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This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find support for the classic account of high culture's purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet they also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers hailing from an emerging professional, managerial, and intellectual middle class. Importantly, the inclusion of this new audience was segregated: they did not mingle with elites in the concert hall. This segregated inclusion paved a specific way for the constitution of cultural capital. It meant that greater purity and greater inclusiveness happened together, enabling elite cultural participation to remain distinctive while elite tastes acquired broader social currency. Edith Wharton's classic Gilded Age novel, The Age of Innocence, begins at the opera. The opening paragraphs describe the excitement throughout New York society at hearing the Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson sing

We tend to think of consecration as something happening to individuals: We say that someone has been consecrated when they have been declared a saint, inducted into a hall of fame, or presented with a lifetime achievement award. The present article explores the analytical payoffs of looking at consecration as a population-level phenomenon, that is, as the delineation of clear-cut divides between the chosen and the rest in a population of candidates. This approach, I argue, brings out the unique character of consecration as an abstract process of status formation: It enhances the perceived worth of the consecrated, not by confirming that they are individually worthy, but by asserting the existence in a field of a reliable hierarchy of worthiness. A population-level approach also implies that consecrating institutions derive some of their authority from the forcefulness of the divides they draw between elected individuals and others. The article shows how this explains some of the salient features of retrospective consecration projects. To make these points I analyze cases of consecration in a variety of empirical domains, from politics to the arts, sports, and religion.

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In most contemporary societies, people underestimate the extent of economic inequality, resulting in lower support for taxation and redistribution than might be expressed by better informed citizens. We still know little, however, about how understandings of inequality arise, and therefore about where perceptions and misperceptions of it might come from. This methodological article takes one step toward filling this gap by developing a research design—a blueprint—to study how people’s understandings of wealth and income inequality develop through social interaction. Our approach combines insights from recent scholarship highlighting the socially situated character of inequality beliefs with those of survey experimental work testing how information about inequality changes people’s understandings of it. Specifically, we propose to use deliberative focus groups to approximate the interactional contexts in which individuals process information and form beliefs in social life. Leveraging an experimental methodology, our design then varies the social makeup of deliberative groups, as well as the information about inequality we share with participants, to explore how different types of social environments and information shape people’s understandings of economic inequality. This should let us test, in particular, whether the low socioeconomic diversity of people’s discussion and interaction networks relates to their tendency to underestimate inequality, and whether beliefs about opportunity explain people’s lack of appetite for redistributive policies. In this exploratory article we motivate our methodological apparatus and describe its key features, before reflecting on the findings from a proof-of-concept study conducted in London in the fall of 2019.

Résumé Dans cet entretien, Andrew Abbott revient sur sa trajectoire intellectuelle et personnelle. Parcourant plus de quatre décennies de recherche et d’enseignement, il aborde plusieurs thèmes qui ont été centraux dans son travail. Il évoque en particulier sa critique du positivisme, formulée dans les années 1980 et qui lui a permis d’interroger les méthodes des sciences sociales, les formes de savoir qu’elles autorisent, et l’inconscient épistémologique de la sociologie étatsunienne. L’entretien est surtout l’occasion pour lui d’évoquer en détail sa théorie processuelle du monde social en cours d’élaboration. Abbott en explicite les fondements et la positionne par rapport à différents auteurs contemporains ou passés.

remercie Peter Bearman, Victor Corona, Pierre François et Claire Lemercier pour leurs remarques sur des versions précédentes de ce texte.

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