Abstract
Luc Boltanski’s programme of pragmatic sociology, now gaining substantial attention among English-speaking sociologists, was forged in opposition to the supposed excesses and blind spots of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’. After outlining the main lines of development of Boltanski’s project and emphasizing the major points of difference with Bourdieu, the article offers a critical Bourdieusian response to pragmatic sociology. It highlights a number of ways in which Boltanski’s position is based on a misreading or distortion of Bourdieu’s ideas, is less unlike Bourdieu’s position than he claims and suffers from analytical shortcomings. This is not to say there is nothing of value in Boltanski’s work, but overall it offers useful pointers to be accommodated rather than a thoroughgoing conceptual revolution.
For several decades now, Luc Boltanksi has been busily crafting a distinctive analytical lens through which to examine social life. All the ingredients for sociological success are present: a neat collection of concepts and phrases that can readily be applied to a diverse array of topics, a philosophical anthropology anchoring them in a specific conception of human beings, an ambitious characterization of contemporary Western society and the historical mutations that have forged it, sustained reflection on the relationship between the sociological and the political, and even an identifying appellation, or set of appellations, facilitating the impression of coherence and portability between advocates – in this case, ‘pragmatic sociology’, ‘French pragmatism’ and ‘the pragmatic sociology of critique’. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Boltanski’s vision has long since burst out of its French cradle and attracted the attention of Anglophone sociologists, not only those interested in showcasing the particularities of Gallic thought (Frère, 2004; Mottier, 2019) or exploring the latest developments in social theory (Baert and da Silva, 2010; Susen and Turner, 2014), but also those searching for concepts to put to use or hypotheses to test in empirical enquiry on their subject of choice (see the special issue of European Journal of Social Theory on ‘Pragmatic Sociology’, vol. 14, no. 3, 2011; Samuel and Kanji, 2020) .
Like the other major export of French sociology in recent times, actor-network theory (ANT), Boltanski’s particular brand of pragmatism received some initial patronage from the man who dominated the field in the late twentieth century: Pierre Bourdieu. Also like ANT, specifically the version championed by Bruno Latour, Boltanksi not only broke from Bourdieu in the 1980s but deployed Bourdieu’s sociology as a critical foil for self-positioning. Boltanski’s break, however, was a deeper cut. A long-time colleague and collaborator of Bourdieu’s, Boltanski was no thrusting newcomer to the field eager to oust the old guard but someone who had helped from the start build a style of sociology and set of thinking tools and who was now turning against them, dissatisfied with the direction in which they were being taken and yielding the impression that deep immersion in that style of sociology had bred knowledgeable disaffection. Perhaps for that same reason Bourdieu seemed unwilling to openly respond to Boltanski’s new path, despite it being laid on a foundation of implicit swipes at the former chief. No such reticence was in evidence regarding ANT – in his late lectures on the sociology of science, Bourdieu (2004) delivered a withering, if brief, assessment of ANT’s contribution. Concerning Boltanski, however, there was nothing. Nor does there seem to have been any substantial response from those working in the Bourdieusian vein, even those, like Loïc Wacquant, typically unafraid to call out blatant misreadings and strategic self-positioning (e.g. Wacquant, 2001). There have been some comparisons of the two projects, for sure (see contributions to Susen and Turner, 2014, especially Part V), but a head-on critical rejoinder has failed to emerge.
The aim of this article is to begin to plug that gap by offering a Bourdieusian response to Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology. A definitive assessment of Boltanski’s project in the round it does not claim to be – instead the task is to focus on the major points of divergence, claimed or hidden, between the two thinkers with a view to suggesting where pragmatic sociology falls short. To that end, I will sketch out the main lines of Boltanski’s project as it has unfolded since the 1980s, including his later endeavour to reconcile his approach with Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’, as he describes it. The response, building on provisional remarks elsewhere (Atkinson, 2016), will be twofold. First, Boltanski’s depiction of Bourdieu’s sociology, so crucial for demonstrating his difference from, and advance over, his former colleague, is highly questionable. In fact, posturing aside, Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology has every appearance of being no different from critical sociology when it comes to some of the major charges levelled at the latter. Second, Boltanski’s arguments constantly beg the question, especially in relation to power, competence and resources, yielding a partial analytical framework crying out for Bourdieusian support. This is not to say there is nothing of value in Boltanski’s contribution, but, overall, it offers useful lessons for Bourdieusian sociology rather than a necessary replacement.
