Dubet - Why Remain 'Classical'?

European Journal of Social
Theory
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Why Remain `Classical'?

Franois Dubet
European Journal of Social Theory 2007; 10; 247
DOI: 10.1177/1368431007078891
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European Journal of Social Theory 10(2): 247260

Copyright 2007 Sage Publications: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore
SYMPOSIUM
Theme 4: But Do We Still Not Need Some
Sort of Theoretical Unification?
Why Remain Classical?

Franois Dubet
U N I V E R S I T D E B O R D E AU X - I I , B O R D E AU X , A N D E H E S S - C A D I S
As sociologists, we should ask ourselves the same sociological questions we so

readily put when scrutinizing the intellectual and scientific productions of other
disciplines. That is, whether the extremely particular type of knowledge of social
phenomena called sociology can survive the passing of the specific contexts i.e.
the dawning of industrial society and the forming of democratic nation-states
and lines of questioning in and around which it came into being. Aristotle, Ibn
Khaldun, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza and many other thinkers were certainly
exceptional social thinkers, and we can accept the idea that they said most of what
there was to say, but they cannot be considered sociologists. Despite, or indeed
thanks to the existing hodge-podge of sociology textbooks and study programmes,
there is a pantheon of sociologists and a version of sociology that can be considered
classical, if only because contemporary sociologists are constantly returning to
them, including as a means to generate new ideas.1
Given how useful expert social knowledge and specialized branches of the discipline are considered in our societies, given how fully sociological-style argumentation and demonstration partake of decision-making today and the legitimacy of
the decisions made, and given how close the tie is between sociological reflexivity
and modernity, as Giddens put it, we need not worry about the academic and
professional survival of sociology. But a discipline can survive academically even
after losing its unity and epistemological raison dtre. This is what happened to
geography and psychology, which have yielded to the battering ram of stronger
disciplines: geography by earth sciences, economics, and sociology; psychology
by psychoanalysis, ethnology, the neuro- and cognitive sciences. Can sociology
hold its own against more formalized disciplines, such as economics, or better
established ones, such as history and political philosophy, when the sociological
ground in which it took root and developed is transformed or disintegrates?
www.sagepublications.com
DOI: 10.1177/1368431007078891
248
European Journal of Social Theory 10(2)

The Programme of Classical Sociology
The unity of classical sociology derives not so much from the answers proposed
by the founding fathers of the discipline as their questions or programme: to
define and study society; that is, invent it as a singular object of science. If we do
not wish to extend the boundaries of sociology to include all manners of understanding and explaining social life, e.g., those of La Botie, Rousseau, and Adam
Smith, we have to think of the sociological tradition as it came to us and impressed
itself upon us: as a particular social philosophy that constructed a set of accounts
of modernity using a few principles that since then have been infinitely repeated
and rearranged: rationalization, individualism, the division of labour, and some
others (Nisbet, 1967; Martuccelli, 1999). All these accounts are interwoven in the
works of the major authors and function as so many variations on the binary opposition traditionmodernity; all are dominated by a sociological sensibility that
combines a sense of something like fate providence was de Tocquevilles word
with an insuppressible worry about the risks entailed by modernity. In this sense,
a kind of tragic consciousness attaches to the foundations of sociology, a consciousness which goes some way to explaining the eternal return to the classics and the
eternal freshness of rereading them. All the founding fathers perceived modernity
as the product of necessary developments that no one could resist, but they never
fully yielded to its charms. Anomie, alienation, the masses each founding father
contributed his small hell, his fear of seeing modernity modulate into dehumanized barbarity. The most brilliant explanation of the development and nature of
the sacred, Durkheims Les Formes lmentaires de la vie religieuse, cannot be dissociated from a conception of modernity as disenchanted, and the underlying fear
of same. And behind Webers forefronting of the religious sources of capitalism is
the haunting fear that these passions [will] directly imprint this pursuit with the
character of a sporting contest (Weber, 2002: 124).
While sociologists did not perhaps invent the idea of society as a more or less
functional whole strongly identified with the national state understood at the
time to be taking the place of traditional communities they did make us feel
the force of that idea. Society is the theoretical, general construction of the nationstate. Sociologys canonical conceptions are often just ways of implementing
narratives of modernity: they transform those narratives into stable systems into
society. Socialization, social control, the individual, institutions, social classes,
legitimacy, social action all appear as simultaneously synchronic and diachronic,
subjective and objective processes that bring together actor and system. The terms
do not so much designate objects of study as offer solutions to the question of
the nature and mechanisms of the social order: Why and how is it that modern
societies hold together when it seems that everything is ultimately swept away
by the flux of change? The unity of this thinking seems fairly strong to me, and
sociologists re-readings of it often give rise to debates and tensions between
holism and individualism, for example that seem reconstituted, trite, excessive,
unimaginative: assertions that Durkheim was more of an individualist than he
let on in his more scientific statements, and that the Weber who studied the
Dubet Why Remain Classical?

