Pierre Bourdieu(1930-2002) - French sociologist, philosopher, culturologist, author "philosophy of action". Sociology for him was social typology. The central ideas of his theoretical concept are social space, field, cultural and social capital, habitus. In his opinion, the place and role of the agent in this space predetermines economic capital, which can act in different forms as cultural and social capital as well as symbolic capital, usually called prestige, reputation, name etc.

According to the theory of P. Bourdieu, this is not so much a structure as the result of active actions of “agents” or “actors” of the process. Actor - is a subject with immanent inner activity. The set of such actors is weight, or what can be shaped and what is shaped—leaders, the state, parties, bosses, and so on. The introduction of the “actor” (or, as a variant of the “agent”, action), according to Bourdieu, emphasizes the modern role and new understanding of the mass, which through its activity influences the result of social change.

Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu(1930-2002) is a contemporary French sociologist. Bourdieu calls his teaching "philosophy of action" because the concept of action is central to it.

Bourdieu's central problem is the relationship between cognition and action, which in research becomes the relationship between subject and object. He believes that all attempts at direct understanding mean the absolute position of the I of the observer and that objectification through structural analysis brings the alien closer, although outwardly it moves it away. The goal of knowledge for Bourdieu is understanding through objectification. Thus, the pre-logical logic of practical actions, such as rituals, cannot be understood by “getting used to” an observer burdened with rational logic, but will become more “tangible” when distanced and objectified.

Next to the phenomenological and objectivist methods of theoretical knowledge of the social world, he puts praxeological knowledge. Its purpose is not to discover objective structures as such, but "structured structures that are capable of acting as structuring structures". The concept of "double structuring" is the basis of Bourdieu's sociology, the essence of which is that social reality is structured, firstly, by social relations that are objectified in the distribution of various capitals, both tangible and intangible, and, secondly, people's ideas about social structures and the surrounding world as a whole, which have a reverse effect on the primary structuring.

Bourdieu's notion of practice is defined by the dialectic of objective structures and deeply internalized structures ("rootedness" in culture), and deeply internalized structures cannot be fully explained in terms of objective structures, but, conversely, objective structures cannot be deduced from the intentions of those acting in them.

Bourdieu's action is not directly determined by economic conditions. The actions of actors, according to Bourdieu, are motivated by interests, but the concept of interest itself is complex and ambiguous. It can be understood broadly - as an indication that any ultimate goal of an action can be considered as an interest if the actor pursues it to the detriment of someone else's interests. A narrower understanding of interest refers to the concepts of prestige, wealth or power. Bourdieu prefers this interpretation. For Bourdieu, the concept of "interest" denotes the desire for dominance, and he presents social life as a constant struggle for dominance over others. He is convinced of the unconscious nature of the attraction to dominance, although he gives many examples of “strategies” for moving towards dominance that look like purposeful and conscious actions (for example, the desire to invest in “educational capital” in order to ultimately receive economic profit).

The specificity of Bourdieu's analysis of the desire for dominance is the description of the types and forms of its implementation. To do this, he introduces two concepts - economic capital and cultural capital. The first of these concepts is straightforward: the rich are omnipotent. Giving culture the status of capital means that culture, like economic capital, brings benefits that are not limited to economic enrichment, even if it also takes place (for example, the concept of “profitability of a diploma”). Culture is, according to Bourdieu, "symbolic capital".

He sees economic conditions more as a "privilege" that allows the rich to do what is not available to the masses, who therefore feel deprived. Bourdieu speaks of the doubling of goods through their symbolic existence along with their economic existence (similar to the "doubling of the world" through concepts). In modern society, the ruling class dominates not only due to economic capital, but also symbolic; according to Bourdieu, intellectuals belong to the ruling class along with entrepreneurs. Signs of distinction (for example, titles, dress, language) through the conceptual association of "marked" in this way create at the same time differences between groups. The day's dominant symbolic capital represents the capital of trust, credit. Symbolic capital, like economic capital, gives power: "Power to effect the recognition of power."

The sociological concept of Bourdieu

There are scientists whose work is very difficult to limit the rigid framework of some theoretical direction. The outstanding French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (born in 1930), who created a special sociological "Bourdieu school", undoubtedly belongs to such scientists. Bourdieu's research is actually interdisciplinary in nature, which is facilitated by the fundamental philosophical education he received (Bourdieu's teachers were L. Althusser and M. Foucault).

The sociological concept of Bourdieu integrates theoretical and empirical sociology. He advocates practical thought as opposed to abstract "objective" theorizing, criticizes the claims of some sociologists to take a dedicated position "above the fight" and from there to give a theoretical explanation of real social processes. It is no coincidence that one of the main works of Bourdieu is entitled by him "Practical Sense".

Bourdieu's integrated approach requires the introduction of the concept of "agent" instead of "subject" or "individual". Thus, Bourdieu emphasizes the activity, independence of agents, who "are not automata, fine-tuned like clockwork in accordance with the laws of mechanics, which they do not know." Agents choose life strategies, in accordance with certain goals, but not directed by someone else's will.

