Sociology of Bourdieu

Journal of Classical Sociology
Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi Vol 2(3): 299328 [1468795X(200211)2:3;299328;031196] www.sagepublications.com
Sociology and Philosophy in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu, 1965751

DEREK ROBBINS University of East London
ABSTRACT The paper rst offers a brief account of the competition between the
Durkheimian sociological tradition and German philosophy in the period in which Bourdieu was a student at the Ecole Normale Sup erieure. It indicates the intellectual inuences of the early years that Bourdieu subsequently acknowledged and then examines his use of the work of Weber in his rst book, Sociologie de lAlg erie (1958). The paper then focuses on the development of Bourdieus thought from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, a period in which he strategically presented himself as an anti-humanist sociologist whilst also articulating a view of science that was in tune with phenomenological and ontological philosophy. Bourdieus Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945 (1967a) receives particular attention since his analysis of sociology and philosophy in France in the post-war period was a key element in his own position-taking in respect of the two disciplines. The paper then examines Bourdieus critiques of Weber at this time and suggests that his dissatisfaction with Webers epistemology logically became a dissastisfaction with the claims of sociological explanation as such. There followed an attempt to reconcile a commitment to social science with an allegiance to elements of phenomenological thought. The outcome was a willingness on Bourdieus part to see reexivity as a means to problematizing sociological explanation more than as a means to rening it or making it more sophisticated. The consequence was that commitments to phenomenological ontology and social science co-existed in this period. The balance was to change again subsequently in Bourdieus thought, and his responsivenesss to changing conditions exemplies how we should ourselves rethink the relations between possible future social theories and the classical theories of Western sociology.
KEYWORDS Bourdieu, phenomenology, philosophy, sociology, Weber
The specicity of the title is signicant in two respects. Bourdieu insisted that the relations between disciplines or modes of thinking are not immutable or atemporal. In particular, the relations between sociology and philosophy are, in his word, arbitrary, or, perhaps more precisely, socially and historically contingent. In part, this article explores Bourdieus representation of this contingency in French intellectual life, but it is also an article that considers the contingency within Bourdieus own intellectual production during one decade. I begin by offering a brief account of the competition between the Durkheimian sociological tradition and German philosophy in the period in which Bourdieu was a student at the Ecole Normale Sup erieure. I indicate, rstly, the intellectual inuences of his early years, which Bourdieu subsequently acknowledged, and then examine his use of the work of Weber in his rst book Sociologie de lAlg erie (1958). I then focus on the development of Bourdieus thought from the mid-1960s to the mid1970s, a period in which he strategically presented himself as an anti-humanist sociologist whilst also articulating a view of science that was in tune with phenomenological and ontological philosophy. Bourdieus Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945 (1967a) receives particular attention since his analysis of sociology and philosophy in France in the post-war period was a key element in his own position-taking in respect of the two disciplines. The article examines Bourdieus critiques of Weber and suggests that his dissatisfaction with Webers epistemology logically became a dissatisfaction with the claims of sociological explanation as such. There followed an attempt to reconcile a commitment to social science with an allegiance to elements of phenomenological thought. The outcome was a willingness on Bourdieus part to see reexivity as a means to problematizing sociological explanation more than as a means to rening it or making it more sophisticated. The consequence was that commitments to phenomenological ontology and social science co-existed in this period. The balance was to change again subsequently in Bourdieus thought, and his responsiveness to changing conditions exemplies how we should ourselves rethink the relations between possible social theories and the classical theories of Western sociology.
The State of French Sociology in the 1920s

Georges Davy published Sociologues dhier et daujourdhui in 1931. It was a collection of four studies on Espinas, Durkheim, McDougall in relation to Durkheimian sociology, and L evy-Bruhl that had been published in French journals during the 1920s, preceded by an article on La Sociologie Franaise de 1918 a ` 1925, which had rst been published in English in The Monist in 1926. In spite of the consideration of American social psychology in the third study, the collection was narrowly nationalist. There were no references to American sociology or to Marx or Weber. The assessment of past and present sociologists indicated by the title amounted exclusively to a consideration of the progress of an independent French tradition. Davy was a rst-generation Durkheimian, which
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meant that he saw himself as a second-generation positivist. Born at the time of Comtes death, L evy-Bruhl and Durkheim separately and differently as students at the Ecole Normale Sup erieure in the 1880s began to give intellectual and institutional esh to the emergent sociology sketched in the Cours de philosophie positive. Born in 1883 and also a student at the Ecole Normale Sup erieure, Davy became associated with the Ann ee Sociologique cluster (Clark, 1973) in 1910, and as early as 1912 ve years before the death of Durkheim published a choice of Durkheim texts with an introductory study of his sociological system in a series devoted to Les Grands Philosophes. Franais et e trangers (Davy, 1912). Davy was an apologist for Durkheim. Writing his introduction to Sociologues dhier et daujourdhui in 1926, he celebrated the pioneering work of SaintSimon and Comte with their idea of a distinct social reality, the object of a distinct social science as objective as the other sciences (1931: 6), which was the origin of a positivist and rationalist sociology that, he argued, had been in eclipse for a good quarter of a century. Davy was convinced that this sociology was going to be reborn with the work of Espinas and spread with the work of Durkheim and his school. During this period of eclipse presumably between 1900 and 1925 Davy was prepared to acknowledge the importance of the followers of Le Play, particularly in respect of their methodology, but there was no doubt in his mind that the future lay with the Durkheimians. He welcomed the editions of the work of Saint-Simon which were published in 1924 and 1925 under the inuence of Bougl e and the appearance of key posthumous editions of Durkheims work in the mid-1920s, and he warmly praised Bougl es own work and that of Fauconnet, placing his own texts, particularly Le droit, lid ealisme et lexp erience (1922), within the same increasingly dominant Durkheimian movement. The emergent intellectual dominance was in the process of being underpinned by signicant institutional developments. At the end of his introductory article, Davy pointed to the fact that sociology had now been accepted within the Licence and had also been introduced as a subject for study in the e coles normales primaires and for the baccalaur eat. The mutual support of institutional and intellectual trends was consolidated by the production of several sociology textbooks, one of which was ements de sociologie (1924). Davy was condent that he was part of an his own El unstoppable resurgence of sociological analysis that was still rmly attached to the ideological and methodological commitments of the mid-19th-century founders.
Inuences on French Thought after 1930

Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 and he studied at the Ecole Normale Sup erieure from 1951 to 1955. The situation was by then far from what Davy had expected. Shortly before the year of publication of Sociologues dhier et daujourdhui, Edmund Husserl had given what were to be published as his Paris Lectures
ROBBINS PIERRE BOURDIEU, 196575
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(Husserl, 1964). By the mid-1950s, Merleau-Ponty had researched the Husserl Archive in Louvain and was inuential in disseminating his ideas in France. Lyotard wrote a small introduction to phenomenology in 1954 in which he discussed Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and Bourdieus near contemporary at the Ecole , Derrida, was writing an introduction to a translation of Husserls Origins of Geometry (Derrida, 1974). Also in 1954, Foucault participated in the translation of Ludwig Binswangers Traum und Existenz, and wrote a long introductory discussion of existential psychiatry for it. The inuence of Heidegger was apparent here as it had been in the work of Sartre during the 1930s leading to the publication of LEtre et le n eant in 1943. Meanwhile, Raymond Aron had been responsible for introducing the work of Dilthey, Rickert, Simmel and Weber in his Essai sur la th eorie de lhistoire dans lAllemagne contemporaine (1938). Equally, of course, Jean Hyppolite in particular had been responsible for the renewed interest in Hegel and for the consequential rise of Marxist existentialism that has been described in detail by Mark Poster (1975). In parallel with this French interest in German thought in the period between 1930 and 1960 was the tangible effect of the period of the Second World War on the institutional situation of sociology. Davys condence was misplaced, for very tangible reasons. Appended to Roger Geigers article Durkheimian Sociology under Attack: The Controversy over Sociology in the Ecoles Normales Primaires (in Besnard, 1983) is a letter written in 1941 from the Vatican City by the Vichy R egimes ambassador to the Vatican, who had been a civil servant at the time of the introduction of sociology into the curriculum of the e coles normales primaires, which Davy celebrated in 1931. L eon Berard wrote: Let us return to the program of the Ecoles Normales Primaires of 1920. . . . to these normal school students who came from the Higher Primary Schools, who had not done one hour of philosophy, they were going to teach not philosophy, but, among the hundreds or thousands of diverse systems, one xed system of philosophy: Durkheims sociology. I must tell you that for several years the teachings of that rabbinical ideologue had become a sort of ofcial and practically obligatory academic doctrine. The sociologists were in possession of magisterial chairs at the Sorbonne. . . . From them emanated the decisive and directing inuences. (Besnard, 1983: 135) Only in 1941 could this anti-semitic opposition to sociology have been so clearly articulated. There was, perhaps, an unholy afnity between the French vogue for German philosophy that developed in the 1930s and the decline of French sociology in the 1940s. Certainly, in the interview of 1985 in which Bourdieu recollected his student days, he insisted that sociology teaching was intellectually moribund and that his fellow normaliens treated the subject with contempt. Fed
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the line by his questioners that philosophy was dominated by a sociologist in the early 1950s, Bourdieu replied: No that was just the effect of institutional authority. And our contempt for sociology was intensied by the fact that a sociologist could be president of the board of examiners of the competitive agr egation exam in philosophy and force us to attend his lectures which we thought were lousy on Plato and Rousseau. (1990: 5) Bourdieu was referring here to Georges Davy. Davys authority epitomized for him the contemporary condition of Durkheimianism. It possessed institutional capital but had forfeited intellectual capital.
Bourdieus Philosophical Training

In considering the relationship of Bourdieus work to the classical tradition of sociology, it is important to keep rmly in mind the fact that he was trained in philosophy and was not at all formally educated either as a sociologist or as an anthropologist. For his dipl ome d etudes sup erieures, he prepared a translation of Leibnizs Animadversiones in partem generalem Principiorum cartesianorum and wrote a commentary on it under the supervision of Henri Gouhier, a historian of philosophy. In one of his last interviews with Yvette Delsaut (Delsaut & Rivi` ere, 2002) Bourdieu did not deny that whilst he was teaching at the Lyc ee in Moulins from 1955 to 1956 he had registered to write a th` ese d etat under the supervision of Georges Canguilhem on Les structures temporelles de la vie affective. It appears that this did not materialize but, in the 1985 interview from which I have already quoted, Bourdieu mentioned that he had undertaken research into the phenomenology of emotional life, or more exactly into the temporal structures of emotional experience (1990: 67), and it seems likely that he was referring to this unwritten or incomplete thesis. In the same interview, Bourdieu supplied more information about the people who had inuenced his intellectual develop ment when he was a student at the Ecole Normale Sup erieure. There are several important components of this development. First of all, Bourdieu acknowledged that he had read Being and Nothingness very early on, and then Merleau-Ponty and Husserl. He was, therefore, well aware of what he called phenomenology, in its existentialist variety. He argued that he had never really got into the existentialist mood, but, nevertheless admitted that: I read Heidegger, I read him a lot and with a certain fascination, especially the analyses in Sein und Zeit of public time, history and so on, which, together with Husserls analyses in Ideen II, helped me a great deal as
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was later the case with Sch utz in my efforts to analyse the ordinary experience of the social. (Bourdieu, 1990: 5) It is easily possible to discern from these acknowledgements the provenance of Bourdieus concern with the problem of the temporal structures of affective life. Secondly, the inuence of Marx was negatively signicant. In the 1985 interview, Bourdieu claimed that Marxism did not really exist as an intellectual position in the early 1950s in France, but that I did read Marx at that time for academic reasons; I was especially interested in the young Marx, and I had been fascinated by the Theses on Feuerbach (1990: 3). This was the decade before Sartres Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) and before the brief intellectual domination of Althusser. Bourdieu was well read in Marx but never committed to Marxism or to the universality of Marxist explanation. Thirdly, Bourdieu mentioned the inuence of several philosophers whose classes he attended whilst at the Ecole Normale Sup erieure. He mentioned the inuence on him of Henri Gouhier, Georges Canguilhem, Gaston Bachelard, Eric Weill, Alexander Koyr e, Martial Gu eroult and Jules Vuillemin, and commented that: All these people were outside the usual syllabus, but its pretty much thanks to them and to what they represented a tradition of the history of the sciences and of rigorous philosophy . . . that I tried, together with those people who, like me, were a little tired of existentialism, to go beyond merely reading the classical authors and to give some meaning to philosophy. (1990: 4) There is a common thread that links many of the authors whom Bourdieu cites. That thread relates to Kant in that many of the authors were engaged in academic philosophical analysis of the relevance of Kantian epistemology to the philosophy of natural science, either by reference to pre-critical philosophers such as Leibniz or to post-Kantian thinkers such as Fichte (see, e.g., Gu eroult, 1930, 1934; Vuillemin, 1954, 1955; Weill, 1963). These authors can, crudely, be put into two categories of thinking: on the one hand, those, like Canguilhem and Bachelard, who were particularly interested in developing a philosophy of science or a historical epistemology with respect to scientic explanation; and, on the other hand, those who were more concerned to engage philosophically with the work of Kant, or post-Kantians like Fichte, or varieties of neo-Kantianism. In different ways, however, this third strand of inuence on Bourdieus thought involved consideration of the social or historical contingency of scientic explanation. We have Abdelmalek Sayads testimony (1996) that what was impressive about Bourdieus teaching of Kant at the University of Algiers in the last few years
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of the 1950s was that it used Kantian philosophy to inform methodological practice in social science observation. Bourdieu was interested in Kant and the neo-Kantians to advance reexive sociological inquiry. His interest in the Critique of Practical Reason, for instance, was that Kantian insights should be deployed to improve the exercise of reason in practice. This disinclination to philosophize abstractly is also evident in Bourdieus remarks about the fourth strand of inuence on his early thinking structuralism. He attacked L evi-Strauss for appropriating the linguistic science of Saussure in such a way as to maintain the status of philosophy. Making glancing blows against Foucault, Derrida and Barthes, Bourdieu criticized the tendency of the 1960s to draw freely on the prots of scienticity and the prots associated with the status of philosopher in using the -ology effect archaeology, grammatology and semiology to give pseudo-empirical substance to theoretical speculation precisely at the time when, rather, it was necessary to question the status of philosopher and all its prestige so as to carry out a true conversion into science. In short, as Bourdieu put it, although I made an attempt in my work to put into operation the structural or relational way of thinking in sociology, I resisted with all my might the merely fashionable forms of structuralism (1990: 6). Bourdieu also lectured on Durkheim and Saussure at the University of Algiers, but his interest, as in the case of the lectures on Kant, was methodological rather than systematic he was trying to establish the limits of attempts to produce pure theories (1990: 6). Bourdieu conrmed many of these inuences in a paper that he gave in Amsterdam in 1989. In the article that was subsequently published in English translation as Thinking About Limits, Bourdieu wrote: What I now very quickly want to address is the epistemological tradition in which I have begun to work. This was for me like the air that we breathe, which is to say that it went unnoticed. It is a very local tradition tied to a number of French names: Koyr e, Bachelard, Canguilhem and, if we go back a little, to Duhem. . . . This historical tradition of epistemology very strongly linked reection on science with the history of science. Differently from the neo-positivist, Anglo-Saxon tradition, it was from the history of science that it isolated the principles of knowledge of scientic thought. (1992a: 41) This may have been a strategic statement, just as, equally, may have been the remarks offered in the 1985 interview. The 1985 interview was with, amongst others, Axel Honneth, who, at the time, was research assistant to J urgen Habermas, and Bourdieu may well have been wanting to emphasize the nature of his philosophical trajectory away from academic philosophy towards practising social anthropology precisely so as to differentiate his own position from that of
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Habermas. Equally, the Amsterdam paper was presented at the time in which Bourdieu was seeking to emphasize the potential for universalization of the particular French tradition to which he belonged in opposition to the threat of universal conceptual domination posed by the American positivist tradition. This was the period of his engagement with American social science as manifested in Social Theory for a Changing Society, which he co-edited with James Coleman (Coleman and Bourdieu, 1989) following a conference held in Chicago, and, in particular, of Bourdieus Epilogue to that publication entitled On the Possibility of a Field of World Sociology. These are necessary caveats to be entered in relation to Bourdieus retrospective account in the late 1980s of his early intellectual development. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I want to examine some of Bourdieus earliest texts, especially some of those written between 1965 and 1975 during the period in which he developed his distinctive concepts and in which, I shall argue, he sought to reconcile his knowledge of the classical tradition of sociological explanation with his philosophical disposition to give social science a new kind of epistemological foundation.
Bourdieus First Book