great religious systems was less of an individualist than the Weber who theorized
rational action. Many such contemporary readings cloud the issue, turning
Durkheim or Marx into individualists or structuralists who didnt know thats what
they were. But we know that tradition is often nothing more than a projection
of the present onto the past.
The focus of classical sociology was not social phenomena or social facts, but
society conceived as the way modern social life is organized. We may be surprised
to see how the spontaneous functionalism of most pre-1960s sociologists, their
conception of society as an integrated system, a sort of all-encompassing mechanism in which division of labour, institutions, social control, and conflict itself
all worked to shape an order that they unanimously thought of as no longer
subject to natural ties or shared belief in the same gods we may be surprised to
see how this idea has fallen into oblivion. The apprentice sociologists of the
1960s, Parsonians and Marxists alike, learned to think of this representation as an
obvious fact. Its power was, and is, due to its capacity both to preserve and be
critical without those actions affecting its fundamental nature. The feeling it gave
us was of being confronted with alternative versions of the same narrative or myth.
While sociology may be thought of as the social philosophy that carried
forward the idea of society, it is also a particular philosophy in that it sought to
be a positive science. The fact that sociology involves writing and style does not
make it an art, and most classic sociologists sought in various ways historical
methods, statistics, comparative study, experimentation to lay foundations for
objective knowledge. This social philosophy endowed itself with methods, and
accepted empirical criticism of its results. Though ours is no Popperian world,
clearly not just anything goes in sociology. Moreover, it is fair to think that sociology has its own stock of methods, which, while not making it a genuine science,
do make it something more than a philosophy founded on conceptual coherence.
It is of course even less a literary exercise, though sociological writing does exist.
I would be fairly willing to defend sociological methods and their demands and
requirements as effective means of parrying the twin dangers of going off the
subjective deep end (more readily imputable to journalists than sociologists) and
reaching epistemological heights sometimes so lofty that anyone calling for
nomological sociology would then hardly dare attempt to put it into practice. At
the very least, sociology can be recognized as a discipline because it requires discipline: rules of demonstration, the establishing of bundles of facts.
Traditions Revisited
We can begin by observing that the sociological tradition is in fine shape. One
need only run an eye down university programmes and the tables of contents of
sociology textbooks to see that they are themselves a kind of sacred history
where all paradigms are engendered rationally. More seriously, most theoretical
works considered essential present themselves as combinations and syntheses of
classical sociology: Simmel and Durkheim for Parks; Durkheim and Weber
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for Parsons; Durkheim, Weber, and Marx for Bourdieu; Weber and Marx for
Touraine; de Tocqueville, Simmel and Weber for Boudon; Marx, Mead, Parsons
and Weber for Habermas, etc. Before asking whether contemporary sociological
theory is continuous with this tradition, it should be observed that the sociological tradition functions as a source of inspiration and above all an inexhaustible
resource in the quest for legitimacy. Appeals to authority have not disappeared,
and the classics are continually cited to establish the legitimacy of highly contemporary theories or theoretical analyses. Sometimes a classic is rediscovered; at
other times an old text is made into a classic the case of Simmel in France in
recent years; some classics, such as Marx and Parsons, are quickly forgotten; and
traditions, such as that of the Chicago School, are invented. Sociology does not
really wish to break with its history, because over and beyond its methods and
theoretical choices, that history still seems like the best guarantee of belonging
to the sociology family. Conversely, some works that present themselves as radically new are in fact recycling the most classic notions, adding a few linguistic
inventions that are chic rather than truly innovative.
Attachment to tradition does not necessarily lead to devotional trotting out
of the same old ideas. New combinations emerge, just as new music can be written
without changing scales or harmonies. And, frankly, attachment to the sociological tradition is a good thing because it keeps alive sociologys concern to link actor
and system, explain one by the other in both directions. Sociology seeks to answer
the two questions why? and to what end? by means of the idea of society. This
is its real value. And from this perspective, it seems to me we can still accept
Lockwoods distinction between systemic and social integration if, that is, we
agree that the project of classical sociology has always been to link the two
together by showing how one engenders the other in a sort of loop in itself
problematic (Lockwood, 1964; Archer, 2003). Sociological tradition thus allows
us to resist the danger of a break between the system and nothing but, where
society and culture function as purely objective mechanisms, and the actor and
nothing but, in which actor intentionality seems almost as if it were pure freedom.
The sociologists calling, as I see it, is to get a grip on this problem; to think, as
C. Wright Mills put it, of private troubles as public issues and public issues as
aggregations of private troubles (Wright Mills, 1959). After all, the canonical
texts of sociological tradition became so for a reason: Suicide works to show that
the most personal experiences are caught up in larger mechanisms; in the opposite
direction, The Protestant Ethic shows that the most private of beliefs engender
radical economic mutations. It matters little what path is chosen here; the point
is to link action and the system in one analysis where the explanation gives rise
to understanding and the reverse is just as necessary.
It makes sense that Bourdieus sociology is the most widely read, taught, and
quoted in France today and throughout a large part of the world. Bourdieus
thought can be considered both a synthesis of classical sociology and a critique
of it, both the apogee of that tradition and the thinking that came to slay it.
Apogee in that it is unlikely that the integration of actor and system has ever
been presented so compellingly, seamlessly, in a language that effaces all rifts and

