The British Journal of Sociology 2019 Volume 70 Issue 3

BJS
Is self-worth crucial for the reproduction of
inequality? A response to Michele Lamont’s Lecture

Eva Illouz

Commentary for Lamont M. 2019 “From ‘having’ to ‘being’: self-worth and the current crisis of
American society” for British Journal of Sociology DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12667

In the pages of the influential Harvard Business Review the former President
of the American Psychological Association and prominent scholar of positive
psychology, Martin Seligman, discusses the benefits of positive thinking by
using a telling example taken from the work sphere:
Douglas and Walter, two University of Pennsylvania MBA graduates, were
laid off by their Wall Street companies 18 months ago. Both went into a
tailspin: They were sad, listless, indecisive, and anxious about the future.
For Douglas, the mood was transient. After two weeks he told himself, ‘It’s
not you; it’s the economy going through a bad patch. I’m good at what I do,
and there will be a market for my skills.’ He updated his résumé and sent
it to a dozen New York firms, all of which rejected him. He then tried six
companies in his Ohio hometown and eventually landed a position. Walter,
by contrast, spiraled into hopelessness: ‘I got fired because I can’t perform
under pressure,’ he thought. ‘I’m not cut out for finance. The economy will
take years to recover.’ Even as the market improved, he didn’t look for
another job; he ended up moving back in with his parents.
Douglas and Walter (actually composites based on interviewees) stand
at opposite ends of the continuum of reactions to failure. The Douglases
of the world bounce back after a brief period of malaise; within a year
they’ve grown because of the experience. The Walters go from sadness
to depression to a paralyzing fear of the future. Yet failure is a nearly
inevitable part of work; and along with dashed romance, it is one of life’s
most common traumas. People like Walter are almost certain to find their
careers stymied, and companies full of such employees are doomed in hard
times. It is people like Douglas who rise to the top, and whom organiza-
tions must recruit and retain in order to succeed. But how can you tell who
is a Walter and who is a Douglas? And can Walters become Douglases?
(Seligman 2011)

Illouz (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) (Corresponding author email: eva.illouz@mail.huji.ac.il)
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2019 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 101 Station Landing, Suite 300,
Medford, MA 02155, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12664
740  Eva Illouz

Following the tenets of positive psychology, Seligman frames the stories of

these two employees as the story of a missed opportunity to turn adver-
sity into self-improvement for one, and as the story of resilience for the
other. The moral lesson is clear: whatever blow fate deals us, negativity must
always be converted into existential positivity. The inequities of the work
sphere are nothing but tests for our resilience. And these tests should never
be the object of our anger or hopelessness (Cabanas and Illouz accepted for
publication).
Seligman here operates a few moves at once, which all reflect what has
been loosely called neo-liberal ideology: (1) He never names the practice of
downsizing, obviously responsible for the firing of two (presumably) valuable
employees. This is a clear case of obfuscation, common to agents disseminat-
ing ideology. (2) He creates a hierarchy between two types of employees: one
who bounces back and becomes quickly recyclable on the labour market and
accepts his downward career path and one whose self-worth is so deeply dam-
aged that he can no longer be a member of the market nor resign himself to a
downward path. (3) That latter fact is explained by his lack of resilience, in turn
viewed as self-inflicted defeatism. (4) This enables Seligman to value some
personalities and discard others. In fact if hopelessness, depression, pessimism
can be corrected by adequate training, their existence and persistence point
to a lack of adequate mental training. This lack of mental training becomes a
moral failing. (5) Positivity is a personality feature that makes one impervious
to social circumstances, to negative messages and to failure. It is the capacity
to ignore the very external stimuli which cause uncertainty, anxiety, stress or
worthlessness and to remain (almost autistically) focused on one’s self-worth.
In that sense, it is a capacity to obliterate social environment and to remain
self-defined and self-focused.
Seligman manages to naturalize neo-liberal ideology by failing to name
properly downsizing, by denying the devastating psychic effects of occupa-
tional uncertainty, by making a distinction and hierarchy between the mentally
and economically fit and unfit, by creating an equivalence between economic
adversity and psychic opportunity, by downplaying and even delegitimizing
feelings of injustice and unfairness and by calling for eternal psychic opportun-
ism, seizing all failures as occasions for self-improvement and for the display of
emotional capital in the form of resilience (see Illouz 2008). All this amounts
to creating a new way of stigmatizing those who lack in self-sufficiency and in
positive thinking. Not only is lack of self-worth not viewed as an effect of social
structure but it is viewed as self-inflicted. More: it is in fact ultimately viewed
as the cause for one’s poor economic performance. By a spectacular inversion
so familiar to deeply ideological forms of thinking, the effect of social inequal-
ity becomes the cause for it.
This in turn no doubt contributes to reinforce the stigmatization of the
downwardly mobile. It is this process of stigmatization of the downwardly
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2019  British Journal of Sociology 70(3)
 Is Self-worth crucial for the reproduction of Inequality?  741