The Bourdieusian phase
There was little in Boltanski’s early work with Bourdieu to suggest that he would renounce the style of sociology they built together. Having joined Bourdieu’s Centre for European Sociology in the 1960s (Swartz, 1997), he was a major contributor to some of the earliest research projects based there. This included the analysis of photography as a middle-brow art, to which Boltanski and Chamboredon contributed a chapter, grounding differences in subjective expectations and orientations among professional photographers to differences of social origin and class-based ‘manners’ (Bourdieu et al., 1990: Chapter 5). Even as Bourdieu went on to develop his celebrated conceptual toolkit of capital, habitus and field, Boltanski happily deployed them in his own studies. He did, admittedly, take them in novel directions. He was the first, for example, to consider non-traditional cultural forms in terms of fields, his particular specimen being comic strips (Boltanski, 1975), and he took an interest in the fact that some people can be positioned in more than one field at a time (Boltanski, 1973). When Bourdieu (1984) rethought class from top to bottom, positing the existence of a multi-dimensional social space homologous with a space of lifestyles, emphasizing the role of ‘symbolic struggles’ – struggles over classifications and evaluations of the world – and drawing attention to ‘class sense’ – our sense of our place in the world relative to others – Boltanski was a major aid, co-authoring substantial staging-post arguments and pursuing particular case studies at length (Bourdieu and Boltanski, 1975; Boltanski, 1987 [1982]; Boltanski and Thévenot, 1983). True enough, Boltanski’s main interest tended to be in uses of language and their role in shaping everyday understandings (Robbins, 2014), perhaps pushing Bourdieu further on this than he would have gone by himself, but he still managed to fit it into the general framework that Bourdieu was elaborating.
Then, when Boltanski was well into his forties, came the turning point. In a series of key works, often written with new-found collaborators, he began to pursue novel interests and outline an alternative framework (Boltanski, 1999 [1993]; 2011 [2009]; 2012 [1990]). Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999; 2006 [1991]; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005 [1999]). If it now goes under the label of ‘pragmatic sociology’ or ‘French pragmatism’, it is in good part because, like the American pragmatism of James or Dewey, it pays particular attention to instances of when things ‘go wrong’. In Boltanski’s case, the interest is in when things go wrong for people in their everyday lives – more specifically, when a dispute arises and people are forced to justify or explain their own actions or the actions of others – because this reveals much about the assumptions underpinning social relations in between these ‘critical moments’. At first, he investigated this theme while still friendly with Bourdieu and broadly in agreement with him. Following Bourdieu’s increasing interest in the statistical technique of multiple correspondence analysis, a factorial method designed to detect the major geometric oppositions within data and thus capable of modelling the structure of specific fields, Boltanski duly conducted a factorial analysis of the characteristics of disputes aired in the leading French newspaper and examined their homologies with class and other factors (Boltanski et al., 1984; reproduced and modified in Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: Part III). By the end of the 1980s, however, he had become convinced that the analysis of disputes and justification required a fresh framework radically different from Bourdieu’s. 1
From critical sociology to the sociology of critique
The starting point of this new framework is that people are intensely concerned with justice and ready to denounce what they believe to be unfair or scandalous. It might be the actions of a specific person, or it might be another entity or ‘actant’ identified by the denouncer – a group, a system, an organization, etc. – and it might be a small-scale and rather quotidian disagreement or mushroom into a full-blown public affair. The point is, the denouncer believes the accused violates a specific yardstick of worth – that what they do, in other words, is unjustified, and threatens the worth of the denouncer. The accused, perhaps operating as a representative of an entity, can respond, but often the real source of disagreement stems from the fact that the denouncer and the denounced are working with different definitions of what makes something or someone worthy or just. Here Boltanski introduces probably the best-known aspect of his argument: the existence of six major principles of worth, or justification, that people invoke. Identified through empirical research into disputes but also a lengthy trawl through political philosophy and instructional books on behaviour, these principles are sometimes referred to as polities, cités or ‘orders of worth’. Each is said to have its own ‘grammar’ – its own linguistic rules and regularities in how to describe, frame and evaluate people, events and objects – and its own ‘world’ – a collection of archetypes, people, objects and practices typically associated with it.
First, there is the ‘inspired’ polity. Finding its fullest philosophical articulation in the writings of St Augustine, this polity defines worth and justice in terms of grace and creativity, attaches importance to the expression of emotion and valorizes those of a spiritual or artistic bent. The ‘domestic’ polity, second, revolves around interpersonal esteem and recognition, with trust as the lynchpin, finds a philosophical advocate in Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and positions those heading traditional, family-based hierarchies as people of worth – relatives and clan chiefs but also bosses of enterprises. Third, the polity of ‘fame’ or ‘renown’ defines worth in terms of popular opinion – worth derives from the fact that someone/thing is believed to be worthy by many. Anchored in a Hobbesian view of the world, the celebrity is its paragon. Fourth, the ‘civic’ polity, of which Rousseau was the philosophical mouthpiece, anchors justice in a notion of the ‘common good’ and vaunts group membership and belonging. The ‘market’ polity, reflected in the writings of Adam Smith, reduces worth and justness down to money – how profitable or economical something is – and entails a grammar of buyers and sellers. Finally, there is the ‘industrial’ polity, in which worth is defined in terms of how efficient something or someone is. Saint-Simonesque, it positions the expert as the arbiter and archetype of worth.