doubts thanks to its subjectless projects, its necessary freedoms, its disinterested
interests, its clear-eyed blindness, its necessary exceptions. Critique because the
social order involves a kind of domination that refuses to acknowledge itself,
change is an illusion, immobility a ruse. Bourdieu used Durkheim, Marx, Weber
the three pillars of Le sens pratique to obliterate the opposition between LviStrauss and Sartre that dominated France in the 1960s (Bourdieu, 1980). Undeniably, this theoretical and rhetorical power is the beacon that has attracted, or
repelled, the members of an entire generation of French sociologists, just as an
entire generation of American sociologists existed only in relation to Parsons. As
for the method, Bachelards epistemology of the epistemological break made it
possible for Bourdieusian sociology to be a science that does not really submit
to validation criteria able to demonstrate that a theory is false. This reclarification
of the bases of sociological tradition also marked the decline of that tradition,
annihilating its open, anxious questions with the internal coherence of its answers.
How to resist this theoretical power? Many have given in to it, especially sociology teachers. Researchers, on the other hand, have tended to find more questions
in it than answers. As for the popularity of Bourdieus work, and the appearance
of his name in street demonstrations, Im tempted to explain by the fact that his
theory has been the strongest defence of the idea of society, precisely the idea
that galvanizes defenders of the nation-state and its institutions.2
Between Rationality, Culture, and the Subject
The move in France to put classical sociology behind us may be understood with
the help of the following idea: there is no continuity or reversibility between actor
and system, subjectivity and objectivity.3 Action is no longer perceived as the
subjective component of the system but has become instead a problem in itself.
And after the structuralist-functionalist-Marxist wave of the 1960s and 1970s,
the crushing majority of theoretical texts in the past 30 years have focused on
action subjective action. This leaves us two ways of partaking in the return of
the actor (Touraine, 1984) and getting out of the circle Bourdieu closed.
The first is methodological individualism in its utilitarian mould, in any case;
that of Coleman and Gary Becker. The individual actor is rational and pursues
his/her interests as a function of the situations in which he/she finds himself/
herself and the information he/she possesses. The idea is to apply micro-economic
reasoning to conduct that seems non-economic, such as voting, marriage, school
choice, delinquency, collective mobilization, organizations, social mobility, etc.
Let me say that I have no moral repugnance for this type of reasoning since my
own empirical studies have convinced me that much of social behaviour can
easily be explained this way. In fact, it can be disturbing to see individuals who
behave in this way plunge into abysses of self-justification, seeking to transform
their honourable interests into disinterested virtue. Each of us is a bit Paretian.
My reservations with regard to methodological individualism are of a different order. On the one hand, if we understand the social system as the fitting
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together of a culture and a social structure, its hard to think of it as a mere
effect of the aggregation of individual behaviours. We would do better in that
case to speak of overall socio-economic context, or situation, than of society. In
fact, studies guided by this approach generally take cultures and social structures
for existing realities that could not possibly be explained in terms other than
constraints and action frameworks. It is legitimate to think of education as a
market (for example), but can the same go for school programmes/curricula and
teaching patterns? An overly narrow conception of rationality drastically limits the
models reach, and threatens to turn sociology into a field of micro-economics.
On the other hand, the good reasons game, in its attempt to resist this danger,
extends the notion of rationality to the point where the model covers all families
of motivation and action. Rationality then becomes so distended that it serves
as the basis for a kind of cognitive sociology wherein it encompasses beliefs,
traditions, and moral and aesthetic judgements (Boudon, 2003). Moreover, the
celebrated example of Olsons collective action paradox is paradoxical first and
foremost because it shows that collective mobilization cannot be the product of
interest aggregation alone (Olson, 1965). In order to mobilize rationally, a whole
series of irrational elements such as beliefs, feelings of belonging, shame, etc.
have to combine becoming non-rational components of the enlarged version
of rationality. The model swallows up all, and comprehensive sociology does not
so much study the subjective good reasons that actors themselves proffer as it
deduces those reasons from actors choices and discourses. This kind of sociology
requires another kind upstream of it, a sociology that can explain action frameworks and ensure that the system, or society, is not a pure effect of aggregation;
its own natural inclination is to explain behaviours by examining increasingly
fine-grained empirical material.
In response to this theoretical family, other families have developed which,
while not being necessarily holistic, do affirm that sociologys object today is what
could be called ethical or moral individualism. Here the key terms are social tie
(an expression I dont understand very well), gift, individual, identity, subject. In
much less radical fashion than classical sociology, the insistence here is on the
tension between the system, perceived as a set of objective fluxes and forces, and
the individual, perceived as a subject concerned to realize himself, herself. Whereas
methodological individualism surely hearkens back to eighteenth-century political economy, moral individualism is of Hegelian and phenomenological filiation.
Touraines thinking is a clear illustration of this option, affirming as it does with
increasing clarity the non-social character of the subject, who is defined not so
much by society as against it meaning in turn that all in sociology is not social.
Though I feel fairly close to this last family, I would be tempted to say that
some of the same criticisms apply to it as to its competitor. It constructs social life
in opposition to utilitarianism and the market, thus tending to reduce the system
to blind, purely objective mechanics and ultimately reintroducing a set of actorvs.-society dualisms: solidarity vs. the market, the community vs. rationality,
subject vs. individual, etc. dualisms of the very sort that classic sociological
thinking sought to overcome.

