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European Journal of Social Theory

http://est.sagepub.com/content/10/2/247The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/1368431007078891

2007 10: 247European Journal of Social TheoryFranois Dubet

Why Remain `Classical'?

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S Y M P O S I U M

Theme 4: But Do We Still Not Need SomeSort of Theoretical Unification?

Why Remain Classical?

Franois DubetUNIVERSIT DE BORDEAUX-II , BORDEAUX, AND EHESS-CADIS

As sociologists, we should ask ourselves the same sociological questions we soreadily put when scrutinizing the intellectual and scientific productions of otherdisciplines. That is, whether the extremely particular type of knowledge of socialphenomena called sociology can survive the passing of the specific contexts i.e.the dawning of industrial society and the forming of democratic nation-states and lines of questioning in and around which it came into being. Aristotle, IbnKhaldun, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza and many other thinkers were certainly

exceptional social thinkers, and we can accept the idea that they said most of whatthere was to say, but they cannot be considered sociologists. Despite, or indeedthanks to the existing hodge-podge of sociology textbooks and study programmes,there is a pantheon of sociologists and a version of sociology that can be consideredclassical, if only because contemporary sociologists are constantly returning tothem, including as a means to generate new ideas.1

Given how useful expert social knowledge and specialized branches of the disci-pline are considered in our societies, given how fully sociological-style argumen-tation and demonstration partake of decision-making today and the legitimacy of

the decisions made, and given how close the tie is between sociological reflexivityand modernity, as Giddens put it, we need not worry about the academic andprofessional survival of sociology. But a discipline can survive academically evenafter losing its unity and epistemological raison dtre. This is what happened togeography and psychology, which have yielded to the battering ram of strongerdisciplines: geography by earth sciences, economics, and sociology; psychologyby psychoanalysis, ethnology, the neuro- and cognitive sciences. Can sociologyhold its own against more formalized disciplines, such as economics, or betterestablished ones, such as history and political philosophy, when the sociological

ground in which it took root and developed is transformed or disintegrates?

European Journal of Social Theory10(2): 247260

Copyright 2007 Sage Publications: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore

www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/1368431007078891

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The Programme of Classical Sociology

The unity of classical sociology derives not so much from the answers proposedby the founding fathers of the discipline as their questions or programme: todefine and study society; that is, invent it as a singular object of science. If we donot wish to extend the boundaries of sociology to include all manners of under-standing and explaining social life, e.g., those of La Botie, Rousseau, and AdamSmith, we have to think of the sociological tradition as it came to us and impresseditself upon us: as a particular social philosophy that constructed a set of accountsof modernity using a few principles that since then have been infinitely repeatedand rearranged: rationalization, individualism, the division of labour, and someothers (Nisbet, 1967; Martuccelli, 1999). All these accounts are interwoven in the

works of the major authors and function as so many variations on the binary oppo-

sition traditionmodernity; all are dominated by a sociological sensibility thatcombines a sense of something like fate providence was de Tocquevilles word with an insuppressible worry about the risks entailed by modernity. In this sense,a kind of tragic consciousness attaches to the foundations of sociology, a conscious-ness which goes some way to explaining the eternal return to the classics and theeternal freshness of rereading them. All the founding fathers perceived modernityas the product of necessary developments that no one could resist, but they neverfully yielded to its charms. Anomie, alienation, the masses each founding fathercontributed his small hell, his fear of seeing modernity modulate into dehuman-

ized barbarity. The most brilliant explanation of the development and nature ofthe sacred, Durkheims Les Formes lmentaires de la vie religieuse, cannot be disso-ciated from a conception of modernity as disenchanted, and the underlying fearof same. And behind Webers forefronting of the religious sources of capitalism isthe haunting fear that these passions [will] directly imprint this pursuit with thecharacter of a sporting contest (Weber, 2002: 124).