Any particular situation or event, then, can be justified or denounced on the basis of any combination of these polities, and disputes arise not only when people disagree whether an overt justification is valid, as in debates over whether something or someone really is efficient, trustworthy, and so on. They also boil up when there is disagreement between specific parties about which order of worth matters and how it tallies with others. Something may be justified by one party by reference to the market order of worth (it makes money), for example, but denounced by others on the basis of the civic order of worth (it does not serve the common good). Situations where the presence of evaluations relating to one polity are challenged on the basis that evaluations from a different polity may be more equitable, often entailing some degree of scrutiny by relevant parties and leading to a final conclusion or compromise, Boltanski dubs ‘tests’.
Boltanski’s most elaborate analysis of disputes is undoubtedly his history, written with Eve Chiapello (2005 [1999]), of the changing orders of worth commonly invoked to justify capitalism (see also Boltanski, 2008). In the early days of smaller-scale production and family firms, capitalism was rationalized on the grounds of domestic and commercial principles – money-making was good, but also capitalists were seen as benevolent and trustworthy father figures. Eventually this gave way to a justification of capitalism based on civic and industrial principles – capitalism is the most efficient mode of production and benefits all. This was, in turn, met with critique in the 1960s from those invoking the inspired order of worth – capitalism was seen as stifling authentic human existence, freedom and creativity. Yet this ‘artistic’ critique was then incorporated into the justification for capitalism by the 1990s, as demonstrated by the explosion of management literature privileging flexibility, interpersonal connection, creativity and employee self-fulfilment in its vision of good practice.
The critique of critical sociology
From the perspective just outlined, the major problems with Bourdieu’s sociology are as follows. First, Bourdieu’s concepts are unsuited to the analysis of concrete, everyday situations because the notion of habitus entails a conception of dispositions, or ‘internalised determinations’ and ‘incorporated constraints’, that ‘determine…behaviour in all circumstances’ and thus replace the observable uncertainty of interaction with an unrelenting logic of necessity (Boltanski, 2003: 159–60; 2011 [2009]: 22, 165; 2012 [1990]: 29–30, 39, 286; Boltanski et al., 2014b: 593). The habitus, complains Boltanski, is like ‘a kind of internal computer system’ automatically calculating options for people who thus ‘never act consciously’ (Boltanski et al., 2014a: 563). People may well have habits, of course, but they are irrelevant to the analysis of justification struggles (Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 39, 43). Second, Bourdieu’s critical sociology casts all social relations in terms of domination and symbolic violence (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 20). It thus ignores the critical capacities of people themselves – their competence and willingness to call out an injustice rather than just passively accept it (p. 26) – and the clash of incompatible points of view entangled with it (p. 67). It makes no space for the possibility of relations and exchanges devoid of power relations, like relations of love or gift exchanges, and instead posits secret interests or ‘unconscious strategies’ – a nonsense term, according to Boltanski – of which the individuals implicated are unable to be aware and which, if they were told of them, they might vehemently and earnestly deny (Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 83, 140–4, 149, 280–1; 2011 [2009]: 20, 46). Yet there is a fatal tension in critical sociology: since Bourdieu never outlined a philosophical anthropology – a basic conception of human nature – he has no basis for his critique; no justification for why domination is bad and should be challenged (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 22).
Third, and following on from the second problem, Bourdieu assumes an asymmetry between his sociological critique and everyday critique (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 21). The sociologist’s vision and critique are, in other words, arrogantly held to be better, truer, closer to how things are, than anyone else’s, even though Bourdieu’s obsession with the omnipresence of unconscious interests and strategies logically erases the possibility of such a disinterested analysis (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005 [1999]: 455). It also overlooks the fact that sociological discourses circulate through and are re-appropriated by others in their own critiques. Finally, and flowing from all of the above, Bourdieu over-emphasizes the importance of social class, and not only because relentless individualization means people themselves barely see the world in those terms any more. Migration and globalization have obliterated any chance of identifying classes by a unity of habitus and taste, and putting class at the heart of critique, as Bourdieu does, ‘flattens’ individual differences and singularities into one dimension and obscures other social relations and identities (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 39, 45, 144–5; see also 2008: 115ff). This assessment might have been stimulated at least in part by the detection of only a weak relation between class and disputes in his early statistical foray in this direction (Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 247).
