Raymond Boudon's career as a social scientist started with an inquiry into the mathematical approach to the study of social facts and the problems of the structuralist perspective in mid-twentieth-century sociology (Boudon 1967; 1971 [1968]). He then turned his scientific attention to the study of inequalities in education, publishing a book (Boudon 1974 [1973]), which has put his work at the center of academic discussions as he reached conclusions which were significantly at odds with that of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (1990 [1970]). Afterward, from the 1980s on, Boudon studied topics such as social values (Boudon 1995; 2001), ideology (Boudon 1989 [1986]; 1994 [1990]), and democracy (Boudon 2003; 2006). But, from that moment on, something had changed. Although he always was interested in epistemological issues, his focus became increasingly theoretical rather than topical. He aimed at discovering the proper general foundations of social scientific analyses through the study of the specific topics he was addressing. As a consequence, these empirical/topical concerns were increasingly brought together in order to illustrate the fruitfulness of what he termed the “general theory of rationality” (Boudon 2007; 2011).

Indeed, a large portion of his academic work from the 1980s up to his death in 2013 aimed at carefully building this theory based either on a rethinking of classical and contemporary social theories (Bulle and Morin 2015) or on empirical/topical insights. If a special concern with the problems of ideology, values, democracy, and political sociology indeed permeates his work, his analyses nevertheless all aim at clarifying the general research program he is trying to delineate for the social sciences.

It is no coincidence, however, that the analysis of the topics of ideology, values, and politics were put at the front as convincing illustrations of his own theory. Values, politics, and ideas are indeed complex things which can neither be fully explained using the instrumental approach of rational choice theory (RCT) nor using any of the various fashionable irrationalist approaches of the day. It is very easy to dismiss opposing ideas, values, or thoughts as being merely the result of brainwashing, false consciousness, crowd mentality, panopticism, habitus, the patriarchy, systemic racism, the heterosexual matrix, and so on.