On Justification

Economies of Worth

Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thévenot, Catherine Porter

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691125169, 9780691118376
• eBook ISBN: 9781400827145
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A vital and underappreciated dimension of social interaction is the way individuals justify their actions to others, instinctively drawing on their experience to appeal to principles they hope will command respect. Individuals, however, often misread situations, and many disagreements can be explained by people appealing, knowingly and unknowingly, to different principles. On Justification is the first English translation of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's ambitious theoretical examination of these phenomena, a book that has already had a huge impact on French sociology and is likely to have a similar influence in the English-speaking world.

In this foundational work of post-Bourdieu sociology, the authors examine a wide range of situations where people justify their actions. The authors argue that justifications fall into six main logics exemplified by six authors: civic (Rousseau), market (Adam Smith), industrial (Saint-Simon), domestic (Bossuet), inspiration (Augustine), and fame (Hobbes). The authors show how these justifications conflict, as people compete to legitimize their views of a situation.

On Justification is likely to spark important debates across the social sciences.

PART ONE

THE IMPERATIVE TO JUSTIFY

One

THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND THE LEGITIMACY OF AGREEMENT

THIS BOOK DEALS WITH the relation between agreement and discord. Its primary aim is to build a framework within which a single set of theoretical instruments and methods can be used to analyze the critical operations that people carry out when they want to show their disagreement without resorting to violence, and the ways they construct, display, and conclude more or less lasting agreements.

The issue of how agreements are reached is one of the fundamental issues that the social sciences have taken over from political philosophy, appropriating it in the languages of order, equilibrium, norms, culture, and so forth (Habermas 1984–87). But the study of the agreement-reaching process should not exclude an examination of instances in which order breaks down, as evidenced by some moment of crisis, disequilibrium, critique, dispute, or contestation. For example, there is no reason to maintain a radical opposition between sociologies of consensus and sociologies of conflict, although they derive from quite different traditions. Our intent here, on the contrary, is to treat instances of agreement reaching and critique as intimately linked occurrences within a single continuum of action.

Contemporary social scientists often seek to minimize the diversity of their constructs by situating them within a single basic opposition. In one tradition, rooted in Durkheimian sociology, the ordering principle rests in the notion of the collective. In another tradition, any sort of order or equilibrium is construed as the unintended result of individual choices; this principle informs approaches that borrow the rational choice model from economics. Our own perspective offers a third approach: we seek to embrace the various constructs within a more general model, and to show how each one integrates, in its own way, the relation between moments of agreement reaching and moments of critical questioning.

The opposition between what belongs to the collective and what belongs to the individual has been reinforced through a series of crosscutting critiques that often pit sociologists and economists against one another. For example, the sociologist Alessandro Pizzorno points out that utilitarian presuppositions do not suffice to account for voter confidence; some specific explanatory factor such as identification with a political party—which is totally irrelevant from a utilitarian standpoint—must be added (1990, 305). The opposition between explanations based on groups and explanations based on individuals not only marks the boundary between sociology and economics, it can also arise within each of these disciplines; the opposition between the two approaches appears so radical that, more often than not, it defines the basic methodological choice made by contemporary social scientific researchers.

It is possible, of course, to bridge the gap and develop arguments that recognize the reality of social phenomena (collective determinations) while drawing on rational calculations normally attributed to individuals (personal strategies), as when we speak of collective strategies. The kinds of explanations produced by political science in particular encourage such accommodations: this is the case with analyses that seek to address the “negotiation” (an interpersonal relationship described with reference to a market modality) of interests that are deemed “collective” in nature (a designation presupposing the establishment of a general interest). But a reaffirmation of the opposition between individualism and collectivism threatens to break these explanatory assemblages apart by foregrounding their internal contradictions.

Must all developments in the social sciences conform to this dichotomy? How can we deal with empirical materials and results produced by disciplines that appeal alternately to one or the other of these explanatory modes? How might we imagine bringing them together and coming to terms with their contradictions in a way that goes beyond the unsatisfying juxtaposition of common references to the economic and social realms, to individual interests and collective forces?

