Luc Boltanski (born 1940) is a French sociologist, Professor at the cole des hautes tudes

en sciences sociales, Paris, and founder of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale,
known as the leading figure in the new "pragmatic" school of French sociology.
[1]
His work has
significantly influenced sociology, political economy and social and economic history. He is the
brother of artist Christian Boltanski.
Contents
[hide]
1 Work
o 1.1 On Justification
o 1.2 The New Spirit of Capitalism
2 Selected publications
3 References
4 Further reading
Work[edit]
He contributed to the start of the "political and moral sociology" framework. Political and moral
sociology has gradually developed as a research programmein the sense proposed by Imre
Lakatosaround a conceptual nucleus looking to construct a theory of action based on mile
Durkheim's theory of moral fact, revising the inheritance of methodologicalstructuralism from
the point of view of dynamics and processes. The research program stresses how, in many
conflicts, the characteristics of the disputants change during the course of the conflict.
His most recent work deals with the links between detective novels and the emergence of the
nation state.
[2]

On J ustification[edit]
A book co-authored with Laurent Thvenot, On Justification: The Economies of Worth, 2006
(French original: 1991), argues that modern societies are not a single social order but an
interweaving of multiple orders. Boltanski and Thvenot identify six "orders of worth" or
"economies of worth," systematic and coherent principles of evaluation. These multiple orders
(civic, market, inspired, fame, industrial, and domestic) are not associated with particular social
domains but coexist in the same social spaceas Boltanski and Thvenot persuasively
demonstrate through a content analysis of texts used in managerial training in contemporary
French corporations.
Central to On Justification is the notion of "test" to indicate forms of conflict among the actors,
with a variable degree of legitimacy (chap. 5). If the experiences following one another in
conflict processes are legitimate, they firmly bind actors to claim the universality of their
reasoning in accord with the order of worth they refer to. If, however, the agents in conflict refer
to different order of worth (e.g. to that of the civic polity and to that of the industrial polity),
legitimate tests are not available. But if the agents are nevertheless oriented towards a notion
of the common good (which belongs to neither of the conflicting polities), an (albeit fragile)
"compromise" may evolve to settle the dispute (chap. 10). The notion of workers' rights is an
example of such a compromise between the industrial and the civic orders (p. 325). These
compromises are always fragile because attempts to define the common good, on which the
compromise rests, are bound to re-ignite the conflict (p. 278).
The New Spirit of Capitalism[edit]
The New Spirit of Capitalism, 2005 (French original: 1999), co-authored with ve Chiapello,
explores a seventh "projective city"
[3]
(organized around the concept of flexible networks now
prominent in the conception of "the project"). While On Justification was based on an analysis
of major texts of political philosophy, this book is based on a systematic analysis of managerial
literature from the 1960s and 1990s and aims "to describe the 'residue', which cannot be
interpreted in the language of the six existing cities" (p. 24).