While sociologists did not perhaps invent the idea of society as a more or lessfunctional whole strongly identified with the national state understood at thetime to be taking the place of traditional communities they did make us feel

the force of that idea. Society is the theoretical, general construction of the nation-state. Sociologys canonical conceptions are often just ways of implementingnarratives of modernity: they transform those narratives into stable systems intosociety. Socialization, social control, the individual, institutions, social classes,legitimacy, social action all appear as simultaneously synchronic and diachronic,subjective and objective processes that bring together actor and system. The termsdo not so much designate objects of study as offer solutions to the question ofthe nature and mechanisms of the social order: Why and how is it that modernsocieties hold together when it seems that everything is ultimately swept away

by the flux of change? The unity of this thinking seems fairly strong to me, andsociologists re-readings of it often give rise to debates and tensions betweenholism and individualism, for example that seem reconstituted, trite, excessive,unimaginative: assertions that Durkheim was more of an individualist than helet on in his more scientific statements, and that the Weber who studied the

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great religious systems was less of an individualist than the Weber who theorizedrational action. Many such contemporary readings cloud the issue, turningDurkheim or Marx into individualists or structuralists who didnt know thats whatthey were. But we know that tradition is often nothing more than a projectionof the present onto the past.

The focus of classical sociology was not social phenomena or social facts, butsociety conceived as the way modern social life is organized. We may be surprisedto see how the spontaneous functionalism of most pre-1960s sociologists, theirconception of society as an integrated system, a sort of all-encompassing mech-anism in which division of labour, institutions, social control, and conflict itselfall worked to shape an order that they unanimously thought of as no longersubject to natural ties or shared belief in the same gods we may be surprised tosee how this idea has fallen into oblivion. The apprentice sociologists of the

1960s, Parsonians and Marxists alike, learned to think of this representation as anobvious fact. Its power was, and is, due to its capacity both to preserve and becritical without those actions affecting its fundamental nature. The feeling it gaveus was of being confronted with alternative versions of the same narrative or myth.

While sociology may be thought of as the social philosophy that carriedforward the idea of society, it is also a particular philosophy in that it sought tobe a positive science. The fact that sociology involves writing and style does notmake it an art, and most classic sociologists sought in various ways historicalmethods, statistics, comparative study, experimentation to lay foundations for

objective knowledge. This social philosophy endowed itself with methods, andaccepted empirical criticism of its results. Though ours is no Popperian world,clearly not just anything goes in sociology. Moreover, it is fair to think that soci-ology has its own stock of methods, which, while not making it a genuine science,do make it something more than a philosophy founded on conceptual coherence.It is of course even less a literary exercise, though sociological writing does exist.I would be fairly willing to defend sociological methods and their demands andrequirements as effective means of parrying the twin dangers of going off thesubjective deep end (more readily imputable to journalists than sociologists) and

reaching epistemological heights sometimes so lofty that anyone calling fornomological sociology would then hardly dare attempt to put it into practice. Atthe very least, sociology can be recognized as a discipline because it requires disci-pline: rules of demonstration, the establishing of bundles of facts.

Traditions Revisited

We can begin by observing that the sociological tradition is in fine shape. One

need only run an eye down university programmes and the tables of contents ofsociology textbooks to see that they are themselves a kind of sacred historywhere all paradigms are engendered rationally. More seriously, most theoreticalworks considered essential present themselves as combinations and syntheses ofclassical sociology: Simmel and Durkheim for Parks; Durkheim and Weber

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for Parsons; Durkheim, Weber, and Marx for Bourdieu; Weber and Marx forTouraine; de Tocqueville, Simmel and Weber for Boudon; Marx, Mead, Parsonsand Weber for Habermas, etc. Before asking whether contemporary sociologicaltheory is continuous with this tradition, it should be observed that the sociologi-cal tradition functions as a source of inspiration and above all an inexhaustibleresource in the quest for legitimacy. Appeals to authority have not disappeared,and the classics are continually cited to establish the legitimacy of highly contem-porary theories or theoretical analyses. Sometimes a classic is rediscovered; atother times an old text is made into a classic the case of Simmel in France inrecent years; some classics, such as Marx and Parsons, are quickly forgotten; andtraditions, such as that of the Chicago School, are invented. Sociology does notreally wish to break with its history, because over and beyond its methods andtheoretical choices, that history still seems like the best guarantee of belonging

to the sociology family. Conversely, some works that present themselves as radi-cally new are in fact recycling the most classic notions, adding a few linguisticinventions that are chic rather than truly innovative.

