A vital and underappreciated dimension of social interaction is the way individuals justify their actions to others, instinctively drawing on their experience to appeal to principles they hope will command respect. Individuals, however, often misread situations, and many disagreements can be explained by people appealing, knowingly and unknowingly, to different principles. On Justification is the first English translation of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's ambitious theoretical examination of these phenomena, a book that has already had a huge impact on French (...) sociology and is likely to have a similar influence in the English-speaking world. In this foundational work of post-Bourdieu sociology, the authors examine a wide range of situations where people justify their actions. The authors argue that justifications fall into six main logics exemplified by six authors: civic (Rousseau), market (Adam Smith), industrial (Saint-Simon), domestic (Bossuet), inspiration (Augustine), and fame (Hobbes). The authors show how these justifications conflict, as people compete to legitimize their views of a situation. On Justification is likely to spark important debates across the social sciences. (shrink)

Distant Suffering examines the moral and political implications for a spectator of the distant suffering of others as presented through the media. What are the morally acceptable responses to the sight of suffering on television, for example, when the viewer cannot act directly to affect the circumstances in which the suffering takes place? Luc Boltanski argues that spectators can actively involve themselves and others by speaking about what they have seen and how they were affected by it. Developing ideas in (...) Adam Smith's moral theory, he examines three rhetorical 'topics' available for the expression of the spectator's response to suffering: the topics of denunciation and of sentiment and the aesthetic topic. The book concludes with a discussion of a 'crisis of pity' in relation to modern forms of humanitarianism. A possible way out of this crisis is suggested which involves an emphasis and focus on present suffering. (shrink)

This article argues that many situations in social life can be analyzed by their requirement for the justification of action. It is in particular in situations of dispute that a need arises to explicate the grounds on which responsibility for errors is distributed and on which new agreement can be reached. Since a plurality of mutually incompatible modes of justification exists, disputes can be understood as disagreements either about whether the accepted rule of justification has not been violated or about (...) which mode of justification to apply at all. The article develops a grammar of such modes of justification, called orders of worth (grandeur), and argues that the human capacity for criticism becomes visible in the daily occurrence of disputes over criteria for justification. At the same time, it is underlined that not all social situations can be interpreted with the help of such a sense of justice, which resides on a notion of equivalence. Regimes of love, of violence or of familiarity are systematically distinct from regimes of justification. (shrink)

The paper offers a modelling of the sense of justice as it is displayed in ordinary situated disputes. While this model accounts for a plurality of legitimate forms of evaluation which are used in the process of critique and justification, it escapes a relativism of values by demonstrating that all these forms satisfy a set of common requirements. The reasonable character of the everyday sense of justice is also anchored in a reality test involving the engagement of objects which qualify (...) for a certain form of evaluation. The paper discusses this model in relation to competing theories of justice, and models of social action and interaction. (shrink)

In various European countries, the relation between `the left' and `the right' presents itself today in paradoxical form: the attenuation of the differences at the level of policy making is accompanied by the persistence, if not even strengthening, of the polarisation in terms of verbal position taking and of partisan self-description. To understand this situation, one needs to return to that which constitutes the ideological core of the opposition between left and right. The left remains marked, though not necessarily in (...) an explicit fashion, by the heritage of the quest for `total revolution'. Such quest presupposes a radical critique of the world in the form in which it presents itself, namely as an obstacle to the full realisation of humanity. In this sense, the left is intrinsically connected to critique, and left and right stand opposed to each other in the same way that critique is opposed to celebration. From the second half of the 19th century onwards, the critique of the left was elaborated in particular in the form of a social critique of capitalism. Since the 1970s and 1980s, and since the end of communism in particular, the theme of total revolution, however, dissociates itself more and more from the idea of social revolution to focus instead on the idea of sexual revolution. Certain problems that the left encounters today stem from the fact that it amalgamates two highly different kinds of expectation and of critiques. On the one hand, there are the social concerns and the critiques of capitalism, which, however, are no longer oriented towards total revolution. On the other hand, there are expectations that are still turned towards total revolution, but have been shifted towards the exigency of a revolution in the order of reproduction and of sexuality and, thus, have dissociated themselves from the critique of capitalism. (shrink)

Reading A Sociology of Modernity made me turn again towards history and encounter the path of a historical sociology. One can say that Peter Wagner´s work opens up particularly rich perspectives towards a new consideration of the complex relations between sociology and history and on the consequences that the internal movements within each discipline have had on the other. I shall approach some issues regarding these relations by looking, first, at the theme of temporality and at the distinction between the (...) past and a present (often turned towards the horizon of the future) and, second, at the theme of the events and their frequent contradistinction to structures. (shrink)

