Celebrated in France, the piano-playing scholar changed how we think about “deviance.” Illustration by Simon Prades

Americans have often had strange and serendipitous careers in Paris, from Thomas Evans, the Philadelphia dentist who cured Emperor Louis-Napoleon of a toothache and became an indispensable ornament of the Imperial court, to those African-American jazzmen, like the great soprano-sax player Sidney Bechet, whose careers were revived, and reputations nurtured, in France in ways they never could have been in America. But few have known an odder trajectory than Howie—“Only my mother ever called me Howard”—Becker. Howard S. Becker, to give him his full, honorary-degree name—he has six—has been a major figure in American sociology for more than sixty years. Now a brisk eighty-six, he remains most famous for the studies collected in his book “Outsiders,” of 1963, which transformed sociologists’ ideas of what it means to be a “deviant.” In America’s academic precincts, he is often seen as a sort of Richard Feynman of the social sciences, notable for his street smarts, his informal manner, and his breezy, pungent prose style—a Northwestern professor who was just as at home playing piano in saloons. (Indeed, the observations that put him on the path to academic fame, on the subculture of marijuana smokers, began while he was playing jazz piano in Chicago strip joints. “Not burlesque houses,” he says. “These were strip joints.”)

Yet it is his position in France that is truly astonishing. Two critical biographies of Becker have been published in French in the past decade, and “Beckerisme” has become an ideology to conjure with. YouTube videos capture him speaking heavily accented Chicago French to student audiences, and he now spends a good part of every year in Paris, giving seminars and holding court. His work is required reading in many French universities, even though it seems to be a model of American pragmatism, preferring narrow-seeming “How?” and “Who, exactly?” questions to the deeper “Why?” and “What?” supposedly favored by French theory. That may be exactly its appeal, though: for the French, Becker seems to combine three highly American elements—jazz, Chicago, and the exotic beauties of empiricism.

This summer, Becker published a summing up of his life’s method and beliefs, called “What About Mozart? What About Murder?” (The title refers to the two caveats or complaints most often directed against his kind of sociology’s equable “relativism”: how can you study music as a mere social artifact—what about Mozart? How can you consider criminal justice a mutable convention—what about Murder?) The book is both a jocular personal testament of faith and a window into Becker’s beliefs. His accomplishment is hard to summarize in a sentence or catchphrase, since he’s resolutely anti-theoretical and suspicious of “models” that are too neat. He wants a sociology that observes the way people act around each other as they really do, without expectations about how they ought to. Over the decades, this has led him to do close, almost novelistic studies of jazz musicians, medical students, painters, and photographers.

Among sociologists, he’s most famous for having made sociology’s previous theories of “deviance” look deviant: studying obscure or out groups, he has shown that the way their members act together follows the same kinds of rules that everyone else follows. Some people may march to a different drummer—but, when they do, they’re usually all marching in rhythm, too. As one of his students has written, “Rather than asking the less than fruitful question of why people break rules, Becker came to focus on how people go through an identifiable process to choose to break rules.” A Beckerian analysis of a social “world” asks how, in any culture or subculture, someone comes to be called an insider while someone else gets pushed outside. Simple as it is, this approach has proved immensely influential in the study of everything from drug addiction to queer theory. Basically, Becker believes that Yogi Berra was right: you really can observe the most by watching. Heather Love, a professor of English at Penn who specializes in gender and sexuality studies, points out that it shares “many of the same concerns, about institutions, power, the dynamics of social relations” as contemporary post-structuralist research, “but all in this kind of homegrown, ordinary language, a ‘just the facts, ma’am’ style that has the appeal of American noir and hardboiled fiction.”

Not long ago, in an apartment that he and his wife, Dianne Hagaman, had taken for the fall in the Fifth Arrondissement—the neighborhood of Paris that clusters around the old Sorbonne—he sat and talked about his life’s work and its apotheosis in Paris, almost as a spectator of his own surprising career. As long-faced and dry-eyed as a stoical silent comedian, Becker is game to talk about anything. A conversation with him becomes an inimitable spool of bebop piano tips, Chicago history, sociological minutiae, and meditations on French intellectual life, with helpful detours into strip-club culture in the forties and the reasons that French professors think of themselves as civil servants while American ones imagine themselves as entrepreneurs.

“I always really wanted to be a piano player,” he begins. “When I was about twelve, I heard boogie-woogie for the first time and fell in love with it. My folks had bought a piano for show, and I bought a book of boogie-woogie and taught myself to play it, more or less. And then I met some kids in the neighborhood—you see, I went to Austin High.” Austin High was the citadel of Chicago jazz, where, in the twenties, Bud Freeman had helped create a form of excited, driven white-folks jazz that remained influential through the swing era. “I got jobs for people who couldn’t afford real musicians—thirteen-year-old kids playing for other thirteen-year-old kids.” Then he got into a better band, which was racially mixed. “That was a big thing,” he says. “Because we were racially mixed, we played only black dances. The kids who were at the black dances, if you didn’t play those pieces exactly the way they were on the record, you were in trouble. So I took lessons from Lennie Tristano. When I met him, he was in his late twenties and had already stopped playing in public—he wouldn’t put up with anything other than perfect playing conditions, with the result that he almost never played.”

Tristano, who was a saxophonist as well as a pianist, was the Glenn Gould of bebop: difficult, hypersensitive, reclusive, and hugely gifted. “Instead of teaching ‘freedom,’ or creativity, Tristano taught me a set of practices that create the feeling of what an improvisation ought to sound like,” Becker says. Tristano taught simple ways of solving puzzles that come up in improvising—for instance, ways of adding flatted fifths and minor ninths to otherwise too familiar chord sequences. “He showed how to create an essentially unlimited set of possibilities to work with as I played through an evening in a bar,” Becker recalls. Jazz solos, he learned from his models, were concocted almost entirely “from a small collection of ‘crips,’ short phrases that can be combined in a million ways, subjected to all possible variations.” The lesson that social performance, even of the highest kind, was more a string of crips than an outpouring of confessions remained at the root of Becker’s understanding of the way the world works.