Bourdieu and Marx: Practices of Critique (Marx, Engels, and Marxisms) [1st ed. 2022] 3031062884, 9783031062889

Table of contents :
Foreword
Why Does Bourdieu’s Relation to Marx Matter Today?
Concepts as Historical Rapiers
History and Time
References
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction. Heirs: Bourdieu, Marx and Ourselves
Inheriting Debts, Not Capitals
Classifying the Unclassifiability of Debt
Inheriting a Dichotomous Marx
Inheriting Critical Practice
References
Part I: Domination: Practising Critique
Chapter 2: Bourdieu with Marx, from Economy to Ecology
Foucault and Bourdieu: A Dominant Class with Two Poles
How Bourdieu Builds the Second Pole
Structural Reproduction According to Marx
Reproduction According to Bourdieu
Capital Endowment: Where Marx and Bourdieu Split Off
Domination Versus Exploitation
The Duality of the Domination-Exploitation-Destruction Process
Bourdieu with Marx in an Ecological Perspective
References
Chapter 3: Violence, Symbolic Violence and the Decivilizing Process: Approaches from Marx, Elias and Bourdieu
Introduction: Bourdieu as Marx’s Heir
Elias: Civilization, Culture and Counter-Civilizing Spurts
The Court Society
Elias’s The Civilizing Process (2000 [1936])
Pierre Bourdieu: State Monopolization of Violence and Symbolic Violence
Bourdieu’s “On the State”
Conclusion
References
Online References
Chapter 4: Putting Marx in the Dock: Practice of Logic and Logic of the Practice
Embodied Domination and the Discursive Order
Domination Takes Bodily Form
Naming the Unnameable: Heretical Discourse
The Heresiarch Sociologist
The Logic of Practice and the Order of Ideas
To Return to Marx
The Battle Against the “Critical Redeemers of the World”
From Philosophical Praxis to the Praxis of Non-philosophy: The Practical Reversal
Logic of Practice or Practice of Logic?
References
Chapter 5: The Poverty of Philosophy: Marx Meets Bourdieu
Divergent Paths from the Critique of Philosophy
History: From Modes of Productions to Differentiated Fields
Dynamics: From Self-Transformation to Hysteresis
Symbolic Domination: From Mystification to Misrecognition
From Class Struggle to Classification Struggle
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Marx/Bourdieu: Convergences and Tensions, Between Critical Sociology and Philosophy of Emancipation
Introduction: Towards a Renewed Hermeneutics of Critical Texts
First Field: The Methodology of the Social Sciences
Second Field: The Sociology of Class
Third Field: Practice, Between the Sociology of Action and Revolutionary Politics
Fourth Field: The Political Philosophy of Emancipation
References
Chapter 7: Bourdieu on the State: Beyond Marx?
Marx in the Background
Marx’s View of the State
State Development and Ideology in Historical Materialism
Bourdieu’s View of the State
Bourdieu’s “Genetic History” of Modern States
Origins of the State Nobility and Ideology of Public Service
Field of Power and the State
Thematic and Methodological Similarities
Conclusion
References
Part II: Inheriting Critique of Economic Practices and Theories
Chapter 8: Practice and Form: Economic Critique with Marx and Bourdieu
Economic Critique
Form and Fetish (Marx I)
Economy of Practice (Bourdieu I)
With Marx Against Marxism (Bourdieu II)
Fictitious Capital and Capital Mimesis (Marx II)
Reflexive Eclecticism
References
Chapter 9: Does Bourdieu “Extend” Marx’s Concept of Capital?
Introduction
The Extension Model
The Marxian Concept of Capital
Bourdieu’s New Capitals
Towards a Definition: The Forms of Capital
Capital, Exploitation, and the Economic Field: The Limits of Bourdieu’s Critical Sociology
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: Reassessing Bourdieu’s Use of the Marxian Concept of Capital
Introduction
Preliminary Remarks
“The Forms of Capital” and Capital as a Form
Capital or the “animated monster which begins to work, ‘as if its body were by love possessed’”
To What Extent Are Bourdieu and Marx’s Concepts of Capital Compatible?
Objections
Counter-objections
References
Chapter 11: Bourdieu, Marx, and the Economy
A “remote” Use of Marxism
Changing Contexts That Reveal Persistent Ambivalence
A Social and Political Trajectory
Key Moments of “confrontation”
References
Chapter 12: Marx and Bourdieu: From the Economy to the Economies
Introduction
A Double Historicized Objectivity
The Struggle: The Engine of Social Life
Capital and Capitals
The Denial of the Economy and “Interest in Disinterestedness”
The Legitimacy of Domination: Symbolic Violence
The Field as a Space for the Game
Final Reflection: A Toolbox
References
Part III: Intellectual Field: Interpreting Critique of Ideology
Chapter 13: Bourdieu, Marxism and Law: Between Radical Criticism and Political Responsibility
Bourdieu Between Althusser and Thompson
State, Social Law and Neoliberalism
Concluding Remarks on the Marxian Ancestry of the Sociology of the Juridical Field
References
Chapter 14: If Theodicy is Always Sociodicy: Bourdieu and the Marxian Critique of Religion
Theodicy and Sociodicy
Weber, Durkheim, but Especially Marx
The Relentless Critique of Religion
Conclusion
References
Chapter 15: Bourdieu’s Lesson: Marx vs. Althusser?
De te fabula narratur
The Irresistible Attraction of the Role of the “King”
“King: I Fill a Place, I Know’t”
References

Citation preview

MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Bourdieu and Marx Practices of Critique

Edited by Gabriella Paolucci

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms Series Editors

Marcello Musto York University Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver University of Bristol Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

Gabriella Paolucci Editor

Bourdieu and Marx Practices of Critique

Editor Gabriella Paolucci Department of Political and Social Sciences University of Florence Firenze, Italy

ISSN 2524-7123     ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-031-06288-9    ISBN 978-3-031-06289-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Keith Corrigan / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Arianna, Filippo and any other grandchildren, as yet unborn, with the hope that you will always be able to practice the critique of «the present state of things».

Foreword

The chapters in this book explore the intellectual encounter between Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Marx, which has taken on a new urgency in the structural global crises of the early twenty-first century. Taken together, the essays here provide wonderful philosophical and theoretical elaborations of Bourdieu’s engagement with Marx, and more particularly the subtle ways in which Bourdieu keeps his distance from Marx whilst also invoking his critical purpose. Contributors differ in their assessments of how successful Bourdieu is in settling his accounts with Marx, which offers readers the opportunity to come to their own considered evaluations. In short, this book is a hugely welcome contribution to the expansive literature which testify to the ongoing relevance of Bourdieu’s thinking not only in its own terms, but also in its potential to cross-fertilise with other currents of work. I can attest from my own experience that Marxists can doubt the value of Bourdieusian-inflected approaches to class, which they see as drawing attention away from the fundamental divide between capital and labour.1 However, it is pleasing to see all the contributors to this book, even those who ultimately doubt that Bourdieu adds intellectual and political benefit to Marxism, take a deeply respectful approach to Bourdieu’s writing. 1  The debate on the Great British Class Survey (Savage et al. 2013, 2015), which used a Bourdieusian capital-based approach to diagnose the dynamics of twenty-first-century class relations, illustrates this well. See, for instance, the critiques by Toscano and Woodcock (2014) or Skeggs (2014). It is striking how little engagement there still is with Bourdieu’s thinking from within political economy.

