An Introduction to Social Analysis by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu's Class Theory: The Scientist as Revolutionary Pierre Bourdieu Political Sociology

Biography

Structuralist constructivism

In defining and studying the essence social relations Bourdieu proposed to use two fundamental approaches simultaneously:

1. 1) structuralism - in the social system there are objective structures that do not depend on the consciousness and will of people, but are able to stimulate one or another of their actions and aspirations;
2. 2) constructivism - the actions of people, due to life experience, the process of socialization, "form a social agent as a truly practical operator of constructing objects."

Central to the sociological theory of Bourdieu are the concepts of "habitus" and "social field", through which the gap between macro- and microanalysis of social realities is overcome.

According to Bourdieu, the objective social environment produces habit- "a system of strong acquired predispositions"; in the future, they are used by individuals as initial attitudes that give rise to specific social practices of individuals.

social field is a logically conceivable structure, a kind of environment in which social relations are carried out.

Bibliography

• "Heirs, students and culture"
• "Love for art, art museums in Europe and their visitors"
• "Reproduction. Elements of the theory of the education system»
• "Difference, the Social Critique of Opinion"
• "Practical View"
• "Poverty of the World"
• "Social Habits in Science"
• "About Television"
• "Male Dominance"

Published in Russian

• Sociology of politics / Per. from French; comp., total. ed. and foreword. N. A. Shmatko. - Moscow: Socio-Logos, 1993.
• Started. Choses dites / Per. from fr. N. A. Shmatko. - Moscow: Socio-Logos, 1994.
• University doxa and creativity: against scholastic divisions / Per. from fr. // Socio-Logos'96. - Moscow: Socio-Logos, 1996. - S. 8-31.
• For rationalist historicism / Per. from fr. // Socio-Logos of postmodernism. Almanac of the Russian-French Center for Sociological Research. - Moscow: Publishing House of the Institute of Experimental Sociology, 1997.
• The spirit of the state: the genesis and structure of the bureaucratic field / Per. from fr. // Poetics and politics. Almanac of the Russian-French Center for Sociology and Philosophy. - Moscow: Institute of Experimental Sociology; St. Petersburg: Aleteyya, 1999. - S. 125-166.
• Sociology and Democracy / Per. from fr. // Poetics and politics. Almanac of the Russian-French Center for Sociology and Philosophy. - Moscow: Institute of Experimental Sociology; St. Petersburg: Aleteyya, 1999. - S. 119-124.
• Practical meaning / Per. from French; total ed. and after. N. A. Shmatko. - Moscow: Institute of Experimental Sociology; St. Petersburg: Aleteyya, 2001. http://yanko.lib.ru/books/cultur/bourdieu-all.htm archive file
• Experience of reflective sociology / Per. from English. E. D. Rutkevich // Theoretical sociology: Anthology: In 2 hours / Per. from English, French, German, It. Comp. and general ed. S. P. Bankovskoy. - Moscow: University Book House, 2002. - Part 2. - 424 with ISBN 5-8013-0046-5
• Political ontology of Martin Heidegger / Per. from French A. T. Bikbova, T. V. Anisimova. - Moscow: Praxis, 2003. - 272 s - ("Ideologies".) ISBN 5-901574-27-3 (Reviews: Ilya Nilov. Two-faced philosophy)
• On television and journalism / Per. from fr. T. V. Anisimova and Yu. V. Markova, ed. and foreword. N. A. Shmatko. - Moscow: Pragmatics of Culture, 2002. - 160 p.
• Structure, habitus, practice // Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology. - Volume I, 1998. - No. 2.
• Sociology of social space / Per. from French; total ed. and after. N. A. Shmatko. - Moscow: Institute of Experimental Sociology; St. Petersburg: Aleteyya, 2005. In 2 volumes.
• On symbolic power // Bourdieu P. Sociology of social space. - Moscow: Institute of Experimental Sociology; St. Petersburg: Aleteyya, 2007, p. 87-96
• Bourdieu, P. Forms of capital / per. from English. M. S. Dobryakova; Bourdieu P. Distinction: social criticism of judgment (fragments of the book) / transl. from fr. OI Kirchik // Western economic sociology: an anthology of modern classics. - Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004. - 680 p.
• For biased knowledge // Emergency reserve. - 2002. - No. 5 (25).

About P. Bourdieu

• Bowman, Z. Pierre Bourdieu, or the dialectic of vita contemplativa and vita activa / Per. from English. A. D. Kovaleva // Sociological Journal - 2002. - N 3. - P. 5-19.

• Karsenty, B. Sociology in the space of points of view

• Maybe J. Sociological engagement // Poetics and Politics. Almanac of the Russian-French Center for Sociology and Philosophy. - M.: Institute of Experimental Sociology; St. Petersburg: Aletheya, 1999.

• Modern Social Theory: Bourdieu, Giddens, Habermas. Proc. allowance / Comp., trans. and intro. Art. A. V. Ledeneva. - Novosibirsk: Publishing house Novosib. un-ta, 1995. - 120 p.

• Socioanalysis of Pierre Bourdieu: Alm. Russian - French Center of Sociology and Philology of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences / Ed. ed. Shmatko N.A. - M.: St. Petersburg: Aleteyya, 2001. - 285 p. - (Gallicinium)

• Tsygankov, D. B. Introduction to Sociology by Pierre Bourdieu // Zhurn. sociological and social. anthropology = J. of sociology a. social anthropology. - St. Petersburg, 1998. - T. 1, N 3. - C. 148-155.

• Shmatko, N. A. Analysis of cultural production by Pierre Bourdieu // Socis: Sots. research - M., 2003. - N 8. - S. 113-120.

• Shmatko, N. A. An Introduction to Social Analysis by Pierre Bourdieu. Preface to P. Bourdieu's book "Sociology of Politics". - M.: Socio-Logos, 1993.

• Shmatko, N. A. Habitus in the structure of sociological theory // Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology. - 1998. - No. 2.

• Shmatko, N. A. Genetic structuralism of Pierre Bourdieu // History of theoretical sociology. In 4 volumes. T.4 / Responsible. ed. and compiled by Yu. N. Davydov. - St. Petersburg: RKhGI, 2000.

• Shmatko, N. A. On the way to practical theory practices. Afterword to P. Bourdieu's book "Practical Sense" - M.: Institute of Experimental Sociology; St. Petersburg: Aletheya, 2001.

Links

• "The Sociological Space of Pierre Bourdieu" - a site dedicated to Pierre Bourdieu, with big amount texts and reference materials
• After Bourdieu: The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Reflection (section on Bourdieu in the New Literary Review, no. 60)
• Shirshova, I. Basic concepts of the concept of Pierre Bourdieu // Almanac "East". - 2004. - No. 11, November.
• Basil Levoff. The media as a space for the circulation of capital of fame (the ideas of P. Bourdieu and Alvin Toffler are compared)

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See what "Bourdieu P." in other dictionaries:

- (Bourdicu) Pierre (b. 1930) French sociologist, ethnologist, author of an original concept that considers the metatheoretical foundations of sociology. In 1955 he graduated from the Higher pedagogical school where Althusser and Foucault were his teachers. He taught... ... The latest philosophical dictionary

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), French sociologist close to neo-Marxism. Works on the sociology of power and politics, social stratification (see SOCIAL STRATIFICATION) of society and the "symbolic capitals" of various groups, art and ... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

- (b. 1930) French sociologist close to neo-Marxism. Works on the sociology of power and politics, the social stratification of society and the symbolic capitals of various groups, art and mass culture. Books Middle Art. Essays… … Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

Pierre Bourdieu Pierre Bourdieu Date of birth: August 1, 1930 Place of birth: fr: Denguin, France Date of death: January 23, 2002 Place of death ... Wikipedia

After graduating from the university, Bourdieu initially planned to write a dissertation under the guidance of the eminent philosopher of science and historian of epistemology, Georges Canguièmes. But his philosophical career was interrupted by conscription into the army. The young scientist, probably as punishment for his anti-colonialist activities, was sent to Algeria, where he did military service for a year, and after demobilization decided to remain a teacher at the Faculty of Literature at the University of Algiers.

The Algerian experience of Bourdieu became decisive for his further intellectual development. In Algiers, he moved from epistemology to fieldwork, writing two original books on ethnology: The Sociology of Algiers. (Sociology de l'Algerie) and "Sketch of the theory of practice" ( Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique). However, the young scientists' dislike of the war in Algeria put him in danger, and in 1959 he returned to France, taking up the post of assistant to Raymond Aron in 1961.

In 1964, Aron invited Bourdieu to head the Ford Foundation-funded Center for Historical Sociology, and in the following years Bourdieu gathered around him a constellation of collaborators (Luc Boltansky, Yvette Delso, Claude Grignon, Jean-Claude Passron, and Monique de Saint-Martin) who, in further help him found an extremely powerful and productive school. At the same time, Bourdieu showed interest in the French education system, writing (with Jean-Claude Passron) two works on the reproductive function of education: "Heirs: students and culture" ( Les heritiers, les etudiants, et la culture) and "Reproduction" (La reproduction).

