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Alain Touraine is a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is co-founder of the journal Sociologie du travail and former president of the French Sociological Society. Among his previously published works are Sociologie de l'action (1965), La awareness ouvriere (1966), May Movement (1968, English translation 1971), Post-industrial Society (1969, English translation 1971), The Academic System in American Society (1972, English translation 1974), Pour la sociologie and Lettres a une estudiante (both 1974). The present work was first published as Production de la socidte; © Editions du Seuil, 1973.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1977 University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1977 Printed in the United States of America 81 80 79 78 77 987654321 Library of Congrefs Cataloging In Publication Data Touraine, Alain. The self-production of society. Translation of Production de la societe Includes table of contents. 1. Sociology. 1. Title. HM51.T6713 301 76-611 ISBN 0-226-80858-0

CONSOLIDATED

Foreword by J. W. Freiberg Foreword Introduction

Historicity

A. Society turns in on itself B. Historical action C. The cardinal points of sociology D. The birth of sociology E. From guidelines to practice F. Actors and systems

15 27 32 48 53 60

The Historical Action System

sixty-five

The Domain of Historicity Locating the Historical Action System C. The Functioning of the Historical Action System D. The Configurations of the Historical Action System

xviii 1

72 79 91

VII

Satisfied

3 4 5

class relations

117

A. Historicity and social classes B. Classes as historical actors C. Types of class systems: industrial society D. Post-industrial society E. Alienation F. Final considerations

118 134

The Political or Institutional System

175

A. Institutions B. Institutionalization C. Between historicity and organization D. The State

175 197 206 216

social organization

235

Introduction: Where Sociology and History Meet A. The Organizational System B. Administrations, Companies, Agencies C. The Categories of Social Practice

235 239 249 270

149 155 166 170

Satisfied

Social movements

298

A. Four types of collective behavior B. The nature of social movements C. The natural history of social movements D. Levels of project E. The formation of social movements F. Social movements and the state E. Final considerations

298 310

Social change

374

Introduction: historicity, conflict, change A. The temporality of social systems B. Disruption behavior C. Internal transformation behavior D. Forms of development E. Final considerations

374 383 389 411 424 443

Conclusion

446

446 449

The sociologist and his analysis and action on society

336 343 355 364 371

Satisfied

C. Decline or decline of sociology D. The internationalization of sociology E. The author abandons his book

453 454 456

index glossary

459 465

PREFACE/WORD

When I was a graduate student at UCLA in 1969, Alain Touraine came to teach for a semester. He had just arrived from Santiago de Chile, where he had been teaching the previous semester. Though I didn't know it at the time, Touraine was in self-imposed exile, a kind of modern-day Hegira. The events of May 1968 were difficult for him; he was one of the few major professors who was deeply involved. When events came to a summary end, he found himself in limbo. He got too involved with most of his classmates and friends from his generation, and he didn't get involved enough with most of his students and friends from my generation. She needed to distance herself from Paris, the barricades and recriminations, and think about what it all meant and what the implications were for the grand theoretical model she had envisioned creating of 'events': student activism, old left conservatism, repression Gaullist. In Los Angeles, Touraine gave a graduate seminar on what became the chapters on historicity and system of action in this book. The class started with about twenty graduate students and three or four professors in attendance. Two weeks later, there were about eight students left, one from Argentina, one from Chile and one from Alabama. Those who ran away found the class "too theoretical", "too abstract", "too philosophical". Indeed, the material presented was radically different from most of American sociology. However, I remember very well the feelings of the smaller group that stayed with him; each of us felt after the semester that we had the most powerful intellectual experience of our graduate career. For the first time, we were able to put into socio-political perspective the individualist, psychological and scientific fragments that were presented to us in our most common courses and texts. we had read some

Preface

Marx predigested, of course, in our research theory course, but the paradigm in which we think and were taught, and thus read Marx, has become hopelessly reified. We memorize bits of theory and bits of method, a dash of demographics, a dash of history, all with a pinch of salt. We weren't being polite. We were being minestrone'd. That's why the Touraine seminar was a remarkable experience for us. For the first time we encountered a sociologist who operated from a unified and theoretically sophisticated perspective, summarizing for him what appeared to us to be almost infinite and essentially unrelated events in the world. We hoped, I would even say we yearned for, a theoretical model that would bring together for us everything we experienced in such a moving way: Vietnam, the student movement, the black rights movement, the new values in the patterns of interpersonal relationships, repression. of US military, espionage and police machinery, etc. We learned a lot from Touraine, but he also learned from us. I was fascinated by the spontaneity of our newfound non-doctrinaire critique of modern society and the counterculture we were creating to allow us to live more humane and cooperative lives personally, while doing what we could to support the liberalizing movements in our country. day. In 1970-71 I had the opportunity to live in Paris and study again with Touraine. I would learn that the difference between him and most of my professors in California was simply a manifestation of the differences between European and American thinking in general. I was surprised, frankly. Rather than professional and highly "expert" American sociologists, the Europeans were intellectuals, much more likely to be concerned with broad questions and able to situate their research questions both philosophically and historically. Rather than seeing the social world as a confusing collection of independent events, Europeans sought the unity hidden beneath the surface of everyday phenomena. I was taught to equate totalitarianism with thought control; It had never occurred to me that in a fairly pluralistic liberal society, the general thought patterns of an entire people could be structured so effectively. I attended Touraine's seminar at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Of the twenty-five students, few were French; They came from three or four Latin American countries, two or three Africans, three or four Europeans and two Asians (1 was the only American). We all spoke French, but what a wild cacophony of accents! The other week we heard from Touraine the first versions of what are here the chapters on the political-institutional system, class relations and social movements. On odd weeks, we tried with each other to apply their theoretical models to the varied experiences of our different backgrounds. We sat around a huge old table trying to find

Preface

x j

an understanding of the world we inherited and the generation of our parents who managed it so inadequately. One thing became particularly clear. I am a total rejection of the positivist and functionalist model of US sociological theory that was based on the assumption that society was a group of capable adults who made rational decisions and who, except for a few deviants, things did quite well and improved all over the time. the time. The consensus was that only an analysis of society in terms of class relations could explain the origin and dynamics of poverty and exploitation, rebellion and repression. We saw that the only possible sociology was one that saw society not as a given state of affairs that should be protected and preserved, but as the result of social action, which included discussion and decision, but also conflict and struggle. Touraine's social theory was respected by this multinational seminar, even though we criticized it incessantly. He listened and defended, but he also changed and incorporated many of the criticisms. Once again, the seminar was an exciting experience, in part because the theoretical material presented provided a model in which we could understand and communicate with each other about the world events that revolve around us. But in part, like the Los Angeles seminar, what made the experience come alive was seeing Touraine incorporate our critique and our generational perspective into his theoretical work. Out of these seminars, and others like them, came the present book. While this book incorporates the criticisms and advice of so many students and colleagues, many of his ideas can be seen in embryonic form in Touraine's thesis Sociologie de I action. Although the present work is very abstract and theoretical, its models are immediately applicable and extremely useful in specific empirical studies. While the general thrust of the book is clear to anyone with a basic understanding of the traditional literature of sociological theory, much of the discussion is original and innovative. Several years ago, Touraine and JDaniel Belj almost simultaneously published books on what they called "post-industrial society." It is certainly essential to examine how different the paradigms within which sociologists work are, as somewhat similar notions of post-industrial society take on radically different meanings for them. Both argue that, especially since World War II, there have been significant changes in the social processes of production and reproduction in industrial society. Somehow we must take into account the increasingly important roles of science, the public sector, mass education, etc. Bell's perspective leads him to interpret these changes essentially in an "end of ideology" direction, while Touraine's model suggests, in short, that we are, in fact, moving towards a new

xiv

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phase of social relations and that, therefore, we must be prepared to examine and understand the new social classes, conflicts and ideologies that will gradually develop. Bell's post-industrial concept is a polemic against dialectical thinking, while Touraine's concept is a call to sharpen our dialectical acumen for understanding new actors - new social classes - in a new situation. The chapter on the political-institutional system presents a model of political sociology that, in my view, dialectically goes beyond the current debate between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas about what degree of unity should exist between the ruling class and the state. The model provides a simultaneous appreciation of the relative autonomy of a political system within the structured confines of a class society. That is, we are asked to see the actual operational dialectic between the prepolitical determination of the limits of possible politics by a ruling class and the partially autonomous political action of opposing interest groups (some of which directly represent the perspective of the ruling class). within these limits, on the other. Thus, the model clarifies the double entry of the ruling class into politics; it formulates a pre-political structuring of possible political action and, at the same time, acts in the political arena through interest groups and politicians who propose and support specific legislation and administrative action that promotes the interests of the ruling class. Another function of Touraine's political sociology in relation to his scheme taken as a whole is the transitional role played by the political-institutional level in mediating between historicity at one extreme and the organizational phenomena of everyday life at the other. The historicity of a society is seen as an abstract and ultimately general determination of what the phenomenal experiences of an empirical society will actually be like. After all, being an industrial society as opposed to a pre-industrial or post-industrial society is. determinant of many things; very different possibilities exist in institutional processes and organizational structures for three very different historicities. However, everyday life can be radically different in two industrial societies; the relative autonomy of institutional and organizational levels within a given society provides a relatively wide range of possible political and organizational patterns. The political-institutional level, then, is seen as the active transforming agent between the vague definitions of the situation provided by historicity (mode of accumulation, definition of cultural model, model of knowledge, pattern of class relations) and hyperspecificity. the régies du jeu of everyday life. This is the fascinating thing about Touraine's political sociology. It is both an abstract theoretical model and an effort to be specific about the transformative role of politics in structuring social reality with respect to the patterns of production and power that structure a society's historicity.

Preface

given society. It is a model of political sociology that directly opposes political analysts who advocate the full autonomy and final cause of the political process (mainstream American political science is most guilty of this). But, on the other hand, he is equally opposed to those analysts who consider the state nothing more than a complex ideologically sophisticated mechanism of ruling class hegemony. Touraine refuses to see society as one big, essentially happy family, as in the image above, where pluralistic decision-making determines the definitions and direction of social reality. But he also refuses to see society as one big organization, run by the ruling ruling class in the manner of an upper-class Victorian family, as in the last picture. Touraine asks us to appreciate the complex interrelationships between the system of production and class relations, between class relations and the relative autonomy of the political-institutional system, between the ruling class as the pre-political determinant of the political system and the ruling class as actor. , between the popular class as an agent of rebellion and social change and the popular class as a voluntary participant in everyday life and, therefore, an active agent of stability and passivity. One of the most compelling pieces of evidence in support of this model's usefulness of the transformative role of politics between the extreme generalities of historicity at one end of the scale and the extreme specifics of organized everyday life at the other, is the diffusion of the political (in his sense of the word " political") even in anti-political societies. Clearly, on one level, totalitarian societies sometimes lack relatively autonomous political arenas. However, Touraine predicts that what happens in these societies, and I think recent historical events confirm this, is that the ruling class effort to end politics only succeeds in displacing it, not eliminating it. Thus, when there is no opening at the political-institutional level, as when it is used as a transparent ideological mechanism that does not open space for dissent, political conflicts move to the organizational level. Thus, organizational structures become deeply involved and politically divided, with partisanship, intrigue, and even open conflict. Thus, if a ruling class tries to run society as if it were simply an organization and represses political debate and dissent, it ends up displacing that conflict into its own organizational structures: the bureaucracy, the army, universities, hospitals, etc. . A model like Touraine's seems extremely useful, for example, to study the development of political awareness in the Portuguese army during the recent fascist regime. Another provocative idea, presented in this book and developed in more recent writings by others, is an analysis of the state primarily as an agent of social change rather than an actor in social structure. Touraine increasingly emphasizes the need to separate and then coordinate a structural analysis organized around the concept of

Preface

historicity and social class and a genetic analysis whose central concept is the State. There is no doubt that this new and, I believe, most important book by Alain Touraine is difficult to read, as is almost all of French social philosophy. However, there is a remarkable wealth of original ideas here; anyone who carefully explores these pages will not be disappointed. J.W. Freiberg University of Boston

PRB54CE

I began writing this book in the fall of 1966 at the University of Montreal. Having spent the years 1962-64 writing my Sociologie de faction, which was as much a study of social actors as it was an essay on advanced industrial societies, I now wanted to get more directly to the heart of the matter by analyzing what is commonly called structure. social, and dedicating all my efforts to define a theoretical procedure. These first texts were replaced by others, generally written for my seminars, especially at the Ecole pratique des hautes études, but also at the Latin American Faculty of Sociology in Santiago de Chile, at the University of California at Los Angeles and at the Institut d'e* tude du de\eloppment e*conomique et social in Paris. My task was interrupted several times by other tasks that seemed more urgent or required less time. It was stimulated by the crisis of May 1968 that I experienced at the University of Nanterre and experienced as a utopian social movement that soon collapsed, but nevertheless heralded a new society and, by its occurrence, demanded a new way of thinking from society. Some chapters were published or distributed in versions prior to this one and also, of course, very different from this one. However, I think it would be better to indicate the following publication data: Chapter 1, "Historicity", appeared in Vers une nouvelle civilization? a tribute to Georges Friedmann (Paris, NRF, 1973). Chapter 2, 4 'Le system d'action', appeared in The Ouma\Sociologieetsocie'te's 1, no.2 (1969): 221-47. Chapter 3, 'Les classes sociales', appeared in Las classes sociales in Latin America Transactions of the Mérida Conference organized by the Institute of Sociological Studies of the UNAM, Mexico Chapter 6, "Les mouvements sociaux", was presented as a document at the World Congress of Sociologia carried out in Varna, September 1969, and published in part in Rassegna Italiana de sociologia, January-March 1972, pp. 11-60.

xvili

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I feel the greatest gratitude to all those, whether colleagues or students, who have helped me over these years with their comments and criticisms. Perhaps they managed to make communicable thoughts that at first were very close to my personal experience, my professional life and my place in society. In particular, I thank Werner and Maria Ackerman, Anouar Abdel-Malek, Michel Amiot, Fausto Ayrton, Guy Bajoit, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Manuel Castells, Maurice Chaumont, Jacques Dofny, Robert Fraisse, J. W. Freiberg, Jean Max Gaudilliere, Louis Maheu, Alberto Melucci, Edgar Morin, Serge Moscovici, Bernard Mottez, Jose* Nun, Françoise Quarré, Melvin Seeman, Geronimo de Sierra, Silvia Sigal, Dominique Wolton, Francisco Weffort. Christiane Guigues helped me gather the various books and documents I needed, which I chose not to list at the end, as this book is something of a lonesome effort, and it helped me in many ways. Colettef Dicfier transcribed manuscripts bordering on indecipherable with a skill and sunny patience that I hope was not wasted in vain. Section VI of the École pratiques des hautes études, in particular its Center d'Étudeses mouvements sociaux, formerly Laboratoire de sociologie industrielle, has provided me over the years with a working environment to which I am too attached to attempt any banal expression. of my gratitude. The weight of this book came as much from Adriana, Marisol, and Philippe as it did from me. It belongs to them. It's hard to be a sociologist. We are too involved in the object of our investigation not to depend on our ideology and our passion. Forgetting them, in the name of empiricism and objectivity, simply results in the naive acceptance of conservative ideology and its very foundation: the status quo. But we must free ourselves from this state of affairs through knowledge, situating the actors and their ideology within the systems that hide behind the categories of social practice. This book thus imposes on its reader, as it imposed on its author, a great distance between itself and social practice, as well as a sustained effort to build an analytical tool that is as simple and useful as possible. Perhaps you have exceeded your goal and are seen as too general in your notions. Let the reader at least know that the reason for its existence was exactly the opposite, and that I wouldn't have bothered with it if I hadn't seen in it a means of getting rid of the confusion of ideologies or prejudices, of penetrating even the most dramatic and convening of social life: the fact that society produces itself, through its work and its knowledge, through its class relations and its political interaction. Montreal Santiago de Chile Los Angeles Chatenay-Malabry

1% from October to December 6, 1972

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xix

Note: Those interested only in the general thrust of this book may limit themselves to reading the Introduction, the first three chapters, and the conclusion. At the beginning of each of the last five chapters, I have inserted a brief paragraph indicating its central theme. Possibly the prospect of having to read less than half of this work will appeal to some who would otherwise be daunted by its size and style. I hope these tentative readers are encouraged to go further and read the rest.

INTRODUCTION

1. Societies learn to know themselves sociologically when they recognize themselves as the product of their work and their social relations, when what at first appears to be a set of social 'data' is recognized as the result of social actions, decisions or transactions of domination or conflicts. That is why our own development-oriented age is gradually creating sociology. Long hidden by all forms of social philosophy that related social facts to a non-social explanatory principle, be it providence, law, evolution, or "natural" necessity, sociology has a hard time getting rid of the appeal to a creative beginning. force —energy, idea, values— that conquers and organizes an indomitable nature. For this is, in fact, the most common form adopted by pre-sociological thinking associated with the triumph of industrialization, industrial capitalism and colonial empires. Today, this social philosophy of progress, optimistic or pessimistic, can no longer be sustained, as our industrialized countries have acquired """ the confused but solid certainty that they have always had complete power over themselves, including the power to self-destruct. to the totalitarian regime, or to increase its product in unprecedented proportions. Evaluating itself in the name of principles, putting itself in evolution, society starts to recognize itself as a network of actions and relationships. , he turns less and less to his past, as the importance of tradition diminishes more and more in relation to the new knowledge acquired, and more and more to his future, that is, to the decisions he takes and the debates or conflicts that accompany them.

Introduction

This image is very simple and the transformation I describe did not start yesterday. But it has now become evident enough to create an ever stronger demand for sociological analysis. And might I add that this demand is met very slowly, for even where sociology is not banned or domesticated it is still in continual conflict with the old categories used to analyze social reality? He finds it difficult to free himself both from appeals to the non-social to explain the social and from subjection to the "laws" or internal "logic" of a category of social facts. This violent rupture between interpretation and positivist analysis is no longer possible when there is no longer any authority or metasocial guarantee to control the functioning of society. It is no longer possible to escape sociological analysis by subordinating it to a knowledge of divine order, the essence of politics or homo oeconomicus. As these essences disappear, they at the same time dissolve the illusion that there might be non-sociological laws controlling certain social phenomena. We can no longer ask ourselves about the nature of society, but only about its functioning, or about its guidelines, its power, its decision-making mechanisms, its forms of organization and change. 2. Let us therefore accept that society rests solely on social action, that the social order has no metasocial guarantee for its existence, be it religious, political or economic, and is entirely the product of social relations. This means that we must agree to think of society from the experience —a new form of experience, but here considered exemplary—of those societies that act most deeply on themselves, both through economic growth and through social revolution. Such societies are no longer defined as creations of God or Prometheus, but as systems of social relations. We recognize, then, that society is a system capable of transformation and not just reproduction. Is our path sufficiently defined by this initial choice? No, because from this recognition two paths depart, the divergence of which defines the main options of sociology. It is possible to think that the end of the old dualisms, the identity of the being of society with its action, should lead to a reanalysis of everything that is usually called social structure in terms of processes of change. This means that a society must be conceived more and more as a network of decision makers, who have a certain influence and through whose interaction the adaptation of the social group in question to changes in its environment and to internal changes is carried out empirically. , very imperfect form, but acceptable. The disappearance of the old social philosophies must also be accompanied by the disappearance of all recourse to values, principles and

Introduction

absolutes in the theory and practice of social action. The more complex the society, the less mechanical it is, the more areas of uncertainty, disorganization, innovation, deviation, imagination it will include, at the same time that it will have to adapt more and more to the ecosystem of which it is a part, and which is increasingly threatened by the destructive creativity of our industry. How can we not recognize in all this the revival of those themes that accompanied the industrial revolution? The liberal appeal to pragmatism, adaptation, openness, change, the search for diversity and heterogeneity, plus a new awareness of the limits of our natural resources and the dangers of industrialization? It is true that most sociological research does not explicitly invoke such a view, either because it takes refuge behind a dissection of reality that it refuses to question, in the name of a naive objectivism, or because it is guided by outdated images of reality. . society, one in which there is a social order based on the consensus of values or, on the contrary, on imposed domination. However, it is in fact this neoliberalism that underlies most of the recent developments in sociological analysis. It brought us new knowledge of organizations, gave central importance to decision analysis, and seriously addressed the study of endogenous changes. a form that will invoke an approach more than an ideology, I will call it "political" sociology here, to denote not a chapter of sociology, but a general conception: society is the result of its decisions, which in themselves refer to the interests, arguments, conflicts and transactions through which - always temporary and unstable - the changes that point in the direction of greater diversification, increased flexibility, easing of social norms, symbolic systems and the 3 I could define this book saying that he shares with this neoliberal political sociology the idea that society is a system of social interactions and that its functioning is the result of its action, but that given this basic conception, opposed to any recourse to values and essences, it explores a profoundly different line of analysis, both in its actual orientation and in its ideological implications. While it is clear that society is not just a system with a pilot that must maintain the balance and continuity of this system through various mechanisms of social control, both integrative and repressive, neither can society be reduced to a system capable of altering its purposes. and organization through mechanisms of training and controlled reinforcement of certain forms of behavior or organization. Society is not only reproduction and adaptation: it is also creation, self-production. He has the ability to define himself and thus, through the knowledge and investment he has gained, transform his relationships with his environment, build his

Introduction

average. Human society has a capacity for symbolic creation through which, between a "situation" and a social conduct, meaning is formed, a systematization of conduct. Human society is the only known natural system that has this ability to shape and transform its functioning based on its investments and the image it has of its ability to act on itself. This distance that society places between itself and its activity, and this action by which it determines the categories of its practice, I call historicity. Society is not what it is, but what it makes itself be: through knowledge, which creates a state of relations between society and its environment; through accumulation, which removes a part of the available product from the cycle that leads "to consumption; through the cultural model, which captures creativity in ways that depend on society's practical mastery over its own functioning. It creates the totality of its social orientations and through a historical action that is at the same time work and meaning, the image that is formed, then, is that of a society that is not just a system of internal and external exchanges, but above all an agent of its own self-production, an agent in the creation of guidelines for social action based on the practice and awareness of work production. This image does not reintroduce the old dualisms, does not oppose a Promethean energy to the inertia of matter, or to the march of progress .against the resistance of tradition, but opposes the image of a society reduced to its processes of change. This eliminates from his analysis any appeal to any "beyond" nature, essences or the march of history. society with its own action and, from there, the specific characteristics of social systems are questioned. We are not obliged to choose between, on the one hand, reducing society to a system of the same type as a machine or an organism and, on the other, invoking a social vitalism that subordinates explanation to the intervention of forces and energies, of a meaning in life. evolution, or the fundamental needs of man. Sociology must reflect on the example offered by biology and build the kind of system that will allow it to account for the specific characteristics of social behavior – which is goal-oriented – and to recognize that every society constitutes and transforms its own social behavior. Jind cultural guidelines. It is essential for such a procedure that we do not reduce society to its functioning and exchanges, but that we understand it mainly as a self-productive process. ^ - By maintaining that society is always divided from itself, divided into V self-production and self-reproduction, I also defend two important ideas:

Introduction

First, that social evolution is neither continuous nor linear, and cannot be reduced to a general trend of increasing differentiation, complexity and flexibility. Rather, what we must do is differentiate between various systems of historical action, all of which correspond to a particular mode of knowledge, type of accumulation, and j^ult^mpdel, all of which are qualitatively different from each other. This is even more important for an understanding of the present than for an ordering of the past, as we are not now entering a society of pure adaptation, but rather a post-industrial society that is defined, like all others, by its orientations. and its class relations and, therefore, also for what it exhibits and what it relegates to the shadows. Secondly, that the orientations of the historical action system define the field of social relations, political relations, forms of social organization and, therefore, also "games", direct or indirect, of all kinds, of conflict or negotiation. and that these orientations do not, consequently, define a body of values that makes social integration possible through its diversification in role norms and expectations. All sociology of values must be rejected, but this cannot be achieved by treating society as a simple apparatus of domination, as this would oblige us to presuppose the existence of some meta-social, "natural" order in the name of which this action was passed. ; Nor can it be achieved by limiting oneself to a pragmatist view of society, as if there were no dominant social order that seeks to impose and reproduce itself. The central problem of sociology is to understand how a society is based on a set of guidelines while being directed and organized by power, how it is one and also two, historicity and class relations. This problem can only be resolved by recognizing society's capacity to determine itself by its own historical action, by its work on its work, by the guidelines that govern its functioning. This self-alienation necessarily implies the division of society into two opposing classes: it is not society, but a part of society, the ruling class, that assumes responsibility for historicity and enhances the functioning of society to go beyond mere self-reproduction - through of the use of accumulation for knowledge. Thus, a certain social category is identified with what is most general in society: its historicity. And that means that historicity has become the object. Those who do not belong to the ruling class but to the popular class (as I will call it) defend themselves against this domination and against historical action itself, but they also challenge its private appropriation and seek to regain control by overthrowing it. the domination of the ruling class. Thus, class conflict can only be defined as the struggle for the final "stake", which is the direction or control of historical action.

Introduction

The orientations of the historical system of action, instead of being translated directly into norms, are “sealed” by class relations and class domination, which allows us to reject the notion of values that introduces a direct correspondence between the cultural orientations of a society and the judgments of actors about social behavior. Interposed between the first and second are class relations. The problem of social classes, which has remained at the center of sociological analysis since the end of the eighteenth century, cannot be clearly posed until it is recognized that society is not a totality or an order, but a system, whose main characteristic is to produce its own guidelines. \ and therefore the conditions governing its operation. If, on the contrary, one continues to think of society as a social order, then this order must be referred to as the unit of a social consensus maintained by social control and socialization, a unit that is denied by the very existence of conflicts and social movements and is nothing more than an invention of the dominant classes, or else we are forced to accept that society as a whole is the work of domination, violence and ideology, which presupposes, I repeat, that something beyond society is invoked, a nature that one day he will free himself from the contradictions of society. And this idea, in a wide variety of forms, largely dominated nineteenth-century historicism. The development of sociology is only possible if we renounce any identification of social systems with mechanical systems – as the legal spirit has long done – or even with organic systems, and accept their particular nature: instead of being governed by a code of a ability to arrive at guidelines that later, through class conflicts and political mechanisms, control the categories of their practice. , civilization, or more specifically the State – thought of as the sovereign manager of its various activities and the conditions for its survival as an actor. It is above all in this sense that Marx's critical analysis retains all its value as an antidote against the optical illusion that leads each of us to perceive social relations as subject to some unifying intention or law. 4. These are, therefore, the three notions on which this analysis is based: 7 historicity, which defines society's instruments of self-production; the system of historical action, understanding as such that totality composed of social and cultural orientations, through which historicity exercises its dominion over the functioning of society; and class relations, struggles for control of historicity and the system of historical action. The first three chapters of this book are devoted to a presentation of these notions.

Introduction

The fourth and fifth chapters will explain the passage from this first level of analysis to that of political decisions, a level that I will call the institutional or —synonymous— political system, then that of social organization. The main task of my analysis "will be to reconcile the hierarchy of these levels with the individual autonomy of each one. This autonomy has two reasons for being: collectivities or political organizations are specific social totalities limited by borders and, therefore, have problems of integration or adaptation which cannot be reduced to those of historicity; on the other hand, they are also historically, not sociologically, defined units; and they are therefore heterogeneous, so that, for example, even Britain at the end of the 19th century cannot be completely identified with industrial capitalism. As for the hierarchy of systems, this means that both institutions and organizations are domains of social life far from being independent of the orientations of historical action, which are, on the contrary, expressions of these orientations, so that in both types of systems ^ we find them occurring as essential elements is both the state of d orientations and the system of historical action and the state of class relations. Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to actors, not systems and their structure. The first of these chapters deals with social movements, collective behaviors situated at the level of the field of historicity, that is, at the level occupied by the system of historical action and class relations, seat of the conflict for the control of historicity./ Chapter 7 then abandons the synchronic analysis to respond to the problem of social change, the most difficult problem to address in terms of methodology. from this book While neoliberal sociology immediately situates itself in change and rejects as inherited superstition anything resembling fundamental orientations or conflicts in a society - a position which at least has the advantage of capturing very directly the processes of change - a priority I give to the study of how the field of historicity, political institutions and forms of social organization are produced, it becomes very difficult to explain the change. Furthermore, it is a problem on which past sociology, functionalist or otherwise, has shed very little light. A theory of change must start from the existing tensions between a field of historicity and the heterogeneous historical whole to which it is always associated. In a society where this tension is reduced to a minimum, the passage from one field of historicity to another can occur without pause, with "modernization" causing changes in social organization, then in institutions, which then give rise to the necessary elements for a new system. of historical action. But where there is a lot of heterogeneity, as is the case of societies under

Introduction

domination, an international class struggle arises, in which the dominant nation speaks of its "modernizing action" when it opens markets, obtains its profits, imposes its culture, and in which the popular class is at the same time relying on its history and in its individuality, at the same time that he aims, through his struggle against domination, at the creation of a field of historicity to which nothing in his experience can yet correspond. This is a reminder that the most modernizing societies are not the most modern. and it also completely discards the sociocentric ideology of dominant societies according to which all nations form a procession, with dominant societies at the head, and all must eventually pass through the same stages. social transformation is as constant in this book as it accompanies all the manifestations of social movements, from the defensive retreat towards collective identity,_ and explosion towards violence and deviance, to the creation of social counter-models and the entry into a general conflict for the historical action control. For nothing reveals society's self-production more directly than the confrontation of social movements and the politics of social change. 5. Each of the domains thus defined in sociology must be analyzed as a process, not as a response to functions. For too long we have been content simply to divide social organization into institutions – judicial, political, religious, educational, military, etc. – and then compare the forms these institutions take in different societies, whether building grids of classification or some general evolutionary line. Even today, what arguments continue about the functions of the political system, the nature of social classes or the extent of religious practices. Breaking society apart is not the best way to understand how it works and changes. Also not ignored is the need for specialized research to remind us that in sociology, as in other fields, the aim is to arrive at knowledge of fundamental mechanisms and, consequently, to destroy objects as they occur in practice as quickly as possible. , then that one can then reconstruct the field of phenomena on the basis of a small number of general schemes and, at a higher level, of proven theories. So this book can be classified as a general sociology book, as long as the term is not misunderstood: you won't find chapters on family, religion, economics, etc., as you would in the more commonplace. manual or general manual. The vocabulary of these books has been replaced by a different one, which occasionally may cause surprise (its individual words are given in the glossary at the end of the book with their redefinitions), but this is extremely small, because its purpose is to help. at the

Introduction

replacing the usual superficially objective descriptions with an attempt to reconstruct the various types of social interactions and the relationships between social systems: the historical action system, the class relations system, the political or institutional system and the organizational system, the concatenation of what constitutes the functioning of society, that is, the mechanisms by which society is able to produce, adapt and reproduce.

6. When studying behaviors that have meaning for the actors themselves, the sociologist always runs the risk of becoming a true historiographer, of presenting the totality of social relations coherently ordered in the light of the dominant ideology. Nor does he avoid this difficulty by relating behavior to situations, as if it were possible to understand social relations in terms of other categories of facts, such as the state of technology, say, or the average level of income. Since its inception, sociology has not tired of pointing out that such situations, to be part of its analysis, must first be reformulated in terms of social interactions. I intend to adhere strictly to the central principle of sociological analysis: the meaning of behavior must be explained not by the conscience of the actor or the situation in which he finds himself, but by the social interactions in which he is involved. Sociology and analysis of social interactions are synonymous terms. However, we must, of course, distinguish various types of social interactions, to which the great chapters of sociology correspond. At the level of social organization, within a limited social whole governed by a central authority, we can isolate social interactions that depend on roles, that is, behavior. by an actor in a given position that is recognized as legitimate by those with whom he interacts as occupying that position. therefore, they depend on their common participation in a social order with a set of norms. On the one hand, there is reciprocity of behavior between actors who occupy complementary positions in the application of a norm; on the other hand, stratification, diversity of levels of participation in the issuance, dissemination and consumption of wealth and behaviors to which society attributes a value. Here the relations are of reciprocity and difference. At the decision-making level, relationships are of a different kind. Actors no longer act within a set of rules; they compete together in the decision-making process that establishes legitimate norms and expectations. These are, therefore, relations of competition, not of reciprocity, of influence, not of difference. I should add, before getting to social relations at the level of historical action, that at both the organizational and political levels, the actor also enters

Introduction

in relations with other actors located in other social groups, and with these actors it does not share common norms nor is it expected to reach common decisions. These intersocial relations are sufficiently different from other types to make them the main object of study for political science. At the level of the field of the historicity of a society, relationships are established between actors who are not in a situation of reciprocity or competition but rather of conflict, who are not situated in a scale of participation or in a position of influence, but rather in a relationship of domination Historical action, the work of society on its own work, is exercised solely through class conflict in a struggle that is not a simple conflict of interests or values, but a battle for control of historicity and the social and orientations cultural aspects of the historical action system. . These classes, these historical actors are not actors in any concrete or directly observable sense. History is not the epic of the capitalist class or the working class. Here as elsewhere, a social actor cannot be defined except by analyzing its interaction with other actors. But this principle is more directly and strictly applicable when it comes to lessons. We cannot explain a particular instance of behavior by saying that it belongs to a class, but only by locating it in relation to the opposition between classes and their antagonistic efforts to control the system of historical action. A sociology of action must never be identified with a reconstitution of the praxis of class actors; It is above all the analysis of domination relations that determines conflicts, movements and ideologies. The "ShTllay" relationship is one of domination because the actions involved are governed by a wager, a prize, which is a set of social and cultural guidelines, and beyond. that historicity itself, which is an action and not a state of affairs. 7. These social relationships are partly: open and partly hidden. They are open to the extent that rulers and ruled are in conflict, fighting for control of historicity. Society, therefore, is not an order, an organism; he is divided against himself; each of its orientations is the object of conflicting attempts at appropriation. Hence the importance that is constantly given in this book to public debates, conflicts, social movements, and also to the recurring criticism of the illusions of social integration. They are hidden to the extent that a domination is imposed that covers the popular response with oppression, with alienation, with propaganda, and fragments it or reduces it to violence or retrogression. The sociologist must not identify himself with any actor's ideology, but to achieve that independence, without which his work is impossible, he must throw all his weight into the task of restoring the nature of social relations thus hidden, in order to let the others speak. who has no voice, to enlighten

Introduction

what is hidden, prohibited or closed, to break the power of ideological discourse and false evidence in the categories of social practice. A task made even more difficult by the fact that the closer one gets to the struggles and movements that animate the field of historicity, the more the collective actors deepen their ideologies and the more determined they are to impose their values. The more ardent the struggle for social domination, or the more absolute the power, the more surely the sociologist's critical analysis is rejected. Caught between an "empiricism" at the same time superficial and conservative -since it reduces the actor to his behavior within the established order- and the passions of the struggles or pressures of power, sociology has great difficulties in surviving and maintaining or even discovering its unity. . This book in itself cannot fully satisfy either the researcher, who demands that methods and procedures be immediately presented to him, nor the actor in collective life, who needs to situate his objectives, his partners, his adversaries in time and space, and identify them. if with a group. However, is there a reason why they both shouldn't understand this? The sociologist does not study facts, but documents. In order not to become a prisoner of a "reality" that he thinks looks from the outside when in reality he is part of it, he needs to submit himself to an intellectual asceticism that leads him to discover, behind the organization and discourse of society, its social relations . , that is, of its conflicts and its domination, as well as what this domination keeps hidden in the shadows. And who takes part in the battles or in the government of society, can he understand his own action if he reduces society to the established order, or to a mere battlefield, or to a mere market? Can you be alien to a sociology whose main objective is to understand how men make their history, through their work and their social relationships? This book talks about society through sociology. It is by reflecting on his own knowledge acquisition work that the sociologist best responds to the questions of the social actors themselves. Because its task is to destroy social relations and social processes, freeing itself from all social and ideological forms of censorship that established power and order use to protect and justify itself. Only in this way can sociology guarantee its own continued existence. Every time you try to find order in real life and derive general laws from it, every time you try to explain structure and change with the help of the same notions, this is nothing more than an irrelevant embellishment of history. It must unapologetically turn the face of both world histories and general sociologies whose aim is to situate

Introduction

societies and explain them. And what better battleground could there be against such a pseudoscience of societies than a sociology of action? What could more clearly proclaim that there is no sociology of social situations, but only of social relations? Sociology is not alone in its rush to embark on this path. Other disciplines that have to deal with simple models of social relations, and especially economics, have progressed much more rapidly in their formalization. Sociology advances more slowly because the sets it has to deal with are more complex. That is why it will continue to advance for a long time in two complementary ways: isolating particular sets of social relations that can be treated in more detail, and building theoretical schemes, not yet very formalized, but which represent an advance in the definition of a procedure and the identification of the studied mechanisms. . 8. This book begins with a study of abstract sets, such as historicity, the historical action system, and class relations, and then moves in later chapters to more concrete collectivities, such as a political system or organization, and mechanisms of change. Why didn't I choose the reverse order? Why not start with limited but more detailed analyzes to demonstrate the need to draw on certain concepts that are then clearly spelled out in a conclusion? Because this book is not a fieldwork presentation, but only intended as an introduction to a sociological procedural method. The most urgent thing, then, was to follow the general line of this procedure, whose main characteristic is not to take as a starting point the social organization, but the very production of society, that is, a set of social mechanisms not directly given to an observation that in fact, it runs the risk of being imprisoned by the categories of social praxis, always imbued with ideologies. need, and to complete it with a review of the reasoning itself, is to ask more directly about the methods that need to be invented or applied to develop objects of investigation corresponding to the principles of reasoning and to verify the propositions that derive from them , therefore this book it is not concerned with presenting a sociological theory, which would be excessively ambitious, but only with putting the iologist in a position to carry out analyzes that may lead to the production of an integrated set of propositions. Although it is quite long and can seem quite daunting, this book should be approached as a brief introduction to a range of possible research. In an even simpler way, it is intended to contribute to the opening of a domain of essential knowledge for societies that can no longer be defined by their action on a supposedly external nature, but must recognize that

Introduction

they are the product of the action they exert on themselves, through their system of historical action, their class relations, their political institutions and their forms of social organization. In the long term, it tries to introduce readers to the search for a new sociological practice, capable of making its way through the best-lit and most controlled areas of social life to arrive at the behavior by which a society produces and transforms. yourself. Finally, it should be said that this book, far from looking like an analysis of current social events, arises from reflections and concerns raised by the time in which it was written. Those who make economic and political decisions are increasingly aware that they must intervene in the totality of social life. Growth cannot be assured without social and political mobilization or, conversely, without an ideological campaign to increase corporate profits. These leaders impose their utopia and ideology on societies, they identify with "the satisfaction of needs/* with prosperity, innovation and equal opportunities. The dominance of leaders over societies has increased enormously, and The hallmarks of our century, our hallmark in times to come, will be that an entire society can be possessed by the word and letter of a leader, that language becomes a material force, that enchantment breeds organization, confusion./ Some are involved in the action of apparatuses, others erect barricades that were originally supposed to be used against another enemy, however, others question society as a whole and not just its power. they are among the first to see the reappearance of social movements, or at least of their precursor signs. How can the sociologist believe that what he writes is neutral, indifferent, in the face of this great question that dominates our present: who are and what will be the actors, fields and stakes of the social battles to be waged? struggled in those societies in which power extends to all aspects of collective activity, so that it can no longer be called political or economic and must therefore be recognized as the management and appropriation of social organization and social change? This book is paving the way for an answer to that question. In addition, he is trying to prove that it is extremely important for him to question himself. But how are we going to "recognise ^^JJL^L0-^!!-0^^^1^^ am * European liberal societies, which are those in which it is easier to inform, think and express oneself

Introduction

freely are also those in which the demand for a liberating future becomes less and less heard. That is why this book is addressed not only to French readers, but also to all those in the world whose deepest experience is domination and who believe both in the need to combat it and in the possibility that the masses of humanity will one day do so. your own story. It owes much, on the one hand, to the great intellectual movement that renewed Latin American sociology and to the new awareness achieved by the people of Quebec and, on the other hand, to the issues and debates in American society and culture. At no time will he deviate from his own field, that of sociological reflection, and he will not seek to draw false sparks from the fire of events. But the author, who will be absent from the book, has the right, at the moment of leaving it, to say why he dedicated half of his life to it.

HYDRICITY

1 a.

Society closes in on itself

one.

beyond the function

Human societies cannot be sufficiently defined by their rules and the instruments by which they function. They act on their own functioning, either to modify it or to transcend it. 1. First, by applied experience, that is, by policy. The rules that govern social interactions are not intangible; they are largely the result of decisions and, consequently, can be modified as a result of a change in the power or influence relationships between the actors, and also as a result of the modification that occurs in the environment. Modern analyzes of organization and decision-making have greatly expanded our knowledge of society's internal and external exchanges and, consequently, of the temporary and partial character of its norms, which are products of interaction and transactions. As a political actor, society no longer resembles an organism that guarantees its stability through homeostasis; it is constantly modifying its activities and its organization by adaptation. 2. Second, by what I call historicity. Human society cannot be reduced to an organism that always reproduces itself without change, depending for any transformation of itself on mutations caused by internal or external events. Its ability is not limited to adapting to a changing environment and is constantly changing the rules by which it works. It also has the possibility of proposing, in addition to the order of its activities, the order of its representations. It has a symbolic capacity that allows it to build a knowledge system together with technical tools that it can use to intervene in its own functioning. fifteen

sixteen

Chapter One

But we must go further. This ability to act on itself, this non-coincidence of society with its own operating rules, must be much more than the mere creation of the order of words alongside the order of things. This "double" of society must also have means of action, of intervention in the material functioning of society and, therefore, means of investment. Finally, this distance of society from itself is also apprehended by social consciousness. Tragic and arrogant apprehension, because it is at the same time apprehension of a tear and mastery. Inventor of knowledge, investment agent, creator of an image of creativity that I call the cultural model, society produces itself, imposes meaning on its practices, turns against it and does not exist only in nature; It doesn't just have a story; it has historicity, which is the ability to produce its own social and legal field, its own historical environment. Society produces itself. This cannot mean that you create the conditions of your existence from an idea. For where did this idea come from and how could it be conceived if not as a metasocial guarantee of social organization: divine providence, human nature, idea, march of history? But neither can it mean that these representations and these orientations were formed from a material experience that could be defined independently of them. We must not look here for any first cause. Work is a state of the forces of production determined by historicity, that is, by a model of knowledge, by a type of accumulation and by an image of creativity or cultural model; but these components of historicity always appear as a distancing of society from itself and from the reproduction of its functioning. The specific characteristic of human society is precisely this distance between the totality of activities that define the functioning of a society and the system of meanings that simultaneously determines it and takes care of X from it, in a circle that will only appear as vicious if one seeks the first cause, and which, on the contrary, defines the particularity of society as a system in relation to other concrete systems. In short, a certain historicity is expressed through certain characteristics of social organization, a level of productivity, a capacity for growth and a technical division of labor, it is on the basis of this organization of labor that accumulation allows an exit from the economic cycle and that the cultural model fills the gap formed between historicity and functioning. linked to a material situation; Give it meaning, inform it. We must equally reject both the idea that forms of social life are determined by a material situation, such as the state of technology, and the contrary idea that society imposes culture on nature, civilization writes on the virgin page of a natural world. indomitable. .

Historicity

Historicity is neither an idea nor a material situation; it is the specific characteristic of social action, which constitutes its experience through the meaning it gives it. Human activity, at all levels of technical development, is the organization of a technical environment and not the integration into a natural whole. From the first hunter to the missile builder, man is the producer of techniques. The analysis must start from this action, at the same time instrumental, economic and ideological, to use terms that are at the same time everyday but loaded with obscurities; which is a model of knowledge, of accumulation and a cultural model, to use the terms I will use here, referring to the organization of a field of knowledge, the reservation of a proportion of the available resources for consumption and an image of creativity. . Historicity is not transcendence; it is not what escapes society conceived as a system. On the contrary, it is what allows us to conceive of society as a system, but without the need to reduce it to another, less complex type. Through historicity, activity becomes meaning and meaning becomes practice again. It is this double movement, upwards towards historicity and - even more important - downwards through the system of historical action, institutions and organizations in society, which will form one of the two central themes of this book. The second is an investigation into the forms of social interaction linked to the historicity and production of society by society itself: class relations. It is a mistake to criticize functionalist sociologies of integration and values by confronting them with the history of societies or by the forces of conflict and change with them. There is a great risk that we will be forced to resort to pre-sociological interpretations. I do not blame functionalist sociology for representing society as a system; This is your great positive contribution. Its mistake was to conceive this system according to mechanistic or organist images so inadequate that they simultaneously forced a return to an evolutionary vision, inherited from nineteenth-century liberal and positivist optimism, impregnated with the most unacceptable type of idealism and ethnocentrism. B.

The components of historicity: knowledge, accumulation, cultural model.

1. Serge Moscovici {Essai sur Vhistoire humaine de la natures Paris: Flammarion, 1%8, and more recently, la socike comre nature, Paris: Union générale d'exlitions, coll. 18/10, 1972, see also "Le marxisme et la question naturelle", L'hommi* et la sotiete, July-September 1969, pp. 59-109) pointed out with some force that society is not in opposition to nature and that, consequently, it is false to distinguish between the natural and the natural.

