Why (Not) Pragmatism? Contribution for Turner, Bryan S. und Simon Susen:

The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Critical Essays on the ‘Pragmatic Turn’ in

Contemporary French Sociology. Anthem Press: London 2013.

Tanja Bogusz

Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature again over by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. William James, ‘What pragmatism means’ (1922 [1907])

Is Luc Boltanski a pragmatist thinker? In some current French debates, this question

is not a rhetorical one. More than ten years after Pierre Bourdieu’s death, and about

thirty years after the founding of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale (GSPM)

with Laurent Thévenot and Michael Pollak at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences

Sociales in Paris, the critical stance towards Bourdieusian sociology seems to be

increasingly linked to the question of whether or not one may be described as a

pragmatist.

At the end of the 1980s, being 'pragmatic' permitted a couple of former students and

collaborators of Bourdieu to create a fruitful and widely discussed ‘sociology of

critique', in contrast with Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’. It is no secret that this so-

called ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’ – or, if one prefers, simply ‘pragmatic

sociology’ – was not explicitly referring to the classical American pragmatism

founded by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, George Herbert Mead and John

Dewey. This has been largely admitted by members of the GSPM (Dodier, 2005;

Thévenot, 2011). Interestingly enough, no one cares less about it than the most

emblematic figure of the group, Boltanski himself. Though internationally

recognized as one of the founders of French neo-pragmatism, Boltanski’s references

to this philosophy of knowledge and action are scattered and appear anything but

systematic. Known for his scepticism towards theoreticist intellectualism, this is,

after all, not surprising. Does this mean, however, that his sociology is, after all, not

pragmatist (Stavo-Debauge, 2012)? And what can we learn from this question?

Boltanski’s sociology differs from common approaches in the sense that it enables

him to combine perspectives that in mainstream sociology are generally considered

to be incompatible; structuralist hermeneutics, symmetrical analysis, Deleuzian

thought, practical phenomenology, anthropological empiricism, and, finally, critical

theory. It is a sociology that attests to the on-going transformations in capitalist

societies in general, and particularly in French society since the beginning of the

twentieth century. And despite its postmodern character, Boltanski’s sociology does

not celebrate an abysmal regression into pure relativism. The main object of study is

not social inequality, but the ways in which people try to cope with the often

irreducible paradoxes capitalist democracies produce. This has opened up new

avenues of inquiry and challenged the historical legacy of critical theory. Boltanski’s

merit, together with Laurent Thévenot and his colleagues from the GSPM, lies

exactly in the fact that his sociology has enlarged critical theory by making actors

part of it. This fits perfectly with the pragmatist attitude. At the same time, the near

absence of pragmatist authors as a systematic analytical reference and the critical

task of sociology that Boltanski has been emphasizing more recently, give rise to

incoherence and irritation regarding his pragmatism. Such, in my view, productive,

tensions in Boltanski’s work, in comparison with classical pragmatist positions, will

be the subject of this chapter.

The examination of pragmatism in Boltanski’s thought enables a perspective on his

enterprise through the lenses of a seemingly obvious element of his sociology that is

not only far from being obvious, but also foregrounds a striking question within a

more general reflection of contemporary social enquiry. Opposed to the often empty

clashes of ‘-isms’, postmodern scholars have rightly stressed the making of theories,

the practical realization of their accounts, that is, their methodology. The critique

against the fixing of concepts, rich in nouns but poor in data, has become a common

practice in sociology itself since Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor-

Network-Theory (ANT) began to reflect on knowledge production practices. This

2

development echoes one of the core pragmatist attacks on the intellectual attitude in

theories of truth. For John Dewey particularly, knowledge was a matter of practice, a

matter of ‘doing’. In The Quest for Certainty (1984 [1929]) Dewey asserted the

following:

The maintenance and diffusion of intellectual values, of moral excellencies, the aesthetically admirable, as well as the maintenance of order and decorum in human relations are dependent on what men do. (Dewey, 1984 [1929]: 25)

In my contribution, I shall adapt this pragmatist assumption to seek out pragmatism

in Boltanski’s sociology by offering a close reading of some aspects that distinguish

his enterprise from other contemporary approaches. Needless to say, I am much less

concerned with the number of quotations Boltanski has on pragmatist writers than

with the way he builds and justifies his approach and its possible impact for further

developments in current social theory. These will be tested along three problems

treated both in classical pragmatism, especially by John Dewey, and in Boltanski’s

sociology:

- Conceptual dealing with uncertainty

- The constitutive character of critique in society

- Description versus normativity

These three problems comprise historical, epistemological and methodological

impacts that should be examined carefully.1 Boltanski was, at the beginning of his academic career, a scholar and an intimate

collaborator with Pierre Bourdieu. His sociology is deeply influenced by the

practice-theory approach promoted by the latter. Bourdieu’s insistence on practice

as a central way of acquiring knowledge was very close to Dewey’s critique of the

marginalization of practice within the philosophical tradition (Dewey, 1983 [1929];

Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 122; Bogusz, 2012). Although he developed a clear-

cut methodological tool to integrate practice and knowledge, Bourdieu, following the

3

structuralist legacy, was far less concerned with the possibilities of human action

and practice than the pragmatists. As Jean-Louis Fabiani states: ‘Bourdieu will never

leave room for uncertainty in his theoretical frame’ (Fabiani, 2002: 4). Despite his

radical questioning of the construction of social categories, which was most

elegantly expressed together with Boltanski in a 1976 special issue of the Actes de la

recherche en sciences sociales entitled ‘La production de l’idéologie dominante’2,

Bourdieu was not concerned with questioning the way actors enlarge and transform

their social and cultural environment. This question was foregrounded by Boltanski

in an article on the multiplicity of institutional positions and class habitus

(Boltanski, 1973), and, notably, in his doctoral thesis Les cadres (The Making of a

Class, 1982), which was a great success in France and made him independent of his

intellectual father, or, as he liked to call him, his ‘patron’. Despite the frequent, and

often startling shifts in Boltanski’s subjects and fields, scepticism towards

sociological externalism, most strongly represented by concepts of social order that

exclude uncertainty, overestimate the power of normative constraints and

underestimate the constitutional power of critique within democratic societies,

remaining a constant, and problematic, feature. Certainly, this empirically nourished

scepticism, combined with a deep sense of humanism, channels Boltanski’s complex,

rather implicit relationship with classical pragmatism, as I shall attempt to show.

Enquiring Transformation: Conceptual Dealing with Uncertainty

Uncertainty is a main feature both of classical pragmatism and the sociology of

Boltanski. Let me start with the classics. When John Dewey named his famous

Gifford lectures The Quest for Certainty (1984 [1929]), he meant it as a severe

critique of mainstream philosophy. To counterbalance abstract academicism, Dewey

developed a pragmatist instrumentalism. This instrumentalism claimed a close

relation between knowledge and reality against what he called the ‘spectator

theories of knowledge’, where stated facts were seemingly unaffected by the fragility

of their existence, since in the classical tradition knowledge was a matter of ideal

belief. Following Dewey, the separation between theory and practice started with

4

the emergence of reason as the moral basis for science. To conquer a scientific

attitude, Dewey wrote:

the quest for certainty has always been an effort to transcend belief. Now since, as we already noted, all matters of practical action involve an element of uncertainty, we can ascend from belief to knowledge only by isolating the latter from practical doing and making (Dewey, 1984 [1929]: 21).

