Moral categories have all but disappeared from the theoretical vocabulary of sociology. When it comes to explaining social orders, neither beliefs about legitimacy nor feelings of injustice, neither moral disputes nor normative consensus plays a significant role anymore. Instead, sociology views the object of its study either as anonymous processes of self-organization or as the result of cooperation between strategic actors. The disciplines that serve as a model for these studies are biology or economics, whose conceptual models are considered adequate for explaining a process as complex as the reproduction of societies. In light of these theoretical reorientations, one cannot avoid the impression that contemporary sociology is striving to finally leave behind its founding fathers. After all, for Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, as well as Talcott Parsons, it was obvious that a basic conception of the social world could only be gained by making use of the concepts, models and hypotheses of a theory of morality. Practical philosophy was the breeding ground, so to speak, and the discipline that guided classical sociology. But ever since Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action, the last grand attempt at a theory of society on the basis of practical philosophy, that has all been forgotten. Until recently, it seemed that Habermas's book represented the end of the tradition of normative sociology. That this is not the case, that there is still a current within social theory that draws on moral- philosophical sources, is largely due to the efforts of a small group of researchers in France centred on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. The work of this extraordinarily productive circle originated in a critique of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, and is constantly opening up new paths of inquiry in its efforts to explain the integration of modern societies as a conflict-filled interaction between differing moral beliefs.1 The founding text of this sociological school is De la justification2 by Boltanski and Thévenot, published in 1991. The book, which has now been translated into English,3 deserves careful analysis for the simple reason that it is by far the most interesting contemporary attempt to give sociology a new basis in moral philosophy.
Even in the way they formulate the starting point of their study, Boltanski and Thévenot adopt the perspective taken up by the classical sociologists in their efforts to found a theory of society. Like Weber, Durkheim and Parsons, these two authors locate the key problem of sociology in understanding what it means that individual actors normally coordinate their aims and thereby contribute to the production of social orders. But in explaining the consensus required to bring about such coordination, Boltanski and Thévenot do not employ the two strategies that once dominated the field. Neither do they follow Durkheim by locating the necessary consensus in an antecedent collective consciousness, nor do they follow modern economists by viewing this coordination as the fortunate result of the coincidence of individual strategies (26ff.).4 By rejecting both these conceptual models, the authors must seek out a third type of explanation, one which – unlike Durkheim – takes account of the interpretive authority of the individual actor, without – unlike modern economists – denying the influence of comprehensive social systems of interpretation. Boltanski and Thévenot present their answer to this problem in three steps which, taken together, form the first element in their theory of society.
The first step of their argument consists in assuming that actors generally coordinate their aims by resorting to previously learned models of moral order that justify legitimate modes of social coexistence. Unlike Bourdieu once claimed, the members of society are not to be conceived of as individuals who are unaware of their own motivations, and whose patterns of social behaviour are largely determined by unconscious interpretive powers. Instead, they are to be grasped as beings who possess cognitive abilities of self-determination, inasmuch as they can, on their own initiative, resort to wholly different conceptions of order in the coordination of their individual aims. In this first step, therefore, the assumption of a plurality of models of social coexistence is not a merely arbitrary addition, but a necessary component of their entire theory: because subjects can be viewed as competent and cognitively autonomous actors, they have to be capable of resorting to more than one model of social order if they are to be able to choose among these orders according to their own criteria.
In the next step of their argument, the two authors introduce a distinction borrowed from American pragmatism, one which greatly modifies this claim: although subjects can coordinate their actions almost unconsciously and automatically, provided that no interruptions occur in their interaction, once that interruption occurs, they must direct their attention to their previous, routine cognitive and moral assumptions. Therefore, individuals can only become conscious of the models of order they use to coordinate their aims in so-called ‘unnatural’ situations that interrupt the flow of their lifeworld practices. Once that happens, they are faced with what John Dewey and George H. Mead would have termed the ‘functional requirement’ of examining what they previously assumed valid in order to adapt to changed conditions. Like other theorists with such a pragmatic bent, Boltanski and Thévenot also believe that scientific observation must make use of these moments of disruption, of ‘breakdown’ and ‘crisis’ (36), in order to study the true structures of social integration. We gain insight into the background normative beliefs that enable the coordination of individual actions through the perspective of participants who must deal with a disruption of their interaction by reflecting on their conflicting conceptions of order.
