European Journal of Social Theory

14(3) 361–381
An interview with Luc ª The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:

Boltanski: Criticism sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1368431011412350
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and the expansion of
knowledge

Interviewed by Mauro Basaure

Universidad Diego Portales, Chile

In their important work On Justification: The Economies of Worth Luc Boltanski and
Laurent Thévenot (2006) develop the notion of a ‘sociology of critique’, which has made
a decisive contribution to our understanding of what can be called an ordinary sense of
justice. In this interview,1 I take the model worked out in On Justification as a point of
departure to ask about the various conceptual consequences it has had on the further
development of the sociological theory of Luc Boltanski. The interview shows that
Boltanski’s recent research on various subjects – such as capitalism (Boltanski and
Chiapello, 2005a), abortion and procreation (Boltanski, 2004), and distant suffering
(Boltanski, 1999) – can be understood as part of a developing research programme that
has been partly set in motion by the divers critiques raised against the sociological per-
spective exposed in On Justification. In other words, Boltanski takes these criticisms
seriously by responding to them through a transformation and expansion of his research
program without abandoning the kernel of his pragmatic social theory.
LB ¼ Luc Boltanski; MB ¼ Mauro Basaure
MB I would like to start with a slightly problematic question: Is it true that, in France,
On Justification was implemented not only as an instrument of sociological research, but
also – in the context of administration theory – as an instrument for conflict management
strategies? What is your opinion on this type of reception of your sociology?
LB That happens to be the way it is: once a book has been published, the author no
longer has control over how and in which contexts it is used. An author is not always
content with the reception of his work, and I was not always at ease with the way On

Corresponding author:
Mauro Basaure, Instituto de Humanidades, UDP, Av. Ejercito 278 (Patio interior), Barrio Universitario,
Santiago, Chile
Email: mauro.basaure@udp.cl

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362 European Journal of Social Theory 14(3)

Justification was interpreted and implemented, for example, when it was used as an
instrument of administration by arguing as follows: ‘If you would like to solve conflicts
within corporations, you need to realize that there exist several logics of action’, or
something along those lines. I do believe, however, that I understand why our book can
be used in this way.
Nonetheless, our scientific goal was a different one. It was meant to be understood
within the framework of what I called the ‘sociology of critique’. The frame of analysis
of the model of economies of worth (mode`le des e´conomies de la grandeur) or the model
of cities (mode`le des cite´s)2 was developed merely as a research instrument to make a
pragmatic study of empirical conflicts possible. Perhaps this frame of analysis seems too
abstract. It must be said that a large number of empirical studies have been conducted
which use, or refer to, the ‘sociology of critique’ in one way or another. And even today
there are still several studies which are conducted in this spirit. Now that both an English
and a German (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006) translation of On Justification have been
published, I am very interested in seeing how the reception will continue to develop
within other contexts.
MB After the publication of On Justification, both you and Laurent Thévenot tried to
develop a theory of regimes of actions (re´gimes d’action) in two different ways. The theory
is based on the idea that people, when engaging in social interaction, take part in different
regimes of action and that everyday conflicts of justice – as studied and modelled in
On Justification – can only be connected with one of these regimes. You developed this
theory in your book L’amour et la justice comme compe´tences (Boltanski, 1990).3 With
this theory you showed that, in contrast to an affirmative but narrow – and in the end
misleading – reading of your work, the purpose of On Justification was not to develop a
general sociology of action which would do justice to all aspects of human behaviour.
LB Exactly, the purpose was never the development of a general social theory. This is
caused in part by my basic understanding of what the construction of theory means.
I applied On Justification in the way unorthodox economists apply neo-classical theory,
that is, I knew that the book was incomplete. I believe that there are two different stra-
tegies for developing a frame of analysis. On the one hand, there is a bad strategy which
consists of believing that one’s work is true and trying to apply it to all fields in order to
prove that it is true. On the other hand, I am convinced that it is a good strategy to assume
that one’s work is local because theories are always local. Then, one can transfer the
theory to another field, in which it may work worse, leading to a continual process of
remodelling of the theory. I believe these two strategies are antipodal. In the latter case,
the theory is reappraised and altered for improvement. If it is too local, you can develop a
larger framework, instead of simply stopping the process.
As a matter of fact, the book you mentioned, L’amour et la justice comme compe´-
tences, was, in a way, an answer to the simultaneously generalizing and confining read-
ing of On Justification as a general social theory. In the book, I attempted to embed
situations to which the issue of justice is central within a larger framework which also
contains many other situations. Similarly, in my book Distant Suffering: Morality, Media
and Politics (Boltanski, 1999), I was interested in cases where the distance within the
situation is so great that the issue is really no longer one of justice. In On Justification,
by contrast, we had mainly studied situations in which the people were face to face.

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Basaure 363

When you have distance, when suffering is shown to you at a distance, you cannot react.
You cannot verify whether the suffering really exists. And in any case, you cannot do
anything to alleviate it. Rather, this is where feelings come into play. Although the
regime of action is not that of love as agape (re´gime d’amour comme agape`), it is no
longer part of the issue of justice; the issue is actually one of pity.
However, let us continue with L’amour et la justice comme compe´tences. In this
book, I tried to prove that people have a whole range of capabilities: the capability
of violence, of absolute, unconditional love, of coordination through equivalences,
to mention only a few; my goal was to widen the field. While Laurent Thévenot
(2006) elaborated a theory of regimes of engagement (re´gimes d’engagement), I devel-
oped a matrix of four regimes of action (re´gimes d’action) the construction of which is
based on two distinctions. On the one hand, I differentiated between regimes of conflict
(re´gimes de dispute) and regimes of peace (re´gimes de paix); and, on the other hand, I
differentiated between the regimes in which equivalences play a role and those in
which equivalences do not play a role.
By intersecting these two distinctions, a matrix with four regimes of action can be
constructed: first, there are regimes of conflict in which equivalences play a role. This
is the regime of justice to which the model of the economies of worth, as developed
by us in On Justification, is applied. As a matter of fact, referring to justice implies that
one is in the midst of a conflict. When we are not in dispute, we do not ask about the
justifiability of our actions. All the problems associated with critique and justification
refer to the regime of justice. There are other situations, however, which do not belong
to this regime, and this is exactly why the model developed in On Justification is not a
general social theory. For example, there are situations of conflict which are situations
of violence. Unfortunately, I have never studied this phenomenon empirically,
although I place it within my programme. Elisabeth Claverie (2004) is currently the
only member of our group (Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale) working on this
phenomenon, but not on the basis of this model. In L’amour et la justice comme com-
pe´tences, there is merely an approximate conceptual description of the regime of vio-
lence. Therein, I discerned conflicts of violence and conflicts of justice by stating that
equivalences no longer play a role within conflicts in which violence asserts itself. For
example, if we were to begin fighting physically, we would leave the stabilized world,
which is held in place to some extent by the recognition of equivalences. The equiv-
alences are rescinded, even if people or groups de facto re-establish equivalences after
violent tests (e´preuves violentes).4
On the other hand, I was convinced that, in addition to the regimes of conflict, there
had to be regimes of peace as well. Fortunately, we are not always in conflict with one
another. By continuing to differentiate between activated and deactivated equivalences,
I was able to discern two very diverse forms of regimes of peace. The first one was
inspired by Bruno Latour’s (1987, 1993, 1999) work on objects. The idea was – and this
is especially interesting to me, because I am taking this up again in my current work –
that there are cases in which the task of saying ‘what it is’ or ‘what it is not’ can be
assumed by objects which play the same role: they say ‘what it is’. When there is a train
schedule, you would not continue to ask me ‘Why can’t you arrive at 3:20 p.m.?’ or ‘I
would prefer you to arrive at 3:34 p.m.’ In a manner of speaking, the train schedule offers

