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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2021
Different sociological approaches claiming a close relation to pragmatism have developed over recent decades, emphasizing situated action, the interpretive and reflexive capacities of actors, and their social capabilities. These so-called pragmatic conceptions have often been presented as an alternative to the structuralism that dominated previous decades. Without ignoring the differences between the two approaches, this article seeks to show not only that they can both be usefully applied to the same object, but also that they can be integrated into a unified theoretical framework. The argument is based on recent empirical work devoted to the study of commercial exchange, in particular the relation between price and value. The pragmatic study of exchange situations makes it possible to identify different forms of valuation that are both embedded into the cognitive resources of actors and objectified in arrangements around commodities. From a structural point of view, these forms of valuation can be considered a “transformation group,” in the sense described by Claude Lévi-Strauss. However, this cognitive structuralism cannot help us to understand the changes undergone by these forms over historical time. For this, we must call on another type of structuralism, which might be labeled “systemic” structuralism. This proposes narratives that aim to establish chains of causality between local processes of commodification and the evolutions of capitalism at a global level.
This article was translated from the French by Michael C. Behrent and edited by Chloe Morgan and Nicolas Barreyre.
I am deeply grateful to the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and to its president, Pierre-Cyrille Hautcœur, for the honor of delivering the thirty-ninth Marc Bloch lecture. I have only modified a few details of the address, meaning that this text is not, strictly speaking, an article: the form of a lecture, which is intended to be heard, differs greatly from that of an article, which is destined to be read. Nonetheless, I have added some forty footnotes so as to provide bibliographic references to works that are mentioned or evoked, but often allusively, and to clarify as much as possible statements that might seem hasty or obscure.
1 Simon Susen, The “Postmodern Turn” in the Social Sciences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
2 Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth [1991], trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
3 Among his numerous works, see Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems [1984], trans. John Bednarz Jr. with Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
4 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1974, 1980, and 1989); Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983); Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
5 Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (1994; repr. London: Verso, 2010); Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2008).
6 Fernand Braudel, La dynamique du capitalisme (Paris: Arthaud, 1985); Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism: 15th–18th Century [1979], trans. Siân Reynolds, 3 vols. (London: HarperCollins, 1981, 1982, and 1984), especially the second volume, The Wheels of Commerce, for analysis of the dynamic of capitalism.
7 Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020); originally published as Enrichissement. Une critique de la marchandise (Paris: Gallimard, 2017).
8 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures [1970] (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998).
9 Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification, especially 133–38 for the notion of “tests.”
10 The concept of characterization—or qualification—is juridical in origin. See Olivier Cayla, “La qualification ou la vérité en droit,” Droits. Revue française de théorie juridique 18 (1993): 3–18. It has been elaborated in particular in the economics of convention. See Laurent Thévenot, “From Social Coding to Economics of Convention: A Thirty-Year Perspective on the Analysis of Qualification and Quantification Investments,” Historical Social Research 41, no. 2 (2016): 96–117.
11 Prices, when they emerge at the conclusion of a test, can be considered as events, just like “facts” in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Prices are not things that can be named, even if it is possible to attribute them an (often metaphorical) qualification—for instance, when one speaks of a “slashed price” or “loss-leader pricing.”
12 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects [1968], trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 2006). During the 1960s and 1970s, interest in objects, which was stimulated by the critique of “consumer society,” turned notably to semiology. In the wake of Roland Barthes’s work, things were considered as the bearers of signs and, in particular, signs of identity and/or distinction. See, for example, the texts written between 1963 and 1973 collected in Barthes, L’aventure sémiologique (Paris: Seuil, 1985); Barthes, The Fashion System [1967], trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (1983; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Things received new attention, considered not as signs but as full-fledged actors in social life, beginning around the 1990s, following the seminal work of Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
13 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind [1962] (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968), especially 75–109. In a transformation group, in Lévi-Strauss’s sense, permutations are “connected to one another and can be represented in a table, in which each binary trait receives an opposite value.” See Patrice Maniglier, Le vocabulaire de Claude Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Ellipses, 2002), 55–56.
14 In the case of commodity structures, a formalization in mathematical terms, using the language of category theory, was developed by Guillaume Couffignal in the appendix of Boltanski and Esquerre, Enrichment, 343–68.
15 The collection form rests on a play of differences. It follows that a successful collection is not considered an accumulation of things but is presumed to totalize all the differences deemed relevant to a certain domain of objects within a collectors’ circle. According to this serial logic, the collectors’ quest is stimulated, including in its economic dimension, by the need to fill gaps so as to achieve a “complete” collection—a task that in most cases proves unachievable.
16 The critique of the hypothesis of the homogeneity of products, one of the postulates upon which the neoclassical thesis is based, was the starting point of Chamberlin’s analysis. He sought to reduce the opposition between competition theory and monopoly theory by showing that most exchange consists in various combinations of forces, some of which tend towards competition, some towards monopoly. This led Chamberlin to explore a new approach to commercial exchange, which he termed “monopolistic competition”: Edward Chamberlin, The Theory of Monopolistic Competition: A Re-orientation of the Theory of Value (1933; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949).