The central concept of the sociology of P. Bourdieu is the so-called habitus - “systems of stable and portable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles that generate and organize practices and ideas that can be objectively adapted to their purpose, however, they do not imply a conscious focus on it and the indispensable mastery of the necessary operations to achieve it. Of course, this definition cannot be called easy (the above passage gives a good idea of ​​P. Bourdieu's style).

The most important achievement of P. Bourdieu is his theory of social space. According to Bourdieu, “First of all, sociology is a social topology. Thus, it is possible to depict the social world in the form of a multidimensional space built according to the principles of differentiation and distribution, formed by a set of active properties in the universe under consideration, i.e. properties capable of giving its owner strength and power in this universe. Agents and groups of agents are thus defined by their relative positions in this space."

In turn, the social space can be divided into different fields: political, economic, academic, etc. The total social capital that an individual has at his disposal is made up of his capitals in various fields. At the same time, social capital is capable of converting from one form to another, for example, a graduate of a prestigious university easily finds a well-paid job, and a successful entrepreneur can secure his election as a deputy.

P. Bourdieu pays great influence to the political applications of his theory, as well as to questions of “sociology”, professional qualities and citizenship of sociologists: “I would like sociologists to be always and in everything at the height of the enormous historical responsibility that fell to their lot, and that they always involve in their actions not only their moral authority, but also their intellectual competence.”

• Shmatko Natalia
• Encyclopedia articles related to the work of Pierre Bourdieu

BOURDIER(Bourdieu) Pierre (1930-2002) - French sociologist, representative of post-structuralism ( cm.). Founder and publisher (since 1975) of the journal "Scholarly Works in the Social Sciences", head of the Department of Sociology of the College de France (since 1981), professor high school social sciences, head of the publishing house "Liber - Raison d'agir". Studied at the Department of Philosophy Ecole Normal with L. Althusser ( cm.), G. Bachelard and M. Foucault ( cm.). From 1955 to 1958 he taught philosophy at the Lyceum in Moulin, then moved to Algeria, where he continued teaching and began working as a sociologist. He taught at the University of Lille, then in Paris. Since 1964 - Research Director of the Higher School of Practical Research. In 1975 he headed the Center for European Sociology. Author of 35 books and hundreds of articles, B. studied social reproduction, the education system, the state, power and politics, literature, mass media, social sciences.

Main works:

Published in Russian: "Beginnings" ("Choses dites") (M.: Socio-Logos, 1994); "Practical Sense" (M.: Institute of Experimental Sociology; SPBourdieu: Aleteyya, 2001); "Market of symbolic production" // Questions of sociology. 1993. No. 1/2; "Sociology of politics" (M.: Socio-Logos, 1993).

And also: "Love for art. European art museums and their public" (1966 and 1969); "Middle Art. An Essay on the Social Use of Photography" (1965, with L. Boltanski, R. Castel, J.-C. Chamboredon); (1979); "Intellectual field and creative project" (1966); "Scientific field" (1976); "Students and their studies" (1964, jointly with J.-C. Passeron, M. Eliard); "Heirs. Students and Culture" (1964, jointly with J.-C. Passeron); "Pascal's reflections" (1997); "Poverty of the World" (1993, co-authored); "Practical reason. On the theory of action" (1994); "Rules of Art. Origin and Structure of the Literary Field" (1992); "Answers. Toward a Reflective Anthropology" (1992); "Issues of Sociology" (1980); "Answers to Economists" (1984), etc.

Bourdieu's main work, Difference: A Social Critique of Judgment, is one of the three most cited sociological books. Since the publication of The Poverty of the World in 1993, Bourdieu has taken a critical sociological and politically biased position, speaking on the side of socially disadvantaged, threatened or excluded groups from society: Algerian emigrants, the unemployed, the youth of the "problem Parisian outskirts", the peasants who oppose neoliberal repressive legislation. Bourdieu expressed his position as a biased sociologist - a "scientist-fighter", connecting in some way Sartre's "total" and Foucaine's "specific intellectual" in studies and publications on "hot stories", united in the book series "Reason for Action". These works, as well as speeches at rallies and demonstrations, brought on Bourdieu a lot of criticism from "pure thinkers" who believed that the business of a scientist is to stay away from politics, to observe and analyze, but not to participate directly in political events.

Bourdieu's concept is an attempt to synthesize structuralism ( cm.) and phenomenology - "genetic structuralism". Bourdieu is fighting on two fronts: both with objectivism and with subjectivism. The experience of anthropological and sociological research led him to the conclusion that the operations of breaking with everyday experience and building objective connections are fraught with the danger of giving them the status of really existing things that arose apart from individual or group history. Hence the thesis about the need to combat the realism of structure and rigid determinism, which postulates the complete dependence of the individual on objective social relations. On the other hand, subjectivism, the individualistic tendency to consider a person only as a set of peculiar personal characteristics (rational choice, taste, abilities, intentions), the primacy of the freedom of the subject, the denial of social determinations, etc., is, according to Bourdieu, no less dangerous for social science. He believes that only an appeal to practice - to this "dialectical place opus operatum and modus operandi- objectivized and incorporated products of practical history, structures and habitus" makes it possible to get away from the "inevitable" choice between objectivism and subjectivism.

