polity
For Jean-Elie Boltanski
I’ve got to tell you: me, all my life, I’ve thought for myself; free, I was born different. I am who I am. I’m different from everyone… I don’t know much. But I’m suspicious of lots of things. I can say, pass it to me: when it comes to thinking ahead, I’m a dog handler – release a little idea in front of me and I’m going to track it for you into the deepest of all forests, amen! Listen: how things should be would be to get all sages, politicians, important elected representatives together and settle the issue for good – proclaim once and for all, by means of meetings, that there’s no devil, he doesn’t exist, cannot. Legally binding! That’s the only way everyone would get some peace and quiet. Why doesn’t the government deal with it? Oh, I know very well, it’s not possible. Don’t take me for an ignoramus. Putting ideas in order is one thing, dealing with a country of real people, thousands and thousands of woes, is quite another… So many people – it’s terrifying to think about it – and not one of them at peace: all of them are born, grow up, marry, want food, health, wealth, fame, a secure job, want it to rain, want things to work…
João Guimarães Rosa, Diadorim
This book originated in three talks given at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in November 2008. Professor Axel Honneth, with whom I have kept up a very rewarding dialogue for several years now, took the initiative of entrusting me with the task, at once stimulating and intimidating, of making this contribution to the series of Adorno Lectures. I hope he will accept my warm thanks for having provided me with the opportunity to present, in synthetic form, some observations that have accompanied my thinking over the last three years.
In returning to these lectures with a view to publication, I have been unable to resist reintroducing a number of arguments that I had to eliminate so as not to exceed the time allotted me. In addition, I have integrated into the body of the text some more up-to-date considerations on contemporary forms of domination, which I had the opportunity to present in October 2008 at Humboldt University in Berlin, in the context of a lecture which the Centre Marc Bloch organizes annually to mark the start of the academic year. The three Adorno Lectures have thus, as it were, been opened up, giving rise to the six segments that make up this work. Nevertheless, conscious of the difficulty presented by the transition from lecture form to book form – a task virtually impossible in as much as the two formats involve different methods of argument and stylistic practices1 – in writing them up I have sought to preserve, at least to some extent, their initial oral character. They must therefore be read as if they were a series of six talks. Consequently, readers should not expect to find a finished work, whose composition would have taken me many more years of labour and whose size would be (will be?) much greater, but only a series of remarks, whose articulation has certainly not yet reached the desired level of integration and coherence, as if they had been set down on paper in preparation for composing a book. Or, if you like, at best a sort of précis of critique.
The six segments can be assembled in twos to form three different parts. The first two concern the issue of the relationship between sociology and social critique. This is a question that has never stopped haunting sociology since the origins of the discipline. Should sociology, constituted on the model of the sciences, with an essentially descriptive orientation, be placed in the service of a critique of society – which assumes considering the latter in a normative optic? If so, how should it go about making description and critique compatible? Does an orientation towards critique necessarily have the effect of corrupting the integrity of sociology and diverting it from its scientific project? Or, on the contrary, should it be acknowledged that it in a sense constitutes the purpose (or one of the purposes) of sociology, which, without it, would be a futile activity, remote from the concerns of the people who make up society? Questions of this kind have periodically arisen in the course of the history of sociology, hitching up with other pairs of oppositions en route – for example, between facts and values, ideology and science, determinism and autonomy, structure and action, macro-social and micro-social approaches, explanation and interpretation and so forth.
Having, in the first segment (which may be read as an introduction), rapidly presented some concepts that can be used to describe the structure of critical theories in social science, in the second I dwell on a comparison between two programmes to which, in the course of my professional career, I have sought to make a contribution. The first is the critical sociology of the 1970s, particularly in the form given it in France by Pierre Bourdieu. The second is the pragmatic sociology of critique, developed by some of us in the Political and Moral Sociology Group of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in the 1980s and 1990s, which was fashioned both in opposition to the first and with a view to pursuing its basic intention. In particular, in this chapter readers will find a reciprocal critique of each of these programmes, from the perspective of their contribution to social critique.