Chapter One

social order and values, between the body and soul of social activity. Nature is a cultural definition of matter. Thus, we should not speak of nature, but of "states of nature", that is, of systems of knowledge. This knowledge work is never identifiable with economic activity. Production and consumption are economic categories that always belong to a study of exchanges. But every work system also includes the intervention of "natural forces", of a knowledge activity. Science, for example, is not an economic element, it has no price in itself, because it does not produce goods but. on the contrary, it endows society with a nature, as religious thought did in another type of society. This first component of historicity, the model of knowledge, is both the most fundamental and the one that will play the most limited role in our analysis of society. It is fundamental because it manifests more directly the human capacity to create, through knowledge, an image of the world and social relations and an image of the non-social. Before entering any particular sociological analysis, we are faced with the primordial fact that human language orders a universe organized by technology, thus allowing experience to turn back on itself that allows man - and only man - to have a history, that is, to produce not only its change, but its own situation. However, the fundamental role of this component also makes it dependent. It does not directly govern the orientations of social and cultural action or the forms of accumulation and relations of production. In itself, a productive force par excellence, it appears both at the beginning and at the end of the analysis: on the one hand, a set of technical means and operations and, on the other, a sign of society's distance from its own society. . March. 2. This separation between the two orders of phenomena grouped under the name of work is inconceivable without recognizing the economic forms of historicity. The existence of work on work presupposes an accumulation process. Part of the consumable product is reserved and invested in works that carry the brand of the cultural model. The closer it gets to industrialized societies, the more this accumulation is identified with productive investment. While, on the other hand, in societies with a weak historicity, with only a small capacity for action over themselves, the uses to which the accumulated resources are destined are not directly productive: temples and priests, castles and the courts absorb the surplus withdrawn from consumption, but accumulation always has economic uses, since whoever controls it, even if his central role is religious or political, is playing an essential role. the production. The greater the amount of accumulation, the greater the degree to which it transforms the conditions of production. When she is little, the

Historicity

surpluses collected are separated from economic activity and used to carry out large constructions or works. On the other hand, an important part of the resources accumulated in an industrialized society is used to directly transform working conditions and produce work, which is the role of technology. Investment modifies the organization of work and therefore its productivity. 3. A society is not adequately defined by the state of its productive forces; such a definition must be derived from the relations between his activity and his capacity to act in that activity. This distance is culturally apprehended: every society is guided by this apprehension of creativity, which I call the cultural model. In a society with a strong historicity, that is, in which the production of work exerts a strong control over the production of wealth, this apprehension of creativity is practiced: science is recognized as creativity, as the force that directly transforms the state of affairs of nature. . In a society with weak historicity, on the contrary, creativity is apprehended only abstractly, not as praxis, but as /gus. as metasocial order./! its cultural model is not a representation of the knowledge model, but of the distance between the production and reproduction of work and, therefore, of society's capacity to act on itself. I therefore use the expression "cultural model" in a very specific sense, not to describe this or that observable orientation or value within a society, but to define, within a conceptual system, that essential aspect of historicity through which society "reflects" on itself by apprehending its own capacity for action in a way that defines the field of social relations and what I will call the system of historical action in the next chapter. , that even when historicity is fully controlled by the dominant class, the cultural model is not reducible to the dominant ideology. Ideology belongs to specific actors; the cultural model belongs to a type of society as a whole, it contributes to the definition of the field of social relations. The actors, however opposite they may be. they interact and conflict within a cultural framework. All this shows that a cultural model can only be situated qualitatively in relation to other cultural models. Each cultural model contributes to the definition of a type of society, not a specific collectivity. This cultural model is not a value system. It does not imply any judgment about what is socially good or bad. Define a cultural field. Just one example: recognizing science as the contemporary form of creativity *makes* Which is the specific characteristic of post-industrial society in which science is at the same time a model of knowledge, a cultural model and even an instrument of accumulation. In the previous sentence, science is seen only as a cultural model.

Chapter One

it does not in itself imply any judgment about the positive or negative aspects of a science-dominated society. It can be said with equal justification that science creates abundance or that it threatens humanity with total destruction. It is in this sense that science is not a social value, which does not distinguish positive behavior from negative behavior. The guidelines of historical action do not constitute consecrated principles within society and that directly define the forms of social organization, because society is not an actor, a sovereign, a legislator. They define the theme of a society, not its government. C. Society torn apart. The fact that a society produces itself and is not reducible to its functioning directly leads to the existence of opposing social classes and the conflict between them. It is not society as a whole that looks to itself for guidance. It is always utopian to think that a community is transformed, capable of simultaneously acting in accordance with certain forms and transcending them, of providing investment and consumption. The class that manages society's accumulation, its model of knowledge and its cultural model is the ruling class of society. This class is identified with the historicity of society. But since it is only a part of society, it is also identifying historicity with its particular interests, confusing the cultural model with its own ideology. The dominated class reacts to this domination both defensively, insisting on its own social and cultural identity, and offensively, questioning the power of the dominant class, appealing to the very historicity that the dominant class is appropriating. It is clear, then, that the orientations of historicity do not by themselves determine rules of conduct, since class conflict and the nature of social domination are interposed between them. The orientations of historical action are what is at stake in the class struggle. Which means that they are not the ideology of the ruling class and that they are not independent of class relations, which would otherwise be nothing more than a mode of social stratification. Class relations are linked to productive forces, a state of economic activity and a technical division of labor, but they are more than that: they are the expression of historical action itself in terms of social actors, the expression of society's capacity act on itself through the investment of accumulated resources in activities selected by a cultural model, but it is the state of class relations that governs the decision mechanisms in a society and, therefore, also the formation of the rules that, in turn, , govern social organization , which allows us to reject any sociology of values.

Historicity

A long chapter (3) will be devoted to class relations; but the main lines need to be indicated here. We cannot present the dominant class as purely creative, as the class that allows us to break out of routine and defend immediate interests in order to face long-term projects, general ideas and complex strategies. This would obviously ignore the fact that the ruling class defends private interests and privileges and, even more important, the fact that it dominates the lower classes, the workers. But neither can accumulation be reduced to a class relationship, between exploiter and exploited. In particular, the closer one gets to industrialized societies, the more the productivity of work is defined not only by individual work or even in a team, but also by the forms of organization, by the global programming of production and by the application of the science. , technology and mathematics to economic activity. A simple observation, but one that prevents us from presenting labor relations as a simple confrontation between the worker-producer and the beneficiary. What is essential is to recognize that the ever-present and essential relationship between domination and exploitation cannot be separated – if we want to understand the functioning of society as the behavior of actors – from the relationship between society and its historicity. It is not enough to say that the ruling class fulfills the task of developing the productive forces. Because to say so is to state a material fact but tell us nothing about its social significance. But if we try to see what's underneath, we discover the pull that the ruling class exerts on all of society towards a particular kind of historicity. Of the three components of historicity, accumulation is the one that makes it possible to uproot the historicity of the activity, distancing society from its own functioning. The mode of knowledge posits the fact of society's non-coincidence with its being: alongside those binding activities governed by the survival requirements of the community and its adaptation to the milieu from which its livelihood derives, it establishes the world of the image (to use the phrase). word adopted by Kenneth Boulding in The Image: Knowledge and Life in Society, University of Michigan Press, 1956). Accumulation gives material content to this distance. Economic activity cannot be reduced to the production-consumption cycle; what is subtracted from this cycle is used in the service of society's transcendence over itself, be it a transcendence towards the future, a process of growth, be it a transcendence turned towards a principle of order and unity, be it of a religious or political type . Now it is easier to see what historicity is. To define it, must we make a hypothesis about the orientations of human action? Are we to establish an image of a man attracted by his desire to create, his desire to get rich, or even more generally by a need for work?

Chapter One

It is normal that in each society there is a preferred image of man, a kind of hero. But this very fact, which would become less clear on closer examination, clearly shows that it cannot constitute a principle of explanation, since these human types change from one age and from one society to another. Talking about human nature in this sense is a roundabout way of introducing an ideology or describing certain aspects of a society. If we try to explain society through social behaviors, then we condemn ourselves to the inability to produce anything other than interpretations of society, since we introduce from the beginning what must be explained. But it is equally impossible to consider social situations as material "facts", when by their very definition they are sets of behaviors and social relations, that is, of actions. For the sociologist, placing an opposition between the network of social relations and the priority of "material" activities — the activities of production and reproduction of individual and collective existence — cannot make sense. Such an idea belongs only to historicist thought; whether the development of the mind is placed above society or the priority of "natural" needs and activities designed to satisfy them, society is still explained by the non-social; it is obvious that this method is as unacceptable today as when Durkheim condemned it. We must also eliminate other less crude concepts of society that also omit any recourse to the concept of action. We cannot consider a society as an organism endowed with balancing mechanisms, capable of transforming itself in the direction of increasing complexity simply under the influence of external stimuli. Even less can we consider him a being endowed with a kind of built-in code that will change according to the mutations that occur during its transmission, the change then being the result of individual actions sanctioned by their effectiveness, their materiality, success and reaction to the social code to transform it. We are forced to recognize that human collectivities are systems defined in their specific and essential characteristics, not by their operating code, but by their ability to be guided by a cultural model. What I call historicity, then, is the particularity of social systems that, in addition to their reproduction combined with eventual accidents "that can make them change, and also beyond their possibilities of trial and error and adaptation, have the capacity to act through a set of cultural and social orientations. All societies are both activities and a "reflection" of these activities, which in turn govern the orientations of social action, the decision-making mechanisms and the modalities of functioning in specific societies, demonstrating their ability to change their relationship with the environment.

Historicity

in a model of knowledge, in a type of accumulation and in a cultural model that together constitute historicity. The latter governs a system of guidelines that controls the functioning and adaptation systems. The content of historicity depends on the type of activity of society, its work, but transforms this activity into culture and social organization. Society governs its activity through the formation of knowledge, through accumulation, through awareness of creativity, so that all aspects of its organization become, at the same time, means at the service of that production of society itself. Social organization as such is not unique to the human species, but the human race is the only species that has sufficient symbolic capacity to make sense—both meaning and direction—from its experience; the only one for whom nature is culture, creation and normative orientation, in the name of whose triad its organization is organized, transformed and, I repeat, produced. Human societies are open systems not only capable of modifying their goals, but also possessing the capacity to create normatively oriented behaviors, to produce and destroy their social order. This ability does not entirely define social life. Society works on three levels: it produces itself, but it also adapts and consumes itself. And I'm going to call those three levels in this book: the field of historicity, the institutional system, and social organization. But if historicity must be the central theme of sociology, it is because only human societies have this capacity for self-transformation, which is linked to the symbolic capacity of human beings, that is, to their capacity to act in their relationship with their environment and their environment. environment. about their social organization. It is possible for a society to lose its historicity, to sink into mere reproduction, or to be totally divided into mass and elite; it is also possible that it ceases to adapt, that is, that it is entirely reduced to its political system, the strategies of its members and its own strategy in relation to other societies. A human society can be a system of historicity; it is not moved in spite of itself by a force that runs through it, by the march of history or by some transhistorical essence. Historicity is not a type of behavior or an impersonal force: it is the production of society by society. The evolutionary philosophies of history that made use of the notions of force and energy must be completely replaced by the study of historical action, that is, of the elements whose interrelationships define the self-transforming action of society. It is not a question here of introducing a theory of social change; it was neither convention nor convenience that made social change the subject of the last chapter of this book. The historicity of a society is not the process that makes it pass from the T state to the T-FL state. It is a strictly defined concept within a synchronic analysis. A company is formed in

Chapter One

in terms of its resources, an image that is not a representation, but a set of schemes of cultural and social orientations that shape the collective experience: model of knowledge, type of accumulation, cultural model. This historicity is realized in a system of historical action and class relations, in a political system and in forms of social organization. More than locating a society in history, we are talking about locating historicity within society as an organizing principle of a field of practices and relationships. / Therefore, not only is an analysis of change inadequate, but also, in many respects, This approach makes this analysis more difficult, since it cannot be carried out except from the investigation of tensions and non-coincidences. of a society and the nature of the forms of social practice that are informed by it while they are in the background. while escaping from it as concrete, complex, historical social units. Change cannot be understood except in terms of the opposition between structure and event. Historicity, as the foundation of social structure, is neither an idea nor a material force. It is pointless to question whether it falls under the category of economics, politics or ideology. These terms in themselves only produce confusion or, even worse, refer to a separation between subject and object that is absolutely incompatible with the task of sociology, which is to study social action. Because social action is at the same time work and awareness, practice and guidance, mechanisms and objectives, always inseparable. d.

Tensions and Conflicts

Having placed the theme of historicity at the beginning of this analysis, it is also best to guard against possible misunderstandings. Certainly, I do not intend to sing a hymn of praise to the creative power of man, ruling and ordering an indomitable nature and moved by its own inspiration, impulse of its soul, or divine grace, beyond the daily life of the world. Such a view of things, which may take less crude forms, expresses pre-sociological thinking which cannot be transcended until society discovers that it does indeed have virtually unlimited power over itself. By separating society's soul from its body, this view assumes that the existence of this soul is guaranteed in some essence —Man, God, History— and that social facts have no meaning other than the intention and inner life of the actor, who are imposed. inert in nature. When one frees oneself from all recourse to idealistic notions, then nature is no longer wild or paradisiacal; it is simply a set of natural systems, open or closed, that function according to laws that it is up to science to discover. The further we move away from an abstract humanism, the wider the field

Historicity

of these natural systems within human existence is revealed. Hence the constant extension of the natural sciences. But we cannot separate this recognition of "human nature" from the formulation of the specific characteristics of society and the human species. Man shapes his environment and his social organization; it is not part of an ecological whole; he organizes this whole from his own transforming activity. In a word, he has a story. It is this ability to produce its own transformation that I call historicity, and which is at once activity and self-awareness, work of knowledge and cultural model. This historicity does not shape the formless; on the contrary, it is linked to existing natural systems: the biological being, including the human mind, the interpersonal relationships through which personality is formed and forms of sociability. Each state of historicity corresponds to a certain "nature" that is its complement and its opposite, but it is not up to historicity to determine the characteristics of the natural systems that organize the activity from which historicity is formed. and who in turn governs. Any reflection on historicity must shed light on the close connection between two apparently opposing ideas whose complementarity must be understood. First, the relationship between social activity and historicity is circular. Historicity arises from a state of collective activity: its content is determined by the form of that activity. In another sense, social organization always results from the dominance of sociocultural orientations and class relations —in turn governed by historicity— over media resources and sets. Why should this be called a vicious circle? On the contrary, it is about placing the most elementary condition of all for the existence of any sociological analysis. Once this cycle is broken, idealism will flood in. Historicity is not an idea, but a concept introduced with the sole purpose of destroying, rooting and branching, every recourse to any metasocial justification for the social order. Society is what it makes based on what it is, and not on principles or values that cannot be anything, for the sociologist, but on the ideologies of particular actors. Second, this interdependence of activity and historicity, of work and work at work, is tension and estrangement. Hence the emphasis I placed on providing a sociology of historicity, a m-shareholder sociology, as opposed to current works inspired by functionalism, although the latter no longer appears today as anything more than a somewhat vague orientation, lacking the academic power it he had at the time. the moment I started my fight against it. It is a constant trend in sociology, often in the name of empiricism, to accept the social order as neutral and to see each individual taking his or her place in it, establishing relationships with others, to make a difference.

Chapter One

series of exchanges within that order according to the rules of the social game. The actor carries his status and role with him, just as the worker carries the name of his company on his overalls, which is considered his group and, therefore, his social being. It is, therefore, a naively conservative sociology, examining with the most minute attention how society works while, at least equally, trying to avoid asking what works. Society seen in its historicity and, consequently, also the social actors, as participants in this historicity, cannot be defined by its content, but, above all, by the gap, the distance, that separates the production of society by itself from the reproduction of your activity. . This means, above all, that the analysis of society is not built directly around the content of historicity, but around the tension between historicity and the natural systems mobilized by social activity. We will find this fundamental tension, in changing forms, at all levels of society, and its recognition requires a critical procedure diametrically opposed to that of positivism. This, in turn, means that no actor is the only bearer of this tension. It is a system of social interactions or class relations that constitute the unit of action within which this tension manifests itself. It is impossible to pinpoint each individual's place, or insert each individual in his or her proper place, because society is not a game in which pawns have rights and are subject to restrictions. Social relations govern the relations between historicity and the functioning of society. And alongside this, as I have already noted, the most fundamental social interactions of all, class relations, can only be understood as historicity in action. It would be appropriate to ask at this point what mark historicity imprints on social actors. My analysis of social movements will essentially answer this question, as such movements are the confrontation of social class agents who seek control over the historicity and mode of production of society itself. This is a theme that corresponds to the circularity of activity and historicity that I have recognized as one of the faces of the sociology of historicity. What is there that also corresponds to its other face, to the recognition of tension and tears? The ultimate mark of participation in historicity is the distance that remains between the actor and the roles he plays, not only in social exchanges of all kinds, but also within social movements, insofar as the latter have no existence. concrete if they are not also politicians. —or even military—organizations and units. Instead of the appeal to freedom referring to some human essence beyond all social determinism, a procedure both unacceptable and incomprehensible to the sociologist, instead of freedom being nothing more than the uncertainty that resides in the intersection of a series of independent series, the trans-

Historicity

descent into a historicity that no actor has ever had the right to fully appropriate for himself, that no form of social organization, no system of political decision-making, no system of class relations can completely exhaust, because they are all stages of the redemption of historicity for the future. functioning of society. Transcendence and not possession. The moment the actor identifies with historicity, he confuses it with an organization, which may have no social consequences if this confusion is perpetrated simply by an individual actor trapped in a personal utopia, but which produces the most dramatic effects when the A power-possessing actor, reversing the movement of analysis, identifies historicity with order and identifies with this now sanctified order.

Historical Action

one.

the historical subject

Shareholder sociology reminds us that a society does not coincide with its functioning, norms, rules and sanctions, that it carries its own self-transcendence within itself. But he made a mistake if he apprehended this transcendence as an absolute that transcends contingencies and social determinations, if he erects a philosophy of freedom against social determinisms. Because in reality there is nothing that allows sociological analysis to distinguish between this creative transcendence and the disorganization of the crisis. One cannot oppose the frozen and instituted to an instituting spontaneity without running the risk of not being able to distinguish the suprasocial from the infrasocial, from those organic energies of which Parsons speaks, which constitute for him the inferior realm of social action. The flaw here stems from the fact that the reflection remains purely polemical. Part of the social organization, understood as closed and fully controlled, to rebel against it. My procedure is different: it starts very deliberately not from the rejection of this closed society, but from an affirmation of historical action. This action is not an endless overcoming of social determinations, but the construction of a field of action. It does not introduce a philosophy of the subject, but a shareholder sociology. Instead of opposing the subject to society, what is intended here is a direct analysis of society not as self-awareness, but as work on oneself. When I used the subject terra historic in Sociologie de l'action (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965). was to define, not an actor involved in his struggle to apprehend himself in his creativity and beyond his alienations, but rather a society as a historical field, as a model of knowledge, as a

Chapter One

mode of accumulation and cultural model that defines creativity, the three elements present in every constitution and social transformation. The historical subject is not a new avatar of God, the Sovereign or the laws of the market. He is not a character, but another name for the field of historicity of a society; It is the set of cultural orientations and social conflicts through which a society constitutes itself as an agent of historicity. If I consider this term useful, despite the misconceptions it may raise, it is to emphasize that sociological analysis cannot be based on the search for structures similar to those of the human mind or exchanges that allow the survival of a collectivity. Sociology differs from anthropology both in the type of society studied and even more so in its method of approach. He sees society as the work of an action, which is not of an empirical actor, nor of a collective conscience, but the work of society on itself. All other aspects of social life, both decision-making and the functioning of social organization, are determined by historicity, which constitutes the sociocultural field in which class relations, political decisions and mechanisms of social control come into play. If my use of the word "subject" is to lead anyone to believe that I am representing society as a will, as an actor, then I immediately renounce the word; Sociology studies nothing but systems of social relations. The historicity I speak of is not the work of an actor; it is the characteristic of society at the level I define as the production of society by itself or, what amounts to the same thing, of society as a historical subject. The closer one approaches this level of analysis, the more one must leave behind any subjective meaning of the behavior. If we look at things from a functionalist point of view, then the analysis naturally relates to social behavior and the actor's self-representation of the system and its place within it. Society then appears as data from the actor's point of view, as a set of internalized rules to guide conduct. A sociology of historical action, on the other hand, is at the opposite pole from a study of subjectivity. Rather than looking at actors defined by their roles, it examines the elements that constitute a historical field of action, that is, the social and cultural models on the basis of which a society is organized. The actor is defined by the social and cultural movements that make him intervene on the level of historicity. Functionalist analysis has the apparent advantage of examining "men as they are", that is, of observing the "normal" functioning of society. Shareholder analysis, on the contrary, is more attentive to the domination exercised by a class or a society. by power holders and conflicts over control of historicity, analyzes not only the various combinations of innovation and repression by

Historic

the dominant classes, but also, on the part of the dominated classes, the ever-living presence of movements tending to the collective reappropriation of historicity and the various forms of rejection, retreat and defense against the dominant order. He knows that the story is never epic, that the actors are never fully conscious and organized, that the meaning of events never clashes with the actors' consciousness, and that their battles cannot be described as those of an eighteenth-century engraving. Actors, although they may be aware of being involved in historical action and social conflict, cannot be seen as bearing the meaning of that action in their individual performances. B.

Between Integration and Contradiction

We can now return to our starting point and redefine the place of shareholder sociology within sociological analysis as a whole. One of its main objectives is to rescue sociology from the situation of false choice in which it is often trapped. Because it seems, at first glance, as if he were forced to choose between an ideal philosophy of values and an analysis of the inner contradictions of an economic and social system and the all-powerful apparatus of class domination. If we look at the sociology of development, it seems divided into two schools: on the one hand, the school that talks about modernization and looks at both the progress of rationality or organic solidarity and traditionalist resistance to change; the school that reduces the dynamics of underdeveloped nations to the effects of the domination exercised over them by the great capitalist powers. This second school seems to me more sound than the first, as it places its emphasis on a social relationship of essential importance rather than artificially placing dominant and dominated societies on a Rostow scale of development that is too ethnocentric not to be an ideological tool to use. be used on behalf of the colonizers. But why should there be this gap between modernization and dependency? Isn't it essential, rather, to understand independence movements, nationalisms, popular or messianic groups, trade union and political movements, as well as the formation of a ruling class and its links with foreign capital or the state, through which a new development action that either fights against dependency or, on the contrary, reinforces it and cannot be reduced to mere modernization, since it determines the type of "tkmodernized"* society that is built? I refuse to choose between reducing social behavior to roles or adapting to change, on the one hand*, and, on the other, an image of society as a system motivated only by the logic of domination. There are other social behaviors, other social relationships. There are political relations, at least where

Chapter One

totalitarianism is not supreme: a plurality of influences, a certain autonomy of decision within a society. Above all, there are conflicts and social movements and, therefore, beyond political institutions, an "opening"* of society, a debate about the directions of change. most sociologists so far have belonged to - given extreme strength to ruling class ideology: all the talk in our part of the world has been about modernization, about adaptation, even about reducing conflict and ideologies. Despite the ideology and class domination it reinforces, it is natural that criticism, lacking support in the organized action of the new social movements, has detached itself from the dominant discourse in order to judge the objective reality of domination from the outside. Although this step was politically essential, we must be sure to know how to overcome it and rediscover in our society, as in any society in motion, the realities of cultural orientations and social conflicts. Society is not simply a system of norms or a system of domination: it is a system of social relations, debates and conflicts, political initiatives and claims, ideologies and alienations. Sociology is never faced with a choice between an analysis of subjectivity and an analysis of objectivity, because the very nature of the behavior it studies does not belong to either order. Men make their history not through their intentions and values, but through the sense of action that society exerts on itself, an action that is both subjective and objective, jointly defined by an accumulation and a cultural model. Therein lies the central domain of sociological analysis. However, not everything is sociology. Because the domination of the ruling class is always great enough for its innovative action, on the one hand, to give a certain autonomy to the question of modernization and, on the other hand, for its power to constitute a system of domination, repression, exploitation. , which has its own specific logic; this dominance is also usually limited enough that the political process has its own space within it. We must take into account the autonomy of these social processes to protect shareholder sociology from the ever-present risk of becoming a philosophy of freedom and an epic vision of history. But this autonomy cannot be independence. It is never justified to define a society as modern or traditionalist, universalist or particularist or to affirm that social organization is reduced to the pure realization of domination, since the ruling class is not in a position to define the mode of knowledge, the type of accumulation and the cultural model. that constitute the historicity within which it operates: in short, one cannot

Historicity

consider the evolution of a society as a result of its political decisions, since these decisions are limited both by the historicity of society and by class domination. Shareholder sociology must occupy a central position in sociological analysis, because it takes the sociological method, that is, the analysis of behavior through social relations, to its highest level, that of historicity, the level of society's work on itself. But whoever undertakes this path must always be aware of how inadequate his knowledge will be in relation to the difficulty of the task he is undertaking. Perhaps I should reiterate that the central importance I attach to the concept of historicity has nothing to do with a vague exhortation to "see social facts in relation to history." Nothing could be more innocent, on the surface, than these gentle reminders of the usefulness of situating observed phenomena in time and space, of examining their development, of taking their particularities into account. Is not sociocentrism sociology's number one sin, we are often asked, when a little historical and geographic awareness could so easily protect against anachronisms and misinterpretations? Such caveats are certainly timely when it comes to analyzing a historical situation; but often, under a thin layer of "common sense", they hide what is really a total rejection of sociological analysis, or a recourse to a historicism against which sociology has always had to fight, and to which the concept is destined. of historicity. to strike the last, fatal blow. The object of sociology is never a concrete historical whole; even if we take its analysis to the furthest limits of macrosociology, as I myself am doing, what is at stake is always the analysis of social mechanisms and relations, mechanisms and relations that must be isolated from the historical settings in those that were observed for the first time. turn. If we look for the meaning of social conduct in the evolution of societies or in any of their particular aspects —their techniques or their values, for example—, we will fall into historicism, that is, into the other extreme of relativism. that destroys all possibility of knowledge, in the idea that throughout history a sense, a human nature, or a natural and stable type of social organization is manifested, realized. I must repeat: the main reason for the concept of historicity is to eliminate all historicist recourse to services, that last avatar of the metassocial guarantees of the social order. It is time to recognize that it is in the manner of sociology that our societies must now know themselves, apprehending themselves as systems and no longer as evolutions. Those we call historians contributed to effecting this change no less than those we call sociologists.

Chapter One

The cardinal points of sociology

one.

Functions, Controls, Decisions, Actions

The study of society is faced from the outset with certain choices that guide it, that determine the division, if not into schools, then into orientations sufficiently diverse to oblige us to redefine general sociology as an analysis of the relationships between these various orientations. . It is desirable, therefore, that the present sociological investigation, like any other, be aware of the starting point it is adopting, even though it may later struggle to break free from it. These general orientations are defined by the preference given to one of the two possible answers to each of the two questions that the sociologist initially encounters. A unit called "society" must have an organization, a continuity and, therefore, mechanisms for maintaining and transmitting guidelines, norms or power. But it is also the producer of its history and must have the means to adapt to changes. of their environment or to act on their own transformation. The sociologist is then faced with a first option: he will question himself about the problems of society's production or about those of its reproduction, about order or about movement. Second, a society is a unit, an actor, which determines its internal functioning and its relations with the outside world, but it is also the locus of social relations that may seem more fundamental than values, norms or socialization mechanisms. to the unit of corporate action or to social relations, and above all to relations of domination, it conceives society sometimes as a field of decisions guided by objectives, adapted to the environment, sometimes, on the contrary, as a field of social relations, of conflicts, of ideologies and, consequently, gives more emphasis to what is excluded, repressed or manipulated. A sociological school or orientation is defined by the intersection of these two options. It is not necessary to assume that every sociologist consciously decides to adopt one of the four cardinal points thus defined as his particular point of departure. These four points, however, make it possible to situate the branches of sociological thought in relation to each other and, consequently, to make them more aware of the often implicit choices they make and the limitations to which they are subject. Let's quickly summarize these four fundamental orientations. 1. A sociology of order that prioritizes society's relations with its environment will define the nodes that must be organized within it. Society must feed itself, defend itself, reproduce itself, ensure its stability and continuity.

Historicity

2. On the other hand, a sociology of order that is more attentive to internal social relations understands order as a receptacle of domination exercised by some and imposed on all. Here it is no longer a question of functions, but of controls, of an apparatus of repression and social and cultural integration, functioning at the service of a power. 3. The sociology of movement, in examining the problems involved in adapting a social unit to a changing environment, attaches the greatest importance to decisions by which an actor responds coherently to stimuli in that environment. 4. Finally, a sociology of movement that gives the greatest importance to oppositions and conflicts within society can be called a sociology of action. Movement is not a decision made by a "government" within society; it is the result of social relations that were never fully institutionalized and that expressed the constant opposition between rulers and ruled, opposition linked to the accumulation and concentration of decision-making power. Sociological endeavors, at their core, can be divided into four domains that study functions, controls, decisions, and actions (see Fig. 1). order society's interactions with the environment

internal social relations

functions

movement decisions

controle S

(Video) The Master Key System (1916) by Charles F. Haanel

Figure 1

Each of the rows and columns is associated with certain attitudes that are not purely scientific. And this explains why a certain society, social group or individual will give preference to a certain aspect of sociological analysis. At the risk of painting in too bold a color, these various images of the sociologist must be thinned out. Those located on the top row are more "optimistic". They also pay more attention to what happens at the "top" of society. They are more interested in the legislator, the government, the CEO than the prisoners, minorities or officials. O

Chapter One

Others tend to look more for the occult forces of society, distrusting its discourse and its rationality in which they believe they detect the dominance of an ideology, a mixture of integration and repression. The column of order contains those who are particularly sensitive to social continuity, those who see the weight of the past, its values or its heritage in today. In the movement column, on the other hand, it is the future that seems to govern the present, and the resulting analysis emphasizes new trends, forces and conflicts. But we can go even further in the political location of sociology's main themes. The problems I have laid out generally, attributing them to society in general, also correspond more directly to the concerns of opposing social classes. The dominant class, guardians of the social order, concerned with ensuring the transmission of its own privileges and social inequalities, responds more to the question of functions because it is more interested in maintaining the established order than in questioning its values and power. While a working class irritated with the barriers erected in the field of consumption, education, etc. existing mechanisms. for the reproduction of inequalities. On the other hand, it is a new ruling class that analyzes society more directly in terms of decision-making. It is much less interested than an old ruling class in the values and principles to be defended; much more interested than an old ruling class in the effectiveness of a strategy that allows it to control the transformation of society. As its main adversary, it finds new oppositional forces, centered on new problems and new social conflicts, in rebellion against the dominant ideology and full of passionate enthusiasm for the creation of collective protest action. The Junctions study examines social roles, the actor's behavior legitimately expected by his partner in a specific social activity. The role/role expectation dyad is a transcription in terms of social interaction of a norm and, therefore, an element of order. This functionalist distances himself from the domain of sociology if he replaces these networks of relationships with conformity or non-conformity to principles, values and essences embodied in a sovereign. The study of decisions is devoted to influence relations, the actor's comparative capacity to modify his partner's behavior or to be modified by him in terms of his own behavior. It departs from the field of sociology when the actors do not seem to belong to the same social whole, when their strategies can then be analyzed in terms of "game theory", a situation that is found in varying degrees throughout the study of intersocial relationships. and, more particularly, internationally. The study of actions is sociological insofar as it examines

Historicity

conflicts and, above all, class conflicts, conflicts over control and appropriation of society's ability to transform itself through its work; it ceases to be sociological if it opposes human values or a human nature to social domination, or if this conflict is conceived as an evasion of the order of social relations and as purely economic, for example. The study of controls highlights alienation, the contradiction between the behavior of the dominated actor corresponding to his situation and the behavior imposed on him by institutions and socialization in the service of the dominant order. It departs from the domain of sociology if it does not recognize the existence of anything other than this order, which it supposes closed, or this domination, which it supposes total, and does not recognize any other social dynamic than the dissociation of that internal order and the demands of the environment. My classification here is based on themes, not works. The sociologist who could fit any box precisely into this tabulation would be better defined by an ideological label than by a sociological school. In fact, all sociological thinking of any importance represents an effort to integrate a variety of themes, to escape an ideological vision by replacing the theme it prioritizes in a more general analysis. It would be just as false to believe that the sociologist can avoid the options indicated here by appealing to "objectivity" as it is to lock him rigidly within an ideological school. But it is not possible to advance towards a strictly sociological analysis, defined by its coherence and the interests it represents, if not to the extent that we recognize that each of us enters society through a particular door, a door conditioned by our specific social situation, our political options, our life stories. Everyone should know from the start where and what their first base is. What makes it possible to transcend the limitations from which we started is, above all, the recognition of the unity of sociological reasoning. In other words, what imprisons sociology within ideology is the refusal to recognize the specificity of a sociological point of view. This pons asinorum can be defined very simply. The specific task of sociology is to explain social behavior by the nature of the social interactions of which this behavior is one of the terms. Each of our four major themes is conducive to sociology because it studies a type of social interaction. It moves away from sociology if it is a pretext to resort to other types of reasoning. I will try in this book, like most sociologists, to get out of one of my "boxes" of sociological analysis to formulate the elements of a general method of procedure. But I must begin by indicating the cardinal point towards which my face is turned while I am on the starting line.

Chapter One

It is shareholder sociology that seems to me the best starting point and the most central contribution to general sociology. This advantage is related, in the first place, to the particular characteristics of more industrialized societies. Almost everything in them occurs as a result of decisions or social relationships. It is difficult to see how knowledge of rapidly changing societies could give a central place to the analysis of principles, values and their transmission, since these are things that evoke very slowly changing and non-industrial societies. or post-industrial societies. This observation clearly favors both the sociology of decision and the sociology of action. Indeed, one could see these two as inseparable; each is the "secret enemy" of the other. But the sociology of decisions necessarily identifies itself with the c/uss ruler, refusing to look beyond political mechanisms, refusing to recognize the existence of class relations and a system of domination, imposing an image of behavior social as self. Calculation and interested strategies that favor decision makers, moving away from what the social order rejects and excludes, by denying the existence of social movements. Only shareholder sociology is located directly at the level of social relations, upstream of the level of political decisions, and is therefore as aware of what is excluded as it is of what is effected, what is dominated and what dominates. Shareholder sociology is more directly opposed to the sociology of functions. Nothing could seem further from an analysis of society as an actor guided by values and norms, which establishes and controls its internal order and its relations with the environment, than the analysis of the action and conflicts through which society acts on yourself. leave its functioning, towards a beyond in the present, towards objectives that may be inside or outside history. Shareholder sociology is close to a sociology of controls, as the latter criticizes the sociology of functions by recognizing the power behind rules and the inequality behind differentiation. But he distances himself from it insofar as he apprehends the present as governed more directly by the future or the beyond than by the past. Shareholder sociology is, therefore, the one that is furthest from being a description of the social order, from identifying itself with the discourse of society itself, while the sociology of functions is the one that comes closest to this discourse and more easily confuses sociological analysis. with a reconstruction of the image of a society. it is formed through its institutions and its dominant ideology. All this should give the sociology of action the driving role in the construction of sociological analysis. The sociology of controls teaches how to unmask the social order; the study of decisions puts sociology in the foreground. Shareholder sociology could link these two types of progress and

Historicity

to build a critical sociology of society's production by itself, as opposed to the positivist analysis of society's consumption by itself by its members that defines a functionalist sociology. But, by its very role, shareholder sociology is exposed to greater dangers than other currents of sociological analysis. Any critical sociology runs the risk of becoming a prisoner of the ideology that opposes the ascendancy of the dominant, since the latter has the advantage of greater instrumentality, of possessing the “realism” of any actor who effectively manages a social whole. runs this risk more directly than a sociology of controls, which applies its critique to the observation of a consolidated established order. praxis and, more simply, by those of an epic philosophy of history. Consequently, the theoretical advantages that I attribute to the procedure or approach that I am going to present are never separable from the practical obstacles that it encounters. the closer one gets to the action, the more one runs the risk of being rejected, deceived and manipulated by the same actors, and the more one is tempted to confuse the meaning of the action and the conscience of the actor. This is why shareholder sociology entered the field late, constrained by its own ambitions and the resistance it is bound to arouse. It is at least useful for sociology as a whole to hear the goals this approach sets itself, the concepts it employs, and the social phenomena it gives shape and visibility through its analysis. It can be admitted that certain types of research are unaware of the theoretical orientations on which they are based. But sociology is too involved in the world of opinions and ideologies to easily dispense with the constant effort to define its approaches and criticize its own limitations. B.

From functionalist sociology to shareholder sociology

The formation of sociology accompanied the development of Western societies during the course of their industrialization. As this industrialization was initially dominated by a capitalist bourgeoisie whose economic achievements disrupted society, but whose actions were subject to almost zero social and political control, self-styled sociologists were often concerned firsthand and above all with the restoration of a society. certain social integration^ and, therefore, social control over economic activities. If economic analysis could shed light on the movement of society, would it not be the task of sociology to discover the necessary conditions of order? The question that haunted, and still haunts, what we might call classical sociology is this: under what conditions, through all its transformations?

Chapter One

tions and conflicts of interest, does a society maintain the unity that allows it to define laws, make its institutions work, educate new generations and manage its internal conflicts? In Western Europe, this line of questioning developed in parallel with a progressive institutionalization of labor disputes. The action of unions, the introduction of social laws and labor codes helped to reintroduce the idea of solidarity to which Durkheim gave lasting importance. In the United States, a nation formed by the more or less complete integration of successive waves of immigrants, and which managed to overcome its greatest crisis, the unity of society —supported in this case by the tremendous development of its legal and political institutions— seemed to many like the fact extraordinary whose explanation should guide sociological thinking. In Soviet society, and in countries whose development is controlled by a communist party, it is rather the strength of an ideological and political system that first imposes itself on the observer and brings to the fore the questions of integration, participation and citizen education. this order and this integration presuppose a perfect agreement between all parties; conflicts of interest must still exist, as social roles are differentiated and there is a hierarchy. But classical sociology considers that such conflicts occur within institutional mechanisms that, in turn, rest on a body of values and norms. The historical conditions of the formation of sociology explain, then, why sociology has seen society more often as an actor that exercises a certain control over its activities and organization, defining rights and duties, forms of authority and organization. This social and intellectual tradition has contributed much to our knowledge of society. But this contribution cannot be isolated and evaluated except at the price of a critical analysis, an analysis that will reveal not only how classical sociological thought belongs to a particular culturally and historically defined field, but also its political role. At the same time, the critique we must make is governed by a change in the sociologist's own position and a change in the political situation. Just as classical sociology developed along with the progressive institutionalization of conflicts produced by capitalist industrialization, any criticism of it is inseparable from the emergence of new social ruptures, new problems, new social movements. This renewal of sociology has two main aspects: first, the greater extension of the catchment area of sociological thought and, more broadly, of political events. Sociology, like history, was limited for decades to the study of the most "advanced" societies. They are still very inclined to call someone who studies Africa an Africanist and someone who studies Europe or North America a sociologist. But today it is impossible to go on seeing societies as

Historicity

more or less developed, neatly placed in various stages of growth. They are not like horses in a race, running faster or slower, starting before or after the other. They cannot be understood without some consideration of the relations of domination and dependence that unite them, or without consideration of the transformation and liberation movements that animate the dominated peoples. Secondly, within the dominant and rich societies themselves, the progress in the institutionalization of certain conflicts is being accompanied by new ruptures, by problems and movements that are still "savage/*"uncivilized". to its functioning and integration, but to its orientations and conflicts. Sociology must pay special attention to the new forms of power and conflict that appear before its eyes. of society's action on itself: the creation of a programmed society, industrialization of consumption and information, the expansion of the field of social conflicts, accelerated development programs and the revolutionary transformation of the great nations – sociology must begin to question its classic approach, which contradicts it consisted of placing the observer in front of a society conceived as a constituted totality, a monument of culture. If we consider the national "reality" as fundamental and, therefore, Therefore, the nation as a character, if we give greater importance to the legal norms that organize social life and the moral principles that sustain them and, finally, if we look for systems behind political or cultural units, we tend to see society as an entity , because our most common experience is that neither ourselves individually, nor the groups we are part of, have the capacity to change the rules of the social system . gambling, the conditions of economic life or cultural conventions. This type of representation is not favorable to sociology in principle. In order to mark the distance that separates society from the actors that inhabit it, there is a tendency to resort to a historical, legal or economic explanation of social facts./ What we could call classical or functionalist sociology has, however, contributed to maintain this kind of approach, introducing into it the most elementary requirements of sociological analysis. He claimed the right, with Durkheim, to explain the social by nothing but the social. But also, and consequently, it has presented society as a system organized around its values and its needs for integration, conflict management or adaptation to internal or external changes.

Chapter One

It is this image of society as an actor, as sovereign, advising and administering justice, laying down the law and waging war, educating its children and punishing deviants, that we must eliminate once and for all. We must overthrow the old conception of society, which society itself cannot use, in practice, except as an operation of ideological subjection. I will point out here three important aspects of this functionalist representation that I believe must be urgently eliminated from the thinking of sociologists. 1. The notion to which classical sociology always returns is that of values. But all forms of investigation of social interactions take us away from values. Should I remind you that political sociology and organization theory have shown us that decision systems —at least in our type of society— are not the application of principles, but the result of transactions, a fact that recognizes a certain heterogeneity of interests? It is about strategies and interests that we should be talking in this area, not about values. If we consider the functioning of the organizations themselves, this observation becomes even more evident; behavior is guided within them as much by technical constraints as by power relations or, more generally, by social relations. The closer we get to concrete social experience, the more the apparent unity of values explodes: on the one hand, the instrumentality of a society, that is, the internal characteristics of its productive forces, on the other, the social and political character of the relationships that guide its development. productive system and the management of society. For this reason, we cannot say that authority in the State and in modern business is functional, rational-legal, that is, in Weber's sense, bureaucratic. It is enough to consult the observations of the sociology of work to immediately see that rationalization is in no way separable from a social power whose intervention manifests itself in relations of authority that are neither entirely rational nor entirely legal. The notion of bureaucratic authority masks the gap and, at times, the contradiction that exists between a technique and a power. The notion involved is ideological. It is not just isolating a certain order of phenomena within the field of observation, which would be legitimate; it is to replace the unity of a discourse with a set of relations, tensions and contradictions. Organizational sociology made no progress until it got rid of this type of discourse. What then is the value system of a society? At the highest level, it is the unit of a discourse of the dominant classes or the dominant political forces of a society, a discourse whose function is to identify forms of social organization with technical activity, combining them in the notion of values. Social power then appears as the spirit or soul of society, and asserts that all social conflicts develop within a general consensus.

Historicity

The value system is nothing more than a more or less coherent ideology, always linked to social categories that have a certain power, that is, the ability to define the activities and gratifications of the members of society as a whole from their own goals. . and representations. But this ideology does not completely determine the categories of social practice. It exercises dominion over what can be called the discourse of society; does not account for all its aspects. Because that speech is also a debate and a discussion; in them the voice of the popular classes, of interest groups with access to the political system, of "professionals" who are creating rhetoric instead of ideology, etc., can be heard, even if faintly. It is essential to recognize that social practice as a whole, even when isolated from the complexity of a social formation, forms an uncontrolled and unintegrated whole and therefore represents class relations, struggles for political influence and all other types of social relations. interactions, despite the unification effort maintained in the name of values, principles or traditions, by the ruling class and its ideologues. For there to be a system of values that unifies social practice, it is necessary that society be totally dominated, politically and culturally, by a sovereign, be it Capital or the Central Committee. 2. It is also an ideological operation that makes it possible to assert that a society is governed by a coherent body of values. Are industrialized societies universalistic while others are particularistic? A totally arbitrary statement. Nationalisms are, in effect, broader particularisms than those restricted in number and extent by attachment to a community; Does this mean they are a form of universalism? Ethnocentrism is evident here, leading to an opposition between traditional and modern societies as if the former were "inferior" to the latter. It could be shown, by taking each of the standard variables that Talcott Parson defines (especially in Toward a General Theory of Action, Harvard University Press, 1951, and in Working Papers in the Theory of Action, Free Press, 1953) that every society experiences affective and affective-neutral, specific and diffuse, particularistic and universalistic, instrumental and consummatory, self-oriented and collectively oriented behavior. These notions make it possible to classify behaviors, but they cannot be used to define the totality of the cultural orientations of a society, much less to describe the evolution of societies. A society is not a ship steered by a pilot towards a known destination. 3. This double reduction, from society to a central actor and from the actors' orientations to a unified system of values, leads to a third limitation and

Chapter One

distortion of sociological analysis: it refuses to leave the field illuminated by institutions. What does not conform to the rules of these institutions is called disorganization, marginality, deviation, anomie. At no time does it occur to this sociology to tear down the official image of society and challenge the established order in the name of everything that does not conform to it. Social movements are mere manifestations of some kind of malfunction or unfortunate discrepancy in social organization. And even Robert Merton, who is much more aware that most of the dangers inherent in an excessively rigid functionalism, in his paradigm of social conduct (Social Theory and Social Structure, Free Press, 1957, pp. 131-94), new but beyond the recognition of the discrepancies between the acceptance of the ends and the acceptance of the means in a given society, what it leaves in an indeterminate land of nadie all conduct that rejects both the ends and the means, the more well the power and the organization. This positivist sociology is identified with the rules of social life. Just as in France knowledge of society was retarded by the authority of the State or the Church, just as it is practically impossible in dictatorships, so it cannot be limited, as in the United States particularly, by the authority of norms less linked to a central power, more internalized, of a more moral nature, so that sociology is placing itself more and more within the established order, or even making its own contribution to building the wall that, both internally and externally, protects the "civilized" against the "savages" "? ç.

Calculation and mask

This clear conscience enjoyed by classical sociology is now being attacked from two different sides: on the one hand, by a sociology that is more sensitive to social change and the decision-making mechanisms that guide it; on the other hand, by a critical sociology that draws attention to the presence in the social order of a construction at the service not of values but of the dominant class. I return here, after having dealt with a sociology of values, to the role played by a sociology of decisions and a sociology of controls. What I try to do is follow more precisely the path that leads from classical sociology to shareholder sociology through the other two currents of sociology, whose positive contributions and deficiencies must be pointed out. 1. In his early works, such as The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim (as A. Pizzorno pointed out in his "Lecture actuelle de Durkheim" in Archives europe'ennes de sociologie, 1963, pp. 1-36) is times close to a line of thought, most strongly developed by English radicalism, which today has regained great vitality. According to this line of thought, social order is not achieved through integration into a value system, but through efficient

Historicity

functioning of the representative institutions: they allow to eliminate the "pathological forms" of the division of the work. Society is not guided by values, not even by the demands of its own integration; it evolves pragmatically, from the negotiations and transactions that are established between the different groups of interests. Political and social laws, contracts and collective agreements define limited and temporary balances and guarantee the best possible adaptation of society to the constant changes in the environment. It is useless and even dangerous to appeal to values, to principles that manifest both the rejection of change and the maintenance of one or another type of absolutism. Value idealism must be replaced by pragmatic rationalism. This is a book/vision whose main merit is that it is a doctrine of change. But what seems to me to be confusing two orders of phenomena that must be kept distinct: the fact that in certain modern societies the field of negotiations and representative institutions expands does not allow us to conclude that a society is a political market, that power is nothing more is than influence and that there are no structural limits to the negotiations and pressures exerted by the interests of the groups. The state of a society is not entirely the result of its decisions; all claims are non-negotiable; in addition to political processes, and acting as their limits, there are both orientations that define a cultural and social field qualitatively different from all others, and relations of domination and power. There is no society that is not like an iceberg; the visible part, that of consciousness, decisions, transactions, is smaller than the invisible part, that of the impossible, the forbidden, repression, domination. No mechanism of planning, of conscious harmonization, of compromise can integrate all the conflicts into a whole. The analysis centered on integration reduces society to its forms of social organization, division of labor and, simultaneously, transforms differentiation, specialization and hierarchization into an order that cannot have any other meaning than the determined maintenance of the established order, masking the reality of power, inequality, repression. A purely "political" sociology, on the other hand, centered on the study of negotiations and decisions, dissolves social structure in social change, thus asserting continuity within change and deliberately neglecting the qualitative leaps that must be made, one way or another. other. otherwise, in the course of any long-term change process. This "political" sociology marks an important advance in functionalist sociology. By investigating societies that are in a process of rapid change, which they are trying to dominate, it is no longer directed, like the classical school, towards the investigation of the conditions of an order that could still recover, despite the convulsions of industrial capitalism.