Pierre Bourdieu

Bourdieu broke off relations with Aron in 1968 in response to the latter's conservative condemnation of the then student protests. In the late 60s and early 70s, Bourdieu laid the foundation for his leading role in French sociology, publishing a huge amount of work on critical issues theory and methodology. In 1975, he founded the journal Social Science Research Papers ( Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales), which became the factory of his own creativity and the creativity of his students. In the late 1970s - early 80s, the main works of his late period were published, among the many of which should be called “Distinction. Social Criticism of Judgment" (La distinction: critique sociale du judgment), Homo academicus, "State nobility" ( La noblesse état) and "Rules of Art" (Les regles de l'art).

"The social theory created by Bourdieu alone is to the modern intellectual left what neo-Marxism was to the students of the 1960s."

In the 1990s, Bourdieu became more radical, becoming an organic intellectual on the far left. (gauche de la gauche), under whose influence he wrote "The Beggars of the World" (La misère du monde), an extensive series of interviews that testify to the devastating effects of neoliberalism on the lives of ordinary people. Given such an intellectual and political biography, it is perfectly understandable that Bourdieu was to become an inevitable reference point for the modern intellectual left: a brilliant and tireless sociologist, combining the intellectual sophistication of Lévi-Strauss or Jean-Paul Sartre with the empirical rigor of Anglo-American applied research and ethnology. , at the same time continuing, especially in last years life, the French tradition of the engaged intellectual. In fact, the social theory he created alone is to the modern intellectual left what neo-Marxism was to the students of the 1960s.

However, it is clear that Bourdieu, who evokes sympathy among the avant-garde, is at the same time attractive to the unbiased mainstream of American social sciences, which is usually reserved about borrowing the ideas of French intellectuals.. How to explain the attractiveness of Bourdieu for such different circles? In this article I will consider two points of view: the one according to which Bourdieu's theory is a large sociological theory (hereinafter I will call it a macrosociological theory) like the theories of Marx, Weber or Durkheim, and the opposite view, according to which Bourdieu's sociology is consistent with the social conditions characteristic of for the academic elite, especially in the United States.

Macrosociological theories are distinguished by their explanatory power. They have, among other things, three characteristic features: they link structural divisions in society with observable behavior; they develop explanations for why, given these divisions, societies can reproduce; they also generalize the processes of change in societies. Thus, if successful, these theories offer some characterization of stratification, reproduction, and social change. Marxist theories of class struggle and the mode of production, Weber's sociology of domination, and Durkheim's characterization of the division of labor, anomie, and social solidarity are all macrosociological theories. Bourdieu's writings are also such a theory, but a careful study of them shows that the explanations he offers are often tautological or insufficient. In fact, in this article, I consistently confirm Philippe Gorsky's recent assertion that "Bourdieu's work does not have a general theory of social change." I argue that this is where the puzzle lies: if Bourdieu's sociology largely explains nothing, then his current popularity cannot be explained by the power of his macrosociology.

So I turn to the second explanation, which suggests that Bourdieu's appeal is based on the unsurpassed ability of his work to express the experience and political aspirations of today's academic elite. I distinguish three features of Bourdieu's sociology that make it attractive to this group. First, like network analysis, its underlying social ontology is consonant with the life experience of the academic elite, the main consumer of this social theory. Secondly, Bourdieu's sociology reveals the possibility of the political significance of the intelligentsia, organizationally poorly connected with the popular forces. In particular, Bourdieu's description of symbolic power promises a transformation of the social world through the transformation of the categories by which the social world is comprehended. Thus, social change can be achieved without finding an external non-academic agent capable of bringing it about. In times when such a social agent is invisible, the attractiveness of such a policy is obvious. Third, Bourdieu's sociology offers a powerful defense of academic privilege. Much of Bourdieu's political energy was devoted to defending the university's autonomy: in more early period- the autonomy of the university from politics, in a later period - the autonomy of the university from the economy. Therefore, Bourdieu's sociology can simultaneously provoke the reformist impulses of the "engaged" wing of sociology and the conservative impulses of its professional wing.

Bourdieu's sociology as a macrosociological theory

Before proceeding to a detailed analysis, it is necessary to dwell briefly on Bourdieu's basic terminology. While this may seem abstract, it is unfortunately a necessary condition for understanding his work. In Bourdieu's sociology, four main concepts can be distinguished: capital, habitus, fields, and symbolic power.

Capital points to resources. Bourdieu distinguishes three main types of capital: economic (understood mainly as income and property), social (understood mainly as connections) and cultural (informal education, cultural objects and trust). They can be defined in two aspects - quantitative and structural. So, individual agents can own more or less the same amount of capital, it can be structured in different ratios. Accordingly, although two different "agents" may have the same amount of capital, one of them may have more cultural capital, and the other more economic capital. In general, the amount and structure of capital determines for the individual a "place in the social space" or class position. The primary class division in Bourdieu's scheme is at the intersection of the possession of large and small capital, but in each of these classes there is an additional distinction between those with a larger share of economic or cultural capital. Thus, the concept of capital should display a map of the main social divisions in modern society.

Habit is a set of unconscious dispositions, including taste, sense of self, body postures, and, most importantly, skills or "hands-on". Habitus is formed primarily in the family, but in "stratified" societies, the school also plays a key role. In general, the habitus produces behavior patterns that reproduce the social agent in the space he occupies. this moment public position. Simply put, habitus transfers the different class positions conditioned by different forms of capital to the level of observable behavior.

fields are agonal social games in which agents compete with each other for some socially determined stake, such as profit or prestige. And although there are an infinite number of such fields, the most important are the economic field, the political field and the field of cultural production. From Bourdieu's point of view, social reality consists mainly of fields, and he understands social action as action within these fields. The consequences of the frequent use of this metaphor are quite significant, and I will consider them in detail in the next chapter.

The final pillar of Bourdieu's sociology is the notion symbolic power. It stems from the failure to recognize social relations as historically probabilistic, especially the rules that govern individual fields, taken as natural rules. This failure to recognize the mediation of the rules that govern fields is a crucial element in Bourdieu's theory of reproduction.

As a result, the general conceptual scheme of Bourdieu is as follows: individual resources (capital) produce a character structure (habitus) that generates specific types of behavior in the contexts of specific social games (fields). Further, these contexts are consistently reproduced, as the process of linking capital, habitus and field into one is systematically distorted by fundamental ideas that serve to legitimize the existing unequal distribution of resources (symbolic power). Bourdieu uses these concepts to describe stratification, social reproduction and social exchange. Thus, his goal is to develop a social theory as broad and powerful as the classical social theories of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Does Bourdieu succeed?

Capital and habitus: a new theory of class?

One of the most important theses of Bourdieu is that habitus, understood as a system of dispositions (predispositions), recognition and practical mastery, is a product of a class position, or rather a product of the volume and structure of the subjective possession of capital. Habitus is an unconscious scaffold or "generative mechanism" that operates by analogy in a wide range of different contexts and thus gives form to a multitude of behaviors. The habitus provides the basic framework for cultural taste, it embodies the store of implicit knowledge, it even shapes bodily orientations in space. As Bourdieu writes, "the habitus produces practices, both individual and collective, and hence history itself, in accordance with the patterns generated by history." So his thesis is that there is a close relationship between this deep and powerful schema on the one hand and the class position on the other. Accordingly, it should be possible to show that different habitus are the result of different amounts and structure of capitals, which agents have in particular fields.

The field of empirical study of habitus is predominantly aesthetic taste, since taste makes tangible dispositions and schemes of recognition. Thus, in an attempt to empirically demonstrate the connection between class and habitus, Bourdieu tries to show the connection between class position and differences in aesthetic tastes. However, his work in this area has two difficulties. Bourdieu fails to concretize the empirically understood meaning of the term "class" nor to provide convincing evidence for the existence of "habitus" in the sense of a "generating mechanism" that can be applied to many other areas. This is especially noticeable in the book that is considered to be his masterpiece - "Distinction" (La distinction).

From a book about class and taste, such as Discrimination, one would expect its author to begin his exploration with a conceptualization of class. Bourdieu's general thesis is that the ruling class, conventionally defined as having a high cultural and economic capital, has a "taste for freedom" expressed in its aesthetic and aloof attitude towards culture, while the oppressed class, consisting of those with a low total capital, has a "taste for necessity", expressed in attachment to specific, tangible things. These statements are rather ambiguous. One problem is that in Distinction, Bourdieu inflates the concept of class to such an extent that it loses its usefulness as a concept. empirical research. Thus Bourdieu writes:

Social class is not determined by property (not even property such as the amount and structure of capital), not by a combination of types of property (sex, age, social and ethnic origin - for example, the ratio of blacks and whites or natives and immigrants - income, educational level, etc.). and not even a chain of types of property arising from basic property (place in industrial relations) regarding cause and effect, conditioning and conditioned. It is determined by the structure of relations between all relevant types of property, which gives each of them a specific value, and the consequences they have on social practices.

We find a similar assertion in an early preliminary study by Bourdieu and Monique de Saint-Martin: “Changes—according to class or class strata—of the practices and tastes they convey (see Tables 1 and 2) are arranged in according to a structure homologous to changes in economic and educational capital and changes in the social trajectory”. It is worth briefly reviewing each of the quoted passages. In the first of these, Bourdieu says that the social class is not "determined" by one of the types of property, but by "the structure of relations between all the corresponding types of property." But it doesn't explain what classes are produced by "relationship structures". Further, although he refers to "relevant property types," he says nothing about what "relevant property types" should be used to distinguish classes, so mentioning the relationship between them does not clarify much.