The third step consists in proposing that we grasp such ‘unnatural’ moments, in which we discursively examine our previously accepted conceptions of order, as the hinges of social reproduction: social life is characterized by an ‘imperative to justify’, which in the face of regularly occurring crises compels the members of society to reciprocally uncover their latent conceptions of order and justify them to each other. These stations of discursive justification represent the conscious, reflexive side of social reproduction, which makes explicit what was once implicit in the flow of routine lifeworld interactions: partners in communication are forced to offer arguments and justifications for why a problematic segment of their lifeworld should be solved within the horizon of one model of order rather than another. They must justify why a task of coordination which has become questionable can only be dealt with in the way they prefer.
Of course, the authors are aware that in these moments, in which the social order is broken through consciously, there is always the alternative of a violent solution. The party with the most power can interrupt the discursive argument and impose its own conception of order on the other party (38). However, Boltanski and Thévenot intentionally limit their scope to ‘peaceful’ forms of coping with such argumentative confrontations: ‘Civil war … along with tyranny (which bases the order of the polity on force and fear)’ (38) is excluded from their study. The authors do not make clear whether they intend to restrict their study to democratic societies; and they are very reluctant to define in more detail the type of society to which their study is meant to apply. We only find out that the study focuses on ‘differentiated’, ‘complex’ societies characterized by the fact that a number of competing conceptions of order can fulfil the task of coordination in a given sphere of action (173). And we might add that the focus is on societies in which such interpretive conflicts are solved in an argumentative and peaceful manner. There is no reason not to presume that the object of inquiry in On Justification is essentially the Western democratic state.
These three premises delineate the theoretical framework of the book. Its primary achievement – the power of its theoretical penetration and the wealth of impulses it offers – only truly comes to the forefront once the authors begin to gradually fill in this hollow normative theory of society. They are not content to give a merely formal analysis of the discursive interruptions of social life; they are less concerned with the rational conditions underlying argumentative conflicts than they are with the moral topics and conflict scenarios typical of everyday life in Western society. In that sense, the study is intended to be no less than a comprehensive, empirically oriented analysis of all the moral disputes and conflicts that could arise in the social lifeworld of a society such as that of France. To that end the authors are faced with two tasks, both of which pose a significant challenge: first, they must attempt to reconstruct all the moral models of order that serve contemporary societies as normative sources for coordinating social action; second, they must get an overview of the types of social conflicts in which discrepancies over the legitimacy of practised models of order begin to appear. The grandeur of their study consists in the wealth of empirical observations, hermeneutic speculations and textual analyses that Boltanski and Thévenot employ in carrying out these two tasks. At the same time, the study demonstrates the limits of developing a sociological theory without the use of any structural determinations.
According to the general thesis of our two authors, coordinating individual aims always requires mutual agreement on the moral norms that determine which future expectations are considered legitimate. As we saw above, these intersubjectively presupposed conceptions of order generally remain in the pre-reflective background of the uninterrupted course of events in the lifeworld. Individual actors only become aware of them when interaction breaks down; this breakdown forces us to reflect on what were previously implicit beliefs. For Boltanski and Thévenot, the first task is to gain insight into the basic principles that normative models of order must obey by attempting to comprehend such breakdowns. Furthermore, they intend to hermeneutically reconstruct the models of order that are most significant when it comes to maintaining our social order.
What remains unclear throughout the entire study are the details of the method used to define the formal properties of the models of order currently in practice. Although they do not say it explicitly, they apparently believe that modernity is characterized by a number of normative principles that legitimate social order must obey (74ff.). This implicit premise becomes especially clear when they introduce the first basic principle of orders of justification or ‘polities’ (Rechtfertigungsordnung) currently in effect. According to Boltanski and Thévenot, all familiar models of a legitimate social order must be committed to the ‘principle according to which the members of a polity share a common humanity’, and therefore must forbid extreme forms of discrimination or exclusion (74). This prerequisite of moral universalism is not argued for in the book, but is merely claimed to be an empirical given in ‘our’ societies. Certainly it would have been necessary to go into more detail about the structural-historical or social-historical reasons for why such a universalistic idea of human beings should be a normative condition of modern societies at all. This is all the more true of the second basic principle that, in the eyes of Boltanski and Thévenot, determines all currently valid conceptions of order. They claim that all customary, contemporary models of justification are guided by the notion that social superiority is justified by a special contribution to the ‘common good’ (76f.). Even though the authors use confusing formulations (‘investment formula’), they probably mean that each model of a justifiable social order must be founded on the principle of achievement, which normatively determines which rung ‘originally’ equal members of society should occupy in the social hierarchy. The more ‘sacrifices’ or contributions a certain person or group of persons makes to the common good, the higher the status they should occupy within society. When the authors argue that this second principle should be valid in all present normative models of order, they not only mean that there must be different, competing conceptions about such contributions or sacrifices, but above all that the idea of individual achievement must dominate the entire spectrum of justifications for contemporary social orders. In ‘modern’ society, all conceptions of a legitimate social order are, without exception, determined by the following principle: achievements considered to be especially valuable are to be honoured by being accorded a higher status or ‘worth’.