At this time, the theoretical space of contemporary sociology as it may be
observed in France seems structured by three major poles. In the first call it
pole A action is reduced to the system; in the second, B, the system is a product
of rational action; in the third, C, the two terms stand in opposition. Clearly
whats happening is that the very idea of society as the improbable, problematic
integration of social integration and systemic integration is weakening, and it is
reasonable to think that despite bows and curtsies to the classics, this is indeed
a break from the classic age of sociology understood as the social philosophy that
invented the idea of society. Habermas, as we know, proposed a complete separation between the problems of system and action. A sociologist like Touraine is
perfectly in line with this when he affirms that sociology has to rid itself of the
idea of society, whereas Boudon dissolves most of the classical concepts of society
in an elementary syntax of rational action that becomes a cognitive grammar.
Both approaches, however opposed they may be, must be granted the virtue of
following their respective lines of reasoning out to the end. But most sociologists, who use theories rather than doing theory, do not go that far and in fact
work far below the ambitious level of classical sociology.
Dispersion in Interactions
Looking over the space of a generation, we can only observe that the programme
of classical sociology has gradually been broken down into a series of specialized
sociology fields whose theoretical foundations are often quite local and result
from an accumulation of strong individual works.
This dispersion is due to the professionalization and massification of the sociology field.4 A whole set of specialized sociologies have developed, each of which
constitutes a relatively autonomous world, with its own reviews, its own games
of reference and reverence as if there were a tight correspondence between its
theories and its objects of research. We have to acknowledge the fact that young
researchers often orient themselves this way in the disciplinary space: when they
choose this or that empirical object indeed, because they choose it they take
the theoretical package associated with it. In this way, multiple regional theoretical traditions have been created, as attested to by thesis bibliographies and
what are considered de rigueur citations. It is hard to see these regional traditions
as anything other than sedimentations and fashions that produce synthetic
overviews the multiple Sociologies of . . . manuals: Sociology of the family, of
education, Occupational sociology that in turn handle traditions as if they were
so many bits of patchwork precisely because their purpose is to present a
synthetic overview. In general, the outline of these works follows the conventional
order, going from macro to micro, objective to subjective, culturalism to rationalism, this balanced with a critique of functionalism, itself reduced to straw man,
necessary village idiot, and at the end fine-tuned down to symbolic interactionism and constructivism. Every sociology specialty arranges its own tradition for
itself, its own tranquil dramaturgy, thereby fragmenting sociology in a way that
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responds fairly well to social and academic demand. I attach great importance to
these manuals, given that they were written for students, and to these articles and
theses because objectively they represent the crushing majority of sociological
production. Sociology seems to have become a science of social problems, as is
already the case in some bookstores where sociology books are shelved in the
school, social work, immigration, organizations, health, and gender sections,
among others.
This type of fragmentation explains the very real practical triumph of interactionism, and it confers a degree of theoretical legitimacy on descriptions and
analyses that simply dont go very far, that dont do much more than string along
a few heartfelt truisms: situations and data are constructed; individuals act within
contexts; they want to get someone else to do the dirty work; norms are debatable; deviance is learned; identity is produced by how others see one but people
use a mixture of cunning and cynicism to resist against this; youve got to cool
the mark out, etc. All these micro-mechanisms which are of great importance,
of course thus acquire a kind of high theoretical dignity; the fineness of the
observations is touted. This passion for the micro is surely understandable after
the functionalist orgies of the 1970s, but the danger is that it will turn sociology into an exercise either commanded by genius or doomed to insignificance.
Goffman and a few others were and are geniuses putting their novelistic talents
to work within the pragmatist tradition of James and Pierce (Joseph, 2004). What
I mean by insignificance is that this kind of sociology could never tell us anything
more than what its telling us now, which amounts to nothing more than what
the actors themselves say fairly spontaneously; namely that they manage, they get
by. Any number of novelists, beginning with Proust or Goffmanian filmmakers
such as Robert Altman may be preferable to this.
I would tend to take the interactionist cluster very seriously, precisely since
it is part of the move away from classical sociology. What troubles me is that the
idea of society is becoming useless without this being perceived as a problem;
without our looking any more at how we get from individual interactions to
collective facts. While it is useful to study classroom interactions, we hop uneasily
from such interactions to statistical regularities for pupil cohorts very often we
make as if the connections were clear. We have a good understanding of how a
person becomes a marijuana smoker but we dont go further to explain why a
given society smokes more or less than another. My main reason for being
concerned about the practical success of interactionism is that as a teacher I see
the charm it has for sociology students for what seems a very simple reason:
society is no longer Society; it has been reduced to what individuals see and say
of it. Students seem to think that once youve described what actors do and
presented what they say, the work is done. For the rest, anything is possible and
nothing seems connected to social life. The assumption seems to be that on the
one hand you have objective, reified mechanisms that no one knows anything
about any more, except that they are the market; on the other, actors real-life
experience, which sociologists are supposedly experts on in particular, the socialproblem family. In fact, never has there seemed to be such a radical dissociation

