This article argues that many situations in social life can be analyzed by their requirement for the justification of action. It is in particular in situations of dispute that a need arises to explicate the grounds on which responsibility for errors is distributed and on which new agreement can be reached. Since a plurality of mutually incompatible modes of justification exists, disputes can be understood as disagreements either about whether the accepted rule of justification has not been violated or about (...) which mode of justification to apply at all. The article develops a grammar of such modes of justification, called orders of worth (grandeur), and argues that the human capacity for criticism becomes visible in the daily occurrence of disputes over criteria for justification. At the same time, it is underlined that not all social situations can be interpreted with the help of such a sense of justice, which resides on a notion of equivalence. Regimes of love, of violence or of familiarity are systematically distinct from regimes of justification. (shrink)

Voici un ouvrage qui surprendra. Car on n'y retrouvera pas les êtres qui nous sont familiers : ici, point de groupes, de classes sociales, d'ouvriers, de cadres, de jeunes, de femmes, d'électeurs auxquels nous ont habitués les sciences sociales ; point de ces personnes sans qualités que philosophie politique et économie nomment individus ; point, non plus, de ces personnages grandeur nature que nous dépeignent histoire et anthropologie. Non, ici, c'est de vous, de nous tous qu'il est question, dès lors (...) que, vivant en société, nous vivons en situation, c'est-à-dire dans les rapports aux autres et aux choses. A chaque instant, nous cherchons à rendre compréhensibles nos conduites, afin d'assurer, à quelque niveau que ce soit - le groupe, l'entreprise, la collectivité -, la coexistence avec autrui par l'accord : tels sont le rôle et la nature de la justification. La sociologie traditionnelle, quelle qu'en soit l'école, prétend que les personnes rationalisent leurs conduites au nom de motifs apparents et fallacieux alors qu'elles sont, en réalité, déterminées par des forces cachées et objectives qu'il revient, bien évidemment, au sociologue de dévoiler... En rupture de ban avec la perspective cavalière que la philosophie politique et la sociologie ont longtemps adoptée face à l'ordre social, Luc Boltanski et Laurent Thévenot ont pris le parti de traiter sérieusement les personnes et leurs prétentions à la justice. Ils ont voulu comprendre quels sont les principes, les équivalences, les valeurs de référence - ce qu'ils appellent les grandeurs - auxquels les acteurs en appellent lorsqu'ils veulent manifester leur désaccord sans recourir à la violence. S'éloignant en cela des théories de la justice, les auteurs montrent comment les personnes prennent appui sur des objets communs, présents dans la situation pour asseoir leurs justifications. Il en résulte un ouvrage original qui construit un cadre permettant d'analyser la relation entre accord et discorde, et qui nourrit ses réflexions de l'analyse serrée de la littérature de management comme de lettres de dénonciation adressées aux grands quotidiens ou de classiques de la philosophie politique. Il en résulte un ouvrage ambitieux qui ouvre la voie à une approche qui ne réduise plus les acteurs à des agents donnés par des forces extérieures, mais qui les étudie en situation de maîtrise de leur conduite et de leur coexistence dans le monde de tous les jours. (shrink)

The problem of how to access and deploy the explanatory power of culture in historical accounts has long remained vexing. A recent approach, combining and transcending the "culture as structure"/ "culture as practice" divide among social historians, puts explanatory focus on the recursivity of meaning, agency, and structure in historical transformation. This article argues that meaning construction is at the nexus of culture, social structure, and social action, and must be the explicit target of investigation into the cultural dimension of (...) historical explanation. Through an empirical analysis of political alliance during the Irish Land War, 1879–1882, I demonstrate that historians can uncover meaning construction by analyzing the symbolic structures and practices of narrative discourse. (shrink)

In an effort to clear away confusions regarding the role of cultural analysis in historical explanation, this paper proposes a new approach to the issue of cultural autonomy. The premise is that there are two forms of cultural autonomy, analytic and concrete. Analytic autonomy posits the independent structure of culture-its elements, processes, and reproduction. It is achieved through the theoretical and artificial separation of culture from other social structures, conditions, and action. Concrete autonomy establishes the interconnection of culture with the (...) rest of social life, and is achieved by fleshing out the historically specific formulation of particular cultural structures. In addition to theoretically specifying the two forms of cultural autonomy, I demonstrate analytic and concrete autonomy in practice by examining two works that incorporate culture into the analysis of the same historical event. The rewards of recognizing both analytic and concrete cultural autonomy are twofold. First, cultural reductionism can be countered by establishing that culture is structural. Second and more important, once the independent nature of a cultural form is established, its causal contribution to concrete historical situations can be assessed accurately and integrated into historical explanation. (shrink)

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)