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Sociology as Anti-Utilitarianism
Alain Caillé
European Journal of Social Theory 2007; 10; 277
DOI: 10.1177/1368431007078893

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 European Journal of Social Theory 10(2): 277–286
Copyright © 2007 Sage Publications: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore

SYMPOSIUM

Theme 4: But Do We Still Not Need Some

Sort of Theoretical Unification?

Sociology as Anti-Utilitarianism
Alain Caillé
U N I V E R S I T Y O F PA R I S - X , N A N T E R R E , PA R I S

The Present Day: An Overview

If one were to go by the incredible variety of writings that lay claim to the socio-
logical label, or the improbable heterogeneity of training programmes in sociol-
ogy – at every university what is taught under this name is different – one would
have to conclude that the discipline exists only in the form of a fiction and that,
as much as it would like to be scientific, it closely resembles an unattainable
science of imaginary questions or solutions. In no other field of thought with
pretensions to specialized knowledge does one find so great a gap between equally
possible and accepted definitions of the object or of the method.
As to its aim: following the French positivist tradition (from Saint-Simon to
M. Mauss via A. Comte and Durkheim), sociology can be seen as the other name
designating social science in general, including anthropology, history and part of
economics and political philosophy, or else, on the contrary, as one particular
social science discipline among others. And each of these two choices – the gener-
alist or the particularist one – opens in its turn onto a whole series of possible
options. Thus, the generalist aim can be pursued in a systemic perspective, with
a strong emphasis on synchrony. Then the main focus of attention is on the more
or less fragmentary unity of society and on the way in which it breaks down into
more or less systemic and functional sub-systems, more or less mutually compat-
ible or more or less irreducible and ‘differentiated’ (ausdifferenziert). Or else, on
the contrary, priority is given to history, to chance, to contingent events, and the
very idea of society or of a possible systemic coherence of the spheres of social
action in their entirety is then minimized, if not ruled out altogether. The first
option, which extends from Durkheim to Luhmann via Talcott Parsons, Lévi-
Strauss and Louis Dumont, is that of the French sociological school, of function-
alism, culturalism and structuralism. The second opens onto the gigantic field of
comparative historical sociology whose incontestable champion is Max Weber.
But it should be added that each of these two possible options is only able to
fulfil its true potential by creating space within itself for the opposite option.

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278 European Journal of Social Theory 10(2)

For some 30 years now at least, the choice that seems to be more and more
predominant within the institutions of sociology, however, is the particularist
choice. In the face of strong identity claims on the part of other disciplines,
notably economics, history and philosophy, sociologists have ceaselessly reined
in their ambitions. They generally no longer lay claim to a generalist, cross-
cutting or overarching form of knowledge, but one that is different. But differ-
ent in what way? Different in virtue of the possession of a specific object or in
virtue of the sociologist’s ability to examine in a divergent manner the objects of
others? This question has in fact scarcely been resolved and, in truth, it is often
not even raised. That sociology can have one or more specific objects at first
seems obvious, in light of the existence of numerous specialized sociologies: the
sociology of labour and organizations, the sociology of sport, leisure, health, law,
government, war, science, the economy, etc. Since the objects studied in this way
are perfectly real, the corresponding sociologies can deem themselves to be assured
of their at least potential scientificity. For a given object, a clearly delimited field
of knowledge. Nonetheless, the question arises as to how these diverse sociolo-
gies relate to one another and what they might ultimately have in common. In
what sense can they be sociology, if there does not exist one or another form of
general sociology? (And should one speak of a political sociology, an economic
sociology, an industrial sociology, etc., or else of a sociology of politics, of the
economy, of industry, etc.?) Moreover, for each of these objects the competition
with other disciplines is stiff. For what reasons would an economics, an ethnol-
ogy, a philosophy or a history of each of these objects not be superior and prefer-
able, in fact and even by right, to their sociology? The definition of particular
sociologies by their empirical object and by their specific content turns out to be
illusory (as was already strongly stressed by Simmel). It remains then for sociol-
ogists to claim as their own, not the study of the content of such or such an
activity, but its form, and to display, for want of a general theory, the specific
methodological techniques making it possible to define it.
Concretely, for some 30 years now, the dominant evolution of the discipline
has been characterized by the shift from a macrosociological perspective to a
microsociological one, inspired by symbolic interactionism (carried on nowadays
by the analysis of networks), and by the partial abandonment of the project of a
systematic comparative historical sociology, attentive to universal history, in
favour of a constructivist-deconstructionist viewpoint more interested in demon-
strating the extent to which existing institutions are contingent and arbitrary
than in analyzing their concrete historical roots. It remains to be seen what
methods will be considered adequate from the micro-interactionist and decon-
structivist point of view dominant today.
Now, as to methods, the quarrel over the diverse possible options is perhaps
still more inexplicable than the one over the objects. Wolf LePenies has done a
good job in showing how classical sociology found itself torn between the literary
ideal of the realist novel (itself susceptible to the sociological ideal . . .) and the
ideal of the sciences of nature. Ought the work of sociological knowledge be of
the same type as scientific work (impersonal and cumulative), as a work of art

