Sociology of Bourdieu

Sociology and Philosophy in the Work ofPierre Bourdieu, 1965751

DEREK ROBBINS University of East London

ABSTRACT The paper first offers a brief account of the competition between theDurkheimian sociological tradition and German philosophy in the period in whichBourdieu was a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure. It indicates the intel-lectual influences of the early years that Bourdieu subsequently acknowledged andthen examines his use of the work of Weber in his first book, Sociologie de lAlgerie(1958). The paper then focuses on the development of Bourdieus thought fromthe mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, a period in which he strategically presentedhimself as an anti-humanist sociologist whilst also articulating a view of sciencethat was in tune with phenomenological and ontological philosophy. BourdieusSociology and Philosophy in France since 1945 (1967a) receives particularattention since his analysis of sociology and philosophy in France in the post-warperiod was a key element in his own position-taking in respect of the twodisciplines. The paper then examines Bourdieus critiques of Weber at this timeand suggests that his dissatisfaction with Webers epistemology logically became adissastisfaction with the claims of sociological explanation as such. There followedan attempt to reconcile a commitment to social science with an allegiance toelements of phenomenological thought. The outcome was a willingness onBourdieus part to see reflexivity as a means to problematiz- ing sociologicalexplanation more than as a means to refining it or making it more sophisticated.The consequence was that commitments to phenomenological ontology andsocial science co-existed in this period. The balance was to change again subse-quently in Bourdieus thought, and his responsivenesss to changing conditionsexemplifies how we should ourselves rethink the relations between possible futuresocial theories and the classical theories of Western sociology.

KEYWORDS Bourdieu, phenomenology, philosophy, sociology, Weber

Journal of Classical SociologyCopyright 2002 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi Vol 2(3): 299328 [1468795X(200211)2:3;299328;031196]www.sagepublications.com

The specificity of the title is significant in two respects. Bourdieu insisted that therelations between disciplines or modes of thinking are not immutable or atem-poral. In particular, the relations between sociology and philosophy are, in hisword, arbitrary, or, perhaps more precisely, socially and historically contingent.In part, this article explores Bourdieus representation of this contingency inFrench intellectual life, but it is also an article that considers the contingencywithin Bourdieus own intellectual production during one decade. I begin byoffering a brief account of the competition between the Durkheimian sociologicaltradition and German philosophy in the period in which Bourdieu was a studentat the Ecole Normale Superieure. I indicate, firstly, the intellectual influences of hisearly years, which Bourdieu subsequently acknowledged, and then examine hisuse of the work of Weber in his first book Sociologie de lAlgerie (1958). I thenfocus 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-humanistsociologist whilst also articulating a view of science that was in tune withphenomenological and ontological philosophy. Bourdieus Sociology and Philos-ophy in France since 1945 (1967a) receives particular attention since his analysisof sociology and philosophy in France in the post-war period was a key element inhis own position-taking in respect of the two disciplines. The article examinesBourdieus critiques of Weber and suggests that his dissatisfaction with Webersepistemology logically became a dissatisfaction with the claims of sociologicalexplanation as such. There followed an attempt to reconcile a commitment tosocial science with an allegiance to elements of phenomenological thought. Theoutcome was a willingness on Bourdieus part to see reflexivity as a means toproblematizing sociological explanation more than as a means to refining it ormaking it more sophisticated. The consequence was that commitments to phe-nomenological ontology and social science co-existed in this period. The balancewas to change again subsequently in Bourdieus thought, and his responsivenessto changing conditions exemplifies how we should ourselves rethink the relationsbetween possible social theories and the classical theories of Western sociology.

The State of French Sociology in the 1920sGeorges Davy published Sociologues dhier et daujourdhui in 1931. It was acollection of four studies on Espinas, Durkheim, McDougall in relation toDurkheimian sociology, and Levy-Bruhl that had been published in Frenchjournals during the 1920s, preceded by an article on La Sociologie Franaise de1918 a` 1925, which had first been published in English in The Monist in 1926. Inspite of the consideration of American social psychology in the third study, thecollection was narrowly nationalist. There were no references to Americansociology or to Marx or Weber. The assessment of past and present sociologistsindicated by the title amounted exclusively to a consideration of the progress of anindependent French tradition. Davy was a first-generation Durkheimian, which

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meant that he saw himself as a second-generation positivist. Born at the time ofComtes death, Levy-Bruhl and Durkheim separately and differently as students atthe Ecole Normale Superieure in the 1880s began to give intellectual andinstitutional flesh to the emergent sociology sketched in the Cours de philosophiepositive. Born in 1883 and also a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Davybecame associated with the Annee Sociologique cluster (Clark, 1973) in 1910,and as early as 1912 five years before the death of Durkheim published achoice of Durkheim texts with an introductory study of his sociological system ina series devoted to Les Grands Philosophes. Franais et etrangers (Davy,1912).

Davy was an apologist for Durkheim. Writing his introduction to Socio-logues dhier et daujourdhui in 1926, he celebrated the pioneering work of Saint-Simon and Comte with their idea of a distinct social reality, the object of adistinct social science as objective as the other sciences (1931: 6), which was theorigin of a positivist and rationalist sociology that, he argued, had been in eclipsefor a good quarter of a century. Davy was convinced that this sociology was goingto be reborn with the work of Espinas and spread with the work of Durkheim andhis 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 mindthat the future lay with the Durkheimians. He welcomed the editions of the workof Saint-Simon which were published in 1924 and 1925 under the influence ofBougle and the appearance of key posthumous editions of Durkheims work inthe mid-1920s, and he warmly praised Bougles own work and that of Fauconnet,placing his own texts, particularly Le droit, lidealisme et lexperience (1922),within the same increasingly dominant Durkheimian movement. The emergentintellectual dominance was in the process of being underpinned by significantinstitutional developments. At the end of his introductory article, Davy pointed tothe fact that sociology had now been accepted within the Licence and had alsobeen introduced as a subject for study in the ecoles normales primaires and for thebaccalaureat. The mutual support of institutional and intellectual trends wasconsolidated by the production of several sociology textbooks, one of which washis own Elements de sociologie (1924). Davy was confident that he was part of anunstoppable resurgence of sociological analysis that was still firmly attached tothe ideological and methodological commitments of the mid-19th-centuryfounders.