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364 European Journal of Social Theory 14(3)

us the coordination principle, because it is an obligatory reference both for you and for
me. If you will, this refers to the principle of coordination in neo-classical economics. It
concerns a conventional coordination which is established by a compulsory object. At
the same time, however, equivalences are present in this regime. They are very effective,
but without being explicit and debatable, as is the case within the regimes of conflict.
Referring to the limits given by the reference scheme of the stabilizing objects suffices
to pacify our relationships.
In addition, I was keeping the possibility of another regime of peace in view, one in
which the relationships are pacified without relying on stabilizing objects. Within this
regime, which I called the regime of love, the relationships are pacified because the per-
sons involved have chosen to deactivate the equivalences. The absence of equivalence
renders calculation (calcul) difficult or impossible. For the construction of this regime,
I went back to a central concept of Christian theology, the concept of agape, of love as
agape. In Christian tradition, the idea of agape is opposed to that of justice, to that of the
demand for justice, because agape rejects the possibility of calculation. Yet, without this
possibility, it is impossible to estimate what I have given and what I have received. Natu-
rally, this regime is not always active in social life, but it refers to moments in life that are
important and that have often been ignored by the social sciences.
The fact that I developed the concept of love as agape in reference to Christian theol-
ogy shocked people who are concerned with a criticism of utilitarianism from the stand-
point of a Maussian ‘sociology of the gift’. In my opinion, however, this was not a
religious statement. As you implied in your question, my goal was simply to widen the
perspective of my sociological model.
In order to develop a suggestion for an analytical construction of the regime of love as
agape, I drew on the fantastic text Works of Love by Kierkegaard (1962). One of the most
interesting characteristics of this regime is that the persons involved express a preference
for the present. The equivalences are deactivated, the past is not held on to as if in guilt,
the past is only remembered weakly. The future is not perceived as a plan which needs to
be fulfilled, but rather, the future is viewed from the perspective of the present, in a mode
of hope. Why is the past held on to so imperceptibly? Calculation is not active, and, there-
fore, the protests which aim at reciprocal justice cannot come into being. Justice is always
retrospective, looking back. With love as agape people ensconce themselves in the present
without constantly looking for and at the gains and losses of the others. This is another
topic which I have not studied empirically yet. However, my study ‘Messages d’amour
sur le Te´le´phone du dimanche’ (Boltanski and Godet, 1995) is concerned with similar
phenomena. I wanted to undertake a study parallel or symmetrical to ‘La dénonciation’
(Boltanski, 1984). Yet, the problem with agape is that it is not possible to gain observatory
access to it. I do not like to conduct sociological research which invades people’s private
sphere; hence, for this study, I used radio broadcasts of people speaking to prisoners,
people who were close relatives, friends, wives etc. on the telephone.
As you can see, these four regimes of actions are interwoven, depending on whether
they are based on equivalences and on whether they refer to conflict. You can switch
from one to the other, but they all represent different situations and regimes of action.
Of course, I do not believe that this is a general social theory. Even this broader model
can only be viewed as a more or less efficient research instrument.

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Basaure 365

MB You mentioned that it is possible to move from one regime to another, for
example, from the regime of justice to the regime of violence and to that of love; this
makes this model of regimes of action complex and dynamic.
LB Correct. I am very interested in the moments in which people switch from one
regime of action to another, especially those moments in which they switch from the
regime of love as agape to that of justice. To understand more about these moments,
it is better to concentrate on literature, theatre, or cinema than on sociology! It is similar
for transitions from agape to violence. This is particularly simple because the regime of
love as agape ignores the equivalences and is quite instable. Love and violence – the two
regimes which are the furthest apart – share the fact that they deactivate equivalences and
thus cannot be stabilized by their presence. Concerning the transition from the regime of
love as agape to that of justice, Bergmann’s movies show us examples in scenes with
domestic conflicts. Bergmann is very observant of these types of moments. He stages
couples who work hard not to compete with one another, not to compare what is being
given and received, and who then, all of a sudden, reiterate all the accusations, whether
old or new, important or unimportant. This is the moment of transition into the regime of
justice, inside which, in retrospective, we insert elements of a process, cause, reasons,
consequences, responsibilities, and so on.
I have been trying to understand, on an analytical level, how this conversion from
agape to justice is possible. It seemed to me that the transition could only take place
if one of the partners refused something that the other offered him. In reality, the persons
in the regime of love as agape do not demand anything; they do not expect anything,
especially not the reciprocation of their gifts, because they do not calculate. Not to expect
any kind of quid pro quo seems to be an unattainable goal, but I believe that this occurs
often in everyday life, because it would be impossible if everyone was permanently cal-
culating what he or she does and what others do for him or her in order to keep the equiv-
alences constant.
In any case, research on the regimes of action, but also on the transition between the
regimes of action, must be continued. Unfortunately, I did not continue work in this area,
but I see a very large potential for research here.
MB I would like to come back to the problem of the reception of On Justification.
There were several critical readings of this book. You are assuming that people taking
part in particular everyday conflicts hearken back to common normative orders or prin-
ciples of justification. The ordinary sense of justice means that all of us have the capac-
ity to turn to these normative principles, when we criticize or give a justification. Thus,
it can be claimed that your model of economies of worth has a collective – that is, an
institutional – perspective. In your book, however, this perspective was applied not
macro-sociologically but micro-sociologically, that is, in relation to everyday conflicts
of mere situational meaning. It does seem to me that this model mainly concerns the
micro-level, even if in a very particular sense. On Justification was criticized in pre-
cisely this regard. Can this be considered a valid criticism?
LB Fair enough, what we did in On Justification was criticized by sociologists who
are interested in macro-sociology or in the structure and figuration of social entities.
Their argument was that the book should not be based exclusively upon the sociology
of interaction. This critique is, in part, reasonable. On Justification does present a

