Pierre Bourdieu, the centrality of the social, and the possibility of politics (original) (raw)
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From critical sociology to public intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and politics
Theory and Society, 2003
By the late 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu had become the primary public intellectual of major social scientific status at the head of the anti-globalization movement that emerged in France and in other Western European countries. This article discusses how Bourdieu became a leading public intellectual, a role that seems to contrast with his early years as a professional sociologist. It explores what seemed to change in Bourdieu’s activities and outlook as sociologist and what seems to have remained constant. It identifies several institutional conditions that seemed necessary for Bourdieu to be able to play the kind of public intellectual role he did in his later years. Bourdieu’s movement from a peripheral position to a central location in the French intellectual field, the changing character of the field itself, the growing influence of the mass media in French political and cultural life, the failures of the French Socialists in power, a cultural legacy of leading critical intellectuals in France, a unifying national issue of globalization, and the political conjuncture in 1995 all intersected in ways that opened a path for Bourdieu to choose new and more frequent forms of political action. His responses to that combination of factors at different moments reveal both a striking continuity in desire to preserve the autonomy of intellectual life and a change in view and strategy on how best to do that. The article concludes with a brief evaluation of Bourdieu’s public intellectual role.
Scholarship with commitment: On the political engagements of Pierre Bourdieu
Constellations, 2004
I run the risk of shocking those [researchers] who, opting for the cozy virtuousness of confinement within their ivory tower, see intervention outside the academic sphere as a dangerous failing of that famous "axiological neutrality" that is wrongly equated with scientific objectivity.. .. But I am convinced that we must at all costs bring the achievements of science and scholarship into public debate, from which they are tragically absent. Pierre Bourdieu, Preface to Contre-feux 2 Pierre Bourdieu's interventions since the mass strikes and demonstrations that rocked France in December of 1995 have been the object of oft-violent condemnations by the Parisian journalists and media intellectuals whose power he mercilessly dissected in his writings on television and journalism. Bourdieu was widely accused by established newspaper writers of "coming late" to political action and of abusing his scientific renown. But the sociologist's engagements with political issues date from his entry into intellectual life, in the 1960s during the Algerian War of Independence. 1 Since then, continual reflection on the "social conditions of possibility" of his civic interventions has led him to separate himself as much from pedantic scientism as from blind faith in political spontaneity, still much in evidence among "free intellectuals." Taken as a whole, Bourdieu's trajectory recounts the genesis of a specifically political mode of intervention in which social science and civic activism, far from being opposed, can be construed as the two faces of the same coin of analysis and critique of social reality aimed at contributing to its transformation. It is a trajectory that illustrates how sociology itself is enriched by political engagement and reflection on the social and intellectual conditions of this engagement: The time has come to transcend the old alternative of utopianism and sociologism in order to propose sociologically-based utopias. For this social scientists would have to succeed in collectively exploding the censorship they feel obliged to impose on themselves in the name of a truncated idea of scientificity.. .. The social sciences have purchased their access to the status of a science (in any case always disputed) by a formidable renunciation: through a self-censorship that constitutes a veritable self-mutilation, sociologists-myself for one, who have often denounced the temptation of prophetism and social philosophy-have made themselves refuse all attempts to
The intellectual development of Pierre Bourdieu
Századvég Publishing
Pierre Bourdieu, born in 1930, gradually became one of the most influential French sociologists of the late 1980s with the sociological work he began in 1957 and, at the time of his death in 2002, one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century. This chapter traces in detail the shifts in emphasis in his research and the major publications that characterized them, and provides at least some indication of the brief messages of some of his works and the changes in his position that can be traced in this way. In order to provide a more accurate understanding of Bourdieu's intellectual trajectory, it should be briefly noted at the outset that in the last 45 years of his life, after his initial ethnological research, Bourdieu focused on four major areas, each of which was the focus of his analysis for several years, but all four areas were constantly present in his thinking in smaller studies. In the 1960s, his research focused primarily on the various areas of the sociology of education; in the 1970s, his analysis shifted to both the sociology of art and the sociology of language; while in the 1980s, in addition to the smaller studies he had previously conducted, he incorporated the academic-scientific field into his research with regular monographic analyses. In addition to these four areas, he also included a number of other areas in his analyses with smaller studies-for example, he wrote several small papers on contract in the sports field and a study of the legal field-but his thinking was essentially based on analyses of these four areas. Unlike other greats of modern sociological theory, such as Parsons, Luhmann, or Habermas, Bourdieu's way of thinking is characterized by the fact that he carried out a series of analyses, including extensive empirical surveys (with large teams), and abstracted these results after drawing first-order theoretical conclusions, and at this level he gradually built the categories of his overarching social theory through the "cross-fertilization" of the findings obtained in the different fields. In other words, we can say that the four major areas of research mentioned above were gradually integrated into a comprehensive social theory, and that the smaller areas of research mentioned above also served to further test the theoretical framework thus created. Bourdieu's thinking thus clearly reflects the demands that characterize modern sociological theory to a greater or lesser extent in relation to older social philosophies. It involves a constant back and forth between more detailed empirical knowledge and abstract theorizing, and is no longer characterized by the exclusivity of logical construction from concept to concept at the abstract level. After this introduction, let us take a closer look at the shifts in emphasis and the construction process of Bourdieu's research and his general theory.