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 Caillé Sociology as Anti-Utilitarianism 279

(always singular) or as the work of philosophical thought (singular like the work
of art but aiming for knowledge like scientific work)? More concretely, how can
a single discipline harbour within its boundaries partisans of the mathematical
analysis of social facts (from Paul Lazarsfeld to network analysis), empiricist
practitioners of pure observation without commentary, and defenders, like Jean
Baudrillard, of poetic analysis, without counting the multiple variants of the
phenomenological approach, variously crossed with the epistemology of the
second Wittgenstein? To this already ample diversity must be added the fact that,
depending on the choice of object, generalist or particularist, and in line with
the methodological or theoretical options selected, each sociologist will draw
especially on one or another discipline, economics for the exponents of Rational
Action Theory, history for the comparatists, moral and political philosophy for
the critical sociologies, anthropology, ethnology or linguistics for microsociolog-
ical interactionism, etc. (Figure 1). And each of these disciplines, in turn, is of
course itself riven by quarrels over object and method, not to mention political
and ideological disputes.
The only conclusion that seems to emerge from this initial overview is that the
sociological discipline is so heterogeneous that in order to try to hold together for
better or worse all its fragmented pieces, one would have to assemble them behind
the ideal of a truly very general sociology. Too general, and seemingly beyond reach.
The temptation is therefore great to leave the discipline in its state of thorough
fragmentation without attempting to paste any of the pieces together. And besides,
by what right, in the name of what could one set out to reconquer the lost unity
– all the more lost in that it was never found – of sociological knowledge?

Of Classical Sociology and its Relative Unity

Before resigning ourselves to surrender in the face of disciplines better assured of

their foundations and their relative unity, we must nevertheless ask ourselves if

sociology = general social science

Durkheim Weber

systematic historical
sociology sociology

specialized symbolic
sociologies interactionism

sociology = particular science

Figure 1

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280 European Journal of Social Theory 10(2)