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Indeed, specifically on the issue of class analysis, Bidet’s chapter offers an excellently balanced discussion of their respective views. In fact all the chapters in this collection are testimony to the value of open scholarly discussion. This book strikes a very strong chord to me as someone who has sought to synthesise aspects of Marx’s and Bourdieu’s thinking in my own studies of inequality: indeed, my own The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past (2021) addresses this debate head on. Since I see Bourdieu as working within the spirit, if not always the letter, of a Marxist perspective on inequality and social change, I am therefore delighted to welcome this collection. As a sociologist with strong historical leanings, I lack the philosophical and/or legal expertise that many contributors bring to their chapters, and I have therefore learnt much from reflecting on their careful textual exegeses and reflections on these two thinkers. In this preface I do not seek to match this erudition and only seek to offer a few provocations and reflections of my own. My preface begins by firstly sketching out why, historically, the debate between Bourdieu and Marx has become so important, before in the second section introducing my own thoughts about the importance of Bourdieu’s rapier-like use of concepts. Finally, in reflecting on my own argument in The Return of Inequality, I return to the enduring affiliation between Marx and Bourdieu which is associated with the overarching concern with time and history in their thinking.

Why Does Bourdieu’s Relation to Marx Matter Today? Why do we need to better understand the relationship between Bourdieu’s thinking and that of Marx, given their very different lineages and affiliations? To be sure, there are the usual scholarly games to be had in comparing the work of different influential theorists, in exposing weaknesses and absences, and in ultimately coming to some kind of balanced evaluation. But this kind of academic point scoring is inconsistent with both Marx and Bourdieu’s deeper intellectual and political aims, as Gabriella Paolucci brings out in her reflections on the commitment of both of them to the “practice of critique”. It is important to ponder why Bourdieu’s work still resonates so strongly, even twenty years after he died. His undoubtedly influential diagnoses of cultural capital and distinction (most famously, Bourdieu 1984)

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are easy to criticise for their Eurocentrism and for their dependency on a 1960s’ French-oriented vision of culture, economy and society. His evocation of the Kantian aesthetic as the template of cultural capital might appear to hark back to a world of highbrow intellectuals which were disappearing even at the time he wrote and has now been largely supplanted. He has little to say explicitly about the significance of gender, ethnicity, race and age divisions which were profound at the time that he wrote, and which have only become more evident as the twenty-first century has progressed. On the face of it therefore, his writing might not seem a promising stepping-off point to reflect on the corporate, digitally mediated, globalised and hybridised arenas of culture and consumption which abound today.2 And yet, we don’t have to search very far to understand exactly why this exchange matters, since as economists Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman pithily state, in the twenty-first century, ‘capital is back.’ In this spirit, it is not incidental that many contributors to this volume make the discussion of the concept of capital central to their reflections. The economic aspects of the ‘return of capital’ are now descriptively well known. Economists, drawing on granular taxation data as well as survey evidence from across the globe, have shown that not only has there been a striking rise in top earnings across many nations, but there has also been a remarkable accumulation of private capital—in the form of tradeable assets—which has entailed the astonishingly rapid and dramatic build­up of wealth. This phenomenon began on a significant scale in the 1980s as part of the neo-liberal shift towards market provision which reversed the mid-twentieth-century pattern in which high taxation and interventionist states brought about the striking decline of private wealth (Piketty 2014, 2020). It has continued, with variations across the globe, ever since. We should not be distracted by Piketty’s dry and empiricist tones from failing to register the astonishing trends that he unravels. ‘The market value of private property (real estate, professional and financial assets, net of debt) was close to six to eight years of national income in Western Europe from 2  I do not have the scope here to explicate the vast sociological literature on the ongoing relevance of Bourdieu’s diagnoses of cultural capital. I refer interested readers to Bennett et al. (2009), the most rigorous attempt to replicate Bourdieu’s Distinction studies in the UK; to Savage et al. (2013, 2015), which attempts to reflect on how Bourdieu’s thinking can inform our analyses of social class divisions; and Savage (2021), which attempts to sociologically draw out how Bourdieu’s thinking can best inform our analyses of ‘the return of inequality’. I draw on elements from each of these works, especially the last, in this preface.

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1870 to 1914, before collapsing in the period 1914–1950, and stabilizing at two to three years of national income 1950–1970, then rising again to five to six years in 2000–2010’ (Piketty 2020, Fig. 10.8, p 430). The motif of the ‘return of capital’ makes us aware that contemporary social change involves the build-up of historical privilege as wealth accumulates. When recognising the astonishing expansion of private capital stocks we therefore need to question the widespread refrain that we live in a turbo-charged, information-revolution dynamic capitalism, as trumpeted by entrepreneurs across the globe. Rather, our world has returned to that familiar to Karl Marx, as he sat in the British Museum reading rooms reflecting on the dramatic rise to prominence of private capital during the nineteenth century. Just like Marx, we are now surrounded by hugely wealthy people, proclaiming themselves to be the bearers of progress and enlightenment, whilst living standards for the majority of the world’s population, including in the richer part of the world, are marked by insecurity and precarity, even where a degree of economic security may have been achieved. And yet, in another sense, we are also in a very different world to that of Marx, and in understanding this, Bourdieu’s thinking becomes inescapable. One of the problems of Piketty’s unravelling of inequality trends is his invocation that if we can only summon up the political will, we can reassert the power of a ‘participatory socialism’ which proved so powerful during the early decades of the twentieth century and—whether in their communist revolutionary modalities, or in the social democratic reformist tradition—did indeed lead to a sustained reduction of inequality across many richer nations. Because Piketty renders social change largely in terms of shifting relativities of income and wealth, he does not register how qualitative social changes which have taken place over the past hundred years means that even if we now are back to nineteenth-century economic distributions, culturally we live in a profoundly different world (see Savage 2014; Savage and Waitkus 2021). It is precisely for these reasons that the concept of cultural capital becomes so important, as it permits a debate with the Marxist tradition whilst also insisting on the fundamentally different ways that cultural capital operates compared to the forces of economic capital that Marx himself highlighted. Bourdieu’s diagnoses of cultural capital are premised on his awareness that during the twentieth century, the hold of cultural capital has become completely inescapable, and this now sets us apart from the capitalist world that Marx critiqued during the nineteenth century. Educational provision

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has expanded dramatically, and as economic prosperity has risen, not only in the global north but also unevenly across the global south, so the expansion of opportunities for commodified consumption has come to the fore. The fact that—just before the COVID pandemic—for the first time in world history, half of the world’s population could experience holidays away from home is a remarkable statistic to ponder. Let us be clear about the significance of Bourdieu’s thinking here. As archaeologists, anthropologists and historians have emphasised, social life is always culturally mediated—this is not a new phenomenon of the later twentieth century. What Bourdieu brought out was the increasing prominence of routes to inheritance and the accumulation of privilege through the command and mastery of cultural institutions, codes and capacities— especially those associated with educational attainment. In Marx’s day, routes to upward social mobility through educational attainment hardly existed in any form.3 In Bourdieu’s day, and even more so since he and Passeron first coined the concept of cultural capital in the 1960s, the hold of advanced formal education as a lever for social mobility has become hegemonic across the world.4 We cannot view contemporary capitalism as if it is analogous to the version that Marx diagnosed in the nineteenth century, even though its economic drivers remain fully capitalist. These vignettes reveal all too clearly why the thinking of both Marx and Bourdieu is needed to grasp the challenges of contemporary inequality. And yet, as numerous contributors show, the style of thinking deployed by these two writers is different, and even though some concepts—notably that of ‘capital’—are central to both writers, it can be hard to square them up together. Furthermore, Bourdieu insists that his work is not Marxist in any direct way. Thus as Swartz in his chapter points out (and as other contributors also echo) Bourdieu insists that his writing is formed as part of a 3  See Andrew Miles (1993), who demonstrates that it was nearly impossible for the children of manual workers to move into business, professional or managerial ranks during the nineteenth century. 4  Such is the irritating hold of glib liberal discourses of the rise of meritocracy that it is possible to overlook the astonishing and dramatic rise of formal education in the past century. ‘Our World in Data’ draws on comparative data from the International Institute of Applied System Analysis, which is widely used by the United Nations. In 1970 only 19% of the world’s population had experienced secondary or post-secondary education, and by 2020 this had risen to 49%. If those under 15 (who will thereby not have had the opportunity to have finished their education) are excluded from the population figures, the shift is even more striking, from 31% to 65%. See Projections of Future Education—Our World in Data.

