Justice in reality: overcoming moral relativism in Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology of critique

ABSTRACT

In recent years, the pragmatic sociology of critique developed by French sociologist Luc Boltanski in cooperation with such authors as Laurent Thévenot and Éve Chiapello has received increasing attention within the social sciences. However, critical voices have questioned the theory’s capacity to overcome challenges of moral relativism and to stand as a form of critical sociology in its own right. In this article, I will trace the theory’s development from Boltanski and Thévenot’s early work of the 1980s to Boltanski’s most recent ideas. I will argue that the idea developed by Boltanski and Thévenot that ordinary people should be viewed as metaphysicians capable of distinguishing between what is and what ought to be lays the core foundations of the theory and provides a strong response to the challenge of moral relativism. Furthermore, I will show how Boltanski and Chiapello, in their study of the New Spirit of Capitalism, which is based on this fundamental notion of social actors as metaphysicians, develop a theory of domination and emancipation that can serve as the basis for critical sociology.

KEYWORDS:

• Luc Boltanski
• pragmatic sociology
• moral relativism
• critical sociology
• emancipation
• domination
• justification
• capitalism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers involved for their thorough and thought-provoking comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Jacob Didia Jensen is a teaching assistant at the Department of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University. He holds an MA in Social and Political Theory from the University of Birmingham and an MSc in Sociology from the University of Copenhagen. His research interests include the justifications of welfare state policies and the relationship between social theory and the methods of social science. Furthermore, he takes a particular theoretical interest in the relationship between French pragmatic sociology and newer Frankfurt School theory.

Notes

1. On Justification (French: De la Justification) was in 1987 published in an almost identical version under the name Les économies de la grandeur (English: Economies of Worth) (Lemieux 2014, 153).

2. In his review of On Justification, Axel Honneth criticizes Boltanski and Thevenot for assuming that ‘people, always and everywhere, coordinate their aims by implicitly presupposing a normative order that rewards special achievement with superior social status’ (Honneth 2014, 104). This critique must be viewed as misplaced, as On Justification is part of a broader research programme in which justification makes up one aspect.

3. I here follow the English translation of The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007) in which these regimes of justification are also referred to as ‘cities’. In the English translation of On Justification (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006), they are translated into ‘polities’.

4. The type of critique generated by truth tests echoes the concept of ‘immanent critique’ developed in the tradition of critical theory (cf. Stahl 2013, 375ff).