European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology

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Voicing concern and difference: from public spaces

to common-places

Laurent Thévenot

To cite this article: Laurent Thévenot (2014) Voicing concern and difference: from public
spaces to common-places, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1:1, 7-34, DOI:
10.1080/23254823.2014.905749

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European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2014
Vol. 1, No. 1, 7–34, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.905749

Voicing concern and difference: from public spaces to common-

places
Laurent Thévenot*

EHESS, Centre SIMMEL, 96 boulevard Raspail, Paris, 75006 France and CREST,
Laboratoire de Sociologie Quantitative, 60 rue Étienne Dolet, 92240 Malakoff
(Received 14 December 2013; accepted 14 March 2014)

This paper aims to clarify some of the contributions that so-called ‘pragmatic
sociology’ [sociologie pragmatique] might make to political and cultural
sociology. The appellation is commonly used to encompass a research
current that has contributed to the revival of the French social sciences for
nearly 40 years, in sociology, anthropology, political science but also
institutional economics and economic sociology – specifically ‘Economie
des conventions’: convention theory – and law, and that has lately reached
an international audience. I shall concentrate here on the line of research
that originated in the foundational model of conflicting orders of worth that
Luc Boltanski and I developed and which I expanded into a sociology of
engagements.
Keywords: pragmatic sociology; engagements; common good; worth;
criticism; voice

Introduction
Among the new features of contemporary political economy, its governing struc-
tures and the critical voices which can be heard in relation to them, the extreme
discrepancy of scales – from highly globalized to strongly localized – and diver-
sity of causes of concern raise new challenges for research in cultural and pol-
itical sociology. The spread of various ‘populist’ and extreme right movements,
in particular, might be linked to such features. There is a need to grasp both a
wide diversity of political constructions used to make issues common, in prac-
tice, and a variety of levels in the ways people are engaged when expressing
their concerns, from close familiar attachments to milieu to highly generalized
and abstracted causes. This paper seeks to clarify some of the ways in which
so-called ‘pragmatic sociology’ [sociologie pragmatique] can respond to these
challenges.

*Email: [email protected]

© 2014 European Sociological Association

8 L. Thévenot
‘Pragmatic Sociology’ and Classical North-American Pragmatism
The appellation is commonly used to encompass a research current that has con-
tributed to the revival of the French social sciences for nearly 40 years, in soci-
ology, anthropology, political science but also institutional economics and
economic sociology – specifically ‘Economie des conventions’: convention
theory – and law, and that has lately reached an international audience.1 I shall
concentrate here on the line of research that originated in the foundational
model of conflicting orders of worth that Luc Boltanski and I developed (Bol-
tanski & Thévenot, 1987, 1991, 2006) and which I have expanded into the soci-
ology of engagements (Thévenot, 1990b, 2006).2 Boltanski and I initially
addressed the following question: when parties to a dispute seek to enlarge the val-
idity of their respective claims – and thus the legitimacy of those claims – what
requirements do they have to meet? We proposed an approach to politics in
which critical activities in practice are understood to raise the level of generality
(a ‘montée en généralité’) of arguments and supporting evidence for them. We
identified the conventional forms of equivalence and qualification that actors in
conflict turn to in this generalizing process. This approach is consistent with pol-
itical and cultural sociology on the fundamental issue of ‘politicizing’ and ‘depo-
liticizing’ disputes (Eliasoph, 1998; Luhtakallio, 2012).
In spite of the epithet ‘pragmatic’, which was used in response to renewed
interest in action theory, this line of research did not develop directly out of Amer-
ican pragmatism (Stavo-Debauge, in press), which French sociologists only later
re-discovered as a consequence of the development of pragmatic sociology.3 Inter-
actionism and ethnomethodology certainly had an indirect influence. However,
pragmatic sociology also drew upon a quite different tradition in continental soci-
ology and philosophy – indeed, one of its achievements is to have revived the link
between sociology and philosophy. First Boltanski and later myself, for a shorter
period of time, were associated with Pierre Bourdieu’s research centre before we
created our own group, which we named the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et
Morale on the basis of the sociological innovation we had developed. Upstream,
we drew on Emile Durkheim’s sociology and the decisive step he took with Marcel
Mauss (Durkheim & Mauss, 1971/1903) of linking classifications or other concep-
tual categories to the constitution of groups/communities, thus paving the way for
future developments in political and cognitive sociology. Boltanski and I also
drew on Max Weber’s sociology, which influenced Bourdieu; however, we dealt
with a plurality of legitimate orders of domination, a notion that Bourdieu did
not accept. ‘Orders of worth’ govern criticisms and justifications that claim legiti-
macy (1) on the grounds that evaluations of worth ascribe qualifications for the
common good and thus benefit all; and (2) on condition that these qualifications
not be permanently ascribed to persons as statuses but rather be put to an in situ
reality test (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). The fact that in general these two pre-
requisites – the common good and the reality test – are not met gives rise to a
feeling of injustice, which we elucidate in On Justification (Boltanski & Thévenot,
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 9
2006). The governing rules that result from the meeting of these two conditions
constitute a construction that has been historically and culturally worked out to
alleviate structural tension among human beings living together. We used the
term ‘grammar’ with this particular meaning: a set of rules developed to reduce
such tension. The grammar of orders of worth lessens the tension between
unequal states of worth which have the effect of ranking human beings, and a
common, shared humanity, the latter being a kind of ideal underpinned by
various religious, ethical, and political traditions.

An analytical grid for compound communities and personalities developed

through fine-grained comparative research
In the first part of this paper, I introduce further theoretical developments in gram-
mars of commonality in the plural and regimes of engagement that help to differen-
tiate ways of voicing concerns and differing. The first category aims at the
community. It deals with ways of maintaining a composite and conflicting commu-
nity: which kinds of disagreement are integrated, which kind of difference is legit-
imate, even at the cost of sacrificing others? The second category aims at the
individual, or more precisely the personality if we think of this as a combination
of disparate components that have to be subsumed under some kind of dynamic
identity. The last category is still sociological because components depend on differ-
ent modes of relating to things and other people. These analytical tools contribute to
political sociology by offering a dual view: of the dynamics of composite conflicting
communities and of the dynamics of composite personalities or complex personal
identities. Such a dual view is needed if we want to account for the interrelated meta-
morphoses of modes of government and of selves that we observe nowadays, when
it is widely accepted that policies and management tools associated with neoliberal
governance strongly affect the constitution of the self and even explicitly demand
some specific auto-regulation and auto-management of this self.
Few theoretical resources are available to comprehend these two metamor-
phoses jointly, with the outstanding exception of Michel Foucault’s conceptions
of ‘governmentality’ and ‘techniques of the self’ (Foucault, 1991), and even
there the two conceptualizations are not analytically interconnected. Comparative
research also requires developing integrated analytical tools. Instead of referring to
stable and possibly reified dissimilarities and to national cultures and histories –
such as French Republicanism or American individualism – we do better to
break these entities down into more elementary, transversal, dynamic categories.
When we do so, dissimilarities and metamorphoses appear as various, variable
combinations of elementary components and bring to light a rich dynamics of
cross-influences, borrowing and learning mechanisms.4 For example, comparative
research on the US and France (Lamont & Thévenot, 2000; Thévenot & Lamont,
2000) was a first move towards the identification of two different grammars used
to communicate on issues and differences. Whereas the grammar of orders of
worth allows radical criticism and clashes around conflicting qualifications for
10 L. Thévenot
the common good, the other, more frequently referred to in the American polity, is
a liberal grammar that tames disagreements and channels them within the bound-
aries of interests or preferences expressed by individual choice in public. A further
continuous dialogue with cultural and political sociologists working in convergent
directions helped to enlarge this comparative perspective (Alapuro & Lonkila,
2012; Eliasoph, 2011; Eliasoph & Lichterman, 2003; Luhtakallio, 2012; Luhtakal-
lio & Eliasoph, in press).
The second part of this article presents a third grammar that usefully sup-
plements the categories commonly used for comparative research. Although
widely implemented, this grammar is not taken into account in most approaches
to politics and participation in public spaces or arenas. And yet it plays a key
role in the making of commonalities and is involved in a variety of contemporary
social movements – for the protection of urban places or nature – that are anchored
in local and personal attachments while giving them a broader commonality. Clar-
ifying the grammar of this type of commonality also helps us understand how it
becomes an instrument in contemporary so-called populist movements.

