The relationship that the sociologist maintains with social criticism has been obsessing discipline since its origins. Should sociology be put at the service of a critique of society? Is sociology deviated from its scientific project because of the criticism, or is the latter its purpose, a purpose without which sociology would be reduced to the category of mere idle activity, independent of the concerns that buzz in the mind of the people gathered in society? This question has determined some of the binomials of basic oppositions in this matter - those that occur between facts and values, between ideology and science, between determinism and autonomy, between structure and action, between approaches macrosocial and microsocial, between explanation and interpretation, and so on. This question is also the one that dictates the content of two of the main programs that currently configure this area of ​​knowledge: the critical sociology of the 1970s, particularly in the way Pierre Bourdieu would give it in France; and the pragmatic sociology of criticism, developed in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the field of critical sociology, the description in terms of relations of forces comes to emphasize the power of oppression mechanisms, in the way that the oppressed come to suffer passively, even reaching, in their alienation, to adopt precisely those values ​​that subject them - internalizing them in the form of ideology. Pragmatic sociology describes the actions of human beings who rebel using reason and comes to highlight the ability they have, given certain historical conditions, to rise against their domination, also forging a whole set of new interpretations of reality and putting them at service of a critical activity. Boltanski proposes in this book a framework that allows to articulate and unify these two approaches, apparently antagonistic. The ambition of this work lies in contributing to the renewal and updating of practices related to emancipation.