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366 European Journal of Social Theory 14(3)

problem on the macro-level, but this issue requires further explanation. It needs to be
clarified that this is not only a matter of ethnomethodology, according to which every-
thing is always constructed from the viewpoint of the resources of the local situation, so
that, as a consequence, the institutional dimension threatens to disappear. The model of
cities refers to a frame which goes far beyond the situation, because there are general
conventions that are valid everywhere. Nonetheless, I must admit that the critique put
forward against our book is justified, at least in a two ways. On the one hand, the critique
is permissible because there can be a massive set of inequalities, so massive that it is not
even asserted by the people involved in a situation. When working on a situation, you
only perceive the inequalities related to the moral grammar of a specific situation. Thus,
it is necessary to search for explanations which lie outside the situation itself. From then
on, the critical position needs historical support; it needs to be freed of the constraints of
the current situation in order to present something new, a possible and different future.
During the analysis of the situation, the risk of naturalizing the situation without allow-
ing for possible alternatives is very large. On the other hand, and this needs to be said as
well, our model of the economies of worth can describe the argumentation of the persons
involved in a situation, but it cannot describe the change in society that has come about in
the past 10 years! This is the price you have to pay when you try to construct models as
we did with our model of the ordinary sense of justice.
Essentially, the problem of describing the macro-level remains completely unre-
solved in On Justification. But it does have to be mentioned here that this problem
remains unresolved by our critics as well. Today, you can no longer believe typologies
which connect someone’s political ideologies to his occupational group or classes. Why?
Because it is no longer possible to link everyday experiences with what is described by
the terms ‘uncredentialled supervisor’, ‘proletarian’, ‘expert manager’, and so on. These
typologies and structural analyses were the main instrument of sociology between 1960
and 1980, but they have disappeared from the field of sociology, just as they have from
social and political representation. Please allow me to elucidate: the classes still exist and
the inequalities are even stronger today, but the representation of the classes, especially
within governmental institutions, has weakened tremendously.
The problem of the re-conceptualization of the macro-level, and in particular of social
classes, is still a central problem. The question is how to handle this problem. Should we
forego a re-conceptualization of the macro-level completely, thus accepting the eternal
opposition between the very traditional Parsonian and Bourdieusian sociology, on the
one hand, and situational micro-sociology, on the other? To me, this seems too easy
or soft – and unacceptable. The search for a solution must go on – but how? Bruno
Latour’s model, for example, is linked to the idea that the macro-level must be con-
structed according to the performance of those involved. However, the description is
so tedious that no one has worked with the model yet. We do not even know whether
such a description is realizable or not. In The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski and
Chiapello, 2005a), Ève Chiapello and I tried a different approach to transcend the prob-
lem of the description of the macro-level.
MB So, there is a shift in focus between On Justification and The New Spirit of Capit-
alism. The shift is on the axis of micro- and macro-level. In the book you last mentioned,
you examined the birth of a new normative world, the so-called ‘projective city’ (cite´ par

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Basaure 367

projet). However, with this new universe of justification, you also attempted to explain
the historic dynamics of the last decades with regard to a social macro-object, capitalism.
It seems to me that this implies another shift in focus, on a synchronic and diachronic
axis: while the focus in On Justification was on the synchronic model of normative
orders, you chose a historic sociological perspective in The New Spirit of Capitalism
– just as you did with your sociology in The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society
(Boltanski, 1987), and before that in the 1960s and 1970s.
LB This question gives me the opportunity to concentrate on the problem of the
historical perspective beyond the question of the macro-level. There were some valid
criticisms of On Justification which came from historians, not sociologists. They
reproached us for having ignored the historical dimension. In earnest, we were often
criticized for having neglected history. A particularly sharp-sighted example was the
critique voiced by Bernard Lepetit (1995) in his book Les formes de l’expe´rience. His
argument can be summarized as follows: In On Justification, there are only two tem-
poral levels: on the one hand, the brief temporality of the situation, spanning from the
moment of conflict to the test and until the settlement after the test; and, on the other
hand, a long-term and indistinct temporality, during which the cities emerge, func-
tioning as normative hold points. A mid-term temporal level is missing, and that is
precisely the level of historic knowledge, the level that counts for historians. Natu-
rally, the argument is absolutely valid. We used the city as an ordering model, but
we were not interested in questions concerning historical knowledge, such as why the
reputational city emerged at the same time as absolutism, etc. We claimed that cities
are historical phenomena; yet, we did not explain their development, but rather
accepted their presence.
In our defence, it needs to be emphasized that not everything can be done at once. The
perspective chosen in On Justification is not a historic one. The construction of a model
was of help here. It allowed us to develop a fixed form, a model, in order to confront it
with the reality that enforces the improvement of the model precisely by contradicting
him. This is how I consider my work, as can be seen in the model of the regimes of action
or in the theories developed in The New Spirit of Capitalism. By the way, this is how the
complete history of economy functions. If you are bogged down in empiricism and you
do not have anything that you can confront with reality, neither a theory nor a model, you
run the risk of practising a pretty trivial type of sociology which will not lead to worth-
while results. Thus, the focus needs to be on modelling and logical containment – a task
which, in the case of On Justification, was in the hands of Laurent Thévenot, who is orig-
inally a mathematician and studied economics and who is, therefore, capable of a much
stricter formalization than I could have offered alone.
It needs to be added that we were completely aware of the fact mentioned above, and
that our obvious disinterest in the history of the emergence of the cities was agreed upon.
We were both critical of a certain kind of historicism which had developed during the
1970s, that is, we were critical of the historians who invoked recurrently Foucault and
who were occupied with ‘the history’ of whatever came up. The fact that we compared
canonical texts from very different ages, and, even worse, that we associated them with
handbooks of marketing – just to analyze seemingly trivial situations of conflict – was
provoking. The fact that we put together Saint Augustine’s De civitate Dei and a text

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368 European Journal of Social Theory 14(3)

