Abstract
This chapter outlines Bourdieu’s intellectual biography. It contends that his work can be understood in terms of a world-view. It then places his writings within the intellectual and political context within which they emerged. It argues that his work can be understood in terms of five major overlapping phases. Finally, it outlines and summarises his most important theoretical concepts, including habitus, field, capital, strategies and the economy of practices.
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- 1.
Yacine, Tassadit, ‘Introduction’ in Bourdieu, Pierre. Algerian Sketches. Edited by Yacine, Tassadit, Cambridge: Polity, 2013, p. 18.
- 2.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. 14th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
- 3.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
- 4.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity, 1991; Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990; Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998.
- 5.
Lane, Jeremy. Bourdieu’s Politics: Problems and Possibilities. New York: Palgrave, 2006.
- 6.
As Lukes notes of Durkheim’s politics: He had a ‘faith neither in the activities of politicians in parliament nor in the possibilities of proletarian revolution; least of all did he believe in the internationalism of the working class’ in Lukes, Steven. Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work. 2nd ed. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Australia, 1992, p. 322.
- 7.
As Clarke argues: ‘After the Franco-Prussian war, the Third republic set itself the task of rebuilding France and it was on this basis that Durkheimian sociology with its promotion of a secular education had flourished. Durkheim’s collectivistic, sociologistic, rationalistic, positivistic, and secular social philosophy centered on a secular state ensured that his thought became identified with the Republic as the embodiment of the collective conscience. Liberal republican intellectuals sought to protect society as a whole by acting as a moral collective force aimed at transforming educational institutions into secular rationalist institutions to impose a morality on an anomic social order... The Durkheimian republicans found themselves positioned between a nationalistic Catholic and monarchist militarism seeking to overthrow the Republic on the one side, and a working-class increasingly taking on syndicalist forms seeking a transformation of the whole society on the other.’ Clarke, Simon. The Foundations of Structuralism: A Critique Levi-Strauss and the Structuralist Movement. Sussex: Harvester, 1970, p. 11.
- 8.
See L. Wacquant ‘Durkheim and Bourdieu: The Common Plinth and Its Cracks’ in B. Fowler (ed.) Reading Bourdieu in Society and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, pp. 105–120.
- 9.
For a discussion of Bourdieu’s republican critique of culture see Yair, Gad. The Last Musketeer of the French Revolution. Plymouth: Lexington, 2009. For an overview of Bourdieu’s political interventions see Poupeau, Franck and Thierry Discepolo. ‘Scholarship with Commitment: On the Political Engagements of Pierre Bourdieu’ in L. Wacquant (ed.) Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: the Mystery of Ministry. Cambridge: Polity, 2005, pp. 64–90; Bourdieu, Pierre. Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action. Edited by Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo. United Kingdom: Verso Books, 2008; and Lane, Jeremy Bourdieu’s Politics.
- 10.
Poupeau, Franck and Thierry Discepolo. ‘Scholarship with Commitment: On the Political Engagements of Pierre Bourdieu’ in L. Wacquant (ed.) Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: the Mystery of Ministry, pp. 64–90; Bourdieu. Political Interventions.
- 11.
I take the concept from Mannheim.
- 12.
Bourdieu, Pierre. In Other Words. Cambridge: Polity, 1990, pp. 27–8.
- 13.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Sketch for a Self-Analysis. Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
- 14.
Descombes, Vincent. Modern French Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1981
- 15.
Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’. Edited by Allan David Bloom. New York: Cornell University Press, 1980.
- 16.
Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 5.
- 17.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper Row. 1962.
- 18.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. 1962, p. 92.
- 19.
Levi-Strauss. 1949. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969; Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1955. Tristes Tropiques. London: Penguin, 2012.
- 20.
Clarke, The Foundations of Structuralism, p. 7.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Anderson, Perry. The New Old World. London: Verso, p. 140.
- 23.
Le Sueur, James. Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
- 24.
Anderson, Old New World.
- 25.
For exceptions see Lane, Jeremy. Pierre Bourdieu. London: Pluto, 2000; Calhoun, Craig. ‘Pierre Bourdieu and Social Transformation.: Lessons from Algeria’ Development and Change, 37(6). 2006, pp. 1404–1415; Goodman, Jane E. and Paul A. Silverstein (eds.) Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009; Loyal, Steven. ‘The French in Algeria, Algerians in France: Bourdieu, Colonialism and Migration’ The Sociological Review, 57(3). 2009, pp. 406–427.
- 26.
Le Sueur. Uncivil War.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 1.
- 28.
Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘Algerian Landing’ Ethnography, 5(4). 2004, p. 438.
- 29.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, p. 5.
- 30.
See Bourdieu, In Other Words, pp. 6–7.
- 31.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Algerians. Boston: Beacon Press. 1961.
- 32.
Pierre Bourdieu, Darbel, Alain, Rivet, Jean-Pierre, and Seibel, Claude. Travail et Travailleurs en Algeria, Paris and the Hague: Mouton, 1963; Bourdieu, Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad. La Deracinement: La crise de l’agriculture traditionanelle en Algeria, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964.
- 33.
Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘What Makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups’ Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 32, pp. 1–18.
- 34.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.
- 35.
Bourdieu, Algeria, p. 94.
- 36.
Bourdieu, Algerian Sketches, p. 40.
- 37.
Bourdieu, Algeria, p. 134.
- 38.
Bourdieu. Algerian Sketches, p. 93.
