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European Journal of Social Theory

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DOI: 10.1177/1368431019855004
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critique

Will Atkinson
SPAIS, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Abstract
Luc Boltanski’s programme of pragmatic sociology, now gaining substantial attention
among English-speaking sociologists, was forged in opposition to the supposed excesses
and blind spots of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’. After outlining the main lines of
development of Boltanski’s project and emphasizing the major points of difference with
Bourdieu, the article offers a critical Bourdieusian response to pragmatic sociology.
It highlights a number of ways in which Boltanski’s position is based on a misreading or
distortion of Bourdieu’s ideas, is less unlike Bourdieu’s position than he claims and
suffers from analytical shortcomings. This is not to say there is nothing of value in
Boltanski’s work, but overall it offers useful pointers to be accommodated rather than a
thoroughgoing conceptual revolution.

Keywords
Boltanski, Bourdieu, class, critical sociology, pragmatic sociology

For several decades now, Luc Boltanksi has been busily crafting a distinctive analytical
lens through which to examine social life. All the ingredients for sociological success are
present: a neat collection of concepts and phrases that can readily be applied to a diverse
array of topics, a philosophical anthropology anchoring them in a specific conception of
human beings, an ambitious characterization of contemporary Western society and the
historical mutations that have forged it, sustained reflection on the relationship between
the sociological and the political, and even an identifying appellation, or set of appella-
tions, facilitating the impression of coherence and portability between advocates – in this

Corresponding author:
Will Atkinson, SPAIS, University of Bristol, 11 Priory Road, Bristol, BS8 1TU, UK.
Email: w.atkinson@bristol.ac.uk
2 European Journal of Social Theory XX(X)

case, ‘pragmatic sociology’, ‘French pragmatism’ and ‘the pragmatic sociology of cri-
tique’. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Boltanski’s vision has long since burst out of its French
cradle and attracted the attention of Anglophone sociologists, not only those interested in
showcasing the particularities of Gallic thought (Frère, 2004; Mottier, 2019) or exploring
the latest developments in social theory (Baert and da Silva, 2010; Susen and Turner,
2014), but also those searching for concepts to put to use or hypotheses to test in
empirical enquiry on their subject of choice (see the special issue of European Journal
of Social Theory on ‘Pragmatic Sociology’, vol. 14, no. 3, 2011; Samuel and Kanji,
2019) .
Like the other major export of French sociology in recent times, actor-network theory
(ANT), Boltanski’s particular brand of pragmatism received some initial patronage from
the man who dominated the field in the late twentieth century: Pierre Bourdieu. Also like
ANT, specifically the version championed by Bruno Latour, Boltanksi not only broke
from Bourdieu in the 1980s but deployed Bourdieu’s sociology as a critical foil for self-
positioning. Boltanski’s break, however, was a deeper cut. A long-time colleague and
collaborator of Bourdieu’s, Boltanski was no thrusting newcomer to the field eager to
oust the old guard but someone who had helped from the start build a style of sociology
and set of thinking tools and who was now turning against them, dissatisfied with the
direction in which they were being taken and yielding the impression that deep immer-
sion in that style of sociology had bred knowledgeable disaffection. Perhaps for that
same reason Bourdieu seemed unwilling to openly respond to Boltanski’s new path,
despite it being laid on a foundation of implicit swipes at the former chief. No such
reticence was in evidence regarding ANT – in his late lectures on the sociology of
science, Bourdieu (2004) delivered a withering, if brief, assessment of ANT’s contribu-
tion. Concerning Boltanski, however, there was nothing. Nor does there seem to have
been any substantial response from those working in the Bourdieusian vein, even those,
like Loı̈c Wacquant, typically unafraid to call out blatant misreadings and strategic self-
positioning (e.g. Wacquant, 2001). There have been some comparisons of the two
projects, for sure (see contributions to Susen and Turner, 2014, especially Part V), but
a head-on critical rejoinder has failed to emerge.
The aim of this article is to begin to plug that gap by offering a Bourdieusian response
to Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology. A definitive assessment of Boltanski’s project in the
round it does not claim to be – instead the task is to focus on the major points of
divergence, claimed or hidden, between the two thinkers with a view to suggesting
where pragmatic sociology falls short. To that end, I will sketch out the main lines of
Boltanski’s project as it has unfolded since the 1980s, including his later endeavour to
reconcile his approach with Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’, as he describes it. The
response, building on provisional remarks elsewhere (Atkinson, 2016), will be twofold.
First, Boltanski’s depiction of Bourdieu’s sociology, so crucial for demonstrating his
difference from, and advance over, his former colleague, is highly questionable. In fact,
posturing aside, Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology has every appearance of being no
different from critical sociology when it comes to some of the major charges levelled
at the latter. Second, Boltanski’s arguments constantly beg the question, especially in
relation to power, competence and resources, yielding a partial analytical framework
crying out for Bourdieusian support. This is not to say there is nothing of value in
Atkinson 3

Boltanski’s contribution, but, overall, it offers useful lessons for Bourdieusian sociology
rather than a necessary replacement.

