Sociology of the stumbling-block: A profile of Alessandro Pizzorno

Abstract

‘But he has nothing on!’ Throughout his career, the Italian sociologist Alessandro Pizzorno's sophisticated and penetrating sociological analysis has laid bare the shortcomings of the theoretical ‘new clothes’ woven by methodological individualism out of concepts of ‘individual’, ‘interest’, ‘decision’. As well as articulating Pizzorno's critique, this article aims to draw attention to the substantial and skilfully designed suit of theoretical clothes in which he has dressed the naked emperor. Pizzorno calls on sociologists to pay particular attention to processes of mutual recognition and attribution of identity: these processes, Pizzorno argues, give standards of value to the individuals involved, who are seen as ‘jealous of their reputation’ rather than as utility maximisers.

Keywords:

• identity
• recognition
• interest
• collective action

Notes

Notes

1. Pizzorno observes that not only personal experience, but the whole school of social science is marked by confrontation with diversity: ‘Is it not perhaps true that the fundamental question for social sciences is exactly that of explaining the nature of problems which emerge when different cultures come into contact?’(Pizzorno 2007e, 276).

2. By ‘micro-departures from the state of nature’, Pizzorno means the emergence from isolation or solitude of two or more individuals who reciprocally recognise each other, allocating each other a specific identity.

3. While the 1977 paper (Pizzorno 1993g) is the first stage in Pizzorno's reflection on identity and collective action, the author had been interested in identity forming processes since the 1960s. This is demonstrated by the recent republication of the 1960 ‘Essay on the Mask’ (Pizzorno 2007g), in which the mask (as Sassatelli (2007) notes in a conversation with the author) is seen as a framework for the constitution of an identity. According to Pizzorno, the mask does more than hide, because by ‘hiding somebody’ it reveals, it becomes ‘a tool of social communication’, ‘presence to the onlooker’. Pizzorno finds the essence of the mask in its relationship to the gaze of others, in its providing a reference that allows for identification and recognition by others.

4. According to Pizzorno, free riding is suspended in cases of conflict of recognition, where a group struggles to obtain the recognition of its distinct identity: ‘[I]f what is at stake is the acquisition or confirmation of an identity through which someone wants to be recognised, that person cannot stay outside the game. Non-participants – free riders – cannot win the benefits at stake, because identity is created through participation in conflict’ (Pizzorno 1993f, 196). By contrast, the principle of free riding is valid in cases of distributive conflict between fully formed identities, where benefits can be obtained even by those who are not involved in conflict.

5. See La Valle (2005, esp. 448–54) on Pizzorno's role in bringing to the attention of contemporary sociology ideas of identity and recognition.

6. Sciolla (2000) locates Pizzorno's position on the constitution of identity as a theory of attribution.

7. As Coleman (1990) intuited, it is the right to act that constitutes social action and this arises from the intersubjective consensus action meets in a given situation. Yet, as Pizzorno (2006, 312) notes, the attribution of consensus to an action can only be preceded by attribution of meaning to it by participants in the situation where the action takes place ‘as consensus can only be reached … by those who have understood the meaning of the act consented to’.

8. Pizzorno (1996a, 109) defines ‘methodological individualism’ as a theory of decisions: ‘[I]t is assumed that social reality is made up of an accumulation of individual actions, that every single action by an individual is caused by decisions made by the subject of the action, and thus it is concluded that decisions constitute the unit of analysis for explaining social reality itself.’

9. Pizzorno (1996a, 119) writes: ‘[T]he reciprocal recognition of some kind of identity between the participants in a social interaction is the condition by which the interaction itself is possible. … In order for them to be able to understand one another's actions, the actors need to see themselves as having some form of stable identity. When this process of recognition is repeated routinely, and the participants deal with new situations by linking them to comparable earlier situations whose outcomes they remember, adequate consistency of meaning will be ensured, expectations will be met, and predictions can be made with certainty.’ Such considerations lead Pizzorno to argue that the single most important operation in the constitution of social order is categorical naming: the process of attribution and adoption of social identities that produces interpretative schemata through which individuals understand social reality.

10. While these elements are addressed by the neoinstitutionalist perspective, this position remains methodologically sterile in as much as it grounds the rationality of action in the actor's intentions without reference to others. For further details on the relationship between the theory of rational choice and neoinstitutionalism, see Pizzorno (2007b, 135–41).

11. The origin of preferences cannot be explained as the effect of individual choice. Nozick's theoretical proposal to consider the ‘formation of an image of the self’ as a process generating preferences clearly shows that such a process cannot be the result of deliberate choice in that a self-image must be recognised by others and so requires interaction rather than decision (Nozick 1993). While a conception of oneself seems logically necessary to explain preferences, ‘in order to understand how people construct particular self-images and derive preferences from these, we shall need to look further afield’ (Pizzorno 1996a, 113).

12. This concept of social identity focuses on the coherence, continuity and predictability of the acting subject's preferences. The attributes of these preferences derive not only from individual biography (personal identity); on a social level they can be related to roles (systemic identity) and/or belonging to a particular collectivity (collective identity).