The second passage is no less problematic. Bourdieu adds two new and unthematized aspects to the concept of class: educational capital and trajectory. But their relationship to economic and cultural capital, the main aspects of social division, remains unexplained. For example, it remains unclear whether educational capital is a form of cultural capital or whether it is a completely separate type of capital. Is it possible, for example, to have both insignificant cultural capital and significant educational capital at the same time? However, to make this clear, the reader is referred to "Tables 1 and 2" which are known to reappear in The Discrimination as "space of social positions" and "space of lifestyles". The data in the table is introduced to show the correlation (in the Bourdieuian sense) between taste and class, but since they are constructed from the above voluminous class definition, they cannot show this. The tables contain information on the number of children, hours worked per week, the size of the city where the "class" originates from, and data on whether occupational groups can expand or contract demographically (indicated by arrows). But none of these indicators has anything obviously to do with "class" in the sense that Bourdieu ascribes to it, or in any other.

Bourdieu's attempt to explain habitus as the result of class is thus aggravated by a fundamental lack of concepts. He does not explain how his proposed "class" indicators relate to his theoretical class mapping. Thus, his scheme of the space of social position contains a number of seemingly irrelevant (from the point of view of class analysis) social differences. This creates serious problems for his writings on class and taste, because in the absence of a clear concept of class, any difference in taste in any of the social aspects recorded in his studies turns out to be evidence of a class difference in habitus. This is all the more paradoxical for a book that is considered a classic of sociological theory, because The Distinction repeats typical mistake empiricist social research: the concepts and indicators used by Bourdieu flow into each other, which means that any confirmation will be compatible with his argument. Consequently, the Bourdaisian theory of class and habitus lacks (in a formal sense) an empirical context, since it is not clear what proof is in principle incompatible or contradicts its description. Thus, the thesis that habitus is determined by class position is reminiscent of the statement that Karl Popper famously cites as an example of the non-empirical statement: "Tomorrow it will rain here, or tomorrow it will not rain here." [Being compatible with all plausible evidence, Bourdieu's description undermines its status as an explanatory description.

Sometimes it seems that Bourdieu tries to solve the problem by resorting to the tautological thesis that habitus is in fact an indicator of class, and not its consequence. There is a conceptual justification of this thesis in his works. Bourdieu often sees habitus as an internalization of class position, and in his work on capital calls habitus an incorporated form of capital. In this case, differences in tastes, apparently, can be indicators of "class habitus". Thus, Gorsky argues that “according to Bourdieu, social position [class] influences individual disposition [habitus] and vice versa [!], ad infinitum if it does not define or make fashion inevitable at all. But it is obvious that this would imply a "class character" of the habitus, which is what Bourdieu's analysis must show. To define habitus as the "embodiment" of a class is to eliminate the explanatory task of trying to show the relationship that exists between them.

Conceptualization problems are not abstract theoretical problems. They give a deep ambiguity to the specifics of the data presented by Bourdieu. For example, one of the most impressive data presented by Bourdieu is a table showing differences in the percentage of respondents who described certain objects as potentially making a “good photo”. Bourdieu divided the respondents into three "classes", or clusters, according to profession: the popular classes, the middle classes (small manufacturers, white-collar workers, techies, and the "new petty bourgeoisie"), and the upper classes (self-employed, engineers, freelancers, and professors) . The results of the table were suggestive, showing that only 1% of small producers expressed the opinion that a photograph of a car accident would be good, while 17% of professors and creative workers were inclined to the same opinion. Similarly, 37% of educators and artists thought that a photograph of a cabbage would be a good photo, compared to only 7% of working-class respondents.

Explaining this approach, Bourdieu argues that “the ability to think of something as beautiful or better than something else is subject to aesthetic transformation ... and is closely related to cultural capital, inherited or acquired through education(my italics). Note the symptomatic semantic difference between "inheritance" and "acquisition through education." It cannot be stressed with sufficient certainty that only the first of these interpretations is consistent with Bourdieu's concept of habitus, defined (in part) by "cultural capital". The reason is that the class habitus is not acquired in the process school education. Indeed, in earlier work, Bourdieu categorically rejects the notion that habitus can change radically in education; schools, he says, to a large extent transmit earlier differences in the "primary habitus" of early socialization. Therefore, "school-acquired cultural capital" is not cultural capital at all: it is only learning. Thus, Bourdieu's photographic evidence, although one of the strongest facts in The Distinction, is hardly decisive, for it is compatible with two very different, indeed fundamentally opposite, explanations of the response pattern. It is possible that Bourdieu's survey data is deeply inconsistent with the habitus theory, since these data can only testify to the importance of pedagogy, and not to class origins.

Moreover, the very notion of a harmonious habitus determined by class and vice versa is not yet confirmed by Bourdieu's data. Recall that habitus cannot be defined by differences in any one area of ​​taste. Since it is a "generator", it would have to create similar differences in many different areas. In support of this view, Bourdieu provides data not only on tastes, but also on the regularity of different types of activities: DIY, Photography, Records, Painting, Musical Instrument, Louvre and Modern Art Gallery , "Easy music" and "News". Here Bourdieu's data show interesting differences. So, if 63% of workers mentioned the frequent use of "Do it yourself", then only 40% of respondents from the upper class made a similar mention. Similarly, painting was mentioned by 16% of teachers and artists, and only 4% of respondents from workers.

But this does not mean only that Bourdieu's data suggest the same differences in tastes in the most diverse areas or even within the same area of ​​​​taste. Thus, in the field of cultural life, the data show that museum attendance is largely shaped "class" (in the conventional sense of professional stratification), although data on photography and home film viewing showed a relatively small class difference: 50% for workers compared to 59% for the average class and 65% for the upper class.

Even in very narrow realms, such as aesthetic preferences in cinema, the idea of ​​a single projected class habitus does not seem to find support. For example, a survey of “movies watched” divided respondents into four categories (“social and medical workers"," small business executives and secretaries, "office workers" and "small shopkeepers and artisans" - categories, again, only remotely correlated with Bourdieu's theory), found a difference in group preferences for some films ("The Trial", " Vice and Virtue" and "Salvatore Giuliano"). However, other films in the same study were highly rated by all four professional groups.

This brief review of Bourdieu's data suggests that his thesis that there was a characteristic "class habitus" in France in the 1960s and 70s was insufficiently substantiated. Differences existed on some narrow topics, but perhaps they are due to greater access to education, free time and resources, as well as a deep, generative pattern of "class habitus". In fact, Bourdieu gives little evidence of the coherent and projective habitus of different types that operates similarly in various forms of cultural life. Instead, some activities and tastes seem to be more relevant to the class, others less so.

As one of Bourdieu's most astute interlocutors puts it, "Occupation [in The Distinction] is correlated with consumption habits and dispositional measures, but more often than not, this is indirectly." In short, Bourdieu provides very little evidence that different classes, differentiated by their degree of cultural and economic capital, create different habitus. In his studies, not only occupational groups have a vague relation to his concept of class; Bourdieu's empirical data on habitus lacks credibility as regards the existence of a single "generating mechanism" of aesthetic taste.

So far we have assumed that Bourdieu's main project in Distinction and related studies was to show that habitus is rooted in class differences. But at the same time he puts forward a second, completely opposite point of view. After the first half of the book lays out the theory of habitus and attempts to document it, chapter six begins with the bewildering assertion that "different social classes differ not so much in their acceptance of culture as in their knowledge of it." This is the difference between knowing (connaissance) and recognition (reconnaissance) forms the basis of the "cultural benevolence" that Bourdieu considers characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie. Essentially, his argument boils down to the fact that a wide range of philistine tastes are oriented towards the search for substitutes for the legitimization of high culture. This leads to an extremely high level of consumption of "pretentious" cultural objects, objects that are portrayed as anything but what they really are: stoves rather than kitchens, stamp collections rather than art collections, decorated nooks rather than rooms.

Bourdieu continues this mode of analysis when he argues that the habitus of the working class is marked by the "approval of domination", as evidenced not only by the "lack of luxuries" [among the workers], but also by the "availability of numerous cheap substitutes for these rare commodities, 'sparkling white wine' instead of champagne, imitation leather instead of real leather, reproductions of paintings instead of original canvases.” They are, in Bourdieu's words, "indicators of the dispossession of the second power, which agrees with the definition of goods as worthy of possession."

These quotes drew sharp criticism from Bourdieu for "arrogance" and for attacking weighty evidence of the cultural autonomy of the working class. Much less attention has been paid to the extent to which Bourdieu's analysis of cultural benevolence contradicts his earlier description of class habitus. In fact, all his works on culture are characterized by two formally incompatible theses: on the one hand, the thesis that every class or, more broadly, social group has your own habitus and therefore own schemes of perception and evaluation (aesthetic tastes); on the other hand, the thesis that the petty bourgeoisie and the working class are subject to the schemes and ideas of the ruling class. However, it is clear that in order to be culturally oppressed, the petty bourgeoisie and the working class must share at least some of the elements of the ruling class habitus, for one of the key elements of the habitus are those "categories of perception and evaluation"] , due to which specific cultural objects are recognized as legitimate. If different classes indeed have different habitus, as suggested in Bourdieu's first proposition, then no relation of cultural domination could exist between them. Each class would simply live in a parallel symbolic universe with its own "values". Conversely, if relations of cultural domination exist between classes, they must share a common habitus. Accepting both arguments at the same time is inconsistent.

