Abstract
The article confronts two criticisms of ideology: first, the Durkheimian approach; second, the Foucauldian model. Both return to social practices in order to deactivate the concept of ideology. However, while Foucault eliminates at the same time the concept of ideology and the concept of social totality, Durkheim maintains the centrality of the latter by claiming society as a whole is the effect of solidarity, not of ideology. I discuss these two ways of understanding social practices, their epistemological backgrounds and consequences for critique. On the one hand, I show how, lacking the concept of totality, Foucault must reduce critique to unlimited acts of critique of an ontologically fixed “power”. Durkheim, on the other hand, lacks to explain why the social actors often do not use the critical potential of their own solidarity in order to criticize society. My article concludes by proposing a new theory of ideology: as every ideology is an act of totalization, grounded in the idealization of the categories allowing this totalization itself, it seems that solidarity, understood as a scientific (sociologically) established principle of totalization, lacks its own idealization. Therefore, I argue, sociological knowledge of solidarity must transform itself into ideology in order to become a critical category for the actors themselves.
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Notes
- 1.
K. Marx, Capital, London, Penguin Classics, 1992, vol. 1.
- 2.
This article will not explore the discussion on the German side. In the 1960s and the 1970s, the Frankfurt School of critical theory did not seek to get rid of the Hegelian concept of totality (which Habermas would later do) as much as it sought to fight a certain positivism in the social sciences (see: T. W. Adorno, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, London, Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1976) which simply rejected the concept of society along with the idea of an awareness of common life.
- 3.
M. Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze”, D. F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, pp. 205–217.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 206.
- 5.
Ivi.
- 6.
Ivi.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 200.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 207.
- 9.
Ivi.
- 10.
It should be stressed that, from this perspective, Marxist theory is only a form that power assumes in capitalist society.
- 11.
It would be wrong to say that this critique of the concept of totality refers only to the Marxist variant. In his discussion with Durkheim (M. Foucault, The Punitive Society, Lectures at the College de France 1972–1973, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Foucault equally rejects the sociological concept of totality for the same reason. In his view, Durkheim’s interpretation of totalizing power as “social morality” and thus a universal that produces increasing justice in its deployment does not change the fact that it is still power that totalizes. For Foucault, the problem of totalization is not the concrete universal that totalizes, but the principle of totalization itself, in other words the very idea of universal.
- 12.
J. Rancière, “The Ethics of Sociology”, The Intellectual and His People, Staging the People, London, Verso, vol. 2, 2012, pp. 144–170.
- 13.
J. Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, Durham, NC, Duke University Press Books, 2004.
- 14.
J. Rancière, “The Ethics of Sociology”, cit. p. 157.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 149.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 152.
- 17.
Ivi.
- 18.
É. Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, New York, Free Press, [1893] 1997.
- 19.
It should be noted that, in both cases, the exchange is not what creates society. Society is instituted before any exchange between individuals according the rules of exchange. There exists a third variant of the idea of exchange, but it is not a thought of the social and, as such, is not of interest here: the variant whereby society is created through the exchange (communication) of rules (conventionalist or legal approach). Critique of this conception of the constitution of society through exchange was masterfully conducted by V. Descombes, The Institutions of Meaning: A Defense of Anthropological Holism, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2014.
- 20.
J. Rancière, “The Ethics of Sociology”, cit. p. 155.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 163.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 165.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 166.
- 24.
É. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, New York, Free Press, [1895] 1991.
- 25.
M. Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power”, cit. p. 207.
- 26.
A. Honneth, The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal, Cambridge, Polity, 2017.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Regarding Robert Castel, this rupture occurred when the question of solidarity was reintroduced into the sociological reflection (R. Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question, Rutgers, Transaction Publishers, 2002). Regarding Luc Boltanski, the rupture is referred to as the “sociology of critique”, openly directed against the “critical sociology of Bourdieu” since the publication of: L. Boltanski, On Justification: Economies of Worth, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2006.
- 29.
On the German side, it can be observed in Axel Honneth’s work since the publication of his magnum opus: A. Honneth, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, New York, Columbia University Press, 2014. On the French side, it can be observed in the theoretical productions of the philosophers and sociologists from the LIER (Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Studies on Reflexivities), including Bruno Karsenti, Cyril Lemieux, Florence Hulak, Francesco Callegaro, Edouard Gardella, Dominique Linhardt, Gildas Salmon, Pierre Charbonier, Stefania Ferrando and others.
- 30.
It is necessary to distinguish between either side of the Rhine regarding sociological works, meaning between investigations (France) and philosophical works, meaning the global theorizations of the bond of solidarity constituting society (for which Axel Honneth’s work sets the standard). The link between sociology and philosophy accomplished by the “philosophy of social sciences” has no equivalent on the German side.
- 31.
I cite as examples: Y. Barthe, Les retombés du passé, Paris, Le Seuil, 2017; C. Moreau de Bellaing, Force publique. Une sociologie de l’institution policière, Paris, Économica, 2015.
- 32.
K. Marx, The German Ideology, Eastford, Martino Fine Books, 2011, p. 79.
- 33.
This is indeed how it seems we should understand the reformulation of the theory of ideology as expounded by Marx in the chapter entitled “The Fetishism of Commodities and Its Secret” (Marx, Capital, cit. pp. 163–177), which emphasizes the spontaneous emergence of false representations of what is happening in social practices based on commercial exchange and its first real abstraction, “the commodity form”.
- 34.
L. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, London, Verso, 2014.
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Christ, J. (2021). From Society to Social Practices: Proposals for a New Theory of Ideology. In: Marcucci, N. (eds) Durkheim & Critique. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75158-6_6
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