The Critique of Sociology’s Lack of Realism

Scholars who account for human behavior in terms of individual choice challenge the first approach by showing that its “holism” is untenable and that it remains too tainted by metaphysics to satisfy the requirements of science. They hold that one cannot base an explanation on the reality of so-called collective phenomena; on the contrary, what one has to show is how these phenomena can result from the behavior of the only beings pertinent to the analysis, the individuals involved. From this standpoint, it would be more fitting conceptually to treat persons as individuals than as agents, for we would be positing individuals free from all normative constraints who can follow the dictates of their personal appetites. This line of argument, crystallized in the opposition between collectivist and individualist disciplines, implies that sociology takes people in groups as its only empirical subjects, whereas economics, a more realist discipline, concerns itself only with individuals.

F. A. Hayek’s Scientism and the Study of Society offers a particularly trenchant formulation of these critiques. The author contrasts “methodological individualism” with a “scientistic approach treating as facts those collectives which are no more than popular generalizations”—or, as he puts it later on, “vague popular theories” (1952, 38, 54). To dismantle the totalist (collectivist) prejudice, he borrows the terms in which Charles Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos formulated their critique of sociology: “[I]n the imagination as in direct observation, [collective acts] always reduce to a sum of individual actions. The ‘social fact,’ as recognized by certain sociologists, is a philosophical construction, not a historical fact” (210–11 n. 29).

Individualism: A Different Social Metaphysics

Our work seeks to bring to light certain elements of similarity underlying the apparently irreconcilable methodological opposition we have described (an opposition that becomes particularly pronounced when it is expressed as an antinomy: “individual” vs. “collective”). To this end, we shall focus on those aspects of the competing modes of explanation that remain obscured when this antinomy is used to elucidate their differences.

First of all, let us note that an explanation based on social factors can also recognize persons. Indeed, this dual constraint accounts for the importance granted by such explanations to the internalization of collective determinations, in the form of a quasi unconscious lying deep within every human being. In parallel fashion, and contrary to what the term “individual” generally implies, whether it is used by economists who vaunt “individualism” or by sociologists who critique it while denouncing the anomic character of risky trade among competitors (Durkheim 1997 [1893], xxxi–xxxviii), individuals as viewed by economists—individuals who enter into relationships in a marketplace—function as qualified persons. We shall seek to show that, on the contrary, the conception of the individual required by economists to make their argument imposes constraints on the social actor that make him a moral being. We are not using the term “moral” here as it is used by certain theoreticians of liberalism, in the limited sense of having a benevolent disposition that would compensate for self-interested greed. We shall try to show that moral capacity is presupposed in the construction of an order of market exchanges among persons, who must be capable of distancing themselves from their own particularities in order to reach agreement about external goods that are enumerated and defined in general terms. The fact that the goods are private property often obscures the hypothesized common knowledge that the universality of their definition implies. The conventions defining common knowledge allow acquisitive desires to compete and adapt to one another, but these conventions generally remain implicit (natural) in economic theory. We shall relate them to Adam Smith’s efforts to define persons who display this moral capacity in terms of the notions of “sympathy” and “impartial spectator” that he develops in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976 [1759]).

As soon as one can show persons acting “under” the group, or point to the convention of market competition that weighs “on” individuals, the opposition begins to fade, suggesting that the collective/individual dichotomy is not the appropriate way to account for the differences between the two models. The models cannot address their common object, human commerce, without making a twofold reference, on the one hand to the singular status of these persons, and on the other hand to the possibility of transcending the particular traits of persons and laying a foundation for agreement in what we shall call a higher common principle. This principle can be spelled out in quite different ways, depending on whether it is expressed through the collective will or through the universality of market goods. The tension between reliance on general forms and reference to particular persons does not result, then, from a confrontation between the two explanatory systems; rather, it is intrinsic to each system. A bilevel configuration, incorporating both the level of particular persons and a level of higher generality, forms a common theoretical framework that constitutes the two systems as a political metaphysics.