In summary, there are three main problems in Bourdieu's description of the relationship between habitus and class. First, since Bourdieu does not offer a clear definition of class, it is not clear how the differences in aesthetic preferences he establishes relate to class differences in any sense. Secondly, even recognizing that the categories of professions he uses really represent classes, the models he established are incompatible with habitus theory. Bourdieu provides no evidence that his respondents possess a "generative mechanism" that can be seen across cultural domains. In fact, the data he cites point to the opposite: that some rather specific forms of cultural practice are closely associated with certain occupational groups, while others are not associated with them at all. Thirdly, Bourdieu is actually working covertly with two incompatible models of culture and class relations, one of which understands habitus as class stratified, and the other as shared by all classes. Thus, at its most fundamental, Bourdieu's sociology as a macrosociological theory fails because he fails to link basic social structural divisions to observable behavior.

Misrecognition and the School System: Bourdieu's View of Reproduction

I now turn to an assessment of Bourdieu's work in the second aspect - in his point of view on social reproduction. Of course, Bourdieu recognizes the deepest class inequality of modern capitalism. This poses a problem that is quite familiar to the tradition of Western Marxism. Given the obvious inequalities and injustices of modern capitalism, how is it possible that such societies are capable of sustained reproduction for a long time? Bourdieu's answer to this no doubt real conundrum is symbolic power, which can be better understood as, in the words of Mara Loveman, "the ability to appear as a natural, inevitable, and therefore apolitical product of historical struggle." Bourdieu's description of symbolic power is reminiscent of French Marxist Louis Althusser's theory of ideology. Like Althusser, Bourdieu argues that non-recognition of the social world is a precondition for action; therefore, a false, imaginary or erroneous understanding of the social world is by default a universal condition for the actors of capitalist society. At the same time, like Althusser, he emphasizes that this condition of universal misrecognition is reinforced by the education system. Therefore, under capitalism, the school is the central institutional mechanism of social reproduction. In order to consider this view of social reproduction, it is first necessary to get a general idea of ​​why Bourdieu considers non-recognition to be universal.

Bourdieu considers it universal because, as already noted, he views society as a set of competitive games called fields. Each field, like the game, has its own rules and positions. So, for example, the field of the economy is determined by the competitive struggle of firms for profit. But, in addition, there is a field of cultural production, an intellectual field and a field political power. Each such field has similar profit margins, such as intellectual prestige or political power.

"Are agonistic games (fields) a good metaphor for social life in general?"

The omnipresence of fields justifies the universality of non-recognition; to be a player in the game, one cannot constantly question the rules of the game, pointing to their arbitrary and historical conditioning. To raise the question of the rules of the game would mean no longer playing, but rather watching the game. In Bourdieu's concept, the participants in games do not recognize the arbitrary nature of the rules that govern their actions, in the sense that they take the rules for granted. In sum, if being a social actor means being a kind of participant in the game, and for this it is necessary to obey its arbitrary rules, then the act involves non-recognition. Of course, there are ambiguities in this explanation of misrecognition. (Does the game of basketball require the suppression of consciousness that its rules are an arbitrary product of history?) But a more fundamental question is whether agonistic games (fields) are a good metaphor for public life generally? It is striking how rarely this question has been asked, given that a huge number of energetic researchers have devoted themselves to defining fields, clarifying Bourdieu's ambiguous use of this term, and applying this concept in empirical work. The play metaphor underlying the idea of ​​the field, and the resulting general misrecognition in the vast body of Bourdieu and influenced literature, remains an unexamined speculation.

General game or field problem (field) from the point of view of the social is that there are many areas of social life that are not structured as games. One of them is the world of work, in the sense of material transformation and creation. Even in the most exploitative and alienated conditions, work involves a collective effort of transformation and is therefore project-oriented rather than "taking a position" or "distinguishing" within the field. Moreover, it is not clear why participation in the labor process would require non-recognition as submission to the rules of the game, as occurs inside Bourdieu's fields. In fact, an effective work process, as Marx and Weber clearly understood, requires constant meaningful forecasting of the consequences. different options actions.

Another key type of action that can seemingly evade the field metaphor is social movements, especially revolutionary social movements, often oriented towards establishing and challenging previously unrecognized rules of the social game. As in the case of labor, social action here seems to require not submission to disrecognition, but gap with him.

The ultimate type of social interaction outside the field metaphor is communication-oriented interaction. Again, this social structure cannot be understood as an area of ​​competition in the sense of Bourdieu, since mutual understanding is the result of mutual and benevolent interpretation, not agonistic discrimination.

All of this suggests that Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction is highly dubious to the extent that it depends on the universalization of the game/field metaphor. There are no sufficient grounds for thinking about competitive games, and the necessary misrecognition, which, from the point of view of Bourdieu, is carried out in them, exhausts the totality of social relations. As a result, it seems unlikely that symbolic power, as non-recognition, would serve general description social reproduction.

In addition to the general idea of ​​non-recognition, Bourdieu offers a more concrete and institutionalized theory of reproduction that focuses on the education system. He postulates a fundamental transformation modern society from the method of "reproduction of the family" to the method of "reproduction at the school level". In the family mode of reproduction, resources and property are transferred to family members. In the school mode of reproduction, they are at least partly invested in education, which then provides the heir with a diploma. Bourdieu argues that the second method provides much more legitimacy to the ruling classes than the family method, and that this legitimacy increases to such an extent that the educational system itself becomes more and more autonomous from direct control by the economically dominant class. This argument is expressed by Bourdieu and Passron as follows:

The examination is best suited to instill in everyone the legitimacy of academic verdicts and the social hierarchies they legitimize, since it forces those who drop out to assimilate with those who fail, while at the same time allowing those who have been selected from among the small number of the elect to see in their election is a confirmation of their merit or "gift", thanks to which, apparently, they were preferred to all others.

Thus, education and examinations transform class inequality into merit inequality, legitimizing both of these inequalities in the eyes of both the ruling and the oppressed classes. In Bourdieu's view, to a large extent the modern ruling class is an elite of diplomas. Recall that this is also the argument of Althusser: the school ideological apparatus of the state is a key institution in the reproduction of capitalism.

It is not within the scope of this article to deal with disputes about the role of learning in capitalist reproduction. However, two issues deserve attention. The first is that Bourdieu's description of reproduction by schooling largely dependent on the French context. The French school system, with its enormous prestige and relatively high level of autonomy from business, is closely linked to the specific dynamics of France's social development. It is characterized by the existence, at least since 1789, of a powerful and centralized state, staffed by highly educated officials, and a relatively nondescript industrial capitalism. Thus, although diplomas play an extremely important role in legitimizing capitalist social relations in France, given this specific model development, there is no reason to consider this phenomenon as typical. However, the reproduction of capitalism is certainly a universal phenomenon that calls into question the school system as an adequate explanation for the reproduction of capitalism itself. American capitalism, as the main and archetypal variant of capitalism, is also not a suitable example. There was no correlation, even at the highest level, between winning the competition - a sine qua non success under capitalism - and the educational achievements of business owners/entrepreneurs. Indeed, the culture of the American capitalist class tended to disregard formal university training over practical industrial experience. But this had little effect on the legitimacy of capital in the United States.

The second problem with Bourdieu's description of reproduction is more analytical. Although the question of social reproduction really makes sense only in the context of a theory of capitalism as torn apart by internal conflicts, uneven and unstable, Bourdieu never formulated a theory of capitalism. In fact, the term capitalism, as opposed to the term capital almost never occurs in his work. This gap is weakened by his description of reproduction, since he did not notice that there are sufficient material reasons support of capitalists by direct producers, regardless of the system of education or lack of recognition. Since capitalist profit is a condition of economic growth and employment, it must be possible that it is in the interests of individual workers or groups of workers that profits, and even more so capitalist property relations, have to be maintained. As a consequence, capitalism, far more than other systems of production, has a potential "material basis of consent"—regardless of any mechanisms.

Finally, Bourdieu's disregard for electoral democracy as a potential mechanism for social reproduction is also noteworthy. First, there is almost no democracy in Bourdieu's work in the basic Schumpeterian sense of an institutionalized system for establishing alternations of political elites. Bourdieu mentions democracy in passing in his monumental lecture course On the State. (Surl'État) when discussing public opinion; in a very summary works by Barrington Moore; and as the ideology of American imperialism. In another work, he develops the idea of ​​a political field and gives a subtle description of the relationship between party leaders and their followers. But even in his original article on political representation, which is clearly expected to discuss party systems, voting procedures and parliament, there is almost no analysis of these issues. Instead, Bourdieu's thought revolves around the idea that the electorate is alienated from its own means of political representation. Indeed, even a very sympathetic observer will admit that Bourdieu's work almost ignores the standard problems of political sociology, thereby limiting his influence in this area.

"Because this theory is based on the school system, it turns French specificity into a universal law, ignoring the powerful economic and political mechanisms that also work to stabilize capitalism."

This neglect of democracy is particularly surprising, since elections seem to be much more directly related to the legitimation of political power than the school system; Indeed, elections are a key example of the lengthening of the "chains of legitimation" that Bourdieu sees as crucial to the stability of the modern political order. Elections establish a quasi-fictitious political equality that obscures real inequalities and forces states to be the spokesman for a nation of formally equal citizens. In elections, people are not members of social classes or other interest groups. Thus, elections establish a highly individualized relationship to the state, posing fundamental challenges for collective movements seeking to overcome or transform state power and capitalism. Class interests in electoral democracies are delegated to the representatives of these interests, and neither the classes nor the masses as a whole exercise direct political pressure on the state.