Hence, Dewey saw the fatal error of rationalism in the isolation and marginalization

of practice that, in his pragmatism, was granted epistemologically key status,

especially in his theories of knowledge and enquiry. Scientific enquiry represented

for Dewey a practice that reflected the most advanced forms of human negotiation

with uncertainty, because

experimentation effects a transition of a problematical situation in a resolved one. [...] The institution of a new object of experience is the essential fact (Dewey 1984 [1929]: 152).

Making an experience by operational accomplishment is a way of coping with

uncertainty. Therefore, uncertainty

is primarily a practical matter. […] Thinking has been well called deferred action […] Deferred action is present exploratory action. The first and most obvious effect of this change in the quality of action is that the dubious or problematic situation becomes a problem (ibid: 178).

In Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality (2000), John R. Shook stresses

the performative notion of acquainted knowledge reflected in Dewey’s

instrumentalism, which was based on the assumption of uncertainty that embraces

the necessity to test established experiences:

Dewey’s instrumentalism suggests that it is thought’s task to deal with new experience, and where thought cannot succeed, reflective inquiry creates new concepts to produce knowledge that will. In thought, concepts are submerged in the sufficiently meaningful experience of unproblematic activity. No notice is taken of the concept of a thing since we know what to do with it and what to expect from it, and thus we use previously established knowledge without being consciously aware of our dependence. In inquiry,

5

experience is not sufficiently meaningful, and things suddenly become doubtful. Their meanings (thought’s concepts) are brought to our attention because they do not work, and new meanings are demanded if activity is to resume. Hence reflective inquiry must alter their meanings to produce a testable judgment of what activity will work. (Shook 2000, 191)

The importance of the ‘test’ in the sense of the ‘trial’ is central here, as it was central

in Science and Technology Studies, which called Boltanski’s attention to critical

activities in everyday practices. But in STS, a 'test' is not only a cognitive category in

the sense presented by Shook. The concept of a ‘trial’ in the early laboratory studies

of Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Michel Callon, John Law and

many others offered a handy tool to grasp the experimental framework of research

activities, which made explicit the vulnerability of the networks that rendered the

interaction of science and technologies possible. Although STS scholars, except for

Latour, only rarely refer to classical pragmatists (Bowker and Star, 2000: 289;

Fossier and Gardella, 2006; Latour, 2008) or, surprisingly, occasionally even place

them in the camp of straightforward rationalists (Sismondo, 2004: 9; Law, 2009:

239), it is important to note that James’s ‘radical empiricism’ and the theory of

enquiry promoted by Dewey, display a striking affinity with the features of the

constructivist critique against teleological functionalism and positivism that

emerged within the STS movement (Bogusz 2013).3

Far from adopting naively teleological positivism, James and Dewey took science as

the best example to profess the irreducible anthropological evidence of uncertainty

and to set up the idea of coordination against determinism. As Rosa M. Calcaterra

states, for James

philosophy should be able to recognize and accept the fluidity of our being in the world, and, therefore, also the plurality of means and perspectives through which radical uncertainty of human existence is faced (Calcaterra, 2008: 949).

She notes:

6

[W]hat really matters is James’s intense invitation to transform the pathos of human and cosmic uncertainty into an ethos of contingency centered on individuals' responsibility to impress, through their ideas and actions, a human directive in the course of events (ibid: 97).

This shows a striking affinity with Boltanski’s enterprise. In scientific enquiry, a

‘trial’, in French ‘épreuve’, is an event through which uncertainty is revealed. It

requires a professional ethos of contingency. This idea of ‘trial’ was notably adopted

by Boltanski and Thévenot in their studies on critical judgement, documented in

their book On justification (2006 [1991]: 360). They borrowed the idea from

Latour’s study on Louis Pasteur (Latour, 1988: 158ff.). Boltanski and Thévenot

deduced from Latour’s use of ‘trial’ as a science-oriented ontology of interaction

between materiality and morality the idea of critical capacity as an ethos of

contingency that makes democracy work.4 From their empirical studies of

controversies, they concluded that this ethos is translated into members’

competencies to make agreements derived from test situations. In an article

presuming the English publication of ‘De la justification’, they stated:

The competence to make an agreement […] must allow the formation of arguments that are acceptable in justice, as well as the construction of assemblies of objects, arrangements that hold together, the fitness of which can be demonstrated. These arrangements are necessary in order to test the claims made by the persons. The notion of test plays a central part in our construction. In opposition to the ‘linguistic turn’, it inclines towards realism. Indeed, for persons to be able to reach an agreement in practice, not only in principle, a reality test has to take place, accompanied by a codification or, at least, an explicit formulation of valid proof. In order to be able to take these proofs into consideration, the model of analysis must be able to enlighten the presence not only of persons – the sole beings of political philosophy – but also of objects. We do consider the reality test to require the capacity of persons to take these objects at face value and to endow them with value. (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2000: 212ff.)

The pragmatist notion of the test has thus been making its way through

constructivism, STS and ANT to the French sociology of critique, which, though not

referring to the classics, is undoubtedly connected to James’s radical accentuation of

uncertainty and Dewey’s translation of this uncertainty into knowledge practices, or,

as he preferred to call it, ‘intelligence’ (Shook, 2000: 179). As in STS, the argument

takes up situated accounts, but triggers concrete situations by integrating those

7

entities that are intervening as attempts to resolve uncertainty expressed in

controversies.5 ‘Tests’, in a general sense, refer to the way reality is shaped. As

‘reality tests’ they embrace both cognitive and practical ends. They reveal indices for

collective struggles in pursuit of a moral sense of community. In a footnote, Boltanski

and Thévenot make a striking assumption about the notion of the test and its

sociological importance in capturing uncertainty:

[T]aken in a broad sense, the term designates procedures that are capable of reducing the uncertainty of a situation through the achievement of agreement as to the qualification of the beings involved. In this sense, a test encompasses both an evaluation according to a moral standard and an assessment according to the standard of truth. (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006: 360)

Later, Boltanski and Thévenot, and Boltanski alone, continue to reaffirm the

importance of test situations in that they develop a more subtle grammar that I will

not describe here in detail. This grammar expresses the complex attitudes members

of a situation adopt to deal with uncertainty, and their often astonishing capacities of

accommodation and invention. They establish ‘principles of equivalence’ to build

orientations that are ‘valid in all generality’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2000: 213). It

is an attempt to translate uncertainty as treated in classical pragmatism into ‘a

sociology of critical capacity’.