The theoretical basis of Bourdieu's sociology is the concept of "double structuring". Its essence lies in the fact that social reality is structured, firstly, from the side (existing objectively, i.e., regardless of the consciousness and will of agents) social relations objectified in the distribution of various resources (capitals) of both material and non-material nature , and, secondly, on the part of people's ideas about these relationships, about social structures and about the world around them as a whole, which have a reverse effect on the primary structuring. Bourdieu specifies that the relationship between structures and practices is equivalent to the relationship between objective and incorporated structures, which is realized in any practical action. This ratio expresses the process of internalization/exteriorization, linking objective and incorporated structures: social relations, being internalized in the course of practical activity, turn into "practical schemes" (schemes for the production of practices) - incorporated structures that determine exteriorization, i.e. reproduction by practitioners of agents that gave birth to their objective structures. The concept of double structuring includes a set of ideas that reflect the genesis and structure of social reality. What belongs to the genesis is the establishment of cause-and-effect relationships in social reality: there are objective (independent of the will and consciousness of people) structures that decisively influence the practices, perceptions and thinking of individuals. It is social structures that are the "ultimate causes" of practices and representations of individual and collective agents, which these structures can suppress or stimulate. On the other hand, agents are immanently characterized by activity, they are sources of continuous causal influences on social reality. Thus, social structures determine the practices and representations of agents, but agents produce practices and thereby reproduce and/or transform structures. Speaking about the active role of agents in the reproduction/production of social reality, Bourdieu emphasizes that it is impossible without incorporated structures - practical schemes that are the product of the internalization of objective social structures. It follows from this that the subjective structuring of social reality is a subordinate element of the structuring of the objective. The second aspect of the double structuring of social reality is structural. It consists in the fact that everything in society is structured: firstly, social relations are unevenly distributed in space and time; secondly, agents are unevenly distributed among social relations (not all agents and not at the same time take part in the same social relations); thirdly, they are unevenly distributed among (individual and collective) agents of the objectification of social relations, which Bourdieu calls capitals; fourthly, incorporated social relations (practical schemes) are also extremely unevenly distributed. Agents, based on their practical schemes, perceive, evaluate and express social reality in different ways. The ability of agents to spontaneously navigate in social reality and more or less adequately respond to events and situations, which develops as a result of a huge amount of work on education and upbringing in the process of socialization, crystallizes into a type of habitus corresponding to the social conditions of the formation of an individual ( cm.).

Considering the nature of the various resources that individuals put at stake in the struggle for a certain position, led Bourdieu to the conclusion that behind all the wealth and variety of stakes, there are three large groups, three categories of capitals. economic capital - the possession of material goods, which, based on their role as the universal equivalent of any product, include money that helps to take a predominant place in the field, as well as any product in the broad sense of the word. cultural capital - education (general, vocational, special) and the corresponding diploma, as well as the cultural level of the individual, which he inherited from his family and learned in the process of socialization. social capital - Resources associated with belonging to a group: a network of mobilizing ties that cannot be used except through a group that has some power and is able to provide a "quid pro quo" (family, friends, church, association, sports or cultural club, etc.). P.). Symbolic Capital - a kind of social, associated with the possession of a certain authority, reputation; it is the capital of recognition by a group of equals and external authorities. The distribution of capital between agents manifests itself as a distribution of power and influence in this space. The positions of agents in the social space are determined by the volume and structure of their capitals. Economic and cultural capitals are sources of power for those who possess them personally, which gives the agent power over those who have less or who are deprived of this capital.

The totality of all social relations is not something amorphous and homogeneous, but is endowed with a certain structure. This circumstance is reflected in the concept "field", understood as a relatively closed and autonomous subsystem of social relations. The field is a place of power, a relatively independent space structured by oppositions that cannot be reduced to a mere "class struggle"; it is a special place where the most diverse stakes of the struggle are expressed, but most often in a transformed form that makes them somewhat unrecognizable. The outside observer always tends to downplay the role of these stakes, reducing them to ordinary interpersonal or political conflicts. The field is a set of positions that statistically determine the views of the agents occupying them both on this field and on their own practices aimed either at maintaining or at changing the structure of power relations that produces the present field. The field arises as a consequence of the progressive social division of practices. One of its most important characteristics is autonomy, i.e. relative independence of the functioning of the field from external coercions. The field redefines all external influences in its own "logic". Bourdieu calls this property of the field the ability to refraction, the strength of which is measured by the degree of transformation of external requirements into a specific form characteristic of the nature of the field. The most important characteristic of the field is the form of interactions between agents, whose positions in the field should be considered only in mutual relations. The principle of relativity is the most important for understanding field theory and the whole concept of Bourdieu as a whole. Agents are defined through the positions they occupy in the field, which differ from each other by the combination of capital objectified in them and, as a result, by the specific power and influence received by the material and symbolic profit, the price that must be paid to occupy them. Agents operating in the field are endowed with permanent dispositions learned during their time in it. The logic of the field functioning constructs from various positions (included in the field at a given time and under given conditions) a certain space of possibilities for each agent. The ensemble of positions is actually a division of the field in accordance with the logic of the struggle for various possibilities. Each position of the field is associated with a system of representations, dispositions, interests and a special vision of the division of the field. Between the field of possibilities, the structure of positions and the structure of products produced in this field, there is a certain homology. Because of this, the struggle of agents for maintaining or changing their position in the field, for transforming the structure of the field is at the same time a struggle for preserving or changing the structure of the products of this field and the tools of this production.

