Pierre Bourdieu in Context1

Craig Calhoun2
Placing Pierre Bourdieu has proved difficult for many readers. Anthropologist,
sociologist, or philosopher? Action theorist or structuralist? Materialist or culturalist?
Determinist or committed to political struggle? Seeking throughout his life to overcome
problematic oppositions, Bourdieu also embodied them. Difficult to read, he reached a
broad audience far beyond academic walls. Intensely competitive and even combative, he
inspired personal loyalty and argued for solidarity. A critic of the higher education
system, he was among its most successful products. An opponent of the grands
mandarins who dominated French intellectual life, he became one of them. A very private
man as well as a critic of the media, he became a remarkably prominent celebrity.
The fame came especially in the last years of his life, and to some extent has
distorted reception of his career and oeuvre as a whole. In the 1990s, Bourdieu became
Frances most famous campaigner against the imposition of a neoliberal model of
globalization. Pierre Carles documentary movie on his political work, Sociology Is a
Martial Art, was a surprise commercial success in 2000-2001portraying Bourdieu as a
sort of intellectual equivalent of the farmer and anti-fast food activist Jos Bov. Theater
groups staged performances based on his ethnographic exploration of social suffering, La
misre du monde.3 Women approached him in the street to tell him how La domination
masculine had inspired them.4 When he died on January 23rd, 2002, Le Monde delayed
publication by several hours so the front page could carry the news. It was the lead story
on TV news in France (and other European countries) and ran with expressions of grief
and loss from Frances president, prime minister, trade union leaders, and a host of other
dignitaries and scholars.
The entry into politics that made Bourdieu so prominent a celebrity also aroused
criticisms, suspicions, and resentments among his fellow social scientists. Beyond
theoretical or empirical differences, the new conflicts were fueled by both academic and
state politics. On the first side, there were many who saw Bourdieus fame and influence
as unfair, leaving too little room for their own or that of other heroes. Others accused him
of bringing a militant style to scholarly disputes. Disappointed former protgs and
colleagues complained that Bourdieu was not only dominant but also domineering. 5 In a
This paper was developed out of speeches presented early in 2002 at New York University, the
University of Pennsylvania, and finally the New School for Social Research, April 26, 2002; it
incorporates parts of a French text presented as the opening speech to the Colloq Bourdieu at
Cerisy-la-salle, July 2001. I am indebted to Loic Wacquant and Emmanuelle Saada for their
comments on earlier versions.
2
President of the Social Science Research Council and Professor of Sociology and History at
New York University.
3
Bourdieu, et al. The Weight of the World. Trans. P. Ferguson. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000; orig. 1993.
4
Bourdieu, La domination masculine. Paris: Seuil, 1997.
5
This charge was made in especially vitriolic and lengthy form in Jeannine Verds-Leroux, Le
Savant et la politique: Essai sur le terrorisme sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu. Paris: Grasset,
1

comment after Bourdieus death, a distinguished former student and co-author, Luc
Bolstanski, acknowledged that Bourdieu had been a serious scientist in the 60s and 70s
but suggested that his more recent work was little more than agit-prop. 6 That Boltanski
broke the norms of mourning made this shocking, but much the same view had been
expressed for several years by others whose differences were more in the realm of state
politics, and who were troubled by Bourdieus criticisms of the Socialist government,
especially after the strikes of 1995. Journalists, wounded by his attacks on the
mainstream media, joined in.7 Bourdieu came to symbolize the gauche de gauche, the
many groups that outflanked the Socialist Party on the Left. Bourdieu indeed had accused
the successive prime ministers Jupp and Jospin of selling out and making their version
of socialism little different from neoliberalism. As perhaps the most prominent
mainstream socialist to argue that the party had abandoned both its radicalism and its
critical stance on capitalism he was seen as supporting defections to the smaller parties of
the Left. When the Socialists were ignominiously defeated in the first round of the 2002
elections, many blamed Bourdieu posthumously (rather than the still-living if uninspiring
candidate). Others, of course, suggested that the defeat of Jospin merely confirmed
Bourdieus diagnosis, and that the partys sacrifice of principle was also poor electoral
strategy.
Though differently motivated, these lines of criticism and attack converged on the
notion that Bourdieus work changed deeply in the 1990s, and especially that there was a
sharp divergence between his earlier, scientific research and his later political
interventions. By contrast, I will try to establish the unity of Bourdieus work, the extent
to which the concerns expressed in his political writings are both of a piece with and
supported by his scientific analyses. The extent to which Bourdieu directly entered public
debates and the frequency with which he wrote polemics for broader audiences certainly
changed through his career and especially in the 1990s. But the intellectual themes,
conceptual framework, and both theoretical and empirical orientation of Bourdieus
sociology remained impressively consistent, especially from its first fully mature
expressions in the early 1970s through his death. This is not to say that there was no
internal development; new dimensions were added to Bourdieus sociology and older
themes both deepened and extended. Concepts and theoretical provenance earlier left
more implicit were made more explicit. But Bourdieu worked not by declaring a
theoretical system and then revising it, but by continually deploying a core conceptual
1998.
6
Interview, in Les ractions de nombreux compagnons de route, Le Monde, 24.01.02.
7
Anthony Pouilly Bourdieu et les journalists: lheure des comptes, Revue la science politique
12 (2002): 1-4; Daniel Schneidermann, Du journalisme aprs Bourdieu. Paris: Fayard, 1998.
Schneiderman was a Le Monde reporter who complained that Bourdieu should have recognized
that, within necessary limits, many journalists were also engaged in promoting critical
consciousness. In the same manner that social democrats resented being lumped with liberals,
Schneiderman thought Bourdieu should have made stronger distinctions among journals and
jounralists. For extensive discussion of this, see the website Action-Critique-Medias
(http://acrimed.samizdat.net/journalismes/critiques) and Pascal Fortin, Bourdieu, Schneidermann
et le journalisme: Analyse d;une contre-critique, Composite, 1
(http://commposite.uqam.ca/2000.1/articles/fortin.htm).

framework and set of insights in different empirical analyses. 8 The definitions of concepts
were to some extent pliable and reworked in the midst of different analyses (to the
consternation of later systematizers). New concepts were added, but the growth was
incremental and consistent, not a matter of sharp breaks. 9 Far from being arbitrary in
relation to his more scientific work, his political analyses of the 1990s reflect grounding
in that scientific work going back to his early studies of Algeria, and extend a consistent
analytic framework to new objectsalbeit, given the pressures of time and political
immediacy, often without the empirical research necessary to fully substantiate his
claims.
Bourdieus political actions are fully consistent with and understandable in terms
of his scientific sociology, though they were not dictated by it. Bourdieus challenge to
threatened collapse between scientific and economic (and for that matter, political and
economic) fields in the 1990s and early 2000s is of a piece with his rejection of a collapse
between academic and political fields in 1968 and both are informed by his theory of
quasi-autonomous social fields and by his analysis of the disruption of traditional life and
marginalization of former peasants in Algeria.
If it is a misapprehension to divorce Bourdieus politics too sharply from his
sociology, it is equally misleading to read him only through oppositions to other leading
French intellectuals and not through the affinities which also exist. For example, I shall
emphasize the extent to which Bourdieu was part of the poststructuralist generation
(along with Foucault and Derrida among many others). Of course, his work was distinct
within that broad movement (and especially distinct from much of what made
poststructuralism a movement in the English-language world). Not least, it was more
serious about science and social organization than other lines of work usually grouped
under that label. But the generation was also shaped by common intellectual sources,
institutions and political context.
Roots and Project
To begin with, let us recall the extraordinary scope and distinctive commitments
of Bourdieus work. The most influential and original French sociologist since Durkheim,
Bourdieu was at once a leading theorist and an empirical researcher of broad interests and
distinctive style. Bourdieu not only helped redefine the fields of sociology and
anthropology; he made prominent contributions also to education, history, literary
See Rogers Brubaker, Social Theory as Habitus, Pp. 212-234 in C. Calhoun, E. LiPuma, and
M. Postone, eds.: Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press and
Derek Robbins The Work of Pierre Bourdieu. Boulder: Westview, 1991.
9
If there was any such break in Bourdieus work, it came in the 1960s and 1970s as he first
appropriated and then transcended structuralism (without ever fully abandoning it) in developing
a theory of practice and struggle. Bourdieus early studies of Algeria were not especially
theoretical, and were influenced more by phenomenology than structuralism. Bourdieu first drew
on structuralism to challenge nave subjectivism, then sought to bring time, improvisation, and
sense of the game to bear to show the limits of thinking culture in purely structural terms,
especially as a system of rules. Yet this was not a break into epistemic maturity, but a gradual
working-out and improvement of positions and tools.
8

studies, aesthetics, and a range of other fields. He analyzed labor markets in Algeria, 10
symbolism in the calendar and the house of Kabyle peasants, 11 marriage patterns in his
native Barn region of France,12 photography as an art form and hobby,13 museum goers
and patterns of taste,14 schooling and social inequality,15 modern universities,16 the rise of
literature and art as a distinct fields of endeavor,17 and the experience of poverty amid the
wealth of modern societies.18

Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Darbel, J-P. Rivet and C. Seibel. Travail et travailleurs en Algerie. Paris
and the Hague: Mouton, this ed. 1995; orig. 1963.
11
Pierre Bourdieu, La maison kabyle ou le monde renvers, pp. 739-58 in J. Pouillon and P.
Maranda, eds., changes et communications : Mlanges offerts Claude Lvi-Strauss
loccasion de son 60me anniversaire. Paris: Mouton, 1969; Pierre Bourdieu. Esquisse dune
thorie de la pratique. Prcd de trois etudes dethnologie kabyle. Genve: Droz, 1972
12
Pierre Bourdieu, Les strategies matrimoniales dans le system de reproduction, Annales, 1972
n. 4-5: 1105-27; Le bal des clibataires. Paris : Seuil, 2002.
13
Pierre Bourdieu, Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Dominique
Schnapper, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990; orig.
1965.
14
Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1990; orig. 1966.
15
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Inheritors. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979; orig. 1964; Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education,
Culture, and Society. Trans by. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977; orig. 1970.
16
Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988; orig. 1978; The
State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press; this ed.
1996; orig. 1989.
17
Bourdieu, Pierre, The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic, pp 254-266 in The Field of
Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; orig. 1989; The Rules of Art.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996; orig. 1992.
18
Pierre Bourdieu, et al., The Weight of the World. Trans. P. Ferguson. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000; orig. 1993. Though it is dated, the best review of the development and
breadth of Bourdieus work are Derek Robbins, The Work of Pierre Bourdieu, op cit.; also helpful
is David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997.
10

A former rugby player and a reader of the later Wittgenstein, Bourdieu was drawn
to the metaphor of games to convey his sense of social life. But by game he didnt
mean mere entertainments. Rather, he meant a serious athletes understanding of a game.
He meant the experience of being passionately involved in play, engaged in a struggle
with others and with our own limits, over stakes to which we are (at least for the moment)
deeply committed. He meant intense competition. He meant for us to recall losing
ourselves in the play of a game, caught in its flow in such a way that no matter how
individualistically we struggle we are also constantly aware of being part of something
largera team, certainly, but also the game itself. The habitus, as society written into
the body, into the biological individual, enables the infinite number of acts of the game
written into the game as possibilities and objective demandsto be produced; the
constraints and demands of the game, although they are not restricted to a code of rules,
impose themselves on those peopleand those people alonewho, because they have a
feel for the game, a feel, that is, for the immanent necessity of the game, are prepared to
perceive them and carry them out.19
Social life is like this, Bourdieu suggested, except that the stakes are bigger. Not
just is it always a struggle; it both imposes constraints and requires constant
improvisation. This is true of marriage, education, professional life, politics. The idea is
directly related to Wittgensteins account of language games. 20 These are not diversions
from some more basic reality but a central part of the activity by which forms of life are
constituted, reproduced, and occasionally transformed. Learning a language is a constant
training in how to improvise play in social interaction and cultural participation more
generally. No game can be understood simply by grasping the rules that define it. It
requires not just following rules, but having a sense of the game, a feeling for how to
play.21 Nothing is simultaneously freer and more constrained than the action of the good
player. He quite naturally materializes at just the place the ball is about to fall, as if the
ball were in command of himbut by that very fact, he is in command of the ball. 22
This is a social sense, for it requires a constant awareness of and responsiveness to the
play of both ones opponents and ones teammates. A good rugby (or soccer or
basketball) player is constantly aware of the field as a whole, and anticipates the actions
of teammates, knowing when to pass, when to try to break free.
A good social analyst is simultaneously describer, critic, and player of social
games. There is no escape from gamesmanship (though many fields that claim
disinterestedness as a constitutive featurelike academiademand that participants
dissimulate and Bourdieus critics frequently accused him of being a gamesman as
though that were a distinctive trait and somehow a betrayal of the game). Games,
however, may differ. Science is not mystically purified of self-interest or freed of
Bourdieu, In Other Words. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990, p. 63; original emphases.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Trans G.E.M. Anscombe, London:
Macmillan, 1967; orig. 1953.
21
See Charles Taylor, To Follow a Rule pp. 45-60 in C. Calhoun, E. LiPuma, and M.
Postone, eds.: Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993 on
Bourdieus account of the limits of rule-following as an explication of action and its relationship
to Wittgenstein.
22
Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 63.
19
20

arbitrary historical determinations. The pursuit of the accumulation of knowledge is

inseparably the quest for recognition and the desire to make a name for oneself; technical
competence and scientific knowledge function simultaneously as instruments of
accumulation of symbolic capital; intellectual conflicts are always also power struggles,
the polemics of reason are the contests of scientific rivalry, and so on. 23 Yet, this does
not mean that knowledge reduces simply to power (in the oversimplification widely read
into Foucaults linkage of the notions) nor does it mean that because technical
competence confers symbolic capital it does not function as technical competence.
Science and scholarship are not organized not by freedom from interest, though they may
claim that, but by the harnessing of interests to the pursuit of knowledge. If such fields
are favourable to the development of reason, this is because, to put oneself forward
there, one has to put forward reasons; to win there, one has to win with arguments,
demonstrations or refutations.24
Bourdieu came by his critical intellectual orientation naturally, if you will, or at
least biographically. Born in 1930, he was the grandson of an itinerant sharecropper and
son of a farmer who later turned postman in the remote village of Lasseube in the
Pyrnes Atlantiques. He rose through the public school system to the top of his class at
the Lyce de Pau, the Lyce Louis-le-Grand Paris, and the cole Normale Suprieure at
the rue dUlm, the preeminent institution for the consecration of French intellectuals. Lest
invoking Bourdieus humble origins seem like merely a ritual act of hagiography for the
self-made man, it is worth noting how much they mattered in his reception (and often
rejection) by French elites. Even after he was famousand indeed, even after his death
he could be haughtily referred to as the former scholarship boy from Barn who became
the most respected and at the same time most controversial Homo academicus in
France.25 Or again, this son of a low-level functionary of Barn, a lover of rugby as
much from regional atavism as from a love for conflict was never at ease in the Parisian
salons.26
Bourdieu was never allowed the unselfconscious belonging of those born to
wealth, cultural pedigree and elite accents. At the same time, he also never confused his
success with simple proof of meritocracy (even if it did demonstrate some degree of
grudging openness in the system). Instead, he developed from it an extraordinary capacity
for critical social analysis and epistemic reflexivity. While he only presented his
elements of a social self-analysis as his last lecture course at the Collge de France
(and in other venues), a year before he died, one could read much of his work as a less
personalistic version of the same project.27
Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000; orig. 1997, p. 110.
Ibid., p. 109.
25
Aude Lancelin, Bourdieu fait son cinema, Le Nouvel Observateur, 26.04.01; also Nouvel
Observateur website, 04.02.2002. Lancelins article is excerpted on the Action-Critique-Medias
site, http://acrimed.samizdat.net/journalismes/culture/01bourdieu09.html. Nouvel Observateur
and Bourdieu existed in longtime mutual acrimony, perhaps precisely because the Nouvelle
Observateur was the journal of caviar socialism.
26
Ferenzci, Thomas, Un homme de combat, Le Monde, 25.01.02, p. 1-2.
27
Pierre Bourdieu, Science de la science et rflexivit. Paris: Raisons dagir, 2002; see also Homo
Academicus and Postscript 1 to Chapter 1 of Pascalian Meditations. An unauthorized publication
23
24

