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Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi Vol 2(3): 299–328 [1468–795X(200211)2:3;299–328;031196]
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ABSTRACT The paper first 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 École Normale Supérieure. It indicates the intel-
lectual influences of the early years that Bourdieu subsequently acknowledged and
then examines his use of the work of Weber in his first book, Sociologie de l’Algérie
(1958). The paper then focuses on the development of Bourdieu’s 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. Bourdieu’s
‘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 Bourdieu’s critiques of Weber at this time
and suggests that his dissatisfaction with Weber’s 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
Bourdieu’s part to see reflexivity as a means to problematiz- ing sociological
explanation more than as a means to refining 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 subse-
quently in Bourdieu’s thought, and his responsivenesss to changing conditions
exemplifies how we should ourselves rethink the relations between possible future
social theories and the classical theories of Western sociology.
Only in 1941 could this anti-semitic opposition to sociology have been so clearly
articulated. There was, perhaps, an unholy affinity 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
No – that was just the effect of institutional authority. And our contempt
for sociology was intensified by the fact that a sociologist could be
president of the board of examiners of the competitive ‘agrégation’ 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. Davy’s authority epitomized for
him the contemporary condition of Durkheimianism. It possessed institutional
capital but had forfeited intellectual capital.
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 Husserl’s analyses in Ideen II, helped me a great deal – as
All these people were outside the usual syllabus, but it’s 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., Guéroult, 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 scientific 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 influence on Bourdieu’s thought
involved consideration of the social or historical contingency of scientific explana-
tion. We have Abdelmalek Sayad’s testimony (1996) that what was impressive
about Bourdieu’s teaching of Kant at the University of Algiers in the last few years
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 Jürgen
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
. . . 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 finance 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: 54–5)
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 imma-
nently established. Although Bourdieu cited Williams’s Culture and Society
(1958) in his article, nevertheless that book exemplified the approach that he was
seeking to criticize. For Bourdieu, Williams’s 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 field. Bourdieu’s fundamental objec-
tion 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 Bourdieu’s position, it
is, nevertheless, falsely realist. Bourdieu’s opening sentence is very important in
indicating the epistemology that he was taking for granted. There are two
components. There is, first 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 defined, 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 explicat-
ing but, nevertheless, the attainment of dominance in representations of reality
had nothing to do with the objective phenomena and everything to do with the
conflict between modes of perception or the contest between faculties. Although
the opening half-sentence may seem an almost casual introduction, it does
disclose Bourdieu’s attachment to a neo-Kantian epistemology and, already, a
willingness to apply that epistemology reflexively. As we shall see, it was also a neo-
The reader will find in this paper neither a systematic history of the
sociological or philosophical events and schools which have succeeded one
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 down-
grading it for 15 years. Bourdieu discussed the stance adopted by Sartre and was
only prepared to acknowledge that the latter’s intellectual endeavours were
beneficial 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 influence 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 first beginning and, by the same token, on ignorance
of the epistemological problems posed by any scientific 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 Goldmann’s then recent comment that ‘future historians will probably
identify the years 1955 to 1960 as the sociological turning-point in France
. . . 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 scientific practice.
(1967a: 211)
Bourdieu on Weber
There is no space to explore the manifest influence here of Cassirer’s Substance et
fonction. The important point is that Bourdieu was seeking to make the identifica-
tion 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
interprétation de la théorie de la religion selon Max Weber’, 1971a) and indicated
the ways in which his meta-scientific perspective enabled him to assimilate the
theories of religion of Marx, Weber and Durkheim in (‘Genèse et structure du
champ religieux’, 1971b). The title of the latter implies the basis of Bourdieu’s
critique of Weber in the former. For Bourdieu, Weber failed to acknowledge the
significance of the objective religious field within which individuals were consti-
tuted. By extrapolating ‘types’, Weber imposed extraneously constructed cate-
gories 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 l’Algérie (1958). Bourdieu argued in ‘Une
interprétation de la théorie de la religion selon Max Weber’ that a latently
Amongst the omissions resulting from his failure to construct the religious
field 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 significant 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’s 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
scientifically 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
finds 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)
Sokolowski clarifies 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 politi-
cian, 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 define 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 reflective way, on everything in the natural
attitude, including the underlying world belief.
(2000: 47)
Summary
This article has focused on the brief period in which Bourdieu was both
legitimating himself within the field of sociology and simultaneously laying the
foundations for a ‘theory of practice’ that would subject all scientific 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 firmly 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 ossified as
academic philosophy. The truth, therefore, must be that Bourdieu exploited
phenomenology whilst rejecting its transcendental pretensions. In effect, phe-
nomenological 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 Bourdieu’s 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 Bourdieu’s ambivalent resolution of his personal, social and intellectual
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 Rivière (2002: 177–239).
2. 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
modified’ version of the original French article and was written in 1985.
References
Aron, R. (1938) Essai sur la théorie de l’historie dans l’Allemagne 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 l’Algérie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Bourdieu, P. (1962a) ‘Célibat et condition paysanne’, Études rurales 5–6:
32–136.
Bourdieu, P. (1962b) The Algerians. Boston: Beacon.
Bourdieu, P. (with J.-C. Passeron) (1964) Les héritiers: les étudiants et la culture.
Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Bourdieu, P. (with L. Boltanski, R. Castel and J.-C. Chamboredon) (1965) Un
art moyen: les usages sociaux de la photographie. Paris: Éditions de
Minuit.
Bourdieu, P (with A. Darbel and D. Schnapper) (1966a) L’amour de l’art. Paris:
Éditions de Minuit.
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 Bourdieu’s work. He is currently editing two further
collections of articles in the Sage Masters of Contemporary Social Thought series: the first set on Jean-
Address: School of Social Sciences, University of East London, Longbridge Road, Dagenham, Essex RM8
2AS, UK. [email: d.m.robbins@uel.ac.uk]