How are composite communities and composite personalities maintained?

The identification of a plurality of conflicting orders of worth governing criticizing
and justifying practices that refer to conceptions of the common good brought to
light a certain sense of injustice in action. Yet it seemed to leave key questions
for political sociology unanswered: what about other constructions, ones that con-
trast with these ‘vertical’, i.e., hierarchical, orders of worth and promote instead
‘horizontal’ modes of dispute or dispute resolution? What about the individual inter-
ests that are assumed to rule agents’ behaviours and that do not fit conceptions of the
common good? What asymmetries of power are involved in these constructions?

Approaching powers through coordination modes and capacities

The answers I propose involve further developing the framework that connects
power to coordination. Shaping people and things in conventional forms produces
capacities – or powers – to communicate and coordinate, that are needed for living
in human communities. But investments in such coordinative forms (classifi-
cations, standards, rules, etc.) produce, when individuals or social classes
capture them, strong asymmetrical powers over other people. Coordination may
become direct subordination or, more subtly, coordination powers involve cogni-
tive and evaluative formats that turn out to be quite oppressive of other formats and
their users. This is notably the case with benchmarking forms which are widely
used nowadays for comparative ranking. First, they put unequal pressure on the
different levels of the organization (Bruno & Didier, 2013). Second, their exclu-
sive focus on engaging in plans or objectives, and even more restrictively their
emphasis on the output of such objectives, is typical of governance through objec-
tives (Thévenot, 2011b) which suppresses cooperative modes of coordination and
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 11
personal familiarization in the workplace, both components making the value of
métiers (Charles, 2012). Coordinative powers also bear on alleged ‘horizontal’
procedures of negotiating interests, and even on ‘networks’, as both of these con-
figurations require asymmetry – creating kinds of commonality and coordinative
powers.
I enlarged the notion of coordinative powers to personal capacities or abilities
that imply coordinating with oneself and are a prerequisite for coordination with
others. These theoretical and methodological enlargements build on two interrelated
kinds of research. On the one hand, I carried out, in cooperative projects, compara-
tive research on how criticism and dissension are expressed, identifying a variety of
evaluative frameworks which are understood to be particularly legitimate when it
comes to building commonality and therefore channeling conflicts. We observed
the material equipment of evaluative frames and the evidence that is considered rel-
evant when putting those frames to the test, a move that enlarges the scope of social
movement literature. I co-organized several collaborative and international pro-
grammes with the US and Russia bringing together sociologists from various
countries chosen because of their strong political and cultural disparities – the
point being to investigate some of those very disparities. This produced material
that helped me complement the initial model of conflicting orders of worth, and inte-
grate it into a more general framework on ways of making commonality and differ-
ing. I identified two additional constructions, with the aim of correcting some biases
in categories used for comparison in political and sociological research, biases due
to the narrow dependence of those categories are on the Western historical and cul-
tural contexts in which they were elaborated. On the other hand, we conducted a
different kind of collective research on the reconstruction of welfare policies
around individual autonomy and self-management. Clarifying the impact of such
new imperatives led me to come back to notions of personal identity and personality.
I conceived the construction of personality – or self – as based on a variety of
relations to the world that contribute to self-assurance. Whereas in our former col-
laborative research, Boltanski and I concentrated on how people draw on their com-
mitment to justifications and criticisms that refer to legitimate orders of worth to
reach commonality through modes of coordination with others, I changed the per-
spective in order to study modes of coordination with oneself. Such self-coordi-
nation has to be drawn upon to form expectations about someone else’s course of
action when coordinating with others. Socially acknowledged modes of coordi-
nation with oneself should thus be a part of the social science research agenda.
Moreover, their analysis allows for a more dynamic approach to the notion of iden-
tity. In sociology, conceptions tend to be polarized between an over-stabilized and
over-collectivized definition, on the one hand, and, on the other, an extremely flex-
ible and individualized notion insisting on the choice or bricolage between a kind of
portfolio of multiple possible identities.
To appreciate the tension involved in building personality and commonality,
we have to distinguish between a wide range of different ways of committing
oneself, from commitment to public and collective causes to highly personal
12 L. Thévenot
and intimate concerns or familiar habits. I prefer the word ‘engage’ to ‘commit’ as
it enlarges the usual understanding of the promise or pledge beyond formal or
explicit arrangements. My assumption is that the relative continuity of the self,
from one place and time to another, is sustained by the ‘pledge’ [gage], guarantee,
or security, deposited in a proper environment, the appropriateness of the securing
environment which provides this pledge varying with the regime of engagement.
Appropriateness is not restricted to property rights, or instrumentality of resources
as means to an end. It covers all the ways an environment has to be prepared or
shaped within proper ‘formats’ to support a particular regime of engaging with it.
Paying close attention to proper or what I call ‘formatted’ environments and to
the prior ‘investments in form’ that are required to shape them, sociology of engage-
ments makes room for an ‘equipped humanity’ (Thévenot, 2002). The dependency
of human beings’ capacities and powers on such formatted and structured environ-
ments sheds light on mechanisms of domination and oppression that are most indir-
ect: they work through the trans-format-ion of the format of these environments that
is taken into account in policies and organizations.
Relating self-assurance and powers to a properly formatted environment, we
systematically investigated the consequences that contemporary policies have for
these powers. Collective empirical research has been done on the metamorphosis
of European Union welfare policies – in the social, health, education, and subsidized
housing areas – designed to get closer to the person (Breviglieri, Pattaroni, & Stavo-
Debauge, 2003). I have shown through theoretical and empirical research how ‘gov-
erning through standards’ (Thévenot, 1997, 2009) also deeply affects the consist-
ency of the self. This mode of governing debases former state-led welfare policy
and handling of economic, environmental and social issues. It bypasses nation
states, depoliticizes debates and substitutes private standard-setting bodies for pol-
itical arenas.
Looking back at these two bodies of empirical research, we notice their inter-
relation. The first focuses on the dynamics of problematic communities.5 How do
actors cope with conflicting evaluations that have to be integrated somehow
through coordination and commonality to maintain the existence of communities?
What use is made of the structural coordinative powers – and their equipment –
that are associated with the making of commonality? By contrast, the second
kind of research focuses on the complex dynamics of personalities, in the sense
of a personal identity that is recomposed in the course of pragmatic biographies
(Thévenot, in press-b). This dual approach – through community and personality
dynamics – sheds light on the same core problem raised by living together: the
problematic integration of a wide variety of modes of evaluating and coordinating
one’s own behavior, as well as coordinating with other actors. If one takes
seriously the strong discrepancy between public commitments and more personal
ones, the problem of how to integrate the full range of commitments comes into
view. Let us now consider two types of analytical tools designed to deal with
this issue.
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 13
Maintaining personal identity by engaging oneself with the world: from close
personal familiarity to qualification for the common good
Coping with uncertainty when striving to coordinate with others requires having
assumptions about elementary ways of coordinating with oneself that make poss-
ible expectations about someone else’s undertaking. To elucidate this prerequisite,
we identified a variety of valued modes of engaging oneself with the world that
extend the notion of promise or commitment beyond formal and discursive guaran-
tees of consistency. Regimes of engagement strongly differ from one another in
scope, the kind of good they foster and possible mutuality, from the ease obtained
by close personal familiarization to qualification for the common good. This wide-
ranging notion of engagement offers an understanding of the multi-layered fabric of
personalities and resulting inner tensions. This composition of the person cannot be
fully grasped by the topographic and dual opposition between public and private
spheres, nor by the aggregative distinction between collectives and individuals.
When characterizing privacy and individualism through such differentiations,
one misses a significant dissimilarity between two regimes. Engaging in personal
familiarity reassures through past habituation, this ease being warranted by custo-
mized personal belongings and a personalized environment. Engaging in an indi-
vidual plan implies a projection of the individual will into the future, granted by an
environment suitable for functional utilization. These two ways of engaging with
the environment involve contrasting kinds of self-assurance, and time orientation.
They also rely on proper environmental arrangements that differ strikingly.
This distinction is needed to clarify current cultural and political changes
which are generally covered by the broad notion of ‘individualization’. With
Marc Breviglieri, I ran a collective program named ‘Politiques du proche’
which studied efforts to bring political action closer to personal and individual