In that case, it would be difficult to prove that Bourdieu offers a convincing description of the reproduction of capitalism. Since his theory is based on non-recognition, it unreasonably extrapolates the playing metaphor of the field to all social relations. Since this theory is based on the school system, it turns French specificity into a universal law, ignoring the powerful economic and political mechanisms that also work to stabilize capitalism. Thus, Bourdieu's theory does not satisfy the second criterion of macrosociological theory. He has no plausible description of the reproduction of society.

Relative Deprivation and Intellectuals: Bourdieu's Theory of Social Transformation?

I now turn to Bourdieu's understanding of social transformation. It is necessary to start with the fact that the metaphor of the field creates serious difficulties for any convincing description of social changes, since, by reducing social life to the level of an antagonistic game, it excludes the very possibility of collective and purposeful action, since any action is constituted by a position in a separate field with its indisputable rules. Any description of social change by Bourdieu must therefore be carried out without a rigid notion of collective action.

The limitations that the field metaphor imposes on transformation theory are best illustrated by Bourdieu's study of political sociology, in which he applies the theory in a comprehensive manner. His main thesis on politics is that the opposition of political representatives reveals much more about their views than their relationship with their electoral or social base. Therefore, in order to understand a particular political position, “it is important to know the universe of competing political positions offered by the field, as well as the demands of the laity, whose positions are chosen by designated proxies (the “base”). The formation of a position - the expression speaks for itself - is an act that acquires meaning only correlatively, with the help and through the difference, distinctive gap". Thus, these are opposing positions in politics, indicating what the politicians are fighting for. There is obvious truth in this approach to modern politics, although in the case of Bourdieu it is far from original.

However, in interpreting politics as an electoral game or "field", Bourdieu is strikingly unprepared to address the decisive political events that created the modern world and are therefore central to any truly plausible account of social change: the English Civil War, the Revolution and civil war in America, the French Revolution, the unification of Germany, or the Italian Risorgimento. The lack of explanation here is not accidental. And it is not due to a lack of relevant evidence or contempt for the "philosophy of history", as Bourdieu himself sometimes claims. It is rather a consequence of the metaphor of the field. This metaphor cannot be used to explain these examples of revolutionary struggle, because they are not consistent with the model of positioning in the established institutional context, which is the exclusive domain of Bourdieu's political sociology. Not surprisingly, no Bourdieuian theory of revolution, democratization, or the emergence of authoritarianism has yet emerged. The types of social processes that produce these results are on the periphery of the struggle within the field.

Without a mechanism for collective action, Bourdieu is left with only two options for explaining change, and he uses both. The first is to turn to the concept of differentiation: “In my study of the concept of the field, I emphasized this process, which Durkheim, Weber and Marx described: over time, societies differentiate, forming separate independent universes, - I think that this is one of the general laws that can be accepted. Leaving aside the absurd notion that Marx and Weber believed that differentiation is a "general law" requiring no further elaboration, this thesis is striking in its empty Comteian arrogance. Instead of explaining, Bourdieu refers to an agentless grandiose process that opens up to societies "over time". This description of social change is not a description at all.

Bourdieu's second description of change shifts from the macrodynamics of differentiation to agents participating in a competitive field. In this description, called the "hysteresis effect" by Bourdieu, social change occurs as a result of actors pursuing strategies that are not adapted to the current state of their field of action. best example The second type of argument is Bourdieu's analysis of the 1968 crisis. He argues that the crisis was the result of an overproduction of university graduates after 1960, which provoked unreasonable career expectations as demographic growth lowered the value of their diplomas, although their career expectations were consistent with the former state of the academic field. Thus, graduates of French universities found themselves in the grip of a kind of false consciousness. They believed that their diplomas gave them certain positions that could have been available to them in the former state of the field, but these positions were becoming scarce due to the increase in university admissions. As a result, university graduates have found that their degrees are worth much less than they expected. This frustration led them to join the non-university intellectuals and the working class against the institution of education. The various leftist movements that raged in France during this period were the result of misrecognition, in which agents in "homologous" positions in the social space (university graduates, non-university intellectuals and the working class) came to understand their similarities.

This argument has both a general theoretical problem and a palpable empirical weakness. The theoretical problem is that there is still no explanation for the changes in conditions in the field - the rapid increase in the number of university graduates. First, Bourdieu does not explain why the three groups of actors suddenly find themselves in a "homologous" position. To say that at that time they all experienced relative deprivation is only to ask a question. After all, the student riots of 1968 were part of a worldwide movement against capitalism and the state that remained outside Bourdieu's explanatory framework. It is interesting, at least, that the riots of the late sixties occurred precisely at the moment of the transition of the world economy from a prolonged boom to a prolonged recession, although in Bourdieu's analysis such wide structural factors hard to notice.

Moreover, in comparative terms, this analysis is also questionable. Italian sociologist Marzio Barbagli in his book, in many ways similar to "Homo Academicus", proves that united Italy was characterized by an acute situation of intellectual overproduction of social positions. After the First World War, the situation deteriorated sharply as respectable intellectuals faced the prospect of unemployment after returning from the front, while yesterday's university graduates faced diminishing career prospects. Taken as a whole, this dynamic created a sense of “relative deprivation, as war-created expectations were compounded by the inevitable loss of status or career expectations. But in a political context characterized by the rise of the revolutionary socialist party, intellectuals have shifted not to the left, but to the extreme right. In fact, Barbagli proves that many organizations of intellectuals such as engineers and teachers primary schools, in the early 1920s, took part in violent attacks on workers' institutions. In short, Barbagli argues that the same dynamic that Bourdieu attributes to the extreme left in France in 1968—a feeling of relative lack of career prospects—led to fascism in Italy. [

Since roughly the same process led to different results in these two contexts, a satisfactory explanation of the politicization of intellectuals would seem to require—besides an analysis of the consequences—a clarification of their factors, in particular the attitude of leftist parties to intellectuals. Overall, Bourdieu's theory of change remains uncertain. Indeed, the most striking thing about it is its banality. It hardly takes Bourdieu to come up with a theory of relative deprivation. Moreover, it is in any case not sufficient to explain Bourdieu's main political conclusion - the leftward movement of French academics in the late sixties.

Thus Bourdieu's sociology is not a macrosociological theory in any of the three ways I mentioned in the introduction. His class analysis fails to link class structure to the distribution of observable behavior. Instead, his analysis tends to be empty tautologies, as the meaning of the concept of class expands to include all social distinctions, including, regrettably, aesthetic taste as such. His hidden Althusserian theory of reproduction, due to an unconvincing generalization of the game metaphor, does not take into account the political and economic aspects of this problem. Finally, two of Bourdieu's descriptions of social change (nineteenth-century evolutionism and the "transplanted" theory of relative deprivation) are unconvincing, but not surprising.

These shortcomings of explanation are not, of course, Bourdieu's personal shortcomings. Considered in terms of intellectual sophistication and empirical breadth, Pierre Bourdieu's work is almost without precedent. The problem, paradoxically, is that Bourdieu does not have a theory of class structure in the sense of a structured relationship between direct producers and superfluous appropriators whose interaction could promote historical development. In Bourdieu's fields, as such, there is no dynamic development; their inhabitants, mired in misrecognition, can never become collective actors.

Why Bourdieu?

It is important to consider the facts. Despite these difficulties, Bourdieu is a relevant sociological theorist. Indeed, when people think of "theory" in the context of a discussion of sociology, Bourdieu usually comes to mind. Between 1980 and 1984, only 2% of all articles in the four leading sociological journals cited Bourdieu, but by the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, this figure had increased to 12%. If these articles were limited exclusively to pretentious theoretical treatises, one would imagine that their number would increase substantially. Vacan's assessment of Bourdieu as "the most celebrated contemporary sociologist" remains correct a decade after Bourdieu's death. As one British scholar recently noted: "There is no doubt: Pierre Bourdieu is the most influential sociologist of the late twentieth century." Therein lies the big mystery. Since Bourdieu's sociology does not involve macrosociology, as might be expected, the appeal of his work must rest on something else. Thus, a different approach is needed to understand its popularity. Further remarks of necessity are somewhat abstract and require confirmation. real research. Here they are open for discussion.

As I argued in the introduction to this article, there are three reasons for Bourdieu's popularity among the academic elite in the advanced capitalist countries, especially in the United States. First, his sociology is consonant with the life experience of academic workers; second, it offers an ersatz political identity for the academic left; third, it offers powerful protections for academic privilege and autonomy for professional scientists. Thus, Bourdieu's sociology can best be understood not as a social theory, but as an ideological formation that emerged from the soil of common experience and provided political project, which promotes integration in the academic space of the “left” and “right”.

Consonance with life experience

Many social theories become plausible by bringing the micro-social worlds of their creators and consumers to the macro level. This is especially true of Bourdieu's notions of 'sex' and 'symbolic power'. It would be completely wrong to assume that, because these concepts are restrictive metaphors, they are not universally applicable; such a view could overcome the dogmatism of Bourdieu himself. On the contrary, the idea of ​​the field is just applicable to academic life. Academics are embraced by taking positions and discerning. Their cultural products acquire meaning in polemical competition with other products. It is not surprising, therefore, that some of Bourdieu's most successful analyzes focus on how the political positions of intellectuals tend to be masked when these positions are transferred to the realm of cultural production.