The Bourdieusian phase

There was little in Boltanski’s early work with Bourdieu to suggest that he would
renounce the style of sociology they built together. Having joined Bourdieu’s Centre
for European Sociology in the 1960s (Swartz, 1997), he was a major contributor to some
of the earliest research projects based there. This included the analysis of photography as
a middle-brow art, to which Boltanski and Chamboredon contributed a chapter, ground-
ing differences in subjective expectations and orientations among professional photo-
graphers to differences of social origin and class-based ‘manners’ (Bourdieu et al., 1990:
Chapter 5). Even as Bourdieu went on to develop his celebrated conceptual toolkit of
capital, habitus and field, Boltanski happily deployed them in his own studies. He did,
admittedly, take them in novel directions. He was the first, for example, to consider non-
traditional cultural forms in terms of fields, his particular specimen being comic strips
(Boltanski, 1975), and he took an interest in the fact that some people can be positioned
in more than one field at a time (Boltanski, 1973). When Bourdieu (1984) rethought class
from top to bottom, positing the existence of a multi-dimensional social space homo-
logous with a space of lifestyles, emphasizing the role of ‘symbolic struggles’ – struggles
over classifications and evaluations of the world – and drawing attention to ‘class sense’ –
our sense of our place in the world relative to others – Boltanski was a major aid, co-
authoring substantial staging-post arguments and pursuing particular case studies at length
(Bourdieu and Boltanski, 1975; Boltanski, 1987 [1982]; Boltanski and Thévenot, 1983).
True enough, Boltanski’s main interest tended to be in uses of language and their role in
shaping everyday understandings (Robbins, 2014), perhaps pushing Bourdieu further on
this than he would have gone by himself, but he still managed to fit it into the general
framework that Bourdieu was elaborating.
Then, when Boltanski was well into his forties, came the turning point. In a series of
key works, often written with new-found collaborators, he began to pursue novel inter-
ests and outline an alternative framework (Boltanski, 1999 [1993]; 2011 [2009]; 2012
[1990]). Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999; 2006 [1991]; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005
[1999]). If it now goes under the label of ‘pragmatic sociology’ or ‘French pragmatism’,
it is in good part because, like the American pragmatism of James or Dewey, it pays
particular attention to instances of when things ‘go wrong’. In Boltanski’s case, the
interest is in when things go wrong for people in their everyday lives – more specifically,
when a dispute arises and people are forced to justify or explain their own actions or the
actions of others – because this reveals much about the assumptions underpinning social
relations in between these ‘critical moments’. At first, he investigated this theme while
still friendly with Bourdieu and broadly in agreement with him. Following Bourdieu’s
increasing interest in the statistical technique of multiple correspondence analysis, a
factorial method designed to detect the major geometric oppositions within data and
thus capable of modelling the structure of specific fields, Boltanski duly conducted a
factorial analysis of the characteristics of disputes aired in the leading French newspaper
and examined their homologies with class and other factors (Boltanski et al., 1984;
4 European Journal of Social Theory XX(X)

reproduced and modified in Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: Part III). By the end of the 1980s,
however, he had become convinced that the analysis of disputes and justification
required a fresh framework radically different from Bourdieu’s.1

From critical sociology to the sociology of critique

The starting point of this new framework is that people are intensely concerned with
justice and ready to denounce what they believe to be unfair or scandalous. It might be
the actions of a specific person, or it might be another entity or ‘actant’ identified by the
denouncer – a group, a system, an organization, etc. – and it might be a small-scale and
rather quotidian disagreement or mushroom into a full-blown public affair. The point is,
the denouncer believes the accused violates a specific yardstick of worth – that what they
do, in other words, is unjustified, and threatens the worth of the denouncer. The accused,
perhaps operating as a representative of an entity, can respond, but often the real source
of disagreement stems from the fact that the denouncer and the denounced are working
with different definitions of what makes something or someone worthy or just. Here
Boltanski introduces probably the best-known aspect of his argument: the existence of
six major principles of worth, or justification, that people invoke. Identified through
empirical research into disputes but also a lengthy trawl through political philosophy and
instructional books on behaviour, these principles are sometimes referred to as polities,
cités or ‘orders of worth’. Each is said to have its own ‘grammar’ – its own linguistic
rules and regularities in how to describe, frame and evaluate people, events and objects –
and its own ‘world’ – a collection of archetypes, people, objects and practices typically
associated with it.
First, there is the ‘inspired’ polity. Finding its fullest philosophical articulation in the
writings of St Augustine, this polity defines worth and justice in terms of grace and
creativity, attaches importance to the expression of emotion and valorizes those of a
spiritual or artistic bent. The ‘domestic’ polity, second, revolves around interpersonal
esteem and recognition, with trust as the lynchpin, finds a philosophical advocate in
Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and positions those heading traditional, family-based hierar-
chies as people of worth – relatives and clan chiefs but also bosses of enterprises. Third,
the polity of ‘fame’ or ‘renown’ defines worth in terms of popular opinion – worth
derives from the fact that someone/thing is believed to be worthy by many. Anchored
in a Hobbesian view of the world, the celebrity is its paragon. Fourth, the ‘civic’ polity,
of which Rousseau was the philosophical mouthpiece, anchors justice in a notion of the
‘common good’ and vaunts group membership and belonging. The ‘market’ polity,
reflected in the writings of Adam Smith, reduces worth and justness down to money –
how profitable or economical something is – and entails a grammar of buyers and sellers.
Finally, there is the ‘industrial’ polity, in which worth is defined in terms of how efficient
something or someone is. Saint-Simonesque, it positions the expert as the arbiter and
archetype of worth.
Any particular situation or event, then, can be justified or denounced on the basis of
any combination of these polities, and disputes arise not only when people disagree
whether an overt justification is valid, as in debates over whether something or someone
really is efficient, trustworthy, and so on. They also boil up when there is disagreement
Atkinson 5

