], 1996b [1988], and 2012). Boltanski and Thévenot initially present these clashing worlds (cités) within a purely relativist framework, tracing their intellectual precursors within the history of ideas (Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau, etc.) whilst locating their descendants within current management texts. Yet, by 1999 [1993], Boltanski also begins to chart sociologically various responses to the vision of others’ suffering. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, becomes – and remains – his main ethical anchorage for this work. Subsequently, he focuses forensically on public indignation over notable scandals (Boltanski, 2012a [1990], pt. 3), much as Bourdieu had analysed the political and cultural dynamics of the Dreyfus Affair (Bourdieu, 1996a [1992]: 131 and 341). In another break with Bourdieu, however, Boltanski addresses the normative questions concerning the benchmarks of a truly social existence. For him, the latter is represented in the ideal-types of social justice and disinterested love, or agape (the inner-worldly model of generosity proffered by St. Francis and the Franciscan monks; 2012a [1990]).

Despite their marked logical rigour, erudition, and empirical breadth, in my view the works of this period lack the originality and freshness of Boltanski’s latest stage. Nevertheless, we should note that from 1993 onwards an important shift has occurred, a move away from cognitive relativism. He now trenchantly rejects the anti-realist scepticism of certain post-1968 philosophers, notably Baudrillard (Boltanski, 1999 [1993]: 176–177).

We may also note in passing that On Justification posits the ‘polity model’ as the highest common denominator of the various cités or worlds, constituting – as it does – a combination of a Rousseauian civic world, a Saint-Simonian industrial world, and a Smithian market world. Here he makes illuminating recourse to Durkheim’s Socialism and Saint-Simon as a way forward to combine these, the first two particularly (2006 [1991]: 66 and 285–292).

This thematic concern with rival cités or world views was Boltanski’s term for Weber’s theodicies and Bourdieu’s ‘sociodicies’. It was later to be developed more powerfully. The ‘inspired cité‘ of Augustine – the ‘cité by projects’ of feudalism – is now interpreted as having been transformed into secular artistic projects within contemporary Western societies. It is this desire to pursue trajectories chosen from the ‘[artistic] city by projects’ that animates painters, architects, designers, and increasingly even creative entrepreneurs and managers (Boltanski, 2004). The New Spirit of Capitalism clarifies further how these different cités are historically ordered, re-baptizing them as successive spirits of capitalism. Crucially, however, unlike earlier middle-period works, The New Spirit of Capitalism adopts a classical unmasking technique, showing that the ‘artistic spirit’ is a form of existence that in practice is largely unattainable for the working masses. Men and women who lack privileges cannot obtain the lightness of being that allows them to participate in the borderless world of transnational artists and networked managers, those elites who have broken down the ‘Chinese walls’ that once kept liquid capitalist modernity at bay (Marx and Engels, 2012 [1848]). Boltanski’s recent objectivist critique thus usefully supplements the disturbing kaleidoscopic perspectivism of On Justification with its relativist underpinnings (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006 [1991]).

III. The Late Phase

Boltanski has written his three greatest works in his most recent phase – that is, from 1999 onwards. These all illuminate aspects of contemporary or historical societies whilst succeeding simultaneously in creating stimulating theoretical debate. Enigmes et complots [Enigmas and Conspiracies] (2012b) adds to his oeuvre a comparative assessment of different national trajectories, focusing closely on Britain and France. This masterly book is much more than it first appears. Taking as his subject the detective fiction of Conan Doyle and Georges Simenon, and the spy novels of John Buchan, Eric Ambler, and John le Carré, Boltanski also highlights by these means his distinctive historical sociology. Emphasizing the important divergences between these writers in terms of literary structure, Boltanski relates these not just to the cultural determinants of the detective and spy genres – criminal and police memoirs, etc. – but, more widely, to the structural determinants through the divergent French and British histories in the second half of the nineteenth century. Detective novels are viewed here as part of the literary field, although Boltanski once more expands the earlier Bourdieusian model of consecration to include canonization from a popular base (2012b: 66). In a striking analysis of various modes of passage or crossovers between the popular and the literary field, Kafka’s variant on the detective genre, The Trial, is examined as exemplifying a symbolic revolution within the novel form (2012b: 369–376). Kafka’s modernist reassemblage incorporated many of the classic narrative events of the subgenre – the arrest, the trial, the condemnation of the guilty man – but only in order to subtly transform them. In Boltanski’s perceptive Durkheimian coda, the novelist from the newly recognized Czechoslovakian nation is interpreted as playing on the way that the nation-state itself had become sacred, subtly laying bare the manner in which fears about national and social identity are imprinted on minds and bodies (2012b: 376).

For Boltanski, the rise of positivist sociology in the 1850s inaugurates a mode of investigation of those social forces underlying and structuring perceived regularities of social action. Hence, in such disparate disciplinary fields as sociology and psychiatry, where new mental illnesses (such as paranoia) were to be diagnosed in the late nineteenth century, inexorable causal laws seemed now to constrain subjects who had once appeared in liberal theory to be the sovereign arbiters of their own fates (2012b: 247–249). Such modes of investigating modernity have also been profoundly altered by the nation-state and bio-power as key figurations for the construction of social reality. Here, however, Boltanski usefully remedies a conspicuous absence in Foucault’s discussion of governance: namely, the question of how the transnational economic power possessed by capital is linked to the construction of the nation-state. Boltanski observes that capital possesses little respect for national territories, yet must be endlessly appeased by national governments. This constellation of events raises questions about the inner contradictions of capitalist power, which in these novels take the form of ‘hermeneutic contradictions’:

To a surface reality, no doubt illusory, although it has an official status, is opposed a deep reality, hidden, threatening, unofficial, but certainly more real. The adventures of the conflicts between these two realities – REALITY/ against/reality – constitute the main linking thread of the work […]. Thus the appearance and very rapid development of the detective novel, then the spy novel, […] the identification of paranoia by psychiatry, the development of the social sciences and especially of sociology […] are all testaments to a new way of problematizing reality and working on the contradictions found within it. (2012b: 15; my translation)

The most memorable detective novels are set apart by the art with which they approach this anxiety about the nature of reality (2012b: 38). In two striking chapters on the detective genre, we can see what Boltanski owes to the analysis of social interests and perspectives associated with both Marx and Weber. He gives a persuasive examination both of the narratives featuring Sherlock Holmes – the diplomatic ‘detective of the great’ (2012b: 99), engaged in the ‘art for art’s sake’ of detection (2012b: 86) – and of the very different novels featuring the police detective, Maigret. Maigret’s identification is not so much with the elite as with the French Republic itself, and thus to a humanist solution to the troubles besetting the administration.

(Continues…)Excerpted from The Spirit of Luc Boltanski by Simon Susen, Bryan S. Turner. Copyright © 2014 Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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