Segments 3 and 4 can be read as a second part, wherein is expounded in its main lines an analytical framework intended to formulate afresh the question of critique, such as it is given free rein not in the theoretical space of sociology, but in everyday reality. But this framework also has the aim of providing tools that make it possible to reduce the tension between critical sociology and sociology of critique. It therewith pursues an objective of pacification. This framework is developed from the postulate (of the order of a thought experiment) that the organization of social life must confront a radical uncertainty as regards the question of how things stand with what is. It dwells on institutions, considered in the first instance in their semantic functions, as instruments geared towards the construction of reality through the intermediary, in particular, of operations for qualifying entities – persons and objects – and defining test formats. The possibility of critique is derived from a contradiction, lodged at the heart of institutions, which can be described as hermeneutic contradiction. Critique is therefore considered in its dialogical relationship with the institutions it is arrayed against. It can be expressed either by showing that the tests as conducted (i.e. as instances or, as analytical philosophy puts it, as tokens) do not conform to their format (or type); or by drawing from the world examples and cases that do not accord with reality as it is established, making it possible to challenge the reality of reality and, thereby, change its contours. The distinction between reality and world supplies the conceptual framework of these analyses.
Segments 5 and 6 form a third part, more sharply focused on current political problems. Segment 5 presents some summary applications of the analytical framework outlined in the two preceding segments, devoted to describing different regimes of domination. The term ‘domination’ – in the sense in which it is used in this little précis – refers to historical situations where the work of critique finds itself particularly impeded in various ways depending on the political context, and also in more or less apparent or covert fashion. In this segment I pay particular attention to a mode of domination – which can be characterized as managerial – that is in the process of being established in Western democratic-capitalist societies. Finally, Segment 6 (which may be read as a provisional conclusion) aims to sketch some of the paths critique might take today in order to proceed in the direction of emancipation.
To conclude, I shall add that the issue of critique and the problems posed by the relationship between sociology and critique, to which I have devoted much of my work for many years, have not only captivated me by their theoretical attraction. For me, and no doubt more generally for sociologists of my generation, who came into the discipline in the years immediately preceding or following May 1968, they have a quasi-biographical character. We have gone through periods when society was populated by powerful critical movements and then through periods marked by their retreat. But today we are perhaps entering a phase that will witness their return.2 This History with a capital ‘h’ is bound to have an impact on the little history of sociology.
To thank all those who made a contribution to the development of this work is a task impossible to acquit without omitting or neglecting someone. My thanks go in particular to the members of the Political and Moral Sociology Group (GSPM), to my students at EHESS, and to the numerous researchers who have stimulated my thinking by intervening either in my doctoral seminar or in that of the GSPM. I am especially indebted to Damien de Blic, Eve Chiapello, Elisabeth Claverie, Bernard Conein, Nicolas Dodier, Arnaud Esquerre, Bruno Karsenti and Cyril Lemieux, who, with great generosity, have read, criticized and commented on earlier stages of this work. Tomaso Vitale of Milan University has also been an exacting reader and an impassioned (and stirring) interlocutor. I have also benefited from discussions with students or colleagues from history (Ariane Boltanski, Robert Descimon, Simona Cerutti, Nicolas Offenstadt), anthropology (Catherine Alès, François Berthomé, Matthew Carey, Philippe Descola), literature (Philippe Roussin, Loïc Nicolas), and law (Olivier Cayla, who was generous enough to trust me with the as yet unpublished manuscript of his thesis, Paolo Napoli, and especially my dear late friend, Ian Thomas). In addition to the attention of Axel Honneth, at Frankfurt my work benefited greatly from the help given by Mauro Basaure, who was an intermediary of inexhaustible intelligence and good will between the Institute for Social Research and the GSPM, but also from the observations of other researchers at the Institute – in particular, Robin Celikates and Nora Sieverding. I am grateful to Sidonia Blätter, Eva Buddeberg and to the two distinguished translators who rendered these lectures – written and delivered in French – into the language of Adorno: Bernd Schwibs and Achim Russer. I am also grateful to Gregory Elliott who, having worked on eight hundred pages of The New Spirit of Capitalism, has, once again, brought his elegant style to this English translation. I must finally add that this text could not have been finished without the vigilant skill of my brother, the linguist Jean-Elie Boltanski, who has followed every step of its preparation. But in order for it to become a book, friendly attention was once again required from my editor Eric Vigne, who perseveres against the current in publishing writings which, without his stubborn efforts, would simply be condemned to disappear in the incessant flow of messages saturating our computers.