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scholarly dialogue with numerous academic forbears, including Durkheim and Weber, and he refuses any direct Marxist lineage. Indeed, as Burawoy and Paolucci point out (in somewhat different terms), Bourdieu’s wariness towards the ‘theory effect’, in which bodies of scholarly thinking themselves shape social change in a way that has only become more manifest after Marx’s death, is bound to distance him from the way that the Marxist tradition became instantiated in totalitarian regimes during the twentieth century. As Brindisi and Raimondi reflect, we need to place Bourdieu’s relationship to Marx also in the context of his objections to the ‘actually existing Marxism’ of Althusser, which was of more immediate concern in the period and place where he was writing. The implication, as Alciati brings out, is that once we look at Bourdieu’s wider resonances with Marx, such as in Marx’s critique of religion, it is easier to find affinities. Even where Bourdieu appears to genuflect to the same concepts as Marx, Bourdieu always treats them with suspicion, mindful of how Marx’s own concepts, precisely because of the historical force they came to play during the twentieth century, can perform their own ‘symbolic violence’. This comes out very clearly in the differing relationship that Marx and Bourdieu had to the concept of class. Neither writer spoke extensively about class as such, yet class was central to Marx’s account of historical change, and as Lebaron and Corcuff, and Bidet, show, an awareness of class is embedded in Bourdieu’s writing. As Burawoy brings out, because Bourdieu was mindful of the way that the mobilisation of ‘actual’ classes had itself demonstrated the problematic ‘theory effect’, he wanted to offer alternative modalities for championing progressive politics, and hence was highly suspicious of the vocabulary of class, even though many of his followers have been keener to elaborate a Bourdieusian class analysis.5 The difficulties of the concept of class are symptomatic of a wider issue: it has proven largely intractable to find conceptual tools to inter-relate ‘culture’ to ‘economy’. There continues to be an endemic tendency in contemporary social science to generate silos which handle these separately—often using different methods (quantitative vs qualitative); housed in different disciplines (economics, international relations and politics vs anthropology and sociology); and using conceptual vocabularies which 5  It is somewhat ironic that, especially in European sociology, Bourdieu is sometimes seen to be something of a class determinist even though he made very little use of the concept in his work, and he largely sought to find other frameworks to analyse inequality and division.

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demarcate rather than inter-relate (consider the appeal of Fraser’s (1995) distinction between the politics of redistribution vs that of recognition). Piketty’s (2020) critique of ‘identitarian politics’ as somehow distracting socialists from economic redistribution is a recent example of how this tension can continue to generate schism rather than alliance. But this siloing is ultimately deeply limiting, and here Bourdieu continues to offer an inspiring insistence that we always need to put concepts into tension with others, not treat them as standalone systems. This is why Bourdieu offers the best, even if contentious, platform to conceptually reflect on how the cultural and economic can be inter-related, and how a multidimensional concept of capital is preferable to a purely economistic one.

Concepts as Historical Rapiers Many chapters here reflect on the different status of concepts in Bourdieu compared to Marx, and in particular the provisional and ambivalent way that Bourdieu proffers his concepts, which often seem to lack the clarity that Marx offers, and rather seem to operate as sleights of hand. Thus, Aiello relates how none of his main concepts of capital, habitus and field are original, and represent borrowings from separate and by no means compatible traditions. Desan notes that Bourdieu’s concepts are not rooted in a labour theory of value and have no theory of capitalism. Numerous chapters reflect on the oddity that although Bourdieu draws on the concept of capital from Marx, he nowhere elaborates a satisfactory concept of the economic itself, leaving this as some kind of shadowy realm. On the face of it, any attempt to disinter the respective analytical pertinence of Marx and Bourdieu may lead one to favour the former, given Marx’s concern to establish the conceptual coherence of his analysis of capitalism as an overarching mode of production, especially in his mature years as he wrote Capital in contrast to Bourdieu’s different style of analysis, where he routinely sets up tensions and dissonances between concepts. We therefore need to bring out why Bourdieu refused to use concepts in the confident and assured style of Marx. As Gutierrez, Lebaron and Streckeisen reflect, for Bourdieu to have attempted a formal definition of economic capital, or capitalism more generally, would have run the risk of isolating an autonomous economic realm which his broader conceptual framework warned against, which is why he hence invokes the looser perspective addressing the ‘economy of practices’.

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Bourdieu refuses to play the game of setting up an overarching conceptual system, which would perform its own kind of symbolic violence. Hence, he prefers to draw out the metaphorical appeal of concepts, leaving them incomplete and understated. Some critics have seen his use of concepts in which he largely avoids formal definitions, as a sleight of hand, as a deliberate appeal to obscurantism (Goldthorpe 2007). Actually, I think there is a deliberately strategic inclination in Bourdieu, aligned to his rejection of philosophy and his embrace of sociology, in which the practical deployment of concepts, and not their analytical purity, takes centre stage. From this perspective, the dominance of capitalist principles, and their rationalising norms, makes it important not to set up some kind of competing theoretical system (such as those which came into prominence with the structuralist Marxism of Althusser and Poulantzas), but to find an alternative, flexible, line of critique. From this practical vantage point, as Gutierrez reflects, ‘naming your enemy’, in the form of an elaborated concept of capitalism or the ‘economic’, can be seen as an erroneous route, one which can be complicit with the elitism of the ‘scholastic point of view’. For this cannot be anything other than reductive as this objectification is bound to essentialise what is a more fluid and dynamic system. However, this does not mean that ‘anything goes.’ It is possible to engage in a much more subtle critical engagement by taking key analytical terms, and reworking them, contesting their power. It is in these terms that the implications of his discussion of cultural capital, most famously encapsulated in his ‘Forms of Capital’ essay, need to be understood. Deliberately eschewing any kind of a formal account of economic capital, he instead elaborates the thought experiment of thinking through how culture—conventionally understood from within the humanities as explicitly framed against the economic domain—might nonetheless be regarded as a form of capital. The triptych of terms he uses to unpack cultural capital—the ‘institutionalised’, ‘embodied’ and ‘objectified’—is deliberately mobilised to distinguish them from the economic, even whilst apparently deploying an economistic frame of reference. Thus, it is important that economic capital is not embodied, whereas cultural capital is. A lottery winner who wins £1 million is able to spend this freely (and might even be persuaded to use the money as an investment resource to fully join the capitalists), whereas someone who inherits a Van Gogh painting but is unable to give an account of why Van Gogh is a canonical painter because they have not been exposed to the appropriate scholastic

