Rethinking classical theory the Sociological Vision of Pierre Bourdieu

After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration

Volumn , Issue , 2005, Pages 25-64

  Brubaker, Rogers ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 33744983417     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1007/1-4020-2589-0_3     Document Type: Chapter

References (130)

1. Rogers Brubaker, "Social Theory as Habitus," Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, eds. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (Cambridge, England: Polity Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 212-234.
2. Pierre Bourdieu, "The genesis of the concepts of 'habitus' and 'field," Sociocriticism 2/2 (1985): 15-16.
3. Ibid., 12.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a theory of practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
5. [The article and notes have been reprinted unchanged, and hence do not take account of the large body of more recent work by and about Bourdieu. Eds.] Nice has translated four important books by Bourdieu (as well as a number of articles) in recent years: Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977);
6. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (co-authored by Jean-Claude Passeron, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1977);
7. The Inheritors (co-authored by Jean-Claude Passeron, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979);
8. Distinction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
9. Two other books by Bourdieu-Questions de Sociologie and Le Sens Pratique-are also being translated by Nice and will be published by Wesleyan University Press. For a complete listing of English translations of Bourdieu's work through 1979, see Media, Culture and Society (1980) 2, 295-96;
10. a bibliography of his French publications appears in Revue française de science politique (1980) 30, 1223-27.
11. Most of his recent work has appeared in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, which Bourdieu has edited since its founding in 1975. Among recent English translations, see especially "The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods," Media, Culture and Society (1980) 2, 261-93.
12. Nicholas Garnham and Raymond Williams, "Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Culture: an Introduction," Media, Culture and Society (1980) 2, 209.
13. (For other discussions in English of Bourdieu's work, see Paul DiMaggio, "Review Essay: On Pierre Bourdieu," American Journal of Sociology (1979) 84 (6), 1460-74;
14. Pekka Sulkunen, "Society Made Visible-on the Cultural Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu," Acta Sociologica (1982) 25 (2), 103-115;
15. Richard Jenkins, "Pierre Bourdieu and the Reproduction of Determinism," Sociology (1992) 16, 270-281;
16. John Thompson, "Symbolic Violence: Language and Power in the Writings of Pierre Bourdieu," in Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1984), 42-72).
17. Though not especially surprising, given the current academic division of labor, it is ironic that the reception of Bourdieu's work has largely been determined by the same "false frontiers" and "artificial divisions," that his work has repeatedly challenged (see Questions de Sociologie, (Paris: Minuit, 1980), 30, 35 and especially 52, where Bourdieu suggests that his own work depends on uniting the traditionally ethnological concern with systems of classification and the traditionally sociological concern with social classes.)
18. Charles Lemert, "Literary Politics and the Champ of French Sociology," Theory and Society (1981) 10, 645-69.
19. Bourdieu's theory of knowledge, presented in Bourdieu, J.-C. Chamboredon, and J. C. Passeron, Le Métier de Sociologue, 3rd edn., (Paris: Mouton, 1980),
20. requires of sociology and the other social sciences reflexive attention to their own condition of production. "The sociology of sociology is not... one 'speciality' among others but one of the first conditions of a scientific sociology," (Questions de Sociologie, 22). For an introduction to Bourdieu's conception of the fields within which symbolic production takes place, see "Intellectual Field and Creative Project," in Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education, ed. Michael F. D. Young, (West Drayton, England: Collier Macmillan. 1971).
21. Le Sens Pratique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980), 8. The opposition between the Lévi-Straussian and Sartrean models of intellectual vocation, Bourdieu writes, encouraged in those considering careers in social science "the ambition to reconcile theoretical and practical intentions, the scientific vocation and the ethical or political vocation,... through a more humble and responsible manner of accomplishing their work as researchers," (ibid.). Bourdieu was indeed guided in his early studies of Algerian society during the Algerian war by an ambition to unite theoretical and practical aims (see the long preface to Le Sens Pratique), and he continues to regard his sociological work as one of démystification and deconsecration, as a work committed to revealing "hidden bases of domination" and thus to undermining the "misrecognition of the mechanisms on which it is founded," (Questions de Sociologie, 7, 13, 28). But while the themes of his early book Les Héritiers (an account of the pervasive and deeply inegalitarian effects of social origin in the experience of French university students) were taken up by student radicals in 1968, French Marxists and others on the left have criticized his work for what they have taken to be its pessimistic or even quietistic political implications. Even sympathetic commentators such as Nicholas Garnham and Raymond Williams, who believe Bourdieu's work constitutes a "progressive political intervention," are critical of the "functionalist/determinist residue in [his] concept of reproduction which leads him to place less emphasis on the possibilities of real change and innovation than either his theory or his empirical research makes necessary," (pp. 222-23). Bourdieu himself-to the consternation of certain (very) "critical theorists,"-has devoted much more attention to the relation between sociological theory and sociological practice (especially in Le Métier de Sociologue) than to the relation between sociological theory and political practice.
22. Le Sens Pranque, 43.
23. Because of the dominance of structuralist, objectivist modes of thought in postwar French social theory, Bourdieu devotes most of his metatheoretical attention to a critique of objectivism. For his criticism of Sartre's voluntaristic theory of action and subjectivist conception of society, see Le Sens Pratique 71-78
24. Outline of a Theory of Practice, 13-16.
25. For the specific importance of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber as cardinal points of reference for Bourdieu in the construction of his own theory, see Reproduction, 4-5;
26. "Genèse et structure du champ religieux," Revue française de sociologie (1971) 12, 295-334, esp. 295-300;
27. Questions de Sociologie 24-25.
28. Here as elsewhere Bourdieu presents the task of theory-construction as one of "integrating in a coherent system the contributions of the different partial and mutually exclusive theories, without yielding to scholastic compilation or to eclectic amalgamation" ("Genèse et structure," 295).
29. Apparent contradictions, between Marx and Weber for example, can be transcended by "going back to the common root," (Questions de Sociologie, 25).
30. For Bourdieu's most sweeping exercise in theoretical synthesis, see the short article on "Symbolic Power," in ed. Denis Gleeson, Identity and Structure: Issues in the Sociology of Education, (Nafferton, Driffield, England: Nafferton Books, 1977), where the insights to be "integrated (and transcended)," are those of Kant and Cassirer, Sapir and Whorf, Hegel, Saussure and Lévi-Strauss as well as Marx, Durkheim. and Weber.
31. Bourdieu has in fact reserved some of his sharpest criticisms for Marxism. See for example, the conclusion to "The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups," in this issue, in which Marxism is characterized as the "most powerful obstacle to the progress of the adequate theory of the social world.," For a subtle reading of Bourdieu's work that places it in a (broadly conceived) Marxian tradition, see Garnham and Williams.
32. DiMaggio, 1461.
33. "If one takes seriously at the same time the Durkheimian hypothesis of the social genesis of schemes of thought, perception, appreciation and action and the fact of class divisions, one is necessarily led to the hypothesis that there exists a correspondence between social structures (properly speaking, power structures) and mental structures, a correspondence that establishes itself via the intermediary of the structure of symbolic systems such as language, art and religion" ("Genèse et structure du champ religieux," 300).
34. See the Preface to the English edition of Distinction, xi-xii: "The model of the relationships between the universe of economic and social conditions and the universe of life-styles which is put forward here [is] based on an endeavor to rethink Max Weber's opposition between class and Stand."
35. See especially Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, and "Symbolic Power.,"
36. The theory of the economy of symbolic goods is developed in the following articles: "Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception," International Social Science Journal (1968) 20 (4), 589-612;
37. "Le marché des biens symboliques," L'Année Sociologique (1971) 22, 49-126;
38. "Genèse et structure du champ religieux"; "Une interpretation de la théorie de la vie religieuse selon Max Weber," Archives Europeennes de Sociologie (1971) 12(1), 3-21;
39. "The Production of Belief.," For the conception of symbolic capital and its relation to economic capital, see Outline of a Theory of Practice, esp. 171-183.
40. "Genèse et structure du champ religieux," 300.
41. Distinction, 468.
42. For Bourdieu, as for Durkheim, this hypothesis provides a sociological answer to questions raised by Kant. Durkheim claimed that his sociological theory of knowledge would conserve "the essential principles of the [Kantian] apriorists" while grounding itself in the "positive spirit," of the empiricists (Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, (New York: Free Press, 1965, 32); similarly, Bourdieu admits to the "perhaps immoderate ambition of giving a scientific answer to the old questions of Kant's critique of judgment, by seeking in the structure of the social classes the basis of the systems of classification which structure perception of the social world and designate the objects of aesthetic enjoyment," (Distinction, xiii-xiv).
43. It is a recurrent theme of Distinction that even the most sophisticated cultural and social appraisals and evaluations are structured by a small number of (logically) primitive principles of classification-e.g., oppositions between high and low, spiritual and material, fine and coarse, light and heavy, unique and common, brilliant and dull-that are grounded in the "fundamental structures of society" above all in the "opposition between the 'elite' of the dominant and the 'mass' of the dominated, but also in the opposition between "two principles of domination..., material and intellectual," (Distinction, 468-69).
44. "Genèse et structure du champ religieux," 297-300.
45. Reproduction, 4;
46. "Genèse et structure," 297; Distinction, 480.
47. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 8-15.
48. Le Sens Pratique, 34.
49. Outline of a Theory of Practice, 183.
50. See also Questions de Sociologie, 25:
51. "Against the typical regression of Marxism towards economism, which knows only the economy in the narrow sense of the capitalist economy and which explains everything by the economy thus defined, Max Weber extends economic analysis (in the generalized sense) to regions ordinarily abandoned by economics, such as religion. Thus, he characterizes the Church... as monopolizing the control of the goods of salvation. He suggests a radical materialsm that would investigate economic determinants (in the broadest sense) in regions such as art or religion where an ideology of 'disinterestedness' reigns." For Bourdieu's own analyses of the "economic," logic of interest, investment, accumulation, and profit in fields of activity as diverse as high fashion, science, and conversation, see (in addition to Distinction and the works cited in note 15) "Le couturier et sa griffe," Actes de la recherche (1975) 1, 7-36;
52. "The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason," Social Science Information (1975) 14, 19-47;
53. "The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges," Social Science Information (1977) 16, 645-68.
54. Distinction, 20-22, 178, 209-213.
55. Questions de Sociologie, 33-35.
56. For Bourdieu's criticism of the human capital theory of Gary Becker, see "Avenir de classe et causalité du probable," Revue française de sociologie (1974) 15, 36.
57. Distinction, 2-3, 5, 53-56.
58. Le Sens Pratique, 233-44.
59. Distinction, 482-94.
60. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Harmondsworth, England. Penguin, 1967), 33.
61. Claude Lévi-Strauss, "Social Structure," in Structural Anthropology, (New York: Basic Books, 1963).
62. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism (Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1979), chs. 1 and 2.
63. Jean Piaget, Structuralism (Routledge, 1971), 98;
64. Maurice Godelier, "Anthropology and Economics," in Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 45.
65. See especially the analyses in Le Métier de Sociologue.
66. Distinction, esp. 18-22 and 65f.
67. Le Sens Pratique, 43-70, esp. 46-47 and 56-58.
68. Reproduction, 5;
69. cf. Outline of a Theory of Practice, 22.
70. See Part One of Reproduction and "Symbolic Power.,"
71. See n. 16 above.
72. For a clear, short statement of the importance of méconnaissance, with reference to the practice of gift-giving, see Outline of a Theory of Practice, 4-5.
73. Ibid., 171-72.
74. Ibid., 178.
75. Ibid., 178-79.
76. Le Sens Pratique, 231 n. 28.
77. The increasing social attention paid to styles of life is itself economically conditioned: the functioning of the advanced capitalist economy "depends as much on the production of needs and consumers as on the production of goods-This economy demands a social world which judges people by their capacity for consumption, their 'standard of living,' their life-style, as much as by their capacity for production," (Distinction, 310).
78. Pierre Bourdieu and Monique Saint Martin, "Les Catégories de l'entendement professoral," Actes de la recherche (1975) 3, 68-93;
79. see also Reproduction, 141-76. (The emphasis placed on style seems to be much heavier in the French than in the English or American educational systems.) One implication of this analysis is that the achievement of the liberal Utopia, in which all forms of inheritance of economic resources would be abolished and free education would be provided at every level for all who were "qualified," would not suffice to transform formal equality of opportunity into real equality of opportunity. "The educational system can... ensure the perpetuation of privilege by the mere operation of its own internal logic," (Inheritors, 27). For students from culturally privileged backgrounds would begin their formal educational careers with rich endowments of cultural capital, and these initial advantages would be compounded and recompounded over the years. Even economic power would continue to be a source of (indirectly) inheritable privilege. For the economically powerful-those with the "power to keep economic necessity at a distance," (Distinction, 55, trans, altered)-would be better placed than others to cultivate, by making use of their own greater leisure or of the services of hired cultivators, the appropriate dispositions and capacities in their pre-school children.
80. Distinction 152, 241-43.
81. On the concept of cultural capital, see Bourdieu, "Les trois états du capital culturel," Actes de la recherche (1979) 30, 3-6.
82. On strategies of reconversion (of one form of capital into another) and the inflationary and devaluationary consequences of the boom in higher education, see Distinction 125-66. On the usefulness of analogical concepts such as degree inflation, cultural capital, and symbolic markets, see Jean-Claude Passeron, "L'inflation des diplômes: remarques sur l'usage de quelques concepts analogiques en sociologie," Revue française de sociologie (1982) 23, 551-84.
83. Le Sens Pratique, 22. The long autobiographical preface to this work gives a full account of Bourdieu's early enthusiasm for and subsequent disenchantment with structuralist modes of analysis.
84. "Structuralism and the Theory of Sociological Knowledge," Social Research (1969) 35(4), 705.
85. For the most sustained discussion of the concept of habitus, see Outline of a Theory of Practice, esp. chs. 2 and 4.
86. "Avenir de classe et causalité du probable," esp. 9, n. 15. See also Reproduction, 155f.