Political Metaphysics as a Social Science

Our effort to bring out common elements in seemingly contrasting explanatory methodologies—one based on “individual” behavior and one based on “collective” behavior—will allow us to sketch a new object for the social sciences, an object that can tie together the requirements for agreement and the conditions for discord.

To do this, we shall have to pay much more attention than is customary to the structure of each of the two methodological constructs. These are reduced to cursory outlines by oppositionalist accounts, and they are ignored altogether by crosscutting critiques. However, to simplify the exercise and to make our own approach easier to grasp, we shall consider only two of the theoretical developments offered by the social sciences; we shall not attempt to cover all the disciplines they include, or everything the terms “sociology” or “economics” may ordinarily designate. We have chosen to work with the sociology of collective phenomena and the economy of the marketplace because the explanatory schemas that underlie these theoretical constructs are coherent and can be integrated in a variety of ways.

Because each of these disciplines seeks to formulate laws according to which human beings enter into relationships, whether they come to terms in an expression of the collective will or negotiate their acquisitive desires in a marketplace, each relies on a rule for reaching agreement (on collective identity or market goods); each refers to a universal form that extends beyond the idiosyncratic characteristics of particular persons. Our effort to bring to light the political metaphysics underlying both economics and sociology is complicated by the break with philosophy that allowed each of these fields to be constituted as a scientific discipline. Nevertheless, we should like to suggest that each one is a product of the political philosophy that served as its matrix and in which the underlying metaphysics is clearly discernible.

Our investigation of the origins of these disciplines reveals that in each case a normative higher common principle was transformed into a positive scientific law. This reductive operation, which is characteristic of naturalism in the social sciences, is the price paid by economics and sociology for becoming associated with the natural sciences, with a political physics. But such a reduction profoundly modifies the meaning of the rule adopted for reaching agreement and the way it relates to particular persons. In political philosophy, a rule is a convention, a support that can ensure collective agreement among persons familiar with the convention. Later on, we shall see how a political philosophy is elaborated in an effort to justify such a convention. In the political physics that the social sciences are helping to develop, a rule is a scientific law that applies to persons and things alike. There is no longer any place for collective agreement about a form of generality. The two levels of political metaphysics are projected onto a single plane, one on which beings can no longer be distinguished except by the extent to which their behavior conforms to a common pattern, and this will depend on the degree to which they comply more or less scrupulously with the law.

Thus, in Durkheim’s sociology, the collective being is not only a moral being (it becomes a moral being when Durkheim writes not as a sociologist but as a political philosopher) but also an object that is as real as a specific person, and even more “objective.” The reductive conflation of the two levels—that of the collective moral being and that of individual persons— that is implied by the sociological realism of collective phenomena is accompanied by the metamorphosis of a principle of agreement (the general will) into a law that applies to persons. Durkheim shunts aside the resulting theoretical difficulties by developing an explanatory system based on the assumption that people will (more or less consciously) internalize—as a compelling or determining factor—the principle of political philosophy that allows them to enter into relationships with others and to reach collective agreement.

Economists are confident that they can expose the metaphysics underlying the sociological approach, and they challenge the claim that sociology is a science. Economists question the reality of collective phenomena, which they view as human constructs. Like all institutions, such constructs have to be explained in terms of the interests of individuals, which are the only realities economists are willing to recognize. This line of argument is crystallized in the opposition between disciplines focusing on the collective and disciplines focusing on the individual: the implication is that sociology recognizes only people in groups as empirical subjects, while economics, more grounded in reality, deals only with particular individuals.