13. Pizzorno's identitary approach has been subjected to harsh but ineffectual criticism by Aguiar and de Francisco (2002).

14. Pizzorno (2000, 214) notes that, in his model of recognition, ‘the individual cannot understand personal goals otherwise than as the outcome of his or her way of interacting with others; and these goals must be such that their attainment follows criteria that are recognisable by another individual. Goals formed in solitude are neither attainable nor conceivable. Not attainable because … social sanction in one form or another (approval, admiration, envy, comparison, emulation, participation of one type or another) is an essential element of the satisfactory attainment of goals. Not conceivable because goals must be formulated according to the grammar of the processes of attaining goals which is practiced or sanctioned by a circle of others.’ The formation of links of recognition is a condition of the possibility of goals being pursued.

15. From Pizzorno's point of view, the actor's inclusion in a circle of recognition, his image of himself as homo sociologicus taking part in an interactive process of identification that gives rise to the constitution of institutionalised social relations, is a condition for the formation of the individual's identity as homo economicus equipped with long-term preferences that guide the individual's choice of which course of action to undertake (Negri 1989). See also Pizzorno (1983) on identity as a precedent and condition for interest.

16. Pizzorno (2007d) distinguishes between three types of reputation: credibility (developed over time in situations of interpersonal relations); excellence (a judgement given by the equals of a person in a particular area of competence); and community conformity (a judgement given by representatives of a collectivity, confirming and ratifying the rules that regulate it).

17. The theory of the structure of the acting subject ‘jealous of their reputation’ cannot neglect the third component of the self: the judging self, introduced by Adam Smith (1759) and unfortunately not included specifically in the model of the self by Coleman (1990). On this point, see Pizzorno (2006).

18. On the contrast between Pizzorno and the theorists of social capital, see Pizzorno (2007c, 2007d).

19. Social theory not only overcomes the stumbling-block, but also reduces distance by explaining events in cultural contexts different from those of the observer.

20. Pizzorno is interested in explaining actions that are not immediately transparent, trying to reconstruct the rules of the specific social context that gives meaning to individual actions and puts them into a coherent series of precedents and consequences. In contrast to the tenets of methodological individualism, it is assumed that ‘an individual's reality can be observed and defined in the same way in every society and in every situation. It is not divisible into units (for example, into roles) which are understood, reconstructed, classified, interpreted, together with their meanings, independently of their attribution to this or that individual. The observer imagined by methodological individualism is omniscient, the imagined subject of the action to be studied is perfectly transparent and the composition of the context in which the action takes place is entirely without influence on the definition of the type of actions dealt with’ (Pizzorno 1989c, 145).

21. Scientific inquiry – a ‘means of unveiling’ diversity that escapes being grasped by common sense classifications, suggesting new means of justifying the rationality of social reality – reveals, within the structure of the identities that serve to identify different social situations, the fragile underpinning of everyday social interaction (Pizzorno 2007a).

22. Pizzorno's critique of neoutilitarian theories of democracy represents the best example of the strategy adopted by the author to challenge rational choice theory. Rather than condemn the lack of realism of the premises of the theory, Pizzorno held it necessary to ‘suspend judgement on premises and allow oneself to be guided by the rationale of the theory itself to the point where relevant facts seem to remain unexplained and logical contradictions seem unsurmountable’ (Pizzorno 1993e, 180). Pizzorno has developed a criticism from within of rational choice, aimed at highlighting its logical difficulties and empirical opacities. On Pizzorno's reflections on democracy, see also Vassallo (1995).

23. Pizzorno (1993e, 170) writes: ‘[T]he logic of individual political action cannot be reconstructed as the logic of a choice of the most appropriate means to a given end, but rather as the logic of an action of belonging. That is, as the logic of comparison and conflict between collective identities, with the major effect of modifying the participants’ objectives.’

24. The concept of an ‘area of equality’ allows Pizzorno to suggest a particular reading of elections as celebratory ceremonies allowing the formal, institutionalised periodical reconfirmation of the area of equality represented by the national community. In democracy, the democratic rite represents ‘a periodic reaffirmation that all citizens are equal in the face of a fundamental act of the state. Indeed, choice only represents one of the meanings of the act of voting, the other a confirmation of solidarity’ (Pizzorno 1993c, 107). Universal suffrage has a function of national integration being ‘the act of birth, repeated ritually at every election, of a collective of individuals who are its members in that they enjoy this specific right, and by exercising it establish a condition of equality between them’ (Pizzorno 1996b, 981). Voting is an expression of belonging rather than a choice between alternatives because ‘freedom of choice is born from participation in a single collective identity’ (Pizzorno 1996b, 982).

25. Absolute politics, typical of the modern West, defines the identities to which interests can refer. According to Pizzorno (1993b), political modernisation does not represent a process of secularisation of values, but territorialisation of binding connections. Western history shows a transfer of collective responsibility for ultimate goals from a collective bounded by Christianity to distinct collectivities defined by the territorial boundaries of individual states. See Pizzorno's summary of recent Western politics (Pizzorno 1993b) for more on the absolute politics of the Hobbesian moment, and on the monopolisation of the production of authoritative collective identities by the territorial principle – successor to the tools of the politics of transcendence practised by the Church to conserve the supraterritorial religious identity of the Gregorian moment. The concept of ‘absolute politics’ guides Cella (2006) in his study of the introduction of differences through boundaries.