The tension between philosophy and sociology had already been apparent in Bourdieus rst book: Sociologie de lAlg erie (1958). As I have already indicated, Bourdieus intention was to transfer his philosophical interest in the phenomenological analysis of emotions and intersubjectivity to apply to the larger issues of cross-cultural adaptation that he witnessed in relation to the Algerian response to French colonial intervention in North Africa. He needed to establish a status quo ante of Algerian cultures in order, subsequently, to analyse processes of cultural adjustment. This was the motive forcing him to nd ways of describing the traditional organization of Algerian tribes. A descriptive sociology was a necessary instrument to develop a descriptive phenomenology of acculturation processes. Attention has always focused in particular on Bourdieus discussion of the Kabyle culture in the second chapter of his book. This is understandable because Kabyle culture was always a point of reference in his thinking, even, for instance, as late as in his contribution to the discussion of gender issues in La domination masculine (1998). Durkheim had also cited the Kabyles as evidence for the existence of the kind of mechanical solidarity that he called politico-familial organization in Chapter 6 of The Division of Labour in Society (1933). Bourdieu did not cite Durkheim in the Bibliography or the text of Sociologie de lAlg erie, but the two sources of information cited by Durkheim (Hanoteau and Letourneux, 1873; Masqueray, 1886). It seems likely, therefore, that Bourdieus interpretation of the social organization of the Kabyles derived from the same sources as did Durkheims interpretation, but there is nothing to suggest that Bourdieu was endorsing Durkheims distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity or, indeed, that he was engaging directly with Durkheims text at all. By contrast,
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Bourdieus Bibliography does contain Webers Gesammelte Aufs atze zur Religionssoziologie (19201). Apart from the mention of several American texts on acculturation, the reference to Webers volume is the only explicitly theoretical one in the Bibliography. There are also many references to texts on Islamic law and Islamic religious practices (including Chelhod, 1958; Letourneau, 1950). The discussion of the Kabyles focuses on berber law but has no reference at all to religion. It is the rather more neglected chapter on the Mozabite culture (Chapter 4) that mainly appears to be the product of Bourdieus reading in the secondary literature that he cited. His discussion of the Mozabites overtly operated with the language that is familiar to us from the rst part of the Aufs atze that is separately published as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1930). Bourdieu started with the paradox of Mozabite culture that it stimulated sophisticated and dispersed commercial activity across North Africa whilst retaining tight social and cultural cohesion. He sought to nd the why and the how of this paradox, and Webers interpretation of the relationship between Calvinism and capitalism provided a ready-made, off-the-peg explanation. The Mozabites were adherents of a heretical sect of Islam and the heresy was based on two principles derived from a strict interpretation of the Koran that all believers are equal and that every action is either good or bad. On this basis, Bourdieu proceeded to describe the Mozabites as religious dissidents: Thus these equalitarian rigorists, according to whom religion must be vivied not only by faith but also by works and purity of conscience, who attach great value to pious intention, who reject the worship of saints, who watch over the purity of morals with extreme severity, could be called the Protestants and Puritans of Islam. (1958: 45/1962b: 39) The adoption of Weberian terminology is blatant. The chapter has a sub-heading called Puritanism and Capitalism and it concludes that the soul and the life of the Mozabites . . . are organized around two distinct centers which stand in the same opposition as the sacred and the profane. Thus it is that the modernistic adaptation to the world of nance and business does not contradict the rigid traditionalism of the religious life but, on the contrary, preserves it and makes it possible. (1958: 58/1962b: 545) It needs to be said, of course, that Sociologie de lAlg erie was probably written quickly in difcult circumstances as the Algerian War of Independence was becoming more intense, and it also needs to be accepted that this was the rst
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publication of a relatively young man. The point is not so much the inadequacy of the analysis as the nature of the inadequacy. Bourdieu was prepared to use whatever sociological explanations were to hand and which seemed plausibly to t the historical, ethnographic records with which he was working. He did not try rigorously to defend the analogy that he deployed between Kharedjite Abadhites and Calvinists, concentrating only on the formal similarities without referring to substantive differences between dissident Islam and dissident Christianity, precisely because his interest was not at all in the validity of the sociological explanation as such. Bourdieus accounts of the original social organization of the Algerian tribes were only of interest to him in as much as they could be regarded as objectications of the putative subjective values of those people whom he was to interview in their new situations in Algiers. The accounts were discursive exercises. Although the rst edition of the book was entitled Sociologie de lAlg erie, the English translation of 1962 was entitled The Algerians, by which time, also, the ndings were differently presented. By 1962, Bourdieu, back in France, had attended some of the research seminars of L evi-Strauss, and the English text contains diagrammatic representations of the social/spatial organization of a Kabyle house that anticipate La maison kabyle ou le monde renvers e (Bourdieu, 1970b). This was Bourdieus most L evi-Straussian article, but it subsequently became clear that there was no more conviction on his part about this ethnological gloss than there had been in his use of Weberian discourse. What we see in Bourdieus own critique of some of his earlier L evi-Straussian pieces in the rst part of Esquisse dune th eorie de la pratique (1972) is not so much the discovery of a new methodological position as the articulation of a position that was able to accommodate the articiality of the explanatory discourses that he had exploited in his formative intellectual apprenticeship in North Africa. It is to this process of articulation that we must now turn.
Champ Intellectuel et projet createur