Drafts of this work have been presented and discussed in various seminars or conferences and, in particular, in the conference in Frankfurt that assembled researchers from the GSPM and the Institute for Social Research in November 2006; in the conference on common sense organized by Sandra Laugier at Amiens University in December 2006; in the seminar organized in May 2007 at the Ecole normale supérieure (Lyon, literature and social science) by the directors of the journal Tracés, Arnaud Fossier and Eric Monnet, and, in the same month, during the important day school on ‘Anthropology and Pragmatics’ organized by Carlo Severi at the Musée de Quai de Branly in Paris; in the Hannah Arendt symposium at the New School for Social Research in New York in December 2007, on the initiative of Nancy Fraser; and then, at the same institution, during a workshop organized by Janet Roitman and Anne Stoler in May 2008; in Antonio Negri’s seminar in January 2008; and in the conference on individualism organized by Philippe Corcuff, whose comments were very useful to me, at Cerisy in June 2008.
I shall approach critical sociologies starting from the concept of social domination, a polemical notion if ever there was one, because it has been a major axis of critical theories while having often been rejected by other currents in sociology, at least when the term domination is used not only to refer to different ways of placing power in the service of politics, whatever it might be – as is more or less the case with ‘modes of domination’ in Max Weber – but also serves to identify and condemn manifestations of power deemed extreme and abusive. As we shall see in the next talk, critical sociology has made abundant use of it in this sense and the pragmatic sociology of critique has simply ignored it. However, do not expect me to outline a conceptual history of this notion, which would take me far beyond not only the time in which I shall address you but also, alas, my competence. I shall instead base myself on this problematic notion in order to seek to clarify the relationship between sociology and critique, and examine the ways in which they might converge in compromise formations that are never free of tensions.
An initial characteristic of sociologies of domination is that they fashion a synthetic object, in the sense that it cannot give rise to direct observation, so that revealing it is necessarily the result of a reconstruction on the part of the analyst. All sociology can observe is power relations. For standard sociology, reference to power goes hand-in-hand with the identification of asymmetries, but they are diverse, partial, local or transitory. The existence of different sources and sites of power creates a web in which these powers can become entangled, contradict and even neutralize one another. The fact of exercising power or of being subjected to power does not escape the consciousness of actors and power relations are invariably visible to the eyes of an observer. Power can therefore easily form the object of an empirical sociology, on the one hand because social relations are shot through with forms of power that are fairly readily observable, at least in certain situations; and on the other hand because power relations are, in many cases, inscribed in pre-established formats that are themselves stabilized in the form of customs or registered in texts – for example, juridical texts and other forms of regulations. As Max Weber showed, power thus tends to be rationalized, whatever its modalities, in the sense that its structures and exercise are subject, at least formally, to requirements of justification that impart a certain robustness to them. It is by invoking these requirements that those who hold power can claim it to be ‘legitimate’, thereby compelling those who challenge it to rise in generality in such a way as to subject the very principles they invoke to critique.1 By contrast, to characterize a form of power as ‘arbitrary’ signifies that it is impossible to take its measure by referring it to a pre-established format ensuring its exercise a certain consistency and thereby to stress the difficulties facing those who endure it in forming predictable expectations of it. Because it must be both asserted and justified, power speaks of power.
The same is not true of domination. Critical theories of domination posit the existence of profound, enduring asymmetries which, while assuming different forms in different contexts, are constantly duplicated to the point of colonizing reality as a whole. They adopt the point of view of the totality.2 The dominated and the dominant are everywhere, whether the latter are identified as dominant class, dominant sex or, for example, dominant ethnicity. What is involved is not only not directly observable, but also invariably eludes the consciousness of actors. Domination must be unmasked. It does not speak of itself and is concealed in systems whose patent forms of power are merely their most superficial dimension. Thus, for example, contrasting with the demand to get done, rendered manifest by an order given in a hierarchical relationship, are manoeuvres or even, in still more tacit fashion, social conditions deposited in an environment, which combine to determine an actor to do something for the benefit of another as if she were doing it of her own accord and for herself. It is therefore as if actors suffered the domination exercised over them not only unwittingly, but sometimes even by aiding its exercise.
