The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Chapter Outline

Summary

This Introduction contains a brief summary of the key themes, issues, and controversies covered in each of the following chapters.

Luc Boltanski and (Post-) Classical Sociology

In Chapter 1, Bridget Fowler provides a comprehensive and critical introduction to Boltanski's work. Anyone who is not, or barely, familiar with Boltanski's key contributions to the contemporary social sciences will find this chapter useful. To start with, Fowler examines Boltanski's writings in relation to classical sociological thought. In so doing, she argues that his critical engagement with the concept of domination is firmly situated in the Marxist and Weberian traditions of social analysis, whilst his sustained interest in moral and symbolic representations is symptomatic of the considerable influence that Durkheimian thought has had on his development as a researcher. Attempting to make sense of the milestones of Boltanski's intellectual trajectory, Fowler proposes to distinguish three phases of the French scholar's impactful career: the initial period (1970s– 80s), shaped mainly by Bourdieu's ‘constructivist realism’ the middle period (1990s), motivated by a paradigmatic shift towards ‘relativist perspectivism’ and the most recent period (1999–present), marked by the ambitious effort to develop a pragmatist version of ‘critical theory’. According to Fowler, Boltanski has produced his most original – and, probably, most influential – works during this recent stage, permitting him to be widely regarded as one of the most prominent French sociologists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Luc Boltanski and Pragmatism

In Chapter 2, Louis Quéré and Cédric Terzi set out to take on the difficult – and, arguably, paradoxical – challenge of assessing the conceptual and methodological merits of Boltanski's ‘pragmatic’ sociology from a ‘pragmatist’ perspective. In essence, they affirm that it is misleading to characterize his approach as ‘pragmatic’, since – from their point of view – it remains trapped in the pitfalls of classical European thought, notably due to its incapacity to overcome the counterproductive conceptual dualisms of mainstream social-scientific analysis.