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education fails to have cultural capital (to be sure, they could sell the painting and realise the economic capital, but this is precisely Bourdieu’s point). In this way cultural capital is both more invidious than economic capital because of its ‘stickiness on the body’, and more slippery, prone to mis-recognition, and necessarily becomes tied up with contestations over the nature of ‘objectified’ cultural capital. Thus, whilst several contributors skilfully bring out how Bourdieu does not have an effective theory of the economic as such, this can also be seen as Bourdieu’s overarching contribution. It is also pertinent to ask why Marx does not have a theory of the cultural, other than through reductive terms such as ‘base and superstructure’. We need to understand Bourdieu’s concept of habitus in a similar spirit. Taken too literally, and too mechanically, it can easily be criticised for assuming an over-socialised and over-determined conception of human agency (e.g. Croce 2016; Alexander 1995; Jenkins 1992). However, Bourdieu did not use the concept in this kind of psychologically mechanical way, as some kind of ‘master explanator’. His main purpose is simply to assert, against economists and game theorists, that people come to any kind of social interaction with an inescapable historical baggage which is bound to affect how they interact, how skilled they are at improvisation, and thereby how likely they are to come out of the interaction in a stronger position. Any attempt to abstract from this historical baggage, in the form of developing formal logics of exchange, is bound not only to misconstrue how interactions necessarily work, but more than this to be a form of symbolic violence, in which only those with specific competences are able to master the interaction involved. In historical terms therefore, Bourdieu exactly works in the spirit of Marx, seeking to expose the accumulation, inheritance, and pervasiveness of privilege and power, and the way that by being universalised and naturalised they can be made to appear de-political. In this respect, Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural capital in Distinction is utterly consistent with Marx’s rendition of commodity fetishism in Capital. Bourdieu grasped, therefore, that the proliferation of cultural capital in contemporary societies entail the need for a differing kind of critique which avoids proffering an alternative formal theoretical schema which could actually set up new modes of symbolic violence in their wake. Scholastic game playing is so central to the routine organisation of cultural privilege that it behoves radical scholars not to partake of it, but to find alternative modes of criticism.

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We can characterise Bourdieu’s approach as using concepts as rapiers, lightning fast in exposing deficiencies in the weak spots of dominant paradigms, and quickly withdrawing to avoid setting up an alternative set of orthodoxies. And, just as a skilled fencer would not want to objectify their opponent, reducing them to a fixed set of properties, so the skilled fencer will wait to expose weak spots as and when they appear, darting here and there as necessary. This, I admit, is the ‘best Bourdieu’, which is fully mindful of how academics need to be cautious about how we go about our businesses in building up any kind of scholarly apparatus that can itself then come to act as a form of cultural capital. But clearly there were occasions when Bourdieu did not abide by his own best practice. Burawoy is entirely right that later in his career, as he sought to shore up his reputation and standing, he did adopt a more conventional academic perspective, notably in laying out abstract principles of field analysis, which he then worked up into a defence of scientific rationalism (notably in Bourdieu 2004). Perhaps in the context of neo-liberal incursions on critical academic autonomy during the 1980s, Bourdieu’s approach was tactically adept, but nonetheless Burawoy is surely right to criticise him for ultimately exhibiting the same scholasticism as he claimed to be pitching against. Even Bourdieu fell into the same academic game playing traps which he had also critically exposed. In my view, this aspect of Bourdieu’s thinking was at its most evident when he was giving his thinking its most ‘spatialising’ form, through his deployment of the most formal approaches to field analysis. However, although this spatial emphasis resonates strongly, for instance in recent sociological attempts to elaborate analyses of ‘social space’ (e.g. Savage and Silva 2013; Vandebroek 2018), it is vital to place this element of Bourdieu’s thought in tension with his concerns about time, which ultimately are more productive, and also place him in a closer lineage to Marx.

History and Time If we are to find the most productive way in which Marx and Bourdieu are in accordance, it is their privileging of history and time over space that matters. This is a point that Fowler in this volume underscores with her thoughtful account of Bourdieu’s relationship also to Norbert Elias (and see also Gorski 2013). Gareth Stedman Jones (2016) has recently reminded us that Marx was not a modernist who insisted as an axiom that ‘everything that is solid melts into air.’ Rather, he was deeply embedded in a

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classical historical scholarship which insisted that politics matters because of immanence; that we only have one world, in the here and now, which requires us to act; and that therefore that ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it’. Even though Bourdieu’s own concept of field deploys a strongly spatialising frame, it is his ultimate appeal to history which colours his work. It is not incidental that so many contributors reflect on his definition of capital as ‘accumulated history’, and although this phrase is imprecise, it ultimately underscores the importance of his work. It is not incidental that he came across the concept of cultural capital in reflecting on changing French inheritance strategies, or that the question of reproduction and transmission permeates his thinking. It is this historical sensitivity that also explains his attraction to using rapier concepts. In his famous essay ‘Science as a vocation’ Max Weber laid out the tragic dilemma of modern science—that in conforming to the rationalising scholarship of modernity, scholars are bound to produce findings which will be superseded and cannot therefore ultimately ground any account of value or meaning. As a side note here, several interlocutors in this volume reflect on how Marx and Bourdieu construe value, mainly to note that Bourdieu has no concept of economic value such as derived from the labour theory of value and therefore fall short in providing an adequate grasp of economic circuits. This is true within its own terms since Bourdieu makes only general allusions to value as being ‘accumulated history’ and broad references to labour rather than any more precise formulation. However, since as Weber, following Nietzsche, insists, since conceptions of value ultimately require a grounding in human, historical purpose which can only be undercut within capitalist modernity, Bourdieu’s approach in ultimately refusing an economistic logic has its merits. It is this orientation to time as tragedy, which has its forbears in Marx and Weber, which underscores much of Bourdieu’s work. As Burawoy mentions, one of Bourdieu’s neglected masterpieces is ‘The Bachelor’s Ball’ (Bourdieu 2008), which returns to his home province of Bearn to explicate the changing milieux of family farming. One of his most evocative photographs features the elderly bachelors, who as eldest sons had inherited their farms, but at the very time that rural economies were losing ground to manufacturing and the service sector based in the cities. Women now had better prospects than to marry those men still tied to their family farms, who were left to look sadly in on the dances of those on the cusp of history.

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Bourdieu draws out the necessary irony of a fully historical sensibility. The inheritor bachelors, the beneficiaries of the historical accumulation of their family farms, who might be thought to be the historical victors compared to their disinherited siblings turn out, in the longer term, to be the losers, trapped by their inheritance into eking out a way of life which was losing its provenance. And so it is that the victorious inheritors can yet end up, ironically, as the losers. This refrain is a fitting contrast to Walter Benjamin’s question about ‘with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathise. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them.’ But some victors, it transpires in Bourdieu’s ironic vision, end up being defeated by history itself. This ironic sensibility pervades Bourdieu’s work. The great cultural masters who proffer works purported to be of universal appeal are actually playing scholastic games of cultural accumulation. Meritocracy masks the transmission of privilege even whilst proclaiming that the doors are open to all. We are all bound up in the Don Quixote effect. The starting point of Distinction lies in drawing out how all the young French people flocking to higher education, many being the first in their families to attend universities, and hence proudly thinking of themselves as driving epochal change in which the corridors of elite consecration are finally opened up, are actually being duped. The inflation of education credentials is devaluing their significance at the very time that increasing numbers of French people are gaining access to them. This ultimate appeal to history is fundamental because it explicates Bourdieu’s understanding of social change, in which dispossessed and marginalised elites, and not just the downtrodden proletariat, can be forces for change. Here it is certainly possible to complain that Bourdieu abandons the centrality of the class struggle as a motor of history for a more nuanced perspective alive to intra-elite struggle and the role of contestation within the ‘field of power’. However, in reflecting on the fortunes of Marxist revolutionary politics during the twentieth century, Bourdieu’s perspective might offer more succour to progressive politics in the twenty-first century. For continuing to work within the spirit of Marx requires us to recognise the power of cultural capital and leads us to refuse any reductive appeal to the capitalist economy alone as some kind of deus ex machina of long-term historical change. Professor of Sociology London School of Economics