As a result, theories of domination must select an object slightly different from that of sociologies which, for convenience sake, we shall call standard. This discrepancy is the result of different forms of totalization. As an empirical activity, sociology can describe different dimensions of social life (and different forms of power) without necessarily aiming to integrate them into a coherent totality – on the contrary, even seeking to bring out the specificity of each of them. By contrast, theories of domination unmask the relations between these different dimensions so as to highlight the way they form a system. Where sociology takes as its object societies, however it identifies them (and it could be shown that it invariably involves nation-states, as is obviously the case, for example, in Durkheim),3 theories of domination, relying on sociological descriptions, construct a different kind of object that can be referred to as social orders. In fact, it is only once this object has been constructed that an approach to society as a totality considered critically can be posited;4 and that a mode of domination can be described in its generality (and also, in numerous cases, that contradictions immanent in this order can be identified, whose exposure furnishes a basis for its critique. In fact, contradictions are distinguished from the disparate only within a unified framework).5 The substitution of social order – an object that is manifestly constructed – for social relations – an object supposed to follow from empirical observation – represents the strength and weakness of critical theories of domination. They are always liable to be denounced as illusory – that is to say, as not offering pictures which provide a good likeness of reality, but merely being the expression of a rejection of reality based on nothing but particular (and contestable) points of view or the desire (and resentment) of those who condemn it.6
Compared with the so-called natural sciences, the specificity of the social sciences is that they take as their object human beings grasped not in their biological dimensions, but in so far as they are capable of reflexivity (that is why it is appropriate to distinguish between the social and the human sciences). Considered in this respect, human beings are not content to act or react to the actions of others. They review their own actions or those of others in order to make judgements on them, often hinging on the issue of good and evil – that is, moral judgements. This reflexive capacity means that they also react to the representations given of their properties or actions, including when the latter derive from sociology or critical theories.7
The moral judgements formulated by actors in the course of their everyday activities often take the form of critiques. Moral activity is a predominantly critical activity. The sociological doxa taught to first-year students (often invoking a popularized form of Weberian epistemology) consists in making a sharp (if not always clear) distinction between, on the one hand, critical judgements delivered by so-called ‘ordinary’ people and sustained by ‘moralities’ or ‘cultures’, which form part of the legitimate objects of description, and, on the other hand, critical judgements made by sociologists themselves (renamed ‘value judgements’), which are to be banished (axiological neutrality). This distinction is based on the Weberian separation of facts from values.8 Critical theories of domination necessarily rely on descriptive social science to paint a picture of the reality subject to critique. But compared with sociological descriptions that seek to conform to the vulgate of neutrality, the specificity of critical theories is that they contain critical judgements on the social order which the analyst assumes responsibility for in her own name, thus abandoning any pretention to neutrality.
The fact that they are backed up by the discourse of truth of the social sciences endows critical theories of domination with a certain robustness in describing the reality called into question, but complicates the critical operation itself, which is essential to them. This confronts them with a dilemma.
On the one hand, it prevents them making judgements that rely directly on the resources, invariably exploited by ordinary critique, represented by spiritual and/or moral resources of a local character. Metacritical theories cannot judge the city as it is by comparing it with the City of God, or even by introducing a secularized but specific moral ideal that the metacritical theoretician naively adopts on her own account in order to judge (and condemn) society as it is, as if it involved not one moral conception among others, but the moral ideal in itself (which would contradict the comparativist requirement to place the moral ideals present in all known societies on an equal footing). That is why critical theories of domination are clearly distinguished from the very many intellectual movements which, basing themselves on moral and/or religious exigencies, have developed radical critiques and demanded from their followers an absolute change in lifestyle (e.g. primitive Christianity, Manichaeanism, millenarian sects, etc.).
On the other hand, however, critical theories of domination are not abstract organums suspended in the heaven of metaphysics. The existence of a concrete relationship with a set of people (defined as public, class, group, sex or whatever) forms part of their self-definition. Unlike ‘traditional theory’, ‘critical theory’9 possesses the objective of reflexivity. It can or even must (according to Raymond Geuss) grasp the discontents of actors, explicitly consider them in the very labour of theorization, in such a way as to alter their relationship to social reality and, thereby, that social reality itself, in the direction of emancipation.10 As a consequence, the kind of critique they make possible must enable the disclosure of aspects of reality in an immediate relationship with the preoccupations of actors – that is, also with ordinary critiques. Critical theories feed off these ordinary critiques, even if they develop them differently, reformulate them, and are destined to return to them, since their aim is to render reality unacceptable,11 and thereby engage the people to whom they are addressed in action whose result should be to change its contours. The idea of a critical theory that is not backed by the experience of a collective, and which in some sense exists for its own sake – that is, for no one – is incoherent.