between specific parties about which order of worth matters and how it tallies with
others. Something may be justified by one party by reference to the market order of
worth (it makes money), for example, but denounced by others on the basis of the civic
order of worth (it does not serve the common good). Situations where the presence of
evaluations relating to one polity are challenged on the basis that evaluations from a
different polity may be more equitable, often entailing some degree of scrutiny by
relevant parties and leading to a final conclusion or compromise, Boltanski dubs ‘tests’.
Boltanski’s most elaborate analysis of disputes is undoubtedly his history, written
with Eve Chiapello (2005 [1999]), of the changing orders of worth commonly invoked to
justify capitalism (see also Boltanski, 2008). In the early days of smaller-scale produc-
tion and family firms, capitalism was rationalized on the grounds of domestic and
commercial principles – money-making was good, but also capitalists were seen as
benevolent and trustworthy father figures. Eventually this gave way to a justification
of capitalism based on civic and industrial principles – capitalism is the most efficient
mode of production and benefits all. This was, in turn, met with critique in the 1960s
from those invoking the inspired order of worth – capitalism was seen as stifling authen-
tic human existence, freedom and creativity. Yet this ‘artistic’ critique was then incor-
porated into the justification for capitalism by the 1990s, as demonstrated by the
explosion of management literature privileging flexibility, interpersonal connection,
creativity and employee self-fulfilment in its vision of good practice.

The critique of critical sociology

From the perspective just outlined, the major problems with Bourdieu’s sociology are as
follows. First, Bourdieu’s concepts are unsuited to the analysis of concrete, everyday
situations because the notion of habitus entails a conception of dispositions, or ‘inter-
nalised determinations’ and ‘incorporated constraints’, that ‘determine . . . behaviour in
all circumstances’ and thus replace the observable uncertainty of interaction with an
unrelenting logic of necessity (Boltanski, 2003: 159–60; 2011 [2009]: 22, 165; 2012
[1990]: 29–30, 39, 286; Boltanski et al., 2014b: 593). The habitus, complains Boltanski,
is like ‘a kind of internal computer system’ automatically calculating options for people
who thus ‘never act consciously’ (Boltanski et al., 2014a: 563). People may well
have habits, of course, but they are irrelevant to the analysis of justification struggles
(Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 39, 43). Second, Bourdieu’s critical sociology casts all social
relations in terms of domination and symbolic violence (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 20). It
thus ignores the critical capacities of people themselves – their competence and
willingness to call out an injustice rather than just passively accept it (p. 26) – and
the clash of incompatible points of view entangled with it (p. 67). It makes no space
for the possibility of relations and exchanges devoid of power relations, like relations
of love or gift exchanges, and instead posits secret interests or ‘unconscious strategies’ –
a nonsense term, according to Boltanski – of which the individuals implicated are
unable to be aware and which, if they were told of them, they might vehemently and
earnestly deny (Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 83, 140–4, 149, 280–1; 2011 [2009]: 20, 46).
Yet there is a fatal tension in critical sociology: since Bourdieu never outlined a philo-
sophical anthropology – a basic conception of human nature – he has no basis for his
6 European Journal of Social Theory XX(X)

critique; no justification for why domination is bad and should be challenged (Boltanski,
2011 [2009]: 22).
Third, and following on from the second problem, Bourdieu assumes an asymmetry
between his sociological critique and everyday critique (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 21).
The sociologist’s vision and critique are, in other words, arrogantly held to be better,
truer, closer to how things are, than anyone else’s, even though Bourdieu’s obsession
with the omnipresence of unconscious interests and strategies logically erases the pos-
sibility of such a disinterested analysis (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005 [1999]: 455). It
also overlooks the fact that sociological discourses circulate through and are re-
appropriated by others in their own critiques. Finally, and flowing from all of the above,
Bourdieu over-emphasizes the importance of social class, and not only because relentless
individualization means people themselves barely see the world in those terms any more.
Migration and globalization have obliterated any chance of identifying classes by a unity
of habitus and taste, and putting class at the heart of critique, as Bourdieu does, ‘flattens’
individual differences and singularities into one dimension and obscures other social
relations and identities (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 39, 45, 144–5; see also 2008: 115ff).
This assessment might have been stimulated at least in part by the detection of only a
weak relation between class and disputes in his early statistical foray in this direction
(Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 247).
In short, Bourdieu’s sociology is said to be determinist, objectivist and reductionist –
familiar claims echoing those of others (e.g. Alexander, 1995; Jenkins, 2002) but
launched from a very specific point of view. Situated in a baseline Hobbesian vision
of human beings as plagued by uncertainty, Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology instead
takes people’s critical capacity and competencies seriously and aims to do nothing more
than elucidate the regularities of people’s critiques, almost Wittgenstein-like, and under-
score the messiness of social life that follows from actors in the same time-space
situation working with multiple registers of justification. Sociological knowledge and
lay knowledge are treated symmetrically, and though the existence of power relations
was never exactly denied, Boltanski (2012 [1990]: 40–1) early on refused to use them as
covering principles of causal explanation. The exercise of free will can be identified in
the ever-present possibility of invoking different polities in situ (p. 57), and if there are
‘constraints’ imposed on the situation by the logic of the orders of worth, people are not
only fully able to become aware of them but often actively seek them out in their claims
(p. 39).
Later, however, Boltanski rowed back just a little on some of this critique and claimed
to be re-appropriating some of the lessons of critical sociology (2011 [2009]). This
amounted to two clarifications, the first being an acknowledgement that there is a dis-
crepancy between how the world is and how it should be in order to satisfy people’s
moral expectations. The second was an admission that certain institutions, or rather
people perceived to be representations of those institutions, have disproportionate power
to define reality for everyone else, to be taken seriously and to shut down critique or
challenge (pp. 50ff, 116ff) – though he stressed that this entails not just symbolic
violence, as Bourdieu would have it, but comforting and integrating ‘semantic security’
too (p. 78) – and that those definers of reality constitute the dominant class in society
today (pp. 145–6, 151–3; Boltanski and Esquerre, 2016: 53). Symbolic power is let back
Atkinson 7

in, in other words. This new rapprochement was first piloted in Boltanski’s (2013 [2004])
analysis of abortion, where he identified the emergence of an official, generalized
justificatory discourse of childrearing revolving around an ‘authentic’ and self-
actualizing ‘parental project’ and its contrast with the myriad, oscillating justifications
for having children or terminating a pregnancy, dependent on particular circumstances,
deployed by women themselves.