Chapter One

The zation no longer conceives of society as based on principles and as agencies that teach those principles and apply them; defines it in terms of its operations and thus follows a method that allows a direct analysis of the company's operating mechanisms. In practice, however, the appeal to values and social integration is replaced by identification with cyclists and their representation of society. Already in the 19th century, liberal ideologues wanted all workers to behave like entrepreneurs, seeking their own benefit, assuming risks and initiatives, in accordance with economic rationality, which was equivalent to denying the domination relations exercised by the employer over the wage earner. . . Today, in the same way, by focusing attention on decision-making, an opposition is inevitably established between those who are capable of making decisions, choices, deliberations, negotiations, and those who are bound by tradition, rigid, obstructed by habits and principles and can only appear as a mass that must have an elite that leads them to change. This sociology reduces the functioning of society to the interaction of actors, in the same way that historical studies have so long told us of its kings and captains, its saints and heroes, leaving the immense multitude in the shadows "inactive". . 2. Diametrically and usefully opposed to this interactionism, we find the critical sociology of social controls, which sees in the categories of social practice not the formal expression of values and norms, but the maintenance of inequalities and power. This sociology, faithful to the Marxist critique of the "fetishism*" of economic categories, recognizes in those domains apparently most distant from social domination and production the mark of the dominant ideology and its work of legitimizing existing inequalities and privileges. indispensable procedure without which pre-sociological notions inevitably regress: appeals to the "natural" differences between men, to the "natural" criteria of development or pay, to the independence of cultural facts from the social "frames" in which they are inserted . are inserted etc. But can we be content with seeing society simply as a system of domination without finding ourselves caught again between two equally deplorable solutions? The first consists of appealing against everything that is institutionalized and organized to a human nature that only reveals itself in the spontaneity and constant transcendence of the established order, an idea that is always about to emerge in a sociology of which it constitutes, in fact, the negation: the social organization, which is nothing more than the product of power and ifs.

Historicity

ideology, can be destroyed by rebellion, thus making it possible to return or achieve a society in which exchange is replaced by use, instituted by instituted, the search for signs of wealth and status for the satisfaction of basic living expenses of the man. need. In whatever tone these themes are presented, they never express more than nostalgia for a social philosophy whose splendor cannot hide the fact that it is precisely what sociology must transcend in order to exist. The second solution returns to the functionalism that was supposedly defeated. This sociological school, which speaks of domination, could use the term stratification more simply. Why accuse the ideology of a ruling class, he wonders, when all that is needed is recognition of the dominance of values and norms? That differentiation and hierarchization exist in all domains of social organization has never been denied by anyone; Why conclude from observing their presence that society is governed by a single class, of which everyone constantly talks without ever defining it in terms of its decisions, its interests, its productive role? Just as the sociology of decisions dissolves the system into the actors and their relationships, the sociology of controls dissolves the actors into the system, which may be acceptable if it is only a matter of understanding how a system is maintained, but which ceases to be . whether it is a question of explaining its nature and reason for being, how it is produced and how it works. d.

Towards a sociology of the shareholder

In conclusion, we must recognize that it is much more difficult to find a way out of functionalist sociology – without abandoning it completely – than all those who adopt such a tone and criticize it suppose. Which brings us to another look at our outline of the main streams of sociological analysis presented earlier in this chapter. The sociology of decisions and the sociology of controls are less orientations of sociology comparable to a functionalist or shareholder sociology e) than islands in the middle of the river that runs between the other two. At every moment, sociology has to make a choice between what could be called a sociology of collective consciousness, which is above all a sociology of order and its maintenance, and a shareholder sociology, which is also the sociology of historicity and relationships. . The sociology of decisions is already a sociology of action, but it remains a sociology of order insofar as it recognizes the open market as the best of all possible worlds and defines social actors according to their place in social organization, rather than trying to discover how the latter was produced by the relationships between the actors. The sociology of controls seems to break with the clear conscience of

^ .

f r

Chapter One

classical sociology, but it is nothing more than the opposition of His Majesty the Functionalist, stripping himself of all possible means to understand the production of social order. However, both sociologies, by their very opposition, pose an insoluble problem for functionalist sociology. For the latter, actor and system are inseparable. The actor plays a role defined by the norms and values of the system. The sociology of controls tells us that actors do not play the role they think they do, that actors are masked, the data loaded, the social order a comedy that always ends in deceit. The sociology of decisions also destroys the classical image of the system; it replaces the absolute with the relative, the immutable with change, values with transactions. How to simultaneously account for these images of social life: on the one hand, a society that is produced through its changes and decisions, empirically and under the guidance of a ruling elite; on the other, a social order that is the mask that hides systematic domination and the repression that accompanies it? We are forced to advance, together, two apparently contradictory propositions: (D a society is a whole defined and delimited by certain social and cultural orientations that are not property of a category of actors, but of the field of social relations, and (2) A society is a whole, made of social relations, and is produced by actors through their forms of conflict and cooperation. These two propositions are only compatible if, instead of conceiving society as an order, we recognize that it is defined by because by its historicity and hot for its functioning, for its ability to self-produce itself and not for its reproductive organs, as this first step allows you to dissociate the orientations of historicity from the values of the social order and promote class relations and domination between as a wedge. This is why the sociology of values must be rejected as strongly as possible. The weakness of the sociology of decisions and l The sociology of controls is that the No q question this image of society as a functional system, market or ideology, supported by functionalist thinking. Historicity is not a set of values, as it defines guidelines that are not put into practice and do not become socially functional if not through the relations between the classes that struggle to control them. Society is not pure class domination or an order entirely at the service of values. About that double negative statement and positive propositions! implies, this entire book is constructed. Social practice always simultaneously refers to class domination and the orientations of historicity. The sociology of decisions must suppress the system to understand the

Historicity

actors; the sociology of controls must suppress the actors to display the system. But the first reintroduces the system by identifying it with the | interests of the elites, and the second leads us to the functionalist analysis of the system due to its inability to analyze class relations. Let's end with this dilemma: 1 historicity is the wager of class relations; it does not govern social organization without being marked by the dominance of the ruling class; but the dominated are not reduced to mere extras in the spectacle of the dominant class. There are enough exclusions, prohibitions and repressions, but also enough ruptures, debates and social movements, so that we can easily discern, behind the established order and its reproduction, the class struggles through which historicity is transformed into organization. . And we immediately discover that the established opposition between a sociology of order and a sociology of movement has been overcome. The sociology of movement, isolated from order, refers to a sociology of decisions, while the sociology of controls is limited to the social order. Historicity is not pure movement; it is not a force for change, but the constitution of a field of collective experience. Furthermore, the action of each class is not a simple desire for change, but a struggle against a given order. The very nature of industrialized societies, as of all societies engaged in a conscious effort at development, purges social analysis of all recourse to essences, to values. The mistake would be to believe that this disappearance of the metassocial guarantees of the social order must lead to a conception of society as a simple network of decisions, changes or operations destined to maintain and reproduce order. Society must be conceived as a system, but whose specificity is that of being capable of historicity, of producing its own functioning condition based on guidelines, creating a model of knowledge, accumulation and apprehension of creativity. Such is the central idea of the sociology that I call shareholder: society is not reduced to its functioning or its adaptation to an environment; it is produced, so that there is a fundamental tension between the historicity of a society and the functioning or reproduction of a collectivity, of a "social formation". that manifests historicity, but which is also a particular historical unit and a social organization that functions according to the norms and requirements of an internal coherence. I am not sure that my placing of a sociology of historical action in relation to other streams of sociological analysis defines it more clearly. Some might even chafe at an approach that seems to put everyone in their place while presenting itself as a final synthesis. I hope no one interprets the spirit in which these pages were written as one of conquest. I simply try to define an approach and show that it corresponds to the most specific of sociological analysis. But

Chapter One

what may constitute your interest certainly constitutes your weakness. Ultimately, it would be fair to answer that this shareholder sociology of mine has no content of its own, that by dint of transcending all others it has been reduced to existing in those undefined no-man's lands that serve to separate other particulars. but well-founded ways of analyzing themselves. Without being too pessimistic, I recognize that it is more reasonable to look at how the parts of a society - or the parts of a discourse - fit together than to look back from the established order to that interdependence of tensions and conflicts by which I define society's self-production. And yet, how can we not say that the time has come, at a time when the present is commanded more by the future than by the past, to give priority to the way in which a society produces itself more than to the means by which it itself reproduce; And how, at the same time, not to take a stand against a sociology of decisions or “planning” that is not just a set of often notable achievements, but, above all, the ideological weapon of the new ruling class? What I am certainly not trying to do here is to capture the whole of sociology in some imaginary textbook, its separate chapters written for the most part by different authors, none of them knowing what the finished work would be, and inadvertently lending their authority to a global conception that they do not subscribe. In much simpler terms, I am simply saying that when defining a particular procedural approach, it should be openly acknowledged that it will conflict with others. Furthermore, I hope that my frankness has the double advantage of provoking discussions and serving as an antidote to the laziness of all those who call themselves sociologists without ever asking themselves what sociology means. d.

The birth of sociology

one.

The invisible hand withdraws

Sociology could not be born until a society was formed with an entirely "practical" cultural model that excluded any recourse, any upward reference to a transcendent order, to what I have called the metassocial guarantees of the social order. The European industrial revolution of the 19th century marked a first stage in the emergence of sociology. The world of essences was being attacked by society's growing capacity to act on itself and transform itself. But industrial society, as it was then formed, still does not appear as the actor of its own transformation. It still refers to free initiative, to the market and its laws, to an invisible

historicity

hand that resembles a god or a sovereign. And those who denounce the capitalist profit that hides behind the market refer, in turn, to work as creative energy, whose progress is in contradiction with the domination of the bourgeoisie. Capitalist industrial society saw the birth of economic analysis, but sociology could not emerge until growth appeared as mobilization of social resources, as a set of decisions and no longer as submission to laws, and even, also, society's control over itself manifested itself in the policies of economic and social intervention, as well as in the possibility of totalitarian regimes, or even in revolutions capable of completely overthrowing a society. In our own century, sociology can finally assert its existence. Sociology, which starts from the construction of the concept of historicity, thus allows us to go beyond historicism. By conceiving the "meaning" of a society as its work on itself, the construction of an experience, shareholder sociology frees itself from all recourse to the meaning of history and continues the great intellectual transformation initiated by Marx when he broke with positivism. // refuses to explain the social by the metasocial and also refuses to consider society as a machine defined by the principles of its functioning. Again, both idealism and naturalism are to be avoided. Society cannot be reduced to the interrelation of its elements; but if it acts on itself through knowledge, accumulation and its cultural model, in a word, through its historicity, it is not because it is governed by the designs of providence, by the progress of enlightenment, or by the rise of the national state, but simply through its own work, its own ability to construct a "state of nature" and a type of social organization. It is because today's industrialized societies have a theoretically unlimited capacity to transform themselves and the possibility of totally self-destructing that we can no longer prioritize a sociology of order. Sociology is no longer organized around values, but around social relations; its investigations are less concerned with the laws that control its operation than with the process of action. But to reduce industrialized societies to their historicity would be as false as to reduce primitive societies to their functioning. What makes the acceleration of social change most evident is the ever-faster dissolution of what were once called "institutions." Jurists and administrators must recognize that the law is no longer conceived as the expression of sovereignty and the general interest. Civilizations—and nations as well—are discovering that they no longer have "spirit." Men are becoming actors, they are being uprooted from the domain of rules, imperatives, customs. What disappears, therefore, is the image of society as a family home with thick walls, a hearth where the fire burns in the hearth, illuminating the pictures of ancestors hanging on the walls, in

Chapter One

which: a culture and established forms of social relations are transmitted from generation to generation. In place of all humanisms, we now see the emergence of a growing historicity in confrontation with the natural being of man. We are simultaneously discovering that man is part of nature and that he is different from the rest of living beings. We are breaking down the barriers that once separated human thought, animal behavior and machines; but at the same time we are capturing man's sociogenetic capacity. Nature and anti-nature. We are both. And instead of throwing all the weight to one side or the other of the scale, it is better to recognize that what is essential is the union of these two aspects of human reality. This creates an image of society different from all that preceded it, images that have always defined society by its principles, by its essence, or by its place in an evolution seen as the bearer of meaning. Sociology need not claim the whole territory of the social sciences. It asserts its right only in its dialogue with that grouping of the natural sciences that fits into anthropology. One cannot identify the two any more than separate them. Sociology also cannot get lost in the model of knowledge that biology has created. Or to isolate him from that model, as that would be comforting his old idealistic ways. Sociology is a science of man, although in the past it has often reinforced and justified man's submission to the metasocial guarantees of the social order. He looked for laws to explain social action outside of that action; he subjected human behavior to divine laws, to the laws of princes, to the laws of the market. And in doing so, he returned to his main task: that of refusing to consider any social fact as a thing, rejecting the social situation itself and revealing, behind practice and discourse, society's action on itself through creation. . of a field of historicity and class conflicts. This transformation of sociological analysis runs up against obstacles less intellectual than political. The more the ruling classes' capacity for action extends, the more strongly they impose their ideology, which presents their action as positive and rational, and which consequently identifies and fuses the direction of social change, the results of political deliberations, controls as how a whole and the internal coherence of media groups. The company presents itself as a company, an organization that ensures its own growth by combining mechanisms for adapting to a changing environment with maintaining its own integration. The ruling classes always have a rationalizing and integrating vision of society. Shareholder sociology, on the contrary, because it refuses to identify

Historicity

Society with its rulers, by recognizing the central role of class conflict, is constantly attentive to what the social order represses and destroys, as well as the interference of power in social organization. Whether they recognize it or not, social adversaries are speaking the language of sociology for the first time. The rulers know that their role is no longer to dominate nature, but to manage organizations, networks of social relationships, that the efficiency of the economy depends on the forecasting, decision-making, adaptation and innovation capabilities of complex groups. Gone are the days when an organization—factory, office, regiment, university, hospital—was a tool in the hands of a leader and encountered no (recognized) problem other than resistance from an adversary or raw material. We are no longer in the world of engineers and entrepreneurs, but in that of managers and technocrats. On the other hand, a new awareness of truly social problems is emerging among the masses of addicts: be it the migration of workers, relations between the sexes or age groups, the conditions of urban life, forms of authority and, more broadly, the power to guide and direct change, it is more directly in social terms than in legal or economic terms that claims and rejections are expressed. The interest of the ruling class resides in fostering the belief that this change implies an increase in rationality and a growing autonomy in the face of the various problems posed by the difficulties of adapting to a rapidly changing society. But it is a bad response to this propaganda to close ourselves in tired analyzes and believe that social problems are only serious when they can be reduced to economic interests or to confrontations over the form of institutions. It is in sociological terms, and therefore in terms of social relations and the action that society exerts on itself, that the new forms of social domination, exclusion and repression, conflicts and social movements must be understood. However, the attempt to do so is met with great resistance, especially in a country like France, where the characteristics of industrial or pre-industrial societies remain relatively marked, so it seems daring to insist on trends and needs not yet experienced by everyone. But must sociology wait until a type of society is already in decline before daring to examine it? B.

Beyond historicity?

This portrayal of sociology and the social conditions of its formation, however, invites a critique that must be duly considered. Is it not, for all its protestations, an extreme form of nineteenth-century historicism? It is not culturally linked to the specific experience of

Chapter One

societies in an exceptional phase of growth? And it will not, therefore, be obsolete, now that we find ourselves at the beginning of a post-industrial society in which the search for new balances has once again become essential, after the convulsions introduced by a phase of economic development that must now decline, since This threatening the biological conditions necessary for the existence of societies? Isn't it time to recognize that the most economically advanced countries are about to enter a post-historic phase? I do not rule out this hypothesis. It is possible to imagine a new type of society, concerned with its balance, with its functioning, with its integration, and whose investments would be absorbed by the conditions of survival or "happiness" and no longer by those of growth. Nothing allows us to say that societies will become increasingly "historical", and perhaps we are witnessing the end of a long period dominated by accumulation, capital, books and what American students call "dictatorship". the ego". But this new naturalism, although it is opposed to the ethic of production characteristic of industrial society, departs both from this ethic and from an acceptable conception of the relations between man and nature. Previous societies left us the image of man dominating and "civilizing" nature. All the metassocial guarantees of the social order share this very general representation: man rules over woman, mind over body, technique over habit, intelligence over emotions, etc. The list can go on. indefinitely. A spiritual principle is being imposed on the material world, which is the world of disorder, of the immediate, of the variable. Opposing these images to that of a human society belonging to the natural world, subject to its balances and its "laws", means maintain, even reinforce, the opposition between man and nature. But in this case it is the ecological balance that is good and it is in the human that we must look for the diabolical, the destructive forces of order. in post-industrial society, in an environment dominated by complex organizations and technologies, the Promethean myth of industrial society must not be revived, much less replaced by a naturalization of man. On the contrary, it should instill in us the idea that human society, whatever it may be, builds its own environment, that every environment is technical and cultural, that man is nature, yes, but with its own characteristics, among the main ones that it is precisely this ability to build their relationship with the environment and their social organization instead of simply receiving them. The opposition between spiritualism and naturalism must be replaced by a sociology that is primarily concerned with the work of human societies. Rather, we should consider the new naturalism as the counterpart of the

Historicity

the utopia of the ruling class. This reduces society's guidelines to its functioning. The counter-utopia counteracts the dominance of the ruling classes with an appeal to identity, expression, pleasure. The very opposition of these two representations invites us to consider them as an aspect of the class struggle, of the clash between their respective utopias in a society that dedicates more of its product to investment than any other society in history and that, in this sense, it is the furthest away from being a consumer society. It is because the new conflicts and new social movements corresponding to post-industrial society are not yet strongly organized that the "naturalist" utopias are so evident. Was it not the same in the early days of industrial society, when economic liberalism and utopian socialism clashed before the organization of the labor movement, before the recognition of the importance of class struggle and the nature of industrial capitalism? , in addition to "modernization"? The great cultural upheaval that became more visible as soon as it reached the dominant classes marks the exhaustion of industrial society and its replacement not by an equilibrium society, but by a post-industrial society in which society's capacity for action on itself is limited. decreasing. another leap forward. , and in "this one is learning to define TtselTas as a whole!" fiscal 1)7Systems and actions. Certainly, sociology must criticize itself for going beyond the typical modes of analysis of industrial society, but the most important thing is to shout loud and clear that the pain that sociology is suffering at this moment is not its death throes, but its pain. From childbirth. This book is intended to be a critical reflection on the practice of sociology, critical first because it tries to divert sociological work from obsolete or secondary paths to essentials and, second, because it questions the dominance of socially and politically dominant forces. sociological knowledge. But these criticisms occur within a defense of sociological knowledge, since societies with strong historicity can and should know themselves and other societies through the use of sociology. Historicity has never been as dominant as the mode of existence of societies today. Never, therefore, has a sociology of historical action, of development, of class interaction been so necessary. I.

From guidelines to practice

The study of historical action is not all there is to sociology. It is only the first step of the analysis, but the one that governs its general direction. We must, at the same time, follow the movement that leads from the historical experience of a society to its system of social organization and control, and also constantly remember the presence of historical action and its problems at the functional level of the various aspects of social organization. our analysis

Chapter One

It must, therefore, be governed by two principles: the differentiation of the various levels of analysis of social reality and the hierarchy of these levels. one.

Institutional processes

If the study of historical action is not in itself the whole of sociology, it is first of all because it does not examine concrete social wholes. Speaking of manorial society as a social and cultural system does not exempt us from examining France or England as kingdoms and studying the functioning of their institutions within these political units. The second stage of sociological analysis, after the study of historical action, is therefore the analysis of the institutional system, which can also be called the political system. The new element introduced here is the existence of an organized system of social control. The internal structure of the field of historical action transforms at this point into a set of social mechanisms through which the rules of collective activity are defined. If we place at the center of the analysis the body of values and norms that define a culture and a society, institutions emerge as the formal expression of their norms, and sociology must ask itself about the spirit of laws and regulations. On the other hand, a purely contractual conception of institutions can be defended, presenting them as limited and temporary contracts made between social groups, each of which seeks to maximize its advantages at the lowest cost. Faced with these two conceptions, it seems to me that the institutional system transforms historical action and the social conflicts that occur in it into a body of decisions and laws, at the same time that it has a certain autonomy based both on the mismatch between a field of historicity and a collectivity. politics and also about the internal problems of integration and adaptation of this collectivity. Institutions must be conceived here, not as organized social life, but as mechanisms for reaching legitimate decisions within a political unit. This is why I overlap the terms institutional and political, thus indicating that the specific role of the institutional system is to combine the unity of political management and the representation of divergent or conflicting social interests. The institutional or political integration of a society is always limited. First, by the domination that imposes anticipated limits to all deliberations and decisions and, second, by non-negotiable protests. The result of the political system is the separation of the legal from the illegal and, therefore, the maintenance of what is considered order and also the repression of everything that is rejected as out of order. B.

social organization

This definition of the institutional or political system leads to a third level of analysis, that of social organization or, if we prefer, organizations. This

Historicity

These are groups in which we find, on the one hand, the exercise of an authority that defines rules of conduct and possesses the means to ensure social integration and sanction deviations and, on the other hand, the application of those historical and class. action.relationships that characterize the type of society in which organizations occur. It is fundamental here not to identify what is a level of analysis with a concrete reality. An industrial company is certainly an industrial company, a company in which authority is exercised and functions and statutes, reward and punishment mechanisms are defined. But there may be an institutional system in which both the board and the unions negotiate to make certain decisions. And, above all, the company is an essential element in the historical action of an industrial society, it is the place where the productive forces and class relations develop. Industrial sociology has devoted most of its efforts to studying the relationships between these three levels of analysis: certain workers' demands are related to the position of individuals or groups within organizations, while others question the political and economic, institutional system of the company itself. , and others are a manifestation of conflict between classes whose existence and nature can only be defined at the level of the field of historicity. As can be clearly seen the hierarchy of levels of analysis and, at the same time, their relative autonomy within a single specific unit of observation. The great interest of research on organizations —industrial, administrative, scientific or otherwise— derives precisely from the fact that it makes it possible to study the interaction between historicity*, the political process and organizational functioning, both in social and social terms. . slfuation and the actors. The same type of analysis can be applied to realities even larger than organizations, such as collectivities like a city or a nation. This plurality of levels of analysis within the same community has two consequences. The first and most obvious is that the totality of social behavior observable in the functioning of social organization cannot be analyzed exclusively with the help of concepts conceived exclusively for the study of social organization. Sociological terminology incorrectly uses the concept of role. It must be recognized that only a limited part of social behavior involves roles. There are no fixed roles, except to the extent that interacting actors accept the norms that define their mode of interaction. This is the case of the technical division of labor. We speak of a team when this distribution of roles within a group is recognized, accepted and justified by the positive value accepted as belonging to the performance of a community task. The images that immediately come to mind are those of the surgical or medical team, or even the crew of a ship or plane. One can also think of a school, insofar as it appears as an organ of socialization, which presupposes that knowledge

Chapter One

and the attitudes transmitted in the teaching process are accepted by both teachers and students as a given. But these same examples demonstrate the limitation of this type of reasoning. Roles also depend on some method of assigning them and on how authority is exercised. Consequently, the type of participation in the decision-making system determines certain attitudes towards roles that cannot be defined in terms of role. The importance of informal organization, at the same time marginal and contrary to formal organization, shows the reality of this "political" behavior, which is no longer governed by reference to common norms, but is in fact an element of contestation of those rules, by withdrawal, argumentation and negotiation, or rebellion. Even more profoundly, members of an organization can challenge its power system. Such is the nature of class struggle: it manifests itself in the conflict of social organization whose raison d'être resides in the field of historicity and, therefore, in its most "abstract" level. This brings us directly to the second observation. The social control that is exercised within an organization is not the direct expression of cultural values and social norms, but the refraction of class interaction through the institutional system. being resides in earlier levels of analysis. It is at the same time an instrument of integration and an instrument of constriction. Consequently, many behaviors that seem dysfunctional if situated at the level of the organization itself, take on a very different meaning if they are linked to political struggles or to changes in the historicity of a society and in class relations A strike, or more generally an opposition movement or Protest disrupts a community, has an adverse effect on its "normal" functioning, but can be an important element of historical action or within the political system. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the autonomy of the levels of analysis than these disparities between the meaning that the same behavior can have at each level. These disparities cannot be overcome by a vague appeal to a general logic or a fundamental line of social development. ç.

Hierarchy and Autonomy of the Levels of Analysis

Thus, the study of social organization always has two aspects. On the one hand, it refers to media systems, to techniques. It examines the interdependence of these means and the mechanisms that regulate the balances and changes in the functioning of these systems.

Historicity

Consequently, it recognizes the existence of a social behavior linked to the place that the actor occupies within a differentiated and hierarchical organization. Concepts such as anomie, differential receptivity to socialization, relative deprivation, role conflict, latent function, to name just a few of the most widely used, belong to this type of analysis and represent the positive aspect of functionalism. On the other hand, it must consider the rules of organization and the mechanisms that govern its functioning as an expression of political relations inscribed in a social domination. This complementarity of the two points of view is already manifested at the level of political institutions. The latter are, at the same time, an instrument for reinforcing social domination – which masks the private character of their interests behind the generality and objectivity of laws and constitutions – and a place for negotiation and management of changes. They often have enough autonomy for political forces not to be purely and simply a translation of social interests and for the political system to institutionalize change. This autonomy can become pathological if the political system fails to interpret the great debates and social conflicts; on the other hand, it can disappear if the gap between the ruling class and the political system is replaced by their fusion in the omnipotence of an absolutist state. France is a curious example of a national society that has experienced, and still lives, a perpetual balance between these two extreme situations, so that its political institutions have the simultaneous appearance of an absurd and irrelevant game, not only for revolutionary movements, but also for those in power, and of being reduced to the apparatus of a state that is reinforcing and hardening the action of a ruling class too weak or too enmeshed in the defense of the past to act on its own. At the level of social organization, this duality is much more marked, as it is the one that exists between power and techniques, but it can also happen that it leads either to a dissociation or to a fusion. There is dissociation when bureaucratization appears, that is, when the internal functioning of an organization ceases to be guided by adaptation to the environment or by the problems and conflicts of historicity. Fusion occurs, on the other hand, when techniques are nothing more than the mask of ideology and power. This is more likely to happen in organizations responsible for cultural reproduction, and particularly within the education system. Both institutions and organizations depend, then, on the field of historicity, which thus penetrates social organization. But, again, both at the organizational and institutional levels, actions occur that tend to isolate these levels from the domain of historicity, in order to achieve either a pure adaptation of a political society to its changes.

Chapter One

environment, or a pure reproduction of social organization. The functioning of any level of social reality outside the field of historicity is always subject to a tension between the intervention of historicity and, in opposition to it, social reproduction. d.

conflicting creation

The sociology of functions and the sociology of controls are therefore partners in warfare. Both share an emphasis on social integration, one is positivist and accepts society's discourse about itself, the other is critical and sees the unity of society not in consensus but in domination. The first should be more vigorously contested, as it ignores the problems of historicity and those of the political system, reducing them to the existence of a supposedly coherent and accepted code of conduct. But the second runs the risk of leading to an excessively schematic and, therefore, ideological analysis, by neglecting the autonomy of techniques and, above all, by failing to recognize that these techniques are the projection of historicity itself, of the production of society. by knowledge and by the cultural model, at the level of organizations. Society is not closed, it is not fully integrated by values or power. At the level of the organizations themselves, the dialectic of historicity and class conflicts is pursued in the very praxis of social movements. What determines a concrete society is its field of historicity Social relations can only be understood within an experience, which is not a point or a segment of a line of development b, but a whole, qualitatively different from others, thus how models, particular types of knowledge, types of accumulation and cultural models are different from each other. But this whole cannot be identified with a social order except, first, to the extent that the ruling class fully identifies itself with its historicity, that is, it is not confronted by the social movement of a popular class; secondly, to the extent that the political system is reduced to the management of the State apparatus by this ruling class; and, finally, to the extent that the instrumentality of society is entirely reduced to the exercise of power. Totalitarian societies come closest to this image, portrayed in tragic terms in works of sociological fiction such as Orwell's. But it would be equally false to conceive of society as a completely open set of class conflicts, political arguments and demands, in which social movements representing opposing classes are in constant confrontation or on almost equal terms as a power and a counterpower. Social relations are limited, on the one hand, by political calculations and the internal coherence of technical systems e. on the other, by the logic of a mode of domination that operates simultaneously in the economic, political-legal and cultural spheres. However, this social domination can never be all-inclusive. To

Historicity

At the same time that it builds a social order and tries to insert all the actors in it in a way that fits their private interest, it also excludes, represses and even negotiates with rejection or revolt. Society cannot appear open unless, in addition to its principles, rules and functions, the sociologist can discover the behaviors of opposition, defense and protest that manifest themselves more often unconsciously and disorganized than in the form of movements. . The wage earner does not just behave according to the logic imposed on him by capitalist or technocratic power. He slows down, skips class, creates an informal organization, daydreams, rebels, forms unions. The organization of work in its concrete reality is, ultimately, nothing more than the direct and "rationalized" expression of the bosses' power. Even the educational system, even more directly linked to the dominant ideology, is never completely reduced to this ideology, because it is a vehicle of knowledge, not just of values, because it depends on a state in which non-dominant categories exert an influence. because its professional rhetoric remains distinct from the ideology of the ruling class, because the age groups within it resist authority and its norms. Order never reigns without limits. Society is always crossed by rejections, revolts, conflicts; it is constantly contested and constantly repressed, which is enough to indicate the inadequacy of all conceptions of society, whether as a machine made of interdependent parts, or as an ideological construction. Every society is dominated by an order that is that of the ruling class, but the dominance of this order is limited by its own historicity, political institutions and technical needs. And the dominated class always makes use of these three checks on power to maintain its resistance and organize its opposition. Shareholder sociology would be doomed to destruction if it did not recognize both the existence of domination and its limits and the forms of opposition that these limits make possible. He does not believe that a system of domination cannot be transformed or destroyed except outside or through the play of its natural contradictions; nor does he believe that a society's orientations are solely the result of influence, negotiation, and a pragmatic adaptation to the changing demands of an environment. He conceives society as a field of conflicting creation. At this point, it may be possible to see how a sociology of historicity makes the analysis of change difficult, but at the same time provides the means for linking the study of change with that of social structure. It makes the analysis of change difficult because it is synchronously situated and is denied from a conception of social evolution. But the sociologist would only imprison himself in the whole that he is.

Chapter One

build if you defined it by your operation. It would then have no other recourse but to explain the change by external causes, which boils down to either giving no explanation at all -since no relationship can be established between a change in the environment and an internal change- or adopting a linear form. view of evolution in complete contradiction with the point of view adopted at the beginning. If, on the other hand, the distance and adjustment that separate a field from the historicity of a social organization and, even more, from the life of a concrete and, therefore, heterogeneous collectivity, allow us to introduce an analysis of change that continues to depend on the general conception of the social structure it employs. But this issue can only be approached after an analysis of the various levels of social reality and also of the forms of social action most directly linked to historicity: class relations and social movements. F.

Actors and Systems

one.

From actor to social interaction

Shareholder sociology states that social behavior must be understood in its guidelines. It rejects any opposition between the fundamental reality of economic relations and the representations derived from those relations that seem to govern them artificially. But he also categorically refuses to accept the establishment of social relations as a whole within a framework of systematized values and norms. Historicity is an action of society on itself, but society is not an actor; He has no values or power. Values and norms belong to actors who act in the field of historicity, to social classes. The movement underlying these analyzes should now be more evident. From historical action to organization, passing through the political system, our analysis goes from the experience of a society to its internal management, from its practice to its conscience, from social relations to power, from the problems of a society to the solutions it organizes. The analysis in no way starts from an absolute principle, from an appeal to freedom and to a subject that seeks to transcend his alienations in order to rediscover his unity or affirm his inexhaustible power of transcendence and negativity. On the contrary, it starts from work, from the creative activity through which a society defines its field by transforming its environment, constituting a state of nature and a set of cultural and social orientations, to finally arrive at regulation and integration mechanisms. This sociological analysis is always threatened by doctrinal reductions. They confuse society with one of its levels or one of its analytical elements. For some, society is reduced to its operating system, and the dynamism of

Historicity

historical action is replaced by the supposed existence of a body of values and norms that unify and control all social life; constitutes an ideology of the established order. For others, society is nothing more than a political system, a decision mechanism, which simultaneously excludes the internal problems of organizations, linked to the interdependence of its elements, as well as the problems of historical action, from its guidelines. the class relations that express it. Finally, there are those for whom society is entirely dynamic. They are all forces of production, social relations and cultural models, as if the political system and the functioning of organizations did not have their own coherence, as if all social behavior contributed directly to modifying the historical field, as if society did not have inertia. -\ But it would be a bad way to oppose such ideological simplifications to settle for a pluralism of methods and levels of analysis. The essential task of sociology is to accompany the transition from creation to organization and also to seek, in the various forms of resistance to the constraints and limitations of order, factors for change and innovation. There is a hierarchy between the levels of analysis that I distinguish. This does not mean that one is more important than the others or that it isolates four determining factors." It is inadmissible to say that this or that category of social facts - the form of production or the "system of ideas" - another category of facts, be it beliefs religious or economic activity. It should already be clear that a level of analysis and a category of social facts corresponding to a practically defined area of social life cannot be identified. The hierarchy of levels indicates, on the contrary, the forms of social organization can only be be understood by reference to the political decisions of a society, which are limited and oriented by a system of historical action and by an interaction of classes.— -I The sociology of historicity, because it is a sociology of action, encounters the difficulty typical of all approaches that analyze the meaning of behavior: the meaning is not for the observer prisoner of the consciousness of the objects? actors? of the observer does not depend for that very reason from the position of the actors themselves? This difficulty becomes more and more obvious as one focuses on the more intentional types of social behavior and, above all, on social movements. The labor movement or national independence movement aims to achieve specific objectives, to define its own situation, its own nature and that of its opponents. Is the sociologist not reduced to being only its memoirist or spokesman? Sociology has generally responded to this objection by asserting that its object is not the act of social interaction. The meaning you are parsing cannot

Chapter One

be confused with the actor's consciousness for the simple reason that it must account for the behavior of two or more actors involved in a social interaction. This answer is the only possible one. And, moreover, it is necessary to delimit it still further, for in this general form it does not definitively eliminate the objection. In practice, the relationship between the actors can be conceived as a reciprocity of consciences. The actors communicate only because they are within a set of values and norms that define their respective roles, that is, the legitimate expectation of each one of certain behavior by the other. Interaction presupposes the existence of a higher consciousness, which is no longer that of individual actors, but that of society, a collective consciousness. In this case, the sociologist is definitively condemned to be a prisoner of this conscience. If we add that this collective consciousness can only be the dominant ideology, that is, that of the dominant class, then the sociologist would simply be exposing and defending this ideology. He would be no more himself than the ideologue. And the more he tried to stay out of specific interests, the more "objective" he tried to be, the more wedded he was to a defense of the established order. Whether appealing to a collective conscience or a dominant ideology, social relations, far from being a tool for analysis, only appear as the manifestation of an order that is also a supreme actor. The concept of historicity, on the other hand, refuses to define actors by their interaction and participation in shared values. He conceives society as a set of cultural tensions and social conflicts. When the actor identifies with a role, he is being endowed with a social ego and, therefore, with rights and duties, traits and norms of character: good or bad husband, citizen or worker. Functionalist sociology, even when it appears in its most abstract form, is bourgeois fiction. We must get rid of this conception, which literature and painting discarded a long time ago. The analysis cannot represent the actor. It might just defuse it, tear it apart, to make us notice social interactions above all else. but also, and more profoundly, the permanent confrontation between desire and language, historicity and the natural laws that structure the resources, human and non-human, that control and use the orientations of historical action. An actor never corresponds directly and fully to a component of historicity or to any of the social or cultural orientations that mark historicity's dominance over social practice. Even a ruling class is not identifiable with a cultural model or a type of accumulation. The relations between the actors are not relations of participation in common values nor of pure contradiction of interests; Worldwide

Historicity

The social relationship brings together actors who share the same sociocultural experience, who participate in the same historicity and who dispute its control. The actors constantly oscillate between this community and this conflict, as well as between the functioning of society and its historicity. The actor is always ambiguous in his relationship with the orientation of historical action and, consequently, in his conduct at all levels of social reality. The sociologist's analysis is not possible, except insofar as the interacting actors are kept apart by misunderstanding, alienation and conflict, and also insofar as they cannot make conscious contact, insofar as there is no empathy. The meaning of a situation cannot be understood except through the relationship of opposing actors. It is because society does not coincide with its functioning, because it is in tension with itself and in disequilibrium, that sociology must always be critical, since the actor is defined by it only as a mediator between opposing orientations, so that one must stay from outside this actor, placing oneself directly at the level of social relations networks to understand the social mechanisms involved, the forms of intervention observed by society on itself. -¥• Because it always explains social behavior through social relations, sociology cannot make use of the traditional opposition between subjective and objective. The actor cannot be explained by the situation, since the situation is itself social relations and society's action on itself. Historicity is neither a state of the productive forces nor a project or value system of a society. It is society's work on itself and, therefore, its "technical" aspect —knowledge model— is not separable from an economic relationship —accumulation— nor from a cultural model that some would be tempted to classify as ideological. Can we speak of action separating the situation from the sense of conduct? B.

The actor protests.

The acceptance of these general principles is difficult only because they have an impact on the social actors themselves, centered on their intentions, their goals and their ideologies and therefore bound, insofar as they exercise authority or influence, or power, to oppose themselves. to an analysis that questions the image they have of themselves. This is why sociology is inevitably against power, for the simple reason that power is inevitably against it. Sociology, on the other hand, benefits from power struggles; thrives away from strongly organized social actors; it is associated with freedom, perhaps more than any other domain of knowledge today, as the persecutions it suffered and still suffers under totalitarian regimes dramatically show. The resistance encountered by the sociologist is heightened by the fact that, most of the time, he is studying his own society: the validation of his analysis.

Chapter One

can never be provided by the agreement of the interested parties. The meaning it establishes can never satisfy the minds of its actors. He would like these actors to tell him: you understand us. But if this answer is given, then it is to be feared that the sociologist is mistaken, that he has stepped out of his true role to assume that of mediator, or that of ideologue. The sociologist's only justification is that he must arrive at an understanding of social relations which cannot be apprehended by the actors themselves, but which makes it possible to explain and predict their behavior under definite conditions.

TE HSTOROL SYSTEM / O O N

A. The Domain of Historicity Historicity is, above all, the creation of a model of knowledge and, therefore, a distancing from the circuit of social exchanges, whether between community members or between community and environment. But it's not just representation. Formed out of a state of activity, it intervenes in that activity; transforms it into a social system in which behavior is governed by a set of guidelines, themselves determined by society's action node on itself. Accumulation endows historicity with means of action, but it is from the cultural model that the field of orientation of social practice is constituted/Society is not reduced to the laws that govern its functioning; nor is it governed by ideas, that is, by any given meaning as external to social practice, be it some divine law or historical determinism. It is constituted by itself —the social can only be explained by the social—, that is, by its own means and by its awareness of acting on itself. Is this not returning a central role to the Idea? Is not this cultural model an image of the ideal society, against which social conduct must be measured? Nothing could be further from the concept of a cultural model. Ijjsjn is not separable from the work that society does on itself: it is situated by a type of work and accumulation; manifests the material state of apprehension that society has of itself. The historic action system, the SHA. it is the system of domination of historicity over social practice. It is not a more or less coherent set of values or principles, but the linking of elements in tension with each other, because through them society assembles itself in its double, as in African religions the believer assembles in the spirits. sixty-five

Chapter Two

This leads to encounters with three successive orders of problems. First, how is this stress-based system built? Secondly, how to recognize it, since it must be observable and, therefore, possess a concrete autonomy beyond the oppositions that form its nature? Finally, what is the relationship between this set of guidelines, which defines the sociocultural field, and the other face of historicity, that of accumulation, of society torn from itself and, therefore, of class relations? Once the historical action system defines a field, it delimits types of societies and, therefore, a first level of analysis of historical realities. How are we going to build these guys without falling into an evolutionary philosophy of history? That will be the subject of the last section of this chapter. one.

dimensions

Having defined historicity as the orientation of social practice and, therefore, as distancing society from its own functioning, let us now carry out the inverse operation and define the mode of domination of historicity over social practice. If we do not, we run the serious danger of reducing historicity to a reflection of society on itself, to an ideology of social change, two interpretations that were clearly rejected in the previous pages. Within historicity, its three components do not play the same role in this domain of social practice, in this constitution of a field of social and cultural orientations. The model of knowledge is at once the most direct and least socially organized expression of historicity. It governs the productive forces while building on them as a base, but without intervening in the social systems that stand between it and historicity. Accumulation, on the other hand, is a process of linking economic activity and historicity. It explains the practical division of society from itself; but it does not explain the orientation of social behavior by historicity. This last role is that of the cultural model. The image of creativity and, therefore, of historical action, ends up governing the categories of social and cultural practice. It is this set of guidelines, this system of domination of historicity over practice, that I call the system of historical action. Through it, social practice is determined not by its internal laws or by the demands of social life, but by the resources mobilized in the service of a cultural model. The system links historicity and functioning. It cannot be the formal expression of the cultural model, as if the “idea” of society were specified in different institutional domains: economic, political, religious, etc. It associates opposites and thus defines itself by tensions. It is simultaneously an apparatus for transcending social functioning and the determination of that functioning.

The Historical Action System

Constructing the historical action system is, therefore, defining the oppositional pairs that specify the tension between historicity and functioning. Instead of enumerating the elements that, as a whole, would constitute this system, we must start from the generality of the system, which is the link and, at the same time, the tension between historicity and the elements of social activity. The elements of the system can only be defined by combining these axes of complementarity and opposition. We can define a series of oppositional pairs that can be seen as dimensions of the historical system of action. I will only indicate those that seem to me the three most essential. Certain aspects of the following analyzes would become much more complicated if we increased this number, but the nature of the reasoning used would not change. /. Movement—order. The movement of a society is inseparable from its order. Historicity can only manifest itself by being transcribed in social relations. This principle of movement must also be a principle of order, otherwise it would be nothing more than an abstract idea, and the sociological domain as a whole could be analyzed with the help of concepts related to the functioning of the social system. This is the first dimension of the historical system of action. It is the process by which a movement is transformed into an order. This order is inseparable from movement, but it is also opposed to it, just as distribution or consumption is opposed to production while being linked to it. Historical action is by no means a pure movement of continual transcendence of the social order. It constitutes a social order and therefore types of society. The tension between movement and order is therefore that of the two faces of historicity: the transcendence of social functioning and the foundation of categories of social practice. The present analysis is situated only in the field of historicity. It does not present the relations of historicity with institutions or with social organization. However, the slope of the historical system of action called “order” already descends to social organization. This is why I use the more general term: categories of social practice. 2. Guidelines—resources. This opposition is implicit in the very concept of historicity. Human action is always divided between guidelines and resources. The latter can be called "natural" in the sense that they are the subject of study by the natural sciences. The means triggered by a cultural model constitute sets of variables, systems. The natural sciences make it possible to know the rules according to which these systems function, but they do not explain the nature of the orientations that

Chapter Two

make use of them. At the same time, man intervenes as a needy being, that is, with his biological existence, his personality problems, and also with the roles he plays in the reproduction of society. A religious-type cultural model, which orients society towards an extremely abstract image of creativity, is associated with a very strong structuring of the community and the exchange systems that guarantee its continuity and survival: the principle of universal order is above social action but assumes responsibility for the social organization of communities deeply rooted in their reproduction, as indicated by the very fact that the cultural model indicates society's low capacity for action on itself. Conversely, in industrialized societies it may seem that society's capacity to act on itself has no limits, that its Promethean ambition makes it its own creator. This is not the case. As the elementary structures of social organization disintegrate, historicity finds resistance from other resources: first from technology itself, but also from the biological conditions of man's existence, as well as from other parts of nature and, lastly, from personality. Therefore, we must beware of two opposite errors. Man is not a demiurge; the more powerful his action, the more, on the other hand, she ceases to recognize herself as a spirit and replaces herself in the finite world of which she is a part. On the other hand, man does not simply occupy a niche within an ecosystem. Society is not a closed system or even a system defined by its exchanges with the environment. It has the ability to intervene in itself, in its internal organization, as well as in its relations with the outside world. Society is part of an ecosystem, but it also constitutes its own environment from an action that is not reproductive, but inventive. He is nature, but he is also a creator of nature. At a time when society's ability to act on itself is rapidly increasing and threatens the ecosystem of which man is a part, it is normal to criticize the ancient separation between nature and culture, the opposition between body and mind that triumphed with idealism, it must lead to a new naturalism derived not from mechanics, as in the seventeenth century, but from biology. But. Just as social thought, following the naturalism of the Enlightenment and under the pressure of historical events, rediscovered through the industrial revolution, the French revolution and the beginnings of the labor movement, the problems of historical action, so too did development A new model of the knowledge based on information, communication and systems analysis must be followed by new thinking about historical action and its current forms. 3. Culture—society. The juxtaposition of these two terms does not immediately evoke an opposing pair in the way that order and order do.