Bourdieus thought always developed within the framework of an intellectual matrix. He simultaneously pursued ideas within and between compartments so that, for instance, the articulation of his philosophy and methodology in respect of his Algerian anthropological research emerged in the early 1970s after a decade of research and reection that could be thought to belong to the sociology of culture and education. The difculty is to know where to break into this matrix so as to try to represent it. However, I take as my starting point the article that was rst published in a special number of Les Temps Modernes in 1966 devoted to the problems of structuralism: Champ intellectuel et projet cr eateur (1966d). Since returning to France from Algeria, Bourdieu had published two books arising from his sociological work there, and also several articles that were pursuing lines of inquiry derived from the Algerian studies notably in relation to time, honour and work. After several years lecturing at the University of Lille, Bourdieu was
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established as a lecturer in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and as a researcher in Arons research group, the Centre de Sociologie Europ eenne. He had undertaken studies of the experience of students in French higher education, particularly students of philosophy and sociology at the University of Lille when he was teaching there. The same mixture of concerns was present in this work as had been present in the Algerian research. Les h eritiers: les e tudiants et la culture (1964) focused on the curriculum as a mechanism of acculturation, and Bourdieu published the results of questionnaires that attempted to generate a prole of the cultures of students prior to their academic studies. He had been involved with a project on photography and photographic clubs, which resulted in the publication of Un art moyen: les usages sociaux de la photographie in 1965, and also with a project analysing the attendance at French, and then selected European, museums/art galleries, which resulted in the publication of Lamour de lart in 1966 (1966a). That year saw the publication of Condition de classe et position de classe (1966b) and Une sociologie de laction est-elle possible? (1966c), both of which were essentially theoretical, the former in relation to structuralism and the latter in opposition to Alain Touraine, but there had been very little reason to anticipate the developed argument of Champ intellectuel et projet cr eateur neither the articulation of the concept of eld nor the application to cultural history. The opening paragraph needs to be given in full. Bourdieu began: In order that the sociology of intellectual and artistic creation be assigned its proper object and at the same time its limits, the principle must be perceived and stated that the relationship between a creative artist and his work, and therefore his work itself, is affected by the system of social relations within which creation as an act of communication takes place, or to be more precise, by the position of the creative artist in the structure of the intellectual eld (which is itself, in part at any rate, a function of his past work, and the reception it has met with). The intellectual eld, which cannot be reduced to a simple aggregate of isolated agents or to the sum of the elements merely juxtaposed, is, like a magnetic eld, made up of a system of power lines. In other words, the constituting agents or systems of agents may be described as so many forces which, by their existence, opposition or combination, determine its specic structure at a given moment in time. In return, each of these is dened by its particular position within this eld from which it derives positional properties which cannot be assimilated to intrinsic properties. Each is also dened by a specic type of participation in the cultural eld taken as a system of relations between themes and problems; it is a determined type of cultural unconscious, while at the same time it intrinsically possesses what could be called a functional weight, because its own mass, that is, its power (or
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better, its authority) in the eld cannot be dened independently of its position within it. (1966d: 865/1971d: 161) This was a new voice and a new approach. Bourdieu was announcing that the sociology of knowledge in general and of artistic production in particular should not be predicated on the autonomisation of historical producers studied in relation to a currently imposed construction of their supposed social contexts. Rather it should be founded on the analysis of those impersonal, objective systems within which communication takes place and within which meanings are immanently established. Although Bourdieu cited Williamss Culture and Society (1958) in his article, nevertheless that book exemplied the approach that he was seeking to criticize. For Bourdieu, Williamss work placed texts and authors that had been selected, evaluated and esteemed within the literary critical discourse of high culture in relation to a hypostatized context that was the construct of the equally high-culture discourse of social and economic history. The resulting sociology of literature was not an analysis of the system of historical social relations within which texts functioned but, instead, a current construction of a representation of the past that was dependent on elements that had been falsely rendered independent and that functioned ideologically in the present as a creative project within a present intellectual eld. Bourdieus fundamental objection was to the post hoc or detached imposition of a structure on phenomena that, in fact, participate in the construction of their own structures. Although this summary represents the emphasis of Bourdieus position, it is, nevertheless, falsely realist. Bourdieus opening sentence is very important in indicating the epistemology that he was taking for granted. There are two components. There is, rst of all, the insistence that sociological analysis entails the analysis of the system of social relations within which individuals operate and within which their individualities are dened, but, secondly, there is the insistence that this way of seeing intellectual and artistic production is a necessary corollary of adopting a sociological perspective. The principle must be perceived and stated concerning the boundaries of sociological explanation rather in terms comparable to mathematical proof. There is no claim here that reality is being analysed. The account of reality that is disclosed by sociology is a function of the sociological mode of perception. It does not exclude other modes of perceiving the same phenomena and offering alternative accounts of those phenomena. Bourdieu was clearly committed to the sociological account that he was explicating but, nevertheless, the attainment of dominance in representations of reality had nothing to do with the objective phenomena and everything to do with the conict between modes of perception or the contest between faculties. Although the opening half-sentence may seem an almost casual introduction, it does disclose Bourdieus attachment to a neo-Kantian epistemology and, already, a willingness to apply that epistemology reexively. As we shall see, it was also a neo-
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Kantianism that was derived from the Marburg School and, in particular, Ernst Cassirer, rather than from Rickert, Windelband and the south-west German School of neo-Kantianism. Rickert had written The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science (1986) in order to argue that contingent individual behaviour in history could be analysed not by adopting the procedures of natural science but only by adopting an alternative methodology specic to and inherent in the different phenomena. Bourdieu appears to have believed, instead, that delimitations of explanatory discourses are themselves historically contingent. Limits have to be acknowledged and declared, but they are not intrinsic. Bourdieus disquiet about Webers methodology derives, in part, from the latters attachment to the philosophical orientation of the south-west German neo-Kantian School. Bourdieus neo-Kantianism merged with Bachelards historical epistemology and resisted transcendentalism. We have to accept that we proceed as if sociological explanation were valid (to use the title of a text by another inuential neoKantian, Hans Vaihinger [1924]), but we seek to make this provisionality dominant for extraneous reasons.
Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945