Mike Savage

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References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1995. Fin de siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason. London: Verso. Bennett, Tony. 2009. Culture, Class, Distinction. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984 [1979]. Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. 2004 [2001]. Science of Science and Reflexivity. Trans. R.  Nice. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. 2008 [2002]. The Bachelor’s Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Béarn. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity. Croce, M. 2015. The Habitus and the Critique of the Present: A Wittgensteinian Reading of Bourdieu’s Social Theory. Sociological Theory 33 (4): 327–346. Goldthorpe, John H. 2007. ‘Cultural Capital’: Some Critical Observations. Sociologica, 1(2). Gorski, Philip S. 2013. Introduction: Bourdieu as a Theorist of Change. In Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, ed. Philip S.  Gorski, 1–16. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jenkins, R. 2014. Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge. Jones, Gareth Stedman. 2016. Karl Marx. Greatness and Illusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miles, Andrew. 1999. Social Mobility in Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-­Century England. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty First Century. Trans. A. Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Piketty, Thomas. 2020 [2019]. Capital and Ideology. Trans. A.  Goldhammer. Harvard: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Savage, Mike. 2014. Piketty’s Challenge for Sociology. The British Journal of Sociology, 65(4): 591–606. Savage, Mike. 2021. The Return of Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Savage, Mike et al. 2013. A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment. Sociology 47 (2):219–250. Savage, Mike. 2015. Social Class in the 21st Century. London: Penguin. Savage, Mike, and Elizabeth B. Silva. 2013. Field Analysis in Cultural Sociology. Cultural Sociology, 7 (2): 111–126. Savage, Mike, and Nora Waitkus. 2021. Property, Wealth, and Social Change: Piketty as a Social Science Engineer. The British Journal of Sociology 72(1): 39–51. Skeggs, Beverley. 2015. Introduction: Stratification or Exploitation, Domination, Dispossession and Devaluation? The Sociological Review 63(2): 205–222.

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Toscano, Alberto, and Jamie Woodcock. 2015. Spectres of Marxism: A Comment on Mike Savage’s Market Model of Class Difference. The Sociological Review 63(2): 512–523. Vandebroeck, Dieter. 2018. Toward a European Social Topography: The Contemporary Relevance of Pierre Bourdieu’s Concept of ‘Social Space’. European Societies 20(3): 359–374.



Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the kind Bourdieu and Marx scholars internationally who made this book possible by accepting my invitation to contribute their writings. Amongst them, I would like to thank Bridget Fowler, not only for our long  and fruitful discussions of the work of Bourdieu, but also for having generously checked the English of many of these  chapters. Amongst  those who, over the years, have occupied an important place in the course of my studies of Marx, I would like to remember my late partner, Pino Ammendola, with whom I took the first steps in both reading the work of the Trier philosopher and in “practical-­ critical activity”. Last, I would like to thank Marcello Musto for inviting me to publish this book in the series which he edits.

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Contents

1 Introduction.  Heirs: Bourdieu, Marx and Ourselves  1 Gabriella Paolucci Part I Domination: Practising Critique  23 2 Bourdieu  with Marx, from Economy to Ecology 25 Jacques Bidet 3 Violence,  Symbolic Violence and the Decivilizing Process: Approaches from Marx, Elias and Bourdieu 43 Bridget Fowler 4 Putting  Marx in the Dock: Practice of Logic and Logic of the Practice 71 Gabriella Paolucci 5 The  Poverty of Philosophy: Marx Meets Bourdieu103 Michael Burawoy

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6 Marx/Bourdieu:  Convergences and Tensions, Between Critical Sociology and Philosophy of Emancipation131 Philippe Corcuff 7 Bourdieu  on the State: Beyond Marx?153 David L. Swartz Part II Inheriting Critique of Economic Practices and Theories 177 8 Practice  and Form: Economic Critique with Marx and Bourdieu179 Peter Streckeisen 9 Does  Bourdieu “Extend” Marx’s Concept of Capital?199 Mathieu Hikaru Desan 10 Reassessing  Bourdieu’s Use of the Marxian Concept of Capital217 Miriam Aiello 11 Bourdieu,  Marx, and the Economy249 Frédéric Lebaron 12 Marx  and Bourdieu: From the Economy to the Economies263 Alicia B. Gutiérrez Part III Intellectual Field: Interpreting Critique of Ideology 283 13 Bourdieu,  Marxism and Law: Between Radical Criticism and Political Responsibility285 Gianvito Brindisi

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14 If  Theodicy is Always Sociodicy: Bourdieu and the Marxian Critique of Religion313 Roberto Alciati 15 Bourdieu’s  Lesson: Marx vs. Althusser?327 Fabio Raimondi

Notes on Contributors

Miriam Aiello  received her PhD in Philosophy at Roma Tre University. She is a post-doctoral fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici (Naples) and Teaching Assistant at Roma Tre University. She has worked extensively on the historical-philosophical and psychological ground of Pierre Bourdieu’s economy of practice and of his concept of habitus. She is preparing a book on Bourdieu’s philosophy mind and theory of action. Her research interests also include reflexivity, models of the unconscious, personal identity, self-deception and confabulation and the inter-relations between philosophy, social sciences and psychology. Her latest articles deal with Bourdieu’s account of the mental and personal identity; the relationship between Leibniz’s Monadology and the social theory of Tarde, Adorno and Bourdieu; the phenomenon of confabulation; the mind-body problem; the structures of temporal experience (Plato and Kant). Roberto  Alciati  is Assistant Professor of History of Religions at the University of Florence (Italy). His research focused mainly on the history of monasticism and asceticism in late antiquity and early Middle Ages. However, over the years he has developed a growing interest in Pierre Bourdieu’s thought, which he uses to study the socio-historical dynamics of the history of religions. His publications include Norm and Exercise: Christian Asceticism Between Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages (Stuttgart 2018) and Monaci d’Occidente, secoli IV–IX (Rome 2018). He also translated in Italian and commented on

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Bourdieu’s two essays on the religious field (Pierre Bourdieu, Il campo religioso. Con due esercizi (eds. R. Alciati and E.R. Urciuoli; Turin 2012). Jacques Bidet  is a former professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre and a founder of the journal Actuel Marx. Throughout his researches since the 1980s, he has been developing a theory of modern society and history known as a “metastructural theory of modernity,” mainly inspired by Marx, in the light of both Althusser and Habermas. Among his books are Exploring Marx’s Capital (2006 [1985]); Critical Companion of Contemporary Marxism (2007), codirection with Statis Kouvelakis); Foucault with Marx (2015). Gianvito  Brindisi is Associate Professor of Legal Philosophy at the ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’ University (Naples, Italy). He is the author of Potere e giudizio. Giurisdizione e veridizione nella genealogia di Michel Foucault (2010) and Il potere come problema. Un percorso teorico (2012). He co-­ edited, with Orazio Irrera, the monographic issue of the review ‘Cartografie Sociali’ Bourdieu/Foucault: un rendez-vous mancato? (2017). He is the co-editor and translator, with Gabriella Paolucci, of the Italian edition of Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociologie générale, volume 1. Cours au Collège de France (1981–1983) (2019). Michael Burawoy  has studied industrial workplaces in different parts of the world—Zambia, Chicago, Hungary and Russia—through participant observation. In his different projects he has tried to cast light—from the standpoint of the workplace—on the nature of postcolonialism, on the organization of consent to capitalism, on the peculiar forms of working-class consciousness and work organization in state socialism, and on the dilemmas of transition from socialism to capitalism. During the 1990s he studied post-Soviet decline as “economic involution”: how the Russian economy was driven by the expansion of a range of intermediary organizations operating in the sphere of exchange (trade, finance, barter, new forms of money), and how the productive economy recentred on households and especially women. No longer able to work in factories, most recently he has turned to the study of his own workplace—the university—to consider the way sociology itself is produced and then disseminated to diverse publics. Over the course of his research and teaching, he has developed theoretically driven methodologies that allow broad conclusions to be drawn from ethnographic research and case studies. These ­methodologies are represented in Global Ethnography, a book co-authored with nine gradu-