Influences on French Thought after 1930Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 and he studied at the Ecole Normale Superieurefrom 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

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(Husserl, 1964). By the mid-1950s, Merleau-Ponty had researched the HusserlArchive in Louvain and was influential in disseminating his ideas in France.Lyotard wrote a small introduction to phenomenology in 1954 in which hediscussed Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and Bourdieus near contemporary at theEcole, Derrida, was writing an introduction to a translation of Husserls Origins ofGeometry (Derrida, 1974). Also in 1954, Foucault participated in the translationof Ludwig Binswangers Traum und Existenz, and wrote a long introductorydiscussion of existential psychiatry for it. The influence of Heidegger was apparenthere as it had been in the work of Sartre during the 1930s leading to thepublication of LEtre et le neant in 1943. Meanwhile, Raymond Aron had beenresponsible for introducing the work of Dilthey, Rickert, Simmel and Weber in hisEssai sur la theorie de lhistoire dans lAllemagne contemporaine (1938). Equally, ofcourse, Jean Hyppolite in particular had been responsible for the renewed interestin Hegel and for the consequential rise of Marxist existentialism that has beendescribed in detail by Mark Poster (1975). In parallel with this French interest inGerman thought in the period between 1930 and 1960 was the tangible effect ofthe period of the Second World War on the institutional situation of sociology.Davys confidence was misplaced, for very tangible reasons. Appended to RogerGeigers article Durkheimian Sociology under Attack: The Controversy overSociology in the Ecoles Normales Primaires (in Besnard, 1983) is a letter writtenin 1941 from the Vatican City by the Vichy Regimes ambassador to the Vatican,who had been a civil servant at the time of the introduction of sociology into thecurriculum of the ecoles normales primaires, which Davy celebrated in 1931. LeonBerard wrote:

Let us return to the program of the Ecoles Normales Primaires of 1920.. . . to these normal school students who came from the Higher PrimarySchools, who had not done one hour of philosophy, they were going toteach not philosophy, but, among the hundreds or thousands of diversesystems, one fixed system of philosophy: Durkheims sociology. I must tellyou that for several years the teachings of that rabbinical ideologue hadbecome a sort of official and practically obligatory academic doctrine. Thesociologists were in possession of magisterial chairs at the Sorbonne. . . .From them emanated the decisive and directing influences.

(Besnard, 1983: 135)

Only in 1941 could this anti-semitic opposition to sociology have been so clearlyarticulated. There was, perhaps, an unholy affinity between the French vogue forGerman philosophy that developed in the 1930s and the decline of Frenchsociology in the 1940s. Certainly, in the interview of 1985 in which Bourdieurecollected his student days, he insisted that sociology teaching was intellectuallymoribund and that his fellow normaliens treated the subject with contempt. Fed


the line by his questioners that philosophy was dominated by a sociologist in theearly 1950s, Bourdieu replied:

No that was just the effect of institutional authority. And our contemptfor sociology was intensified by the fact that a sociologist could bepresident of the board of examiners of the competitive agregation examin philosophy and force us to attend his lectures which we thought werelousy on Plato and Rousseau.

(1990: 5)

Bourdieu was referring here to Georges Davy. Davys authority epitomized forhim the contemporary condition of Durkheimianism. It possessed institutionalcapital but had forfeited intellectual capital.

Bourdieus Philosophical TrainingIn considering the relationship of Bourdieus work to the classical tradition ofsociology, it is important to keep firmly in mind the fact that he was trained inphilosophy and was not at all formally educated either as a sociologist or as ananthropologist. For his diplome detudes superieures, he prepared a translation ofLeibnizs Animadversiones in partem generalem Principiorum cartesianorum andwrote a commentary on it under the supervision of Henri Gouhier, a historian ofphilosophy. In one of his last interviews with Yvette Delsaut (Delsaut & Rivie`re,2002) Bourdieu did not deny that whilst he was teaching at the Lycee in Moulinsfrom 1955 to 1956 he had registered to write a the`se detat under the supervisionof Georges Canguilhem on Les structures temporelles de la vie affective. Itappears that this did not materialize but, in the 1985 interview from which I havealready quoted, Bourdieu mentioned that he had undertaken research into thephenomenology of emotional life, or more exactly into the temporal structuresof emotional experience (1990: 67), and it seems likely that he was referring tothis unwritten or incomplete thesis. In the same interview, Bourdieu suppliedmore information about the people who had influenced his intellectual develop-ment when he was a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure. There are severalimportant components of this development.

First of all, Bourdieu acknowledged that he had read Being and Nothing-ness very early on, and then Merleau-Ponty and Husserl. He was, therefore, wellaware of what he called phenomenology, in its existentialist variety. He arguedthat he had never really got into the existentialist mood, but, neverthelessadmitted that:

I read Heidegger, I read him a lot and with a certain fascination, especiallythe 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


was later the case with Schutz in my efforts to analyse the ordinaryexperience of the social.

(Bourdieu, 1990: 5)

It is easily possible to discern from these acknowledgements the provenance ofBourdieus concern with the problem of the temporal structures of affective life.

Secondly, the influence of Marx was negatively significant. In the 1985interview, Bourdieu claimed that Marxism did not really exist as an intellectualposition in the early 1950s in France, but that I did read Marx at that time foracademic reasons; I was especially interested in the young Marx, and I had beenfascinated by the Theses on Feuerbach (1990: 3). This was the decade beforeSartres Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) and before the brief intellectualdomination of Althusser. Bourdieu was well read in Marx but never committed toMarxism or to the universality of Marxist explanation.

Thirdly, Bourdieu mentioned the influence of several philosophers whoseclasses he attended whilst at the Ecole Normale Superieure. He mentioned theinfluence on him of Henri Gouhier, Georges Canguilhem, Gaston Bachelard, EricWeill, Alexander Koyre, Martial Gueroult and Jules Vuillemin, and commentedthat:

All these people were outside the usual syllabus, but its pretty muchthanks to them and to what they represented a tradition of the history ofthe sciences and of rigorous philosophy . . . that I tried, together withthose people who, like me, were a little tired of existentialism, to gobeyond merely reading the classical authors and to give some meaning tophilosophy.

(1990: 4)

There is a common thread that links many of the authors whom Bourdieucites. That thread relates to Kant in that many of the authors were engaged inacademic philosophical analysis of the relevance of Kantian epistemology to thephilosophy of natural science, either by reference to pre-critical philosophers suchas Leibniz or to post-Kantian thinkers such as Fichte (see, e.g., Gueroult, 1930,1934; Vuillemin, 1954, 1955; Weill, 1963). These authors can, crudely, be putinto two categories of thinking: on the one hand, those, like Canguilhem andBachelard, who were particularly interested in developing a philosophy of scienceor a historical epistemology with respect to scientific explanation; and, on theother hand, those who were more concerned to engage philosophically with thework of Kant, or post-Kantians like Fichte, or varieties of neo-Kantianism. Indifferent ways, however, this third strand of influence on Bourdieus thoughtinvolved consideration of the social or historical contingency of scientific explana-tion. We have Abdelmalek Sayads testimony (1996) that what was impressiveabout Bourdieus teaching of Kant at the University of Algiers in the last few years


of the 1950s was that it used Kantian philosophy to inform methodologicalpractice in social science observation. Bourdieu was interested in Kant and theneo-Kantians to advance reflexive sociological inquiry. His interest in the Critiqueof Practical Reason, for instance, was that Kantian insights should be deployed toimprove the exercise of reason in practice.

This disinclination to philosophize abstractly is also evident in Bourdieusremarks about the fourth strand of influence on his early thinking structuralism.He attacked Levi-Strauss for appropriating the linguistic science of Saussure insuch a way as to maintain the status of philosophy. Making glancing blows againstFoucault, Derrida and Barthes, Bourdieu criticized the tendency of the 1960s todraw freely on the profits of scientificity and the profits associated with the statusof philosopher in using the -ology effect archaeology, grammatology andsemiology to give pseudo-empirical substance to theoretical speculation pre-cisely at the time when, rather, it was necessary to question the status ofphilosopher 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 intooperation the structural or relational way of thinking in sociology, I resisted withall my might the merely fashionable forms of structuralism (1990: 6). Bourdieualso lectured on Durkheim and Saussure at the University of Algiers, but hisinterest, as in the case of the lectures on Kant, was methodological rather thansystematic he was trying to establish the limits of attempts to produce puretheories (1990: 6).