In short, Bourdieu’s sociology is said to be determinist, objectivist and reductionist – familiar claims echoing those of others (e.g. Alexander, 1995; Jenkins, 2002) but launched from a very specific point of view. Situated in a baseline Hobbesian vision of human beings as plagued by uncertainty, Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology instead takes people’s critical capacity and competencies seriously and aims to do nothing more than elucidate the regularities of people’s critiques, almost Wittgenstein-like, and underscore the messiness of social life that follows from actors in the same time-space situation working with multiple registers of justification. Sociological knowledge and lay knowledge are treated symmetrically, and though the existence of power relations was never exactly denied, Boltanski (2012 [1990]: 40–1) early on refused to use them as covering principles of causal explanation. The exercise of free will can be identified in the ever-present possibility of invoking different polities in situ (p. 57), and if there are ‘constraints’ imposed on the situation by the logic of the orders of worth, people are not only fully able to become aware of them but often actively seek them out in their claims (p. 39).
Later, however, Boltanski rowed back just a little on some of this critique and claimed to be re-appropriating some of the lessons of critical sociology (2011 [2009]). This amounted to two clarifications, the first being an acknowledgement that there is a discrepancy between how the world is and how it should be in order to satisfy people’s moral expectations. The second was an admission that certain institutions, or rather people perceived to be representations of those institutions, have disproportionate power to define reality for everyone else, to be taken seriously and to shut down critique or challenge (pp. 50ff, 116ff) – though he stressed that this entails not just symbolic violence, as Bourdieu would have it, but comforting and integrating ‘semantic security’ too (p. 78) – and that those definers of reality constitute the dominant class in society today (pp. 145–6, 151–3; Boltanski and Esquerre, 2016: 53). Symbolic power is let back in, in other words. This new rapprochement was first piloted in Boltanski’s (2013 [2004]) analysis of abortion, where he identified the emergence of an official, generalized justificatory discourse of childrearing revolving around an ‘authentic’ and self-actualizing ‘parental project’ and its contrast with the myriad, oscillating justifications for having children or terminating a pregnancy, dependent on particular circumstances, deployed by women themselves.
A critique of the sociology of critique’s critique of critical sociology
Strawmanning and the pot calling the kettle black
The initial response to all this is to reject many of the accusations hurled at Bourdieu by Boltanski. Often they are based on caricature, cobbling together a feeble strawman that tumbles into a heap at the lightest argumentative breeze, or – surprisingly for someone who worked so closely with Bourdieu for twenty years – unfamiliarity with the nuances of critical sociology. Some oversights are perhaps relatively minor. The counter-emphasis on ‘semantic security’ and the integrative effects of institutions, for example, seems to forget that Bourdieu already strove to accommodate that via his notion of doxa, or the shared taken-for-granted assumptions about what is what and ‘what is done’ that allow people to get on with their practice and give people a sense of stability. True enough, Bourdieu does not work with the same underpinning assumption about certainty-seeking that Boltanski does, which rings of psychological determinism in the same manner as Anthony Giddens’ (1984) appeal to ‘ontological security’ as the ultimate basis for human action (Atkinson, 2007). Yet Boltanski is clearly trying to cast Bourdieu on one side of an epistemological couple he wishes to integrate – conflict versus consensus – that Bourdieu’s concepts already surmount, since doxa is at once the basic foundation for ‘getting on’ and the historical legacy of struggle and domination (Bourdieu, 2001: 1–2).
The claim that Bourdieu downplays the circulation and appropriation of sociological discourses through society, second, seems to disregard his interest in the ‘theory effect’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 181–2; 1991; 1998: 11–12), that is, the real and observable effects on social relations of academic systems of classification – the way they are drawn on to carve up the world in perception and mobilize people, including through conceptions of justice and injustice (Marxism being the major case in point). This seems curious considering Boltanski (1987 [1982]) analysed precisely this in relation to the making of the class of ‘cadres’ in France while still working broadly within Bourdieu’s framework – an analysis which has been paraded as exemplary of Bourdieu’s position (Wacquant, 1991).
Other instances of misrepresentation are more fundamental, however. To claim that Bourdieu never outlined a philosophical anthropology that could ground his critique of society, for example, is simply mistaken. Starting in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, and developed further in Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu (1990: 196–8; 2000a: 237–45) sketched a baseline vision of human beings as destined for death and, because of that, driven to find diversion and purpose – or justification for their being – in recognition from others. Being denied recognition and purpose – an outcome of the struggle for recognition, since asserting one’s worth is often done at the expense of others – is, in his view, the most wretched form of suffering there is, and unmasking the inequities of recognition behind pervasive justificatory myths forms the normative, political mission of social scientific research. At the same time, Bourdieu (2001: 109–12) did acknowledge the possibility of relations and forms of recognition uncontaminated by struggle and domination, specifically relations of pure love (Fowler, 2014), but he was also realistic enough – and in tune with an awful lot of research on the family – to posit that this was really a limit case, liable to tip back into an imbalance of power (see further, Atkinson, 2016). It still constitutes a theoretically realizable goal, however, and might just be a relation extendable beyond the family to a broader love of the other. Ultimately, Bourdieu was not a crypto-Nietzschean positing a simple quest for power at the heart of human existence and practice, but a Pascalian with shades of Hegel.
