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Bourdieu, ethics and symbolic power

Léna Pellandini-Simányi Abstract This article critically discusses Pierre Bourdieu’s views on ethics and normative evaluations. Bourdieu acknowledged that people hold ethical stances, yet sought to show that these stances are – unconsciously – conducive to obtaining symbolic power and legitimizing hierarchy. The first part of the article looks at this argument and charts the shifts it went through particularly in the early 1990s. The second part discusses ontological and empirical critiques of the ethics as ideology argument and suggests the latter to be more salient, as Bourdieu proposed his argument as an empirical rather than as an ontological point. The reason why he nevertheless found the ethics as ideology explanation fitting to nearly all the cases he studied, as the third part argues, is not simply that reality ‘obliged’ him to do so, but his circular definition of symbolic capital as qualities that are worthy of esteem. This definition makes his argument of ethics as ideology unfalsifiable and impedes him from distinguishing between cases when legitimate power is the aim of ethics and between those when it is merely their side effect.The article concludes by suggesting ways in which Bourdieu’s work can be fruitfully incorporated into the study of ethics once the tautology is resolved. Keywords: Bourdieu, esteem, ethics, sociology of morality, symbolic power

Introduction The sociological study of ethics and morality has taken diverse paths from the birth of sociology as a discipline in the 19th century. Durkheim (1993) and Weber (2003) attributed a central role to ethics (or ethos) in explaining social and economic phenomena. Marx (1977a, 1977b), in contrast, radically questioned the explanatory power and hence the importance of ethics, by arguing that values merely reflect structures and interests defined by economic relations. Following this tradition, critical sociologists analysed people’s normative stances mainly as covert interests. The study of ethics qua ethics in this tradition was seen not only as futile, but also harmful: values considered as ideologies were seen as something to be unmasked rather than acknowledged (Sayer, 2004). Recent years, however, witnessed a renewed interest in the study of everyday ethics as a phenomenon that is related, yet not reducible to economic relations and interests (see, for example, Bauman, 1993; Laidlaw, The Sociological Review, Vol. 62, 651–674 (2014) DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12210 © 2014 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2014 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, 02148, USA.

Léna Pellandini-Simányi

2002; Sayer, 2005, 2011; Abend, 2007; Evens, 2008; Zigon, 2008; Hitlin and Vaisey, 2010). This is the field that this article wishes to contribute to by providing a critical discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s dismissal of ethics. Bourdieu’s work is important in this regard because it contains some of the most well-developed arguments that posit ethical stances as covert means of power struggles. Bourdieu did not suggest that people do not engage in normative evaluations; on the contrary, he emphasized the centrality of evaluations in everyday life. However, in the predominant part of his work he interpreted these as covert competitive strategies to advance one’s position and legitimize power (Bourdieu, 1984, 1991a, 1991b). His works are so allencompassing – ranging from religion (Bourdieu, 1991a) to art (Bourdieu, 1996), science (Bourdieu, 1999a, 2004), and everyday taste (Bourdieu, 1984) – that if one is to study everyday ethics qua ethics, one almost inevitably comes across a relevant work of Bourdieu that argues one’s efforts to be futile. This is why the study of ethics qua ethics can only proceed if one is able to show where Bourdieu’s arguments, by which he dismisses it, are found wanting. This is the focus of the current article. The article starts by outlining Bourdieu’s position on ethics, charting the shifts that it went through and the tensions that exist within it. This part suggests that although the argument that sees ethics as a pretext for powerstruggles – characterizing most of his oeuvre – is mitigated in his works following the early 1990s, he did not revise his original position, merely complemented it by exceptions (as in the case of science) and somewhat inconsistent additions. The second part discusses the two main lines of existing criticism of Bourdieu’s dismissal of ethics. The first challenges Bourdieu on ontological grounds, proposing a view of humans as ethical beings as opposed to the power-driven depiction posited by Bourdieu (Honneth, 1986; Taylor, 1989; Evens, 1999; Sayer, 2005). The problem with this line, as this part argues, is that Bourdieu did not mean his arguments to be ontological but empirical and, in principle, falsifiable. The second line of criticism attempts such an empirical falsification (Lamont, 1992; Sayer, 2005; Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006), however, all empirical counterevidence listed by these theories seems reconcilable with Bourdieu’s theory. This leads to the core question of the article: How does Bourdieu manage to maintain the claim that all seemingly ethical actions are objectively power-driven? The answer, proposed in the third part, lays in his tautological definition of symbolic capital as esteem. As esteem is granted on an ethical basis – as it involves looking up at someone for worthy qualities – an esteem-based hierarchy always presupposes ethics. This means that Bourdieu is only able to show that all ethics are objectively powerdriven because his very concept of legitimate power is grounded in an ethically based notion of esteem. The article concludes by outlining ways in which Bourdieu’s work can be usefully incorporated into the study of ethics, once this tautology is corrected. Before moving to the main analysis, a note on what I mean by the term ‘ethical’: I will use the words ethics, morality and normative evaluations 652

© 2014 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2014 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review


interchangeably1 to denote stances that Charles Taylor refers to as ‘strong evaluations’ (Taylor, 1989: 74). ‘Strong evaluations’ are normative principles that are experienced as independent from personal inclination – and are therefore different from preferences – constituting outer standards by which our very desires can be judged: ‘We sense in the very experience of being moved by some higher good that we are moved by what is good in it rather than that it is valuable because of our reaction’ (1989: 74). This formulation implies a descriptive rather than a substantive, normative use of the term ‘ethical’: what makes an idea ‘ethical’ is the fact that for particular people it represents a way of living or being that they consider higher as opposed to being simply more desirable. The advantage of this descriptive definition is that it allows for the empirical analysis of very different normative stances – even of those that the analyst might happen to disagree with. Also note that unlike some theories of ethics that treat agency as the prerequisite of ethical action,2 the conception of ethics used here does not require agency, but also includes the unreflexive adherence to existing moral traditions.

