Practice and Form: Economic Critique with Marx and Bourdieu

Abstract

The chapter argues to combine Marx and Bourdieu for the purpose of economic critique. Whereas Marx reveals the crucial importance of social forms and capital fetishism, Bourdieu is a strong weapon against rational choice theory. And he convincingly criticizes Marxism for its inability to overcome basic theoretical oppositions like idealism vs. materialism. But Bourdieu’s capital theory also contributes to the proliferation of capital concepts in social science and therefore contains some complicity with economic imperialism, that is, the colonizing of research fields by the economic approach. When Marx wrote his Critique of Political Economy, economics did not yet exist. Only later the new economic orthodoxy emerged, propagating the economic approach as the best and only serious way to explain all human behaviour. As a sociological antidote to this, Bourdieu’s theory of practice is of crucial importance. And if Marx may be somewhat outdated as a critical economist, he remains powerful as economic critique. In order to challenge economic imperialism all disposable sources of critique can be mobilized, but contradictions and tensions between them should not be ignored. This approach is what Bourdieu calls a reflexive eclecticism, and the author entirely adheres to this concept.

Chapter translated from Streckeisen 2013. For a more in-depth argument, see Streckeisen 2014. The term “economic critique” refers to “Ökonomiekritik” in German.