Thus, one of the main ideas that Bourdieu offers to the academic elite is to generalize their life experience. From the point of view of Bourdieu's sociology, her social world can be a microcosm of society as a whole. Indeed, the notion of the constitution of social life as a "field" that does not require a critical break with life experience is essentially the common sense of how the world works for professors. [It is therefore difficult to imagine a sociological theory in which the social ontology corresponds more closely to the life-world of intellectuals.

Political ersatz engagement

Nevertheless, Bourdieu's sociology offers more than a mere generalization of "professorial" experience. It also suggests a parallel resemblance to what Lenin called the "professional revolutionary." Bourdieu's sociologists are the avant-garde. They have knowledge about the principles of the social world, stemming from the social theory they created, but denied by non-scientists, bogged down in the quagmire of common sense and everyday ideas.

This concept is generally based on the notion of a radical gap between social theory and non-scientific knowledge, which is a consequence of general misrecognition. Absorbed by the social game, the actors, due to their obsession with the logic of practice, are not able to comprehend the real structure of the fields in which they act. They act in accordance with the unconscious, unspoken concept of the world, the "sense of the game." Reflections on the social world, the formation of the social as an object of knowledge, cannot take place in the game. Bourdieu constantly emphasizes that it is an intellectual illusion to attribute a reflective capacity to agents acting in the field of practice:

Cognition does not depend exclusively - as elementary objectivism teaches - on the point of view of an object from the position of an observer defined in "space and time". This distortion is much more fundamental and more pernicious, because, being fundamental to cognitive action, it is doomed to go unnoticed: practice is distorted by the very fact that it is taken from a certain "point of view" and that it is thus transformed into an object (of observation and analysis) [ .

However, for Bourdieu, reflective thinking, the formation of practice as an object of analysis, requires a break with practice. Conversely, practice life experience requires a break with reflection. agents can act only to the extent that they Not reflect on their actions; therefore, reflection is possible only from a position outside the field of action.

Sociological understanding requires a break with practice, achieved through a special training through which prospective sociologists create a new habitus or set of scientific dispositions to replace old positions. Thus, in Bourdieu's sociology there is a connection between theory and practice, but unlike, for example, revolutionary Marxism, its consequences are noticeable, first of all, in the world of sociology.

"The sociology of Bourdieu suggests something like self-transformation. If approached correctly, it will turn out to be social world."

Rogers Brubaker, in his article carefully clarifying Bourdieu's call in this respect, has captured this point especially clearly. He calls for a break with "conceptualist, theoretical, logocentric readings" of Bourdieu; in other words, with those readings that would explore the logical coherence and empirical plausibility of Bourdieu's work. Instead, the ambitious sociologist "should strive for practical assimilation, for the inclusion in his habitus of those means of thinking that Bourdieu provides." Unfortunately, those who lack "access to atelier[workshop] Bourdieu or seminar room" tend to oppose his work theoretically rather than practically. Zawiska and Sallaz put forward a similar point more eloquently when they ask "how Bourdieu's ideas have been used in studies published in major American sociological journals." In short, Bourdieu's sociology presupposes something like self-transformation. If you approach her correctly, she will be model for becoming a sociologist rather than an explanatory structure of understanding social world.

From this point of view, Bourdieu's sociology can be seen as a kind of secularized radical Protestantism, promising an intellectual renaissance through disciplinary practices aimed at creating a new sociological habitus. Like the Calvinist ethics described by Weber, Bourdieu's sociology requires a constant exploration of itself, a process hidden behind the concept of "reflexivity". Culturally, such a sociology belongs to a number of other practices that are quite characteristic of the modern intelligentsia: yoga, gourmet diets, fitness trainers, etc.

Why should academics accept it? There is no reason to believe that Burdzian sociologists are far more careerists than others; in fact, it's probably the other way around. Intellectuals gravitating toward Bourdieu tend to want to use their knowledge to improve the world. But they, especially in the United States, lack any plausible political tool to align their research with social change. There is no organizing link between social theory and political practice, except perhaps for the vast sea of ​​intellectually empty and covertly ocratic "politically significant" social science prevalent in American universities. One hypothesis that explains the appeal of Bourdieu's work is that it turns the potentially destructive energy of social criticism inward, thus creating a type of political engagement that promises a very achievable goal of accumulating "symbolic power" instead of confronting real exploitation and domination. This appeal best expresses, again, Brubaker's wit (gloss): the essence of Bourdieu's texts “is not merely to interpret the world; the point is to change the world by changing the way we are, in the first place, representatives of other social sciences We understand the world. This pale repetition of the Marxist (without quotation, of course) Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach is an impressive summary of Bourdieu's appeal. In him we see a thinker who mobilizes huge intellectual resources to search for a militant project for the transformation not of society, but of the consciousness of sociologists.

Protection of academic privileges

The inward-turning radicalism of Bourdieu's sociology is paradoxically linked to another feature of it: its obsession with defending delimitation or "autonomy." The main political concept of Bourdieu, despite its pompous radical appearance, turns out to be classical pluralism, familiar to readers of Dahl, de Tocqueville, Mosca or Weber. This view is based on the defense of intellectual autonomy, in a rather conservative sense, as the institutional basis for forcing the ruling class to universalize its particular interests.

"One of the criteria for Bourdieu's political independence is his well-founded and strong condemnation of the NATO bombings in Serbia at a time when many "progressives" in North America and Europe mumbled sweet words in their defense."

This statement may seem biased. It is therefore important to recognize that many of Bourdieu's political utterances were quite radical, especially early in his intellectual career in Algeria and later in life as he battled French neo-liberalism in the 1990s. In fact, some of his political assessments, especially in the field of geopolitics, are astoundingly poignant and far beyond those silly platitudes, predominantly in American sociology, that sound like "political analysis." One of the criteria political independence Bourdieu is his well-founded and blunt condemnation of the NATO bombing of Serbia at a time when many "progressives" in North America and Europe mumbled soft-spoken words in their defense.

But the most striking thing about Bourdieu's political writings is, nevertheless, their extreme limitation. In the absence of an elementary theory of capitalism, his political pronouncements are mostly about defending the existing status quo against the intrusion of the logic of the market. The fundamental political value for Bourdieu is not freedom or equality, but autonomy, in particular the autonomy of sociology. The intellectual foundations of such a policy are too conservative. Nowhere is this stated with such clarity as at the end of his book "State Nobility" (La noblesse état):

It is clear that, regardless of their reasons or motives, these battles between representatives of the ruling [class] necessarily add to the field of power a modicum of universality - foundation, disinterestedness, citizenship, etc., which, as in previous battles, is always symbolically effective. weapons in the current battles. And, seeking not to make judgments about the comparative merits of this or that regime, which are often identified with "political philosophy", we admit that progress in delimiting the forms of power consists of many defensive acts against tyranny, understood in the Pascalian sense, as an encroachment of one order on the rights of the other, or rather, as the intrusion of forms of power associated with one field into the functioning of another field.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu studied not works of art, but their institutional context, which forms, legitimizes and supports certain values ​​and tastes. Thanks to him, such concepts as “cultural capital”, “habitus” or “disposition” appeared in modern criticism. Prior to the publication of excerpts from his work and Public Art, critic, theorist and curator Ludmila Voropay spoke to T&P about his innovative method of analyzing art.

The works of the famous French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu have perhaps had the most significant impact on the language of description and the categorical apparatus used in recent decades for the theoretical analysis of "art" and "artistic production" as social phenomena. Bourdieu addressed directly to artistic issues in different years in works such as: “Public Art. An Essay on the Social Use of Photography” (1965), “Love of Art. European Art Museums and Their Publics (1966, with Alain Darbel), Difference: A Social Critique of Judgment (1979), Rules of Art. The Origin and Structure of the Literary Field” (1992) and “Free Exchange” (1993, conversations with the famous German artist Hans Haacke).

In his research, Bourdieu analyzed various aspects of the influence of the social context on the process of creating artistic and literary works, as well as on the genesis of the institutional space itself, thanks to the existence of which something can, in principle, be called a work of art. A special role in his work was played by the study of those complex mechanisms feedback which allow artistic and literary works to influence the formation of behavioral norms and codes, as well as unwittingly become tools of social stratification.

Exploring a wide range of phenomena of public life from literature and art to sports, religion and science, Bourdieu significantly expanded and modernized the traditional sociological conceptual apparatus to describe the social realities that changed after the Second World War. Thanks to Bourdieu, concepts such as “field of artistic production”, “cultural capital”, “habitus” and many others, which have now become almost inevitable in the public intellectual discourse, have come into wide use.

social field

First of all, Bourdieu introduced the concept of "social field", understood by him as a kind of autonomous social space, constituted by the relations between individuals and social institutions, as well as the structures created by them. Bourdieu explained this understanding of the social field using the metaphor of the gravitational field: gravitational forces are invisible, but they are what drives the planets and keeps the world in balance. Similarly, social relations, being invisible, create and maintain the balance of the social world. The social space as a whole consists of a number of functionally differentiated social fields, such as, for example, the field of politics, science, economics, education, sports, religion, art, and others.