A critique of the sociology of critique’s critique of critical

sociology
Strawmanning and the pot calling the kettle black
The initial response to all this is to reject many of the accusations hurled at Bourdieu by
Boltanski. Often they are based on caricature, cobbling together a feeble strawman that
tumbles into a heap at the lightest argumentative breeze, or – surprisingly for someone
who worked so closely with Bourdieu for twenty years – unfamiliarity with the nuances
of critical sociology. Some oversights are perhaps relatively minor. The counter-
emphasis on ‘semantic security’ and the integrative effects of institutions, for example,
seems to forget that Bourdieu already strove to accommodate that via his notion of doxa,
or the shared taken-for-granted assumptions about what is what and ‘what is done’ that
allow people to get on with their practice and give people a sense of stability. True
enough, Bourdieu does not work with the same underpinning assumption about
certainty-seeking that Boltanski does, which rings of psychological determinism in the
same manner as Anthony Giddens’ (1984) appeal to ‘ontological security’ as the ultimate
basis for human action (Atkinson, 2007). Yet Boltanski is clearly trying to cast Bourdieu
on one side of an epistemological couple he wishes to integrate – conflict versus con-
sensus – that Bourdieu’s concepts already surmount, since doxa is at once the basic
foundation for ‘getting on’ and the historical legacy of struggle and domination (Bour-
dieu, 2001: 1–2).
The claim that Bourdieu downplays the circulation and appropriation of sociological
discourses through society, second, seems to disregard his interest in the ‘theory effect’
(Bourdieu, 1990: 181–2; 1991; 1998: 11–12), that is, the real and observable effects on
social relations of academic systems of classification – the way they are drawn on to
carve up the world in perception and mobilize people, including through conceptions of
justice and injustice (Marxism being the major case in point). This seems curious con-
sidering Boltanski (1987 [1982]) analysed precisely this in relation to the making of the
class of ‘cadres’ in France while still working broadly within Bourdieu’s framework – an
analysis which has been paraded as exemplary of Bourdieu’s position (Wacquant, 1991).
Other instances of misrepresentation are more fundamental, however. To claim that
Bourdieu never outlined a philosophical anthropology that could ground his critique of
society, for example, is simply mistaken. Starting in his inaugural lecture at the Collège
de France, and developed further in Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu (1990: 196–8;
2000a: 237–45) sketched a baseline vision of human beings as destined for death and,
because of that, driven to find diversion and purpose – or justification for their being – in
recognition from others. Being denied recognition and purpose – an outcome of the
8 European Journal of Social Theory XX(X)

struggle for recognition, since asserting one’s worth is often done at the expense of
others – is, in his view, the most wretched form of suffering there is, and unmasking
the inequities of recognition behind pervasive justificatory myths forms the normative,
political mission of social scientific research. At the same time, Bourdieu (2001: 109–12)
did acknowledge the possibility of relations and forms of recognition uncontaminated by
struggle and domination, specifically relations of pure love (Fowler, 2014), but he was
also realistic enough – and in tune with an awful lot of research on the family – to posit that
this was really a limit case, liable to tip back into an imbalance of power (see further,
Atkinson, 2016). It still constitutes a theoretically realizable goal, however, and might just
be a relation extendable beyond the family to a broader love of the other. Ultimately,
Bourdieu was not a crypto-Nietzschean positing a simple quest for power at the heart of
human existence and practice, but a Pascalian with shades of Hegel.
If all this sounds similar to some of Boltanski’s own assumptions and language, that is
because it is. Whatever Boltanski’s interest in uncertainty, ultimately he, like Bourdieu,
takes as his starting point in all his work the human concern to be worthy, the potential
for that worth to be violated and the means people deploy to defend or justify their worth.
His later admission that the dominant class are concerned with ‘survival’ in the long span
of history – to be recognized as ‘somebody’ by those who come after them – and the
dominated with solidarity, by way of compensation, only confirms that focus with a
minor spin (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 152–3). The difference is not just that Bourdieu set
his vision out first, in 1982, but that he went deeper into its foundations, grounding the
quest for recognition, and the misrecognition it generates, in finitude, the absurdity of
human existence and the necessity for purpose that they engender.
A second fundamental misrepresentation of Bourdieu’s sociology is the idea that
resistance, critique and clash are ruled out of the picture in favour of reproduction. How
many times does this pervasive caricature have to be refuted? As Bourdieu and Wac-
quant (1992) long ago made crystal clear, the notion of field, as a space of positions
defined by possession of capital, i.e. principles of misrecognition, has resistance, clash
and critique built into it. The term is devised specifically to make sense of how and why
people are ready to denounce others, willing to call out the seemingly powerful and liable
to hold and defend contrasting views – this is what the language of orthodoxy and
heterodoxy, subversion and conservation are meant to capture.2 Of course it might still
be claimed that such resistance and critique are determined, unfolding automatically and
necessarily from the dispositions of habitus, no matter the situation. Again, however, that
is a distortion of the Bourdieusian logic. The relationship between fields and habitus was
never conceived as a case of the latter mechanistically releasing the conditionings of the
former. A field offers up a constantly shifting space of possibles, a range of futures which
are more or less realizable, given the recognized properties (capitals) a player possesses,
and which manifest in a sense of the possible – a feel for the game, i.e. what kind of
courses of action are feasible or desirable – built up through past experience. The habitus
is a phenomenological term at root, encapsulating what Husserl called protention in
relation to the various social games we play: the prepredicative associations and expec-
tations lying on the horizons of perception (Atkinson, 2018). And just as Husserl made
plenty of space for when perception is misleading, so Bourdieu made room for when
people misjudge a situation (see especially Bourdieu, 2000a).
Atkinson 9

