Bourdieu, Marx, and the Economy

Abstract

This chapter aims to show that Bourdieu mobilized in his work an in-depth and very particular reading of Marx and of certain Marxists. He always kept his distance from Marxist economic theorizing, as he did, moreover, with those operated in the two other great economic “paradigms”: neoclassical and Keynesian, but also various theoretical traditions, which he saw as toolboxes more than reference spaces in which he would navigate. Early reader of Capital, from which he adopts some concepts or schemes, trained as a philosopher in a context of centrality of Marxism in the French intellectual field, Bourdieu was at the same time very early opposed to the influential communist “stalinian” mood at the École normale supérieure and in the university. In 1963, he nevertheless accepted an invitation to present his work on educational inequality at Louis Althusser’s seminar, with his young colleague Jean-Claude Passeron. Until 1968, Althusser was favourable to Bourdieu’s sociological engagement, and Bourdieu-inspired sociologists were, for some of them, relatively closer to Marxist intellectuals and organizations, including the then powerful Communist Party. This complex posture led Bourdieu to a very ambivalent form of systematic and apparently contradictory mixture of avoidance and close relationship, which would become more pronounced in two historical contexts: the “Marxist moment” of May 1968 and the following years, and the collapse of the reference to Marx in the French intellectual and political field at the turn of the 1970s. A third and new period of proximity and more direct intellectual confrontation emerges after 1993 and the publication of La misère du monde (The Weight of the World), which I will analyse in depth. Using various sources, I propose a realistic and systematic account of a very original Marx reading and usage, which relates to a not less original scientific habitus. Distinguishing different contexts of uses and references, I also try to stress the strong continuity in the double and circular movement of his thought, combining a close and empathic relation to an intellectual tradition on one side, and a more critical vision of its political and symbolic expressions and uses on the other side, the last being based on a stance on sociological reflexivity, which makes Marxism a central object of analysis.