Bourdieu’s shifting views on ethics Bourdieu dedicated a large part of his work to the analysis of normative evaluations people pass: he studied the basis on which honour is granted in Algeria (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990b), the qualities that the French education system values (Bourdieu, 1988), the evolution of the criteria that define good art (Bourdieu, 1996) and the normative distinctions people make in their everyday life under the heading of ‘taste’ (Bourdieu, 1984). His position on these normative stances – although containing some contradictions that will be discussed shortly – can be classified as social constructivist.3 Social constructivism sees ethics as a matter of social agreement. This distinguishes it from objectivist theories that argue that the definition of the ‘good’ and what is valuable can be grounded in something objective: in human nature and needs, or in the intrinsic qualities of goods and practices (Sayer, 2011). Yet social constructivism also differs from subjectivist or emotivist theories that suggest that the definition of the good is subjective, simply a matter of individual likes and dislikes (Taylor, 1989). First, social constructivism suggests that ethical standards are beyond individuals; as Taylor argues ‘Each young person may take up a stance which is authentically his or her own; but the very possibility of this is enframed in a social understanding of great temporal depth, in fact “tradition” ’ (Taylor, 1989: 39). Second, unlike emotivism, most social constructivist theories do not see ethics as preferences, but as ‘strong evaluations’ (Taylor, 1989: 74) in the sense described above: as qualities and principles that people experience as higher external standards by which their own conduct is to judged. Yet, unlike objectivist theories, they locate the source of these external standards in society and culture rather than in human nature. © 2014 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2014 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

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Social constructivism can be further divided into two camps, based on how the content of the ethics reached through such a social agreement is explained: with reference to interests of the dominant group, or to cultural traditions that are independent from socio-economic relations (see second part for further discussion). In this debate the largest part of Bourdieu’s work falls into the former camp: he interpreted evaluative stances first and foremost as a means by which struggles over power are fought. This position, however, shifted and carried a number of contradictions. The major shift took place in the early 1990s (Sintomer, 1996; Fáber, 2007; Fowler, 2011) when Bourdieu took a more explicit stance on political matters, which was related to the revaluation of his relativist views on science and to a limited extent, on ethics. In this section I look at his views on ethics before and after the shift. Ethics as ideology Bourdieu’s explicit position on ethics until the early 1990s was informed by two related points. First, he suggested that people incorporate different conditions of existence as well as existing moral frameworks through the habitus. The habitus is a largely unconscious, internalized, even bodily sense of the social world acquired through upbringing. It delimits tastes, bodily gestures, ways of eating, sitting and talking; in short, everything we think and do, including our normative ideas (Bourdieu, 1984, 1995). This argument lends itself to the interpretation proposed by Andrew Sayer (2011), according to which our ethical stances are developed as part of our habitus. For example, Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) includes vivid descriptions on how the sense of honour, a deeply ethical sense of how a man of virtue should behave, and more broadly, what it means to be a proper man is ‘inculcated in the earliest years of life’ until it becomes a ‘permanent disposition, embedded in the agents’ very bodies in the form of mental dispositions, schemes of perception and thought, extremely general in application’ (1977: 15). Similarly, in Distinction he describes how ‘world views’, ‘philosophies of life’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 292) and ‘a sense of belonging to a more polished, more polite, better policed world’ (1984: 76) are learnt and transmitted through practice. This argument, in itself, does not say that normative stances are ideological, unconsciously aimed at legitimizing power; simply that personal ethics are partly developed through acquiring a practical and symbolic sense of a historically, socially and culturally located position through upbringing. The habitus, understood this way, offers grounds for understanding ethics not only as abstract ideas but as an embodied and practical sense of the good (see, for example, Shove, 2003; Lakoff and Collier, 2004; Skeggs, 2004; Sayer, 2005; Ignatow, 2008; Introna, 2009; Pellandini-Simányi, 2009; Slater, 2009; Sayer, 2011).4 The second point, on which I wish to focus in this article, explains ethics as unconscious competitive strategies to maintain and advance one’s position 654



and to acquire and legitimate power. Bourdieu calls legitimate power ‘symbolic power’, by which he means the kind of power that is reinforced by authority (as opposed to, say, sheer force). He suggests that symbolic power is the prime target of social life, which is therefore depicted as a struggle ‘to win everything which, in the social world, is of the order of belief, credit and discredit, perception and appreciation, knowledge and recognition – name, renown, prestige, honour, glory, authority, everything which constitutes symbolic power as recognized power’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 251). The struggle for symbolic power unfolds between groups, defined by specific sets of capitals and their relations to one another (Bourdieu, 1984). Groups try to acquire symbolic power, firstly, by playing according to the existing rules, that is, by maximizing the ‘symbolic profit’ (1984: 270) on their existing assets, without putting into question the basis on which symbolic power is granted. This unconscious drive to maximize symbolic profit – dictating different strategies in the light of specific compositions of capitals – explains for example evaluative, normative stances to art: ‘The preference of intellectuals – characterized by low economic and high cultural capital – for cheaper, avant-garde art theatre is governed by the pursuit of maximum “cultural profit” for minimum economic cost’, expecting ‘the symbolic profit of their practice from the work itself, from its rarity and from the discourse about it (after the show, over a drink, or in their lectures, their articles or their books) through which they will endeavour to appropriate part of its distinctive value’ (1984: 270). Note that what Bourdieu describes here may well be experienced by the agent as genuine intellectual curiosity; yet his point is that objectively it is merely a strategy that leads to the highest symbolic profit that can be acquired given a specific set of capitals. Secondly, groups also try to change the rules in their own favour: they struggle over the basis on which symbolic capital is granted so as to increase the value of their existing assets. Every group tries ‘to impose the taxonomy most favourable to its characteristics, or at least to give to the dominant taxonomy the content most flattering to what it has and what it is’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 475–476). In other words, every group has an interest in promoting its own qualities as the most valuable ones, as this would give grounds for legitimate power over other groups (Bourdieu, 1991b). For example, if an intellectual manages to impose her value system on others – who are not from intellectual families, therefore come with a different habitus and a lower level of ‘cultural capital’ – and hence others adopt and measure their own worth according to how culturally sophisticated they are, she created a situation where she comes out winning. Others will look up at her and accept her superiority. She gained symbolic power. ‘Adapting to a dominated position implies a form of acceptance of domination . . . the sense of incompetence, failure or cultural unworthiness imply a form of recognition of dominant values’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 389).5 This is why Bourdieu suggests that what a French intellectual proclaims to be the ethical value of cultural sophistication is – objectively – nothing else than an unconscious competitive strategy: it is © 2014 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2014 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