Bourdieu considers the analysis of the field of economics as a special case of general field theory, which, while not being a model for the analysis of all other fields, nevertheless provides the sociologist with research tools that allow him to construct various fields, including those most distant from economics. The definition he gives to the field of economics reflects very clearly the combination of specific and general properties of fields: "The field of economics is a relatively autonomous space, subject to its own laws, endowed with a peculiar axiomatic associated with the original history. It produces a special form of interest, which is a special case of the field possible forms of interest. Social magic can turn almost anything into an interest and stake it out in the struggle." It can be said that the general theory of fields was built through a theoretical extrapolation of economic concepts to non-economic areas, and extrapolation, validated by empirical induction, demonstrating both the fruitfulness and the limitations of this kind of borrowing.

The construction of the field requires the isolation of all possible manifestations of the selected system of social relations: practical, symbolic, ideological, behavioral, etc. It is necessary to analyze in detail the distribution of capital, existing classifications and hierarchies, dominance/subordination relations, institutions and power structures. This work on the sociological reconstruction of the ensemble of social relations is the basis for the analysis of any field. The field does not exist in reality, being a product of sociological construction, but at the same time it is not arbitrary, but is based on socio-historical facts. The field is not a simple designation of formal connections applicable to any social formation, but a mode of social reality, the study of which is a special sociological task. See also: "Distinction. Social Criticism of Judgment", Human Capital, Social capital, social space.

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

distance learning

Anishchenko Yu.Yu.

Supervisor:

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. The central ideas of his theoretical concept are 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. 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 areas of 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-strauss, 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;

Discovery of social mechanisms of 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 angle of view, to single out one or another “section” of the object being studied, its “level”, “side” that is of interest to the sociologist.

Special sociological disciplines are characterized by:

a) establishing objective relationships between the studied subject area and the integrity of the social system in the 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 basis and their 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 social life of certain types of social activity and social communities, the laws 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.

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 Canguième. 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 Algiers, where he spent a year military service, 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 1960s and early 1970s, Bourdieu laid the foundation for his leading role in French sociology by publishing a huge number of works on the most important issues of 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 quite clear that Bourdieu was to become the inevitable reference point for the modern intellectual left: a brilliant and indefatigable 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 the last years of his life, the French tradition of a biased 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 impartial 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 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 autonomy of the university: in the earlier period, the autonomy of the university from politics, in the 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. On the whole, the habitus produces models of behavior that reproduce the social agent in the social position he currently occupies. 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 stably reproduced, since 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 habituses are the result of different amounts and structure of capitals that agents possess 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 of 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 are introduced to show the correlation (in the Bourdieuian sense) between taste and class, but since they are constructed on the basis of the aforementioned lengthy 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, for 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, since The Distinction repeats a typical error of the 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 an ab initio 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 forming a “good photograph”. 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 a picture 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 class habitus is not acquired in the process of schooling. 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, data show that museum attendance is largely shaped "class" (in the conventional sense of professional stratification), although data on photography and home cinema 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, the “movies watched” study, which 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 differences 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] correlates with consumption habits and dispositional measures, but more often than not, this does not happen directly." In short, Bourdieu provides very little evidence that different classes, differentiated by the degree of their possession 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 other than 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 generally, 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 is 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 relations 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 apparent inequality and injustice of modern capitalism, how is it possible that such societies are capable of sustainable reproduction for a long time? Bourdieu's answer to this no doubt real conundrum is symbolic power, best 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 of 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 performing an action involves non-recognition. Of course, there are ambiguities in this explanation of misrecognition. (Does the game of basketball require the repression of the consciousness that its rules are an arbitrary product of history?) But a more fundamental question is: Are agonistic games (fields) a good metaphor for social life in general? 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 literature and literature written under his influence, 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 labor process, as Marx and Weber clearly understood, requires constant meaningful forecasting of the consequences of various options for action.

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 serves as a general description of 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 of modern society from a mode of "reproduction of the family" to a mode 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 way provides much more legitimacy to the ruling classes than the family way, 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 inspire everyone with recognition of 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 a small number of electors 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 the legitimation of capitalist social relations in France, given this particular model of 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 for highest level, between the victory in the competitive struggle - 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, because he fails to see that there are sufficient material reasons for the support of capitalists by direct producers, regardless of the system of education or misrecognition. Since capitalist profit is a condition for 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 brief summary of Barrington Moore's work; 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 very individualized relationship to the state, creating fundamental problems 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 the 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 ‘field’, I emphasized this process, which was described by Durkheim, Weber and Marx: 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. The best example of 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 endowed them with 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 the very least, that the riots of the late 1960s occurred precisely at the moment of the transition of the world economy from a prolonged boom to a prolonged recession, although it is difficult to notice such broad structural factors in Bourdieu's analysis.

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 has led to different results in these two contexts, a satisfactory explanation of the politicization of intellectuals seems to require - in addition to analyzing the consequences - clarifying their factors, in particular the attitude of left 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 toward 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 contribute to 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 are necessarily somewhat abstract and need to be confirmed by 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 provides a political project that promotes integration in the academic space of "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 harmful, since, being fundamental to cognitive action, it is doomed to remain unnoticed: practice is distorted already by virtue of the fact that it is taken from a certain “point of view” and that it is thus transformed into an object ( observation and analysis) [ .

