Neo-classical Sociology. The Prospects of Social Theory
Today.
Alain Caillé and Frédéric Vandenberghe
Il n´y a pas des sciences sociales, mais une science des sociétés
Marcel Mauss, “Divisions et proportions des divisions de la sociologie”
Abstract
This article calls for a new theoretical synthesis that overcomes the fragmentation, specialisation
and professionalisation within the social sciences. As an alternative to utilitarianism and the
colonisation of the social sciences by rational choice models, it proposes a new articulation of
social theory, the Studies and moral and political philosophy. Based on a positive anthropology that
finds its inspiration in Marcel Mauss´s classic essay on the gift, it recommends a return to classical
social theory, reconsiders the legacy of Marxism and explores articulations between theories of
reciprocity, care and recognition.
Keywords: General social theory – French theory - Postcolonial Studies – Care – Recognition - The
Gift – Marxism/Post-Marxism – Anti-utilitarianism - Marcel Mauss
While humanity is entering the Third Millennium, sociology is entering its Second Century. Our
question is whether it was merely, like anthropology, a discipline of the Twentieth Century or
whether it can continue for another two centuries. There are an increasing number of sociologists,
sociology teachers and sociology students around the world, but for a number of reasons, it is not
clear that this seemingly favourable situation will last, nor that the discipline will survive for a long
time in its current form. Not that sociology is in crisis. It isn´t. All things considered, that is what we
find most worrying. With its increasing professionalism, it courts the risk of becoming irrelevant.
There are numerous investigations of local social problems, from drunken driving in Alabama to
bullying on the Internet and discrimination of Thai transsexuals in Paris. About the global crisis,
1
however, it has hardly anything special to say.1 When its contributions are not couched in obscure
jargon or impenetrable maths that give them a scientific semblance, its observations remain so close
to common sense (with ample verbatim quotations from interviews) and everyday life (with detailed
descriptions of banal situations) that one wonders what distinguishes sociology from sociography or
even from (realist) literature. Both in its expert and common sense versions one finds a lot of moral
posturing and ideological positioning. As if denunciations of global capitalism and sympathy with
the downtrodden could possibly change the system!
In a money-driven world that admits only the measure of immediate profitability, the usefulness of
sociology is indeed challenged. The discipline may not be in crisis, it nevertheless displays
increasing uncertainty about its identity, its project and its legitimacy. The ritual invocation of Marx,
Weber and Durkheim as “founding fathers” of sociology does not restrain disorientation and
fragmentation of the discipline. While it constructs an illusionary continuity between the past and
the present, it precludes exploration of continuities with older traditions (natural law, philosophy of
history, humanities, moral and political philosophy, political economy). The canonisation of the
classics checks disciplinary drift, but it only does so by relegating other authors to the periphery of
the discipline. Who still reads Tocqueville, Comte, Spencer or even Parsons?
A century later, the attempt at canonisation is repeated in the introductory courses to sociology, but
now it is Giddens, Bourdieu and Habermas who are enthroned as “neo-classical sociologists”. As if
the discipline had stopped at the beginning of the nineties! Meanwhile, the “new theoretical
movement in sociology” (Alexander, 1988) has become old hat. The scholastic exercises to link
agency and structure may still attract some novices, but is has run its course and become formulaic.2
The intellectual consensus has petered out only to be replaced by a moral and political front. While
the discipline is ideologically united and self-consciously positions itself left-of-centre of the
political spectrum– yes, indeed, critique has become hegemonic in the field - theoretically,
methodologically, empirically and normatively sociology remains divided as ever.
In this article, we propose a series of integrated reflections on the current state of the social
sciences. Our aim is to contribute to the development of a general social theory along anti-utilitarian
lines. The article contains five sections. It opens with a brief analysis of a quadruple fragmentation
within the social sciences: the autonomisation of theory and research, the fragmentation among
1
See, however, the three-volume set of the Possible Futures Series, edited by Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian
(2011), as well as the analyses in Wallerstein et al. (2013).
2
In Scholasticism, the primary purpose of the disputation is to resolve contradictions dialectically. Questiones follow
one after another, opponents give a response, a counterproposal is argued and the opponents’ arguments are rebutted.
The value of intellectual contributions is reduced to the logical relationship it establishes with the preceding response.
In this way, contradictions are resolved and smoothened out, while the dogma and the doxa are reinforced.
2
theories, the separation of sociology and the Studies, as well as between the social sciences and
moral, social and political philosophy (1). As an alternative to the rational choice models of neoclassical economics, it develops the contours of neo-classical sociology and calls for a new
synthesis of social theory, the Studies and moral and political philosophy (2). Through an
articulation of metatheory, social theory and sociological theory, it advances a loose integration of
theories of social action, order and social change and spells out the minimal requirements of a
pluralist position (3). Although it fully acknowledges the importance of Marxism, it critically
reconsiders its legacy and proposes an anti-utilitarian formulation of critical theory that is inspired
by Marcel Mauss´s anthropology of the gift (4). Finally, in dialogue with theories of care and
recognition, it presents and proposes the gift paradigm as a general social theory that, with a little
help from our friends, is able to translate the other theories. Tentatively, we suggest that it offers the
best platform for a new synthesis within the social sciences.
Four Fragmentations
When we look at the current situation of sociology, we see four fragmentations – two internal ones
and two external ones.
(1) The first fragmentation within sociology is that between teaching and research, theory and
methods, concepts and techniques, abstractions and operationalisations. On the one hand, we have
the teaching of classical and contemporary sociological theory (SOC 101: Marx, Weber, Durkheim,
Simmel; SOC 201: Bourdieu, Giddens, Habermas, sometimes also Luhmann, though, granted, his
work is definitely more difficult to instruct). The introductory courses are given at the beginning of
the curriculum to students who are generally too young to grasp its significance. The result is rather
predictable: Sociology is identified with a positivist, objectivist and determinist account of society
(culled from the first chapter of The Rules of Sociological Method), an iron-cage-vision of
modernity (extracted from the final pages of The Protestant Ethic) and a trenchant, yet stereotyped
critique of neo-liberal capitalism (inspired by the Communist Manifesto). On the other hand, there´s
hands-on training for empirical research, both qualitative (participant observation, interviews, life
histories, etc.) and quantitative (multiple regression, correspondence analysis, geodata, etc.), which
is required from both researchers and research apprentices alike. Increasingly, the access to data
defines the identity of its practitioners. In many countries, but above all in France and the USA, less
so in the UK, Italy and Germany, empirical research has become a conditio sine qua non to be even
recognized as a sociologist. While historians would never dream of excommunicating a fellow
historian from their ranks, lest s/he were a revisionist or a negationist, sociologists regularly
3
threaten their colleagues with a Berufsverbot: “Who has never done empirical research should not
enter here” (Lahire, 2002: 8).
The question, therefore, arises: What or who is a sociologist? He or she is a professional who
practices a cult of commemoration of the “founding fathers”, quotes Marx, Durkheim and Bourdieu,
does specialized work in one of the many “fields” of sociology (sociology of health, education,
sports, social movements, etc.), applies research methods and techniques (participant observation,
discourse analysis, factor analysis) to gather and analyse the empirical data and does not eschew
moral and political evaluation of the social situation that is investigated.3
(2) Those who define themselves primarily as empirical researchers (ethnographers and stats
people) are not really bothered by theoretical and conceptual issues anyway. All too often, theories
have a merely decorative use and conceptual issues are quickly resolved and dissolved through a
series of obligatory references to a few contemporary schools of thought that are far from reaching
unanimity within the discipline: critical realism, neo-Marxism, actor-network theory, pragmatism,
symbolic interaction ism, ethnomethodology, etc. – all these scholarly references function more as
“badges of identification” (Berthelot, 2000: 72) than as genuine pointers of conceptual elaboration.
Hence, a second fragmentation. It results from the conflicts and tussles between anathematising
sociological schools (cultural sociology vs. structural sociology, critical vs. systems theory, rational
choice vs. neo-institutionalism) that are unable to come to a minimal consensus about the very
essence of sociology. “Multiple paradigmatasis” has now become so acute that it is hard to see what
the nano-approach of discourse analysis has in common with the mega-approach of world systems
theory. Apart from a nominal adherence to sociology, within the discipline, there´s not even a
minimal consensus about the unit of analysis, basic ontology or elementary concepts. At best,
there´s mutual indifference and tolerance; at worst, confrontation and agonistics. The agonistic
game seems driven as much by academic interests as by the force of arguments and the persuasion
of ideas. All too often, the stake consists in showing that one´s theory is bigger and, therefore, better
than the one of the adversary. Alternatively, scholastic compare-and-contrast exercises, say of
structuration theory and figurational sociology or Habermas´s critical theory and Bourdieu´s critical
sociology, are staged as duels, with the commentator usually acting as final empire.
(3) To those two divisions within the discipline itself, we should add two others that emerge at the
boundaries of sociology and its environment. The third fragmentation comes about when empirical
work is conducted in response to theoretical perspectives that are unrelated to sociology as such and
3
We could have added: who does admin, writes projects, gets external funding, publishes in international journals to
increase the impact factor, transmits transferrable skills, etc., but nowadays those tasks and requirements are incumbent
on any academic. For a critical discussion of university reform in France, see Revue du Mauss, 2009/ 1, no. 33.
4
have no truck with the discipline, even if they investigate social life. Sociologists’ work is, indeed,
increasingly carried out with implicit or explicit reference to what we will call “the Studies”. By
this, we mean to refer to the congeries of anti-disciplinary investigations, like Cultural Studies,
Media & Communication Studies, Gender Studies, Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Studies,
Governmentality Studies, etc. that specialise in the (un)systematic investigation of the
power/discourse connection. The pervasive and perverse influence at the intersection of class, racial
and sexual domination on scientific, philosophical and common sense discourses is, supposedly,
demonstrated when absences in the texts are decoded as signs of the presence of power. The books
that represent these critical and deconstructive currents of thought are now selling much better with
the general public around the world – except in France which, until very recently, superbly ignored
the work of Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha and even Judith Butler. Strictly sociological work is
decreasingly found on the shelves of the academic bookstores.4
One of the conspicuous features of the Studies is that they are largely anti, inter- or transdisciplinary. Historians, philosophers, literary critics, political scientists, anthropologists and
sociologists practice them with or without reference to the sociological tradition. Although most of
the Studies are written in English, they mostly find their inspiration in French philosophers (with
the exception of Gramsci): Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida (and also, though more marginally,
Althusser, Lacan and Lyotard).5 Moreover, most of their work derives from “French Theory”
(Cusset, 2005), which was taught on American campuses in the 1970s and 1980s by these very
authors, but on American terms and with a tone curiously unfamiliar in France, where, until
yesteryear, social scientists were hardly aware of the Studies.6
The Studies are not only more transdisciplinary, they are also more transnational than sociology,
which, until very recently, practiced “methodological nationalism” without acknowledging it did.
