Genetic Structuralism, Psychological Sociology and Pragmatic Social Actor Theory

Abstract

This article sets out to show that Wittgenstein and Freud have exerted a considerable - though narrow - influence on Bourdieu’s sociology. But their influence also pervades the theoretical development of two other currents that have emerged in French sociology in the last few years, and that were developed by L. Boltanski and L. Thévenot on the one hand, and B. Lahire on the other. Although they do not make it explicit, the advocates of these two currents have nevertheless been influenced by Wittgenstein and Freud. Thus Boltanski has drawn on Wittgenstein to develop a sociology which gives primacy to the social actor’s interpretation of his or her situation through lay theorizing. Lahire’s work clearly pays a debt to Freud with his psychological sociology. It would therefore be interesting, in the first instance, to tease out how Wittgenstein and Freud, respectively, have influenced these two systems to demonstrate that they can indeed be used to generate new sociological currents, other than Bourdieu’s own. This would then allow us to explore how they could be used to fill any gaps in Bourdieu’s work, thus giving the latter renewed relevance and staunching its stagnating tendencies. Ultimately, this analysis aims to show how Wittgenstein’s and Freud’s theoretical influences can lead the way towards a theoretical synthesis between Bourdieu’s critical sociology, Boltanski’s social actor theory and Lahire’s psychological sociology. Currently, these three currents operate independently of each other, without any kind of dialogue. And yet, far from being incompatible, these sociologies offer opportunities for exploring how they might complement and mutually enrich each other.

“Politics Without Politics”: Affordances and Limitations of the Solidarity Economy’s Libertarian Socialist Grammar

“…"Grammar tells what kind of object anything is" (2001 [1953]: 373/99e, see also Cervera-Marzal and Frère, Forthcoming). Living in and speaking about the world according to a grammar is about mastering a language game, rather than about compliance with Durkheimian social rules or a Bourdieusian Embodied Habitus provided by the social order (Frère 2004). A grammar is both enabling and constraining.…”

“…Contra Bourdieu, the sociologist is no longer seen as the only one with the ability to highlight the determinations that supposedly drive social actors' behaviours because these determinations are embodied as habitus and therefore hidden from these actors' own reflexivity (Bourdieu 1987). Within the pragmatic sociology paradigm-which shares common ground with Latour's Actor-Network-Theory approach (2005; Guggenheim and Potthast 2011)-sociologists "abandon their belief that their interpretations carry more weight than those of social actors" and instead attempt "to clarify the words used by actors to justify their actions because actors themselves do not have the time to do so" (Frère 2004).…”

Public political thought: bridging the sociological–philosophical divide in the study of legitimacy

“…Since doxa and discourse are the two sides of the PPT coin, we may now turn the doxastic research question above (‘What does A believe legitimates P ?’) onto its discursive flipside: ‘Who (de)legitimates P , why, and how?’ The answers to this complementary question point to specific moral agents and their legitimating argumentations. Boltanski rightly encourages sociologists to ‘abandon their belief that their interpretations carry more weight than those of social actors’, and instead attempt ‘to clarify the words the actors use to justify their actions’ (cited in Frère : 92).…”

The Sight of Loss

“…In other words, it produces a plural self—the individual embodies more than one self‐position. As Bruno Frère (2004:89) notes, “Bourdieu does not allow us to understand how an individual lives in a plurality of social worlds nor his own internal plurality.”…”