“The habitus plays an important role in the system of identifying one’s own / the other’s, being a kind of form of“ embodied ”in the literal sense of the word“ cultural capital ”

Each of these fields has partly common, partly its own own rules functioning, making them autonomous and distinct from other fields. This concept of the "social field" is somewhat similar to the concept of "social system" by Niklas Luhmann. The autonomy of fields for Bourdieu, like the autonomy of systems for Luhmann, is ensured not by their actual independence from the social space as a whole, represented primarily by other social fields, but by the presence of an institutional infrastructure that transforms direct external influences into a series of operations determined by the internal mechanisms of functioning of this field.

The fields, in turn, include so-called sub-fields, for example, the field of education includes sub-fields of school, university, preschool institutions, and the artistic field - subfields of literature, music, visual arts and so on.

Habit

The concept of field is closely connected with another fundamental concept of Bourdieu's sociological theory, namely, with the concept of habitus, which denotes the personal social history incorporated, that is, inscribed in the body of an individual. Habitus is a product of the process of socialization and includes the ways of perception, thinking and action learned and reproduced by the individual ("agent" in Bourdieu's terminology), which are also socially marked and determined.

Habitus is a kind of subjectivation of objective social relations, attitudes and practices. It largely determines the artistic taste of the individual, his manner of behavior, value system, taste in food and clothing, and even such bodily manifestations as facial expressions, gestures or gait. In this sense, the habitus is supra-individual. A certain habitus is characteristic of a certain social group with the same socialization and origin, as well as with a common "life style". Habitus plays an important role in the system of identifying friend/foe, being a kind of form of "embodied" in the literal sense of the word "cultural capital", largely determining the career opportunities and success of an individual in society.

Types of capital

Another significant theoretical innovation of Bourdieu was his allocation of various types of capital, which made it possible to more accurately and nuancedly describe and conceptualize a complex system. social interactions and relations of power that have developed in the transition from industrial to post-industrial society. At the same time, capital itself was understood by Bourdieu as the presence of certain resources that allow the individual to take one or another position in society. In addition to the usual concept of economic capital, Bourdieu introduces three more types of capital: cultural, social and symbolic (the latter is in a sense a kind of social capital). Economic capital is understood by Bourdieu in a very traditional way: the possession of economic resources in the form of money, property, goods and other things. Cultural capital includes education, acquired in the process of learning and socialization of knowledge, skills and manners. Social capital is inherited or acquired connections that are necessary to achieve a certain position in society, career positions, and so on. And, finally, symbolic capital is recognition within a particular social or professional group, what can be called reputation or authority.

“Intellectuals and artists rarely manage to adequately convert cultural and symbolic capital into economic capital”

The positions of individuals in society depend on the amount of capital at their disposal, as well as on the ratio of these capitals in a certain socio-cultural and economic situation, since different types capital is not always equally convertible. Thus, for example, intellectuals and artists, who for the most part have a rather high amount of cultural and symbolic capital, rarely manage to adequately convert these types of capital into economic capital, and therefore they often find themselves in a position of socially dominated by those who have a large amount of economic capital. but with less cultural capital.

Field of artistic production

In his most famous work, Difference: A Social Critique of Judgment, Bourdieu traced the dependence of cultural preferences on social origin and economic resources on a large empirical material of French society in the 1960s and 1970s. Having demonstrated to what extent aesthetic taste is not only an expression, but also a kind of guarantor of a certain class belonging, he pointed out the important function of taste and cultural consumption in general, which consists in manifesting and legitimizing social differences. The focus of this study, however, is not art per se, but rather the role that aesthetic preferences play in distinguishing between different social groups and their lifestyles.

In "Rules of Art. The origin and structure of the literary field" Bourdieu proceeds directly to the analysis of the works of art and the social space in which they are created. Here he tries to describe the totality of those social conditions that affect both the process of creation and the form and content of works of art. The value of works of art arises, according to Bourdieu, not because of the creative efforts of their creators alone, but due to the presence of an artistic field as such. The process of artistic production is not reduced to the material creation of a certain artifact by the artist, but includes the whole complex of subsequent comments, reviews and other acts of perception institutionalized by the field of production. In the words of Bourdieu himself: “The producer of the value of a book or a painting is not the author, but the field of production which, as the universe of faith, produces the value of a work of art as a fetish, producing a belief in creative power author. A work of art exists as a symbolic object of value only when it is recognized and recognized, that is, socially institutionalized as a work of art, by readers or spectators who have the disposition and aesthetic competence necessary to recognize and recognize it as such.

From this follow the tasks formulated by Bourdieu for the sociological study of the artistic and literary field: “The science of works of art should consider as its object not only material, but also symbolic production - that is, the production of the value of a work, - or, in other words, the production of faith in the value of a work. . This science must take into account not only the direct producers of a work in its materiality (artists, writers, etc.), but also the whole ensemble of agents and institutions involved in the production of the value of a work through the production of belief in the value of art in general and belief in the distinctive value of this or that masterpiece."

“The value of works of art arises not only because of the creative efforts of their creators, but due to the presence of an artistic field as such”

Bourdieu offers a fairly detailed list of players who ultimately shape the very field of artistic production. These include, in addition to the artists themselves, also critics, art historians, publishers, art dealers, gallery owners, museum curators, patrons, collectors, and canonizing authorities such as academies, competition juries, and the like. An important role is also played by the system of political and administrative bodies directly involved in art and culture, such as ministries and departments of culture, various departments, funds and committees, which can influence the art market “either through canonization verdicts, related or not related to economic incentives ( orders, pensions, prizes, scholarships), or through regulation (tax incentives for patrons or collectors). This list is completed by the institutions which, in Bourdieu's phrase, are engaged "in the production of producers", i.e. educational institutions like art schools and academies, as well as those that are involved "in the production of consumers", such that create the conditions for the possibility of "recognizing the work of art as such, that is, as a value, starting with teachers and parents responsible for the initial assimilation of artistic dispositions."

Another fundamental point of Bourdieu's analysis is the allocation of two “subfields” within the field of artistic production: the subfield of limited, that is, elite production, in which producers produce for other producers, and the subfield of wide, that is, mass artistic production.

Sensitive to the problems of both "production of producers" and "production of consumers", Bourdieu's work had a tremendous impact not only on the sociology of art itself, but also on the very "agents" of the field of artistic production, that is, on artists, critics and theorists of contemporary art. His research has played a significant role in shaping the discourse of institutional criticism, providing the theoretical basis for many works and texts by artists such as Andrea Fraser and Hans Haacke. The latter’s conversations with Bourdieu were included in the book “Free Exchange”, the main theme of which was the growing heteronomization, that is, the decrease in the degree of autonomy of the field of artistic production due to the increasing frequency, especially in the United States, of interventions in the artistic process by politicians, official authorities and institutional representatives, and also due to the growing influence of the art market and purely economic factors on the creation and reception of works of art in the course of the general neo-liberalization of all social institutions and relations.

Most of the principles and mechanisms of the work of the artistic field described by Bourdieu still remain relevant today and can be an excellent help in understanding the artistic and social processes that we observe.

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF BELARUS

BELARUSIAN STATE UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Sociology of politics by Pierre Bourdieu

Course work

2nd year students

departments of sociology

absentee form learning

Anishchenko Yu.Yu.

Scientific adviser:

PhD in Philosophy

Associate Professor Grishchenko Zhanna Mikhailovna

MINSK 2006
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. Positioning of Pierre Bourdieu in modern sociology

Chapter 1. The sociology of politics by Pierre Bourdieu is an independent sociological discipline

1.1 The main methodological criteria for the formation of an independent sociological discipline

1.2 Subject, object and categorical apparatus of the sociology of politics

1.3 Subject, object and categorical apparatus of the sociology of politics by Pierre Bourdieu

Chapter 2. Political laws of Pierre Bourdieu

2.1. Delegation and political fetishism

2. 2 Public opinion does not exist

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction. Positioning of Pierre Bourdieu in modern

sociology

Pierre Bourdieu is a French sociologist, philosopher, culturologist - undoubtedly one of the most significant figures in modern sociology. He was born in a village on the border with Spain, in the family of a postal official. After graduating from the Higher Pedagogical School in 1955, he taught philosophy at the Lycée Moulin, in 1958 he left for Algeria, where he continued teaching and began sociological research. From Algiers he moved to Lille, and then to Paris, where in 1964 he became research director at the Higher Practical research school. In 1975, he founded and headed the Center for European Sociology, as well as the journal "Scholarly Works in the Social Sciences", which, along with the French Journal of Sociology, is considered the leading sociological publication in France. In 1981 he was elected a full member of the French Academy and became head of the department of sociology at the College de France. His life is an attempt to combine the career of a sociologist and an intellectual practitioner.

His work evolved from philosophy to anthropology and then to sociology. Central ideas his theoretical concept– social space, field, cultural and social capital, habitus. The ethical side of the doctrine and the desire to build a fair society based on republican values ​​are of great importance. Many scholars note the enormous contribution of Bourdieu to the understanding of society. Bourdieu is characterized by a deep disregard for interdisciplinary divisions, which impose restrictions on the subject of research and on the methods used. His research combines approaches and techniques from the fields of anthropology, history, linguistics, political science, philosophy, aesthetics, which he applies to the study of such diverse sociological objects as: the peasantry, art, unemployment, the education system, law, science, literature, marriage and kindred unions, classes, religion, politics, sports, language, housing, intellectuals and the state "top".

The sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu is built around three main categories: "field" - "capital" - "habitus"; and includes many interrelated concepts that make it possible to refer to the analysis of a wide variety of social phenomena. The origin and formation of this approach, called "genetic structuralism", should be considered in the context of the intellectual and social situation in France, which determined the possibilities for the formation of Pierre Bourdieu as a scientist. During his student years in the social sciences, at first philosophy reigned supreme, and then anthropology received the greatest authority. Despite the fact that it was in France that sociology first became a university discipline and had a strong academic tradition, as training course at that time, it was not properly developed and was considered a non-prestigious specialization. P. Bourdieu explains his choice in favor of sociology by the desire for seriousness and rigor, the desire to solve not abstract cognitive problems, but to analyze a really existing society and its real problems by means of social sciences. The departure of P. Bourdieu from philosophy was influenced, among other things, by the works of M. Merleau-Ponty "Humanism and Terror" (1947) and "The Adventures of Dialectics" (1955), in which an attempt was made to apply universal philosophical categories to the analysis of contemporary political phenomena.

In the fifties and sixties of the 20th century, three trends were most widely spread in French philosophy: phenomenological-existentialism, structuralism and Marxism. Many sociologists find inspiration for Bourdieu in the writings of K. Marx, M. Weber, E. Durkheim and E. Cassirer. Bourdieu was interested in many philosophical and sociological currents of the 20th century, but none completely satisfied him. In the book Pascal's Reflections, he consistently revealed his attitude to modern trends philosophy and sociology, described the intellectual atmosphere in France in the middle of the 20th century, analyzed the similarities and differences of his position with the views of L. Althusser, L. Wittgenstein, G. Garfinkel, I. Hoffmann, J. Deleuze, E. Cassirer, K. Levi- stros, T. Parsons, J.-P. Sartre, M. Foucault, J. Habermas and others. Deep assimilation, gap and overcoming - these are the main mechanisms that led Pierre Bourdieu to the formation of his own "synthetic" direction, later called "genetic structuralism". “With the help of structuralism, I want to say that in the social world itself, and not only in symbolism, language, myths, etc., there are objective structures that are independent of the consciousness and will of agents, capable of directing and suppressing their practices and ideas. With the help of constructivism, I want to show that there is a social genesis, on the one hand, of patterns of perception, thought and action, which are the constituent parts of what I call fields or groups, and what are usually called social classes.

The works of Pierre Bourdieu - 26 monographs and dozens of articles on the methodology of social cognition, the stratification of society, the sociology of power and politics, education, art and popular culture, ethnographic studies - have been translated into all European languages. By the strength of the impact, Pierre Bourdieu is compared with J.P. Sartre and is considered the greatest sociologist of our time.

Chapter 1. The sociology of politics by Pierre Bourdieu is an independent

sociological discipline

1.1 The main methodological criteria for the formation

independent sociological discipline

Special sociological disciplines are theories that are theoretical generalizations that explain the qualitative specifics of the development and functioning of a variety of social phenomena. Each special sociological theory has its own object and subject of study, its own approach to the study of this subject.

The formation and formation of an independent sociological discipline, a special theory means:

Discovery, formulation of specific patterns of development and functioning of a group of homogeneous phenomena and processes;

Opening social mechanisms functioning of these phenomena and processes;

Development for the studied object (phenomenon, process, group, and so on) of its own system of categorical-conceptual apparatus, such a system that does not contradict the laws of development and functioning of the object as part of the whole.

Special theories are characterized by a high level of abstraction and allow one and the same object, one or another social community to be considered from a certain point of view, to single out one or another “section” of the object being studied, its “level”, “side” of interest to the sociologist.

Special sociological disciplines are characterized by:

a) establishing objective relationships of the studied subject area with integrity public system past, present and future;

b) identification of specific, characteristic for this subject area of ​​internal connections and patterns.

Independent disciplines have broad interdisciplinary links with other branches of social science and other sciences. They are focused on the management and planning of social processes, as a rule, in the short term and in special, private areas of public life. The sociology of group behavior, social mobility, the sociology of the family, politics, sports, labor, economics, and so on - each of the identified varieties of sociological knowledge has its own layer of theoretical and empirical research. Therefore, each discipline has its own theoretical base and its own empirical material, corresponding to a certain region, collected and processed according to a certain methodology.

Thus, an independent sociological discipline is a concept that explains the functioning and development of particular social processes; the field of sociological knowledge, which has as its subject the study of the independent spheres of the social life of certain species social activities and social communities, patterns of their development and functioning.

1.2 Subject, object and categorical apparatus of sociology

politicians

For the sociology of politics, as an independent sociological discipline, it has its own subject, object, and conceptual and categorical apparatus. The sociology of politics is characterized by a focus on the study of power, analysis of political processes from the standpoint of their perception and reflection in the minds and behavior of people. Zh. T. Toshchenko expressed this approach in "Political Sociology" as follows: how deeply, seriously, thoroughly people perceive political processes, how they relate to them and how much they intend to promote or resist them - gives the sociology of politics a qualitative certainty and distinguishes it from other political sciences.

Many eminent scientists contributed to sociology, one of whom was Pierre Bourdieu. French citizen, born in 1930, philosopher, culturologist, author of the theoretical concept of social space, field, cultural and social capital. He believed that the place of the subject in determines the economic capital, which can be considered in terms of cultural, social and symbolic assets.

short biography

The biography of Pierre Bourdieu is full of various events. He took an active part in political transformations and studied a lot. The future sociologist was born in 1930 in Dangen (France). His father is a peasant, his mother's family are small proprietors. In 1941-1947. Pierre Bourdieu studied at the Lyceum Louis Barthou, where one of the teachers noticed him and advised him to enroll in the elite Lyceum of Louis the Great for a course in the humanities and elite sciences.

In 1951 Bourdieu was admitted to higher school, Louis Marin also studied with him. At this time, his philosophical and sociological worldview is formed. He is interested in the works of Sartre, Husserl, Marx, Merleau-Ponty. At school, together with Derrida and Maren, he founded the Committee for the Defense of Freedom. In 1953 he defended his diploma on Leibniz, in 1954 he passed the exam for the right to teach philosophy and began working on a dissertation on the temporal structures of emotional life.

From 1954 to 1955 works as a teacher in high school. After he refused compulsory military service, he was transferred to Versailles, to the Army Psychological Service. At the end of 1955, Pierre was transferred to Algeria, where the war was going on, where he stayed for two years. During this time, he managed to start ethnological research, which he continued while working as an assistant at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Algeria in 1958-1960.

Back to France

The time spent in Algiers defined Bourdieu's career as a sociologist. He publishes several books on ethnology, in 1958 the work "Sociology of Algeria" was published, where Pierre Bourdieu analyzes the influence of colonialism on the destruction of the traditional way of life. After Algeria declared independence, Bourdieu wrote Labor and Workers in Algiers and The Crisis of the Traditional Agriculture in Algeria". After completing his studies, he returned to France.

In 1960 he worked as chief secretary at the Center for European Sociology. In 1961 he received a teaching position at the University of Lille, where he worked until 1964. Pierre Bourdieu married Marie Brizard in 1962. In mid-1964, the French sociologist became deputy head of the Center for European Sociology, began to study cultural practices, to which he devoted the next 10 years.

In 1968 he founded his own Center for Sociology and Culture, where he studied social hierarchy and reproduction. Died in 1983.

Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu

Studying social reality, Bourdieu wanted to move away from the phenomenological and structuralist approaches. He does not use the concepts of subjects and objects, instead of them he introduces a new word "agent". Unlike subjects who obey certain rules, agents reproduce strategies - certain systems of practice that have a specific goal, but are not directed by the goal. To explain his concept of agents, Bourdieu introduces the concept of habitus.

Habitus is a system of strong predispositions acquired in the process of socialization that help the individual to function in a particular structure. This is a kind of system of dispositions that determines the activities and representations of individuals. Habitus is the product of history, producing individual and collective practices. Causes the presence in the actions of individuals of past experience, which is a guarantee correct behavior. Habitus tends to generate generally accepted manners of behavior that are adapted to the logic of a particular field of activity - social space.

social space

Bourdieu believed that society should be considered as a structure in two forms. The first hypostasis is a reality of the first order, where a person's position in society is determined by the distribution of material resources, prestige, values ​​and other social benefits. The reality of the second order is the manners of behavior and thinking of individuals, which correspond to their position in society. Simply put, Bourdieu viewed social reality as a relationship between the physical and the subjective.

It is possible to allocate social and physical space - a field. Physical space is determined by the interconnection of external parts that form it, social - appears as a result of the implementation of various positions. The social field can consist of several fields, that is, a person can occupy several social positions.

Home according to Bourdieu is to identify hidden structures in the environment of the physical and social field. But this is only a small part of his research. No less interesting is the sociology of politics by Pierre Bourdieu.

Policy

Bourdieu also considered the state apparatus from the point of view. The main feature of the field is that agents and institutions fight according to the rules formulated in this space. They work hard and get different results. This is how elites and masses are formed. The political field has no constituent parts, this is a kind of card on which the game is played for access to capital. And every game has its own rules.

According to Pierre Bourdieu, society is not a structure, it is just the result of the actions of agents who take part in the game of the field.