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ate students, which shows how globalization can be studied ‘from below’ through participation in the lives of those who experience it. Throughout his sociological career he has engaged with Marxism, seeking to reconstruct it in the light of his research and more broadly in the light of historical challenges of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Among recent publications are “A Tale of Two Marxisms: Remembering Erik Olin Wright” (2020); “Going Public with Polanyi in the Era of Trump” (2019); “A New Sociology for Social Justice Movements,” in M. Abraham (ed.) Sociology and Social Justice (2019). Philippe  Corcuff  is Reader in Political Science at the Political Studies Institute of Lyon and member of the CERLIS laboratory (Research Centre on Social Links, UMR 8070, CNRS/Paris University/Sorbonne Nouvelle University). He is active in anti-globalization and anarchist movements. He was a columnist for the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo (2001–2004). He is the author of, among others, Bourdieu autrement (Textuel, 2003), Marx XXIe siècle (Textuel, 2012), Où est passée la critique sociale? (La Découverte, 2012), Enjeux libertaires pour le XXIe siècle par un anarchiste néophyte (Éditions du Monde libertaire, 2015) and La grande confusion. Comment l’extrême droite gagne la bataille des idées (Textuel, 2021). He also contributed to Domination and Emancipation. Remaking Critique, D.  Benson (Ed.), Lanham (MD) (2021). Mathieu Hikaru Desan  is a historical sociologist with substantive interests in social theory, political sociology, cultural sociology, critical sociology, Marxism, fascism, and the history of socialist thought. He has published on these and other topics in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Sociological Theory, History of the Human Sciences and Thesis Eleven. He is working on a book manuscript about the practical logic of political conversion, with a special focus on the case of French “neo-­ socialists” who became ideologically committed Nazi collaborators during World War II. Bridget Fowler  was a founding member of the Department of Sociology in the University of Glasgow, where she is now an honorary staff member and Emeritus Professor of Sociology. She is interested in social theory, particularly with reference to Marx and Bourdieu, and, more widely, the sociology of culture, including the obituary. Her most recent books are Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (ed., 1997); Reading Bourdieu on Society and Culture,

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Sociological Review Monographs (general introduction by Fowler, as well as introductions to each section, 2000); The Obituary as Collective Memory (2007); Stretching the Sociological Imagination: Essays in Honour of John Eldridge (ed. Bridget Fowler, with Matt Dawson, David Miller and Andrew Smith (2015); Time, Science and the Critique of Technological Reason: Essays in Honour of Herminio Martins (ed. Bridget Fowler, with J.E. Castro and L. Gomes; 2018). She has written numerous articles and book chapters of which the most cited are Pierre Bourdieu: Unorthodox Marxist? in ed. S.  Susen and B.S.Turner, The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu (2011) (translated into Italian pp.  361–390  in ed. Gabriella Paolucci; Bourdieu e Marx (2018)) (with F. Wilson); “Women Architects and Their Discontents,” Sociology, 2004, 38 (1): 101–119 (reprinted in Architectural Theory Review, 2013, 17, 2–3199–215); and “Pierre Bourdieu on Social Transformation with Particular Reference to Political and Symbolic Revolutions,” Theory and Society (2020) 49, 439–463. Alicia B. Gutiérrez  holds a PhD in Sociology from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and a PhD from University of Buenos Aires-­ Anthropology Department; is Tenured Professor of the Chair of Sociology at the School of Philosophy and Humanities of the National University of Córdoba; is Principal Researcher of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research; and is Director of the Institute of Humanities. On Pierre Bourdieu she has published Pierre Bourdieu. Las prácticas sociales (Spanish edition; 1994), under the title Las prácticas sociales. Una introducción a Pierre Bourdieu (2002); Pobre como siempre…Estrategias de reproducción social en la pobreza (2004); De la grieta a las brechas. Pistas para estudiar la desigualdad social en nuestras sociedades contemporáneas (2021). She has translated a large part of Bourdieu’s work into Spanish for Argentine and Mexican publishers. Frédéric Lebaron  is Professor of Sociology at the Ecole normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, inside the université Paris-Saclay. He is the director of the Human and Social Sciences Department of ENS Paris-Saclay. He specializes in economic sociology, political sociology and sociology of inequality. He was a close collaborator of Bourdieu between 1996 and 2002 and president of the French Sociological Association between 2015 and 2017. His recent work includes studies on the global central bankers, economic policies in Europe, dynamics of well-being inequalities in Europe. He recently published Savoir et agir. Chroniques de conjoncture (2007–2020) at éditions du Croquant.

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Gabriella  Paolucci  has been a fellow at European University Institute and then Assistant Professor at University of Florence (Italy), where now she is Associate Professor of Sociology. Her research focused on time uses, urban spaces, power and security policies, symbolic violence and State policies, social theories (Marx, Rawls, Sartre, Heller, Foucault, Bourdieu). Her books include La città, macchina del tempo (Milan, 1998); Cronofagia. La contrazione del tempo e dello spazio nell’era della globalizzazione (Milan, 2003); Libri di pietra. Città e memorie (Napoli, 2007). On Pierre Bourdieu: Bourdieu dopo Bourdieu, (ed. Turin, 2009); Introduzione a Bourdieu (Bari, 2011); Key Concepts and The State and Economics, in Re-thinking Economics. Exploring the Work of Pierre Bourdieu (eds. A.  Cristoforou and M Lainé, London, 2015); Bourdieu & Marx. Pratiche della critica (ed.; Milan, 2018). Fabio Raimondi  is Senior Lecturer in “History of political thought” and Adjunct Professor of” “Forms of political and institutional innovation” at the Department of Law of the Udine University. He is a member of the Direction board of the journal Storia del pensiero politico (History of Political Thought)—il Mulino edition, and of the European Hobbes Society. His main fields of research are the political thought of the Renaissance, Hobbes, Marx, Engels and Marxism. He is the author of numerous essays in journals and collective volumes. Among his latest books are Constituting Freedom. Machiavelli and Florence (2018). Mike  Savage  is ‘Martin White’ Professor of Sociology at The London School of Economics and Political Science, since 2012. He was the Head of the Department of Sociology between 2013 and 2016. Between 2015 and 2020 he was Director of LSE’s International Inequalities Institute. Between 1993 and 2016 he was on the Editorial Board of The Sociological Review, where he was editor between 2001 and 2007, and as Chair of Editorial Board between 2011 and 2016. He has also been a member of the ‘Sociology Research Evaluation Exercises’. Among his most recent books are Class Analysis and Social Transformations (2000), Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity (2003), Globalisation and Belonging (2005), The Return of Inequality. Social Change and the Return of the Past (2021). Peter Streckeisen  is a professor in the Department of Social Work at the Diversity and Inclusion Institute of Zurich University of Applied Sciences. He also is Senior Lecturer (Privatdozent) for Sociology at University of Basel. He completed a BA in Political Science at University of Lausanne