Though arising from the observation of dealing with uncertainty, one main feature

stressed by Dewey, that is, the notion of experimentation is set in the background of

the model of justice established by the French sociologists. Maybe as a reaction to

critiques regarding the danger of mechanism residing in the idea of the sociology of

critical capacity as ‘problem solving’, in On Critique (2011 [2009]) Boltanski takes a

more explicit stance on the notion of uncertainty. In a discussion on ‘the power of

institutions’, where he calls for a detailed analysis of the varieties of practices and

test formats within them, he accounts for a pragmatism that should fully

acknowledge the radical uncertainty of social arrangements:

In my view, the main defect of the full pragmatic position – at least when, abandoning the terrain of the description of segments and interactions, it is engaged in a quasi-normative perspective – is that it does not follow the highly promising road it has itself

8

mapped out to a conclusion. The main contribution of the pragmatic standpoint to sociology has been to underline the uncertainty that threatens social arrangements and hence the fragility of reality. But it stops half way when it places too much confidence in the ability of actors to reduce this uncertainty. […] This overestimation of the capacities possessed by actors to create meaning or repair it, and to create links or restore them, perhaps stems, at least in part, from the excessive significance attributed to a common sense supposedly deposited in some way the interiority of each actor taken individually. (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 54).

For Boltanski, there is thus a ‘radical uncertainty’ (2011: 56) at stake:

My intention is therefore to take seriously the unease about what is and what is valid, which, latent in situations where order seemingly obtains, is forcefully expressed in moments of dispute (ibid: 57).

When the standard of truth – common sense – is destabilized, participants of a

situation are uncertain how to act. But is emphasizing uncertainty sufficient to grasp

the experimental and creative character of action in uncertain situations? It seems

that both structuralism and the critical legacy of the sociology of Bourdieu turn the

fact of acting in uncertainty, hence, experimentalism in the sense of a pragmata

(praxis), into a sort of black box within an actor’s individuality. At the same time,

Boltanski stresses throughout his works the creative and unpredictable productivity

of critique. But, while for Dewey experimentalism covers the anthropological

response to uncertainty and is fundamental to democracy, for Boltanski critique

functions as a driving motor for social transformation. In a pragmatist sense, this

raises the question: Is it possible to link critique and experimentalism? In the

following section, I shall discuss from a pragmatist perspective the complexity, and

problems, of Boltanski’s notion of critique.

The Constitutive Character of Critique in Society

What for Dewey is the experimental character of democracy as a practice is the

constitutive character of critique in capitalism for Boltanski. In his sociology of

transformation, methodologically inspired by the idea of symmetry, but politically

ambitious in maintaining a critical posture, critique is the key concept with which

9

Boltanski explains cultural and social dynamics. This aspect could be investigated

respectively in The Making of a Class (1986 [1982]), On Justification (2006 [1991]),

The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005 [1999]), and On Critique (2011 [2009]). The

epistemological voyage ‘critique’ has undertaken within the works could be

sketched in the following manner: ‘critique’ has been transformed from a

genealogical (1986 [1982]) to a symmetrical (2006 [1991]), a political (2005

[1999]), and finally a moral framework of analysis (2011 [2009]) in order to

comprehend modes of ordering and agreement.6 These fairly disjunctive and

somewhat opposing operations are contrasted with a continuous goal Boltanski

keeps referring to throughout his investigations, as he stated in a paper on On

justification: ‘In the model we outlined, a critical capability can […] be seen as a

characteristically anthropological stance’ (Boltanski, 1996: 28). Thus he reclaims

this sociology of critique as being part of a ‘general anthropology’ (Boltanski, 2009:

35). From the Bourdieusian legacy, which was engaged in an alliance of sociology

and anthropology (Bourdieu, 2003 [2000]), the structuralist ‘habitus’ was replaced

by the pragmatic anthropological constant ‘critical capacity’. Albeit a fairly

simplified picture, the difference between the two approaches could be subsumed

within these two concepts. Yet Boltanski has never abandoned structuralism either

(Boltanski, 2004; Karsenti, 2005).

As indicated above, though Bourdieu called for a constructivist structuralism by

integrating practices as modulation and expression of social inequalities, he

underestimated their performative qualities. What Boltanski and his colleagues

missed in the habitus was exactly its uncertainty and potentials – though reflected

upon in Bourdieu’s writings on the ‘sens pratique’, but maintained by a picture of

actors who merely try to stabilize an established context, not to transform it.7 This

perspective was certainly also due to the different historical framework of the

respective emergence of Bourdieu’s sociology and that of his younger critics

(Boltanski in Duvot, 2012).8 In an atmosphere of political optimism as Boltanski’s

generation experienced it in France in the 1980s due to the election of the socialist

François Mitterrand, the establishment of sociology as a fully recognized discipline,

10

and the political success of social critique, Bourdieu's collaborators looked for new

fields of interrogation. Boltanski observes, drawing on the early works of the GSPM

on disputes:

We considered major controversies or minor disputes occurring in offices or companies, closely examining the critical capacities of the actors, with the goal of reconstructing a critical theory, somewhat like Dewey, on the basis of the critical experiences of the actors themselves (ibid.).

Despite the rather cursory reference on Dewey, who obviously was not a central

author for the GSPM during the 1980s, Boltanski’s post-hoc resumé calls for a short

step back again to the pragmatist classics, e.g. to John Dewey’s notion of critique.

How did Dewey integrate the critical notion in his philosophy? And how is critique

linked with experimentalism?

First of all, it is rather difficult, maybe even impossible to grasp Dewey’s critical

stance independent from his ethics of enquiry.9 I will try to do that nevertheless, and

return to the latter on the relationship between description and normativity. Both

critique and enquiry refer to Dewey’s position as a public intellectual who observed

increasing changes at the end of the nineteenth century and the first part of the

twentieth: industrialization, big social and cultural movements, and the

establishment of numerous intermediate organisms to resolve such public problems

as education, racism, homelessness, conflicts between social classes, participation

and, more generally, the democratic endeavour. Dewey was not only commenting on

these themes as an armchair thinker, but as a philosopher he did what his friend and

colleague in Chicago, Robert E. Park advised his students in sociology: ‘Go into the

district, get the feeling, get acquainted with people!’ (in Lindner, 2007: 11).10

It is important to evaluate Dewey’s comments on democracy with regard to the

spirit of his time, when many of his accounts were not self-evident – and one could

wonder if they are self-evident today, if we fully acknowledge their reach. Dewey

seized James’s idea of ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ that boosted the pragmatic

notion of experience, and took seriously the experience of actors themselves. Instead 11

of critique, however, Dewey spoke rather of ‘intelligent action’ in the sense that

Shook discussed Dewey’s analysis of acting within uncertain situations earlier.

Dewey strongly believed in the human potential for intelligent action to solve

general and especially public problems. His, clearly optimistic, hope was that

pragmatism could help make this potential more explicit (Dewey, ([1925] 1998).

