of symbolic exchanges had an autonomous existence entirely distinct from relations of exchanges of goods); at other times, they tend to seize hastily upon models originating in economics and apply them to their own objects and thereby to justify decisions on economic policy concerning those objects; in still other instances, they are inclined to develop a critical attitude toward economics in general, as if sociology and anthropology alone had access to some truth about human relations that the science of economics, tainted by inhumanity, could not grasp. While critique is by no means absent from our work, it is aimed at contemporary capitalism and not at economics as such. Our intention has thus been to extend the efforts of scholars – undoubtedly more numerous in a not-so-remote past than they are today – who have worked toward unifying the social sciences, contesting all forms of disciplinary orthodoxy. Today, in our view, this effort must entail moving beyond the tensions between, on the one hand, approaches inherited chiefly from positivism (which are frequent in economics) and, on the other hand, approaches that stem principally from constructionism (more frequent in sociology). We have sought to move forward along this path by developing a pragmatic structuralism. This approach makes it possible to combine a social history with an analysis of the cognitive skills that actors use in order to act.
As far as our methods of inquiry are concerned, we have been highly eclectic in our choices, operating like gleaners, as it were. Although we have occasionally included examples from other countries to show that we are talking about a process that can be disseminated, we have focused on the case of France, which is unquestionably one of the countries in which the transformations we have sought to bring to light are most clearly manifested. Our sources were numerous and wideranging. We collected sets of existing statistics; we conducted formal or informal interviews, both with informants invested with institutional authority and with so-called ordinary actors, such as artists, or collectors of various things ranging from works of contemporary art to football club insignia; we went through reams of documents produced for commercial or self-promotional purposes that we found either in print form or on the Internet; we analyzed marketing manuals for luxury items, tourism, art, and culture; and we undertook to produce an ethnography of places where the formation of an enrichment economy in France could be grasped “in real time” (for example, in the Aubrac region or in Arles).
The pages that follow are thus the result of a sort of artisanal approach that was once frequently practiced in the social sciences – and in social anthropology or in history more than in sociology – but that tends to be condemned today, even though it offers great advantages in terms of freedom and especially flexibility. Since our project was free of any constraints that might have been imposed by dependence on outside financing, it could be continually redefined and reoriented in response to the results obtained. It is too often forgotten that, by limiting oneself to work based on “big data,” one rediscovers an object that has already been socially constructed, and one rules out the possibility of introducing both the cognitive behavior of actors and the social changes that have not yet been subject to taxonomic identification or to technical and institutional recognition.
The process of collecting materials was all the more demanding in that what gradually turned out to be our key objects of inquiry – that is, on the one hand, the formation of an economy of enrichment and, on the other, the current state of commodity structures and of the skills that allow actors to orient themselves in this economy – have not in either case yielded, up to now, outcomes that would allow for a global, and in particular a statistical, overview. There are no data-processing or administrative centers that would collect, sift, and shape data covering the entire set of domains that must be taken into account, as we see it, if one is to grasp features in contemporary socio-economic developments that we believe to be very important. Thus we have had to criss-cross a large number of areas, from contemporary art to the luxury industry, from the national patrimony to tourism, and so on. Each of these areas calls for further study; our book as a whole can be read as an invitation to work in a new field of research. Our hope, then, is that the task will be taken up again by others who will be able to flesh out the results and further develop the hypotheses presented here.
Notes
1 1. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” trans. Howard Eiland, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 32–49.
2 2. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland, ibid., vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 391.
3 3. For details, see chapter 4, note 1.
1 The Age of the Enrichment Economy
The deindustrialization of Western Europe
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, in Western societies, mass production was no longer viewed as the only way – perhaps not even as the principal way – to maximize profits and accumulate wealth. For capitalism, too, the extension beyond mass production proved to be a necessity imposed by the requirement of profit as the possibilities opened up by that form of production, initially considered virtually infinite, seemed to reach their limits. While the standard form was not abandoned, the extension of capitalism entailed financialization and – in the realm of the production and/or commercialization of objects – the redrawing of geopolitical maps. Certain “emerging” countries took over responsibility for mass production as the primary path to enrichment (the accumulation of wealth), while some countries that had been among the powerhouses of world capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries concentrated on finance and on developing high-tech goods in order to retain power – from a distance – over the manufacturing of the most common goods, insofar as these were products derived from technological innovations. However, the latter countries also turned toward a much more intensive commodification of domains that had long remained more or less on the margins of capitalism.
The geographic expansion of capitalism redistributed – toward countries in which the labor force was abundant and ill-organized and in which wages were therefore low – a number of standard production sites, although the conception and sales of the objects produced remained for the most part under the control of companies headquartered in Western countries, which were still at the heart of world capitalism. Among other effects, these transfers accelerated the deindustrialization of Western Europe. Deindustrialization in the first decade of the twenty-first century is a well-studied phenomenon affecting Western economies, France’s in particular.1 Industrial employment reached a peak in 1974, with more than 5,900,000 salaried workers. In the early 2010s, this sector lost a little more than 40 percent of its personnel. During the same period, what statisticians define more broadly as the “productive sphere” decreased from 48 percent of all jobs to 35 percent.2 This drop affected almost all areas: mining, metallurgy, machinery, ship-building, textiles, and so on, excluding only certain high-tech sectors such as aeronautics and the nuclear, pharmaceutical, and weapons industries.3 The sectors that included intermediate goods and common consumer products were particularly affected. Their decline, which began as early as the 1960s and 1970s in the textile and leather-working areas, went on to affect manufacturing as a whole.
By “deindustrialization,” however, we do not mean the shift to a “post-industrial” society that was often predicted by sociologists in the 1960s.4 That prophecy has not been fulfilled on a global scale. On the one hand, many domains that had long remained on the margins of the industrial world – such as small businesses, education, health, and personal services – are run today (even those that do not depend on the private sector but are under state control) according to management methods