With very few exceptions (most notably Wallerstein and Luhmann), it identified society with the
4
In the UK, the US and Germany the academic bookstores themselves are disappearing fast. In France, thanks to the
competition law and the imposition of a fixed price for books since 1981, they still resist to the competition on the
Internet (Fnac and Amazon). For how long, though? Worldwide, the academic and higher education publishing industry
is facing a serious crisis. See Thompson, 2010 for a well-informed analysis of the publishing field and its challenges by
one of the founders of Polity Press.
5
Notwithstanding its globalism, Postcolonial Studies remains largely restricted to the Commonwealth and the
Francophonie, with the result that Australia, Algeria and Canada figure more prominently in Readers, Handbooks and
Companions of Post-colonial Studies than Brazil, Mexico or Argentina. Of late, Enrico Dussel, Annibal Quijano, Walter
Mignolo and others who advocate for a Decolonial Shift have started to gain some traction in Hispanic and Lusophone
countries. See Lander, 2000 for an influential sample of Latin American post-colonialism.
6
Interestingly, French intellectuals use the category ‘French theory’ (in English) to refer to work that is classified in the
Anglo-Saxon world under post-structuralism. The re-import of the Studies from the USA to France is typically received
with a mixture of enthusiasm and rejection. The political correctness of the genre easily triggers polemics and
polarisation. Following a media campaign of far-right opponents to gay marriage, Gender Studies has recently been
vilipended as a theory that promotes homo- and transsexuality in primary schools.
5
container of the nation-state and conceived of the world society as an extension of their own
country. Depending on their locus of observation, the world at large appeared as a macroscopic
reproduction of their own society: republican, egalitarian and civilizational (France), stratified,
scientific and cultural (Germany), individualist, commercial and utilitarian (Great Britain) or
communitarian, pragmatic and democratic (USA). Wary of boundaries, be they national are
disciplinary, the Studies deconstruct them and have less difficulties to scale up and take a global
turn. But up to now, their endeavour has been largely negative and critical. In their search for ‘excentric’ positions from the global South, they behave like academic backpackers, hopping from one
intellectual tradition to another to find an undiscovered critical thinker, say, in Iran (Shariati?),
Indonesia (Alatas?) or Peru (Quijano?) who has contested the coloniality of metropolitan
knowledge. The time has now come to join intellectual forces to develop a historically sensitive,
anthropologically informed comparative history of civilizations from a cosmopolitan standpoint corresponding to Weber´s “universal history”, but without its provincialism.
4) To these three fragmentations – the double internal fragmentation between theory and empiricism
and between rival schools, and the external fragmentation between sociology, history, literary
criticism and philosophy – one might add a fourth one, which overlaps and strengthens the
dissipative tendencies: between the social sciences on the one hand and moral and political
philosophy on the other. While moral and political philosophy has become more social, dealing with
issues like democracy, justice, equality and identity, sociology has increasingly turned its back to
philosophy. The result is what Alexander and Seidman (2001) call a “downwards shift” in
theorising, a turn away from generalising and normative reasoning and a shift towards more
pragmatic and problem-oriented investigations. As the synthetic movement in social theory started
waning and the structure-agency debate became stale and repetitive toward the mid-nineties, moral
and political philosophy became not only more inspiring, but also more attuned to developments
within society.
To clear the way to investigations that are at the intersection of sociology, the Studies and moral and
political philosophy, we will quickly review some developments in contemporary moral, social and
political philosophy. Following the debate between liberalism and communitarianism of the 1990´s,
itself a result of the massive international reception of John Rawls´s landmark publication in 1971
of A Theory of Justice, moral philosophy has sought to move beyond the narrow, formal and
procedural frameworks in which John Rawls's concept of justice as fairness and Jürgen Habermas's
discourse ethics have locked the normative and ethical thinking for almost fifty years. Be it through
a return to Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche or Heidegger, philosophers have
increasingly explored the ethical questions that Kantian deontology and utilitarian consequentialism
6
had neglected and pushed to the margins: solicitude (Levinas), care (Gilligan), trust (Baier),
empathy (Irigaray), giving (Caillé), hospitality (Derrida), authenticity (Taylor) and recognition
(Honneth).7 The rehabilitation of practical philosophy, the rediscovery of virtues and moral
sentiments, the ethical turn within post-structuralism and feminist theory have dislocated the
normative emphasis from the basic structure of well-ordered societies to intersubjectivity, alterity
and primary sociability (Sayer, 2011). Within sociology, the development of moral philosophy has
spawned a renewed interest in moral sociology with a spate of new approaches that seek to correct
the Durkheimian emphasis on morality with Weberian theories of action and pragmatic theories of
interaction (Vandenberghe, forthcoming).
If moral philosophy encounters micro-sociology, macro-sociology encounters critical theory and
social philosophy. Complementing classical theories of modernity with an investigation of the
normative foundations of social critique, social philosophy critically investigates developmental
tendencies of society. It does not hesitate to characterize them as “social pathologies” when they
threaten social integration and jeopardise the social conditions of the personal realisation of the
“good life” (Honneth, 2000: 11-69; Fischbach, 2009). Understood as a systematization of the
diagnoses of the present (Zeitdiagnosis) that one finds in the work of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche or,
closer to us, of Arendt, Habermas and Charles Taylor, social philosophy does not only analyse
social developments, but it also evaluates and judges them. Through an explicit thematisation of its
normative criteria, it investigates social pathologies that result from a lack of community (anomie),
meaning (disenchantment) or freedom (alienation) and suggests possible remedies. Joining thus
analysis to diagnosis, social philosophy stands at the intersection of moral and political philosophy.
While contemporary social philosophy remains indebted to the German tradition of critical theory,
from Horkheimer via Habermas to Axel Honneth, Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, contemporary
political philosophy has visibly been much more influenced by French post-structuralism and
deconstruction. More radical than critical theory, which remains tied to the presuppositions of the
liberalism-communitarianism debate of the 90´s, contemporary political philosophy weaves poststructuralism and post-Marxism into a heady contentious brew of radical anti-liberalism. Inspired
by a leftist interpretation of Heidegger´s “ontological difference”, the political was introduced as a
foundational moment of politics and society (Marchart, 2007). With the rise of the Global Justice
Movement around the turn of the century and the recent return of radical anti-systemic social
movements on the scene of world history, late- and post-Marxist philosophers of the cultural left,
7
We will return to these issues in the final section of the article where we will propose a rapprochement between neoHegelian theories of recognition and a neo-Maussian theory of the gift.
7
like Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Slavoi Zizek, Ernesto Laclau or Jacques Rancière have seen in
the “newest” social movements in the Middle East (the “Arab Spring”), Western Europe (“los
indignados”) and the United States (“Occupy”) a rejuvenation of non-representative forms of
democracy. Their revolutionary interpretations of the ontology of the present are not only in tune
with the Zeitgeist; to the extent that their analyses are both relevant and influential, they have also
put sociology in the shadow and recast it as an “old European discipline” that harks back to
foundational texts of the 19th Century to understand the challenges of the 21st Century.
Neo-Classical Social Theory
The question is now if all that theoretical effervescence in the social sciences that is largely
happening outside of the discipline of sociology - in the Studies and in moral, social and political
philosophy – though with important repercussions on it, could somehow be considered as being part
of sociology? Is it possible to work towards a new synthesis of social theory, the Studies as well as
moral and political philosophy? And, if so, could sociology be at the forefront of the new synthesis?
One could say that, from an intellectual point of view, it does not really matter.8 As long as thought
and society move forward, labels are not important. But, for better or for worse, the organized and
institutional transmission of knowledge needs labels that allow one to define the curriculum, to
monitor pedagogical advancement and to formulate criteria of validation. All the official talk about
the importance of inter- and transdisciplinary talk should not hide, however, that the sciences,
universities and teaching are still largely organized around the same disciplinary lines that were
institutionalised along national lines in the 19th Century (Stihweh, 2000: 103-145).9
Another important consideration, of a more strategic and metapolitical nature, is that if the social
sciences do not find a unified riposte to the colonization of their territories by economics and
rational choice theories, they are bound to lose the ‘science wars’ and poised to become irrelevant.
If economics is so powerful, it is not only because it has been able to combine parsimony
(simplicity of its fundamental concepts) with sophistication (the complexity of its mathematical
8
Both of the authors are sociologists by training (though Caillé also has a Ph.D. in economics) and social theorists by
vocation. Our particular location within the discipline explains, in part, why we privilege neo-classical sociology.
Although we call for a transdisciplinary synthesis, we are well aware that our arguments are mainly pitched to
sociologists and that our article would probably not be published in journals of anthropology, history, geography or
economics, though we hope that it will inspire our colleagues from neighbouring disciplines, spur them to take on board
our project and write similar articles for slightly different audiences.
9
In the US, Europe and Latin America, the disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences remain as strong as ever.
There have been significant incursions of the humanities into the social sciences, but as far as we can see, it is only in
India that the social sciences are now truly interdisciplinary. Their studies of culture and society are philosophical,
historical, sociological, anthropological and literary at all once.
8
models,), but also because it has succeeded in imposing universally a standard curriculum. From
Chicago to Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai to Shanghai, Paris to Dakar, economics is taught in the same
way, with the same canonical texts and the same econometric techniques.10 Among economists one
finds a large variety of ethical and political positions. Within the discipline, there is also a rather
strong schism between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.11 But in all universities over the world, the
‘dismal science’ is basically taught and transmitted in uniform fashion. The existence of a strong
disciplinary identity explains, at least partly, why its worldwide influence on people’s minds
continues almost unabated. The strength of its hegemony can be gauged by the fact that even the
economic crisis has not succeeded in denting the dominance of neo-classical theory within
economics and of economics within the social sciences.12 It should be granted, though, that rational
choice has made less inroads in sociology than in political science and even less in anthropology
and history.
From the very beginning, the sociological project has been shaped by its opposition to utilitarianism
(Parsons, 1937; Caillé, 1986, 1988, Revue du MAUSS since 1982).13 Unlike economics, which
analyses the social order as a spontaneous order - a “catalaxy” (Hayek, 1979, II: 107-132)- that
emerges out of the uncoordinated pursuit of private interests, sociology has always foregrounded
the normative and ideational elements that make social life possible and that allow the actors to
coordinate their actions on the basis of a shared vision of the world. Although sociology does not
ignore self-interest and fully acknowledges the role of power (see Weber) and property (see Marx)
in social life, it has always emphasised the constitutive role of ideas, values and norms in social life,
10
The predominance of neo-classical economics in the curriculum is so strong that 42 associations of economics
students of 19 countries have recently launched a spirited campaign for a "change of course" so as to make teaching
more plural and pluralist. See the Open Letter of the International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics
(http://www.isipe.net/open-letter/). Their demands are quite similar to those that were formulated in 2000 by the French
"éconoclastes" (www.autisme-economie.org).
11
Although orthodox economics remains dominant, its hegemony is not uncontested. In 2007, Alain Caillé took the
initiative to launch a "Manifesto for an institutionalist political economy" ("Manifeste pour une économie politique
institutionnaliste", Revue du MAUSS, 2007, no. 30: 37-47). It was signed by more than than 20 economists and
economic sociologists who represent a variety of currents within heterodox economics - among them: Regulation
School (Robert Boyer), Conventions School (Olivier Favereau), Social and Solidarity Economy (Jose-Luis Corragio),
Varieties of Capitalism School (Peter Hall), Institutional Economics (Geoffrey Hodgson), etc.