Intelligent action, following Dewey, embraced and equalized both scientific and

public action in a procedural way. In a similar vein, science, especially the

experimental sciences, represented for Dewey a blueprint for a clever but non-

teleological operation of problem-solving.11 The public constitutes the arena 12

where the possibilities and the limits of social arrangements, not to say democracy

itself, are at stake. In an essay on ‘Creative Democracy’ (1939), Dewey asserted:

A genuinely democratic faith in peace is faith in the possibility of conducting disputes, controversies and conflicts as cooperative undertakings in which both parties learn by giving the other a chance to express itself, instead of having one party conquer by forceful suppression of the other. […] Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process. (Dewey, 1998 [1939]: 342-343)

Like Boltanski and Thévenot, Dewey stressed the importance of disputes as a central

token of social interaction and political life. The critical notion for Dewey was thus to

seek in his attempt to make democracy an ongoing critical practice for ‘a way of life’,

as he sometimes stated in an era when this formula did not yet have the

voluntaristic connotation it has today. However, much more explicitly than Boltanski,

Dewey frequently linked the democratic process of experience with the

experimental attitude of the sciences, as his enthusiastic and optimistic comment on

Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy13 shows:

The principle of indeterminacy […] thus presents itself as the final step in the dislodgment of the old spectator theory of knowledge. It marks the acknowledgment, within scientific procedure itself, of the fact that knowing is one kind of interaction which goes on within the world. Knowing marks the conversion of undirected changes toward an intended conclusion.

(Dewey, 1984 [1929]: 163).

12

In The public and its problems Dewey underlined the idea of a state that is always in

the making and that its formation ‘must be an experimental process’ (Dewey, 1954

[1927] 33). His ‘democratic ethos’ of contingency taken from James strengthened

the uncertainty of everyday phenomena men encounter in societies. And it is notably

up to them to find solutions within these situations, as Richard Bernstein stresses:

Dewey certainly recognizes that there is a positive role for expert knowledge in a democratic society. He always emphasized the importance for social enquiry for advancing social reform. But ultimately, democratic citizens must judge and decide; not the experts. This stands at the core of Dewey’s democratic faith (Bernstein 2010b: 75).

For Cornel West ‘Dewey holds pragmatism to be a historical theory of critical

intelligence and scientific enquiry and of reform and amelioration’ (West, 1989: 70).

Dewey’s notion of critical intelligence, even as an experimental practice, definitely

did not require a revolutionary goal in terms of Marxism, although its revolutionary

potential was, in Dewey’s lifetime, socially and politically evident (Menand 2002,

Peirera 2007). It is difficult to seize the degree of analogy in Boltanski’s sociology,

which differs, in his later work, from a similar attitude in his attempts to pursue a

politically radicalized social science. In the conclusion of his book on his intense

collaboration with Bourdieu, Boltanski lauds the strong dynamics of the

Bourdieusian enterprise that led him to the optimistic idea of a powerful

sociological science that would enable emancipation (Boltanski, 2008: 178). And in

‘On critique’ (2011 [2009]), he advocates a clear normative task:

[I]f sociology (especially critical sociology) or anthropology never not stop telling ‘tall stories’, as claim the numerous (and reactionary) reactions they provoke, it is precisely in that they live in intimate proximity to their subject-matter. Their role is precisely to help society – that is, people who are called ‘ordinary’ – deliberately maintain themselves in the state of constant imbalance in the absence of which, as the direst prophecies announce, domination would in fact seize hold of everything. (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 160)

By outlining the task of the sociologist, we observe an ethical transfer from

description to political determination. In any case, in the works of Boltanski the

taxonomy of critique is constantly in evolution and, especially in his more recent 13

works, shifting from an instrumental to a political one, or, as Robin Celikates

suggests, from a ‘pragmatic sociology of critique back to critical theory’ (Celikates,

2008: 131) The pragmatists, especially James and Dewey, by contrast, were not

critical researchers within the Marxist tradition, and if there was a ‘combat’ for

democracy, they rejected the idea of a, however, flexible and constantly re-written,

grammar of action, which was at the core of the structuralism which characterized

the sociology of Bourdieu and Boltanski. From the perspective of the sociology of

knowledge, it seems logical: Critical social sciences were characterized in Europe,

especially in France and Germany, notably by a combination of Marxism and Neo-

Kantianism. The pragmatists, however, were radically opposed to Kantianism

because of its assumption about critical externalism, which turned out to be the

bridge between Kant and Marx. They preferred Hegel to Kant (Dewey even more

than James) and went far beyond the questioning of Kant’s conceptions of truth,

reality and knowledge (Rorty, 1998, 2007; Bernstein, 2010c).

Taking into consideration the great methodological distance between the sociology

of critique of the 1990s and the Bourdieusian enterprise, Boltanski’s later statement

thus requires comment. Boltanski distanced himself from Bourdieu at the end of the

1970s, and wrote his thesis under the supervision of Pierre Ansart, not, as expected,

of his long-time colleague and master, Bourdieu. The main problems arose after the

publication of La distinction in 1979, and the public success of the idea of a

reproductive habitus as a tool for critical sociology. Boltanski and some of his

colleagues saw it as a circular argument (Boltanski, 2003). Bourdieu, they argued,

despite his interest in actor-theories and his efforts to make Erving Goffman’s works

accessible to the French public, was not able to solve the tension between

determinism and actor’s capabilities to create new situations and institutional

frameworks. Moreover, as Boltanski states in an interview: ‘it is not only the

sociologists who refer to macro-sociological entities. Everyone does’ (in Duvout

2012). That was why he, together with Michael Pollak and Laurent Thévenot,

established a different approach with the intention: ‘to develop an empirical

sociology of critique’ (ibid.). But if uncertainty is the starting point of this sociology

14

of critique, how is it possible to return to a merely normative idea of critique, which

is Janus-faced: normative for the purpose of empowering social critics, and

normative for its methodology that empowers the sociologist as a prominent critic

among other critics? Where has uncertainty and experimentalism gone, understood

in classical pragmatism and in many accounts, also in Boltanski’s works, as a

powerful resource for the creation of knowledge and action?

I think the problem here, which was at the origin of several critiques of On

Critique, where it occurred even more forcefully, lies in an unsolved tension not

between structuralism and phenomenology, as Boltanski observed in relation to the

works of Bourdieu,14 but between structuralism and pragmatism. Pragmatism is a

bottom-up theory. But regimes of action, generalized in models of ordering, result in

a structuralist, though universalistic mode of apprehending social dynamics.

Structuralism is a grammar that orients action, and thus not a bottom-up approach.

