ABSTRACT

This chapter continues the overview of unmasking writers in sociology. It begins by considering Peter L. Berger’s commitment to debunking. Berger claims that while humanism sets the moral framework of sociology, debunking is its principal tool of enquiry. It is sociology’s job to “see through” and “look behind” hackneyed definitions of the situation, standard versions of everyday life, publicly approved interpretations. Sociology is an irreverent science.

But is it a science at all? The chapter suggests that debunking is more of a morality play than a search for scientific truth. Christopher Hitchens’s debunking of the Christian saint Mother Teresa backs up this view.

A very different approach to Berger’s appears in the work of the French sociologist Luc Boltanski. He reshapes the Marxian lexicon of denunciation, critique and emancipation. Unveiling – the term Boltanski prefers to unmasking – is not a monopoly of Marxist and other radical intellectuals. The style is also employed, says the French writer, in the vernacular to protest against social oppression. A key task of sociology is to illuminate the forms this protest takes.

The chapter assesses the cogency of Boltanksi’s “pragmatic sociology of critique” by reconsidering a major episode of denunciation – the Dreyfus Affair – and by questioning the imposition of an unveiling template on the everyday language of protest.