If all this sounds similar to some of Boltanski’s own assumptions and language, that is because it is. Whatever Boltanski’s interest in uncertainty, ultimately he, like Bourdieu, takes as his starting point in all his work the human concern to be worthy, the potential for that worth to be violated and the means people deploy to defend or justify their worth. His later admission that the dominant class are concerned with ‘survival’ in the long span of history – to be recognized as ‘somebody’ by those who come after them – and the dominated with solidarity, by way of compensation, only confirms that focus with a minor spin (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 152–3). The difference is not just that Bourdieu set his vision out first, in 1982, but that he went deeper into its foundations, grounding the quest for recognition, and the misrecognition it generates, in finitude, the absurdity of human existence and the necessity for purpose that they engender.
A second fundamental misrepresentation of Bourdieu’s sociology is the idea that resistance, critique and clash are ruled out of the picture in favour of reproduction. How many times does this pervasive caricature have to be refuted? As Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) long ago made crystal clear, the notion of field, as a space of positions defined by possession of capital, i.e. principles of misrecognition, has resistance, clash and critique built into it. The term is devised specifically to make sense of how and why people are ready to denounce others, willing to call out the seemingly powerful and liable to hold and defend contrasting views – this is what the language of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, subversion and conservation are meant to capture. 2 Of course it might still be claimed that such resistance and critique are determined, unfolding automatically and necessarily from the dispositions of habitus, no matter the situation. Again, however, that is a distortion of the Bourdieusian logic. The relationship between fields and habitus was never conceived as a case of the latter mechanistically releasing the conditionings of the former. A field offers up a constantly shifting space of possibles, a range of futures which are more or less realizable, given the recognized properties (capitals) a player possesses, and which manifest in a sense of the possible – a feel for the game, i.e. what kind of courses of action are feasible or desirable – built up through past experience. The habitus is a phenomenological term at root, encapsulating what Husserl called protention in relation to the various social games we play: the prepredicative associations and expectations lying on the horizons of perception (Atkinson, 2018). And just as Husserl made plenty of space for when perception is misleading, so Bourdieu made room for when people misjudge a situation (see especially Bourdieu, 2000a).
Practices based on the sense of the possible are oriented around securing or defending one’s worth (or capital), which in everyday terms might be conveyed as doing what one feels is ‘the right thing’ or what one ‘cares about’. People thus have not only a range of thinkable options and a sense of futurity underpinning them but goal-oriented reasons for their actions – all facets that Boltanski, after Elster, says characterize ‘strategies’ – which Bourdieu noted tend to fall into species (i.e. subversive or conservative). Yet why people have these options, futures, reasons and goals is less easy for them to articulate, why they have what they do in their horizons (and even that they have perceptual horizons) is difficult to grasp, and it is in this sense that there is an element of ‘unconsciousness’ involved. Both the term ‘strategy’ and the label ‘unconscious’ certainly carry considerable semantic baggage and need to be handled carefully, but ultimately they are used to convey that people are pursuing what they care about, that these pursuits often share family resemblances and that there are some pursuits or options which are simply unthinkable. True, Bourdieu sometimes tended to underemphasize conscious projection in favour of protention as a means of escaping finalism, but in other places he made it clear that deliberation and projection – ‘thought of action’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 18) – are nevertheless grounded in protention and bounded by the sense of the possible it furnishes (see Atkinson, 2010).
Boltanski’s opposing view, on the other hand, has every impression of trying to regress to an image of people as beings without history, moving from situation to situation more or less unencumbered by the past. Yet the details and logic of Boltanski’s language, even in his early work, frequently contradict that and, in fact, offer a vision not unlike Bourdieu’s or, at times, a more determinist one. After all, the orders of worth are held to impose ‘constraints’ on situations offering up ‘possibilities for action’ and a ‘space’ in which affairs play out (e.g. Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 29, 39, 51; see Susen, 2014). However, given that the constraints on situations can only exist via the competencies displayed by actors, that competencies, in Boltanski’s view, revolve around language use (an innate capacity, but given form through practical and explicit learning), and that the history of tests is embedded in individual memories and shapes expectations (Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: Chapter 7), logically they must be embodied or ‘internalized’ as protentions. Boltanski does say actors have an awareness of the logic and limits of the orders, but he also admits elements of them are hard to articulate (p. 30), and unless he posits the unlikely scenario that actors know the orders to the same extent as he does, this starts to sound uncannily like a practical feel for the orders and how they can be invoked – a model of agency at one with Bourdieu’s.