That is how the achievement principle becomes the decisive norm for justifying modern social orders, without being explicitly declared as such. Almost inconspicuously, the two authors smuggle a premise into their investigation that is in no way self-evident and needs much stronger justification. Even a glance at the empirical research generally shows that the members of Western society tend to assert wholly different principles when it comes to judging problems of social justice. Depending on the type of social relationship assumed to obtain for a certain problem of distribution, they employ normative criteria such as social equality, individual needs or personal achievement. Observations such as these are what motivated David Miller to undertake a pluralistic attempt at a theory of justice.5 When it comes to defining the moral norms that, in modern societies, determine what counts as a just distribution of goods and burdens, we must assume a plurality of principles whose validity depends on the nature of the social relationship in question. Of course, Boltanski and Thévenot aren't interested in advancing a normative theory of justice; as sociologists, they seek insight into the background normative beliefs that members of contemporary societies use to generate a world of practical commonality. Nevertheless, Miller's approach cannot be considered entirely irrelevant for this inquiry, for even he bases his theory on sociological investigations and comes to the conclusion that, alongside the achievement principle, there are other, entirely different, basic criteria for judging the moral legitimacy of social orders, all of which have significance in the lifeworld. If we relate this consideration back to the work of Boltanski and Thévenot, there is a question as to whether we should in fact regard all currently widespread conceptions of justified social orders as adhering to the achievement principle. It does not seem accurate to claim that people, always and everywhere, coordinate their aims by implicitly presupposing a normative order that rewards special achievement with superior social status. There are just as many spheres or forms of relationship in which people advance conceptions of legitimacy that obey criteria such as individual need or legal equality. Here as well, only structural considerations are likely to enable the authors to gain a greater awareness of their own premises. Instead of directly and immediately offering a definition of the formal properties of contemporary beliefs about justice, it would have been advisable to first ask whether certain types of social practices or institutions of modernity demand entirely different normative principles than that of individual achievement. The fact that Boltanski and Thévenot ignore such considerations is a considerable deficit, one which the reader encounters in many places in the book. The connection between institutional structures and spheres of value, between social sub-systems and the corresponding norms, remains entirely unclear; the impression arises that individual actors' interpretive achievements are not bound to any socio-structural guidelines at all.
After they have defined the formal properties of modern conceptions of order with the help of this form of universalism and the achievement principle, the authors proceed to survey their concrete embodiments. One might expect a methodological procedure along the lines of Charles Taylor's grand investigation in a different field, Sources of the Self.6 This would involve a kind of historical-hermeneutic reconstruction of ideas of just social orders that obtain in modernity. One might also expect that the authors would undertake an empirical investigation of the currently widespread forms of just coexistence, be it through group discussions, interviews or questionnaires. But Boltanski and Thévenot employ neither of these two methodological strategies. They attempt neither historical hermeneutics nor empirical illustration, but instead base their investigation on the history of political philosophy, because they presume that the roots and models of all currently valid conceptions of social justice are to be found in the paradigmatic works in this field. The authors do not really explicitly justify this unusual procedure anywhere in the text; rather, a justification only appears implicitly in very few places. For instance, in one aside, the authors write that modern political philosophy has given many contemporary societies their definitive character (71f.). If we summarize the various remarks on this issue in the text, their justification for resorting to the canon of political thought ultimately amounts to the claim that, even today, all our conceptions of justice and social coexistence have been decisively influenced by the great philosophical classics. We would have to add that it is via the formation of cultural traditions that certain ideas in the philosophical tradition have managed to influence our everyday notions so strongly that even contemporary social cultures of justification largely feed on past models of political thought.
This notion is not unattractive, even if it is highly speculative and no great effort is made to justify it. The authors certainly do not want to claim that the classical works of political philosophy themselves are the source of the conceptions of order that we use to coordinate and justify our everyday actions. This assumption would take us across the threshold of cultural idealism, in which our everyday social consciousness is nothing but an archive of past theoretical history. Their claim is most likely that the power of certain philosophical works to influence our consciousness has been great enough to produce, through the obscure pathways of cultural inheritance, the paradigms or archetypes we currently use to reach agreement on potential forms of social justice. In these situations of justification, we do not make reference to the writings of Aristotle or Rousseau, but employ patterns of argumentation that were explicitly formulated for the first time in these works, and which have become a part of our collective intellectual property through repetition and propagation. Nevertheless, Boltanski and Thévenot appear to waver occasionally with regard to how their claim is to be interpreted. Sometimes it seems that the works they cite only illustrate certain narratives of justification (73), and other times they have a tendency to treat these same texts as sources of our current conceptions of justice (74). However, only the first, weaker interpretation is adequate for understanding the rest of the text, which avoids any hint of cultural idealism.