it is really impossible to identify a common denominator shared by those who

are generally considered to be the great ancestors or founding fathers of the disci-
pline. The only thing about which sociologists are in agreement, wrote R. Aron,
is the fact that they disagree about what sociology is. But – and here is a curious
fact which merits reflection – they are most often equally in agreement about
what sociology definitely is not. Is it really impossible to identify the sources of
and reasons for this agreement about or through disagreement? In other words,
to pinpoint how sociology differs from the philosophy of philosophers, the econ-
omics of economists or the history of historians?
Let us sketch out here an ideal-type of the sociology of the founders. To under-
stand the main thing at stake in classic sociology, we believe it is necessary to
show how the sociological ambition was determined first of all with respect to
political economy, in its wake and in opposition to it, and, secondarily, with
respect to philosophy (secondarily, since the distancing process had already been
carried out in large measure by the economists).
The first point to note is that the sociological tradition was initially consti-
tuted in a relation of adherence to political economy and, above and beyond it,
to the utilitarian imaginary that served as its matrix. For the quasi-totality of the
founders, great readers of the economists, it went without saying that the latter
had in fact opened the way to a properly scientific, objective analysis of social
phenomena (with only Comte and Durkheim reluctant to concede this). The
adherence to the ‘programme’ of the economists was in the first place largely
adhesion. The ‘zero-degree’ of the sociological approach appeared with the
superimposition on this initial acquiescence of a dimension of objection to
political economy which began as an objection to the model of the homo
oeconomicus. The latter, in the sociologists’ view, cannot be reduced to nothing
but himself. He is such only under capitalism (Marx), in America and coupled
with a profoundly religious individual (de Tocqueville), combined with a subject
equally wertrational, affective and traditionalist (Weber), immersed in the logic
of illogical actions (Pareto), and only after having long been homo donator
(Mauss), etc. In short, the nascent sociology is at once utilitarian and anti-
utilitarian, but as long as it limits itself to partially contesting the model of the
homo oeconomicus, what for my part I call the axiomatics of interest, without
proposing its own explanation of social action, it is, in sum, anti-utilitarian only
negatively and by default.
Sociology only begins to constitute itself positively and as such when it leaves
behind the adhesion to economic explanations and enters into a relation of
going beyond political economy. This going beyond takes place in its turn in two
phases and through two modalities at once complementary and opposite. On the
one hand, the sociologists want to be even more objective and objectifying than
the economists. On the other, they hope on the contrary to confer upon the
sociological subject, individual or collective, more subjectivity, liberty and
creativity than the dismal homo oeconomicus can have. As far as objectification is
concerned, the sociological approach aims to objectify the objectifications of the
economists by historicizing them and thereby revealing that what economists

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 Caillé Sociology as Anti-Utilitarianism 281

hold to be natural givens – homo oeconomicus, economic calculation, capital,

money, value, interest, etc. – result in fact from a history. A history which, however,
is not the speculative history of philosophers (here distance is established with
respect to a certain philosophy, whose central concepts are also historicized by
the sociological approach), but the empirical history of concrete men which must
be reconstructed scientifically. And first of all empirically. But what is meant by
‘concrete men’? The calculating individuals of economists? Groups? Classes?
Races? Peoples? Nations? Each of the founders of the sociological tradition will
give different answers to this question. But this diversity, all too obvious, must
not obscure the impressive analogy among the respective trajectories their thinking
followed. All of them started out from a rather prosaic vision of the underlying
nature of social man, a vision close to that of the economists, notwithstanding
the relation of objection; all of them – at one time or another, in one form or
another – all of them (even Marx) end up discovering the decisive role of religion
in the shaping of properly social action.
The problem is that sociologists were never able to agree on any definition of
this religious fact which, implicitly or explicitly, they nonetheless all ended up
deeming to be essential. This is in all likelihood where the unsolved riddle of
classical sociology chiefly resides, along with the reason for its inability to
produce a model of intelligibility of social facts as easy to grasp, to share and to
operationalize as that of the economists. Without claiming to solve the riddle
of the sphinx, let us nevertheless indicate in what direction it seems to us that
the solution must be sought. Indeed, it has, in many respects, already been found
repeatedly.
Rather than talking about the decisive role of religion, let us say that what
sociology discovers at the deepest level is that the relation among human and
social subjects must be constituted as such; that it is irreducible to its utilitarian,
instrumental, functional or economic stakes, as real as these are; that the relation