Attachment to tradition does not necessarily lead to devotional trotting outof the same old ideas. New combinations emerge, just as new music can be written

without changing scales or harmonies. And, frankly, attachment to the sociologi-cal tradition is a good thing because it keeps alive sociologys concern to link actorand system, explain one by the other in both directions. Sociology seeks to answerthe two questions why? and to what end? by means of the idea of society. This

is its real value. And from this perspective, it seems to me we can still acceptLockwoods distinction between systemic and social integration if, that is, weagree that the project of classical sociology has always been to link the twotogether by showing how one engenders the other in a sort of loop in itselfproblematic (Lockwood, 1964; Archer, 2003). Sociological tradition thus allowsus to resist the danger of a break between the system and nothing but, wheresociety and culture function as purely objective mechanisms, and the actor andnothing but, in which actor intentionality seems almost as if it were pure freedom.The sociologists calling, as I see it, is to get a grip on this problem; to think, as

C. Wright Mills put it, of private troubles as public issues and public issues asaggregations of private troubles (Wright Mills, 1959). After all, the canonicaltexts of sociological tradition became so for a reason: Suicideworks to show thatthe most personal experiences are caught up in larger mechanisms; in the oppositedirection, The Protestant Ethic shows that the most private of beliefs engenderradical economic mutations. It matters little what path is chosen here; the pointis to link action and the system in one analysis where the explanation gives riseto understanding and the reverse is just as necessary.

It makes sense that Bourdieus sociology is the most widely read, taught, and

quoted in France today and throughout a large part of the world. Bourdieusthought can be considered both a synthesis of classical sociology and a critiqueof it, both the apogee of that tradition and the thinking that came to slay it.

Apogee in that it is unlikely that the integration of actor and system has everbeen presented so compellingly, seamlessly, in a language that effaces all rifts and




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doubts thanks to its subjectless projects, its necessary freedoms, its disinterestedinterests, its clear-eyed blindness, its necessary exceptions. Critique because thesocial order involves a kind of domination that refuses to acknowledge itself,change is an illusion, immobility a ruse. Bourdieu used Durkheim, Marx, Weber the three pillars ofLe sens pratique to obliterate the opposition between Lvi-Strauss and Sartre that dominated France in the 1960s (Bourdieu, 1980). Unde-niably, this theoretical and rhetorical power is the beacon that has attracted, orrepelled, the members of an entire generation of French sociologists, just as anentire generation of American sociologists existed only in relation to Parsons. Asfor the method, Bachelards epistemology of the epistemological break made itpossible for Bourdieusian sociology to be a science that does not really submitto validation criteria able to demonstrate that a theory is false. This reclarificationof the bases of sociological tradition also marked the decline of that tradition,

annihilating its open, anxious questions with the internal coherence of its answers.How to resist this theoretical power? Many have given in to it, especially sociol-ogy teachers. Researchers, on the other hand, have tended to find more questionsin it than answers. As for the popularity of Bourdieus work, and the appearanceof his name in street demonstrations, Im tempted to explain by the fact that histheory has been the strongest defence of the idea of society, precisely the ideathat galvanizes defenders of the nation-state and its institutions.2

Between Rationality, Culture, and the Subject

The move in France to put classical sociology behind us may be understood withthe help of the following idea: there is no continuity or reversibility between actorand system, subjectivity and objectivity.3 Action is no longer perceived as thesubjective component of the system but has become instead a problem in itself.

