Abstract
This essay argues that whilst historical materialism strongly inspired Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological perspective it also possesses, at the same time, other intellectual debts and footprints. First of all, the paper briefly notes the international context of the Marx-Bourdieu relation and references this debate in Latin America.
Subsequently, the article presents the central features of the Bourdieusian “economy of practices” pointing out the links to the Marxist perspective and the contribution of other sources such as: the double historicized objectivity; struggle as the engine of social life; capital and capitals; the denial of the economy; the legitimacy of domination and the symbolic violence; and the field as a game space.
Finally, the chapter reasserts the central argument to remember the analytical value of Bourdieu’s economy of practices, a condition we take as a “toolbox.”
The economic is never absent from any field however autonomous—whether the field is religious, juridical or literary. It is present, but it cannot appear in its in own name. This is important: in religion, they don’t speak of the salary of the priest but of ‘offering’.
—Bourdieu (2021: 48)
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This is also the interpretation made by Gutiérrez (1995). (Cf. Specially in pp. 26–30).
- 3.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (Marx 1937: 5).
- 4.
Translated from the original French by the author.
- 5.
This and other aspects related to a Bourdieusian analysis of history is considered in Gutiérrez (2016).
- 6.
In the case of the economic field, Lebaron points out two fundamental issues: first, that it is the historical result of an autonomization process of a social order (the economic one) and of a specific illusion, a particular belief in the value of that game. Second, that economic domination “imposes the very legitimacy of domination” and the dominant is not content with appropriating most of the wealth produced (surplus value, in the Marxist case) but rather “imposes on the dominated the vision of himself and his own reality that is his own gaze” (Lebaron 2004b: 133).
- 7.
Translated from the original Spanish by the author.
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Gutiérrez, A.B. (2022). Marx and Bourdieu: From the Economy to the Economies. In: Paolucci, G. (eds) Bourdieu and Marx. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_12
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