17 Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 2:183: “When goods traveled, they naturally increased in price the further they went. This was what I shall call [surplus market value]. Can this be described as a universal rule? With near certainty.” [This citation has been modified to match the translation of Braudel’s plus-value marchande in Boltanski and Esquerre, Enrichment]. In Braudel’s analysis, the idea of surplus market value supplements, without opposing, the Marxist notion of surplus value extracted from labor, which explains profit formation. In Enrichment (pp. 261 sq.), Esquerre and I drew heavily on Braudel’s hypothesis of surplus market value tied to displacement. We even considered the possibility that not only the commodity but also the potential buyers could move, as a way of incorporating tourism, whose ever-increasing economic importance plays a key role in the enrichment economy. Furthermore, we introduced the possibility that commodities could be displaced in a way that is not geographic but rather occurs when a thing moves from one form of valuation in which its price is low to another in which its price is high (for example, when a used standard object that fetches a low price on the second-hand market moves to the collection form).
18 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy [1867], trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), book 1, chap. 1. The starting point of Capital is an analysis of commodities and their circulation through the intermediary of exchange, which necessarily precedes the critique of the exploitation of human labor.
19 Jean-Yves Grenier, L’économie d’Ancien Régime. Un monde de l’échange et de l’incertitude (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996); Alain Guerreau, “Avant le marché, les marchés : en Europe, xiiie–xviiie siècle,” Annales HSS 56, no. 6 (2001): 1129–75.
20 Among the large bibliography, see in particular Patrick Verley, L’échelle du monde. Essai sur l’industrialisation de l’Occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), and, for a detailed analysis of the techniques used in the early days of standardization, David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
21 Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (London: Verso, 2006).
22 Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism [2012], trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 2014), 1–46, interprets these movements in terms of a “legitimation crisis” that marked “the end of postwar peace.”
23 In France, industrial employment reached its peak in 1974, with more than 5,900,000 employees. By the early 2010s, more than 40 percent of these positions had been lost. In the same period, what statisticians more broadly define as the “productive” sector went from representing 48 percent to 35 percent of all jobs. See Lilas Demmou, “La désindustrialisation en France” (working document, General Directorate of the Treasury, no. 2010/01, June 2010); Vincent Hecquet, “Emploi et territoires de 1975 à 2009. Tertiarisation et rétrécissement de la sphère productive,” Économie et statistique 462/463 (2013): 25–68.
24 France remains the world’s primary destination with eighty-five million foreign tourists arriving in 2015. Tourism made up 7.4 percent of France’s GDP in 2013, according to the information available from the Ministry of Artisanry, Commerce, and Tourism (www.veilleinfotourisme.fr/).
25 In Europe, the luxury sector has experienced particularly high growth, especially in exports, since the early 2000s. France, which leads this sector, holds 11.2 percent of the global market in high-end products, with an annual growth rate of 9.8 percent. Of 270 prestige brands in the world, 130 are French. See Benjamin Leperchey, “Le Comité stratégique de filière (Csf) des industries de la mode et du luxe,” Annales des Mines. Réalités industrielles 4 (2013): 14–19.
26 Edward A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
27 Reference to necessity is a frequent feature of work that attempts to associate a philosophical approach and historical facts in a “grand narrative.” It even occurs in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, who claimed to have found in the “bitter struggle against scarcity” the “original structure” at the foundation of “human history”: Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason [1960], vol. 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 2004), 122 sq.
28 Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: Gallimard/ Le Seuil, 1996).
29 Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation [2009], trans. Gregory Elliott (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 18–49.
30 The question of correspondences between linguistic categories and cultural traits, along with the idea that linguistic categories, due to their inscription in a cultural register, can interpose themselves between social actors and their experience of the world—particularly in the case of perception—has been significant to the development of so-called Humboldtian currents in cultural analysis (referring to Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose linguistic conceptions are Kantian in origin). They culminated with the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” which, expressed more stridently by Benjamin Lee Whorf than by Edward Sapir, suggests that the categories of spoken language preshape experience. Benjamin L. Whorf, Selected Writings, ed. J. B. Carroll et al. (Boston: Mit Press, 1956). This hypothesis was widely challenged in the 1970s, particularly in the much-studied case of color perception: Eleanor Rosch, “Linguistic Relativity,” in Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science, ed. Philip N. Johnson-Laird and Peter C. Wason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 483–500. For a discussion that, while mostly in the tradition of Humboldtian linguistics, breaks with its more schematic forms, see Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, vol. 2 [1968], trans. Mary Elisabeth Meek (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1973).
31 On the distinction between reality and world, see Boltanski, On Critique, 57–61. For an example of this distinction used to clarify the conceptions of enigma and inquiry, see Boltanski, Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies [2012], trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 1–40.