When it comes to selecting the texts used to illustrate their claims, the authors apply the same criteria that they discerned when it came to explaining the formal properties of contemporary conceptions of order. Therefore, the only works of classical tradition that can be viewed as paradigmatic are those in which a particular achievement principle is developed on the basis of moral universalism – a principle that is capable of justifying a social hierarchy. Boltanski and Thévenot claim to be able to distinguish between as many such foundational texts as there are distinct criteria of achievement in our beliefs about justice. The authors do not exclude the possibility that other classical points of reference could be used to illustrate these ideas of ‘social worth’, nor do they claim that these paradigms of justice could not be supplemented with other models in the future (71).7 On the basis of these restrictions, the authors draw on six texts in the history of ideas in order to elucidate the competing conceptions of justice at work in our culture of justification: Augustine's The City of God founds the paradigm of charismatic individual achievement; Bossuet's Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture develops the idea of a domestic hierarchy (häusliche Rangordnung) in which the head of the household is charged with the protection of the family; Hobbes' The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic presents a status hierarchy based purely on the esteem a person enjoys in the eyes of the public; Rousseau's Social Contract lays the basis for a civil order in which social worth is based on the degree to which a person represents the common good; Saint-Simon's Du système industriel outlines the contours of a system of industrial strata based entirely on a person's usefulness for the satisfaction of the overall needs of society; and, finally, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments develops the market economy principle of a scale of value centring upon the socially useful achievement of wealth (78–123). Again, none of these works are to be viewed as sources of our contemporary conceptions of justice in the sense that we all have their title or their wording explicitly in mind. Wherever the name of an author appears in this list, another name could just as easily be inserted, provided that the author founded a similar achievement principle. What is decisive is solely the fact that these are philosophical works that have contributed in some way to the emergence and development of ideas of social hierarchy that continue to be relevant today.
For that reason, it would be otiose to criticize individual decisions in the composition of the list. Certainly, the selection of names and works blatantly reflects the preferences of these two authors raised in the tradition of French philosophy. In terms of which texts have had the most historical influence, it is rather odd that they should choose Bossuet as the founder of the notion of a domestic hierarchy, given the fact that German authors have produced far more influential justifications of patriarchal values. Not a line in the entire book illuminates the partly convoluted and partly obvious channels through which these writings have exercised their paradigmatic influence. Not a word is said about the history of the reception of these works, nor do the authors take a look at the political circumstances surrounding their publication, as if the ambitious plan to offer a genealogy of our current conceptions of justice could be achieved by merely presenting the central ideas of a few classic texts. But the real deficit of this list is not that it ignores the history of the reception of these works or that it has a culturally limited perspective, but that it omits an entire class of works in political philosophy that continue to be influential today. No mention is made of Kant's political republicanism, nor of John Locke's classical liberalism, even though their fundamental egalitarianism is at least as significant for our contemporary conceptions of justice. This gap in particular reveals just how problematic it is to anchor every form of polity in the achievement principle. Alongside widespread conceptions of justice in which our social order is normatively founded on some kind of achievement and should thus be hierarchically organized, there are broad currents of civil egalitarianism, such as in the writings of Locke or Kant. The exclusion of these works is neither inadvertent nor due to carelessness, but instead the result of a kind of reductionism with regard to basic normative concepts; and this has its roots in a much earlier stage of the investigation.
