Those interested in any of a variety of fields—reasoning about justice, the foundations and mechanics of social interaction, rational action, value formation, norm change, or conflict—will find rich potential in this ambitious and challenging book by sociologist Luc Boltanski and economist/statistician Laurent Thévenot, which does not fit into any single research paradigm. Published in France more than 15 years ago, the book is available in this English translation and ought to have a significant impact on social theory generally.
Boltanski and Thévenot develop a framework for examining individual interaction as fundamentally structured by the requirement to provide justification. The imperative to justify comes from the fact that disputes (and their constant potential) permeate social and organizational life in modern differentiated societies. On what basis is agreement or settlement reached? To conduct relationships on a basis other than force, individuals must be able to use rules, applicable to all on generalizable grounds, which guide them in justifying themselves and judging others. In their broadest aims, then, the authors paint a new view of social phenomena (“economies of worth”), and at the individual level, develop a view of the capacities a person must have to live successfully in a complex multiworld by offering a “model of competence” or a form of modern prudence (p. 232). They seek to keep both levels of description and explanation equally in view: that of social phenomena as an independent “reality” and of the individual agent who must constitute that reality, move within it, and change it.
The heart of the book is their delineation of six economies of worth, each distinguished by a unique principle of order, upholding a “common good” in terms of which actions, states of being, and judgment are ranked in a hierarchy of worth—an “economy.” They initially present these using classic texts of political philosophy to sketch out the six “worlds” as six “polities.” All modern social orders begin with the assumption that persons are qualified to participate based simply upon their common humanity (ruling out a eugenics model as a legitimate polity); therefore, all social orders are analogous to polities in that they establish a common good subject to legitimacy testing. These worlds are the following: inspired (St. Augustine), domestic (Bossuet), fame (Hobbes), civic (Rousseau), market (Adam Smith), and industrial (Saint-Simon). The authors then further flesh out—“compose” (p. 158)—these worlds as they make sense in the form of contemporary human contexts. Each constitutes a “natural order” (or “reality”) that the authors construct as a grammar (making interesting use of business texts as sources of primary data to gather utterances that order and direct appropriate action) via a set of categories that define subjects, objects, qualifiers, and “relations designated by verbs” (p. 140): that is, what ought to be the natural order among things. A grammar for each world of worth emerges, which is maintained when people accede to using and submitting to the tests of coherence embedded in that grammar. Their framework provides more than a rubric of “discourse” because the relationships among persons are always qualified through direct and indirect handling of “objects”: whether they be tradable goods (market), good manners (domestic), political procedures (civic), laws (civic), and so on. An economy of worth specifies what things count, how, and in what ordered hierarchy, thereby providing a coherent, powerful, and natural world within which people interact on terms of “justice” (generalizability). A wealth of detail is given to substantiate each world to convey its naturalness, the sense that people have that certain objects and ways of treating them and each other fit together in a coherent form; those studying the aesthetic dimension of moral life will find a lot to use here. In addition, their concept of “sacrifice” (p. 76) as the cost of access to the higher states of worthiness (what the top of the heap have to give up to attain and keep their premier status within an economy of worth) enables us to make sense of the acceptability of unequal status and reward within a world that stresses a common (ideally equal) humanity.
Justification demands that a principle be applied when determining the basis upon which a particular thing, action or person accords with a generalized standard. To live in and among worlds of worth, individuals must practice justification on micro and global scales. The capacity persons display then is activated at numerous levels: in relationships within intimate family ties, in office disputes, in setting up trading situations, when demanding political reform at a national level, and so forth. Boltanski and Thévenot portray the imperative to justify then as both pragmatic and moral, linked in an overarching framework—moral reasoning as well as fitting together (e.g., efficient order on a factory floor). Furthermore, persons move between worlds, in acts of free will, bringing along standards from one world to impose on another, engaging in critique, clashes, and compromise. Social coordination then requires a versatile cognitive ability to use tacit and explicit knowledge within and between various worlds, and the will to use it to achieve agreement. Their discussion along these lines could contribute to a deeper examination of practices of public reasoning and to the role of visionaries or value entrepreneurs—those risk takers who invent worth. Their depiction of persons provides fresh angles from which to challenge well worn but difficult dichotomies in explanations of behavior between structure versus agency and rationality versus ethics.
There are many virtues to this richly textured book. The authors justify their claim to their framework's being a “dynamic realism” (p. 17) and a pragmatic ethics. They have offered a social cognition or psychology for modern persons in complex, differentiated societies that does not reduce persons to self-interested individualists nor to disembodied Kantian moral reasoners. Acknowledging Walzer's work in his Spheres of Justice, they add a social-psychological grounding to the idea of justice within spheres of living. In addition, the book points to interesting mechanisms of value construction, change, and dispute management through the delineation of practices of testing, critique, denunciation, and compromise on clashes of worth, and importantly in the connection to the world of “objects” that comprise human environments.
The analysis could be extended to consider the potential for tapping those mechanisms of conflict management in situations of more extreme clashes. On this score, I believe the authors leave too much unexplored. Perhaps because of the focus on the coordination of human behavior and their commitment to justification rather than real breakdowns of justifiability (conflict), the authors stop short of explaining when and how breakdowns can be overcome with a new form of a common good (other than describing what it looks like in abstract terms). Where will potential new focal points of justice-producing coordination come from (normative transformation), in substance and in actors? The authors stress that the model “allows us to discriminate between situations oriented toward justification and situations of domination or contingency” (p. 346). Even though they draw a clear line between justification and force, we might ask whether these belong to wholly different explanations of human action. Finally, more discussion would be welcome on the relative status and substantive relationships among the six worlds and on the domains of living that are not subsumed under these rubrics, such as war, violence, and love, to name three.
This book has had an enormous impact on French sociology since its publication 15 years ago. How does it speak more directly to political scientists and political theorists? First, anyone contemplating work in the fields of trust and institution building (and their relationship) will have to consult this text. Their analysis of “setting up situations that hold together” (p. 228) enables us to view the phenomenon of trust and the development of institutions in intriguing new ways. Second, the heavily plowed field of “public reason” and liberalism will benefit from their broader understanding of the nature of giving reasons as gathered from various fields of human interaction, beyond the official public political sphere (Charles Tilly has recently [2006] published what looks like this book's twin: Why? What Happens when People Give Reasons … and Why?). Third, the book contributes to an area of study waiting to be explored by political science and theory: the impact of narrative and “stories” on constructing the context of thought and collective action. Finally, Boltanski and Thévenot provide another perspective on the role of the political entrepreneur or innovator and hence on the role of leadership in collective life. For these reasons and others, this excellent book ought to be influential and inspiring for key research paradigms in the study of politics.