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about attaching higher evaluation to qualities that one gained through one’s upbringing in order to establish one’s legitimate claim to power. Bourdieu makes this argument with respect to social groups (see, for example, Bourdieu, 1984), as well as to the struggles within and between specific fields (see, for example, Bourdieu, 1996, 2000). Fields are organized around specific stakes that all participants of the given field pursue. These stakes are always a form of symbolic power, which is granted on different grounds in each field. For example, in the scientific field scientific expertise and new, truer results grant symbolic power, whereas in the autonomous artistic field artistic achievement does. The qualities and achievements that are valued within a given field could be read as their central values or founding ethics. However, Bourdieu argues that these seemingly disinterested ethics are guided objectively by the same logic of competition for symbolic power between groups of different capital compositions described above: each tries to give a definition of what counts as a valuable achievement and who can be considered a genuine member of the field that is most favourable to it:‘Each is trying to impose the boundaries of the field most favourable to its interests or – which amounts to the same thing – the best definition of conditions of true membership of the field (or of titles conferring the right to the status of writer, artist or scholar) for justifying its existence as it stands’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 223). This is why the prime form of antagonism is always ‘between orthodoxy and heresy . . . the struggle between those who espouse conservatism because of the dominant position they temporarily occupy in the field (by virtue of their specific capital) . . . and those who are inclined to a heretical rupture, to the critique of established forms, to the subversion of the prevailing models’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 234). For example, novel normative visions of good art by an artist, or a new morality preached by a prophet can be understood objectively as best strategies of groups whose capital composition is not valuable enough according to the existing rules, who therefore try to get new valuations accepted. Bourdieu’s point, in other words, is that stances that seem and are experienced as disinterested and ethical correspond, objectively, to the best strategies that particular capital compositions permit in the struggle over power within a given field. How are people’s normative stances synced with those required by these struggles? People enter – unconsciously, guided by their habitus – those fields and within them those positions where they can expect the ‘highest profit’ (in terms of power) on the kinds of capitals and habitus that they possess (Bourdieu, 1990a, 1996). For example, the habitus and cultural capital of someone from a French intellectual family will grant her a higher position in the academic field than in, let’s say, football or the church (Calhoun 2003), so she is more likely to enter that field. Her habitus and capital portfolio will also define which position within the chosen field she will enter: that of the conservator or the rebel, depending on which position promises her higher symbolic profits. Once having entered a position in a given field, its occupant is moved by the requirements of the position: ‘the institutional space, in which all social agents 656



. . . have their places assigned to them, produces so to speak the properties of those who occupy them, and the relations of competition and conflict which set them against each other’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 193–194, emphasis in the original), as a result of which occupants of these positions ‘unless they exclude themselves from the game, have no other choice than to struggle to maintain or improve their position in the field’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 193). In this sense it is not so much the agents, but the positions that they occupy that are competitive and power-driven and that move the people occupying them according to their logic. In this scheme, ‘all actions, even those understood as disinterested or nonpurposive, and thus freed from economic motives, are to be conceived economically’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 235), as a means to maximize symbolic profit. Albeit this view of social life may seem close to rational action theory, Bourdieu clearly distinguishes his position from that school by emphasizing that the struggle for power does not take place through conscious strategies, but intuitively (Bourdieu, 1990b). Partly because it is guided by the habitus that provides an unconscious sense of the social world; and partly because it is moved by the requirements that a specific position in any given field exerts on its occupant (Bourdieu, 1990a). Based on this depiction, Bourdieu suggests that even though people may subjectively experience their actions as value-driven, objectively these normative stances can be shown to be conducive to acquiring power. As Sayer (2005: 42) argues: At one level, Bourdieu recognized the deeply evaluative character of social behaviour in terms of how people value themselves and members of other groups, and the practices and objects associated with them. However his interests in this regard lay primarily in the valuation of these things in strategic, functional and aesthetic terms. This is partly a consequence of his interest- and power-based model of social life, and his adoption of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that is reluctant to acknowledge disinterested action, including ethical responses. Any ideas that certain actions may be disinterested are quickly deflated by deriving them from their habitus and interests (e.g. Bourdieu, 1984). Bourdieu applied this theory to a wide array of fields from religion to art and science, arguing that normative views within these fields are to be understood as a product of the competing positions within and between them. However, as Sayer points out, alongside these explicit arguments, he seemed to hold an implicit, ‘crypto-normative’ (Sayer, 2005: 99) stance that condemned social inequalities and injustice (see also Evens, 1999, 2008). This stance informs his work, for example, on the education system and taste, which expose the hidden mechanisms through which inequalities are reproduced and naturalized. Applying his theory to analyse this stance would mean that his own view of inequality being a bad thing is merely the best means, in the light of his © 2014 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2014 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

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capital-composition, of advancing his position within the scientific field. Yet Bourdieu surely did not see his indignation over injustice in these terms, but as an ethical stance that is – at least in part – beyond the struggle for power. In fact, his very concept of mis-recognition suggests that the ‘good’ can be established with reference to objective standards outside power-struggles (Sayer, 2001, 2003, 2005). Sayer suggests that these objectivist stances represent a contradiction to Bourdieu’s avowed relativist position, according to which the definition of the good is a matter of power-struggles. This point is correct if we read Bourdieu’s theory as a general one, applying to all human actions. In my reading (explained in the next section), however, he sought to provide descriptions of particular empirical cases, and did not exclude in principle the existence of other cases when ethics are not driven by interests. If my reading is correct, the objectivist stances signal not a contradiction, but a gap in Bourdieu’s theory: whereas he gives abundant descriptions of cases when ethics are unconscious means by which people advance their own power position, he did not explore any instances when normative views are not ideological – including his own case, which he, as his implicit crypto-normative language suggests, presumably considered as such. The normative shift of the 1990s The late 1980s, early 1990s marked a change in Bourdieu’s views on ethics, which is related to his ‘political turn’ and to a partial revision of his original relativist position (Sintomer, 1996; Fáber, 2007; Fowler, 2011).6 From the early 1990s Bourdieu increasingly took part in political action – for example, he gave a talk at the railway workers’ demonstration in 1995 (Wolfreys, 2000) – and took a more explicit normative stance in his writings on current social and political matters. For example, in his political essays collected in Political Interventions he attacks neoliberal regimes that produce an ‘extraordinary mass of suffering’ (Bourdieu, 2008a: 102) and in an interview with Terry Eagleton (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1992) he is explicit about the elimination of human suffering as the ultimate benchmark of the ‘good’.This more objectivist approach to ethics is clearly articulated in the Pascalian Meditations, where he argues that: sceptical or cynical rejection of any form of belief in the universal, in the values of truth, emancipation, in a word, Enlightenment, and of any affirmation of universal truths and values, in the name of an elementary form of relativism which regards all universalistic manifestos as pharisaical tricks intended to perpetuate a hegemony, is another way, in a sense a more dangerous one, because it can give itself an air of radicalism, of accepting things as they are. There is, appearances notwithstanding, no contradiction in fighting at the same time against the mystificatory hypocrisy of abstract universalism and 658