Practices based on the sense of the possible are oriented around securing or defending
one’s worth (or capital), which in everyday terms might be conveyed as doing what one
feels is ‘the right thing’ or what one ‘cares about’. People thus have not only a range of
thinkable options and a sense of futurity underpinning them but goal-oriented reasons for
their actions – all facets that Boltanski, after Elster, says characterize ‘strategies’ – which
Bourdieu noted tend to fall into species (i.e. subversive or conservative). Yet why people
have these options, futures, reasons and goals is less easy for them to articulate, why they
have what they do in their horizons (and even that they have perceptual horizons) is
difficult to grasp, and it is in this sense that there is an element of ‘unconsciousness’
involved. Both the term ‘strategy’ and the label ‘unconscious’ certainly carry consider-
able semantic baggage and need to be handled carefully, but ultimately they are used to
convey that people are pursuing what they care about, that these pursuits often share
family resemblances and that there are some pursuits or options which are simply
unthinkable. True, Bourdieu sometimes tended to underemphasize conscious projection
in favour of protention as a means of escaping finalism, but in other places he made it
clear that deliberation and projection – ‘thought of action’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 18) – are
nevertheless grounded in protention and bounded by the sense of the possible it furnishes
(see Atkinson, 2010).
Boltanski’s opposing view, on the other hand, has every impression of trying to
regress to an image of people as beings without history, moving from situation to
situation more or less unencumbered by the past. Yet the details and logic of Boltanski’s
language, even in his early work, frequently contradict that and, in fact, offer a vision not
unlike Bourdieu’s or, at times, a more determinist one. After all, the orders of worth are
held to impose ‘constraints’ on situations offering up ‘possibilities for action’ and a
‘space’ in which affairs play out (e.g. Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 29, 39, 51; see Susen,
2014). However, given that the constraints on situations can only exist via the compe-
tencies displayed by actors, that competencies, in Boltanski’s view, revolve around
language use (an innate capacity, but given form through practical and explicit learning),
and that the history of tests is embedded in individual memories and shapes expectations
(Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: Chapter 7), logically they must be embodied or ‘internalized’ as
protentions. Boltanski does say actors have an awareness of the logic and limits of the
orders, but he also admits elements of them are hard to articulate (p. 30), and unless he
posits the unlikely scenario that actors know the orders to the same extent as he does, this
starts to sound uncannily like a practical feel for the orders and how they can be invoked
– a model of agency at one with Bourdieu’s.
The alternative is to trace Boltanski’s (pp. 32–3) argument that the orders have a
‘metaphysical’ existence over and above situations – a point which Boltanski stresses to
distance himself from ethnomethodology (p. 43) – to its logical conclusion: they are, in
themselves, unalterable by the actors themselves, only open to articulation and invoca-
tion. Not only does this raise all sorts of historical questions: has the market polity always
existed, even pre-capitalism? If so, that seems curiously anachronistic; if not, then how
did it come about? Why did specific philosophers seek to elaborate the ones they did
when they did? It also poses a larger query reminiscent of the determinist limit point of
post-structuralism: do actors speak the different orders of worth or are they spoken by
them? Did the justifications for capitalism emerge through agential activity or the play of
10 European Journal of Social Theory XX(X)

fixed metaphysical entities? Boltanski’s claim that volition exists in the invocation of a
different polity in the situation hardly avoids this since all it does is label a species of
activity, which could well be determined, as free will and, in any case, reduces free will
down to the ability to invoke a pre-existing polity not yet invoked from a limited range
(rather than produce a new one, for example).3
The conclusions here also have ramifications for Boltanski’s positioning of his and
Bourdieu’s contrasting views of the capacities of the social scientist compared to non-
social scientists. Yes, Bourdieu (2004) held that the constructs of the social scientist are
different from the constructs of non-sociologists going about their everyday business,
with greater chance of being better approximations of how the world is, because the
constructs of the social scientist are subject to the checks and balances of the scientific
field. And, yes, Bourdieu was of the view that the constructs of the social scientist offer
models of structures and forces which non-social scientists may not be conscious of or
able to articulate. But is what Boltanski claims to be doing really so different? If he
claims to be elucidating metaphysical orders shaping the conditions of possibility of
action, memory and expectation; if he admits that these are not always known to their full
extent by people themselves and that he offers up a ‘clearer’ model of human action
appealing to evidence and reason (Boltanski, 2012 [1990]: 29–30), made possible by his
platform as a social scientist, is this really so radical a departure from Bourdieu’s attempt
to situate people’s practical sense and quest for justification in a distribution of who is
more or less misrecognized and in what ways? Could Boltanski not be said to be offering
an explanation for what people do (and not just an elucidation), based on sifting out from
everyday activity the unacknowledged principles of practice, that is assumed to be closer
to the truth than the accounts individual agents would give? Boltanski (2011 [2009])
moved in this direction in his later work, of course, but his earlier work may not have
been as radical a departure as he presented in the first place.

