In his Frankfurt Adorno Lectures, Luc Boltanski addresses a question that particularly preoccupied the first generation of the Frankfurt School, but which is currently being posed much more insistently in French social theory than in this country: How does the knowledge of the critical theorist relate to the everyday judgments of the actors on whose behalf he formulates his critique? In doing so, Boltanski remains true to the fundamental motif that increasingly distanced him from his teacher Pierre Bourdieu throughout the 1980s. He undermines the classic separation between the perspectives of the sociologically trained critic and the society members caught up in their everyday world, insists on the critical competence of "normal" actors, and assigns sociology the task of describing and theoretically utilizing those practices of justification.