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From the Arts to Action Theory: The Sociological Work of Pierre-Michel Menger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2018

Jean-Louis Fabiani
Jean-Louis Fabiani*
Affiliation:
EHESS-CESPRA
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Abstract

This article is an attempt to show the originality of Pierre-Michel Menger's sociological work through the study of his theoretical trajectory. A useful starting point can be found at the fruitful intersection between the analysis of professions and the justification of public policies. For instance, contemporary serious music depends on public subsidies even though there is as yet no public demand for it. The actors involved must make decisions about the future in an uncertain world, a theme that serves as the guiding thread of Menger's major book, Le travail créateur. How should sociology consider the uncertainty that rules inter-individual adjustments? That is the task that an innovative social science must undertake. Menger does not import economic reasoning into his sociology, but confronts these approaches while maintaining a critical tension between them, a position that sets him apart from the partisans of rational choice theory. Menger's research program is ambitious, but two questions remain: What is the status of history within the model under construction? And how can we obtain a clearer vision of the concept of talent, which often remains a black box?

Type
Sociology, Creation, Action
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 71 , Issue 4 , December 2016 , pp. 611 - 634
Copyright
Copyright © Éditions EHESS 2018 

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Footnotes

This article was translated from the French by Michael C. Behrent and edited by Chloe Morgan and Stephen Sawyer.

References

1. This is the title of chapter 2 of Menger, Pierre-Michel, Le travail créateur. S'accomplir dans l'incertain (Paris: Gallimard/Éd. du Seuil, 2009)Google Scholar. An abridged version of this work has been published in English: Menger, The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement under Uncertainty, trans. Steven Rendall et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

2. Menger, “Difference, Competition, and Disproportion: The Sociology of Creative Work,” trans. Liz Libbrecht (Paris: Collège de France/OpenEdition, 2016), https://books.openedition.org/cdf/4384.

3. Menger, Le paradoxe du musicien. Le compositeur, le mélomane et l’État dans la société contemporaine (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), which is a revision of Menger's doctoral dissertation, “Analyse socio-économique de la création musicale sérieuse contemporaine : production, diffusion, consommation” (PhD diss., EHESS, 1980).

4. Haskell, Francis, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976)Google Scholar. Menger was responsible for the French translation of this work, which was published during his term as editor of the series “Art, Histoire, Société” with Alain Mérot. See Haskell, La norme et le caprice. Redécouvertes en art : aspects du goût et de la collection en France et en Angleterre, trans. Robert Fohr (Paris: Flammarion, 1986).

5. Menger, Le paradoxe du musicien, 11.

6. On this question, see in particular Guy Saez, Geneviève Gentil, and Michel Kneubühler, eds., Le fil de l'esprit. Augustin Girard, un parcours entre recherche et action (Paris: Comité d'histoire du ministère de la Culture/La Documentation française, 2011).

7. Bourdieu, Pierre and Passeron, Jean-Claude, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1977)Google Scholar.

8. The term is used by Denis Lalonde in a review of Menger's Le paradoxe du musicien published in Canadian University Music Review/Revue de musique des universités canadiennes 7 (1986): 236 – 40, in particular p. 237.

9. Moulin, Raymonde et al., Les architectes. Métamorphose d'une profession libérale (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1973)Google Scholar; Moulin et al., Les artistes. Essai de morphologie sociale (Paris: La Documentation française, 1984).

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17. Ibid., 451; trans., 288.

18. Bourdieu, Pierre, Manet: A Symbolic Revolution [2013], trans. Collier, Peter and Rigaud-Drayton, Margaret (Cambridge/Medford: Polity Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

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20. Menger, Le travail créateur, 482; The Economics of Creativity, 310.

21. Ibid., 33; trans., 15.

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27. Goffman, Erving, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (New York: Wiley, 1961)Google Scholar, 117.

28. Lahire, Bernard, The Plural Actor [1998], trans. Fernbach, David (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011)Google Scholar, 16. Lahire does not mention Goffman's Encounters, which lies at the heart of Menger's analysis.

29. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice [1980], trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

30. Schütz, Alfred, Collected Papers, vol. 1, The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Natanson, Maurice (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962)Google Scholar.

31. Goffman, Erving, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1961)Google Scholar.

32. Bourdieu, Pierre, Homo Academicus [1984], trans. Collier, Peter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power [1989], trans. Lauretta C. Clough (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

33. Émile Durkheim, Selected Writings on Education, vol. 2, The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and Development of Secondary Education in France [1938], trans. Peter Collins (New York/Abingdon: Routledge, 1977; repr. 2006).