Begging the question

The second response to Boltanski’s critique is to root out the instances where something
is posited or assumed, without clear articulation, that concurs with or cries out for the
articulated principles of critical sociology. In fact, there is one keystone passage that
contains, in nuce, all the major question-begging assumptions of Boltanski’s pragmatic
sociology. After chiding critical sociology for obscuring it, Boltanski (2012 [1990]: 28)
offers in summary form his contrasting vision:

[A]ctors . . . all possess critical capacities; all have access to critical resources, though to
varying degrees, and they call on these resources more or less continuously in the ordinary
course of social life. They do so even though their critiques have very uneven chances of
modifying the state of the world that surrounds them; the effectiveness of a critique depends
on the degree to which the actors have mastered their social environment.

Added to this should be Boltanski’s definition of competence (aka critical capacity/

resources) as the ability to formulate arguments by reference to polities that are accep-
table in terms of their universal conditions of validity (p. 39). The immediate questions
Atkinson 11

that follow are these: where did these capacities come from and why do people have
them to ‘varying degrees’? We have already hinted above that competencies, dependent
as they supposedly are on language, must be acquired, and now we see that they involve
differential ‘mastery’ and that the ability to be able to appeal to and couch arguments in
an acceptable language – the limit point of which is the philosophical language of
Rousseau, Smith, etc. – is acknowledged to be variant. This invokes not just the feel
for the game again, therefore, but could be construed as alluding to (without positing) a
differential mastery of specific systems of symbols and signifiers underpinning the
perception and articulation of concrete phenomena as exemplary of higher-order cate-
gories of activity and existing in specific interrelation with others. This is exactly what
Bourdieu put under the label of ‘symbolic mastery’, which is at the root of his notion of
cultural capital, suggesting a class-based distribution of critical resources. Boltanski
admitted class differentiation in his early empirical work, of course, but tried to down-
play it, based on questionable handling and interpretation of his data (p. 239ff).4
The next question that arises is precisely why people continuously call on their critical
resources. They feel their worth is in question, that much we know, but why is their worth
in question in any particular situation? Why do they challenge or invoke a specific polity,
and how might that systematically vary across the population? What are the conditions of
possibility of what Boltanski analyses, in other words? These are not queries that Bol-
tanski is interested in answering, at least in his initial post-Bourdieu work, but the
obvious answer is that there is a distribution of worth, meaning that certain people are
more likely to feel aggrieved by certain regularized situations than others, in certain
ways, and to mobilize specific counter-arguments likely to rescue their worth, given
what they have – which fits snugly within the logic of Bourdieu’s notions of social space
and fields.
A case in point is Boltanski and Chiapello’s analysis of the shifting justifications for
capitalism. Why did the artistic and social scientific critiques spring up when they did in
the 1960s? Who advocated them? As Boltanski and Chiapello readily admit, it was
intellectuals, artists and the growing number of students going through the expanding
education system at the time. So these groups evidently had a shared ethos (creativity/
authenticity) and interest (asserting their worth) setting them against the profit-oriented
or technocratic pursuit of economic capital – an ethos and interest which resonated with
trade union leaders because of a common anti-capitalistic orientation. What else do those
groups have in common? Possession or acquisition of a specific way of seeing the world
(symbolic mastery) related to a specific source of misrecognition (cultural capital).
Rather than assume the ethos comes magically from nowhere, therefore, it makes sense
to draw a connection between a group’s source of worth and their mode of challenging
the worth of others. Thus, the critique becomes explicable as a shared subversive strategy
in the intensifying battle between the cultural and economic poles of the field of power,
to use Bourdieu’s terms. The subsequent neoliberal flexibilization of work, especially in
the public sector, could also be construed as a conservative revolution in the field of
power and its constituent subfields aimed at disarming critique by removing its founda-
tions (Bourdieu, 1998), while the focus on creativity and connection within the economic
field may simply be an effect of the absorption of growing numbers of graduates –
12 European Journal of Social Theory XX(X)

including social science graduates – into the economic field and the diversification of the
field of management studies.
None of these inferences necessarily refute Boltanski and Chiapello’s account, so full
of interesting details, but they go beyond mere description of the events and regularities
to note structural homologies and posit conditions of possibility. They also leave one
wondering more broadly if appeals to expertise or creativity are not typically linked to
the assumptions and hierarchies of cultural capital, or ‘powers spiritual’, and invocation
of profitability characteristically linked to economic capital, or the main ‘power tem-
poral’ today; if assertion of the value of domestic authority or public renown are not
simply different faces of symbolic capital at work; and if appeals to the ‘common good’
and group membership are ever free from the group-making and value-seeking practices
of agents in fields.
Then there is the question of who typically ‘wins’ in justification struggles, since
Boltanski recognizes people’s chances here are uneven. ‘Mastery of the social environ-
ment’ seems to be the key in his earlier work, invoking the feel for the game and
symbolic mastery again. That this is only a partial or naı̈ve view is recognized by
Boltanski himself in his later writings, where symbolic power is linked to positions of
authority or representation within institutions. The follow-up question here, of course, is
how people got into those positions of authority in the first place. What possessions or
characteristics of those individuals typically secure them leadership roles and power over
others because they are (mis)recognized by those in charge of the allocation process as
inherent symbols of the possessor’s worth? In lieu of an answer from Boltanski, other
than vague reference to management of networks (social capital) (2011 [2009]: 148), we
can assume (given there is enough research on it, e.g. Friedman and Laurison, 2019) that
qualifications (cultural capital) play a part alongside specific expertise, experience and
‘charisma’ (as well as money, of course) – all resources that Bourdieu recognized in his
analyses of the bureaucratic field, the political field and the religious field and which
cannot be entirely divorced from class as he construes it (Bourdieu, 1987; 1991; 2005).5
Symbolic power and lack thereof may define the dominant and dominated in society,
then, but there is no getting away from the anchoring of that difference in the unequal
possession of capital and the different possibilities and trajectories it opens up for people.

Class and multiplicity

This brings us to Boltanski’s take on class. In his attempted rapprochement with critical
sociology, Boltanski recognized dominant and dominated classes, their differential pos-
session of symbolic power (which we have now anchored in capital) and their diverging
ethos of survival vs. solidarity which clearly (given Boltanski’s language of ‘objectives’)
also constitutes the interests underpinning their practice.6 The ethos/interest we have
already grounded in the Pascalian quest for recognition, but Boltanski also spotlights the
diverging temporal horizon (long-term versus short-term) that gives ethos these specific
forms and roots it in the possession or not of a widely recognized ‘name’ that will last
down the ages. An interesting point, for sure, but hardly outside the logic of Bourdieu’s
framework.
Atkinson 13

What about those instances where Boltanski explicitly tries to reject Bourdieu’s
image of class, however? To begin with, his claim that classes (especially the dominant
class) can no longer be identified on the basis of shared habitus is thrice undermined.
First, his own admission that long-term temporal horizons and survival, as well as
managerialism, constitute the ethos of the dominant class sounds an awful lot like
detection of shared orientations, values and futurity – elements of habitus, in other
words. Second, Bourdieu (1984) did not posit a unitary dominant habitus but recognized
considerable internal heterogeneity within classes, especially along the lines of capital
composition and trajectory. The dominant class is polarized, in fact, along exactly the
faultlines suggested above to be underpinning events documented The New Spirit of
Capitalism, with an economic fraction (which seems to exhaust the dominant class in
Boltanski’s account) facing off against a cultural fraction. Third, empirical research
across the globe consistently registers the same broad patterning of tastes and habitus
as Bourdieu did (e.g. Prieur et al., 2008; Flemmen et al., 2017; Atkinson, 2017).
Next is Boltanski’s refusal of class reductionism. Whether Bourdieu was really guilty
of this, given his interest in myriad relatively autonomous fields, is contentious, but it
could at least be claimed that multi-field membership, and the conflicting identities and
interests it might spur, were generally reserved for those within the field of power and,
moreover, never really related systematically to in situ action. These are, in fact, claims
made explicitly by Bernard Lahire (1998; 2011), who is otherwise hostile to Boltanski’s
pragmatic sociology. The first contention can be countered by the fact that Bourdieu
recognized more fields than just those within the field of power, not least the family as a
field where love can become a stake of struggle (Bourdieu, 1998; Atkinson, 2016) but
also fields formed by specific organizations or institutions like those so dear to Boltanski
(Bourdieu, 2000a; 2005). The second contention, however, is more telling. Here, per-
haps, Boltanski is indeed on to something. In focusing on the structure and strategies of
specific fields, Bourdieu did tend to bracket out anything else that might be going on and
reduce pertinent situations and actions to the logic of the field (or social space) under
investigation. A person does what they do or thinks what they think because of their
position and dispositions in the space in question.7 This does not mean, however, that it is
impossible to consider the effects of multi-field membership on specific situations or that
doing so invalidates Bourdieu’s conceptual toolkit. Bourdieu (2000b) himself posited the
notion of ‘social surface’ to encapsulate the fact that people can be positioned in more
than one field, with effects on their activity in each, and I have elsewhere made the case
that a little phenomenological flesh on these bones – including a specific reading of
Husserl’s concepts of the lifeworld and the ‘world horizon’ – can help illuminate the
ways in which field forces intermingle in shaping everyday spatiotemporal experience
and practice (Atkinson, 2016; 2018).
A multi-field approach can be usefully compared to Boltanski’s (2013 [2004]) multi-
polity approach in relation to the theme of abortion. Maybe there is, as Boltanski notes,
an official discourse of self-realization involved – we might construe that as the ortho-
doxy generated by the field of power – and maybe he is right to say this is accommodated
and interpreted in myriad ways by women themselves in their own justifications. Yet
rather than accept an account of homogeneous heterogeneity, we can go further to
observe and untangle the interlocking field effects generating patterns and tendencies
14 European Journal of Social Theory XX(X)

in people’s decisions and evaluations. On the one hand, there is, as Fowler (2014) has
rightly noted, the fact that rates of abortion and attitudes towards it are starkly differ-
entiated by class position (and, we might add, position in the relatively autonomous
space of ethno-national difference: Atkinson, 2019). Compounding this is consideration
of the effects of having a child on one’s capacity to accumulate or maintain capital within
an employing organization qua field with its own relatively autonomous sources of
misrecognition. On the other hand, the decision to have children, and thus continue or
terminate a pregnancy, is embedded within the familial field. The legacy of women’s
historical confinement to the familial field and the attendant naturalization of child-
bearing and rearing as women’s inherent purpose, as a kind of sociodocy, lie behind the
recourse to ‘what the body tells them’ that Boltanski detects. Yet the familial field also
acts as the arena in which having a child is a move in a relatively autonomous quest for
recognition. If it is perceived as a project of ‘self-realization’, it is only because it is a
project to create a being to love and receive love from, and to consolidate love from
others (e.g. partners) or perhaps to compensate for lack of love, though there can be other
reasons why people have or do not have children (e.g. economic considerations), and if it
is unplanned, then defence (justification) or termination is played out with and against
the power relations and orthodoxy within the family (e.g. parental/partner expectations)
and the woman’s feel for them. Ultimately, justification for continuing or terminating a
pregnancy is not simply an idiosyncratic effort to make sense of particular circumstances
but is based on the balance of possibilities between a number of fields towards which
one’s commitment (or illusio) may be uneven in the first place – a balance which can, as
Boltanski highlights, generate ambivalence and disquiet if not major emotional conflict
and turmoil.