32 Émile Durkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology [1955], trans. J. C. Whitehouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 35: “What characterizes radical empiricism is its emphasis upon the absolute uniformity of existence. It refuses to admit the idea that there are two worlds, that of experience and that of reality.” Cited in David Lapoujade, William James, empirisme et pragmatisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997), 27.
33 This is what distinguishes those who speak a language “fluently”—whether their so-called “mother tongue” or a second language—from the learner who struggles to speak correctly by applying the rules they have been taught, that is, by using language as if it could be detached from the situation in which it is used. One of the contributions of linguistic pragmatics is precisely to have shed light on all that the formulation and comprehension of utterances owes to “discourse situations” and thereby “the extent to which meaning is under-determined by the linguistic material employed.” See Oswald Ducrot and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, eds., Nouveau dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage (Paris: Seuil, 1995), particularly 111 sq. and 631 sq. This is particularly clear in investigations of the relationship between explicit and implicit meaning, for instance in the case of irony: see Alain Berrendonner, Éléments de pragmatique linguistique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1982).
34 This idea, in various (and more or less polemical) formulations, pervades The German Ideology in its attack against the young left Hegelians: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2011); written in 1845–1846 and published for the first time in 1932.
35 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice [1972], trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice [1980], trans Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
36 John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938; repr. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966). Dewey defined inquiry as a movement in ordinary experience when it encounters a situation whose indeterminate character introduces doubt and concern. Getting out of such a situation presumes the transformation, by means of observation and a selection of significant traits, of concern into a defined problem, thereby rendering action possible once again. This transformation of the initial situation is the primary tool, both cognitive and practical, for resolving the identified problem and moving beyond the state of concern that triggered the inquiry.
37 The discourse of “globalization,” born from the articulation of macroeconomics and political science or geopolitics—disciplines that remain rooted in positivism—played an important role in the return of grand narratives to the social sciences, which, inspired by phenomenology and pragmatism, had since the 1980s increasingly focused on the linguistic dimensions of human activity and the microanalysis of situations. In history, a similar movement occurred in the transition from microhistory to “global history”—I am currently working on a research project on this topic.
38 For the conception of institutions mobilized here, see John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995); for a sociological approach compatible with Searle’s ideas, see Boltanski, On Critique, 50–82. Unlike human beings who, situated in their bodies, can only have “points of view” on the world, institutions, precisely because they are beings without bodies, can claim to say where things stand in general and for everyone. But lacking bodies, they can only do so via the intermediary of a spokesperson. This displaces the uncertainty concerning the world, which institutions are supposed to absorb, onto the question of whether the spokesperson, while appearing to state the will of the institution and thus the general will, is in fact simply stating their own personal point of view, in light of the position they occupy and their own interests.
39 Several years ago, Esquerre and I developed these ideas in a short political essay that sought to share our concern at the rise of the far right and its repercussions in the intellectual world. This phenomenon, which affects most European countries, has only continued to grow since then. See Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Vers l’extrême. Extension des domaines de la droite (Bellevaux: Éd. Dehors, 2014).
40 Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Israel’s work has provoked much debate, and commentators ranging from the enthusiastic to the critical have noted his emphasis on the role of ideas in revolutionary movements at the expense of structural factors; his position that the Enlightenment began in Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century with philosophical radicalism and Spinozism in particular; and the fact that he posits too deep a break between the so-called “moderate” Enlightenment and an Enlightenment deemed “radical” in the sense that it pushed materialistic, democratic, and egalitarian concepts of politics and social life to their limits. See Antoine Lilti, “Comment écrit-on l’histoire intellectuelle des Lumières ? Spinozisme, radicalisme et philosophie,” Annales HSS 64, no. 1 (2009): 171–206. There is no doubt that Israel’s work is debatable, as is all ambitious work, but one must acknowledge—as Lilti does in his nonetheless critical article—that his “grand narrative” has contributed to a “reconsideration of the subversive charge of the Enlightenment” (which is far from insignificant) in a Europe that is still grappling with religion, authoritarianism, and the legitimation of inequality.
41 The ability to move between a plurality of perspectives is the condition of possibility for what Michel Foucault calls a “critical attitude” as a posture of resistance against “governmentalization.” Indeed, one must be able to draw on a different perspective—that is, an exteriority, even an imagined one—in order to pose a “question which would be: ‘how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them.’” Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?” [1978], in The Politics of Truth (1997; repr. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 41–82, here p. 44. Yet as Foucault says a little later, this movement, rooted in a critique of “ecclesiastical rule” that claimed to be justified by Scripture, developed “to the point of raising the very simple question: were the Scriptures true?” (p. 46). This “critique finds its anchoring point in the problem of certainty in its confrontation with authority,” which Foucault associates with Pierre Bayle, a central figure in the “grand narrative surrounding the diffusion of Spinozism” as traced by Israel.
42 Here, one must understand the word “style” in the technical sense it was recently given by Marielle Macé in Styles. Critique de nos formes de vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2016).
This is a translation of: Pragmatique de la valeur et structures de la marchandise