of political philosophy which was so far apart time-wise, such as The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith, is quite provoking and shows our hostility to this ‘history’.
MB Nonetheless, you take account of the critique on the part of the historians. In
which concrete sense can your book The New Spirit of Capitalism be read as an answer
to the critique of the model of the economies of worth, which you have acknowledged as
justifiable and which was put forward against you by historians?
LB As you probably know, when two people work together, it leads to higher expec-
tations, because each partner asks the other questions which cannot be answered imme-
diately and which move the examination forward. This is what led Ève Chiapello and me
to reopen the classic question of the dynamics of capitalism, step by step, without having
planned it in advance. This question is examined once again in The New Spirit of Capit-
alism, with a presentation containing three ‘actants’ (not ‘actors’, because this is not about
physical persons, but abstract entities which act within the text):5 capitalism, the spirit of
capitalism and critique. First and foremost, it is the effect of the critique which allows the
spirit of capitalism to change. Capitalism cannot find due justification within itself,
because it is free of any and all moral and even political expectations. Thus, it is the cri-
tique which has the responsibility of finding justifications, which in turn are taken over by
capitalism and absorbed by its ‘spirit’. These justifications appeal to the externally norma-
tive hold points of capitalism, which are, in essence, the cities corresponding to the model
developed in On Justification. A large part of the book focuses on the analysis of the
dynamics of capitalism in its relationship to the spirit of capitalism and to critique. Thus,
by basing the analysis on the city, we have taken the historic dimension into account.
As a second example, the division into historic periods which we suggested can be
mentioned. The spirit of capitalism can be seen as a ‘historical individual’, to use Max
Weber’s expression. The spirit of capitalism has not always been the same. One can iden-
tify different periods. We differentiate between three sorts of spirits of capitalism, even
though the book is actually only concerned with the last type, which we believe is being
established at the moment. In The New Spirit of Capitalism we particularly tried to con-
struct the historic dynamics of the development and deinstitutionalization of normative
hold points or cities. We worked with a hypothesis which claims that, momentarily, a
seventh principle of the normative order, which we call the projective city,6 is being
established. We wanted to describe the emergence of a new spirit of capitalism where
the world is represented as a network and where the principal figure is the ‘manager’
or the ‘coach’ who implements temporary ‘projects’ and whose talent is the capacity
to make connections.
Through concrete analysis of this development, we also tried to show that, currently,
we are in a period characterized by the disappearance of one of the worlds described in
On Justification, namely the domestic city. In On Justification, we had not yet observed
this disappearance. Afterwards, it became clear to me that it had been apparent since
May of 1968 (Boltanski, 2002). If I had to give a minimalist description of May 1968, I
would say that it marks not the disappearance of the domestic world, but the end of the
possibility of referring to domestic justifications legitimately within certain situations.
As you can see, this effort led us to have a clear historic perspective vis-à-vis the devel-
opment of capitalism in the last few decades, and, in consequence, a macro-
sociological perspective.

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Basaure 369

MB It looks like everything is coming together. There is another quite common

critical view of On Justification, however, which has been expressed by Bourdieusians,
Marxists or former Marxists. They claim that you neglected the power relations in On
Justification. Do you accept this critical view as well?
LB We must begin by reminding ourselves of the two different theoretical tendencies
of the last 40 years. First, in the 1970s, sociologists and the philosophy applied to sociol-
ogy only spoke of power. There are power relations, and there are strategic and interest
relations for sure, but we think that a world in which all interpersonal relationships are
defined by power and interest would be a very problematic world and that it would not
have a very long life span. Thus, it represents the worst possible negative utopia. The role
which is assigned to normativity and morality in this theoretical construction is
especially weak and problematic. On the other hand, in the 1980s, there was only the
so-called life in common or living-together, or rational consensus, and so on. It is gen-
erally accepted as a fact that, roughly, the rediscovery of political philosophy and of
the theory of morality went along with a relative negligence of power relations. This
was particularly obvious during these years in the field of political philosophy, with
regard to the discovery of the Anglo-Saxon debate on the good or the just society. Over
the last 40 years, we went from an era during which the social world was defined com-
pletely by power relations, and in which moral claims could be reduced to the status of
mere illusion, to an era which is marked by reanimation of interest in normativity, the
political theory of democracy, human rights, etc. However, this transition led to the
neglect of power relations. In the first case mentioned, the world described is too bleak
to be tolerable. In the second case, the world is too ‘picture perfect’ to be credible. This
is the theoretical context in which our book was developed.
On Justification is an experiment which has several crossovers with theoretical endea-
vours made around the same time by researchers such as Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen
Habermas, such as the reactivation of Kantianism and new interest in the theory of mor-
ality, even if we never believed in the exclusive power of communicative reason. It also
needs to be said that, during this period, we (in the milieu of sociology in France) began
to read Ricœur’s work in earnest, who had been, in a way, proscribed during the preced-
ing decade.
MB So the left-wing critique of On Justification was fitting . . .
LB Yes, in a way it was. Power relations do not play an important role in the frame of
analysis chosen for the economies of worth. They are not a subject matter of On Justi-
fication, but not because we thought power relations were non-existent. This must have
become clear shortly afterwards, when I developed the model of regimes of action. I
admit, however, that this book is ambiguous in this respect and that such a misunder-
standing was quite possible.
I would like to say that I am not at all indifferent to this critical view. I was educated
in the context of the sociology taught in the 1960s and 1970s, and I was therefore
undoubtedly very susceptible to the critique put forward against us: that we had forgot-
ten the element of history, that we had neglected the macro-level or not accounted for
power relations.
MB You chose to speak of a misunderstanding. I would prefer to call it an inconsis-
tency of emphasis. You do not deny the existence of power relations in society, but you

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370 European Journal of Social Theory 14(3)

try to take the question of legitimacy seriously. In On Justification, this aspect is

emphasized without ignoring that there are relations based on violence, power, and dom-
ination. Thus, it is a model of situations of conflict, directed towards justice, and not, as
you have mentioned before, a general theory of human behaviour in society.
LB In this context, I would like to come back to my diagnosis regarding the develop-
ment of theories throughout the past 40 years. It is a well-known fact that in Max
Weber’s work the reference to legitimacy can be the subject matter of a variety of inter-
pretations. First, it is represented as a particular sphere; then, it is shown in the form of
legitimization, that is, simply as a subsequent rationalization in the name of deceptive
reasoning, of pure power and interest. The latter interpretation corresponds to the one
commonly made in the course of the sociology of the 1970s. Afterwards, as already men-
tioned, the situation transitions from the focus on power to a focus on normativity. It is
surprising that the models which focus completely on power were developed in a society
in which everything was running comparatively well, in that of the 1970s. In contrast, in
the catastrophic world of the 1980s, during which money became the all-dominating
point of reference, everybody began to be interested in normativity.
I am critical of the models which focus only on power, but, simultaneously, I cannot
claim to agree completely with the angelic normativism of the 1980s. In our own way,
we actually were a part of this movement in the direction of normativism. By emphasiz-
ing normativism, which had been neglected by the preceding generation, we became sus-
ceptible to new developments. However, our model is neither a normative theory of
justice nor a general theory of society. This is where the misunderstanding begins: it was
understood as a neo-contractualist theory of justice or as a general theory of society, neg-
ligent of violence and power. Laurent Thévenot and I were seated much too deeply in the
field of empirical sociology to ignore the existence of relationships governed by power.
Nonetheless, we observed situations in which critique was possible, in which justifica-
tion was possible, and in which justification was not only put forward in order to impose
the end of the debate.
In comparison to theories which merely emphasize power relations and relations of
interest or even violence (since concepts such as that of symbolic violence introduced
by Bourdieu allow consideration of all social relationships as sub-forms of violence),
we were able to show that there are situations in which people criticize one another and
justify themselves. However, we never claimed that any and all situations correspond to
the type described. Our aim was to incorporate the fact that, in certain situations, people
feel entitled to justification, particularly when there is a certain balance of power
between the persons. The frame we constructed for On Justification was meant to show
that critique needed to be observed as a special capacity. People can remove themselves
from the situation they are in and refer to another world in order to criticize the situation
they are still in. In the case of radical critique alluding to the change of a governing prin-
ciple, however, the possibility of finding a solution to the conflict is dependent on the
capacity of one of those people involved to enforce one principle of justification better
than the other, possibly by employing power.
When looking at the development of theories throughout the last 40 years, we can see
that a central problem is the attempt to end the continual transition from theories of power
to normativism. This is one of the tasks that I have been trying to solve in my own way.

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MB I would like to insist on that point. The critical view of your work is, in part, true,
in the sense that you emphasized the consensus and legitimacy and slightly disregarded
the power relations. After the publication of On Justification, some of the representatives
of the left-wing interpreted your work as an alienation from critique on the whole, and in
the political sense as a resigned transition of your position towards the right-wing. Con-
trariwise, I am of the opinion that it is not possible to place your model within the slightly
obsolete dichotomy between a sociology of consensus and a sociology of conflict, of a
left-wing and a right-wing sociology. Would you agree?
LB Of course, you are right. Corresponding to the spirit of the age, some interpreted
our work as a renouncement of critique in favour of consensus. However, this is not how
it was. In their interpretation of our work, the Bourdieusians and Marxists focused on the
factor of justification and not on that of critique. The answer to this critical view brings
us to the ‘sociology of critique’. I accept the left-wing critique when it claims that we did
not place enough emphasis upon power relations, but I cannot accept it at all when it
claims that we devised a world of consensus, without conflict, because we focused
merely on consensus. This critique is ‘completely off-target’, because our enterprise was
to adopt an attitude of methodological distance vis-à-vis critical sociology – not to deny
critique, but rather to make it a fully-fledged subject matter of sociology, to conduct the
‘sociology of critique’.
The work we undertook was aimed at the elaboration of a normative model, but it is
utterly compatible with social critique. After all, critique always has two elements: it has
an eye on normativity, but also one on the world which has not yet achieved normativity.
It is precisely the confrontation of power relations and justice which leads to the emer-
gence of critique. The empirical field in which we began our work was that of conflicts in
which the people involved exchanged critique and justification.
So we got down to construct a frame which would allow us to explain and link
the constraints bearing down upon critique and justification in a way which precisely
was meant to avoid the opposition of critical sociologists and consensus-oriented
sociologists.
Thus, the distance to critical sociology was actually part of the method. When work-
ing within critical sociology, you are driven by the desire to obtain the truth as fast as
possible, in order to help people who are being treated unjustly or falsely accused. This
indignation keeps the research going. It is a very efficient motor; it drives you to see or
emphasize aspects of the social world which are ignored or underestimated by the con-
temporarily prevalent discourses. But if there is one thing that indignation does not drive
one to practise, it is precisely the sociology of indignation. Coming from the viewpoint
of critical sociology, you can do many fascinating things, but you cannot conduct the
sociology of critical operations itself. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ana-
lyze an affair (and by affair, I mean an affair in the sense of the Dreyfus Affair) with
regard to its specific social form, as we do (Boltanski and Claverie, 2007), and be a part
of it, by introducing one’s own indignation into it, no matter how justified it is.
MB Thus, the method and purpose of your sociology were misunderstood by the
leftist critics.
LB Exactly. Furthermore, this is a matter of partly unjustified critique, because I
cannot think of any sociology, anthropology or political science which does not pose

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372 European Journal of Social Theory 14(3)

questions of consensus and coordination of action, which is why I consider it very

fatuous to regard someone as ‘reactionary’ for taking a question of consensus seriously.
As you know, there is a commonplace which differentiates between sociology of consen-
sus and sociology of conflict and which says that one is right-wing, because it is con-
cerned with acquiescence, and that the other is left-wing. However, the reality is
completely different. The problem of consensus is the actual matter of sociology, which
it inherited from political philosophy. There, it is the problem of peace, or of war – which
is the same problem. There is no sociology that can evade the problem of consensus. The
sociology of domination or power also exhibits a theory of agreement, namely that
agreement is achieved through power. In this case, there is no acceptance; this is an
agreement without acceptance, if you like. I do not know any classic sociologist who has
not taken this question seriously, because without the possibility of consensus, there
would be no society. Of course, there is always the possibility that the consensus is an
illusion, that it is based upon a mere effect of symbolic domination and will never be
more than an illusion. Our goal was to take the question of critique and that of justifica-
tion, the possibility of conflict and consensus as the solution of conflict equally seriously.
The problem of consensus deserves to be taken as seriously as the problem of critique.
Both critique and justification have to be corroborated by normative requirements. The
critique needs to justify itself as well.
Over the past 20 years, we put a lot of research into the areas of critique and affairs. If
you only view everything from the viewpoint of critique, you miss half of what is hap-
pening. The other half is what I am working on today and what I have decided to call
celebration (ce´le´bration) – a concept I adopt from Bourdieu. I am interested in the rela-
tionship between critique and celebration. An observation from the perspective of cri-
tique and affairs would mean to talk about our shared time here as follows: ‘This is
not a vacation, we have been working the whole time!’ or ‘What we’re doing cannot
be considered work, after all, we’re smoking our pipes and drinking coffee, etc.’ I argue
that there has to be a lot of other kinds of work to be able to affirm ‘what it is’. Come to
think of it, there is a never-ending dynamic movement between critique and the necessity
to reconstitute the world perpetually by confirming it, by asserting ‘what it is’. My idea is
that precisely this is the task of institutions. If a world consisted solely of critique, it
would be intolerable. Hence, a certain line of moderate libertarian politics could be
inferred from this fact. It would indicate that institutions are inevitable, because they sta-
bilize parts of reality and they are well advised to do so. However, these institutions need
to be linked closely to criticism.
MB Why exactly do you object to the approaches that view consensus mainly as an
expression of power and social order as a system of domination?
LB Different points can be brought up here. First of all, I believe that a world based
solely on domination would be insupportable and would not have a long span of life.
Second, if you think that everything goes back to domination and violence, you can
no longer differentiate between situations that people gauge as harmonious and pleasant
and situations that are considered to be insufferable and horrible. If you like, you can no
longer distinguish between a family vacation in the countryside and a slave factory in
India or China. It is simply aggravating to base one’s perspective on a framework which
does not allow discrimination of this kind, because in doing so you dismiss the potential