There is no need to consider further here the substance of Champ intellectuel et projet cr eateur. For our purposes, the introductory passage of the article claries Bourdieus purpose in writing Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject in the following year (1967a). This was an article that was never published in French but only, internationally, in Social Research. Within the international eld of sociology, Bourdieu was seeking to offer an insider view of the sub-eld of French sociology to an outsider readership. Within the article, therefore, he attempted to provide an objective social history of intellectual relations in France between 1945 and 1966 from a systematically sociological perspective adopted at the end of this period, whilst, at the same time, he endeavoured to contextualize his own intellectual agency during those years. The experiment was as much an attempt in the intellectual eld to explore the boundaries of subjectivity and objectivity as, in the anthropological eld, his C elibat et condition paysanne (1962a) had been in respect of the social situation in his native B earn. Publication in Social Research was an attempt to place the article outside the immediate eld of production and consumption that was the object of the articles inquiry. The connection with Champ intellectuel et projet cr eateur was made explicit in the opening paragraph. From the outset, therefore, the methodology adopted in the article was linked to the position that Bourdieu had already articulated within the social and intellectual trajectory under consideration: The reader will nd in this paper neither a systematic history of the sociological or philosophical events and schools which have succeeded one
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another in France since 1945, nor a philosophy of the history of philosophy or of the history of sociology, but a sociology of the main trends of sociology which, in order to restore their full meaning to works and to doctrines, tries to relate them to their cultural context, in other words, tries to show how positions and oppositions in the intellectual eld are connected with explicitly or implicitly philosophical attitudes. It is with this in mind that we have prepared this outline of a sociology of French sociology, which aims at uncovering unconscious afnities rather than describing declared afliations, and at deciphering implicit purposes rather than accepting literally declarations of intent. (1967a: 162) As this passage indicates, Bourdieus article focused on the changing relations between philosophy and sociology in the particular socio-economic conditions of post-World War II France. In Les h eritiers (1964), Bourdieu had already inspected the social contingency of the student selection of these subjects of study, and it could be said that he was now analysing the social contingency of how these subjects were themselves constituted for student consumption. It was an approach that anticipated the abstract discussion of the arbitrariness of curriculum content in La reproduction (1970a), but the constant, tacit frame of reference was Bourdieus own position-taking between the two intellectual disciplines the one within which he was trained and the other that he was employed to transmit. The sub-text of his argument and of his position-taking related to the contemporary vogue for quantitative sociological research as it has developed in the United States. He contended, however, that such research is ultimately nothing but a neo-positivism that seeks its guarantee in American sociology and civilization (1967a: 164). He claimed, in other words, that the apparent indifference of American empirical social science to philosophy and theoretical speculation was predicated on positivist philosophy. Bourdieu found it ironical that empirical social science could only re-establish itself in France by resurrecting the antiphilosophical philosophy of the Comtist tradition. The view that Bourdieu tried to express in the article was, essentially, that the empiricist social science that was a form of neo-positivism was inadequate precisely because it was founded on an inadequate philosophy of social science. What was required was a new kind of empirical practice grounded in postpositivist philosophy of science. Again, the irony for Bourdieu was that structuralism had generated humanist reaction because, like Durkheimianism, it seemed to treat social facts as things, but the shortcoming of structuralism, as of Durkheimianism, was that it was methodologically insufciently anti-humanist. Bourdieu paid specic attention to some articles by Merleau-Ponty, and argued that in his De Mauss a ` L evi-Strauss (1959) Merleau-Ponty granted ethnology its philosophical emancipation, but he did not fail to reserve to philosophy the right to re-interpret or, better, to arouse the existential signicance of the
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inanimate structures built up or discovered by the ethnologist (1967a: 167). Bourdieu claimed that the accommodation between existential philosophy and social science achieved by the intellectuals of the previous generation was one that preserved freedom and voluntarism within a pseudo-scientistic and pseudodeterministic structural analysis whereas what was needed was the delimitation of a social science theory and practice that, by concentrating on the systemic relationalism of observed phenomena, would rule out any explanatory recourse to the supposition of the existence of free human agency within those systems. Such a supposition was, for Bourdieu, an interpolation from outside the immanent system that was merely a projection of the disposition towards existentialist philosophy on the part of the scientic observers. Bourdieu accused L evi-Strauss of the same underlying humanist orientation, arguing that he brought out in the role of the ethnologist what must have surpassed the fondest expectations of a phenomenologist (1967a: 167) in the following passage from his Foreword to Sociologie et anthropologie: The apprehension (which cannot be objective) of the unconscious forms of the activity of the mind nevertheless leads to subjectivation; for, after all, it is a similar process that, in psychoanalysis, enables us to recover our self, however alienated and, in ethnological investigation, to reach the most alien of other persons as if he were another self of ours. (L evi-Strauss, 1950: xxxi, quoted in Bourdieu, 1967a: 167) Bourdieu proceeded to argue that this humanist social science found support in the intellectual climate of the years of Occupation, Resistance and Liberation. The existential philosophy that was homologuous with social and political experience during the period of its production did a disservice to social science by downgrading it for 15 years. Bourdieu discussed the stance adopted by Sartre and was only prepared to acknowledge that the latters intellectual endeavours were benecial in breaking with the canonical rules and subject-matter of university philosophy, which had the effect of liberating anthropological science from the conventions that had held it prisoner (1967a: 180). This was an inuence that Bourdieu was recognizing as of latent value for his own project, but the article looked next at the reaction to existentialism in the early 1960s and he claimed that the emergent empirical sociology in France was founded on the illusion of a rst beginning and, by the same token, on ignorance of the epistemological problems posed by any scientic practice, as well as on deliberate or unwitting disregard of the theoretical past of European science (1967a: 184). This epistemological ignorance was encouraged by the social and economic conditions in which public and private bureaucracies began to look to sociology to provide legitimation of their policy intentions. Bourdieu quoted Lucien Goldmanns then recent comment that future historians will probably identify the years 1955 to 1960 as the sociological turning-point in France
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between crisis capitalism and organization capitalism, accompanied by a transition from philosophical, historical and humanistic sociology to the a-historical sociological thinking of today (Goldmann, 1966: 6, quoted in Bourdieu, 1967a: 190). The position Bourdieu was adopting in Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945 on the eve of the May events in Paris of 1968 is complicated, but it can be summarized in the following way. The second-generation Durkheimians in whom Davy had placed such condence in 1931 had, for Bourdieu, lost contact with the pioneering intellectual achievement of the early Durkheim. Durkheimianism had routinized positivism and had become assimilated to institutionalized university philosophy. There had been a shift towards a spiritualization of the conscience collective in Durkheims own late work and this had partly been the consequence of seeking institutional accommodation with philosophical opponents. The immediate post-war period had seen an explicable rise in libertarian philosophy, and this had inhibited the progress of the scientic analysis of social systems. Structuralism had accommodated phenomenology and philosophical individualism whilst American empirical sociology was becoming popular because it presented itself as unphilosophical and, for this reason, was uncritically compliant with the orientations of organization capitalism. What was needed was an empirical social science that was grounded on a sound epistemology. One of the problems of the war period was that the institutional links that maintained dialogue between philosophy and social science were severed and, for a while, the intellectual discourses existed in isolation from each other. Bourdieu pointed hopefully to the fact that all but non-existent between 1950 and 1960, research workers with a philosophical background, and more especially graduates in philosophy or from the Ecole Normale, nd their way into the research institutions that had been established without them (1967a: 208). The philosophers now cited as contributing to a new engagement of philosophy with social science were Bachelard, Piaget, Gu eroult, Canguilhem, and Vuillemin, none of whom was associated with the dominant non-university philosophy spearheaded by Sartre. The philosophies produced by these intellectuals were . . . predisposed, by the very object they choose for themselves and by the way in which they approach it, to lend sociology the theoretical assistance it needs, if only by posing the generic question of the conditions that make possible any scientic practice. (1967a: 211) Signicantly, Bourdieu also commented in a footnote that what these intellectuals had in common was that they came from working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds and primarily from the provinces (1967a: 211 fn.54).
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Bourdieus purpose in writing Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945 is now clear. Having initially dabbled with L evi-Straussian thinking in the early 1960s, he had then, in seeking to present himself as a sociologist, been tempted by American quantitative methods. The detailed statistical appendices to Lamour de lart suggest this temporary temptation. However, by 1966/7, Bourdieu was committed to establishing a new reconciliation between philosophy and sociology that would underpin the empirical practice of the research group that he was to lead from 1968. Equally, he began to articulate a philosophy of social science that would enable sociologists to be politically engaged without accepting the Sartrian philosophy of engagement. At the same time, he sought to outline a theory of social science that emphasized research practice and was quite separate from the practice of university social science teaching. In his own terms, he was about to begin the process of establishing an intellectual eld of social science discourse within which his own creative practices would be legitimated, and it was logical that this preparatory period should culminate in the launching of the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1975, which was to function for Bourdieus theory of practice as the Ann ee Sociologique had for Durkheimianism.
Emergent Philosophy of Social Science

These were very productive and signicant years for Bourdieu. In 1967 (1967b) he published his translation into French of Panofskys Gothic Architecture and Scholastic Thought (1957), concluding with a postface the argument of which is, in part, repeated in Syst` emes denseignement et syst` emes de pens ee (1967c). Panofsky was a disciple of Cassirer, and Bourdieu was clearly interested in Cassirers thought throughout this period. Not only did he cite Cassirers Structuralism in Modern Linguistics (1945) and his Sprache und Mythos (1925) in articles, but, as General Editor of Le Sens Commun series for Les Editions de Minuit, Bourdieu was responsible for organizing the translations into French of ve works by Cassirer between 1972 and 1977, notably the three volumes of La philosophie des formes symboliques (1972) and Substance et fonction: ements pour une th El eorie du concept (1977). Bourdieu produced Le m etier de sociologue in 1968 (1968a). This was subtitled Epistemological Preliminaries and was intended as the rst of several volumes that would be of practical value to research students. It offered a blueprint for the theory of sociological knowledge that he was counterposing against structuralism. Indeed this was the title of an article which appeared in 1968 in Social Research, almost as a companion piece with Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945. Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge (1968c) was never published in French. In 1970, ements pour une th Bourdieu published La reproduction: El eorie du syst` eme denseignement (1970a). The following year he published both Une interpr etation de la th eorie de la religion selon Max Weber (1971a) and Gen` ese et structure du
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champ religieux (1971b). There were other signicant texts in these years, but I want to highlight the section of the rst chapter of Esquisse dune th eorie de la pratique, pr ec ed e de trois e tudes dethnologie kabyle (1972), which was published separately in translation in 1973 as The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge. All these texts of these years, and others of the same period, cross-refer richly, but I want to examine in detail the abstract statement of theory that Bourdieu offered in Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge (1968c); his application of that theory in seeking to reinterpret the work of Max Weber; and, nally, the consequences of his attempt to extend his theory of sociological practice in his reconsideration of his Algerian eldwork.
Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge

At the beginning of Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge, Bourdieu insisted that the importance of structuralism was that it introduced a new scientic method rather than that it was a new explanatory theory: The theory of sociological knowledge, as the system of principles and rules governing the production of all sociological propositions scientically grounded, and of them alone, is the generating principle of all partial theories of the social and, therefore, the unifying principle of a properly sociological discourse which must not be confused with a unitary theory of the social. (1968c: 681) Bourdieu was trying to specify the boundaries of a properly sociological discourse as much here as in the opening sentence of Champ intellectuel et projet cr eateur. The dening character of sociology lay in its method rather than in its ndings. It followed that classical theorists such as Marx, Durkheim and Weber, totally different in their views of social philosophy and ultimate values, were able to agree on the main points of the fundamental principles of the theory of the knowledge of the social world (1968c: 682). This was the guiding principle behind Le m etier de sociologue (1968a), which assembled passages from ideologically diverse sociological practitioners in order to demonstrate and communicate the unity of sociological meta-science. In accordance with Comtes contention, the meta-scientic unity of sociology is united with science in general. It participated in the identity of principles upon which all science, including the science of man, is founded (1968c: 682). Tacitly, Bourdieu was attempting to rescue the correct understanding of Comte from Durkheims distorting interpretation. Positivism was not advanced by Comte as the particular methodology of the social sciences but, rather, social science was simply the application to social relations of the principles underlying all scientic
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endeavour. Although this is never explicitly stated, Bourdieus position was Comtist in that by rejecting substantialist in favour of relational thinking, he was excluding religious, metaphysical or, more generally, humanist reference from sociological method: The originality of anthropological structuralism lies essentially in the fact that it attacks from rst to last the substantialist way of thinking which modern mathematics and physics have constantly striven to refute (1968c: 682). The inuence of the non-existentialist philosophers of science is evident here. Bourdieus article was devoted to seeking to explain the ways in which, to count as social science, the abstract thinking of mathematics and geometry has to be applied impersonally to social and cultural relations, which are essentially relations between persons. As Bourdieu puts it: To remove from physics any remnant of substantialism, it has been necessary to replace the notion of force with that of form. In the same way social sciences could not do away with the idea of human nature except by substituting for it the structure it conceals, that is by considering as products of a system of relations the properties that the spontaneous theory of the social ascribes to a substance. (1968c: 692)
Bourdieu on Weber
There is no space to explore the manifest inuence here of Cassirers Substance et fonction. The important point is that Bourdieu was seeking to make the identification of immanent systemic relations the keystone of the sociological method underpinning his research practice and that of his colleagues. In order to legitimate the sociological practice that he was advocating, he wrote two articles in which he deliberately distinguished his approach from that of Weber (in Une interprtation de la th eorie de la religion selon Max Weber, 1971a) and indicated the ways in which his meta-scientic perspective enabled him to assimilate the theories of religion of Marx, Weber and Durkheim in (Gen` ese et structure du champ religieux, 1971b). The title of the latter implies the basis of Bourdieus critique of Weber in the former. For Bourdieu, Weber failed to acknowledge the signicance of the objective religious eld within which individuals were constituted. By extrapolating types, Weber imposed extraneously constructed categories on situations that should be understood as categorially self-constituting. Bourdieu made explicit the limited texts of Weber from which he was working, and it would seem that he was now providing a critique of those texts that he had uncritically exploited in Sociologie de lAlg erie (1958). Bourdieu argued in Une interpr etation de la th eorie de la religion selon Max Weber that a latently
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interactionist interpretation was always present in Webers analyses. To demonstrate this, he pointed to four passages in which he claimed that Weber acknowledged that the behaviour of conceptual types magician, priest and prophet is in reality constructed in interactive practice. Without denying Webers insights, Bourdieu claimed that we can make a break from Webers explicit methodology to disclose what he was really suggesting. However, we also need to make a second break. The rst break liberated the interactions of agents from the imposition of typological conceptualization. The second break involves recognizing that agents are not themselves autonomous. Rather, the analysis of the logic of interactions has to be subordinated to an analysis of the objective structures within which the interactions have meaning for the agents. Individual agency has to be understood in terms of the eld within which it is exercised. Without this second break, the danger is that interaction will be understood inter-subjectively or inter-personally, leading to psychological abstraction. By working with explanatory types, Weber used particular exemplars to analyse the general. Scienticity was constructed and voluntarism apparently avoided by generalizing from particular case-studies, but Weber failed to understand that his types were actually the products of the system within which they operated rather than autonomous instruments by which the system could be extraneously explained by observers. Bourdieu elaborated his objection most explicitly in the following footnote: Amongst the omissions resulting from his failure to construct the religious eld as such, Max Weber presents a series of juxtaposed points of view which each time are derived from the position of a particular agent. The most signicant omission, without doubt, is the absence of any explicit reference to the strictly objective relationship (because established through time and space) between the priest and the original prophet and, by the same token, the absence of any clear and explicit distinction between the two types of prophecy with which every priesthood must deal the original prophecy whose message it perpetuates and from which it holds its authority and the competing prophecy which it combats. (1971a: 6 fn. 5)2 Bourdieu proceeded to argue that a religious eld functions to satisfy religious need, but this can only be poorly dened if it is not specied in terms of the needs of different groups and classes. Bourdieu claimed that Weber did not attempt such an elaboration of the constellation of interests in competition within a religious eld, even though he did feel obliged to take precise account of the particular needs of every professional group or every class. In evidence, Bourdieu referred to Webers discussion in Status Groups: Classes and Religion and added: Another analysis of the differences between the religious interests of peasants and petit bourgeois town-dwellers can be found in the chapter entitled
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Hierocratic Domination and Political Domination (Bourdieu, 1971a: 7 fn.7/ 1987: 135 fn. 3). Again, Bourdieu was suggesting that Weber instinctively appreciated that there were competitions for dominance that could only be described in terms of interaction and could not be analysed typologically. The example Bourdieu chose here to suggest the inadequacy of Webers methodology is signicant because the relations between peasants and towndwellers were the objects of his analysis in his Algerian work as well as in C elibat et condition paysanne (Bourdieu, 1962a), and the difference between the structuralist comparative analysis of the universalized concept of the peasant condition and the analysis of the structure of relations within particular systems constituting the peasant position was the starting point for the general discussion in Condition de classe et position de classe (1966b). What Bourdieu was arguing here in respect of religious interests, he was also saying in respect of the political eld in Lopinion publique nexiste pas (1971c). A nal example of Bourdieus critique of Weber relates to the notion of charisma. Bourdieu wrote: As well as occasionally succumbing to the na ve representation of charisma as a mysterious quality inherent in a person or as a gift of nature . . . even in his most rigorous writings Max Weber never proposes anything other than a psycho-sociological theory of charisma, a theory that regards it as the lived relation of a public to the charismatic personality. . . . (1971a: 1415/1987: 129) Bourdieus claim was that Weber, at best, regarded charisma as something that was invested in an individual by a social group. By contrast, Bourdieu contended that charisma has to be understood to be an attribute that is comprehended scientically in terms of the objective structure of relations by which it is constituted. It is measurable abstractly like a magnetic force and not by recourse to social psychological interpretation. He concluded: Let us then dispose once and for all of the notion of charisma as a property attaching to the nature of a single individual and examine instead, in each particular case, sociologically pertinent characteristics of an individual biography. The aim in this context is to explain why a particular individual nds himself socially predisposed to live out and express with particular cogency and coherence, ethical or political dispositions that are already present in a latent state amongst all the members of the class or group of his addressees. (1971a: 16/1987: 131) In subjecting the work of Weber to an epistemological critique, Bourdieu was consolidating the sociological methodology advanced in his Structuralism
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and Theory of Sociological Knowledge (1968c). Bourdieu would appear to have been repudiating the implicit phenomenology of his early eldwork and the L eviStraussian philosophical ethnology of his texts of the early 1960s, and legitimating himself as the spokesperson, expressing himself with particular cogency and coherence, for the new philosophical sociology that was the product of the social and historical developments he had outlined in Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945 (1967a). The situation was, I believe, more complicated than this, and the complexity has to be discussed in order to approach a proper understanding of Bourdieus position in relation to the classical tradition of sociology. He positioned himself within sociology by reference to a perceived inadequacy of Webers methodology. Webers use of types was an articial or arbitrary imposition on phenomena that possessed inherent systemic meaning. In dening the boundaries of sociological explanation, however, Bourdieu was aware that sociological explanation as such represented a discursive imposition that was as articial or arbitrary as typological imposition within the discourse.
The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge

In spite of Bourdieus criticism of Merleau-Ponty in Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945, he was only strategically renouncing his earlier phenomenological interests. The philosophical inuence of Merleau-Pontys La structure du comportement (1942) was particularly evident in C elibat et condition paysanne (1962a) and in Bourdieus development of the concepts of habitus and hexis, whilst Merleau-Pontys La ph enom enologie de perception (1945) was reworked in Bourdieus El ements dune th eorie sociologique de la perception artistique (1968b). At the same time as Bourdieu was dening the limits of social scientic explanation, he was also reecting on the pre-logical, ontological realities that social science purported to describe. The framework of Le m etier de sociologue (1968a) was based on an adoption of Bachelards emphasis on the need to make epistemological breaks so as to understand the social conditions of production of scientic explanation. It appeared, therefore, to advocate a sociology of sociology or a reexive sociology as a necessary procedure for constructing and verifying sociological ndings. The epistemological breaks were presented as the means by which sociological explanation could be rened. However, by the time that Bourdieu published The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge in 1973, the epistemological breaks were serving a broader purpose. They were functioning to allow the sociological analysis of sociological objectivism to become a means by which ontic realities might be disclosed. The dense passage is familiar but needs to be presented in full: The social world may be subjected to three modes of theoretical knowledge, each of which implies a set of (usually tacit) anthropological theses. The only thing these modes of knowledge have in common is that they all
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stand in opposition to practical knowledge. The mode of knowledge we shall term phenomenological (or, if one prefers to speak in terms of currently active schools, interactionist or ethnomethodological) makes explicit primary experience of the social world: perception of the social world as natural and self-evident is not self-reective by denition and excludes all interrogation about its own conditions of possibility. At a second level, objectivist knowledge (of which the structuralist hermeneutic constitutes a particular case) constructs the objective relations (e.g. economic or linguistic) structuring not only practices but representations of practices and in particular primary knowledge, practical and tacit, of the familiar world, by means of a break with this primary knowledge and, hence, with those tacitly assumed presuppositions which confer upon the social world its self-evident and natural character. Objectivist knowledge can only grasp the objective structures of the social world, and the objective truth of primary experience (from which explicit knowledge of these structures is absent) provided it poses the very problem doxic experience of the social world excludes by denition, namely the problem of the (specic) conditions under which this experience is possible. Thirdly, what we might refer to as praxeological knowledge is concerned not only with the system of objective relations constructed by the objectivist form of knowledge, but also with the dialectical relationships between these objective structures and the structured dispositions which they produce and which tend to reproduce them, i.e. the dual process of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality. This knowledge presupposes a break with the objectivist knowledge, that is, it presupposes investigation into the conditions of possibility and, consequently, into the limits of the objectivistic viewpoint which grasps practices from the outside, as a fait accompli, rather than construct their generative principle by placing itself inside the process of their accomplishment. (1973: 534)
The Phenomenological Context