Bourdieus sense of bodily insertion into the competitive and insular universe of
French academe was an inspiration for his revitalization of the Aristotelian-ThomistHusserlian notion of habitus, the system of socially constituted dispositions that guides
agents in their perception and action. His awareness of what his classmates and teachers
did not see--because it felt natural to them--informed his accounts of the centrality of
doxathe preconscious taken-for-granted sense of reality that is more basic than any
orthodoxy--and of misrecognition in producing and enabling social domination.
Though educated in philosophy, Bourdieu embraced sociology precisely in order
to make empirical research a tool for breaking through ordinary consciousness to achieve
truer knowledge about a social world usually considered too mundane for philosophical
attention. Perhaps this was an especially apt choice for an oblate miraculan initiate
whose social background and non-elite habitus made his interventions seem brutal amid
the aristocratic world of the Parisian intelligentsia and the normaliens philosophes, no
matter how brilliant they were. A certain explicitness about academic games both
expresses and makes the best of that distance. It is no denigration to note that Bourdieus
incessant struggle against the heritage of the normalien philosophe was simultaneously
an effective reminder that he had earned the status, and at the top of his class, before
rejecting what he called the caste profits of the philosopher. Accepting instead the
challenges of empirical research offered, Bourdieu thought, the best means for breaking
with the enchantments of established ideas and self-evident social relations. And his
critical distance from the institutions within which he excelled propelled his telling
analyses of French academic life, and indeed of inequality, the state and capitalism
generally. I have never really felt justified in existing as an intellectual, he wrote in an
extraordinary but not at all casual line. I have always tried to exorcise everything in
my thinking that might be linked to that status, such as philosophical intellectualism. I do
not like the intellectual in myself, and what may sound, in my writing, like antiintellectualism is chiefly directed against the intellectualism or intellectuality that remains
in me28
Bourdieus contemporaries at the cole Normale, Jacques Derrida and Michel
Foucault, shared this sense of distance from the dominant culture of the institution. 29
Though the specifics varied, a certain horror at the social environment of the cole
informed each in a struggle to see what conventional consciousness obscured. Indeed, as
Bourdieu sometimes reminded listeners, Foucault attempted suicide as a student there.
Bourdieus intellectual response differed crucially from Derridas and Foucaults: he
embraced science. He remained, nonetheless, friendly with both (and his work showed
important similarities to Foucaults, especially perhaps in its stress on embodiment and
the politics of knowledge). It was Foucault who proposed Bourdieu for a chair at the
Collge de France.
of parts of the elements of a social self-analysis by Nouvel Observateur shortly after Bourdieus
death, contrary to the wishes of his family, created a small scandal.
28
Pascalian Meditations, p. 7.
29
Derrida was Bourdieus exact contemporary and early friend; Foucault finished at the Ecole a
year after they started. All were taught in part by Louis Althusser, though they responded
differently, Bourdieu ultimately with considerable hostility.

Algeria
In 1955, Bourdieu was sent to do military service in Algeria during that French
colonys struggle for independenceand Republican Frances horrific repression of it.
The bloody battle of Algiers was a formative experience for a generation of French
intellectuals who saw their state betray what it had always claimed was a mission of
liberation and civilization, revealing the sheer power that lay behind colonialism, despite
its legitimation in terms of progress.30 Bourdieu addressed this both with direct opposition
and with research into the nature of domination itself, including in France, and into the
nature of misrecognition and the struggle over classification.
Confrontation with the Algerian war, and with the transformations wrought by
French colonialism and capitalism, left a searing personal mark on Bourdieu, solidifying
his commitment to the principle that research must matter for the lives of others. Scarred
but also toughened, he stayed on to teach at the University of Algiers and became a selftaught ethnographer. He proved himself an extraordinarily keen observer of the
interpenetration of large-scale social change and the struggles and solidarities of daily
life. Among other reasons, his native familiarity with the peasant society of Barn gave
him an affinity with the traditional agrarian societies of rural Algeria that were being
destroyed by French colonialism. With Abdelmalek Sayad, he studied peasant life and
participation in the new cash economy that threatened and changed it. 31 Working with
Sayad and Alain Darbel (among others) helped to inaugurate a pattern of intellectual
partnership that characterized Bourdieus entire career.32
Bourdieu did not simply study Algeria, though, but rather sought out its internal
variants, regional and minority communities that were stigmatized and marginalized
not only by French colonialism but also by the construction of Algerian national identity
as modern and Arab in opposition to rural, tribal, and traditional. Sociologie dAlgerie
describes in some detail not only Arabic-speaking peoples but Kabyles, Shawia, and
Mozabiteseach of which groups had its own distinct culture and traditional social order
though both colonialism and market transformations were disrupting each and along with
opposition to French rule pulling members of each into a new, more unified Algerian
system of social relations.33 Indeed, the very term Kabyle (the name for the group
See James D. Le Seuer, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the
Decolonization of Algeria. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002 and Bourdieus
foreward to it.
31
Bourdieu and Sayad, Le deracinement, la crise de l'agriculture en Algerie. Paris: Editions de
Minuit. An exceptional scholar in his own right, Sayad remained a close friend and interlocutor of
Bourdieus until his death in 1998. See Emmanuelle Saada, (2000); Bourdieu and Loc
Wacquant, The Organic Ethnologist of Algerian Migration, Ethnography, 1 (2000) #2: 173-82.;
Bourdieus introduction to Sayad, La double absence: Des illusions de lmigr aux souffrances
de limmigr. Paris: Seuil, 1999.
32
Weight of the World was produced with contributions from 23 co-authors! Much of Bourdieus
later effort would go into maintain sites of collective production and dissemination of knowledge:
research centers, journals, and book series.
33
Bourdieu, Sociologie dAlgerie, Paris: PUF, 1958.
30

Bourdieu studied most) is derived from the Arabic word for tribe, and both a claimed
identity and a reminder of marginalization.
This double domination informed both his analyses of Algeria specifically and his
development of a theory of symbolic violence. Conducting research in Kabyle villages
and with Berber-speaking labor migrants to the fast-growing cities of the Algerias
coastal regions, he addressed themes from the introduction of money into marriage
negotiations to cosmology and the agricultural calendar, and the economic crisis facing
those who are forced into market relations for which they are not prepared. 34 He studied
the difficult situation of those who chose to work in the modern economy and found
themselves transformed into its underclass, not even able to gain the full status of
proletarians because of the ethno-national biases of the French colonialists.35
Behind the studies of social change was an account of the traditional other to
modernization, the less rapidly changing peasant culture and economy.36 It is informative
to recall that the Kabyle were Durkheims primary exemplars of traditional, segmentary
social organization in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and thus already had a role
as representative of a certain type of the premodern. Influenced by Merleau-Ponty and
Sartre, among others, Bourdieu undertook in his first book to write a phenomenology of
affective life.37 This was a vague frame for the minimally theoretical Sociologie
dAlgerie, but it contributed to Bourdieus development of an analytic perspective on
peoples investment in social roles and games, symbolic systems and structures. Before
abandoning the study of philosophy in Paris, he had contemplated writing a thesis on
Merleau-Ponty under the direction of Cangulhem. He carried this broadly
phenomenological orientation into his Algerian research, but gradually came to reject
what he saw as a one-sided subjectivism. It was partly this search for a way to explain the
symbolic order and its role in constituting life in Berber villages but which could not be
fully articulated by those who lived it that drew him to Lvi-Strauss and structuralism. He
would eventually seek to transcend structuralism as well, notably through trying to
grapple better with issues of temporality, including both the role of timing in social
action and the constitution of time as part of the sociocultural order. From this start,
however, he launched a lifelong struggle to understand and express the ways in which
See, perhaps most importantly, Bourdieu and Sayad, op cit.
Bourdieu, Sociologie dAlgerie, Paris: PUF, 1958; Bourdieu, Darbel, Rivet and Seibel, Travail
et travailleurs en Algerie. Paris and the Hague: Mouton, this ed. 1995; orig. 1963.
36
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1997; orig. 1912).
37
Jeffrey Alexander makes much of uncovering the fact that Bourdieu was influenced by Sartre,
and then suggests that Bourdieus later critiques of Sartre were disingenuous. See Alexander,
The Reality of Reduction, in his Fin de siecle Social Theory, London: Verso, 1995. But
Alexander fails to grasp both the ubiquity of Sartres influenceas of Lvi-Strausssin the
French intellectual field of the 1950s and the extent to which Bourdieu in his work of the later
1960s and 70s played each off against the other as representations of subjectivism and
objectivism. Bourdieu drew on many influences, and it is true that he did not always make them
clear, and especially not those that were most obvious in his field. Though the temporal
progression is not quite so simple, Bourdieu proceeded through the stages his theory described:
subjectivism, structuralist objectification, the attempt to develop an account of practice that
transcended their opposition.
34
35

practical activity was informed by both abstract doctrine and lived experience without
being strictly reducible to either (for example, prescription of ideal marriage patterns and
actual social relations and available options).
One of the most basic difficulties in ethnographic research, Bourdieu came to
realize, is the extent to which it puts a premium on natives discursive explanations of
their actions. Because the anthropologist is an outsider and starts out ignorant, natives
must explain things to him. But it would be a mistake to accept such explanations as
simple truths, not because they are lies but because they are precisely the limited form of
knowledge that can be offered to one who has not mastered the practical skills of living
fully inside the culture. Unless he is careful, the researcher is led to focus his attention not
on the actual social life around him but on the statements about it which his informants
offer. The anthropologists particular relation to the object of his study contains the
makings of a theoretical distortion inasmuch as his situation as an observer, excluded
from the real play of social activities by the fact that he has no place (except by choice or
by way of a game) in the system observed and has no need to make a place for himself
there, inclines him to a hermeneutic representation of practices, leading him to reduce all
social relations to communicative relations and, more precisely, to decoding
operations.38 Such an approach would treat social life as much more a matter of explicit
cognitive rules than it is, and miss the ways in which practical activity is really generated
beyond the determination of the explicit rules. This involves not only failure to follow
rules but creative transpositions of representations across different settings and
improvisations implicit in the successful play of social games. Bourdieus project was to
grasp the practical strategies people employed, their relationship to the explanations they
gave (to themselves as well as to others), and the ways in which peoples pursuit of their
own ends nonetheless tended to reproduce objective patterns which they did not choose
and of which they might even be unaware.
Bourdieu initially represented the lives of the original inhabitants of Algeria in
fairly conventional terms, echoing many aspects of the more critical end of the
modernization theories of the day. Increasingly, though, he began to develop not only a
challenge to the idea of benign modernization, but a much richer and more sophisticated
analysis of how a traditional order could be created such that it reproduced itself with
impressive efficacy without any conscious intention to do so, template for the
reproduction, or exercise of power in its pursuit. This was made possible, Bourdieu
argued, by the very organization of social practices, combining the symbolic and the
material seamlessly in a polythetic consciousness, and inculcating practical orientations
to actions in the young through experiences repeated in everyday life. The spatial
organization of the household and the calendar of agricultural production, thus, were not
only cultural choices or responses to material conditions, they were media of
instruction organizing the ways in which the world appeared to members of the society
and the ways in which each could imagine himself and improvise action. This social
order did not admit of divisions into different fields of activity with different specific
forms of value or claims on the loyalties of members. Kinship, poetry, religion, and
Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977,
p. 1.
38

10

agriculture were not distinct, thus, as family, art, religion and the economy were in more
modern societies. Kabyle could thus live in a doxic attitude, reproducing understanding
of the world as simply the taken-for-granted way it must be, while the development of
discrete fields was linked to the production of orthodoxies and heterodoxies, competing
claims to right knowledge and true value.
Recognizing that the traditional order was sustained not by simple inertia or the
force of cultural rules, Bourdieu turned attention to the ways in which continuous human
effort, vigilance towards proper action that was simultaneously an aspect of effective
play of the game, achieved reproduction. This was a game peasants could play effectively
in their villages. They were prepared for it not only by explicit teaching but by all their
practical experiencesembodied as second nature or habitus. The same people who
could play the games of honor with consummate subtlety in peasant villages were
incapacitated by the games of rationalized exchange in the cities. Labor migration and
integration into the larger state and market thus stripped peasant habituses of their
efficacy and indeed made the very efforts that previously had sustained village life and
traditional culture potentially counterproductive.
From this it was a short step to problems posed by declining efficacy of the
traditional order and the weakness of preparation the Berbers had for participation in the
modern society of Algerianotably the fields of economy and politics. At first,
Bourdieu looked to education as a vehicle for equipping the marginal and dominated with
the capacity to compete effectively in the new order. 39 Eventually, he saw education as
more contradictoryproviding necessary tools but only in a system that reinforced and
legitimated subordination. Kablyes and other Berbers not only wound up dominated, but
colluded in their own subjugation because of the ways in which they felt themselves to be
different and disabled. Experience constantly taught the lesson that there was no way for
people like us to succeed. Occasional exceptions were more easily explained away than
the ubiquitous reinforcement that inculcated pessimism as habitus. Feeling fundamentally
unequipped for the undertakings of Algerias new modern sector, they transformed a
fact of discrimination into a principle of self-exclusion and reduced ambition.
These studies helped forge Bourdieus theory of practice and informed his entire
intellectual trajectory, including both academic endeavors and his later political critique
of neoliberalism. Near the end of his life, he wrote:
As I was able to observe in Algeria, the unification of the economic field tends,
especially through monetary unification and the generalization of monetary
exchanges that follow, to hurl all social agents into an economic game for which
they are not equally prepared and equipped, culturally and economically. It tends
by the same token to submit them to standards objectively imposed by
For decades Bourdieu quietly supported students from Kabylia in the pursuit of higher
education, a fact that speaks not only to his private generosity and sense of obligation, but to his
faith that, for all their complicity in social reproduction, education and science remained the best
hope for loosening the yoke of domination. He also helped Berber emigrants in Paris found a
research center, "CERAM" (Centre de Recherches et d'Etudes Amazighes), and was a founder of
a prominent support group for imprisoned and threatened Algerian intellectuals (CISIA, Comit
de soutien aux intellectuels algriens).
39