mobile at the time when opportunities for social mobility have objectively
narrowed that Lamont addresses in her wide-ranging and enlightening BJS
lecture.
Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence suggested implicitly what Lamont
made explicit in this (and other) pieces, namely that the self can be damaged
in enduring ways through mechanisms of self and other devaluation. But
Bourdieu did not clarify or dwell on the fact that contemporary capitalist
economy makes exacting psychic demands on the self and that personality is
evaluated according to the self-esteem, self-worth, self-confidence it displays.
These psychic attributes are forms of introjections of one’s sense of social value
which become assets in contexts and situations where the value of people is
uncertain. As Michel Feher has illuminatingly suggested, the contemporary
self is a capital not only in Gary Becker’s sense that external forms of self-
investments such as education accrue to it, and not only in Bourdieu’s sense
that it uses its familiarity with high culture as a capital. Rather, for Feher, it
is the entire matrix of emotional dispositions that form a self which become
mobilized to the marketplace (2009). Emotions must be fructified to be
adapted to the workplace. To the best of my knowledge, Bourdieu never made
‘self-worth’ into a crucial mediating variable, explaining how different social
classes approach their social roles with different psychic equipments. This,
among other things, is one of Lamont’s key contributions to the sociology of
inequality (1992, 2009a, 2009b).
Building on her impressive body of work for the last 30 years, Lamont brings
here sociology to the heart of policy-making. She shows not only that social
mobility has slowed down but that the founding myth of the American nation
– the American dream – has no longer any traction. Given the widespread
neo-liberal belief in self-management and self-improvement, this has direct
consequences on self-worth, one of the chief categories which Lamont has
researched in the last decades in a series of path-breaking studies. She thus
suggests to remedy to the devaluation associated with downward mobility by
extending self-worth to minorities, thus ‘broadening criteria of self-worth from
“having” to “being,”’ and by institutionalizing them through various means.
In this way, she places cultural sociology at the heart of policy-making. For,
if Lamont considers traditional measures of inequality to be important, she
advances more qualitative and intangible ones as well, such as recognition (or
lack thereof). This is indeed a most welcome move. To those who have tradi-
tionally argued that inequality is a matter of fair redistribution of resources,
Lamont retorts that the problem is multidimensional, and that it should there-
fore include a cultural dimension as well, where culture is here located directly
in the self and its inner resources (in this she follows a glorious tradition in
anthropology and cultural sociology). Given the prevalence and even consoli-
dation of ideals of self-sufficiency, the disdain of the middle and upper-middle
classes for the economically ‘failed’ has increased along with what Lamont
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742  Eva Illouz

calls a ‘hardening of the boundaries’ around them. This, according to her,

can be remedied through a three-pronged strategy: by multiplying criteria of
worth, by pushing forward universalist conceptions of human worth, and by
destigmatizing the stigmatized.
Particularly stimulating in these suggestions is their call on making psychic
problems (self-worth) into non-psychological problems. Lamont suggests that
we institutionalize modes of evaluation that could restore to men and women
their sense of worth and dignity (to use a word Lamont used in the title of one
of her books). Lamont thus places sociology in the (vast and wide) terrain that
has so far been occupied by psychology.
Lamont’s proposal that we institutionalize multiple criteria of self-worth as
a way to counter the hardening of boundaries is most welcome but should not
come as a surprise. Moving away from dominant criteria of worth has a long tra-
dition. It has been for example the strategy of charismatic spiritual leaders and
philosophers (especially of the Stoic variety), calling for detaching oneself from
conventional definitions of social goods and valuing the inner life (‘being’).
Moreover, the multiplication of criteria of social worth and their institution-
alization have been at the very centre of the 1960s’ revolts, which forcefully
countered the capitalistic values that had taken hold of industrial societies and
offered new and multiple criteria of worth (‘imagination’ or ‘sexual pleasure’).
The 1960s’ demands were largely relayed by feminist, gay and black movements
who advanced alternative forms of self-worth. Women’s housework was reha-
bilitated against its devaluation by capitalist and male implicit valuation of
paid work. African American identities were revalued in the Black is Beautiful
movement which countered the physical valuation of whiteness (white skin,
smooth and blond hair). The gay liberation movement devised strategies to
oppose shame and secrecy as operative modes of self-devaluation and inter-
nalization of the hatred for homosexuals. Gay re-valuation of gay desire was
a successful cultural and political strategy, culminating in the legalization of
gay marriage in several countries. Finally, post-colonial movements and iden-
tities have been, to a great extent, about reclaiming a lost sense of worth dam-
aged by the colonial trampling of local cultures and the bodily integrity of the
colonized. Developing alternative modes of evaluation was crucial in political
struggles to achieve symbolic and legal equality with the colonizers.
Thus, my first remark is factual: strategies to multiply criteria of evaluation
have been with us for many decades. This in turn places Lamont’s analyses of
self-worth as a key dimension of social inequality right at the centre of sociol-
ogy as a whole, not only of cultural sociology.
Moreover, to the extent that modern economy demands unprecedented
psychic resources – precisely because so much of the work of having a self has
been privatized and left to the sole resources of the individual – we may say
that institutionalizing self-worth can be an effective counter force to increase
the inner psychic resources demanded to compete in cut-throat market places.
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2019  British Journal of Sociology 70(3)
 Is Self-worth crucial for the reproduction of Inequality?  743

