Everyone learned, from primary school, that the night of August 4, 1789 was the night of the abolition of privileges. Since then, we have continued to see them reborn everywhere and everyone considers themselves more or less, especially less, privileged in their life, their work, their social position. Better, in the last period, under the influence of a doctrine that claims to be progressive and sensitive to the "rights of man and citizen", we begin to denounce in all directions the "privileges" of the white man, the Westerner, the "cis-gender" and so on and so forth, among which, intersectionality obliges, "the white, Western, cis-gender, masculinist man...",. Where does this itch for privilege come from? And first of all, is it always the same thing? Are feudal privilege and the privilege of the white man... of the same nature? Let's try to clarify all this.

What was abolished on the night of August 4-5, 1789 were a number of privileges received by the nobility and the clergy throughout history and the evolution of feudal society towards the monarchical regime that prevailed at the time of the French Revolution. A series of decrees issued in the following days abolished privileges such as personal servitude, mortmain, champart (the lord's right to take part of the harvest), corvée, exclusive rights to dovecotes and hunting, etc. Some were considered redeemable, such as those related to land, which transformed the privilege into a right of private property. Because the privilege was initially a generosity of the King of France, who alone possessed the privilege over his kingdom, granted to representatives of the nobility or the clergy. 

Their main privilege is not to pay taxes, it is supplemented by the banal rights and servitudes that weigh on the peasants. An entire social, political, and economic system is built on this basis. Some cities obtain the privilege of not paying certain taxes – they generally take the name of Villefranche de or sur… something. The trade corporations (tanners, bakers, roasters, etc.) obtain over time the privilege of monopoly. The venality of the charges further accentuates the system of privileges that structures the whole society. This is the very nature of the feudal system: it is based on privileges.

The French Revolution, by abolishing privileges on the night of August 4, 1789, legally dismembered the feudal system, but favored and even metaphorically instituted a new privilege, that of money. This no longer derives from a liberality of royal power that shapes the bonds of subjection that structure the whole of society, it is first the fruit of an accumulation, primitive as Marx would say, of money in the form of capital. Which, as we know, will shape a new society that we will call bourgeois, capitalist or, today, liberal. In this one, man can become free, free himself from personal bonds of subjection, he remains nonetheless dependent on the quantum of money-value that he possesses. As Simmel notes in his Philosophy of Money, it is by abandoning the qualitative point of view (in this case the bond of subjection) for the quantitative point of view (property, wealth) that many mutations will have taken place in societies. Historically speaking, "privilege" will experience the same type of mutation.

Sociology, in its ambition to understand the world as it is and not as it should be, will methodically seek to describe and explain the different forms or types of privileges that come to complicate the ordering of the social and make operational the metaphorical privilege of money-capital. Simmel, Weber, Elias, but also Durkheim or Mauss, will flush them out on the side of the culture with which social individuals are endowed, of their attitudes towards life, of their beliefs, their techniques, etc. We are more readily aware, through his most often ideologized media popularization, of Pierre Bourdieu's contribution to this enterprise. What he calls the symbolic space or field is precisely this dimension of social exchanges through which the asymmetry of privileges held by some and others is realized, and often incorporated as he says. This is the theme of "symbolic violence" that Bourdieu will decline in different domains by emphasizing the fact that social individuals are both the object and the subjects. That which, "naturalized", "incorporated", "unconsciously" integrated in the form of habitus, leads to the domination of some over others. The "symbolic capital" (cultural, social, dispositional, etc.) that each person has operating as so many relative social privileges in the distribution of the social positions occupied. 

The Bourdieusian vulgate that will overwhelm, beyond the sociological discipline and the social sciences, the intellectual and media universe, will retain that the "dominant" impose themselves on the "dominated" because their symbolic privileges would reinforce their economic privileges (capital-money). Which is not entirely Bourdieu's thesis, which admits incongruences between capitals, and therefore the privileges that they would represent. This is evidenced by his analysis of the "Ball of Bachelors" in the rural Béarnese environment, where he notes that the sons of "great families" of peasants find themselves trapped in the system of privileges that was theirs (property, notoriety) while a new system of symbolic privileges is imposed (knowing how to dance, knowing how to talk to girls, knowing how to introduce oneself, etc.) that they lack. Their matrimonial strategy comes to naught, they remain single and their economic capital will soon melt like snow in the sun.

As we can see, what Bourdieu presents as a symbolic privilege is not accompanied by any legal status, does not open up any rights – as feudal privilege was. It only appears as a privilege because it produces “effects of domination”, that is to say the strategic success or failure of the mobilization of symbolic capital (cultural, social, etc.) in a social game governed by the same rule followed by all without even knowing it. This is the famous symbolic violence, the power of theillusion, the naturalization of social arbitrariness and the whole arsenal of formulas dear to Bourdieu to say thatultimately Privileges benefit the privileged.

Beyond the caricature, it is necessary to emphasize how much the Bourdieusian approach to privilege plays on the metaphorical register. Symbolic privilege tends to be reduced in him – although according to the complex processes of habitus, of the relative autonomy of fields, of social symbolism – to royal privilege in the principle of social injustice targeted by the revolutionaries of 1789. Symbolic privilege thus overflows its explanatory function of the social game of structuring society, to become a political and ideological issue for a better society, in any case a society desired to be more just. An eternal question of moral and political philosophy, very real nevertheless, but hardly decidable by the sociologist, even if he is the most acute on what provokes its topicality. 

