Abstract

Mauro Basaure, Vando Borghi and Manlio Iofrida discuss Luc Boltanski's "De la Critique" ("On Critique"). Basaure focuses the basic grammar of this sociology based on «world», as chaotic environment, «reality», as construction, and «institutions», as means to maintain the order. Their interplay develops immanent contradictions and social critique can be broadly understood as a critique of social pathologies. Borghi emphasizes Boltanski's attention to the critical capacities of social actors, which, combined with other perspectives, is particularly helpful to (re)connect sociology and critique. Iofrida outlines the contours of Boltanski's philosophical anthropology in which body and embodied functions are located in the foreground. Its dualism between chaos and order can be overcome by integrating the critique with a notion of ecology as irreducibility of nature to culture.