This dual requirement places a very strong constraint on the structure of critical theories. On the one hand, they must provide themselves with normative supports that are sufficiently autonomous of the particular moral corpuses formed from already identified religious or political approaches, and identified with as such by specific groups whose critical stances they arm. In fact, were this not the case, the opponents of these theories (even those who might initially have been favourable to them) are bound to reduce them to these positions and, consequently, to denounce their local character, bound up with particular interests. They will then dissolve into the sea of ordinary critiques that accompany relations between groups and form the fabric of everyday political life, in the broad sense. But, on the other hand, they must try to meet these ordinary critiques as if they derived from them and were merely unveiling them to themselves, by inducing actors to acknowledge what they already knew but, in a sense, without knowing it; to realize what this reality consists in and, through this revelation, to take their distance from this reality, as if it was possible to exit from it – to remove themselves from it – in such a way as to conceive the possibility of actions intended to change it. When this second condition is not fulfilled, critical theories can be rejected by consigning them to the sphere of ‘utopias’;12 or, as Michael Walzer more or less does (in connection with the work of Marcuse in The Company of Critics) by regarding them as nothing more than the lamentations of rootless intellectuals, cut off from the sense of reality that comes from belonging to a community and, as a result, having abandoned even the desire of acting to transform it.13
The kind of critical judgement built into theories of domination therefore has complex relations with the critiques formulated by people in the course of everyday life. It never coincides with them and subjects them to more or less sustained attention depending on the case, ranging from rejection (critiques formulated by actors derive from illusions, particularly moral illusions) to partial acknowledgement (there is something in these ordinary critiques that can pave the way for Critique with a capital ‘c’). But in any event, a distinction is maintained between the partial critiques developed by the actors on the basis of their experiences and the systematic critique of a particular social order.
For this reason we shall say that critical theories of domination are metacritical in order. The position adopted, geared to the critique of a social order in its generality, distinguishes metacritical positions from occasional critical interventions which, from a position of scholarly expertise, call into question, with a view to reparation or improvement, some particular dimension of social relations without challenging the framework in which they are inscribed. But metacritical constructions must also be distinguished from the multiple critical stances adopted by ordinary people who, in the course of political action and/or the disputes of daily life, denounce people, systems or events that are characterized as unjust by reference to particular situations or contexts. In the rest of these talks, when we speak of critique, it is to these socially rooted, contextual forms of criticism that we shall be referring, while reserving the term metacritique to refer to theoretical constructions that aim to unmask, in their most general dimensions, oppression, exploitation or domination, whatever the forms in which they occur.
The two operations whose ideal type I have tried to trace – the sociological operation of describing society and the critical operation addressed to a social order – share the common feature that they need to situate themselves in a position of exteriority. But the kind of exteriority to be adopted is not the same in both cases. We shall speak of simple exteriority in the case of description and complex exteriority in the case of value judgements that are based on metacritical theories.
The project of taking society as an object and describing the components of social life or, if you like, its framework, appeals to a thought experiment that consists in positioning oneself outside this framework in order to consider it as a whole. In fact, a framework cannot be grasped from within. From an internal perspective, the framework coincides with reality in its imperious necessity. This engineering perspective is the one often adopted by sociologists when they are attuned to the officials in charge of large organizations (be it firms or organizations dependent on the state) and prove open and attentive to the problems facing these officials and the issues they pose. This position is one of expertise. The expert is asked to examine the problematic relationship between elements (e.g. between women’s access to wage-labour and the birth rate), which have already been subject to formatting in a language of administrative or economic description used by those in charge to govern.