Bourdieu confirmed many of these influences in a paper that he gave inAmsterdam in 1989. In the article that was subsequently published in Englishtranslation as Thinking About Limits, Bourdieu wrote:

What I now very quickly want to address is the epistemological tradition inwhich 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 anumber of French names: Koyre, Bachelard, Canguilhem and, if we goback a little, to Duhem. . . . This historical tradition of epistemology verystrongly linked reflection on science with the history of science. Differ-ently from the neo-positivist, Anglo-Saxon tradition, it was from thehistory of science that it isolated the principles of knowledge of scientificthought.

(1992a: 41)

This may have been a strategic statement, just as, equally, may have been theremarks offered in the 1985 interview. The 1985 interview was with, amongstothers, Axel Honneth, who, at the time, was research assistant to JurgenHabermas, and Bourdieu may well have been wanting to emphasize the nature ofhis philosophical trajectory away from academic philosophy towards practisingsocial anthropology precisely so as to differentiate his own position from that of


Habermas. Equally, the Amsterdam paper was presented at the time in whichBourdieu was seeking to emphasize the potential for universalization of theparticular French tradition to which he belonged in opposition to the threat ofuniversal conceptual domination posed by the American positivist tradition. Thiswas the period of his engagement with American social science as manifested inSocial Theory for a Changing Society, which he co-edited with James Coleman(Coleman and Bourdieu, 1989) following a conference held in Chicago, and, inparticular, of Bourdieus Epilogue to that publication entitled On the Possibilityof a Field of World Sociology. These are necessary caveats to be entered inrelation to Bourdieus retrospective account in the late 1980s of his earlyintellectual development. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I want toexamine some of Bourdieus earliest texts, especially some of those writtenbetween 1965 and 1975 during the period in which he developed his distinctiveconcepts and in which, I shall argue, he sought to reconcile his knowledge of theclassical tradition of sociological explanation with his philosophical disposition togive social science a new kind of epistemological foundation.

Bourdieus First BookThe tension between philosophy and sociology had already been apparent inBourdieus first book: Sociologie de lAlgerie (1958). As I have already indicated,Bourdieus intention was to transfer his philosophical interest in the phenomeno-logical analysis of emotions and intersubjectivity to apply to the larger issues ofcross-cultural adaptation that he witnessed in relation to the Algerian response toFrench colonial intervention in North Africa. He needed to establish a status quoante of Algerian cultures in order, subsequently, to analyse processes of culturaladjustment. This was the motive forcing him to find ways of describing thetraditional organization of Algerian tribes. A descriptive sociology was a necessaryinstrument to develop a descriptive phenomenology of acculturation processes.

Attention has always focused in particular on Bourdieus discussion of theKabyle culture in the second chapter of his book. This is understandable becauseKabyle 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 dominationmasculine (1998). Durkheim had also cited the Kabyles as evidence for theexistence of the kind of mechanical solidarity that he called politico-familialorganization in Chapter 6 of The Division of Labour in Society (1933). Bourdieudid not cite Durkheim in the Bibliography or the text of Sociologie de lAlgerie,but the two sources of information cited by Durkheim (Hanoteau and Letour-neux, 1873; Masqueray, 1886). It seems likely, therefore, that Bourdieus inter-pretation of the social organization of the Kabyles derived from the same sourcesas did Durkheims interpretation, but there is nothing to suggest that Bourdieuwas endorsing Durkheims distinction between mechanical and organic solidarityor, indeed, that he was engaging directly with Durkheims text at all. By contrast,


Bourdieus Bibliography does contain Webers Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Reli-gionssoziologie (19201). Apart from the mention of several American texts onacculturation, the reference to Webers volume is the only explicitly theoreticalone in the Bibliography. There are also many references to texts on Islamic lawand Islamic religious practices (including Chelhod, 1958; Letourneau, 1950).The discussion of the Kabyles focuses on berber law but has no reference at all toreligion.

It is the rather more neglected chapter on the Mozabite culture (Chapter4) that mainly appears to be the product of Bourdieus reading in the secondaryliterature that he cited. His discussion of the Mozabites overtly operated with thelanguage that is familiar to us from the first part of the Aufsatze that is separatelypublished as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1930).Bourdieu started with the paradox of Mozabite culture that it stimulatedsophisticated and dispersed commercial activity across North Africa whilst retain-ing tight social and cultural cohesion. He sought to find the why and the how ofthis paradox, and Webers interpretation of the relationship between Calvinismand capitalism provided a ready-made, off-the-peg explanation. The Mozabiteswere adherents of a heretical sect of Islam and the heresy was based on twoprinciples derived from a strict interpretation of the Koran that all believers areequal and that every action is either good or bad. On this basis, Bourdieuproceeded to describe the Mozabites as religious dissidents:

Thus these equalitarian rigorists, according to whom religion must bevivified not only by faith but also by works and purity of conscience, whoattach great value to pious intention, who reject the worship of saints, whowatch over the purity of morals with extreme severity, could be called theProtestants and Puritans of Islam.

(1958: 45/1962b: 39)

The adoption of Weberian terminology is blatant. The chapter has a sub-headingcalled Puritanism and Capitalism and it concludes that the soul and the life of theMozabites

. . . are organized around two distinct centers which stand in the sameopposition as the sacred and the profane. Thus it is that the modernisticadaptation to the world of finance and business does not contradict therigid traditionalism of the religious life but, on the contrary, preserves itand makes it possible.

(1958: 58/1962b: 545)

It needs to be said, of course, that Sociologie de lAlgerie was probablywritten quickly in difficult circumstances as the Algerian War of Independence wasbecoming more intense, and it also needs to be accepted that this was the first


publication of a relatively young man. The point is not so much the inadequacy ofthe analysis as the nature of the inadequacy. Bourdieu was prepared to usewhatever sociological explanations were to hand and which seemed plausibly to fitthe historical, ethnographic records with which he was working. He did not tryrigorously to defend the analogy that he deployed between Kharedjite Abadhitesand Calvinists, concentrating only on the formal similarities without referring tosubstantive differences between dissident Islam and dissident Christianity, pre-cisely because his interest was not at all in the validity of the sociologicalexplanation as such. Bourdieus accounts of the original social organization of theAlgerian tribes were only of interest to him in as much as they could be regardedas objectifications of the putative subjective values of those people whom he wasto interview in their new situations in Algiers. The accounts were discursiveexercises. Although the first edition of the book was entitled Sociologie delAlgerie, the English translation of 1962 was entitled The Algerians, by whichtime, also, the findings were differently presented. By 1962, Bourdieu, back inFrance, had attended some of the research seminars of Levi-Strauss, and theEnglish text contains diagrammatic representations of the social/spatial organiza-tion of a Kabyle house that anticipate La maison kabyle ou le monde renverse(Bourdieu, 1970b). This was Bourdieus most Levi-Straussian article, but itsubsequently became clear that there was no more conviction on his part aboutthis ethnological gloss than there had been in his use of Weberian discourse. Whatwe see in Bourdieus own critique of some of his earlier Levi-Straussian pieces inthe first part of Esquisse dune theorie de la pratique (1972) is not so much thediscovery of a new methodological position as the articulation of a position thatwas able to accommodate the artificiality of the explanatory discourses that he hadexploited in his formative intellectual apprenticeship in North Africa. It is to thisprocess of articulation that we must now turn.