However, for Bourdieu, reflective thinking, the formation of practice as an object of analysis, requires a break with practice. Conversely, practice as 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 for Bourdieu's political independence is his well-grounded 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.

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 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.

Pierre Bourdieu (b. 1930) is one of the greatest French sociologists of our time. His professional biography developed as a gradual ascent to the heights of the sociological Olympus, to his wide recognition by the scientific community and the formation of a separate sociological trend called the "Bourdieu school".

After graduating from the Higher Pedagogical School (Ecole normale supérieure) in 1955 with a degree in philosophy (Althusser and Foucault were Bourdieu's teachers), he began teaching philosophy at the lyceum in the small town of Moulin, but in 1958 he left for Algeria, where he continued teaching and began research as a sociologist. It was Algeria, Algerian workers and small entrepreneurs that were the focus of his first published sociological works: "Sociology of Algeria" (1961), "Labor and workers in Algeria" (1964). This was followed by a move, first to Lille and then to Paris, where in 1964 Bourdieu became research director at the Higher Practical Research School (Ecole pratique de hautes études). In 1975, he founded and headed the Center for European Sociology, which has extensive international scientific contacts and programs, as well as the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, which is currently, along with French sociological journal ("Revue française de sociologie"), one of the leading sociological journals in France.

The most important step in the recognition of the merits of Pierre Bourdieu was his election in 1981 as a full member of the French Academy and his receipt of the honorary post of head of the department of sociology at the College de France. Currently, Bourdieu is the author of 26 monographs and dozens of articles published in major scientific journals in France and other countries. His works are translated into all European languages ​​and have a wide resonance in the international scientific community.

General characteristics of the sociological concept of P. Bourdieu

The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu is deeply critical and reflective. His dialectical and sometimes paradoxical thinking is aimed at criticizing not only the social or political reality of the period being lived through, but also sociology itself as a tool for understanding the social world. That is why the sociology of sociology occupies a large place in the works of Bourdieu. Starting with his first books: "The Sociology of Algeria" ("Sociologie de l "Algérie") (1961) "Pedagogical Attitude and Communication" ("Rappof pédagogique et Communication") (1965), "The Sociologist's Craft" ("Le Métier de sociologue ”) (1968) and ending with one and the last - “Answers” ​​(“Réponses”) (1992), Pierre Bourdieu constantly analyzes the ontological and social status sociology in modern society, freedom and predetermination in the choice of the subject and object of research, independence and political engagement of sociologists.

Drawing the attention of sociologists to the need to apply sociological analysis to sociology itself as one of the areas of the social universe, subject to the same laws as any other area, Bourdieu notes that the activity of a sociologist is guided not only by the goals of cognition, but also by the struggle for one's own position in the scientific community. environment. “A large part of orthodox sociological work,” he writes, “owes its immediate social success to the fact that they responded to a dominant order, often reduced to an order for tools to rationalize governance and domination, or to a “scientific” legitimization of the spontaneous sociology of the dominant.”

Bourdieu is characterized by a deep disregard for interdisciplinary division, which imposes restrictions both on the subject of research and on the methods used. His research combines approaches and techniques from the field of anthropology, history, linguistics, political sciences, philosophy, aesthetics, which he fruitfully applies to the study of such diverse sociological objects as: the peasantry, art, unemployment, the education system, law, science, literature, marriage. - kindred unions, classes, religion, politics, sports, language, housing, intellectuals and the state "top", etc.

When a distinction is made between empirical sociology and theoretical sociology, it is usually said that empirical sociology studies real facts and phenomena interpreted within the framework of an abstract model, which is theoretical sociology.

Empirical sociology, based on specific data, is a priori integrated into the social reality it observes, while theoretical sociology in its reasoning tries to take a certain objective “super-reflexive” position, located, as it were, above society. Such a division into empirical and theoretical sociology is absolutely inapplicable to the work of Bourdieu. Rejecting the "non-practical" strategy of theoretical research not involved in social life as "observation of the observer", the author builds his works as a person whose interests are invested in the reality he studies. Therefore, the main thing for Bourdieu is to fix the result produced by the situation of observation on the observation itself. This means a decisive break with the tradition that the theorist "has nothing to do with social reality except to explain it."

The departure from such a “non-invested in social life” strategy of research means, firstly, the explication of the fact that a sociologist cannot occupy a certain unique, distinguished position from which he “sees everything” and whose entire interest is reduced only to a sociological explanation; secondly, the sociologist must move from an external (theoretical) and disinterested understanding of the practices of agents to a practical and directly interested understanding.

“The sociologist opposes the doxosophist by calling into question things that seem obvious ... This deeply shocks the doxosophists, who see a political bias in the fact of refusing to submit, deeply political, expressed in the unconscious acceptance of common places in the Aristotelian sense of the word: concepts or theses that argue , but about which they do not argue.

The logic of Bourdieu's research is fundamentally opposed to pure theorizing: as a "practical" sociologist and social critic, he advocates practical thought as opposed to "pure" thought or "theoretical theory." He repeatedly emphasizes in his books that theoretical definitions have no value in themselves unless they can be made to work in empirical research.