And after the structuralist-functionalist-Marxist wave of the 1960s and 1970s,the crushing majority of theoretical texts in the past 30 years have focused onaction subjective action. This leaves us two ways of partaking in the return of

the actor (Touraine, 1984) and getting out of the circle Bourdieu closed.The first is methodological individualism in its utilitarian mould, in any case;that of Coleman and Gary Becker. The individual actor is rational and pursueshis/her interests as a function of the situations in which he/she finds himself/herself and the information he/she possesses. The idea is to apply micro-economicreasoning to conduct that seems non-economic, such as voting, marriage, schoolchoice, delinquency, collective mobilization, organizations, social mobility, etc.Let me say that I have no moral repugnance for this type of reasoning since myown empirical studies have convinced me that much of social behaviour can

easily be explained this way. In fact, it can be disturbing to see individuals whobehave in this way plunge into abysses of self-justification, seeking to transformtheir honourable interests into disinterested virtue. Each of us is a bit Paretian.

My reservations with regard to methodological individualism are of a differ-ent order. On the one hand, if we understand the social system as the fitting




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together of a culture and a social structure, its hard to think of it as a mereeffect of the aggregation of individual behaviours. We would do better in thatcase to speak of overall socio-economic context, or situation, than of society. Infact, studies guided by this approach generally take cultures and social structuresfor existing realities that could not possibly be explained in terms other thanconstraints and action frameworks. It is legitimate to think of education as amarket (for example), but can the same go for school programmes/curricula andteaching patterns? An overly narrow conception of rationality drastically limits themodels reach, and threatens to turn sociology into a field of micro-economics.On the other hand, the good reasons game, in its attempt to resist this danger,extends the notion of rationality to the point where the model covers all familiesof motivation and action. Rationality then becomes so distended that it servesas the basis for a kind of cognitive sociology wherein it encompasses beliefs,

traditions, and moral and aesthetic judgements (Boudon, 2003). Moreover, thecelebrated example of Olsons collective action paradox is paradoxical first andforemost because it shows that collective mobilization cannot be the product ofinterest aggregation alone (Olson, 1965). In order to mobilize rationally, a wholeseries of irrational elements such as beliefs, feelings of belonging, shame, etc.have to combine becoming non-rational components of the enlarged versionof rationality. The model swallows up all, and comprehensive sociology does notso much study the subjective good reasons that actors themselves proffer as itdeduces those reasons from actors choices and discourses. This kind of sociology

requires another kind upstream of it, a sociology that can explain action frame-works and ensure that the system, or society, is not a pure effect of aggregation;its own natural inclination is to explain behaviours by examining increasinglyfine-grained empirical material.

In response to this theoretical family, other families have developed which,while not being necessarily holistic, do affirm that sociologys object today is whatcould be called ethical or moral individualism. Here the key terms are social tie(an expression I dont understand very well), gift, individual, identity, subject. Inmuch less radical fashion than classical sociology, the insistence here is on the

tension between the system, perceived as a set of objective fluxes and forces, andthe individual, perceived as a subject concerned to realize himself, herself. Whereasmethodological individualism surely hearkens back to eighteenth-century politi-cal economy, moral individualism is of Hegelian and phenomenological filiation.Touraines thinking is a clear illustration of this option, affirming as it does withincreasing clarity the non-social character of the subject, who is defined not somuch by society as against it meaning in turn that all in sociology is not social.

Though I feel fairly close to this last family, I would be tempted to say thatsome of the same criticisms apply to it as to its competitor. It constructs social life

in opposition to utilitarianism and the market, thus tending to reduce the systemto blind, purely objective mechanics and ultimately reintroducing a set of actor-vs.-society dualisms: solidarity vs. the market, the community vs. rationality,subject vs. individual, etc. dualisms of the very sort that classic sociologicalthinking sought to overcome.