Champ Intellectuel et projet createurBourdieus thought always developed within the framework of an intellectualmatrix. He simultaneously pursued ideas within and between compartments sothat, for instance, the articulation of his philosophy and methodology in respect ofhis Algerian anthropological research emerged in the early 1970s after a decade ofresearch and reflection that could be thought to belong to the sociology ofculture and education. The difficulty is to know where to break into this matrix soas to try to represent it. However, I take as my starting point the article that wasfirst published in a special number of Les Temps Modernes in 1966 devoted to theproblems of structuralism: Champ intellectuel et projet createur (1966d). Sincereturning to France from Algeria, Bourdieu had published two books arising fromhis sociological work there, and also several articles that were pursuing lines ofinquiry derived from the Algerian studies notably in relation to time, honourand work. After several years lecturing at the University of Lille, Bourdieu was


established as a lecturer in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and as aresearcher in Arons research group, the Centre de Sociologie Europeenne. He hadundertaken studies of the experience of students in French higher education,particularly students of philosophy and sociology at the University of Lille whenhe was teaching there. The same mixture of concerns was present in this work ashad been present in the Algerian research. Les heritiers: les etudiants et la culture(1964) focused on the curriculum as a mechanism of acculturation, and Bourdieupublished the results of questionnaires that attempted to generate a profile of thecultures of students prior to their academic studies. He had been involved with aproject on photography and photographic clubs, which resulted in the publicationof Un art moyen: les usages sociaux de la photographie in 1965, and also with aproject analysing the attendance at French, and then selected European,museums/art galleries, which resulted in the publication of Lamour de lart in1966 (1966a). That year saw the publication of Condition de classe et positionde classe (1966b) and Une sociologie de laction est-elle possible? (1966c),both of which were essentially theoretical, the former in relation to structuralismand the latter in opposition to Alain Touraine, but there had been very littlereason to anticipate the developed argument of Champ intellectuel et projetcreateur neither the articulation of the concept of field nor the application tocultural history. The opening paragraph needs to be given in full. Bourdieubegan:

In order that the sociology of intellectual and artistic creation be assignedits proper object and at the same time its limits, the principle must beperceived and stated that the relationship between a creative artist and hiswork, and therefore his work itself, is affected by the system of socialrelations within which creation as an act of communication takes place, orto be more precise, by the position of the creative artist in the structure ofthe intellectual field (which is itself, in part at any rate, a function of hispast work, and the reception it has met with). The intellectual field, whichcannot be reduced to a simple aggregate of isolated agents or to the sumof the elements merely juxtaposed, is, like a magnetic field, made up of asystem of power lines. In other words, the constituting agents or systemsof agents may be described as so many forces which, by their existence,opposition or combination, determine its specific structure at a givenmoment in time. In return, each of these is defined by its particularposition within this field from which it derives positional properties whichcannot be assimilated to intrinsic properties. Each is also defined by aspecific type of participation in the cultural field taken as a system ofrelations between themes and problems; it is a determined type of culturalunconscious, while at the same time it intrinsically possesses what could becalled a functional weight, because its own mass, that is, its power (or


better, its authority) in the field cannot be defined independently of itsposition within it.

(1966d: 865/1971d: 161)

This was a new voice and a new approach. Bourdieu was announcing thatthe sociology of knowledge in general and of artistic production in particularshould not be predicated on the autonomisation of historical producers studied inrelation to a currently imposed construction of their supposed social contexts.Rather it should be founded on the analysis of those impersonal, objective systemswithin which communication takes place and within which meanings are imma-nently established. Although Bourdieu cited Williamss Culture and Society(1958) in his article, nevertheless that book exemplified the approach that he wasseeking to criticize. For Bourdieu, Williamss work placed texts and authors thathad been selected, evaluated and esteemed within the literary critical discourse ofhigh culture in relation to a hypostatized context that was the construct of theequally high-culture discourse of social and economic history. The resultingsociology of literature was not an analysis of the system of historical socialrelations within which texts functioned but, instead, a current construction of arepresentation of the past that was dependent on elements that had been falselyrendered independent and that functioned ideologically in the present as acreative project within a present intellectual field. Bourdieus 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 Bourdieus position, itis, nevertheless, falsely realist. Bourdieus opening sentence is very important inindicating the epistemology that he was taking for granted. There are twocomponents. There is, first of all, the insistence that sociological analysis entailsthe analysis of the system of social relations within which individuals operate andwithin which their individualities are defined, but, secondly, there is the insistencethat this way of seeing intellectual and artistic production is a necessary corollaryof adopting a sociological perspective. The principle must be perceived andstated concerning the boundaries of sociological explanation rather in termscomparable to mathematical proof. There is no claim here that reality is beinganalysed. The account of reality that is disclosed by sociology is a function of thesociological mode of perception. It does not exclude other modes of perceivingthe 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 realityhad nothing to do with the objective phenomena and everything to do with theconflict between modes of perception or the contest between faculties. Althoughthe opening half-sentence may seem an almost casual introduction, it doesdisclose Bourdieus attachment to a neo-Kantian epistemology and, already, awillingness to apply that epistemology reflexively. As we shall see, it was also a neo-


Kantianism that was derived from the Marburg School and, in particular, ErnstCassirer, rather than from Rickert, Windelband and the south-west GermanSchool of neo-Kantianism. Rickert had written The Limits of Concept Formationin Natural Science (1986) in order to argue that contingent individual behaviourin history could be analysed not by adopting the procedures of natural science butonly by adopting an alternative methodology specific to and inherent in thedifferent phenomena. Bourdieu appears to have believed, instead, that delimita-tions of explanatory discourses are themselves historically contingent. Limits haveto be acknowledged and declared, but they are not intrinsic. Bourdieus disquietabout Webers methodology derives, in part, from the latters attachment to thephilosophical orientation of the south-west German neo-Kantian School. Bour-dieus neo-Kantianism merged with Bachelards historical epistemology andresisted transcendentalism. We have to accept that we proceed as if sociologicalexplanation were valid (to use the title of a text by another influential neo-Kantian, Hans Vaihinger [1924]), but we seek to make this provisionalitydominant for extraneous reasons.

Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945There is no need to consider further here the substance of Champ intellectuel etprojet createur. For our purposes, the introductory passage of the article clarifiesBourdieus 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 field of sociology,Bourdieu was seeking to offer an insider view of the sub-field of Frenchsociology to an outsider readership. Within the article, therefore, he attemptedto provide an objective social history of intellectual relations in France between1945 and 1966 from a systematically sociological perspective adopted at the endof this period, whilst, at the same time, he endeavoured to contextualize his ownintellectual agency during those years. The experiment was as much an attempt inthe intellectual field to explore the boundaries of subjectivity and objectivity as, inthe anthropological field, his Celibat et condition paysanne (1962a) had been inrespect of the social situation in his native Bearn. Publication in Social Researchwas an attempt to place the article outside the immediate field of production andconsumption that was the object of the articles inquiry. The connection withChamp intellectuel et projet createur was made explicit in the opening para-graph. From the outset, therefore, the methodology adopted in the article waslinked to the position that Bourdieu had already articulated within the social andintellectual trajectory under consideration:

The reader will find in this paper neither a systematic history of thesociological or philosophical events and schools which have succeeded one


another in France since 1945, nor a philosophy of the history of philoso-phy or of the history of sociology, but a sociology of the main trends ofsociology which, in order to restore their full meaning to works and todoctrines, tries to relate them to their cultural context, in other words,tries to show how positions and oppositions in the intellectual field areconnected with explicitly or implicitly philosophical attitudes. It is withthis in mind that we have prepared this outline of a sociology of Frenchsociology, which aims at uncovering unconscious affinities rather thandescribing declared affiliations, and at deciphering implicit purposes ratherthan accepting literally declarations of intent.

(1967a: 162)

As this passage indicates, Bourdieus article focused on the changing relationsbetween philosophy and sociology in the particular socio-economic conditions ofpost-World War II France. In Les heritiers (1964), Bourdieu had already inspectedthe social contingency of the student selection of these subjects of study, and itcould be said that he was now analysing the social contingency of how thesesubjects were themselves constituted for student consumption. It was an approachthat anticipated the abstract discussion of the arbitrariness of curriculum contentin La reproduction (1970a), but the constant, tacit frame of reference wasBourdieus own position-taking between the two intellectual disciplines the onewithin which he was trained and the other that he was employed to transmit. Thesub-text of his argument and of his position-taking related to the contemporaryvogue for quantitative sociological research as it has developed in the UnitedStates. He contended, however, that such research is ultimately nothing but aneo-positivism that seeks its guarantee in American sociology and civilization(1967a: 164). He claimed, in other words, that the apparent indifference ofAmerican empirical social science to philosophy and theoretical speculation waspredicated on positivist philosophy. Bourdieu found it ironical that empirical socialscience could only re-establish itself in France by resurrecting the anti-philosophical philosophy of the Comtist tradition.

The view that Bourdieu tried to express in the article was, essentially, thatthe empiricist social science that was a form of neo-positivism was inadequateprecisely because it was founded on an inadequate philosophy of social science.What was required was a new kind of empirical practice grounded in post-positivist philosophy of science. Again, the irony for Bourdieu was that structural-ism had generated humanist reaction because, like Durkheimianism, it seemed totreat social facts as things, but the shortcoming of structuralism, as ofDurkheimianism, was that it was methodologically insufficiently anti-humanist.Bourdieu paid specific attention to some articles by Merleau-Ponty, and arguedthat in his De Mauss a` Levi-Strauss (1959) Merleau-Ponty granted ethnologyits philosophical emancipation, but he did not fail to reserve to philosophy theright to re-interpret or, better, to arouse the existential significance of the


inanimate structures built up or discovered by the ethnologist (1967a: 167).Bourdieu claimed that the accommodation between existential philosophy andsocial science achieved by the intellectuals of the previous generation was one thatpreserved freedom and voluntarism within a pseudo-scientistic and pseudo-deterministic structural analysis whereas what was needed was the delimitation ofa social science theory and practice that, by concentrating on the systemicrelationalism of observed phenomena, would rule out any explanatory recourse tothe supposition of the existence of free human agency within those systems. Sucha supposition was, for Bourdieu, an interpolation from outside the immanentsystem that was merely a projection of the disposition towards existentialistphilosophy on the part of the scientific observers.

Bourdieu accused Levi-Strauss of the same underlying humanist orienta-tion, arguing that he brought out in the role of the ethnologist what must havesurpassed the fondest expectations of a phenomenologist (1967a: 167) in thefollowing passage from his Foreword to Sociologie et anthropologie:

The apprehension (which cannot be objective) of the unconscious formsof 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 mostalien of other persons as if he were another self of ours.

(Levi-Strauss, 1950: xxxi, quoted in Bourdieu, 1967a: 167)

Bourdieu proceeded to argue that this humanist social science found support inthe intellectual climate of the years of Occupation, Resistance and Liberation. Theexistential philosophy that was homologuous with social and political experienceduring 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 wasonly prepared to acknowledge that the latters intellectual endeavours werebeneficial in breaking with the canonical rules and subject-matter of universityphilosophy, which had the effect of liberating anthropological science from theconventions that had held it prisoner (1967a: 180).

This was an influence that Bourdieu was recognizing as of latent value forhis own project, but the article looked next at the reaction to existentialism in theearly 1960s and he claimed that the emergent empirical sociology in France wasfounded on the illusion of a first beginning and, by the same token, on ignoranceof the epistemological problems posed by any scientific practice, as well as ondeliberate or unwitting disregard of the theoretical past of European science(1967a: 184). This epistemological ignorance was encouraged by the social andeconomic conditions in which public and private bureaucracies began to look tosociology to provide legitimation of their policy intentions. Bourdieu quotedLucien Goldmanns then recent comment that future historians will probablyidentify the years 1955 to 1960 as the sociological turning-point in France


between crisis capitalism and organization capitalism, accompanied by a transitionfrom philosophical, historical and humanistic sociology to the a-historical socio-logical thinking of today (Goldmann, 1966: 6, quoted in Bourdieu, 1967a:190).

The position Bourdieu was adopting in Sociology and Philosophy inFrance 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 Durk-heimians in whom Davy had placed such confidence 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 institu-tionalized university philosophy. There had been a shift towards a spiritualizationof the conscience collective in Durkheims own late work and this had partly beenthe consequence of seeking institutional accommodation with philosophicalopponents. The immediate post-war period had seen an explicable rise in liber-tarian philosophy, and this had inhibited the progress of the scientific analysis ofsocial systems. Structuralism had accommodated phenomenology and philosoph-ical individualism whilst American empirical sociology was becoming popularbecause it presented itself as unphilosophical and, for this reason, was uncriticallycompliant with the orientations of organization capitalism. What was needed wasan empirical social science that was grounded on a sound epistemology. One ofthe problems of the war period was that the institutional links that maintaineddialogue between philosophy and social science were severed and, for a while, theintellectual discourses existed in isolation from each other. Bourdieu pointedhopefully to the fact that all but non-existent between 1950 and 1960, researchworkers with a philosophical background, and more especially graduates inphilosophy or from the Ecole Normale, find their way into the research institu-tions that had been established without them (1967a: 208).

The philosophers now cited as contributing to a new engagement ofphilosophy with social science were Bachelard, Piaget, Gueroult, Canguilhem, andVuillemin, none of whom was associated with the dominant non-universityphilosophy spearheaded by Sartre. The philosophies produced by these intellec-tuals were

. . . predisposed, by the very object they choose for themselves and by theway in which they approach it, to lend sociology the theoretical assistanceit needs, if only by posing the generic question of the conditions that makepossible any scientific practice.

(1967a: 211)

Significantly, Bourdieu also commented in a footnote that what these intellectualshad in common was that they came from working-class or lower middle-classbackgrounds and primarily from the provinces (1967a: 211 fn.54).