Dialectics of the social agent

By introducing the agent as opposed to the subject and the individual, Bourdieu seeks to disassociate himself from the structuralist and phenomenological approaches to the study of social reality. He emphasizes that the concept of "subject" is used in widespread ideas about "models", "structures", "rules", when the researcher, as it were, takes an objectivist point of view, seeing in the subject a puppet controlled by the structure, and deprives him of his own activity. . In this case, the subject is considered as one who implements a conscious purposeful practice, obeying a certain rule. Bourdieu's agents, on the other hand, "are not automata tuned like clockwork in accordance with the laws of mechanics, which they do not know." Agents carry out strategies - peculiar systems of practice, driven by a goal, but not consciously directed by this goal. Bourdieu proposes, as a basis for explaining the practice of agents, not a theoretical concept constructed in order to present this practice as “reasonable” or, even worse, “rational”, but describes the very logic of practice through such phenomena as practical feeling, habitus, strategies. behavior.

One of the basic concepts of Pierre Bourdieu's sociological concept is the concept of habitus, which allows him to overcome the limitations and superficiality of the structural approach and the excessive psychologism of the phenomenological one. Habitus is a system of dispositions that generates and structures the agent's practice and representations. It allows the agent to spontaneously navigate the social space and respond more or less adequately to events and situations. Behind this is a huge amount of work on education and upbringing in the process of socialization of the individual, on the assimilation of not only explicit, but also implicit principles of behavior in certain life situations. The internalization of such life experience, often remaining unconscious, leads to the formation of the agent's readiness and inclination to respond, speak, feel, think in a certain way, and not in another way. Habitus, therefore, “is the product of the characterological structures of a certain class of conditions of existence, i.e., economic and social necessity and family ties, or, more precisely, purely family manifestations of this external necessity (in the form of a division of labor between the sexes, surrounding objects, types of consumption, relations between parents, prohibitions, worries, moral lessons, conflicts, taste, etc.)”.

Habitus, according to Bourdieu, is at the same time the generative principle according to which practice is objectively classified, and the principle of classification of practices in the representations of agents. The relationship between these two processes determines the type of habitus: the ability to produce a certain kind of practice, to classify surrounding objects and facts, to evaluate various practices and their products (what is usually called taste), which also finds expression in the space of agents' lifestyles.

The relationship that is established in reality between a certain set of economic and social conditions (the amount and structure of capital available to the agent) and the characteristics of the position occupied by the agent (the corresponding space of lifestyles) crystallizes into a special type of habitus and makes it possible to make meaningful both the practices themselves and and judgments about them.

Dual nature of social space and social positions

Bourdieu sees the main task of sociology in highlighting the most deeply hidden structures of various social environments that make up the social universe, as well as the mechanisms that serve to reproduce and change it. The peculiarity of this universe lies in the fact that the structures shaping it "lead a double life." They exist in two guises: firstly, as a “first-order reality”, given through the distribution of material resources and means of appropriating socially prestigious goods and values ​​(“types of capital” according to Bourdieu); Secondly, as a "reality of the second order", they exist in representations, in schemes of thinking and behavior, i.e. as a symbolic matrix of practical activity, behavior, thinking, emotional assessments and judgments of social agents.

Bourdieu writes: “First of all, sociology is a social topology. Thus, it is possible to depict the social world in the form of a multidimensional space built according to the principles of differentiation and distribution, formed by a set of active properties in the universe under consideration, i.e., properties capable of giving its owner strength and power in this universe. Agents and groups of agents are thus defined by their relative positions in this space. Each of them is placed in positions and in classes defined in relation to neighboring positions (i.e., in a certain area of ​​a given space), and one cannot actually occupy two opposite areas in space, even if it is mentally possible.

Speaking about the position of agents in space, Pierre Bourdieu emphasizes the aspect that social and physical spaces cannot be considered in a “pure form”: only as social or only as physical: “... Social division, objectified in physical space, functions simultaneously as a principle of vision and divisions, as a category of perception and evaluation, in short, as a mental structure. Therefore, social space is not some “theoretical void” in which the coordinates of agents are indicated, but a physically embodied social classification: agents “occupy” a certain space, and the distance between their positions is also not only social, but also physical space.

In order to understand what is “between” agents occupying different positions in social space, it is necessary to “move away” from the usual consideration of the “social subject” and turn to what makes a position in space independent of a specific individual. Here we should once again emphasize Bourdieu's use of the concept of "agent", which primarily reflects such a quality of an individual as activity and the ability to act, to be the bearer of practices of a certain kind and the implementation of a strategy aimed at maintaining or changing one's position in the social space.

Therefore, it can be said, on the one hand, that the totality of positions in the social space (more precisely, in each specific field) is constituted by practices, and, on the other hand, that practices are what “locates” between the agents of the space of practices, thus, also objectively, as well as the space of agents. The social space, as it were, reunites both of these spaces - agents and practices - with their constant and active interaction.