between objectivity and subjectivity once again, exactly the dissociation that
classical sociology refused to accept. A few of the finer feelings, democratic and
respectful of identities, provide this sociological style with honourable, vaguely
critical normative underpinnings. In Chapter 1 of these students theses, you set
the scene, using general knowledge accumulated about a situation and a group;
in Chapter 2, you present minute description of the behaviour of a few individuals; in Chapter 3, you take care of the epistemological by saying that the
analysis and action categories are themselves constructed.
In fact, because in interactionism, interactions are thought of as social reality
itself rather than one level of social life that can only be explained by other such
levels as the notion of role allowed, regardless of its weaknesses interactionism
is perfectly malleable, readily adaptable to all possible conceptions of the system,
including the most critical. The return to honest, straightforward Marxism in
British new education sociology offers a clear illustration of these twists and
turns. Obviously in my case against interactionism, I am not claiming that the
approach fails to teach us anything and I am certainly not claiming that the works
of Becker, Goffman, and Lemert are insignificant. What I do think is that this
approach sweeps too many problems under the rug as Goffman said with irony,
recalling that while social systems were undoubtedly very important, he wouldnt
be talking about them. Actually, the problem is nothing less than the theoretical
status of this theoretical family.
Intermediate Considerations
The intellectual space of current French sociology seems to me to be laid out thus:
1
2
3
4
The critical theory of reproduction is both the crystallization and a disenchanted reversal of classical sociology.
Methodological individualism has tried to reconstruct classical sociology
under the aegis of utilitarianism and broadened rationality.
A return of the actor has been constructed on the basis of a kind of ethical,
reflexive, self-made individualism.
Most sociological theories being used today are specialized and often use a
kind of soft interactionism to escape the grip of classical sociology without
choosing a stance and without looking like they are/arent choosing one.
The theories implicit in (1), (2), and (3) may be thought of as great theories
because the intention is that they be genuinely general constructions; they are
visions of the world that, whatever else may be said of them, have taken their
building materials from the pantheon of the founding fathers (whose unity I
readily admit to be a pure construction; however, that unity is operative in
sociologists minds). (1) bets all on the system and reduces action to programming or an effect of the systems own contradictions. (2) understands action as
the manifestation of individuals reasons. Finally, (3) continuously underscores
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system-actor tensions while radically separating the two. Everything that sociological tradition worked to hold together is coming apart.
To historians of sociology, this state of affairs does not seem new: there have
always been several ways of apprehending the social (Berthelot, 1990). But how
can we resist the contrary pleasures of ever new and nothing new? We could
also reasonably think that sociology has something to do with society, and that
the fragmenting of paradigms we see in the discipline may be explained by very
real changes in what we are nonetheless still obliged to think of as Society,
especially since most of these changes were anticipated by classical sociology,
already thought of as a combination of various accounts of modernity.5
How could the ideas of system and social structure, the idea of society itself,
ever have held their own against transformations of the nation-state defined as
an integrated culture, economy, and instance of political sovereignty? How could
we possibly believe that the promotion of the individuals sovereignty wouldnt
affect the mechanisms that engender actors and those that engender social regulation? How could we imagine that accentuations of the division of labour would
not deal a serious blow to the idea of a stable, integrated system? Sociology has
become so patently plural because the social world has itself become plural, and
no central principle now seems up to the task of explaining it. There are surely
good reasons why the classic sociologist most likely to be called to the rescue is
Weber, for he was surely the founding father who best resisted the pathos of the
unity of social life idea. Weber is a pure theorist who never proposed a unified
theory, and this explains his many filiations with Nietzscheism, phenomenology,
and methodological individualism, among others. Who else could have had the
honour of inspiring the Frankfurt School, Schutz, and Boudon?
Is it because the world has changed, or did the classical sociology programme
exhaust itself? The answer doesnt really matter here. If my analysis is credible,
the most reasonable position becomes that which I share with a few others: sociological theory should work from the twofold principle of heterogeneous action
and heterogeneous system. This is a means of being loyal to the classical sociology programme while defending middle-range theories by which I do not mean
regional ones.6 It favours the idea that sociological theory should bring to light
mechanisms borrowed from (1), (2), and (3), rather than sociological laws. If
we accept that social life and society no longer have a centre while continuing to
insist that social life requires relative order and local unity, then clearly the space
of sociological theory can only be dialogic and should be able to coherently
combine different conceptions of actions. All sciences are not physics; most of
them discover and demonstrate mechanisms rather than laws, and that is already
a great deal.
Mid-range Theories for Holding it Together
Given that culture, society, and the economy are tending to separate out into
increasingly autonomous subsystems, it is understandable that a whole set of