ADHERENCE TO ECONOMICS

adhesion objection

OBJECTIFICATION SUBJECTIFICATION

historicization/ symbolization
deconstruction

GOING BEYOND

Figure 2

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282 European Journal of Social Theory 10(2)

has its own efficacy, but that it cannot take form, exist and play its role unless it
is symbolized (and ritualized). Sociology is the science of this efficacy proper to
the relation (of which religion is but a way of giving it form), irreducible to its
content. Simmel is doubtless the one who formulated this idea best. But his
formulation only assumes its full meaning when interpreted with the help of the
author to whom he is, in fact, intellectually the closest, M. Mauss. The relation
can only take form on the basis of a gift dimension which represents the moment
of non-conditionality, without which there is no relation as such, but only
exchange and contract. The non-conditionality of which it is a question here is
a conditional non-conditionality. The relation can only survive (outside of domi-
nation and exploitation) if there is something in it for each party – this is the
moment of conditionality, of the utilitarian and instrumental – but it can only
take form and regenerate itself through anti-utilitarian non-conditionality.
Thus reformulated, sociology no longer appears as a merely negative anti-
utilitarianism, criticizing economists in the name of an indeterminate theoretical
dissatisfaction, but as a positive anti-utilitarianism: one which does not complain
about the weaknesses of the model of the homo oeconomicus in the name of an
ideal of the free gift, pure and fusional love, or the warm relation attributed to
small, closed communities, but which concretely analyzes the engendering of the
social bond through the thousand and one modalities of the provisional anti-
utilitarian sacrifice of utility in favour of the relation itself. Thanks to the symbol-
ism of the relation, the agents who enter into it achieve their recognition as
subjects, their liberty and their creativity. And this is true both on the macro level
(where the gift constitutive of the relation is identical to the political sphere) and
on the micro level. Both on the level of the generalized interactionism that shapes
vast social formations at a distance, and on that of the microscopic interactions
that take place face to face.

The Contemporary Legacy of the Sociological Tradition

Because it is unable to identify the paradigmatic base of the sociological tradition

to which it claims to be the heir, contemporary sociology maintains a curious
avoidance relation vis-à-vis this tradition, treating it as a sort of deus otiosus to
which every sort of veneration is due (especially in the classroom) but which one
is unsure what to do with in practice. One could show how the great majority
of recent sociological productions fall somewhere within the quadrilateral that
we sketched out in the introduction by opposing the choice of general sociology
– with its two options, systematic or historicist – and that of micro-sociology,
with its two options, specialized sociology and/or the interactionist approach
(symbolic or reticular). These approaches conceive of themselves as being largely
irreducible to one another. Are they really?

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 Caillé Sociology as Anti-Utilitarianism 283