So where does the idea of sociology as a moral instance, which at last shows the way

to a ‘better’ society, lead us? Back to Kantianism or to Hegelian idealism? In a

subsequent article on the programme of the GSPM, and notably his works with

Laurent Thévenot, Boltanski offers a hint of his re-interpretation of the structuralist

legacy.15 He names it ‘analytic constructivism’ due to its grammatical character. He

adds:

But, unlike strictly structuralist approaches, its intention is to converge the grammatical enterprise with a mode of establishment of data which differs radically, because it has its starting point in the experience of the persons and in the connections they make with that experience. (transl. from Boltanski, 2009: 19)

Critique, seen as an enacted translation of connecting experience with specific

situations, is understood here as the angle of sociological enquiry. It is not the

grammar that counts, but the way it is enacted, as he clarifies in On Critique:

We can therefore more or less link to the spirit of pragmatism the way in which the sociology of critique undertook to describe the social world as the scene of a trial, in the course of which actors in a situation of uncertainty proceed to investigations, record their interpretations of what happens in reports, establish qualifications and submit to

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tests. […] Sociology achieves its objective when it provides a satisfactory picture of the social competencies of the actors. (Boltanski, 2011 [2009]: 25.)

The last sentence is of crucial importance. It combines both structuralist and

pragmatist analysis, and shows the originality of Boltanski’s thought in merging

approaches that are usually seen as incompatible. Instead of explaining away

uncertainty by imposing a differential logic on observed practices, ‘logic’ is softened

into ‘a picture’ that should represent a very specific feature of social agreement, that

is, competence. Competence, coming from Chomsky’s linguistic model of a brain

grammar, where competence (what Ferdinand de Saussure called ‘langue’) and

performance (what Saussure called ‘langage’) are enacted through critical practices.

When Boltanski calls for a sociology that should picture the critical capacities of the

actors, he is aiming for an engaged sociology that advocates the critical powers in

capitalist societies. Dewey, by contrast, refused to flirt with radical political criticism

and kept experimentalism as an end in view for social reform. At the same time, we

have two clear similarities between Dewey’s and Boltanski’s works, especially those

that were undertaken together with Thévenot. First, the assumption that society is

not a form of order, but an ordering, a dynamic that always happens. Second, that the

expert, whether a philosopher or sociologist, is not necessarily more capable of

giving hints to improve this procedure than ‘the ordinary’ woman or man. This idea

requires, in Dewey’s thought, an ethical democratic posture not only from the ruling

class, but from all members of a society, a normative call for engagement that we do

not find in Boltanski and Thévenot,16 but with some tonalities in the more recent

Boltanski. In his early works, critique, in the sense of social conflict and dissonance

between social groups, acted as a methodological transmitter to explain social

change, as Boltanski has shown in his powerful analysis of The Making of a Class. In

the symmetrical period, critique is a methodological tool to understand actors’

capacity to seek for equivalences in a non-coherent world.17 Since The new spirit of

capitalism, critique is charged with more meaningful tasks than merely enacting the

social dynamics of capitalism and democracy. And in his latest books one might

wonder if the concept of critique has not become a theory of truth (Celikates, 2008). 16

This leads me to the final section – the tension between description and normativity

in classical pragmatism and in the works of Boltanski.

Incongruent Modes of Ordering: Description vs. Normativity

How can cultural analysis overcome the methodological contradiction between a

precise description of the social and the expectation, maybe most dispersed among

social scientists themselves, of giving something back to the observed (as recognized

in ethnology and cultural anthropology), or to propose, or even impose, guidelines

for a so-called ameliorated society (as recognized in classical and political

sociology)? Such philosophers as James and Dewey treated this question with as

equal importance as their sociologist heirs, but discussed it via the tension between

empiricism and rationalism with, especially considering James, a clear statement for

the ‘empiricist attitude’ (James, 1922 [1907]: 51). This attitude echoes one of the

core pragmatist critiques of intellectualism in theories of truth, most radically

articulated by William James, who wanted to bring down to earth Peirce’s theory of

the effective meaning of philosophical propositions:

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? – fated or free? – material or spiritual? – here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. […] Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right. (James, 1922 [1907]: 45ff)

Unending disputes not only benefit the philosopher. They are part of our everyday-

life. ‘Endless disputes’ (Boltanski, 1996), that might or might not be good for the

world, have therefore been taken up as central objects of enquiry by Boltanski and

Thévenot. Their studies have confirmed actors’ capacities to trace the practical

consequences of their arguments and to find compromises that end disputes. The

methodological notion of ‘common goods’ Boltanski and Thévenot used was meant

to create a descriptive perspective on actors’ ways of problem-solving. Without

referring to James, it could be understood as the sociological counterpart of the 17

pragmatist’s goal, to take distance from a normative stance and to replace it by a

descriptive theory of truth. Whilst the structuralist heritage left, within the concept

of principles of equivalence, implicitly normative criteria to orient actor’s

negotiation practices (Honneth, 2008: 97), finally the situated account of these

practices decides which of these might be enacted.18

James‘s shift from Peirce’s rather normative theory of truth towards a more

descriptive one (Calcaterra, 2008: 94-96) was taken up by George Herbert Mead and

John Dewey, whose philosophies served as important epistemological foundations

for those sociologies that have contributed to the ‘practice’ and the ‘pragmatic

turn[s]’ we have been witnessing for about twenty years within the international

social sciences (Calhoun et. Al., 1993; Schatzki et. Al., 2000; Emirbayer and Maynard,

2010). As mentioned above, for Dewey experimentation, a notion which includes

both scientific experiment and experience, was a way of translating uncertainty into

an operational act of enquiry. Uncertainty, a matter of practice, is experienced

through doubt and seeks for resolutions. By adopting the scientific stance, Dewey

stressed the importance of the scientific method, dealing with methodological

justification and traceability of accounts. Uncertainty and doubt, instead of

disconcerting, turn out to be the most fruitful sources of curiosity and critical

investigation with which to generate good descriptions of the world. In the chapter

‘The Supremacy of Method’ in The Quest for Certainty, Dewey assumed:

The scientific attitude may almost be defined as that which is capable of enjoying the doubtful; scientific method is, in one aspect, a technique of making a productive use of doubt by converting it into operations of definite inquiry. (Dewey, 1984 [1929]: 182)

Whereas James offered epistemological groundings to transform the pathos of

uncertainty into an ethos of contingency, Dewey, drawing on the experimental

sciences of his lifetime, went even further in highlighting both the methodological

and the moral consequences of such an ethos. They resulted in a call for a

descriptive and anti-normative approach, which would have endangered the

benefits of systematic enquiry by reducing its inconsistencies. This anti-normativity

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led Dewey to the social effects of the ethos of enquiry that had, as in the sociology of

Boltanski, its starting point in radical uncertainty:

A philosophy that in its quest for certainty ignores the reality of the uncertain in the ongoing processes of nature denies the conditions out of which it arises (Dewey, 1984 [1929]: 195).