The Historical Action System

movement or directions and resources. And yet the system of historical action cannot be defined without this opposition. For the system is the domain of historicity over the functioning of society: it is, therefore, work and the creation of a relationship with the environment, on the one hand, and collectivity, on the other. A historical system of action is not a political, territorial and organizational unit, but neither is it an intention of society. It is a model of society and therefore of a culture and social forms. The connection between culture and society, the relationship with the environment and the relationships between actors, however, is subordinated to the other two. Cannot be set except within the intersection of the previous two opposing pairs. The historical system of action is a set of social forms that allow us to move from a cultural model, a model of creativity, to a model of consumption located on the side of order and resources. Social elements interpose between cultural elements. A cultural model requires the use of social resources and the creation of a principle of order. It is within these social forms that a pattern of consumption is formed, and it is through the pattern that cultural behavior is brought under the dominion of the cultural pattern. The historical action system is thus defined by the intersection of opposing pairs. This places it in sharp contrast to a social organization defined by norms and vertical and horizontal differentiation of status and roles. It is not a society's rule book, but the scene of its drama, the mobilization of its action upon itself from its work. The dialectic of historical action is composed of oppositions and complementarities between a society's will to be and its being, between its self-production and its practice. Social action is not defined only by exchanges within a whole or by responses to stimuli; Between the material conditions of existence and the forms of social and cultural organization, there is a system of principles, the system of historical action, incarnation, historicity. B.

Elements

It is now possible to summarize our previous analysis by combining the three dimensions we just discussed and using them to construct the historical action system. The combination of the three dimensions that we have established allows us to situate the elements of the historical action system, but not to define its nature and relationships. Therefore, we must add that the historical action system as a whole is the mode of domination of historicity over social practices and, more precisely, a set of sociocultural orientations that govern the forms of work, that is, economic activity. The elements do not constitute its economic activity, but its totality must constitute a field of socioeconomic organization. They can be presented by means of a diagram (fig. 2).

Chapter Two

We already know the first element of the system. It is the cultural model. If accumulation directly introduces class relations, the cultural model indicates the recognition of a form of creativity that is the engine of society and uses accumulated resources. clean

T move

cultural model

hierarchy

mobilization

need

guidelines

Figure 2

The cultural model is movement and not order, orientation and not resource, culture and not society. Before naming the other elements, it remains for us to define their relationships with each other, since we know the dimensions in which they occur and their general nature. It is the attribute of SHA to link the historicity and functioning of society and thus associate elements that oppose each other as much as possible to combine the three selected pairs of opposition. It is easy to see that the simplest image of the SHA is the one that combines the three opposite pairs to produce four elements, each one of which has the same position that each one of the other three in one of the dimensions and opposes them in both. other dimensions. But the composition of the SHA can be apprehended more clearly and directly when one takes into account that its elements must form a whole that encompasses all the tensions defined by the combination of the three pairs of opposition. The cultural model must be completed with an element that places social resources at the service of the cultural model; otherwise, this model would be nothing more than an ideology or a dream. I call this element mobilization because it implies giving content to society's movement, to the transcendence of its functioning. Now we must move on to the side of order, to the transformation of the subunit formed by the cultural model and the mobilization of socioeconomic activity into organization. The cultural model must be linked to a corresponding hierarchical mode. Otherwise, society would be divided in two, a crisis situation that is worth examining, but which only appears as a crisis in relation to the expected correspondence between the cultural model

The historical fiction system

and a scale of social levels. I am not referring here to social classes, as this is a scale, while classes are defined solely by class relations, which in turn are based on accumulation. Nor do I speak of stratification, although this second notion is closer to that of hierarchization, simply because the system of historical action is nothing more than an instrument of analysis, whereas one can speak of stratification only with reference to a more concrete system. defined. territorially. organization. Finally, historicity governs not only this principle of distribution but also, and simultaneously, a mode of consumption, a definition of needs, an element that is cultural and not social at the same time, derived from resources and not from guidelines and, therefore, complements the a hierarchization in the field of ordering. This construction can be presented more concisely in a diagram (see fig. 2). The diagram presented in Figure 2 does not show a division of economic organization into four specific domains. It does not describe the functioning of a society, but rather the social and cultural orientations through which a state of historicity controls and directs the practice of SoaaT. Here, too, it is a question of a system: the nature of each of the elements is defined by the position it occupies in the whole. Each one is linked to the other three by relations of proximity and opposition in the pairs that form the basic unit of construction of the system. The transition from one element to another is not a transition from one particular aspect of a general principle to another particular aspect of it. On the contrary, the nature of SHA compels us to discard such a formulation and its attendant temptations. Isn't there a tendency to say that the forms of mobilization or hierarchization must be in harmony with the cultural model? A dangerous phrase if we do not clarify that this "harmony" is achieved by combining oppositions and not similarities, since any two elements are always united by two relations of opposition and only one of resemblance, therefore it is impossible to reduce the system of historical relations to action " general idea" of society; the tensions that oppose its individual elements are nothing more than the small change in the general tension that unites and separates at the same time the great knot of a society and its historicity. Those who think in terms of values and norms can show how particular norms, tailored to this or that specific "institutional" domain, are nothing more than specific forms of more general values. Here, on the contrary, what is shown in action and society's action on itself is specified, its distance in relation to its own functioning, if the elements are in harmony it is because they are also in opposition. .others, so that the SHA is entirely animated by the tensions inherent to the movement by which society constitutes the field of its social and cultural orientations from its activity, thus giving meaning to that activity.

Chapter Two

impose, beyond any difference between its elements, the unity of a body of values. It does not exist outside its internal oppositions; it is the system of these oppositions. This clearly indicates the stark difference that exists between the SHA and a social control system or a political system. We are used to talking about societies, that is, concrete political units that have laws and a government, mechanisms of exchange, production, education, repression, and so on. The SHA is not a society, let alone what is called with the somewhat vague term "social system", but only one level within an analysis of society. The historical action system is not an actor exercising power or authority; no system of social control to ensure its maintenance. It is an abstract system, as opposed to an organization, which is a concrete system in the sense that it is defined by boundaries and the authority exercised within them. It is essential to recognize this difference in definition between the units found by different levels of sociological analysis. "Capitalist society" is a type of unit that does not coincide with political collectivities, much less with concrete historical units. The only thing we have established for now is the theme of a general type of society, before moving on to seeing the actors act and form decision-making, organization or control mechanisms in it. The SHA is a system of oppositions because it is the path that their toricities adopt, due to society's transcendence of itself for itself. Therefore, the SHA must be conceived as a whole and not as the result of the sum of a certain number of elements, each of which is essential for its functioning. B.

Locating the Historical Action System

How does the sociologist apprehend the system of action? Is it a construction of the mind, not susceptible of any apprehension by experience and of no other use than as a necessary element in an analysis? A necessary hypothesis to explain certain types of behavior? This focus mode cannot be enough. The historical system of action must be subject to a direct approach, as it has a certain operating autonomy. What, then, is the object of a sociology of this system of action? What facts does it take into account? one.

The debates of a society

The analyzes that we have just presented make it possible to avoid a pitfall. Action system elements are not experienced as values. Members of a society do not assert them as imperatives, such as what is good, what is desirable, or what is just.

The Historical Action System

They do not appear as targets, except for certain social actors, thus contributing to the formation of their ideology. But this presupposes that we have already brought these actors and their conflicts into play, which in fact is not the case. The elements of the action system are therefore not recognized as values, nor defended or defended. This does not make them less present in the collective consciousness, but they are taken as facts, not values. In programmed societies —which we will continue to take as an example for convenience—, although growth has been defined as the cultural model, it is by no means affirmed as a value. At most, it is often justified by what appears to be its direct consequence: a rise in the standard of living. But this in itself is a specific ideology, which can be easily countered by another. Growth is equally experienced as a constraint, as the pressure of artificially created needs, as an exhausting rat race that makes life difficult and robs it of all meaning, or as the destruction of "natural resources". Let a discussion begin between these two ideologies, and it soon becomes clear that growth is in itself a neutral fact that can be judged favorably or unfavorably depending on the point of view adopted. Scientific progress means a car and a television for everyone, something many consider desirable. But it also means the threat of thermonuclear annihilation, something that fills almost everyone with horror. The same observation can easily be applied to all other elements. Judgment about them is always ambivalent and provides fodder for literally endless arguments. A banal but illuminating conclusion. For this ambivalence is nothing more than the apprehension of the relations of complementarity and opposition that unite the elements. Growth is good because it brings with it more "modern" forms of organization and hierarchization or types of needs, which free us from the limitations of an earlier system; it is bad insofar as it opposes the requirements inherent in the other elements, it is continuous movement, it does not enjoy, etc. What the action system reveals is the totality of debates that animate a society, the totality formed by the problems that the community faces. This totality is not immediately apprehensible. It must be isolated from two different orders of problems: on the one hand, the social conflicts that oppose one category of actors to another, and that cannot be involved here; on the other hand, the problems arising from the heterogeneity of a specific society. French society, for example, can be seen in part as a programmed society, but it also includes vast areas of old capitalism and even some pre-industrial economic, social and cultural aspects. Every society in the process of change experiences tensions and pauses between

Chapter Two

several generations of problems and actors. The social conflicts and tensions associated with change must be kept separate from what I call here a society's debates. The system of action is not revealed by a body of values, but by a system of debates. Each of its elements is apprehended in its opposition to each of the others, and the unity of the system can only be perceived as the field of those debates in which irresolvable choices are imposed and which constitute the permanent problems of a society. Each of the perceived oppositions is seen as normal and intolerable. It links two terms that can be accepted or rejected, while it is never possible to end the debate with a compromise. Thus, it is possible to draw a map of the problems that a society faces, insofar as this society corresponds to a system of action. These problems never have a solution', the historian just observes that at some point they stop being raised or get blurred and disappear. Shareholder sociology begins by defining the nature of these debates, which are endless but form a limited whole. Schematically, we could say that an action system is experienced as a network of problems that are both general and insoluble, corresponding to the relationships of one of the four elements with each of the other three. But of course there are more complex problems involving more than two elements. Above all, the expression of these problems is not constant. There exists within any society, and insofar as it corresponds to a system of action, a field of discourse that must be reconstituted from common conscience, from common sense. The reflection of its intellectuals can serve as a guide in the search for the limits and themes of this discourse, but nothing replaces a direct study of public opinion. Public opinion is almost always studied in isolation, referring to the facts, the situation, to which it is a reaction. The opinions of various actors are compared; tries to capture the differences between what young and old, workers and industry leaders, men and women think. This type of analysis is interesting, albeit limited; expands the field of historiography; but it has nothing to do with the analysis to which we refer here. Instead of differentiating the actors, we seek the unity of a discourse, not to find in it the unity of a system of beliefs and values that does not exist, but, quite the contrary, to define a network of oppositions, of questions. Debates, in our sense, do not concern the positive or negative value of a cultural or social trait, but the relationships between such traits. This corresponds to the nature of the action system, which is not an aggregate of elements, but a system of relationships through which these elements are

The System of Historical Acts on

defined. Each of the elements is only defined within the system by its opposition along certain axes with each of the others. Debate should be distinguished from discussion and deliberation. I speak of discussion when the field of exchange is defined by a decision to be taken that will affect the relative position of the actors. A discussion can always be described as political in the sense that it presupposes an institutional order and, therefore, limits, the most obvious of which is the acceptance of the existence of the actors involved in the discussion. There is no discussion between a union and a board of directors, except to the extent that the board recognizes the existence of the union. It is not uncommon for such recognition to be accompanied by mental reservations. The board may think that everything would be much easier and prettier if there were no unions, and the union, in turn, may be thinking that the final objective of its action is the suppression of the bosses and their replacement by a workers' cooperative or some other another decision-making system. But if one of the partners considers at a given moment that it has become possible to change the name of the political game, then the discussion ends. A deliberation is even further removed from debate than it is from discussion. It presupposes the recognition of norms, collective objectives and roles. If a group meets to examine its activities or the relationships among its members, it is likely to be, at least initially, for deliberation and not for debate or discussion in the sense in which I am using the terms here. . What is assumed is a community, not just a field of decision. What are we going to do to further the community goals? How can we resolve this conflict that has arisen within him? Is authority exercised correctly? Should we change community characteristics or recruiting for it? These examples immediately show that the problems subject to deliberation are defined as functions of the social system. When we move from deliberation to debate, the relationships between the actors are diluted. While a deliberation highlights roles and, consequently, social relationships, while a discussion seeks to modify these relationships, or the lines of communication, or forms of authority, in the debate there is no other character than the situation itself, which is no longer a framework, but the very wager of the debate. Adebatejs a drama; the characters involved are not the real actors. A pure debate, not associated with fixed elements of discussion, can be intolerable for the actors face to face. Therefore, we should not limit our discussions to research_Jo_rc. A society's debates can be reconstituted from limited exchanges, usually at a distance, through speech or writing. The actors respond without communicating.

Chapter Two

The Agencies of Historicity

If we reduce historicity to what is at stake in social conflicts, we run the risk of seeing it as an ideological expression of the dominant class; but if we recognize that it has an autonomous social expression, do we not run the risk of placing a body of values, norms and, therefore, institutions, in the usual sense of the word, at the center of our analysis? Historicity is not an ideological construction. It is a set of cultural and social orientations that are presented to the actor's social data and not as individualized beliefs. In post-industrial society, scientific and technological investment, the cybernetic model of organization, hierarchical education, orientation towards consumption are not opinions. Neither are values that can be translated directly into forms of social organization, as it is not possible to understand social organization abstracting from conflicting class relations and political mechanisms for formulating the rules that govern this organization. Having established this objection, let us recognize that each element.no. The historical action system has a concrete social support that I will call the agency of historicity, which is not a historical actor like social classes are. An example will clarify what I mean. There can be no science without laboratories and research centers, just as there can be no religion without the church, that is, without a specialized religious function”. It is absurd to claim that science is nothing more than a wager on the class struggle and that there is a proletarian science against a bourgeois science or an Aryan science against a Jewish science, but it is equally false to think that the organization of science is just the transcription directly from a specific social function. looking at research policy, the organization of research centers and, even more, universities, it immediately becomes impossible to abstract science from class interests and orientations. we have seen throughout the investment in research shed light on the growing awareness of the political and military effects of many scientific discoveries and, more particularly, of the social and political determinants behind the choice of research undertaken, it is no longer possible to consider laboratories as ivory towers. Scientists do not exist above and apart from the social and political fray; at the same time, its science is not reduced to the ideology of the actors in confrontation. Scientists are always in a false position: they are defending the autonomy of scientific knowledge against ideological pressures and, above all, against established power. But the confrontation between opposing classes or social forces need only become more intense for them to be torn apart. They must defend their independence from power and therefore feel closer to the opposition and protest forces.

The Historical Action System

But these also seek, through their struggles, to impose their own ideology in the scientific field. Thus, scientists fear that political confrontation will destroy the independence of science, either because it will be forced to conform to an orthodoxy, or because there will be a compromise between opponents to the detriment of the "purity" of scientific research. Scientists, and indeed all categories of the "priestly" intelligentsia, are neither pure intelligences floating above the tumult nor ideologues. They are linked to the ruling class insofar as it dominates the historical system of action and the political system and thus favors certain areas of research. They are also part of the ruling class insofar as they belong to apparatuses that are part of the ruling class. On the other hand, they constantly oppose their competence to political and administrative decision-making power and fight the limits imposed on the circulation of ideas and people. Professionalism is often a way of transcending these contradictory tendencies and setting professional groups and organizations apart from their ties to power holders in society. Thus, the intelligentsia occupies three positions simultaneously: neutrality and involvement with one or another social field. What defines the members of an agency is not their detachment from conflicting social interests, but the blending within the group, and more often within the individuals themselves, of these three positions. The same remarks apply to the other elements of the historical action system. The organizers, those who analyze systems management, are also specialists caught between defending their rationality and their ambiguous position in political and class relations. Hence the constant mixture of reserve or distrust they display towards the ruling class as well as popular movements, and their tendency to develop ideological defenses in the form of technologism or scientism. The hierarchical mode of a society, which belongs to the side of order, materializes in an assemblage, in a historicity of another type. Education is responsible for this function. Teachers, who sometimes can also be researchers but in the vast majority of cases have different functions, ensure a social hierarchy that in post-industrial society is based precisely on education itself, which gives the category of teachers a functional autonomy that it did not have. in earlier times. societies, where the hierarchy was based, for example, on property or citizenship. It should be added immediately that the agency role of historicity played by education is by no means a complete definition of the functions of education in society. But it is necessary to underline right away that the social selection role of education according to a hierarchical mode is always associated with another role, that of reproducing or reinforcing class oppositions. These two functions can

Chapter Two

they cannot identify any more than they can disassociate. Education seeks to select the most apt in general to receive higher education, as it must provide the necessary means for scientific development. But it also creates or reinforces class barriers to talent mobility, and the way in which these two functions intermingle is demonstrated by the fact that a judgment about suitability for higher education is always also a judgment about social formation in the use of a language. which is the language of the upper classes. The ambiguity of the teachers' situation manifests itself in the constant mixture of opposition and conformism that characterizes their behavior. In this they are like all agents of historicity, from priests to scientists, who are both vigilantes and demonstrators. We will see later how the clash between these two functions leads all agents of historicity to develop an abstract rhetoric that cannot be reduced to either a class ideology or an element of historicity, and which is more a professional line of defense than a mask. by interests outside the group itself. It is probably in the expression of needs that the existence of an autonomous agency is most difficult to recognize. The difficulty seems particularly great in post-industrial societies, where the orientation of needs can be defined as a search for personal or collective identity and pleasure. However, in this particular case, the agents of the mass media, that is, the agents of the social processing of needs, in fact occupy the same ambiguous position as the other agencies of historicity. As in the other cases, the observer is above all aware of the dominance of the ruling class over the expression and social orientation of needs. An abundant and suggestive literature speaks strongly and not unjustifiably about the manipulation of needs. This is an indispensable reaction against the propaganda of the ruling classes who falsely naively assure society that advertising is a response to individual demand and thus acquires a democratic function. But since criticism of such claims has been going on for a long time and without lack of energy, we must look further. Closer study of business and advertising uncovers significant conflicts. The fashion area offers one of the most interesting examples today. While fashion itself is a system of social hierarchy and, moreover, the creation of a distinct social status, the clothing trade is also drawn to support youth-initiated movements recognized as signs of cultural innovation. Thus, commerce cannot be fully assimilated to society's economic management apparatus, which manipulates demand in the name of operating its power and profit. Dependent on technocrats, merchants, and advertisers they also depend, in non-totalitarian societies, on the formation of cultural trends that are by no means the direct creation of economic decision-making centers. The same observations apply to media professionals.

The Historical Action System

In this case, as in the others, we would be denying the existence of social classes if we ignored the upper class's dominant control over instances of historicity. But it would also be false to see the latter as mere agents of social domination. Finally, it is equally unacceptable to place these agencies above the social fray. Its role is always limited and subordinate in the field of historical action and also, consequently, in the political system. But they have a certain autonomy that is recognized in the appearance of specific functions at the level of social organization. This relative and subordinate autonomy of instances of historicity is the concrete expression of a society's historicity. What is at stake in class conflicts are not abstractions or ideologies, but social practices. Class conflicts occur within a given social and cultural field of historicity. It is never legitimate to say that this field constitutes by itself the organizing principle of society; a factory is not the concrete expression of industrial growth; it cannot be defined independently of the class power wielded on it. But, at the same time, social struggles are determined by the system of historical action, by the nature of the productive forces of society itself, which these struggles transform into class relations and, consequently, into a political system and a system of social organization. .

The operation of the historical action system

one.

the counter elements

The SHA could be defined as a system of imbalances. The cultural model is not at the center, like a spider in the middle of its web, organizing and controlling social activities. Jt is an engine, but it must become order and also resource mobilization to play that role. It is not an ideal model of society, but a set of guidelines that govern social practice. It can be presented in a slightly different way than used previously. Figure 3 shows that the alternation of full and empty boxes is the orientation of historical action and the actors' objectives. The historical system of action is a network of oppositions governed by the nature of the cultural model. It is the domain of orientations over resources, movement over order, and the interdependence of cultural orientations and social forms. The tensions between its elements mean that society is not a character guided by an image of the ideal society. The cultural model is not a social model of movement. The historical action system is not an actor, but what is at stake in a game of actors.

Chapter Two

clean

movement

(Video) If It Were Not Filmed No One Would Believe It

guidelines

cultural model

hierarchy

resources

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culture

society

culture

I think 3

If we introduce the actors, taking into account their goals and their values, we will see that they can only act by breaking the structure of the historical action system, destroying the oppositions that separate the elements from each other and merging the elements. in its objectives. The objectives are guides of the actors not in an action of society on itself, but in the functioning of a social organization. These goals are, then, the opposite of the elements of historical action and can only arise from their destruction, that is, from the appropriation by an actor of the system of historical action and from its reduction by that actor to an organization and operation of it. that organization. That's why they should be called counter-elements. They are representations valued by the actors and not guidelines for the historical action itself. The counter-elements are the values of class actors and no longer the wager of class relations. Take empty box 2 from figure 3. It designates an orientation for movement, but a social movement. It is, therefore, a sociocultural model of movement, an immediately clear definition for each reader as an actor. It is the image of an ideal society towards which individuals and collectivities are striving to pave their way. In reality, the contents of this box are even more comprehensive and inclusive than I have just suggested: this sociocultural model, like any image of an ideal society, is a model of order as well as movement. Therefore, it is evident that a counter-element can be empirically defined as the place of overflow and mixing of the elements that surround it. In more theoretical terms, each counter-element breaks down the oppositions on which the system of historical action is based; it substitutes a tension, which is a manifestation of historicity, for the identity of functioning and for the so-called rational action. This substitution is not the work of the historical system of action itself; it can only arise from the ideological activity of the actors. Nothing could better demonstrate that JHS cannot be defined in terms of social or collective consciousness. Social conscience postulates values or

The Historical Action System

factual situations, raises order or movement; You cannot direct your behavior towards goals that disappear every time you try to specify them, as all elements refer to each other in an endless game of complementarities and oppositions. The transition from elements to counter-elements is the transition from system to actors. A counter-element can be represented by a self-sufficient image, while an element can never be defined outside of its relations with the other elements. Can this general analysis based on a specific case be applied to other cases? Yes, as long as the various elements of the system occupy equivalent positions within it. But the content of the various counter-elements still needs to be defined on a case-by-case basis for all of this. So let's look at case 1 (in fig. 3). As in case 2 that we have just seen, this counter-element can only be understood as the fusion of the three elements that surround it. The cultural model is reduced to a technique, mobilization becomes a cultural and no longer a social form, and needs are transformed into resources at the service of the movement. It is easy to recognize the presence of this counter-element in our own society. Suffice it to say, in fact, that our society is driven by a scientific and technical growth mode, but it is the organizations that pragmatically adapt to the changing environment, manage their communications ever better, use the information they produce. increasingly efficient to correct its course and ensure its survival. Thus, they produce a development that is no longer an orientation, but the result of certain practices. There is no more distance and tension between the cultural model and the mobilized social resources: the two elements blend together. Needs are nothing more than the expression of this transformation of social resources into cultural resources. Individuals and groups seek to maximize their benefits and reduce their costs; they also seek to expand the field they control, and it is the totality of these self-interests, combined to produce this flexible and dynamic organization, which produces the ultimate growth. Certainly other expressions can be given to this fusion of elements in a trunk element. We will see what counter-elements. Because they belong to the world of actors, they take on different colors as they act as guides of one kind or another. But one picture will be enough to convey the mechanism behind the formation of this counter-element. which is at the level of resources and not at the level of guidelines. I will call it instrumentalism, to emphasize the removal of any reference to a cultural model of movement. Case 3 is analogous to the previous one, as it also ignores the presence of orientations. But it is doubly separate from them in the sense that it is on the side of order and on the side of society, not culture.

Chapter Two

The social order is nothing more than a factual organization, devoid of any hierarchical principle. The variety of social categories is confused, in this case, with the mode of mobilization. Society, one might say, is reduced to the technical division of labor, and the nature of needs can no longer be traced to anything other than this social organization. This gives the image of a simultaneously diversified and stable society, a society in which everyone fulfills a function and lives in a particular way, organizing the different functions to respond to society's needs, without the need for any intervention. . Perhaps it is easier in this case than in others to understand why such a counter-element destroys the system as a whole and corresponds to representations and an ideal image of society — ideal because it is beyond the tensions that define the system of action and they are experienced by the actors. Classification is replaced here by what might be called segmentation. Case 4, like case 1, is that of a counter-element situated at the level of the guidelines. It is a model of cultural order. But the existence of such a model is not compatible with that of a cultural model. It would only be like this if the action system presented itself as an unstable balance between opposing demands, such as activity and contemplation, which would transform SAH into an endless game of rhetorical oppositions and would completely contradict all the analyzes we have done so far about it. this. This model of order, therefore, can only be conceived as a fusion of the elements that surround it. Cultural practices and the social hierarchy within it merge to give rise to a model of sociocultural integration, and this model also merges with a model of movement. Here again it is easy to see an expression of the model in our own society. What else is the notion of a mass consumer society? A society based on hierarchical needs that have enough impetus to constitute the engine of society's movement. From this point of view, it is the rush to consume that creates the pace of production. Once again a reassuring image, which frees us at low cost from the needs inherent in the scientific growth model, the limitations of large organizations and the dominance of the social hierarchy. This counter-element, like the others, is a means of transcending the tensions of historical action. Our analysis so far has introduced the counter-elements one by one; but if we look at them all together, do they form a system, like the elements? Shouldn't we speak of a countersystem, so that an analysis of historical action should be, above all, an analysis of the existing relations between these two systems that have the same formal characteristics, the same relations between the elements or counterelements that compose them? This formal parallelism is very clear and stems from the very construction of the SHA. It is important, because it means that the images, which are the

The Historical Action System

counterelements, they are interdependent and opposite, so that within any type of SHA we should be able to isolate a well-defined set of ideas_ahQ.ujt,_the historicity of society, from ideal images of that society. clean

motor/mm

guidelines

resources

Culture

SfXil'/V

cultural model

sociocultural model

CE instrumentalism

mobilization

E=CE-element of counter-element

society

you

culture

,. , • nierarcni/.ation „

CE sociocultural integration

segmentation

I need mine

Figure 4

But this does not lead to the integration of elements and counter-elements into a much larger unit. The SHA is society's action on itself based on its experience and its awareness of creativity and accumulation. The countersystem, if we call it that, is nothing more than a set of contradictory representations. the counter-elements destroy the system and so it presents itself as a total image to the exclusion of all others. Let's go back to our example. Our post-industrial society can be thought of as an instrumental society, as a creation of collective will, as a set of functional segments, or as a mass society. But these are all conflicting ways of looking at one thing. The transition from one counter-element to another is impossible.-"~ But counter-elements cannot be thrown out of our field of analysis as easily as anything else. If we try to unite them into a whole, then analysis becomes will lose while, if we recognize that they break the relationship between two or more elements, then their existence seems necessary. A totally integrated and balanced system of action cannot exist. The elements oscillate around the axes that define them, penetrating with each oscillation the area of counter-elements. Equilibrium is maintained only if two opposing counter-elements exert opposing and counterbalancing pressures. The counter-elements are active; they manifest themselves as wills, as intentions, as principles. While the element is apprehended by the actors only as a problem, a nexus of oppositions, the counter-element asserts its stability as a goal of social conduct. s and counter-elements is a manifestation of what unites or separates the actors and what is at stake in your relationship. The social field is defined only by its tensions and imbalances, behind which

Chapter Two

one can always glimpse society's distancing from itself and the dominance of historicity over social practices. Each counter-element, on the contrary, being a social and cultural unit, defines expected types of behavior. The actor's situation is defined within it by the position he occupies in relation to others and his degree of participation in a pattern of behavior. But the contrary element has unity and simplicity... in appearance only. We will see later that social classes and social movements simultaneously interpret them in contradictory ways. More directly, each counter-element is torn apart by oppositions that necessarily refer to the elements and the relationships between them. Let us take an example in our kind of society. Its counter-element of sociocultural integration is mass consumption, located at the meeting point of the "natural" needs of man and a social hierarchy based on knowledge and, therefore, on education. Now, mass consumption, if we examine it, rests on two opposing principles: on the one hand, the social hierarchy of consumption and the importance of status symbols in objects and modes of consumption; on the other, the individualization of need and jouissance. Mass consumption is crossed by two opposing movements: the search for status and the expectation of pleasure. We will see later that opposing historical actors do not simultaneously adhere to the same aspect of a counter element. The unity of the latter is therefore artificial, but for that reason it cannot be neglected by analysis. The totality of counter-elements forms a civilization. This word denotes a set of representations, images. It introduces a unity into society and culture, the unity of consciousness. A civilization is an ideal that the observer finds at the heart of reality. This is why almost everyone in a society tries to define a civilization and no one is ashamed of the inconsistency of the given definitions. If we take the notion of civilization in this sense, it turns its back on sociological analysis. Not only does each counter-element destroy the structure of the SHA, but the counter-elements in turn are accumulated and molded in very diverse ways into comprehensive images of a civilization that each actor, according to his own! social and individual characteristics, he contemplates and admires as if contemplating some social data, when these are nothing more than the reflection of his own way of life. The counter-elements do not contribute anything to the analysis of society, but they guide us towards the actors. The SHA is live, it cannot be parsed directly. It can only be apprehended when fragmented and transformed into counter-elements. This opposition between elements and counter-elements opens up one of the main fields of sociological research. Elements are studied~~as~

The Historical Action System

guidelines for social practice; they can be arrived at by a direct consideration of the organization of work, consumption, the use of savings, etc. Counter-elements, on the other hand, are representations. Thus, we are dealing with two materially different types of evidence. It is important: to establish the correspondence between them, to investigate how, in a given society, the combination of counter-elements leads us to postulate the existence of the elements, and how the representation of the elements leads to the formation of the counter-elements. . Analysis of the latter is therefore an important means of checking the validity of a particular construction of the y SHA. in particular, the attribution to each of the elements of a certain content of a historical nature. Anticipating the analysis of this topic, it is essential to mention that the counter-elements cannot receive a general social content; they are inevitable and are given a particular imprint by the actors who strive to control the historical action system and turn its orientations into values. Each counter-element thus presents itself in the form of an opposition between two images of society, one of which belongs to the ideology of the upper class and the other to that of the popular class, either directly or through professional ideologues. An element has stable and clear content; its complexity comes from its relationships with each of the other elements of the system. A counter-element, on the other hand, is independent of all the others, although it is itself ambiguous, assuming different contents depending on the class that it is carrying. Thus, I can now replace the term "counter-element" introduced throughout my analysis, by the term that occupies its place in everyday language: values, "counter-element" is not constitutive of a field of historicity; it is the point of view of an actor, who is always ultimately a class actor, looking at the system of historical action. Such, in effect, is the definition of values already given. The relations between elements and counter-elements are the relations between the historical action system and the class actors. Here we are at the very center of sociological analysis, as the field of historicity, the basis of any concrete social collectivity, the relationship between this system of action and this system of actors. return fully to this fundamental question b.

The crises of historical action

SHA is a stress system. The elements are not institutional domains, they are all more or less coherent with each other, that is, they belong more or less to the same system of values, but are defined based on the conditions of existence of historical action. If there is no connection between order and movement, between orientations and resources, between culture and society, then there can be no historicity. Talking about the system is

Chapter Two

postulate the interdependence of its parts and, therefore, the balance of the whole. This balance is not maintained by any controlling or regulating force. Therefore, there is no reason to give priority in practice to the state of equilibrium over states of disequilibrium. For the construction of the analysis, it is indifferent whether we know or not that there really are societies in equilibrium, that is, societies whose elements all belong to the same configuration with the same force or the same distinction. . But we must consider the general effects of disequilibrium. These effects will be called crises. This term is used in opposition to conflict, which defines a state of relations between actors. There is no inevitable link between a state of crisis and a state of conflict; one can only say that the crisis has effects on the conflict, in the sense that the conflict can be obscured by a state of crisis. The simplest form of such a crisis is when one of the elements is at odds with the others. Suppose, for example, a nesting mode that lags behind all other SHA elements and therefore still belongs to a previous configuration. Imagine a society where the hierarchy is based on family background and ownership, while the other elements belong to an industrial or post-industrial society. This isolated element tends to extend to the empty spaces that surround it, that is, to transform itself into several counter-elements as shown in Figure 5. The lagging element becomes a set of representations of the actors that do not correspond to the state dominant in society. The presence of only one of these elements creates an almost general mismatch between the historical existence and the interaction of the actors*. This explains the importance in such a society of social problems, which are largely false problems, although they play a considerable role in the relationships between actors. In some European countries, the maintenance of the old system of social hierarchization brought with it a whole set of social and political problems that overload and distort the class conflict in these societies.

Figure 5

CE=counter-element H=hierarchization

In the case of France, perhaps it is the mismatch of needs, even more than the hierarchy, that is most noticeable. This has several effects, from the clericalism-anticlericalism struggle to the maintenance of

The Historical Action System

paternalism in the organization of work, to the relapse into particularist issues such as corporatism, three areas that correspond to the counter-elements that involve the needs of the element. However, the crisis remains limited as only one element is affected. Instead, it becomes central when one of the system's axles is broken. From the nature of the SHA it follows that it can be affected by three central crises: rupture of the movement-order axis, that is, the disjunction CM -r M // H - N; rupture of the orientations-resources axis, that is, the disjunction CM + H // M -f N; rupture of the culture-society axis, that is, the disjunction CM 4 N / / M ^ H . 1. We will call the first one the crisis of historicity, as it affects the more general dimension of the SHA. In a modern type of society, it expresses itself as a disjunction of the social order and the economy. The economy can be more modern, free market or technical progress oriented, while the social order remains more archaic. But the reverse situation is no less real: the modernization of the social order and cultural practices can anticipate the model of organization of production and work. The crisis thus triggered is a social crisis, which threatens the unity of society seen in its historicity. Like all types of crisis, it tends to manifest itself in the importance given to certain categories of actors, which do not coincide with social classes, but often overlap with them. Here these categories are of the ancient-modern type. Just think of the use of the word "bourgeois" in France: that term is not just a doublet for capitalist. While the latter is a precise denotation of a ruling class, the word "bourgeois" introduces the idea of archaism, of privilege, of transforming what is acquired into what is transmitted. On the side of the dominant class, as on the side of the dominated class, there are strong tensions between the supporters of the old and the supporters of the new that complicate and sometimes obscure the class conflict. Therefore, such a crisis is very likely to occur in economically heterogeneous societies in which a traditional economic sector is maintained despite economic growth. 2. The second crisis will be called the crisis of rationality. Orientations and resources, ends and means, oppose each other. The social categories that tend to form are either high-low or elite-mass. Two contrasting examples naturally come to mind. Soviet society has a very advanced cultural model.

Chapter Two

and classification model. The role played by science and technology —like that of education— is considerable. On the other hand, the use of social and cultural resources, the ways of organizing work and consumption are archaic. Hence an awareness of opposition between the ruling elite and the mass of the people. In the United States, the situation is the opposite: the forms of mobilization and the nature of needs have been greatly modernized, while the modes of movement and order remain strongly marked by previous capitalist development. Here, too, we find a keen awareness of the opposition between the mass of the people and the elites, an opposition which, depending on the circumstances, can be progressive or reactionary, but which can never be reduced to class conflict. The resulting crisis can be called institutional or political, as it affects society's management capacity. 3. The third crisis will be called the integration crisis. It directly threatens the unity of the SHA by pitting culture against society. In our type of society, it opposes production and consumption, on the one hand, to organization and distribution, on the other. This is a cultural crisis, you might say, and one that puts extreme pressures on the personality. It tends to oppose change, both in consumption and production, to social integration. Nowadays it occurs mainly in societies driven by foreign economic forces, like Quebec, or by national economic forces, like Japan, when the dominance of these forces is insufficiently compensated by mechanisms of political intervention. In each of these cases, splitting in the JHS leads to the formation of two opposing subsystems in which elements and counterelements mix. These divisions can be represented as in Figure 6. The opposition of these subsystems becomes even stronger and more complex, as each of them contains counter-elements that oppose each other, but reinforce each other in their common opposition. subsystem. Therefore, a crisis of the SHA is likely to imply a dominance of counter-elements and, therefore, social struggles centered on the control of counter-elements, while the reference to the historicity of society disappears. This is even more evident in the extreme case of a general JHS crisis, a situation in which the three crises already described overlap. The SHA then completely disappears and is replaced by the whole formed by the counter-elements, whose unity is artificial. Historical actors are fully engaged in struggles that become, one might say, ideological, and become dissociated from the problems of historicity. This is the sociological scenario of decadence, which is the loss of historicity.

The Historical Action System

historicity crisis CM M

crisis of rationality

norte

METRO

norte

ens \s of m degree CM M

Figure 6

CM = cultural model H = Hierarchical nation M = mobilization N = needs Note: The counter-elements were inserted in the subsystems to which two of its three surrounding elements belong. For example. in the integration crisis CE2 was placed with the CM and N elements, which flank it.

This defines the interest of a crisis study. In a society where there is no crisis, historical actors struggle around an axis of counter-elements, but they deviate directly and constantly towards the elements themselves. If the dominant and dominated classes defend both a sociocultural model of development and an instrumental conception of economic progress, the clash between these positions obliges them, on the one hand, to rediscover a cultural model that is no longer a sociocultural model, since both classes they are seeking equally and contradictorily to appropriate it; Likewise, class conflict rediscovers the existence of forms of mobilization that cannot be reduced to the interests of one class or another, as both can claim them simultaneously. Just as the introduction of actors inevitably implies the passage from elements to counter-elements, the struggle between these actors inevitably reintroduces the elements, which are the stakes of this struggle. / But this oscillation between elements and counter-elements, between historical problems and solutions posed by social consciousness through class conflict, is interrupted by SHA elements, which create a certain opacity between elements and counter-elements as a result of their non-coincidence . Social consciousness and its conflicts are no longer directly related to problems of historicity. Ultimately in a state of generalization

Chapter Two

crisis, conflicting social representations form a closed world. Ideas, images, objectives, all oppose each other without their opposition recognizing a common ground. In that case, we should not say that the class struggle is victorious. Quite the contrary is true. Because all reference to historicity disappears, and the actors are no longer defined except by the multiple play of their oppositions and their competition. Now, whatever the precise conception of conflicts, they always imply a will to control and direct a general process of historical change. In a crisis situation, this general process dissolves into the struggle of the actors. Social conflicts are nothing more than a shadow game. More precisely, conflicts linked to historicity are degraded to conflicts located at the institutional and political level; social classes are also fragmented and subdivided into a multitude of social forces. Let us imagine for a moment these societies in the process of development, by nature they are societies in crisis whose elements in general do not coincide with each other because several systems of historical action are at work. The result is that politics acquires a complexity and autonomy unknown in more stable societies, where, on the contrary, the opposition of social classes is much more evident. The analysis of the crisis is indispensable for that of the historical actors. It is rare for social classes to occur in a pure state (without even considering here the intervention of actors formed at other levels of social reality: institutions and organizations). The opposition between the adherents of the old and the new, between the elite and the mass, between the innovators and the collectivity, overlaps with that of classes. Knowledge of the crises makes it possible to unravel this tangle and, consequently, to isolate the general character of class conflicts, beyond their particular historical manifestations. The crisis study is also the necessary complement to the analysis which, having defined the SHA and its elements, has laid the foundations for an examination of the historical actors introducing the notion of counter-elements, and is decir passing from the historical experience to the representations of Social consciousness. A crisis is a discord between the elements and counter-elements of historical action. ç.

mastery and separation

Historicity is the level of analysis that governs my procedure as a whole. A society is a particular type of system whose functioning is governed by its ability to act on that functioning, to build a field of cultural experience based on the ability to produce work through knowledge, accumulation and the cultural model. The historical action system, on the other hand, is a "regional" concept. Defines one of the social systems, a TbF and levels of sociological analysis. through this analysis, also of the social reality. A society, seen in its simplest form

The Historical Action System

aspects, abstracted from its historical complexity, is the concatenation of three subunits: the field of historicity, institutions and social organization. The historical action system is one of the two elements of the field of historicity; the other is the class relations that form the field of historical actors. The historical action system is organized around the cultural model, a component of historicity; class relations are more directly linked to accumulation. ↑ Even before directly addressing the issue of social classes, it is necessary to highlight the interdependence of the historical action system and class relations. There are two types of analysis that must never be separated: that of the division of society into classes and the way in which it is "fed" by the driving force of historicity and, more directly, by the system of historical action. Everything is social relations, but everything is also governed by historical action. Reconciliation between these two orders cannot be achieved by compromise, as if the division into classes is never complete and society's orientations are never fully integrated with each other. What unites these orientations is so fundamental that we should find it at the very heart of any analysis. It is, in fact, historicity, because historicity must inevitably be at the same time a motor and a rupture, a constitutive principle of a system of historical action and a rupture with the functioning of society. The cultural model is the means by which historicity becomes the orientation of social activity; accumulation, on the contrary, heralds the rupture of activity towards historicity, while class relations, in a complementary movement, cause this division of society from itself to shift downwards again towards social organization. If historicity is forgotten, if the system of historical action and class relations are left in confrontation, their unity and duality are contradicted. On the other hand, they come together when it is recognized that society is only definable by the relationship between its historicity and its functioning, the domination of the first over the second, which is also the starting point of the first from the second. Analysis does not need to start from a summit to descend again to the planes of social organization. It is governed by this circular relationship: activity-historicity-functioning and, therefore, by the double movement of ascent and descent that leads to historicity and then descends again to social organization. d.

Historical Action System Settings

The system of historical action is defined by the relations that unite its

Chapter Two

elements, but their content depends on the work situation, since the cultural model itself is linked to a type of accumulation and, therefore, to a certain level of action of society on itself, to a certain level of development of creative work and knowledge . We could therefore, without further ado, leave to history the task of applying the general concepts worked out to each individual concrete society. But that would be rushing things a bit and not establishing the reasons that allow us to talk about the structure of historical action. We are not concerned here with reducing historical analysis to the application of a sociological construction, but with bringing to light a series of implications in this concept of SHA. I will therefore return to some points raised earlier in this chapter. one.

The construction of the four social types

The elements of the SHA are sociological in nature, but correspond to the elements of economic activity. The cultural model corresponds to production, mobilization to work organization, hierarchy to distribution, needs to consumption. This correspondence is derived from the SHA definition itself. that it is not a system of ideas but the organization of the movement that drives society to exceed its functioning, in terms of its creative work and in the name of the awareness of creativity that this work gives it. But the system of historical action does not exactly coincide with economic activity, term for term, except when society is completely shaped by its historicity. The further away from this situation, the more the cultural model is linked, like accumulation itself, to the order and not to the movement of economic activity. All "historical" societies thus lie between two extremes which probably do not correspond to any real case: on the one hand, a society of pure reproduction, entirely governed by its laws of function and exchange; on the other, a society entirely controlled by itself, a voluntary association or a totalitarian nightmare. The space between these points is not occupied by a long upward struggle towards freedom and responsibility, but by a variety of social types, configurations of the historical system of action. Each of them corresponds to the roots of historicity in one of the elements of economic activity: consumption, distribution, organization, production. For this reason, they will be referred to here by the name of the economic activity from which they derive and which they transform into meaning and practice: agrarian, mercantile, industrial and programmed societies. We are not dealing here with types of total society, but only with configurations of the historical system of action. No territorial collectivity

The Historical Action System

can be identified with one of these types. History begins by apprehending concrete totalities that are at the same time systems of historical action, political social organizations, states and modes of social change. The less strong the grip of historicity on the functioning of society, the less easily a social type can isolate itself from the particular forms of organization, reproduction and change of particular collectivities. /. The programmed society. In the most economically advanced societies, what accumulates is the capacity to produce production, the very principle of "creative work", that is, of knowledge. This is revealed by the importance of teaching and research, by the decisive role that information plays. and by the use of information systems in economic growth. The cultural model, in this case, corresponds to the P (production) element of the economic system. It follows that the isomorphism of the two systems is expressed by a term-by-term correspondence of the SHA elements and the economic elements, and this is represented in figure 7. movement

clean

cultural model

hierarchy

s=social elements c=cultural elements orientations

Production

distribution c

chapter four

Movements that do not care about their political influence are also those that are not revolutionary, that directly link the crisis of a social system to a messianic-type utopia, or that try to carry out a coup d'état through a totally disorganized action. base. Every true social movement is reformist and revolutionary at the same time, it recognizes and makes use of the existence of the political system, it also recognizes its limitations and it constantly maintains the general line of its action outside and above institutions, at the level of class conflicts and historicity. . The ruling class, in turn, also uses political institutions, but these institutions constitute a limitation to its hegemony. To think that institutions and politics are a vehicle of domination is simply to forget that domination manifests itself much more outside the institutional system, both in what it rejects or prohibits and in what it imposes. If sociology claims that what seems to limit or question hegemony is nothing more than the mask of that hegemony, then it may well, in turn, be accused of being a mere ruse, albeit a more subtle one, on the part of the class. dominant. . . An absurd and infinitely retrospective game, but one that doesn't exist only in the imagination. The institutional system and its discourse are determined by the system of historical action and by class relations and domination, but there is never a direct correspondence between ruling class domination and political institutions. d.

The state

So far I have tried not to talk about the state. The word barely popped up more than a sentence here and there. This is because, in practice, the State cannot be confused with the political system or with any of its elements. The State is not a concept constructed by sociological analysis, but a complex social agent, whose action extends to the field of historicity, to institutions and also to social organization. one.