Bourdieus purpose in writing Sociology and Philosophy in France since1945 is now clear. Having initially dabbled with Levi-Straussian thinking in theearly 1960s, he had then, in seeking to present himself as a sociologist, beentempted by American quantitative methods. The detailed statistical appendices toLamour de lart suggest this temporary temptation. However, by 1966/7,Bourdieu was committed to establishing a new reconciliation between philosophyand sociology that would underpin the empirical practice of the research groupthat he was to lead from 1968. Equally, he began to articulate a philosophy ofsocial science that would enable sociologists to be politically engaged withoutaccepting the Sartrian philosophy of engagement. At the same time, he sought tooutline a theory of social science that emphasized research practice and was quiteseparate from the practice of university social science teaching. In his own terms,he was about to begin the process of establishing an intellectual field of socialscience discourse within which his own creative practices would be legitimated,and it was logical that this preparatory period should culminate in the launchingof the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1975, which was tofunction for Bourdieus theory of practice as the Annee Sociologique had forDurkheimianism.

Emergent Philosophy of Social ScienceThese were very productive and significant years for Bourdieu. In 1967 (1967b)he published his translation into French of Panofskys Gothic Architecture andScholastic Thought (1957), concluding with a postface the argument of which is,in part, repeated in Syste`mes denseignement et syste`mes de pensee (1967c).Panofsky was a disciple of Cassirer, and Bourdieu was clearly interested inCassirers thought throughout this period. Not only did he cite CassirersStructuralism in Modern Linguistics (1945) and his Sprache und Mythos(1925) in articles, but, as General Editor of Le Sens Commun series for LesEditions de Minuit, Bourdieu was responsible for organizing the translations intoFrench of five works by Cassirer between 1972 and 1977, notably the threevolumes of La philosophie des formes symboliques (1972) and Substance et fonction:Elements pour une theorie du concept (1977). Bourdieu produced Le metier desociologue in 1968 (1968a). This was subtitled Epistemological Preliminaries andwas intended as the first of several volumes that would be of practical value toresearch students. It offered a blueprint for the theory of sociological knowledgethat he was counterposing against structuralism. Indeed this was the title of anarticle which appeared in 1968 in Social Research, almost as a companion piecewith Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945. Structuralism and Theoryof Sociological Knowledge (1968c) was never published in French. In 1970,Bourdieu published La reproduction: Elements pour une theorie du syste`me den-seignement (1970a). The following year he published both Une interpretation dela theorie de la religion selon Max Weber (1971a) and Gene`se et structure du


champ religieux (1971b). There were other significant texts in these years, but Iwant to highlight the section of the first chapter of Esquisse dune theorie de lapratique, precede de trois etudes dethnologie kabyle (1972), which was publishedseparately 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, butI want to examine in detail the abstract statement of theory that Bourdieu offeredin Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge (1968c); his applicationof that theory in seeking to reinterpret the work of Max Weber; and, finally, theconsequences of his attempt to extend his theory of sociological practice in hisreconsideration of his Algerian fieldwork.

Structuralism and Theory of SociologicalKnowledgeAt the beginning of Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge,Bourdieu insisted that the importance of structuralism was that it introduced anew scientific method rather than that it was a new explanatory theory:

The theory of sociological knowledge, as the system of principles and rulesgoverning the production of all sociological propositions scientificallygrounded, and of them alone, is the generating principle of all partialtheories of the social and, therefore, the unifying principle of a properlysociological discourse which must not be confused with a unitary theory ofthe social.

(1968c: 681)

Bourdieu was trying to specify the boundaries of a properly sociological dis-course as much here as in the opening sentence of Champ intellectuel et projetcreateur. The defining character of sociology lay in its method rather than in itsfindings. It followed that classical theorists such as Marx, Durkheim and Weber,totally different in their views of social philosophy and ultimate values, were ableto agree on the main points of the fundamental principles of the theory of theknowledge of the social world (1968c: 682).

This was the guiding principle behind Le metier de sociologue (1968a),which assembled passages from ideologically diverse sociological practitioners inorder to demonstrate and communicate the unity of sociological meta-science.In accordance with Comtes contention, the meta-scientific unity of sociology isunited with science in general. It participated in the identity of principles uponwhich all science, including the science of man, is founded (1968c: 682). Tacitly,Bourdieu was attempting to rescue the correct understanding of Comte fromDurkheims distorting interpretation. Positivism was not advanced by Comte asthe particular methodology of the social sciences but, rather, social science wassimply the application to social relations of the principles underlying all scientific


endeavour. Although this is never explicitly stated, Bourdieus position wasComtist in that by rejecting substantialist in favour of relational thinking, hewas excluding religious, metaphysical or, more generally, humanist reference fromsociological method: The originality of anthropological structuralism lies essen-tially in the fact that it attacks from first to last the substantialist way of thinkingwhich modern mathematics and physics have constantly striven to refute (1968c:682).

The influence of the non-existentialist philosophers of science is evidenthere. Bourdieus article was devoted to seeking to explain the ways in which, tocount as social science, the abstract thinking of mathematics and geometry has tobe applied impersonally to social and cultural relations, which are essentiallyrelations between persons. As Bourdieu puts it:

To remove from physics any remnant of substantialism, it has beennecessary to replace the notion of force with that of form. In the same waysocial sciences could not do away with the idea of human nature except bysubstituting for it the structure it conceals, that is by considering asproducts of a system of relations the properties that the spontaneoustheory of the social ascribes to a substance.

(1968c: 692)

Bourdieu on Weber

There is no space to explore the manifest influence here of Cassirers Substance etfonction. The important point is that Bourdieu was seeking to make the identifica-tion of immanent systemic relations the keystone of the sociological methodunderpinning his research practice and that of his colleagues. In order tolegitimate the sociological practice that he was advocating, he wrote two articlesin which he deliberately distinguished his approach from that of Weber (in Uneinterprtation de la theorie de la religion selon Max Weber, 1971a) and indicatedthe ways in which his meta-scientific perspective enabled him to assimilate thetheories of religion of Marx, Weber and Durkheim in (Gene`se et structure duchamp religieux, 1971b). The title of the latter implies the basis of Bourdieuscritique of Weber in the former. For Bourdieu, Weber failed to acknowledge thesignificance 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 haduncritically exploited in Sociologie de lAlgerie (1958). Bourdieu argued in Uneinterpretation de la theorie de la religion selon Max Weber that a latently


interactionist interpretation was always present in Webers analyses. To demon-strate this, he pointed to four passages in which he claimed that Weber acknow-ledged that the behaviour of conceptual types magician, priest and prophet isin reality constructed in interactive practice. Without denying Webers insights,Bourdieu claimed that we can make a break from Webers explicit methodology todisclose what he was really suggesting. However, we also need to make a secondbreak. The first break liberated the interactions of agents from the imposition oftypological conceptualization. The second break involves recognizing that agentsare not themselves autonomous. Rather, the analysis of the logic of interactionshas to be subordinated to an analysis of the objective structures within which theinteractions have meaning for the agents. Individual agency has to be understoodin terms of the field within which it is exercised. Without this second break, thedanger is that interaction will be understood inter-subjectively or inter-personally,leading to psychological abstraction. By working with explanatory types, Weberused particular exemplars to analyse the general. Scientificity 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 thesystem within which they operated rather than autonomous instruments by whichthe system could be extraneously explained by observers.

