Luc Boltanski

Luc Boltanski is a French sociologist, born in 1940, who is a director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. He is regarded as a leading figure in developing the pragmatic sociology of critique, an approach that examines how ordinary people themselves exercise moral judgment and criticism in disputes, rather than reserving critique for sociologists alone. With Laurent Thevenot he co-authored On Justification: Economies of Worth (1991), which analyzes how people justify their actions by appealing to different legitimate orders of worth, and he wrote Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (1999), examining how spectators respond to the suffering of distant people encountered through media. With Eve Chiapello he co-authored The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), which compares management literature across decades to trace a shift toward flexible, network-based work organization. His later work includes The Foetal Condition: A Sociology of Engendering and Abortion (2013), a sociological study of abortion as both a social practice and a theoretical problem.