But these six conceptions of justice are supposed to contain not only the principles of the formation of various hierarchies, but also the corresponding normative core of an entire image of society, even an entire lifeworld. It is no accident that the authors term these polities ‘cités’ or ‘communities’, which is meant to express the fact that these are conceptions of an entire way of life, a comprehensive system of norms and practices. Boltanski and Thévenot make the bold claim that the horizon of our everyday acts and experiences is always determined by the categories of the model of order according to which we interpret a given situation. My surroundings appear to me in the light of the normative agreement that regulates the relationship to my partners in interaction within a certain segment of the social world. Just how far-reaching the consequences of this idea are for the authors only becomes clear once we realize that they even include material artefacts within this morally constituted horizon: ‘In order for persons to reach agreement, … the quality of things must have been determined in a way that is consistent with the principles of worth invoked’ (130). Depending on the type of hierarchy previously accepted for a given situation, the objects upon which people act take on different meanings for them: in the world of the family, to paraphrase an example used by the authors, a table acquires the meaning of an invitation to a common meal; in the industrial world it is a worktable; and in the market world, it is a place of assembly. As members of societies, our normative relations-to-world are as numerous as the principles of moral agreement we have already accepted in our interaction. Therefore, actors familiar with all of modernity's constitutive value orders are constantly compelled to move back and forth competently between six different lifeworlds.
It is never clear why the authors expand their considerations on the socially constitutive role of polities into an analysis of the lifeworld. The text occasionally makes reference to the works of Bruno Latour in order to make plausible why material objects have to be included in sociological analysis.8 But these remarks certainly do not justify why we should understand particular lifeworlds according to the criterion of underlying beliefs about justice. After all, this thesis is linked to the strong premise that the customary categories of practical philosophy explain the entirety of our relations to the world. Whatever we experience, and however we perceive persons, circumstances and things, we do so with the help of categorial schemas that derive from a certain presupposed conception of a legitimate social order (133ff.). It is not too problematic that this assumption conceives of our social environment as something that is always already disclosed in terms of certain interests and projects; these are ideas that Boltanski and Thévenot could easily have picked up from the works of Merleau-Ponty or early Heidegger. What is confusing about this premise is instead the fact that the ‘ready-to-hand’ character (Zuhandenheit) of our world results entirely from moral guidelines that stem from our mutually accepted conceptions of order. The pragmatic quality of our social life is thereby reduced to a single way of normatively justifying social orders. Our world discloses itself as meaningful to us not through the horizon of our instrumental interests, or through needs to control our environment or manage our survival, but solely through the deep-seated desire for evidence of the legitimacy of our social institutions.
This phenomenological or perhaps even ‘transcendental’ turn takes Boltanski and Thévenot far beyond what the classical authors of their discipline would have accepted when it comes to sociology's dependence on moral philosophy. The founders of the discipline regarded the philosophical categories used to grasp moral beliefs or value orientations as a challenge to search for corresponding phenomena in the structures of social reproduction. This gave birth to sociological concepts such as value spheres, collective consciousness and systems of action. By contrast, in On Justification, the categories of political philosophy are taken as direct expressions of the content of our everyday social consciousness, without transferring them into socially congealed structures. This moral content, the so-called ‘polities’, are viewed as a ‘transcendental’ framework within which different lifeworlds are constituted. Ultimately, the various spheres of the social world are, for Boltanski and Thévenot, nothing but the product of practices of moral justification. The difficulties that result from privileging moral philosophy in such a one-sided manner become constantly apparent in the neglect of structural sociological categories and alternative, non-moral guidelines for action. There is no effort to pursue the question of how moral beliefs are embodied in institutions and stable systems of action; nor is there an examination of whether there are other, non-moral interests that motivate social reproduction. If these deficits still only appear indirectly at this point, they become all the more apparent once the authors turn to the treatment of crises or breakdowns in the process of justified interactions.
The image we receive from the study is one in which reality is differentiated into several partial sub-worlds, whose inner connection results from the specific achievement principle embodied in each respective conception of order. Members of society are forced to coordinate their actions with the aid of models of justified sociality; they do so by resorting to an arsenal of inherited ‘polities’ and understand their correspondingly legitimated interaction within the horizon of their shared moral beliefs. Yet this image, as Boltanski and Thévenot make clear from the beginning (36f.), addresses the rather improbable – that is, harmonious – side of social life; but in reality, there is dispute and conflict over the appropriate justification for their relations of interaction. Only by taking up these everyday disputes do the authors enter the arena in which the empirical research of their theoretical circle moves.9 Here we also find the plan of a ‘sociology of critique’, which, unlike critical sociology, abstains from any normative judgements and strictly focuses on observing the critical activity of competent actors.10 The entirety of the work of this intellectual circle centred on Boltanski and Thévenot is founded on the idea that we constantly argue about the meaning and appropriateness of our models of justification.