Sociological work answering to this kind of demand, which developed in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, today makes up the bulk of the output identified with sociology the world over. It has two key objectives, which are complementary. The first is to increase the rationality of organizations and enhance their productivity, which subordinates sociology to management. The second is also to limit the costs, but this time the so-called ‘human’ costs, entailed by managerial policies geared to profit. In the second case, sociology is called on to help put in place ‘palliative care’, as one says in medicine – that is, either to sketch the shape of ‘social policies’ or to provide justifications to those who implement them on the ground (i.e. ‘social workers’) and sustain their morale. However, in both cases this work by experts identifying with sociology can be realized (it would be better to say must be) without problematizing the general framework upon which the ‘variables’ considered depend.
The social sciences free themselves from expertise, and hence define themselves as such, by positing the possibility of a project of description which is that of a general social anthropology (in a number of cases appealing to comparativism) from a position of exteriority. In the case of ethnology or history, adoption of a position of exteriority is favoured by the distance – geographical in one instance, temporal in the other – that separates the observer from her object. Because it derives in a sense from constraints that are independent of the observer’s will, the move towards exteriority has been able to remain more or less implicit in the case of these disciplines.
In the case of sociology, which at this level of generality can be regarded as a history of the present, with the result that the observer is part of what she intends to describe, adopting a position of exteriority is far from self-evident. The fact that its possibility even poses a problem in a sense leads the move to externalization to become self-conscious. This imaginary exit from the viscosity of the real initially assumes stripping reality of its character of implicit necessity and proceeding as if it were arbitrary (as if it could be other than it is or even not be); and then, in a second phase, restoring to it the necessity it had initially been divested of, but on which this operation of displacement has conferred a reflexive, general character, in the sense that the forms of necessity identified locally are related to a universe of possibilities. In sociology the possibility of this externalization rests on the existence of a laboratory – that is to say, the employment of protocols and instructions respect for which must constrain the sociologist to control her desires (conscious or unconscious). It is thus that descriptive social sciences can claim that they sustain a discourse of truth. It must be added that this truth claim, which is bound up with a description carried out by occupying a more or less extraterritorial post vis-à-vis the society being described, generally gives the social sciences, whatever they are, a critical edge (and this even, albeit in highly limited fashion, in the case of expertise). For, if the very substance of their object was constantly in full view of everyone, the social sciences would simply have no reason to exist. In this sense, we can therefore say that sociology is already, in its very conception, at least potentially critical.
In the case of theories of domination, the exteriority on which critique is based can be called complex, in the sense that it is established at two different levels. It must first of all be based on an exteriority of the first kind to equip itself with the requisite data to create the picture of the social order that will be submitted to critique. A metacritical theory is in fact necessarily reliant on a descriptive sociology or anthropology. But to be critical, such a theory also needs to furnish itself, in ways that can be explicit to very different degrees, with the means of passing a judgement on the value of the social order being described.
Metacritical theories of domination are often combined with theories of exploitation. The term exploitation has an economic orientation. Exploitation refers to the way that a small number of people make use of differentials (which can be very diverse in kind) in order to extract a profit at the expense of the great majority. In theories of domination, reference to exploitation serves to indicate the purpose of domination (as if domination in the pure state, which would have no rationale but itself, was difficult to conceive). On the other hand that is, considered from the perspective of a critique of exploitation domination also possesses a character of necessity. It is difficult to conceive exploitation that is not dependent on some form or other of domination (if they were not dominated, why would human beings let themselves be exploited?).
However, it must be stressed that the concept of domination does not have a strictly economic orientation, but rather (if I can put it like this) a semantic one. It is directed at the field of the determination of what is – that is to say, the field in which the relationship between what (borrowing terms from Wittgenstein) can be called symbolic forms and states of affairs is established. We can also say, in a different language inspired by law, that the critique of domination concerns the establishment of qualifications – that is (as we shall see in more detail later), the operations which indivisibly fix the properties of beings and determine their worth. This work of qualification generally relies on formats or types, invariably combined with descriptions and/ or definitions, which are themselves stored in various forms (such as regulations, codes, customs, rituals, narratives, emblematic examples, etc.). These formats incorporate classifications (and, in particular, classifications making it possible to distribute people between groups or categories) and combine them with rules that exercise a constraint on access to goods and their use. They thereby play a major role in the formation and stabilization of asymmetries.