26. Della Porta, Greco, and Szakolczai (2000) define ‘identifying activity’ as ‘first degree exchange’: this creates the collective identities needed to evaluate the medium- and long-term advantages and disadvantages of ‘second degree exchange’, consisting of efficient activity, aimed at gaining material goods and other forms of utility. This distinction between first- and second-degree exchange reflects the priority Pizzorno gives to identification over efficiency.

27. Pizzorno (2001) criticises the Habermasian distinction between the public sphere and civil society, inverting Habermas's order of logical succession between activity in civil society and activity in the public sphere. Without the prospect of recognition of identity in the public sphere, Pizzorno argues, it would not be rational for individuals to take part in the activity of the collective subjects of civil society.

28. The freedom of conversion, the unlimited free possibility of redefining interests through the formation of a collective identity without the possibility of defining a common good, characterises representative pluralistic regimes. This allows us to formulate a theory not of the contents, but of the forms taken by collective identities in their successive relationships with the system: ‘[T]he affirmation of identity first, then the organisation of its representation, then its bureaucratisation and the elaboration of the representatives’ interests as a group, finally its involvement in summit talks with those in power: these successive phases, when they take place in this way, suggest a cycle going from collective enthusiasms to trust in representatives and finally to the beginnings of distrust; this in turn creates the conditions for the cycle to recur’ (Pizzorno 1993h, 281).

29. Lack of recognition is also the analytical key to interpreting cases of ‘identity inflation’: ‘[T]he bearers of a collective identity sometimes feel it is threatened – because they fear the little-known risks of a new situation they are moving into; or because the unifying group (party, social movement, national State, or similar) has lost standing relative to others against which it measures itself; or because the leadership of the group finds it faces an internal threat. In this situation a process of identity production (ideological, ritual, doctrinal, gestural) develops within the collective, evoking past situations in which, for whatever reason, the collective felt itself strong and unified. With this ideological operation the leadership of the group aims to fend off the threat by reinforcing the visible and communicable aspects of what were originally the circumstances in which the group formed itself or made itself look strong’ (Pizzorno 2007e, 288–9). Group formation, as a case of identity inflation, can thus be seen a response to the threat, created by social change, of erosion of collectivities that were previously close-knit.

30. Pizzorno defines groups, movements and parties as closed networks, ‘structures of relationships whose members have a preponderance of relationships with each other, while they have no, or very few, relationships outside the network. Rules regulating action are unanimously shared, they are binding, and transgressions are punished. Action of an individual to conform with the rules is strongly encouraged by others, and encouragement and approval reinforce the will to undertake or pursue the action – which thus is incentivised and becomes beneficial in itself. When these conditions are identified, decisions by individuals to participate in collective action have no need to be calculated according to their outcome because they are motivated by the participation itself’ (Pizzorno 1996a, 127). By participating, the individual gains recognition from an internal source, produced by the development of interpersonal relations of cooperation in which all group members take part. By contrast, recognition from an external source would derive from the prioritisation of the collective subject – the group as a whole – over the recognition of others.

31. See Pizzorno (1980a, 1980b) for a deeper analysis of the two functions enacted by the parties: transmission of demands and strengthening of the mandate to representatives.

32. The precarious nature of the representative regime that hinges on mass parties is encapsulated by the idea of ‘democracy in balance’ (in the sense that economists give to the term) formulated by Rosanvallon (1998). Rosanvallon argues that mass integration parties carried out the precious task of presenting a political image of the social sphere needed to avoid the indetermination of actual people. Only the masses’ lack of social recognition, resolved by the parties of integration (as shown by Pizzorno), assured the contingent equilibrium between the procedural moment and the sociological moment of representative democracy. See Rosanvallon's valuable study for further detail, particularly on the difficult relationship between modern representation and image-presentation.

33. As a result, the balance between transmission of demands and exercise of the mandate, previously guaranteed by the parties of integration, is lost. For further details on the transformations of representative systems, see the excellent Pizzorno (1992) on the relationship between party change and spread of corruption in contemporary democracies.

34. According to Pizzorno (2007d), the media are an institution conferring forms of recognition that go beyond the traditional forms of recognition conferred by circles founded on reputation. ‘Just as the market abstracts the working process in which each individual worker is involved, so the means of mass communication abstract each person's process of recognition and transform it into different levels of exposure’ (Pizzorno 1998, 60–1).

35. Reflections analogous to Pizzorno's, on the sphere of visibility created by the media and the consequent struggle for visibility among political actors in the media arena, can be found in Thompson (1995, 2000).

36. Note the strong similarities between Pizzorno and Manin (1997) on the metamorphoses of representative regimes.

37. The public's application of moral criteria to political choices favours the increase of judicial power in order to monitor virtue and the correctness of politicians. Pizzorno sets out his thoughts on the relationship between representation and judiciary power, with particular reference to Italy, in Pizzorno (1998).