Justifying Culture: Orders of Worth and the Limits of Compromise in Comparative Cultural Policy

Cultural policy justifies public spending in several incompatible idioms at once. It invokes citizenship, economic contribution, inherited identity, and artistic creation without any common measure among them. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s economies of worth, this study reads five national cultural policy profiles selected by maximum variation from a corpus of twenty-nine. Because the source material consists of expert-authored accounts of national policy rather than primary policy instruments, the analysis concerns how cultural policy is represented in this genre rather than national cultural policy discourse as such. It identifies five recurring patterns, one per case, through which justificatory tension is managed in the texts examined: suspension, accumulation, proceduralisation, explicit naming, and subordination. Artistic worth appears in this material primarily by being attached to another order, such as civic or economic. The analysis further establishes a scope condition, since civic and inspired claims become textually undecidable in documents addressed to no identifiable interlocutor.