for universal access to the conditions of access to the universal, the primordial objective of all genuine humanism which both universalistic preaching and nihilistic (pseudo-) subversion forget. (Bourdieu, 2000: 71) These arguments are clearly at odds with his ‘standard’ theory, outlined above, that posits hidden power-interest behind ethical stances. In order to reconcile these arguments, he needed either to complement his work with a description of the conditions under which the ethics as ideology argument does not apply; or, if it was meant to be a general description, to revise the theory altogether. He did indeed make steps to both directions to accommodate this now explicit non-relativist position; yet these changes, I will argue, remained partial, resulting in a somewhat contradictory theory. First, major modifications of his original position focused on his arguments on the scientific field, which after the early 1990s appears to be the exceptional area where people are able to break free from the power-driven logic.Whereas in The Specificity of the Scientific Field (Bourdieu, 1999a), published originally in 1976, he provided a ‘standard’ analysis of science – where scientific arguments are described as matters of power struggles – in Science of Science and Reflexivity (Bourdieu, 2004), published in 2001, the scientific field is posited as a field where a transhistoric, universal truth can be arrived at. Reflexivity – of sociologists in particular – seems to be the key to apprehend and overcome social determinism and the power-driven logic characterizing other fields, as ‘sociologists can find weapons against social determinism in the very science which brings them to light’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 178). It is this knowledge that enables, and in fact, obliges them to take part in political matters (Bourdieu, 1989). The special status of the scientific field means that it could be the empirical case, missing from his earlier work, where ethics qua ethics could be analysed. Unfortunately, Bourdieu does not provide such an analysis. Rather, he limits his arguments to the possibility of achieving Truth, rather than Ethics. Although he urges intellectuals to engage in political issues (‘Our dream, as social scientists, might be for part of our research to be useful to a social movement’ – Bourdieu, 2008b: 58), he warns them that they ‘should not fall into the trap of offering a program’ (2008b: 56): their role should be limited to providing statements of facts rather than value-judgements. Bourdieu resolves the apparent contradiction between this argument and his explicit normative position by suggesting that good sociological descriptions talk for themselves, automatically leading to the ‘good’, that is, to the eliminations of suffering and freedom. For example, they have a liberating effect as they give voice to people (Bourdieu, 1999b), helping them ‘express what they suffer’ (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1992: 121), and they pinpoint the ways in which social determinism can be overcome, allowing people to ‘equip themselves with specific weapons of resistance’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 340). In this light, what I called his explicit normative position can be interpreted as not even a normative position, but simply a set of statements of facts of suffering, exploitation and unfreedom. © 2014 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2014 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

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However, in itself the statement of these facts should not have any normative implications: unless one holds the normative position that exploitation is a bad and freedom is a good thing, one should feel no moral indignation. This is clearly not the case with Bourdieu, which suggests again an implicit ethical stance in his work.Yet his writings fail to provide grounds for such a normative position even in this period, as the question of how ethics qua ethics is possible, if at all, is evaded by the above argument that only discusses the possibility of interest-free factual statements. The second, much less developed, yet more fruitful modification of Bourdieu’s original theory can be found in traces in the Pascalian Meditations (Bourdieu, 2000), where he offers a somewhat different interpretation of recognition, which is the essence of symbolic capital. Whereas in earlier writings he described recognition and symbolic capital largely in terms of their effect of legitimizing power, here he suggests that they are central to human ontology and a meaningful life. He argues that as children grow up in the domestic field they move from a stage of narcissistic self-love to a stage where they discover themselves as an object of others and start to seek their approval. This process, suggests Bourdieu, ‘relies [my emphasis] on one of the motors which will be at the origin of all subsequent investments: the search for recognition [emphasis in the original]’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 166). In this text he suggests that the search for recognition is a universal human quality, the very basis of our human, social nature; though even here he sees it as a form of self-love rather than ethics (‘Such might be the anthropological root of the ambiguity of symbolic capital – glory, honour, credit, reputation, fame – the principle of an egoistic quest for satisfactions of amour propre which is, at the same time, a fascinated pursuit of the approval of others’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 166, emphasis in the original).) Furthermore, the pursuit of symbolic capital in this text is equated with the search for recognition, which appears here not simply as a means of acquiring power, but as central to a meaningful life: The social world gives what is rarest, recognition, consideration, in other words, quite simply, reasons for being. It is capable of giving meaning to life . . . One of the most unequal of all distributions, and probably, in any case, the most cruel, is the distribution of symbolic capital, that is of social importance and of reasons for living . . . Conversely, there is no worse dispossession, no worse privation, perhaps, than that of the losers in the symbolic struggle for recognition, for access to a socially recognized social being, in a word, to humanity. (Bourdieu, 2000: 240–241) This suggests that social games are moved by the quest for a meaningful life, a purpose, a social mission without which, as he argues, people sink into indifference and depression (Bourdieu, 2000: 240). He uses the term ‘illusio’ for this belief that the stakes of social games and fields in particular are worth 660



pursuing. Although it is an illusion in the sense of lacking an objective basis, it is still essential for the participation in social games that provide the meaning of life. These arguments are somewhat inconsistent with his standard depiction of ethics as a means of acquiring power. In fact, as we will see in the next sections, the very same points form the basis of theories that argue, against Bourdieu, that ethics are not reducible to power-struggles, but often stem from the human pursuit of meaning and purpose. My own view, explained in the third part, is that the two positions are not necessarily contradictory; in fact, normative evaluations are double-faceted in that they simultaneously involve ethics and allow for the legitimization of power. The problem is, however, that Bourdieu does nothing to explain how the two points can be reconciled, but presents these arguments alongside his original theory, as seamless additions to, rather than as a revision of it. In the very same text he writes that ‘it is competition for a power that can only be won from others competing for the same power, a power over others that derives its existence from others, from their perception and appreciation’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 241) and that ‘symbolic capital . . . is not a particular kind of capital but what every kind of capital becomes when it is misrecognized as capital, that is, as force, a power or capacity for (actual or potential) exploitation, and therefore recognized as legitimate’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 242). This way these arguments, although promising, remain unconcluded. In the following sections of the article therefore I will focus on the original argument that seeks to expose the ideological nature of ethics, which despite these modifications represents his most well-elaborated position.