For Dewey, these conditions had indeed both methodological consequences and

consequences for theories of truth and values. Here the effects of the descriptive

stance, though not stated by Dewey as such, but obviously significant to his

argument, get their full sociological significance:

When theories of values do not afford intellectual assistance in framing ideas and beliefs about values that are adequate to direct action, the gap must be filled by other means. If intelligent method is lacking, prejudice, the pressure for immediate circumstance, self-interest and class-interest, traditional customs, institutions of accidental historic origin, are not lacking, and they tend to take the place of intelligence. Thus we are led to our main proposition: Judgments about values are judgments about the conditions and the results of experienced objects; judgments about that which should regulate the formation of our desires, affections and enjoyments. For whatever decides their formation will determine the main course of our conduct, personal and social. (Dewey, 1984 [1929]: 211ff)

Despite its fairly idealistic tone, we can here again assume central features of the

sociological framework established in the 1980s within Science and Technology

Studies and ANT, which can be summarized in the idea of a strong descriptive stance

against the normative drawbacks described by Dewey. But simultaneously, he

enlarged this methodological approach by giving hints regarding the question of

judgement faculties that were at the core of the enterprise undertaken by Boltanski

and Thévenot. Indeed, by putting actors’ descriptions and sociological descriptions

on the same analytical level they opposed the implicit normativism critical

sociologists conceal by pretending positivist neutrality. Instead of making explicit

their normative perception of the social (i.e. in terms of social inequality etc.),

‘critical’ sociologists, following Boltanski and Thévenot, make judgements that

neglect the fact that they are, first of all, as Dewey has noted, ‘judgments about the

conditions and the results of experienced objects’:

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For critical sociology then confronts the impossibility of capturing the necessarily normative dimensions that support its contribution to the denunciation of social injustices; this impossibility leads it inevitably to place undue emphasis on the externality of science in order to establish the legitimacy of its own practice.’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006 [1991]: 11)

In On Critique Boltanski introduces his Adorno lectures with a chapter on ‘The

structure of critical theories’. He offers a fresh and illuminating account of the

paradoxes of sociology by opposing the descriptive and normative features of this

human science, which was historically associated with social critique:

It is […] that descriptive social sciences can claim that they sustain a discourse of truth. It must be added that this truth claim, which is bound up with the description carried out by occupying a more or less extraterritorial post vis-à-vis the society being described, generally gives the social sciences, whatever they are, a critical edge.’ (2011 [2009]: 8).

The four notions ‘power’ versus ‘domination’ and ‘society’ versus ‘social order’

created the necessity to distinguish ‘judgements of facts’ and ‘judgements of values,’

following Max Weber. But the problem, Boltanski observes, was that one of the most

powerful branches of sociology, that is, critical sociology, has never accomplished

this task (ibid.: 3). In contrast to the natural sciences, the social sciences grapple

with moral beings observing other moral beings. To solve this problem, sociologists

tried to create forms of moral exteriority. This idea comes from Kant, and is, to my

knowledge, not treated in classical pragmatism beyond the well-known, but for this

purpose too superficial critique of intellectualism, and Dewey’s critique on the

‘spectator theory of knowledge’ that targeted neo-Kantianism. This leads me to my

conclusion.

Conclusion

Throughout his work, Boltanski asserts the problematical contrast of analytical

externalism and the necessity to grasp actors’ own capacities to criticize, given

particular situations. Within the French history of empirically grounded knowledge

theory, coming from a long anthropological tradition and the incessant exchanges

between sociologists and anthropologists, his outstanding enterprise is without

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doubt pragmatist in the sense that it queries not only uncertainty and the ways

actors deal with it, but also inasmuch as it shows how critique channels the

transformation and renovation of central moral categories and action regimes

within capitalist societies. The sociology of critique has become one of the most

advanced attempts to reinforce, with a certain optimism, actors’ capacities to design

their environment and to move, from a methodological standpoint, closer to the

actors’ own ways of modelling, judging, classifying, protesting, inquiring, or even

resigning given frameworks of action and thought. But Boltanski’s methodological

pragmatism ends where the open question of the limits of critique turns into

externalism, either into a roll back to critical structuralism or to grave political

assumptions that seem to underestimate the experimental character and

unpredictability of action and politics in general.

However, caution is required. Pragmatism has taught us that the experimental

attitude must be judged not only by what is being said, but also by what is being

done. And Boltanski, who is not only a great sociologist, but also a gifted writer, has

again astonished his zealous readers by choosing a completely unknown and

original field of enquiry in his new book Enigmes et complots. Une enquête à propos

d’enquêtes: The link between the emergence of modernity, the notion of conspiracy

and detective stories, paranoia and, finally, the emergence of that strange science

called sociology. A certain John Dewey is also consulted when Boltanski reflects on

the object of enquiry and the uncertainty that should be revealed (Boltanski, 2012:

303-304). The author of The Quest for Certainty and his teacher William James

would probably have been proud of such a courageous expression of a scientific

ethos of contingency, and maybe even more so, since their descendant doesn’t really

insist on being a pragmatist. For James, who detested dogmatism, including

pragmatism itself:

[Pragmatism] has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body’s properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all

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own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms. (James, 1922 [1907]: 54)

Notes

1 In a paper he gave at a workshop I organized with Craig Calhoun in 2008 at New York University, Laurent Thévenot presented for the first time his insights on the relationship between Dewey’s philosophy of action, the sociology of Bourdieu and the differing accounts promoted by the GSPM (Thévenot 2011). 2 This issue was recently republished by Boltanski (Boltanski and Bourdieu 2008) and complemented by an essay on the intellectual framework and the ‘making of’ it (Boltanski 2008). 3 In his essay ‘Nature in experience’ Dewey assumed a clear-cut distance from his critics who accused him of utilitarianism: ‘To argue from the strictly theoretical character of the motives of the inquirer, from the necessity for “disinterested curiosity” to the nature of that investigated is a kind of “anthropocentrism” of which I should not wish to be guilty’ (Dewey 1998 [1940]: 161). 4 Michael Guggenheim and Jörg Potthast have named the relationship between the Boltanskian and the Latourian schools ‘symmetrical twins’, a title that relates to the symmetrical approach promoted by STS, ANT and Latour, which was adopted in the field of general social controversies by Boltanski and Thévenot. In their elaborated article, Guggenheim and Potthast establish a systematic comparison between the two sociologies, and their respective limits of fusion (Guggenheim and Potthast 2012, see also Latour 2009 and Bogusz 2010, pp. 71-94). 5 See for instance Boltanski (1990: 255-356) and Dodier (1995). 6 Here I am drawing on a paper I gave at the centenary of the German Association of Sociology (DGS) at the University of Frankfurt in 2010 within a public meeting ‘Author meets critics,’ organized with Jörg Potthast (moderation), Reiner Keller (second critic), and Luc Boltanski on the occasion of the publication of the German translation of On Critique. See the paper (in French) on my academia.edu page: http://hu-berlin.academia.edu/TBogusz 7 With the exception of The Rules of Art (1996 [1992]). 8

