PERSON
Luc Boltanski
The French sociologist who revealed capitalism’s most remarkable survival mechanism—its capacity to absorb the very critiques directed against it and emerge renewed—and whose framework of orders of worth exposes exactly how the spirit of AI capitalism justifies itself.
Luc Boltanski is the sociologist of capitalism’s moral life—the analyst who showed that the system survives not by suppressing its critics but by absorbing them, converting their vocabulary of liberation into the architecture of the next round of accumulation. His central concept, developed with Éve Chiapello in
The New Spirit of Capitalism, is
metabolization: the process by which capitalism digests opposition rather than expelling it, rebuilding its normative foundations from the very materials its critics supply. The third spirit of capitalism addressed the artistic critique’s demand for creativity, autonomy, and liberation from bureaucratic routine—and did so by creating the gig economy, the project-based workforce, and the freelance artist of herself, all of which satisfied the demand for freedom while simultaneously dismantling the collective protections the social critique had spent decades winning. His parallel framework, developed with Laurent Thévenot in
On Justification, maps six
orders of worth—distinct moral universes with incompatible criteria for evaluating what