Engagements, grammars, and the public: From the liberal grammar to individual interests

ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of individual interests within the pragmatic sociology of engagements, developed by Laurent Thévenot. He developed the idea of multiple regimes of engaging with the world – cognitive models of information-processing and what kind of good is engaged in different situations. In this article I argue that the way the sociology of engagements is currently formulated does not sufficiently allow for analysing public participation and disputes in situations where individual interests play a crucial role in public debates. The article presents a slight reformulation of what Thévenot calls the grammar of individuals in a liberal public, based on (a) an understanding of how individual interests relate to the common good and general will, (b) the constitution of legitimate actors within polities, and (c) the separation between the levels of generality and publicity. This reformulation might be called the grammar of individual interests, clarifying and simplifying earlier terminology.

KEYWORDS:

• Social theory
• sociology of engagements
• individual interests
• individuals
• political sociology
• pragmatic sociology

Acknowledgements

This author wishes to thank Laurent Thévenot, Eeva Luhtakallio, Tuukka Ylä-Anttila, Tomi Lehtimäki, Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Risto Heiskala, Tuomas Ylä-Anttila, Markku Lonkila, and Irina Raposova, Adam Gajdos and other participants in the Politics of Engagement – colloqium in Helsinki 2016 – as well as two anonymous reviewers and numerous copyeditors for all the helpful comments during different stages of the process that ended up as this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 What I propose here is to rename a theoretical category, while at the same time reworking some of the ideas included. Whether it would be more suitable to understand what I present here as a distinct category in itself, while keeping the original formulation unchanged, is a question I leave to future debate.

2 Thévenot in his later works builds a picture of a pluralistic, not an atomistic society – and this difference is related to having a discrete but large number of possible justifications.

3 See also Rosanvallon (2000).

4 I do not want to push this point too far: there are so many nuances of individual polities (as they are called in On Justification) and orders of worth that a direct one-to-one correlation is not easy to show. I argue that it is actually not necessary either: even if the link is vaguer, it still helps us, like an archetype, to see how argumentation based on individual interests is different from the grammar of public justification.

5 This article is only concerned with the regime of planned action and the ensuing grammar of liberal individuals.

6 Regarding the all-encompassing nature of On Justification: of course all arguments possible could be interpreted as being somehow about the common good – voicing private interests could be seen as tacitly endorsing market worth, or only being a different mode of civic justification and so on. This however comes dangerously close to sloppy psychologising, since from public, written sources, we would be hard-pressed to argue that a certain cognitive process was behind the argumentation, perhaps even unbeknownst to the speaker herself. I suggest that a more substantial interpretation of certain arguments can be arrived at by defining them in different terms, and that the categories presented in On Justification are better utilised if they are used only as references to the common good (in relation to the concept of general will.)

7 It is entirely possible that these problems only manifest themselves when we look at the public or semi-public level of politics, and do not present themselves in, for example, ethnographic research, or in other situations more directly linked to individuals in cognitive situations.

8 See Rousseau (1762) for The Social Contract, discussion on it in Boltanski and Thévenot (1991/2006, pp. 107–111); Baczko (1988) on the social contract and the French revolution; Young (1996) and Benhabib (1996) on deliberative democracy contrasted with interest-based or aggregative democracy; and Rosanvallon (2013) for the legitimacy of interest-based democracy.

9 And at the same time, the rules of the political culture are not identical for everyone. While Everyman might well say ‘I’m only in it for my own backyard’, that same option is not available to the more public members of the community, such as politicians and representatives – at least not in same capacity. The same is true for publicity: it might well be that we hope that the world might be a place where everyone’s first thought would be for the common good, and that is why newspapers and public officials are probably expected to present these justifications more prominently.