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See Bogusz 2010, pp. 13-37 and pp. 151-158. 9 Incidentally, the entanglement between the empirical sciences and knowledge theory in Dewey show a certain contemporary resemblance to Émile Durkheim’s claim for sociology as a ‘real science’ (Durkheim: 1982 [1895]) and proposes another explanation for the hostility of German philosophers and sociologists towards both American pragmatism (Joas 1992) and the works of Durkheim. As Wiebke Keim has shown in a paper on the history of the reception of Durkheim in Germany, among many other reasons it was probably the still dominant Diltheyan paradigm (a clear cut separation between the natural and the human sciences, between ‘Verstehen’ and ‘Erklären’), still crucial in the neo-Kantian tradition, which have lead German thinkers to distortions of Durkheim’s oeuvre in Germany (Keim 2013). 10 For a detailed presentation on the historical framework, see the excellent book by Louis Menand on the emergence of pragmatism in the US (Menand 2002). 11 The importance of Darwinism saved Dewey from being a naïve believer in the progress of nature, science and technology. Rather, he pointed to the complex interaction procedures that are necessary to produce even provisional knowledge (see Dewey 1977 [1909]; 1986 [1938]: 26ff.). 12 On the notion of ‘arena’ see Cefaï 2002. 13 In 1927 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg established the ‘principle of indeterminacy’ or ‘uncertainty principle’. It asserted the observation that absolutely precise measurements are impossible, due to interference in the measured quantity which is inevitably introduced by the measuring instrument. Dewey took it as a scientific confirmation of the pragmatist account of uncertainty within human action. 14 In an interview Boltanski describes the goal of Bourdieu was to converge phenomenology and structuralism (in Duvoux 2012). In an article he adapts this attempt to his own enterprise (Boltanski 2009: 19). In On critique, however, he accuses constructivism in the phenomenologist tradition of not being radical enough considering the reach of uncertainty and its consequences for a non-determinist sociology (Boltanski 2011 [2009]: 55). 15 In La condition fœtale (2004), Boltanski gives the most systematic and expressive account of structuralism. 16

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Thévenot continued to re-work the concept of ‘regimes of engagement’ in a number of case studies (Thévenot 2006, 2009). For further discussions of action conceptions within the works of the GSPM, see Breviglieri et Al. 2009, and Dodier 1993, 2005. 17 Here the notion of translation introduced by Michel Callon was influential (Callon 1986). 18 Dear editors, I wasn’t able to solve this problem: When I delete this endnote, I also delete all references, although I have formatted them differently. I am sorry for that and hope you’ll find a solution References Bernstein, Richard (2010a) The Pragmatic Turn, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bernstein, Richard (2010b) ‘John Dewey’s Vision of Radical Democracy’ in Richard Bernstein The Pragmatic Turn, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 70-88. Bernstein, Richard (2010c): ‘Hegel and Pragmatism’ in Richard Bernstein The Pragmatic Turn, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 89-105. Bogusz, Tanja (2010) Zur Aktualität von Luc Boltanski. Einleitung in sein Werk, Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Bogusz, Tanja (2012) ‘Experiencing Practical Knowledge. Emerging Convergences Between Pragmatism and Practice Theory’, European Journal for Pragmatism and American Philosophy 3(2): 32-54. Bogusz, Tanja (2013) ‘Experimentalismus statt Explanans? Zur Aktualität der pragmatistischen Forschungsphilosophie John Deweys’, Zeitschrift für theoretische Soziologie 3 (in print). Boltanski, Luc (1973) ‘L'espace positionnel. Multiplicité des positions institutionnelles et habitus de classe’, Revue française de Sociologie XVI(1): 3-26. Boltanski, Luc (1987 [1982]) The Making of a Class, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Boltanski, Luc (1990) L’amour et la justice comme compétences. Trois essais de sociologie de l’action, Paris : Métailié. Boltanski, Luc (1996) ‘Endless Disputes. From Intimate Injuries to Public Denunciations’. Working Papers in Networks and Interpretation 96 (2), Cornell University, Department of Sociology. Boltanski, Luc (2003) ‘Usages faibles, usages forts de l’habitus’, in Pierre Encrevé and Rose-Marie Lagrave (eds.) Travailler avec Bourdieu, Paris: Flammarion, pp. 153-161. Boltanski, Luc (2004): La condition fœtale. Une sociologie de l’engendrement et de l’avortement, Paris : Gallimard.

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Boltanski, Luc (2008) Rendre la réalité inacceptable. A propos de ‘La production de l’idéologie dominante’, Paris: Demopolis. Boltanski, Luc (2009) ‘Autour de la justification: un parcours dans la sociologie morale’, in Marc Breviglieri, Claudette Lafaye and Danny Trom (eds.): Compétences critiques et sens de la justice. Colloque de Cérisy, Paris: Economica, pp. 15-35. Boltanski (2011 [2009]) On Critique. A Sociology of Emancipation, trans. Gregory Elliot, Cambridge: Polity Press. Boltanski, Luc (2012) Énigmes et complots. Une enquête à propos d’une enquête, Paris : Gallimard. Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot (2000) ‘The Reality of Moral Expectations. A Sociology of Situated Judgement’, in Philosophical Explorations 3: 208-231. Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot (2006 [1991]): On Justification. Economies of Worth, trans. Catherine Porter, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Boltanski, Luc and Pierre Bourdieu (2008 [1976]) : La production de l’idéologie dominante, Paris : Demopolis. Bourdieu, Pierre (1996 [1992]): The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emmanuel, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (2002) ‘Structures, Habitus, Practices’, in Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff and Indermohan Virk (eds.), Contemporary Sociological Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 276-288. Bourdieu, Pierre (2003 [2000]): ‘L’objectivation participante. Acceptance speech on December 6 2000 for the Huxley Memorial Medal Award at the Royal Anthropological Institute London’, in Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 150(5), special issue: ‘Regards croisées sur l'anthropologie de Pierre Bourdieu’: 43-58. Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Susan Leigh Star (1999) Sorting Things out. Classification and Its Consequences, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Breviglieri, Marc, Claudette Lafaye and Danny Trom (eds.) (2009) Compétences critiques et sens de la justice. Colloque de Cérisy, Paris: Economica. Calcaterra, Rosa Maria (2008): ‘Truth in Progress. The Value of the Facts and Feelings Connection in William James’, in Flamm, Matthew Caleb, John Lacks, and Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski (eds): American and European Values: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 90-105. Calhoun, Craig, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff and Indermohan Virk (eds.) (2002) Contemporary Sociological Theory, Oxford: Blackwell. Callon, Michel (1986), ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay’, in John Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge, pp. 196-233.