The two authors take a first step towards defining the meaning of such disputes by distinguishing between two distinct forms of breakdown in our daily routine activities. The possibility that the agreement underlying our interactions will be disturbed can arise when either the conditions of application or the appropriateness of the corresponding normative structure comes into question. In the first case, which is termed ‘contention’ (187), actors must interrupt their routine actions because one of the participants questions whether the commonly presupposed polity or order of justification is applied in a fair and appropriate fashion. In the second case, which is termed a ‘clash’ (187), their interaction comes to a halt because they disagree about which potential order of justification should be applied. Clearly the authors intend to take the philosophically familiar distinction between internal and external critique, pull it down from the level of theoretical language and apply it to everyday action: in ‘contention’, actors mobilize internal criteria of problematization by inquiring about the appropriate conditions for applying an already accepted conception of justice, while when they ‘clash’, they assert external criteria by doubting the appropriateness of a previously practised model of order. With this extremely skilful theoretical manoeuvre, the authors suggest that even everyday actors in everyday situations perform intellectual acts that, normally, are only asked of philosophers or critical theorists. Boltanski and Thévenot argue that in our everyday actions, each of us is always already involved in the business of normative critique, even before the academic intellectual pulls out the big guns.
In order to demonstrate that ‘theoretical’ critique stands on the same level as the kind of critique that each of us practices in our everyday lives, the two authors must, in principle, show that their own knowledge is in no way superior to that of normal actors. After all, the intention of replacing what was previously regarded as critical sociology with a ‘sociology of critique’ demands removing the gap between these two levels of knowledge.11 The case of ‘contention’, the first arena of conflict, does not seem to present any difficulties for Boltanski and Thévenot; they merely ‘observe’ what involved actors do when, within the framework of a basically accepted polity, doubts are raised about the status hierarchy derived from that order (133ff.). According to the authors, the means generally used for settling these arguments represent discursive events they term ‘tests’. This refers not to the official procedures that regulate the granting of educational titles, but instead to the nearly inconspicuous and daily occurring situations in which we commonly test, without the pressure of acting, whether the previously practised distribution of status positions really does conform to the underlying polity. As the examples presented in the study illustrate nicely (136ff.), each of these normatively regulated worlds is accorded a specific, characteristic test procedure. For example, within a civil order, a parliamentary investigation serves to clarify whether a certain representative, in light of rumours about inappropriate behaviour, truly possesses the competence and ‘stature’ that has been accorded to him or her. Within the ‘world of fame’, an intersubjectively examinable, experimental phase ensures that researchers must prove that their project deserves the recognition they claim it does. What is particular about these test procedures, as Boltanski and Thévenot repeat tirelessly, is that the distinction between criteria of correctness and justice has been eliminated entirely. Because the material objects, in the meaning accorded to them by the commonly presupposed polity, are included in the corresponding test procedure, the ‘just’ placement of a person in a status hierarchy must be proven with reference to how ‘properly’ he or she copes with ‘ready-to-hand’ objects (33, 41, 130).
But even at this point, we could point out that it would be careless to exclude social developments in which participants begin to apply, either intentionally or unintentionally, ‘inappropriate’ or normatively misplaced criteria for examining social ‘worth’. Our socialization might certainly equip us with a ‘sense of the common’ for what is the appropriate respective procedure in a given context for determining actual ability and achievement (201ff.). Normally we tend to judge politicians according to their moral integrity and expertise, artists according to their inspirational power and the strength of their aesthetic expression, and craftsmen according to their technical skills and their familiarity with materials. But even in this relatively familiar social sphere, often enough there are tendencies to measure social worth and achievement according to criteria that do not correspond to the seemingly appropriate and socially trained criteria. We all are familiar with studies that currently show an increasing tendency to evaluate artistic creativity according to success in the market, and it is not rare for citizens to vote on the basis of the image a politician projects in the media, rather than on his or her moral reliability. And we constantly encounter the claim that measuring students' performance always involves an underlying assessment of their sociocultural habitus. Even Boltanski and Thévenot would not reject the possibility of such developments, in which alien and inappropriate criteria of excellence overarch social spheres of values. It is no accident that they occasionally refer to Michael Walzer, who has made the agreement between social tasks and the corresponding internal principles of distribution the guideline of his theory of justice.12 All the more crucial is the way the authors account for such shifts or phenomena of ‘overarching’ within their theory. The study itself offers no clear answer to this question, but even makes the problem vanish by relegating it to the sphere of external critique. Yet these do not represent conscious demands for a new principle of justification in a sphere that was previously regulated in a different manner; instead, these are mostly unintentional developments in which an inappropriate principle of social worth has asserted itself ‘behind the backs’ of those involved. An analysis of society cannot remain neutral in the face of such occurrences by merely describing them as given facts. After all, one of its basic theoretical assumptions is that each polity and each socially differentiated sphere of value is characterized exclusively by its own procedure for examining abilities and achievements. Yet, somehow, Boltanski and Thévenot ignore the inner normativity of their own conceptual toolkit. Although they seem to assume a necessary connection between a polity and corresponding criteria of distribution, they deny it in the very next step. As if driven by a guilty conscience for possessing more knowledge than the actors they investigate, the two authors deny what they have indirectly claimed: each socially established, intersubjective system of moral norms of action has a specific criterion of excellence; if it is overarched by alien, inappropriate criteria, then this represents a theoretical misdevelopment or social pathology.