Bourdieu elaborated his objection most explicitly in the followingfootnote:

Amongst the omissions resulting from his failure to construct the religiousfield as such, Max Weber presents a series of juxtaposed points of viewwhich each time are derived from the position of a particular agent. Themost significant omission, without doubt, is the absence of any explicitreference to the strictly objective relationship (because established throughtime and space) between the priest and the original prophet and, by thesame token, the absence of any clear and explicit distinction betweenthe two types of prophecy with which every priesthood must deal theoriginal prophecy whose message it perpetuates and from which it holds itsauthority and the competing prophecy which it combats.

(1971a: 6 fn. 5)2

Bourdieu proceeded to argue that a religious field functions to satisfy religiousneed, but this can only be poorly defined if it is not specified in terms of theneeds of different groups and classes. Bourdieu claimed that Weber did notattempt such an elaboration of the constellation of interests in competitionwithin a religious field, even though he did feel obliged to take precise account ofthe particular needs of every professional group or every class. In evidence,Bourdieu referred to Webers discussion in Status Groups: Classes and Religionand added: Another analysis of the differences between the religious interests ofpeasants and petit bourgeois town-dwellers can be found in the chapter entitled


Hierocratic Domination and Political Domination (Bourdieu, 1971a: 7 fn.7/1987: 135 fn. 3). Again, Bourdieu was suggesting that Weber instinctivelyappreciated that there were competitions for dominance that could only bedescribed in terms of interaction and could not be analysed typologically.

The example Bourdieu chose here to suggest the inadequacy of Webersmethodology is significant because the relations between peasants and town-dwellers were the objects of his analysis in his Algerian work as well as in Celibatet condition paysanne (Bourdieu, 1962a), and the difference between thestructuralist comparative analysis of the universalized concept of the peasantcondition and the analysis of the structure of relations within particular systemsconstituting the peasant position was the starting point for the general discussionin Condition de classe et position de classe (1966b). What Bourdieu was arguinghere in respect of religious interests, he was also saying in respect of the politicalfield in Lopinion publique nexiste pas (1971c).

A final example of Bourdieus critique of Weber relates to the notion ofcharisma. Bourdieu wrote:

As well as occasionally succumbing to the nave representation of charismaas a mysterious quality inherent in a person or as a gift of nature . . . evenin his most rigorous writings Max Weber never proposes anything otherthan a psycho-sociological theory of charisma, a theory that regards it asthe lived relation of a public to the charismatic personality. . . .

(1971a: 1415/1987: 129)

Bourdieus claim was that Weber, at best, regarded charisma as something thatwas invested in an individual by a social group. By contrast, Bourdieu contendedthat charisma has to be understood to be an attribute that is comprehendedscientifically in terms of the objective structure of relations by which it isconstituted. It is measurable abstractly like a magnetic force and not by recourseto social psychological interpretation. He concluded:

Let us then dispose once and for all of the notion of charisma as a propertyattaching to the nature of a single individual and examine instead, in eachparticular case, sociologically pertinent characteristics of an individualbiography. The aim in this context is to explain why a particular individualfinds himself socially predisposed to live out and express with particularcogency and coherence, ethical or political dispositions that are alreadypresent in a latent state amongst all the members of the class or group ofhis addressees.

(1971a: 16/1987: 131)

In subjecting the work of Weber to an epistemological critique, Bourdieuwas consolidating the sociological methodology advanced in his Structuralism


and Theory of Sociological Knowledge (1968c). Bourdieu would appear to havebeen repudiating the implicit phenomenology of his early fieldwork and the Levi-Straussian philosophical ethnology of his texts of the early 1960s, and legitimatinghimself as the spokesperson, expressing himself with particular cogency andcoherence, for the new philosophical sociology that was the product of the socialand historical developments he had outlined in Sociology and Philosophy inFrance since 1945 (1967a). The situation was, I believe, more complicated thanthis, and the complexity has to be discussed in order to approach a properunderstanding of Bourdieus position in relation to the classical tradition ofsociology. He positioned himself within sociology by reference to a perceivedinadequacy of Webers methodology. Webers use of types was an artificial orarbitrary imposition on phenomena that possessed inherent systemic meaning. Indefining the boundaries of sociological explanation, however, Bourdieu was awarethat sociological explanation as such represented a discursive imposition that wasas artificial or arbitrary as typological imposition within the discourse.

The Three Forms of Theoretical KnowledgeIn spite of Bourdieus criticism of Merleau-Ponty in Sociology and Philosophy inFrance since 1945, he was only strategically renouncing his earlier phenomeno-logical interests. The philosophical influence of Merleau-Pontys La structure ducomportement (1942) was particularly evident in Celibat et condition paysanne(1962a) and in Bourdieus development of the concepts of habitus and hexis,whilst Merleau-Pontys La phenomenologie de perception (1945) was reworked inBourdieus Elements dune theorie sociologique de la perception artistique(1968b). At the same time as Bourdieu was defining the limits of social scientificexplanation, he was also reflecting on the pre-logical, ontological realities thatsocial science purported to describe. The framework of Le metier de sociologue(1968a) was based on an adoption of Bachelards emphasis on the need to makeepistemological breaks so as to understand the social conditions of production ofscientific explanation. It appeared, therefore, to advocate a sociology of sociologyor a reflexive sociology as a necessary procedure for constructing and verifyingsociological findings. The epistemological breaks were presented as the means bywhich sociological explanation could be refined. However, by the time thatBourdieu published The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge in 1973, theepistemological breaks were serving a broader purpose. They were functioning toallow the sociological analysis of sociological objectivism to become a means bywhich ontic realities might be disclosed. The dense passage is familiar but needs tobe presented in full:

The social world may be subjected to three modes of theoretical know-ledge, 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


stand in opposition to practical knowledge. The mode of knowledge weshall term phenomenological (or, if one prefers to speak in terms ofcurrently active schools, interactionist or ethnomethodological) makesexplicit primary experience of the social world: perception of the socialworld as natural and self-evident is not self-reflective by definition andexcludes all interrogation about its own conditions of possibility. At asecond level, objectivist knowledge (of which the structuralist hermeneuticconstitutes a particular case) constructs the objective relations (e.g. eco-nomic or linguistic) structuring not only practices but representations ofpractices and in particular primary knowledge, practical and tacit, of thefamiliar world, by means of a break with this primary knowledge and,hence, with those tacitly assumed presuppositions which confer upon thesocial world its self-evident and natural character. Objectivist knowledgecan only grasp the objective structures of the social world, and theobjective truth of primary experience (from which explicit knowledge ofthese structures is absent) provided it poses the very problem doxicexperience of the social world excludes by definition, namely the problemof the (specific) conditions under which this experience is possible.Thirdly, what we might refer to as praxeological knowledge is concernednot only with the system of objective relations constructed by the objectiv-ist form of knowledge, but also with the dialectical relationships betweenthese objective structures and the structured dispositions which theyproduce and which tend to reproduce them, i.e. the dual process of theinternalization of externality and the externalization of internality. Thisknowledge presupposes a break with the objectivist knowledge, that is, itpresupposes investigation into the conditions of possibility and, conse-quently, into the limits of the objectivistic viewpoint which grasps practicesfrom the outside, as a fait accompli, rather than construct their generativeprinciple by placing itself inside the process of their accomplishment.