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At this time, the theoretical space of contemporary sociology as it may beobserved in France seems structured by three major poles. In the first call itpole A action is reduced to the system; in the second, B, the system is a productof rational action; in the third, C, the two terms stand in opposition. Clearly

whats happening is that the very idea of society as the improbable, problematicintegration of social integration and systemic integration is weakening, and it isreasonable to think that despite bows and curtsies to the classics, this is indeeda break from the classic age of sociology understood as the social philosophy thatinvented the idea of society. Habermas, as we know, proposed a complete separ-ation between the problems of system and action. A sociologist like Touraine isperfectly in line with this when he affirms that sociology has to rid itself of theidea of society, whereas Boudon dissolves most of the classical concepts of societyin an elementary syntax of rational action that becomes a cognitive grammar.

Both approaches, however opposed they may be, must be granted the virtue offollowing their respective lines of reasoning out to the end. But most sociolo-gists, who use theories rather than doing theory, do not go that far and in fact

work far below the ambitious level of classical sociology.

Dispersion in Interactions

Looking over the space of a generation, we can only observe that the programme

of classical sociology has gradually been broken down into a series of specializedsociology fields whose theoretical foundations are often quite local and resultfrom an accumulation of strong individual works.

This dispersion is due to the professionalization and massification of the soci-ology field.4A whole set of specialized sociologies have developed, each of whichconstitutes a relatively autonomous world, with its own reviews, its own gamesof reference and reverence as if there were a tight correspondence between itstheories and its objects of research. We have to acknowledge the fact that youngresearchers often orient themselves this way in the disciplinary space: when they

choose this or that empirical object indeed, because they choose it they takethe theoretical package associated with it. In this way, multiple regional theor-etical traditions have been created, as attested to by thesis bibliographies and

what are considered de rigueurcitations. It is hard to see these regional traditionsas anything other than sedimentations and fashions that produce syntheticoverviews the multiple Sociologies of . . . manuals: Sociology of the family, ofeducation, Occupational sociology that in turn handle traditions as if they wereso many bits of patchwork precisely because their purpose is to present asynthetic overview. In general, the outline of these works follows the conventional

order, going from macro to micro, objective to subjective, culturalism to rational-ism, this balanced with a critique of functionalism, itself reduced to straw man,necessary village idiot, and at the end fine-tuned down to symbolic interaction-ism and constructivism. Every sociology specialty arranges its own tradition foritself, its own tranquil dramaturgy, thereby fragmenting sociology in a way that




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responds fairly well to social and academic demand. I attach great importance tothese manuals, given that they were written for students, and to these articles andtheses because objectively they represent the crushing majority of sociologicalproduction. Sociology seems to have become a science of social problems, as isalready the case in some bookstores where sociology books are shelved in theschool, social work, immigration, organizations, health, and gender sections,among others.

This type of fragmentation explains the very real practical triumph of inter-actionism, and it confers a degree of theoretical legitimacy on descriptions andanalyses that simply dont go very far, that dont do much more than string alonga few heartfelt truisms: situations and data are constructed; individuals act withincontexts; they want to get someone else to do the dirty work; norms are debat-able; deviance is learned; identity is produced by how others see one but people

use a mixture of cunning and cynicism to resist against this; youve got to coolthe mark out, etc. All these micro-mechanisms which are of great importance,of course thus acquire a kind of high theoretical dignity; the fineness of theobservations is touted. This passion for the micro is surely understandable afterthe functionalist orgies of the 1970s, but the danger is that it will turn sociol-ogy into an exercise either commanded by genius or doomed to insignificance.Goffman and a few others were and are geniuses putting their novelistic talentsto work within the pragmatist tradition of James and Pierce (Joseph, 2004). WhatI mean by insignificance is that this kind of sociology could never tell us anything

more than what its telling us now, which amounts to nothing more than whatthe actors themselves say fairly spontaneously; namely that they manage, they getby. Any number of novelists, beginning with Proust or Goffmanian filmmakerssuch as Robert Altman may be preferable to this.

I would tend to take the interactionist cluster very seriously, precisely sinceit is part of the move away from classical sociology. What troubles me is that theidea of society is becoming useless without this being perceived as a problem;

without our looking any more at how we get from individual interactions tocollective facts. While it is useful to study classroom interactions, we hop uneasily

from such interactions to statistical regularities for pupil cohorts very often wemake as if the connections were clear. We have a good understanding of how aperson becomes a marijuana smoker but we dont go further to explain why agiven society smokes more or less than another. My main reason for beingconcerned about the practical success of interactionism is that as a teacher I seethe charm it has for sociology students for what seems a very simple reason:society is no longer Society; it has been reduced to what individuals see and sayof it. Students seem to think that once youve described what actors do andpresented what they say, the work is done. For the rest, anything is possible and

nothing seems connected to social life. The assumption seems to be that on theone hand you have objective, reified mechanisms that no one knows anythingabout any more, except that they are the market; on the other, actors real-lifeexperience, which sociologists are supposedly experts on in particular, the social-problem family. In fact, never has there seemed to be such a radical dissociation




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between objectivity and subjectivity once again, exactly the dissociation thatclassical sociology refused to accept. A few of the finer feelings, democratic andrespectful of identities, provide this sociological style with honourable, vaguelycritical normative underpinnings. In Chapter 1 of these students theses, you setthe scene, using general knowledge accumulated about a situation and a group;in Chapter 2, you present minute description of the behaviour of a few indi-viduals; in Chapter 3, you take care of the epistemological by saying that theanalysis and action categories are themselves constructed.

In fact, because in interactionism, interactions are thought of as social realityitself rather than one level of social life that can only be explained by other suchlevels as the notion of role allowed, regardless of its weaknesses interactionismis perfectly malleable, readily adaptable to all possible conceptions of the system,including the most critical. The return to honest, straightforward Marxism in

British new education sociology offers a clear illustration of these twists andturns. Obviously in my case against interactionism, I am not claiming that theapproach fails to teach us anything and I am certainly not claiming that the worksof Becker, Goffman, and Lemert are insignificant. What I do think is that thisapproach sweeps too many problems under the rug as Goffman said with irony,recalling that while social systems were undoubtedly very important, he wouldntbe talking about them. Actually, the problem is nothing less than the theoreticalstatus of this theoretical family.

Intermediate Considerations

The intellectual space of current French sociology seems to me to be laid out thus:

1 The critical theory of reproduction is both the crystallization and a disen-chanted reversal of classical sociology.

2 Methodological individualism has tried to reconstruct classical sociologyunder the aegis of utilitarianism and broadened rationality.

3 A return of the actor has been constructed on the basis of a kind of ethical,reflexive, self-made individualism.4 Most sociological theories being used today are specialized and often use a

kind of soft interactionism to escape the grip of classical sociology withoutchoosing a stance and without looking like they are/arent choosing one.

The theories implicit in (1), (2), and (3) may be thought of as great theoriesbecause the intention is that they be genuinely general constructions; they arevisions of the world that, whatever else may be said of them, have taken their

building materials from the pantheon of the founding fathers (whose unity Ireadily admit to be a pure construction; however, that unity is operative insociologists minds). (1) bets all on the system and reduces action to program-ming or an effect of the systems own contradictions. (2) understands action asthe manifestation of individuals reasons. Finally, (3) continuously underscores




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system-actor tensions while radically separating the two. Everything that socio-logical tradition worked to hold together is coming apart.

To historians of sociology, this state of affairs does not seem new: there havealways been several ways of apprehending the social (Berthelot, 1990). But howcan we resist the contrary pleasures of ever new and nothing new? We couldalso reasonably think that sociology has something to do with society, and thatthe fragmenting of paradigms we see in the discipline may be explained by veryreal changes in what we are nonetheless still obliged to think of as Society,especially since most of these changes were anticipated by classical sociology,already thought of as a combination of various accounts of modernity.5

How could the ideas of system and social structure, the idea of society itself,ever have held their own against transformations of the nation-state defined asan integrated culture, economy, and instance of political sovereignty? How could

we possibly believe that the promotion of the individuals sovereignty wouldntaffect the mechanisms that engender actors and those that engender social regu-lation? How could we imagine that accentuations of the division of labour wouldnot deal a serious blow to the idea of a stable, integrated system? Sociology hasbecome so patently plural because the social world has itself become plural, andno central principle now seems up to the task of explaining it. There are surelygood reasons why the classic sociologist most likely to be called to the rescue is

Weber, for he was surely the founding father who best resisted the pathos of theunity of social life idea. Weber is a pure theorist who never proposed a unified

theory, and this explains his many filiations with Nietzscheism, phenomenology,and methodological individualism, among others. Who else could have had thehonour of inspiring the Frankfurt School, Schutz, and Boudon?

Is it because the world has changed, or did the classical sociology programmeexhaust itself? The answer doesnt really matter here. If my analysis is credible,the most reasonable position becomes that which I share with a few others: socio-logical theory should work from the twofold principle of heterogeneous actionand heterogeneous system. This is a means of being loyal to the classical sociol-ogy programme while defending middle-range theories by which I do not mean

regional ones.6

It favours the idea that sociological theory should bring to lightmechanisms borrowed from (1), (2), and (3), rather than sociological laws. Ifwe accept that social life and society no longer have a centre while continuing toinsist that social life requires relative order and local unity, then clearly the spaceof sociological theory can only be dialogic and should be able to coherentlycombine different conceptions of actions. All sciences are not physics; most ofthem discover and demonstrate mechanisms rather than laws, and that is alreadya great deal.

Mid-range Theories for Holding it Together

Given that culture, society, and the economy are tending to separate out intoincreasingly autonomous subsystems, it is understandable that a whole set of




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theories have taken on the essential task of constructing ways of fitting togetherthe various composite areas. J.-D. Reynauds regulation theory and, in a completelydifferent direction, the theory of conventions, are exemplary in this connection.Mid-range theories are not local ones adapted to a particular type of problem-object such as delinquency or school inequality. They are theories that seek toexplain certain mechanisms while only being able to manage this by turning totheories other than themselves. They require both extremely fine grains andcoarser ones. They are combinations, assemblages, that do not claim to producea general vision of society yet cannot do without a representation of society andthe concepts it implies: institution, role, classes, power, domination, change, etc.

In France, the work of Latour, for example, and Boltanski and Thvenot belongto this family of theories. They offer a point of view on social action withoutclaiming to gather all the threads together, since most of these constructions take

off from the postulate that action develops in a plural world, that there are severallevels or registers of action, several grammars or modes of justification (Boltanskiand Thvenot, 1987; Latour, 1987). Some radicalize this point of view and aremoving towards a kind of pragmatics of action sociology, more or less directlyinspired by the ethnomethodology critique, itself perhaps the most radical andinteresting break from classical sociology.7 Others continue to be more attachedto classical sociology and resolutely engage in a kind of combination rhetoric.

My own work belongs to this latter approach, and therefore runs the risk ofnot making the break and being less visible. I would qualify the attitude Ive

chosen as neo-classic because it is characterized by a mode of theoretical elabo-ration less engaged in theoretical discussions than an attempt to resolve empiri-cal and quite practical problems: Why is pupils motivation to work in school solow? Why is work becoming increasingly stressful when, objectively, it is lessheavy than before? Why do young people in working-class neighbourhoodsmanifest irrational violence? This type of theoretical practice, impure becauseembedded in empirical research that is not primarily concerned to demonstrateor produce a theory but rather to resolve enigmas, is guided by certain principles.But the cameralist style is not necessarily an easy one to do. The following are

some of the principles that led me to propose a theory of social experience(Dubet, 1994):

1 As we move away from the central figure of society developed by classicalsociology, social action is motivated by several types of logic, one defined byintegration mechanisms, another by strategic rationality, and a third by therelation to self or subjectivation.

2 Each of these types of logic refers to a process in which social subsystems the subsystem of norms and identities, that of markets, that of culture

are separated from one another. Society is structured around no centralprinciple (Bell, 1978; Dubet and Martuccelli, 1998).3 Each type may be explained objectively in terms of its link to the subsystem

it refers to, according to processes whose nature was established by classicalsociology theories: socialization, limited rationality, and subjectivation.