Critiques of Bourdieu’s view on ethics Against the view that sees ethics as covert, unconscious means to acquire power, a number of recent works have argued for treating ethics and normative evaluations as autonomous phenomena that can be related, but not reduced to power motives. These theories challenge the ethics as ideology argument on two grounds: ontological and empirical. Albeit empirical data always require interpretation that is in turn informed by ontological assumptions (see next part), the distinction is useful here to capture the distinct focus of the critiques. Ontological critiques Authors proposing an ontological argument suggest that – contrary to the power-driven picture painted by Bourdieu – holding normative, ethical stances is an inevitable, intrinsic quality of being human. Sayer, for example, argues that we are ‘evaluative beings’ (2005: 139), not because it helps us to acquire power; rather it is ‘vulnerability to suffering and capacity for flourishing that © 2014 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2014 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

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gives experience its normative character, and from which “the force of the ought” as regards ethical matters derives’ (Sayer, 2009: 12). A related ontological point is put forward by Charles Taylor (1989), albeit on different grounds. He also argues that people are inherently evaluative beings, yet not because of their capacity to suffer and flourish, but because moral agency is the basis of identity. Identity depends on taking a position with respect to strong evaluations, which makes evaluative choices an imperative of being human: Living within such strongly qualified horizons is constitutive of human agency, that stepping outside these limits would be tantamount to stepping outside what we would recognize as integral, that is, undamaged human personhood . . . To know who you are is to be oriented in the moral space, a space in which questions arise about good or bad, what is worth doing and what is not, what has meaning for you, and what is trivial and secondary. (Taylor, 1989: 27–28, my emphasis) This does not mean that people behave morally at all times; but that taking certain moral positions is the very essence of being human, therefore an inescapable human condition. Axel Honneth (Honneth, 1995; Fraser and Honneth, 2003) puts forward a similar idea in that he sees moral integrity and personhood as the core of human life. According to him personhood is dependent on recognition by others (an idea also strongly present in Taylor’s 1994 work), therefore he stresses the interdependence between respect and self-respect. For him, normative evaluations are understood as part of the core human pursuit of recognition:7 [T]he reproduction of social life is governed by the imperative of mutual recognition, because one can develop a practical relation-to-self only when one has learned to view oneself, from the normative perspective of one’s partners in interaction, as their social addressee. (Honneth, 1995: 92) These critiques are important, as any project that seeks to acknowledge ethics qua ethics is only made possible by an ontology that does not see humans as intrinsically power-driven. Yet they are insufficient to disprove Bourdieu’s arguments because he did not intend them as a description of human ontology, but of particular, historically specific empirical realities. For example, in an interview with Terry Eagleton he talked about the possibility of other forms of actions: Terry Eagleton: That is a true description of many fields of our experience, but are there not other forms of discourse, other forms of action, which you couldn’t conceptualize so easily in those agonistic terms? 662



Pierre Bourdieu: . . . [T]hat is an important question, and one that I ask myself; I agree that it is a problem. I don’t know why I tend to think in those terms – I feel obliged to by reality. My sense is that the kind of exchange we are now engaged in is unusual. Where this happens, it is the exception based on what Aristotle called ‘philia’ – or friendship, to use a more general expression. ‘Philia’ is, according to Aristotle, an economic exchange or symbolic exchange that you may have within the family, among parents or with friends. I tend to think that the structure of most of the fields, most of the social games, is such that competition – a struggle for domination – is quasi-inevitable. (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1992: 116) There are indeed parts of Bourdieu’s work, for example in the Outline (Bourdieu, 1977), that suggest that he saw this ‘logic of philia’ as informing the ‘good faith economy’ of the Kabyle in Algeria, in contrast to profit-maximizing Western capitalism. In this reading, the competitive, instrumental logic described above is a historical product that emerged only with modern capitalism, rather than a universal human characteristic (Fowler, 2011). Empirical critiques If the reduction of ethics to power-struggles is not an ontological argument, it follows that it can be questioned empirically rather than on ontological grounds. These empirical critiques have been formulated along two major lines.8 The first suggests that Bourdieu ignored the normative operations and moral distinctions that people make in everyday life. For example, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) suggested that traditional critical sociology, and Bourdieu in particular, underestimated the critical capacity of agents and they argue that people do engage in normative evaluations and judgements. Similar points are made by Lamont (1992), who provides the empirical evidence of moral distinctions that people use to evaluate each other, as well as by Sayer (2001, 2005, 2009, 2011). The problem with these critiques is that showing that people take normative stances and that they experience their motives as ethical does not suffice to falsify Bourdieu’s ethics as ideology argument. The core of that argument is not that people do not engage in normative operations, but that they do so in ways that help them to advance their own position in the hierarchy. In fact, in Bourdieu’s account the subjective experience of genuine, disinterested normative judgement is essential for the legitimatization of hierarchy (Bourdieu, 1984, 1991a, 1991c, 1993). This means that it is not enough to show that people see themselves as evaluative beings, as it could fit into the ethics as ideology account as well; what needs to be proven is that these evaluations cannot be explained simply in terms of power interests. This is the focus of the second line of empirical criticism that argues that the content of ethical ideas cannot be derived from power interests, but from © 2014 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2014 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

