This article presents the moral and political sociology developed by the research group around Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot from its gradual dissociation from the tradition of critical sociology during the 1980s to the present. Taking the major presentation of this approach, De la justification, as the point of departure, the key items of criticism to which this book was exposed are discussed, both in terms of their intellectual merit and in light of the ongoing debates in French social and (...) political theory. The work of this group was often rather erroneously taken to have provided both a new theory of society and a new normative political philosophy. What it aimed at achieving in the first place, in contrast, was a questioning of the assumptions on which reasonings in social theory and political philosophy are based and how those reasonings relate to social actors' own engagement with the world. Not least in response to the criticism received, however, the approach has been further elaborated in recent years, and it works now towards a new representation of the contemporary state of social relations and towards a comprehensive analysis of the practical political philosophies employed in political disputes. (shrink)

In this article I undertake an analysis of erotic sexual intercourse - commonly, and more accurately, designated as love-making - in the spirit of Durkheim's social analysis of religion. Thus, based on a phenomenological semiotic analysis of the peculiar things we do and feel in the course of making love, I propose, first, to uncover the implicit `logic' that generates and governs these distinctly sociable doings and sociable feelings. Second, I proceed to suggest that the sameself logic, albeit in an (...) attenuated version, also generates and governs the broad class of `social occasions proper', and that this homology calls for gathering erotic and social occasions under one and the same rubric, which I propose to call the `socio-erotic' (since the term `social' has been denatured through overuse). Third, I conclude with a discussion of how socio-erotic domains fit into a larger world structured and governed mainly by interest-driven and power-driven conflictual fields. (shrink)

This article offers to unravel lines of both continuity and change in Bourdieu's repeated return to the topic of the gift throughout his intellectual career. While this periodical revisiting of the gift may seem at first like mere repetition, a closer reading reveals three successive and cumulative phases in his gift theory, each adding a new layer of analytical and normative inflections. Emerging from these three phases is a trajectory marked by systematic theoretical consolidation but also growing dilemmas and inner (...) tensions, even to the point of self-contradiction: starting from a critical debunking of the disinterested gift as sincere but obfuscating fiction, it culminates with a positive, prescriptive valorization of disinterestedness as something which needs be cultivated in our very own times. Challenging his vision, as it were, ' from within, "these inner tensions and developments amount to an intriguing, inverted case of Bourdieu's own idea of "double truth, "all the more significant since it pertains to a topic that he defined as playing a paradigmatic function in his general theoretical approach. (shrink)

This paper draws a parallel between two contemporary French conceptions of sociology. Each is first considered in terms of the principles and strategies of its sociological method. Through an analogy with Marx's philosophy of social science, critical sociology is shown to make an heuristic use for the analysis of cultures and social structures of the resistance to sociology that the sociologist encounters in the social objects, whereas pragmatic sociology adopts a pluralistic and descriptive strategy towards actions, actors and things. The (...) paper then tries to show how common interests or trading zones could allow both critical and pragmatic sociology to profit from their competitive relation by taking each other as objects of sociological analysis. (shrink)