Given the endemic presence of uncertainty and ontological insecurity, psy-

chic resources are constantly needed to ‘colonize’ the future and perform trust.
Self-confidence becomes a way to synecdochically persuade others of one’s
value, compelling them to make inferences about one’s set of competencies
and capacity to collaborate.
And yet, in the remainder of this paper, I will cast some shadow on this
diagnostic. Despite its pertinence and importance, I believe we should be cau-
tious about our uses of ‘self-worth’ as a key dimension of social analysis. The
fact that multiple criteria of worth have been with us for a while, constitutes a
reference point we can use to ask if indeed they counter effectively inequality
and are valid substitutes for it. Thus the question I want to raise: Is an increase
in subjective well-being and self-worth the adequate response to inequality?
First, as already noticed, diversification of worth already exists. Some strands
of feminist thought and Evangelical churches hold each in their own way that
‘care’, altruism and the inner life matter more than the (male) world of status
and competition. Women in particular are probably the most likely to claim
that caring for others is more meaningful than ‘running in the rat race’, yet they
are most likely to be poor and more likely to be victimized (Ferraro 2015). The
same holds true for the African American population which, despite its reval-
uation of blackness continues to suffer from the highest rate of incarceration
rate and violence (Threadcraft and Miller 2017). The problem of strategies of
revaluation is that they cannot be distinguished from the psycho-social pro-
cess which Bourdieu had identified as ‘making virtue out necessity’, a process
whereby one incorporates the objective constraints attached to one’s social
position and accepts them through a process of valuation of the very depriva-
tions one suffers from (for example, working class disdain for education; their
valuation of manual work or of the ‘real world’). Women’s valuation of ‘care’ is
a glaring example: while women execute most of the care work of society and
are thus excluded from more lucrative or high-powered positions, they can
celebrate this as an alternative dimension of worth.
Second, Lamont quotes a study by Glanzer, Hill and Johnson (2017) with
a nationally representative survey of college students from 10 colleges and
universities of various ranks. The findings indicate that more than 50 per
cent of students do not view making money as the ultimate purpose of life
and 81 per cent of students strongly agreed that being happy is one of the
purposes driving their life. Millennials seem to offer examples of the evolu-
tion of criteria of worth such as meaningful connections. But this diagnostic
ignores the fact that states and corporations have moved to make happiness
and subjective well-being into new dimensions to evaluate their own per-
formance. Indeed, happiness measures have been adopted by policy makers
worldwide.
As Cabanas and myself have documented (accepted for publication), a large
number of institutions now rely on happiness indexes and aim to reinforce
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744  Eva Illouz

