Phenomenology as a tool for sociology of critique

After Bourdieu, French sociology tended to see value-based arguments as “illusio” that hid cultural or economic determining factors of which actors were unaware (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 21). In the study of the solidarity economy (a filed I will introduce later) this Bourdieusian conception has led to actors’ own justifications being quickly dismissed, as it is shown how they are in reality moved by market forces. But what would happen if, rather than suspecting solidarity economy actors’ moral justifications to be the veil concealing the invasion of the market’s logic, we just took them seriously? To answer this question, I will try first to demonstrate the usefulness of the sociology of critique (also called pragmatic sociology), an original research program in contemporary French thought created by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in the 90. Sociology of critique allows us to treat values as sources of motivation, especially within fields which are keen to promote a moralized and politicized economy. By studying the moral judgements of people thanks to the notion of “moral grammar”, the sociology of critique has helped restore to people the critical capacity that had been confiscated by the sociologist (Latour, 1993, p. 50-51). In a second time, I will show through the example of solidarity economy how rich is this sociology which turn from a (bourdieusian) critical sociology to a sociology of critique (as actors critique).
But in a third time I will point out a problem in sociology of critique. Indeed, while the sociology of critique’s notion of grammar allows us to understand the action of actors when it is coherent with the values they use to justify it, it does not allow us to explain a paradox: how can we understand the fact that sometimes the moral values mobilized by actors to justify their action seem to misrepresent the main characteristics of their action? Within the Bourdieusian framework of unconscious actors unaware of the factors that really determine their action, we can understand how their erroneous justifications might not fit with their action. But once we have left the Bourdieusian paradigm, this paradox cannot be solved from within the sociology of critique itself. Resolving this problem requires phenomenology as we will show in a fourth time, convoking Husserl and Scheler.
Indeed, the notion of grammar can be understood as the cognitive syntax of what Husserl and Scheler call “intentional states of mind” that mediate how an actor’s consciousness relates to the external world. This redefinition will lead us to conceptualize in a fifth time, the notion of “extrapolation”. It can be understood as the moment where an action is so focused on the realization of one single moral value that this action can be seen by actors themselves as contradictory with some other values of the solidarity economy’s general grammar of justification. In this way, I aim to reinforce the sociology of critique paradigm and I continue to take actors’ moral values seriously without reducing them to some kind of unconscious social toolkit that veils the real causes of action.