11

competition from more efficient productive forces and modes of production, as

can readily be seen with small rural producers who are more and more completely
torn away from self-sufficiency. In short, unification benefits the dominant.40
Unification, of course, could be a project not only of the colonial state but also of national
states, the European community, and the World Trade Organization.
As a self-taught researcher in Algeria, Bourdieu fused ethnography and statistics,
theory and observation, to begin crafting a distinctive approach to social inquiry aimed at
informing progressive politics through scientific production. In some ways, it may have
helped to be self-taught because it encouraged Bourdieu to ignore some of the artificial
oppositions structuring the social sciencese.g., between quantitative and qualitative
inquiry. Research also gave Bourdieu an approach to practical action at a time when he
felt caught uncertainly between political camps. He both drew heavily on Fanon, for
example, and then vehemently rejected the revolutionary politics that attracted him,
seeing it as naively and sometimes dangerously romantic. 41 Convinced that total
revolution was impossible, but also that the French state was insupportable, Bourdieu
soughtwithout complete successan approach that would give adequate weight to the
power of social reproduction without simply affirming it.
Structure and Practice
The resulting studies, developing through Esquisse dune thorie la pratique,
Outline of a Theory of Practice and The Logic of Practice (not to mention a host of
articles) are among the most influential efforts to overcome the reified oppositions
between subjective and objective, agency and structure.42 Though Bourdieu introduced
the phrase structuration later made famous by Anthony Giddens, his approach was
different in two important ways. First, it was always rooted in a reflexive inquiry into the
conditions of possibility of both objective and subjective views, never simply a new
theory of a third way.43 Second, Bourdieu never sought to tackle these issues purely in the
Pierre Bourdieu, Unifying to Better Dominate, Items and Issues, winter 2001; orig. 2000
(forthcoming in Firing Back, New York: New Press, 2002.
41
See Bourdieu, The Revolution in the Revolution. There is useful discussion in Jeremy Lane,
Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto, 2000.
42
Esquisse dune thorie la pratique, prcd de trois tudes dethnologie kabyle, Geneva : Droz,
1972; Outline, op cit., The Logic of Practice, trans R. Nice. Stanford : Stanford University Press,
1990 ; orig. 1980. Outline is often described as a translation of Esquisse, but it is in fact
substantially rewriting and incorporates not only a changed order of presentation and relation
between theoretical and ethnographic text, but some significant changes in theory. Logic (Le Sens
Pratique, a more evocative title), reworked the same texts, with further additions and deletions.
Robbins account of the relations among the three is the most detailed in English; see The Work of
Pierre Bourdieu, ch. 7.
43
I mean here an analytic third way, some manner of escape from the problems objective and
subjective. Bourdieu sought to objectify each perspective, but also to recognize each within the
larger whole of sociological inquiry. Objective analysis, he wrote in Homo Academicus, p. xiv
obliges us to realize that the two approaches, structuralist and constructivist are two
complementary stages of the same procedure. Bourdieu and Giddens diverged much more
sharply on the idea of a political Third Way and what Bourdieu saw as Giddens insufficiently
critical approach to globalization.
40

12

abstract but instead always in struggle to understand concrete empirical cases. The most
important of these cases came from his Algerian fieldwork, studies of French educational
institutions, and inquiries into the fields of art and literature. Bourdieus studies join with
Foucaults work of the same period in moving beyond structuralisms avoidance of
embodied subjectivity and with Derridas effort to recover epistemology by breaking with
the notion that it must be grounded in the Cartesian perspective of the individual knowing
subject. In an important sense, discussed further below, the imprecise term
poststructuralist fits Bourdieu as well it does Foucault or Derrida.
Bourdieu built on structuralism and benefited especially from the work of Claude
Lvi-Strauss, who among other things had helped rehabilitate the Durkheimian project.
Indeed it is actually hard to remember in the English language world and given the way
in which the history of social science is typically taught, that in France the work of
Durkheim had fallen precipitously from prominence after his death and that of Marcel
Mauss. Not only were less sociological views ascendant, but the Durkheimian version of
neoKantianism with its social foundations for the categories of knowledge was all but
forgotten. Philosophy sought an emancipation from social determination (this was a
prominent theme in existentialism, but not limited to it). Lvi-Strauss revitalized the
Durkheimian tradition and renewed the project of studying the interdependence of
cultural and social relations.44 Bourdieu saw himself as in important ways resuming that
legacy, even while also improving on it, and the book series he edited made a variety of
works by Durkheim and his students available that considerably broadened understanding
of their project.45
In studies like his analysis of the Kabyle house, Bourdieu produced some of the
classic works of structuralism.46 He broke with conventional structuralism, however, as
he sought a way to move beyond the dualisms of structure and action, objective and
subjective, social physics and social semiotics and especially to inject a stronger account
of temporality (and temporal contingency) into social analysis. 47 For this he drew on the
materialist side of Durkheim and Marx; on the phenomenologies of Husserl, Heidegger,
and Merleau-Ponty and later on ethnomethodology (not least the work of his friend Aaron
This was not merely a feature of the late Durkheim as opposed to some less cultural early work,
but a theme throughout his career. It is in part an artificial separation of sociological and
anthropological claims on Durkheim that makes his interests look more discontinuous than they
are. See discussion in Michele Richman, Sacred Revolutions, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001.
45
British social anthropology kept the Durkheimian tradition alive in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, and it
is no accident that Radcliffe-Browns Structure and Function in Primitive Societies was translated
into French as part of Bourdieus Le sens commun series.
46
Originally written in 1963-4, this was first published in 1969 in an homage to Lvi-Strauss and
republished as part of the French edition of the Outline. In the same sense, many of Michel
Foucaults works of the mid-1960s are arguably classics of structuralism and not yet in any strong
sense poststructuraliste.g., The Order of Things, New York: Pantheon, 1970; orig. 1966.
47
Bridget Fowler (Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory. London: Sage, 1977, p. 16) rather
strangely sees the concept of practice as associated with [Bourdieus] conversion to
structuralism thus missing some of the other sources on which it drew-most notably Marx and
marxism--and the extent to which it marked an effort to transcend limits of structuralism.
44

13

Cicourel); on Wittgenstein, Austin and post-Saussurian linguistic analysis; on Ernst

Cassirers neo-Kantian theory (especially The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms) and Erwin
Panofskys studies of the history of art and perception; and on the historical rationalism
of his own teachers Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Jules Vuillemin. 48
Bourdieus effort was not merely to forge a theoretical synthesis, but to develop the
capacity to overcome some of the opposition between theoretical knowledge based on
objectification of social life and phenomenological efforts to grasp its embodied
experience and (re)production in action. Human social action is at once structured and
structuring, Bourdieu argued, indeed structuring because it is structured, with the
socialized body as analogical operator of practice.
At the heart of Bourdieus approach to practice lay the notion of habitus. The
concept is old, rooted in Aristotles notion of bodily hexis and transmuted and
transmitted by Thomas Aquinas in his approach to learning and memory. It is used by a
range of modern thinkers including Hegel, Husserl, and Mauss. Bourdieus own recovery
of the term coincided with that of Norbert Elias (though they seem to have been
independent) as Elias sought to grasp the transformations of manners in modern
European history.49 Bourdieus concept was specifically more social and more bodily
than, say, Husserls usage which focused on the background understandings latent in any
act. Though Husserl understood action (including perception) in more individual and
cognitive terms, he did stress the importance of dispositions and horizons of potential
acts. Bourdieu stressed the generative role of the habitus, the ways in which embodied
knowledge transmutes past experience into dispositions for particular sorts of action.
The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce
habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed
to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize
practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without
presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations
necessary in order to attain them. Objectively regulated and regular without being in
any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without
being the product of the organizing action of a conductor.50 This is the kind of prose that
leads unsympathetic critics like Jenkins to call for Bourdieu to be translated into ordinary
Bourdieus book series Le sens commun (published by ditions de Minuit) revealed some of
the intellectual resources on which he drew and which he made available in France: The works of
Ernst Cassirer, Gregory Bateson, Erwin Panofsky, Joseph Schumpeter, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jack
Goody, and Erving Goffman, among many others, are known in France mainly because of
Bourdieus efforts.
49
See discussion in Roger Chartier, Social Figuration and Habitus, pp. 71-94 in Cultural
History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Elias and Bourdieu share a variety of themes,
tastes, and some other concepts, though there are also striking differences. Not the least of the
latter is the extent to which Elias focused on long-term historical change, whereas Bourdieu,
while sometimes dealing intensively with sharter-term processes of change seldom addressed
questions of large-scale, epochal historical change. See Calhoun, Habitus, Field of Power and
Capital: The Question of Historical Specificity," in Critical Social Theory, Oxford: Blackwell,
1995.
50
Logic of Practice, p. 53.
48

14

language.51 The idea is genuinely complex, however, not simply mystified; it is not
unintelligible.
Bourdieu emphasizes first that learning is not all explicit and mediated by
language, but often tacit and embodied. Second, he stresses that action is generally not
produced by rule-following but by improvisation. Much of this improvisation is
unconscious (like that of musicians in a jazz band) and takes place in the real time of
participants rather than the time out for thought that characterizes the point of view of
observers. Third, the capacity to produce such improvisationsand thus actionsis
developed through lengthy processes of learning which are simultaneously processes of
inculcation by society and social fields (since the learning takes place in interaction)
and active self-creation (since the learning is a byproduct of action which is itself
improvised and either satisfying in its effects or not). Habituses thus reflect processes of
conditioning associated with material and social conditions of life but also some
individuation in those processes. Fourth, they are simultaneously structured and
structuring, because they are embedded in the repetition and occasionally innovation of
action through time. They are reproduced in the effort to do almost anything, and they are
inherently social, existing as much in the interaction as the person. Fifth, they are
efficacious without conscious orientation to ends because they have been produced out of
a nearly infinite number of iterations of similar actions (and reactions) and trial and error
learning reinforces the effective actions; this is what Bourdieu means by saying they are
objectively adjusted to circumstances and objectively adapted to outcomes. Sixth,
though, they may be transposed into new circumstances, where they may be more or less
effective but will in any case shape the production of actions (and responses) and thus
new learning.
Bourdieu acknowledges that in some cases such new learning may involve
varying degrees of conscious effort to change unconscious improvisationas coaches get
athletes to watch tapes of themselves and try to change the ways they swing golf clubs,
rush tennis nets, or pole vault. But whatever our conscious intentions, what we do is
shaped by the objective intention inscribed in how we have learned to do what we do
and in the flow of activity in which we are engaged. (Try saying the alphabet rapidly with
the conscious intention of skipping certain prespecified letters.) In all situationseach of
which is new in some degreethe habitus generates responses to objective possibilities
based on its history. It represents not the patterns of the past as thought but the totality of
the past insofar as it is embodied.
Part of what makes the notion of habitus difficult to explicate is the extent to
which pre-established categories of our thought systematically get in the way. We oppose
mind and body and imagine relations between them as though they could be external
matters of cause and effect; embodied knowledge is thus a problematic idea. We
emphasize individual actors rather than fields of interaction and thus exaggerate intention
rather than minimally thought reaction or awareness of whole fields of activity in trying
to account for outcomes. We think of intention as obviously a matter of consciousness,
a thought about what we might do, and not equally the very objective direction of our
51

Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu, pp. 162-73.

15

thoughts (and actions), where they tend to go, the stretching of past into future, which
is shaped by our capacities and their limits, the patterns of our learning, the distribution
of our emotional investments.
Bourdieu railed against false antinomies and the kinds of scholastic oppositions
that serve less to advance scientific knowledge than the careers of those who write
endless theses arguing one side or the other, or proposing artificial syntheses designed
essentially to create a new academic profit niche. The point was not simply to choose
Weber over Marx, or Lvi-Strauss over Sartre, but to escape from false dualities and
imposed categories. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, thus, he analyzed the opposition
of mechanism to finalism, so prominent in the debates over structuralism, as a false
dilemma. It is, by the way, a false dilemma that has refused to die. Once familiar to
English-language anthropologists through the debate between George Homans and David
Schneider (attacking the structuralist, especially Lvi-Straussian position on
methodologically individualist grounds) and Rodney Needham defending it, the false
dilemma has recurred in recent metatheoretical arguments occasioned by rational choice
theory and so-called critical realism. Mechanisms are all the rage, advocated by Jon
Elster and Charles Tilly, backed up by philosophers of science like Mario Bunge. 52 They
promote various ideas of mechanism (usually without considering that their work
might be read as mechanistic) in response to the common interpretative style of
ethnographic or phenomenological work that treats agents self-understandings or
intentions as analytically sufficient. Bourdieu would not be altogether unsympathetic, as
he pointed out that methodological objectivism is a necessary moment in all research. But
most of the protagonists in the theoretical debates seek ways to advance causal analysis
without having to pass through the complexities of a theory of practice, usually by
treating either actors decisions or structural conditions as in themselves causally
efficacious. As Bourdieu reported, one of the major functions of the notion of habitus is
to dispel two complementary fallacies each of which originates from the scholastic
vision: on the one hand, mechanism, which holds that action is the mechanical effect of
the constraint of external causes; and, on the other, finalism, which, with rational action
theory, holds that the agent acts freely, consciously, and as some of the utilitarians say,
with full understanding, the action being the product of a calculation of chances and
profits.53
Rodney Needham, Structure and Sentiment. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962; George C. Homans and
David M. Schneider, Kinship, Authority and Final Causes. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1955; Jon
Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989;
Charles Tilly, Mechanisms in Political Processes, Annual Review of Political Science, 2001, 4,
pp. 21-41; Mario Bunge, The Sociology/Philosophy Connection. New Brunswick: Transaction,
1999; Peter Hedstrm and Richard Swedberg, eds., Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach
to Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A key question is whether what
many mean by the emphasis on mechanisms is less a serious statement about the nature of
explanation than simply a restatement of Mertons advice to stick to middle-range theories
between pure description and grand theoretical systems. See Merton, Social Theory and Social
Structure. Glencoe: Free Press, 1949, 1957, 1968. For some it is dogmatic metatheory, for others
merely prudent search for partially generalizable aspects of complex social phenomena.
53
Pascalian Meditations, p. 138.
52

16

When Bourdieu wrote Outline, it was Sartrean existentialism that posited each
action as a sort of unprecedented confrontation between the subject and the world.54 For
todays advocates of explanation by mechanisms the fear of a loss of objectivity is
aroused by poststructuralist cultural studies, in which the subject acting in the world may
be less central but the subjective perspective of the observer dramatized. But the
objectifying responsewhether in the form of rational choice theory or a more structural
theoryremains problematic if it is conceived as sufficient for science rather than a
moment in a larger process of producing social knowledge. As Bourdieu wrote in
Outline:
In order to escape the realism of the structure, which hypostatizes systems of
objective relations by converting them into totalities already constituted outside of
individual history and group history, it is necessary to pass from the opus
operatum to the modus operandi, from statistical regularity or algebraic structure
to the principle of the production of this observed order, and to construct the
theory of practice, or, more precisely, the theory of the mode of generation of
practices, which is the precondition for establishing an experimental science of
the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of
internality, or, more simply, of incorporation and objectification.55
There exists, thus, no simple solution to the riddle of structure and agency.
Rather, their mutual constitution and subsequent interaction must be worked out in
analysis of concrete empirical cases, by reconstituting, first, the social genesis and
makeup of objective social worlds (fields) within which agents develop and operate,
second, the socially constituted dispositions (habitus) which fashion the manner of
thinking, feeling, and acting of these agents. This double historicization calls for field
and habitus to be related in analysis of specific temporal processes and trajectories.
Moreover, it must be complemented by the historicization of the analytic categories and
problematics of the inquiring scholar. Only in this way can social scientists do the
necessary, if hard, labor of conquering and constructing social factsthat is, of
distinguishing the hidden forms and mechanisms of social reality from the received
understandings of previous academic knowledge, folk knowledge and the everyday
preconceptions of culture more generally. On this basis, empirically-based reflexive
analysis can also establish the social and epistemological conditions for both the
objective and subjective perspectives themselves, and for avoiding the pitfalls of what
Bourdieu later termed the scholastic bias the tendency of social analysts to project
their own (hermeneutic) relation to the social world into the minds of the people they
observe.56
Bourdieus analyses thus lay the basis for an empirical science that would address
the practices of knowledge at the same time as it produced knowledge of social practice.
The issue remained central in his challenge to neoliberalism:

Outline, p. 73.
Outline, p. 72.
56
This is discussed in several places; for a general treatment see chapter 6, The Scholastic Point
of View, in Practical Reason. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
54
55

17

The implicit philosophy of the economy, and of the rapport between economy and
politics, is a political vision that leads to the establishment of an unbreachable
frontier between the economic, regulated by the fluid and efficient mechanisms of
the market, and the social, home to the unpredictable arbitrariness of tradition,
power, and passions.57
This frontier is reinforced by both academic preconceptions and folk understandings,
and structures the apparently objective categories and findings of economic analysis. 58
The production of knowledge structured by such presupposed categories undergirds the
failure to take seriously the social costs of neoliberalism, the social conditions on which
such an economy depends, and the possibilities of developing less damaging alternatives.
Pursuit of such a reflexive grounding for social science was one of the central
motivations for Bourdieus sociology of the scientific and university fields. 59 One cannot
understand the stances intellectuals took during the pivotal period of May 1968, for
instance, without understanding both the positions they held within their microcosm or
the place of that intellectual field in the web of symbolic and material exchanges
involving holders of different kinds of power and resources which Bourdieu christened
the field of power. This bears not just on political position-taking but on intellectual
work itself. It is necessary to use the methods of social sciencenot merely introspection
or memoryto understand the production of social science knowledge. 60 Bourdieu was
often accused of determinism, as though he were simply expressing a belief in agents
lack of free will. Much more basically, though, he argued that agency itself was only
possible on the basis of the complex and ubiquitous pressures of social life, and that this
as well as simple exercise of material coercion helped to explain the inertia of power
relations and academic ideas alike. In the context of 68, for example, despite his own
critiques of the educational system, Bourdieu was wary of romantic radicalism that
imagined leaping beyond it or beyond inequality at a power at a single jump. That would
be to neglect the way in which institutions actually worked; a new institution like
University of Paris VIII (Vincennes) would still be an institution and still within the
university system.61 It also posed the risk of making matters worse by undermining rather
Limposition du modle amricain et ses effets, Contre-feux 2, pp. 25-31; p. 29-30.
Bourdieus understanding of the historical process by which this tacit understanding of market
society was established was close toand indebted tothat of Karl Polanyi. See, e.g., The Great
Transformation, New York: Rinehart, 1944.
59
See Bourdieu, The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress
of Reason, Social Science Information, vol. 14, no. 6, 1975, pp. 19-47; Homo Academicus; and
The State Nobility.
60
I have always asked of the most radically objectifying instruments of knowledge that I could
use that they also serves as instruments of self-knowledge, Pascalian Meditations, p. 4. See also
Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992.
61
The background to this phase of Bourdieus thought as well as to the struggles of the era was
the expansion of the university system which made room for new subjects (like sociology) and
new (or at least more common) class trajectories of rapid upward mobility. The new eighth
branch of the University of Paris became a center for both. Close colleagues of Bourdieus like
Passeron and Robert Castel did in fact move to Vincennes. That Bourdieu did not may reflect
both his greater cultural capital, which enabled his move eventually to the Collge de France, and
his sense that the specific form of the growth produced compartmentalization more than
57
58

18

than expanding the capacity of the higher education system to offer opportunities,
destroying the claim to universalism that underwrote the value of universities. Bourdieu
remained committed to educational reformand indeed wrote an influential report on the
subject for the socialist government of the 1980s. He did not take his analysis of social
reproduction as a warrant for fatalism, but rather as pointing equally to the difficulty and
the need for struggle to transform education and society to the benefit of the
marginalized.
More generally, Bourdieu called for an objective analysis of the conditions of
creativity, and the pressures that resisted it, rather than an idealization of it as a purely
subjective phenomenon. Alexander, for example, has criticized Bourdieu on the grounds
that only a theory that posits a sharp autonomy of self from environment could possibly
offer a meaningful account of creative action, and that only an appeal to universal values
transcending social and historical circumstances could provide a normative basis for
democracy.62 Bourdieu, by contrast argued for refusing to replace God the creator of
eternal verities and values, as Descartes put it, with the creative Subject, and giving
back to history and to society what was given to transcendence or a transcendent
subject.63 He demanded also that social scientists pay scrupulous attention to the
conditions and hence limitations of their own gaze and workstarting with the very
unequal social distribution of leisure to devote to intellectual projectsand continually
objectify their own efforts to produce objective knowledge of the social world. As he
made clear, he could not exempt himself from epistemic reflexivity, though like any other
would need to be placed in an intellectual field not analyzed in purely individual terms. 64
Bourdieu challenged, in other words, the common tendency to propound objective
explanations of the lives of others while claiming the right of subjective interpretation for
ones own.
Poststructuralism
As Bourdieu has suggested, his generation of French intellectualsthe
normaliens philosophes especiallywere formed in a tightly organized intellectual
field.65 Sartre and Lvi-Strauss were the towering giants organizing the oppositions in this
field of force, though there were a number of influential, if not quite towering giants.
Existentialism was always broader than Sartre, and structuralism came in Lacanian,
Althusserian and other non-Lvi-Straussian variants, but both the intellectual power of
the individuals and the social organization of the field itself made them paramount. Sartre
was the dominant French intellectual of Bourdieus youth. In the 1960s, structuralism was
ascendant and available to Bourdieu and his peers as help in challenging the cult of the
self-sufficient individual, even though the strongest among them would in turn try to
transcend the limits of structuralism.
opportunity.
62
Alexander, Fin de Sicle Social Theory.
63
Pascalian Meditations, p. 115.
64
See Pascalian Meditations, esp. Postscript 1 to Chapter 1 and the sketch of a social selfanalysis in Science de la science et rflexivit.
65
See Impersonal Confessions, pp. 33-42 in Pascalian Meditations.

19

Bourdieu was part of the structuralist and then poststructuralist movements in the
general sense of incorporating a structuralist starting point but moving beyond it, as well
as simply by generational identity. He shared with other progenitors of poststructuralism
a suspicion of purely actor-centered (e.g., Sartrean) accounts of social life and an
emphasis on the centrality of power. His project of a theory of practice was distinct,
however, in its claim to scientific status rather than philosophical-literary critique; in its
reflexivity and in its retention of both phenomenological and materialist moments largely
rejected by the followers of Derrida, Foucault and Lacan.66 Bourdieu rejected the
widespread reliance on the metaphor of textuality as an approach to social life, and
though he shared an emphasis on physical embodiment with Foucault, he rejected the
tendency to import ideas of an underlying life-force along with other aspects of
Heidegger and Nietzsche. Dwelling on the more familiar faces of poststructuralism is
useful, however, in situating Bourdieus theory and seeing its relationship to his politics.
The connections are particularly obscure to those reading in English, because the pattern
of translation and reception made Bourdieu appear not as a contemporary of Foucault and
Derrida, but as though he came after them.
Poststructuralism is almost by definition incoherent. It labels, mainly at a
distance, a congeries of predominantly French efforts to move beyond the temporary
certainties of structuralism. Structuralism itself was more a bundle of linked theoretical
positions than a single theory. It joined Lvi-Strauss to Althusser and Lacan to Piaget,
despite their substantial oppositions. To some extent, though, it was a kind of intellectual
movement.67 It reached an apogee in the 1960s and gave birth to poststructuralism in that
moment of its triumph.68 This was also the moment in which American reception began in
earnest. This was, however, a reception that varied considerably by discipline. In
anthropology, the importance of Lvi-Strauss brought a significant engagement with
structuralism before engagement with Foucault or Derrida (and in fact, some of
Bourdieus early work was rightly read as exemplifying this structuralism). Althusser
influenced Marxists, but not the core of any academic discipline. American sociology
drew little on French structuralism, and only belatedly incorporated much influence of
Foucault. History, by contrast, showed a very selective influence of structuralism (mainly
in the new intellectual history) but a pervasive influence of poststructuralism,
especially Foucault. To a considerable extent, nonetheless, structuralism and
poststructuralism made the Atlantic crossing together. This was perhaps especially true in
66

This is a broad generalization. Deeply influenced by Lacan, for example, Castoriadis also draws on
phenomenology and materialsim. Foucaults work is more phenomenological and materialist (in some
ways) than that of Derrida or Lacan.

Franois Dosse, History of Structuralism. Trans. D. Glassman. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1998 (2 vols.); orig. 1991.
68
In the 1960s, Foucault, Derrida, and Bourdieu all published texts that stand among the
classics of structuralism: e.g., Foucault, The Order of Things. New York: Pantheon, 1970; orig.
1966; Derrida, Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976; orig. 1967;
and Bourdieu, The Kabyle House in Logic of Practice; orig. 1960. There was perhaps more
post to Derridas mid-1960s structuralism. In the 1970s, all three challenged structuralism in
basic ways even while continuing to incorporate much from it. See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory
of Practice; Derrida, Disseminations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, 1972 ; and
Foucault, Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon, 1977; orig. 1975.
67

20

literary studies, which were pivotal for the very idea of poststructuralism, and where the
way had been prepared to some extent by the teachings of Paul DeMann and the
development of a Yale School of French Studies. Moreover, in many fields,
poststructuralist writings were vastly better known and more influential than
structuralism itself had beenand failure by later generations of students to grasp the
structuralism in poststructuralism produced many misunderstandings. In a sense, in the
American reception, what poststructuralism was post to and in tension with varied
among academic disciplines and not surprisingly shaped its appropriation.
Derrida and Foucault were the most influential sourcesand symbols--for what
came to be called poststructuralism, reaching out initially from within the structuralist
movement to embrace other philosophical resources and ideals, such as the work of
Nietzsche; to challenge rationalist certainties with reinstatements of both doubt and irony;
and to suggest that rejecting the philosophy of individual consciousness did not entail
rejecting epistemological inquiry. Their commonalities, like their places at the head of a
putative poststructuralist movement, were less claimed by them than ascribed by
appropriators on the other side of the Atlantic (and the link of poststructuralism to
postmodernism can be similarly confusing). 69 The unity of poststructualism was always
dubious, and seldom important to those acclaimed the central poststructuralist theorists.
There were a variety of paths beyond (as well as within) structuralism.
As Bourdieu indicates, it would be possible to produce as one wished the
appearances either of continuity or break between the 1950s and 1970s, depending on
whether or not one takes account of the dominated figures of the 1950s who provided the
launch-pad for some of the leaders of the anti-existentialist revolution in philosophy.
Bachelard and Canguilhem were among the most important for Bourdieu. But the
generational pendulum had been swinging for some time. Existentialism joined forces
with individualist reaction against Durkheim, setting the stage for Lvi-Strausss
resuscitation of the Durkheimian tradition as well as his specific version of structuralism
within it. If the Algerian war marked a crisis in the domination of existentialist thought,
the field contained a plurality of positions and shifting relations of force well before that.
Structuralism was certainly a movement but not a movement sufficient unto itself and
without a context of struggle. And the poststructuralist generation grew directly out of
this movement. Many, including Bourdieu, had experienced in their youth simultaneously
the domination of Sartre and existentialism and the teaching of a number of powerful
critics of existentialism and advocates of other philosophical approaches. Teachers like
Bachelard and Cangulhem were crucial influences even if never dominant forces in the
broader intellectual field. Thus, for example, Jeffrey Alexander misunderstands both
Bourdieu and the field in imagining that Bourdieu was greatly influenced by Althusser
during the wave of structuralist Marxism prominent in the 1960s because he fails to
realize that Althusser taught Bourdieu as a teenageras indeed he taught many of the rest
of Bourdieus generation in Khgne and at the cole Normale.70 Khgne and the cole
Normale of the Rue dUlm were central and extraordinarily intense formative
See Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference.
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995; Norris, Christopher, The Truth about Postmodernism.
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993; Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration. London: Verso, 1987.
69

21

experiences, and the khgnes of the late 1940s and early 1950s became the
poststructuralist generation by rebelling against the philosophy of the subject dominant in
their youth, embracing structuralisms of various sorts, and then reacting against limits of
structuralism (while simultaneously making their own ways in the academic hierarchy). 71
Most poststructuralism was at odds with social science because it embraced the
intellectual identity and location of philosophy. Nonetheless, it was influenced by the
partially sociological insights of the earlier generations of philosophers and historians of
science. To take an extreme example, only the transfiguration resulting from a complete
change of theoretical context prevents people from seeing in the Derridean slogan
deconstruction a very free variation on Bachelards theme, which has become an
academic topos, of the break with preconstructions, inherent in the construction of the
scientific object, which has been simultaneously orchestrated at the scientific or
scientistic pole of the field of philosophy (especially by Althusser) and of the social
sciences.72
Most of those labeled poststructuralists, however, shared three refusals. First, they
shared a rejection of positive politics, most especially the modern attempt to build new
political systems or defend political arrangements rather than only to resist power or
expose inconsistencies, abuses, and aporias.73 Second, they shared a repudiation ofor at
least a disinterest inthe social, which often appeared as the mundanely material and
was associated with determinism.74 In a sense, both of these refusals reflected the
Nietschean heritage of poststructuralism; they reflected Nietzsches rejection of a world
of ordinary values and compromises, of the masses and mere existence, and of a morality
of good and evil as the underpinning for a politics of liberation. Third, they rejected
science, viewing it mainly as part of a system of repressive power and not as a potential
source of liberation (a concept usually abandoned with ideas of positive politics).
Alexander, Fin de sicle Social Theory. Alexander is determined to show Bourdieu to be a
deterministic Marxist at heart. Some of Bourdieus formulations do indeed resemble Althussers,
as some resemble other versions of structuralism and then post-structuralism as he works through
his own version of the problematique he and most of his philosophical generation confronted.
71
The cole Normale in the rue dUlm is the pre-eminent institution for the formation of French
intellectualsand overwhelmingly important to its field in a way no single institution in the US
comes close to rivaling. Khgne is the intensive preparatory course for those seeking to enter the
cole (and its students are called khgnes).
72
Pascalian Meditations, p. 38. Bachelard is the source for the idea of epistemic break that
Althusser used in his analysis of Marx and which English language readers often cite as though it
originated with Althusser.
73
This is not to say that they were politically inactive; Foucault, for example, campaigned
importantly on prisons. The point is the reluctance to embrace a positive political project as
distinct from resistance. Perhaps equally indicative is Foucaults early support for the Iranian
revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeni, which Foucault praised precisely its resistance to
modernity.
74
It should be granted, though, that if poststructuralism, along with much of the cultural studies
movement in English language scholarship, suffered an inattention to the social, a symmetrical
lack, or even repudiation, characterized much of social and political theory and sociology. Those
on the other side from poststructuralism and kindred cultural inquiry often insisted on thin
notions of culture and especially failed to pay much attention to creativity.
70

22

Bourdieu suggested, in fact, that this was partially a reflection of the very training of the
core poststructuralists as philosophy students at the cole Normale, but also their
appreciation of the caste profits that accrued to those who chose higher status
disciplines (even though both Derrida and Foucault were in fact marginalized by
academic philosophy, the former gaining influence mainly in literary studies and the
latter gaining position as a historian). Other situations of privilege could also support
such thought, however. As Bourdieu wrote of an American center of this ostensibly
decentered thought, the University of California at Santa Cruz, how could one not
believe that capitalism has dissolved in a flux of signifiers detached from their
signifieds, that the world is populated by cyborgs, cybernetic organisms, and that we
have entered the age of the informatics of domination, when one lives in a little social
and electronic paradise from which all trace of work and exploitation has been
effaced?75
Bourdieu had little patience for the rejection of science recently fashionable
among self-declared critical thinkers. He thought that the French theory that claimed
indebtedness to Foucault and Derrida had much to answer for on both the scientific and
the political fronts and considered postmodernism a global intellectual swindle made
possible by the uncontrolled international circulation of ideas that gained prestige from
their exotic provenance even while this undercut what should have been the corrective
mechanisms in different intellectual fields. Much of French poststructuralism and
postmodernism derived, thus, from a German Lebensphilosophie opposed to the
historicist rationalism at root of the French social science lineage. While he shared the
view that simple empiricism was liable to reproduce ideologically conventional views
(and while concepts like habitus also point to the limits of rationalism and the importance
of a lebenswelt perspective, if not a lebensphilosophie), he argued that the necessary
response was not to throw out the baby of science with the bathwater of positivism and
abandon empirical research, but to wield continual collective vigilance over the
classifications and relations through which scientific knowledge was produced and
disseminatedincluding by state bureaucracies whose categories pigeon-hole human
beings for their own purposes while providing social scientists with apparently neutral
data.
The problematic tendencies inherent in French poststructuralism were magnified
in its American appropriation. As in the importation of lebensphilosophie into France, the
export of poststructuralism to America involved both an artificial accretion of prestige
and an intellectual decontextualization. The American appropriation was marked by a
further reduction in attention to social relations, partly perhaps because it was led by
professors of literature whose disciplinary formation encouraged focusing on the
abstracted text, but also because of a tendency to underappreciate (Jameson
notwithstanding) the marxist theory in the background and underpinnings of many
poststructuralist theorists. Poststructuralist theories were conjoined with politics, but
seldom with positive rather than negative political projects (and too often with the
illusion of politics that intra-academic insurgency offers). If French poststructuralism was
born of the 1960s, it is not unfair to suggest that American poststructuralism flourished
75

Pascalian Meditations, p. 41.

23

most in the wake of the 1960s, amid considerable disillusionment and cynicism. And
American poststructuralism eagerly embraced the critique of science.
All these are crucial reasons why what has come most visibly after
poststructuralismin both France and the US--is on the one hand a resurgent right wing
populism and on the other variants of liberalismwhether neoKantian or Hayekian. The
Left has been both weak and theoretically impoverished. 76 Certainly, the new right wing
politics has attracted few poststructuralists, and indeed few theorists. It is rooted more in
populist ressentiment than in intellectual innovation. But it also builds on some openings
poststructuralism helped to create, including especially the denigration of the social. If
few poststructuralists like Margaret Thatcher, many have nonetheless seemed
sympathetic to her suggestion that there is no such thing as society. Poststructuralism,
as conventionally understood, offers scant tools to contest the neoliberalism of global
capitalist interests.77 Likewise, while many poststructuralists have emphasized the
deconstruction rather than affirmation of identity in identity politics, nonetheless the
movement has offered minimal bases for contesting the resurgence of a racism
transformed into a kind of ethnic claimputatively not against others but only in favor of
us.
The popular poststructuralism that began to flourish after 1968, and as French
theory spread to America was, Bourdieu feared, specifically disempowering to the
struggles against neoliberalism. Just as 1960s-era attacks on the university made it harder
to defend the academy from new right-wing assaults, the poststructuralism (and
postmodernism) that followed encouraged denigrations of science, government action,
and social order. Identity politics was often substituted for more material struggles. Both
trends weakened those who might resist neoliberalism, and fight to protect some of the
gains made in previous struggles (and often institutionalized in states).
Much academic poststructuralism and postmodernism produced illusions of
radicalism without fact contesting either power structures or the production of suffering. 78
It involved, in Bourdieus terms, transgression without risk. As Bourdieu wrote of
A variety of liberalisms are involved, including both more left and more conservative
neoKantian positions in France--and there especially the variety of academic positions trading on
rejections of the thought of 68 (cf. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaud, French Philosophy of the
Sixties. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990; consider also Lyotard). In America,
somewhat similarly, feminists who had argued largely from poststructuralist positions were often
thrown back on liberalism in their efforts to defend gains against resurgent right wing challengers.
This fit with feminisms close association with defense of multicultural freedoms, but it often
sacrificed the kind of more general and positive social and political theory earlier linked to
socialist-feminism (though see efforts to reclaim the latter project, e.g., by Nancy Fraser, in
Justice Interreuptus. New York: Routledge, 1996).
77
La Nouvelle vulgate plantaire, Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2000: 6-7; pp. 443-51 in
Bourdieu, Interventions, 1961-2001, Paris, Agone, 2002.
78
This is the grain of truth in the otherwise ludicrous assaults of rightwing critics of tenured
radicals. The attacks are most painful precisely because they force ostensible radicals to realize
that they are not so radicaland certainly not the Marxists many critics claimas well as that
they lack the power ascribed to them.
76

24

Philippe Sollers, the famous founder of Tel Quel and ostensible cultural radical, The
man who presents and sees himself as an incarnation of freedom has always floated at the
whim of the forces of the field.79 The phrase could describe not only the particular
individual, but the paradigmatic individual of individualism, unable to recognize the
social conditions of actual freedom, confusing ephemeral novelties with changes in the
underlying field of power. And what Bourdieu suggests is that for all the will to
radicalism in fashionable poststructuralist thought, it more commonly achieves cynicism
and a kind of cultural play that fails to engage deeper social issues. If this is willfully selfserving in Sollers case and a genuine intellectual misrecognition in others, so much
more reason to seek out a theoretical basis for a more critical intellectual position.
Poststructuralists were the most important enemies of the universalist critique of
hierarchysometimes to be sure still resisting hierarchy itself, but abandoning this
foundational position for the resistance. Bourdieu also surrendered foundationalism, but
insisted on aspirations to the universal even if his theory held that these would inevitably
fail to reach perfection. Instead of accepting the illusion of foundation, he argued that
we should recall both the arbitrariness of beginnings and the constructive work of history.
Critical analysis, thus, revealed that in the beginning, there is only custom, the historical
arbitrariness of the historical institution which becomes forgotten as such by trying to
ground itself in mythic reason.80 But historical and sociological research provided tools
not merely for announcing this, but for distinguishing the ways in which different fields
work, the defenses they create against direct exercise of force, and their capacity to
support an investment in constitutive norms that embody the aspiration to universality.
Art, literature, and science are thus not realms of pure disinterest, but are still realms in
which agents have a particular interest in the universal.81 Moreover, the very existence
of differentiated fields is a bulwark against the exercise of tyrannical force. Every
advance in the differentiation of powers is a further protection against the imposition of a
single, unilinear hierarchy based on a concentration of all powers in the hands of one
person or one group.82
Many other poststructuralists were strong celebrants of difference. Bourdieu
was skeptical. He emphasized instead distinction and differentiation of fields. In his
view, difference typically suggested essential, internal characteristics of identities, as
though persons, groups, or social positions simply existed unto themselves. Distinction,
by contrast, emphasized the ways in which each existed only in its juxtapositions to the
others, in a field of relationships, and in a temporal process in which positions were
Sollers, Bourdieu said, made cynicism one of the Fine Arts; Acts of Resistance. New York:
New Press, 1998, p. 12.
80
Pascalian Meditations, p. 94. Bourdieus position, embracing Pascal and a tradition of French
historical rationalism should evoke in English-language readers some echoes of Hume,
rethought as less conservative and less anti-rationalist. propos of the opposition of
existentialism to structuralism, it is worth recalling that Pascal is often seen as anticipating
Kierkegaard and some other existentialists, not least in his emphasis on the non-rational sources
of the first principles of knowledge, and on the paradoxical, contradictory aspects of human
existence.
81
Pascalian Meditations, p. 123.
82
Pascalian Meditations, p. 103.
79

25

always in a dialectical relationship to position-takings. 83 Rather than emphasizing

attributes of individuals, Bourdieu showed them to be embedded in trajectories and
struggles, improvising new responses on the basis of generative capacities learned in their
previous social engagements. This is why the dispositions of individuals or groups can
lead in opposite directions depending on specific confrontations with circumstances. But,
the logic of distinction always involves hierarchies. Bourdieu thought the celebrants of
difference often nave, imagining that they could will into being an egalitarian order
without addressing institutional underpinnings in a serious way. In fact, the differentiation
of social fields produces hierarchies even as it defends against the dominance of a single
hierarchy. To have science, thus, entails recognizing differences in scientific achievement
and judging the validity of truth claims. That legitimate scientific authority is likely to be
co-mingled with illegitimate impositions of power based on other criteria is true and
deserves critique. But that science is hierarchically organized rather than purely
egalitarian is hardly a reason to reject it or consider it no different from the market or
politics. On the contrary, maintaining scienceamong other fieldsreduces the scope
for direct exercise of political and economic power.
In the hands of many in the European new right (and some homologues in
America and elsewhere) a non-hierarchical construction of essentialist difference has
served as the basis for both celebrations of self-identity and politics of exclusion.
However repugnant right-wing nationalism and ethnic politics may be to poststructuralist
advocates of identity politics, those advocating more relativist, less sociological and
historical positions, and those failing to analyze fields and hierarchical relations have
weak capacity for critical analysis. It is accordingly not surprising that this new
differentialist racism (in Taguieffs phrase), has produced confusion in the anti-racist
camp, because it has reduced the purchase of traditional anti-racist arguments while
introducing a new racism that can appropriate the terms of the poststructuralist discourse
of difference and resistance to universalism. 84 There is clearly an irony in seeing
celebration of difference turn into a racist reaction to it.
Equally ironically, and even more centrally perhaps, the poststructuralist politics
of resistance has turned into an outright liberalism for some, and undercut resistance to
dominant liberalism for others. This is ironic, because most versions of liberalism
depend, for example, on presumptions of individual subjects strikingly at odds with
poststructuralisms deconstructions and analyses of the production of subjects by
disciplinary power. Similarly, poststructuralists often affirmed a polymorphous creativity
at odds with the role of neoliberalism in support of the disciplining labor for global
consumption. There is perhaps a closer and less ironic link between the celebration of
consumer culture by many postmodernists (in ways not really inherently poststructuralist)
and the neoliberal argument that consumer choices are a good measure of freedom. In any
case, many whose primarily political instincts were simply to resist authority have found
Just as physical space is defined by the reciprocal externality of positions, the social
space is defined by the mutual exclusion, or distinction, of the positions which constitute it, that
is, as a structure of juxtaposition of social positions, Pascalian Meditations, p. 134.
84
Pierre-Andre Taguieff, The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and its Doubles. Trans. by
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001; orig. 1991. See also Bourdieu and Wacquant,
La Nouvelle vulgate plantaire.
83

26

themselves unable to resist the seductions of an ideology that sees free movementfree
play!of capital as a prime instance of resistance to authority. 85 It is now hard to find a
way out of oppositions between a racism and nationalism dressed up in new differentialist
colors, and a neoliberalism in which the liberties of capital dominate over any positive
conception of human freedom. Whatever their contributions, most versions of
poststructuralism offer little help in the search for an escape from this frustrating forced
choice.
For many who have been influenced by poststructuralism, positive political action
on a large scale raises a specter of utopian aspirations and the potential consequences of
totalitarian social engineering. Simply shoring up liberalism appears as the best choice
protecting civil liberties, for example, as a way of protecting differences among subjects.
To some extent this reflects simply the extent to which the left was thrown on the
defensive, hoping to preserve various freedoms during the rise of the new right. But there
was also an elective affinity between poststructuralism and the abandonment of projects
more directly engaging state power or seeking structural change in social relations. At the
same time, many followers of poststructuralism, in America at least, tended to substitute
academic politics for ties to social movements beyond the universities. Feminism, for
example, was once a remarkable demonstration of how academic intellectual work and
broad social movement could be joined, but the link was largely severed in the era of
poststructuralist predominance. To some extent, this was not the fault of poststructuralism
but of larger movement and political dynamics. The dominant forms of poststructuralism,
though, were particularly prone to what Bourdieu called the scholastic fallacy, to
attributing the problems of theoretical understanding to people not engaged in theory as
such, and thus to imagining that academic contestation over cultural issues was the same
as practical politics rather than a potentially useful complement to it. 86 Poststructuralist
theory did offer useful complementsincluding its emphasis on difference and the
problems with universalismbut not a viable alternative. Fights between marxists and
poststructuralists, moreover, tended to crowd out other traditions of critical social
analysisincluding for example the approaches offered in France by Mauss and
Merleau-Ponty, both part of a tradition Bourdieu sought to revitalize.

One of the many ironies of U.S. politics in the 1980s was that many who saw themselves as
radical critics of the established order identified with poststructuralism and with an academic
politics in which more old-fashioned leftists (including marxists, especially of an older
generation) were the would-be authorities to be resisted as often as extra-academic authorities of
the right. To speak of the social, or of basic structures of capital, was in many circles seen as a
retrograde attempt to enforce old views that stood condemned as repressive andperhaps worse
boring. What this meant was that opportunities for a fruitful melding of marxist and
poststructuralist insights were often lost, or at least deferred. Indeed, the image of
poststructuralism in the U.S. tended often to present French poststructuralists as more clearly
opposed to marxism (and structuralism) than was in fact the case. The structuralism and (often
structuralist) marxism incorporated into many of the classics of poststructuralism was
underestimatedmaking works like Derridas Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994)
more surprising than they should have been.
86
Pascalian Meditations, ch. 2 (among many discussions).
85

27

Not all features of liberalism are problematic, of course, but liberalism without a
strong theory of social relations and social practice is in a remarkably weak position to
contest the neoliberalism that makes the abstracted individual the ground of all analysis
and the economic the primary measure of this individuals well-being. This neoliberalism
is the dominant ideology of the day. Mounting an effective challenge to it, and moving
beyond the idea that it is the only available alternative to the new racism and nationalism,
depends on revitalizing the idea of the social and overcoming debilitating oppositions
between the social and the economic, the social and the individual, and the social and the
cultural. Not least of the importance of Bourdieus work, then, is suggesting a truly
sociological way to incorporate the gains of poststructuralism, but transcend its
weaknesses.87 Most versions of liberalism, by contrast, represent a continued retreat from
the social.
In order to contest neoliberal orthodoxy and the paradoxical collapse of much
poststructuralism into it, we need to inquire into the very construction of the social
that is, of human life understood relationally. Bourdieus theory is not the last word on
this, but it is a crucial starting point for investigating how the social is built and rebuilt in
everyday practice, and how the basic categories of knowledge are embedded in this.
Bourdieus work at its most basic is a challenge to false oppositions: the interested and
disinterested, the individual and the collective, and the socio-cultural and the economic.
A presupposition which is the basis of all the presuppositions of economics is that a
radical separation is made between the economic and the social, which is left to one side,
abandoned to sociologists, as a kind of reject 88 This in turn undergirds a political vision
that leads to the establishment of an unbreachable frontier between the economic,
regulated by the fluid and efficient mechanisms of the market, and the social, home to the
unpredictable arbitrariness of tradition, power, and passions.89 Economics is able to claim
a falsely asocial (and acultural) individual subject, and the social (including culture) is
posited as the non-economic realm (the realm at once the economically unimportant and
of the pure aesthetic--never a true commodity but claimable only after the fact as an
economic good). When the production of knowledge is structured by such presupposed
categories, failure to take seriously the social costs of neoliberalism, the social conditions
on which such an economy depends, and the possibilities of developing less damaging
alternatives is almost inevitable.
Education, Inequality and Reproduction
Bourdieus engagement with the social was not simply a theoretical position but
the product of an acute interest in social inequality and the ways in which it is masked
On this point, and also the relationship of both Bourdieu and other poststructuralist arguments
to critical theory, see Calhoun, Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of
Difference. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
88
Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance, p. 31. Bourdieus emphasis was especially on the separation of
the economic from both the social and the cultural, but the opposition of the latter two can also be
equally pernicious, as in specious ideas of division of labor between sociology and anthropology
in the US, or the construction of sociology of culture within American sociologyrather than,
say the cultural sociology of central Europe.
89
Bourdieu, Contre-feux II. Paris: Raisons dAgir, 2001, pp. 29-30.
87

28

and perpetuated. At once personal and political as well as scientific, this concern was
appropriately evident in his studies of intellectual production and its hidden
determinations. More generally, it underpins his account of the forging, conversion and
communication of cultural capital and the operation of symbolic powera central
theme of his career. Already prominent in his work on Algeria, this concern became even
more prominent when he turned his attention to France, notably in studies of matrimonial
strategies and gender relations in his native Barn during the early 1960s.90
In 1964, in collaboration with Jean-Claude Passeron, Bourdieu published The
Inheritors, the first of several ground-breaking studies of schools, cultural distinction and
class division, soon followed by Reproduction in Education, Culture, and Society.91 The
latter outlines a theory of pedagogical work as an exemplar of symbolic violence. This
concept reflects Bourdieus structuralist/poststructuralist heritage, referring to the
imposition of a cultural arbitrary that is made to appear neutral or universal. Both
books examined the ways in which seemingly meritocratic educational institutions
reproduced and legitimated social inequalities, for example by transforming differences
in family background or familiarity with bourgeois language into differences in
performance on academic tests. Read in English narrowly as texts in the sociology or
anthropology of education, they were also more general challenges to the French state,
which embraced education more centrally than its counterparts in the English-language
countries. The national education system stood as perhaps the supreme exemplar of the
pretended seamless unity and neutrality of the state in simultaneous roles as
representative of the nation and embodiment of reason and progress. Bourdieu showed
not merely that it was biased (a fact potentially corrigible) but that it was in principle
biased. This was read by some as a blanket condemnation, and indeed Bourdieu himself
worried later that this loose reading of his work encouraged teachers simply to adopt lax
standards in order not to be seen (or see themselves) as the agents of symbolic violence.
The heavy emphasis of the early works on demonstrating the tendency of the
educational system to reproduce its own internal hierarchy and the external material and
symbolic hierarchies of the larger social order encouraged some readers in the distorting
simplification of seeing the studies as merely arguments that education is a process of
reproduction. In fact, Bourdieu did not deny the progressive possibilities of education
albeit in need of reformand he certainly saw science as potentially liberating. If
anything, Bourdieus early work on Algeria suggests that he started out with a conviction
that reformed educational institutions and access could provide the dominated and
marginalized with effective resources for political and economic participation (The Work
of Pierre Bourdieu, ch. 4). By the mid-1960s, he was becoming increasingly dubious that
educational institutions could play this role, and perhaps reacted against his own earlier
affirmation of their potential in his disappointed critique of their embeddedness in
processes of reproduction.92
Bourdieu published several articles on these themes, and left a more extended, book-length
treatment, Le Bal des clibataires: crise de la socit paysanne en Barn (Paris: Seuil, 2002) in
press at his death.
91
Bourdieu and Passeron, op cit.
92
See Robbins, The Work of Pierre Bourdieu, ch. 4.
90

29

Bourdieus views of the educational system reflected the disappointed idealism of

one who had invested himself deeply in it, and owed much of his own rise from
provincial obscurity to Parisian prominence to success in school. As he wrote in Homo
Academicus, he was like someone who believed in a religious vocation then found the
church to be corrupt. The special place held in my work by a somewhat singular
sociology of the university institution is no doubt explained by the peculiar force with
which I felt the need to gain rational control over the disappointment felt by an oblate
faced with the annihilation of the truths and values to which he was destined and
dedicated, rather than take refuge in feelings of self-destructive resentment. 93 The
disappointment could not be undone, but it could be turned to understanding and
potentially, through that understanding, to positive change.
Bourdieus disillusionment with the educational system was not simply an
immediate response to his experience at the cole Normale, though that was certainly
among its roots. In his early work on Algeria, in fact, Bourdieu looked to schools as
potential vehicles for remedying the poor preparation of ex-peasants for the new
commercial society and post-colonial politics. If only they could be organized to provide
fair, open, and effective access to high value cultural goods, he implied in concert with
many educational reformers, then educational institutions could be the crucial means for
improving society. As Bourdieu continued to think about Algeria, though, and even more
as he began to analyze French schooling, he became dubious about the potential.
Increasingly, he saw the issue not as the failure of schools to perform their manifest
functionto use Mertons phrasebut rather as their success in fulfilling various latent
functions. Of the latter, maintaining and simultaneously disguising the class structure was
central. Also important, though, was providing an institutionally specific field for
educators and intellectuals themselvestogether with field-specific capital over which
these could struggle. The very engagement of the educators in this field and in the pursuit
of standing within it made it very unlikely that they could become the force for change
Bourdieu had previously hoped.94
Homo Academicus, p. xxvi.
Failure to take Bourdieus work in Algeria seriously enough has impeded many sociologists
grasp of the trajectory of his views on education. A prominent recent American book on
Bourdieu, thus, never connects the two (David Swartz, Culture and Power: the Sociology of
Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). The issue is even more acute in
the sketchier accounts of Richard Jenkins (Pierre Bourdieu, London: Routledge, 1992) and
Bridget Fowler (Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory, London: Sage, 1997). Harker points to the
problem in BourdieuEducation and Reproduction, pp. 86108 in Richard Harker, Cheleen
Mahar, and Chris Wilkes, eds.: An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu (New York: St.
Martins, 1990); Robbins gives a fuller account in The Work of Pierre Bourdieu and Lane in
Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction. Part of the issue is that Bourdieus early work is not all
available in English; part is that the way Bourdieus work was received into different Englishlanguage fields at different times created structuring preconceptions about itnot least about the
work on education which was the first source of Bourdieus fame in English. Sociologists also
tended to assume his work on Algeria was somehow of a different, anthropological genre, and
of interest mainly with regard to traditional society (an impression perhaps encouraged by the
way in which it was represented in Outline). See also discussion in Moishe Postone, Edward
LiPuma, and Craig Calhoun, Introduction to Calhoun, LiPuma, and Postone, eds., Bourdieu:
93
94

30

Educational institutions were central to Bourdieus concern, but his sense of

disappointment and his critical analyses both reached widely. All the institutions of
modernity, including the capitalist market and the state itself, share in a tendency to
promise far more than they deliver. They present themselves as working for the common
good, but in fact reproduce social inequalities. They present themselves as agents of
freedom, but in fact are organizations of power. They inspire devotion from those who
want richer, freer lives, and they disappoint them with the limits they impose and the
violence they deploy. Simply to attack modernity, however, is to engage in the selfdestructive resentment Bourdieu sought to avoid. Rather, the best way forward lies
through the struggle to understand, to win deeper truths, and to remove legitimacy from
the practices by which power mystifies itself. In this way, one can challenge the myths
and deceptions of modernity, enlightenment, and civilization without becoming the
enemy of the hopes they offer. Central to this is renewed appreciation of both the
autonomy and distinctive character of the scientific field and of the contributions it can
make to public discourse:
It is necessary today to reconnect with the 19 th century tradition of a scientific
field that, refusing to leave the world to the blind forces of the economy, wished
to extend to the whole social world the values of the (undoubtedly idealized)
scientific world (Bourdieu 2001: 8).
In educational institutions, particular systems of categories, contents, and
outcomes are presented as necessary and neutral (and one senses Bourdieus outrage at
professors who cant see the system reflexively and critically even while he explains their
complacency and incapacity). Forming the taxonomic order of both the way academics
think and the way the system is organized, these impressively protect against internal
critique and therefore against successful reform and improvement.
The homology between the structures of the educational system (hierarchy of
disciplines, of sections, etc.) and the mental structures of the agents (professorial
taxonomies) is the sources of the functioning of the consecration of the social
order which the education system performs behind its mask of neutrality.95
In short, the educational system is a field. It has a substantial autonomy, which it must
protect, and a distinctive form of capital which depends on that autonomy for its efficacy.
It is internally organized as a set of transposable dispositions and practical taxonomies
that enable participants to understand their world and to take effective actions, but which
also produce and reproduce specific inequalities among them and make these appear
natural. These can be challengedas indeed Bourdieu challenged them by analyzing
thembut it should not be thought that they could be easily changed by a simple act of
will. And it is externally productive, providing the larger field of power with one of its
most powerful legitimations through the process of the conversion of educational capital
into more directly economic, political, or other forms.

Critical Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Loc Wacquant, in
Bourdieu and Wacquant, Toward a Reflexive Sociology.
95
Bourdieu, The Categories of Professorial Judgment, in English edition of Homo Academicus.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988; orig. 1978.

31

Here we see again the dialectic of incorporation and objectification. 96 The

education system depends on the inculcation of its categories as the mental structures of
agents and on the simultaneous manifestation of these as material structures of
organization. This enables the production of objective effects that do not cease to be
objective and materially powerful simply by pointing to the subjective moments in their
creation. It is true that there is symbolic aggression observable in all examination
situations (and Bourdieu goes to great lengths to document and analyze such things as
the terms teachers use in commenting on examination papers) but not that this is
explicable simply as the psychological attitude of individual agents. Rather, it is a
disposition inculcated by agents own trajectories through the educational field (as
students as well as teachers) and both reproduced and rendered apparently neutral by its
match to the categories of organization and value in the field as a whole.97
More generally, the social order is effectively consecrated through the educational
system because it is able to appear as neutral and necessary. In one of Bourdieus favorite
metaphors for describing his own work, Maos notion of twisting the stick in the other
direction, he turned the structuralist analysis of taxonomies in another way by
mobilizing it through an account of practice in the context of fields.98 And the analysis of
how the culturally arbitrary (and often materially unequal) comes to appear as natural and
fair directly informed his later critique of the imposition of neoliberal economic regimes
and the American model of dismantling or reducing state institutions, including those like
Outline, p. 72; Logic of Practice, ch. 3, and esp. p. 56.
The Categories of Professorial Judgment ends with an illustration of the workings of fields
that is also a comment on the aristocratic side of the fashionable Heideggerianism of the
poststructuralist era:
These generic dispositions are in fact made specific by the position held by each reader in
the university field. We see, for instance, what the most common reading of the classical
texts (O Epicurean garden!) may owe to the virtues of provincial gardeners, and what
ordinary and extraordinary interpretations of Heidegger may owe to that aristocratic
asceticism which, on forest path or mountain pass, flees the flabby, vulgar crowds or their
concrete analagon, the continually renewed (bad) pupils who have to be endlessly saved
from the temptations of society in order to inculcate in them the recognition of true value;
p. 225.
See also Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1991; orig. 1988 where field analysis is used to understand Heidegger himself (whose
trajectory from rural origins to professorial eminence is not altogether without resemblance to
Bourdieus). It is worth noting that this book originated as a lengthy article in 1975; Bourdieu
redeployed it as an intervention into a different set of intellectual debates when he republished a
slightly revised version.
98
Bourdieu complained about the misunderstanding of those who seized on the analytic devices
he took up from one or another established approach, missing the fact that he was already
exaggerating in order to twist the stick in the other direction, and then labeled his approach by the
strategically deployed conceptperhaps most famously the idea of strategy that he used as a
way of injecting dynamism into structuralist analysis; Pascalian Meditations, p. 63; see also
Bourdieu, "Concluding Remarks," pp. 263-75 in C. Calhoun, E. LiPuma and M. Postone, eds.:
Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity and Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993.
96
97

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education that do provide opportunities for ordinary people even while in their existing
form they reproduce distinctions like that of ordinary from extraordinary.99
Just as Marx argued that capitalism produced wealth that it could not effectively
distribute to all its participants, Bourdieu argued that science and education do in fact
produce and reproduce knowledge but do so inseparably from inequalities in capacity and
opportunity to appropriate that knowledge:
Economic power lies not in wealth but in the relationship between wealth and a
field of economic relations, the constitution of which is inseparable from the
development of a body of specialized agents, with specific interests; it is in this
relationship that wealth is constituted, in the form of capital, that is, as the
instrument for appropriating the institutional equipment and the mechanisms
indispensable to the functioning of the field, and thereby also appropriating the
profits from it.100
It would make no sense to start socialismor any more egalitarian societyby willfully
abolishing all the material wealth accumulated under capitalism and previous economic
systems. But it would be necessary to transform the system of relations that rendered
such wealth capital. Likewise, knowledge as a kind of resource deployed by those with
power in relation to specific fieldslegal, medical, academic--constitutes a specific form
of capital. But knowledge need not be organized this way.
Fields and Forms of Capital
Bourdieus exploration of the operation of different forms of power blossomed
into a full-fledged model of the relations between economic, cultural, social and symbolic
capital in the deployment of strategies of class reproduction. This perhaps reached its
fullest development in his study of the grands coles and the political and economic
power structure of the elite professions.101 The studies of education were part of a broader
approach to culture and power that drew also on a series of empirical studies of art and
artistic institutions starting in the 1960s.102 In addition to the book-length works on
education and art, Bourdieu published extensive shorter studies of the religious,
scientific, philosophical, and juridical fields. In these and other investigations, he laid the
basis for a general theory of fields as differentiated social microcosms operating as
spaces of objectives forces and arenas of struggle over value which refract and transmute
external determinations and interests. His deepest and most sustained work on fields, as
well as his most historical research, focused on literature and was capped by The Rules of
See Bourdieu, The essence of neoliberalism, Le Monde diplomatique (English edition),
December, 1998: 1-7.
100
Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1977, pp. 184-5; see also Bourdieu, Les structures sociales de lconomie. Paris: Seuil,
2000.
101
Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996; orig. 1989.
102
Bourdieu, Alain Darbel and Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1990; orig. 1966; Bourdieu, Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude
Chamboredon and Dominique Schnapper, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1990; orig. 1965.
99

33

Art, an investigation of the symbolic revolution wrought in literature by Flaubert,

Baudelaire and others.103 Bourdieus greatest unfinished work is probably its companion
study, a sociogenetic dissection of Manet and the transformation of the field of painting
in which he played a pivotal role.
This line of work is most widely known, however, through Distinction, almost
certainly Bourdieus most prominent book in English. 104 Distinction is an analysis of how
culture figures in social inequality and how the pursuit of distinction or differential
recognition shapes all realms of social practice. It is also an effort to move beyond the
opposition between objectivist theories which identify the social classes (but also the age
or sex classes) with discrete groups, simple countable populations separated by
boundaries objectively drawn in reality, and subjectivist (or marginalist) theories which
reduce the social order to a sort of collective classification obtained by aggregating the
individual classifications or, more precisely, the individual strategies, classified and
classifying, through which agents class themselves and others. 105 Bourdieu develops,
thus, an argument that struggles over classification itself are an important and largely
ignored aspect of class struggle (suggesting in the process that class struggle has hardly
become obsolete). That classification is materially efficacious may be a familiar idea
from the structuralist heritage; that it is an exercise of political power and potentially
challengeable by a politicaland also culturalstruggle is more in keeping with
poststructuralist arguments (though Bourdieus notion of power always had more to do
with agents wielding and benefiting from it than, say, Foucaults).
Distinction, however, is also crucially a response to Kants Third Critique (and to
subsequent philosophical disquisitions on judgment). 106 Much as Durkheim had sought to
challenge individualistic explanation of social facts,107 so Bourdieu sought to uncover the
social roots and organization of all forms of judgment. Kants argument had sought an
approximation in practical reason to the universality available more readily to pure
reason. He had seen this as crucial equally to artistic taste and political opinion. But he
had imagined a standpoint of disinterested judgment from which practical reason (and
critique) might proceed. Bourdieu clearly accepted the analogy between art and politics,
but not this idea of disinterest or of a place outside social struggles from which neutral
knowledge might issue. If he shared this critique of ostensible neutrality with Foucault
and other more conventional poststructuralists, he differed importantly in arguing that
knowledge not only buttresses the hierarchies of the social world but also can be an
effective part of the struggle to change that world, even if it is never produced from a
standpoint outside it. The world-as-it-is-perceived issues out of and bolsters the world-asit-is, a struggle over classification may actually change the world, andthis was crucial
Bourdieu, The Rules of Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996; orig. 1992.
It was named one of the ten most influential sociology books of the 20 th century by the
International Sociological Association, on the basis of an impressively unscientific survey.
Distinction ranked 6th with 43 votes; Bourdieus next entry on the list was Logic of Practice with
7. Webers Economy and Society topped the list with 95 votes
(http://www.ucm.es/info/isa/books/).
105
Distinction, p. 489.
106
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987; orig. 1790.
107
Notably in Suicide, New York: Free Press, 1976; orig. 1895.
103
104

34

for Bourdieuthat struggle need not be simply a matter of power but can be through
science a matter of knowledge which transcends mere power even if it does not escape
struggles over power and recognition altogether. In short, we neednt go down the
ostensibly Nietzschean path towards a choice between simple embrace of the will to
power or a futile resistance to it. On the contrary, there is, as Nietzsche pointed out, no
immaculate conception; but nor is there any original sin and the discovery that someone
who discovered the truth had an interest in doing so in no way diminishes his
discovery.108
We can refuse relativism even though we cannot escape social relations. And if
many of the poststructuralists failed to avoid relativism, they also failed to recognize the
system of social relations in which they remained embedded, including the quasiaristocratic system of the university (and especially in the French case, the philosophycentered production of this aristocratic system).109
Failing to be, at the same time, social breaks which truly renounce the
gratifications associated with membership, the most audacious intellectual breaks
of pure reading still help to preserve the stock of consecrated texts from becoming
dead letters, mere archive material, fit at best for the history of ideas or the
sociology of knowledge, and to perpetuate its existence and its specifically
philosophical powers by using it as an emblem or a matrix for discourses which,
whatever their stated intention, are always, also, symbolic strategies deriving their
power essentially from the consecrated texts. Like the religious nihilism of some
mystic heresies, philosophical nihilism too can find an ultimate path of salvation
in the rituals of liberatory transgression. Just as, by a miraculous dialectical
renewal, the countless acts of derision and desacralization which modern art has
perpetrated against art have always turned, insofar as these are still artistic acts, to
the glory of art and the artist, so the philosophical deconstruction of philosophy
is indeed, when the very hope of radical reconstruction has evaporated, the only
philosophical answer to the deconstruction of philosophy.110
Philosophy is like art in claiming a certain disinterested distance from the economy but in
fact contributing to the reproduction of the social order. Both also specifically deny the
centrality of the social, not only in terms of the institutions in which they flourish but
equally in the necessary distinction between merely intellectual and truly social breaks
with the established order.
If philosophy and artand at least to some extent science 111--operate with a denial
of interest, economics and less academic discourses about economic matters clearly
embrace interest. But they operate with a presumption of neutrality and objectivity that
renders them vulnerable to a closely related critique. For if the cultural world is the
Pascalian Meditations, p. 3.
Bourdieu, Lecture on the Lecture, in In Other Words. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1990; orig. 1982.
110
Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 496.
111
Bourdieu, The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of
Reason, Social Science Information, 14 (1975), #6: 19-47 and Les usages sociaux de la science.
Paris: INRA Editions, 1997.
108
109

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economic world reversed, as Bourdieu famously put it112, it is also true that liberal
economics turns precisely on the denial of cultural significance, the positing of
interests as objective, and the perception of economic systems as matters of necessity
rather than products of choice and power (and therefore potentially to be improved by
struggle). There is no disinterested account of interests, no neutral and objective
standpoint from which to evaluate policy, not even academic economics.113 But this
doesnt remove economic matters from science, it simply extends the demand for a truly
reflexive social science, and for an overcoming of the oppositions between structure and
action, objective and subjective to economics and economic analysis. The economy has
no more existence separate from or prior to the rest of society than do art or philosophy. It
is not merely necessity, to which we may only adapt, any more than artistic creativity is
simply freedom with no social base.
Bourdieu did not develop any detailed account of the economy as such, partly
because his concerns lay elsewhere and partly because he questioned whether any such
object existed with the degree of autonomy from the rest of social life that conventional
economics implied.114 His account of the different forms of capital, thus, involved no
account of capitalism as a distinctive, historically specific system of production and
distribution. This was perhaps implied by his treatment of the corrosive force of markets
in Algeria and by his critique of neoliberal economic policies. In each case the more
inclusive, larger-scale organization of economic life also entailed a greater reduction of
other values to economic ones (and a specification of economic values as those of private
property). Economism is a form of ethnocentrism, Bourdieu wrote. It removes the
elements of time and uncertainty from symbolically organized exchange; it desocializes
transactions leaving, as Bourdieu follows Marx (and Carlyle) in saying, no other nexus
between man and man than callous cash payment. It treats pre-capitalist economies
through the categories and concepts proper to capitalism. 115 Among other things, this
means introducing what Bourdieu calls monothetic reason, in which analysts imagine
that social can only mean or actors only intend one thing at a time. Precapitalist thought
in general, and much ordinary thought even in capitalist societies is, Bourdieu suggests,
polythetic, constantly deploying multiple meanings of the same object. Practice has a
logic which is not that of the logician. 116 It puts symbols and knowledge together
practically, that is, in a philosophically unrigorous but convenient way for practical use.
Bourdieu devoted a good deal of effort to challenging such economism. But he
did this not to suggest an alternative view of human nature in which competition did not
matter so much as an alternative view of the social world in which other kinds of goods
and relationships were the objects of investment and accumulation. This led him into the
Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed, pp. 29-73 in
The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; orig. 1983.
113
See Andrew Sayer, Bourdieu, Smith and disinterested judgment, Sociological Review 47
(1999) #3: 403-31.
114
See Bourdieu Les structures sociales de lconomie, which takes up but moves well beyond
arguments about embeddedness following Polanyi.
115
Logic of Practice, pp. 112-3.
116
Logic, p. 86. Compare Pascals most famous line, The heart has its reasons, of which reason is
ignorant.
112

36

influential idea of different partially convertible forms of capital: notably cultural, social,
and symbolic.
The social world can be conceived as a multi-dimensional space that can be
constructed empirically by discovering the main factors of differentiation which
account for the differences observed in a given social universe, or, in other words,
by discovering the powers or forms of capital which are or can become efficient,
like aces in a game of cards, in this particular universe, that is, in the struggle (or
competition) for the appropriation of scarce goods of which this universe is the
site. It follows that the structure of this space is given by the distribution of the
various forms of capital, that is, by the distribution of the properties which are
active within the universe under study--those properties capable of conferring
strength, power and consequently profit on their holder. ... these fundamental
social powers are, according to my empirical investigations, firstly economic
capital, in its various kinds; secondly cultural capital or better, informational
capital, again in its different kinds; and thirdly two forms of capital that are very
strongly correlated, social capital, which consists of resources based on
connections and group membership, and symbolic capital, which is the form the
different types of capital take once they are perceived and recognized as
legitimate.117
Economic capital is that which is "immediately and directly convertible into money." 118
Educational credentials (cultural capital) or social connections (social capital) can only be
converted indirectly, through engagement in activities that involve longer-term
relationships: employment, family and marriage, etc. Different social fields create and
value specific kinds of capital, and if economic capital has a certain primacy for
Bourdieu, it is not dominant in all fields and its role may in varying degree be denied or
misrecognized.
Bourdieus work on Algeria stresses the tension between the relatively
undifferentiated traditional order and development conceived as transition to a society in
which the economic field had a kind of differentiated autonomy. His later arguments
against neoliberal globalization, by contrast, focus on the threats posed by
dedifferentiation, a loss of autonomy by fields other than the economy. There are
common threads: crucially, the lack of preparation of large segments of the population for
the new conditions and the introduction of new inequalities without systems of social
reciprocity to mitigate their effects. But Bourdieu does not offer a strong account of how
and why economic capital should have its distinctive powers, and to what extent these are
specific to or take a distinctive form in societies that can be called capitalist. 119 Perhaps
it is simply the one-sided focus on certain sorts of social practices and valuesthose
designated properly economic in capitalismthat both constitutes capitalism and makes
it powerful (as well as dangerous).

"What Makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups," Berkeley
Journal of Sociology, 32 (1987): 1-18, quotation from pp. 3-4.
118
Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital," in John G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and
Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood, 1986, pp. 241-58.p. 243.
119
See Calhoun, Habitus, Field, and Capital.
117

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Bourdieus analytic focus is more on showing that what economism takes as the
universal characteristic of human naturematerial, individual self-interestis in fact
historically arbitrary, a particular historical construction. A general science of the
economy of practices, thus, would not artificially limit itself to those practices that are
socially recognized as economic. It would endeavor to grasp capital, that energy of
social physics in all of its different forms, and to uncover the laws that regulate their
conversion from one into another. 120 Capital is analogous to energy, thus, and both to
power. But, the existence of symbolic capital, that is, of material capital misrecognized
and thus recognized, though it does not invalidate the analogy between capital and
energy, does remind us that social science is not a social physics; that the acts of
cognition that are implied in misrecognition and recognition are part of social reality and
that the socially constituted subjectivity that produces them belongs to objective
reality.121
Sociology in Action
Bourdieus approach was to rethink major philosophical themes and issues by
means of empirical observation and analyses rooted in a practical sense of theoretical
things rather than through purely theoretical disquisition. 122 Only relatively late, in
Pascalian Meditations, did Bourdieu offer a systematic explication of his conception of
social knowledge, being, and truth. In this book, he started once again with the premise
that the knowledge produced by social analysts must be related to the conditions of
intellectual work and to the peculiar dispositions fostered by the scholastic universe. He
laid out his philosophical anthropology, in which human action is guided not by
interests but by the struggle for practical efficacy and pursuit of recognition, whose
form will be determined by particular locations in collective and individual histories. He
clarified his agonistic view of the social world, anchored not by the notion of
reproduction but by that of struggle (itself internally linked to recognition). And he
showed why epistemic--as distinguished from narcissisticreflexivity mandates a
commitment to historical rationalism, and not relativism.
Scienceincluding sociology and anthropologywas for him a practical
enterprise, an active, ongoing practice of research and analysis (modus operandi), not
simply a body of scholastic principles (opus operatum). It was no accident that he titled
his book of epistemological and methodological preliminaries The Craft of Sociology.123
The craft worker is always a lover of knowledge; the craft itself is precisely a store of
Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, p. 118. The reference in quotes is to
Logic, p. 122, the capital accumulated by groups, which can be regarded as the energy of social
physics, can exist in different kinds.
121
Logic, p. 122.
122
Brubaker, Social Theory as Habitus, Pp. 212-234 in C. Calhoun, E. LiPuma, and M. Postone,
eds.: Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
123
Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Craft of
Sociology. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991 ; orig. 1968. If it was an accident that this was Bourdieus
book of 1968, it was nonetheless meaningful, for his response to the crisis of the university was in
part to institute a better, more democratic but also professional pursuit of sociological knowledge.
See Robbins, The Work of Pierre Bourdieu, ch. 5.
120

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knowledge, yet it is never fully discursive and available for explicit transmission as such.
Masters teach their skills by example and coaching, knowing that know-how cannot be
reduced to instructions, and never escapes its situated and embodied character. Like
habitus, the rules of art is a phrase that signifies practical knowledge, learning-bydoing, tacit understanding, like the knowledge of cooking embodied in a grandmothers
demonstrations and guidance rather than a cookbook. Art can never be reduced to
following set rules and yet to say it is without coherence, strategy or intention or not
based on social organized and shared knowledge would be to misunderstand it utterly.
Neither is science simply the value-free expression of truth. It is a project, but one
organized, ideally, in a social field that rewards the production of verifiable and forever
revisable truthsincluding new truths and new approaches to understanding--and not
merely performance according to explicit rules and standards.124 It is a project that
depends crucially on reason as an institutionally embedded and historically achieved
capacity, and therefore refuses equally the rationalistic reduction of reason to rules,
simple determinisms unreasoned acceptance of the status quo, and the expressive appeal
to insight supposedly transcending history and not corrigible by reason.
Indeed, it was as a social scientist that Bourdieu in the last years of his life turned
to analyze the impacts of neoliberal globalization on culture, politics, and society. The
social sciences, which alone can unmask and counter the completely new strategies of
domination which they sometimes help to inspire and to arm, will more than ever have to
choose which side they are on: either they place their rational instruments of knowledge
at the service of ever more rationalized domination, or they rationally analyse domination
and more especially the contribution which rational knowledge can make to de facto
monopolization of the profits of universal reason.125 Though he was accused of simply
adopting the mediatic throne Sartre and Foucault had occupied beforeand certainly he
never fully escaped from that mediatic version of politics--he offered a different
definition of what a public intellectual might be. Citing the American term, he wrote of
one who relies in political struggle on his competence and specific authority, and the
values associated with the exercise of his profession, like the values of truth or
disinterest, or, in other terms, someone who goes onto the terrain of politics without
abandoning the requirements and competences of the researcher. 126 He contrasts such a
specific intellectual to the general intellectual (Sartre was the obvious model) who
spoke on all matters claiming a right conferred more by personal eminence or
authenticity than by professional expertise or perspective. If the tradition of Zola
legitimates intellectual as political forces in France, it was nonetheless important to
recognize the difference between simply claiming a new sort of aristocratic-clerical right
to speak in public, and bringing analyses with specific scholarly bases into public debate.
Bourdieu was famous long before the struggle against neliberal globalization of
the 1990s. In June 1968, some students had actually carried copies of his book, The
Inheritors, onto the barricades. But Bourdieu had stayed more or less apart from that
Suggested in The Specificity of the Scientific Field, and discussed at more length in
Pascalian Meditations.
125
Pascalian Meditations, p. 83-4.
126
Bourdieu, Contre-feux II, p. 33.
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struggle, turning his attention to scientificalbeit critical--research. Some of this