12
Paradoxically, the economic downturn seems only to have strengthened the hegemony of economics. While orthodox
economics and its mathematical whizzary (the ´subprimes´) are one of the direct causes of the crisis, heterodox
economics (post-Keynesianism, institutionalism, regulation theory, economics of convention, etc.) can analyze its
consequences. Notwithstanding their opposition, orthodox and heterodox economics share common interests and a
common worldview. Their opposition should not hide their common doxa.
13
Technically speaking, we understand by utilitarianism any theory that implicitly or explicitly subscribes to the
“axiomatic of interest” (Caillé, 1986). For a long view of the utilitarian tradition, from Socrates to Rawls, see Caillé,
Lazzeri and Senellart (2001); on the utilitarian tradition, from Bentham to the Mills, see Halévy´s (1995) classical study
of philosophical radicalism. More recently, two books with same title The Sociological Ambition (Shilling and Mellor,
2001, Laval, 2002) have arrived at a similar conclusion: “Sociology from its very beginning has waged a struggle
against utilitarianism” (Laval, 2002 : 469).
9
even when the latter are considered ideological reflexes of antagonistic social relations in society at
large or its fields and subfields. To the extent that sociology self-consciously continues moral
philosophy by different means, it does not separate social and moral life (Chanial, 2011,
Vandenberghe, forthcoming). It rather seeks to investigate their relation not only conceptually, but
also empirically. Given its differentiation from economics, it stands and falls with its opposition to
utilitarianism (Caillé, 1988). For a long time, sociology was able to think of itself as the other of
economics, and simultaneously also as its extension, its critique and its Aufhebung. If sociology
were to fall apart, an entire field of thought – that which refuses the transformation of the world into
a vast market – would likewise disappear, condemning us to theoretical, ethical and political
powerlessness.
Hence, in order to organize a rationalized transmission of the achievements of modern reflexivity,
and to counter the imperialism of economics and its tendency to “colonise” the social and political
sciences (Archer and Tritter, 2000), there is a pressing need to find a common denominator among
all of the above-mentioned schools and streams of thought. At this point, we would like to advance
our main argument and suggest two things (we cannot do more than suggest):
First, as an alternative to neo-classical economics, we plead for the development of “neo-classical
sociology” as a common platform for the dialogical synthesis of sociology, the Studies, as well as
social, moral and political philosophy. We call it neo-classical sociology, because we believe that
the contemporary understanding of sociology is much narrower than what the founders of sociology
had in mind. They knew that foundational work borders on the philosophical. Their foundation of a
new science and their principled rejection of utilitarianism was inseparable from their appeal for a
renewal of society. As Durkheim famously said in his second preface to De la division du travail
social: “Sociology would not be not worth a single hour's effort if it had no more than speculative
interest” (Durkheim, 1986: xxxix). We sincerely believe that if we go back to the initial inspiration
of sociology, we can perhaps “refound” the social sciences and reformulate its remit so at to make it
more cosmopolitan, ecumenical and inclusive, so inclusive that it can integrate sociology and
anthropology, the Studies and moral and political philosophy into a common project. That, we
submit, is the task of social theory, which we understand in the broad and inclusive sense as the
general theory of the social sciences or, to say the same thing in slightly different words, the theory
of societies in general.14
Moreover, and though we realise that the following affirmation may be slightly less consensual, we
14
For a first exploration of the possibility of a general theory of society, see Revue du MAUSS (2004/2, no. 24), partially
translated in European Journal of Social Theory (2007, 10, 2)
10
also would like to suggest that the missing common denominator of the social sciences is to be
found in what we and our friends from the MAUSS (Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste en Sciences
Sociales) call the “gift-paradigm”.15 Indeed, thirty years of collective, interdisciplinary reflection on
the phenomenon of the gift as a total social fact, have convinced us that the concept of social
relations one can deduce and extract from Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le don (Mauss, 1950) can and
should be extended beyond the immediate field of ethnology to all social sciences. From this
foundational perspective, Mauss´s discovery of the triple obligation of the gift -“to give, to accept
and to return the gift” (Mauss, 1950: 205-214) – appears as the basis of social life in general. The
mechanism of reciprocity, which is the motor of sociability, produces, and continues to produce,
society. Without reciprocity, no society; without generosity, neither economics, nor politics are
possible. The focus on the individual and collective capacity to initiate, create and sustain social
relations allows us also to move beyond the impasses of individualism and collectivism, liberalism
and socialism, market and state. When the dynamics of reciprocity are fully worked out into a
relational and associational theory of society, the anthropology of the gift emerges as a fully-fledged
“third paradigm” (Caillé, 2000) between individualism and holism. We think that it not only offers
an alternative for the social sciences, but also for society. As the crucible of society, the political is
the continuation of the gift by other means. It is carried forward by non-governmental organisations,
civil associations and social movements that seek to uphold the moral economy against both the
market and the state. Such associations do not aim to abolish the state or the market; rather, moving
beyond the lib/lab formations of social democracy, they contribute to the realisation of Mauss’s
dream of a cooperative or associative socialism.16
We have not sufficiently recognized that through its professionalization and specialization,
sociology has gradually become very different from what its founders had originally envisaged it.
With the exception of Georg Simmel, who developed his formal sociology along narrow lines, all of
the founders conceived of sociology as a general science. They did not think of sociology in a
narrow sense, but developed it as a general science of society and its subsystems. From the
beginning, sociology was thus more than sociology. It was both a specialized discipline (sociology)
and a generalising discourse (theory of society); it was, as Habermas (1991: 184) says in a
remarkable reflection on Weimar sociology, “at once discipline and superdiscipline, Soziologie und
15
The Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences was founded by one of the authors and gathers anthropologists,
sociologists, political scientists, philosophers and heterodox economists who have a common interest in reciprocity, feel
inspired by Mauss´s seminal essay on the gift and publish in the Revue du MAUSS. Alain Caillé, the founder of the
MAUSS and director of its journal, is also the main theorist of the gift-paradigm. Programmatic and synthetic
statements can be found in Caillé, 2005, 2009 and forthcoming.
16
For a discussion of assocations and associative socialism, see Revue du MAUSS, 1998/1 and 2000/2.
11
Gesellschaftstheorie”. The founders envisioned their sociology as a kind of federative
metadiscipline that would unify the various social sciences (history, anthropology, sociology,
political science, political economy) under a single heading. None of them thought of it as a mere
accumulation of field surveys; rather they devised it as an empirical social, moral and political
philosophy that would integrate social and historical research into a systematic presentation and
interpretation of the evolution of societies. The ambitions of the inventor of the name, Auguste
Comte, were clearly aimed at a “positive” (scientific and romantic) philosophy of history that would
investigate the empirical conditions of moral order and progress. Was Marx an economist, a
sociologist, a historian, an anthropologist or a philosopher? Let us not forget that Max Weber, a
lawyer by training, whose first research was in history, had long regarded himself as an economist.
Simmel conceived of himself as a philosopher and considered sociology as a pastime. For
Durkheim, as for his friends and collaborators of L’Année sociologique, sociology was clearly
intended to unite all the specialized disciplines of the social sciences: ethnology, science of religion,
science of education, history, economy, etc. And that, with the clear ambition of giving better
answers to the questions raised by moral and political philosophers.
We should also note that, unlike the social sciences (economics, political sciences, sociology and
anthropology), which emerged at the onset of modernity as separate disciplines, history does not
fragment its subject along disciplinary lines (Wallerstein, 2011: 273). With philosophy, it is one of
the matrixes (or mother schemes) from which the social sciences will arise through disciplinary
differentiation and scientific specialisation. Like philosophy, it is synthetic and deals with the
totality of pre-modern life. The question now is if sociology, broadly understood, can investigate the
whole of social life and be, as it were, its modern counterpart? Our answer will be affirmative and
we will argue that is the task of social theory to work out a general framework for the analysis of
society that is philosophically informed and historically sensitive, conceptually astute and oriented
to the present. If Foucaldians had not captured the term “ontology of the present”, we would gladly
have used it to circumscribe the task of social theory.
With Comte, we think that it is high time to overcome fragmentation and specialization through
further specialization and differentiation. We need to “transform the study of scientific generalities
into one more grand specialty” (Comte, 1949: 57). We need to train and form a new class of social
scientists who are interdisciplinary and not narrowly attached to their own discipline, who study the
different branches of the social sciences and explore connections and relations between them, in
order to find what they have in common.
Let us assume, then, that within all disciplines that make up the humanities and the social sciences,
there are two slants: a specialized slant, centred on itself and its own disciplinary problems, and a
12
general slant, open to interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange with the other sciences, disciplines
and discourses in its environment. If we represent the divisions in spatial terms of centre and
periphery, we would find sociological sociology, anthropological anthropology, political
politicology, etc. at the outer remit and a philosophical sociology, a philosophical anthropology and
a philosophical political science at its core. Our suggestion is that general social theory is at the very
heart of the social sciences and that it represents a synthesis of anthropological, sociological and
political theory. Compared with classical sociology, contemporary sociology has become
specialized, esoteric and fragmented. “While the hinterland has proliferated, the heartland has been
lost to view” (Turner, 2001: 5).
Contemporary sociology has indeed failed to compensate its tendency to specialize with a
countervailing tendency to generalise. To move forward, we need to go backwards and seek
inspiration once again from the classics, real or putative, who identified sociology with a general
social science. Not to become Marxologists, Durkheimologists or Weberologists, but to rejuvenate
sociology and thereby guarantee its relevance and its future, we need to develop a neo-classical
sociology. With Marcel Mauss, but we find similar positions in Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Parsons or
Bourdieu, we assume that “there are no [separate] social sciences, but [only] one science of
societies” (Mauss, 1969: 51) and we propose to name the general theory of the science of societies
social theory – a denomination which, ironically, does not exist as such in France.
Metatheory, Social Theory, Sociological Theory
To bring out with more precision what we understand by social theory, we will bring in a
supplementary distinction between metatheory and sociological theory and position social theory in
between both (Vandenberghe, 2009: 290-303). Like always, the distinctions are fluid, but what
matters here are not the distinctions themselves, but the way they are articulated, integrated and
overcome in a general theory of societies that crosscuts the disciplinary cleavages within the social
sciences, as well as between the social sciences, the Studies (gender and postcolonial studies) and
moral philosophy (theories of recognition and care). Like in the Indian story of the turtles, theory
goes down all the way. Explicit philosophical visions become metatheoretical presuppositions of
social theory, which, in turn, become presuppositions of sociological theory, which, in turn, inform
empirical research.17 While the formulation of theory is deductive (or abductive), research is, of
17
Let us take an example to make the argument clear: Marxism is unthinkable without Hegel´s objective idealism. In
Marx, dialectics (metatheory) undergirds historical materialism (social theory), which informs the theory of the class
13
course, inductive. The relation between the philosophical and the scientific, the transcendental and
the empirical is ultimately a circular one. While every theorist is supposed to descend the ladder of
metatheory, social theory and theory of the present, the researcher can be more eclectic and use
theories more sparingly like tools. The good researcher knows when to leave the tools in the box.