Table 1. Four regimes of engagement with the world.

Engaging in
exploration
Engaging in Engaging in (Auray, 2007,
justification for an individual Engaging in Auray & Vetel,
the common good plan familiarity 2014)
Evaluative Worth (qualifying Accomplished Ease, Excitement by
good for the common will comfort, novelty
good) personal
convenience
Information Conventional Functional Usual, Surprising
format congenial
Capacity, Qualified, worthy Autonomous, Attached to Curious, explorer
power willful
Mutual Legitimate Joint project, Close Play
engagement convention of contract friendship,
coordination intimacy
14 L. Thévenot
concerns. We compared this process in two domains of political action: social
movements that are today, more frequently than before, based on local and per-
sonal attachments; and public policies that are reformed to get closer to individ-
uals instead of dealing with them through collective categories. We studied the
ongoing metamorphosis of welfare policies by the observation, in France, of the
situated engagements of workers and their practices in the domains of social
work, health, and education. We revealed the pragmatic requirements of the
mottos of individual responsibility and activation by highlighting the prominent
place taken by engaging in an individual plan. This regime is a prerequisite for
notions of autonomy, individual responsibility, choice, project-making, contract,
all of which are promoted by such policies.6 It expanded at the expense of other
commitments and associated evaluations, such as solidarity and egalitarian com-
mitment to a civic order of worth. It thus threatens the engagement in civic qua-
lification that formerly prevailed among agents who were in charge of
implementing these policies. This diagnosis and the distinction between engage-
ment regimes not only focuses on relationships between individuals and groups,
as Robert Castel’s remarkably insightful notion of the ‘disaffiliation’ process
does (Castel, 1995), but also makes explicit another burdensome transform-
ation, ensuing from the dominant position that these reformed policies
ascribe to engaging in an individual plan.
However, empirical research has shown that highly experienced agents
involved in these policies combine engaging in a plan with other regimes
that are not taken into account in the design of the policies. In particular,
they pay attention to what affects the comfort of persons when they are famil-
iarly engaging with their surroundings, and take care of this familiarized
environment along with persons themselves. When professional care is
involved, it creates tensions with institutions and law, which are sometimes
neglected by the literature on care, as Luca Pattaroni has shown (Pattaroni,
2005). This concern to maintain ease of familiar attachments and the combi-
nation of a wide plurality of regimes of engagement including the qualification
for civic worth, calls for skill in the ‘art of composition’. That skill may charac-
terize the practice of ‘intermediary professions’, like social work, healthcare,
and teaching, which are caught between diverging imperatives: that of including
or keeping persons within a political community with its common goods and
institutions, providing personalized care for close attachments, and empowering
an autonomous agency which will sustain responsible individual projects and
plans. Lack of conceptual and social recognition of, and financial remuneration
for, their ‘art of composition’ exposes this aspect of the ‘intermediary pro-
fessions’ to exploitation (Thévenot, 2011b).
The distinction between these two regimes also clarifies ways of voicing con-
cerns that are grounded in close personal attachments and can be observed in con-
temporary expressions of disagreement and conflict. These personal attachments
challenge the usual definition of collective social movements, yet do not fit the
format of individual strategies or projects. Participative democracy can make
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 15
room for the format of individual projects, but usually not for the format of fam-
iliar engagement (Richard-Ferroudji & Barreteau, 2012). The sociology of
engagements allows us to trace oppressions and humiliations that are felt when
familiar attachments are affected and the resulting harm cannot be expressed in
an argumentative and critical format. If such oppression does not come to
public attention, it may turn against the victim of it, as when, in some former
public services subjected to privatization and ‘new management’, a series of
suicides occurred (Renou, 2010). In such ‘laboratories of antipathy’, the reorgan-
ization of the workplace dramatically affects the familiar environment and its basic
support for self-confidence and pride.
Below the level of an individual projecting herself in a plan or a strategy, and
possibly displaying her individual interest, preference, and choice for an optional
plan in public, we can usefully identify another regime of engaging, one distinct
from familiarizing. Among various contemporary bodily expressions of discon-
tent, some may be aggrandized into inspiration worth and artistic manifestations
(Thévenot, 2014a), while others may stay at the level of a deeply idiosyncratic
and emotional experience of discovering the world, which led us to identify, on
the basis of Nicolas Auray’s research (Auray, 2007; Auray & Vétel, 2014), the
regime of engaging in exploration, its dynamics, particular mode of evaluation
and relation to the environment. In contrast to the two previous ones, this
regime is exclusively present-oriented. Value is placed on surprise and the assur-
ance of an excited self depends on the unflagging rejuvenation of the environment
– including one’s body – which has to be arranged to produce the shock of
newness. Such a renewable milieu is properly arranged by contemporary tech-
niques of information and communication that deliver a permanently ‘refreshed’
display on a screen able to prelaunch curiosity. This engagement is a basic com-
ponent of contemporary consumption and production, and contributes to the blur-
ring of boundaries between the two spheres.
These several ways of engaging with a close or idiosyncratic environment
reveal how distant they are from engagement in a public cause or public
space. We should avoid presuming such collectivity, publicity or even common-
ality in interactional spaces. The large movement of reduction of the notion of
usage to what makes sense in a public space assumes an anthropology founded
on speech and visual perception (Breviglieri & Stavo-Debauge, 2009). The
focus on public detachment fosters distrust toward various approaches of tangi-
ble familiarization of an environment at hand (Breviglieri, 2009; Stavo-
Debauge, 2003). It overly simplifies the sociological task, and the practical
task that actors fulfill to build commonalities on the basis of these highly per-
sonal modes of engaging with a close environment. Taking into account close
engagements, we are not abandoning the sociological focus on sociality in favor
of psychology. These engagements are still social because they are commonly
acknowledged. And yet close engagements (in familiarity or exploration)
depend on a kind idiosyncratic hold on the environment that is not easily
grasped by someone else. They do not allow the kind of commonality that is
16 L. Thévenot
assumed by current notions of (collective) practices or interactions. They also
demand methods of investigation which include visual analysis and video
recording to capture the trying and testing moments when such close engage-
ments are involved (Breviglieri, 1997; Viot, Pattaroni, & Berthoud, 2010).