Metacritical theories of domination tackle these asymmetries from a particular angle – that of the miscognition by the actors themselves of the exploitation to which they are subject and, above all, of the social conditions that make this exploitation possible and also, as a result, of the means by which they could stop it. That is why they present themselves indivisibly as theories of power, theories of exploitation and theories of knowledge. By this token, they encounter in an especially vexed fashion the issue of the relationship between the knowledge of social reality which is that of ordinary actors, reflexively engaged in practice, and the knowledge of social reality conceived from a reflexivity reliant on forms and instruments of totalization14 – an issue which is itself at the heart of the tensions out of which the possibility of a social science must be created.
A re-reading of the sociological traditions which, to various degrees, incorporate a critical dimension, undertaken with the two constraints that have just been mentioned in mind, would doubtless make it possible to identify the main compromises that have been forged to combine the requirement of descriptive neutrality (simple exteriority) and the search for bases paving the way for critique (complex exteriority). As is the case every time we find ourselves in the presence of theoretical corpuses, subject as such to internal consistency – at least relative – while being haunted by a structural tension, the possibilities are certainly not unlimited. Without any pretention to exhaustiveness, but simply with the aim of exhibiting the kind of arrangements sociology resorts to in order to link itself to critique, we can very schematically indicate some of the compromises that seem to have been most frequently forged, and which can combine several of the possibilities we shall now describe.15
A first set of possibilities consists in taking sociological and normative advantage of a philosophical anthropology (which can be made more or less explicit). The ability of human beings to live in society will be associated with the existence in all human beings of properties and characteristics that can be specified differently depending on the anthropology in question (rationality; the capacity to exchange goods; the capacity to communicate by conforming to requirements of relevance; sympathy for the suffering of others; recognition etc.). Critique will then consist in showing how the existing social order does not allow members, or some of them, fully to realize the potentialities constitutive of their humanity. These constructions owe much of their critical power to the fact that they bank on a common humanity and therewith contain exigencies of equality of treatment between members of the same society. A satisfactory society is one without leftovers and the existing social order can be criticized in as much as it excludes, oppresses, scorns and so on, a greater or lesser number of its members, or simply prevents them from realizing what they are capable of as human beings.
But this kind of construction must confront two tricky problems in particular. The first consists either in criticizing any difference – which might seem unrealistic and consequently unconvincing – or justifying the distinction between acceptable differences and unacceptable differences, from the standpoint of the philosophical anthropology adopted. The second stems from the fact that the philosophical anthropology which serves as a basis for critique must be both sufficiently robust and sufficiently general to resist critiques that aim to reduce it to a particular moral or religious tradition (as in the case of the accusation of ethnocentrism); and, at the same time, sufficiently precise to be declined in different forms in such a way as to enable the condemnation of specific social orders. We can add that this kind of normative support can either be treated in an a-temporal fashion or historicized, paving the way for an evolutionism or progressivism, but increasing the constraints of justification required to achieve recognition in the framework of the social sciences, by demanding recourse to a philosophy of history compatible with the longitudinal descriptions furnished by historians.
A different set of possibilities, less ambitious on a critical level than the previous ones but better placed to take advantage of the specific resources supplied by sociological description, consists in extracting the normative position serving as a basis for the critique to which a certain social order is subjected from the description of that order itself and, as a result, giving less weight to a normative anthropology placed in a quasi-transcendental situation. A first mode of this type can consist in playing on the differential between the official and the unofficial. It will then be shown that the ideal this order lays claim to does not correspond to its actual outcomes and, consequently, to the real condition of its members or some of them. Critique then takes as its main target the fact that the order in question does not in fact conform to the values it assigns itself in principle.
A second mode paves the way for a critique of law from an analysis of the condition of customs. A certain condition of the social order will then be open to being criticized as ‘pathological’ (as Durkheim put it) when the rules posited in an established form (i.e. most often, in modern societies, ‘legal’ form), whose transgression is accompanied by sanctions, do not – or no longer – have their guarantor in constraining norms ‘immanent in the social’, which by this token are recognized or even internalized by actors. This critical position is rendered more robust when it can enter into a compromise with a historical perspective, as is the case when analysis intends to emphasize that the law has remained unchanged whereas customs have changed (or ‘evolved’), so that the condition of the law lags behind the condition of customs.
