Sociology has often been seen as a key component of the critical consciousness of modern society. Leading practitioners of the discipline such as Raymond Boudon, Michael Burawoy and John Goldthorpe have recently tried to re-assess the task of sociology by distinguishing various types of practices and self-understandings, and even though some of them did so with a view to defending the professionalized discipline, none of them could avoid including an idea of sociology as critique into their typologies. In contrast to the older forms of social science (in the broad sense of the term), sociology does not have an object of study: there is no equivalent to the state or the rules for life in common, which is the object of political science and political philosophy; or the market or the ways of satisfying human needs, which is the object of economics; or the ways of achieving valid knowledge, which is the object of philosophy and epistemology. Sociologists have toyed with the idea of invoking “society” (or sometimes “civil society”) as an object of their own, but such attempts have always been contested and have, at best, enjoyed temporary plausibility.
It is more fruitful to see sociology as the discipline that studies the structure of social relations, and in particular the transformation of the structure of social relations after the liberal-democratic and market-industrial revolutions that started in Northwest Europe and North America in the late 18th century. Inspired by Enlightenment thought, these revolutions were undertaken in the name of liberty, but their outcomes were far from fulfilling the high expectations that had been raised. From their beginnings, sociology and social theory had a double agenda: they had to analyse the transformations of the social bonds in the wake of those revolutions; and they had to assess the falling-short of reality with regard to expectations. Thus, they were constitutively both empirical (and historical, as they were analysing social change) and critical. Whenever one part of the agenda was dropped, the whole endeavour immediately made little sense.
Historically, therefore, it seemed natural that the analyst would also be the critic of society. The scientific study of society would reveal insights into its failings that were not accessible to ordinary members of the same society. Karl Marx’s critique of political economy inaugurated this conception of critique, and in German language it was further elaborated in the Critical Theory (with capital initials) of the Frankfurt School, first in Max Horkheimer’s programmatic writings and then in his and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment of 1944, and in French more recently in Pierre Bourdieu’s critical sociology. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s “sociology of critical capacity” (1999) grew out of intense collaboration with Bourdieu during the 1960s and the 1970s. Since the publication of their De la justification (1991, in a first version 1987), however, their approach has increasingly been portrayed – and presented itself – as an alternative to Bourdieu’s critical sociology, and the ties between what one may rightly call the two most important groups of social theorists and sociologists in France were severed.
Luc Boltanski’s De la critique - Précis de sociologie de l’émancipation begins with a succinct account of “the structure of critical theories” and proceeds further by confronting the sociology of critical capacity, or “pragmatic sociology”, of his own making with Bourdieu’s critical sociology. Thus, its author aims to explore and explicate both the divide between the two approaches and their respective potential for renewing critique under current socio-political conditions, which are referred to as “democratic and capitalist societies”. The book was occasioned by the Adorno lectures which Boltanski gave in Frankfurt in November 2008, thus by the encounter between the sociology of critical capacity and the recent research programme of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which is dedicated to exploring the “paradoxes of capitalist modernization” and has been elaborated in recent years under the guidance of the institute’s current director Axel Honneth. Like Boltanski’s moral and political sociology, Honneth’s social philosophy withdraws somewhat from the claim that the analyst has a superior critical insight into the workings of society and politics and aims at historically situating the normative claims against which social reality can be measured. Similarly, both authors and approaches do not wish to renounce the capacity for critique on grounds of such situatedness and thus face the problem of justifying their critical leverage in the absence of strong epistemic claims – and this in the face of persistent wide diffusion of the apparently more radical critiques that had emerged from within their intellectual traditions, through the works of Horkheimer, Adorno and to some extent Habermas in the “Frankfurt case” and through Bourdieu and the longer tradition of the “intellectuel engagé” in the “Paris case”. Thus, the book provides a fascinating double comparison: between different versions of critique within intellectual traditions that have undergone transformations over time; and between two current research programmes that have renounced the grand claim of criticizing the contemporary social world from a higher stand-point but have instead turned to the critical capacity of the members of those societies themselves.
Boltanski is troubled by the possibility that the latter turn, even though unavoidable and strongly promoted in his own works, spells the end to critique as sociology knew it. To regain a critical angle beyond the analysis of multifarious disputes and controversies that have been in the centre of the research programme in moral and political sociology that he co-initiated, he plausibly turns to institutions as social phenomena that, on the one hand, are created by social actors and can be changed by them but, on the other hand, always pre-exist any human being and appear to impose their rules on them. In the former sense, they are amenable to pragmatic sociology as the sedimented outcome of conflictual interactions; in the latter sense, they can be criticized by the detached analyst who focuses on their structures and the forms of social asymmetry and domination that they may entail. Generalizing the argument, Boltanski introduces a distinction between “reality” as it is and “world” as the repertoires of showing that every given “reality” is always only one of a plurality of possible ones. As human beings are hermeneutic animals, they are always able, in principle, to relate to a given reality in such a way that a gap between reality and the world may emerge. This is the space for critique – which is neither entirely beyond the experience of the ordinary members a society, as the earlier versions of critical theory maintained, nor limited to the encounter and interaction between a few members of that society, as it is in the nature of institutions to stretch rules so as to include larger numbers of human beings than those who actually interact. Precisely, Boltanski suggests, institutions tend to cover the totality of possible view-points of any experience and thus limit plurality of interpretation. This is what earlier theorizing referred to as naturalization or reification. However, they are unlikely to preclude any interrogation of the “reality of reality” because of the variety of human experience and the openness of their interpretation.
In more detail, Boltanski distinguishes between three types of “examinations” or “proofs” (épreuves) to which any given reality can be subjected. First, the test of truth, wich is enacted in institutional practice itself to confirm existing rules and demonstrate their lasting character in routines of all kinds. The second and third types of examination, in contrast, are related to forms of critique. “Reality tests” examine whether the practices of institutions indeed perform that which they claim to perform. As societies work with a plurality of registers of evaluation, as demonstrated in De la justification and later works of the Groupe de sociologie politique et morale, the possibility always exists that a practice may be malsuited for the kind of test it is meant to perform and can be criticized on those grounds. Such critique is now called “reformist”. Finally, “existential proofs” emerge from the experience of suffering such as for reasons of injustice or humiliation, which are not (or not yet) in any way represented or representable – recognized, Axel Honneth would say – within the given institutional framework. The critique that emerges from such experience is “radical”.
Up to this point, Luc Boltanski’s book is a marvellous example of the sophistication with which this author treats all the subjects to which his passions drive him and also of the fruitfulness of an encounter of different intellectual traditions that here sparks numerous insights which were hardly available within the single traditions. Rightly so, though, Boltanski does not stop at the point of elaborating a novel view of critique but aims further at using the tools that he prepared for different societal situations and the possibility of critique within them, indeed with a view to a historical sociology the ultimate aim of which is to capture the specificity of the present. Restrictions of space permit only short further remarks, and I will limit myself to three.
First, and perhaps least importantly (“for the record”, I am inclined to say), the author is both too modest in the characterization of his own work and too restricted in the broader discussion of historical forms of critique. On the one hand, Boltanski suggests that institutions played too small a role in pragmatic sociology, but from his own Les cadres (1983) to some – admittingly passing – remarks in De la justification to, centrally, his and Eve Chiapello’s Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (1999), the role of critique in transforming society has always interested this author. Perhaps someone else is needed to write about the underlying centrality of institutions and their transformations in recent French moral and political sociology. On the other hand, this interest might have borne more and earlier fruit had other intellectual traditions been taken into account. Even in De la critique we do not find any reference to Reinhart Koselleck’s Kritik und Krise of 1959, arguably the first fully elaborated version of such an argument, or to Shmuel Eisenstadt’s reworking of the so-called “axial age hypothesis”, which aims at historically tracing the distinction between the existing world and other possible worlds and the dynamism that the existence of such a distinction potentially creates. Even Cornelius Castoriadis’ analysis of the imaginary institution of society and the distinction between the instituting moment and the instituted one is mentioned only once without further discussion.
The latter reference is central, second, because Castoriadis insisted that our Western societies, even though he called them “liberal oligarchies” rather than democracies, were erected, at least partially, on the principle of autonomy. Even though this principle has been weakened by the powerful presence of the capitalist drive to increase rational mastery (or pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery, as Castoriadis liked to say), it has not withered away and remains present for re-appropriation and critique of reality. Boltanski, in contrast, gives short shrift to political philosophy as “the fiction that serves as foundation for the institutions” and does not – or hardly – consider the “imperative for justification” (his words) that pervades our societies and institutions. Political philosophy, however, should better be seen as a potential resource for critique, at the very least “reformist critique”, but in numerous current situations are also much more than that. Boltanski here seems to see “fundamental democratisation” (Karl Mannheim) as a rather irrelevant “surface phenomenon” (Adorno in a review of Mannheim) and thus unfortunately contributes to the neglect of the political that marks much of critical theory, both of the Frankfurt and the Paris version.
It remains true, though, finally, that the transformations of capitalism have engendered a reality that is undergoing constant change and in which such change is seen as both good and necessary. Hannah Arendt already referred to this phenomenon as the risk of “worldlessness” (The Human Condition, 1958) and made it truly central to her own version of critique because human beings need to constitute a common world – not “reality”, as this is an act of language, of speaking together – that requires some stability as otherwise it could not be common. Such a constitution of a common world has become ever more problematic due to the alliance of science and capital, as Boltanski rightly points out referring also to recent sociology of scientific knowledge. It is also problematic, however, because it is simply difficult to reach strong substantive agreement between numerous actors who participate in deliberation on the basis of “equal humanity” (De la justification). In conclusion, Boltanski focuses, albeit in different terms, on this risk of loss of world towards which a radical critique is in urgent need of elaboration. At this point, however, he seems to have somewhat lost sight of the need to constitute such critique in linguistic interactions between ordinary members of our societies on the basis of their experiences. Encountering the Frankfurt School tradition, Luc Boltanski has become more Adornian than he was before, and this may entail some gain, but also some loss.