Maintaining commonality in the plural by communicating and integrating

differing voices
I proposed a simple model of grammars of commonality in the plural which
relies on the two operations of communicating and integrating differing
voices to make them part of a larger whole. The need to situate the grammar
of plural orders of worth in a wider variety of constructions brought to the
fore by comparative research, appeared when we put this model to the test of
a US–French comparative research program in which we investigated repertoires
of evaluation used to deal with hot topics (Lamont & Thévenot, 2000). We
observed that all orders of worth are used in both the US and France – with
strong differences in their respective weights, mutual combinations in compro-
mises, and strategic use. Although the US movement for civil rights undoubtedly
qualifies for ‘civic worth’, with its anonymous, egalitarian collective solidarity,
we noticed that in the US context, the term civic was frequently used differently.
Additional empirical research led me to identify a second liberal grammar of
individuals in a liberal public. The distinction between the two grammars illumi-
nates contemporary metamorphoses of welfare policies and economic and politi-
cal modes of governing, all covered by the relatively loose, all-embracing notion
of neoliberalism.

Two grammars based on conflicting conceptions of the common good vs. different
individual preferences
Our pragmatic approach to politics focuses on basic operations needed to practi-
cally voice concerns and differ in conflict. I concentrated on these core operations
to distinguish a variety of grammars which have been historically and culturally
elaborated to deal with the same structural tension. Instead of presuming a
(public) space of communication – understood in the narrow sense of information
exchange – and because information requires shared formatting, we have to pay
close attention to the prior transformation of personal concerns into the format
which commonality demands. This elementary operation of communicating
voice is hard. It assumes that some discrepancies met in personally engaging
with a close environment are sacrificed.
In the first grammar of plural orders of worth, the sacrifice issuing from communi-
cation is considerable since any concern has to be formatted in relation to a character-
ization of the common good. Not only the argument itself, but also the material
evidence which supports it, have to qualify for an order of worth which sustains an
evaluation aiming at such a common good. By comparison, in the second liberal
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 17
grammar, the sacrifice is less. Whatever personal concern is expressed, it has to be for-
matted and presented as a choice – or preference – that an individual makes between
publicly available options. In no way should this formatted individual choice – desig-
nated as ‘preference’, or ‘stake’, or ‘interest’ – be confused with any kind of personal
concern. Too deeply personal, intimate, or emotional concerns are not appropriate for
liberal communication (Centemeri, in press; Stavo-Debauge, 2012).
A second main operation regards the possibility of differing and coping with
plurality. In his Politics, Aristotle warned us that ‘a city is by nature a plurality,
and when its unification goes too far, from a city it becomes a family’ (Aristotle,
1962, II, 2, p. 85). A strong accent is nowadays put on differences. Yet the infinity
of possible differences is channeled by the diverse grammars, each of them select-
ing a relevant kind of difference and way of differing. Because of this channeling,
each construction offers a distinct mode of integrating differences – composing
difference in the old sense of settling a disagreement that results in the composition
of a pluralist common ground for the community.
In the first grammar of plural orders of worth, differing is strongly critical,
resulting from the denunciation of an order of worth in the name of another (Bol-
tanski & Thévenot, 2006). Although clashes can be intense, common features
shared by all orders of worth allow the possibility of local and temporal integration
of differences between several orders of worth and result in what we analyzed as
‘compromise’ (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006.). The historical threat brought by
conflicting religious convictions which aim at the common good and lead to
civil war is at the origin of liberalism and still haunts it (Stavo-Debauge, 2012).
In this liberal grammar, differences are less dramatically expressed, because
they are expressed as individual choices or interests. Consequently criticism is
only allowed at a lesser degree. The integration of differences is achieved by nego-
tiation and bargaining between ‘stakeholders’.

The support of intermediary objects in the composition of commonality:

qualifications for the common good vs. options publicly chosen by individuals
A medium is required to communicate one’s personal concern and to differ.
Let’s call it an ‘intermediary object’. It has a material support but the term
‘object’ more widely designates the focus of human beings’ attention or
emotion towards which communicating and differing expressions are directed.
This object is ‘intermediate’ since it lies between several persons who strive
to communicate and differ.7 In the grammar of plural orders of worth, inter-
mediary objects are those that qualify for a common good, or make possible
compromises between several of them. Thus, civic objects of public service,
such as tariff equalization and spatial organization of delivery which provide
solidarity and equality of access among citizens, used to be key intermediary
objects that supported welfare policies. They were redesigned for services
that qualify for market competition order of worth, or devices that aim at a
compromise between market and civic worth. In the liberal grammar of a
18 L. Thévenot
Table 2. Three grammars of commonality in the plural.
Grammar of individuals Grammar of personal
Grammar of plural orders of choosing among diverse affinities to multiple
worth options in a liberal public common-places
Intermediary objects: entities Intermediary objects: options Intermediary objects:
qualifying for the common publicly accessible for personally invested
good (worth) or allowing a individual choices common-places
compromise between
different orders of worth
Communicating by Communicating by Communicating by
aggrandizing personal transforming personal personal affinity to a
concern into worth as attachments into individual common-place
qualification for the choices for options open to
common good the public
Composing [settling] a Composing a difference by Composing a difference
difference [disagreement] individually opining and by diversely
by critical denunciation negotiation between associating common-
and by compromising individual choices places
between the plurality of
forms of worth
Assumed background Assumed background Assumed background
engagement: engaging in engagement: engaging in engagement: engaging
justification for the an individual plan in familiarity
common good

plurality of individual choices, intermediary objects are the publicly knowable

options to be chosen. Thus social and healthcare services were reshaped to
provide ‘transparent’ options between which an ‘informed’ individual could
choose and give her ‘consent’. This reshaping and focus on intermediary
objects formatted as options turns out to be quite inappropriate and even
oppressive when weighing on vulnerable persons longing for care or depending
on their care-givers.8
Structures that mediate differing expressions limit what is acknowledgeable as
a relevant difference, and channel conflicts, guiding them through the medium
which is used to integrate differences into a composite community. Intermediary
objects constitute structures of power, domination processes resulting from their
coordinative power. The analysis of these dominant coordinative powers is
needed when measurement, statistical, and benchmarking tools (Bruno &
Didier, 2013) are of growing significance for policies that include their own evalu-
ation and thus seem to make useless any additional criticism. We can draw distinc-
tions between policies and between states from the grammars and the ways in
which they are combined. The link between states and statistics (Desrosières,
1998/1993) can be viewed in a larger perspective on the ‘politics of statistics’
(Thévenot, 1990a). Fundamental links between various grammars serving
to build commonality and variations in the components of the statistical
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 19
chain – questionnaires, codification, methods of data analysis – together with
varying sociological and economical theories provide measurable represen-
tations of the community and evaluations of policies (Thévenot, 2011a).