Introduction: Preliminary Reflections on the Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu
Critical Essays, 2009
This chapter has been published in the volume 'The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays', edited by Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, London: Anthem Press 2011. xiv THE LEGACY OF PIERRE BOURDIEU the fi gure of Nietzsche behind Weber. Subsequently, Parsons's reception of Weber was much criticised by writers who sought to 'de-Parsonise' Weber. Later, in 1947, Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills brought out From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, which showed an increased interest in Weber's writings on the state, bureaucracy, power, and authority. Although other North American sociologists-such as Lewis Coser in his Masters of Sociological Thought (1971)were appreciative of the European legacy, most North American sociologists looked to their own traditions, in particular to the Chicago School, pragmatism, and symbolic interactionism. Their 'founding fathers' were Mead, Park, and Thomas, rather than Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. This gap between a critical-pessimistic Western European sociology and a progressive-optimistic North American sociology persists to a signifi cant extent today. To take one example, Jeffrey C. Alexander has been at the forefront of the study of the European tradition, but his recent work The Civil Sphere (2006) has a characteristic positive conclusion based on the view that various social movements in North American history-notably the women's movement and the civil rights movement-as well as the incorporation of the Jewish community into North American public life testify to the success, fl exibility, and robustness of political liberalism in general and American liberalism in particular. There has been a long tradition of critical writing in North American sociology; yet, naturally enough, its focus has been on migration and immigrants, the 'racial' divide, the civil rights movement, and US imperialism in Latin America. By contrast, in European sociology after the mid-twentieth century, the Left was preoccupied with both empirical and conceptual problems that emerged from the legacy of Marxism, such as social class and class consciousness, the role of the state in capitalism, and the role of ideology in class societies-to mention only a few. While 1968 had an impact on both sides of the Atlantic, its meaning in the European context was somewhat different (Sica and Turner, 2005). As shall be explained in the chapter on Pierre Bourdieu's treatment of religion, one clear difference between Western European and North American sociology can be described as follows: whereas Western European sociologistssuch as the British sociologist Bryan Wilson-mapped the steady decline of religion in the modern world in the secularisation thesis, North American sociologists were inclined to record the resilience of religion and its essential contribution to the North American way of life, as in the works of Talcott Parsons, Will Herberg, Liston Pope, and Gerhard E. Lenski. Across the Atlantic, although Britain had emerged successfully from the Second World War, European Anglophone sociology was not especially optimistic or triumphant. The British Empire, which had been in decline since the end of the Victorian period, was fi nally pulled apart by the war effort, and even the Commonwealth survived only as a fragile reminder of the past. Under This chapter has been published in the volume 'The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays', edited by Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, London: Anthem Press 2011.
Philosophy and Society, 2021
The event was planned on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of one of the world's leading sociologists-Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002). The greatest indicator of the scope of Bourdieu's influence is the fact that he has become the world's most cited sociologist, ahead of Émile Durkheim, and the world's second most cited author in social sciences and the humanities, after Michel Foucault and ahead of Jacques Derrida. As part of this discussion, we address the subject of "Bourdieu and Politics", politics-broadly constructed. We evoke Pierre Bourdieu's involvement in public affairs during the 1990s, while taking into account the concept of the collective intellectual that Bourdieu introduced into social sciences by giving it a specific meaning. Ivica Mladenović: Professor Sapiro, you recently directed an impressive collective work: Bourdieu International Dictionary (Sapiro 2020), which has already become the best-selling encyclopedia and dictionary of sociology and ethnology on Amazon. It contains nearly 600 entries, it is composed of a team of 126 authors from 20 countries, and brings together specialists of Pierre Bourdieu, among them sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, historians, anthropologists, and others. The entries cover: concepts, objects of research, methods, disciplines and intellectual currents with which Bourdieu interacted,