Inequality in Seeds

In this important work, both in terms of the scope of its questioning and its volume (1230 pages), Bernard Lahire and his colleagues pose a central question for sociology and a founding question for our contemporary democratic societies: that of the social and family sources of inequalities. The originality of the work, its relevance and its topicality lie in the nature of the questioning implemented and the scope of its empirical framework. Against a sociology of generalities, which is too often satisfied with repeating the same thing, and against the excesses of subjectivist approaches summarizing the question of inequalities to that of their perception by the actors, the work edited by Bernard Lahire claims to be a critical, empirical sociology aimed at revealing the processes by which family living and socialization conditions are the basis of inequalities from the very beginnings of schooling. To do this, it is part of an epistemology that we could describe as “classical”, successively calling upon Émile Durkheim, Charles Darwin, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Auguste Comte, in the epigraph of the first chapters, with a view to producing a science of social facts (p. 46). Because “sociologists are (…) not ideologues, but producers of truths about the social world, among which are truths about inequalities and dominations” (p. 49).

Documenting social inequalities among children

The work therefore mobilizes large-scale research led by Bernard Lahire and carried out over four years by 17 sociologists as part of the project ANR “Class and gender childhoods: socialization bonuses under multiple constraints of children aged 5-6”. On the empirical level, 35 children aged 5 to 6 were the subject of the survey, which led to the collection of

175 in-depth interviews conducted with parents (three interviews per family), a significant person in the entourage — nanny, grandmother, etc. — playing an important role in the child’s socialization (one interview), and the nursery school teacher (one interview), as well as (…) ethnographic observations carried out in particular at school (in the classroom and in the playground) but also at the child’s home, and, last but not least, on short language exercises offered to children and aimed at objectifying the extent of their vocabulary, their mastery of syntax and their ability to explain sequences of events in a narrative manner (p. 15).

Armed with this empirical device, detailed in Chapter 3, the authors bring the reader into the family and social universe of these 35 children to understand both the strength of family socialization, its consequences on habitus and its links with their school destinies. In a word, to understand how social domination is inscribed in bodies, destinies, ambitions, desires.

For this, the plan of the work offers multiple perspectives. Theoretical and programmatic for part I, the work offers with part II a vast panorama of childhood life in France in the 2020s. The ethnographic descriptions are very rigorous in the systematic nature of the observations and fascinating in the contrasts they reveal to the reader. While Libertad, a little Roma girl whose parents dream of her becoming a singer, sees her life punctuated by displacements and expulsions. Annabelle grows up in a middle-class family with her mother and grandmother who meticulously control the games she downloads onto her tablet. Mathis, for his part, lives with his family in a large 200 m house² “located in a very chic suburban area in the west of Paris.” (p. 792).

The social fabric of children

This panorama of French society seen from the children’s side offers a living, embodied, innovative image of social stratification in France. It goes far beyond simple observations on the inequalities of conditions that structure – and fracture – French society to move towards a living incarnation of these inequalities in all their violence, their consequences, their injustice, without ever falling into miserabilism. The part III of the book offers a cross-sectional reading of the 35 case studies with the aim of showing “the social construction of children”. The book thus deals with housing, employment, use of money, school, relationship to authority, language, leisure, etc. with the perspective of showing how individualities are constructed in differentiated and hierarchical social universes, opening the way to a detailed understanding of the mechanisms of differentiated construction of individualities in social space. These chapters, like the whole book, are thought out and written with talent. They allow the reader to understand how social stratification constructs bodies and minds through the complex processes of socialization of young children, how this stratification is incorporated, by which daily microprocesses the position of each is inscribed in space and time, but also in the body. Valentine, for example, who grew up in the Parisian bourgeoisie, dances, “but for posture” the authors specify, “not just to relax… Standing up straight is a way of corresponding to the idea of ​​the bourgeois body, which must have this concern for posture” (p. 890).