On the Relative Unity of Fragmented Sociologies

A closer look reveals that the overall fragmentation of sociology exists solely from
a vantage point located within one of the established schools in particular and
solely to the extent that the school in question is presumed to be the only one
privy to the truth about the whole. Thus, Rational Action Theory, the utilitarian
theory of action, does not pose a problem in and of itself. It only becomes
problematic if it asserts that all social action must be assumed to be reducible to
rational instrumental calculation. The same would hold true for a ritualist
theory of action (or interaction) unwilling to see anything but the dimension of
obligation, not to say compulsion. Or, conversely, of a theory that would make
solidarity or liberty (individual or collective) the primary and unique facts, conse-
quently assigning their opposites to the pole of alienation or reification. In the
same way, the quarrel over methods is largely sterile. It is clear that each method
is legitimate to the extent that it helps bring to light aspects that the others leave
in the dark.
But it is obviously not enough to stop here at a diplomatic and epistemologi-
cally correct eclecticism. In order to ensure a fruitful coexistence of apparently
irreducible schools of thought, it is necessary to dispose of minimal meta-
theoretical propositions capable at least of providing rough guidance to the
potential explanatory powers of each.
The principal theoretical and meta-theoretical challenge that sociology must
meet in order to find its identity and relative unity is that of the clarification of a
properly sociological theory of action, at once complementary and opposed to the
standard economic paradigm. What relationship is there between the Weberian
theory of action (and interpreted in what way?), Parsons’ AGIL schema,
Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus, the Habermasian or Luhmannian formulations,
etc.? For my part, I believe that the terrain for the articulation of these diverse
theorizations is to be sought within the framework of a Maussian theory of action
(unfortunately still too implicit) showing how there enters indissociably into every
action a measure both of self-interest and of interest for others, and, at the same
time, a measure both of obligation and of liberty (or creativity). In this framework,
the Maussian theory of action affirms the hierarchical primacy, at once positive
and normative, of the subject’s interests in self-constitution (in recognition) over
his instrumental interests, the hierarchical primacy of the anti-utilitarian dimen-
sion over the utilitarian dimension. Note that this multidimensional paradigm
of action is anti-paradigmatic insofar as it never prejudges the relative strength
of each of the four motives and, even if it forcefully asserts that the social relation
and the recognition of the subjects cannot be obtained as such except through
the detour of the anti-utilitarian moment, it leaves the answer to the question
open to empirical investigation. Finally, let us add that this paradigm of indi-
vidual action is easily transformed into a paradigm of collective action, in which
coordination can in turn be assured by interest and/or solidarity, by obligation
(hierarchy) and/or liberty and creativity.

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284 European Journal of Social Theory 10(2)

As to methods, there is scarcely any doubt that an acceptable sociological

approach must be able to satisfy four main imperatives: (1) to describe reality;
(2) to explain it by appealing to the principle of reason and by seeking objective
causes (Schutz’s weil Motiven); (3) to understand and interpret the subjective
meaning of action (Schutz’s wo zu Motiven); and finally, (4) to evaluate reality,
indicating the desirable route and turning away from the one that is less so. I
imagine there will be little disagreement about the first three imperatives, even
if each school in fact gives more emphasis to one or another among them. Only
the fourth runs the risk of being seriously contested. I consider, for my part,
following Alvin Gouldner notably, that it is the principal methodological impera-
tive, the one by which sociology opens onto axiological reflexivity and, taking its
own paths, converges with the philosophical (and economic) traditions.

Sociology and Globalization

Sociology needs to reflect upon the fact that it is a recent discipline, a latecomer
with no guarantee that its relevance was not closely tied to the quite peculiar
historical period in which it appeared, the one in which the great traditional
societies (of the Ancien régime) made the revolutionary turn into economic,
political, technical and scientific modernity. These societies were still societies;
they were still partially organized around what survived of all the old unifying
principles – religious, communitarian, symbolic – against which the enterprise
of democratic modernization silently struggled. One may wonder whether
globalization does not mark the entry into an era in which nothing more of the
old order of things will exist and in which, as a result, nothing more will evoke
anything resembling a society of the Durkheimian or Parsonian type. Let us put
it differently. And dogmatically. The societies which anthropologists studied can
be subsumed under the concept of primary society, i.e. the small society founded
on mutual knowledge, the gift (the obligation to give, to receive and to recipro-
cate), and on symbolism. The main line of inquiry of classical sociology concerned
the modalities and the implications of the great upheaval that occurred within
what we may call the secondary society, the great society that assembles its
members well beyond the ‘between us’ sphere of mutual knowledge by submit-
ting them to one and the same law. The traditionalist secondary society, of the
Ancien régime, was founded on the religious Law. Modernity, the object of soci-
ologists’ and economists’ inquiry, consisted in the replacement of the religious Law
with a general legality of a functional and impersonal type, distributed among the
economic law of the market, the juridical law of the State, scientific laws and
universal moral law. Today we are witnessing, with globalization, the emergence
of a tertiary society, the vast, world-spanning society whose leading modality is
virtuality, which entails the capacity to de-realize everything that was posited as
pre-eminently real by the societies that came before. This tertiary and virtual
world cannot survive, however, if it is not able to continue to build, on infinitely
varied and interwoven scales, the social relation as such, and consequently to

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 Caillé Sociology as Anti-Utilitarianism 285

create room, at both the macro and the intersubjective and micro levels, for the
anti-utilitarian dimension of social being, which is the one that it fell to the socio-
logical tradition to identify and the one that constituted the matrix of the primary
and secondary societies.

