"Thus, for the question of knowing if virtue is possible, one can substitute the question of knowing if one can create universes in which people haven interest in the universal. Machiavelli says that the republic is a universe in which citizens have an interest in virtue. The genesis of a universe of this sort is not conceivable if one does not posit the motor, which is the universal recognition of the universal, that is, the official recognition of the group and its interests over the individual and the individual’s interest, which all groups profess in the very fact of affirming themselves as groups.

The critique of suspicion reminds us that all universal values are in fact particular, universalized values, which are thus subject of suspicion (universal culture is the culture of the dominants, etc.). A first, inevitable moment of the recognition of the social world, this critique should not make us forget that all the things the dominants celebrate, and in which they celebrate themselves by so celebrating (culture, disinterestedness, the pure, Kantian morality, Kantian aesthetics, etc., everything which I objectified, perhaps somewhat crudely, at the end of Distinction), can only fulfill their symbolic function of legitimation precisely because they benefit in principle from universal recognition - people cannot openly deny them without denying their own humanity; but, for this reason, the behaviors that render them homage, sincere or not, it matters little, are assured a form of symbolic profit (notably of conformity and distinction) which, even if it is not sought as such, suffices to ground them in sociological reason and, in giving them a raison d’être, assure them a reasonable probability of existing.

… one of the difficulties of the political struggle today is that the dominants, technocrats or epistemocrats on the right or the left, are hand in glove with reason and the universal: one makes one’s way through universes in which more and more technical, rational justifications will be necessary in order to dominate and in which the dominated can and must also use reason to defend themselves against domination, because the dominants must increasingly invoke reason, and science, to exert their domination. This makes the progress without doubt go hand in hand with the development of highly rationalized forms of domination (as one sees, today, with the use that is made of a technique like the survey); it also creates a situation in which sociology, alone in a position to bring these mechanisms to light, must choose now more than ever between putting its rational instruments of knowledge at the service of an increasingly rational domination, or rationally analyzing domination and especially the contribution that rational knowledge can make to domination"