87. Outline of a Theory of Practice 78, 83.
88. Bourdieu's most extensive analysis of dispositional lag is contained in his study of colonial Algeria in the course of its adjustment to an imported and imposed money economy. Largely as a result of the massive rural clearances carried out during the war, agents endowed with economic and temporal dispositions oriented to a traditional agrarian economy were uprooted and suddenly forced to confront an urban money economy. The traditional dispositions had to be transformed, through a process of "creative reinvention," in order that individuals could adapt to the demands and opportunities of the new economy. But dispositions "do not change in the same rhythm as economic structures," and the period of transition and readaptation generated much confusion, "as if these societies were not contemporary with themselves," as well as great hardship for those groups whose dispositions were most closely oriented to the traditional economic order and who were thus least well equipped to adjust to the demands of the emerging money economy. See Algeria 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); quotations from 4 and 5.
89. Distinction, 143-44.
90. "Avenir de classe," 5; Distinction, 168.
91. Outline of a Theory of Practice, 82-83.
92. As Paul DiMaggio has suggested in his "Review Article," 1464.
93. Marx, too, had a general, transhistorical conception of class what Giddens (The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies, (London: Hutchinson, 1973), 27)
94. calls his "abstract or 'pure' model of class domination,"-but it was never systematically elaborated. Much confusion in discussions of class has resulted from the failure to distinguish between this undeveloped general conception of class and class conflict and his systematically articulated analyses of the structure, genesis, and dynamic consequences of class divisions in capitalist society. (See also Tom Bottomore, Classes in Modern Society. (George Allen & Unwin, 1965). 23).
95. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 928.
96. Le Sens Pratique. 209.
97. Ibid., 100.
98. Algeria 1960, 2.
99. Le Sens Pratique, 100.
100. Distinction, 269.
101. Though Distinction is about contemporary France, Bourdieu claims (in the Preface to the English edition) that its basic analyses of the "relationships between the universe of economic and social conditions and the universe of life-styles" are "valid
102. Le Sens Pratique, 241.
103. Distinction, 173.
104. Ibid., 79, 190-92.
105. Ibid., 213, 219.
106. Ibid., xi.
107. Ibid., 331.
108. Ibid., 339.
109. Ibid., 32-34. For a pointed contrast between the pure aesthetic of (certain fractions of) the bourgeoisie and the anti-aesthetic ethos of the working class, see ibid., 4-5.
110. Ibid., 199, 376.
111. Ibid., 53-56.
112. Ibid., 376, 54.
113. Ibid., 56.
114. Ibid., 376.
115. Ibid., 114. Sometimes Bourdieu distinguishes three main forms of capital: economic, cultural, and social, the last a "capital of social connections, honorability and responsibility" (122) that may yield advantages on the job market, on the marriage market, in a political career, etc. See also "Le capital social," Actes de la recherche (1980) 31, 2-3.
116. Distinction, 292; compare 283, 286.
117. Ibid., 101-106.
118. Ibid., 244.
119. Ibid., 106.
120. Le Sens Pratique, 145.
121. Distinction, 259.
122. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Free Press, 1949), 90.
123. Distinction, 176, 214, 219, 286.
124. Ibid., 331-38.
125. Weber, Methodology. 90.
126. Distinction, 66.
127. Ibid., 325. Bourdieu's analyses of the ethos and life-style of the "new petite bourgeoisie," (354-71) are among the most suggestive in the book.
128. Ibid., 350, 346. The intra-class opposition between fractions with differing "asset structures," according to Bourdieu, is not merely a structural and static one: in the middle and especially the upper class, it engenders ongoing struggles to define the "dominant principle of domination"-struggles to determine the relative importance of economic, cultural, or social capital in attaining or maintaining privileged social positions and to secure the "best conversion rate for the type of capital with which each group is best provided," (ibid., 254, 310). It is hard to know what to make of these abstract formulations. Despite much abstract talk of class struggles in Distinction, the concrete struggles Bourdieu discusses in any detail are not the struggles of classes or class fractions, but (1) struggles of individuals and families to preserve or enhance their powers and privileges over time or to transmit them across generations; and (2) the struggles of occupational groups or fractions of such groups for material or symbolic rewards. Though the former are class-conditioned struggles (it is a great merit of Bourdieu's work to have demonstrated this in rich ethnographic detail), they can hardly be considered class struggles; indeed they are the very opposite of struggles informed by consciousness of collective interest. And though the latter could be considered class struggles given Bourdieu's elastic and highly general conception of class, it is not clear what theoretical gain would result from assimilating the struggles of occupation-based status groups (as they would be called in a broadly Weberian tradition) to the struggles that directly affect the destinies of the more inclusive groups traditionally conceived as classes.
129. Ibid., 106. 112.
130. Weber, Methodology, 80.