Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics

Boltanski, Luc

Images of starving children, bombed villages and mass graves brought to us by television in the comfort of our homes implicitly call on us to act. What can we do when the suffering we see is so distant and we feel powerless compared with the forces behind the suffering? Luc Boltanski examines the ways in which, since the end of the eighteenth century, spectators have tried to respond acceptably to what they have seen, and discusses whether there remains a place for pity in modern politics.

Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Cambridge University Press

Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies) (English and French Edition)

A vital and underappreciated dimension of social interaction is the way individuals justify their actions to others, instinctively drawing on their experience to appeal to principles they hope will command respect. Individuals, however, often misread situations, and many disagreements can be explained by people appealing, knowingly and unknowingly, to different principles. On Justification is the first English translation of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's ambitious theoretical examination of these phenomena, a book that has already had a huge impact on French sociology and is likely to have a similar influence in the English-speaking world. In this foundational work of post-Bourdieu sociology, the authors examine a wide range of situations where people justify their actions. The authors argue that justifications fall into six main logics exemplified by six authors: civic (Rousseau), market (Adam Smith), industrial (Saint-Simon), domestic (Bossuet), inspiration (Augustine), and fame (Hobbes). The authors show how these justifications conflict, as people compete to legitimize their views of a situation.On Justification is likely to spark important debates across the social sciences.

On Justification: Economies of Worth (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology)

Thévenot, Laurent

Social Sciences

Princeton University Press

A vital and underappreciated dimension of social interaction is the way individuals justify their actions to others, instinctively drawing on their experience to appeal to principles they hope will command respect. Individuals, however, often misread situations, and many disagreements can be explained by people appealing, knowingly and unknowingly, to different principles. On Justification is the first English translation of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's ambitious theoretical examination of these phenomena, a book that has already had a huge impact on French sociology and is likely to have a similar influence in the English-speaking world. In this foundational work of post-Bourdieu sociology, the authors examine a wide range of situations where people justify their actions. The authors argue that justifications fall into six main logics exemplified by six authors: civic (Rousseau), market (Adam Smith), industrial (Saint-Simon), domestic (Bossuet), inspiration (Augustine), and fame (Hobbes). The authors show how these justifications conflict, as people compete to legitimize their views of a situation. On Justification is likely to spark important debates across the social sciences.

Business & Money

Economics

The Foetal Condition: A Sociology of Engendering and Abortion

Abortion is a contentious issue in social life but it has rarelybeen subjected to careful scrutiny in the social sciences. Whilethe legalization of abortion has brought it into the public domain,it still remains a sensitive topic in many cultures, often hiddenfrom view and rarely spoken about, consigned to a shadowyexistence.  Drawing on reports gathered from hospital settings and in-depthinterviews with women who have had abortions, Luc Boltanski setsout to explain the ambiguous status of this social practice.Abortion, he argues, has to remain in the shadows, for it reveals acontradiction at the heart of the social contract: the principle ofthe uniqueness of beings conflicts with the postulate of theirreplaceable nature, a postulate without which no society wouldachieve demographic renewal.  This leads Boltanski to explore the way human beings areengendered and to analyze the symbolic constraints that presideover their entry into society. What makes a human being is not thefoetus as such, ensconced within the body, but rather the processby which it is taken up symbolically in speech - that is, itssymbolic adoption. But this symbolic adoption presupposes thepossibility of discriminating among embryos that areindistinguishable. For society, and sometimes for individuals, thearbitrary character of this discrimination is hard to tolerate. Thecontradiction is made bearable, Boltanski shows, by a grammaticalcategorization: the “project” foetus - adopted by itsparents, who use speech to welcome the new being and give it a name- is juxtaposed to the “tumoral” foetus, an accidentalembryo that will not be the object of a life-forming project.  Bringing together grammar, narrations of life experience and anhistorical perspective, this highly original book sheds fresh lighton a social phenomenon that is widely practised but poorlyunderstood.

Sociology

Polity

Love and Justice as Competences

People care a great deal about justice. They protest and engage in confrontations with others when their sense of justice is affronted or disturbed. When they do this, they don’t generally act in a strategic or calculating way but use arguments that claim a general validity. Disputes are commonly regulated by these ‘regimes of justice’ implicit in everyday social life. But justice is not the only regime that governs action. There are some actions that are selfless and gratuitous, and that belong to what might be called a regime of ‘peace’ or ‘love’. In the course of their everyday lives, people constantly move back and forth between these two regimes, that of justice and that of love. And everyone also has the capacity for violence, which arises when the regulation of action within either of these regimes breaks down.  In Love and Justice as Competences, Boltanski lays out this highly original framework for analysing the action of individuals as they pursue their day-to-day lives. The framework outlined in this important book is the basis for the path-breaking work that he has developed over the last twenty years – work that has examined the moral foundations of society in and through the forms of everyday conflict. For anyone who wants to understand what a critical sociology might mean today, this book is an essential text.

People care a great deal about justice. They protest and engage in confrontations with others when their sense of justice is affronted or disturbed. When they do this, they don’t generally act in a strategic or calculating way but use arguments that claim a general validity. Disputes are commonly regulated by these ‘regimes of justice’ implicit in everyday social life. But justice is not the only regime that governs action. There are some actions that are selfless and gratuitous, and that belong to what might be called a regime of ‘peace’ or ‘love’. In the course of their everyday lives, people constantly move back and forth between these two regimes, that of justice and that of love. And everyone also has the capacity for violence, which arises when the regulation of action within either of these regimes breaks down. In Love and Justice as Competences, Boltanski lays out this highly original framework for analysing the action of individuals as they pursue their day-to-day lives. The framework outlined in this important book is the basis for the path-breaking work that he has developed over the last twenty years – work that has examined the moral foundations of society in and through the forms of everyday conflict. For anyone who wants to understand what a critical sociology might mean today, this book is an essential text.

On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation

The relationship between sociology and social critique has haunted the discipline since its origins. Does critique divert sociology from its scientific project? Or is critique the ultimate goal of sociology, without which the latter would be a futile activity disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people? This issue has underpinned two divergent theoretical orientations that can be found in the discipline today: the critical sociology that was developed in its most elaborate form by Pierre Bourdieu, and the pragmatic sociology of critique developed by Luc Boltanski and his associates. 
In critical sociology, description in terms of power relations underscores the potency of mechanisms of oppression, the way the oppressed passively endure them, going so far in their alienation as to adopt the values that enslave them. Pragmatic sociology, by contrast, describes the actions of human beings who rebel but who are endowed with reason. It stresses their ability, in certain historical conditions, to rise up against their domination and construct new interpretations of reality in the service of critical activity. In this major new book Boltanski develops a framework that makes it possible to reconcile these seemingly antagonistic approaches - the one determinist and assigning the leading role to the enlightening science of the sociologist, the other concerned to stick as closely as possible to what people say and do. This labour of unification leads him to rework central notions such as practice, institution, critique and, finally, ‘social reality,' all with the aim of contributing to a contemporary renewal of practices of emancipation.

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Books by Boltanski, Luc

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Boltanski, Luc. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics

Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies)

Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies) (English and French Edition)

On Justification: Economies of Worth (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology)

On Justification: Economies of Worth (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology)

The Foetal Condition: A Sociology of Engendering and Abortion

The Foetal Condition: A Sociology of Engendering and Abortion

Love and Justice as Competences

Love and Justice as Competences

On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation