Politically, France is moving at the governmental level in much the same direction as the rest of Western Europe. Behind official rhetoric, the Jospin regime has accelerated privatizations (more public assets have been sold off than under the Juppé government), take-overs and cuts in social spending. The establishment press, after mourning the fall of ‘modernizing’ Finance Minister Strauss-Kahn on corruption charges, welcomes the reassurances of his successor Sautet that there will be no change of course. As in Britain, the Right is paralysed by rancorous internal disputes, and the official political scene devoid of any effective opposition. Intellectually, however, neo-liberal hegemony is weaker than elsewhere. Open advocacy of la pensée unique—the homologue of Anglo-Saxon TINA—has now become rarer. A generalized sense of discontent, of impatient and puzzled indignation, has found expression in a range of publications that have found a mass market. Publishers continue to find, rather to their surprise, that books denouncing the free market, globalization, labour flexibility, poverty and inequality are best-sellers. These are not mild sedatives of the sort produced in Britain or America by Will Hutton or Robert Reich. La Misère du monde, edited by Pierre Bourdieu, has sold 80,000 copies; L’Horreur économique by Viviane Forrester 300,000; L’Imposture économique by Emmanuel Todd, 50,000; Ah! Dieu que la guerre économique est jolie by P. Labarde and B. Maris, 70,000. Serge Halimi’s merciless attack on sycophancy in the media, Les Nouveaux chiens de garde, has been another spectacular success. However powerful conformist reflexes remain—with rare exceptions, reactions to NATO’s blitz in the Balkans were no advertisement for Gallic intellectual independence—the moral climate has moved some way from the enthusiastic self-abasement and all-out Americanization of the eighties.

The appearance of Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello is the most important event of the turn so far. This massive book is an astonishing combination—an ideological and cultural analysis, a socio-historical narrative, an essay in political economy, and a bold piece of engaged advocacy. Like two experienced rally drivers, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello take the reader on a dizzying theoretical tour of the past thirty years, at each point where one fears that they might skid off the road with a gross generalization or incautious formulation deftly turning the wheel with an astute qualification or a whole new level of conceptualization. The work has been widely perceived as likely to become a classic.

Boltanski—of the same generation as Bourdieu, with whom he was once associated—is a sociologist who first came to public prominence with the work he co-authored with Laurent Thévenot, De la justification, a sophisticated and sometimes abstruse study of the different intuitive notions of justice people bring to their encounters with the world of social relations and objects. Associated, via Thévenot, with economists concerned with the conventions of market exchange—criticized by some for ‘harmonicism’—Boltanski confesses a primary debt to Albert Hirschman, to whom Le Nouvel esprit is dedicated. Chiapello, by contrast, is a young instructor at a business school, whose first book was on the relationship between artists and managers. An established sociologist and a youthful management theorist do not make an obvious couple for a ferocious critique of contemporary capitalism. But this is, among other things, what Le Nouvel esprit delivers.

Its starting point is a powerful statement of indignation and puzzlement. How has a new and virulent form of capitalism—they label it a ‘connexionist’ or ‘network’ variant—with an even more disastrous impact on the fabric of a common life than its predecessors, managed to install itself so smoothly and inconspicuously in France, without attracting either due critical attention or any organized resistance from forces of opposition, vigorous a generation ago, now reduced to irrelevancy or cheerleading? The answer to this question, Boltanski and Chiapello suggest, lies in the fate that overtook the different strands of the mass revolt against the Gaullist regime in May–June 1968. There have always been, they argue, four possible sources of indignation at the reality of capitalism: (i) a demand for liberation; (ii) a rejection of inauthenticity; (iii) a refusal of egoism; (iv) a response to suffering. Of these, the first pair found classic expression in bohemian milieux of the late nineteenth century: they call it the ‘artistic critique’. The second pair were centrally articulated by the traditional labour movement, and represent the ‘social critique’.

These two forms of critique, Boltanski and Chiapello argue, have accompanied the history of capitalism from the start, linked both to the system and to each other in a range of ways, along a spectrum from intertwinement to antagonism. In France, 1968 and its aftermath saw a coalescence of the two critiques, as student uprisings in Paris triggered the largest general strike in world history. So strong was the challenge to the capitalist order, that at first it had to make substantial concessions to social demands, granting major improvements of pay and working conditions. Gradually, however, the social and the artistic rejections of capitalism started to come apart. The social critique became progressively weaker with the involution and decline of French communism, and the growing reluctance of French employers to yield any further ground without any return to order in the enterprises or any increase in dramatically falling levels of productivity. The artistic critique, on the other hand, carried by libertarian and ultra-left groups along with ‘self-management’ currents in the CFDT (the formerly Catholic trade-union confederation), flourished. The values of expressive creativity, fluid identity, autonomy and self-development were touted against the constraints of bureaucratic discipline, bourgeois hypocrisy and consumer conformity.

Capitalism, however, has always relied on critiques of the status quo to alert it to dangers in any untrammelled development of its current forms, and to discover the antidotes required to neutralize opposition to the system and increase the level of profitability within it. Ready to take advantage of even the most inhospitable conditions, firms began to reorganize the production process and wage contracts. Flexible labour systems, sub-contracting, team-working, multi-tasking and multi-skilling, ‘flat’ management—all the features of a so-called ‘lean capitalism’ or ‘post-Fordism’—were the result. For Boltanski and Chiapello, these molecular changes were not simply reactions to a crisis of authority within the enterprise, and of profitability within the economy, although they were that too. They were also responses to demands implicit in the artistic critique of the system, incorporating them in ways compatible with accumulation, and disarming a potentially subversive challenge that had touched even a younger generation of managers who had imbibed elements of the ‘spirit of 68’.

Capitalism is conceived here, in Weberian fashion, as a system driven by ‘the need for the unlimited accumulation of capital by formally peaceful means’, that is fundamentally absurd and amoral. Neither material incentives nor coercion are sufficient to activate the enormous number of people—most with very little chance of making a profit and with a very low level of responsibility—required to make the system work. What are needed are justifications that link personal gains from involvement to some notion of the common good. Conventional political beliefs—the material progress achieved under this order, its efficiency in meeting human needs, the affinity between free markets and liberal democracy—are, according to Boltanski and Chiapello, too general and stable to motivate real adherence and engagement. What are needed instead are justifications that ring true on both the collective level—in accordance with some conception of justice or the common good—and the individual level. To be able truly to identify with the system, as managers—the primary target of these codes—have to do, two potentially contradictory longings have to be satisfied: a desire for autonomy (that is, exciting new prospects for self-realization and freedom) and for security (that is, durability and generational transmission of advantages gained).