The alternative is to trace Boltanski’s (pp. 32–3) argument that the orders have a ‘metaphysical’ existence over and above situations – a point which Boltanski stresses to distance himself from ethnomethodology (p. 43) – to its logical conclusion: they are, in themselves, unalterable by the actors themselves, only open to articulation and invocation. Not only does this raise all sorts of historical questions: has the market polity always existed, even pre-capitalism? If so, that seems curiously anachronistic; if not, then how did it come about? Why did specific philosophers seek to elaborate the ones they did when they did? It also poses a larger query reminiscent of the determinist limit point of post-structuralism: do actors speak the different orders of worth or are they spoken by them? Did the justifications for capitalism emerge through agential activity or the play of fixed metaphysical entities? Boltanski’s claim that volition exists in the invocation of a different polity in the situation hardly avoids this since all it does is label a species of activity, which could well be determined, as free will and, in any case, reduces free will down to the ability to invoke a pre-existing polity not yet invoked from a limited range (rather than produce a new one, for example). 3
The conclusions here also have ramifications for Boltanski’s positioning of his and Bourdieu’s contrasting views of the capacities of the social scientist compared to non-social scientists. Yes, Bourdieu (2004) held that the constructs of the social scientist are different from the constructs of non-sociologists going about their everyday business, with greater chance of being better approximations of how the world is, because the constructs of the social scientist are subject to the checks and balances of the scientific field. And, yes, Bourdieu was of the view that the constructs of the social scientist offer models of structures and forces which non-social scientists may not be conscious of or able to articulate. But is what Boltanski claims to be doing really so different? If he claims to be elucidating metaphysical orders shaping the conditions of possibility of action, memory and expectation; if he admits that these are not always known to their full extent by people themselves and that he offers up a ‘clearer’ model of human action appealing to evidence and reason (Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 29–30), made possible by his platform as a social scientist, is this really so radical a departure from Bourdieu’s attempt to situate people’s practical sense and quest for justification in a distribution of who is more or less misrecognized and in what ways? Could Boltanski not be said to be offering an explanation for what people do (and not just an elucidation), based on sifting out from everyday activity the unacknowledged principles of practice, that is assumed to be closer to the truth than the accounts individual agents would give? Boltanski (2011 [2009]) moved in this direction in his later work, of course, but his earlier work may not have been as radical a departure as he presented in the first place.
Begging the question
The second response to Boltanski’s critique is to root out the instances where something is posited or assumed, without clear articulation, that concurs with or cries out for the articulated principles of critical sociology. In fact, there is one keystone passage that contains, in nuce, all the major question-begging assumptions of Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology. After chiding critical sociology for obscuring it, Boltanski (2012 [1990]: 28) offers in summary form his contrasting vision: [A]ctors…all possess critical capacities; all have access to critical resources, though to varying degrees, and they call on these resources more or less continuously in the ordinary course of social life. They do so even though their critiques have very uneven chances of modifying the state of the world that surrounds them; the effectiveness of a critique depends on the degree to which the actors have mastered their social environment.
The next question that arises is precisely why people continuously call on their critical resources. They feel their worth is in question, that much we know, but why is their worth in question in any particular situation? Why do they challenge or invoke a specific polity, and how might that systematically vary across the population? What are the conditions of possibility of what Boltanski analyses, in other words? These are not queries that Boltanski is interested in answering, at least in his initial post-Bourdieu work, but the obvious answer is that there is a distribution of worth, meaning that certain people are more likely to feel aggrieved by certain regularized situations than others, in certain ways, and to mobilize specific counter-arguments likely to rescue their worth, given what they have – which fits snugly within the logic of Bourdieu’s notions of social space and fields.
A case in point is Boltanski and Chiapello’s analysis of the shifting justifications for capitalism. Why did the artistic and social scientific critiques spring up when they did in the 1960s? Who advocated them? As Boltanski and Chiapello readily admit, it was intellectuals, artists and the growing number of students going through the expanding education system at the time. So these groups evidently had a shared ethos (creativity/authenticity) and interest (asserting their worth) setting them against the profit-oriented or technocratic pursuit of economic capital – an ethos and interest which resonated with trade union leaders because of a common anti-capitalistic orientation. What else do those groups have in common? Possession or acquisition of a specific way of seeing the world (symbolic mastery) related to a specific source of misrecognition (cultural capital). Rather than assume the ethos comes magically from nowhere, therefore, it makes sense to draw a connection between a group’s source of worth and their mode of challenging the worth of others. Thus, the critique becomes explicable as a shared subversive strategy in the intensifying battle between the cultural and economic poles of the field of power, to use Bourdieu’s terms. The subsequent neoliberal flexibilization of work, especially in the public sector, could also be construed as a conservative revolution in the field of power and its constituent subfields aimed at disarming critique by removing its foundations (Bourdieu, 1998), while the focus on creativity and connection within the economic field may simply be an effect of the absorption of growing numbers of graduates – including social science graduates – into the economic field and the diversification of the field of management studies.
