This communication proposes to enlighten some different politics driven by the European policy of standards in the society of knowledge (Lawn, 2011). If market and competition are often described as important neo-liberal drivers in the agenda of the European Commission, the policy of standards implement other political technologies related to a worldwide circulation of tools from New Public Management and quality insurance (Busch, 2011). These new political technologies challenge the State and its capacity to edict legal norms to govern education systems while new actors (experts and stakeholders) are involved in the design of European standards at the opposite of classical modes of representation of interests (polity) (Lawn, Normand, 2014a; Normand, 2014b).  These technologies legitimates new forms of political liberalism and procedures in decision-making at European level. The process of rationalization of a European government by objectives transforms also the formats of information used by policy-makers (indicators, benchmarks, best practices). At least, political technologies shape a new individual agency of the Lifelong Learner in delegitimizing the statist or communitarian modes of responsibility and solidarity in which education is experienced as a collective good (Normand, 2014c).  Through an opposition between standardization of objects and normalization of practices, the communication will propose a reflexive account on the way these politics reduce the ontology of human beings in underestimating the variety of modes of their involvement in the social world and their attachment to different principles of justice (Star, 1991, Lampland & Leigh Star, 2008;  Thévenot, 2002, 2009). It will use some theoretical concepts of the French pragmatist sociology to reflect on the possibility of a new criticism (Boltanski, Thévenot, 1999, Boltanski, Chiapello, 2005).

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