The way to make sense of this passage is to set it in a phenomenological context. Robert Sokolowskis brilliantly lucid Introduction to Phenomenology (2000) helps us to understand what Bourdieu was doing in this passage. In a chapter entitled An Initial Statement of What Phenomenology Is, Sokolowski argues that in order to understand what phenomenology is, . . . we must make a distinction between two attitudes or perspectives that we can adopt. We must distinguish between the natural attitude and the phenomenological attitude. The natural attitude is the focus we have when we are involved in our original, world-directed stance, when we
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intend things, situations, facts, and any other kinds of objects. . . . We do not move into it from anything more basic. The phenomenological attitude, on the other hand, is the focus we have when we reect upon the natural attitude and all the intentionalities that occur within it. It is within the phenomenological attitude that we carry out philosophical analyses. The phenomenological attitude is also sometimes called the transcendental attitude. (2000: 42) Sokolowski claries the relationship between the two attitudes by specifying more clearly the distinguishing characteristics of the phenomenological attitude: There are many different viewpoints and attitudes even within the natural attitude. There is the viewpoint of ordinary life, there is the viewpoint of the mathematician, that of the medical specialist, the physicist, the politician, and so on. . . . But the phenomenological attitude is not like any of these. It is more radical and comprehensive. All the other shifts in viewpoint and focus remain cushioned by our underlying world belief, which always remains in force, and all the shifts dene themselves as moving from one viewpoint into another among the many that are open to us. The shift into the phenomenological attitude, however, is an all or nothing kind of move that disengages completely from the natural attitude and focuses, in a reective way, on everything in the natural attitude, including the underlying world belief. (2000: 47) Viewed from this perspective, the rst epistemological break advocated by Bourdieu in The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge enables objectivist scientic knowledge, but the objectivism remains within the domain of natural attitudes. The second epistemological break, however, enables an entirely different perspective to be achieved in relation to all natural attitudes. By this reconciliation or synthesis of a philosophy of science derived from Bachelard and the process of phenomenological reduction derived from Husserl, Bourdieu was able to maintain a strictly subjectless or anti-humanist methodology of social science whilst allowing for the agency of beings within a life-world. Bourdieus criticism of Merleau-Ponty and L evi-Strauss had been that they both allowed their philosophical positions to distort the truly positivist scienticity of sociological investigation. His accommodation of philosophy and sociology allowed for a clear demarcation between the possible achievements of sociology and ontology. Bourdieus second epistemological break is not a meta-scientic posture within the eld of sociology. Instead, it represents a sociological way to phenomenological reduction. Sokolowski suggests that phenomenology offers two possible ways to achieve reduction, bracketing or the epoch e. The rst is a Cartesian way
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that subjects all to doubt, and the second is an ontological way to reduction that helps us to complete the partial sciences. We move out to wider and wider contexts, until we come to the kind of widest context provided by the phenomenological attitude (2000: 53). Bourdieus insistence that tout est social (1992c) enabled him to identify ontological and sociological analysis such that he tried to subject all discourses to sociological reduction without privileging the sociological practices of the natural attitude. Bourdieus dual use of sociological inquiry has to be clearly stated. This dual function explains the way in which throughout his career he sought to shift intellectual perspective between differing public discourses or elds, sometimes presenting himself as an anthropologist, a sociolinguist, a cultural sociologist or philosopher, without relinquishing his fundamental commitment to a sociological approach. He approached the Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (Gouldner, 1971) in the perspective of Husserls The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1970).
Summary
This article has focused on the brief period in which Bourdieu was both legitimating himself within the eld of sociology and simultaneously laying the foundations for a theory of practice that would subject all scientic discourses to philosophical scrutiny. Although there is clear evidence for the suggestion here that Bourdieu appropriated phenomenological thinking and grafted it to the philosophy of science, it also has to be rmly said that he did not share the transcendental dispositions of either Husserl or of some of the neo-Kantians. Although he took advantage of the descriptive procedures of phenomenological analysis, Bourdieu did not, unlike Husserl, believe that phenomenology secured the supreme status of philosophy. As Sokolowski puts it: To move into the phenomenological attitude is not to become a specialist in one form of knowledge or another, but to become a philosopher (2000: 47). Bourdieu wrote The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (1991) to show that Heideggerian philosophy could be subjected to sociological/ phenomenological reduction, and Pascalian Meditations (2000) was also an attempt to celebrate the kind of philosophizing that would not become ossied as academic philosophy. The truth, therefore, must be that Bourdieu exploited phenomenology whilst rejecting its transcendental pretensions. In effect, phenomenological reduction was, for him, an heuristic device within the natural attitude that owed its pragmatic results to claims of transcendence that he did not accept. We can conclude that Bourdieus relationship to the classical tradition of Western European sociology was unique. As he sometimes stated, he was an oblate someone who could not fully let go of the intellectual position into which he had been initiated, in spite of his scepticism. It remains to be seen whether Bourdieus ambivalent resolution of his personal, social and intellectual
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inheritance his habitus will continue to provide the paradigm that we need for an ongoing synergy between social research and philosophical reection. If a conclusion is appropriate when all situations require continuous intellectual adjustments, my view would be that Bourdieu was aware that international social, political and cultural developments are occurring that cannot readily be understood by reference to a circumscribed discourse (sociology) generated in one particular place and time (Western Europe from the middle of the 19th century). The insight that I have explored in this article was that we now urgently need to construct shared discourses that seek to theorize internationally shared experiences expressed in particular and different conceptual languages. Bourdieus R eponses: Pour une anthropologie r eexive (1992b) was translated as An Invitation to Reexive Sociology. The English title missed Bourdieus point, and his emphasis needs to be the starting-point for an endeavour that will have the possibility of reviving social theory internationally without simply endorsing our local sociological tradition.
Notes
1. Throughout this text I refer to all collaborative publications with which Bourdieu was involved as if they were the work of Bourdieu alone. The full details of authorship are given in the bibliography. For a discussion of the way in which Bourdieu stimulated collaborative activity, see the interview between Bourdieu and Yvette Delsaut in Delsaut and Riviere ` (2002: 177239). This is my translation. The footnote does not appear in the English translation of the article (Bourdieu, 1987). Another footnote in this English translation indicates that it is a slightly modied version of the original French article and was written in 1985.
2.
References
Aron, R. (1938) Essai sur la th eorie de lhistorie dans lAllemagne contemporaine. Paris: Vrin. Besnard, P. (ed.) (1983) The Sociological Domain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1958) Sociologie de lAlg erie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bourdieu, P. (1962a) C elibat et condition paysanne, Etudes rurales 56: 32136. Bourdieu, P. (1962b) The Algerians. Boston: Beacon. Bourdieu, P. (with J.-C. Passeron) (1964) Les h eritiers: les e tudiants et la culture. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Bourdieu, P. (with L. Boltanski, R. Castel and J.-C. Chamboredon) (1965) Un art moyen: les usages sociaux de la photographie. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Bourdieu, P (with A. Darbel and D. Schnapper) (1966a) Lamour de lart. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
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Bourdieu, P. (1991) The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. (1992a) Thinking about Limits, Theory, Culture, and Society 9: 3749. Bourdieu, P. (1992b) R eponses: pour une anthropologie r eexive. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Bourdieu, P. (1992c) Tout est social, Magazine litt eraire, 302: 10411. Bourdieu, P. (1998) La domination masculine. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity. Cassirer, E. (1925) Sprache und Mythos, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, Leipzig VI. Cassirer, E. (1945) Structuralism in Modern Linguistics, Word I: 99120. Cassirer, E. (1972) La philosophie des formes symboliques. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Cassirer, E. (1977) Substance et fonction: e l ements pour une th eorie du concept. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Chelhod, J. (1958) Introduction a ` la sociologie de lIslam. Paris. Clark, T.N. (1973) Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coleman, J. and P. Bourdieu (eds) (1989) Social Theory for a Changing Society. Boulder, CO, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview. Davy, G. (1912) Emile Durkheim: choix de Textes avec e tude du syst` eme sociologique. Paris: Soci et e des Editions Louis-Michand. Davy, G. (1922) Le droit, lid ealisme et lexp erience. Paris: Alcan. ements de sociologie. Paris: Delagrave. Davy, G. (1924) El Davy, G. (1931) Sociologues dhier et daujourdhui. Paris: Alcan. Delsaut, Y. and M.-C. Rivi` ere (2002) Bibliographie des travaux de Pierre Bourdieu. Pantin: Le Temps des Cerises. Derrida, J. (1974) Introduction to E. Husserl, Lorigine de la g eom etrie, 2nd rev. edn. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (1933) The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Macmillan. Durkheim, E. Foucault, M. (1954) Introduction to L. Binswanger, Le r eve et lexistence. Paris: Descl ee de Brouwer. Goldmann, L. (1966) Sciences humaines et philosophie. Paris: Gonthier. Gouldner, A. (1971) The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. London: Heinemann. Gu eroult, M (1930) Evolution et la structure de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte. Paris. Gu eroult, M (1934) Dynamique et m etaphysique Leibniziennes. Paris. Hanoteau, L.A. and A. Letourneux (1873) La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles. Paris. Husserl, E. (1964) The Paris Lectures. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
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Husserl, E. (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Int. Letourneau, R. (1950) LIslam contemporain. Paris: Ed. L evi-Strauss, C. (1950) Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lyotard, J.-F. (1954) La ph enom enologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (1886) Formation des cit Masqueray, E. es chez les populations s edentaires de lAlg erie. Paris. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1942) La structure du comportement. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945) La ph enom enologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1959) De Mauss a ` L evi-Strauss, La Nouvelle revue franaise 82: 61531. Panofsky, E. (1957) Gothic Architecture and Scholastic Thought. New York: Meridian. Poster, M. (1975) Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rickert, H. (1986) The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1943) LEtre et le n eant. Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, J.-P. (1960) Critique de la raison dialectique. Paris: Gallimard. Sayad, A. (1996) Abdelmalek in Interview, in D. Robbins (ed.) Pierre Bourdieu: Masters of Contemporary Social Thought (Vol. 1). London: Sage, 2000. Sokolowski, R. (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Vaihinger, H. (1924) The Philosophy of As If: A system of the theoretical, practical, and religious ctions of mankind. London: Kegan Paul. Vuillemin, J. (1954) H eritage kantien et la r evolution copernicienne. Paris. Vuillemin, J. (1955) Physique et m etaphysique kantiennes. Paris. Weber, M. (19201) Gesammelte Aufs atze zur Religionssoziologie. T ubingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Weber, M. (1930) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Unwin Univesity Books. Weill, E. (1963) Probl` emes kantiens. Paris. Williams, R. (1958) Culture and Society, 17801950. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Derek Robbins is Professor of International Social Theory at the University of East London, where he also is Director of the Group for the Study of International Social Science in the School of Social Sciences. He is the author of The Work of Pierre Bourdieu (1991) and of Bourdieu and Culture (2000); the editor of the four-volume collection of articles on Bourdieu in the Sage Masters of Contemporary Social Thought series (2000); as well as author of many articles on Bourdieus work. He is currently editing two further collections of articles in the Sage Masters of Contemporary Social Thought series: the rst set on Jean-
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Franois Lyotard; and the other a second, post-mortem, set on Bourdieu. He is writing a book on The Internationalization of French Social Thought, 19502000 and is researching the inuence of the French reception of Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy on the development of French social science. Address: School of Social Sciences, University of East London, Longbridge Road, Dagenham, Essex RM8 2AS, UK. [email: d.m.robbins@uel.ac.uk]
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Sociology of Bourdieu

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Sociology of Bourdieu

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Journal of Classical Sociology

Sociology and Philosophy in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu, 1965751

The State of French Sociology in the 1920s

JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 2(3)

Inuences on French Thought after 1930

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JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 2(3)

Bourdieus Philosophical Training

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Bourdieus First Book

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ROBBINS PIERRE BOURDIEU, 196575

Champ Intellectuel et projet createur

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ROBBINS PIERRE BOURDIEU, 196575

JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 2(3)

Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945

ROBBINS PIERRE BOURDIEU, 196575

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ROBBINS PIERRE BOURDIEU, 196575

JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 2(3)

Emergent Philosophy of Social Science

ROBBINS PIERRE BOURDIEU, 196575

Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge

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ROBBINS PIERRE BOURDIEU, 196575

JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 2(3)

ROBBINS PIERRE BOURDIEU, 196575

The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge

JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 2(3)

The Phenomenological Context

ROBBINS PIERRE BOURDIEU, 196575

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ROBBINS PIERRE BOURDIEU, 196575

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ROBBINS PIERRE BOURDIEU, 196575

JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 2(3)

ROBBINS PIERRE BOURDIEU, 196575

JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 2(3)

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