Abstract
When I read Luc Boltanski’s books, I am left with the sensation that I didn’t read one but several books at once. On Justification (co-authored with Laurent Thévenot, 1991 [2006]) was a comparative study of classical political philosophers, an analysis of the moral justifications mobilized in management texts, and an original sociological theorization of situations of public dispute. The New Spirit of Capitalism (co-authored with Ève Chiapello, 1999 [2005]) was at the same time a historical account of the relationship between capitalism and its critiques, a study of the rise of a new project-based type of justification in contemporary management, and a reflection about the challenges faced by critical social sciences after the de-legitimization of the occupational categories stabilized with the consolidation of industrial capitalism. Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies, Boltanski’s latest book (originally published as Énigmes et complots in 2012) is not an exception in this regard. At least three different books co-exist in this work.
Mysteries and Conspiracies is first a critical cultural study of the rise of detective and spy novels in the late 19th and early 20th century. Chapter 2 is a detailed analysis of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series. Chapter 3 focuses on George Simenon’s Commissioner Maigret, and Chapter 4 analyses a variety of spy novels. The question these chapters try to answer is: what did these novels do in the context in which they emerged? Both relying on a wide range of secondary literature and the conceptual apparatus enunciated in his book On Critique (Boltanski 2011), Boltanski argues that the rise of these popular types of fiction should be understood in the context of the stabilization of the modern national state, and the concomitant new type of social reality produced with it. The mysteries presented in detective and spy novels play with the anxiety readers feel when they are made to imagine what if that stable and calculable social reality represented and produced by the nation state and its expert administrative system was only an illusion, hiding a more chaotic and less acceptable world. Popular literature, Boltanski argues in a tone that could resemble that of more openly critical analyses of ideology in popular culture, think for instance of Žižek’s fascinating TV documentaries, represents this anxiety but also performs a restorative, and finally conservative, function. Not only, at the end of each story, does Sherlock Holmes prove that seemingly chaotic or even potentially magical phenomena can be logically explained but the private detective also exposes the limitations of legal formal institutions, such as the police, that are supposed to be in charge of protecting the predictability of social reality. Echoing Carl Schmitt, Boltanski concludes Chapter 2 by stating that the detective (and later the spy) ‘is the state in a state of ordinary exception’ (p. 72); it fictionalizes and justifies the non-legal work needed to keep the social reality organized by the nation state stable.
Second, Mysteries and Conspiracies is a book about inquiry. Following others, for instance, a fascinating piece of history of knowledge by Carlo Ginzburg (1983) mentioned several times in the book, Boltanski understands detective and spy literature as a fictionalization of inquiry. Characters such as Holmes (and previously Poe’s Dupin) practice a type of ‘case based’ research that was being consolidated at the time in fields such as medicine, art history and by the police. But Boltanski takes one further reflexive step. Like in post-modern anthropology, where the fiction of the objective ethnographic report was replaced by an active comparison of the informants and ethnographer’s ways of knowing, in this book, sociology and the analysed material are actively compared. Certainly, Boltanski does not compare himself with Sherlock Holmes, but the analysis presented in this book results from a productive comparison between the studied fictional researchers and Boltanski’s own professional practice, sociological inquiry. To pick one among many examples, in his analysis of Simenon’s Commissioner, Boltanski writes, ‘Maigret anticipates the figure of the sociologist who work for agencies dependent of the state […] but who does not really come into public view until some thirty years later’ and two pages later, ‘it is because he is a socially situated and qualified being that he can be a good sociologist’ (p. 95). It is through the skilled exploitation of this comparison that this book ends up being both rich research about literature and a strong theoretical reflection about social research.
The comparison with sociology is not limited to detective and spy fictions, but extends to journalism and judicial research. They all share that they deal with what pragmatist philosopher John Dewey understood as inquiry. Dewey, Boltanski explains, defined inquiry as a moment in ordinary experience when one comes up against a situation whose indeterminate character introduces doubt and anxiety. Getting out such a situation presupposes the transformation of the anxiety into a problem, through observation and selection of the features that matter. (p. 218)
Beyond the obvious differences regarding methodological rules that make research acceptable in each field, the inquiry practised by fictional and non-fictional detectives, journalists and sociologists follow a similar grammar. They all try to explain an event that tenses, or ‘tests’, the ‘reality of social reality’, where explanation means identifying the entities that were involved in the event and attributing agency and responsibility among them. But, here is where the similarities stop. Boltanski clarifies, ‘Sociology is not a detective story, still less a spy story, even if it sometimes tries to solve mysteries and even it finds itself confronting the question of conspiracy’ (p. 260). Unlike judicial inquiry, sociology and journalism are not entitled to produce a judgement; and unlike journalism, sociology tends to de-personalize its accounts (i.e. it is not about this or this other particular capitalist but about more abstract actants, such as ‘class’ or ‘capitalism’).