Thus, society as a “first-order reality” is considered in the aspect of social physics as an external objective structure, the nodes and compositions of which can be observed, measured, “mapped”. The subjective point of view of society as a “second-order reality” suggests that the social world is “a contingent and time-consuming implementation of the activities of authorized social agents, which is continuously constructed by the social world through the practical organization of everyday life.”

Speaking of social space as a “second-order space”, Bourdieu emphasizes that it is not only the “realization of social division”, understood as a set of positions, but also the space of “vision of this division”, vision and division, and not only the occupation of a certain position. in space (field) - position, but also the development of a certain (political) position - prize de position. "Social space is thus inscribed simultaneously in the objectivity of spatial structures and in subjective structures, which are partly the product of the incorporation of objectified structures."

The opposition between objectivism and subjectivism of mechanism and goal-setting, structural necessity and individual action is, according to Bourdieu, false, since these pairs of terms do not so much oppose, but complement each other in social practice. Overcoming this false antinomy, Bourdieu proposes social praxeology for the analysis of social reality, which combines structural and constructivist (phenomenological) approaches. Thus, on the one hand, he distances himself from ordinary ideas in order to build objective structures (position space) and establish the distribution of various types of capital, through which an external necessity is constituted, which influences the interactions and representations of the agents occupying these positions. On the other hand, he introduces the direct experience of agents in order to identify the categories of perception and evaluation (disposition) that “from the inside” structure the agent’s behavior and his ideas about the position he occupies.

The constitution of social fields and their main properties

The social space includes how many fields, and an agent can occupy positions in several of them at the same time (these positions are in relation to homology with each other). The field, according to Bourdieu, is a specific system of objective connections between various positions in alliance or in conflict, in competition or in cooperation, determined socially and largely independent of the physical existence of the individuals who occupy these positions.

When considered synchronously, the fields are structured position spaces, which determine the main properties of the fields. analyzing such different fields as, for example, the field of politics, the field of economics, the field of religion, Pierre Bourda; reveals the invariant patterns of their constitution and functioning: autonomization, the definition of the "bets" of the game and specific interests that are not reducible to the "bets" and interests inherent in other fields, the struggle to establish the internal division of the field into classes of positions (dominant and dominated) and social ideas about the legitimacy of precisely this division, etc. Each category of interests contains indifference to other interests, to other investments of capital, which will be evaluated in another field as meaningless. In order for the field to function, it is necessary that the stakes in the game and the people themselves are ready to play this game, have a habitus that includes knowledge and recognition of the laws inherent in the game.

The structure of the field is the state of the relationship of power between the agents or institutions involved in the struggle, where the distribution of specific capital accumulated during the previous struggle governs future strategies. This structure, which is represented, in principle, by strategies aimed at its transformation, is itself at stake: the field is a place of struggle that has at stake the monopoly of legitimate violence that characterizes the field in question, i.e., in the end, the preservation or change in the distribution of specific capital.

Pierre Bourdieu gives an answer to the frequently encountered question about the connection and difference between the “field” and the “apparatus” in the sense of Althusser or Luhmann’s “system”. Emphasizing the essential difference between the "field" and the "apparatus", the author insists on two aspects: historicism and struggle. “I am very much against the apparatus, which for me is a Trojan horse of the worst functionalism: the apparatus is an infernal machine, programmed to achieve certain goals. The education system, the state, the church, political parties, trade unions are not apparatuses, but fields. In the field, agents and institutions fight in accordance with the patterns and rules formulated in this game space (and, in some situations, fight for these rules themselves) with different strengths and therefore different probability of success in order to capture the specific benefits that are the goals in this game. . Those who dominate a given field are in a position where they can make it function in their favor, but must always count on the resistance, counterclaims, claims, "political" or not, of those who are in a subordinate position.

Of course, under certain historical conditions, which must be studied empirically, the field can begin to function as an apparatus: totalitarian institutions (exile, prison, concentration camp) or dictatorial states have made many attempts to achieve this. Thus, apparatuses represent an extreme case, something that can be considered as a pathological state of the field.

As for the theory of systems, here one can find some superficial similarity with the theory of fields. One could easily translate the concepts of “self-referentiality” or “self-organization” as what P. Bourdieu understands by the concept of autonomy; in these two cases, indeed, the process of differentiation and autonomization plays a major role. But the differences between the two theories are nonetheless radical, in the first place the notion of a field excludes functionalism and organicism: since the products of a given field can be systematic without being the products of a system and, in particular, one that is characterized by common functions, internal coherence. if it is true that one can regard the occupied positions entering the space of the possible as a system, then nevertheless they form a system of differences, delimitative and antagonistic distinctions, developing not according to their own internal movement (as the principle of self-referentiality implies), but through internal conflicts with field of production. The field is a place of relations of forces - and not just of meaning - and of the struggle to transform these relations and, as a result, it is a place of continuous change. The connection that can be observed in a certain state of the field, its external manifestation as an orientation towards some one specific function (for example, in the case of the Grandes Ecoles in France - the reproduction of the structure of the field of power) are products of conflict and competition, and not immanent in the structure of a certain self-development.

Another important difference is that the field has no constituent parts. Each subfield has its own logic, its own rules, its own specific patterns, and each stage of the division of the field causes a real qualitative leap (as, for example, when moving from the level of the field of politics as a whole to the subfield of the international politics of the state). Each field constitutes a potentially open space of the game, the limits of which are dynamic boundaries, which are the stakes in the struggle within this field itself. In other words, for a more complete understanding of what separates the concepts "field" and "system", you need to consider them in action and compare them based on the empirical objects they produce.