The integration of the functional levels of society

The three great levels of social reality do not overlap directly within a collectivity that is the final actor, producing its own system of historical action, classes, institutions and organization. Capitalist industrialization cannot be analyzed within a purely national framework, and the political system itself, although linked to a specific territorial collectivity, cannot be fully identified with that collectivity. However, the separation that analysis is forced to introduce between social fields that in fact intersect and do not overlap, also brings with it the importance of the agents that place them in relation to each other, within the framework of territorial unity. The

The Political or Institutional System

217

principal of these agents. It is through the State that a social organization is defined and managed, delimited by borders within which authority is exercised legitimized by the decisions of the political system, and in which social classes struggle for control of a historical system of action. And yet, isn't the State, in turn, less an autonomous agent than the representative of historical actors, of social classes? In most cases, it seems to be linked to the ruling class, as this class would be dominant and dominant if next to it there was a state that was in fact more powerful than it, what would it be like if it controlled the combined levels of functioning of society? In other cases, the state seems to have been conquered by a popular social movement that manages to "seize power" and its subordination is indicated by that of state dignitaries in relation to party leaders, in countries where a communist party has triumphed. Is the State, in any of these cases, something more than the executive apparatus of those who exercise social domination? This interpretation is very superficial. In the case of a popular revolution, the ruling party becomes the state. Thus, it ceased to be just a social movement to become a managing agent of a complex society and, at the same time, a decision-maker that establishes intersocial relations with other States through war and diplomacy. the construction of Socialism in a single country, and even more so the acts of socialist states, have shown quite clearly the gap that inevitably exists between a social movement and a state, especially in a situation of international crisis. That the working class is in power in this or that country never corresponds to reality, but belongs to the ideology produced by the State. This is not to say that socialist societies should not be primarily defined by the labor movement or by revolutionary action undertaken by and for a popular class. But it would be just as false to say that the state is nothing more than the agent of the working or peasant class as to say that the state exercises a definable power independently of the class movement that made its formation possible. When the State is linked to a ruling class, its autonomy is even more evident. For now, suffice it to say that a ruling class is perpetually trying to establish its dominance over society in the most direct way possible and thereby reduce state intervention, the force of which is always greater than the power of the state. ruling class is smaller, or how opposition from the popular classes is more active. Above all, the role of the state is based on the relative autonomy of elements of the historical system of action in relation to collective actions. Although intimately linked to a class or a social movement, the State intervenes directly in the management of the organs of historicity, for example, in a post-industrial society, in scientific and technical development Present in the field of historicity, but not reducible to a social class,

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the State is also present in the political field. The State weighs on the political system with all the weight of the field of historicity and the social organization it represents. On him weighs, in turn, the weight of the political system. State and political system are not two institutional subsystems, but the State is the place where the institutional system combines with other social systems, the historical action system, the class system, the organizational systems. This is something we see clearly when we recognize that the liberal trilogy – legislature, executive, judiciary – is artificial. The State is not limited to executing the decisions of the legislature, but is also, on the one hand, administration and, on the other, an agent of historicity. The state also intervenes, to say the least, in the judiciary. If it is the task of the political system to draw the line between what is legal and what is illegal or criminal, then the state deals, usually very directly, with everything that has been excluded in this process. He is an agent of repression. He ensures the reign of order and, even more, keeps under his direct authority everything that institutional decisions consider a threat to order. Although the justice apparatus may belong in some of its aspects to the political system, prisons and the police are the domain of the State, in which political actors venture very little and always encounter strong resistance from the State. the state apparatus. These repressive agencies are not organizations; they are located at the political level; It is the shadows that the light of institutions keeps at bay, and the State owns these shadows. Finally, should we identify the state with social organization? The State intervenes in this domain, more directly through its administration. Furthermore, the state itself is an organization, because it exercises authority and because it conducts war and diplomacy. In times of war, society even seems to become identical with the state. It is mobilized, and neither class conflicts nor political activities manage to maintain their usual form within this mobilization. But even in this case the State is not just the administrator of a collectivity. It is much more the agent of the political system, of class relations and of the system of historical action on the level of social organization. Sometimes he intervenes so that the decisions of the political system are respected; sometimes it is above all an instrument of the dominant ideology, which it tries to transform into a consensus, namely by acting through its means of socialization. In short, the State introduces political and organizational problems into the field of historicity, problems of historicity and politics into social organization and, finally, problems of historicity and social organization into the political field. It is both intermediary and unifying. And this dual role lies in the very definition of its existence: it unites a field of historicity to a social organization through a political system; unites a general system to a particular territorial community. This is the reason why the

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The study of the State has always been located halfway between history and sociology, in an ill-defined no man's land, but whose autonomy seems firmly established: that of "political sciences", which are concerned, in fact, with knowledge of the political system. The political system, its functioning and its relations with social classes, on the one hand, and with administration, on the other, are clearly inserted within the scope of political sociology, while the State, which must always be defined in time and space, in its history and in an international context, belongs to a different type of analysis in which the comparative method occupies a central position. This dual role of the State needs to be defined more precisely. On the other hand, the State unifies society from top to bottom, inserting social organization within the framework of the political system and in the field of historicity, imprints the practices of social life, which on the surface are relative and changeable, with the seal of the absolute, for it is the supreme power and, in Weber's famous phrase, has a monopoly on legitimate physical violence. The very existence of the state is always belying any purely "liberal" view of society that sees it as a set of strategies, interests and influences, all in competition, but all constantly in a state of negotiation. Its role cannot be understood at the level of the social organization itself; the orientations of the system of historical action and class domination become, through the political system, the rules imposed by a power. The State holds this power, which in principle is absolute and which is most clearly manifested in the work of repression. The State is never more powerful than when it establishes a direct relationship between what it calls values and the defense of a territorial community against other similar communities. On the other hand, the State is not the master, but the last resort. It guarantees the emergence of problems and conflicts from the social organization to the political system, class relations and the system of historical action. It is an instrument of integration and repression, yes, but it is also an agent of change: reformists try to use it to remedy the imbalances and crises produced by a mode of social domination; revolutionaries try to take advantage of it to transform society's orientations and class relations. These two roles are not balanced and are not on the same analytical plane, but they are interdependent. In a synchronic analysis of society, the State appears as an integrator and repressor, but its action does not result, ultimately, in the materialization of a field of historicity, since a territorial collectivity is a complex social formation, a historical reality, and not a type or a sociological setting. In this sense, the State is not an instrument of reproduction, but is always subject to a fundamental tension: between a historical unit and a sociological field. In a diachronic analysis, the State is an agent of social change, but this

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tends to constitute a type of society that is as homogeneous, as coherent as possible, which presents itself as the bearer of a "model" of society. These two roles combine in very different ways, so different in fact that one is constantly tempted to introduce a simplifying principle into their analysis, a temptation, however, which one has to overcome, as this chapter constantly tries to show. Couldn't it be said that integration and change go hand in hand at this middle level of society formed by the political system, since that is where the laws to integrate society are dictated and where the debates can come to change the laws? ? No, this is just an optical illusion. For although the double movement that descends from historicity to social organization and then ascends again from this to the former traverses the political system in both directions, this political system cannot account for it alone. Furthermore, it is just as tempting to assign no role to the political system as it is to assign every role to it. It is not subject to class domination; Is he not powerless in the face of really serious decisions like war, or simply in the face of the power wielded by the head of a company? Nothing exempts us from examining the complexity of the mechanisms by which the two great roles of the State are combined, a fact that also shows the vanity of any investigation into the essence of the State. Political philosophies are mere political or doctrinal creations. The study of the State can never precede or command the study of the functioning of society and the relationships between the hierarchical systems that determine it. Conversely, the state can never be reduced to the role of agent of a social or political force. It never happens that a field of historicity, an institutional system and a social organization overlap perfectly. Hence the role of the State in the process of change, but hence first its power and capacity to resort to force and violence. The State is not only the place of communication between the various levels of society; it always has an autonomous apparatus and a specific capacity for its own action. We will see that the struggle for state power is the reason for the collective actions that I call critical actions to distinguish them from social movements. The state can even destroy all social systems, directly imposing its hegemony over them. B.

State and "Civil Society"

If the place of the state in sociological analysis really is as I have just described it, then the main problem faced by such an analysis is to define the conditions and effects of various forms of state intervention in social life. Some extreme images should suffice here. On the one hand, we have the image of an integrating State that directly manages the historical system of action, intervening in snacks between

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classes and replacing them if necessary, which directly controls the political system and extends its apparatus to the administration of all sectors of social organization. A total state, it might be called, or even totalitarian. In the simplest cases, but probably not the closest to reality, one can imagine that this integration could only operate on one of the levels of social reality. Society becomes an organization or a political system, or the form of domination by the ruling class. The all-powerful state would then dissolve into one of its functions. It is more interesting to consider the case of simultaneous integration into all levels of social reality in a state that replaces itself at these levels. Such a situation means a complete dehistoricization, depoliticization and disorganization of society and, consequently, the deserialization of a society that has become an instrument of the State. In this case, historicity merges with what is most distant from it, the "naturalness" of society, as in the case of Nazism, exalting race, land, Volk. The political system is nothing more than a shadow of itself, that is, an association of mobilization with repression. Social organization is governed by purposes linked to intersocial relations: pursuit of power, expression, preparation for war, which becomes the supreme objective of the state and also leads to its final collapse. This destructuring of society at the same time proscribes any process of change. This state has reached an ultimate form and can no longer change, except in terms of external pressures and your efforts to adapt to them when you cannot control them. Such an outcome can only occur in a situation of general crisis of social organization, political crisis and impotence of social movements, whether from the ruling class or the popular class. At the opposite extreme, we find the image of the State as an intermediary, reduced to registering the interactions between different social systems. This is the classic image of the liberal State, an agent for propagating the elements of the historical action system, an agent of the dominant class, committed to reducing the autonomy of organizations and the weight of its own administration. A state essentially held within the confines of the political system. The moderation of this State subjects it to the life of historical actors: class relations weigh more than State intervention. Therefore, the role of the state depends on the nature of these relationships and the nature of the political system. If the latter is too open, then a "welfare" policy aimed at job security and wealth redistribution will be allowed. Ideally, society becomes a political market, pragmatically managed, open to change, but with a tendency for historicity to dissolve into strategies and transactions, so that political activity is largely directed towards the pursuit of unstable equilibria. If, on the contrary, the political system is "blocked" or has a low degree of

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opening, then state non-interventionism will accompany the hegemony of a more conquering ruling class style, which will itself assume the direction of both the historical system of action and social organization, extending its ideology to all spaces evacuated by the latter's role it will then be to remove any obstacle to the action of the ruling class, repress opposition to it, guarantee an openness and mobility that are nothing more than the mobilization of social resources for the benefit of the ruling class. The State guarantees that there is freedom and equality, which means that it guarantees that the well-fed and well-trained horse can run in the same race as the undernourished horse brought to the racecourse straight from the corral, and also that the ritual is respected. of race, that all protests aimed at pointing out the real inequality of this situation be discarded, more precisely, this state transforms class domination into or stratification; it constructs categories of social practice, but refrains from intervening —at least theoretically— in the way in which men are assigned to currents and the resulting strata. Just let social domination do its job of transforming equality into inequality, freedom into impotence. The role of the State is always situated somewhere between these two extreme positions: the total State that breaks relations with "civil society", imposes its own interests and ideology on it, imprisons it in immobility or aggression and, on the other hand, On the other hand, the State that was absorbed by civil society, subordinated to the interests of the ruling class or, at best, to the conservative balance between social domination and social defense. ç.

State Interventionism and Class Relations

The importance of the State varies between these two limiting extremes; it presupposes that the State goes beyond the political system and enters the field of historicity, but also that it does not destroy the relations between the system of historical action and class relations. Which means that this autonomous role of the State depends above all on the nature of class relations. The role of the State is small both when an ascending dominant class is imposed, which seeks to exercise its dominion directly over society as a whole, and when the State is again absorbed by the political system, when conflicts between mature classes are institutionalized . the advantage These two situations are variants of the conjunction of a predominantly dominant class and a predominantly defensive class. In such situations, the upper class need not take refuge behind an autonomous state. At most he will make use of it as a means of removing obstacles to his own initiatives. Now, let us consider the other forms that class relations take, and then examine successively the following cases: (1) ruling class defensive class, (2) ruling class contesting class, and (3) ruling class contesting class,

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which constitute, together with the case already described (dominant class-defensive class), the simple forms of the double dialectic of social classes. 1. The conjunction of a mostly dominant upper class with a mostly defensive popular class corresponds to a low degree of reference to the system of historical action. It is possible that in this case the political system plays a primordial role, but as this will imply its subjection to the hegemony of the dominant class, it will already be subordinated to the state apparatus that is the expression of this hegemony. More important is the case where the expression of class domination is direct domination over the social organization, in which the social organization is mainly a set of agents for the reproduction of the established order. The State's role then increases in magnitude to the extent that the weakness of the dominant and contesting classes means a crisis of historicity and, consequently, the presence of "uncivilized" initiatives on one or both sides. Order cannot simply reproduce itself, it must be maintained in the face of constant threats. This means that the State assumes an important repressive role, complemented in turn by a tendency towards ideological integration, which becomes more and more intense as tendencies towards explosion become more visible. State action therefore moves downwards; defines and imposes the categories of social practice; proclaims values and norms, enacts rules, establishes authorities, directly recruits and trains youth and professional groups, imposes a religion and an ideology, makes a fuss of separating those who have benefited from its training from - the "bad guys" - those who have not, and whom it excludes or imprisons. The colonial situation is the one in which this type of State develops most, especially when the colonialism in question is of the French type and is still found here and there today, specifically in the Antilles, where capitalist interests are less strong. than those of the dual domination of an old ruling class and a state-centered administration. The role of the instruments of cultural domination and, above all, of the school, although also of the church, is of the utmost importance here. This is why the rebellion is directed against the ideological and state-centered apparatus more specifically than against economic domination. Revolts are waged more in the name of the nation than in the name of a class, when the ruling state is more visible than the ruling class. 2. The exact opposite of situation 1 is that in which a predominantly dominant upper class is associated with a mostly contested popular class. Here, the opposing classes are relating their action directly to the game of their struggle, to the historical system of action. They are involved in a direct relationship and

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open conflict, which inevitably leads to the explosion of the historical action system, whose elements are replaced by sets of counter-elements defended by each of the opposing classes. It may seem, at first glance, that this situation produces the maximum reduction in state intervention. However, this is not quite the case, as such a confrontation presupposes a dynamic, open, very modernizing situation, which means that the historical action system is strongly constituted and that the political system is open. The State's action consists, therefore, in reconciling the demands of the historical action system and the institutional mechanisms, in opposing class conflicts with a call for modernization and conflict resolution. One can speak here of liberal intervention in the sense that there is no direct intervention in the area of class relations. These types of intentions also contribute to a process of maturation of class relations by reducing the importance of domination and defense. The State works for the modernization of the dominant class, but also for the mobilization of the popular class. The State intervenes with greater force if, under pressure from popular opposition, it is forced to rescue society from a crisis arising from the inability of the upper class to exercise its leading role. However, the State, for example, does not limit itself to replacing industrialists who have become speculators; it gives new impetus to economic activity and encourages the reorganization and modernization of the ruling class. He intervenes most directly when there is a stagnant balance between an old class and a new class, so that neither really rules. This is Antonio Gramsdr's interpretation of Caesarism. In all cases, this State extends the "mobilization"* of society, thus supporting itself in its struggle against the ex-patricians. The State puts its emphasis above all on the progress of exchanges, communications, education. 3. In the last conjunction, the popular response collides with an upper class that is more dominant than a leader, incapable of initiating the system of historical action, more investor - and with a speculative than a productivist mentality, more concerned with maintaining barriers than with guiding the change. State intervention in this case is triggered by popular class efforts to control the historical action system. The most extreme form of this intervention is conquest. of the State by a revolutionary movement A more limited form corresponds to a state action that breaks the ruling class in response to popular opposition, assuming a ruling class role, leaving the original ruling class, renewed by this crisis, the possibility of resuming its role leadership later. Finally, the state can be even more directly the agent responsible for the formation of a ruling class incapable of

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constituted without such intervention. The popular response is used and suppressed; a modernizing and authoritarian state, often capable of activating paternalistic populism, struggles to overcome its backwardness or economic underdevelopment, but to the benefit of a ruling class formed under its aegis, which can be more easily foreign than national. Many national histories have examples of transitions from one type of state intervention to another. In Latin America, the national-popular State, which was born under very different conditions both in Mexico and in Brazil, has become a modernizing State that acts as the hand of large foreign companies and plays a repressive role, especially in the case of from Brazil. It is, therefore, the popular response that provokes State intervention in the field of historicity. Inversely, it is the preponderant role of the dominant class that diminishes this role of the State, either imprisoning it in the units of the political system, or imposing its hegemony over this system and using the State only as an apparatus of integration and repression, which also expels it. from the field of historicity and transforms it into an instrument of fusion between institutions and social organization, which combine to become the agent of ideological domination of the upper class. In summary, the state can belong to one of three types when it is not totalitarian, when it does not replace society: (1) it can identify itself almost entirely with the political system, (2) it can be located at the crossroads of institutions and social organization, or (3) it can emerge from its base in the political system and penetrate the field of historicity. Each of these types corresponds mainly to a modality of social change; therefore, they are discussed in more detail at the end of the last chapter of this book. But at least we can name these changing processes. I call liberal societies those in which the ruling class prevails over the ruling class, societies that are not excessively oppressed by their past, by the rule of the former ruling classes; open and conquering societies. Such societies are also under the more direct control of the ruling class. In them, the State has above all an integrative, ideological role. It is the agent of values, that is, of the ideology of the ruling class. It intervenes in social organization to submit it to the decisions of a political system dominated by the dominant class, but from the outside and not from the inside. This state action is not carried out in the name of its leadership role or its links with the ruling class. It is located at the farthest point of historicity and is hidden under an idealist language. At the same time, State agents are more rhetorical than ideologues: social and cultural integration within the framework of class domination, adaptation to economic and cultural changes, behaviors linked to ascending or descending social mobility, all this is confused in the discourse and practices of a

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Extremely professional state. But this integrative role cannot be separated from a repressive function that is exercised against the “deviants” and against the opposition of the popular class. This state attaches great importance to the work of socialization, of inculcating values and norms; he sees himself as exercising a moral and edifying function. Contractual societies are those where the old ruling classes weigh most heavily, where heterogeneity is greatest, where the past has not been abolished by the present but where a powerful ruling class nevertheless exists. In them all the elements of class conflict are mixed and at the same time tend to merge with the debates of the political system, which is a place for reforms, compromises or accommodations, and oriented as much to change as to stability. The state tends to be centered in this political system. Finally, voluntarist societies are those in which the obstacles to change are strongest, in which change is not managed directly by a national ruling class. This means that the State enters the field of historicity under the pressure of a contesting popular class. Sometimes it becomes the agent of that class, sometimes it imposes its power on opposing but composite classes incapable of producing social movements, sometimes it turns against the popular class to establish a new ruling class under its aegis. It should be added, however, that this situation, characterized by dependence on the society in question, brings together two opposite roles for the State. On the one hand, the State is at the service of external domination and plays a repressive role that is accentuated by the fact that dependency leads to underemployment, serious economic imbalances and also violent nationalist movements. On the other hand, this State, dissociated from economic power, can be easily penetrated by political forces. This "openness" of the State is one of the most characteristic aspects of many Latin American situations. This State exercises a redistributive function, creating followers of "clients", sometimes among the middle classes, sometimes among members of the "marginal" society that depends on their gifts to survive, and is the main basis of law. wing populisms such as the famous examples created by Riojas Pinilla in Colombia, Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela or Odría in Peru. But in both cases it is clear that the State is not simply the expression of a national ruling class, which is, on the contrary, "civil" and seeks to reduce state intervention in order to consolidate its own hegemony over the political and social system. organization. When the state overloads the political system, then, it can happen in two opposite ways. When it is mainly the upper class agent, then he acts

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mainly within the social organization, and this is what I called its ideological role. Integrate and delete. When his intervention is guided by popular opposition, then he acts in the field of historicity: he is a modernizer, a "developmentalist". Each of these two types of state action can take weakened or degraded forms. When domination is not imposed by force, it is exercised by social agents who add their own interests and representations that they have been entrusted with transmitting or applying. Ultimately, containment can be replaced by ritual, and the remnants of old forms of domination disappear into mere ceremonies. On the other hand, state interventionism decomposes into institutionalization. The State is under pressure from categories, mainly from the middle class, who seek advantages or security. These two degraded forms of action can be easily combined. The maintenance of the influence of the former dominant classes can be associated with a policy that distributes advantages at least relative to certain social categories. France certainly experienced a period of exhausted republicanism during which the old landed bourgeoisie defended the social and cultural order that suited it, while the new middle classes gradually turned to the defense of newly acquired vested interests what originally had been an impetus for an active participation. wider. . For the world of education, far removed from major national decisions and major political and economic interests, it is easier than for most sectors of society to become an environment in which this double degradation of State action flourishes and to admire with satisfaction the image itself. But this decomposition takes on more serious forms when State intervention is more powerful, when it transforms forms of social participation, class relations and economic policies more profoundly. The closer it approaches the revolutionary state, the greater the threat of a state absolutism that can go as far as totalitarianism. The state becomes the ruling class and the ruling class at the same time. It becomes a bureaucratic apparatus that grants privileges to its own members instead of transforming social organization. The total State, at the same time modernizing and revolutionary, carries with it the despotic State that imposes extreme restrictions on society for the benefit of a newly formed ruling class closely linked to the State. d.

The State, Institutions and Social Organization

Since the State is a linking agent between the field of historicity, the political system and social organization, we must elaborate a set of propositions that define the State's attributions not only according to the greater or lesser importance of the dominant class or the ruling class, or the defensive class or the contesting class, but also depending on whether the

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the political system is more or less dynamic or blocked and, depending on the social organization, stable or in crisis. Let us content ourselves here with defining the general effects of the state of institutions and social organization. 1. If the political system is dynamic, if institutionalization, in the two forms described earlier in this chapter, is strongly developed, then the State should intervene less in the relations between social actors than in the cultural domain, that is, in the organization of relations between society and its field of action. The State thus plays an important role in the very historicity and in the "technical" or "professional" organization of social activity. A blocked political system, on the contrary, returns to the State a large part of political and class relations. If the system shuts down completely, political life will be replaced by rivalries between individuals, clans, cliques and interest groups within the same state. The apparent power of the State, which dominates the political system, actually hides hidden networks of intrigues and conflicts. The more "practical" forms of social organization are dominated by the role they play in the entourage of a group of state leaders. The totalitarian state is also deeply fragmented. Both Goering and Himmler created empires in certain sectors of the state apparatus and therefore also within social organization, just as in Stalinist regimes the army or the police can become a state within a state. 2. If the social organization is stable, if it is not affected by serious crises, either in its internal functioning or in the sphere of inter-social relations, and in particular international relations, then one can formulate the hypothesis that the role of the State it's mostly one. of integration and, therefore, that the ideology of the State is developing more and more, particularly in the field of socialization. It is less a matter of establishing coherent norms for the functioning of society than of instilling them in citizens, and especially in the younger generations. The search for consensus, the dissemination of values, are the essential tasks of this type of integrating state. Serious economic or international crisis. on the other hand, obliging the State to play a more organizing role. He is mobilized by the urgent need to find resources, to restore balance, to provide security. But it must be added that this distinction between the integrating state and the organizing state is "weaker" than those introduced earlier, since the form that this role takes depends on the state of the political system and, above all, on class relations. A revolutionary state usually faces a serious crisis of social organization, which can go as far as a foreign war, a civil war or a severe food shortage. Such a state cannot be purely organizing. But it cannot be defined as integrative at the level of social organization. takes off

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by a social movement, which is something else; intervenes very strongly in the field of historicity, and this intervention is directly associated with an organizing action, just as Carnot, the “victory organizer”, was associated with Robespierre and all the social movements combined in the Jacobin action. It is not a question here of constructing an increasingly complex typology that would only prove to be a bad compromise between the search for principles of sociological analysis and direct knowledge of historical situations. What we are doing, on the contrary, is to present some simple propositions that, together, will allow to account in the most succinct way possible for the diversity of observable situations. I.

From the State as guarantee to the State as ruler

Our analyzes were limited to a consideration of the State in its relations with the different social systems. But does this not in fact place us in a particular historical situation, and can this separation of the state from "civil society" be kept outside the limited framework of industrialized capitalist societies which introduced the separation of these two terms? The objection is not unfounded, but its consequences are less far-reaching than might at first appear. On the contrary, it leads to the differentiation of various components in state action//^ the types of society that predate industrialization, the cultural model introduces a metasocial guarantee for the social order. Historicity is not lived and thought of as praxis, but as an order established and maintained by a sovereign, by the State, an order that replaces the religious guarantees of the social order before being replaced by "economic" guarantees, which finally give up their power if returns to a purely "practical", scientific and technical view of historicity. The state defines the order in which class relationships are placed; at the same time, it extends its domain to the political system and social organization. But this does not mean that society is reduced to being solely the work of the State. The State is all-powerful in the sphere of social reproduction, but it is also dominated by class relations and forms of social organization that resist its intervention. Your weakness is the flip side of your strength. It does not direct social practice, it merely establishes order. Not that this prevents him from intervening in class relations and politics. Therefore, we must distinguish within this type of state what belongs to the corporate state, the guarantee of order, and what belongs to the political state, in general, the integrator or intermediary. It is a reversal of this situation that characterizes post-industrial society. Here the state intervenes in the field of historicity as an increasingly important component of the ruling class. This happens not only in so-called socialist countries, but also in societies that have remained capitalist, in which the interdependence of the State and big business is increasingly

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evident, both when planning is mostly private and when it is mostly public. The State controls ever larger areas of society as the productive system imposes an increasingly integrated management of a technical-human whole. Everywhere, or almost everywhere, education, health services and housing are the object of increasing State intervention, while at the same time mobilizing the growing resources required by scientific and technical development and by the quest for power. Does this mean that the state can be reduced to its status as a member of the ruling class? Certainly not, and the variety of types of post-industrial society that are forming before our eyes is very convincing evidence of this. Here again we must distinguish between two components of state action: the governing state and the political state. That is why the growing role of the State in the economic management of society cannot lead us to think that class conflicts have been overcome and that the political system is nothing more than the instrument of state power. In industrialized capitalist countries, we are seeing rather a dissociation of the state apparatus. On the one hand, the technocratic State that directs large organizations and intervenes in the operation of others; on the other, a State whose role is determined by the situation of class relations and by the characteristics of the political system and social organization. Between these two situations, the pre-industrial and the post-industrial, the State is no longer a metasocial guarantor of the social order, but it is not yet a manager of large organizations. That is why in industrial societies it is often identified with the political system. Such identification is never acceptable. These different roles of the state do not simply succeed one another as stages in some historical evolution. They combine in invariably complex ways, so that the apparent unity of the state has to be broken down by sociological analysis. Let's look at the current French state. It retains many aspects of its former role as a metasocial justification. He is treated as if he were the sovereign, expressing respect and humility that are the recognition of his sacredness. It maintains a pre-industrial system of historical action whose most visible element is the type of organization that Weber called bureaucratic. The rule is more important to him than the goal. Its rigidity, its sense of hierarchy, its division into almost overlapping castes and with almost no intercommunication, all this has often been described, sometimes with admiration but usually with irritation, because its archaism in an industrialized society is evident. But it is difficult to persuade State agents that their social function is not reduced to the "general interest", that large public organizations or teachers are not above society, above its class relations and its political system, that they are not simple professionals who act in the name of their competence and for the good of all, beyond individual interests.

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However, this grandiose and outdated image is far from reality. This guarantee of the State was undermined for some time by the change in society. The Protecting State is often nothing more than a patron State, colonized by interest groups and political forces that were deposited in superimposed layers throughout its administration. This disorganization of the State is simultaneously the opposite of its abstract rationality and its complement, a consequence of its maladjustment to the society in which it operates. Behind this authorization-State and this "politicized" State also emerges the administrator-State, which in turn has two distinct aspects. It is above all an interventionist state, developed by popular opposition, especially during the Popular Front and Liberation era, pressured by trade unions, organizer of co-productions and Social Security committees. It is also the instrument of modernization of the ruling class, first replacing this class to rebuild the country's economic superstructure, to create large productive structures, then, when the large capitalist production groups are formed, associating with them to help the development industries. . In this management function he was favored by his former guarantee function. The high administrators of state planning are descendants of the great royal administrators, so the technocrats had no problem taking the places of a civil and military aristocracy more concerned with power than with money. But this State also guarantees the continuity of the dominant classes and the instruments for the reproduction of social inequality. At the same time that it modernized the upper class, it also maintained the old social and cultural barriers, without relinquishing its role as an agent for the defense of numerous collective interests outside the ruling class. Thus, it performs four main functions: guaranteeing the modernization

incitement to political domination

Hence the constant ambiguity of the judgments made against him, because he is at the same time a "Napoleonist" and a "social democrat", and these terms are also confused, because the Napoleonic state is at the same time the guarantor of order and the modernizing agent of new ruling class, while the social democratic state is both open to political pressures and a relay station for social domination. Those who attack the archaism of the current state are often also those who defend the interests of the new technocratic ruling class, while those who defend it easily accept its role of social domination. Nothing could show more clearly the dangers of analyzes that prioritize the problems of the State, as if the State were the center

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principle of social activity, while its unifying role is always limited enough to oblige analysis to give priority to a definition of the historical action system, class relations, political system and forms of social organization before defining the functions and functioning of the state. F.

Conclusion

The State, insofar as it goes beyond the political system, produces a rhetoric that replaces the social dialectic, the tensions between the elements of the different social systems and the conflicts between the actors, by an apparently “positive” discourse, but forced to resort to to arbitrary statements to bring together opposing or contradictory elements. The autonomy of this state rhetoric is all the greater the more heterogeneous the society, the more limited or blocked its political system, the more in crisis the social organization is. But it also needs to be said that, while covering up society, the state also gives it a unity that is more than merely constraining. The State masks the tensions of the historical action system, class conflicts, political interactions, but, by articulating all levels of social reality, it has a very strong mobilization capacity, it is a creator of community. This other side of the State is what modern societies call the nation. If the homeland is the identification of a field of historicity with a territorial collectivity identified with its values, the nation, on the contrary, is the massive emergence of social organization at the level of historicity, and it is the State that makes the bells and drums of the soldiers sound. of Year II, the Red Army, or those who fought in Vietnam. In an age of big companies and big empires, of sciences and techniques, of strategies and growth, the nation remains more than ever, in all the places on the globe where essential social changes are taking place, the great force of social mobilization. There is no social movement of any size that does not seek to return life and creativity to the nation, and that is not moved by the utopia of absorbing the State into the nation. But it is also this desire that gives the State the most strength and which constantly creates the danger of dissolving the nation into mere subjects and of turning zeal into orthodoxy, conformism or servility. Alongside the State as rhetoric and the State as a nation, there is also the State as dominator, placing itself above the class struggle and the political system. It is against this State that protest movements are formed with the main objective of “seizure of power”, of taking over the State apparatus. It is a fact that such collective action exists, definable more directly by its relation to the State than in terms of conflict. between social classes or the functioning of the political system. It even seems that "political" actors should always be defined by their relationship with the State, since the latter is an agent of synthesis in society.

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life and represents the concrete unity of a field of historicity, a political system and a social organization. Political parties are not just actors in the political system; represent classes or fractions of classes or coalitions of classes; they also mobilize and defend the demands that arise in all sectors of social organization. Therefore, they act on the State, take refuge behind it or fight it. This transcendence of political institutions by political actors themselves allows us to discard the various utilitarian theories, be they those of Bentham or Destutt de Tracy or those of the "incrementalists" of our century. The law is based on more than itself and the decision-making process. But beyond the law and the representation of particular interests, beyond the political system, two unifying principles can intervene. First, the field of historicity, whether in the form of a system of historical action or class action. The law and the political system as a whole rest on a metasocial guarantee of the social order or on social development itself. They can also represent ruling class rule or, conversely, a popular movement overthrowing institutions and seizing power. The state is the other unifying principle. If we are dealing with the organizing state, the sovereign against other sovereignties, then this state domination is limited. But there is a constant tendency for these two transcendences to become confused. The confusion is purely doctrinal when the field of historicity is referred to as the sovereignty of the people. What is a "village" really? Is it the consensus that Rousseau hoped would be expressed in referendums? But the confusion is much more serious when the State is identified with a class, with a system of historical action or, more generally, with the "march of history". The State is the supreme actor in history, the one at the center of wars, revolutions and economic transformations. But he is like a steward who destroys the forces that gave him his power and reverses his purposes. The law can only be transcended by opening the field of historicity, by class relations and by tensions between the orientations of the system of historical action. When it is transcended by a principle of social organization, then society is upside down. It is probably impossible that the greatest and most admired shocks can be produced in any other way, that progress has any other agent than absolute power, or any freedom other than despotism. We must at least remember that when armies, police, "organic" intellectuals and state bureaucracy impose their will on society, what fades in the shadow of state power has only one means of survival and expression: the intelligentsia. It is the intelligentsia alone,

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protected by its ability and proximity to power, even at the price of great suffering and generally prolonged persecution, which reminds us that above the State, even above the law, are class relations and historicity. The extreme visibility of the State apparatus and political parties can lead to the belief that the State is the central principle of society's functioning, that society is the work of the State, that the conquest of the State means the creation of a new society. This is an illusion constantly present in all societies in which political parties are more easily defined by their relationship with the State than by their role in the system of historical action, in which the “political” constantly prevails over the “social”. summarize what we have said. The State is not above society; nor is it a pure instrument for the unification of social practice for the benefit of the ruling class. Locus and agent of communication between levels of social reality, he is always framed in a mode of social domination but does not identify with it. Thus, class conflicts are always more fundamental than struggles for state control, and parties are never the simple expression of social movements, much less the agents of their formation. Reformist action, like revolutionary action, which correspond to different processes of social change, must never be confused with social movements that manifest class conflict in a given field of historicity, and which are related to institutional pressures and organizational demands. which are never entirely governed by the action of parties and the struggle for the State. It is the priority given to the study of social structure over that of the State, it is the recognition of the system of historical action and class relations as fundamental determinants of social action that justifies my insistence on the absence of proper unity in State action, and on the need to decompose this action in order to carry out a true sociological analysis and, more particularly, to reveal the nature of social movements.

SOCML ORGANIZATION

Introduction: Where Sociology and History Meet There is always a temptation to represent social organization as the expression of a central principle such as values or dominance. An analysis made in terms of historicity, of the system of historical action, of class relations, takes us in a totally opposite direction. First, it recognizes in organizations the meeting of technique and power, concrete forms of the system of historical action and class domination, and distinguishes different categories of organization according to their proximity or distance from the field of historicity, which always imposes tensions and conflicts on they. This, in turn, obliges us to conceive of organizations as systems of relations between simultaneously complementary and opposing elements, and not as the work of an omnipotent power or central values. Then, it shows how the practice of society, far from having a true unity, is nothing more than the superimposition on the same surface of all levels of social reality. And this obliges us to recognize that if social practice has a certain unity, it does not owe it to values or the ruling class, but to the State. We must never seek unity at the level of specific collectivities: their functioning is not a system. Only analysis allows us to isolate the fundamental mechanisms of society. No collectivity is homogeneous, nor does it entirely correspond to a sociological type. We are in that no man's land where the sociologist and the historian must approximate their respective methods as closely as possible. The greater the historicity of a society, the greater its heterogeneity. Accelerating change does not change all elements of social and cultural life 235

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life together. "Modern" societies are presented as geographical groups within which geological analysis will differentiate between formations belonging to different epochs. It is true that these societies have an ever greater capacity to act upon themselves and, consequently, are creating ever deeper disturbances in their past heritage. They tend to be defined by their current functioning rather than their links to earlier social forms; but this characteristic trait of modern societies only serves to reinforce their heterogeneity. Our societies are not content to use only coal or oil deposited in distant geological times; they also rummage through cultural repositories of the past, where they find forms of authority, of family organization, of religious beliefs that simply do not disappear under the layers of change. And the dominated societies, which fight for their independence and development, depend even more on the support of their past, that is, on the reality of their people's lives, to mobilize that life against the dominant power. Hence the ambiguity of the word to which sociology should give the clearest meaning of all: society. We always tend to see a sociopolitical collectivity as a society. We speak for the convenience of French, American or Soviet society; and this is confusing and even dangerous if such expressions give rise to the belief in some direct correspondence, in an exact coincidence between a field of historicity, an institutional framework and a territorial collectivity. This unit is not at an adequate social level; It can only be the work of the State, insofar as the State, as we saw in the previous chapter, acts in such a way as to link the field of historicity, the political system and social organization. The important thing from the beginning is to recognize the heterogeneity of the social organization. This is something that can only be shown by historical and not sociological extracts. There is nothing wrong in itself with the old exercise that the history books were so fond of: a photograph of France in 1610, or the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, it can be very useful as a means of showing that the social organization of a collectivity on a given date has no real unity, that its description is the opposite of a synchronic analysis. Likewise, the images provided by regional geography help to break down the superficial unity of observable phenomena, as historical geography has clearly shown. Nothing could be more alien to sociology than the search for the spirit of an age or national psychologies. Such terms confuse actual historical experience with sociological analysis. These generalizations, far from having any explanatory power, are just clumsy attempts to keep track of historical change. The "spirit" of French society changes with this society. It's not a spotlight that points the way forward; it is at best the flickering glow of the red light in the carriage.

(Video) Out of this World (1949) by Neville Goddard

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These observations are not to be taken lightly: they can help to avoid less naïve conceptions than those just mentioned. Don't we often read studies about a society's "value system"? I have already criticized this type of analysis and the use of the concept of values, which leads to the representation of society as the expression – the social organization – of cultural orientations, leaving class conflicts and political conflicts aside. But this procedure requires a different critique: it presupposes, in fact, that a territorial collectivity, a historically and geographically defined whole, fully corresponds to a social whole, to a field of historicity. — The rejection of such a representation leads at the same time to the elimination of another idea, apparently opposite, according to which the social organization as a whole is the concrete expression of a social domination. That a ruling class is exercising dominion over the whole formed by the social organization and also over the political system is an easily accepted proposition, as it is practically tautological. What would become of a dominant class if it did not control anything, if it was nothing more than a powerful interest group, although it operated in a supposedly completely open market? One cannot speak of domination if there is no power involved, that is, the ability to determine the forms of social organization. But there is a long way between this almost debatable claim and the idea that a social organization is the concrete expression of dominant power. And on this path we come across the system of historical action, which governs the nature of class domination and class relations rather than being the result of their action, the capacity for action of the popular classes, which are dominated but not totally alienated, the relative autonomy of the political system and, finally, the even greater autonomy of the social organization as complex historical data. Therefore, if we want to avoid all confusion from the start, we must at least temporarily accept that a given social organization is not a system, it is not a coherent whole, whose parts can be defined by their interrelationships, so that any modification at any point of the whole would imply systematic modifications of all the components of that whole. We start from historicity and the system of historical action, that is, from the action that society exerts on itself, before introducing the question, as fundamental as the first, of class conflicts. At this level, one deals with systems that are not controlled, governed, managed. There is no power to keep them in order, although the historical action system, like the social class system, naturally tends to react against imbalances and crises. Only when we reach the institutional or political level of our analysis can a concrete society, and therefore a decision-making system, be introduced. Just continue in the same direction to find - in

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the level of "social organization", of the practice of a historically defined society - particular units that we shall have to call organizations, formed for the attainment of specific ends, directed by a power that establishes forms of authority and determines the statutes and roles of the various members of organizations. A company, an administration, a hospital are all organizations, but a national society can also be analyzed with the help of this concept. An organization, therefore, has two faces. It is located within a corporate whole. , that is, within a field of historicity and a political system. It also takes place in a historical – and geographical – situation whose analysis is, to some extent, outside of sociology. 1. The organization is not a primary data for the analysis. A capitalist industrial enterprise is not the work of an entrepreneur whose action can be explained in socially indeterminate terms, by the spirit of innovation, by the desire for profit or as a reaction against poverty, it is nothing more than a concrete and particular manifestation of a system of historical action and class relations. It is also an activity regulated by decisions emanating from the political system. The power of the manager of an organization does not depend on his authority within that organization; on the contrary, his authority rests on his power, which is the application in the organizational framework of his leading and dominant role as an upper-class element. An organization can never be defined only by its relations with the environment. Such a definition is nothing more than the ideology of organizational power. Every organization has some mastery over at least some part of the environment. Just as no school responds exclusively to the demands of its students, no company exclusively responds to market demands. Both, in different ways, have the ability to impose their own goals on the environment. 2. But an organization is also a decision-making unit located in a historical setting. This means two things. First, the already mentioned. An organization does not belong to just one field of historicity. It acts by making use of the resources available in a given historical situation. Managers and administrators are loaded with behaviors and representations inherited from the past. This is something particularly visible in organizations with a socializing role, as is the case with schools. Second, an organization is a decision center that acts in relation to other decision centers. All organizations, not just state ones, have inter-social relationships dominated by war and diplomacy. The more autonomous the decision-making centre, the more important the problems of war and peace are for it. The objectives of survival, of conquest, of power, can never be analyzed independently of the field of historicity and the political system in which they develop.

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they occur, but neither can they be reduced to the mere functioning of a society. It is illusory to see international relations as social relations within a global society; In the same way, intersocial relations always exist to some degree between organizations, relations of competition, alliance, aggression, negotiation. Nothing could better emphasize than these elementary observations the gap that separates this analysis of organizations from a general conception of social organization.7 The further away from the field of historicity, the more the unity of the system fragments, the more social relations give way to strategic relations . It is never possible to reduce an organization's behavior to a level of analysis; it is located in one or several fields of historicity and, therefore, in an equal number of cultural models and sets of class relations; exerts influence within a political system; operates in a market and creates a strategy and inter-social relationships for itself. Relations between the great powers cannot be reduced to an international class struggle; nor can they be fully analyzed without reference to class relations within a system of production. Finally, it may be helpful to clearly restate the usage in this book of words that are often used interchangeably in everyday language. I have no right to impose definitions, but I owe it to the reader to try to avoid confusion or obscurity. Sociological practice—mainly functionalist-inspired—has increasingly led to the use of the term "institutions" for what I call organizations. Furthermore, we constantly refer to associations or even social movements as "organizations" in everyday life. I called "institutions" the legally regulated forms of legitimate decision-making. By "organizations" I mean those collective units of action that use specific categories of resources, fulfill a legitimate function, and are administered by a specific mode of authority. What I call "associations" are voluntary groups formed to act in the political system, in class relations or in the system of historical action. Therefore, I will not speak of economic or academic "institutions" when referring to companies or schools, but I will use the word "organizations"; I will not speak of political, trade union or religious "organizations", but of "associations". I will speak, however, of the organization of companies or political parties or religious activities, as it seems to me that the distinction that must be made is quite clear in any particular context. A. The organizational system An organization is not the result of an arbitrary cut of social activity, as expressions such as: the

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political, economic or educational organization of a country, but rather a set of means governed by an authority with a view to performing a function recognized in a given society as legitimate. one.

dimensions

The field of historicity of a society is formed by a system of historical action and class relations. The orientations of the historical system of action —cultural model, mobilization, hierarchization, needs— can be defined independently of class relations, although it should always be remembered that these relations determine the social control of the historical system of action. This separation is no longer possible at the organizational level; as it was not possible even at the level of the political system. Within an organization, power is exercised over the management of certain social resources. This management power is not separable from class domination; These resources and their use are not separable from the historical action system or, more precisely, from its social elements: mobilization and hierarchization. Power defines an organization's goals and rules. These are never purely technical and resist reduction to the social utility defined by a form of production. The objective of a capitalist enterprise is certainly to produce consumer goods or services, but also and equally to produce profit. An educational organization produces human beings attested to having certain knowledge or the ability to perform certain tasks, but this objective is not separable from the function of inclusion in social classes or reproduction of social inequalities. It is impossible to reduce education to professional training, as if it were located simultaneously above and below class relations without participating in them. By power, then, I mean the projection into an organization of class domination legitimized by the political system. Power cannot be reduced to authority, a specifically organizational concept, nor to influence, a typical concept of an analysis of the political system. In a production organization, shop stewards may gain some authority, even if that authority is not institutionalized. Union representatives can also gain some influence and affect or even enforce decisions. But in general they know that they have not reached power and, more specifically, that their action is always situated in relation to a legitimate domination from which they are excluded. Therefore, they must oppose this domination with the strength of a social movement, mobilized by the awareness of a power conflict. An organization is never just a cooperative system. Violence and power relations are always present in him and cannot be reduced to the pressure exerted on him.

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the decision system, because power is not a product of the decision system; on the contrary, it is what defines the limits of this system, as we have already seen in our analysis of institutions. The forms of organization and the norms that govern its operation are manifestations of the orientations of the historical action system. It is possible to follow the transition from one system of historical action to another when one passes from the rational-legal, state type of organization, to the pursuit of productivity through the so-called scientific organization of work, and then again to the goal-oriented organization of more modern organizations. Therefore, any organization unites power with a resource, class domination with a way of working. Any organization that could be defined entirely on the basis of the power wielded within it, without encountering any instrumental constraints, whether of a technical or commercial nature, would cease to exist as such. This case exists; it is that of non-working organizations, such as a prison or, to some extent, a hospital. I'll come back to that case, but for the moment it's clear that it really cannot be counted here as an organization. It is even more difficult to imagine purely technical organizations. And here it is necessary to clarify that power in an organization is not always exercised directly, as in the case of a company with economic purposes within which this power is consubstantiated in a “boss”. A hospital or a university also uses social resources as a means of social domination, even if the authorities are not aware of it. The second pair of oppositions that define the functioning of an organization was briefly mentioned. An organization has an action both inside and outside it. On the one hand, it defines its objectives and organizes exchanges; on the other hand, it establishes norms and maintains its balance, that is, the relations between its parts compatible with its integration and with the achievement of its objectives. It is through its objects that the organization belongs more directly to a society, which depends, in other words, on a field of historicity and a political system. On the other hand, problems of internal balance are ultimately definable in terms of the ordering of their means and without reference to higher levels of analysis. The production flow will require the maintenance of certain internal balances to avoid bottlenecks or underutilization of any part of the productive apparatus. Socially, it also reminds us that every organization must provide some status congruence. When the same work is done by people whose salaries differ markedly, it will create a severe organizational crisis and a sense of injustice or inequality on the part of the underprivileged that will sharpen other internal grievances throughout the organization.

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The previous observations lead us to recognize that an organization is always dependent and autonomous. It depends both on technical constraints and on social objectives, but it is autonomous in the sense of being a decision center that can establish exchanges with the outside world and internal operating rules. This autonomy can be very restricted, especially in the case of administrations with responsibility for the execution of political decisions. On the other hand, the company's image, especially commercial or financial, seems to offer great independence of decision. But it is impossible to imagine a totally dependent or totally autonomous organization. B.