On the Sociological Discipline

The practical consequences that I draw from these reflections might seem contra-
dictory. Given that I ultimately minimize the importance of the theoretical and
methodological fragmentation of sociology, it might seem logical that I would
call for its reunification and for the affirmation of its irreducible identity with
respect to other disciplines. But my conclusion is quite different. For pragmatic
reasons and reasons of substance at the same time.
If, in fact, the current fragmentation of the discipline is not intrinsically
harmful from a meta-theoretical viewpoint, the same cannot be said in practice.
The absence of unity and coherence in the teaching of the discipline and its
difficulty in appropriating its own tradition and defending it in the face of neigh-
bouring disciplines are all factors that lead, first, students and then researchers
to shut themselves up within the narrow confines of the schools, specialized soci-
ologies or locally dominant methodologies with which the accidents of their
curriculum have brought them into contact. All this generates a proliferation of
specializations that are hidebound, if not downright sectarian. The result is that
the properly theoretical debate between the various sociological schools and
traditions is generally reduced to its simplest possible expression. And as to the
debate with philosophy, economics, history or politics, it too remains incredibly
marginal.
It is necessary therefore to attempt a return (in the interest of a new start) to
a point of view at once Simmelian-Weberian and Durkheimian-Maussian that
would make it possible to define a new alliance with the other established disci-
plines in the social sciences. To recognize along with Simmel that sociology has
no object of (and not all) his own, or with Weber that it is but an effort to appre-
hend intellectually something of the variability of the forms of history, and to
conclude, with Durkheim and Mauss, that general sociology is nothing other
than social science considered from the standpoint of that unity towards which,
however inaccessible, it yet must tend. What rendered the Durkheimian project
impracticable and aroused the avowed and active hostility of the other disciplines
was its excessive ambition coupled with the paradoxical attempt to make a
particular social science the site for the necessarily overarching synthesis of the
results of the other sciences. Where philosophy had aspired to achieve a specu-
lative synthesis, Durkheimian sociology aimed for a positive and empirical one.
If we wish to infuse new life into social science debate and to overcome the
kinds of blindness inherent in specialization without giving up the benefits of the
division of intellectual labour due to the disciplinary principle, we need to bring
into being and to institute, alongside the specialized social science disciplines, a

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286 European Journal of Social Theory 10(2)

curriculum and a career path in general social science that would provide a frame-
work for cooperation among those researchers and instructors trained in the
specialized disciplines – economics, sociology, history, anthropology, moral and
political philosophy – who consider that what they have in common with the
other disciplines is more important than what belongs to them alone. Such an
institutionalized setting for generality in social science, geared to both educational
training and the organization of research, would not be specifically sociological,
nor economic, philosophical or anything else. But there is no doubt that if we
succeeded in bringing it into existence, we would thereby have revived the under-
lying spirit of classical sociology and given ourselves the opportunity to assume
its legacy at last.

Acknowledgement

This article was translated by Mark Anspach.

■ Alain Caillé is Professor of Sociology at the Université Paris-X, Nanterre and is

co-director of SOPHIAPOL (Laboratoire de sociologie, anthropologie et philosophie
politiques). He is also the editor of La Revue du MAUSS (www.revuedumauss.com).
His most recent books are: Don, intérêt et désintéressement. Bourdieu, Mauss,
Platon et quelques autres (Editions La Découverte, 2005); Dé-penser l’économique
(Editions La Découverte, 2005). Address: University of Paris-X, Nanterre, France.
[email: Mauss1981@aol.com] ■

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