A third grammar devoid of public detachment: personal affinities to a

plurality of common-places
Putting to an enlarged empirical test our analytical grid, we undertook another piece
of comparative and collective research, between Russia and France (Thévenot,
2005). Avoiding a static comparison of national cultures, we wanted to single
out transversal components of political and cultural constructions, and compare
their combinations. We expected this new fieldwork to reveal gaps that had to be
filled, as did the former US–France comparison. It eventually led to a third
grammar of commonality in the plural.9 This grammar is not Russian any more
than the liberal grammar is American. Facilitated by its exceptional extension in
the Russian field, its identification helps us to discern its use in France and other
European countries.

Communicating with or without words

This grammar opens new perspectives for research because it involves modes of
communication and integration of differing expressions which do not require the
detachment of public spaces from personal attachments, as the two previous gram-
mars do, nor the discursive character associated with arguing in a public sphere.
Political science and sociology usually presume such a detachment when
dealing with public problems.
Alexei Yurchak comments on a kind of communication (soobschenie) which
was largely used in the Soviet Union and involves ‘nonverbal interaction and
spending time together or being together’, while being ‘different from just
“hanging out” with friends, as used in the United States, because it always
involves an intense and intimate commonality and intersubjectivity’ (Yurchak,
2006, p. 148). Along with other authors, he mentions that the term obshchenie
(relations) has the same root as obshschii (common) and obshchina (commune)
and designates ‘not the exchange between individuals but the communal space
where everyone’s personhood is dialogized to produce a common intersubjective
sociality’ (Yurchak, 2006, p. 148). However, he does not point to the role played
by intermediary objects, nor the strongly personal engagement which has to be
invested in these objects and results in an emotional arousal.
On the basis of his fieldwork on Russian managers’ transactions and reciprocal
expectations, Markku Lonkila refers to Yurchak’s characterization of this kind of
communication, and distinguishes it from the classical ‘norm of reciprocity’ and
its barter balance, noticing that this way of relating to others is not in line with
the gift/counter-gift (Lonkila, 2010, pp. 106–111).
20 L. Thévenot
Intermediary objects: common-places
This third grammar differs from the others in the kind of intermediary objects which
are needed for communicating and differing.10 They do not require qualifications
for the common good, nor compromises between them. Neither are they shaped
as publicly well-defined options to be chosen by individuals, and taken as stakes
and interests in negotiation among a liberal public. Intermediary objects are
common-places. To prevent misunderstandings, a caveat is needed. The notion
does not convey the depreciatory connotation of a platitude, but goes back to the
original meaning of a common place. In such a locus communis, various personal
expressions find a common ground to communicate deep concerns, attachments
and feelings. Issuing from the classical notion of koinos topos used in rhetoric to
designate a general theme, such common-places are characterized by deeply per-
sonal and emotional investments. I will conventionally hyphenate the term
common-place to indicate this distinctive understanding. These common-places
and the kind of communication they allow make this third grammar much more hos-
pitable than the two previous ones to personal concerns which rest on familiar
engagements. Nevertheless, communication requires a transformation to express
familiar concerns and attachments through common-places.11
Although they can be said to be symbolic, common-places are not merely
symbols, or signs, because they are the vehicle for deeply personal attachments.
Russian semioticians under the influence of Yuri Lotman (Lotman & Uspenskij,
1984) extract models from literary texts and look at the way they codify. They
evaluate the ‘semioticity of behavior’ and the ‘degree of semiotization’ in the
‘mythology of everyday life and social behavior’ (Lotman & Ouspienski, 1990,
p. 264). This semiotics is more pragmatically oriented than the French semiology
of Roland Barthes. Yet both approaches tend to reduce the practical engaging of
signs to recognition.12 In her work dedicated to ‘common places’ in Russia
(Boym, 1994), Svetlana Boym wants to ‘demystify’ myths of Russian and
Soviet culture and even Lotman’s ‘perpetuation’ of them (p. 30). She refers to
Mythologies (Barthes, 1979/1957) in the very subtitle of her book. In spite of
divergences in our research strategies, I found in her work a number of
common-places which I would relate to the third grammar.
Let us look at concrete common-places taken from our own research on the
process of learning this grammar. Because of its extension in Russia, this
grammar is taught at school through exercises of written essays. This educational
process diverges from the French teaching of ‘dissertation’ in higher classes of
college. That latter exercise involves contradictory arguments stated in general
terms, and is a training for participating in a potential public space which needs
to be detached from personal concerns. These dissertations should display justifi-
cation and criticism according to the grammar of plural orders of worth. In a still
different educational perspective, American – and more generally liberal – edu-
cation fosters the expression of individual opinions. A current examination ques-
tion for an essay, in a Soviet or Russian college, would be: What does the character
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 21
of Natasha Rostova mean to you? A French essay on War and Peace would, in
contrast, require the confrontation of rival interpretations drawn from literary
studies. The pupil will engage in a dialogue between contrasted philosophical
or social messages found in it, mimicking a public space of debate. Any intrusion
of personal concerns into this discourse would be seen as misplaced subjectivity.
By contrast, Russian pupils are asked to carefully relate their own personal life to
the novel’s character. To express the pupil’s failure in this task, the teacher will tell
her that, in her essay, Natasha Rostova is nothing but a cliché (the same word in
Russian). Without the expression of a personal affinity to the common-place, this
object remains superficial, a surface, without being personally invested. The lack
of personal affinity with the intermediary object, and deficiency in expressing per-
sonal attachment when communicating through the common-place, disqualify
communication according to this grammar. The common-place is then reduced
to a surface devoid of any depth, a superficial cliché.13
Common-places are misunderstood when viewed as collective entities assum-
ing holism and lack of individuality. Stereotyping and labeling have been at the
core of social psychology and systematically suspected of conformism, and of
being the basis for dangerous political behaviors. This pertinent worry has so
far prevented exploration of the possibility that reference to tokens taken as
common-places might leave room for the expression of personal attachments
and offer possibilities of differing.