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4 Sociology studies the mechanisms that shape the conditions of activity andthe nature of that activity activity which creates unity in all places wheresociety is being effaced. This means that social experience is necessarily acognitive, normative process, as shown by practical conceptions of justice.

5 This sociological approach is ultimately concerned less to describe societythan show how it is produced.

This type of theoretical development owes much to theories other than itself. Forexample, it readily accepts that statistical regularities can reveal mechanisms ofholistic formation that determine behaviours and opinions and the social-structure hypothesis is considered necessary. It also understands that within thesestructural frameworks, behaviour can be explained in terms of games and choicematrices. Finally, it accepts the idea that actors cannot be reduced to either of

these two types of logic and that because they have no choice but to deal withthem, they are capable of criticizing and transforming them, thereby producingunity when society no longer provides any. We could call all of these programmes

A, B, and C, on condition that those three matrices are understood to determinethe space of sociology at a time when the classic idea of society is slipping outfrom under us. But the slipping away of society, this end of the functionalistillusion, should not invalidate certain of classical sociologys questions. Nor doesnot exempt us from answering the questions it raised about the nature of thesocial order, domination, legitimacy, conflicts . . .

Conclusion

Why maintain such a circumscribed, lack-lustre position when we may well thinkthat the point of sociological theory is to construct a general theory which engen-ders deductive propositions? First, there are several ways of doing theory, severalintellectual temperaments, one of which consists in starting with a set of empiri-cal problems starting, therefore, with the aporia and impasses left by earlier

theories. Theory is not made exclusively on blackboards; it is also made on the labtable. Sociological theory develops by responding to new questions or providingnew answers to old questions without it being necessary to redefine all founda-tions of the edifice every time. Second, as I see it, the right reason not to break

with classical sociology is that it allows us to hold together what has tended tocome undone with the decline of the idea of society. Obviously we dont wantto eternally repeat the classics in a series of reverential gestures. The point is ratherto hold onto their vocation, i.e., to construct a reasoned representation of sociallife, and of what we will continue to call society, having no better term for it,

even when society can no longer be identified with the nation-state. Sociologyappeared at a time when modernity was destroying traditional social worlds; itappeared just as it was once again becoming possible to recompose an integratedimage of social life. Now that this first version of modernity seems to have comeapart, if we dont want representation of the social world to be boiled down to




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an opposition between market rationality and the ineffable subjectivities ofindividuals or irreducibility of cultures, it is more than ever necessary to affirmthe relevance of the sociological vocation. Constructing sociology today impliesresolutely rejecting both the end of history and the clash of civilizations.

Acknowledgements

This article was translated by Amy Jacobs.

Notes

1 I am of course talking about sociology as it exists in France which is not exclusivelyFrench sociology. Other traditions exist elsewhere.

2 Bourdieu reviens! [Come back to us, Bourdieu!] was among the slogans heard indemonstrations by French civil servants in spring 2003 a clear indication that theyidentified their cause with the defence of society as a whole, society itself.

3 I am referring here solely to French sociology, or more exactly the sociology read bymost French sociologists (I am aware of what I dont know, and of the strong artifi-ciality of any world sociology, even in this era of globalization).

4 Since the 1960s, the number of professional sociologists in France has gone from afew dozen to nearly a thousand more, if we count unemployed sociology PhDs.

5 This is why the notion of post-modernity does not seem very useful to me. We aresimply still more modern.

6 It is worth noting that Mertons mid-range theories seem to have better stood the testof time than Parsons supreme theory.

7 This perception can be refuted if we remember that Garfinkel sought to re-appropriatethe major issues of Parsonian sociology.

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Franois Dubet is Professor of Sociology at the Universit de Bordeaux-2 and

a member of the CADIS (EHESS). His recent books include: Lcole des chances:

Quest-ce quune cole juste?(Seuil, 2004), and Injustices: Lexprience des ingal-

its au travail(Seuil, 2006). [email: [email protected]]


why remain classical (dubet)

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