positive self-images. To paraphrase findings from our study, in 2012, the UN

declared 20 March the ‘International Day of Happiness’, proclaiming ‘happi-
ness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in the lives of human
beings around the world’. Defending ‘the importance of their recognition in
public policy objectives’ of nations seemed to create an alternative form of
policy. Another good example comes from the Organization of Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD). This influential world organization
advocates economic policies and coordinates statistics between more than
thirty of the wealthiest nations, and it now issues its own projects or happi-
ness-based tools, all aiming at increasing and measuring happiness. Examples
count the Your Better Life Index and Better Life Initiative. Since 2009, the
OECD has strongly recommended the national accounting systems to adopt
well-being indexes ‘for monitoring and benchmarking countries performance,
for guiding people’s choices, and for designing and delivering policies’ (OECD
2013: 3) in multiple policy domains, such as externalities, public resources
allocation, financial trust, cities design, unemployment, or tax structures.
Important multinationals such as Coca-Cola opened branches of its Coca-
Cola Institute of Happiness in all these countries to yearly issue international
reports on happiness – called a ‘happiness barometer’ – with the collaboration
of happiness economists and positive psychologists. Today, this institute counts
dozens of branches in several countries, including Pakistan. Many corporations
now count in their ranks Chief Happiness Officers (CHO) whose mission is to
improve employees’ happiness (that is, performance).
Happiness, subjective well-being, anti-materialism are now part and parcel
of the official discourses of many institutions of power. It is a chief way to
create a diversion from policies that emphasize redistribution, with some econ-
omists suggesting that happiness is a valid substitute for other measures of fair-
ness. Riding on the wave of happiness studies, economists Kelley and Evans
recently concluded that ‘income inequality is associated with greater happi-
ness’. This ‘key fact’ would apply to developing countries, whereas inequality
in developed countries would be ‘irrelevant’ to individuals’ happiness, ‘neither
harming nor helping’ (Kelley and Evans 2017: 33). The policy implications con-
cerning efforts to reduce inequality, are the following: None. Indeed, as the
economists claim:
Tremendous efforts have been made, both now and in the past, towards
reducing income inequality. There is a widespread willingness to sacri-
fice economic growth in order to suppress inequality. Our results suggest
that these efforts are largely misguided: They are misguided because, in
the world as we find it, societal income inequality does not in general re-
duce individual subjective well-being. In developing countries, inequality
if anything increases happiness. This suggests that current efforts by such
agencies as the World Bank directed towards reducing income inequality

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2019  British Journal of Sociology 70(3)
 Is Self-worth crucial for the reproduction of Inequality?  745

are potentially harmful to the well-being of the citizens of poor countries.

(Kelley and Evans 2007: 35, in Cabanas and Illouz accepted for publication).
Well-being is increasingly viewed as crucial and key to millennials because it
is presented as such by state policies and corporations. Well-being has simply
become a part of neo-liberal governance. Lamont is aware of the danger and
makes sure to make a distinction between criteria of self-worth and ‘grit’ – the
kind of resilience demanded from individuals to bear the sometimes extreme
demands of modern institutions. Yet, in practice it is difficult if not impossible
to make a distinction between strategies to reinforce self-worth and strate-
gies to increase resilience to economic hardships. Given that states have now
a vested interest in having citizens find for themselves alternative paths to sat-
isfaction, multiplying criteria of worth and well-being runs the risk of encour-
aging a form of subjectivity able to withstand rather than challenge the status
quo. Ultimately, I was sometimes left wondering if this could not distract us
from the urgent task of repairing infrastructures, weakening oligarchies and
restoring greater equality.
Lamont does not make it always clear if the alternative criteria of self-worth
she is seeking are for the increasingly frustrated middle and lower-middle
classes or if it is directed to the working classes. She sometimes writes about
one group, sometimes about the other. But we should make a very sharp dis-
tinction between the two. By and large, the working classes have not bene-
fited from the revaluation of various forms of life entailed by the movements
of the 1970s. As a recent study across several countries suggests, a great deal
of the vote for the extreme right can be explained by the general sentiment
of devaluation of working-class lives (made obvious in the decay of neigh-
bourhoods, the devaluation of working-class labour, work, etc.). (http://www.
progressives-zentrum.org/politically-abandoned/?lang = fr). These results con-
firm Lamont’s analysis, but it is a form of devaluation that is grounded in the
objective deterioration of their lifeworld. Worth and dignity cannot only be
psychic. They must be grounded in the ways in which work relations are orga-
nized, wealth distributed and democracy shared. Millennials and members of
the middle classes may be experiencing a narrowing of criteria of worth, but
they experience what Marcuse had called one-dimensionality, the reduction of
the meaning of life to professional and financial success. We may deplore it but
this is not a part of the agenda of the sociology of inequality.
Finally, Lamont calls for building narratives of hope. She believes in the
building power of hope. But in this Trumpian age, we should be cautious about
invoking hope for isn’t this what Trump did precisely and his vacuous promise
to make America great again? I was left wondering if anger and discomfort,
rather than hope, have not been historically the more significant moving forces
behind social change. Anger can be easily misdirected and transformed into

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746  Eva Illouz
resentment against weak targets, but a well-informed anger remains the most
powerful impetus to bring about social justice.
(Date accepted: February 2019)
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British Journal of Sociology 70(3)