Another way of describing the problem in the moral-sociological approach employed by Boltanski and Thévenot is that they have a tendency to quickly and repeatedly rein in the same structural assumptions upon which their argument relies and towards which it aims. In this connection, such assumptions merely refer to claims about the ability of intersubjectively shared norms and practices to engender social institutions. In sociological analysis we have to count on such ‘systems’ of normatively regulated action if we are to be capable of recognizing what is fixed and temporarily stable in the flow of permanent change. But in On Justification, such long-lasting crystallizations of normatively coordinated action deriving from customs, habits or law seem to be entirely absent. Although the authors talk of ‘orders’ of justification or ‘polities’, they do not really take seriously what the sociological concept of ‘order’ entails. This problem – the simultaneous denial and usage of normative structures – becomes more intense once Boltanski and Thévenot go on to analyse ‘clashes’ as a second form of social dispute over the appropriate polity. It is uncertain from the very beginning whether such orders are meant to indicate mere conceptions and beliefs, or in fact real structures.
As we saw above, the two authors use the concept of conflict to indicate social discord and disputes that concern not the appropriate interpretation of a polity, but the possible application of different orders of justification or polities to one and the same situation. Actors' habitual intersubjective actions can be interrupted not only by one of the participants calling into question the previously practised application of an accepted normative structure, but also by interacting subjects casting doubt on the legitimacy of the polity, because they view it as inappropriate to the sphere of action in question. Judging by the number of pages they dedicate to this second type of moral disagreement (213–73), Boltanski and Thévenot seem to assume this is the most widespread form of social disagreement. According to this notion, the major point of disagreement in Western democracies refers to which of the culturally available models of achievement are to be applied to which sphere of social interaction. If we set aside the implausibility of reducing the spectrum of contemporary ideas of social justice to those based on the achievement principle, the image the authors develop of Western societies is certainly not wrong. Many diagnoses agree that the gradually occurring transformations of capitalist welfare states are largely marked by conflicts connected with changes in the normative grammar of certain spheres of action. However, even this attempt to give their notion some empirical plausibility contains more than we could reconcile with the descriptions offered by the authors, because they do not claim that the starting point of such conflicts lies in the normative constitution of social spheres, such that we could not regard them as changes or transformations. Instead the study seems to maintain that actors always engage in moral conflicts under conditions in which they are wholly free to decide which order of justification they will use to try and solve a certain problem of action. This peculiar voluntarism expresses more clearly than anywhere else in the book that Boltanski and Thévenot possess no concept of normatively regulated spheres of action.
The difficulties of this central part of the study begin with the fact that it is not entirely clear whether moral conflicts represent the collision of one normative image of society with another image, or with an institutionalized structure of norms. The text gives the impression that the first alternative is right, that the proposal of a changed polity only collides with the beliefs of those who cling to the previously proven regime. But that cannot be the case, because every polity is supposed to form an entire lifeworld, and thus lead to stable habits of action and perception. The demand to change the normative arrangement collides not with pure conceptions or beliefs, but with habitualized practices that have become second nature, and whose aggregate state is notably more solid than that of mental states. But that contrasts with the authors' presupposition that such conflicts could be mediated in the mode of ‘compromise’ or deliberation; they repeatedly argue that in the wake of moral ‘denunciation’, both parties see themselves challenged to examine their respective arguments in order to arrive at a compromise (277ff.). But how can a normative attitude that we can hardly control – because it has become second nature – be changed in a purely deliberative fashion? If the habitual and proven polity forms a self-evident element of our lifeworld, it will be more persistent than the conception of a mere negotiation of moral conflicts would allow. The reason the authors become entangled in all these contradictions is that they fail to sufficiently explain their own concept of the polity. If the latter is intended as a conception of order we can use to reliably coordinate our interaction, then it has the character of institutionalized systems of action, in which role expectations, moral obligations and social practices form a holistic whole. To claim that such structures, like beliefs, can be changed by arguments alone would be a grave category error.