The question of humanitarian action appeared in France in the public arena at the beginning of the 1990s, almost twenty years after the creation of `Médecins sans frontières' by Bernard Kouchner and Xavier Emmanuelli. The humanitarian debate in France developed in a political context marked by two essential features: on the one hand, the bureaucratization of humanitarian actions with its own secretary of state, an office occupied by Bernard Kouchner between 1988 and 1993 and, on the other hand, the war (...) in ex-Yugoslavia, first in Croatia, then in Bosnia.One can distinguish two partly overlapping phases in the course of the previous ten years: initially there was a phase of media enthusiasm for humanitarian actions, and particularly for the figure of Bernard Kouchner, but this gradually gave way to a wave of intense criticism in the major Paris newspapers and journals such as Le Monde, Libération, and the journals Le débat and Esprit.We should note that this criticism is formulated primarily by intellectuals, most of whom tend more towards left-wing views. But it is also voiced, in a somewhat paradoxical fashion, by certain major figures in the field of humanitarian action, such as Rony Brauman, former chairman of `Médecins sans frontières' . Many of these internal critics continue pursuing their activities within humanitarian organizations while at the same time questioning the forms or results of humanitarian action. In the many texts he published at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Bernard Kouchner himself, while defending humanitarian action, took these criticisms into account and recognized their validity by incorporating them into his discourse of justification.These criticisms appear to reach a culmination in 1993-94, after which the debate started to wind down and was replaced by others, particularly the social question. One could argue, however, that criticism won out over praise, at least in intellectual circles: from 1995 until today, humanitarian action is invoked mainly in order to criticize it. (shrink)

In questo articolo, la questione delle istituzioni viene affrontata accogliendo gli apporti della sociologia pragmatica e delle sue analisi dell'azione in situazione, ma anche riprendendo il tema del dominio. Le istituzioni vengono concepite come le condizioni necessarie per stabilire un accordo tra soggetti dotati di punti di vista situati e inevitabilmente divergenti. D'altro canto, le stesse regole mediante cui le istituzioni assicurano la possibilitÀ dell'accordo, sono al contempo fonti di frammentazione, cioč di dominio: le istituzioni legittimano criteri e norme che (...) ‘ordinano' attraverso l'isolamento e la separazione degli individui. I quali possono rispondere in maniera efficace solo collettivamente, organizzandosi in ‘classi' e sfidando l'ordine costituito mediante specifiche ‘prove' critiche. Da questa concezione del dominio segue che non esiste una vera e propria ‘classe' dominante, poiché i ‘dominanti' sono coloro che non hanno necessitÀ di strutturarsi in classe e sono uniti soltanto da legami di riconoscimento taciti. (shrink)

The question of humanitarian action appeared in France in the public arena at the beginning of the 1990s, almost twenty years after the creation of `Médecins sans frontières' by Bernard Kouchner and Xavier Emmanuelli. The humanitarian debate in France developed in a political context marked by two essential features: on the one hand, the bureaucratization of humanitarian actions with its own secretary of state, an office occupied by Bernard Kouchner between 1988 and 1993 and, on the other hand, the war (...) in ex-Yugoslavia, first in Croatia, then in Bosnia.One can distinguish two partly overlapping phases in the course of the previous ten years: initially there was a phase of media enthusiasm for humanitarian actions, and particularly for the figure of Bernard Kouchner, but this gradually gave way to a wave of intense criticism in the major Paris newspapers and journals such as Le Monde, Libération, and the journals Le débat and Esprit.We should note that this criticism is formulated primarily by intellectuals, most of whom tend more towards left-wing views. But it is also voiced, in a somewhat paradoxical fashion, by certain major figures in the field of humanitarian action, such as Rony Brauman, former chairman of `Médecins sans frontières' . Many of these internal critics continue pursuing their activities within humanitarian organizations while at the same time questioning the forms or results of humanitarian action. In the many texts he published at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Bernard Kouchner himself, while defending humanitarian action, took these criticisms into account and recognized their validity by incorporating them into his discourse of justification.These criticisms appear to reach a culmination in 1993-94, after which the debate started to wind down and was replaced by others, particularly the social question. One could argue, however, that criticism won out over praise, at least in intellectual circles: from 1995 until today, humanitarian action is invoked mainly in order to criticize it. (shrink)