The variable geometry of commonality

Another feature of this third grammar, which might also hinder its identification as
a political matrix, comes from the large variation of scale and variable geometry of
common-places. A tiny community of two lovers produces, and counts on the
support of, highly specific common-places elaborated with emotionally invested
places, quotes from literature, songs or films, and verbal expressions belonging
exclusively to the enamored lovers. Friendly common-places of limited scope
might find a larger number of personal affinities, getting progressively bigger
[‘de proche en proche’].14 In his paper on ‘War songs as an affective medium’
(Oushakine, 2011), Serguei Oushakine mentions an observation in the US
which shows both the role of this grammar in this context and the strikingly vari-
able geometry of common-places. On 11 September 2006, at the World Trade
Center site commemoration, Susan Sliwak, whose husband died on 9/11, said
the following: ‘There is one thing my heart wants to say above all the rest, feelings
best expressed in the words of an American song: “How much do I love you?”’
(Oushakine, 2011, pp. 248–249). This woman personally invests a common-
place which offers intimate communication with her husband and their children,
whom she also mentions in her speech. However, the kind of intermediary
token she invests and the situation extend the communication through the
common-place to 1000 mourners gathered at the World Trade Center, and many
more seeing it on the internet. In spite of this, Oushakine writes that ‘the revelation
22 L. Thévenot
of the personal connection with the dead was replaced by a touching yet imperso-
nal quotation from a popular jazz-band song’ (Oushakine, 2011, p. 249). Yet the
quotation, precisely because of the mode of communication through personal affi-
nities, is anything but impersonal. Oushakine adds to his comment on ‘the cliché’ a
reference to Theodor Adorno on the impoverished quality of the musical material
of popular music (Adorno, 2002/1941, p. 452). The link with Adorno seems to me
misleading since his critical analysis of popular music, far from capturing the kind
of communication that the third grammar clarifies, is dominated by the character-
ization of popular music as ‘structural standardization’ which ‘aims at standard
reactions’ (Adorno, 2002/1941, pp. 438, 441). Adorno (2002/1941) names
‘pseudo-individualization [ … ] endowing cultural mass production with the
halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself’, which
keeps customers ‘in line’ by means of ‘pre-digested’ products (p. 445). This criti-
cal analysis of the marketization and standardization of musical products is
undoubtedly relevant but misses the identification of another possible communi-
cation through common-places and not clichés.
Globalized software sustaining social networks is frequently designed to allow
communication through personal affinities to such common-places. It includes
compromises with two other modes of aggrandizing personal expressions. First,
common-places happen to be de facto market goods and services, and items
which qualify for the worth of fame (‘trendy’). Second, deep personal affinities
might be exposed in blogs but the design of software usually reduces this personal
affinity to a digital expression of individual choice (‘I like’) which characterizes
the liberal public.
Previous considerations might lead to the following question: is not this third
grammar more of a cultural than political construction? The empirical examination
of the implementation of this grammar actually challenges this distinction. This
third grammar is involved in grassroots mobilizations which do not always fit clas-
sical social movement frames. Boris Gladarev has shown that urban movements of
protest in Leningrad deliberately claimed to be ‘cultural’ so as not to fall under the
accusation of anti-Soviet activities (Gladarev, 2011), a strategy which still goes on
today (Volkov, 2012). Protests anchored in personal and familiar attachment to
places – not only historical monuments but old trees or courtyards too – can never-
theless attain a large scope and level of commonality. Places or monuments are
protected not only as historical relics but as common-places which are invested
personally and emotionally. The name of a major association which still flourishes
in St Petersburg, ‘City Alive’ [Jivoy gorod] attests to this mode of engaging with
places. Contributing to the observation, and to the synthesis, of a large number of
mobilizations in contemporary Russia, Carine Clément (Clément, 2008, 2012,
2013) notes that most mobilizations in contemporary Russia are generated from
troubles affecting the close and familiar environment of everyday life. Among
people who experience them, some are led to transform their mode of engaging
and try out militant practices, escaping mistrust, conformity, and paternalistic
expectations with regard to authorities and the state (Clément, 2012).
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 23
The role of this grammar of common-places in mobilizations is not peculiar to
Russia. In her extended research on reactions to the Seveso ecological disaster,
Laura Centemeri documented the local and collectively debated elaboration of
memory places and ‘memory path’ (Centemeri, 2011) which actually operate as
common-places. These common-places have been elaborated and discussed
among members of the community – but not elected representatives who would
qualify for civic worth. In her research on mobilization against the extension of
the Milano-Malpensa airport, she brings to the fore a segment of the mobilization
process which consists in communicating through common-places which are
anchored on the domain threatened by the planned third runway. In conjunction
with the collective ‘No Terza Pista’, the association ‘Viva Via Gagio’ promotes
emotional and sensitive modes of experiencing places and communicating
through them, starting with the Via Gagio itself. This unpaved way crosses a heath-
land viewed as distinctive and emblematic of the region. The place and its surround-
ings are not only symbols. Value is placed on walking on it, enjoying the landscape,
regarding it with deep affection (as ‘caro’, dear), and communicating this personal
investment through writings, poems, songs, pictures, videos. Politicians or celebri-
ties are themselves invited to walk on the path and filmed when they do.
Expectations of communication via such spatial common-places are frequently
observed through the demand that people who suffer from damage to their per-
sonal attachments say to political representatives and experts: ‘Come and see!’
(Richard-Ferroudji, 2011; Thévenot, Moody, & Lafaye, 2000; Cheyns and Théve-
not ongoing research on RSPO and small palm oil planters protests). More than a
simple presence in the field, which does not obviously lead to noticing the familiar
and personal clues which carry evidence of the demander’s attachments, inter-
mediary tokens operating as common-places are needed.
Communicating via personal affinities to common-places can also be observed as
a significant part of the daily life of workers unions activists, when they remain close
to rank and file members and other employees and have conversations with them at
the workplace (Charles, 2012), or when they meet with other militants and commu-
nicate their hard and good times. In his research on the history and contemporary
practices of the French Federal Union SUD (Solidaires, Unitaires, Democratiques),
which issued from the left-wing of CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique
du Travail), Gildas Renou threw light on such emotional communication which
can lead to the kind of effervescence – he refers to Durkheim (Durkheim, 1960/
1912) – which is a major component of commonality and of the making of politics
on the ground of this workplace experience (Renou, in press). Renou noticed that
even in this radical organization, when the federation representatives meet annually
in Paris, members of the Political Bureau do not pay much attention.

Differing by associating common-places differently

The second characteristic of each of the grammars of commonality that we ident-
ified is the plural: how does this third grammar make room for a plurality of
24 L. Thévenot
voices? Which kind of differing and differences does it take into account? Which
dynamics of integrating plural voices does it foster? These questions are particu-
larly relevant to politics that make use of this grammar of common-places, and we
shall consider several reductive or instrumental utilizations of it in the last conclus-
ive section.
Olga Koveneva, whose comparative research on Russian and French construc-
tions of political communities (Koveneva, 2011) contributed to the identification
of this grammar, showed how it makes differing possible, in contrast to the idea of
consensual community. She observed the extremely diverse uses of a protected
natural park in one of Moscow’s suburbs, which would raise – and does so in
some limited arenas of publicization and argumentation – harsh denunciations
because of the conflicting qualifications involved: green worth for protected
species; market and fame orders of worth for a 4×4 rally sponsored by Nestlé;
civic worth for free access to all citizens; inspired worth for a holy spring, etc.
Yet, through the grammar of personal affinities to common-places, differing and
divergent voices can be expressed without the distant mediation of the sort of
public representatives which Koveneva finds much developed in the case of a Par-
isian suburban park. In the Russian case, the same common-place (Life) can be
associated with either one of two others, resulting in evaluative attitudes which
strikingly differ and lead to strong discrepancy between politics of nature that
would respectively refer to each of these two associations. Life can be connected
to the common-place of wild living creatures, which nature-lovers attached to rare
bees find personal affinity with. Or it can be connected to the primordial liveliness
of human life, which is emotionally invested by so-called extreme sports prac-
titioners. Despite these divergences, the discrepancy of uses can be locally
hosted in the sporting club of the park and its festive celebrations. This remarkable
flexibility of associations goes with the plasticity of common-places themselves,
which can never be as precisely defined as in the case of qualified objects or
options open to individual choice. These features of the third grammar illuminate
the extreme variety and versatility of combination among political positions,
found not only in strange alliances between extreme right and extreme left activists
but within the same persons, a situation which puzzles most Western political ana-
lysts. These combinations found in the present Russian Nazbol (National-Bolshe-
vik) party and in its founding figure Eduard Limonov are proliferating in
contemporary Russia, though they can be always found in populist configurations.
Anna Colin Lebedev’s extensive research on the Russian NGO ‘Soldiers’
Mothers’ (Colin Lebedev, 2012, 2013) showed commonality built on a complex
and sophisticated combination of orders of worth (civic and domestic), but also
many common-places carried by literature, poetry, and tales of mothers and
their children. In research extending around the ‘Ukrainian Union of Afghanistan
War Veterans (USVA)’ Colin Lebedev (2010) pointed to a variety of practices of
personal affinity to common-places. Thus, memorials do not remain official public
monuments. Apart from a candle or religious postcard which would also be found
on family graves, or a piece of bread and glass of vodka near the feet of the bronze
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 25
soldier, some persons took care to fix a cigarette between his fingers. Soldiers’
songs play a major role as common-places, relating to one of a wider scope: broth-
erhood. Most interestingly for our present discussion of plurality, Colin Lebedev
notices the extraordinary pluralist association of common-places related to the
Veterans Union, which the concrete arrangement of its Zhitomir branch displays.