theories have taken on the essential task of constructing ways of fitting together
the various composite areas. J.-D. Reynauds regulation theory and, in a completely
different direction, the theory of conventions, are exemplary in this connection.
Mid-range theories are not local ones adapted to a particular type of problemobject such as delinquency or school inequality. They are theories that seek to
explain certain mechanisms while only being able to manage this by turning to
theories other than themselves. They require both extremely fine grains and
coarser ones. They are combinations, assemblages, that do not claim to produce
a general vision of society yet cannot do without a representation of society and
the concepts it implies: institution, role, classes, power, domination, change, etc.
In France, the work of Latour, for example, and Boltanski and Thvenot belong
to this family of theories. They offer a point of view on social action without
claiming to gather all the threads together, since most of these constructions take
off from the postulate that action develops in a plural world, that there are several
levels or registers of action, several grammars or modes of justification (Boltanski
and Thvenot, 1987; Latour, 1987). Some radicalize this point of view and are
moving towards a kind of pragmatics of action sociology, more or less directly
inspired by the ethnomethodology critique, itself perhaps the most radical and
interesting break from classical sociology.7 Others continue to be more attached
to classical sociology and resolutely engage in a kind of combination rhetoric.
My own work belongs to this latter approach, and therefore runs the risk of
not making the break and being less visible. I would qualify the attitude Ive
chosen as neo-classic because it is characterized by a mode of theoretical elaboration less engaged in theoretical discussions than an attempt to resolve empirical and quite practical problems: Why is pupils motivation to work in school so
low? Why is work becoming increasingly stressful when, objectively, it is less
heavy than before? Why do young people in working-class neighbourhoods
manifest irrational violence? This type of theoretical practice, impure because
embedded in empirical research that is not primarily concerned to demonstrate
or produce a theory but rather to resolve enigmas, is guided by certain principles.
But the cameralist style is not necessarily an easy one to do. The following are
some of the principles that led me to propose a theory of social experience
(Dubet, 1994):
1
As we move away from the central figure of society developed by classical

sociology, social action is motivated by several types of logic, one defined by
integration mechanisms, another by strategic rationality, and a third by the
relation to self or subjectivation.
Each of these types of logic refers to a process in which social subsystems
the subsystem of norms and identities, that of markets, that of culture
are separated from one another. Society is structured around no central
principle (Bell, 1978; Dubet and Martuccelli, 1998).
Each type may be explained objectively in terms of its link to the subsystem
it refers to, according to processes whose nature was established by classical
sociology theories: socialization, limited rationality, and subjectivation.
257
258

4
Sociology studies the mechanisms that shape the conditions of activity and
the nature of that activity activity which creates unity in all places where
society is being effaced. This means that social experience is necessarily a
cognitive, normative process, as shown by practical conceptions of justice.
This sociological approach is ultimately concerned less to describe society
than show how it is produced.
This type of theoretical development owes much to theories other than itself. For
example, it readily accepts that statistical regularities can reveal mechanisms of
holistic formation that determine behaviours and opinions and the socialstructure hypothesis is considered necessary. It also understands that within these
structural frameworks, behaviour can be explained in terms of games and choice
matrices. Finally, it accepts the idea that actors cannot be reduced to either of
these two types of logic and that because they have no choice but to deal with
them, they are capable of criticizing and transforming them, thereby producing
unity when society no longer provides any. We could call all of these programmes
A, B, and C, on condition that those three matrices are understood to determine
the space of sociology at a time when the classic idea of society is slipping out
from under us. But the slipping away of society, this end of the functionalist
illusion, should not invalidate certain of classical sociologys questions. Nor does
not exempt us from answering the questions it raised about the nature of the
social order, domination, legitimacy, conflicts . . .
Conclusion
Why maintain such a circumscribed, lack-lustre position when we may well think
that the point of sociological theory is to construct a general theory which engenders deductive propositions? First, there are several ways of doing theory, several
intellectual temperaments, one of which consists in starting with a set of empirical problems starting, therefore, with the aporia and impasses left by earlier
theories. Theory is not made exclusively on blackboards; it is also made on the lab
table. Sociological theory develops by responding to new questions or providing
new answers to old questions without it being necessary to redefine all foundations of the edifice every time. Second, as I see it, the right reason not to break
with classical sociology is that it allows us to hold together what has tended to
come undone with the decline of the idea of society. Obviously we dont want
to eternally repeat the classics in a series of reverential gestures. The point is rather
to hold onto their vocation, i.e., to construct a reasoned representation of social
life, and of what we will continue to call society, having no better term for it,
even when society can no longer be identified with the nation-state. Sociology
appeared at a time when modernity was destroying traditional social worlds; it
appeared just as it was once again becoming possible to recompose an integrated
image of social life. Now that this first version of modernity seems to have come
apart, if we dont want representation of the social world to be boiled down to