However, economists feel free to condemn the social metaphysics of sociologists only because they are not aware of the higher common principle that is also embedded in the positive laws their own discipline brings to light. One can look for this principle in the property that economic actors share: they are driven by interest or needs. We shall probably be able to articulate the principle most clearly if we begin with market goods, which play precisely the same role in economic law that collective beings play in Durkheim’s sociology. Individuals as seen by economists, individuals who interact in a marketplace, are not particular persons; they are moral beings capable of distancing themselves from their own particularity and coming to terms over commonly identified goods on which their acquisitive desires have converged and reached agreement. Market goods, which are commonly evaluated in terms of price, provide the framework for the political metaphysics embedded in economics.

We should highlight, here, an important difference in the way the reductive conflation of the two levels of metaphysics is achieved in each of the two explanatory systems we have mentioned, a difference that may account for the persistence of the collective/individual opposition in efforts to relate the two explanations. As we have seen, sociological realism achieves reduction through the internalization of collective reality, a process that takes on the aspect of an unconscious. In economics, a comparable reduction is achieved by differentiation between goods and persons. The fact that the goods in question acquire value only if they are appropriated by persons masks the fact that they need to be qualified in terms of a common definition. This commonality is the condition for reaching agreement by means of competition, and it offers persons a way to transcend their own particularities. However, the common good deriving from market competition cannot be reduced and transformed into a positive law without leaving traces on the proposed model of human understanding or of the psychology of human actors themselves. For economists, individuals are not riven by tension between their internalized collective representations and their own personal motivations, as persons are for sociologists; nevertheless, they carry within themselves the trace of a desire transformed into interest, that is, they have a direct relation with market goods that overrides all other forms of desire.

The Question of Agreement

At the heart of the argument between two social sciences that are generally presumed to be in mutual opposition in every respect, we can thus recognize the same basic structure (a conventional higher common principle bringing together particular persons), the same naturalism relying on the same fundamental transformation (of a higher common principle into a positive law), whether the explanatory system is based on social phenomena or market individualism. This demonstration leads us to challenge the prevailing dichotomy and to draw two conclusions from the infiltration of a metaphysical construct into disciplines conceived on the basis of a break with philosophical approaches.

The first conclusion, a positive one, stems from the observation that each of the scientific explanatory systems we are considering demonstrates the reality of a possible form of agreement reaching among persons (by means of the group in the one case, by means of the marketplace in the other). To be sure, the social sciences in question treat collective agreement as if it were subject to a positive law that governs interpersonal interactions universally, independently of the will of individuals. It can be shown, however, that each of the disparate forms for reaching agreement corresponds to a general principle proposed by an earlier political philosophy in order to provide a basis for the common good and to ensure agreement by harmonizing individual wills. The positive data contributed by each of our two disciplines—and which we have no intention of rejecting—thus provide proof of the effectiveness of the various principles, and suggest that we should take them seriously when they are invoked as justifications.

The second conclusion, a negative one, complicates the approach suggested by the first. At a minimum, two incommensurable principles of agreement exist: consequently, neither of the two disciplines that transform these principles into positive laws can address the relation between the two forms of law. This inability is particularly troublesome in the treatment of objects that cross boundaries—organizations, for example. Such objects owe their appearance entirely to “good neighbor” concessions granted by adherents to one or the other of the two approaches: economic actors entering into exchanges in a competitive marketplace or social actors subjected to norms. These concessions are fragile, and they can easily be denounced if one of the protagonists breaks the pact by insisting on the universality of his own system for explaining human behavior.

Our undertaking is grounded in these conclusions. How can it be that economics and sociology both translate a metaphysical principle into a positive law, when each discipline subscribes to a definition of reality that is radically opposed to metaphysics? Our response is that neither can deal with the interactions of people in society, which is what both aim to do, unless they take the forms of agreement that people have fashioned into account. And yet each treats agreement reaching as if it were a natural law, s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface: How We Wrote This Book
• Part One: The Imperative to Justify
• Part Two: The Polities
• Part Three: The Common Worlds
• Part Four: Critiques
• Part Five: Assuaging Critical Tensions
• Afterword: Toward a Pragmatics of Reflection
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology