Abstract
This book gathers together exercises which each revolve around the modes and outcomes of the strategies of appropriation that Bourdieu practised with regard to Marx. Both Marx and Bourdieu constantly invoked the future transformation of their own legacy, accepting in advance the rupturing and restructuring effects that this might have for the edifice they constructed. At the same time, they openly conceived their scientific project as a debt towards those of whom they had chosen to be the heirs.
The book is dedicated to the practice of critique that Bourdieu and Marx fiercely exercised throughout their careers, because we believe that this is the terrain on which we can best illuminate the debt that Bourdieu wished to acknowledge to Marx. Dialogue with the system of Marxian critique is a constant in Bourdieu’s work. This is most clearly evidenced by the repeated references to the Trier philosopher that the sociologist scatters throughout his works, and by the adoption of a critical perspective that denotes a massive Marxian presence. In the concatenated set of critiques underpinning the architecture of his work, in the plethora of questions he raises, and in the scientific practice he adopts, Bourdieu attaches himself to the Marxian system—notwithstanding (we might even say, thanks to) his polemical remarks and deviations from this system.
When the inheritance has appropriated the heir, as Marx says, the heir can appropriate the inheritance. And this appropriation of the heir by the inheritance, of the heir to the inheritance, which is the condition of the appropriation of the inheritance by the heir (and which is by no means mechanical nor fatal), is accomplished under the combined effect of the conditionings inscribed in the condition of heir and the pedagogical action of the predecessors, the appropriate owners
—P. Bourdieu, Le mort saisit le vif (1980)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Émile Benveniste shows how the root heres establishes an etymological relationship between the notion of orphan and of inheritance: “How can this etymological relationship be explained? […] According to Indo-European usage property is directly transmitted to the descendant, but he is not for this reason alone qualified as an ‘heir’. At that time, no need was felt for the legal precision which makes us qualify as ‘heir’ the person who enters into possession of material wealth, whatever his degree of relationship with the deceased. In Indo-European, the son was not designated the ‘heir.’ Heirs were only those who inherited in the absence of a son. This is the case with the collaterals, who divided an inheritance where there was no direct heir. Such is the relationship between the notion of ‘orphan, deprived of a relative’ (son or father) and that of ‘inheritance’” (Benveniste 2016: 57–58).
- 2.
There is not a greatly conspicuous literature on the relationship between Bourdieu and Marx, but it does nevertheless count some significant analyses. See, among others: Brubaker (1985), Wacquant (1996, 2002), Andreani (1996), Beasley-Murray (2000), Bidet (2008), Robbins (2006), Santoro (2010), Fowler (2011), Karsenti (2011), Mauger (2012), Granjon (2016), Koch (2018),
- 3.
“The labelling, which is the ‘scholarly’ equivalent of the insult, is also a common strategy, and all the more powerful the more the label is, both more of a stigma and more imprecise, thus irrefutable” (Bourdieu 1990a: 142).
- 4.
“Just as in a tribal society the passing outsider is subjected to questioning until he can be located in a genealogy, so the intellectuals who strive to prove their personal uniqueness and irreducibility do not stop until they have eliminated the unclassifiable—even by resorting, if necessary, to an arbitrary taxonomy. Hence the production of all the ‘isms’ suitable for designating total options committing a whole philosophy and employed with the intention of defining both oneself and the others” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967: 205).
- 5.
For this kind of approach, see also the Bidet’s book on Foucault and Marx, where the author curries out an investigation free from any scholastic perspective (Bidet 2016).
- 6.
- 7.
On this point see also Marcello Musto, who points out that “despite the announcement, at the end of the last century, of Marx’s definitive disappearance, he has reappeared on the stage of history. Freed from the function of instrumentum regni and from the chains of Marxism-Leninism, his work has been handed over to free thinkers” (2011: 36).
- 8.
- 9.
It may be useful, in this regard, to look at Éric Gilles’s survey on the recurrence of references to Marx in Bourdieu’s work (Gilles 2014).
- 10.
In his Collège de France lectures on Classification Struggles, Bourdieu said on this score: “We might call for a sociological analysis of the part played in the intellectual education of all intellectuals by the required initiation, however different in depth, commitment, or passion, into Marxism. In fact, we need a sociology of knowledge to study the impression we may have in our twenties that we know perfectly well how to think about what there is to know perfectly well on the subject of social class: this is a collective experience shared by almost everyone, and is so completely institutionalized that it renders formidably difficult something that should be routine, that is, to approach the issue of classes in general virtually from scratch, and reconsider what it means to classify” (Bourdieu 2018: 5).
- 11.
Mutatis mutandis, this is also what is happening in our own time, with the historical-critical edition of Marx’s writings in the MEGA 2. It provides not only a large amount of original materials that were until recently inaccessible but also very different renderings of texts known for decades in versions very distant from the original manuscripts.
- 12.
First published in Russian by Ryazanov in 1927, but still in partial form, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were made available in France in the 1930s, but only in an abridged form, with the translation from the 1934 German edition first by Lefebvre and Guterman, and subsequently, in 1937, by Jules Molitor. The French edition in fact presents many omissions (the parts on alienated labour are missing) and errors. For the first complete edition, French-language readers had to wait for Émile Bottigelli’s translation, published by Éditions Sociales only in 1962 (Marx 1962). The Grundrisse were published in French only in 1967 (Marx 1967, 1986). The literature on the reception of the young Marx in the post-1945 French intellectual field is quite extensive. For a general survey, the reader can consult, among others: Burkhard (1994), Ferry and Renaut (1990), Musto (2010: 225–272), Pompeo Faracovi (1972), Poster (1975).
- 13.
Among the most significant Algerian texts see: Bourdieu (1962, 1979, 2004, 2012) and the book edited by Yacine (Bourdieu 2008). On the closeness of Bourdieu’s Algerian studies to a Marxian paradigm, it is useful to consult some recent texts, including Denunzio (2017) and Schultheis (2003, 2007). Bourdieu often combined his research work in Algeria with photographic practice. In this regard, see Bourdieu (2012).
- 14.
The critical disposition that permeates the Bourdieusian edifice has been little examined by literature. If it has remained somewhat on the margins of commentaries and glossaries, this probably also derives from the fact that the systematic critique of the scholastic universe and of the position from which intellectuals speak—one of the fundamental themes of Bourdieusian epistemology—can create a certain discomfort in some fields of reception of his work. Not to mention the fact that a sociologist who claims to want to “contribute to providing tools for liberation” through his scholarly work may not be a very welcome guest in the forums of the current academic field.
- 15.
The different objects of Marxian critique that succeeded one another and stratified over time have also responded to and interpenetrated one another, thus going on to constitute a coherent and unitary theoretical arrangement—a “criticism.” This topic is addressed by a vast literature and continues to be so today. See, among others, Benhabib (1984), Bensaïd (1995), Renault (1995), Musto (2011), Celikates (2012), Burgio (2018), Fineschi (2020).
- 16.
Maurice Blanchot writes: “Capital is an essentially subversive work. It is so less because it would lead, by ways of scientific objectivity, to the necessary consequence of revolution than because it includes, without formulating it too much, a mode of theoretical thinking that overturns the very idea of science. Actually, neither science nor thought emerges from Marx’s work intact. This must be taken in the stronger sense, insofar as science designates itself there as a radical transformation of itself, as a theory of a mutation always in play in practice, just as in this practice the mutation is always theoretical” (Blanchot 1997: 99).
- 17.
Henri Lefebvre devoted enlightening words to this subject in a book that did not receive the recognition it deserved at the time (Lefebvre 2016).
- 18.
On this theme, see also the highly stimulating analysis offered by Bruno Karsenti (2013).
- 19.
Alberto Burgio invites us to reflect on the fact that even the notion of production, “against all the economistic interpretations of his thought, contains a great complexity and critical power, since different dimensions and levels of action converge therein. Production always embraces […] material and immaterial, objective and subjective, factual and ‘spiritual’ dimensions, in a dynamic only partly inherent to the economic” (Burgio 2018: 161–162; 423–426).
- 20.
This passage from the Lectures on Classification Struggles at the Collège de France, in which Bourdieu “calls on” Marx to show greater coherence in class theory, aptly highlights the double dimension of the Bourdieusian critique which we mentioned above: “Going beyond these alternatives [objectivity or subjectivity] would require integrating objective classification with the conflict over classifications, rather than simply juxtaposing the two. In the case of social class, we cannot avoid the encounter with Marx, and we cannot help but think that it was he himself who achieved this fusion, for it was he who gave us both an objectivist notion of social class and a theory of class struggle. Yet it seems to me that this integration is superficial, and I fear that the weakness of Marx’s thought lies in the fact that he did not integrate a scientific theory that aims to describe social classes according to their objective properties with a theory of the struggle between different class systems that can transform or modify this objective structure. It seems to me that he failed to achieve this integration and allowed Marxist theory to oscillate successively or simultaneously between, on the one hand, a theory of a physicalist, mechanistic, and determinist kind-with, for example, the theory of the final catastrophe that was much discussed in the interwar period-and, on the other hand, a theory of revolution as a kind of engine in which compression leads to explosion” (Bourdieu 2018: 64–65).
References
Althusser, Louis. 2005 [1965]. For Marx. Translated by B. Brewster. London: Verso.
Andreani, Tony. 1996. Bourdieu au-delà et en-deçà de Marx. Actuel Marx 20: 47–63.
Batou, Jean, and Razmig Keucheyan. 2014. Bourdieu et le marxisme de son temps: une rencontre manquée? Revue suisse de science politique 20: 19–24.
Beasley-Murray, Jon. 2000. Value and Capital in Bourdieu and Marx. In Fieldwork in Culture, ed. Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman. Lanhan—Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publ.
Benhabib, Seyla. 1984. The Marxian Method of Critique: Normative Presuppositions. PRAXIS International 3 (1984): 284–298.
Bensaïd, Daniel. 1995. Marx l’intempestif. Grandeurs et misères d’une aventure critique (XIX–XX e siècles). Paris: Fayard.
Benveniste, Émile. 2016 [1969]. Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society. Translated by E. Palmer. Chicago: Hau Books.
Bidet, Jacques. 2008 [2001]. Bourdieu and Historical Materialism. Translated by G. Eliott. In Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, eds. Jacques Bidet and Eustache Kouvélakis, 587–604. Leiden-Boston: Brill.
———. 2016 [2015]. Foucault with Marx. Translated by S. Corcoran. London: Zed Books.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1997 [1971]. Marx’s three voices. In Friendship. Translated by E. Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1962 [1958]. The Algerians. Translated by Alan C. M. Ross. Boston: Beacon.
———. 1979 [1963]. Algeria 60. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
———. 1980. Le mort saisit le vif. Les relations entre l’histoire réifiée et l’histoire incorporée. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 32–33: 3–14.
———. 1990a [1987]. The Intellectual Field: a World Apart. In In Other Words. Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Translated by L. Wacquant and M. Adamson, 140–149. Cambridge: Polity.
———. 1990b [1982]. A lecture on the lecture. In Other Words. Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Translated by L. Wacquant and M. Adamson, 177–198. Cambridge: Polity.
———. 1991 [1971]. Genesis and Structure of Religious Field. Comparative Social Research 13: 1–44.
———. 1993 [1984]. Sociology in Question. Translated by R. Nice. London: Sage.
———. 1999. The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas. In Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Shusterman, 220–228. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. 2000 [1997]. Pascalian Meditations. Translated by R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2001 [1998] Masculine Domination. Translated by R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2004. Algerian Landing. Translated by R. Nice and L. Wacquant. Ethnography 5(4): 415–443.
———. 2008. Esquisses algériennes. Edited by Tassadit Yacine. Paris: Seuil.
———, 2012. Picturing Algeria. Edited by Franz Schultheis and Christine Frisinghelli. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2014 [2012]. On the State. Lectures at the College de France, 1989–1992. Translated by D. Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity.
———. 2018 [2015] Classification Struggles. General Sociology, Vol. 1. Lectures at the Collège de France (1981–82). Translated by P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity.
———. 2020 [2016]. Habitus and Field. General Sociology, Vol. 2. Lectures at the Collège de France (1982–83). Translated by P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1967. Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945. Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject. Social Research 34 (1): 162–212.
Bourdieu, Pierre et al. 1999 [1993] The Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Translated by P. P. Ferguson, S. Emanuel J. Johnson and S. T. Waryn. Stanford University Press: Stanford.
Brubaker, Rogers. 1985. Rethinking Classical Theory: The Sociological Vision of Pierre Bourdieu. Theory and Society 6: 745–775.
Burgio, Alberto. 2018. Il sogno di una cosa. Per Marx. Roma, DeriveApprodi.
Burkhard, Fred Bud. 1994. The ‘Revue Marxiste’ Affair: French Marxism and Communism in Transition Between the Wars. Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 20 (1): 141–164.
Celikates, Robin. 2012. Karl Marx: Critique as Emancipatory Practice. In Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Karin de Boer and Ruth Sonderegger. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cuyvers, Ludo. 2020. Why Did Marx’s Capital Remain Unfinished? On Some Old and New Arguments. Science & Society 84: 13–41.
Denunzio, Fabrizio. 2017. Le due Algerie di Pierre Bourdieu. Colonialismo, sottoproletariato e azione comunicativa. Democrazia e diritto LIV (1): 92–106.
Derrida, Jacques. 2006 [1993]. Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by P. Kamuf. New-York: Routledge.
Ferry, Luc, and Alain Renaut. 1990. French Marxism. Society 27: 75–82.
Fineschi, Roberto. 2008. Filologia e interpretazione dopo la nuova edizione storico-critica (MEGA-2). Roma: Carocci.
———. 2020. Real Abstraction: Philological Issues. In Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory. The Philosophy of Real Abstraction, ed. Antonio Oliva, Oliva Ángel, and Novara Iván, 61–78. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fineschi, Roberto, and Riccardo Bellofiore. 2009. Introduction. In Re-reading Marx. New Perspective after the Critical Edition, ed. Roberto Fineschi and Riccardo Bellofiore. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fowler, Bridget. 2011. Pierre Bourdieu: Unorthodox Marxist? In The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays, ed. Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, 33–59. London: Anthem Press.
———. 2020. Pierre Bourdieu on Social Transformation, with Particular Reference to Political and Symbolic Revolutions. Theory and Society 49: 439–463.
Gilles, Éric. 2014. Marx dans l’œuvre de Bourdieu. Approbations fréquentes, oppositions radicales. Actuel Marx 56 (2): 147–163.
Granjon, Fabien. 2016. Bourdieu et le matérialisme marxien. In Matérialismes, culture et communication, Tome 1, Marxismes, Théorie et sociologies critiques, ed. Fabien Granjon. Paris: Presses des Mines.
Karsenti, Bruno. 2011. From Marx to Bourdieu: the Limits of the Structuralism of Practice. In The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, 33–58. London: Anthem.
———. 2013. D’une philosophie à l’autre. Les sciences sociales et la politique des modernes. Paris: Gallimard.
Koch, Max. 2018. The Naturalization of Growth: Marx, the Regulation Approach and Bourdieu. Environmental Values 27 (1): 9–27.
Kurz, Heinz D. 2018. Will the MEGA2 Edition be a Watershed in Interpreting Marx? The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 5 (25): 783–807.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1957. Le marxisme et la pensée française. Les temps modernes 137–138: 104–137.
———. 2016 [1965]. Metaphilosophy. Translated by D. Fernbach. London: Verso.
Lefebvre, Henri, and Norbert Guterman. 1934. Morceaux choisis de Karl Marx. Paris: NRF.
Macherey, Pierre. 2014. Geometria dello spazio sociale. Pierre Bourdieu e la filosofia. Verona: Ombre corte.
Marx, Karl. 1962 [1844]. Manuscrits de 1844. Translated by É. Bottigelli. Paris: Editions Sociales.
———. 1967 [1939]. Fondements de la critique de l’économie politique. 2 vols. Translated by R. Daugeville. Paris: Anthropos.
———. 1975a [1844]. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction. Translated by M. Milligan, B. Ruhemann. In MECW, vol. 3: 175–187.
———. 1975b [1844]. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1944. Translated by M. Milligan and D. J. Struik. In MECW, vol. 3: 229–347.
———. 1976 [1845]. Theses on Feuerbach. Translated by W. Lough. In MECW, vol. 5: 3–5.
———. 1986 [1939]. Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy. Rough Draft of 1857–58. (Grundrisse). Translated by E. Wangermann. In MECW, vol. 28: 49–537.
———. 1994 [1843]. On the Jewish Question. Translated by R. A. Davis. In Id. Early Political Writings: 28–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1996 [1873]. Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital vol. I. In MECW, vol. 35: 12–20.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1975 [1845]. The Holy Family: or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company. Translated by R. Dixon and C. Dutt. In MECW, vol. 4: 3–235.
———. 1976 [1932]. The German Ideology. Trans. C. Dutt. In MECW, vol. 5: 19–539.
Mauger, Gérard. 2012. Bourdieu et Marx. In Lectures de Bourdieu, ed. Frédéric Lebaron and Gérard Mauger, 25–40. Paris: Ellipses Editions.
———. 2010. Marx is Back: The Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) Project. Rethinking Marxism 22 (2): 290–291.
———. 2011. Ripensare Marx e i marxismi. Roma: Carocci.
Pompeo Faracovi, Ornella. 1972. Il marxismo francese contemporaneo fra dialettica e struttura (1949–1968). Milano: Feltrinelli.
Poster, Mark. 1975. Existential Marxism in Postwar France. From Sartre to Althusser. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Renault, Émmanuel. 1995. Marx et l’idée de critique. Paris: Puf.
Robbins, Derek. 2006. On Bourdieu. Education and Society. Oxford: Bardwell Press.
Santoro, Marco. 2010. Con Marx, senza Marx. Sul capitale di Pierre Bourdieu. In Bourdieu dopo Bourdieu, ed. Gabriella Paolucci, 144–172. Torino: Utet.
Sapiro, Gisèle. 2020. From Social Theorist to Global Intellectual: The International Reception of Bourdieu’s Work and Its Effect on the Author. In Ideas on the Move in the Social Sciences and Humanities, eds. Gisèle Sapiro, Marco Santoro and Patrick Baert, 299–32. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schultheis, Franz. 2003. Algerien 1960—ein soziologisches Laboratorium. In Pierre Bourdieus Theorie des Sozialen. Probleme und Perspektiven, ed. Boike Rehbein, Gernot Saalmann, and Hermann Schwengel, 25–40. Konstanz: UVK.
———, ed. 2007. Bourdieus Wege in die Soziologie. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag.
Tomba, Massimiliano. 2007. Preface to Italian edition of Daniel Bensaïd. Marx l’intempestif. Grandeurs et misères d’une aventure critique [1995]. Roma: Edizioni Alegre.
———. 2013 [2011]. Marx’s Temporalities. Leiden: Brill.
Wacquant, Loïc J.D. 1996. Culture, classe et conscience chez Marx et chez Bourdieu. Actuel Marx 20: 25–42.
———. 2002. De l’idéologie à la violence symbolique: culture, classe et conscience chez Marx et Bourdieu. In Les sociologies critiques du capitalisme en hommage à Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Jean Lojkine, 25–40. Paris: Puf.
Yacine, Tassadit. 2003. On n’avait jamais vu le ‘Monde’; Nous étions une petite frange découche entre les communistes et les socialistes [Interview of Lucien Bianco]. Awal. Cahiers d’études berbères 27–28.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Paolucci, G. (2022). Introduction. Heirs: Bourdieu, Marx and Ourselves. In: Paolucci, G. (eds) Bourdieu and Marx. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06288-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06289-6
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)