Laurent Thévenot

The Sociology of Critical Capacity

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

Une justification écologique ? Conflits dans l'aménagement de la nature

Claudette Lafaye, Laurent Thevenot : Eine okologische Rechtfertigung ? Konflikte in der Naturpolitik. Eine ganze Reihe von Konflikten, in denen Kollektiven und Individuen betroffen sind, schliessen heute die Natur in verschiedenen Formen ein. Dieser Aufsatz befasst sich mit Fragen zu den hieraus entstehenden Veranderungen in Bezug auf die Kritik- und Berechtigungsmodalitaten. Ausgehend vom Ausdruck unterschiedlicher Ansichten in der Naturpolitik, prufen wir nacheinander drei MogJichkeiten entsprechend den von ihnen ausgelosten Veranderungen : a) Integrierung der Matrix in bestehende Berechtigungsordnungen, b) Erarbeitung einer neuen Ordnung nach dem gleichen Modell, с) weitgehende Infragestellung der diesen Ordnungen gemeinen Matrix und der Grundlage, die sie der Kritik fur Ungerechtigkeiten bietet.

Organized Complexity Conventions of Coordination and the Composition of Economic Arrangements

This article introduces a framework which aims at capturing the complexity of economic organizations. The analysis of most legitimate conventions of coordination results in a new approach to the firm as a compromising device between several modes of coordination which engage different repertoires of evaluation. This contribution to the Économie des conventions offers an analytical tool to operate comparative research on firms, intermediate regulatory committees or public policies.

The reality of moral expectations: A sociology of situated judgement

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

Voicing concern and difference: from public spaces to common-places

This paper aims to clarify some of the contributions that so-called ‘pragmatic sociology’ [sociologie pragmatique] might make to political and cultural sociology. The appellation is commonly used to encompass a research current that has contributed to the revival of the French social sciences for nearly 40 years, in sociology, anthropology, political science but also institutional economics and economic sociology – specifically ‘Economie des conventions’: convention theory – and law, and that has lately reached an international audience. I shall concentrate here on the line of research that originated in the foundational model of conflicting orders of worth that Luc Boltanski and I developed and which I expanded into a sociology of engagements.

A Science of Life Together in the World

Borrowing Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘to live together in the world’ (Arendt, 1958) for the title of this article is a way of situating the sciences of society in the past of moral and political philosophy, while at the same time choosing an author particularly sensitive to the reality of this politics, in the double sense of a practical undertaking and of a propitious material environment. And adding science as the objective is a way of making immediately visible the discordance implicit in the project of sciences of society. That the two terms clash when they are paired is what Arendt strove to convince us in the implacable indictment that she formulated against the social sciences. The thesis set forth summarily in this article, omitting more detailed arguments developed elsewhere, is that this discordancy is the source of a renewal of the sciences of life in society, resulting from a reappraisal of the critical points in their original project. This thesis will take on consistency in the course of answers offered, one by one, to the fruitful questions submitted to us by Alain Caillé.

Vous avez dit «capital»?: Extension de la notion et mise en question d'inégalités et de pouvoirs de domination

Résumé Le capital au XXIe siècle repose sur des choix dans la définition du capital, des inégalités de sa distribution et des politiques d’un État social à privilégier pour y remédier. Répondant à la proposition émise par l’auteur de favoriser un dialogue entre l’économie et les autres sciences sociales, l’article éclaire les implications de ces choix. Il retrace la généalogie politique du capital « humain » et « intellectuel » et le développement ultérieur d’autres variables-capital utilisées pour mesurer des types différents d’inégalités et évaluer les politiques devant y faire face. Différenciant les modes d’investissement et de mise en valeur – non uniquement marchands – de ces divers capitaux, il précise les pouvoirs associés à chacun d’eux, leurs prétentions à la légitimité en dépit des inégalités qu’ils causent, ainsi que les dominations qu’ils exercent. Vient en retour une interrogation sur la délimitation qu’a retenue Thomas Piketty d’un ensemble de biens-capitaux d’usages très divers, et sur leur compréhension et leur évaluation sous la seule valorisation marchande.

An Ecological Justification? Conflicts in the Development of Nature ☆

Abstract There are a number of conflicts today involving groups and individuals as regards nature in its various forms. The aim of this article is to examine how these give rise to changes in the forms of critique and justification that underpin them. Based on various points of disagreement as to how nature should be developed, three possibilities of change have been put forward for examination according to the importance of the transformations required: (a) integration of the model into existing orders of justification, (b) development of a new order based on the same model, (c) serious adjustment of the underlying common matrix of orders and the basis it offers for appreciating injustice.