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sources that are independent from these struggles. What are these other sources? One line of critique is based on an objectivist approach to values, mentioned in the previous part, that suggests that what people value can be linked to relatively universal, objective standards of human needs (Sayer, 2005).9 The difficulty of this theory is that in order to disprove Bourdieu, one would need to show that certain qualities are highly valued independently of social and cultural settings. This is probably possible if we define these valued qualities loosely enough to accommodate plurality, as Sayer (2011) suggests; but then the theory becomes too vague and loses its explanatory power. If on the other hand, we define them narrowly, such a universal applicability is impossible to show: what people consider valuable, worthy of respect varies across fields, cultures and goes through temporal change. The theory then is unable to account for what has been the key question of Bourdieu: why these valuations differ (between and within groups) and why they change (for instance, in the field of art). Another line of critique comes from social constructivist theories that agree with Bourdieu in that the content of ethics is a matter of social agreement rather than deducible from an objective standard, yet they contend that it is cultural tradition, rather than mere power relations that explain them (Calhoun, 1991).10 At one end are theories that – in line with the ‘strong program of cultural sociology’ advanced by Jeffrey Alexander (Alexander and Smith, 2001) – explain ethics by the autonomous, internal development of culture that is independent from socio-economic structure. Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) work on systems of justifications, each of which is centred on a particular ‘worth’ – which, in my reading, correspond to particular ethics – lends itself to this interpretation, as they explain the emergence of each system of ‘worth’ by the internal development of cultural traditions.11 Other theories within the same line take a more balanced approach, maintaining that ethics are shaped both by cultural traditions and power-struggles. For example, Lamont argues that ‘cultural repertoires’ – that include ethics – depend not only on socio-economic factors, but also on cultural resources that are independent from them, such as national traditions. Furthermore, she draws attention to the temporal dimension that allows even those ethical stances that once reflected group interests to become independent: ‘[cultural repertoires] need to be analyzed separately because, even if these repertoires are shaped by a wide range of economic, political, and socio-historical factors, they take on a life of their own once they are institutionalized. In other words, they become part of the environment, of the structure . . .’ (Lamont, 1992: 135). Similarly, Honneth acknowledges that ‘economically powerful groups do have a considerably greater chance of institutionally generalizing their own value conceptions in society and thereby increasing the social recognition of their own conduct of life’ (Honneth, 1986: 65), yet he maintains that economic power alone is not enough. Cultural traditions, treated here as interrelated yet autonomous explanatory factors, play a larger role:12 664



[T]he recognition which an existing social order lends to the values and norms embodied in the life-styles of a particular group does not depend on the volume of knowledge or wealth, or the quantity of measurable goods the group has managed to accumulate, rather it is determined according to the traditions and value conceptions which could be socially generalized and institutionalized in the society. (Honneth, 1986: 65) The problem with this counterargument is that Bourdieu did not claim that it is always the group possessing the highest economic and cultural capital that is able to set the standards of values in its own favour. As it will be discussed in the next section in detail, he held that capitals resulting in a dominant position are dependent on fields and societies. This is why he would be able to refute the above counterargument by showing that ‘traditions and value conceptions’ themselves reflect certain group interests. The fact that all these empirical critiques seem to be reconcilable with Bourdieu’s theory raises the question of whether it is possible even to envisage an empirical instance that would contradict it. In the next section I argue that the answer to this question is negative: the possibility of such an instance is foreclosed by a circularity in Bourdieu’s argument. This is the reason why, rather than being ‘obliged by reality’, the ethical actions in all the cases studied by him appear to be ideological.

Circular definition of symbolic capital Why is it that in nearly all the cases studied by Bourdieu seemingly ethical pursuits turned out to be, at the end, hidden strategies to acquire power? Evens (1999, 2008) suggests that the answer lies in fact that albeit Bourdieu claimed that his description merely reflected reality, his own taken-for-granted lens through which he interpreted reality was ultimately biased towards power-driven interpretations. Indeed, as noted previously, the clear separation between ontology and empirical data applied so far does not take account of the epistemological point that data do not speak for themselves, but are always filtered through interpretation. According to Evens, Bourdieu’s avowed empiricist position implied a particular ontological assumption according to which people are moved primarily by power, and it is this assumption that drove him to interpret even ethical action in those terms. Evens links ethics to agency, suggesting that ‘Because all of our decisions ultimately rest on our decided agential capacity, in the end all must be a question of ethics’ (Evens, 2008: xxii). This is why for him, Bourdieu’s inability to acknowledge ethics qua ethics is ultimately rooted in his tendency to fall back to a deterministic, objectivist view of human action despite his claim of overcoming the subject–object dualism. The solution therefore, according to Evens, is an ontology that recognizes agency and therefore ethics. Similarly to Sayer and Honneth discussed above, he maintains that ‘human practice is a © 2014 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2014 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

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question of value qua value, which is to say, a question of ethics’ (Evens, 1999: 4); however, unlike them, he does not propose a fixed, singular ontology, but a heterodox one with crosscutting materialist and ethical motives. As he points out, the existence of materialist motives does not contradict an ethics-centred ontology: material gain and power need to be valued first in order to be deemed worthy of pursuing, hence their appreciation implies an initial ethical choice. As he argues, ‘Though in a plain sense wealth and power sum up antivalue, they are themselves products of moral selection, and thus they too presuppose the possibility of value as such’ (Evens, 1999: 20), therefore even these motives are ‘always already ethically informed and determined’ (Evens, 1999: 7). The implication of Evens’s critique is that viewed through Bourdieu’s interpretative lens – informed by a materialist ontology – all data will be interpreted as demonstrating the existence of underlying power motives; in other words, the theory becomes unfalsifiable. To trace this process we need to ask first what kind of empirical material would be necessary to falsify Bourdieu’s theory of ethical stances as unconscious means of the pursuit of power. It would need to be first, an ethical position that is not conducive to acquiring and legitimizing power; and second, an instance where ethics cannot be explained objectively by the interest of the more powerful group. Can there be an empirical case of ethics that is not conducive to symbolic power? Hardly. Bourdieu defines ‘symbolic power’ as power based on recognition: ‘renown, prestige, honour, glory, authority’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 251). What he describes here is what Honneth (1995; Brink and Owen, 2007) calls esteem, and what Charles Taylor (1994) refers to as conditional recognition. The essence of these – and of Bourdieu’s notion of recognition – is that they denote respect which is granted based on one’s achievements and qualities that people recognize as valuable, as worthy of their admiration.13 This means that all forms of symbolic power presuppose a normative evaluation, an underlying ethics. This is not to say that everybody will participate in particular fields out of pure dedication, but that symbolic power is only possible if there exist field-specific ethics that participants accept regardless of how well they stick to them in their actual conduct. Without them, achievements and qualities would not yield esteem and any conception of symbolic power would be impossible. However, all ethics automatically and inevitably create different degrees of esteem and hence a hierarchy. This is because ethics denotes ‘strong evaluations’, that is, normative distinctions between better and worse: being a dedicated mother or a devoted scientist is not simply different from being a reckless one, but normatively better. If I think that being a good mother or scientist is something worthy of my awe, this belief will automatically create a hierarchy in the way I see people. This is why, as Dumont argues, ‘to adopt a value is to introduce hierarchy, and certain consensus of values, a certain hierarchy of ideas, things and people’ (Dumont, 1970: 20). In fact, as Evens suggests ‘without value there can be no hierarchy’ (1999: 20). Every ethics 666