- 39.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Bachelors Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Béarn. United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2007.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 83.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 93.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 85.
- 43.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 1990; Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean Claude Passeron, Monique de Saint Martin, Richard Teese, Guy Vincent, and Christian Baudelot. Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996; Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity. 1984; Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998.
- 44.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1964. The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
- 45.
Ibid., pp. 1, 2.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 8.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 17.
- 49.
Ibid., p. 19.
- 50.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1957.
- 51.
Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice; Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice.
- 52.
Bourdieu. Distinction.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 54.
Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 50.
- 55.
Alexander, Jeffrey. ‘The Reality of Reduction: The Failed Synthesis of Pirre Bourdieu’ in Jeffrey Alexander. Fin de Siecle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction and the Problem of Reason. London: Verso Books, 1995, pp. 128–217; Jenkins, Richard. Pierre Bourdieu. New York: Routledge, 1992.
- 56.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception, Londson: Routledge. 2012. p. 112.
- 57.
Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field’ Hastings Journal of Law, 38. 1987, pp. 814–853; Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field’ Comparative Social Research, 13. 1991, pp. 1–44. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993; Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996; Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998.
- 58.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Loic Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, p. 97.
- 59.
On the State, p. 75.
- 60.
Ibid., p. 242.
- 61.
Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation, p. 99.
- 62.
Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss. Primitive Classification. London: Cohen & West, 2009.
- 63.
Outline, p. 5.
- 64.
Ibid., p. 5.
- 65.
Ibid., p. 171.
- 66.
Marx, Karl. 1858. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Allen Lane, 1973.
- 67.
Outline, p. 192.
- 68.
See Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations.
- 69.
Outline, p. 4.
- 70.
Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean Claude Chamboredon, and Jean Claude Passeron. The Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries. Germany: Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1991.
- 71.
Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘The Specificity of the Scientific Field of the Progress of Reason, Social Science Information 14(6). 1975, pp. 19–47; Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘Animadversiones in Mertonem’ in J. Clark, C. Modgil and S. Modgil (eds) Robert K. Merton: Consensus and Controversy, London: Falmer Press. 1990, pp. 297–301; Bourdieu, Pierre. Science of Science and Reflexivity. Cambridge: Polity, 2004.
- 72.
Bourdieu, Science of Science, p. xii.
- 73.
Ibid., p. 166.
- 74.
Ibid., p.167.
- 75.
Ibid., p. 170.
- 76.
Rethinking the State, p. 9.
- 77.
As a result, individuals: ‘unwittingly contribute to wielding the symbolic violence that is wielded upon them, that is upon their unconscious, inasmuch as – and only inasmuch as – their mental structures are objectively in agreement with the social microcosm in which their specific interests are engendered and invested, in and by this very agreement’ Bourdieu, Pierre. In Other Words, Cambridge: Polity, p. 12).
- 78.
Bourdieu Pierre and Boltanski, Luc. ‘La Production de L’Ideologie Dominante’ Actes de la recherche en sciences social Juin 3(3).1976, p8.
- 79.
Austin, John. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.
- 80.
Searle, John. The Construction of Social Reality. London: Penguin. 1979.
- 81.
Anscombe, Elizabeth. Intention. Harvard: Harvard University Press. 2000; The work of Wittgenstein and Nelson Goodman is also directly of relevance. The latter discusses multiple worlds constructed differently according to the categories used by the observer. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. 1978.
- 82.
It is important to note here, that unlike speech act theorists, language is not an autonomous realm of communication and meaning but integrally tied to power. As Wacquant notes, ‘The efficacy of performative discourse is directly proportional to the authority of the agent who enunciates it and to its degree of congruence with the objective partitions of society’ Wacquant, Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics, p. 15.
- 83.
Bourdieu, Language, p. 106.
- 84.
Barnes, Barry. ‘Social Life as Bootstrapped Indiction’ Sociology 17. 1983, pp. 524–545; Barnes, Barry. The Nature of Power. Cambridge: Polity. 1988.
- 85.
Bourdieu, Language, p. 128.
- 86.
Ibid.
- 87.
Ibid., p. 135.
- 88.
Ibid. Here if he argues that beliefs constitute the social world viz-a-viz performativity of language then how can they be measured according to an objective reality independent of it? It is impossible to collectively define beliefs as true or false (or real and unreal) objective or not, when these beliefs do not exist independently of what they are referring but are instead partially constitutive of that very objective reality. There is no criterion by which to judge them – that is, as Wittgenstein remarks elsewhere, ‘there is no standard of correctness’ Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations para 130.
- 89.
Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, pp. 237–245.
- 90.
Bourdieu, Pascalian, pp. 238–239. He adds: ‘So without indulging in the existential exhaltation of ‘sein-zum-Tode’, one can establish a necessary link between three indisputable and inseparable anthropological facts: man is and knows he is mortal, the thought he is going to die is unbearable or impossible for him, and, condemned to death, an end (in the sense of termination) which cannot be taken as an end (in the sense of a goal), since it represents as Heidegger put it, ‘the possibility of impossibility’, he is a being without reason for being, haunted by the need for justification, legitimation, recognition. And as Pascal suggest, in this quest for justifications for existing, what he calls ‘the world’ or ‘society’ is the only recourse other than God. Ibid., p. 240.
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Loyal, S. (2017). Bourdieu’s Intellectual Biography. In: Bourdieu's Theory of the State. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58350-5_2
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