None of these inferences necessarily refute Boltanski and Chiapello’s account, so full of interesting details, but they go beyond mere description of the events and regularities to note structural homologies and posit conditions of possibility. They also leave one wondering more broadly if appeals to expertise or creativity are not typically linked to the assumptions and hierarchies of cultural capital, or ‘powers spiritual’, and invocation of profitability characteristically linked to economic capital, or the main ‘power temporal’ today; if assertion of the value of domestic authority or public renown are not simply different faces of symbolic capital at work; and if appeals to the ‘common good’ and group membership are ever free from the group-making and value-seeking practices of agents in fields.
Then there is the question of who typically ‘wins’ in justification struggles, since Boltanski recognizes people’s chances here are uneven. ‘Mastery of the social environment’ seems to be the key in his earlier work, invoking the feel for the game and symbolic mastery again. That this is only a partial or naïve view is recognized by Boltanski himself in his later writings, where symbolic power is linked to positions of authority or representation within institutions. The follow-up question here, of course, is how people got into those positions of authority in the first place. What possessions or characteristics of those individuals typically secure them leadership roles and power over others because they are (mis)recognized by those in charge of the allocation process as inherent symbols of the possessor’s worth? In lieu of an answer from Boltanski, other than vague reference to management of networks (social capital) (2011 [2009]: 148), we can assume (given there is enough research on it, e.g. Friedman and Laurison, 2019) that qualifications (cultural capital) play a part alongside specific expertise, experience and ‘charisma’ (as well as money, of course) – all resources that Bourdieu recognized in his analyses of the bureaucratic field, the political field and the religious field and which cannot be entirely divorced from class as he construes it (Bourdieu, 1987; 1991; 2005). 5 Symbolic power and lack thereof may define the dominant and dominated in society, then, but there is no getting away from the anchoring of that difference in the unequal possession of capital and the different possibilities and trajectories it opens up for people.
Class and multiplicity
This brings us to Boltanski’s take on class. In his attempted rapprochement with critical sociology, Boltanski recognized dominant and dominated classes, their differential possession of symbolic power (which we have now anchored in capital) and their diverging ethos of survival vs. solidarity which clearly (given Boltanski’s language of ‘objectives’) also constitutes the interests underpinning their practice. 6 The ethos/interest we have already grounded in the Pascalian quest for recognition, but Boltanski also spotlights the diverging temporal horizon (long-term versus short-term) that gives ethos these specific forms and roots it in the possession or not of a widely recognized ‘name’ that will last down the ages. An interesting point, for sure, but hardly outside the logic of Bourdieu’s framework.
What about those instances where Boltanski explicitly tries to reject Bourdieu’s image of class, however? To begin with, his claim that classes (especially the dominant class) can no longer be identified on the basis of shared habitus is thrice undermined. First, his own admission that long-term temporal horizons and survival, as well as managerialism, constitute the ethos of the dominant class sounds an awful lot like detection of shared orientations, values and futurity – elements of habitus, in other words. Second, Bourdieu (1984) did not posit a unitary dominant habitus but recognized considerable internal heterogeneity within classes, especially along the lines of capital composition and trajectory. The dominant class is polarized, in fact, along exactly the faultlines suggested above to be underpinning events documented The New Spirit of Capitalism, with an economic fraction (which seems to exhaust the dominant class in Boltanski’s account) facing off against a cultural fraction. Third, empirical research across the globe consistently registers the same broad patterning of tastes and habitus as Bourdieu did (e.g. Prieur et al., 2008; Flemmen et al., 2017; Atkinson, 2017).