We reckon that it will be easier to reach a consensus on a metatheoretical than on a theoretical basis.
The “heterodox consensus” will most probably be a normative one. The intellectual alliances
between theoretical positions will be of an ethical and political nature. Assuming we can agree on
the metatheoretical foundations of the social sciences, we can then try to elaborate a general social
theory that offers a coherent framework for the analysis of social action, order and change. On this
basis, we can then proceed, in collaboration with the Studies, to the formulation of a historical
grand narrative about the emergence, development and global diffusion of modernity that does not
remain tied to the nation-state, but takes the world as a single unit of analysis. This analysis of the
global present will not only be descriptive, but also normative. It will be cosmopolitan and critical,
analytic and diagnostic, propaedeutic and reconstructive.
(1) Metatheory is theory about social and sociological theory and, as such, it usually proceeds
through commentary and critique of the classics.18 At its most simple, metatheory consists in a
mapping exercise of the general presuppositions and assumptions (Weltanschauungen, world
hypotheses, paradigms, knowledge interests, prejudgments, etc.) of social and sociological theory.
For teaching purposes, sociologists distinguish different principles of vision and division within the
history of sociology and classify them in terms of polarities: individualism vs. holism, action vs.
structure, micro vs. macro, idealism vs. materialism, functionalism vs. dialectics, consensus vs.
conflict, Erklären vs. Verstehen, etc. The mapping exercise is not an end in itself, however, but a
prolegomenon to theory construction. The aim and ambition is to develop a general, synthetic and
encompassing social theory that is in continuous dialogue with the sociological tradition, covers all
its angles and incorporates its fundamental insights in a coherent framework of interrelated
concepts.
In this spirit of dialogical development, we hope to stimulate a debate among our peers and arrive at
a consensus concerning the necessity to establish the social sciences on anti-utilitarian
struggle under capitalism (sociological theory), which orients research on the situation of the working class in
Lancashire. In our case, anti-utilitarianism is our philosophical platform (metatheory) on which we build the gift
paradigm (social theory), which informs our analysis of the role of associations in contemporary societies (sociological
theory). Our argument is that if we can agree on anti-utilitarianism, we can then work toward a loose integration of
social theories (the gift, care, recognition, etc.) and propose a theoretically informed analysis and diagnosis of the
present. To keep our options open, we develop our position at a higher and therefore more inclusive level of abstraction.
18
The four volumes of Jeffrey Alexander´s Theoretical Logic in Sociology (Alexander, 1982-1983) constitute by far the
most ambitious and most successful attempt to analyse systematically the metatheoretical presuppositions of sociology.
14
foundations.19 This is a minimal requirement. It does in no way imply the proscription of rational
choice. That would not be reasonable. It implies, however, a refusal to let the paradigm of interests
occupy the whole space and transform utilitarianism into a comprehensive doctrine of the social
world that is highly reductionist. Our anti-utilitarianism is minimal and pluralist. We do not esteem
that a general social theory must have a systematic response to everything. The formulation of
theoretical systems seems outdated. Undoubtedly, the systematic nature of Marx´s, Parsons´s,
Habermas´s and Luhmann´s theories was their strength. But it also became their weakness. For us, a
good theory is not one that has a response to everything – like the Marxist who explains the current
crisis by means of the falling rate of profit or analyses the Occupy Movement as a class struggle.
For us a good theory is not one that continuously invokes agency and structure or quotes Durkheim,
Bourdieu and Boltanski at every turn of phrase. Although we admire well-crafted systematic
theories, we think that theory is most productive not when it gives the right answers (and even less
when it gives a priori answers), but when it poses the right questions. To organise questions in such
a way that one can give good responses to empirical questions, that is the task of good theory. It
unsettles, provokes, throws new light on old responses and raises new questions.
We do not assume that every social scientist will subscribe to our elaboration of the gift-paradigm
as a positive alternative to utilitarianism. We think, however, that conflicting and rival positions
within social theory can and will, for reasons that are internal to their respective positions, be able
to accept anti-utilitarianism as a reasonable baseline of an “overlapping consensus” within the
social sciences. Adapting Rawls´s (1993) political liberalism to our purpose, we assume the fact of
reasonable pluralism to be a permanent condition of the theoretical field of the social sciences.
(2) While metatheory explores the philosophical (transcendental) presuppositions of the social
sciences, social theory actually try to elaborate a systematic view of social world based on certain
metatheoretical positions. As a preamble to the analysis of social life, social theories work out
coherent systems of interrelated concepts (such as communicative action, life-world and system;
field, habitus and practices or power/knowledge, discourses and practices) that purport to give a
single answer to three fundamental questions that any social science has to raise: What is the nature
of social action? How is the social order possible? What determines social change? (Joas and
Knöbl, 2004: 37-38). The point of social theory consists not only in giving an answer to each of
these questions separately, but to answer them all in such a way that the answers are internally
consistent and cumulative. When the concepts are well ordered and systematically integrated, they
19
In this article, we develop an anti-utilitarian platform. It should be noted that we not only reject utilitarianism, but
also positivism, which can be considered its epistemological counterpart. For an attempt to wed anti-utilitarianism and
critical realism, see Vandenberghe, 2014: 1-99.
15
add up and form a general theory of society.
As regards the nature of action, our position is clear: while we distinguish various motives of action,
most notably interests and sympathy (on the utilitarianism-anti-utilitarianism axis), creativity and
tradition (on the individualism-holism axis), which are irreducible to one another and have to be
thought together to make sense (Caillé, 2009), we strongly reject the interest paradigm that reduces
all types of action to one: instrumental-strategic action (i.e. Weber´s zweckrationale Handlung).20 If
one is to avoid utilitarianism and the analytics of self-interest, one should always take culture
(symbols, ideas, norms, values), sentiments (benevolence, love, sympathy) and creativity
(spontaneity and imagination) into account and aim for an interpretative approach to social action,
interaction and relations.
Our stand regarding the concept of action entails a definite conception of order. The first decision in
theory construction, namely to opt for a synthetic position that overcomes the idealism-materialism
divide with a multi-dimensional conception of action that acknowledges the non-rational (symbolic,
normative, expressive) dimension of human behavior, necessarily implies a reference to the
symbolic order.21 And as the symbolic order always precedes, predates and conditions agency, our
position is necessarily a holistic one. Even more, what distinguishes sociology qua sociology and
differentiates it from both economics and politics, is precisely its holism and its symbolism. This
holism expresses itself paradoxically in the defense of moral individualism. Sociology is antiutilitarian in principle. It represents a definite choice against Mandeville and Hobbes - a “counterHobbes” (Revue du Mauss, 2008/1) -, though via the Marxist and Weberian legacies that stress the
material constraints on action, the strategic side of social life is brought back to the fore.
Action is not contingent, but always already caught up in determinate social orders, and these social
orders vary from society to society and change over time. Social orders are continuously produced,
reproduced and transformed through social practices and struggles. When these transformative
practices become intentional and the struggles become structural, the social becomes, in effect,
political. The political (le politique) reveals the contingency of the social order. It brings out the
social in transition and captures it in statu nascendi. The political is not a subsystem of society. It is
rather a collective intentional act (which can be unconscious) through which society symbolically
represents itself to its members, determines its form and struggles to constitute itself as a collective
20
Weber´s goal-rational (zweckrational) action is ill named and should be called means-rational (mittelrational) or
instrumental-rational action. It suggest a preoccupation with a rational determination of ends, whereas, in fact, it limits
itself to a calculus about the best means to reach any given end.
21
On symbols, symbolism and the symbolical, see Revue du MAUSS, 1998/2. Thanks to the internal connection it
establishes between symbols and gifts, representations and practices, the gift-paradigm (Caillé, 2000: 9-92) overcomes
the opposition between holism and individualism through an insistence on social relations.
16
subjectivity.22 Through the articulation of the symbolical and the political, social power becomes
constitutive of social relations. It determines not only the form of the social order, but through
representation of its unity and articulation of its divisions, it puts the form, the functions and the
institutions of society into movement and makes society dynamic. Through struggle, society is,
thus, actively represented, constituted and enacted as a dynamic and conflictual unity-in-difference.
(3) If social theory is concerned with the systematics of the social sciences, sociological theory
bears on the historical dynamics of society. Sociology emerges when the social order becomes
problematic, both for individuals and collectives, and automatic reproduction of traditions is no
longer guaranteed. At the same time as society becomes conscious of its own existence, it captures
the political moment that is constitutive of the social and disrupts its reproduction. As an expression
of crisis and transition, sociology comes into being as a critical reflection on the contingency of the
social order. Its central theme, from Spencer and Durkheim to Marx and Weber, is and remains
modernity – its genesis, structure, development and diffusion as well as its promises, challenges and
global transformations. As a kind of reflexive analysis on the historical conditions of emergence
(and disappearance?) and of application of the social sciences, sociological theory is more historical
and more comparative than social theory. If social theory is synthetic and tries to overcome
inherited antinomies (agency, structure and social change; meta, micro and macro) in a systematic
fashion, sociological theory is more resolutely macro and also more diagnostic in its basic approach.
Given that it tries to “capture its own time in concepts” (Hegel), it comes as no surprise that it bears
the imprint of its time and is, consequently, more dated. Think about modernization theory of the
1960´s, dependency theory of the 1970´s, postmodernism of the 1980´s, globalization theories of
the 1990´s and post-colonialism of today.
The imbrication of analysis and diagnosis, investigation and critique of the present is not an
anomaly. It is precisely because the social sciences propound “self-descriptions of society”
(Luhmann, 1997, II: 866-893) that function as reflexive representations of society in society that
contribute to its constitution that the sociological, political and pedagogic functions cannot be fully
separated. If the social sciences were to abdicate from their interpretative and diagnostic,
therapeutic and propaedeutic roles in the name of an elusive axiological neutrality, they would
betray not only their origins in social movements, but they would also fail to come to terms with the
22
With Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis and Marcel Gauchet, we understand the political (le politique) not as a
sector of society, but as the dynamic principle of the constitution of society. Society symbolically represents itself as a
unity, yet is also divided through struggle. The political concerns the totality of schemes of action and representation
that command, as Lefort (1986: 20) says, the mise en forme (formation), mise en sens (signification) and mise en scène
(dramatic representation) of society (to stress the dynamical and practical nature of politics and its relation to social
change, we could add mise en mouvement and mise en acte).
17
present and, thereby, undermine their own future. It is precisely because the social sciences do
neither separate systematic theory construction from historical elucidation nor scientific analysis
from critical diagnosis that they are able to contribute to the self-understanding of modernity.