In the main room, on one wall were hung four portraits of the Russian Emperor
Nicolas II, his wife and his children. On the other wall were exposed three huge
icons and a sword. The picture on the Chairman’s mobile phone represented the
Holy Virgin and the ring tone was ‘God save the Tsar’, Imperial Russia’s anthem.
I asked my interviewee if this office was really that of USVA and he explained
that, in fact, it was the office of the local Assembly of Nobility he also chaired
(without being noble himself). During our interview, he explained his engagement
in Komsomol, his respect for the Red Army and his nostalgia of the Soviet years.
Nevertheless, he declared himself to be an authentic Ukrainian patriot working for
his country’s sake. I should not forget to say that he was also deputy at the local
Rada, which was visible from the badge on his vest. (Colin Lebedev, 2010, p. 26)

‘Soviet Union and Imperial Russia, religious devotion and Komsomol activism,
Bandera and the Red Army’, all these common-places would lead to intensely con-
tradictory statements if put in the format of qualifications for different specifications
of the common good, or even the format of a plurality of individual choices dis-
played in a liberal public. All these references are more than clichés which super-
ficially decorate the room. In her investigation, Colin Lebedev discovered a
diversity of entangled economic and political activities around the brotherhood of
Afghanistan war veterans. Multiple combinations of the former common-places
are used to foster political alliances and express differing voices that crisscross in
contemporary Ukraine. Maidan is the square where political expressions occur,
to which individuals personally relate to as a common-place, in connection with
various other common-places. This case exemplifies the tensions between the
dynamics of recombinant difference that this third grammar allows and the kind
of contradictory public space that is entailed by the other two grammars.
Multiple ties would ordinarily be described in the language of network, at the
expense of a comprehension of the kind of commonality building which they
involve, and of the powers they support. Considering political culture in Russia
from a local perspective, Risto Alapuro and Markku Lonkila conclude from
their fieldwork that the image of Russian political culture ‘as consisting of friend-
ship networks and closed circles of trust’ could be questioned by focusing on the
ways people in associations ‘move from their personal attachments to demands
which can be legitimated publicly’ (Alapuro & Lonkila, 2012, p. 123). Contrasting
with the Helsinki local diabetes association which is mainly oriented towards col-
lective solidarity of civic worth combined with liberal grammar, the St Petersburg
association is chiefly governed by the grammar of common affinities to common-
places (particularly discernible on the festive ‘day of diabetes’) combined with
domestic worth when relating to paternalist authorities (Alapuro, 2011).
26 L. Thévenot
Concluding remarks: in the shadows of enlightenment
This move from personal attachments to demands which can be made in public or
in common requires modes of observation and analytical tools that fully grasp the
gap between close personal concerns and expressions used to convey them in a
communicable form. This gap brings up a twofold problem. It raises a problem
for human beings who are torn by recurrent shifts in the scope of their engaging
with the world and with others, having to integrate them in a consistent personal-
ity. It also challenges the maintaining of a consistent community which demands a
severe formatting of personal concerns to allow communicating and differing
voices to be integrated.
Resulting from historical and cultural experiences, each of the three grammars
that we identified paves the way for bridging the aforementioned gap. Each places
heavy constraints on human beings because of the change of format of their con-
cerns, which the grammar demands. Specific pathologies result from each of them,
demonstrating this heaviness. Whereas folie de grandeur and megalomania are
closely linked to the process of aggrandizement in all orders of worth [‘worth’
is used to translate ‘grandeur’], each ‘grandeur’ or qualification of worth produces
its own specific pathology. The tension between the kind of objectification brought
by the qualification process and the intimate self leads to personality disorders.
The relation between depression understood as ‘weariness of the self’ and impera-
tives of autonomy and individual choice (Ehrenberg, 2010/1998) points to a path-
ology linked to the liberal grammar.
Information and communication technologies provide technical support for the
third grammar of personal affinities to common-places, while producing some
alteration of it. They make communicable personal attachments and intimate con-
cerns which are normally excluded from public spaces. Common-places play a
key role, in addition to the liberal grammar which governs the public expression
of individual choices between options. The specific pathology associated with this
third grammar in its altered state is usually characterized in terms of addiction.
Some similarity to the experience of withdrawal symptoms is observed when
human beings are left in a state of inner emptiness and desertion by the interruption
of communication. The felt shortage is not only one of communicating in general,
but one of personally investing anew in the common-places which ICT tools trans-
port. It looks as if coordination with oneself, which a variety of ways of engaging
normally afford in support of the consistency of personality, is reduced to this
equipped communication with others.
After some insights into personality disorders, we shall now turn to the dual
view on community syndromes which develop with respect to each grammar.
We examined elsewhere (Thévenot, in press-a) some of these syndromes
through: (1) the fate reserved to the newcomer, a perspective which enlarges the
approach of exclusion and boundaries; (2) the abusive exploitation of the struc-
tural power associated with commonality; (3) the exclusion of the goods and
damages that the grammar does not take into account. Here, I shall concentrate
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 27
on a present-day syndrome which is mainly connected to the third grammar: the
resurgence of authoritarian politics and reactionary movements often named popu-
list in old European democracies and East European countries.
The sociology of engagements, and the identification of the third grammar in
particular, might bring some clarification to two aspects of these movements: (1)
their origin in reactions to changing authorities and modes of governing; (2) their
mode of mobilization which makes common-places important. In her research on
the French National Front [FN: Front National] and the rise of ‘illiberal politics in
neoliberal times’, Mabel Berezin brings to light the first aspect (Berezin, 2009).
Using an enlarged notion of ‘security’, she relates the growing electoral basis of
these movements to sources of insecurities associated with European integration.
To the transfer of authority from nation states to a European level, we shall add the
rise of ‘private’ authorities related to governing through voluntary standards and
objectives (Breviglieri, 2013; Cheyns, in press; de Castelbajac, 2009; Ponte &
Cheyns, 2013; Thévenot, 1997, 2009, 2011b). Referring to Jeffrey Alexander’s
‘cultural pragmatics’ (Alexander, 2004) and investigating ‘collective evaluation’
which ‘gives a narrative and cultural structure to events’ (Berezin, 2009, p. 57),
Berezin also documents the second aspect. Her ethnographic observation of FN
festivities shows how common-places, while possibly used to express personal
attachments during festive moments, are transmuted into simple wordings and
icons which are ready for instrumental use and manipulation by politicians
(Berezin, 2007). This transmutation turns common-places into substantives,
with an assumed substantial and even essential ground. It allows the closure of
essentialist communities and the rise of antagonistic frontiers. Dead persons get
used as common-places. However, when still alive, they can get a non-democratic
authority from encapsulating common-places within their own body, and become
the kind of authoritarian political leaders who promote a personality cult.
In his analysis of ‘populist reason’, Ernesto Laclau contrasts ‘democratic
demands’, which are absorbed in a differential way by the institutional system,
with ‘popular demands’ which, ‘through their equivalential articulation’ or ‘equiv-
alence chains’, ‘constitute a broader subjectivity’; they produce a kind of ‘empty
signifier’ which does not ‘passively express what is inscribed in it, but actually con-
stitutes’ popular identity (Laclau, 2005, pp. 73–75, 95–96, 99). In addition to the
signifying operations which can explain ‘the forms the investment takes’, Laclau
(2005) points to ‘the force in which the investment consists’ which belongs to
‘the order of affect’ (pp. 110–111, italics by Laclau). Laclau’s analysis focuses on
the upper segment of the transformation that we consider here, when the plurality
of common-places fuse in all-encompassing and homogenizing ‘empty signifiers’,
or ‘floating signifiers’ which are unstable because they cope with heterogeneity in
the construction of the antagonistic frontiers which ‘the people’ presupposes
(Laclau, 2005, p. 153). Thus, he does not pay attention to the lower level of commu-
nicative common-places which are not only signifiers, nor empty or floating.
Elucidating the third grammar of personal affinities to common-places is not
only useful for the analysis of contemporary populist movements and the
28 L. Thévenot
revival of right-wing politics. It might also clarify the conditions that favor the
kind of left-wing politics backed by strong popular support which is the precise
obverse of right-wing populism. If we consider the historical periods of wide
popular support of French and Italian Communist parties, in local politics in par-
ticular, we find a complex combination of this grammar with the egalitarian civic
order of worth which was mainly put forward in discourses and slogans. Objects
and arrangements which qualify for civic solidarity and equality of access, in cul-
tural and social activities in particular, were associated with common-places that,
in contrast to collective civic worth, foster the communication of personal attach-
ments. The friendly, cheerful and festive ambiances nurtured by such communi-
cation were thus made compatible with qualification for the civic conception of
the common good.
The emancipatory program of modernity, which the social sciences inherited
and still stick to, took such a turn that ways of communicating and differing
which are not conservative or reactionary in themselves came to be left aside in
the shadows of the Enlightenment. This limitation is not without danger. It
misses important modes of cultural, social, and political ‘socialization’. It also
reproduces oppression upon them, under the domination of other more publicly
detached formats used to raise issues, take issue with others and criticize. Cultural
and political sociology has to enlarge its analysis of attesting, protesting, and con-
testing, to gain a more comprehensive view of ways to voice concern and to differ.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Eeva Luhtakallio, Charles Turner, and two anonymous reviewers for com-
ments and advice, and to Amy Jacob for her revision of the text.