In these first two modes of internal critique, the normative basis (which can remain implicit) is that of a transparent, authentic society. A good society is one where all, and especially the political elites in power, agree on the effective implementation of the officially proclaimed ideals – especially those inscribed in law – and/or where legal norms, on which sanctions of state origin rely, are the reflection in the legal order of the ‘collective consciousness’ and, therewith, of the moral norms acknowledged by all members (or a majority of them) in the social order.
A third mode among the critical operations open to sociology, while remaining very close to the descriptive requirements it is intent on submitting to qua ‘science’, consists in taking hold, to make normative use of them, of the moral expectations which actors disclose in the course of their actions, in the belief that they attest to the existence of a moral sense in actors. Contrary to interpretations of action in essentially opportunistic terms, it is credited with sufficient permanence and robustness for sociology to undertake its modelling. In this case, the metacritical orientation will therefore be developed by collecting and synthesizing the critiques developed by ‘people themselves’ in the course of their everyday activities. It will particularly rely on moments of dispute, when actors express their moral claims, and also on collective interaction in the course of which they engage in experiments and when, employing the ‘creativity of action’, they ‘perform’ the social in an innovative way. From a position of this kind, one of the difficulties encountered is constructing a critique that can resist the accusation of expressing nothing but the particular viewpoint of the particular group or groups of actors on which observation has focused. That is why the metacritical position adopted will rely less on a substantive normativity than a procedural one. Its main objective will be to sketch the contours of a social order where different points of view can be expressed, opposed and realized through experiments. By contrast, a social order where the conduct of such experiments is impeded by the exercise of authoritarian power will come under fire from critique.
The metacritical positions we have just schematically described share the common feature that they incorporate moral judgements, whether these are formed from an anthropology or derived from the social order submitted to critique. However, there is another path leading to critique which, bracketing moral references (or claiming to), is based in the main on the unmasking of immanent contradictions, be these specific to a determinate social order or present in a larger set of social orders. In this case, critique is not taken on by the sociologist in a personal capacity, in the manner of an ordinary individual judging the state of reality on the basis of values. It derives from the observation (or prediction) that the order in question cannot (or will not be able to) survive, because it cannot find the requisite resources to resolve these contradictions in itself. To various degrees, this assumes the adoption of a historical perspective.
To exploit this possibility, it is necessary to pursue the sociological and historical description and analysis of the cases under consideration sufficiently far to identify these contradictions, construct a genealogy of them, clarify their future and, above all, associate them with conflicts that counter-pose groups or classes in which these contradictions are embodied. A common characteristic of constructions based on a metacritical position of this type is rejection of the idea of a common good, or even that of a space of debate where different points of view confront one another, and their replacement by notions of struggle, power, domination and power relations between antagonistic groups. Different critical orientations can be developed on this basis, depending in particular on whether these struggles are envisaged above all negatively, in so far as they entail the destruction not only of a particular order but of any social order, or positively, in as much as they enable the emergence of new possibilities and the dialectical supersession of the contradictions whose expression they are.
In the first case, these contradictions and antagonisms are associated with conflicts between values (and/or interests) which are regarded as being, in essence, without a generally justifiable solution, either in the sense that there exists no value of a superior logical level making it possible to rank them or because no historical dialectic is envisaged. The possibilities for a compromise between sociology and critique are then rather limited and essentially distributed between two options. The first can consist in stressing the dissociation between sociological analysis and political action, regarded as being inhabited by logics that are not merely different but largely incompatible. As a ‘scholar’, the sociologist strives to understand the meaning actors confer on what occurs and to deploy probable chains of causality; as a man of action, the ‘politician’ makes choices. The sociologist can do nothing but enlighten the politician on the likely consequences of different possible choices and/or criticize political decisions deemed ‘irresponsible’, but only in the sense that those who take them have refused to face the consequences of their choices and thus acted in bad faith.
Another, moral radical option associates sociology with the preservation of order. The sociologist will then assign herself the task of criticizing political actions or arrangements that undermine order, weaken authority, blur the values that give members of society moral ‘reference-points’ and so on. This can lead to placing sociology – including in respects that warrant being called ‘critical’, even if they are orientated towards the ‘right’ rather than the ‘left’ – in the service of strengthening the authority of the state – that is, at the service of an authoritarian state.
social classes theoreticalpractice