The social sciences must satisfy four basic imperatives: to describe, to explain, to interpret and to
judge (Caillé, 1993: 59-63). The imperative to empirically describe social reality and social facts as
they are (which requires observation), the imperative to explain them causally (Erklären, which
requires inductive, deductive or abductive reasoning as well as detection of objective causes, causal
powers or generative mechanisms), the imperative to interpret meaning (Verstehen, which requires
hermeneutic pre-understanding of the objective cultural and symbolic background, as well as a
phenomenological grasping the actors’ subjective reasoning), and the normative imperative to
evaluate, judge or justify social facts and social acts (which requires understanding of how it all
makes sense for the researcher, as well as for the actors, and of its ethical and political
consequences). To the extent that all four imperatives presuppose theory, we could add the
imperative to theorise (which requires references to the corpus status, the state of the art within the
social sciences) as a fifth imperative.
We could also show how the different disciplines of social sciences are organized according to
which of one of these prescriptions they privilege. History favours description, anthropology
interpretation, economics explanation, and philosophy judgment. With our reasoned defence of
methodological pluralism, we do not aim to suggest that every researcher needs to pay allegiance to
all of the injunctions all of the time. Our deontology holds for the social sciences as a whole and for
each discipline, but definitely not for every single research. The social sciences broke away from
the philosophical tradition when they started to take the imperative of description seriously. ("Let us
set aside all facts," wrote Rousseau in Le contrat social, thus summing up a speculative and antiempirical slant within classical political philosophy). Classical social science subscribed to all five
imperatives, considering them both irreducible and complementary. By contrast, current sociology
tends to either solely confine itself to the descriptivist-empiricist register, whenever it has scientific
pretence, or to settle for the outcomes and fallouts of a Marxist tradition that has been insufficiently
re-examined, whenever it seeks to assume its meaning and normative goals.
The Fate of Marxism
A closer look at contemporary developments in social theory, the Studies and moral and political
philosophy reveals a certain form of unity. It comes from the fact that all these approaches are
‘critical’ and can be considered as so many transformations, extensions and recombinations of a
18
common Marxist matrix. All of them seek in their own ways to identify an alienated, dominated or
exploited subject and to investigate the conditions of their liberation and emancipation. That is why
we deem a clarification of their (and our) relation to Marxism essential.
Of all the traditions within the social sciences, Marxism is the one that has most evolved and also
the one that has most stagnated over the last 150 years. Through fusion and rearticulation with the
other two main traditions, the Durkheimian and the Weberian ones, it has developed along two main
lines: a Hegelian that passes via Lukács and goes all the way to Habermas, Honneth and Zizek and
a Spinozian one that passes via Gramsci and connects Althusser to post-structuralism and the
Studies.23
The first line is mainly German and fuses the Hegelian-Marxist impetus of a dialectical and
totalising philosophy of history with a Weberian analysis of the pathologies of reason. No doubt,
Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (Lukács, 1971), once considered the ‘bible of
Western Marxism’, forms the paradigmatic hard core of the interdisciplinary research programme of
the Frankfurt School (Brunkhorst, 1983). In his theory of reification, Lukács, who studied with
Simmel in Berlin and Weber in Heidelberg, offered a classic synthesis of the Marxist-Weberian
theory of alienation with a Hegelian-Marxist theory of class-consciousness. Forced by historical
circumstances (fascism in Europe, Stalinism in the USSR, consumerist capitalism in the USA), the
Frankfurt School would later decompose the synthesis. It would radicalize the Webero-Marxist
analysis of reification-rationalization into a negative philosophy of history as domination and
substitute the Hegelian-Marxist theory of consciousness by a Freudo-Marxist theory of repression
and false consciousness.
While the German wing of contemporary Marxism harks back to Hegel and Lukács, the French
wing is indebted to Spinoza and Gramsci. Gramsci is a pivotal figure, not just because of his
influence on British cultural studies (Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School) and Indian
postcolonial studies (Ranajit Guha and his Subaltern Studies Group), but also because of his impact
on Althusser´s structuralism and the further diffraction of post-Althusserian post-structuralism
(Badiou, Rancière, Laclau).24 If German critical theory represents a Webero-Marxist development,
23
Spinoza or Hegel? This is obviously a didactic simplification and ignores the philosophical interpretations of Marx as
Fichtean, Kantian, Aristotelian, Epicurean, Helvetian, Saint-Simonian, Bergsonian or even Deleuzian. Similarly, the
choice between Lukács and Gramsci is rather contrived, though how many authors have actually tried to combine them?
Who (apart from Roy Bhaskar) has really attempted to synthetise the French and German ways into continental
Marxism?
24
There may be a coupure in Althusser´s life, but not in his work. Even his early structuralist work (like the text on
'contradiction and overdetermination'), post-structuralism was already present as a subterranean current. It fully
exploded in his later work, especially in his 'materialism of the encounter' (Althusser, 1994), and in the work of his most
illustrious friends and collaborators (Derrida, Balibar, Rancière, Badiou, Laclau).
19
French structuralism represents its Durkheimo-Marxist counterpart. As it will start to drift away
from structuralism and Marxism in the 1970´s, it will encounter the genealogies of Foucault (Said,
Rose, Butler), the schizo-analyses of Deleuze (Negri and Hardt) and the deconstructions of Derrida
(Laclau and Mouffe). Thus, the Studies will be born out of a wedlock between Marx and Foucault,
Gramsci and Derrida, Althusser and Deleuze.
If we present this schematic overview of the derivatives of Marxism, it is not just because of an
antiquarian interest in the history of ideas. It is because we think that by bringing Marcel Mauss
back into the fold as a privileged interlocutor and mediator, we might actually be able to do two
things: to reconnect two contemporary offshoots of the two strands of Western Marxism–
recognition theory and the Studies – and at the same time overcome Marxism in a more democratic,
non-authoritarian, associative and convivialist type of socialism.25 If we tack a step back from Marx
to Hegel, it is to reinstall the programme from Hegel to Mauss.26
It is worth repeating that the underlying and unspoken unity of the different discourses or schools of
thought discussed in this article – postcolonial, subaltern and gender studies and theories of care and
recognition – lies in their relations (not always explicit or fully elucidated, but always complex) to
the Marxist tradition. But as it comes through in diffracted, reversed, distorted and negated forms,
the Marxist imprint is not always easy to identify.
With respect to the legacy of Marxism ad its progeny, we would like to highlight four features, two
that extend it, and two others that reverse it.
1. These different discourses differ from and oppose each other according to the collective subject
that they chose to play a role equivalent to that of the proletariat in classical Marxism: a subject at
once alienated, reified and exploited, but a subject that by freeing itself, will free all of humanity.
This is, of course, a classical topic of so-called standpoint theories, from Georg Lukács and Karl
Mannheim to Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway. At its most simple, they claim that the location
at the margins of the system offers a privileged vantage point on its core (and then, surreptitiously,
transform the epistemic level into a social lever that can keel over the world). Depending on their
social location and identification with the socially excluded subject/object, different schools have
advanced different subject-positions as privileged epistemic standpoints: women for women´s
25
Cf. Revue du MAUSS, 2000/2 and 2009/2. In our Maussian reading of Marx, we seek to reactualise another
socialism, associated with heterodox thinkers like Karl Polanyi, Cornelius Castoriadis and André Gorz. In the same
spirit, together with some 64 francophone intellectuals (Edgar Morin, Chantal Mouffe, Jean-Pierre Dupuy among them),
we have recently published The Convivialist Manifesto (Convivialists, 2014). We understand convivialism as new
synthetic ideology that incorporates the best of anarchism, liberalism, socialism and Marxism and gives a constructive
answer to Mauss´ question: How can we live together with our differences without massacring each other?
26
See Habermas´s blurb on the backflap of Honneth´s (2011) Das Recht der Freiheit: "Honneth takes the historical step
back from Marx to Hegel to reinstall the programme from Hegel to Marx".
20
studies, homosexuals for gay and lesbian studies, repressed sexualities for gender studies;
subalterns, the humble, the archaic strata for subaltern studies; the colonized, former slaves or
immigrants for postcolonial studies; the entirety of those who are invisible, humiliated or otherwise
un-recognized for theories of recognition; employees (workers) of care, women or immigrants for
the theory of care, etc.
2. These discourses inherit from critical theory by radicalizing and generalising Marx´s
“defetichising critique” (Benhabib, 1986: 44-69). Through a mixture with other strands in
philosophy (deconstruction), history (genealogy) and social psychology (social constructivism),
they push the de-essentialization, de-naturalization, defetishisation, relativisation and historicisation
of all instituted social categories to the extreme.27 By now the metaphor of social construction has
turned, as Lahire (1995: 95) says, into a metastasis (Lahire, 2005: 95). The basic idea behind the
suggestive building metaphor is that everything that exists in society is, one way or another,
"constructed" – represented, fabricated, constructed and constituted by power in such a way that
some possibilities are ‘disclosed’ and others ‘foreclosed’. By showing the arbitrary and
conventional nature of reality (or what is taken for real), deconstruction continues the Marxist
critique of ideology, but like Foucault, Deleuze or Lyotard, it now includes Marxism itself as a
discourse of power and generalizes the existential determinations beyond class. The demonstration
of how power, class, caste, race or sex work their way into discourse and practices is meant to
liberate other constructs, not once for all, but through continuous contestation of representations,
dislocation of boundaries and rearticulation of the social groups that oppose the existing power and
culture structures. If, at times, deconstruction seems to become an end in and for itself, it is because,
drawing on Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, it has transformed the hermeneutics of suspicion into a
radical ‘hypercritique’ of domination that eschews any possible affirmation or reconciliation.
3. The negativity of Marxist and post-Marxist critique is not only a sign of the times; it also points
to a position of embattlement. With the collapse and self-refutation of communist systems,
capitalism has become ruthless and morphed into a form of rapacious neo-liberalism that knows no
spatial, social or moral limits. The integration of ‘old school’ denunciations of global capitalism
(see Frankfurt School, Bourdieu, Wallerstein, Harvey) with ‘new school’ investigations of the
microphysics of power (see Agamben, Negri, Rancière, Butler) totalizes domination and also
critique: paradoxically, the hypercritique that denounces the system is also the one that closes the
system and, thereby, affirms it. In the same way as the former Frankfurt School trapped itself in
negative dialectics, contemporary critique overshoots its mark, becomes contradictory and lapses
27
For a critique of the metastases of the metaphor of social construction, see Lahire, 2005: 94-111.
21
into self-righteous anger. Without belief in concrete utopias, the critique increasingly becomes total,
abstract and indiscriminate. This accounts for the largely hopeless and nihilistic tone of many of
these perspectives, which find their joy in the struggle itself, and not in the perspective of victory.28
Of course, we do not ignore the messianic dimension of radical critique, but their messianism is
without a messiah, and without a promised land.
4. These struggles consist nonetheless of struggles for recognition (or even, as Tully (2009)
has it, over recognition), and this is where the subversion made in reference to orthodox Marxism is
most striking. 29 What gave the concept of proletariat its homogeneity of principle and its ability to
symbolize, galvanize and crystallize social struggles was that it gradually subsumed, in a struggle
about goods, all of those who strived to improve their material conditions. Unlike the old workers’
movement, the new, newer and newest social movements are not primarily fighting for
redistribution, but for recognition (Fraser and Honneth, 2003). They struggle to be, to appear and to
be recognized for what they are, rather than for what they have or what they do. In retrospect, the
social economic struggles of the past appear as struggles for the recognition of the dignity of the
exploited, and, similarly, but now prospectively, struggles for recognition that will not result in any
material gain will only lead to illusory victories. Between recognition and redistribution, the
relation is indeed a dialectical one, and, as we will see later, it is mediated by a Maussian struggle of
symbolic re-presentation as a struggle to have one´s gifts and contributions recognised.