Notes
1. Other epithets, such as pragmatiste or praxéologique, came later to specify some par-
ticular directions. For a genealogical introduction to sociologie pragmatique, see Thé-
venot and Stavo-Debauge (in press).
2. In English, see: Thévenot (2002, 2007, 2011b, 2013, in press-a).
3. This founding gesture by Boltanski and myself was accompanied from the outset by
the innovative editorial and intellectual project of an annual series, Raisons Pratiques,
which since 1990 (Pharo & Quéré, 1990) has contributed to the intellectual animation
of this current thanks to the constant assistance brought by Louis Quéré. With a
renewed interest in theories of action and the inheritances from which pragmatic soci-
ology benefited (ethnomethodology, interactionism, social and distributed cognition),
the series brought together social sciences and philosophy. In the first 10 years were
introduced, in an interdisciplinary and international exchange, major themes of prag-
matic sociology: forms of action (Pharo & Quéré, 1990), public space, legitimacy and
power (Cottereau & Ladrière, 1992), relationships with objects and the material
environment (Conein, Dodier, & Thévenot, 1993), formats of situated and distributed
knowledge (Conein & Thévenot, 1997) and the logic of situations (de Fornel &
Quéré, 1999), emotions (Paperman & Ogien, 1995), and ‘Economie des conventions’
(Salais, Chatel, & Rivaud-Danset, 1998). More recent issues focused on the texture of
 European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 29
political collectives (Kaufmann & Trom, 2010) and the experience of public problems
(Céfaï & Terzi, 2012).
4. I thank Risto Alapuro for suggesting, from his joint experience as an historian and a
political scientist (Alapuro, 2011, 2012), that such analytical tools might usefully
escape the present alternative between two opposed basic strategies of comparison:
cross-national studies, which relate findings to national and cultural contexts; and
transfer studies, which insist on connected histories and entanglements (oral
communication).
5. We take the term ‘community’ by convention as a generic term, without opposing it to
society.
6. On this topic, see also the following important contributions: Cantelli and Genard
(2007), de Leonardis (2009), Pattaroni (2007).
7. By contrast with the sociological literature which opened the path to identifying
‘boundary objects’ (Star & Griesemer, 1989), our more restrictive notion of inter-
mediary objects unfolds their double function for communicating and for differing,
and shows how their constitutions vary according to diverse grammars of common-
ality in the plural.
8. A dear friend and colleague of mine to whom I dedicate this paper was thus ‘offered’,
after having a big brain cancer tumor removed, a free ‘choice’ between radiotherapy
and chemotherapy.
9. For a first introduction in Russian, based on Nina Kareva’s research on hospitality,
see: Thévenot and Kareva (2009).
10. Oleg Kharkhordin’s own research and the collective programs he participated in or
co-directed offer valuable analysis on community building in post-Soviet Russia
and the materiality of res publica. See: Alapuro and Kharkhordin (2010), Colas
and Kharkhordin (2009), Kharkhordin (2011) and his contribution with Anna Kova-
leva (Kharkhordin & Kovaleva, 2011) in Thévenot (2005).
11. These intermediary objects also move us away from a characterization in terms of the
regime of agape (Boltanski, 1999/1993).
12. For a critical discussion of Lotman’s and Lidia Ginzburg’s semiotic approaches, see:
Thévenot (2012).
13. In his book on the last Soviet generation, Yurchak points to the ‘performative dimen-
sion of ritualized and speech acts’ which rises in importance in these late Soviet times.
Separating from any constative dimension, it leaves people free to engage in activities
far from this language which is not taken at face value (Yurchak, 2006, p. 26). Accord-
ing to Yurchak (2006), this form of language which leads to the ‘wooden’ sound that
gave it its popular slang name, ‘oak language’ [dubovnyi iazyk] (p. 61) is ‘hypernor-
malized’. The French commonly use the term ‘wooden language’ [langue de bois]
to designate this conventional institutional wording which is criticized as clichés.
On the relation between languages, institutions and regimes see Thévenot (in press-c).
14. In Russian, several terms of the same root (rod) characterize common-places and
communications between friends and people from the same corner (rodnoy), and
extensions to the scope of fatherland or motherland (rodina).

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