MONEY, MORALS, AND MANNERS: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class,. Lamont, Michèle. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. xxix, 320 p.in
Contemporary Sociology
There is much justification for Lamont's claim that not enough research in the social sciences directly focuses on upper-middle-class (white) males as a problem rather than as a reference point. As a relative outsider (a woman who is neither French nor American, and has not quite yet achieved upper-middle-classness), she lends a sympathetic ear to two sets of two groups of such men, a French set and an American set, a group in a capital area (Paris and New Jersey), and one in a provincial area (Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne, and Indianapolis in Indiana). She interviewed them for two hours, transcribed the tapes, summarized them, and then coded them "on three 5-point scales, pertaining to moral, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries" (p. 222). Through this she tries to understand their class position by emphasizing the distinctions they make in their speech about themselves and their life styles, or their friends and consociates.
Her concern with cultural categories of distinction is inscribed within the broader agenda of understanding social reproduction through cultural similarities between those who hire and promote managers and professionals and those who present themselves to be hired. She does not however directly question whether managers actually behave this way. Rather, she investigates the subsidiary question: if cultural styles are used that way, how are we to find out what these styles are like in any particular locality? The rationale for conducting a doubly comparative study (France/America, capital/province) outside of her own cultural area is the traditional one anthropologists have used to great advantage: by contrasting several sets of texts one eventually reveals most acutely what structures each. Thus, and simply as an example of the kinds of observations she makes, she tells us that "the French in general are clearly less money-oriented than Americans" (p. 65), or that the French "seem to be more openly interested in power" (p. 71). She talks about the French respect for l'honnête homme (p. 29) who may not be quite "honest" in the legalistic American sense, but rather is an educated, intellectual, somewhat detached, man wise to the ways of the world. She contrasts this to the American emphasis on competence or self-actualization. She mentions how some of her French respondents talked about their extra-marital affairs and their bisexuality while none of the Americans did. The Americans, by contrast, talked about their involvement in community affairs in a way alien to the French. And so on and so forth.
In some ways, none of this is radically different from much that has been written about France, America, and the difference between the two over the past 150 years. There is indeed something fascinating about the persistence of whatever it is that allows, and may even require, observers of all types to come up with these generalizations. We might say that the "facts" themselves need to be less at dispute than their status in our theoretical understanding of these facts. Take the issue of adultery. It is clear that "the French, they" (three out of forty in Lamont's sample) find it possible to talk about their own extra marital affairs while "Americans" (0 out of 40) do not. Lamont however quotes research to the effect that in one survey at least, 50% of married Americans (more males than females, but still a lot in both groups) have had extramarital affairs. What are we to make of this discrepancy between "talk" and "behavior" (or is it "talk in interviews" vs. "talk in surveys")? These are classical questions in the social sciences. They have not been resolved. Lamont does not quite address them, perhaps because they have not either been quite directly addressed in the work of Pierre Bourdieu which she uses as the point of reference to her own (both appreciatively and critically).
Even if she is not writing about "behavior," she is certainly writing about something, occurrences in the world that were "given" to her, data. The men who constructed with her the interviews she uses did something, they did it in a particular way, and we must pay attention to anyone who, like Lamont, presents them to us. Still we are left with a question that recent development in culture theory has raised with insistence: is she--as she says she is--reporting on individual values, a habitus in Bourdieu's sense, or is she reporting on a vocabulary, a set of expressions, stories and such, in a word, on a discourse that must be understood as external to the people but fully constraining on their attempts to explain themselves to themselves or to any researcher? She mentions here and there that this is a question to be considered, but she does not confront it in any way that might lead to a more radical critique of Bourdieu than the one she offers.
This critique essentially centers around Bourdieu's over emphasis on material distinctions as the fundamental ones while she wants to stress moral ones as well. She is trying to escape the aspect of Bourdieu's work that would lead one to return to a rather simple-minded social structural determinism in class reproduction. She points out how "Parisian" are Bourdieu's own moral distinctions (those that he makes more or less explicitly in his work). Or, precisely, are they his own or are they an aspect of cultural models "decoupled from his own life" (my paraphrase of a phrase on p. 128) that he is struggling with? Clearly Bourdieu presents his work as his own. Still, there is something fascinating in the fact that, in his writings, he may be reproducing the very social structural theories that he also says he has been struggling to supersede. There is an issue here that should be directly confronted and that the notion of "habitus," or the more traditional notion of "values" that Lamont uses matter of factly, does not quite address.
When all is said, this book is a serious, valuable, addition to our corpus about French and American cultures that should be paid attention to. She leads us to the threshold of a new understanding of cross and inner cultural differences. This is no mean task.