Elements

The combination of these three pairs of oppositions leads us to define the elements of the organizational system as shown in figure 25. An organization is the whole formed by the means of management that relate objectives and technical resources. But what figure 25 tries to make clear is that an organization is not simply the adaptation of means to ends. System elements are linked to each other by two types of relationships. external

I can

Goals

technique

trucks Z>*^

internal

^ ^

balances

Figure 25

1. First, each of the elements is opposed to the other three in two of the constitutive axes of the system. This situation, like that found in the historical system of action or in the political system, clearly shows that a social system is not governed by a central principle, a system of values, a type of interest or a spirit. It is all the more indispensable that we remember this here than in the other cases, because the historical action system cannot easily be identified with an actor – although Society is still very often spoken of as if it were a will – whereas it is tempting to analyze organizations immediately in terms of actors, usually to identify them with their managers. First, an organization must be defined as a system. This system has no center, so there is no principle that unifies the elements of its operation. An organization such as a

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political system, it cannot function successfully unless it has a way of managing widely conflicting demands. Because the pursuit of certain objectives is always in tension with the maintenance of internal balance, as well as with the establishment of operating rules and even with the carrying out of exchanges with the outside world. These tensions can be better visualized by replacing the diagram of the organizational system with its opposite, that is, with a typology that identifies each of the elements of the system with a type of organization. In this way, a distinction could be made between productive, commercial, managerial and technical organizations. Organizations of the first type would be governed by their objectives, by their will to achieve certain objectives, to increase their production, their profits or their power. Those of the second type would be guided above all by concern for their exchanges with the outside world and, therefore, by their constant adaptation to an environment, a market in constant change. Those of the third type would give more importance to administrative management or to what is conventionally called organization, that is, to its internal functioning. Organizations of the fourth type would be concerned above all with their technical and professional coherence and with the efficient arrangement of their production instruments. Such a typology is of little interest, as all our efforts have been directed towards showing that no organization can exempt itself from responding simultaneously to the four types of demands. It indicates, however, how divergent these demands are and allows shedding light on certain tensions that oppose different departments or different groups of actors within the same organization. Technicians, intermediaries, administrators and managers tend to prioritize one of the elements of the organizational system. 2. But the interdependence of the elements and their oppositions must not make us forget their hierarchical relationships. There is no other organization that is not in relation to objectives, with goals. An organization cannot be reduced to a set of means at the service of objectives defined entirely from the outside. Even a public administration has a certain ability to define its objectives, to elaborate a “policy”. The unit that lacks this capability should be called an establishment, which means that it cannot be isolated from the larger whole of which it is a part. is part of and has a certain autonomy of decision. A company, a firm, is an organization, a factory is nothing more than an establishment. A secondary school is simply an educational establishment, but the French Ministry of Education is an organization. Adaptation to the environment and internal administration are the means by which the objectives are achieved and which consequently determine the nature of the technical means to be used, means always

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possessing an autonomous reality, imposing specific restrictions, which must be taken into account when defining objectives, but which certainly do not constitute the basis on which the organization is constituted. This hierarchy of elements, which can be represented graphically as follows: exchanges of objectives

balance rules

It makes clear, above all, that the organizational system can never be isolated from the hierarchy of social systems in which it occupies the lowest place. Obviously, this subordinate position does not indicate that organizations are somehow unimportant, as it is impossible to think of a society without companies, without schools, without administrations, etc., at least in the differentiated societies we are dealing with. . This means that a society is not a set of organizations that negotiate their political relationships in order to achieve a certain type of global society. The group formed by the organizations puts into practice, in addition to the particularities of each one of them individually, the social and cultural orientations, and class relations, governed by a political system. ç.

Continuity and Innovation

The historical action system and the class relations system were defined as systems without centers. There is no authority that directs or controls the boundary between inside and outside, so various systems of historical action or class relations can mix and match within the same territorial society. The political system is relatively "open", since it is upstream of the legitimate decisions that are the product of its operation, but it is also delimited insofar as it corresponds to a political unit and exercises its sovereignty over a well-defined social group. An organizational system is closed: it is downstream of these decisions, it has precise boundaries within which authority is exercised and rules are applied. Its leaders therefore have the attributes of power, that is, the ability to make peace and war abroad and the double capacity for integration and repression in the interior. There is no organization that does not have formal and informal mechanisms for integration and socialization. Certain types of conduct are expected from members of an organization, and deviations are punished or excluded in accordance with procedures over which the organization has control. These terms are only excessive if we think of social units that are not only organizations, but also political systems, and in which popular social movements are produced that can confront and retaliate against them.

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organizational authority/ Let's consider in a moment the overlapping of various social systems within an organizational structure. But it must be recognized that no organization can become completely institutionalized, that is, become politicized, without disappearing. One can imagine a society in which all organizations have been transformed into voluntary associations, but in fact one is more likely to find that voluntary associations also have organizational aspects and therefore rules and sanctions of their own. That's why it's hard to imagine an organization without a remuneration method. Wages, by whatever name they are given, are the main means of integration and sanction. The person who can most display what the organization favors the most, be it productivity, seniority or qualification, receives a higher remuneration, and the person punished is deprived of all or part of his salary. An organization has control over the definition of its criteria for selection, promotion or demotion and dismissal, even if this power has limits established by law or by collective agreement. The power of the organization is most visible in the State seen as an organization, but it would be artificial to differentiate in type between private and public organizations, or between organizations with specific purposes and social organizations. Every organization is, in some way, a state. This power is large and visible because the organization as a state is a complex historical unit, many of which are not really integrated. Hence the autonomy of the State in relation to a type of society; hence also the autonomy of the administrators of an organization in relation to a mode of production. An organization lives not only in a society, but also in the midst of the events it produces and experiences. Perhaps this is what allows it to transcend the tensions and elements that constitute it. The manager of an organization has sometimes been represented as a referee who listens, reconciles, negotiates and is constantly concerned with adaptation and integration. This image had the merit of facilitating the understanding of the problems of the organization as a system and of going beyond the old image of the entrepreneur at the moment when, for the first time, the centrality of large organizations in societies became evident. But it is also as inadequate an image as a purely conciliatory government would be. The statesman, the leader of an organization, is above all the one who disturbs balances and rules, who defines a policy, who conceives objectives before pondering with a member of his cabinet or his board of directors the best way to reduce tensions. . created by discomfort. A private innovation organization is directly threatened by becoming increasingly absorbed in resolving the inevitable tensions between the various elements of its operation. On the other hand, it is impossible for an organization to take initiatives if

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he has no way of controlling his stress. I am not speaking here of their conflicts – those created by claims, institutional pressures or social movements – but simply of the tensions that occur between the four elements: objectives, norms, exchanges and internal stability. This interdependence of the capacity for initiative and the management of tensions is at the heart of the problem of organizations, as it expresses their dual nature: they are specific units of action and belong to a field of historicity and a political society. Both are system and unit of action. This is one of the reasons why an organization can never be completely transformed into a political system, can never be reduced to an organization of cooperation. It must be a management unit, to respond to the demands of the environment and its own production apparatus. Knowledge of these restrictions, and their management, always imposes a concentration of decision-making capacity, whatever the social mode of determining objectives and the nature of political transactions within the organisation. The other reason is not related to the effect of techniques, but to that of power, that is, of class relations. Sometimes the dominance of the ruling class is direct. The functioning of capitalist enterprises is governed, at a level that transcends individual production units, by the formation and maintenance of capitalist profit. Sometimes it is more indirect, through the mediation of the State and, therefore, of sociologically more heterogeneous coalitions. Urban administrations cannot be understood if they are separated from their function of maintaining and reinforcing class differences and inequalities. The fact that certain organizational units are also the locus of a given political system in no way allows us to conclude that we are witnessing a "transition from proper organizations to organizational systems", as expressed in Crozier's terminology, which calls organizational systems what I call political systems. "The simple, rigid organizations of the past, based on a restrictive model that imposed defensive tactics," writes Crozier, "are slowly giving way to more flexible, complex organizations based on a cooperative game model. more flexible and regulated, organizations become more and more flexible and open like political systems" ("Sentiments, organization, et systemes", Revue francaise de sociology n. 5, 1971, p. 148). Here two different orders of facts are confused. First, there is the correct observation of the transition from organization by rules to organization by objectives, and the transcendence by social practice of the kind that Weber called bureaucratic. But this by no means implies that the functioning of modern organizations comes close to an open political system. I must point out that management by objectives has received its greatest

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Spectacular applications in the field of military operations? The fusion of organization and institution is nothing more than the application of a social ideology that wishes to see all social relations as fully capable of institutionalization, so that power becomes nothing more than influence and domination is negated. The distance between organizations and institutions, and the autonomy of the former, is governed as much by the existence of technical and commercial conditions as by the projection of dominant class domination in the organization. d.

System Crisis

The structural tensions of the organizational system must be mastered, but they can never be fully mastered. Every organization is always threatened by a crisis. And the concept of crisis here has the same meaning as in the previous analysis of historical action, or of the political system, or even of the system of class relations. A crisis is the rupture of one of the axes of the system. The most described is the rupture between outside and inside, between objectives and norms, exchanges and technical balances. In a producer organisation, it can take the form of a decoupling of commercial and financial policy on the one hand, and administrative and technical management on the other. There is also great difficulty in today's universities in reconciling certain social functions —defined both by the educational requirements of those admitted and by the training requirements of the world they will enter— with internal requirements both for the creation of new knowledge and for the functional functioning of the university. organization. norms If crisis leads to explosion, then the organization collapses. On the one hand, he closes in on his internal problems, thus isolating himself from his environment; on the other hand, it gets involved in initiatives that are no longer sanctioned by the ability to involve the entire organization: management no longer follows. The nature of this crisis, like the others, can be defined more precisely if we present the organizational system as shown in figure 26. The separation between outside and inside leads to a confusion between objectives and exchanges. Objectives become autonomous, as they are no longer imposed on the functioning of an organization. They are reduced to a will to conquer. On the contrary, the stock markets are unbalanced by this crisis and are nothing but submission to external pressures. Outward-looking action thus becomes a mixture of arbitrary initiatives inspired by the spirit of conquest and a highly dependent and arduous adaptation to external constraints. The image here is that of a power separate from an organization, for example, a state power that is no longer constrained by rules and balances, or an economic power

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foreign unit

I can

inner autonomy

autonomy

dependency

goal balances

exchanges

technique

Figure 26

bets more on speculation than on the orientation of a productive organization. At the same time, the rules, detached from the objectives, can only be based on the search for the survival of the organization, while the balance of the apparatus that governs the functioning of the organization explodes and is replaced by the internal demands of each one of them, the members of the whole. . components, due to the predominance of specialization. Figure 27 shows what might be called the counter elements of the organizational system. All forms of crisis end up replacing elements of the organizational system with counter-elements. These counter-elements, instead of combining into a system of their own, instead of being simultaneously opposite and complementary, are mutually contradictory. Conquest is at odds with limitations, just as concern for survival is at odds with specialization.

dependency

out of autonomy

I can

Goals

conquest

technique

restrictions

exchanges

inner autonomy

dependency

standards

survival

Specialization

balances

Figure 27

The break between inside and outside brings with it the dissociation of the elements belonging to each of the two halves thus torn apart. The other types of crisis have the same effects. The break between power and technique, between ends and means, gives greater importance to the contradictions between conquest and survival, on the one hand, and between constraints and specialization, on the other. The instrumental components of the organization are forced to close in on themselves and subject to passive adaptation to changes in the environment, while the power no longer exists.

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has another raison d'être than its own reproduction. The struggle for conquest is not motivated by objectives, but by the growing difficulties in guaranteeing its survival, a dizzying flight towards disaster accentuated by the disorganization of instrumental means. The further away an organization's center of power is from its executive departments, the more likely this crisis will occur. It is a constant theme in descriptions of military campaigns. The technical problems and the relationship with the enemy are imposed with evident force, while the objectives and norms are placed at a very different level. The military's particular sensitivity to these problems explains why the military was one of the first major organizations to make major efforts to shorten its chains of command and adopt management by objectives. Finally, the dissociation between dependency and autonomy brings with it the dissociation between constraint and survival, on the one hand, and conquest and specialization, on the other. This crisis is perhaps the most profound, since an organization, before being defined at its own level, must first be defined by the place it occupies in the hierarchy of social systems. Being a particular center of decision and the place of implementation of the field of historicity and the political system, it will hardly survive the dissociation of these two aspects of its nature. This crisis occurs particularly within an organization that is both embedded in an administrative system and responsible for productive tasks that make it analogous to a private company. You cannot combine two opposing logics: your dependence and your autonomy. In response to all these crises, an organization cannot simply resort to a stronger integration of its elements, as the crisis arose from its disintegration. He is then faced with three solutions: either he moves closer to the upper echelons or he becomes a simple agent of social control, thus absorbing himself into the political system, which could be called an administrative solution; o fights to win the right to define its goals and standards at the lowest possible levels, decentralizing decision-making and expanding the scope of initiatives allowed at the base; or, finally, it becomes a veritable state within a state, a sovereign power, a "body" concerned with asserting its privileges, prohibiting external pressures, and having its own disorder recognized as order. B.

Administrations, Companies and Organizations

The organizational system as just described defines a level of sociological analysis and not a set of directly observable social units. But if, instead of descending from the field of historicity to organizations, the reverse path is taken, then it is no longer possible to encapsulate all organizations in the same formula. For some of them, they are directly linked to the political system and do not participate in classes.

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relations or the system of historical action, but through the political system, that is, indirectly. I call these administrations. Others, on the contrary, are directly linked to class relations, being political units. These are companies. Still others participate directly in the system of historical action, also passing through class relations and the political system. For them, I used the term agencies. An administration cannot have its own political system or class relations. It is purely an agent for the enforcement of institutional decisions. A company, on the contrary, because it is directly linked to class relations, becomes a political locus itself; it is both an organization and an institutional system. Likewise, an agency is at the same time an organization, an institutional system and an actor in class relations. administrations

* institutional system

companies

•* institutional system

class relations

agencies

- institutional system

•

class relations

historical action system -"~~~ Figure 2&

In all cases, the analysis at the level of the organizational system is applied in the same way, but as one passes from management to the agency, this analysis ceases to describe the entire functioning of the entity in question and starts to deal with only one of the your levels. one.

Administrations

An administration is created by the sovereign, by the political system. The administrations form a whole that constitutes the State — which is much more than a societal organization that encompasses all of society and provides a more or less solid link between the field of historicity, the political system and organizations — rather than the government apparatus of State. acting. If the State is reduced to its administrative apparatus, it is often said that it is bureaucratized, that is, it is nothing more than the implementation of the decisions of a political system, itself more or less completely subject to class domination. and the orientations of the historical system of action. Administrations correspond to what Amitai Etzioni calls coercive organizations in his Modern Organizations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964). They are the apparatus of social control. This term points to the central problem of any administration. An administration tends to cease to be a true organization, to be reduced to a means for the

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application of political decisions and the legal texts that express them and, therefore, lose their technical dimension, that is, the two elements —exchanges and balance— that are as constitutive of the organizational system as objectives and norms. It's even questionable whether we should still be talking about goals. In certain cases, an administration is reduced to the application of internal regulations. This is the case for repressive administrations and the vast majority of total institutions. This term, used by Erving Goffman (Asylums, New York: Anchor Books, 1961), denotes organizations that fully enclose a population that conducts its social life entirely within them and is therefore completely subject to a regulatory authority. . A hospital, an asylum, a prison, a boarding school, a hostel or house, a military camp, a ship at sea, and even a working-class city are among the best-known examples of total institutions. This type of organization is experiencing a permanent crisis derived from the dissociation between power and instrumentality. And this is even worse when the norms are isolated from their objectives, action turned inward from action turned outward. Such administrations are therefore criticized for being inefficient, unable to adapt to their environment and, ultimately, for not being managed at all. The French are quite used to this kind of experience; think that it is a public administration, and when they enter it, as if they were one of its "patients", they are surprised to find nothing more than a tangle of obligations, to find that the elements of the administrative whole do not communicate with each other , that a decision is taken in the name of the rules and without any consideration of the effects on the management of the administration itself. Such administration goes underground because its objectives are defined above it and because its exchanges with the environment are all unidirectional. Its internal balance no longer makes sense in the absence of all technical autonomy / / Not all administrations are of this type. Many make use of the techniques imposed by the manipulation of complex assemblies, have a certain ability to define their objectives, at least at the operational level, and even direct their relationships with a material and social environment. This is the case of the army, for example, and more generally of other administrations more directly linked to the State, as I defined it. The rule of norms tends, therefore, to weaken, as happens when the army is active, that is, in wartime, and the organization tends to assign itself broader and broader objectives, until the bonds that bind it begin to stretch. . they remain subservient to the institutional system and the field of historicity./ Ultimately, this leads to the creation of total organizations, which are the complete opposite of total institutions and tend to behave like societies, or at least assign values to themselves , a "spirit and a high degree of technicality.

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But then management tends to become an agency, or at least feel like an agency, as the custodian of a society's cultural model. An unfounded claim, as it is “forgetting” everything that is between and separates the historical action system and the organizational system, that is, class relations and the political system. Such total organizations are in practice identifying values and instrumental actions, demanding from their members a moral integration and consensus incompatible with the recognition of fundamental conflicts of orientation and with the organization of a system of negotiation and influence. What is not recognized becomes deviant or clandestine. The political system finds its way back in the form of clans and cliques, at least at the top of the organization, and conflicts of interest express themselves in unofficial slowness, absenteeism, high turnover, theft or sabotage, and more generally due to to the formation of an informal defensive organization that ends up being tacitly recognized^/ Any administration can be situated between these two extreme limits: the total institution and the total organization, the extreme dependence of institutional decisions and the illusion of total independence in relation to a political system and class relations. In the total institution, disorganization is extreme, as only one of the elements of the organizational system – the norms – is invading the territory of all the others. In the total organization, on the contrary, what appears is a superorganization with compensatory resistance mechanisms. Superficially, these two types have common attributes, and this is what leads us to speak of bureaucracy in both cases: resistance to change, inability to deal with demands that come from within or without. But this resemblance is only superficial. It is better not to speak of bureaucracy, except in the case of total organizations, and to call the functioning of total institutions disorganization. The total organization struggles to break the bonds of dependency that keep it subservient to the political system and the field of historicity, and its aspirations to become agency can only reinforce this isolation. The result is that such administration can only go through a process of involution as it changes. Class relations and political relations are no longer experienced as more than organizational problems, as forms of dysfunction, which authority strives to eliminate by imposing new rules, new restrictions, which in turn cause an upsurge of behavior, withdrawal, evasion tactics or passive resistance. Increasingly, the organization dedicates an essential part of its activities to going deeper and deeper into this vicious circle of restriction and resistance. What makes the situation intractable is the stubborn insistence on treating problems that in reality are not as organizational problems. Bureaucratization is the rupture

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of class relations, the orientations of the historical system of action and political relations into uncontrollable elements of organizational functioning. Any individual problem becomes confusing and impossible to solve because it presents itself in an undifferentiated way: officially it is a purely organizational problem, concrete, limited, which seems to be just a matter of normative interpretation or resolution of some technical point; but as soon as it is addressed, it ends up involving inadmissible conflicts of interest and procedural methods not recognized by the decision-making system. Dealing with this new set of problems would require breaking with the organizational system, at least to the institutional level. But that refuses to make the organization whole, once it is so deeply entrenched in its inordinate claims to independence and self-sufficiency. Such an organization may simply break up due to its own internal difficulties, but this is not the most common result. Or, on the contrary, it tends to respond by redoubling the emphasis on its integrating elements, that is, on affirming its values and renewing its technical and rational conditions. This is something that is often seen in educational establishments as they are also administrations. A grandiose form of discourse centered on the values and function of the teaching process, associated with invocations of the so-called learning demands, tries to remove all questions about the social functions of teaching or the mechanisms of adaptation to social demands. . The total institution is very different. Its main function is to carry out the execution of political decisions. Therefore, it is disorganized in the sense of having a minimum of autonomy. It represses more than it integrates, it does not seek to assert its autonomy, but tries, on the contrary, to hide behind decisions taken outside itself. Its members are ghettoized, accommodated in a deviant adaptation, as Goffman emphasized. A bureaucratized administration has pretensions of moral integration and technical efficiency. Total institutions have, above all, the task of removing deviant actors from the social scene so that they are deprived of their political rights. What is expected of them is to guard the border between what is allowed and what is prohibited, what is normal and what is pathological, in order to ward off the threats that “barbarians” may have over the heads of “civilization” . Its raison d'être is not within itself; their role is not in what they do, but in what they prevent. Therefore, they are very little concerned with the definition of objectives and the internalization of norms by their members. They will even easily accept that your operation and its results are completely contrary to the goals that have been set for them. Therefore, if it is possible to overcome the barriers established by authority and if one directly examines its functioning, it is easy to see in these total institutions relations of domination and power in its purest form.

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The arbitrary reigns in them absolutely; violence is what governs their social relations, to the point that one can no longer speak of a social system. Prisoners and guards, sick and disabled with the staff who watch and "treat" them, none of them belong to an organization. The former are confined and governed by the others, who act as delegates of the social order. Relationships are dominated by force and blackmail, arbitrary decisions and corruption. One cannot speak here of the involution of a system as was the case with bureaucratic administrations. There are no internal dynamics, just a permanent reproduction of exclusion. However, this description of total institutions reveals only one aspect of the process of disorganization. In practice, the absorption of the organizational system by the political system can occur both in the sense of a direct control of the pluralism of political forces and in the sense of an imposition of the legitimate order. Which leads us to add to the two extreme types already mentioned—total organization and total institution—a third that we might call a pseudopolitical institution. Instead of the organization being subject to a political system and failing to combine within itself an organizational system and a political system, it experiences contamination and disorganization at both levels of its functioning. Interest groups transform all elements of the organizational system into objects of transactions, objectives and standards, as well as exchanges with the environment or technical management. But, at the same time, these groups are only defined by their role and place in the organization and, therefore, are incapable of becoming true political forces, namely because they are not situated at the level of general decisions and because they remain situated within a heteronomous unit. What we have is a caricature of self-management. These pseudo-political forces do not, therefore, refer to class relations and, consequently, are not actors in a system of historical action. They are organizational pressure groups, which seek to maximize their relative advantages within the organization and thus obtain the greatest possible control over their own conditions of existence and activity, instead of administering and guiding the organization as a whole. Sectorial requirements are those that prevail, and the definition of objectives and standards is only obtained in a residual way, such as the acceptance of what is compatible with particular interests, also within the framework of the remaining minimum requirements imposed by institutional decisions. Here again, talking about bureaucratization generates more confusion than light. Management is not trapped in its involution; it is displaced by influence relationships between groups that are not defined by their role in an organization. This situation is often observed in educational administrations. Teachers defend their professional status

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and your freedom to dedicate your time to other pursuits, such as research, writing for publications, or consulting. Students want to minimize the limitations associated with obtaining diplomas and think more about a professional future that they consider insufficiently linked to the content of their academic activity or the social and cultural activities they carry out with their friends. Administrative staff negotiate their working conditions according to the rules and using means that are not specific to the organization in question. It is possible to imagine an ultimate vision of a university in which there is no longer any real interdependence between faculty, students and non-faculty staff, and which would no longer be definable except as the totality of past transactions between categories that coexist within it. the same frame. defined by political institutions. An extreme case, certainly, but which we are dangerously close to, when political institutions are not able to determine objectives and discharge their responsibilities on the members of the organization without, at the same time, attributing to them the responsibilities that would make self-management possible. Disorganization is characterized above all by the explosion of authority, by the permanent confusion between authority and influence, and by the dissolution of technical balances in favor of transactions between interest groups. This administrative disorganization is accompanied by political disorganization. In such a situation there is no more organization or politics, but a confused mixture of both levels, which causes a double reaction. On the one hand, that of the "organizers", who oppose the pseudo-political institution through integration and concern for the efficiency of the total organization; on the other, that of political forces, which seek to break with this excessively limited organizational framework to act at the level of the political system or class relations. It has been possible to observe these two tendencies at work in French universities in recent years, but their example also shows the tremendous resilience of pseudopolitical institutions when the problems that give rise to these tendencies are not addressed at their normal level. , that is, at the level of the political system, class relations and the system of historical action. The organization is crushed by the weight of social relations and cultural choices too heavy for it. — These analyzes demonstrate the usefulness of complementing the study of the organizational system and its crises with that of the relationships between the organizational level and the higher levels of social reality within a given organism. Administrations are a particularly good case in this regard. They are by definition the organizations most directly subordinated to the political system. They are on the lowest rung of the ladder of social systems. Thus, they tend either to isolate themselves from everything that governs them, or to

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bureaucratized, or else incorporated into the institutional system. This second trend can take two opposing forms: on the one hand, the reduction to the role of law enforcement and defense of the social order; on the other, confusion with a system of political relations. These different forms of administration pathology: total organization, total institution and pseudo-political institution, show that the functioning of an administration is governed by its ability to be both the subject of its objectives and the owner when it comes to managing its technical limitations. administration can only be dependent. This dependency presupposes, above all, a clear separation between the functional levels of society; The recognition of the historical action system, the independence of class relations and the openness of the political system govern the ability of an administration to fulfill its tasks, which are at the same time subordinate, socially and politically, and specific, to what extent they have a technical dimension . In other words, the weaker the State, which is the unifying principle of the field of historicity, the political system and social organization, the better an administration functions in its own domain. Dependence on an administration is a condition of its autonomy, as a set of management means that relate objectives defined at a higher level and technical operations that impose their own limitations. That is why the most stable administrations are those that are furthest from the possibility of becoming bodies or companies, particularly those that manage fiscal resources and expenditures, with no other function than that of a form of management subordinated to political decisions. B.

Companies

The objectives of an administration are established at the level of the political system. The same does not occur with the company, which is an autonomous decision center that directly controls an organization with economic objectives. This definition differentiates the two levels of the company: it is an organization, a set of means at the service of objectives, but it is also a decision-making center, an economic actor. The company is always more or less controlled by the general political system; Its activity must always be carried out within the scope of laws, decrees and regulations, but one cannot speak of a company if the organization's objectives are really determined by political institutions. This is the boundary that separates the company from the administration, and it applies to both public and private companies. State planning, or the establishment of state monopolies within a liberal capitalist society, may result in the creation of vast public services, but these remain highly concentrated, yet autonomous enterprises. On the other hand, in all cases where the state apparatus engulfs the political system, we observe a relative lack of differentiation between administrations.

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treason and company This case, however, is one that most clearly demonstrates the need to distinguish between these two types of organization. Their modes of operation are so different that the tension between administrative management and the company's decision-making capacity is at the heart of the economic operation of planned societies. What does this autonomy of economic decision mean? It can be interpreted as autonomy in relation to the institutional system. The company then emerges as an actor in a market, defining its objectives and rules, managing its exchanges with the environment and its internal balances, namely the coherence of its technical means. In short, it presents itself as an organization in its purest form, while the administration does not own its own objectives, tends to be just an appendix of the institutionalized decision-making system and, ultimately, to not have autonomy of conduct. This image corresponds to the one that companies usually offer of themselves. Is your activity not governed by pragmatic purposes, by conquering markets, by increasing wealth or by expansion, by the ability to respond to changes in the environment? But it may be objected that if the corporation is a decision-making system and therefore a political unit, it must be recognized that, like every political system, it includes both elements of unity and elements of plurality, which is at the same time dependent on a field of historicity and directed towards organizational implementation. Figure 29 again shows the nature of the political system. The company implements the guidelines of the historical plurality system

Unit

political pending

social problems

class domination

institutional pending

political forces (interest groups)

government Figure 29

act and manage your tensions; it is inscribed in class relations and, whatever the nature of these relations, it is the place where the power of the dominant class is exercised, supported by legal formulations. It is also the site of relationships between a range of interest groups; these overlap with class relations, at least in part, but replace class conflicts in the framework of decision-making, over which various forces exert greater or lesser influence. A company as such, that is, the conjunction of an organization and a decision center, is not where class relations are formed. This relationship? they occur at a higher level, the field of historicity. A company is a political unit, -/

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whose operation presupposes class relations and, therefore, the existence of class power. Certainly your political system may be loosely constituted, only slightly institutionalized; their political participation can be very restricted, being limited, for example, to the internal functioning of a board of directors, or to the relationships between managers. But it can also be extended much more widely, through the development of contractual relationships, participation in advisory bodies, or others endowed with certain co-management powers. Interest groups are not just the organizational expression of social classes; we are quite familiar with the lengthy arguments about the relationships between linear and functional organization, "staff and line"; Enough has been written describing the tensions and negotiations between the procedural and production departments, between the technical and commercial departments, or even between the company, its bankers and its customers, for it to be useless to insist here on the multiplicity of actors. who are involved in the decision-making process. But however open the company's political system may be, it cannot be complete. The "boss" of the company is neither an arbiter nor a representative of the majority, nor a leader of the most influential interest groups. He is the actor responsible for the interests of the ruling class. Therefore, a company can be redefined as the political system that guarantees the transmission of class domination for the functioning of an organization. This definition will seem unclear, as the reader will certainly feel that the use of "company" here does not correspond to the everyday usage of that term. This everyday use derives from capitalist industrial society. The ruling class in that society establishes its power at the level of work organization and not at the level of technical progress. This means that the historical system of action, and in particular the cultural model, remains above the level of economic organizations. The essential elements of this society are the market, capital, risk and profit for the entrepreneur. The 19th century created many more images of businessmen than of industrialists. But this situation also implies that the industrial enterprise as an economic unit, as the basis of profit, is directly involved in the sphere of progress and capital. The differentiation between the field of historicity and the institutional system is weak. In industrial society, establishments with economic purposes are both agencies and companies. In post-industrial society, the separation of these two types of organization is much clearer, for two reasons. First, a large number of organizations cannot be called companies in the common sense of the term: this is the case of hospitals, research centers, military or paramilitary establishments. Second, a clear distinction must be made between economic organizations

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tions that form part of the new cultural model insofar as they contribute to technical progress, function as systems and respond to a new type of needs, and those — still dominated by the market and the direct domination of capital over "productive" work — which are industrial companies in the classical sense and therefore ranked below the level they occupied in industrial society, are no longer part of the world of agencies and have become pure companies. The world of economic organisations, even the largest ones, is breaking down more and more clearly into various categories, as we must not forget that alongside the industrial and post-industrial typologies there still subsists the mercantile type, of which colonial companies, as well as oil companies are the most familiar example. To clearly distinguish between the first two of these types, I impose on the reader the necessary effort to replace the social language that speaks of "enterprise" with a sociological language that classifies certain economic organizations and a large number of others as agencies. as "companies/*. The importance of the latter in advanced capitalist societies stems from the fact that they occupy an area of transition from industrial capitalism to a post-industrial society of which they do not represent the technocratic core, and in which they still struggle to maintain relations capitalist class structures and a capitalist ideology, and imposes its domination over all that sector of society in which it intervenes as an accumulation of power. Firstly, because western industrialized societies have not experienced a rupture in the transition from one type of society to another. In them capitalism and technocracy are combined, and the morphological description of the economy does not allow us to separate them. Economic analysis can succeed in this regard and, in fact, has contributed major new insights in this domain; Sociology is also playing a role. role, specifically in the quest to understand the new social relationships and the new fields of negotiation and decision-making that open up in economic organizations. However, beyond the complexity of certain historical situations, what must be analyzed is, of course, the transformation of economic organizations from one social type to another. In industrial society, the domain of organizations, of practical activities, was still dominated by the meta-social guarantees of the social order. The factory was subject to the market in the same way that agricultural life was subject to a cultural model that was both religious and communitarian. An organization as such did not extend to the field of historicity. There was nothing in my Sociology of

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Faction that I called "rationalizing model", successor and destroyer of metassocial guarantees. Such a model does not appear until post-industrial society. r 1 Consequently, it is in this society, for the first time, that organizations become the locus of social domination. Post-industrial society is dominated by large organizations, just as merchant society was dominated by merchants and princes. Personal, autocratic or charismatic power is replaced by the impersonal power of the apparatus, of the technostructure. But, likewise, those economic organizations that have no direct share in the new system of historical action, while possessing great wealth and great political influence, are but "enterprises" situated below the agency level. If a society gives them a central role, then it is closing the doors to post-industrial society in its own face, which is perhaps the case in Europe, both in capitalist and socialist countries, which undoubtedly has great difficulties in getting out of it. . industrial society. . In industrial society, by contrast, and in earlier societies, the ruling class directly controls organizational dominance, to the point that it is difficult to speak of organizations in, say, medieval society. Economic organizations in industrial society are more dependent on capitalist power and the market, but that even means that they are part of the world of agencies, simply because they are more instruments of capitalist profit than organizations. It is in post-industrial society where economic organizations occupy the entire scene and, at the same time, are increasingly differentiated, so that among what is usually called companies we must distinguish between administrations, bodies and companies in the sense given here. word. . ~ Consequently, if we examine the latter, that is, the organizations that are the locus of decisions and strategies, but which are not carriers of the cultural model, their internal conflicts of interest, although they may be above the most fundamental class conflicts, do not they are direct class conflicts in themselves. Only agencies are the locus of formation of class conflicts and their wager. Industrial companies in industrial society are the object of class conflicts because they are agencies, at least in part. The increasing role of technical progress means that most industrial companies today are no longer agencies but what sociologically I call companies. As for economic units that play the role of agencies as well as corporations, we must recognize a fundamental tension within them between two opposing modes of action and functioning. The intermediate position that companies occupy between administrations and agencies leads to a division into three main types of companies: a central type, a type closer to the administration and a type closer to the agency.

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The first gives priority to the goal-trade pairing. Its logic of action, to use Lucien Karpik's term (in "Les politiques et les logiques d'action de la grande entreprise industrielle", Sociohgie du travail, January-March 1972, pp. 82-105), is economic. Leave internal problems in a subordinate position. This type corresponds mainly to companies located in a changing environment. The second type is defined by the dominant role of the objectives-norms axis. It assumes a stable environment, or whose modifications are controlled. The proximity of this type to the administration is clearly indicated by the fact that it corresponds to many public services. A public transport company is much like an administration. Its rules are precise and stable, its authority rational-legal. Commercial and technical concerns are present, but they seem to constitute particular departments within the company and not fully integrated elements of its management. The third type of company attaches central importance to the balancing axis of objectives. As an agency, it moved away from the rational-legal type of authority and became goal-oriented. The fine control of a technical and human communication system is your main task. These three types of companies can be distinguished from each other mainly by their degree of internal differentiation. The administrative enterprise is the one that functions most fully as an organization. Its institutional system is weaker or more dependent on general policy.

administrative company

exchanges^

development company

trading company Figure 30

system. It is even more loosely linked to the field of historicity. Class conflict manifests itself in it only indirectly and carries very little weight with the cultural model. The commercial enterprise, by contrast, is more clearly divided, as we saw at the outset, between an organizational and an institutional level. A discontinuity is found appearing within him between the degrees of authority and the managers. And that creates two very sensitive areas within

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the company: firstly, at the level of the foreman, located at the meeting point of labor and management and which presents contradictory trends that have often been highlighted; secondly, at the managerial level, who are forced to form cliques in order to go beyond the team level and exert some influence on the decisions that they will later be responsible for implementing. The development company is already an agency, so that above the level of the organization's leaders is the level of the agents of historicity, which in the post-industrial society is that of more or less technocratic professionals, and in the society of the industrialization of capital the of entrepreneurs, of financiers who manage the interests of capital and control the cultural model of "progress". It is desirable to recognize the central position that the commercial enterprise occupies, the most clearly differentiated from both administrations and agencies, unit of political decisions, place of conflicts and negotiations, association of an organization and center of economic initiative. Firms are never, in any type of society, the highest-level organizational units. That position always belongs to agencies. ç.

agencies

Certain organizations are agencies of historicity, that is, they are directly at the service of the cultural model of the society in question. Its members share this sacred character of the organization, which materially manifests itself in the monumental aspect of its facilities. Churches, state palaces, false Roman temples or medieval castles of finance and industry! university campuses or research centers, all seek to dominate their surroundings and differentiate themselves from the rest of the buildings by their size, their materials, their style. Members of agencies are not defined by an administrative statute or by a role in some form of production, although these two modes of definition also occur, but mainly because they have internalized certain guidelines and have transformed them into values. for their organization, something they like to express by talking about their vocation or their spirit of "service". More simply, one can speak of their professionalization, in the sense that they belong to a "body" that controls their recruitment, sets their standards of conduct, and exercises some jurisdiction over its members. Values and norms depend on the nature of the cultural context. model, whether religious, statist, economic or scientific. The agency's professionals are the agents of historicity, the representatives of social creativity, of everything that transcends the functioning of society and at the same time is embodied in it.

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In the type of society that is being designed before our eyes, new categories of professionals, new types of agency, emerge. Production companies are turning into agencies; medicine is being organized into hospitals that are treatment, teaching and research centers at the same time; technical, civil and military progress presupposes the creation of new research centers. And then there are the universities; maintaining, on the one hand, their dual role as transmitters of cultural heritage and social inequality and, on the other hand, as suppliers of specialists to society according to its needs, they increasingly become centers for the creation of new knowledge. So something is being built which may only partly correspond to what Fritz Machlup in The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1962) called the knowledge industries, but which is certainly growing very rapidly. In each type of society, the agency that corresponds to the cultural model is clericalized; no society has ever known the self-management of its cultural model. The result is the formation of a barrier between "clergy" and layman. This is indicated by external signs and is maintained by sanctions against those who cross it, the desecrators, that is, any profane who intends to take hold of these sacred activities. This separation invariably gives rise to the formation of barbaric agencies, to anticlerical activities that can be denoted by the general term magic: non-clerics seek to appropriate the cultural model, manipulate it, but without respecting its organization and its language. . The magician opposed the priest just as the new magicians of astrology, for example, oppose today's scientists. Utopian sects played a similar role in relation to progress, which was the cultural model of industrial societies. And, in fact, the cultural model in agrarian and programmed societies corresponds to "cultural" elements of economic organization: consumption and production; consequently, agencies and magic compete and oppose each other in cultural areas. When the cultural model draws its strength from "social" elements, on the contrary. of organization and distribution, then agencies are social forces and magic will take the form of social groups struggling to wrest the cultural model—the state order or progress—from the clerical apparatus. The pTofessijpnaHzation of the agencies is only one of its aspects, the one that corresponds more directly to the image that they have of themselves. A second aspect refers to their relations with social classes. If a company is a political unit that operates within the framework of class domination, an agency is directly a class actor that operates within the framework of the historical action system. If I spoke of values and norms of an agency, it is because the agency identifies itself with the cultural model and with the historical action system as a whole. And this identification reveals the class nature of

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The agency. Because agency is part of the governing apparatus of society. You control a rollup type through your organization. He concentrates in his hands a kind of society's resources. Today, the hospital complex is the central element of the public health service; but it also concentrates all the nation's medical resources in itself, a fact that can be very disadvantageous for the health aspect of health services and preventive medicine in general, since as services they are more dispersed and have a less direct relationship with the development of knowledge and new biological and medical techniques. Consequently, reliable observers of the organization of health care in the United States have been able to point to the fact that, although the great American hospitals are probably the best in the world, the health of the population of the United States as a whole is not so good. how high in a worldwide comparison. It was with these things in mind that doctors and medical students in France in 1968 felt compelled to protest against a strictly professional medical education that seemed to them quite indifferent to the psychological and social problems that are largely what practical terms determine the need for. for treatment. Finally, it is necessary to recall the central importance that the student movement, whether in the United States or in France, attaches to protests against the technocratic role of the university, against its indifference to student education in a broad sense and to social problems, against their links with other elements of the power elite, civilian and military?^ It would be wrong to believe that class conflicts pitted rulers and ruled against each other within organisms. Agencies are what Galbraith called technostructures, and while it is true that the conflicts that form within them are consonant with class conflicts, these situate the agency as a center of power and accumulation more directly in opposition to the consumers of services that the agencies control and dominate. Conflict, as I have said several times, is always both economic and socio-cultural, linked to forms of control over accumulation and over the cultural model. The third main aspect of agencies is that their objectives are not subordinated to any higher authority, so that their organizational system is more tightly integrated than that of companies or administrations. This integration is so great, the relationship of objectives to techniques so complete, that an agency can be described both as an organization and as a voluntary association. This extreme integration goes hand in hand with extreme internal differentiation between the organizational system, the institutional system, and the system for implementing historical action. Integration means that both rules and exchanges are nothing more than mediations between goals and techniques, between creativity and balance. This situation is the opposite of an administration, where the

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patterns tend to take center stage. The technical role thus becomes participation in the objectives, as suggested by the theme of professionalization. Managing an agency simply means managing its operation and no longer implies the pursuit of objectives external to the organization. Differentiation does not necessarily take the form of nested subsystems. But in each agency there is a higher level of decision which is "professional", that is, regulated according to its higher principles, then a political level, and finally a proper organizational level. This allows us to situate an agency in relation to two extreme and opposite types: one in which each level becomes independent of the others and one in which they become indistinguishable. In the first case, the organization is decomposed into agency, company and administration. In the second, the fusion of levels provokes a general ritualization, a mixture of technical operations and service of the cultural model. One can propose the idea that differentiation, that is, the autonomy of hierarchical subsystems, depends above all on the dominant class role played by the agency. It is to the extent that the functioning of the agency is not absolutist, to the extent that the dominated social forces manage to question the agency's domination, that the separation and hierarchization of functional levels is carried out in a more satisfactory manner. This action tends, in fact, to separate the political level from the professional level, on the one hand, and from the technical operation, on the other; however, the lack of response, by reinforcing the direct link between objectives and techniques, tends to eliminate the importance of the institutional level. These three aspects are combined in all agencies, which more than companies and administrations are complete organizations; they are professionalized; They are the governing apparatus of a society. But their relative importance can vary greatly from case to case. This leads us to distinguish three elementary types of agencies: professional, managerial and technical agencies of the first type are those that come closest to the general picture of agencies that we have just presented. They develop when the agency does not have the right to directly influence its environment and, consequently, when it is placed under public control, whose full form is the self-management of a set of resources. Management agencies are, on the contrary, those that have the capacity to adapt social demand to their interests and, consequently, those that enjoy greater economic independence. Technical agencies are the ones that are subject to the greatest technical limitations and have a more indirect relationship with the cultural model. The relative importance of these three types depends mainly on the role

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of the State in society, since the State is the organ that articulates the different levels of functioning of society: field of historicity, political system and organization. The stronger these links are, the more the State intervenes in the field of historicity and the more it tends to subordinate or aggregate agencies, transforming professional agencies into management agencies or reducing them to the condition of technical agencies. /This proposition is the counterpart of the one formulated a little earlier, according to which the combination of an open class conflict with a direct reference to what is at stake in this conflict, that is, to the system of historical action, is the most favorable situation. for the training of agencies at the highest level, that is, the professional. An all-powerful state will have nothing but administrations around it; if merely interventionist, then it will allow for private enterprise and political systems; if it is reduced to an apparatus for executing political decisions, then its place in the field of historicity is occupied by agencies, provided that, at least, that place is not entirely occupied by the domination of the ruling class, which it refuses to allow the activity of any entity that is not directly subject to its interests. Universities know from experience how narrow is the path that allows them to protect themselves from the domination of the state and the ruling class at the same time. I don't think they are sufficiently aware that this independence presupposes that they themselves fight against their protagonism, whether they are really the agents of their opposition, whether they are allies of the popular forces. Administrations, companies and agencies are all organizations. But, in the case of administration, the higher levels of society's functioning are not projected into the organizational system, while at the opposite extreme agency belongs directly to the system of historical action, class relations, political levels and the organization of society. . Companies, finally, are subservient to the field of historicity and, in particular, to class relations, but they still have a political system and also an organizational system. What can be inferred from the previous observations is that the integration of the organizational system is better ensured, not in the administrations, that is, when the organizational system is more isolated from the superior systems, but in the agencies. Differentiation and integration go hand in hand. Administration is subject to contradictory forces, one pushing it towards the loss of its autonomy, the other towards bureaucratization. It maintains its integration with difficulty and often tends to reduce itself to just one of its elements, its norms. On the other hand, there is a close association between principles and practices in agencies, where outward-looking action and inward-looking action tend to merge, just as orientations do with techniques or dependency with autonomy.

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But this greater integration of agency is also constantly threatened by its role in class relations. Each agency is a center of power and therefore a constituent part of the ruling class. The stronger its class role, and therefore, at least in our society, the more technocratic it is, the more its professional role, its political system, and its organizational system are threatened with disintegration. Conversely, the more a government is an agent of class domination, the more easily it achieves integration, without losing an independence it can never possess. This is to say that the stronger the class rule, the more likely organizations are to take the form of administrations and the less likely they are to be agencies. This explains the ambiguity of the social situation of agency professionals: both are linked to the dominant class as managers of the apparatus and are opposed to it in order to maintain their direct relationship with the guidelines of the historical system of action. An administration, in general, is closed in on itself, concerned with fulfilling the tasks assigned to it. It applies the rules and the sanctions that underpin those rules. An agency, by contrast, has all the characteristics of the historical action system. It is a network of tensions. It is never solidly based on the functioning of society; oscillates between heaven and hell. To speak of it as one speaks of an administration or a company, whose objectives are defined in a much more specific way, not to say institutional, is always inopportune. An agency does not fulfill a function, it produces society. Does the distinction made between administrations, companies and agencies encompass organizations as a whole? Don't all the chosen examples correspond to production organizations or management organizations? Is it possible to treat organisms of socialization similarly, say the school, or, in certain societies, the churches, not to mention the family, which cannot be defined as an organization? At first, we are tempted to respond negatively and see the school or the church as a place of transmission of a culture or an ideology, not as an organization in which both the orientations of the historical system of action and class conflicts . they manifest. However, the reasons for answering in the affirmative have already been given and it is best to repeat them. Class relations are effectively present at school, both because the school preserves social inequality and because it modifies it, either by increasing or decreasing it. On the other hand, the school —including secondary education— participates in all levels of social analysis: as an organization it fulfills technical functions at the same time that it instills norms of authority, that is, it reproduces power; as an agent of adaptation to professional and social change, it belongs to the institutional system; and, finally, as a place of

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the production and dissemination of a way of knowing and a cultural model belong to historicity. That is, it is at the same time administration, company and agency. If we go back to pre-industrial societies, then the church, which in those days was responsible for education, can be described in the same way. We must avoid pitting "practical" organizations against supposedly "ideological" organizations. They are all built around techniques and power; they are all the place of domination and conflict at the same time. d.