research produced Homo Academicus, a book partly about the relationship between the
university microcosm and the larger field of power in 1968, but the book appeared over
fifteen years later.127 One reason Bourdieu was not a vocal public activist in 1968 was that
he did not think the crucial issues of power and inequality were well-joined in the
struggles of that year. Neither their romanticism nor the predominant versions of
Marxism appealed to him, and he resisted especially leftist tendencies to collapse the
scientific and political fields. Moreover, he worried that nave overoptimism encouraged
actions that would set back rather than advance the causes of liberation and knowledge.
Not least of all, there was a superabundance of symbolically prominent intellectuals in
1968. By the early 1990s this was no longer so. Sartre and Foucault were both dead, and
a number of others had abandoned the public forum or simply appeared small within it.
The death of Foucault may have been especially important. While Foucault lived,
Bourdieu was in a sense protected from the most intense demands of media and popular
activists for a dominant public intellectual of the left. After Foucault was gone, there was
a sort of vacuum in French public life which Bourdieu was increasingly drawn to fill.
Bourdieu seized the occasion to fight for undocumented and unemployed workers,
against the tyranny of neoliberal ideology, and to create a new International of publicspirited intellectuals. He defended the homeless and anti-racist activists. There was
nonetheless an irony, given the extent to which Bourdieu had earlier railed against French
model of the total intellectual with its presumption of omnicompetence and its
displacement of more specialized scientific knowledge.128 His distinction of specific from
general intellectuals clarified his self-understanding but inevitably he traded not only on
demonstrated competence but fame and position. The sociologist who had criticized
Sartre seemed to be taking on a Sartrean mantle.
As Bourdieus theory suggested, however, public fame is a product of the field not
just the individual, it is not surprising that he could not escape it or that he sought to use it
like any other resource or field-specific capital. In this case, of course, academic
prominence transcended the intellectual field to become political fame partly because of
the very weakness of the boundaries between political and intellectual life and the
mediation of journalists that he elsewhere criticized. 129 Though he increased his public
interventions during the 1980s and early 1990s, a wave of strikes in 1995 was pivotal.
This not only pitted the government and capitalists against workers but split the Left over
whether reformist accommodation to globalization was the best strategy or resistance
made sense. Bourdieu had previously written important reports on education for the
socialist government and participated quietly in the politics at or beyond the left wing of
the socialist party. He grew increasingly disillusioned and frustrated, though, after
Mitterand forced out Michel Rocard (whom Bourdieu explicitly praised), and carried the
party in an opportunistically centrist direction. After making what was then a rare
Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, op. cit.
Bourdieu and Passeron, "Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and
Resurrection of a Philosophy Without Subject," Social Research 34, no. 1 (Spring 1967), pp. 162212.
129
See, e.g., The Hit Parade of French Intellectuals, or Who is to Judge the Legitimacy of the
Judges? pp. 256-270 in Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, and On Television.
127
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appearance at a demonstration at the Gre de Lyon in 1995, Bourdieu took on an

increasingly public role and became a critic of the socialist party from its left. It was in
many ways a transformation of the intellectual and political fields that brought about the
transformation in at least an aspect of Bourdieus habitus.
Basic to Bourdieus interventions as a public intellectual, in this sense, was the
importance of creating the possibility of collective choice where the dominant discourse
described only the impositions of necessity. In the context of the Yugoslav wars of the
1990s, for example, Bourdieu challenged the idea that the choices of European citizens
were limited to passivity before the horrors of ethnic cleansing or support for the
American-led NATO policy of high-altitude bombing.130 More prominently, especially
from the early 1990s, Bourdieu worked to protect the achievements of the social struggles
of the twentieth century -- pensions, job security, open access to higher education and
other provisions of the social state -- against budget cuts and other attacks in the name of
free markets and international competition. In the process, he became one of the worlds
most famous critics of neoliberal globalization. 131 He challenged the neoliberal idea that a
specific model of reduction in state action, enhancement of private property, and freedom
for capital was a necessary response to globalization (itself conceived as a quasi-natural
force).
Calling this the American model annoyed Americans who wished to distance
themselves from government and corporate policies. The label nonetheless captured a
worldwide trend toward commodification, state deregulation, and competitive
individualism exemplified and aggressively promoted by the dominant class of the
United States at the end of the 20th century. Bourdieu identified this American model with
five features of American culture and society which were widely proposed as necessary
to successful globalization in other contexts: (1) a weak state, (2) an extreme
development of the spirit of capitalism, and (3) the cult of individualism, (4) exaltation of
dynamism for its own sake, and (5) neo-Darwinism with its notion of self-help.132
Whatever the label, Bourdieu meant the view that institutions developed out of a
long century of social struggles should be scrapped if they could not meet the test of
market viability. Many of these, including schools and universities, are state institutions.
As he demonstrated in much of his work, they are far from perfect. Nonetheless,
collective struggles have grudgingly and gradually opened them to a degree to the
dominated, workers, women, ethnic minorities, and others. These institutions and this
openness are fragile social achievements that open up the possibility of more equality and
justice, and to sacrifice them is to step backwards, whether this step is masked by a
deterministic analysis of the market or a naked assertion of self-interest by the wealthy
and powerful. This does not mean that defense must be blind, but it does mean that
See, e.g., Interventions, pp. 279-80.
Bourdieu published a host of essays collected in Acts of Resistance, Firing Back, and
Interventions. Bourdieus essays were only a part of his struggle against the tyranny of the
market. He gave speeches and interviews, appeared on the radio and at public demonstrations,
launched a non-party network of progressive social scientists called Raisons dagir (Reasons to
act), and helped to forge links among intellectuals, cultural producers and trade-union activists.
132
Bourdier, Contre-feux II, pp. 25-31.
130
131

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resistance to neoliberal globalization, even when couched in the apparently backwardlooking rhetoric of nationalism, can be a protection of genuine gains and indeed, a
protection of the public space for further progressive struggles.
Bourdieu was concerned above all that the social institutions that supported
reasonby providing scholars, scientists, artists, and writers, with a measure of
autonomy--were under unprecedented attack. Reduction to the market threatened to
undermine science; reduction to the audience-ratings logic of television entertainment
threatened to undermine public discourse. If one wants to go beyond preaching, then it is
necessary to implement practically the Realpolitik of reason aimed at setting up or
reinforcing, within the political field, the mechanisms capable of imposing the sanctions,
as far as possible automatic ones, that would tend to discourage deviations from the
democratic norm (such as the corruption of elected representatives) and to encourage or
impose the appropriate behaviors; aimed also at favouring the setting up of non-distorted
social structures of communication between the holders of power and the citizens, in
particular though a constant struggle for the independence of the media. 133 The problem
was not internationalization as such. Bourdieu himself called forcefully for a new
internationalism, saw science as an international endeavor, and founded Liber, a
European review of books published in six languages. The problem was the presentation
of a particular modality of globalization as a force of necessity to which there was no
alternative but adaptation and acceptance.
In his own life, Bourdieu recognized, it was not merely talent and effort that
propelled his extraordinary ascent from rural Barn to the Collge de France, but also
state scholarships, social rights, and educational access to the closed world of culture.
This recognition did not stop him from critical analysis. He showed how the
classificatory systems operating in these institutions of state, culture, and education all
served to exercise symbolic violence as well as and perhaps more than to open
opportunities. But he also recognized the deep social investment in such institutions that
was inescapably inculcated in people whose life trajectories depended them: what
individuals and groups invest in the particular meaning they give to common
classificatory systems by the use they make of them is infinitely more than their interest
in the usual sense of the term; it is their whole social being, everything which defines
their own idea of themselves134
Neoliberal reforms, thus, not only threaten some people with material economic
harms, they threaten social institutions that enable people to make sense of their lives.
That these institutions are flawed is a reason to transform them (and the classificatory
schemes central to their operation and reproduction). It is not a basis for imagining that
people can live without them, especially in the absence of some suitable replacements.
Moreover, the dismantling of such institutions is specifically disempowering, not only
economically depriving. That is, it not only takes away material goods in which people
have an interest, it undercuts their ability to make sense of their social situation and
create solidarities with others.
133
134

Pascalian Meditations, p. 126.

Distinction, p. 478.

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A central strength of global capitalism is its ability to control the terms of

discourse, and most especially, to present the specific emerging forms of globalization as
both inevitable and progressive. Consider the force of this message in the rhetoric of the
European Union and the advocates of a common currency. Globalization appears as a
determinant force, an inevitable necessity to which Europeans must adapt; capitalism
appears as its essential character; the American model is commonly presented as the
normal if not the only model. Yet European unification is held to be liberal,
cosmopolitan, and progressive.135 To assert as Bourdieu did that the specific pattern of
international relationslike relations within nationsis the result of the exercise of
power is to open up the game, to remove the illusion of necessity. To reveal the power
being wielded and reproduced when apparently open political choices are structured by a
symbolic order organized to the benefit of those in dominant positions, whether or not
they are fully aware of what they do, is to challenge the efficacy of doxic understandings.
These are basic acts of critical theory, and both consistent with and informed by
Bourdieus work since his early Algerian studies.
Conclusion
As we saw, the entry into politics that made Bourdieu so prominent a celebrity
also aroused criticisms, suspicions, and resentments among his fellow social scientists.
Beyond theoretical or empirical differences the new conflicts were fueled by both
academic and state politics. Many charged that Bourdieus new politics was not only
irresponsible but deceptive. It was the former, critics said, because it encouraged
populism, ultra-leftism, and a new anti-Americanism. It was the latter because Bourdieu
claimed to speak with the authority of science, but his ex cathedra pronouncements were
not supported by thorough research and the role in which he made them was one he had
specifically criticized when it was performed by Sartre.136
Bourdieu, The Myth of Globalization and the European Welfare State, pp. 29-44 in Acts of
Resistance. Also, Calhoun, The Democratic Integration of Europe: Interests, Identity, and the
Public Sphere, in M. Berezin and M. Schain, eds., Remapping Europe. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, forthcoming; The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward
a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism, in Daniele Archibugi, ed. Debating
Cosmopolitics. London: Verso, 2002.
136
The Left had no need of Bourdieu, Bruno Latour suggested, not least precisely because he
claimed to speak from the vantage point of science and science itself lacked legitimacy.
Moreover, Bourdieulike scienceclaimed an authority which Latour thought could only be a
form of domination. This interest in science Latour saw (wrongly) as a sudden departure and
deplored it from the vantage-point of a more aristocratic humanism. Bourdieu preserved the
scientific dream of mastery, Latour suggested, and therefore was not content simply to describe
the social world in the terms of actors themselves. Latour both rejected Bourdieus manner of
speaking and posed the rhetorical question, what has Bourdieu done in his laboratory, over
thirty-five years? Have fields become more permeable? Has symbolic capital become more
fluid? Has reproduction become less repetitive? In other words, if one were to claim the
authority of science, one must demonstrate it in technical mastery. One cannot, Latour implies, at
least not for social science, and in any event to speak as though science could underwrite any
political position recalls the crimes of Leninism; La gauche a-t-elle besoin de Bourdieu?
Liberation, 15.9.1998.
135

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I have tried in this paper to challenge the charge of discontinuity or even

contradiction, showing the connections within Bourdieus scientific work and between it
and his political analyses. As to the role, there is an element of truth to the charge, but
also considerable bad faith since most of those making the accusation were precisely the
university based intellectuals who most commonly seek to appear in the editorial pages of
the newspapers.
It is easy to see how celebrity can fuel jealousy among intellectuals. To this we
must add the special complexities of the French intellectual field and Bourdieus place
within it. His chair at the Collge de France gave him a symbolically preeminent but
materially marginal position. He could not effectively place all his protgs in
independent positions. Moreover, though he resisted (and sometimes fiercely denied)
becoming one of the mandarins of the French system, its structural constraints
insistently asserted themselves. There was no other way to organize a large collective
enterprise (or at least he found none). And it was hardly at odds with Bourdieus theory
that those challenging a field should have to accumulate and deploy capital within it, and
participate despite all in its reproduction.
Nonetheless, Bourdieus enterprise exemplified charismatic not rationalbureaucratic leadership. He alone gave the crucial assignments and conferred value on
participants activities. Many felt they were in a competition for his favor and attention,
some that he played them off against each other. Not surprisingly, Bourdieu was worried
by struggles over succession. To achieve personal autonomy, several of Bourdieus early
students and collaborators felt it necessary to go through painful rebellions. 137 A few
could not restrain themselves from publicly expressing their quasi-Oedipal struggles in
newspaper commentary after Bourdieus death. And yet, perhaps the greatest source of
resentment against Bourdieu was his refusal to turn his own success in the intellectual
world, on the political scene, and in the media -- into an endorsement of the system and
thus of all those honored by it. On the contrary, Bourdieu was relentlessly critical of the
consecration function performed by educational institutions. By implication, many felt
deconsecrated.138
Bourdieus public interventions were, however, firmly rooted in his sociological
analyses. Indeed, it was his theory of social fieldshoned in studies of the religious field,
Bourdieu himself had benefited from the patronage of Raymond Aron, and built his academic
base largely on institutional connections he derived from Aron. And yet he chose to break with
Aron rather than be seen directly as carrying on Arons work, a role more fulfilled by Arons
other prominent assistant of the same period, Alain Touraine (see Arons Memoires, Paris:
Julliard, 1993). Bourdieu presented his rise to prominence in ways that minimized the role of
Arons patronage and maximized his own rebellion against the established elite rather than his
consecration by it. That Bourdieu was upwardly mobile and Touraine from an elite background
gave a material ground to their distinctive styles and positions. To his credit, and perhaps to the
credit of a tradition of patrician graciousness, Touraine offered an eloquent appreciation of
Bourdieu after his death while some of Bourdieus own one-time protgs could not (Jos
Garon, La reaction de Alain Touraine, Libration, 25/012002).
138
Knowing the antagonism this would arouse, Bourdieu had called the first chapter in Homo
Academicus A Book for Burning?
137

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the legal field, and the field of cultural production--that informed his defense of the
autonomy (always only relative) of the scientific field from market pressure. His theory
of the multiple forms of capitalcultural and social as well as economicsuggested that
these were indirectly convertible but if they were reduced to simple equivalence cultural
and social capital lost their specificity and efficacy. And his early studies in Algeria
showed the corrosive impact of unbridled extension of market forces.
Bourdieu knew the political importance of science, but also that this importance
would be vitiated by reducing science to politics. In Pantagruel, Rabelais famously said,
Science without conscience is nothing but the ruin of the soul. It is a better line in
French, where conscience also means consciousness. It is not the sort of line Bourdieu
would quote, though, because public appeals to conscience are too commonly
justifications for a jargon of authenticity rather than the application of reason.
Nonetheless, Bourdieu demonstrated that consciencein both its senses--is not simply an
interior state of individuals. It is a social achievement. As such, it is always at risk.
Bourdieu was a scholar and researcher of great rigor and also a man and a citizen with a
conscience attuned to inequality and domination. Would there were more.

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