The important point here is that by retaining a metaphorical use of the notion of privilege, the Bourdieusian sociologist reduces its meaning to that of common language, that of an advantage (innate, acquired or both) producing effects of unequal distribution, or even that of a favor (but granted by whom?) also producing the same effects. The structural meaning, one can also say systemic, of the notion of privilege – which nevertheless persists in certain areas of social life (economic domain, legal domain, etc.) – is confused with the metaphorical meaning and thus authorizes the shift towards the political and ideological meaning that it ends up taking. Coupled with the notion of handicap, its analytical antithetic, privilege participates in the vocabulary of a "critical" sociology with a political vocation, popularizable and moreover become popular.

In the same vein, but perhaps with less scientific success, so-called post-colonial or decolonial studies will use the same semantic spring to impose the idea that a "white privilege", a "privilege of the white Western man", would come to structure both the mentalities and the social and political relations of our current societies. We know how the initiators of these studies (the famous Studies Anglo-American) have claimed to renew the approach to the relations between colonial countries and colonized countries of the past by finding their traces in the current former colonizing powers – sometimes, but less convincingly, in the current former colonized territories (the emancipatory mystique retaining all its rights). Their analytical matrix is ​​that of slavery in the modern period, particularly that of the Atlantic triangular trade. The violence inherent in the uprooting of African populations from their initial condition receives no other meaning than that of their final destiny: to become slaves on the plantations owned by the colonizers who arrived from Europe over time. The scheme is simple, or rather oversimplified, and stops at the idea that a domination in favor of white Europeans is administratively, legally, militarily organized and imposed on both the surviving indigenous populations and the imported populations.

The colonial mentality and the slave-owning spirit are attached to the geographical and cultural origin of the colonists, whatever the ideological dissensions that crossed their affiliated metropolises and deeply evolved during their singular histories. In short, a way of essentializing colonialism by placing it in the European spirit and, after extension to the Americas, Western. This way of cutting up and reconstructing the history of civilizations will shock more than one historian attached to the rigor of the historiographical method, it will revolt them when it takes a political and penal turn by seeking the status of official history of the State ¹.

But more than that, for what interests us here, this historicizing fable will construct a figure of the colonist marked by racist ideology – which it often was – and civilizational superiority – which was only a trait of ethnocentrism –, to be deciphered only as an inexpiable moral fault on the register of "human rights" erected as the ultimate criterion for assessing the facts of history. As if the said "human rights" were a value that had always been imposed and had not itself been the object of historical elaboration, benefiting moreover from the colonial experience of the Western powers, as it would later benefit from the totalitarian experience of some of them. 

However, the "conceptual" innovation of Studies post-colonialism does not lie primarily in the transport of the analysis to the moral and political level alone. It is fundamentally done by essentializing the mentality of the colonist and attributing it to the whole of the Western world from which the said colonist came. A sort ofcolonialist habitus of the Western world would explain all this. Habitus externalized by the colonist, internalized by the Westerner and, according to this deterministic understanding of habitus, always efficient in determining the behaviors of both. Hence the racialism of the Westerner when he finds himself confronted, in his metropolis, with the representatives of the peoples dominated by his ancestors, and the racialization ambient of these metropolises today composed of large fractions of these peoples. In short, a spiritual and behavioral invariant, "racialist", would inhabit the Western metropolitan and would lead him, sometimes unconsciously, to reproduce towards his ex-colonized his attitudes of yesteryear: racist and supremacist.

This is the "white privilege", the "privilege of the West", which the proponents of decolonialist ideology claim to use to set oppressed ex-colonized minorities against their Western "oppressors", "white" and still imbued with their mental privilege as colonizers. The "privilege" here is thought of both metaphorically, as in the Bourdieusian sociologist, but also analogically, as if, in the manner of feudal privilege, a "power" had granted it to every representative of the historical West, reduced to the pigment symbol of his skin. This "power", entirely abstract, or rather entirely ethereal, cannot receive any other incarnation than that of the historical forms taken by the colonialism of States and the imperialism of their relations.

To put it another way, the reasoning of the contemporary decolonialist ideologue comes down to considering that: if the power, at the time of Louis XV for example, was guilty of having led a colonial policy, relying on racist and supremacist colonists, the French citizen of today, when he can be considered a native, must shoulder the guilt, since sometimes without his knowledge he remains inhabited and "worked" by a colonialist habitus. "Naturalized", considered to be part of the order of things, this takes on the appearance of a "privilege" that only a new night of August 4 led by the "oppressed minorities" heirs of colonialism, would be able to abolish. So down with the privilege of the white man!

We understand, in saying this, that all the ideologies that operate in the different sectors of our social world and that take up, more or less, the justificatory schema that we have just given, end up exhibiting a "privilege" that would be the source of the misfortunes that they denounce and intend to eradicate. Whether it takes the name of "patriarchal domination", "heteronormativity", "assignment of sex at birth" and other striking formulations, in all cases a "privilege" lies that operates as a key to explanation and solution. A key that closes (and locks up) and that opens (and frees). The privilege of the male, that of the heterosexual, the privilege of the doctor and of the biological, are all formulas that by mobilizing the notion of privilege crush more contextualized apprehensions, better reasoned understandings, more rational conclusions.

In the discourse of current wokeism, from decolonialists to transactivists, the notion of privilege fulfills a purely rhetorical function. Removed from its contexts of enunciation and semantic reception that would allow it to describe and account for comparative advantages, cumulative or threshold effects, etc., it is generally reduced to those of injustice, abuse and other inequities. Values ​​that symbolized “feudal privilege” and that the rhetoric of privilege preserves imaginatively. Because, in our collective imagination fueled by the school memories of our childhood, privileges ended on the night of August 4, 1789. 

The notion of privilege, omnipresent in woke discourse, is simply a form of repulsive rhetoric.