Luc Boltanski - The New Spirit of Capitalism (2017 updated edition)

The New Spirit of Capitalism appeared in French in December 1999, almost seventeen years ago, and there has been no flagging of interest in it since, either in France or abroad. Its career is ongoing, with new translations and reprints every year for example, by Verso this year. Its authors have likewise continued their careers, tackling different subjects and, in their own fashion and at their own pace, producing a sequel to the book. The latter does not always follow on from it directly, but has involved returning to five years work together and the fruits of an unusual collaboration between an experienced sociologist, who had published two books directly linked to The New Spirit of Capitalism (De la Justification

Rather than return to the context of 199599, when we worked together, and respond to criticisms that have been addressed to us something we have done in previous prefaces we have decided to evoke in our own voices not the book itself but the way that, in some of the work we have undertaken separately since, we have pursued some of the tracks we embarked on together.

Luc Boltanski

Since the publication of The New Spirit of Capitalism, I have pursued my work in various directions, leading to the publication of four books. Although devoted to subjects that prima facie seem very different, they form part of a series whose objective is to develop a sociology of modernity, as largely dominated by developments in capitalism over recent decades.

Like The New Spirit of Capitalism, the first of these books, The Foetal Condition: A Sociology of Engendering and Abortion, whose effects can still be felt today, with even greater intensity than in the immediate aftermath of May 68.

However, it should be noted that these events had contrasting practical consequences in the different areas studied. In the sphere of work and production, the reaction to them saw the governing bodies of capitalism regain control, resulting in increased exploitation of labour. This was achieved by re-engineering enterprises and by massive unemployment, mainly attributable to relocation of production to low-wage countries. These phenomena are at the heart of our analyses in The New Spirit of Capitalism. By contrast, in the domain of biopolitics, buoyed by the development of feminist movements, by a more pronounced demand for autonomy, and also by a new ecological awareness, the events resulted in the legally sanctioned acquisition of new freedoms, which are nevertheless still contested and remain fragile.

In a second book, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation,the sense that each of its elements seems to support the effectiveness of the others. In historical situations where this reality appears to come undone, as is notably the case when economic crises and/or innovative social movements develop, actors can endeavour to shape what, in their everyday life, is rooted in their experience of the world, to translate it into a language and, when they meet with a response, to convert it into political demands, in an attempt to transform the contours of reality through critique.

To understand such operations, we must say a little about the mechanisms whose task is to construct reality and make it cohere. This is where the second set of concepts presented in On Critique comes in. Its objective is a clearer understanding of the role of institutions understood as incorporeal beings or, if you like, fictions which, precisely because they are disembodied, unlike ordinary actors who are always socially situated by dint of their engagement in a body, are tasked with saying how things stand with what is, in principle for everyone and from an overarching standpoint: that is, with defending the very tenor of reality. In this theoretical mechanism, critique assumes its true significance, especially as regards the institutions at which it is directed. Accordingly, the path to emancipation is construed as a dynamic aiming, as it were, to deconsecrate institutions, including the state (at least if it is regarded as an absolute), so as to envisage political orders based on recognition of the uncertainty inhabiting reality and the possibility of changing its contours that is, recognition of the necessity of critique.

The next step, presented in Mysteries and Conspiracies, which was published in 2012, sought to pursue this analysis of modernity by taking as its subject the nation-state as it developed in Europe from around the late nineteenth century that is (to adopt Foucaults formula), the state in the age of biopolitics. The mission of biopolitics is to act as guarantor of the tenor of reality and, utilizing the natural sciences, technology and social science, to render it predictable by reducing the uncertainty that always threatens to invest social existence. The book relies on seemingly disparate phenomena in the sphere of literature, the emergence and rapid, exponential development of crime fiction and spy novels; in psychiatry, the invention of a new nosological entity, paranoia; in political life, the interconnected multiplication of accusations of conspiracy and counter-accusations of indulging in conspiracy theories; and, in the domain of knowledge, the public success of the social sciences particularly sociology, in so far as it serves on the one hand to establish institutional reality, when put to work in a logic of expertise, and on the other to support the critique of institutional reality.