Atkinson, W. (2020). Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology: A bourdieusian critique. European Journal of Social Theory, 23(3), 310-327. doi:10.1177/1368431019855004

he took an interest in the fact that some people can be positioned in more than one field at a time (Boltanski, 1973). 

Next is Boltanski’s refusal of class reductionism. Whether Bourdieu was really guilty of this, given his interest in myriad relatively autonomous fields, is contentious, but it could at least be claimed that multi-field membership, and the conflicting identities and interests it might spur, were generally reserved for those within the field of power and, moreover, never really related systematically to in situ action. These are, in fact, claims made explicitly by Bernard Lahire (1998; 2011), who is otherwise hostile to Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology. 

there was that part when they suggested that the pragmatism part comes from when things go wrong, but that connection to Dewey seems weak

philosophical anthropology

language?

recognition?

 If it now goes under the label of ‘pragmatic sociology’ or ‘French pragmatism’, it is in good part because, like the American pragmatism of James or Dewey, it pays particular attention to instances of when things ‘go wrong’. In Boltanski’s case, the interest is in when things go wrong for people in their everyday lives – more specifically, when a dispute arises and people are forced to justify or explain their own actions or the actions of others – because this reveals much about the assumptions underpinning social relations in between these ‘critical moments’.

you were also thinking about walsh's comment here, the are we just going to keep analyzing disasters one?

is a disaster the same thing as a dispute though?

correspondence analysis 

this is a good summary of B & C, one that uses the OOWs

Boltanski’s most elaborate analysis of disputes is undoubtedly his history, written with Eve Chiapello (2005 [1999]), of the changing orders of worth commonly invoked to justify capitalism (see also Boltanski, 2008). In the early days of smaller-scale production and family firms, capitalism was rationalized on the grounds of domestic and commercial principles – money-making was good, but also capitalists were seen as benevolent and trustworthy father figures. Eventually this gave way to a justification of capitalism based on civic and industrial principles – capitalism is the most efficient mode of production and benefits all. This was, in turn, met with critique in the 1960s from those invoking the inspired order of worth – capitalism was seen as stifling authentic human existence, freedom and creativity. Yet this ‘artistic’ critique was then incorporated into the justification for capitalism by the 1990s, as demonstrated by the explosion of management literature privileging flexibility, interpersonal connection, creativity and employee self-fulfilment in its vision of good practice.

There was also that part you were thinking about, which was, what if you did an analysis to suggest that there are certain areas of texas that used more of a justification than elsewhere? like what if people in bierne used way more of a market justification and that was unevenly distributed?

computer

The habitus, complains Boltanski, is like ‘a kind of internal computer system’ automatically calculating options for people who thus ‘never act consciously’ (Boltanski et al., 2014a: 563). People may well have habits, of course, but they are irrelevant to the analysis of justification struggles (Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 39, 43).

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It also overlooks the fact that sociological discourses circulate through and are re-appropriated by others in their own critiques.

the very B & C point

Migration and globalization have obliterated any chance of identifying classes by a unity of habitus and taste, and putting class at the heart of critique, as Bourdieu does, ‘flattens’ individual differences and singularities into one dimension and obscures other social relations and identities (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 39, 45, 144–5; see also 2008: 115ff). This assessment might have been stimulated at least in part by the detection of only a weak relation between class and disputes in his early statistical foray in this direction (Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 247).

this is good, so Bourdieu was kind of after class all along, and he thought that he could get to class sociologically, and show how people's talk was epiphenomenal and that in the last analysis it led back to class

uncertainty 

In short, Bourdieu’s sociology is said to be determinist, objectivist and reductionist – familiar claims echoing those of others (e.g. Alexander, 1995; Jenkins, 2002) but launched from a very specific point of view. Situated in a baseline Hobbesian vision of human beings as plagued by uncertainty, Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology instead takes people’s critical capacity and competencies seriously and aims to do nothing more than elucidate the regularities of people’s critiques, almost Wittgenstein-like, and underscore the messiness of social life that follows from actors in the same time-space situation working with multiple registers of justification. Sociological knowledge and lay knowledge are treated symmetrically, and though the existence of power relations was never exactly denied, Boltanski (2012 [1990]: 40–1) early on refused to use them as covering principles of causal explanation. The exercise of free will can be identified in the ever-present possibility of invoking different polities in situ (p. 57), and if there are ‘constraints’ imposed on the situation by the logic of the orders of worth, people are not only fully able to become aware of them but often actively seek them out in their claims (p. 39).

uncertainty, 

The initial response to all this is to reject many of the accusations hurled at Bourdieu by Boltanski. Often they are based on caricature, cobbling together a feeble strawman that tumbles into a heap at the lightest argumentative breeze, or – surprisingly for someone who worked so closely with Bourdieu for twenty years – unfamiliarity with the nuances of critical sociology. Some oversights are perhaps relatively minor. The counter-emphasis on ‘semantic security’ and the integrative effects of institutions, for example, seems to forget that Bourdieu already strove to accommodate that via his notion of doxa, or the shared taken-for-granted assumptions about what is what and ‘what is done’ that allow people to get on with their practice and give people a sense of stability. True enough, Bourdieu does not work with the same underpinning assumption about certainty-seeking that Boltanski does, which rings of psychological determinism in the same manner as Anthony Giddens’ (1984) appeal to ‘ontological security’ as the ultimate basis for human action (Atkinson, 2007). Yet Boltanski is clearly trying to cast Bourdieu on one side of an epistemological couple he wishes to integrate – conflict versus consensus – that Bourdieu’s concepts already surmount, since doxa is at once the basic foundation for ‘getting on’ and the historical legacy of struggle and domination (Bourdieu, 2001: 1–2).

