The Poverty of Philosophy: Marx Meets Bourdieu

Abstract

Marx and Bourdieu embark from similar criticisms of philosophers as suffering from the illusion that ideas make history—what Marx calls ideology and what Bourdieu calls scholastic reason. Marx and Bourdieu both identify the source of this fallacy in the failure of philosophers (and other intellectuals or academics) to recognize the peculiar conditions under which they produce their knowledge. Accordingly both Marx and Bourdieu turn from the logic of theory to the logic of practice: in the one case to the practical relations of productions and in the other case to bodily practices. However, where Marx sees the relations of production as leading to class struggle and eventually revolution, Bourdieu sees bodily practice as instilling symbolic domination through habitus. The dominated suffer from an almost irreversible misrecognition—an inability to comprehend their subjugation. So Bourdieu turns away from the dominated as a source of social change and back to intellectuals and the realpolitik of reason which calls on the state and law to realize their claims to universality. Similarly, the failure of working-class revolution leads Marx to return to the logic of theory—the theory of the self-destruction of the capitalist mode of production and alternative paths to the future—whereas the state’s failure to realize the project of universalization leads Bourdieu to turn back to the logic of practice—the mobilization of the dominated into social movements. These paradoxical moves lead Marx and Bourdieu to adopt divergent views of history; divergent approaches to social change; divergent roots of symbolic domination; and divergent perspectives on contentious politics. If the followers of Marx, especially Western Marxism, seek to explain the quiescence of the working class by developing powerful theories of cultural hegemony, will the followers of Bourdieu build a research programme that focuses on the internal contradictions and external anomalies of Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic domination? Or will they see Bourdieu’s writings as a final form of infallible knowledge?

Economic conditions first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle

—(Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 1847)

The historical success of Marxist theory, the first social theory to claim scientific status that has so completely realized its potential in the social world, thus contributes to ensuring that the theory of the social world which is the least capable of integrating the theory effect—that it, more than any other, has created—is doubtless, today, the most powerful obstacle to the progress of the adequate theory of the social world to which it has, in times gone by, more than any other contributed

—(Pierre Bourdieu, Social Spaces and the Genesis of “Classes,” 1984)