These remarks bring us back to the question we asked at the beginning: How, and on what basis,
can we define an alternative paradigm, within the social sciences and social philosophy, to the
utilitarian paradigm of homo economicus, which is at the root of economics, whose models of the
human being – “a machine enhanced with a calculator” (Mauss, 1950: 272) - contribute to the
hyper-commodification of the world by providing a scientific legitimation? A first condition for
this, of course, is to undertake a dispassionate reflective assessment of the strengths and weaknesses
of Marxism in its different forms, its contributions and its unsolvable conundrums. An unrivalled
instrument of social criticism, it appears vitiated by its messianic element, which leads it to a radical
depreciation of any possible form of the present joined by a phantasmagorical overestimation of a
28
Whether the class struggle within theory is waged within the walls of academia (see the agitations of orthodox
Bourdieusians and Foucaldians within the French universities) or on the streets of metropolitan cities (see Negri and the
provocations of black block anarchists in protests), one sometimes has the impression that radicals court and welcome
defeat - as a vindication of their right and an instigation to continue the fight.
29
Within recognition theory, the two stands of Western Marxism (Lukacs vs. Gramsci) are reappear in the distinction
between a struggle for and over recognition. Unlike Honneth´s (1992) struggles for recognition, which tend to be
dyadic (master vs. slave, bourgeois vs. proletarian, minority vs. majority), Tully´s (2009, I: 291-316) struggles over
recognition are relational, multiple and mutually overdetermined. Moreover, they are struggles not for the inclusion of
social categories within a societal community, but over the very norms and rules of recognition as contested and
negotiable norms and rules of power by which subjects are governed.
22
hypothetical and distant past or future (primitive or final communism). This explosive combination
of radical pessimism and optimism forms the matrix of contradictory tensions that polarize the
entire field of Marxism. Of all the possible discourses on society, history and modernity, Marxism is
indeed the most economic and the most anti-economic, the most utilitarian and the most antiutilitarian, the most materialistic and the most anti-materialistic, the most individualistic and the
most anti-individualistic, the most scientific and the most anti-scientific, the most libertarian and the
most dictatorial.
We can better understand the persistence of Marxism within academia. Since the collapse of the
philosophy of history sometime back in the 1970´s, Marxism does no longer constitute “the
insurmountable philosophical horizon of our time”, to quote one of Sartre´s (1960: 17) memorable
phrases.30 Nevertheless, as it sustains and conjoins all opposite and extreme poles into a totalising
philosophy that is at the same time an anthropology, a sociology, a history, an economics and a
political science of and for capitalist societies, it remains an inevitable and necessary reference of
any possible discourse in the social sciences. But these poles are untenable in their radicalism, and it
is a fortiori impossible to hold them simultaneously. The great works of the social sciences can be
regarded as attempts to define realistic and plausible positions between the theoretical, ethical and
political extremities of Marxism.
In this sense, we are all inevitably post-Marxist, not because we are post-structuralist (like Laclau
and Mouffe) or post-modernist (like Baudrillard or Zizek), nor because we have become antiMarxists (like Lefort and Gauchet), but because we have all become pluralists and no longer believe
that a single position should occupy the whole theoretical space. When historical materialism ties
together metatheory, social theory and sociological theory into a single package and incorporates
sociology, the Studies and moral and political philosophy into a comprehensive doctrine, Marxism
becomes dogmatic and degenerates into – dare we say it? – “pre-historical materialism”. In spite of
all its actualizations and refurbishments, it´s always the same old grand narrative that is rehearsed
and that locks the imagination into a series of endless repetitions.
Constellations of Intersubjectivity and Interdependence
To overcome Marxism, we also need to overcome the utilitarianism it shares with liberalism and
30
The exact formulation is the following: "Marxism remains the philosophy of our time. We cannot go beyond it,
because we have not overcome the circumstances that engendered it" (Sartre, 1960: 29). Meanwhile, the circumstances
have changed, not because capitalism has been vanquished, but because with the fall of real existing socialism and the
demise of the working class, we no longer believe that History can be driven forward in authoritarian fashion. Against
Sartre, but with Marcel Gauchet (2007, I: 16), we therefore propose that democracy has become the unsurpassable
horizon of our times.
23
ties it to its other. To develop a general theory of social change that is no longer indebted to the
interest paradigm, we need to ground the social sciences in a normative theory of symbolic action
and interaction. Although we believe that theory of the gift offers in fine the best alternative to
utilitarian, instrumental and strategic conceptions of action, we acknowledge the existence of other
approaches (theories of communication, care, recognition) that tie conceptions of social action and
social change into a general social theory. We do not only acknowledge them. Because we consider
them as privileged partners and interlocutors in our quest for an anti-utilitarian general theory of
societies, we will also discuss them in this section. We have suggested that the social sciences find
their common ground in their opposition to utilitarianism, instrumental rationalism and rational
choice. Unlike economics, which finds its rationale in the calculus of interests, the social sciences
bet as it were on symbols and expressions, ideas and ideals, norms and moral sentiments that
motivate action, make interaction possible and trigger social change. With its insistence on the
sources of sociability and the logics of reciprocity, sociology honours its etymology: it privileges
the interactions with the socius and investigates the logos that animates these interactions,
coordinates them and integrates them in society. If we generalise the insights of sociology beyond
sociology to all the social sciences, we can circumscribe their common ground and locate it in their
opposition to utilitarianism. Anti-utilitarianism is not a negative doctrine, however, but an eminently
positive one. As an explicit alternative and counter to the desolate visions of Man one finds in
Machiavelli, Hobbes and Bourdieu, it is grounded in a philosophical anthropology that underscores
the principles of common humanity, sociability and reciprocity. Moreover, it should be noted that if
the social sciences are anti-utilitarian in principle, this does not mean that in practice they all
subscribe to a single paradigm. There are indeed various approaches that propose a general social
theory. We think, however, that the gift-paradigm is more general than its contenders. The gift is
indeed a ‘total social fact’ that traverses all the major institutions of society (the economy, politics,
religion, morality, law, art). It unifies structure, culture and social practices into a dynamic social
web that only analysis decomposes into parts31. In reality, thanks to the gift, everything is mixed,
interrelated and integrated in a continuous movement. The total character of the gift, its
mutidimensionality and dynamic nature, imparts it a tremendous synthetic potential. To the extent
that all the other social theories can be translated in terms of the gift paradigm, it offers the best and
31
This holds even more when the gift becomes so general and foundational that it coincides with the political. In
primitive societies, the gift and the political are identical. In complex societies, they seem separated
(‘outdifferentiated’), operating at different scales (micro for the gift, macro for the political). They remain,
nevertheless, fused and inseparable. At the micro level, the gift continues to weave friendships and alliances. At the
macro level, the political has to be understood as the integral of all the gifts that operate and circulate within a political
community and unify its members.
24
broadest possibilities of interarticulation among theories.
Our positive anthropology, which is based on Marcel Mauss’s (1950) classic essay on the gift and
considers the human actor as homo donator reciprocans, is compatible with different approaches to
alterity, intersubjectivity and sociability.32 We are thinking here in the first place about the whole
gamut of theories of dialogue, care and recognition. Like the theory of the gift, which is multiple
and contains many strands (Frow, 1997: 102-130), those theories refer, in fact, to complete, loosely
articulated and overlapping paradigms. To underscore their inner plurality, we will describe them as
constellations within the firmament. While the image of constellations evokes a scattering around a
given asterism (dialogue, care, gift and recognition) and a clustering around a major star that
catches the eye (Habermas, Tronto, Mauss, Honneth), we would also like to suggest that the
constellations can be interconnected and interarticulated. The projection of diversity on a celestial
map is meant to encourage the exploration of articulations within and between the galaxies. There is
no reason why theorists of recognition should not care about the gift or why theories of theories of
the gift should not communicate with theories of care. We think, however, that the articulations
have most chances to be successful if they are done by propinquity, de proche en proche – through
their common emphasis on difference and singularity, poststructuralist interpretations of recognition
can, thus, easily be matched with post-structuralist interpretations of care. Similarly, thanks to a
common emphasis on the symbolical, communicative theories of the dialogue can be articulated
without forcing with the theory of the gift, and so on. Due to lack of space, we will not explore all
the interconnections here, but through a reformulation of Hegelian theories of recognition in terms
of Mauss´s gift paradigm, we will try to develop a platform that will allow us to integrate sociology
and anthropology, moral and political philosophy and the diaspora of Studies, into a coherent
framework for the analysis of contemporary struggles.
Let us start, however, with a quick glance at the sky and compare the constellations. What they all
share is an insistence on intersubjectivity, interaction and sociability, or, in short: interdependence.
What matters is the in-between, the inter-human, the inter-connection, the relation that is
ontologically prior to the elements it interconnects and constitutes as distinctive elements that are
what they are in and because of the relation. Moreover, they all bask in a certain atmosphere of
benevolence and have a sympathetic aura. None of the constellations contains theories that are
monadic (though phenomenological theories of intersubjectivitiy do not always avoid solipsism).
32
We know how difficult it is to defend philosophical anthropology after Elias, Foucault and Derrida. But even if the
whole endeavour is unbearably problematic, it is also unavoidable and necessary. Before one starts accusing is of
essentialism, anthropocentrism, speciesism and other crimes against humanity, however, we recommend Frans De
Waal´s (2005) wonderful work on moral sentiments among primates as a primer to a philosophical zoology that is
compatible with our philosophical anthropology.
25
They are all intersubjective and presuppose an opening towards the other and an other-directedness
that is directly at odds with egotistic models of the self that consider the other as an immediate
threat to the self. Furthermore, they all concentrate on primary sociability and consider the
encounter with the concrete other as the primary scene of ethics. The other is not distant, nor
abstract, but an embodied, sentient human being like me I can apperceive, enter in contact with and
talk to. The other is not a He, a She or an It, but, to speak like Buber, a Thou. S/he´s my brother, my
neighbour, my friend. Together, I and Thou, we form a We. Moreover, the transitions between the
normative and the empirical, the philosophical and the social, are quite fluid. Through an
application of ethical principles to concrete practices in social situations that cry for repair and
redress, the social and the normative, the descriptive and the diagnostic, are naturally imbricated. As
a form of applied ethics, the critical descriptions of concrete situations of injustice (exploitation,
humiliation, disrespect) find an easy extension in calls for social politics and public policies at the
societal level. Finally, it should be noted that the constellations come in two versions, a secular
(symbolic) one and an epiphanic (hyperbolic) one. The latter is usually indebted to the ‘theological
turn’ within post-Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology (Janicaud, 1991) and focusses on
something primordial, fused, beyond duality that precedes, founds and transcends ordinary
intersubjectivity. Think about the reversal between conversation (Gadamer) and conversion
(MacIntyre), communication (Habermas) and communion (Derrida), giving (Mauss) and donation
(Marion), care (Tronto) and solicitude (Levinas), recognition (Honneth) and rebirth.33
Now that we have considered some ‘family resemblances’ between the constellations of
intersubjectivity, let us look at the inner plurality of each of our four constellations: communication
and care, gift and recognition (with the former two privileging consensus, the latter two conflict).