34. Fabiani, Jean-Louis, “Par la porte étroite de la pédagogie. Durkheim ou de l’éducation,” Durkheimian Studies 19 (2013): 125 – 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Maurice Halbwachs, “Introduction to the French Edition,” in Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, xiii.

36. Menger, Le travail créateur, 64; The Economics of Creativity, 38.

37. Ibid., 66; trans., 40.

38. Granger, Gilles-Gaston, Essai d'une philosophie du style (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968)Google Scholar, 223; cited in The Economics of Creativity, 44.

39. Menger, Le travail créateur, 83; The Economics of Creativity, 54.

40. See, for example, Walliser, Bernard, Anticipations, équilibres et rationalité économique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1985)Google Scholar.

41. Pareto, Vilfredo, Manual of Political Economy [1909], ed. and trans. Montesano, Aldo et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar, § 150.

42. Menger, Le travail créateur, 99 – 100; The Economics of Creativity, 71.

43. Bourdieu, Pierre, “Erving Goffman, Discoverer of the Infinitely Small,” Theory, Culture and Society 2, no. 1 (1983): 112 – 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, translation of a tribute originally published in Le Monde, December 4, 1982, p. 1.

44. Fabiani, Jean-Louis, “Du chaos des disciplines à la fin de l'ordre disciplinaire ?” Pratiques 153/154 (2012): 129 – 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. Menger, Le travail créateur, 7.

46. See, on this point, one of Menger's best articles, “Artistic Labor Markets and Careers,” Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 541 – 74.

47. Menger, Portrait de l'artiste en travailleur. Métamorphoses du capitalisme (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2002), 8.

48. Boltanski, Luc and Chiapello, Ève, The New Spirit of Captalism [1999], trans. Eliott, Gregory (London: Verso, 2005)Google Scholar.

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52. Menger, Le travail créateur, 15.

53. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The German Ideology [1932] (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998)Google Scholar, 53.

54. Menger, “Difference, Competition, and Disproportion,” § 17.

55. Ibid., § 21.

56. Jeanpierre, Laurent and Roueff, Olivier, La culture et ses intermédiaires (Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, 2014)Google Scholar.

57. Menger, “Difference, Competition, and Disproportion,” § 30.

58. Bourdieu, Pierre, “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods” [1977], trans. Nice, Richard, Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980): 261 – 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59. Menger, Pierre-Michel, Marchika, Colin, and Hanet, Danielle, “La concurrence positionnelle dans l'enseignement supérieur. Les grandes écoles de commerce et leur académisation,” Revue économique 66, no. 1 (2015): 237 – 88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60. Menger, Le travail créateur, chap. 6, “Talent et réputation. Les inégalités de réussite et leurs explications dans les sciences sociales,” 237 – 66. See also The Economics of Creativity, chap. 4, “Talent and Reputation: Social Science Explanations for Varying Degrees of Success,” 142 – 235.

61. Along with Olivier Godechot, Laurent Jeanpierre has proposed the most stimulating reading of Menger's work, shifting the left's critique from ideology to epistemology. Criticisms are generally based on a condemnation of the non-relative character of talent and on an assumption that Menger is indifferent to the difficulties faced by freelance and contractual cultural workers (known in France as intermittents du spectacle), even though he sees this group as a kind of social vanguard. Jeanpierre shifts the interrogation to the core of the theory, arguing that the assumption of actor rationality is unrealistic, and that the unification of the analytical model not only reduces the role of intermediaries but also overlooks the multiplicity of evaluations and, in particular, their almost constant conflictual character, at least in the most innovative realms. See Laurent Jeanpierre, “On the Origin of Inequality in the Arts,” Revue française de sociologie (English Edition) 53, no. 1 (2012): 88 – 106.

62. Olivier Godechot, review of Menger, Le travail créateur, in Sociologie 1, no. 1 (2010): http://sociologie.revues.org/120.

63. Menger, Le travail créateur, 422; The Economics of Creativity, 279.

64. Jean-Louis Fabiani, “Attribuçao de autoria em obras de arte. A questao da evidencia na historia da arte,” in Imagem-Conhecimento. Antropologia, cinema, e outros diálogos, ed. Andréa Barbosa, Edgar T. da Cunha, and Rose S. G. Hikiji (São Paulo: Papirus Editoria, 2009), 85 – 98.

65. These lectures, along with those held in 2017 – 2018, are now available online at https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/en-pierre-michel-menger/course-2016-2017.htm.