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to earnestly criticize actual situations of domination. Such a belief in a universal trait of

domination has perverse effects, among others the impairment of critique itself and, basi-
cally, a tendency to justification of cynicism. Third, and to add insult to injury, the belief
in a generalized domination that represents the law for human societies leads the critical
purpose ‘ad absurdum’. If everything is domination and violence and if this is about a
social law comparable to physical laws, what is there to criticize? It would lead nowhere,
it makes no sense.
The same sense of aporia threatens designs which attempted to establish a direct con-
nection between a positivistic and a critical goal. There needs to be a clear decision
between a positivistic position vis-à-vis the social world that is assumedly governed
by inalienable laws uncontrollable and unchangeable by humans, and a critical position.
If the people involved have no leeway for freedom, if effective actions are not the
intended actions, then you need to dispense with critique and accept the world as it is.
What would there be to be indignant about? A person who is indignant needs to be capa-
ble of developing the principle of his or her indignation. A normative point of reference
cannot be avoided. You need to be able to point to an order which you consider just and
righteous so that the situation that has triggered the indignation can take over the con-
trary shape. In addition, you need to be convinced that it is possible to effectuate change,
even if the change is only partial, but at least to influence the state of affairs to a certain
extent. Consequently, the person who is disgusted by the domination must indeed think
that there are situations in which consensus is not established on the basis of domination
only – if he or she is truly indignant, that is. A project of liberty and a positivistic creed
do not harmonize well.
I must admit that I do not understand the idea that knowledge of the laws governing
our lives is enough to have a liberating effect. How does my situation change if I know
the laws that are dominating me, but cannot evade or transcend them, so that they
would no longer be ‘brazen laws’? If I cannot act deliberately to change the world,
knowledge of the laws is futile. It does not make me more ‘free’. And if the knowledge
of that which is stifling me can help me to end the oppression, then this is so because I
am drawing upon a normative position and, to put it briefly, the moral conviction can
effect actions whose impact on the world is not merely an illusion. All of these contra-
dictions develop if you do not esteem the practical capabilities of people and their
moral sense.
MB If one takes into account that in The New Spirit of Capitalism, power relations do
play an important role, one could think that there is another significant transition from
On Justification to The New Spirit of Capitalism: in the latter, you do go back to the
power relations which were disregarded in the former and which had been so important
in your work with Bourdieu during the 1960s and 1970s.
LB I think it can be said that the book I published with Ève Chiapello was a kind of
answer to this critique – at least from my point of view, because Ève, who has a different
intellectual background, had other goals in mind. The book blends the traces of these dif-
ferent paths, as all works written by two people do. In the book, we tried to place the
power relations and the orders of justification (in the sense described in On Justification)
into the same frame of analysis. This complex integration of relationships of power and
relationships governed by normative standards was important. We wanted to discontinue

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374 European Journal of Social Theory 14(3)

the aforementioned detrimental opposition which had dominated research in sociology

and philosophy (as applied to the social sciences) over the past 30 or 40 years in France.
You have summed it up correctly. To me, also, it seems that the different types of
sociology that I have practised since the end of my education in the 1960s have come
together again. To put it briefly, there is a form of sociology that accepts an external
and superior viewpoint, the composition of ‘great narratives’, and there is a form of
sociology which comes from observation of the actions of people in more or less
restrictive situations and of the justification of their actions. Furthermore, there is a
unification of ‘critical sociology’ and the ‘sociology of critique’. Admittedly, I do not
know whether this attempt at unification can actually hold out theoretically. At the
moment, I am still grappling with this problem. I am trying to translate the term ‘dom-
ination’ into the vocabulary of the pragmatic ‘sociology of critique’. This is a factual
and very complex problem.
MB Could you elaborate on the attempt at unification? In The New Spirit of Capital-
ism, you picked up and revised the term ‘test’, which was already a central term in On
Justification. The revision was made in the sense of tests of strength (e´preuves de force).
LB Our attempt to express the relationship between norms and conflicts revolves
around the term ‘test’. Indeed, it was an important step towards the integration of power
relations and of worth-based relations, of justified relationships. We revised the term
‘test’ in two parallel respects. In The New Spirit of Capitalism, the first revision was a
parameterization of the tests according to their degree of generality, to their legal forma-
lization, to their degree of objectivity, and to their level of reproducibility in a variety of
situations. The span of possible situations went from local tests without a controllable
format to established, identified and highly categorized or institutionalized tests
(e´preuves institue´es), defined by exact regulations. When tests remain informal and
unregulated, they can be much more unfair than when they are formalized. A second dif-
ference between the two perspectives in both books could be described by saying that
from then on, all tests were always tests of strength. It is no longer a matter of distin-
guishing radically between tests of strength and legitimate tests. All tests are tests of
strength: the elections, a school exam, and so on. There is a sort of continuum which
reaches from the unspecified tests of strength, in which you do not know which forces
are at work, to the specified tests of strength, in which only one sort of force is used for
the test so that it can be regarded as legitimate.
Let us look at a school exam, for example. The people who criticize school exams try
to prove that they do not adhere to the norm of tests. For example, look at the critique put
forward by Bourdieu and Passeron (1979) against the school exam in The Inheritors:
They rightly say that while a school exam pretends to measure someone’s capabilities
in Latin, Greek or math, many other capabilities are being measured as well, for exam-
ple, a friendly expression, the charm that the student has according to his or her social
background, the student’s eloquence, his or her manners, etc. These are unspecified
strengths that influence the result. On the other hand, a perfect exam would be one that
is readjusted to a sole situation. Due to the critique, the exam can be cleansed.
If the exam is strongly formalized and institutionalized, its costs will admittedly be
very high for those people who have access to many different resources, whereas they
will be very profitable for those people who have only prepared themselves for the

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specific exam. Thus, the people who have access to many different resources or sources
of strength will try to avoid the test. They will abandon these social forms and this regime
of categorization (re´gime de cate´gorisation), which is a regime of a certain privilege. In a
way, they avoid it to start on a more profitable path. This happened – or, at least, this is
how we interpreted it – when new capitalism evaded the tests posed by the critique from
blue-collar workers in the 1970s, for example, through the deregulation of the labour
market. In a sense, this expression also allowed us to incorporate temporality and change
as well as the macro- and micro-levels.
MB So, you connect power relations and legitimate relations by saying that the latter
are a specific form of the former, a form that is legitimate and compatible with an every-
day sense of justice, less threatened by the critique of injustice. In contrast to its use in On
Justification, the term has been moved slightly to the ‘left’, in the political sense – with-
out meaning that it has attached itself to a traditional critical sociology, but rather that it
remains within the normative and moral perspective of sociology.
LB Indeed, that is a way to describe it. In The New Spirit of Capitalism, we assume
that the tests of strength can also be considered legitimate. The conditions of legitimacy
of the test can be met or not, in the sense that there is a continuum between the mere test
of strength and a legitimate test. Maybe we should rather say that the legitimate tests only
have a certain resilience vis-à-vis the reproach of illegitimacy, because no test is pro-
tected from critique. It is a matter of more or less legitimacy, not of absolute legitimacy.
This was the base on which we constructed our model. These two modalities of tests cor-
respond to two regimes of action: in the first, which is founded on the conception of the
world as a network, the beings perform light-footed leaps to remain in constant modifi-
cation, and they also move when their continuance is threatened by a test. In this regime,
which we called ‘displacement’ (re´gime de de´placement), the changes always have a
local character in that they are situated in a ‘level of immanence’ (plan d’immanence)
and are merely objects of ‘limited reflexivity’ (re´flexivite´ limite´e) without a superior
position. For this reason, the changes caused by the displacement do not immediately
lead to a reconfiguration of the categories that structure the representation, especially the
legal one, of the social world. This reconfiguration, on the other hand, demands a very
complex enterprise by those involved.
For example, this reconfiguration is implemented by critique when it interprets, tota-
lizes, and questions the legitimacy of the changes set into motion by the displacements,
that is, their claim to comply with the common good. Critique has the task of examining
whether the changes caused by the displacement are detrimental to the common good or,
put briefly, whether they adhere to the ‘principle of common humanity’ (principe de
commune humanite´).
MB So the displacement causes a loss of framework for critique. At the same time,
critique needs to reconstruct such a framework within which its claims are able to regain
their potency. Thus, the level of immanence does not seem to offer a categorical frame
for critique, but, nonetheless, you have high hopes that the capacity of the persons to cri-
ticize remains, even there where their normative world has been extremely displaced.
LB Deleuze played an important role during the conceptualization of the regime of
displacement. Take, for example, his work Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Deleuze,
1988), but also Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1994), Nietzsche and Philosophy