The dialogical constellation contains a multiplicity of theories of symbolically mediated encounters
with the other (Theunissen, 1965). Buber´s philosophy of the interhuman, Gadamer´s hermeneutics,
Jaspers´s existential communication, Arendt´s concepts of action as praxis and lexis, Mead´s
symbolic interactionism, all these dialogical approaches have faded somewhat with the publication
of Habermas´s Theory of Communicative Action in 1981. Yet, the different approaches that have
since seen the light and tried to correct some of Habermas´s Enlightenment rationalism with an
insistence on the concrete other (Benhabib), recognition (Honneth), solidarity (Brunkhorst),
reflexivity (Ferrara), dialogue (Kögler), etc. belong to the dialogical constellation, even if they drift
33
For an exploration of the affinities and differences between the mundane and epiphanic version of the gift, see
Vandenberghe, 2008. Through a Heideggerian spin, which unfortunately only works in French, we can transform
recognition (reconnaissance) into natality (co-naissance), natality into gratitude (reconnaissance), gratitude into rebirth
(re-naissance) with, through and thanks to the other´s love (re-co-naissance: being born again with the other).
26
off towards the neighbouring constellations.
Within the constellation of care, we do find at least three strands (Vansevenant, 2001): Theories of
“care of the self” (Foucault, Hadot, W. Schmidt), existential philosophies of “care in itself”
(Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida) and the “care for the other”, associated with feminism and the ethics
of care (Tronto, Gilligan, Held, Noddings).34 What all these theories and philosophies of care,
solicitude and compassion have in common is a junction between a moral disposition to overcome
indifference (care for oneself), to decentre oneself and depersonalise one´s relation to the world
(care in itself) and to assume responsibility for the suffering of the other (care for the other). Unlike
liberal-masculine visions of the self that underscore autonomy, feminist ethics of care value and
cultivate relations of interdependence between persons.
The emphasis on interconnection and reciprocity is also at the centre of the various theories that
make up the constellation of the gift, all of which find their inspiration Marcel Mauss´s fabulous
essay on the gift.35 Readers of Mauss will remember that the gift is in no way a simple thing. First,
it is not a thing, but a triple process of obligations (to initiate, accept and return the gift) that ties
persons and collectives in communities of exchange. Secondly, it is not simple, but complex. It
fuses contradictory motives (obligation and spontaneity, interest and generosity, peace and conflict)
into a system of actions and interactions that are at the root of sociability and community (Caillé,
2000, 2009). Consequently, it comes as no surprise that the reception of Mauss has been
complicated as well, with various interpretations, from Lévi-Strauss to Bourdieu, Bataille to
Baudrillard, Derrida to Marion, Sahlins to Strathern, Lefort to Caillé, that are at odds with each
other. Where some (like Bourdieu) would only see hypocrisy that masks the tit-for-that of exchange,
others (like Derrida) would go to the other extreme and consider the asymmetric, unilateral,
hyperbolic gift with no return possible as the only real gift. Similarly, while some (like LéviStrauss) see the gift as a system, others (like Lefort) see it as action. Some (like Ricoeur) identify it
to peace, others (like Bataille) to agonism, etc.
The theory of recognition has by now sprawled into an academic cottage industry (Guéguen and
Malochet, 2012). Philosophers have offered new interpretations of the role of Anerkennung in
Hegel´s writings (from the early Realphilosophie to the Phenomenologie des Geistes), though
Fichte, Adam Smith and Rousseau have also been hailed as predecessors. Without going back to the
notion of anagnôrisis in Aristotle and Sophocles, it is remarkable how various currents in
34
For an exploration of the ethics of care and its relation to the gift paradigm, see Revue du MAUSS, 2008/2.
As a specialized journal that attends to a general public, the Revue du MAUSS is entirely dedicated to the
investigation and discussion of the gift in all its facets and in all disciples. While each issue focuses on a particular
theme or aspect related to the gift, some special issues (1993/1, 1996/2, 2010/2) have been entirely devoted to Mauss´s
anthropology of the gift.
35
27
contemporary moral and political philosophy (critical theory with Honneth and Fraser,
hermeneutics with Taylor and Ricoeur, deconstruction with J. Butler and J. Tully), psychoanalysis
and social psychology (object relations theory with J. Benjamin and Todorov), have been able to
latch onto the concept of recognition and made it into a major asterism. Its force of attraction is so
strong that young anthropologists, sociologists and social workers who, for the first time, present
their fieldwork in academic conferences, now feel obliged to analyse any resistance of their
favourite ‘least privileged subject’ (native communities, free slaves, ethnic minorities, gays and
lesbians, workers, peasants and fisher folk, the unemployed and the homeless) in terms of a struggle
for recognition.36 The repercussions of Axel Honneth´s (1992) work and his debate with Nancy
Fraser (Fraser and Honneth, 2003) suggest that the category of recognition (and its negation:
invisibility, humiliation, alienation) taps into an unnamed reservoir of diffuse suffering among the
population that deserves attention and repair if solidarity is to be maintained.
Although we have framed the theoretical galaxy of constellations with reference to primary
sociability, the theories in question do not remain at the level of family, friends and peer groups.
They are easily extendable from the circles of primary sociability (socialité) that one finds in all
societies to the “secondary sociability” of institutions in modern societies and even to “tertiary
sociability” of the world society (Caillé, 2000). The theories of action and interaction they propose
are pitched from the very beginning as theories of social change. Their impetus comes from the idea
that societies always find their moral sources in the relations between persons and that institutions
of the nation-state and the world society need to be ‘reembedded’ in the life-world. This is idea of a
living dialectics between life-world and system, state and societal community, market and civil
society is nothing new. One finds it in all classical sociologists and modern political philosophers. It
is what animates Durkheim´s corporatist interpretation of the state and Marx´s appeal to a
Gemeinwesen. But beyond the appeals to primordial unity, there´s also a recognition of the
necessity of social struggle, which brings us back to Marx.
From the moment that the various legacies of Marxism lead to the idea that at the root of social
conflict lies a struggle for or over recognition, the strictly economic conflict appears as a modality
and a particular case of a more general struggle for symbolic representation. The class struggle, the
struggle for material interests and redistribution of material goods, is a modality and a particular
case of considerable importance, and increasingly so today, but a modality and a particular case
36
One of the major ironies is that Honneth´s (1992) theory of recognition does not deal with ethnic and sexual
minorities. Their struggles are for citizenship and take place in the sphere of law, whereas his are somehow tied to work,
solidarity and Sittlichkeit.
28
nonetheless of a struggle to have one´s gifts recognized and valued as contributions.37 We tried to
suggest elsewhere (Caillé, 2007: 185-208) that it is on these grounds that the convergence between
the authors of the sociological tradition (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, but also Tocqueville, Parsons and
Bourdieu), takes place. What they analyse, each in their own way, even if not expressed in the same
terms, is the struggle of the social subjects, individual or collective, to have their value
recognized.38 This question of valuation and valorisation is at the heart of the discourses that
structure social struggles and contemporary debates, and of course of theories of recognition. But, it
is at the core of all the other theories as well. What theories of care problematise is the nonrecognition of the gift of caring as a gift. Somehow, care, which aims at abetting human frailty, is
made invisible when the subaltern, the women or migrant workers from the global South give it.
Similarly, against elite-centred, official, modernist histories of the anti-colonial struggles, Subaltern
studies want to exhume the history of unrecognised contributions and invisible gifts of the
dominated, illiterate masses. Postcolonial studies seek to bring to light not only was has been
extorted from the periphery by the colonial powers by force. It also wants the gifts and
contributions of the former colonies to be recognized and valued by the metropolitan centres.
However, these convergences between sociology, moral and political philosophy and the
Studies should incite us to go further and ask a question: What do the diverse social groups want to
have recognized through their struggles? The answer is not unexpected: they want their human and
social value to be recognized. Love, respect, self-esteem (to use the categories proposed by Axel
Honneth (1992), following Hegel’s suit) are only different aspects of the value attributed to the
subject who benefits from recognition. As a result, we see that within the social and human sciences
the great dividing line runs between economics on the one side and sociology (broadly understood)
on the other. Economics investigates what determines the value of goods and, correlatively, also the
value of subjects as either owners or producers of goods endowed with a certain value. Sociology
asks – though often without knowing it – what determines the relative value of various social
groups, independently from their ability to produce or own goods.
37
Following up some intuitions from Alvin Gouldner´s seminal essays on reciprocity (Gouldner, 1973: 190-299), we
reformulate the theory of exploitation as a theory of unequal reciprocation. While the dominant systematically take
more than they deserve, the dominated systematically give more than they receive. The connection between recognition
and giving is facilitated by the semantic overload of recognition. In Parcours de la reconnaissance, Ricoeur (2004: 327355) had identified gratitude as a supplementary meaning of recognition and explored the connection between Hegel
and Mauss. Our reading of the struggle for recognition as a struggle for gratitude extends Ricoeur´s interpretation, but
we do not share his 'pacified' reading of Mauss.
38
In France, the debate over recognition theory has not been limited to disciples of Honneth (Renault, Voirol, Haber). It
has received a major impetus from the MAUSS. See Revue du MAUSS, 2004/1, Caillé, 2007 and Caillé and Lazzeri,
2009. The contributions in Caillé, 2007 deserve a special mention. The debate is not restricted to conceptual issues, but
implies empirical research by some of France´s major sociologists (Dubet, Thévenot, Dejours, Heinich).
29
When asked what determines the economic value of goods or merchandise, the economic tradition
has provided two main answers: their utility (i.e. their relative scarcity) or the average working time
necessary for their production. What determines the value of social groups and individuals? The
very language we have used to describe the core issues of the major schools of contemporary
thought sufficiently indicates the direction in which we must seek the answer. What social groups in
conflict (women, former colonies, subalterns, care providers, etc.) want to have recognized is the
value of the gifts they have given (or of what has been taken from them). Let us generalize: the
value of individuals and social groups comes from the recognition of the gifts they have actually
given or they could potentially give and/or from the relation they maintain to something more
primordial and sacred (donation (Ergebnis/Gegebenheit), grace (charisma) and gratuity that explain
why there is something rather than nothing).
To articulate the theory of the gift to the theory of care, one ought to pass from simple reciprocity
(A gives to B who gives to A) to complex reciprocity (A gives to B who gives to C who gives to D
who gives, could give or could have given to A, etc.). Through imbrication of the ontological
moment of donation (Ergebnis as integral giving, underscoring the fact that things, such as the
world, nature, life, etc., exist in the first place and were given to all and no one in particular) with
the transitive moment of ‘giving oneself over to another’ (adonnement) out of love, compassion,
sacrifice or gratitude, the gift paradigm reaches a level of generality that even Mauss could hardly
fathom.