Next is Boltanski’s refusal of class reductionism. Whether Bourdieu was really guilty of this, given his interest in myriad relatively autonomous fields, is contentious, but it could at least be claimed that multi-field membership, and the conflicting identities and interests it might spur, were generally reserved for those within the field of power and, moreover, never really related systematically to in situ action. These are, in fact, claims made explicitly by Bernard Lahire (1998; 2011), who is otherwise hostile to Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology. The first contention can be countered by the fact that Bourdieu recognized more fields than just those within the field of power, not least the family as a field where love can become a stake of struggle (Bourdieu, 1998; Atkinson, 2016) but also fields formed by specific organizations or institutions like those so dear to Boltanski (Bourdieu, 2000a; 2005). The second contention, however, is more telling. Here, perhaps, Boltanski is indeed on to something. In focusing on the structure and strategies of specific fields, Bourdieu did tend to bracket out anything else that might be going on and reduce pertinent situations and actions to the logic of the field (or social space) under investigation. A person does what they do or thinks what they think because of their position and dispositions in the space in question. 7 This does not mean, however, that it is impossible to consider the effects of multi-field membership on specific situations or that doing so invalidates Bourdieu’s conceptual toolkit. Bourdieu (2000b) himself posited the notion of ‘social surface’ to encapsulate the fact that people can be positioned in more than one field, with effects on their activity in each, and I have elsewhere made the case that a little phenomenological flesh on these bones – including a specific reading of Husserl’s concepts of the lifeworld and the ‘world horizon’ – can help illuminate the ways in which field forces intermingle in shaping everyday spatiotemporal experience and practice (Atkinson, 2016; 2018).
A multi-field approach can be usefully compared to Boltanski’s (2013 [2004]) multi-polity approach in relation to the theme of abortion. Maybe there is, as Boltanski notes, an official discourse of self-realization involved – we might construe that as the orthodoxy generated by the field of power – and maybe he is right to say this is accommodated and interpreted in myriad ways by women themselves in their own justifications. Yet rather than accept an account of homogeneous heterogeneity, we can go further to observe and untangle the interlocking field effects generating patterns and tendencies in people’s decisions and evaluations. On the one hand, there is, as Fowler (2014) has rightly noted, the fact that rates of abortion and attitudes towards it are starkly differentiated by class position (and, we might add, position in the relatively autonomous space of ethno-national difference: Atkinson, 2019). Compounding this is consideration of the effects of having a child on one’s capacity to accumulate or maintain capital within an employing organization qua field with its own relatively autonomous sources of misrecognition. On the other hand, the decision to have children, and thus continue or terminate a pregnancy, is embedded within the familial field. The legacy of women’s historical confinement to the familial field and the attendant naturalization of childbearing and rearing as women’s inherent purpose, as a kind of sociodocy, lie behind the recourse to ‘what the body tells them’ that Boltanski detects. Yet the familial field also acts as the arena in which having a child is a move in a relatively autonomous quest for recognition. If it is perceived as a project of ‘self-realization’, it is only because it is a project to create a being to love and receive love from, and to consolidate love from others (e.g. partners) or perhaps to compensate for lack of love, though there can be other reasons why people have or do not have children (e.g. economic considerations), and if it is unplanned, then defence (justification) or termination is played out with and against the power relations and orthodoxy within the family (e.g. parental/partner expectations) and the woman’s feel for them. Ultimately, justification for continuing or terminating a pregnancy is not simply an idiosyncratic effort to make sense of particular circumstances but is based on the balance of possibilities between a number of fields towards which one’s commitment (or illusio) may be uneven in the first place – a balance which can, as Boltanski highlights, generate ambivalence and disquiet if not major emotional conflict and turmoil.
Conclusion
Boltanski’s trajectory within the French sociological field is, perhaps, exemplary of the kinds of struggles and strategies that characterize intellectual fields generally. He broke from ‘le patron’ (Boltanksi, 2008), who was then becoming a dominant player, by claiming that the latter had gone too far towards the objectivist/determinist pole of thought and seeking to rescue what had been abandoned, only to later claim to be surmounting an epistemological couple of his own devising by reconciling Bourdieu’s thought with the new pragmatic sociology. I have endeavoured to suggest, however, that Boltanski’s self-positioning narrative was built on a problematic reading of Bourdieusian sociology and that even in his early work his own language either brought him remarkably close to Bourdieu or veered towards even more determinist logic. His later work, where he has acknowledged some of his own earlier oversights, comes even closer to Bourdieu’s logic – offering intriguing new categories and theses, for sure – while still trying to reject him on highly tenuous grounds.
If there is one laudable message within Boltanski’s critique, it is that greater attention could and should be given to multiplicity – the multiple ways in which people seek and justify their worth, that is – and the way it plays out in concrete situations. Yet this is perfectly possible within the parameters of Bourdieu’s framework. Boltanski (1973) himself suggested as much many years ago, while still using the vocabulary of fields, and Bourdieu (2000b) acknowledged it without giving it enough further thought. With a little conceptual elaboration, the analysis of multi-field membership becomes not only a feasible but necessary complement to the analysis of the structure and dynamics of specific fields. If, as Bachelard had it, and Bourdieu after him, intellectual progress comes in the form of clearing away errors and omissions, then we can credit Boltanski with flagging up an underdeveloped aspect of the Bourdieusian toolkit which, with elaboration, can certainly improve the scope of the framework. It might not be the thoroughgoing conceptual revolution Boltanski claimed, but it is an advance nonetheless.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