Secularization

Creativity is increasingly apprehended as a practice, as a set of operations that transform culture, of man's relations with his environment. The cultural model changes, but without ceasing to define a transcendence of the social order: post-industrial society is oriented towards scientific progress with the same firmness with which the ancient agrarian societies towards divine power. This evolution is accompanied by a degradation from what was an agency in a given society to a company, then to an administration, until it finally disappears completely as an organization. Therefore, even if there is never a secularization of society, we can observe a secularization of certain organizations. This degradation has now reached its final stage in the case of religious organizations. The agency first morphed into a corporation, that is, a political force, then an administration, before finally exploding, as we see happening today in the case of Western Christian churches. This degradation appears less brutal in practice because fragments of earlier societies always subsist in post-industrial societies in a state of formation. However, it is more important to note that the degradation, interrupted by attempts to regain a former importance, is accompanied by an increase in anti-organizational behavior, by a transformation of the organization into a voluntary association aimed at reviving the spirit or essence. of degraded agencies, as evidenced by the proliferation of deeply religiously inspired sects, grassroots communities, or social movements that have grown up on the ruins of religious agencies. These processes are less advanced in the case of state organizations. The degradation of these agencies should not be confused with the disappearance of the state in a general sense, an expected development contradicted by observations of industrialized societies. The majesty of state agencies is replaced in industrial society by the growing importance of state services as businesses, as political agents. This is why capitalist industrialization experienced such a strong tendency to confuse the state with the political system. In post-industrial society, state organizations are increasingly administrations, and this creates a great deal of

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gap between a state power, which intervenes in economic and social life, funding and controlling new agencies, managing the progress of knowledge, and state administrations executing the decisions of a political system in which companies play an important role. France finds it difficult to deal with the demotion of its state agencies to administrations. These new administrations persist in trying to preserve the image of their former function, that of serving the general interest; they insist on demanding the respect of those who are subject to them; and they refuse to recognize that they function within the framework of class domination and according to the relations of influence that operate in the political system. Also in the domain of the State, the degradation of agencies is accompanied by attempts at restoration and, more importantly, by efforts at counterorganization that require community self-management. The evolution of economic organizations is shorter: from agencies in industrial society they are demoted in post-industrial society to companies, decision centers, at least insofar as they fail to transform themselves again into agencies by linking their growth to technical progress. Lastly, knowledge organizations are increasingly experiencing the splendor of agencies today. The researcher's isolation is replaced by the creation of laboratories, hospitals, research centers, university institutes. These transformations are summarized in Figure 31. The table gives concrete expression to the frequent definition of post-industrial society as a society of organizations. In fact, it is in this type of society that the dominance of organizations reaches its greatest extension, at least within the practical activity of society. religious organizations

express

economic

knowledge

agency

mercantile society

company

agency

•

industrial society

administration

company

agency

•

administration

company

(Video) How Ireland is Secretly Becoming the Richest Country in the World

agency

agrarian society

post industrial society

Figure 31

The ruling class has to increasingly define itself in industrialized societies by the organizations it controls, such as the administrative elite, such as the technocracy. This

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it is less and less at the service of the metasocial guarantees of the social order. This is a transformation that is far from complete, especially in countries where industrialization has met and is met with resistance from earlier social forms. There, rulers still like to position themselves above organizations as guardians of absolute power, able to serve as a last resort for subjects who have been abused by lower echelons and who sometimes feel compelled by them. Crozier (in La society bloc, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970) has given a very good account of this resistance on the part of the former French ruling class to its organizational role. ç.

The categories of social practice

one.

Organizations between historicity and history

Organizations implement a system of historical action and class relations within the framework of a political system, but these levels of society's functioning also go beyond any particular organization. The organizational behaviors and relationships are determined by the categories of social practice, concrete expression of the field of historicity and the political system. The organization is a decision center, it acts according to objectives and establishes standards, defines roles. But their own master is not enough to choose them freely; its functioning is not determined by its intentions. It would be a great illusion to believe that an organization, be it a factory or a school, a hospital or an army, controls, is capable of transforming its own social function, its forms of authority, its human relations, its forms of socialization through its decisions. . Unit of concrete action, it is at the same time capable of enacting and changing its rules of existence, but immersed in a society that determines it at the upper levels of the field of historicity and the political system. The necessary counterpart to a study of organizations is therefore that of categories of social practice* which are not created by individual organizations but depend more immediately on institutional decisions and, moreover, on class relations and the orientations of the historical system of organization. action. Hence the fact that organizations that fulfill very different functions, but belonging to the same society, have many characteristics in common, what could be called a common spirit, which is also manifested in their authority relations, in the definition of roles and in the forms of Act. stratification and communication. Does this statement perhaps bring us back to a question that was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter? Is there a unity of categories of social practices to look for in a core body of values or in the domain of an agent of social domination?

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These apparently antithetical forms of the same statement are equally unacceptable. They correspond only to two theoretical extremes. It is possible to imagine a society organized around values and consensus, and in which conflicts and tensions unfold within these values, within the norms that specify them, the means of social control that maintain them, and the socialization agencies that sustain them. they.transmit. But no differentiated society really corresponds to this Gemeinschaft image. Historians are constantly reminding us that values, even when manifested in the ceremonial form of a written constitution, always belong to particular social groups and that it is arbitrary to say that the Declaration of the Rights of Man was a formulation of the values held by planters. in Picardy or artisans in the Faubourg St-Antoine. It is more tempting to say that the categories of social practice taken as a whole have a unity which is in fact the unity of ruling class ideology. Because one would not speak of a ruling class if, in fact, it were not capable of imposing rules and forms of social and cultural organization on a community as a whole. However, there is no reason to believe that the dominant position in question is, in practice, complete. It is only so when the dominant class completely reduces historicity to the dimensions of its own interests, replaces the elements of the system of historical action with the counter-elements that constitute its ideology, its values; when its hegemony over the political system is one of total domination; when it reduces the functioning of social organization to the reproduction of its own power. In a word, when society loses all historicity, it is reduced to slavery. This corresponds, in fact, to the extreme forms of the colonial situation, when the imposition of an assimilating ideology and a repressive order is stronger than the effort to promote dependent economic development. The more one moves away from such a situation, which cannot be described only in terms of class, but in terms of total domination, the less acceptable is the image of social practice as an integrated ideological discourse. On the one hand, the instances of historicity retain a certain autonomy; second, domination is repressive and not just inclusive; rejects, does not fully assimilate. Thirdly, there is therefore, in various forms, a defensive or counter-offensive reaction on the part of the dominated classes. Finally, there is a certain autonomy of technology and forms of social activity that cannot be reduced to ideologies. No social practice can be understood as eliminating class domination or reducing that practice to a ruling class ideology. Class conflict and reference to the historical action system always remain the two fundamental and inseparable principles of sociological analysis.

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Before continuing with this analysis, we should consider a second way in which social practice can overwhelm organizations. As organizations are individual and concrete agents, they are not located only in a field of historicity and in a political system. They also act within a historical situation constituted by the superimposition and combination of different sociological subgroups. Labor relations within an organization are not simply determined by the shape of the organizational system: they do not even depend solely on class relations and political interactions; they are also marked by past forms not only of working-class conduct but also of employers. And this becomes all the truer the more heterogeneous, the more "dualistic", the more dependent the society in question, and also the more committed to a voluntaristic effort to build a new society with "old" men. The state of an organization at a given time is a historical fact, a decision is an event, not just a case for applying the operating principles of a system. Social organization depends on a field of historicity, but at the same time escapes it; or rather, what in everyday language is called society —which denotes a collectivity located in time and space— goes beyond social organization, since the latter brings together fragments of various social wholes in the unity of a political whole, which conveys the domain of a system of historical action and a ruling class. Here the sociologist plays in the background for the historian, but can still be useful to him. Social life is made up not only of forms of social organization that lag behind or ahead of the main form, but also, linked to these fragments, the tattered remnants of secondary political systems, of class relations now disappearing or simply taking shape. of elements of historical systems of action that are collapsing or in the process of formation. We live not only in a system of sociocultural orientations and classes, but also in the midst of ghosts, of shades to which life still clings, dreams that are still or already real, and through which we communicate with the past and the future. belonging only to the present. Our words are addressed not only to those who are now in front of us, but also on a stage where the past is repeated and the future is rehearsed. Everything that exists at the same time is not synchronous, it does not belong to the same system, it is not coherent. Is this experience not more vivid today than in the past? The speed of structural changes makes us live more today even among our dead, still here with us, as among our descendants, who infiltrate us through the changes that expel us from our present. The more we live in a society of simultaneity and ubiquity, the more we are other than ourselves, and the more we become involved in dreams and arts that give shape and movement to the shadow of other forms of life. historicity. The actual experience is always out of sync

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with social systems. A society reduced simply to the concatenation of a field of historicity, institutions and social organization would be so oppressive that the individual would be unable to bear it; for then it would be no more than it was, and no longer capable of imagination and change. No longer would he have to decipher the worn inscriptions of the past and the signs that heralded his future, he could no longer be a personal agent of change. Those we call great men are certainly those who manage, by virtue of their deep attachment to the past and the future, to escape the illusions of the established order and discover, behind the false unity of social organization, the central structures of society, in which they open the way to becoming agents of historicity. It must also be said that no organization, no concrete society, is ever reducible to a collection of fragments of historicity. Always, interspersed with all the facts that belong to the field of sociology, are those that belong to anthropology. No social organization completely escapes the demands of its survival; in all of them it is possible to perceive the deep imprint of cultural constructions that express questions alien to historicity and that affect life and death, sex, the relationship with the other, etc. Every organization employs techniques and languages that are used by social action, but are not the product of social interactions. Human societies are also part of nature. The specific characteristics of the human system overlap with those of the various types of non-human systems that, therefore, are also present in the social life of men. It is certainly true that the more the historicity of societies grows, the greater their capacity to act on themselves, the more the area of cultural and social “structures” seems to shrink, just as kinship systems are destroyed in urbanized cities. societies, but there is no proof that historical action entirely fills the void thus created. For what disappears in the way of the established order constantly reappears as play, as voluntary activities, and even more broadly as new forms of community in social life. Those societies that have the most abundant and complex economic resources cannot be reduced to their work any more than others, just as the progress of science does not eliminate our questioning of the human condition. Every social organization is a moving frontier between human nature and social action, between the field of anthropology and sociology. At every moment we are faced with the limits of our territory, and we are not sure that they will continue to expand. B.

The practice of historicity

Returning to the determination of the categories of social practice within the framework of a field of historicity, we find above all the orientations

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of the historical system of action. They manifest themselves more directly in agencies, and with greater difficulty in those companies and administrations that remain marked with the role of agency that they could have played in previous societies and, at the same time, are less linked to the new system of historical action. However, they are not imprisoned in agencies and spread throughout society in the form of expectations, demands. In more industrialized societies, participation in scientific and technical progress, professional competence, organization by objectives, enjoyment are valued, without being able to speak of a body of values, as these different orientations are in tension with each other. . they can never be separated from the positions occupied by actors in class relations. But these guidelines constitute a whole that can be presented in cultural expressions. A society recognizes itself in works of art that are not declarations of principles or ideological works, but the transcription of this social theme in terms of an individual experience of it. The work of art transits through all levels of social reality, from the system of historical action to the history of individual life, passing through class relations, the state of institutions and the role of the state. But its degree of universalism depends on its ability to rise to the level of historicity, a mode of knowledge, a cultural model and a type of accumulation. On the other hand, its importance diminishes in proportion as it is more "idealistic" or, on the contrary, more "realistic", that is, insofar as it tries, on the one hand, to express more and more the spirit of a civilization. on the other, to describe more directly the functioning of society and its various activities. The poorest art of all is that which identifies realism with idealism, as in the case of "socialist realism". If I include art in this discussion, it is because the practice of historicity cannot be isolated in a single step. It can only be reached and expressed from what is most distant from it: personal experience, the lived event. If we try to apprehend it "objectively", we can only end up confusing it with forms of social organization, political relations and class relations. This also explains how the practice of historicity can be better perceived, outside of art, in social movements, which in turn have profound exchanges with art. It is through organizational demands, institutional pressure and the contestation of class power that the way to the system of historical action is found. In this sense, a utopia is not on the margins of society at its center, but only on the condition that it does not disintegrate the system of historical action to select and retain a single element, it is decided, only on the condition that conflict breaks out of classes. The practice of historicity is never, therefore, the mere functioning of

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organizational forms. It constantly transcends them and appears as a force of protest rather than conformity. But if it is true that the rise to the system of historical action takes place from a starting point in social practice through the mediation of art and social movements, the common experience of actors cannot be reduced to these creative forms of conduct. The orientations of the historical system of action affect each of us through class domination, political decisions, organizational authority and state power, that is, through historical aggregates that would only be transparent to social systems if they were sociologically homogeneous , which is never the case. case. The actor is separated from the system of historical action by all the interwoven opacity of forms of domination, hegemony and power, and by all the weight of social reproduction and status transmission. Therefore, he constantly tends to break with this social and historical frame, to confront the laws, the rule, the traditions with an appeal to creativity centered on himself as an individual or in the desired social interactions. He confronts the crushing pyramid of instituted social forms with the force of his spontaneity, the instituting and absolute force of desire. But this reaction is necessarily ambiguous. As a transcendence of the dominated, institutionalized, organized, inherited order, it is the most concrete means of returning to society's production, to its historicity. But such a return can only be void of content, pure distancing rather than counter-affirmation. Social action, individual or collective, which would take this rebellion as a guiding principle, would firstly lead to a total dehistoricization, to a recourse to the fundamental needs of man who can never be anything, behind an idealistic form, but the shadow of the fighting order and, in general, the mythical image of a golden age in some indefinite past or future. It would then become even more a prisoner of what it fights than before, as it would become indistinguishable from marginality, especially from the crisis reactions of the various social systems and, therefore, from the behavior of anomie. The appeal to spontaneity, to personal creativity, always runs the risk of combining too easily with a reinforcement of the social order, just as the ghetto reinforces the dominant interests that exclude it. For the sociologist, there are no human needs that oppose the social order as nature opposes cultural limitations. Fundamental needs, imperative requirements exist in all societies, but they are nothing more than the guidelines of the historical system of action and, therefore, cannot be experienced outside the social relations of domination, decision and organization. And this fact brings the other side of the actor's relations with the system of

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historical action in sight. In the face of revolt there is also participation. The forms of social interaction then appear as agents for the realization of the historical action system. Participation in this system is inseparable from participation in the social order, and dominant forces at all levels of society actively exploit this confusion of cultural orientations with the social order. This, in fact, defines the creation of values and norms, the concrete expression of the ideology of the dominant class that acts through its institutional hegemony and its organizational power. Social participation fails to relate the actor with the historical action system, since it links him to the interests of domination and power, as well as to a historically formed and bequeathed order. Thus, the man who makes his way to God through his church becomes a prisoner of that church, its dominant role and its traditions. The actor cannot arrive at the historical action system directly in the social organization; he cannot do more than manage, more or less successfully, the dialectic of commitment and disengagement. He can only escape this by ascending from the level of social organization to higher levels, first becoming a political actor and, even better, becoming a producer of society, through social movements and art. And yet, social movements are focused on the transformation of social organization and tend to impose a new identification of the historical action system with another social order, while art, in turn, is unable to separate personal creation from the means of expression that are also, in turn, part of the social order and, therefore, determined by relations of domination and power. Every society tends to build a corporate utopia, a paradise in which a direct relationship is established, beyond all social interaction, between individual and cultural orientations that have become values. But the realization of such a social utopia could only be the construction of a totalitarian society, the reduction of society to the State, the identification of everyone with the commandments of a charismatic power. The actor's relationship with historicity cannot exist outside the dialectic of revolt and participation. ç.

Class relations and social practice

It would be pointless to speak of class domination if it did not have a visible effect on social practice. Indeed, the political system also operates within the limits that domination allows. It manifests itself through inequality. But this notion, like that of stratification, to which it is closely related, tends to sound much simpler than it really is and can lead to confusion. Starting from the same descriptions, it can also lead to a functionalist analysis regarding the revelation of class relations. He talks about social organization in terms of

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historical actors and vice versa. It is not difficult to perceive that men do not come into the world and live in it as equals, that social mobility is limited, that the opportunity to access education, income and higher qualification depends on social origin. It can just as easily be added that inequalities are in principle both institutionalized and internalized, so that the man who starts from the bottom has a lower level of aspirations and expectations, while he has already been channeled into channels that diminish his chances of promotion. But the study of social stratification need not make use of the concept of class. The more society is defined as an integrated whole, having common values or ideologies and mechanisms for creating and reproducing inequality, the more it approaches a functionalist analysis, which can have a left or right tone without affecting its basic focus. somehow. It is only necessary to introduce the concept of class if the analysis is to explain ruptures in social organization and even, to be more precise, rejections. This is something that goes far beyond the idea of selection, as there is no community that does not have more or less developed mechanisms for selection and reproduction of inequalities. But vice versa if society splits completely in two. it is impossible to see how the upper class can maintain its dominance except by force alone, since by definition it is numerically smaller. The use of force, coercion, repression is constant; but here one can follow Gramsci from the Quaderni del Carcere and, in particular, Benedetto Croce's // materialismo storico e la philosophy (Turin: Einaudi, 1966) in saying that class domination must necessarily resort to both coercion, which is the role of political society, that is, of the State apparatus – and integration, which is the definition of the role of what Gramsci calls civil society, using this expression in a very different sense than usual. This integrating role cannot be reduced to actions in the form of propaganda. Its importance lies in the fact that the upper class identifies itself with the system of historical action and with historicity itself. And this, I repeat, has two meanings: on the one hand, it produces a utopia that presents the upper classes as servants of historicity; on the other hand, it identifies historicity with the interests of the upper class, in an ideological way, thus laying the foundations for its domination and rejecting those who do not conform to it. Ruling class dominance over social practice cannot, therefore, be reduced to a task of unification, the weaving of a network of social and cultural categories within which the community as a whole functions, nor to an action of separation and rejection. . These two aspects are equally important and inseparable. If you look at the school system in France and, more generally, at the transmission of knowledge, you can say with Pierre Bourdieu

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and Jean Claude Passeron (Les heritiers, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964, and La reproducción, Editions de Minuit, 1970) that its function is to reproduce inequality, to keep everyone in their proper place in the social hierarchy. But Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet (Uecole capitalist en France, Paris: Maspero, 1971) are right to oppose this ideological integration to the effectiveness of the mechanisms of separation and repression. However, his observations are also only partial, as the school system must also allow and organize a certain mobility, spread the values of the ruling class, manage social practice as a whole. In short, the upper class does not exercise a unitary action, but multiple actions that configure a system of domination over social practice. As a ruling class, it acts differently than it does as a ruling class; secondly, it exerts an opening and closing action. Closing because it is a specific group that manages and controls the accumulation, that is, it defends its own interests and maintains its privileges; openness because they want to rule and dominate society as a whole. The elements of this system of domination are defined in Figure 32. The set formed by these four elements belongs to the ideology of the upper class. The term ideology has the advantage of indicating continuity between the level of class relations and that of social organization. But to avoid confusion, and also to underline that this is not a discourse, but a practical activity —the constitution of categories of social practice— it seems to me that the term domain is clearer.

ruling class ruling class

frankness

mobility

concentration

integration

repression

Figure 32

The forms of division of labor or occupation of space, the distribution of authority, the channels of recruitment and promotion, the form and content of sanctions, the symbols of social status are not just ideas or conceptions, but the very form of everyday life. translated into regulations, decisions and even institutional mechanisms, since the dominance of the dominant class is not the product of a system of influences and negotiations. It can be modified by decisions of the political system, but it is more deeply rooted than that system, for it is class domination in action. Power is the manifestation of dominance in an organization; domination is the form it takes across the entire field of social practice. Concentration means that in any social organization the dominance of the ruling class is made visible by an opposition between center and

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periphery, rulers and ruled, or some analogous dichotomy. Hierarchy is discontinuous, and this discontinuity must be blended with the apparent continuity of a stratification. This is a classic theme of sociological research, which tends to collect opinions that amalgamate the two types of representation, that is, that recognize, in addition to the hierarchy of functions and the continuity of an organization chart, a line of rupture and qualitative change. Mobility here does not just mean the ideology that life is a race or a process of natural selection in which the best man must win. Indeed, social organization provides channels of upward mobility, and a ruling class—in the United States or the Soviet Union more than in Europe—is fond of calling attention to the cases of its members who have moved from poverty to poverty. This mobility not only has the function of renewing and therefore strengthening the ruling class; It also manifests the identification of the ruling class with the historical system of action: those who rise are the most "modern", the most enterprising, and for that very reason form the ruling class. Integration is linked to ruling class action. Therefore, it cannot be reduced to the incorporation of the greatest possible number into a social practice defined by the ruling class. It implies the formation of a ruling bloc in which the new and old ruling classes and their allies, be they social categories or state forces, are at least partially merged. It is, therefore, an integration into a mode of domination that involves both the past and the present and the future. It is more directly ideological than mobility or concentration, but less instrumental. Hence its importance in the school system, which is integrating children and young people less into the practice of the ruling class than into a complex whole, in which the reproduction of ancient forms of social domination plays an essential role. The so-called artistic themes, in particular history, literature and philosophy, are deeply marked by this integrative ideological function, which places great emphasis on the continuity of great works. An extreme form of this integration is found in the Harvard Redbook of 1945, which establishes that the university's main task is the transmission of the Western cultural heritage, formed in Greece, then in Rome, developed by Christian civilization and expanded by modernity. humanism and liberalism. Defenders of classical education in France often resort to similar terms in their praise of humanism, of disinterested culture, the product of a succession of social and intellectual elites. But this integration is never complete. Its counterpart, and at the same time a complement to the work of concentration, is repression. Social organization must eliminate, exclude, entrench and silence all those who are not integrable and who have been constituted as deviants by

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concentration and integration mechanisms. The aim of repression is not only the defense of order against disorder, but also the defense of values against the forces that reject them. Taylor offers workers the opportunity to share the behavior of the capitalist entrepreneur. They may grow rich by their work if they put their reason and self-interest to right use. But if the carrot and the internalization of capitalist values do not work, then the whip must be used. Even more crudely, the colonizer deplores the idleness of the Indians who stop working as soon as they manage to earn the handful of dates that allow them to subsist. They must therefore be forced to provide their labor and excluded from a participation which they themselves reject and of which they are incapable. The relative importance of each of the elements in this system of upper-class rule over social practice depends on the nature of the class rule. The more heterogeneous a society, the more closely the old and new ruling classes are associated, the more integration and repression prevail. The more political hegemony the ruling class has, the more importance concentration and repression acquire. These two situations combine more strongly in the colonial situation. But even in the case of a strongly homogenized and liberal industrialized society, that is, a society in which the political system is largely autonomous from class rule, ruling class rule is not reduced to the ideology of mobility, although this element is more visible here than in other cases. For the more a society approaches the post-industrial type, the more deeply it intervenes in itself and also the greater the degree of integration that it demands of its members, at the same time that it imposes an intense concentration, resulting, in a society that already it has greater mobility than others, to increase the field of repression and at the same time transform it. The reproduction of a class domination cannot, therefore, be reduced to the concealment of that domination behind a set of categories and mechanisms that derive their authority solely from rationality, common sense, principles or traditions, and never from interests of class. In fact, such an explanation amounts to talking in unnecessarily dramatic terms about the permanence of a social system organized around values, norms and instruments for controlling the social order and the socialization of new members of a society. From the moment the class conflict is established, the maintenance of domination can no longer be explained by the masks behind which it hides, as the class opponent can rip off the masks at any moment. Therefore, repression must be exercised, a barrier must be erected between what is acceptable and what is prohibited, deviation must be named and sanctioned, darkness must surround the central light.

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It is not just class domination that imposes rejection and repression. The very historicity of society defines the field of the possible, makes certain behaviors, certain feelings or certain ideas inconceivable, incongruous. No culture can respect all of the past and make the path to the future completely clear; it would lose its identity in the uninterrupted flow of change. For this reason, the reproduction of the system of historical action and class relations cannot be confused with the social control that is located at the institutional level, and even less with the rules that govern the functioning of a community, of a concrete whole defined in its human and non-human environment and subjecting itself to essential laws for its survival, for its integration, for its defense against external threats, for the maintenance of its internal and external balances. Societies with a strong historicity almost cease to experience such laws, as they are dominated by decisions and plans for change and no longer by homeostatic mechanisms; consequently, although less imperative in their norms, although more diversified and tolerant, they are also more repressive, because the change in historicity and, therefore, in movements and class conflicts is increasing. Faced with this dominance of the upper class over the categories of social practice, the popular class finds itself deprived of the means of action and subjected to alienation, to that contradiction that so many films, books and sociological researchers have so often described. . , especially in the case of workers, between dependent participation in a practice defined and managed by the upper class and the reference to a counter-organization constituted by the popular class. This counterdominance is by nature less visible, but its importance is considerable. The sociology of informal organization has shed much light on this, especially since the famous "Hawthorne studies" conducted at the Western Electric factory in the late 1920s (see F. J. Roethlisberger and W. J. Dickson in Management and the Worker, University of Harvard). Press, 1939). This counter-dominance operates according to the logic of popular action in the double dialectic of social classes. To the opening managed by the dominant class, it responds with a defensive closure. To the closure established by his adversary, he opposes a contesting opening. Therefore, one can define this counter-dominance system as shown in Figure 33. Equality is the concentration response. It aims at the elimination not of hierarchies, but of barriers and the dichotomization of society. More fundamentally, it is a question of eliminating within the group those forms of hierarchy based on participation in the dominant sphere. Resistance is opposed to mobility. This is the traditional theme of the slow establishment of group norms as opposed to the pull exercised and organized by the ruling class.

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frankness

resistance

equality

company accountants

Freedom

Figure 33

The counter-society issue is more directly ideological than the previous ones, just as integration is more than mobility or concentration. The best analyzes in this field have been produced by those who have studied resistance to colonial rule. The rejection of integration or its extreme form, assimilation, takes its strength from the mobilization of an endangered culture, a culture defended not because it is traditional but because it acts as a breakout to help resist resistance against the influence of domination and corruption. In the same way, at the moment of greater development of the labor movement, the question of proletarian culture arose, and even today, as at other moments in history, they continue to try to organize a counterculture. Finally, the theme of freedom fights against repression, not by organizing ghettos, which only reinforces the work of integration and repression, but by challenging the boundaries that the social order establishes between what is allowed and what is prohibited, what is normal and what is the pathological, the integrated. and the deviant. The anti-psychiatry movement and the fight against the various forms of imprisonment in jails, asylums or homes, is the most contemporary expression of this attempt at counter-domination. However, it is difficult to see how co-dominion could be the exclusive work of the popular class itself, simply because of the weight that both limitations and alienation have on it. The role of elite counts, drawn mainly from the intelligentsia, is therefore almost always important in this attempt to challenge the values and norms established by the ruling class, and also in generating a practice to combat them. But its intervention is only sufficient if the conflict remains on the ideological plane itself. It is only important at the level of social organization if it derives its strength only from a popular practice of counter-domination, only if this practice reveals itself and helps to undo the pseudo-positivity of the social order. This analysis of the dominance of the ruling class over social organization and the attempts of the popular class to establish counter-domination requires, for its realization, the observation of the effects exerted by class relations at the level of consumption, that is, of the transmission and reception of cultural goods versus forms of social interaction.

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Consumer objects and behaviors are ranked in such a way that distinctions between social classes are reproduced. This mechanism operates according to the two methods already indicated. On the one hand, a break is created between higher and lower modes of consumption. Above, there is invention, genius, sheer ingenuity, elegance, good taste, all as much the product of individual gifts as the result of long membership in an elite free from basic material concerns: below, we find the practical and active. repetitive that allows immediate gratifications. On the other hand, a continuity from top to bottom is established, an uninterrupted descending gradation. The work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron has shed remarkable light on this organized stratification. Vulgarized to the stage of radio and television games and contests, "high culture" is degraded from production to reproduction, from modern historical analysis to the rawest narrative and chronological history, but always in such a way as to create a feeling of dependent participation in a superior social and cultural world, revered, imitated and indisputable. The popularization of culture must attract and repel people. Draw him in so there's no risk of him challenging the class nature of the dominant culture; it repels him so that he does not feel able to participate in anything more than one way of objects or at most techniques, without being able to rise even higher to the level of ideas and guidelines. Claude Grignon, in L'ordre des chooses (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1971), has given a very perceptive examination of technical education in French public schools from this point of view. Such education must be inferior, but it must not be different. The technician and nurse must have some notions of general culture so that they can belong to the world dominated by economic or medical rulers: but they must also limit themselves to technical operations, so that questions are never asked about how production works. complex, so that the gap between the elite and the technicians remains, a gap that the latter find easier to accept because another gap, equally large, is created at the same time between them and the masses, be it made up of workers, patients or students. But this class stratification does not only lead to responses of pure conformism. In addition to dependent participation, two very different types of behavior can be observed that also refer to the double dialectic of social classes. On the one hand, the reappropriation of cultural assets for the defensive maintenance of a popular culture based either on professional activity or on the preservation of ancestral cultural values, and centered on primary groups, the family or the neighbourhood. On the other hand, there is the use of consumer objects in a "desocializing" way in an effort to achieve the guidelines of the historical system of action through leaps over the social order. This could be called opportunity seeking, manifested by

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the cult of real or mythical heroes who achieved success without passing through authority, influence or belonging to the upper class. This will to live, stronger among young people, feeds both on participation and on rebelliousness, and allows mass culture to go beyond the popularization of high culture, without ever managing to free itself from the dominance of the ruling class, which perpetually gathers it back "in the herd." This domain is stronger insofar as cultural consumption is more directly linked to the reproduction of social domination and forms of social organization. It is less strong in the domain of consumption of symbolic products when this consumption does not it is linked to professional functions. Here, again, as in the previous analyses, one must not fall into the functionalist illusion of participation stratified by values or forget that ruling class dominance does not fully explain popular behavior, which always remains oriented, although often in degraded forms form - by the double effort of resistance and contestation d.

Social Practice and the State

The categories of social practice are also determined by the political system, although we can limit ourselves here to two observations. First, the political system only seems to give unity to social practice. It does not have this role if it is not open, if it is totally subject to a hegemonic class, that is, if it does not intervene as such. When it intervenes, it does so to the extent that its elements of plurality resist the forces of unification, and also to the extent that its own unity is weak, to the extent that contractual mechanisms are added to legislating, and to the extent that it does not intervene. , proscribes the action of social movements, organizational demands and the pressures exerted on it. Second, the political system, acting within a historically and geographically determined territorial whole, combines rules that are not sociologically interdependent, constitutes and defends a socially composed political order. The greater the intervention of the political system, the less rooted is the unity it possesses. Therefore, we must conclude that the social practice and what we could call the discourse of a society do not have unity, do not form a coherent whole that can be identified with a body of social values or with the domination of a dominant class . Sociology has used the notions of values, norms and roles in a way that cannot be accepted. Social practice is not made up of reciprocity of roles and role expectations harmonized by a common reference to norms and, therefore, to values. This image can correspond to communities defined, ultimately, only by the rules of their operation, or inversely to voluntary communities.

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associations; it is not applicable to a society in which class and political relations are paramount. The actors communicate within the framework of a system of historical action, laws, rules, but their interests do not agree in harmony. Everyone seeks, on the political level, to increase their influence, guide their strategy and also, on the level of class relations, defend themselves against an opponent and at the same time identify with social orientations. Consequently, actors rarely play their parts, rarely behave in accordance with what others expect of them. They cannot dissociate their organizational behavior from their strategic behavior and their class behavior. This overlap and this non-coincidence are more pronounced in agencies than in administrations, are reduced to a minimum in total organizations and manifest themselves above all in social exchanges outside the organization. If we consider the opposite hypothesis, that of a unity of social practice as an ideological whole, we will see that its realization presupposes a complete superimposition of the historical system of action and the political system of class domination. This is only possible if the dominant class is extremely dissociated from the dominant class and, consequently, if society is dominated by a hegemonic block of old and new dominant classes and, therefore, devoid of any capacity to manage its historicity. But this situation is one in which the categories of social practice are the least homogeneous, just like museum exhibitions that bring together works from different societies and eras. It is precisely in this way that the religious culture of a traditionally Catholic region can be combined in a syncretism in constant remodeling of heritage as disparate as the Vatican's buildings and works of art. On the other hand, this social and cultural domination, even if it manages to impose practices, is dominated on all sides by a historicity, by class relations, by political behaviors that it will never succeed in completely suppressing. We have just come across the general idea or theme of ideology once again. It has already played a role in our analysis of social class, and we will encounter it again when we discuss social movements and social change. The time has come to organize the very diverse uses that are given to this word. Let us first set aside the simplest and plainest meaning. Actors have an ideology. They represent a situation for themselves – a situation that is always a whole made up of social interactions seen from their point of view – and they reinterpret as the environment of their intentions what is in fact a relationship of which they are one of the terms. It is in this sense that I used the word ideology, associating it with the concept of utopia. All systems of social interactions, be they class relations and their interests, political relations or organizational relations, produce

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two types of representation in the actors: either they identify with the social field in question and perceive their companions or opponents as obstacles —which corresponds to a utopia— or they identify the social game with themselves, as they perceive themselves in relation to their peers. partners or opponents. There are ideologies and utopias linked to organizational roles, group or class interests. Any observable ideology or utopia at the organizational level also participates in a class ideology or class utopia. But the ideology of the ruling class is also the ruling ideology. Thus we return to the problem of an ideology of the system, of social organization. And consequently we find introduced the idea of three levels of social reality: the economic, the political and the ideological. This theme appears in many ways. First, this trichotomy can be used to distinguish the domains of social production, that of society's adaptation to change, and that of reproduction, the first being defined in economic terms, the second in political terms, the third as ideology. Second, a distinction can be made between societies in which social domination manifests itself in a directly economic manner and those in which this domination manifests itself in a primarily political or primarily ideological manner. Third, social action can be carried out by groups defined by an economic situation or by the mediation of political forces, or by ideological groups. To the first of these ideas we must reply that the levels of analysis and social reality cannot be identified with categories of social facts. The level of social production, which I call the level of historicity, is not the level of economic facts, as it is the level of cultural and social orientations of the system of historical action, as well as class conflicts and ideologies. What interests sociology, at this level as at all others, are not facts—economic, political, or cultural—but social interactions. The upper class always tends to be both dominant, which means that it controls the production of society, and dominant, which means that it guarantees the reproduction of the established order and its own domination. These two orientations manifest themselves at all levels of social reality. Although I distinguish three levels—the field of historicity, the political system, and social organization—this representation must not be confused with a hierarchy of categories of social facts. The second formulation is acceptable on the surface. Indeed, it fits very well into many schemes representing the transition from "traditional" to "modern" societies, from transfer companies to acquisition companies. These are acceptable ideas insofar as they indicate

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the decay of the metasocial guarantees of the social order, but totally unacceptable if they manage to impose an image of evolution that leads from irrationality to rationality, from the religious state to the positive state. Every mode of social domination is both economic and ideological. The masters of past societies were not just god-kings or priests, they were above all the owners of the earth and men. The technocrats of the post-industrial era are not scientists but professors who impose their ideology. When will we completely get rid of that tenacious sociocentrism that makes us see our own society as the last step before the definitive entry into "nature/* into "reason", into "freedom/' at the "end of history"? If there is to be an end to history, then it can only take the form of an event, whether of human or non-human origin, not a return to a steady state free from all the agonies and aspirations of historicity. The third formulation rightly reminds us that the more a society submits to domination, the more social relations are distorted, the more the class struggle is replaced by the clash of the constituted order and the contesting forces that attack it from outside. I will call, in my last chapter, critical action in opposition to social movements. The "economic, political, ideological" trichotomy thus introduces the worst confusions. It suggests that there is a category of social facts corresponding to each of the levels I distinguished: the field of historicity, the political system and social organization, while each of these levels must be defined as a system of social interactions. Class relations are situated at a level identical to that of economic relations and ideologies, which is also a political locus insofar as State action penetrates from the political system to the field of historicity. The political system is also concerned with economic interests and is animated by political ideologies that refer more or less directly to class ideologies, but at the same time also belong in part to the internal rhetoric of the political system itself. Finally, the social organization is the locus of an economic practice, at the same time that organizations are dependent on the political system or also have —in the case of companies and agencies— their own political system. It is also the place where the ideology of the ruling class tends to become the ideology of the system, the spirit of the categories of social practice, but in a way that is not at all constraining except in the realm of pure reproduction, in the cemetery. of dead historicities. One cannot superimpose an ideological superstructure on an economic infrastructure without adopting a historicist point of view. In that case, one can conceive of the productive forces directing society as a whole. But it can also be said that ideas and values drive social practices. In all cases, this evolutionism rests on a philosophy of

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history, the last avatar of the metasocial guarantees of the social order. Sociology cannot exist until that moment when it has utterly expelled vitalism from material forces or values, when it has begun to conceive of the whole of society in terms of social action, and therefore in terms of practice and orientation, economics and ideology. inextricably linked. Social organization can never be seen as the simple concrete expression of domination; it is linked to the field of historicity and, therefore, to the double dialectic of social classes. Closed as a concrete organizational whole, it is open as a practice of historicity. Social organization always presents two complementary aspects. On the one hand, it represents the field of historicity, that is, both the orientations of the historical system of action and class conflicts. On the other hand, it is the expression of domination. It is in this sense that it is the dominant ideology. But it cannot be reduced to that ideology, any more than it can be reduced to cultural orientations or, conversely, to open class conflicts. This is the meaning of the opposition between technique and power, presented at the beginning of this chapter as one of the fundamental dimensions of social organization. An organizational system or a political system does not have a more "positive" unit of content than the historical action system. All social systems are modes of domination of historicity over functioning and are dominated by tensions between the two aspects of class relations: conflict and domination. That is why, in all organizations, tensions between system elements and conflicts between actors can and should be sought. Is there not then a unifying agent of the categories of social practice? Yes, there is such an agent: the State. The State is what articulates the field of historicity, the political system and social organization. A powerful State dominates the political system, intervenes in the field of historicity, replacing social classes to a greater or lesser extent, regulates social practice through its apparatus, which can include agencies and companies as well as administrations. If the State is not simply the guise of a dominant and hegemonic coalition, then it is capable of designing a society, of regulating its authority relations, the forms of its division of labor, its educational programs, its way of occupying space, in a systematic way. But this power of the State does not allow us to say that the set formed by the categories of social practice is homogenized. On the contrary, the intervening or planning State embodies a variety of practical demands; it acts on behalf of the popular classes, although its action is exercised more in the interests of the ruling classes. imposes its

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own interests and representations, which are linked to the intersocial relationships in which they are involved; in particular, it mobilizes a national conscience reinforced by foreign relations, and this is the most heterogeneous aggregate of all, drawing indistinctly inspiration from Joan of Arc and Robespierre, from Peter the Great and Lenin, from Washington and Lincoln. A totalitarian state does not create the most integrated society around a body of values. It imposes conformity, but conformity with heterogeneous and changeable principles and rules. State absolutism reigns in such a society over a social and cultural junkyard. The greatest integrating capacity is found in a State capable of combining its role as a leader in development with its ability to mobilize the popular classes with all their cultural baggage. What we have then is a state social movement, a revolutionary state, the state of the year II, of the soviets, or of the Cuban or Chinese revolutions. And in this case we are very far from Gramsci's idea of civil society, when the State, in Italy or France, integrates the interests and ideologies of the ruling classes, or of the upper strata of underdeveloped regions, with those of modernization centers of the economy and of society. society, giving much more importance in both countries to "intellectuals from the South", manages to unify social organization to a certain extent, but its success can never be more than partial, tending to be limited to the creation of a State ideology , while the heterogeneity of society and social practices remains intact. We are even further away from the situation characterized by the omnipotence of a ruling class. It is always necessary to seek the dominance of the ruling class and demonstrate its presence beyond the socially abstract language of society's rules and administration. Indeed, it is one of the most useful activities of sociology to unmask the false objectivity or technicality of social organization, but this effort must not be limited to any one aspect, however important it may be. What must also be sought and made visible is the historical system of action and domination of the ruling class, as well as the counter-domination of the popular class and the composite action of the political system. This will make clear the gap that separates social organization from its reproduction. The analysis of the first refers to the historical system of action and social classes, through forms of economic activity and organizational power. Reproduction, on the contrary, can only be a concerted action aimed at maintaining the social order, that is, of a concrete historical whole, in which class domination, political power and authority are mixed. Therefore, reproduction can never be the work of

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a single ruling class. It can only be carried out by the State, when it is at the service of a hegemony and the conservation of privileges. The ruling class always seeks to reproduce its domination. But it is prevented from doing so effectively insofar as it is also a ruling class. It is the State that can separate rulers and rulers, merging the dominant classes or class fractions and organizing an apparatus of technical and ideological reproduction. Obviously, the main instruments of social reproduction are the organs of socialization. In industrialized societies, the ruling class, while taking advantage of the school system, distrusts it because it is linked to the state and because, consequently, it sees the middle classes as having political influence. as well as the former ruling classes and their cultural heritage. Reproduction is, therefore, a program of political and ideological action carried out under the direction of the State, of which it is one of the functions. The more societies are capable of rapid change, the more reproduction ceases to be a mere maintenance of an established state. It is reaction, struggle against social change. The upper class, therefore, and also the popular class, find it increasingly difficult in this type of society to manage the relationships between their offensive, dominant or rebellious behavior, on the one hand, and their defensive behavior, on the other, this being last, the reproduction of the social order in the case of the dominant class and the reproduction of a class culture, and even more broadly a dominated culture, in the case of the popular class. In a society with strong social guarantees, it is not just the power of the ruling class that is reproduced, but the entire field of historicity, whose transformation is very slow. In industrialized societies, on the contrary, there is a dissociation between the transforming action of the ruling class and a reproduction process that maintains the privileges of the ruling class, but is more directly linked to the action of the State. In none of these cases can the social order be enhanced by upper-class domination. It is never possible to break the interdependence of the orientations of the historical system of action and class relations. I.

Discourse, ideology and rhetoric

The set formed by practices and representations within an organization or within the social organization does not have its own unit. This discourse can and should always be disaggregated in order to reveal all levels of society functioning —historicity, politics, organizations— and all levels of actors —class, political, organizational. The unit that the State introduces is more a container than a content. But it is impossible for an organization – or an institution – not to seek to establish its own unity.

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Don't define your "spirit". It then produces a specific rhetoric. And this rhetoric reverses the order I followed in my analysis. Instead of emphasizing the organization's dependence on the higher levels of society, it presents it as an independent actor acting on behalf of its principles, its cohesion and its survival. This rhetoric always has two aspects, one justifying, the other polemical. The first is necessary because an organization, divided between its history and its historicity, must assert its autonomy, justify its existence, endow itself with a vocation and a mission. The contentious aspect stems from the fact that any organization is in competition with others, which directly threaten it or seek to improve its own relative position in relation to yours. This rhetoric gains strength proportionally with the autonomy of organizations. It develops more easily in a company than in a management and even more easily in an agency than in a company. The rhetoric of organizations is therefore the opposite of a state ideology or the ideologies of social classes. It develops in socio-professional groups that are not clearly linked to the main social classes or to the economic action of the State. The most notable case is that of school or university rhetoric, which I analyzed as it occurs in the United States in my book Université et socie'tt aux Etats-Unis (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1972). As a rule, it tends to affirm the primacy of a professional function, understood as serving the general interest, independent of social conflicts and political struggles, champion of order and movement, of the past and the present, of the individual and the collectivity and the basis of an esprit de corps. Talcott Parsons and G. M. Piatt, in "Considerations on the American Academic System" (Minerva 4 [1968], pp. 497-523), give a very detailed analysis of the professionalism of American universities, which is also adherence to the autonomy of the university organization. . But an analyst who identifies less with the actor cannot be content with such a description. Rhetoric plays an ambiguous role. On the one hand, it hides an organization's dependence on the highest levels of society, and especially on the ruling class. Professionalization is a comfortable way of not posing the problem of power and of not questioning the nature of the social and political options that govern professional activity, its financing and its forms of organization. This is why the student movement has struggled with professionalism, which has often felt more threatened by such a response than by its ties to the power elite. However, professionalism also implies a willingness to defend oneself against power. Educators distrust the State, big capital, the armed forces. They howl in protest against the slightest subordination of educational organization to external goals.

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The situation is somewhat different in France, where the link between teachers and the state is more direct, but where there is the same determination to be seen as occupying a place at the center of society, halfway between those in power and the people, and the same protection behind principles, norms and extreme professionalism. It is just as impossible to accept this rhetoric in its literal sense, forgetting the dependence on organizations, as it is to treat it as a mere complement to the ideology of the ruling class, as if teachers -to take a specific case- were in fact serving more and more to the interests of the ruling class, asserting themselves as independent, and as if they were fulfilling the social function of maintaining the social order with increasing effectiveness the more they hide behind abstract notions such as liberalism, humanism and professionalism. Rhetoric is the specific characteristic of the "middle strata", whose ties to class relations are sufficiently indirect to be able to simultaneously serve the ruling class, sympathize with the popular class and, above all, defend their own professional and organizational independence. Hence the growing importance today of the rhetoric of the executives of large companies, especially those that are closer to agencies. Separated from top management, away from the workers, they tend to identify with the company and its professional interests. It is rare for them to side with the workers, and it is less and less common for them to feel that they are collaborating with the bosses. They produce a rhetoric that speaks as much about growth as it does about participation to give more autonomy to the companies of which they feel the best evaluated champions. An organization's discourse, therefore, never boils down to rhetoric: it is still shaped by the ideology of the ruling class and also includes the dissenting voice of popular ideology. This separation between ideologies and rhetoric is linked to the dual nature of organizations: they implement the orientations and social relations of a field of historicity and the decisions of the political system; They are also autonomous units reinforced by their historical and geographical particularities. It is useless to try to reduce the superposition of all these components to a unity and, consequently, to endow the categories of social practice with an integration that they cannot possess. Is it possible to detect a cultural rhetoric, analogous to the social rhetoric that develops in organizations? Such an attempt seems reasonable, since cultural practices, especially in our type of society, are increasingly the product of large organizations. The educational system, the press, radio or television, all broadcast programs which are, in effect, the production of organizations more or less related, as the case may be, to an agency, a company or an administration, and which many times belong to all three types at the same time. But this parallelism is partly artificial. An organization's rhetoricians work from within; they have the

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capacity in part to determine the mode of operation of a production unit. Here, on the contrary, if your action exists, then it must be in direct relationship with an audience that has the power to receive or not the cultural product that is conveyed, and this audience is not organized. We do not use the term "t4 mass media" to designate the own newsletters, textbooks or radio programs broadcast by an organization exclusively for its members. It is formed, it seems to me, by the conjunction of two constituents. On the one hand, it occurs, like all rhetoric, within social "reality" as it appears, that is, within the social order that seeks what it likes so-called mass audience, that is, the domain of opinions understood as responses to a set of stimuli whose nature and social meaning are not in question. " and demands. The social and cultural field is in constant transformation, giving rise to the emergence of new demands, but public opinion remains always as conditioned as ever by all reproductive organs. social and cultural awareness, h ingenuity The result is that the rhetoric consistently emphasizes freedom, spontaneity, what people "really want", something that market research is increasingly able to reveal. Public opinion is largely determined by the dominant ideology, but the more it is, the less room there is for rhetoric. Reading the Soviet press is an excellent way to get to know the opinions of that society's rulers, but a very bad way to try to isolate the autonomous contribution of Russian journalists. In the same way, the messages that are transmitted through advertising, in capitalist countries, are essentially the ideological propaganda of private enterprise. An autonomous contribution of rhetoric can only exist when someone puts himself in the position of the consumer and his choices, without questioning the historical system of action, class domination or the political decisions that govern the forms of consumption, but simply focusing on the initiative and consumer satisfaction. That is why the language of rhetoricians constantly mixes references to a world of objects, of cultural data, with references to human nature, goodwill, abstract rights, what is acceptable or unacceptable for consumers. What it totally excludes is the definition of social relations, the search for causes, events or decision mechanisms. Here again, rhetoric is as much a means of concealing the determinants of social and cultural practice as it is a means of opening a barrier between the consumer and the realm of ideology. Cultural transmissions cannot be reduced to rhetoric. They have no more unity of content than organizational practice, except in the case where a totalitarian state completely links the various levels of society. The dominant ideology exercises its dominion over them in the ways we have just discussed.