Conclusion
We understand, therefore, that mutatis mutandis modern struggles for recognition are contemporary
manifestations of the struggles to give – the “agonistic” gift for recognition – as properly exhumed
by Marcel Mauss (1950) in his study of archaic societies. We also understand that history,
sociology, and anthropology are closely related, because the past informs the present, and the centre
informs the periphery. And vice versa. The lesson for sociology is that it must not only develop
sociology experts, but also seek to become, as quickly as possible, a cosmopolitan public sociology
(Burawoy, 2005). Sociology has to become once again a general social science, but this time
without provincial blinders. To be faithful to its heritage, it must reconnect organically with
philosophy, history, ethnology and economics and draw from it all the institutional consequences
for the organization of education and research.
To conclude, we can now characterize the contours of neo-classical sociology as we have sought to
develop it in this article. Like its illustrious forebears from Weimar and Paris, neo-classical social
30
theory fuses theory construction and diagnosis of the present (Habermas, 1993). This fusion
explains the continuity with other traditions of thought (natural law, political economy, philosophy
of history, moral and political philosophy) for whom modernity itself has become a question; its
interest in paradoxes, crises and pathologies of social development, as well as in social movements
and social change; the unity of sociology and social theory in a general theory of society that gives a
coherent answer to the question of social action, order and change; the attempt to develop sociology
as a science of society that systematizes reflections on politics and economics, law and culture,
ethics and psychology and seeks a dialogue with moral, social and political philosophy, as well as
with the Studies; the attempt to outline a sociological theory that is both systematic and historical
and that throws light on the ontology of the present; a defense of methodological pluralism and the
four plus one imperatives of research; and, finally, the unity of theory and metatheory, not to
mention the continuous philosophical, theoretical and methodological self-reflection of all the
proposals it puts forward. All this, of course, in the hope that the collaborative elaboration of neoclassical sociology as an alternative to neo-classic economics, will help the social sciences to
survive not as disciplines of the past - “sociology has been a way of grasping that reality
[modernity] within a historical period that has now ended”? (Wagner, 2009: 9) - but as a discipline
with a future.
References
Alexander, J. C. (1982-1983): Theoretical Logic in Sociology, 4 vols. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Alexander, J. C. (1988): “The New Theoretical Movement”, in Neil J. Smelser (ed.): Handbook of
Sociology, pp. 77-101. Newbury Park: Sage.
Alexander, J. C. and Seidman, S., eds. (2001): The New Social Theory Reader. Contemporary
Debates. London: Routledge.
Althusser, L. (1994) : ‘Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre’, pp. 539-579 in Ecrits
philosophiques et politiques, vol. 1. Paris: Stock/Imec.
Archer, M. and Tritter, J. (eds) (2000) Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonisation. London:
Routledge.
Benhabib, S. (1986): Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Berthelot, J. (2000): “Sociologie et ontologie”, in Livet, P. and Ogien, R. (eds.): L´enquête
ontologique. Du mode d´existence des objets sociaix. Paris: EHESS (Raisons pratiques, no. 11).
31
Bhaskar, R. (1979): The Possibility of Naturalism. Brighton; Harvester Press.
Brunkhorst, H. (1983): "Paradigmenkern und Theoriendynamik der kritischen Theorie der
Gesellschaft", Soziale Welt, 34, 2, pp. p. 22-56.
Burawoy, M. (2005): “Presidential Address: For Public Sociology”, American Sociological Review,
70, 1, pp. 4-28.
Caillé, A. (1986): Splendeurs et misères des sciences sociales. Genève: Droz.
Caillé, A. (1988): Critique de la raison utilitaire. Manifeste du MAUSS. Paris: La Découverte.
Caillé, A. (1993): La démission des clercs, la crise des sciences sociales et l´oubli du politique.
Paris: La Découverte.
Caillé, A. (2005): Anthropologie du don. Le tiers paradigme. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
Caillé, A. (2009): Théorie anti-utilitariste du don. Fragments d´une sociologie générale. Paris: La
Découverte.
Caillé, A. (forthcoming): La sociologie malgré tout. Fragments d´une sociologie générale II. Paris:
Presses universitaires de Paris-Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense.
Caillé, A., Lazzeri, C. and Senellart, M., eds. (2001): Histoire raisonnée de la philosophie morale et
politique. Le Bonheur et l´utile. Paris: La Découverte.
Caillé, A. (ed.) (2007): La quête de reconnaissance, nouveau phénomène social total. Paris: La
Découverte.
Caillé, A. and Lazzeri, C. (eds.) (2009): La reconnaissance aujourd´hui. Paris: CNRS.
Calhoun, C. and Derluguian, G. (2011): Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial
Meltdown. New York: NYU Press.
Calhoun, C. and Derluguian, G. (2011): The Deepening Crisis. Governance Challenges after
Neoliberalism. New York: NYU Press.
Calhoun, C. and Derluguian, G. (2011): Aftermath: A New Global Economic Order? New York:
NYU Press.
Chanial, P. (2011): La sociologie comme philosophie politique et reciproquement. Paris: La
Decouverte.
Comte, A. (1949): Cours de philosophie positive (Première et deuxième leçons). Paris: Garnier.
Convivialists (2014): The Convivialist Manifesto. A Declaration of Interdependence. Duisburg
Global Dialogues 3.
(http://www.gcr21.org/fileadmin/website/daten/pdf/Publications/Convivialist_Manifesto_21980403-GD-3.pdf).
Cusset, F. (2005): French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze et cie – et les mutations de la vie
intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis. Paris: La Découverte.
32
De Waal, F. (2005): Our Inner Ape. New York: Riverhead Books.
Fischbach, F. (2009): Manifeste pour une philosophie sociale. Paris: La Découverte.
Fraser, N. and Honneth, A. (2003): Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical
Exchange. London: Verso.
Frow, J. (1997): Time and Commodity Culture. Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gauchet, M. (2007): L’avènement de la démocratie. Volume I: La révolution moderne. Paris:
Gallimard.
Guéguen, H. and Malochet, G.: Les théories de la reconnaissance. Paris: La Découverte.
Gouldner, A. (1973): For sociology. Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today. London: Allen Lane.
Habermas, J. (1981): Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, J. (1991): “Soziologie in der Weimarer Republik”, pp. 184-204 in Texte und Kontexte.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Halévy, E. (1995): La formation du radicalisme philosophique, 3 vols. Paris: PUF.
Hayek, F. (1979): Law, Legislation and liberty. 3 vols. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Honneth, A. (1992): Kampf um Anerkennung. Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte.
Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Honneth, A. (2000): “Pathologien des Sozialen. Tradition und Aktualität der Sozialphilosophie”, pp.
11-69 in Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit. Aufsätze zur praktischen Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Honneth, A. (2011): Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp.
Janicaud, D. (1991): Le Tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française. Combas: Éditions de
l'Éclat.
Joas, H. and Knöble, W. (2004): Sozialtheorie. Zwanzig einführende Vorlesungen. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp.
Lahire, B. (2002): Portraits sociologiques. Dispositions et variations individuelles. Paris: Nathan.
Lahire, B. (2005): L´esprit sociologique. Paris: Découverte.
Lander, E. (2000): La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas
Latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires : Clacso.
Laval, C. (2002): L´ambition sociologique. Saint-Simon, Comte, Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim,
Weber. Paris: La Découverte.
Lefort, C. (1986): Essais sur le politique. XIXe-XXe siècles. Paris: Seuil.
Luhmann, N. (1997): Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
33
Lukács, G. (1971): History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics. London: Merlin
Press.
Marchart, O. (2007): Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort,
Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Mauss, M. (1950): ‘Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l´échange dans les sociétés archaïques’, pp.
145-284 in Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris : P.U.F.
Mauss, M. (1969): Oeuvres. 3 Cohésion sociale et divisions de la sociologie. Paris: Minuit.
Rawls, J. (1971): A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, J. (1996): Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Revue du MAUSS (1993) : Ce que donner veut dire [n°1].
Revue du MAUSS (1996) : L´obligation de donner, la découverte capitale de Marcel Mauss [n°8].
Revue du MAUSS (1998): Une seule solution, l´association? Socio-économie du fait associatif
[n°11].
Revue du MAUSS (1998): Plus réel que le réel, le symbolisme [n°12].
Revue du MAUSS (2000) : L´autre socialisme. Entre utilitarisme et totalitarisme [n°16].
Revue du MAUSS (2004) : De la reconnaissance. Don, identité et estime de soi [n° 23].
Revue du MAUSS (2004): Une théorie sociologique générale est-elle encore pensable ? [n°24].
Revue du MAUSS (2007): Vers une autre science économique (et donc un autre monde)? [n°30].
Revue du MAUSS (2008) : L´homme est-il un animal sympathique. Le contr´Hobbes [n°31].
Revue du MAUSS (2008) : L´amour des autres. Care, compassion et humanitarisme [n°32].
Revue du MAUSS (2009): L’université en crise. Mort ou résurrection ? [n° 33].
Revue du MAUSS (2009): Que faire, que penser de Marx aujourd’hui ? [n°34].
Revue du MAUSS (2010) : Marcel Mauss vivant [n°36].
Ricoeur, P. (2004) : Parcours de la reconnaissance. Paris : Stock.
Sartre, J.-P. (1960) : Critique de la raison dialectique. Paris: Gallimard.
Sayer, A. (2011): Why Things Matter to People. Social Sciences, Values and Ethical Life.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Shilling, C. and Mellor, P. (2001): The Sociological Ambition. Elementary Forms of Social and
Moral Life. London: Sage.
Stihweh, R. (2000): Die Weltgesellschaft. Soziologische Analysen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Theunissen, M. (1965): Der Andere: Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart. Berlin: de
Gruyter.
Thompson, J. (2010): Merchants of Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Tronto, J. (1994): Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York:
34
Routledge.
Tully, J. (2009): Public Philosophy in a New Key. Vol.1: Democracy and Civic Freedom.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, B. (2001): “Introduction – The Fragmentation of Sociology”, Journal of Classical
Sociology, 1, 1, pp. 5-12.
Vandenberghe, F. (2008): “Entre la voix et la croix, le don et la donation”, pp. 213-246 in Archer,
M. and Donati, P. (eds.): Pursuing the Common Good: How Solidarity and Subsidiarity Can Work
Together. Vatican City: The Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences.
Vandenberghe, F. (2009): A Philosophical History of German Sociology. London: Routledge.
Vandenberghe, F. (2014): What´s Critical about Critical Realism? Essays in Reconstructive Social
Theory. London: Routledge.
Vandenberghe, F. (forthcoming): “Sociology as Practical and Moral Philosophy (and vice versa)”.
Van Sevenant, A. (2001): Philosophie de la sollicitude. Paris: Vrin.
Wagner, P. (2009): The Future of Sociology. Understanding the Transformations of the Social.
Trento: Quaderni del dipartimento di sociologia e ricerca sociale (Quaderno 43).
Wallerstein, I., Collins, R., Mann, M., Derluguian, G. and Calhoun, C. (2013): Does Capitalism
have a Future? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wallerstein, I. (2011): The Modern World-System IV. Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
35