Third, Mysteries and Conspiracies is a book about critique. In Boltanski’s view, social scientific research is still under the curse spelled by Karl Popper. In mid-20th century, Popper initiated a strong and influential critique of what he called ‘historicism’. Namely, social research influenced by the likes of Hegel and Marx, which assigned central roles to abstract collective entities, such as ‘capitalism’, ‘proletariat’, ‘ruling class’ and so on, which should not, Popper thought, play any serious part in proper science. Popper’s critique of critique, in other words, denounced most sociological research as a plain non-scientific conspiracy theory, reinforcing instead a social science based on the study of observable entities, particularly individuals. Chapter 6 reviews, but perhaps unavoidably, in a too simplified and sketchy way (maybe like a teaser for a new book) some of the most influential answers to Popper’s challenge provided during the last decades of social theory: methodological individualism, analytic Marxism, radicalization of structuralism, theory of habitus, microsociology and social network analysis.
Besides introducing the most influential ways in which social scientists have dealt with Popper’s curse, the last parts of the book open a wider and timely question: what should be the status of ‘collective entities’ in the accounts produced by social research? These entities, actually, are not only of interest for sociologists. Despite the influence of Popper and the different strands of methodological individualism, Boltanski explains that collectives (such as ‘the firm’, or ‘business groups’ or ‘innovation clusters’) have remained playing a central role in management sciences, and there are also plenty of abstract ontological figures (‘corporation’, ‘collateral obligations’ and so on) in law. But sociology’s particular problem is that it, many times, does not deal with already legally or technically accepted entities, but that it theorizes the existence and influence of not yet recognized collectives, being therefore always exposed to be denounced as a plain conspiracy theory. The elegant solution to this problem developed in the last decades by Boltanski and co-authors, but also by Actor–Network theorists such as Latour (2005), displaced the role of the social researcher. Collectives (for instance, a new occupational category (Boltanski 1984)) are not discovered by academic sociologists, but sociological research should focus on following the process in which actors themselves assemble, name or stabilize new collectives. However, Boltanski (perhaps like Latour (2013) with his Inquiry into Modes of Existence) is today setting some of the strongest challenge to his own previous work. As Boltanski’s recent work seems to imply, the risk of ‘sociology of critique’ is that it can also empty sociology of its own ‘critical capacity’. The difficult task that Boltanski has set himself is to deal with this impasse and to equip sociology with conceptual tools and methods that can both be respectful of the actors’ own accounts and ontological constructions, but also re-gain the discipline’s role in imaginatively testing the reality of social reality.
Mysteries and Conspiracies is not an obvious read for readers of Organization. I think, however, there are several good reasons that make this a very recommendable book. I recommend it first for those interested in broadening their grasp of Boltanski’s oeuvre. Luc Boltanski is a major contemporary social theorist, but, as he has recognized (Basaure 2011), the international influence of his work is limited to sometimes an oversimplified version of his ideas (i.e. organizations deal with multiple orders of worth or capitalism and critique are dialectically related). Particularly, this book is a good point of entry to Boltanski’s ongoing project of rethinking critical sociology after the sociology of critique. Second, this book directly faces an issue that is at the core of organizational research, namely, the tension between methodological individualism and the recognition of more abstract but not necessarily accepted collective entities, such as global elites, capitalism or terrorist networks. This book does not provide a final answer, but, no doubt, poses a set of questions that are particularly timely these days (of National Security Agency (NSA) global espionage network, HSBC international tax evasion, ISIS in Syria and US drones in Pakistan) when the borders between conspiracy, science fiction and serious research seem to be constantly challenged. Finally, I recommend this book to all of us, social scientists who expect to write books about our work. What some contemporary writers of fiction, like for instance Don DeLillo, have done for the novel, Boltanski does by extending the possibilities of the academic book as a genre. Mysteries and Conspiracies is neither a traditional linear book nor a literary experiment. It is rather a crafted piece where reflexivity and the architecture of the text are made to work in order to put forward a complex, multi-layered but enjoyable book of social science.