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and an MA in Sociology at University of Zurich. He holds a PhD in habilitation thesis at University of Basel. His main research areas are sociological theory, social policy, sociology of work and community development. David L. Swartz  Retired from full-time teaching, David L. Swartz is a visiting researcher in the Department of Sociology and an occasional lecturer in the Core Curriculum at Boston University. He is a Senior Editor and Book Review Editor for Theory and Society. He was among the founders and previous co-chair of the Political Sociology Standing Group of the European Consortium for Political Research. He was also Chair of the History of Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Boston University and a licence and maitrise in Sociology from the University of Paris V-René Descartes and a BA from Goshen College. His most recent book Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals: The Political Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (2013) was co-winner of the American Sociological Association History of Sociology Section Best Book Award in 2014. Two earlier books on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (1997) and After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration (co-edited with Vera L.  Zolberg; 2004), are widely cited in the social sciences. His general research interests include political sociology, elites and stratification, education, culture, religion, and social theory. He has published numerous scholarly papers on these topics. He is researching divisions in American conservatism with particular focus on the attitudes of conservative professors towards the Trump presidency.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction. Heirs: Bourdieu, Marx and Ourselves Gabriella Paolucci

When the inheritance has appropriated the heir, as Marx says, the heir can appropriate the inheritance. And this appropriation of the heir by the inheritance, of the heir to the inheritance, which is the condition of the appropriation of the inheritance by the heir (and which is by no means mechanical nor fatal), is accomplished under the combined effect of the conditionings inscribed in the condition of heir and the pedagogical action of the predecessors, the appropriate owners —P. Bourdieu, Le mort saisit le vif (1980)

Inheriting Debts, Not Capitals What does the act of inheriting an author’s work look like? What happens when a text, a scientific project, an intellectual practice, departs for temporally and spatially distant territories, unknown to those who gave birth to them, and where they are embraced as a legacy to be inherited? What results can this operation produce, when it takes place somewhere like the

G. Paolucci (*) Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_1

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intellectual field? That is, in a field where everything combines to ensure that the debt contracted towards the “ancestors”—ones chosen precisely in order to build recognisable and recognised genealogies—becomes the stakes of struggles to acquire a new symbolic capital? These questions of a general order concern any practice directed towards taking up one or another intellectual inheritance. But they are particularly relevant when the heir and the inherited in question have the standing of a Bourdieu or a Marx. This volume gathers together exercises which each revolve around this array of questions. It questions the modes and outcomes of the strategies of appropriation that Bourdieu practised with regard to Marx. These are strategies that also entirely pertain to us and our own present, should we choose to honour a debt to Marx and Bourdieu and to affirm a responsibility that we wish to take upon our own shoulders. The spirit of both authors calls for this kind of disposition. Both Marx and Bourdieu constantly invoked the future transformation of their own legacy, accepting in advance the rupturing and restructuring effects that this might have for the edifice they constructed. At the same time, they openly conceived their scientific project as a debt towards those of whom they had chosen to be the heirs. There is thus a movement from one inheritance to another. As Derrida suggests, “that we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not” (2006: 68). If the question of inheritance is posed, this is because it can only be conceived as a task to be fulfilled and not as something already given. Taking up the task of inheritance means practising a labour of conquest that reconfigures in new terms that which is being inherited. It means taking charge of a re-appropriation, which becomes such only if it is open to an analysis that selects and discerns, filters and criticises. In other words, the inheritance is realised—becomes real—only when there is someone who appropriates it and, in so doing, establishes practices that, far from transforming that legacy into a fetish, instead break it down and select from it, the better to then reconstruct it. This is a practice that postulates the mode of detachment without which no appropriation can take place. The detachment allows for the conquest: without detachment there would be no appropriation. Nor any labour of recognition. And nor, in the last analysis, any heirs.

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Detachment is the gesture proper to the orphan, who inherits only once the—material and symbolic—rupture with their progenitors is complete. In outlining the intimate relationship between the figure of the orphan and that of the heir, we can draw assistance from Émile Benveniste’s etymological analysis (2016), showing how the root heres underlies the “strange relationship” between the two notions.1 Bourdieu also refers to this scenario when, in The Weight of the World, he writes: This successful inheritance is a murder of the father accomplished at the father’s injunction, a going beyond the father that will preserve him and preserve as well his own “project” of going beyond, given that this going beyond is in the order of things and, as such, in the order of succession. The son’s identification with the father’s desire as a desire for preservation pro-­ duces an unproblematic inheritor. (Bourdieu et al. 1999: 391)

The practice of inheritance must, therefore, be conceived in terms of metamorphosis and not solely of conservation, which would not, after all, give rise to any “history.” Moreover, to operate under the marker of metamorphosis also postulates the exercise of a certain responsibility: one is responsible for one’s “uses” of the debt that one chooses to contract. What scenario opens up when the practice of inheritance is situated in the intellectual field? Here we could evoke the pathologies that give rise to the dynamics of a field in which the attribution of a prestigious inheritance—or even simple self-placement within a genealogy—has the effect of transforming that debt into a symbolic capital which is spent in struggles within the field. Bourdieu devoted a considerable part of his research to unveiling the dynamics of a field in which agents—intellectuals, and especially academics—are led, mostly unconsciously, by the very logic of their training, to treat the legacies of the past as capital, as if designed to be exhibited and 1  Émile Benveniste shows how the root heres establishes an etymological relationship between the notion of orphan and of inheritance: “How can this etymological relationship be explained? […] According to Indo-European usage property is directly transmitted to the descendant, but he is not for this reason alone qualified as an ‘heir’. At that time, no need was felt for the legal precision which makes us qualify as ‘heir’ the person who enters into possession of material wealth, whatever his degree of relationship with the deceased. In IndoEuropean, the son was not designated the ‘heir.’ Heirs were only those who inherited in the absence of a son. This is the case with the collaterals, who divided an inheritance where there was no direct heir. Such is the relationship between the notion of ‘orphan, deprived of a relative’ (son or father) and that of ‘inheritance’” (Benveniste 2016: 57–58).

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to produce “symbolic dividends.” In other words, to treat them as fetishes. In the Lectures on General Sociology at the Collège de France, he poses the question in the following terms: As a sociologist, I shall adopt a systematically suspicious attitude towards any philosophical genealogy that a thinker may offer for their own thinking in so far as the main function of these genealogies is a social one—that is, to constitute a social capital: we fashion our own ancestry. It is no accident that we speak of the founding fathers of sociology. Choosing the founding fathers or ancestors from whom we inherit the eponymous names of our tribes— Marxist, Durkheimian, Weberian, etc.—is a way of affirming our symbolic capital, of appropriating the capital of all these prestigious ancestors, to affirm ourselves as their heirs and in so doing to appropriate the heritage. Of course, those who declare themselves inheritors thus expose themselves to the attacks of all those who envy them the heritage or wish to destroy it—in general their relation to the heritage is described in formulae such as “You are nothing but a Weberian” or “I’m the true Durkheimian”. (Bourdieu 2020: 6)

The canonising, fetishizing effect produced by the capitalisation of the work to which one claims to be the heir is antithetical to the results of an intellectual practice that instead responds to the call of responsibility and recognises, in this debt, its own mandate. Responsibility and debt are all the more demanding in cases like our own, when we are dealing with authors who tasked us with conducting a critical exercise to be carried out with the same audacity that so deeply imbued their work.