produces a sense of legitimate hierarchy; and any legitimate hierarchy can only be based on a shared system of valuation, on a shared ethics. This means that ethics is always conducive to ‘symbolic power’; but not because of an underlying, unconscious competitive logic that it masks, but due to its normative nature, which always implies a hierarchy. As symbolic power is recognition granted based on ethical qualities, it is an inevitable side-effect of any particular ethics.14 At points, Bourdieu himself noted this double-faceted nature of symbolic power. For example, he argued that ‘[society] alone has the power to justify you, to liberate you from facticity, contingency and absurdity; but – and this is doubtless the fundamental antimony – only in a differential, distinctive way: every form of the sacred has its profane complement, all distinction generates its own vulgarity’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 196). However, he failed to see that the consequence of this argument is that it is the very nature of ethics that implies recognition and symbolic power rather than a hidden competitive drive. The main problem of this tautology is that it renders Bourdieu’s explanation unable to distinguish between cause and effect in particular empirical cases. In some cases the pursuit of power creates what look like values from the inside. In other cases, however, the commitment to particular, historically specific ethics and the drive to be better according to them is what creates a hierarchy – and what induces actions that may look like mere competition – from the outside. In these cases, what provides the energy that sets the field in motion is not simply an invisible underlying competitive power motive, but the nature of ethics itself. It is the essence of ethics that it exerts a binding force, and hence the very impetus that pushes one to be better according to its principles. The motive to become a good scientist, a good artist, or a good mother can be seen as aims worth pursuing irrespective of the power that their achievement grants (see also Sayer, 2005, on internal goods). Yet in Bourdieu’s tautological framework in both cases ethics is interpreted as pretext for legitimizing power. A related tautology provides the key to the second question, of whether it is possible to find empirical instances where ethics cannot be explained objectively by the interest of the most powerful group. To unravel the tautology we need to start by having a look at what such an objective analysis means in practice. The most powerful group is defined objectively in terms of its capital composition. Bourdieu’s concept of capital retains some aspects of Marx’s use of the term (Calhoun, 1993). It is an accumulated product of effort, hence a means of transmission: parents can pass on their money, connections and cultural capital to their children, who can therefore start from a better position (Calhoun, 2003). Yet Bourdieu also extends Marx’s notion; in Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984) he focuses on three sorts of capital: economic, social and cultural (I treat symbolic capital separately). There are two possible ways of interpreting the notion of capital and, correspondingly, the argument according to which the most powerful group, in terms of capital composition, determines the dominant ethics. First, we can see © 2014 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2014 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

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these capital forms as universally applicable, which I would like to call the stable view. This view suggests that these capital compositions denote objective relations that will universally determine subjectivities in predictable ways regardless of social setting. In this interpretation, Bourdieu uses France in Distinction as an example of an argument that could be made anywhere else in the world. Lamont (1992), for example, treats capitals as stable, when based on empirical evidence gathered in the US she suggests that Bourdieu overestimated the importance of cultural capital and generalized a characteristically Parisian situation. The argument in this form can be falsified by studies like Lamont’s. The second interpretation treats capitals as field-dependent. I think this reading is more correct, as Bourdieu writes that capitals are ‘species of power . . . whose possession commands access to the specific profits that are at stake in the field’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1989: 39). According to this definition, capital denotes the power by which the stakes – which, let’s not forget, are always forms of legitimate power – of a specific field can be acquired. This means that capital is not absolute but dependent on the field; different features and possessions serve as capitals in different fields. We can talk about religious, scientific, cultural or fashion capital (Bourdieu, 1991c, 1999a; Rocamora, 2002; Entwistle and Rocamora, 2006), because these terms stand for qualities by which legitimate power can be acquired in particular fields. In this reading, Distinction shows that in contemporary French society legitimate power can be achieved by three sorts of capital: economic, social and cultural. In France these are capitals because stakes can be acquired by them; if in another society other qualities would grant power, they would not be capitals. At this point it is important to make a distinction between what I would like to call ‘instrumental’ and ‘ethical’ capitals. ‘Instrumental capitals’ are those that allow one to enter and progress in a given field, yet in themselves do not provide symbolic capital, legitimate power. For example, becoming an academic requires long years of study that is easier to sustain if one is well endowed with money; certain positions are easier to get if one has connections, and so on. Yet money and connections alone do not result in symbolic power. An academic with no scientific qualities, who only got a position because she is the main financial donor of the university, will have power, but not symbolic power. To acquire symbolic power, then, one needs more than instrumental capitals: qualities that yield esteem. I will call these qualities ‘ethical capital’. Ethical because those achievements and qualities yield esteem that others in the given group or field recognize as normatively higher, of ethical value.15 Note, again, that I am using ethical in a broad and relativist sense. Among intellectuals, intelligence and knowledge – which Bourdieu calls ‘cultural capital’ – are the values that grant esteem, whereas in the religious field piety yields respect and functions as ‘religious capital’; simply because participants acknowledge the importance of these qualities as ethical values. 668



The reason why distinguishing ‘ethical capital’ is important is that it sheds light on the circularity of the argument by which Bourdieu proves that ethics reflects the qualities of most powerful group, and therefore are more favourable to that group. He defined capitals as qualities that allow one to acquire the stakes, which are always a form of symbolic power, of a particular field. However, it is only the ‘ethical capitals’ that truly fit the definition; ‘instrumental capitals’ do not grant symbolic power, merely facilitate the achievement of ‘ethical capitals’ in some cases. This means that ‘powerfulness’ is defined as the possession of the sufficient amount and type of ethical capitals; which are, in turn, defined by their ability to grant symbolic power, in other words, respect and recognition. This is why the ‘powerful’ group is by definition the one that is looked up at and whose qualities are deemed as worthy of respect.Along the same logic, a position is ‘dominated’ if it lacks ethical capitals, which in other words means that the qualities that belong to it are not acknowledged as worthy in a given field or culture. This is why, again, by definition, it will always be the case that the qualities of the ‘dominated’ are not given enough recognition. It is due to this tautology that Bourdieu is always able to prove that the accepted values belong to the most ‘powerful’ group; and this is the reason why all empirical counterarguments trying to find instances when ethics are not dictated by the dominant group – just like the one proposed by Honneth at the end of the previous section – can be dismissed by him.