an opposition between market rationality and the ineffable subjectivities of
individuals or irreducibility of cultures, it is more than ever necessary to affirm
the relevance of the sociological vocation. Constructing sociology today implies
resolutely rejecting both the end of history and the clash of civilizations.
Acknowledgements
This article was translated by Amy Jacobs.
Notes
1 I am of course talking about sociology as it exists in France which is not exclusively
French sociology. Other traditions exist elsewhere.
2 Bourdieu reviens! [Come back to us, Bourdieu!] was among the slogans heard in
demonstrations by French civil servants in spring 2003 a clear indication that they
identified their cause with the defence of society as a whole, society itself.
3 I am referring here solely to French sociology, or more exactly the sociology read by
most French sociologists (I am aware of what I dont know, and of the strong artificiality of any world sociology, even in this era of globalization).
4 Since the 1960s, the number of professional sociologists in France has gone from a
few dozen to nearly a thousand more, if we count unemployed sociology PhDs.
5 This is why the notion of post-modernity does not seem very useful to me. We are
simply still more modern.
6 It is worth noting that Mertons mid-range theories seem to have better stood the test
of time than Parsons supreme theory.
7 This perception can be refuted if we remember that Garfinkel sought to re-appropriate
the major issues of Parsonian sociology.
References
Archer, M. (2003) Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bell, D. (1978) The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.
Berthelot, J.-M. (1990) Lintelligence du social. Paris: PUF.
Boltanski, L. and Thvenot, L. (1987) Les Economies de la grandeur. Paris: PUF.
Boudon, R. (2003) Raison, bonnes raisons. Paris: PUF.
Bourdieu, P. (1980) Le sens pratique. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Dubet, F. (1994) Sociologie de lexprience. Paris: Seuil.
Dubet, F. and Martuccelli, D. (1998) Dans quelle socit vivons-nous? Paris: Seuil.
Joseph, I. (2004) Lathlte moral et lenquteur modeste, in B. Karsenti and L. Qur
(eds) La croyance et lenqute: Raisons pratiques. Paris: Editions de lEHESS.
Latour, B. (1987) La science en action. Paris: Folio.
Lockwood, D. (1964) Social Integration and System Integration, in G.K. Zollschan and
G.K. Kirsch (eds) Explorations in Social Change. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
Martuccelli, D. (1999) Sociologies de la modernit. Paris: Gallimard.
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260

Nisbet, R. (1967) The Sociological Tradition. New York: Basic Books.
Olson, M. (1965) The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Touraine, A. (1984) Le retour de lacteur. Paris: Fayard.
Weber, M. (2002) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. S. Kalberg.
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Wright Mills, C. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
Franois Dubet
is Professor of Sociology at the Universit de Bordeaux-2 and

a member of the CADIS (EHESS). His recent books include: Lcole des chances:
Quest-ce quune cole juste? (Seuil, 2004), and Injustices: Lexprience des ingalits au travail (Seuil, 2006). [email: francois.dubet@sociologie.u-bordeaux2.fr]

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European Journal of Social

Why Remain `Classical'?

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European Journal of Social Theory 10(2): 247260

Why Remain Classical?

As sociologists, we should ask ourselves the same sociological questions we so

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European Journal of Social Theory 10(2)

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