But this inconsistency is not the only problem in the authors' treatment of moral conflicts. The above-mentioned tendency to deny theoretically immanent normativity returns here in a more intense form, leading to difficulties for which there is no solution in sight. The authors appear to presuppose that all six distinct polities can be employed anytime and anywhere as a normative pattern for proposing a change in our interaction. Regardless of whether we are dealing with industrial companies, domestic life, hospitals or political events, one of the participants must always be able to call the previously accepted social order into question by demanding a rearrangement according to one of the unused ideas of social justice. In order to explain what that would mean empirically, one only need imagine a father who one day recommends to his family that in the future, the entire household shall be reorganized according to the market order. Or imagine a natural scientist who attempts to overthrow the division of labour in the laboratory by proposing a familial arrangement of caring authority as a model for coordinating the laboratory's diverse activities. The point is not that such bizarre proposals and revolts do not occur in our social world; the issue is whether an analysis of society can relate to these proposals as neutrally as Boltanski and Thévenot do. The institutionalized normative structures dealt with above, or the correctly understood polities, have not developed by accident; they have emerged from practical experiences in which certain norms of recognition have proven over time to be sensible or appropriate when it comes to managing central problems of coordination. An analysis of society cannot simply abstract from the result of normative learning processes, but must instead take them up as theoretical elements in its own categorial apparatus. The central spheres of society would then represent spheres of action that are irreconcilable with any arbitrary set of norms, or, rather, only with those that have already proven superior and sensible. Of course, that does not mean that every social task can only be solved with the use of one particular regime of moral norms; different spheres of action between which we distinguish today have proven, in this normative sense, to be much more plastic than Parsonian functionalism would have us believe. The moral order of the family has undergone just as much change as the industrial working world or state welfare programmes.13 But the process of iteratively examining alternatives has significantly reduced the assortment of models of order at our disposal. Within the family we can no longer – at least not without appearing obdurate, irrational or ridiculous – resort to the regime of patriarchal or charismatic leadership. For the same reason, it would be odd to demand a pure market order or an industrial system of organization in schools. Sociological observers cannot add such restrictions in our normative options as their own value judgement. As normative facts, they belong to empirical reality, just as do increasing divorce rates or more strongly individualized life-paths. For that reason, Boltanski and Thévenot cannot act as if all six models of justice are available for all areas of coordinating individual action. If they had taken more account of the implicit normativity of liberal-democratic societies, they would have realized that some of these models would be inappropriate for certain tasks; in fact, their application would even represent moral regress.
Occasionally the two authors appear to want to answer this objection. For instance, where they address the sense of the common or the sense of morality (Gemein- oder Moralsinn), they write that competent actors must be able to ‘recognize the nature of the situation and be able to bring into play the corresponding principle of justice’ (146). This is the same claim we saw above with relation to the implicit normativity of a society. Normally we learn in the course of our socialization which polities have proven appropriate to which class of tasks, such that we exclude alternative solutions from the very start. The sociologist who describes the choice of such alternatives as regressive or absurd makes use of a generalization of normative knowledge that he or she has acquired as a member of society. Therefore, the theorist's critique of misdevelopments does not go over the heads of the actors, but derives solely from an analysis of their implicit knowledge. Boltanski and Thévenot would have had to arrive at this conclusion if they had taken to heart the thought developed in this quote. But the citizens' ‘sense of morality’ is only rarely mentioned (216, 227), and instead we find talk of a normatively unstructured society. On almost every page, the study runs into the danger of dissolving, so to speak, the moral structure of the social. Only rarely do the orders of justification take on the solid form of institutionalized normative structures, and there are almost no historically excluded alternatives in the moral arrangement of social relations.
This lack of insight into the normative constitution of society, however, should not lead us to call for a return to Bourdieuian structuralism or Parsonian functionalism. The excessive structure and self-standing moral logic their approaches ascribe to society need to be pared down theoretically and opened up. It is the task of Boltanski and Thévenot's study to clear out and liberate these approaches while retaining the primacy of moral integration; that is how they have taught us to perceive the fragile and contested nature of normative orders. But perhaps they have gone too far. Whereas Bourdieu saw determinative forces at work in the formation of social habitus and Parsons only saw one-dimensional systems of action, Boltanski and Thévenot do not even leave the ruins of such normative guidelines. Their study portrays society merely as an arena of social action in which, anywhere and anytime, all arrangements allowed by culturally inherited polities are possible. Had the authors been aware of the pre-structured normative nature of society, they would have realized that they should not have contented themselves with a mere ‘sociology of critique’. An analysis of society, compelled by the object of its investigation, forces us to criticize the respective form of the social.