Abstract
Numerous scholars have pointed up Pierre Bourdieu’s lineage to Emile Durkheim and particularly Max Weber as Bourdieu himself acknowledged. Bourdieu’s relationship to Karl Marx, however, is more contested. Some critics have labelled Bourdieu as a Marxist. Others see him as a non-Marxist who nonetheless extends some of Marx’s thinking in useful directions. Still others contend that nothing in Bourdieu could substantively be considered Marxist. This chapter continues this critical examination of Bourdieu’s relationship to Marx but on an important topic that has received little attention, namely, how Bourdieu compares to Marx in thinking about the modern state. This chapter offers a systematic comparison of Bourdieu’s thinking to the relevant texts of Marx. It shows some overlap but considerable divergence in Bourdieu’s idea that states attempt to monopolize the means of symbolic violence, which for Bourdieu, more than for Marx, is key to controlling the social order. And it offers some intellectual field perspectives on the way Bourdieu relates to Marx’s texts.
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Notes
- 1.
See (Wacquant 2001) and (Mauger 2012) for devastating critiques of Alexander’s polemical enterprise. Mauger (2012: 39) argues that Bourdieu can no more be classified as a Marxist, a Weberian, or a Durkheimian, since he draws significantly from all three. Nonetheless, we are of the view that in terms of conceptualizing the State Bourdieu draws more substantially from Weber without being a Weberian.
- 2.
Bourdieu (1990: 27) notes that labeling one a Marxist, a Weberian, or a Durkheimian, is “almost always with a polemical, classificatory intention.” To say “‘Bourdieu, basically, is a Durkheimian.’ From the point of view of the speaker, this is performative; it means: he isn’t a Marxist, and that’s bad. Or else ‘Bourdieu is a Marxist,’ and that is bad. It’s almost always a way of reducing or destroying, you.” Mauger (2012: 25) perceptively notes that this is similar for the “Bourdieusian” label today!
- 3.
See Mauger (2012: 26) and Bourdieu (1990: 3–7) for testimony by Bourdieu that he read seriously the writings of Marx when a student at the École Normale Supérieure as well as their structuralist rendering by Louis Althusser but did not join or affiliate with the French Communist Party as many of his peers did.
- 4.
By contrast, in an earlier work, The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu 1990), that elaborates Bourdieu’s theory or practice, Marx is cited more than Durkheim or Weber.
- 5.
Burawoy (Burawoy and Von Holdt 2012: 41) notes in passing that the State is undertheorized by Marx even though it plays a key role in understanding the relations of the working class to the capitalist class, most notably in the numerous failures by the working class to mount a successful revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system.
- 6.
See Swartz (2013: chap. 5) for a more complete analysis of Bourdieu’s view of the State.
- 7.
See the scathing criticism that Bourdieu (1975) fires at the Althusserians.
- 8.
Batou and Keucheyan (2014) come to this conclusion as well. Though Bourdieu’s idea of the relative autonomy of fields bears the imprint of Althusser’s thought, the idea of relative autonomy can also be found in Weber’s concept of spheres from which Bourdieu elaborates more directly his concept of field.
- 9.
As arenas of struggle, the concept of fields is more open to resistance to the dominant powers than Althusser’s concept of “ideological status apparatus” suggests. Moreover, Bourdieu sees his concept of field to be more attentive to historical variation. He (Bourdieu 1990: 88) stresses that “as a game structured in a loose and weakly formalized fashion, a field is not an apparatus obeying the quasi-mechanical logic of a discipline capable of converting all action into mere execution.” But “under certain historical conditions, which must be examined empirically, Bourdieu (1992: 102) [admits that] a field may start to function as an apparatus.” In Bourdieu’s thinking, certain dictatorial regimes can take on apparatus-like characteristics.
- 10.
This chapter will not address the important comparison to be made between Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power and violence and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Burawoy (Burawoy and Von Holdt 2012: 51–67) notes a number of common themes in their work that are not pursued by Bourdieu, such as the importance of class struggle, their common criticisms of positivism and determinism, and the importance accorded to culture. Even Gramsci’s key notion of “hegemony,” despite its clear overlap with Bourdieu’s focus on symbolic domination and violence, receives little attention from Bourdieu. Bourdieu occasionally makes sharply critical references to Gramsci, but he appears to have in mind more the concept of “organic intellectuals” than the idea of hegemony. Bourdieu is largely dismissive of the idea of organic intellectuals, categorizing it as but a variation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea of the “fellow traveler” of the French Communist Party [see (Swartz 2013: 169–170) on this]. That said, Bourdieu tends to depict his emphasis on the struggle for symbolic power as more dynamic than the concept of hegemony. But in other parts of his work, Bourdieu stresses the omnipresence of the State monopoly over symbolic classifications that is very difficult to break through just as the pervasiveness of hegemony is difficult to undercut. As Batou and Keucheyan (2014) suggest, there was probably good intellectual field reasons for Bourdieu not engaging seriously Gramsci. During the 1960s and 1970s, Gramsci was largely being discussed by the Althusserian camp of French intellectuals, and Bourdieu was clearly hostile to the philosophical style of structural Marxism they propagated.
- 11.
See Desan’s (2013) analysis that, from a Marxist perspective, Bourdieu’s use of the language of capital does not extend Marx’s concept but offers something quite different.
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Swartz, D.L. (2022). Bourdieu on the State: Beyond Marx?. In: Paolucci, G. (eds) Bourdieu and Marx. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_7
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