International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 113

International Journal on Criminology
vations are not—or not only—specific to a particular individual, class, structure, or
era, beyond the variations in dissemination and the linguistic ways of expressing
them. 8
What is the nature of this other? 9 On the one hand, we can identify it as a
subject (a person or structure) that belongs as an interdependent agent 10 to various
networks of affiliative relations governing its status as a moral person in the legal
and also Benthamite sense of deontology. 11 On the other hand, it is a question of
8 This involves differentiating between relativity and relativism, and also logic and rationality. To
respond (at least relatively, as it goes beyond the scope of this work) to Quine’s objection, based on
the work of Tarski, about the question of the truth of representation in general and of a given proposition
in particular faced with empirical reality (1986), the problem is not so much the existence
for example of different sorts of political life and different sorts of interaction with the presence of
a “rabbit” (Quine 1977, 14, chapitre premier “Parler d’objets”), but that Reality XYZ may not only
exist (like a stone, as Kant said) but be structurally and functionally active in a life and a human
perception, i.e. not exclusively edible, like the vision of the rabbit discussed by Quine, which can
for example tell the time in certain realities, as Lewis Carroll highlighted. Yet the difference between
relativism and relativity on the one hand, and logic and rationality on the other, consists precisely in
not making equivalent the fields of meaning, as does relativism—and in this sense Quine’s thought
cannot be said to be relativist as suggested, albeit tentatively, by a recent work on social epistemology
(Bouvier and Conein 2007, 11)—since it consists of distinguishing the logical meaning that corresponds
to a strict correlation between subject and predicate, cause and effect, from the rational
meaning—which also includes its opposite, the irrational—and which corresponds instead to a
meaning that goes beyond logic to move toward the interpretative, as demonstrated by Weber:
that of a belief in certain actions even though it is not possible to verify their logical outcome. This
includes the example considered by Raymond Boudon (1995) of the fact of dancing to make it rain.
This is rational/irrational in the sense that there is indeed a reason to act, but it remains illogical in
the sense that it is not claimed to work in a technical manner adequate for the demands of continuity
reached by the pragmatic apparatus of the Western techne, also now universalizable. This implies
that the effective correlation between dancing and raining from the morphological point of view of
the human need for water must be relativized and not made equivalent to particular irrigation techniques.
Thus the fact that electricity was invented in the West does not prevent its universalization,
which is in no way a form of domination, even if the historically situated form of its production is of
course questionable; just as there exist, have existed, and will exist different forms of life (mores) in
society, which does not in itself contradict the idea that selection pressure also exists among species
organized into a system and that a single one may withstand the storms of history and then spread
precisely because it has the best constitution ... for example the democratic system, beyond the specific
forms in which it is made particular (Baechler 1985; Boudon 2006).
9 Alain Besançon (1998, 75) defines the “political nature” of men as “their ability to form family ties,
social ties, and organized relationships between the governing and the governed for the sake of
forming a political community, a state.”
10 Agent, in the sense of Weber, i.e. having “motivations” (Weber, 1995, T.1, 28, 34): chapitre premier,
les concepts fondamentaux de la sociologie, §1. Notion de la sociologie et du « sens » de l’activité
sociale. A. Fondements méthodologiques. 1. « ( ... ) Nous entendons par « activité » (Handeln) un
comportement humain (…) quand et pour autant que l’agent ou les agents lui communiquent un
sens subjectif. Et par activité « sociale », l’activité qui, d’après son sens visé (gemeinten Sinn) par
l’agent ou les agents, se rapporte au comportement d’autrui, par rapport auquel s’oriente son déroulement.
» ( ... ) 5. “ ( ... ) Nous « comprenons », parce que nous saisissons la motivation (motivationsmässig),
le sens qu’une personne a associé ( ... ). Nous comprenons le mouvement du bûcheron
ou l’acte d’épauler un fusil non seulement actuellement mais dans sa motivation, si nous savons que
le bûcheron accomplit son acte ( ... ) pour gagner sa vie ( ... ) ».
11 Bentham 1834.
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