(1973: 534)

The Phenomenological ContextThe way to make sense of this passage is to set it in a phenomenological context.Robert Sokolowskis brilliantly lucid Introduction to Phenomenology (2000) helpsus to understand what Bourdieu was doing in this passage. In a chapter entitledAn Initial Statement of What Phenomenology Is, Sokolowski argues that inorder to understand what phenomenology is,

. . . we must make a distinction between two attitudes or perspectives thatwe can adopt. We must distinguish between the natural attitude and thephenomenological attitude. The natural attitude is the focus we havewhen we are involved in our original, world-directed stance, when we


intend things, situations, facts, and any other kinds of objects. . . . We donot move into it from anything more basic. The phenomenological attitude,on the other hand, is the focus we have when we reflect upon the naturalattitude and all the intentionalities that occur within it. It is within thephenomenological attitude that we carry out philosophical analyses. Thephenomenological attitude is also sometimes called the transcendentalattitude.

(2000: 42)

Sokolowski clarifies the relationship between the two attitudes by specifying moreclearly the distinguishing characteristics of the phenomenological attitude:

There are many different viewpoints and attitudes even within the naturalattitude. There is the viewpoint of ordinary life, there is the viewpoint ofthe mathematician, that of the medical specialist, the physicist, the politi-cian, and so on. . . . But the phenomenological attitude is not like any ofthese. It is more radical and comprehensive. All the other shifts inviewpoint and focus remain cushioned by our underlying world belief,which always remains in force, and all the shifts define themselves asmoving from one viewpoint into another among the many that are opento us. The shift into the phenomenological attitude, however, is an all ornothing kind of move that disengages completely from the naturalattitude and focuses, in a reflective way, on everything in the naturalattitude, including the underlying world belief.

(2000: 47)

Viewed from this perspective, the first epistemological break advocated byBourdieu in The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge enables objectivistscientific knowledge, but the objectivism remains within the domain of naturalattitudes. The second epistemological break, however, enables an entirely differ-ent perspective to be achieved in relation to all natural attitudes. By thisreconciliation or synthesis of a philosophy of science derived from Bachelard andthe process of phenomenological reduction derived from Husserl, Bourdieu wasable to maintain a strictly subjectless or anti-humanist methodology of socialscience whilst allowing for the agency of beings within a life-world. Bourdieuscriticism of Merleau-Ponty and Levi-Strauss had been that they both allowed theirphilosophical positions to distort the truly positivist scientificity of sociologicalinvestigation. His accommodation of philosophy and sociology allowed for a cleardemarcation between the possible achievements of sociology and ontology.Bourdieus second epistemological break is not a meta-scientific posture withinthe field of sociology. Instead, it represents a sociological way to phenomeno-logical reduction. Sokolowski suggests that phenomenology offers two possibleways to achieve reduction, bracketing or the epoche. The first is a Cartesian way


that subjects all to doubt, and the second is an ontological way to reduction thathelps us to complete the partial sciences. We move out to wider and widercontexts, until we come to the kind of widest context provided by the phenom-enological attitude (2000: 53). Bourdieus insistence that tout est social(1992c) enabled him to identify ontological and sociological analysis such that hetried to subject all discourses to sociological reduction without privileging thesociological practices of the natural attitude.

Bourdieus dual use of sociological inquiry has to be clearly stated. Thisdual function explains the way in which throughout his career he sought to shiftintellectual perspective between differing public discourses or fields, sometimespresenting himself as an anthropologist, a sociolinguist, a cultural sociologist orphilosopher, without relinquishing his fundamental commitment to a sociologicalapproach. He approached the Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (Gouldner,1971) in the perspective of Husserls The Crisis of European Sciences andTranscendental Phenomenology (1970).

SummaryThis article has focused on the brief period in which Bourdieu was bothlegitimating himself within the field of sociology and simultaneously laying thefoundations for a theory of practice that would subject all scientific discourses tophilosophical scrutiny. Although there is clear evidence for the suggestion herethat Bourdieu appropriated phenomenological thinking and grafted it to thephilosophy of science, it also has to be firmly said that he did not share thetranscendental dispositions of either Husserl or of some of the neo-Kantians.Although he took advantage of the descriptive procedures of phenomenologicalanalysis, Bourdieu did not, unlike Husserl, believe that phenomenology securedthe supreme status of philosophy. As Sokolowski puts it: To move into thephenomenological attitude is not to become a specialist in one form of knowledgeor another, but to become a philosopher (2000: 47).

Bourdieu wrote The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (1991) toshow that Heideggerian philosophy could be subjected to sociological/phenomenological reduction, and Pascalian Meditations (2000) was also anattempt to celebrate the kind of philosophizing that would not become ossified asacademic philosophy. The truth, therefore, must be that Bourdieu exploitedphenomenology whilst rejecting its transcendental pretensions. In effect, phe-nomenological reduction was, for him, an heuristic device within the naturalattitude that owed its pragmatic results to claims of transcendence that he did notaccept. We can conclude that Bourdieus relationship to the classical tradition ofWestern European sociology was unique. As he sometimes stated, he was anoblate someone who could not fully let go of the intellectual position intowhich he had been initiated, in spite of his scepticism. It remains to be seenwhether Bourdieus ambivalent resolution of his personal, social and intellectual


inheritance his habitus will continue to provide the paradigm that we need foran ongoing synergy between social research and philosophical reflection. If aconclusion is appropriate when all situations require continuous intellectualadjustments, my view would be that Bourdieu was aware that international social,political and cultural developments are occurring that cannot readily be under-stood by reference to a circumscribed discourse (sociology) generated in oneparticular 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 toconstruct shared discourses that seek to theorize internationally shared experi-ences expressed in particular and different conceptual languages. BourdieusReponses: Pour une anthropologie reflexive (1992b) was translated as An Invitationto Reflexive Sociology. The English title missed Bourdieus point, and his emphasisneeds to be the starting-point for an endeavour that will have the possibility ofreviving social theory internationally without simply endorsing our local socio-logical tradition.

Notes1. 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 thebibliography. For a discussion of the way in which Bourdieu stimulated collaborative activity, seethe interview between Bourdieu and Yvette Delsaut in Delsaut and Rivie`re (2002: 177239).

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 slightlymodified version of the original French article and was written in 1985.

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Derek Robbins is Professor of International Social Theory at the University of East London, where he alsois Director of the Group for the Study of International Social Science in the School of Social Sciences. Heis the author of The Work of Pierre Bourdieu (1991) and of Bourdieu and Culture (2000); the editor ofthe four-volume collection of articles on Bourdieu in the Sage Masters of Contemporary Social Thoughtseries (2000); as well as author of many articles on Bourdieus work. He is currently editing two furthercollections of articles in the Sage Masters of Contemporary Social Thought series: the first set on Jean-


Franois Lyotard; and the other a second, post-mortem, set on Bourdieu. He is writing a book on TheInternationalization of French Social Thought, 19502000 and is researching the influence of the Frenchreception 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 RM82AS, UK. [email: [email protected]]


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