Conclusion
Boltanski’s trajectory within the French sociological field is, perhaps, exemplary of the
kinds of struggles and strategies that characterize intellectual fields generally. He broke
from ‘le patron’ (Boltanksi, 2008), who was then becoming a dominant player, by
claiming that the latter had gone too far towards the objectivist/determinist pole of
thought and seeking to rescue what had been abandoned, only to later claim to be
surmounting an epistemological couple of his own devising by reconciling Bourdieu’s
thought with the new pragmatic sociology. I have endeavoured to suggest, however, that
Boltanski’s self-positioning narrative was built on a problematic reading of Bourdieusian
sociology and that even in his early work his own language either brought him remark-
ably close to Bourdieu or veered towards even more determinist logic. His later work,
where he has acknowledged some of his own earlier oversights, comes even closer to
Bourdieu’s logic – offering intriguing new categories and theses, for sure – while still
trying to reject him on highly tenuous grounds.
If there is one laudable message within Boltanski’s critique, it is that greater attention
could and should be given to multiplicity – the multiple ways in which people seek and
justify their worth, that is – and the way it plays out in concrete situations. Yet this is
perfectly possible within the parameters of Bourdieu’s framework. Boltanski (1973)
himself suggested as much many years ago, while still using the vocabulary of fields,
Atkinson 15

and Bourdieu (2000b) acknowledged it without giving it enough further thought. With a
little conceptual elaboration, the analysis of multi-field membership becomes not only a
feasible but necessary complement to the analysis of the structure and dynamics of
specific fields. If, as Bachelard had it, and Bourdieu after him, intellectual progress
comes in the form of clearing away errors and omissions, then we can credit Boltanski
with flagging up an underdeveloped aspect of the Bourdieusian toolkit which, with
elaboration, can certainly improve the scope of the framework. It might not be the
thoroughgoing conceptual revolution Boltanski claimed, but it is an advance
nonetheless.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Will Atkinson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1032-1241

Notes
1. There is not the space to unravel all the factors involved in the sociogenesis of Boltanski’s
break, though institutional changes (like Bourdieu’s election to the Collège de France), the
influence of new colleagues (especially Thévenot), reactions to the changing political climate
of 1980s France (including Bourdieu’s more critical stance) and the emergence in the intellec-
tual field of a new wave of young ‘anti-anti-humanists’ opposing Bourdieu and other ‘sixty-
eighters’ (see Bourdieu, 2018: 147ff) are likely to have played a part.
2. In one place, Boltanksi (2008: 149ff) described the maintenance of orthodoxy via ‘official’
justifications shutting down opposition as a ‘simple’ form of domination, only marginally
different from naked oppression, and contrasted it to the ‘complex’ domination in contempo-
rary democratic capitalist societies where popular critiques must be openly faced and accom-
modated or explained away. Seemingly an attempt to code Bourdieu and himself as,
respectively, past and present, or old and new, the distinction is highly tenuous.
3. A more charitable reading might once again detect echoes of Giddens’ (1984) structuration
theory here, particularly his conception of social structure as virtual rules and resources that are
drawn upon and modified by actors in situ and of agents as having the capacity to ‘act
otherwise’ – notions which have likewise been seen to veer between voluntarism and determin-
ism and, bringing us back to an earlier point, to be undermined by a foundational commitment
to psychological determinism (Archer, 1995; King, 2000; Loyal and Barnes, 2001; Atkinson,
2007).
4. To be specific, Boltanski (2012 [1990]: 247) states that the effect of class in his model of
denunciation forms is weak because its categories do not ‘make a strong contribution to the
determination of any of the axes’ and that the structure of the space is more closely related to
the characteristics of the denunciation than the denouncer. For the categories to have made any
16 European Journal of Social Theory XX(X)

contribution to the determination of the axes, however, they would need to have been included
as active modalities in the analysis – yet the accompanying appendix clearly states they were
treated as supplementary (p. 260). In the same place, he also readily acknowledges the ‘weak
reliability of the data and the considerable number of non-responses’ related to the denouncers’
social characteristics, making the detection of a logical and consistent homology all the more
telling. Who knows how much stronger the correspondences might have been with better
quality data?
5. That class background is connected to positions of institutional prominence is demonstrated
clearly in empirical studies of the field of power (e.g. Hjellbrekke et al., 2007).
6. In another place, Boltanski asserts that the dominant class use their symbolic power as a
weapon for exploiting the dominated, suggesting (the Marxist language aside) a shared interest
in the accumulation of economic capital (Boltanski et al., 2014a: 583–4).
7. Wacquant even claims, though without textual support, that Bourdieu explicitly rejected ‘meth-
odological situationism’, an approach concerned with the ‘emergent properties of situated
interaction’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 16).

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Author biography
Will Atkinson is Reader in Sociology in the School of Sociology, Politics and International
Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. His recent books include Beyond Bourdieu (Polity,
2016) and Bourdieu and After (Routledge, 2019).