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Bourdieu’s Five Lessons for Criminology

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Abstract

Drawing on a close reading of Pierre Bourdieu’s works, I offer five lessons for a science of crime and punishment: (1) always historicize; (2) dissect symbolic categories; (3) produce embodied accounts; (4) avoid state thought; and (5) embrace commitment. I offer illustrative examples and demonstrate the practical implications of Bourdieu’s ideas, and I apply the lessons to a critique of orthodox criminology.

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Notes

  1. One might summarize this view with two condensed formulas: (1) acategorial = substantialization = naturalization = sociodicy; and (2) categorial = relationalism = denaturalization = sociology.

  2. It would be preferable to maintain the indefinite form: a habitus, not the habitus. To speak or write with the definite article runs the risk of universalizing a concept that thinks historically. The indefinite article, on the other hand, connotes contingency and particularity. For stylistic reasons, however, it is not always desirable to maintain this strict usage.

  3. Bourdieu borrows the terms ‘state thinker’ and ‘state thought’ from the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard’s (1992) Old Masters where the protagonist observes (with typical Bernhardian hyperbole) that ‘wherever we look we see only state children, state pupils, state workers, state officials, state pensioners, state dead…The state produces and permits only state people, that is the truth.’

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Acknowledgements

This article was completed with support from the Norwegian Research Council (Grant No. 259888).

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  1. Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, PO Box 1096 Blindern, 0317, Oslo, Norway

    Victor L. Shammas

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Shammas, V.L. Bourdieu’s Five Lessons for Criminology. Law Critique 29, 201–219 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-017-9218-3

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