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Bourdieu's works took apart the educational establishment and its
systems of norms and standards, revealing it to be a pure and
simple instrument for reproducing social hierarchy. Of course, it
would be foolish to deny that this sort of analysis reveals nothing
about the real functioning of the schqol system. We must simply
note that by reducing education to the imposition of norms and
standards-to nothing more than this reproductive function-one
has also brought into question the very idea of norms and stan–
dards. Yet norms and standards, for better or worse , define a
common language and culture. In other words , by denying any
truth to norms
as such,
by equating standards
as such
with the re–
pression of differences, this approach came to place exclusive
value on individual authenticity, on what Foucault called "the
culture of self-concern."
The critique of the idea of truth as intrinsically tyrannical
led, in the same way, to a complete relativism that can be
summed up in the formula, "Each to his own truth." This path,
although certainly agreeable in its resistance to dogmatism, led
to the perverse conviction that all opinions are equal and that the
most important thing for an individual is not to reach the truth,
but to "express himself." From there the drift to the hyperindi–
vidualism of the 1980s appears quite logical. In the name of criti–
cizing the oppressive norms of capitalist society or Western ratio–
nality, one thereby strengthened the individualistic values that
limited those very norms. Far from having subverted the
foundations of Western civilization, the philosophers of the 1960s
in this sense did nothing more than reinforce the consumer
society. They were the unwitting agents of an individualist and
liberal revolution-a nonviolent revolution that fizzled out in May
of 1968 as soon as the gas stations reopened and everyone could
leave Paris for the weekend.
If the "School of '68" can now be seen in the context of lib–
eral society' s own evolution , this continuity must inform a criti–
cal reading of the School's thought. One type of criticism permits
us simply to denounce the blindness and obscurity of a project
that, believing itself to have opened a breach in intellectual and
social history, in reality did nothing more than contribute to the
logic of individualism-a logic that, as Tocqueville showed, has
been at work in modernity since its birth. But instead of just con–
tributing to the reinforcement of this individualism, the School