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Cefaï, Daniel (2002) ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une arène publique? Quelques pistes pour une approche pragmatiste’, in Daniel Cefaï and Isaac Joseph (eds.), L’Héritage du pragmatisme, Paris: Éditions de l’Aube, pp. 51-82. Celikates, Robin (2008) ‘Von der Soziologie der Kritik zur kritischen Theorie?’, In: WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (2): 120-132. Dewey, John (1954 [1927]) The Public and Its Problems, Athens: Swallow Press and Ohio University Press. Dewey, John (1977 [1909]) ‘The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy’, in John Dewey The Middle Works 1844-1922, Volume 4: 1907-1909, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 3-14. Dewey, John (1984 [1929]) The Quest for Certainty. A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action, in John Dewey The Later Works (1925-1953), Volume 4: 1929, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbonale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1986 [1938]): Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in John Dewey The Later Works 1925-1958, Volume 12: 1938, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John (1998 [1939]) ‘Creative Democracy – The Task Before Us’, in The Essential Dewey, Volume 1: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, edited by Larry A. Hickmann and Thomas M. Alexander, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 340-343. Dewey, John (1998 [1940]): ‘Nature in Experience’, in The Essential Dewey, Volume 1: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, edited by Larry A. Hickmann and Thomas M. Alexander, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 154-161. Dodier, Nicolas (1993) ‘Les appuis conventionnels de l'action. Éléments de pragmatique sociologique’, Réseaux 62: 63-85. Dodier, Nicolas (1995) Les hommes et les machines. Paris : Métailié. Dodier, Nicolas (2005) ‘L’espace et le mouvement du sens critique’, in Annales. Histoire et Sciences Sociales 2005/1: 7-31. Durkheim, Émile (1982 [1895]) The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method, edited by Steven Lukes, trans. W. D. Halls, Don Mills, Ontario: Free Press. I didn’t find the full name of the translator. Duvoux, Nicolas (2012) ‘The Empirical Sociology of Critique. An Interview with Luc Boltanski’. In: La vie des idées. First published in laviedesidees.fr. Translated from French by Michael C. Behrent with the support of the Institut Français. http://www.booksandideas.net/The-Empirical-Sociology-of.html?lang=fr Published in booksandideas.net 14 February 2012. Here I didn’t know how to quote exactly as I didn’t find hints regarding online references

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Emirbayer, Mustafa and Douglas W. Maynard (2010) ‘Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology’ in European Journal for Pragmatism and American Philosophy 3 (2), Symposium ‘Pragmatism and the Social Sciences: A Century of Influences and Interactions’: 221-261. Fabiani, Jean-Louis (2002) ‘Theory and Practice in French Sociology after Pierre Bourdieu’. Unpublished paper given at the World Congress of Sociology in Brisbane, Australia, July 2002. Fossier, Arnaud and Edouard Gardella (2006) ‘Entretien avec Bruno Latour’, in Tracés. Révue des Sciences Humaines (10), Genres et Catégories, mis en ligne le 11 février 2008, consultée le 6 août 2012. URL : http://traces.revues.org/158 ; DOI : 10.4000/traces.158 Here I didn’t know how to quote exactly as I didn’t find hints regarding online references Guggenheim, Michael and Jörg Potthast (2012) ‘Symmetrical Twins: On the Relationship Between Actor-Network Theory and the Sociology of Critical Capacities’, in European Journal of Social Theory 15 (2): 157-178. Honneth, Axel (2008) ‘Verflüssigungen des Sozialen. Zur Gesellschaftstheorie von Luc Boltanski und Laurent Thévenot’, in WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 5 (2): 84-103. James, William (1922 [1907]) ‘What Pragmatism Means’ in William James, Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, London, New York and Bombay: Longmans Green and Co., pp. 43-81. Joas, Hans (1992) 'Amerikanischer Pragmatismus und deutsches Denken. Zur Geschichte eines Mißverständnisses‘, in Hans Joas, Pragmatismus und Gesellschaftstheorie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 114-145. Karsenti, Bruno (2005) ‘Arrangements avec l’irréversible. À propos de La condition foetale de Luc Boltanski’, Critique 695: 321-336. Keim, Wiebke (2013) ‘Émile Durkheims Programm einer wissenschaftlichen Soziologie in Deutschland’, in Tanja Bogusz and Heike Delitz (eds.) Émile Durkheim: Soziologie – Ethnologie – Philosophie, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, Reihe ‚Theorie und Gesellschaft‘, pp. 47-72. Latour, Bruno (1988) The Pasteurization of France, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (2007) ‘La connaissance est-elle un mode d'existence? Rencontre au muséum de James, Fleck et Whitehead avec des fossiles de chevaux’, in Didier Debaise (ed.): Vie et expérimentation. Peirce, James, Dewey, Paris: Vrin, pp. 17-43. Latour, Bruno (2009): ‘Dialogue sur deux systèmes de sociologie’, in Marc Breviglieri, Claudette Lafaye and Danny Trom (eds.) Compétences critiques et sens de la justice. Colloque de Cérisy, Paris: Economica, pp. 359-374. Law, John (2009) ‘Seeing like a Survey’, in Cultural Sociology 3: 39-256. Lindner, Rolf (2007) Die Entdeckung der Stadtkultur. Soziologie aus der Erfahrung der Reportage, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus. Menand, Louis (2002) The Metaphysical Club. A Story of Ideas in America, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

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Pereira, Irène (2007) ‘La théorie pragmatiste de l'action collective de Dewey’ in Interrogations 5: 136-144. Rorty, Richard (1998) ‘Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin’, in Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress. Philosophical Papers 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 290-306. Rorty, Richard (2007) ‘Kant vs. Dewey. The Current Situation of Moral Philosophy’, in Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Philosophical Papers 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 183-202. Schatzki, Theodore R., Karin Knorr-Cetina and Eike von Savigny (eds.) (2001) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London: Routledge. Shook, John Robert (2000) Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Sismondo, Sergio (2010) Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, London: Wiley-Blackwell. Stavo-Debauge, Joan (2012) ‘La sociologie dite “pragmatique” et la philosophie pragmatiste, une rencontre tardive’. Discussion Paper for the Conference ‘Why pragmatism? The Importance of Pragmatism for the Social and Human Sciences (I): ‘Transdisciplinary Effects of Pragmatism’, Villa Vigoni, Italy, 2012. Thévenot, Laurent (2006) L’action au pluriel. Sociologie des régimes d’engagement, Paris: La Découverte. Thévenot, Laurent (2009) ‘Biens et réalités de la vie en société. Disposition et composition d'engagements pluriels’, in Marc Breviglieri, Claudette Lafaye and Danny Trom (eds.) Compétences critiques et sens de la justice. Colloque de Cérisy, Paris: Economica, pp. 37-55. Thévenot, Laurent (2011) ‘Powers and Oppressions Viewed from the Sociology of Engagement: in Comparison with Bourdieu's and Dewey's Critical Approaches of Practical Activities’, in Irish Journal of Sociology, 19(1) special issue on ‘Key Issues in Contemporary Social Theory’ edited by Piet Strydom, pp. 35-67. West, Cornel (1989) ‘The Coming-Of-Age of American Pragmatism: John Dewey’ in Cornel West: The American Evasion of Philosophy. A Genealogy of Pragmatism, Madison, Wisconsin and London: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 69-111.

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