We cannot, within the framework of this report, detail the content of all the chapters. To take just one example, the first chapter of the third part “Living somewhere: the spatial framework of inequalities” written by F. Giraud, J. Bertrand, M. Court and S. Nicaise (pp. 933 to 952) shows how the space of housing constructs the individual, his self-esteem, his “value” in the eyes of others and of himself. This social construction of the individual by space appears in all its violence by the comparison of the class destinies between an Isham forced to sleep in his mother’s car and a Mathis who regularly spends holidays in his grandfather’s villa on the island of Mauritius. These inequalities, one could object, are known to all and for a long time. Certainly. But the analyses proposed go well beyond the simple observation to show the effects on individuals, their way of being, their spirit, their soul, their destiny. Here, the work of the sociologist, who does not just denounce, applies himself to understanding the effects of these inequalities on the construction of individuals, their psychology, their appearance, their self-image. The other chapters of this part are of the same ilk: they illuminate the whole of French society through a sociology of childhood showing the mechanisms of social transmissions not only of habitus and inequalities, but also of domination.

Chapters 6 and 7 of this part explore, in line with the work of the English sociologist Basil Bernstein (1975), the construction of language skills within the family space. We know that these skills have very strong links with children’s educational paths (Lahire, 1993). The two chapters are jointly written by M. Woollven, O. Vanhée, G. Henri-Panabière, F. Renard and B. Lahire. They show the modes of transmission of these skills in family micro-interactions: through evening readings given to children, through hierarchies of literary genres expressed explicitly or implicitly by parents, through the more or less marked valorization of children’s speaking in the family space, through the variable proximity to foreign languages ​​and their valorization. So many practices that “do not promote to the same degree the constitution of a reflexive relationship to language and to narrative structure” (p. 1037 and 1038). The approach becomes even more precise when it comes to understanding how this reflexive relationship to language is played out in interactions between parents and children and in a contrasting way according to the family cultural capital: the way of privileging – or not – the regulation of conflicts by language, the differentiated use of humor and wordplay as learning this reflexivity.

These family practices of humor and wordplay constitute an unequally distributed resource, which more or less allows children to become familiar early with the properties and powers of language and to acquire a taste for these uses, in an emotional context which is not that of pedagogical repetition and school assessment (p. 1049).

These results are reminiscent of those produced by Annette Lareau (2011) who showed, in the context of the United States, how language fully participates in the socialization of children. Advantaged families use language as an end in itself and for itself while the use in working-class environments is more functional. However, these uses produce very early in young children an internalization of their social place and the legitimacy of this place.

In the end, like any major work that deconstructs the order of things, Class childhoods stimulates reflection on social institutions—family, school, language, etc.—and on French society in general. It shows that one is not born dominant or dominated. One becomes so. The book shows this, demonstrates it, and meticulously dismantles the mechanisms. But its contribution goes far beyond that. Reading the family situations described in detail in the 35 case studies, reading the cross-sectional analyses that result from them, reading the conclusions that emerge from them, the reader is seized by a movement of reflexivity on himself, on his childhood and on his life as a parent, on his place in society and on his responsibility in short.

This is a rare quality for a work of sociology.

The State, Freedom, Sociology

The conclusion of the book addresses a more general reflection on human societies and on the cultural and material accumulation that characterizes our species. As soon as inheritance exists, as soon as socially unequal parents raise their children themselves, the reproduction of inequalities can only be there. In these conditions, how can we fight against a phenomenon so deeply rooted in what we are as humans? Put in these terms, the problem seems insoluble. However, the author outlines two avenues. First, he advocates broader intervention by the State because “with each retreat of the State in areas concerning the family (…) it is the inequalities that widen between social classes and horizons that close” (p. 1179). The second avenue concerns sociology itself. If this discipline were “very widely disseminated, it would allow all members of a society to see the more general frameworks in which they are inserted” (p. 1175). These avenues are interesting, essentially because of the potential debates they raise. Firstly because it is not certain that the State is always the guarantor of perfect and complete equality. Its action can also be normalising and stigmatising, as shown by the work on the non-use of social policies for example (Warin, 2016). Then on the dissemination of sociology and its capacity to enlighten citizens, it would still be necessary that THERE sociology exists, which could be discussed in light of the intellectual dispersion of the discipline. Finally, and to echo Hugues Draelants’ note in these columns in 2019, one could imagine that a more in-depth reflection on educational policies, their design and implementation, could provide keys to reducing inequalities at school, of course, but also in society as a whole.

We can only support the authors in the wish expressed at the very end of the conclusion: “May this book contribute to ensuring that the unequal order of things is recognised, contested and thwarted” (p. 1179).