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376 European Journal of Social Theory 14(3)

(Deleuze, 1983), etc. These texts had a significant impact on the social sciences because
Deleuze provided instruments to describe the world as it is, situated in a ‘level of imma-
nence’: a rhizomatic world, inhabited by forces, crossed by a flow circulating in a net-
work, marked by contacts that develop at intersections of the flow and the potency, etc.
Such an account has asserted itself, at least in part, because it allows repudiation of
these cumbersome beings: the subject, morality, normativity, etc. It also facilitates the
abolishment of the dual-level metaphysics that we implemented in On Justification:
one level constituted by singular individuals and one constituted by conventions which
permit approximation of the two and the formation of equivalences between them
(mettre en e´quivalence).
In On Justification, with the term city, we reinstated the dual-level metaphysics, with
conventions, regulations, and a precise normativity whose structure can be found in
Rousseau’s work. We try to show that this structure (one level containing the singular
individuals, the other containing the general will) is basically the same as the structure
of the collective consciousness in Durkheim’s work. Durkheim criticizes Rousseau, but
borrows his construction of the social bond and the norm.
In the displacement, critique is without orientation, because its normative points of
reference can be found in the principles of equivalences belonging to a regime of cate-
gorization. Critique is thereby placed in a difficult situation: it must provide critique
based on normative resources which are not necessarily adapted to the new, displaced
situation. Thus, it is very simple and unfair to denote the moral indignation as ‘conser-
vative’ or even as ‘reactionary’, particularly when critique has to readapt after a period of
displacement.
MB You just mentioned the term ‘common humanity’ (commune humanite´) that
played an important role in On Justification. One of the goals in your book about the
abortion and the procreation – La condition fœtale (Boltanski, 2004) – was to clarify and
develop this term.
LB Precisely. The term ‘common humanity’ is an axiom of the model of cities. Thus,
it has a central role in On Justification, although the problems it poses were not
expounded adequately in the book. I was interested in the term humanity and in the limits
of humanity. This interest led me to embark on a certain direction of research, namely
that of social anthropology. In On Justification, the ‘common humanity’ is a moral claim
and a central point for the construction of the model of normativity. But, as we like to
say, in everyday life, in the world as it is, the term is a very weak one, constantly threat-
ened, and constantly being reconstructed. For about 20 years we have witnessed the
resumption of the problems concerning this term. The debate on the change of conditions
of procreation, pregnancy, and birth, but also of sickness and death is a manifestation of
the resumption mentioned. This change has generated discussions about humanity in
respect to beings whose status of humanity is unclear, for example, foetuses, premature
infants, coma patients, etc. It needs to be mentioned that all of these problems are the
subject matter of many intense debates and a series of critiques and justifications, offer-
ing the possibility of continuing our work on a ‘sociology of critique’, particularly in the
field which we call ‘common humanity’.
MB In La condition fœtale, however, you go beyond the terms of the model of the
economies of worth. On Justification alludes to the model of the public and even official

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discourse, while in La condition fœtale you work on the reverse side: the things you
know but do not want to express publicly, because they concern an evil and not a value
or worth. Can we say that this is another conceptual transition in comparison to On
Justification, in the sense that it is research on unjustifiable actions?
LB Correct. On Justification is concerned with the relationship of certain
goods, values, worth, etc. which have come into conflict with each other. These con-
flicts can easily arise in the public sphere because they regard official matters. In
Bourdieu’s first works (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990), his anthropological works, an opposi-
tion can be found that I consider very interesting and that I believe should be taken up
again: the opposition between the official (officiel) and the unofficial (officieux).
There are official, public matters and unofficial matters which are known of, spoken
of, rumours. Bourdieu learned this from his intimate connection to his birthplace,
a little village. I often heard him say that people know everything, that the world
knows everything.
But the lion’s share of the work on the ‘sociology of critique’ was more concerned
with public situations, official matters. A book like On Justification is based upon the
claims that are made in public. But you are not always in public. There is a whole series
of other universes, parallel to that of public relationships in which you are expected to
justify your actions and words. There are issues which lie beyond the order of justifiable
matters. Emphasizing the importance of the moment of justification does not mean that
all justifications are true, that the people involved never lie, that there is nothing clandes-
tine, and that there is no such thing as insincerity in the course of social life. In La con-
dition fœtale, my goal was to reincorporate the question of the difference between
justifiable matters (with regard to which one ‘opens one’s eyes’) and that which is not
in the realm of justification (with regard to which one ‘closes one’s eyes’). The action
of abortion adheres not to the logic of good, but to the logic of the lesser evil. It is the
logic of apology, of acceptance, and of understanding in regard to the decisions which
are to be excused. In this sense, abortion is not a justifiable action. La condition fœtale
expresses my interest in the distinction between the official and the unofficial, between
justification and the unjustifiable. In this sense, it is a transition of interest in comparison
to On Justification and you were right to observe it as such.
MB I would like to end this conversation by asking you about your current work.
What are you working on right now?
LB At the moment, I am interested in creating a theoretical framework that would
allow me to interconnect ‘critical sociology’ and the ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’
in a coherent way. It would have to be a framework in which the relationship between
normativity and description can actually be questioned. However, this is a work in prog-
ress.7 I addressed this issue in my last book On Critique.
MB Is this work connected to the fact that, recently, there has been intense collabora-
tion between your research group in Paris, the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale
(GSPM), and the Institute for Social Research (IfS) in Frankfurt am Main, and several
meetings between you and Axel Honneth?
LB Definitely. The collaboration with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt,
but also with colleagues from the New School for Social Research in New York, can
help us compare our work with problems we have not tackled yet, and thus attempt to