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The ideology of the popular classes can also make itself heard in them, more weakly it is true, but all the more so the more open the political system is. Rhetoric also has its place in them, which makes opinion leaders a "middle" category that cannot be reduced to that of transmitters of the dominant ideology. I give so much emphasis to this low degree of integration that is observed in social and cultural practices, because they are represented as totally unified, either by values or by dominant interests, as would right and left functionalism. with it, it is no longer possible to understand how social movements can form and manifest themselves. If universities are purely bourgeois and simply responsible for maintaining a class heritage, then I don't see how a student movement could have arisen. If public opinion is completely shaped by advertising, I don't see how movements can arise within it. Social practice is the plane on which, simultaneously, we find projected the orientations of the historical action system, class relations, the unity and plurality of the political system and the complexity of a historical situation. It is this diversity in the origins of rules and messages that gives rhetoric a certain autonomy, an autonomy that it would be absurd to think has no limits. It cannot be separated from its subservience to all forms of ruling class power and rule. It is an indirect agent of integration and exclusion; but it exists only because social practice is not fully integrated and mastered. Rhetoricians are on the margins of major social conflicts without ever being totally neutral, but their existence shows that such conflicts are not impossible. F.

Social Systems >

This study of organizations, and what goes beyond them in social organization - that is, the direct determination of social practice by the orientations of the historical system of action, class relations and the political system - completes the body of material constituted by the first five chapters of this book. Our analysis started with historicity, accompanied its transformation into a system of historical action and a game of class relations, then descended to the level of concrete collectivities, first of all to the political system whose existence is linked to that of a territorial system. society, then that of organizations, autonomous decision-making units, limited by precise borders, possessing a scale of authority of their own and characterized by their own particularities in time and space. The autonomy of the political system and organizations derives above all from the fact that their content is never reduced to a field of historicity, that they combine agents, rules and behaviors belonging to various systems of historical action and various class systems. relations. It also derives, within a synchronic analysis, from the fact that the

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the systems whose concatenation constitutes the field of historicity have neither a unity of orientations and values nor an instrument of social control. The elements of the historical system of action are defined by their oppositions and their complementarities at the same time. What is called the spirit of a civilization is not the unifying principle of a system of historical action, but an ideological creation, whose only function is to disguise the disintegration of the system or to mask its true nature by more or less identifying it. retrospectively with the interests and representations of the ruling class. The system of class relations is characterized both by the domination of the dominant class and by the resistance or contestation produced by the popular class. It can never be reduced to absolute power, as if society were nothing but a vast organization manipulated in the dark by an evil genius. Two general ideas emerge from all this. 1. My analysis refuses to see society as a single system, since it defines what is generally called a social structure as a system of systems. Society is not an organization, it is not a whole formed by means corresponding to a body of values or the action of a social power. What constitutes a unified whole is the State, not society. The State can be seen as capable of weighing its objectives, of organizing decision-making and negotiation between political forces, of organizing its activities. That is why sociology has had such difficulty in getting rid of the idea that its object is the study of the State, its laws, its institutions, its doctrine, and also to free itself from the domain of the State itself, which it tends to demand from the sociologist, who will be a modern royal historiographer. One of the most evident aspects of this book is its determined attempt to divert analysis from this statecentrism, starting from the historical system of action and social classes and then asserting the priority of the study of the political system over it. that of the state This orientation is a continuation of the constant effort of social thought and sociology since Saint-Simon, Tocqueville and Marx. The role of the State is essential, but it cannot be understood other than as an effort for the practical integration of different social systems, of different nature. The organizational system is the management of a set of means, of internal and external relations, based on objectives. These objectives must be taken as established when the study of the organization begins. "Flying" an organization consists of performing a point-to-point comparison of the required values of all components, on the one hand, and the observed values, on the other, and then changing the feedback mechanisms that will maintain the second set even with

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the first. An organization is situated in an environment that it does not fully control and whose variations it must take into account to define its objectives. The political system is not a "pilot" system, but a field for forming goals or objectives. One cannot fully distinguish between its ends and its means. Political means are instruments for determining the ends imposed on organizations. This system is not governed by norms, as it produces them, or at least produces laws and regulations. It is not based on authority, but on influence, on strategies, and it proceeds through transactions and negotiations, at least insofar as they are compatible with the domination exercised by the ruling class. The functioning of the political system is defined by its adaptation not to an environment, but to the changing relationships between political forces and the more individualized interest groups that act through the political forces. The system of historical action constitutes and produces the field of social experience. It does not have an internal organization that allows it to make decisions. The importance acquired by the sociology of decisions should not make us forget that they are almost never the first determinant of social organization. Decision makers are determined by the historical action system and class relations; they do not simply decide like a sovereign. Has it not been rightly said that politics is the art of the possible? At the level of the system of historical action, it is impossible to speak of the environment, since the environment is defined by the action that a society exerts on itself, by its historicity, by its ability to transcend its functioning and define its own type of development. , not arbitrarily, but based on their cultural model, their accumulation and their way of knowing. Class relations cannot be separated from the historical action system. Classes are not the actors of social organization, much less are they defined by their relationship with the State. They are the actors of historicity, locked in a struggle for control of the system of historic action and historicity, pitting an upper class against a popular class. System of operation, system of adaptation, system of creation: the three levels of society are all systems of a different nature from one another, and their concatenation is not regulated by a sovereign authority, but simply administered by the State within the framework of a concrete and concrete system. , therefore, heterogeneous social unit. 2. This analysis contemplates society as a system of social action systems. He affirms the hierarchy of social systems and the determination of the social organization and the political system by the field of historicity, but sees the latter not as a situation, but as a set of guidelines for action and relationships between actors. Sociology does not discover its true object until it gets rid of two oppositions that cannot make sense to it: that of situation and that of actor.

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and that of objective and subjective. To these two false oppositions I add another one, which translates the first two into the terms of sociological analysis itself: the opposition between explanation and understanding. Social organization is not ultimately determined by a body of values or a state of productive forces. The cultural model is not an idea, but the awareness of a creativity that can only be defined as work on work, the product of knowledge and accumulation. Neither cultural models, nor other elements of the historical system, nor class relations are forms of social organization; they are forms of society's action upon itself. They can never be defined outside of economic activity and economic relations, any more than they can be reduced, in the positivist tradition, to a material state of society. In descending from the historical system of action to social organization, analysis is not making a transition from an objective situation to the domain of social consciousness and ideology. The historical system of action is a system of orientations, of culturally and socially oriented behaviors, and it is at the level of class relations that ideologies are formed. On the other hand, social organization is a set of practices, forms and techniques of work. At the apex of the analysis we find the production of the work, guided by the system of historical action and concretized by class relations; In the background we find the organization of work and the values or norms that organizational power seeks to impose. The system capable of producing its ends governs the one that adapts them to demands and, in turn, governs the organizational system that imposes the ends to the means. This is why sociological analysis cannot separate the explanation of systems from the understanding of actors; because the systems relate orientations, while the actors are nothing more than the agents of the system.

90CUL /I/O/EVENTS

R. Four Classes of Collective Conduct Society should not be taken for what it is, for its forms of organization and its rules of operation. What appears as the frame of social behavior is in reality the always limited, fragile, poorly integrated result of the conflicts and transactions that take place between classes and the social forces that derive from them and that are the actors of historicity. that animate and interpret the system of historical action of a society, that is, its field of social and cultural development. If we understand by social behavior nothing more than the interaction of actors within a given institutional and organizational framework, then the notion of social movement becomes incomprehensible, because social movements belong to the processes by which a society produces its organization based on its system of historical action and via class conflicts and political transactions. By social movements I mean, in essence, the conflicting action of social class agents who fight for control of the historical action system. But it is difficult to abstract this type of collective behavior from the observable reality with which all levels of analysis are intertwined. One can speak of a labor movement, defined by its struggle against capitalism for control of industrial development, without taking into account the investigation of the institutional system, that is, specifically the degree and form of institutional methods for dealing with labor disputes. ? , or without considering the effects of economic crises, professional mobility or the organization of companies? 298

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But before studying the interaction of various types of collective behavior, it is first necessary to make a clear distinction between class conflict, resistance to authority, and pressure on the institutional system. And this amounts to distinguishing between the types of collective behavior that correspond to the historical action system, the institutional system, and the organizational system. The essential part of my analysis will then be devoted to the study of social movements, which are the collective conduct of historicity. Finally, it will be necessary to consider the projection of social movements at the level of the institutional system and, above all, at the level of social organization and, therefore, the transformation of social conflict into a struggle against established power. The most urgent task is to learn to recognize the various types of collective behavior in practice. In fact, we often find opposing general interpretations: for some, the student movement is explained by the crisis of universities, which are organized in a way that is no longer in harmony with society as a whole, while society gives them appeals that new "official material" is produced; for others, it is above all the bureaucratic rigidity of a decision-making system that must be questioned, and this is denounced in terms of accusations against the ministerial bureaucracy and the corporatism of teachers; for still others, the student movement reveals and gives life to a new class conflict. Such discussions, suggestive as they may be, cannot lead to any result unless the characteristics of the types of collective behavior that reveal class conflict, institutional deadlock, or organizational crisis are defined from the outset. At the point we have reached in our analysis, it is now possible to make such distinctions. one.

Characteristic behavior of organizational crisis

The actors are located mainly within a social organization. Every collective action presupposes the existence of an actor, other actors with interests different from theirs and a social field in which their interactions take place. How can we define elements at the organizational level more precisely? 1. Members of an organization who file complaints are defining themselves in two ways, from within and from outside the organization. On the one hand, they occupy a certain position and consider that, for making a certain contribution, they should receive fair remuneration, that is, according to the relative level of their contribution. On the other hand, the organization is just a particular social milieu,

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one in which the actor is only partially involved. Therefore, he acts within it in terms of his other roles and his personal interests as a whole. Price increases are not the responsibility of the individual company or organization, but cause complaints and conflicts within them. Social or professional mobility creates situations in which the actor's professional role is more directly involved, but cannot be reduced to it, another important way in which external factors influence organizational behavior. This duality of the actor's position, locating him both within the organization and outside it, opposes the unity of a class position, which defines the identity of the actor in a social movement. 2. The complaint is addressed to a clearly defined interlocutor, the one who holds the authority and, beyond that, the power. But if we limit the analysis to the specifically organizational level, then the “boss appears at the same time omnipotent and almost totally devoid of control over his decisions, since he is only the person who relates objectives and means in the name of norms, and also in that of a certain strategy in relation to an environment that is in fact a set of constraints on the organization, so that any claim must first be placed within the limits defined both by those constraints and by the very nature of power. Hence the discontinuity of demands, their “nibbling” aspect and a constant oscillation between a very limiting “realism”* and an overflow of the organizational framework that can even lead to the formation of a social movement. 3. The field of conflict is the organization itself; the claim, in this sense, is always aimed at disorganization and reorganization. It disorganizes because it modifies the previous scheme of things; but it points to a reorganization, because it has no real force except when it protests against disorganization and crisis. The person threatened with unemployment, underemployment or dismissal, who protests against arbitrary treatment or poor working and salary conditions, accusing management, wants to protect the organization in which he works and thus guarantee his own future. The miner subjected to a lifetime of hard work still struggles with the closure of his mine for fear of losing his job. Thus, the organizational pretension is a prisoner of the organization, and even appeals to the interests of the organization against those of the power that directs it or of the external forces that act on it. It is difficult, in this case, to emerge a collective action aimed at transforming the social order. Such an action can only materialize if, beyond the crisis of the organization, power is questioned. On the other hand, it is often the case that a social movement gives rise to crisis behavior, or builds on it. An economic crisis, the threat or

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the reality of unemployment, trigger collective behaviors that are not always associated with a challenge to power and that differ from a social movement, that is, from a class conflict that challenges the control of the historical system of action. The student movement in France in recent years has been strongly associated with crisis behavior. It was in the faculties of arts, with very uncertain job opportunities ahead, with a teaching curriculum inherited from liberal society and even from older societies, where the movement developed more easily. If it arises in isolation, this type of collective behavior can only be oriented towards the reconstitution of the social system affected by the crisis. in his Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1963): "A non-institutionalized mobilization for an action whose objective is to modify one or several types of tension based on the generalized reconstitution of a component of the action." , according to this author, as the crisis affects a more fundamental component of action, that is, in descending order of importance: values, norms, participation in organizations and use of resources, technical resources. This is where the crisis takes place, the effort to rebuild society, to restore its principles and functioning, to rediscover the path of a "normal" situation, to recover lost positions, community integration, the rules of the social game, principles that animate culture. Sometimes collective behavior is not aimed at returning to a previous balance: it can show confidence in the future. It's just a crisis, some will say, and once reason returns, a new balance will be found, preserving core values and responding better to the demands of the present time than the old system, which was worn out or destroyed. distorted by external pressures that must bear responsibility for the crisis. In all cases, seen in isolation, the crisis is manifested by fragmentation, anomic behavior, demoralization, withdrawal, apathy or, on the contrary, rebellion against an obsolete organization, too rigid, incapable of responding to society's needs. . Modern society. In all three types of behavior—restoration, anornia, modernization—the actor confronts the social system directly, without the conflicts between actors that are defined by their opposition. The actor is defined within an organization; he refers to its rules, its customs, its needs. He challenges injustice, incompetence, irrationality. The actor itself is not very clearly defined, as each individual may act according to various membership groups and various roles. The crisis is experienced as an absurdity, not as a result of adverse action. Positions are achieved: as "obvious" responses to the crisis and, as light projected on a

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mirror broken and reflected in all directions, the image of the order to be restored is often incoherent and leads to the simultaneous presentation of contradictory claims or objectives. The action that takes place is more of a sharp break, forward or backward, than a transformation. It is therefore difficult to organize, and the specific feature of crisis behavior is its discontinuity, the rapid succession of excitement and depression, of long-range programs and apathetic indifference. Every popular class performs both defensive and contesting actions. But it may happen that the link between these two aspects of your movement is broken or missing, and that a purely defensive action results that later becomes organizational crisis behavior. But many class actions are hastily placed in this category. A rural community affected by the penetration of merchant capitalism is often the object of a messianic movement or some other form of revolt. It is insufficient to see this as a defensive reaction on the part of a community struggling with its own disintegration. Quite often, on the contrary, it can be seen as an effort that aims both at re-appropriating the modernization process and at combating a still distant and ill-defined adversary. The messiah is not simply the one who imposes a return to a more or less idealized previous situation, but the one who tries to transform those who experience change into actors. In this case, what is happening is a social movement and not a simple reaction to social disorganization, a confused form of class struggle and not a traditional mechanism of integration. What distinguishes the two types of collective behavior is the fact that the social movement alone has the capacity to mobilize a group or collectivity to fight an adversary and control change, whereas the reaction to an organizational crisis can only be directed inwards. of a collectivity. Thus, it becomes entirely heteronomous in its political action, or, on the contrary, dominated by a desire to “recover lost ground”, an impetus for greater social participation, also heteronomous. This dissociation between inside and outside, being replaced by the issue of conflict, is the sign by which one can recognize an organizational crisis and the absence of a social movement.b.

institutional tensions

The product of the institutional system consists of decisions that define the framework within which organizations operate. Actors are social forces that try to exert some influence on the decisions that will be imposed on a community. The action of a social force is defined, therefore, by four fundamental components. First, the recognition of the limits of the decision field. a union

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Negotiating with entrepreneurs cannot have as its objective the suppression of capitalism. Such suppression may be the orientation of the labor movement, but there is no industrialization of labor conflicts, except insofar as labor movement and union action are not entirely identical. The union does not give up the guidelines of the union movement when it enters into negotiations, but it only has some influence on decisions because its socially transforming action is indirect and limited. Second, a social force – an interest group or pressure group – appears to improve its relative position relative to other social forces within the system of influence. Third, each social force devises a complex strategy, as its interests are at least as differentiated as the social problems facing the political system. A lobby is only a weak social force because it has only one function and arrives at a complex strategy in a different way. He can only act by sheer vociferous and aggressive activity. If all actors in the institutional system were pressure groups, this system would disintegrate. Ultimately, the action of a social force is always directed towards a decision to be made. The function of the members of a legislature is to pass or not pass laws, that of a municipal council, which is also an executive body, is to decide on the use to be made of local resources. Collective bargaining within a company aims to modify the use of resources and the exercise of authority. However, this description of institutional action is very limited; it does not take into account anything outside the scope of the institutions. However, every institutional system is limited, not all claims are negotiated, not all social interests are represented. Certain collective behaviors are responses to the blockage or closure of the institutional system. In France, the state almost always refused to negotiate wages with unions. In universities, the most economically advanced countries until very recently had almost no system of student representation. In the Roman church there is still almost no recognized institutional system. In all these cases, decision and authority are identified, and opposition tends to pass without a transition from organizational demands to the direct challenge of social domination. But there are also protest movements that oppose the blockade itself and aim to open up the political system: what is attacked is the imposition of values and norms, the refusal of authoritarian or bureaucratic rulers or managers to negotiate. Such action is reforming in nature; calls for necessary modernization and often highlights the positive effects of conflict on social integration when recognized and addressed; At the same time, it questions the heritage of the past and acquired rights. What are the distinguishing features of pressure on the institutional system?

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One is obliged here to find the attributes of a social force. A pressure movement accepts certain limits, requires participation in decision-making, is defined by the real capacity for influence; therefore, his action is directed for and against the institution. The workers go on strike to obtain recognition of the reality of the union and to impose the opening of negotiations. The beginning of the student movement in Nanterre in 1967 was marked by a strike designed to involve students in the implementation of Fouchet's reforms, specifically to rescue certain categories of students from what were believed to be the harmful and unfair effects of that reform. remodeling. Such pressure may be directed towards obtaining institutional treatment of certain claims. It can also be a reaction against the blockage or fragmentation of the institutional system and thus produce and strengthen an anti-institutional revolt. These two types of conduct must be clearly distinguished. The internal problems of social organization and its functioning are associated with problems —different by nature— of power, that is, of the projection of domination relations in the social organization. But the problems of functioning of the institutional system, expressed with words like rigidity, blockage, etc., cannot be identified with those of hegemony, which reveal the domain of social domination over the institutional system. Institutional pressure often has lower classes or elements threatened by the upper class as actors. They demand equality, they oppose the monopoly of wealth and the political power of landlords. Their action is much more political than social, since they do not constitute the popular class of the society considered. This is what happened to small landowners in Greece in the 7th and 6th centuries, especially in Athens, who rose up against the power of the landlords who threatened them: they demanded more equality and supported tyrants. in his anti-aristocratic action. After many centuries, the petty bourgeoisie, in England and France, also demanded measures against wealth and public education to equalize opportunities. In the first case, these small proprietors cannot be identified as slaves, as they were citizens; in the second, the petty bourgeoisie is unable to identify itself with the working class, whose social movement was then organized. Such movements can be extreme in the methods of government they defend or support; they are, however, "moderate" when it comes to their action in class relations. There is no lack of ideologues, especially today, who deny the existence of class conflicts and social movements and see in them only the effect of institutional blockages. May the State and companies only become good strategists, capable of rational calculation, always knowing

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how to negotiate the optimal conditions for adapting to a changing environment, and pragmatic compromises will replace dogmatic confrontations. I am not opposing one ideology to another. I am simply claiming that the collective conduct that responds to institutional system dysfunction is not of the same nature, does not have the same attributes, as social movements that challenge the domination of the historical action system. Nothing could be more arbitrary than asserting the significance of a historical event or a voluntary association. Comparative analysis must be our shield against such naive attempts. The rigidity of the French institutional system is certainly an important element in the situation that led to the explosion of May 1968. But what about American universities? They did not suffer from similar rigidity and centralism, but they produced a student movement not unrelated to what occurred in France or Italy. Before recomposing the event and the connections between different problems and forms of collective behavior, we must first analytically unravel them. This is a task that is all the more difficult and necessary as the sociologist tends to situate himself within a social whole, generally his own society, and like all social actors, he is better able to represent the "concrete" himself. "problems of the functioning of this social whole than its reference to cultural orientations or to a class domination that can only be recognized by an effort of abstraction. 1. Thus, starting from the legitimate isolation of organizational behavior, it is easy to say that the social actors are defined only by their position in the social organization and, more specifically, their position within the social stratification and mobility. The lower strata then appear as conservative and dependent and, finally, as passive. They participate very little in the creation of values and social exchanges, they are not innovative, their behavior is rigid. The upper strata, on the contrary, exhibit more "elective" behaviors, dedicate a larger proportion of their resources to things other than subsistence, are more able to accept the innovations, which are more easily incorporated into their more diversified and flexible type of behavior. On the other hand, the categories The inferiors are more heterogeneous, less capable of collective action and also more sensitive to the desire for individual advancement. This type of analysis, however, finds behaviors that I believe belong to other levels of society's functioning: the political system and class relations. He then invents notions whose aim is to circumvent this change in point of view. If you see protests, say that they aim to restore the previous social order and that they resist the

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effort by the upper strata to carry out the necessary changes rationally and in stages, or it is said that they are anomic reactions to crises, simple forms of social disintegration. The sociological attitude I have just briefly described is not neutral. It is conservative, as part of the established order: "things being as they are"; "empirically" differences are observed between strata or between categories defined by their mobility, which is equivalent to proving that whoever is at the top or who wants to reach is effectively "superior" to those at the bottom. this scheme is nothing more than disorder, resistance to change or a return to the past. The extreme form of this conservative sociology is that assumed by the point of view of the State. Whoever holds power has the initiative, the people are nothing more than an inorganic body. inconstant, authoritarian mass that is divided between marginality, flight to utopian counter-societies and intolerant conformism 2. Those who look at things from the point of view of the political system do not build the same image of social conduct. "bounded rationality7" of interests and strategies, to transactions and negotiations. But they claim, like conservative sociology, that the higher one ascends in the social hierarchy, the greater the capacity for political action grows, and the greater the complexity of strategies and alliances, with the result that change is the work of the most influential, while the people are more rigid If it is observed that the transformations are caused by the action of the popular classes, then this liberal sociology responds that in the first place nothing can be less true. The people intervene, it is true, but on the one hand they are not the cause of the change, as this was only produced by a conflict that took place within the ruling elite, and on the other hand they cannot guide it, limiting themselves to being satisfied in temporarily occupying the power vacuum and increasing the disorder or rigidity of the political system, provoking reactions that make change more difficult and costly. Sociology can position itself on the plane of historicity and, in particular, on that of class relations. But he always runs the risk of presenting the historical actors he treats as true collectivities. Hence the image of a progressive working or peasant class, animated exclusively by a desire for freedom and equality, which becomes a permanent cultural trait and not the expression of a social movement against domination and privilege. To the observations of conservative and liberal sociology, this progressive sociology responds that, if progress is not always identified with freedom, it is because it is taken by traitors, bad shepherds or bad advisers, defenders of old privileges or monopolizers of the general interest. What leads to a

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an ever more powerful appeal to virtue, to social integration, thus reinforcing the weight of the State and the dominant ideology. These distortions of an analysis that identifies one level of society with the functioning of society as a whole invariably lead sociology to become an adjunct to either a principled or tradition-based order or an elitist control of change or creation. . of a new social organization and new class relations. And this leads us to two conclusions. The first is that sociological analysis can never be identified with the management of society, much less with the State. That is why power, whatever its form, distrusts sociology, because it criticizes instead of justifying, distinguishes instead of integrating. However, power is happy to turn to sociology to help it fight deviance, reinforce socialization, eliminate archaisms. And power will tolerate it more easily when it itself is not very integrated, subject to crises of change or adaptation. Sociology receives better treatment in pluralistic political systems than in "monopoly" systems; it is defended more strongly by social movements when they are still in formation or when they are contesting than when they are about to seize power; it is heard more by categories whose states lack congruence or are unstable than by the extremes of the social scale. The second conclusion is that one must choose between the fragmentation of sociological analysis and its independence. Fragmentation means that sociologies of right, left and center carry out an incessant process. contentious battle, which may teach them to confine themselves to the kind of social phenomenon that suits them best, but is more likely to sharpen the swords of competing ideologies. which in turn presupposes a principle of unity, that is, of hierarchization, of the various levels of analysis, and also a principle of dissociation, that is, of separation of society as a system of systems from society as a historically and geographically defined collectivity governed by a state. So, instead of simply separating the problems of the field of historicity, those of the political system and those of social organization, what must be recognized in the first place is that the first set commands over the second and, through them, over the third. Behind the categories of social practice, behind order, stratification and power, one must always look, in the last instance, for the orientations of the system of historical action and class relations. From society's consumption we must return to society's production through its adaptation to changes. But this operation makes no sense unless one recognizes that the whole thus constituted cannot be identified with a directly observable territorial and political collectivity as a state's field of action. There can and must also exist, as opposed to sociology, a political science that starts from the State, its power, its role in international relations, which then

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the State, from its power, its role in international relations, which starts to consider the social organization, represented as a set of hierarchical resources distributed by power, before studying the political exchanges and finally, as a last remnant, the feelings collectives and the collective conditions of existence. When embarking on the study of social movements, nothing could be more essential than to remember that this topic is entirely within the purview of sociological analysis proper and should not be confused with other topics such as the functioning of the state, political crises or even the struggle for power". c.

Modernizing the protests

To organizational demands, institutional tensions and social movements, we must also add modernizing protests. It is in relation to social change that the notion of modernization needs to be presented and discussed, but it must also occur within a type of society. While movements tend to move from the present to the future in the name of modernization, others are defined by their struggle for the present against the past. Such a protest actually arises against the absence of historicity. If the ruling class and the dominated class prevail over the ruling class and the contesting class, if the maintenance of the past and its reproduction prevail over the commitment to an afterlife in the functioning of society, then a society is "disoriented". It is oppressed by the dead works of past systems of historical action, while new domains, latent with historicity, are kept outside the field of social action. The dead are strangling the living, causing a reaction that is both elemental and ambiguous. Elementary because it is a call to return to what is most fundamental, a protest against decadence, against the loss of historicity. Ambiguous because it is unaffected by class relations and because its opposition to past forms of domination can be led by either a new ruling class or an oppositional force. There may come a time when forms of social and cultural control lose their meaning. The administrative apparatus in France, for example, remains dominated by the state-centered cultural model. The slightest bureaucratic request takes on the aspect of a plea to the prince; citizens stay well away from anything the state touches. The protests against the arrogance of the State cannot be separated from those who denounce its inefficiency, its inability to provide the services it has a monopoly on. Such protests are liberal, which means they want to get rid of old forms of authority, but for the benefit of new power and a new ruling class as much as for the popular class. This type of protest is more frequent in the cultural field than in the social one. Is not Europe, western and eastern, entirely made up of culturally archaic societies? Archaism is most visible in Eastern Europe,

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which often has the feel of a museum for 19th century forms of expression, relationship and communication. But archaism is just as great, though less irritating, in the West. Hence the importance of attacks against the forms of control that operate in the private sector: family, church, school. The main places of socialization are the target of attacks that are aimed mainly at their loss of meaning. I do not believe that the condition of women and the discrimination they suffer can be explained by the needs for class domination in our type of society, whether industrial or post-industrial. Women's dependency clearly goes back much further. But whatever its origin, on which Serge Moscovici recently shed much light (La soci&e contre nature)*, the condition of women appears today above all as a void of meaning: our society is incapable of explaining the definition it gives of male and female roles, or say why she resists birth control when she accepts disease control and therefore, to a large extent, death control. The movement that forms against the subjugation of women speaks precisely of a struggle for liberation or equality. Is this not the definition of a modernizing action that still remains undetermined as to its meaning in today's society? The success of such a movement, in bringing vast new areas into 'public life', in expanding the reach of organized control, can benefit the new ruling class, for example by opening up new markets or giving rise to a new 'morality'. "capable of effective use against the subversive elements introduced into the liberation struggle, but it can also help in the formation of new popular social movements that arise in opposition to this advance of modernized conservative forces. Such protests are especially important at a time when a new type of society is being introduced. The new ruling class is often busier fighting the past than its new adversary. It is easier to identify these movements of cultural modernization than those that appeal to historicity against the undue weight of institutionalization or problems Often, in fact, such movements are forced to appeal to a more or less mythical past to protest the reduction of society to its workings. A new right, a new left: these terms refer less to a socially indeterminate than to a "fundamentalism" so ambiguous that it can sometimes lead its reps most ardent seekers of alliances with those apparently most distant from them. How can we forget in France the role of an illiberal Catholicism like that of Bernanos and Mauriac, but committed to the fight against Spanish fascism? The constant weakness and often the greatness of these movements is that they are socially very indeterminate. As a consequence

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Those who refuse to see in social movements anything other than clashes of interests, even struggles for the management of the State apparatus, are the first to denounce the "infantilism" and the confusion of such manifestations. But they also have an exceptional impact, because if they are not social movements that promote a conflict, at least they reach those who reject dead traditions and try to make sense of something that has lost or has not yet made sense. B. The nature of social movements a.

Identity, opposition and totality

At first, we are tempted to say that a social movement is distinguished from other types of collective behavior by the fact that it is oriented towards values, towards a conception of society and of man. Whether in its religious, political or economic content, does it not always appeal to principles: equality, justice, freedom, happiness? Smelser's analysis allows us to avoid this error in judgment. The appeal to values corresponds to a crisis of the value system of social organization and in no way calls for the introduction of the social movement concept as I use it here. On the contrary, the specific characteristic of a social movement is that it is not oriented towards consciously expressed values. Because it is located at the level of the historical action system, it is defined by the confrontation of opposing interests for the control of the developmental forces of a society and the field of historical experience. A social movement is not the expression of an intention or a conception of the world. One cannot speak of a social movement if one cannot at the same time define the counter-movement to which it opposes. The labor movement is not a social movement unless, in addition to all protests against crises of social organization, in addition to any bargaining pressure, it is challenging ruling class domination. It does not matter whether this challenge is reformist or revolutionary, whether or not it is accompanied by confidence in the capacity of the institutional system to face the conflict. What is important is that the actor no longer defines himself in relation to functional norms or procedures for discussion and decision, but in relation to a general social conflict. This conflict does not consist in direct opposition between specific social groups; it is to challenge the control of social development as that development is defined by a cultural model and by the other elements of the historical action system. The conflict has a bet, it takes place within a field. Opponents always speak the same language; otherwise there could be no debate and no combat.

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In a society marked by the role of scientific and technological innovation, by organizations that manage change, by a social hierarchy based on knowledge and by the search for privatization in the sphere of consumption, there cannot be a social movement oriented towards another type of historicity. , in the 19th century, the liberal movement representing the capitalists and the labor movement was by no means opposed to two completely different types of society. They opposed two contradictory versions of progress. Today we often talk about the hostility of youth —and in particular the student movement—to the consumer society. Nothing could be more false. The conflict is between the world of objects and the world of enjoyment, expression and imagination, between two opposing versions of consumption. Both technocrats and members of the opposition movement speak in equal measure of creativity, of change, of the central role of knowledge; but each considers that the adversary appropriates and destroys the fundamental orientations of the system of historical action. This is why I define a social movement as a combination of a principle of identity, a principle of opposition and a principle of totality, and also, seen in a broader context, as an actor in a field of historical action. 1. The principle of identity is the definition that the actor gives of himself. A social movement cannot be organized unless this definition is conscious; but the formation of the movement largely precedes this awareness. It is the conflict that constitutes and organizes the actor. It is common for the actor to define himself first in organizational and institutional terms. It is easier to talk about the poor, that is, those of socioeconomic status, or the underprivileged, that is, those who do not have access to the institutional and political system, who are not represented, than the working class. It is the practice of social relations that situates and defines the historical actor, which is the social movement, just as it is the field of decision that defines the political actor. The social movement actor, therefore, never takes place in any direct observation. The working class does not simply consist of all workers added together to form a whole. Nor does it consist of workers placed under the dominion of capitalists, since this definition would also serve to identify a political or organizational actor. The working class is the actor of a social movement only because it aims, through its conflict with the capitalist class, at controlling the industrial system of historical action. Identity consciousness is part of the definition of a class or a class social force, as classes can only be defined in terms of social relations and, therefore, the orientations of each of the social adversaries. In the practice of social interactions, the principle of identity is presented as a transcendence of the group or category that is its bearer. the workers in

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a factory, a workshop or a city, find themselves, in certain circumstances, locked in a struggle that goes beyond the framework in which it appears, which mobilizes demands that cannot be fully satisfied within an organizational or political framework. They are aware of being more than themselves, both because they are in conflict with an adversary that calls for more than their own strength, and because they have objectives that are not theirs alone. Strike observers often distinguish between instrumental strikes, defined by their precise objectives, and expressive strikes, through which the group asserts or builds its solidarity. It is self-expression that brings out the principle of identity. I use this term in order not to give the impression that a social movement first begins with an awareness of itself, its interests and its objectives, before entering into a fight with the opponent on a battlefield determined by circumstances. The actor's identity cannot be defined independently of the actual conflict with the adversary and the recognition of what is at stake in the struggle. 2. The principle of opposition must be defined in the same way. You cannot organize a movement without being able to name your opponent, but your action does not presuppose this identification. Conflict makes the adversary appear, as it shapes the conscience of the actors who face each other. Even if the conflict is limited by its immediate interest and the forces it brings into play, one cannot speak of oppositional principles unless the actor feels confronted by a general social force in a combat that challenges the general orientations of life. . The dimension of conflict is fundamental in any social movement. This conflict can be partially resolved at the institutional level, but never completely. You can appeal to an arbitrator, a mediator, a court, a tribunal. But this is always a tactic, justified by a determination to use legal means and force to defend or attack an adversary, and does not arise from the conviction that a change in the distribution of influence can make the case for conflict disappear. . Whatever its particular place of occurrence, therefore, the social movement always experiences this conflict as a class conflict, which does not mean that all social movements are fighting for economic interests. If such interests are indeed involved, a social movement only exists when the conflict is situated at the level of the central cultural model of the society in question. In any type of society – agrarian, mercantile, industrial or post-industrial – there is only one pair of social movements, the one that opposes the social classes involved. But concrete social movements are not always "total", especially in periods of formation or decline of a type of society.

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The agent of the social movement may therefore not be directly definable in terms of class. Recent student movements, I am convinced, have revealed the social conflicts of a post-industrial society, but nobody defends the idea that students are a social class. A movement of citizens, consumers, a regional or cultural movement can all be manifestations of a social movement. But its agents are not class actors, as the social movement is confused with organizational demands, political pressures or modernizing protests. 3. Finally, there cannot be a social movement that is defined solely by conflict. Everyone has what I call a wholeness principle. The labor movement only existed because it did not consider industrialization only as an instrument of capitalist profit, but because it had the will to build a non-capitalist, anti-capitalist industrial society, free from private ownership of the means of production and capable of superior development. The principle of totality is nothing more than the system of historical action over which the opponents, located in the double dialectic of social classes, dispute the domain. Therefore, social movement is not necessarily universal. The conflict can be established on just one of the SHA elements. It has a different character depending on whether its locus is order, movement, orientations or resources, social or cultural. But even if it is localized, the social movement still expresses a principle of totality. And this is demonstrated by its effort to control and guide the social organizations whose function is to care for one of the elements of the SHA. The most important social movements are, however, also the most inclusive, and it is difficult to see how a movement could be permanently circumscribed by one of the elements of historicity, as it would run the risk of merging with analyzable elements. collective behavior at an institutional or organizational level. Important social movements contest the general orientation of the historical action system, that is, the action of its opponent in its entirety. It constantly happens that there are "ultras" that deny any principle of totality. This behavior corresponds to phases of rupture, when a social movement still in formation collides, not with an adversary, but with the adversary's identification with social development. So the worker destroys the machines and sabotages production, the student rejects all teaching. If such behavior is isolated, it can be explained without resorting to the social movement concept. The university or industrial crisis can be taken to the point of absurdity. The worker or student reduced to real or virtual unemployment may reject "society." But they belong to social movements to the extent that they are nothing more than extreme expressions of them, in very particular situations. The social movements themselves fight

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against the tendencies that destroy them by reducing them to the expression of a crisis of social organization. Destroying industry or the university is also destroying the social movement that forms within it. Sabotage or criminal actions are undifferentiated forms of oppositional conduct; therefore, they can be analyzed at the most elementary level, that of the crisis of social organization. A social movement cannot be analyzed outside the field of historicity in which it is constituted. It can be said in general that it pits classes, or social forces, which are, in the last resort, class forces in opposition, whose struggle is for the control of a system of historical action. But it is knowledge of the latter that makes it possible to define the nature of the class actor, the field of conflict and its bet. Hence the danger of anachronism: looking to the pre-industrial past in search of the equivalent of the labor movement, one can fail to recognize the social movements characteristic of pre-industrial societies, whose actors, interests and forms of action are all different from those of the labor movement. movement. Likewise, the reference to the labor movement can impede the understanding of the social movements that are formed in post-industrial societies, which challenge the consumer society in the name of the most diverse forms of cultural self-management. Is it again about utopias or resistance to change? Certainly not, because the new system of historical action imposes a new definition of the principle of totality of social movements. The labor movement itself cannot be reduced to a conflict of economic interests or a reaction against proletarianization. It is animated by an image of industrial “civilization”, by the idea of progress achieved through the forces of production used for the good of all, something very different from the common egalitarian utopia, which is quite unconcerned with the conditions of growth. Do we conclude from this that a social movement necessarily proposes a "counterplan", an alternative model of society? Not at all. Such a statement actually confuses two levels of analysis, since a plan or a decision model cannot be defined except from the level of the institutional system, or even the social organization, one cannot speak of a counterplan if one does not point to some type of negotiation or political pressure, unless it is believed that there is a possibility of modifying the company's management by opening up political space. the discussion, by institutionalizing the social debate. This corresponds to the situation of some social movements, but not all. A social movement can be reformist, reformist-revolutionary or revolutionary. Which one depends on the relationships that are established between problems of social organization, the institutional system and class relations. But these differences cannot affect the definition of what a social movement is. What is essential is to recognize that a social movement is not the expression of a contradiction; causes a conflict to arise. It's a way of

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collective conduct oriented not to the values of social organization or to participation in a decision-making system, but to the game of class conflicts that are the system of historical action. To recognize a social movement, it is not enough to ask the actor three questions: who are you representing for? who are you acting against? What result do you expect from your action? Any actor, in any situation, can answer these questions. There is no social movement without the system of historical action, including each of its elements, being the object of opposing views of class actors who are antagonistic. The relationship of the popular class with the T (totality) goes through its contestation of the domination exercised by the upper class. / (identity), O (opposition) and T cannot be given as components that can be isolated by the actor himself: the principle of identity is the instrument of separation between O and 7\ which are presented as linked by the fact of superior -domination class of historicity. O can only be apprehended as a filter along the link between / and 7; the principle of totality, the bet, only appears as such due to a misunderstanding of the conflict between actor and adversary, otherwise it would be nothing more than an objective, that is, either the projection of/or, on the contrary, simply a meeting place, neutral like a football field. It is the specific characteristic of a social movement that each of its elements refers to the relations between the other two. Consequently, he is never in a state of affective neutrality or of pure analysis of his situation. It is never at rest; it is incessantly sent from one to another of its components, from one to another of its aspects. Its conscience cannot have any other content than the endless movement, restlessness and passion that place it in the most total opposition to the actor in an organization that defines itself by its place within a whole and receives its identity from society. system. The actors of a movement do not form a social milieu that can be defined by common choices, a personal and collective social identity. On the contrary, a social movement is constantly busy questioning the definition of social roles, the functioning of the political arena and the social order. Its unity can never be that of an organization, since it is what unites hope and rejection, denial and affirmation. It is at the level of the system of historical action that the social movement is situated. It is false to distinguish between the social movement as an elementary, limited protest, trapped in the lowest strata of society, and a political action that will give it a wider reach and allow it to challenge class and state domination. A social movement cannot be reduced to economics and wage demands. The workers' labor situation gives them a class consciousness that can be disarticulated, superimposed, diluted, but never reduced to demands or immediate dissatisfaction. let's look at the

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inadequacies of a later "spontaneistic" representation; it is far more important to reject the notion that class consciousness can only be brought in from outside. We must not confuse conscience with action, society with the State. Such confusions lead to the identification of a social movement with its organization or its leaders. This danger, the most serious that threatens the practice of social movements, must also be fought at the level of analysis. The origin of Stalinism lies in the total hostility shown to the Proudhonians and the Populists, and in the confidence placed in the party as the bearer of scientific truth. This is how the labor movement gave birth to its opposite, a totalitarian state. The labor movement is defined above all by workers' consciousness, that is, the consciousness of the conflict between capitalists and wage-earners over the orientation of industrial society. And I mean conscience. If it is necessary not to reduce this conscience to opinion, it is even more important not to dissociate action from conscience. If the soldier of Waterloo cannot understand what is at stake in the battle, it is because it is an event and an intersocial struggle rather than a social one. But the colonized native who rebels, or the militant worker, even if he only appears to demand more bread, or because he reacts to an insult, has a representation of the conflict in which he is immersed and a project of society. These historical actors, combatants of social movements, have a double will to create and control or, what is the same thing, a utopia and an ideology. They want to run their own society and fight the adversary that prevents them from doing so. From the point of view of the established order, forms of social behavior "from the outside"* can be studied as responses to a crisis in the organization, without questioning the conscience of the actors. If, on the contrary, behind what is given as order, one seeks both the orientations of a system of historical action and class conflicts, if one reveals the social relations that underlie roles and statuses, then it is impossible not to find guidelines in the actors of the action. the field of historicity, but this awareness is not the actor's discourse, it is inseparable from the action carried out within social relationships and for a historical wager, because it reflects individual opinions and is manifested in a collective awareness that is provided to Herself. with ideological and utopian expressions, whose existence is recognized by the great energy they channel to the mobilization of a certain type of collective action. This does not mean that man by his nature wants to create and control the product of his creation, since such a statement is as meaningless as all those that claim to define human nature. But it is a statement that the

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conduct linked to class relations and participation in the historical action system can only be understood as oriented, endowed with meaning for the actor himself, insofar as he acts at this level of social reality. The actor is not a puppet controlled by a social structure, nor is that structure the result of the actor's intentions. Structure and action cannot be dissociated, as it is in social relations that both must express themselves. This general idea fits well with the analysis of the social movement itself: class relations and social movements are not separable. But we must not apply it so brutally to the study of actual behavior. A social movement is never "pure". On the one hand, it is confused with organizational and institutional behavior; on the other hand, it is also an organization and, at times, almost a state within a state. Class consciousness does not fully describe belonging to a class movement. When one considers a complex and organized protest movement, one sees a discrepancy between awareness and action; Generally speaking, the observer will notice that the movement is made up of leaders, on the one hand, who manage its organization, define its strategy and tactics, sharing at the same time its guidelines, and a "base" made up of very more directly subject to organizational limitations who want to obtain limited advantages, such as a salary increase, food subsidy or the annulment of some sanction, who also want to increase their influence, dispute with representatives of the authority and who are victims of all the problems that arise from their own heterogeneity as a group and which create tensions or conflicts within them. There is a great temptation at this point to renounce any analysis in terms of the social movement, which suddenly seems "idealist", and simply analyze the policy of the leaders and the discontent of the "grassroots". It is not enough simply to resist this temptation. It is necessary to show that the social movement hypothesis is essential to understand the connection between these two faces of protest. And first, you have to listen very carefully to this "base", which can never be reduced to its pragmatic and immediate objectives, which is the bearer of the conscience of the social conflict and of its game, but a conscience intermingled with attitudes that evoke other aspects of the society. the social situation of each individual. It is the action of the leaders that isolates this conscience and removes it from where it is inserted, and often fragmented, among other elements. But it is this awareness that makes it possible to separate what constitutes strategy in the actions of leaders from what constitutes a social movement. And this also defines the importance of militants. It is not that they are the pure expression of the social movement, freed both from the confusion of the "inorganic masses" and from the excessively strategic objectives of the leaders; but they are the mediators between consciousness and action, sometimes closer to the base, sometimes already

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leaderships, but almost always subject to acute tensions and, therefore, driven to a sociological analysis of the problems of the social movement. B.

The field of historical action

A social movement cannot constitute an autonomous unit of analysis. No party, union or voluntary association of any kind can be identified with a social movement, as all can easily manifest reactions to an organizational crisis or tensions in the institutional system. The social movement is identifiable only as an element of a field of historical action, that is, of the interactions between the collective actor considered, its adversary and the relatively autonomous expressions of the system of historical action, particularly the cultural model. The labor movement is not just a definition of itself, of the bosses and of the wager of class relations; It is also a response to the employers' action, to the employers' social movement, whose objective does not necessarily correspond term to term to that of the labor movement. The relationship between the two social movements can take on the most diverse forms; but they are all more or less directly linked to one of the three cases presented in figure 34. In the first case, the two social movements correspond term to term. The capitalist and the proletarian are defining themselves and their adversary in the same way, while locating their conflict in the same field. 1

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