Conclusion The aim of this analysis was to open up the analytical space for taking ethics qua ethics seriously by exposing the flaws in Bourdieu’s arguments that discount ethics as covert means of the competitive pursuit of power. The point that I proposed here is not that people act ethically and out of pure devotion at all times; simply that sometimes they do, yet in Bourdieu’s framework these occasions are indistinguishable from those when they – consciously or unconsciously – pursue power.16 What I hoped to show is that it is not empirical evidence that justifies Bourdieu’s scepticism; but a tautology that labels all qualities worthy of esteem as capitals and hence mistakenly sees all instances of legitimate power as the hidden aim rather than a side effect of normative stances. In contrast to this depiction, I argued that the existence of hierarchy and its acceptance as based on legitimate, symbolic power does not necessarily indicate an underlying power-motive; ethics also create inadvertently a sense of legitimate hierarchy and hence symbolic power. If the tautology is resolved, a modified version of Bourdieu’s theory can be fruitfully incorporated into the sociological study of ethics. I have already mentioned the usefulness of the habitus in understanding the way ethics are acquired and operate in practice. Beyond that, Bourdieu’s concept of the field helps understanding that ethics are not a matter of individual, acultural preferences, but exist in historically evolving, culturally specific areas where their © 2014 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2014 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

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value is recognized and institutionalized. Fields understood this way are the primary arenas where ethics and the cultural traditions are ‘located’, as opposed to abstract notions of ‘values’ that float somewhere outside society. The notion of illusio provides the useful insight that it is the field that presupposes and creates devotion to its field-specific ethics (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1989). It is through participating in fields that these ethics can be made ‘alive’, be engaged, reproduced or transformed by people of different ethical dispositions acquired as part of their habitus. Bourdieu’s analysis of the ‘complicity’ between the habitus and the fields is invaluable in understanding the ways in which these personal and field-specific ethical commitments meet and transform one another. Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

Received 22 September 2011 Finally accepted 16 October 2013

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Agnès Rocamora, Ágoston Fáber, Gábor Vályi, Márk Éber Áron and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes 1 Some authors (Bauman, 1993; Habermas, 1993; Miller, 1998) use the terms ethics and morality to distinguish questions of good life from questions of justice. For the purposes of the present article the distinction is irrelevant. 2 Foucault, for instance, used the term ethics to refer to ‘the conscious practice of freedom’ (1997: 285), that is, to the conscious process of working on the self through practice. For a similar discussion of ethics as bound up with agency see also Evens (1999, 2008) and Zigon (2007, 2008). 3 The debate in which I describe Bourdieu’s position here refers to how ethics actually works in everyday life. There exists a related philosophical debate on how it should work, that is, on the benchmark of the good and the right that can serve as a tenable normative position. These two debates use the same labels for the schools they describe, which may give grounds for confusion. Sayer (2011) provides an excellent discussion of this debate and of the objectivist normative position that he advances; for a social constructivist critique of the objectivist normative position see Slater (1997, 1998) and Honneth (2007). 4 At times Bourdieu proposes a materialist reductionist version of this argument. For example, in Distinction he explains normative stances by the different degrees of distance from necessity. When proposed that way the argument, as Jeffrey Alexander points out, seeks to ‘submerge cultural norms, to demonstrate that they are determined by forces of a . . . material kind’ (1995: 135). 5 In this sense not all groups try to attach a positive evaluation to the qualities in which they excel, but only the dominant group, as one of the hallmarks of being ‘dominated’ is the acceptance of the existing, unfavourable valuation system. 6 Bourdieu’s early work in Algeria also exhibits a clear political commitment against the suffering caused by colonial rule and the Algerian war (see, for example, Bourdieu, 2013). In this sense the political turn in his later work can be seen as a return to this earlier stance.

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Bourdieu, ethics and symbolic power 7 Whereas Taylor uses largely philosophical arguments, Honneth also builds on anthropology and social psychology to support this alternative ontology. In this sense, Honneth’s point is closer to the ethical naturalism promoted by Sayer. 8 A third line challenges Bourdieu for not giving enough attention to agency, which is seen by this line as the precondition of ethics. I do not discuss these theories here because, as I mentioned in the introduction, my use of ethics does not imply agency. For a critique along these lines see Evens (1999, 2008) and Sayer (2011); for a discussion of the possibility of agency as ‘regulated liberties’ in Bourdieu’s work see McNay (1999). 9 Sayer develops arguments both about how ethics actually works and how it should work. Here I only refer to the former, as the latter falls into the philosophical debate on ethics, which is beyond the scope of the current article. 10 According to Taylor (1989) moral traditions can be traced back to religious and philosophical moral sources that we forgot about and therefore we see them as ahistorically universal and beyond debate. A somewhat similar argument is developed by MacIntyre (1981), in that he suggests that our ethical values come from earlier traditions that we are no longer aware of. 11 For earlier formulations see Mills (1940); for a detailed discussion on the similarities and differences between different branches of repertoire theory and their relation to cultural sociology see Silber (2006). 12 Along similar lines, LiPuma argues that not just any symbol and valuation principle will be accepted just because it is promoted by the dominant group, but ‘cultural forms exert power over agents through their meaningfulness’ (1993: 33). 13 Power in itself can also generate admiration, yet in order to be recognized as legitimate power, it needs to be based on qualities deemed as valuable in the given field. This point may be less evident in certain fields, for example in one where esteem is paid to people who earn the most. Yet certain ethical values lay at the very foundation of even these fields. In the business word, respect paid to high-earners is based on the implicit ethical idea that money – similarly to academic titles – is a sign of appreciated qualities: an entrepreneurial spirit, hard work and even aggressive business style (Jackall, 1988; Lamont, 1992). As soon as that assumption does not hold – for example, money turns out to have been acquired through cheating or robbery – money no longer yields esteem, which suggests that only these legitimate ethical qualities allow money to function as a marker of one’s worth in this field. Max Weber’s (2003) classic analysis of the ethos of capitalism can also be read along these lines. 14 See also Lemieux (1999), Dreyfus and Rabinow (1993) and Evens (1999). 15 In this sense the notion is close to, yet broader than what Swartz (2009, 2010) calls ‘moral capital’ to refer to ‘those qualities, capacities, intelligences, strategies, and dispositions that young people acquire, possess, and can “grow’ ” in the pursuit of moral maturity, and where moral maturity (with its goal of “being a good person”) is related to educational, career, and financial success’ (Swartz, 2009: 148). 16 Sayer (2003) uses the distinction between internal and external goods to capture the difference.

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