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piece together a connection of our pragmatic and mainly empirical sociology with
critical theory.
Regarding the connection with Axel Honneth’s work, however, I must say that I am
trying to break with a purely moral perspective. As you know, since you are a member of
the group, I am trying to develop the following argument at the GSPM. Today, if you are
trying to recover a critical position, you basically need to start with the moral positions of
those involved. This has always been our perspective at the GSPM, and it is common
ground both for us and the newer Frankfurt Theory. But in the meantime, I believe that
this is insufficient. Basically, I am trying to take up the idea of an immanent contra-
diction again. This is also the reason why I am interested in that what I call the ‘her-
meneutic contradiction’, namely, the contradiction between the necessity of saying
‘what is’ and the impossibility for singular individuals – who always possess a body
and, therefore, need to remain particular – to actually say ‘what is’ in a completely
legitimate way. The institutions have to say ‘what is’, this is necessary for social life,
but the institutions are made of singular individuals, who cannot say ‘what is’ without
being exposed to criticism. Since this contradiction exists, and since it is a necessary
one, criticism is also necessary.
MB Marxist critique is based on immanent and essential contradiction.
LB Exactly. In a certain way, with this theory, we return to Marx’s starting point. You
could say that I fashion a somewhat strange connection between Marx and La condition
fœtale, which is very interesting but obviously very complicated as well. Even in Marx’s
work, a man who spent his whole life criticizing morality, there is a certain moral theory.
But I believe that you need to go beyond this contradiction by taking a detour by way of
the confrontation of morality with contradictions.

Notes
1. This interview is part of a much more extensive conversation with Luc Boltanski, which cov-
ers almost all of the milestones and stages of his complex work. This part of the interview will
also be published in the Berliner Journal of Sociology in German. The excerpts chosen for
this article focus on the books by Boltanski that have already been published in English and
German. The complete conversation was recorded in several steps, mainly during personal
meetings which took place in Paris, Southern France, and Frankfurt am Main, but also
through correspondence. Some of Boltanski’s responses are based on material from books
published in France as well as interviews with Boltanski in French. I would like to thank Luc
Boltanski cordially for his time and effort in helping me put together this document and for
reading and revising this version. The development of the questions profited greatly from the
discussions with Nora Sieverding. I would also like to thank Corinna Norrick, who helped me
with the translation from German into English, and Simon Susen, for their careful reading and
helpful suggestions.
2. In 1991, in their book De la justification. Les e´conomies de la grandeur, Boltanski and
Thévenot presented a conceptual model which became known in France as the mode`le des
e´conomies de la grandeur or as mode`le des cite´s. Les e´conomies de la grandeur (Boltanski
and Thévenot, 1987) was the original title of an earlier version of the book, published in
1987. The revised version of 1991 was translated into English and published under the title

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Basaure 379

On Justification: The Economies of Worth in 2006. In accordance with this subtitle and with
the terminology used in Distant Suffering (1999), I translate ‘le mode`le des e´conomies de la
grandeur’ as ‘the model of economies of worth’ and not – as in the official translation of The
New Spirit of Capitalism – as ‘the model of economies of status’. Boltanski’s and Thévenot’s
term ‘mode`le des cite´s’ has been translated in different ways, as ‘model of the (political) cit-
ies’ (Boltanski, 1999) and as the ‘model of the polity’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). As in
Distant Suffering and in The New Spirit of Capitalism, I translate this term as ‘model of the
cities’ and not, as in On Justification, as ‘model of the polity’. Accordingly, I translate ‘cite´ de
la opinion’ as ‘reputational city’, ‘cite´ domestique’ as ‘domestic city’, and ‘cite´ par projet’ as
‘projective city’.
3. Since the publication of the first version of On Justification as Les e´conomies de la grandeur in
1987 in France, Boltanski and Thévenot have gone their different ways to develop their
pragmatic model of analysis further. Boltanski’s case (1990) focuses on the development of
a sociology of regimes of action (sociologie de re´gimes d’action). Thévenot (2006), on the other
hand, concentrates on the development of a sociology of regimes of engagement (sociologie de
re´gimes d’engagement). Both have gone far beyond the model of economies of worth, i.e.
beyond the question of justice, critique, and justification. At the same time, however, both
continue to draw upon this model, notably when examining particular regimes of action. In
Boltanski’s case, the analysis of critique and justification is renamed: it is now called regime
of justice or regimen of justification (re´gime de justice). He compares it systematically with
three other regimes of action: the regime of routine (re´gime de justesse), the regime of violence
(re´gime de la violence), and the regime of love as agape (re´gime de l’amour comme agape` or
regime d’agape`). Laurent Thévenot now calls the analysis of critique and justification the
regime of justifiable engagement or regimen of justification (re´gime d’engagement justifiable),
and he compares this regime systematically with two other regimes: the regime of familiarity
(re´gime d’engagement familie`re) and the regime of regular planned action (re´gime d’engage-
ment en plan). This conceptual transition from a model of economies of worth or model of cities
to a model of regimes of action or regimes engagement implies a much stronger involvement of
such forms of coordination of action, which do without referring back to principles of equiva-
lence (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999, 2000; Thévenot, 2001).
4. In On Justification, Distant Suffering and The New Spirit of Capitalism, the term ‘e´preuve’ has
been translated systematically as ‘test’, a choice which I follow. I adopt from The New Spirit of
Capitalism the following translations: ‘e´preuve de force’ as ‘test of strength’ and ‘e´preuve le´git-
ime’ as ‘legitimate test’.
5. Boltanski adopts the concept of ‘actant’ from the actor-network theory (ANT) developed by
Bruno Latour, who is influenced by Garfinkel. This technical concept comes from the study
of literature – from Greimas, specifically. Latour uses it to break away from the influence of
what he calls ‘figurative sociology’. He says:

Because they deal with fiction, literary theorists have been much freer in their enquiries
about figuration than any social scientist, especially when they have used semiotics or
the various narrative sciences. This is because, for instance in a fable, the same actant
can be made to act through the agency of a magic wand, a dwarf, a thought in the fairy’s
mind, or a knight killing two dozen dragons. (Latour, 2005: 54)

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380 European Journal of Social Theory 14(3)

6. The other six cities, which were revealed in On Justification, are: reputational city,
inspirational city, domestic city, civic city, industrial city, and commercial city. Here, I adopt
the translation of The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005a).
7. This book bases on the Adorno Lectures at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, held by
Luc Boltanski in November 2008 in Frankfurt am Main.

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About the authors

Luc Boltanski is Professor of Sociology at the E´cole des Hautes E´tudes en Sciences Sociales
(EHESS) in Paris and researcher of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale (EHESS/CNRS).
Address: 10, rue Monsieur Le Prince, 75006 Paris, France [email: boltansk@ehess.fr]
Mauro Basaure is researcher and assistant professor at the Instituto de Humanidades (IDH) of the
Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago de Chile and member of the Groupe de SociologiePolitique
et Morale (EHESS/CNRS) in Paris. Address: Instituto de Humanidades, UDP, Av. Ejército 278
(Patio Interior), Barrio Universitario, Santiago, Chile. [email: mauro.basaure@udp.cl]

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