Sociology

This chapter sets out to examine the bases of Rancière’s critique of sociology, before then examining the theory of political subjectivation he elaborates in opposition to the sociological problematic. The chapter starts by examining Rancière’s claim that sociology has been ‘contaminated’ by counter-revolutionary thought, showing how both Comte’s and Durkheim’s vision of a functional hierarchy of fixed places and roles rehearses ideas from the classical political philosophy of Aristotle and more particularly Plato. The chapter then examines Rancière’s more controversial claim that the apparently radical sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, continues to work within this same problematic, forced constantly to reassert the inequalities whose existence he ostensibly challenges. Finally, the chapter turns to look at the theory of politics, language, and class that Rancière elaborates in Disagreement and On the Shores of Politics. It shows how this theory emerges out of a polemical interaction with both the classical political philosophy of Aristotle and Plato and Bourdieu’s sociological theory. In the course of these polemics, sometimes explicit, often implicit, Rancière inverts and subverts certain fundamental tenets of Aristotelian, Platonic, and Bourdieusian thought.