In his theory of field economics, Bourdieu notes the need each time to identify those specific forms in which the most general concepts and mechanisms (capital, investment, interest, etc.) appear in various fields and thus avoid any kind of reductionism, but , especially, economic reductionism, recognizing only material interests and the desire to maximize monetary gain.

The question of the political and the analysis of the field of politics

The works of Bourdieu collected in this book concerning his analysis of politics do not respond to a momentary demand to assess the alignment of political forces, but to a fundamental need to obtain a sociological tool for analyzing politics as a specific social reality. Bourdieu studies not parties and political currents or real politicians - this the reader will not find in the book - but the social mechanism for the formation of political parties and political opinions, one of which is delegation. He considers the field of politics as a market in which there is production, demand and supply of a special kind of product - political parties, programs, opinions, positions. Applying the general concept of the structure and functioning of the social field, Pierre Bourdieu consistently considers the specific principles of the distribution of dominant and dominated positions, power, as well as the mechanisms of legitimate violence and the imposition of a certain vision of the distribution of political forces and, more broadly, the division of social space in the field of politics.

As a sociologist, Bourdieu regularly turned to the study of political subjects, which also follows from the works published in this book - they date from different years, but as a citizen he always eschewed politics and never joined any party. However, in recent times, especially after the Gulf War, Bourdieu began to advocate the active role of the sociologist in the political process, for the need to analyze and debunk contemporary politics, without leaving the field of production of a political product to politicians alone, in order to avoid the symbolic, Yes, and direct manipulation, the imposition of certain (dominant) points of view. “Everything happens so,” writes Bourdieu, “as if the more and more inexorable censorship of the scientific world, more and more preoccupied with its autonomy (real or apparent), more and more severely imposes itself on researchers who, in order to deserve the title of scientist was supposed to kill the politician in itself, thereby giving way to the utopian function of the less scrupulous and less competent of the brethren, or politicians or journalists. And he adds: "... I believe that nothing justifies this scientistic renunciation, which destroys political convictions, and that the moment has come when scientists are fully obliged to intervene in politics ... with all the authority and right that comes from belonging to an autonomous universe of science."

Bourdieu views the field of politics in a completely different way than it has now become accepted in our press: that is, not as something given objectively and independently of us, something to which we can react in any way, but cannot change (primarily because this [Perestroika, Yeltsin, Market, Reform, etc.] - "there is no alternative"). For him, the field of politics is a condition and a constantly produced and institutionalized result of political practice.

In line with the holistic concept of the field, the analysis of the struggle waged by agents in the field of politics is also an analysis of the forces aimed at maintaining or changing the existing socio-political structure and at legitimizing the power that dominates the political field. Bourdieu shows that the main stake in the political game is not only and also not so much the monopoly of the use of the objectified resources of political power (finance, law, the army, etc.), but the monopoly of production; and dissemination of political ideas and opinions: it is they who have the "mobilizing" power that gives life to political parties and ruling groups.

If we consider the integration of an agent into political practice as a conscious activity, then it must be explained either in terms that describe the consciousness of the subject, or in terms of a political position, i.e. from two fundamentally different mechanisms for generating acts of political practice On the one hand, part of political actions the subject is conditioned by reflection, rational "projects of the future", etc., and on the other hand, by the ability to spontaneously perceive, evaluate and act within the framework of established social forms. We can say that if the political practice of the subject is regulated by his consciousness, then the political strategy of the agent is the realization of the necessity inherent in the political situation. The agent's political strategy is not the result of a conscious striving based on knowledge, but at the same time it is not a continuation of external coercion: it would be wrong to reduce the agent's subjectivity only to an internalized form of relations in the field of politics or to legitimate violence. However, in order for an agent to achieve results by objectifying his subjectivity in political action, he must have certain capitals - specific knowledge and skills, recognized status, "authority", connections, etc.

According to Bourdieu, the study of the field of politics must necessarily include consideration of the conditions of access to political practice and its implementation. The field of politics is shaped by differences in the active characteristics of agents that give their owners power in the field (the ability to act effectively) and are, in fact, types of power in this field. Each political position is described by specific combinations of these characteristics, defined by relationships with other positions. Everything in the field of politics - positions, agents, institutions, policy statements, comments, manifestations, etc. - can be understood only through correlation, comparison and opposition, through an analysis of the struggle to redefine the rules of the internal division of the field.

Concluding this brief introduction, I would like to quote the words of Bourdieu addressed to sociologists: “... I would like sociologists to be always and in everything at the height of the enormous historical responsibility that has fallen to their lot, and that they always involve in their actions not only its moral authority, but also its intellectual competence. Following Karl Kraus, I want to say that “I refuse to choose the lesser of two evils.” And if I completely refuse to forgive the sins of "irresponsibility" to intellectuals, then I am even less inclined to do so in relation to "responsible" intellectuals, "polymorphic" and "polygraph" who are in between two administrative councils, three cocktails with the participation of the press and several appearances on television give each year a new publication.