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Situated in a baseline Hobbesian vision of human beings as plagued by uncertainty, Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology instead takes people’s critical capacity and competencies seriously and aims to do nothing more than elucidate the regularities of people’s critiques, almost Wittgenstein-like, and underscore the messiness of social life that follows from actors in the same time-space situation working with multiple registers of justification. 

all based on a philosophical anthropology to boot

Whatever Boltanski’s interest in uncertainty, ultimately he, like Bourdieu, takes as his starting point in all his work the human concern to be worthy, the potential for that worth to be violated and the means people deploy to defend or justify their worth.

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grounding the quest for recognition, and the misrecognition it generates,

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a point which Boltanski stresses to distance himself from ethnomethodology (p. 43)

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This is exactly what Bourdieu put under the label of ‘symbolic mastery’, which is at the root of his notion of cultural capital, suggesting a class-based distribution of critical resources. 

yea, does everyone have all the polities? or is it just all managers?

The next question that arises is precisely why people continuously call on their critical resources. They feel their worth is in question, that much we know, but why is their worth in question in any particular situation? Why do they challenge or invoke a specific polity, and how might that systematically vary across the population? What are the conditions of possibility of what Boltanski analyses, in other words? These are not queries that Boltanski is interested in answering, at least in his initial post-Bourdieu work, but the obvious answer is that there is a distribution of worth, meaning that certain people are more likely to feel aggrieved by certain regularized situations than others, in certain ways, and to mobilize specific counter-arguments likely to rescue their worth, given what they have – which fits snugly within the logic of Bourdieu’s notions of social space and fields.

yea that's a good point actually, what about the fact that certain people don't even feel like their worth is in question, what about that?

yea, who wins arguments too, 

• who wins the arguments
• who has the critical capacities to begin with
• where those capacities are distributed
• who feels inclined to argue or that their worth is in question

What about those instances where Boltanski explicitly tries to reject Bourdieu’s image of class, however? To begin with, his claim that classes (especially the dominant class) can no longer be identified on the basis of shared habitus is thrice undermined.

how would that work though? to do a survey? like what would you ask and how would you ask it? would it be on growth? city council? population change? education? open minded ness? remote work? the changing composition of small towns?

like what if you interviewed people who moved there, who were new to town, and then who had been there for a long time, 

• people who have been there for generations
• people who just got there
• people who work there but don't live there

but what's in dispute? or rather, how does the town try to offer security? what is it in the town that tries to bring people together? stabilize. that's the word I was looking for. the arts? or rather, wouldn't it be like a myth or something? the german tradition? is there a new myth or story? the library? nature? the outdoors? 

maybe the scale is off. after all, although this did change, and although B & C did analyze this? at the scale of history, it seems like most analyses are at the scale of the organization--but then again, what about the über one? can über be like the new people who are moving? but über is a device, it is something that people can use... 

you would just have to analyze it. 

Next is Boltanski’s refusal of class reductionism. Whether Bourdieu was really guilty of this, given his interest in myriad relatively autonomous fields, is contentious, but it could at least be claimed that multi-field membership, and the conflicting identities and interests it might spur, were generally reserved for those within the field of power and, moreover, never really related systematically to in situ action. These are, in fact, claims made explicitly by Bernard Lahire (1998; 2011), who is otherwise hostile to Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology. The first contention can be countered by the fact that Bourdieu recognized more fields than just those within the field of power, not least the family as a field where love can become a stake of struggle (Bourdieu, 1998; Atkinson, 2016) but also fields formed by specific organizations or institutions like those so dear to Boltanski (Bourdieu, 2000a; 2005). The second contention, however, is more telling. Here, perhaps, Boltanski is indeed on to something. In focusing on the structure and strategies of specific fields, Bourdieu did tend to bracket out anything else that might be going on and reduce pertinent situations and actions to the logic of the field (or social space) under investigation. A person does what they do or thinks what they think because of their position and dispositions in the space in question.⁷ This does not mean, however, that it is impossible to consider the effects of multi-field membership on specific situations or that doing so invalidates Bourdieu’s conceptual toolkit. Bourdieu (2000b) himself posited the notion of ‘social surface’ to encapsulate the fact that people can be positioned in more than one field, with effects on their activity in each, and I have elsewhere made the case that a little phenomenological flesh on these bones – including a specific reading of Husserl’s concepts of the lifeworld and the ‘world horizon’ – can help illuminate the ways in which field forces intermingle in shaping everyday spatiotemporal experience and practice (Atkinson, 2016; 2018).

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A multi-field approach can be usefully compared to Boltanski’s (2013 [2004]) multi-polity approach in relation to the theme of abortion. Maybe there is, as Boltanski notes, an official discourse of self-realization involved – we might construe that as the orthodoxy generated by the field of power – and maybe he is right to say this is accommodated and interpreted in myriad ways by women themselves in their own justifications. Yet rather than accept an account of homogeneous heterogeneity, 

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