Classifying the Unclassifiability of Debt What we have said thus far is firstly useful in warding off one of the possible misunderstandings to which this book could give rise. That is, the mistaken understanding that one of its aims is to establish whether and how far Bourdieu was a Marxist.2 As Bourdieu himself stated on more than one occasion, to ask whether and in what way an author situated himself within the Marxist field is a scholastic question that does not 2  There is not a greatly conspicuous literature on the relationship between Bourdieu and Marx, but it does nevertheless count some significant analyses. See, among others: Brubaker (1985), Wacquant (1996, 2002), Andreani (1996), Beasley-Murray (2000), Bidet (2008), Robbins (2006), Santoro (2010), Fowler (2011), Karsenti (2011), Mauger (2012), Granjon (2016), Koch (2018),

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provide any useful information about his work.3 It is a question that responds to the logic of a trial, rather than the imperative of interpretive clarity. With his habitual radicalism, Bourdieu always categorically rejected any possibility of a classification of this kind: Those who have identified themselves with Marx (or Weber) cannot take possession of what appears to them to be its negation without having the impression of negating themselves, renouncing their identity. It shouldn’t be forgotten that for many people, to call themselves Marxist is nothing more than a profession of faith or a totemic emblem. (Bourdieu 1993: 13)

And further: “To be or not to be a Marxist is a religious alternative, and not at all scientific” (Bourdieu 1990a: 49), implying a “theological or terrorist use of the canonical writings” (Bourdieu 1990b: 179). We would like to follow on from Bourdieu in his rejection of classificatory labels that establish sacerdotal monopolies, orthodoxies and heterodoxies, and which inevitably result in the neutralisation of the unclassifiable author’s critical power.4 We would like to inherit this distance. This book does not therefore intend to sanction orthodoxies or ascertain heterodoxies, and nor does it intend to indulge in the vulgate of a Bourdieu without Marx, against Marx or with Marx. Rather, it devotes its attention to the unclassifiable in order to better understand it. It moreover seeks to draw elements enlightening for our research and critical practice, from that which cannot be classified within the confines of a self-enclosed system. This is the first reason why it seems appropriate to banish from our horizon any reasoning that concerns Bourdieu’s “Marxism” or otherwise. However, another aspect also needs considering, in order to understand properly why we should want to inherit Bourdieu’s rejection of such a scholastic artifice. This is a general problem which is inevitably faced whenever one sets out to read an author in light of his relationship with 3  “The labelling, which is the ‘scholarly’ equivalent of the insult, is also a common strategy, and all the more powerful the more the label is, both more of a stigma and more imprecise, thus irrefutable” (Bourdieu 1990a: 142). 4  “Just as in a tribal society the passing outsider is subjected to questioning until he can be located in a genealogy, so the intellectuals who strive to prove their personal uniqueness and irreducibility do not stop until they have eliminated the unclassifiable—even by resorting, if necessary, to an arbitrary taxonomy. Hence the production of all the ‘isms’ suitable for designating total options committing a whole philosophy and employed with the intention of defining both oneself and the others” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967: 205).

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Marx.5 It is a problem that ends up presenting a cumbersome obstacle between our gaze and the work in question. By this, we are referring to the distinction traditionally used in the Marxist field between orthodoxy and heterodoxy—a distinction that much of the literature on the relationship between the two authors also leans on. Since the sociologist’s debt to the Trier philosopher does not respond to the letter of Marxist dogmatism—it is argued—a classification may be adopted which consigns Bourdieu’s eccentricity to a wider field with more blurred boundaries than that of the so-called Marxist orthodoxy. Thus a “heterodox Marxist” Bourdieu has been constructed. We do not agree with this operation. There is an ineliminable union between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, as Bourdieu himself masterfully shows in his essay on the religious field (Bourdieu 1991). In the moment that a heterodoxy is sanctioned, the existence of an orthodoxy is assumed, legitimising its validity. Our profound rejection of the idea that in the Marxist field there exists something like an orthodoxy to be cultivated, defended and transmitted or, on the other hand, denied, must lead us to clearly reject the operation of a certifying authority. For its first effect would be to legitimise the dogma-­ producing machine that has created a corpus hardened into ideological dogma, its “orthodoxy” largely constituted—it has often been pointed out, even recently6—by ignorance of Marx’s thought. The factors that have determined the alchemy of its planetary legitimisation belong to the convoluted and dramatic history of the past century—and to adventures in the field of power. If, then, there is no orthodoxy by which to sanction a heterodox apprehension of Marx’s legacy, the only useful way of accessing the debt that Bourdieu contracted with this legacy remains the path of textual comparison. This remains the case, even if we are of course well-aware that any reading of texts, by whatever author, is situated in historical time. One of the most serious problems encountered when comparing intellectual productions belonging to different national fields of knowledge and eras is effectively summarised by Bourdieu, when he points out that our societies and their intellectuals are not “contemporaries” even when they share the same period according to the calendar. This is due in part 5  For this kind of approach, see also the Bidet’s book on Foucault and Marx, where the author curries out an investigation free from any scholastic perspective (Bidet 2016). 6  Among those who have produced evaluations of this tenor in recent years, we can note Bensaïd (1995), Musto (2011), Tomba (2011), Burgio (2018).

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to the fact that the difference between contexts does not necessarily make what happens at the same historical moment “contemporary.” But so, too, to conditions linked to the perception of works and their reception—conditions filtered and moulded by readings and interpretations foreign to the national field of production. Bourdieu himself points this out: International exchanges are subject to a certain number of structural factors which generate misunderstandings. The first factor is that texts circulate without their context. This is a proposition that Marx noted in passing in the Communist Manifesto, an unusual place to look for a reception theory. […] Marx notes that German thinkers have read French thinkers very badly, seeing texts that were the result of a particular political juncture as pure texts, and transforming the political agitators at the heart of such texts into a sort of transcendental subject. In the same manner, many misunderstandings in international communication are a result of the fact that texts do not bring their context with them. […] The fact that texts circulate without their context, that—to use my terms—they don’t bring with them the field of production of which they are a product, and the fact that the recipients, who are themselves in a different field of production, re-interpret the texts in accordance with the structure of the field of reception, are facts that generate some formidable misunderstandings and that can have good or bad consequences. […] If, in general, posterity is a better judge, it is doubtless because contemporaries arc competitors and often have a hidden interest in not understanding, or even in preventing understanding from taking place in others. (Bourdieu 1999: 221)

So, if it is already difficult to establish supranational relations between two “contemporaries” (for instance, Durkheim and Weber, two eminent figures in European sociology who deliberately ignored one another, despite being contemporaries), constructing comparisons between authors who lived in different countries and at different times is a far more problematic endeavour. We are aware, therefore, that our reading of Bourdieu and Marx and their relationship—as well as our way of understanding our debt to them—belongs entirely to our own time and to the cultural and political climate in which we are immersed. Our time is marked not only by the considerable development of the international reception of Bourdieu’s legacy (Sapiro 2020), but also by the rebirth of Marx studies. Far from depriving us of an indispensable point of political reference for our praxis and our thought, the collapse of the socio-­economic formations and States that claimed to be realising Marx’s project has ultimately left as us orphans, helping to release the

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intellectual and political energies needed to recapture Marx’s inheritance with the openness and freedom that a revolutionary spirit like his requires. As has been written, this collapse “is an opportunity to read Marx within and against a tradition of Marxism. It is […] our good fortune” (Tomba 2007: 7).7 This is coupled with the opportunity to take advantage of a historically critical edition of Marx’s writings (MEGA 2)8—provided it does not remain enclosed within the walls of the academy and under the glass bell of philology. Although the practical—political—critique of contemporary capitalism is still struggling to put these developments to good use, it is our conviction that they are highly significant for again stirring the energies of a field that has remained sclerotic for decades.

Inheriting a Dichotomous Marx It is worth asking which Marx Bourdieu intended to inherit, among the many that contended the post-1945 French arena (Batou and Keucheyan 2014; Bidet  2008).  And with which interpretation of Marxian work Bourdieu was polemicising, when he  put  the Trier philosopher in the dock  for his supposed economicism or for the intellectualism that, in Bourdieu’s opinion, informed some Marxian notions.9 Incursions into some of the configurations of the Marxist field present in this volume may already offer us sufficient cues to trace out the image of a Bourdieu who, while acknowledging the inevitable influence that the obligatory passage through Marxism exerted on him,10 preserved his 7  On this point see also Marcello Musto, who points out that “despite the announcement, at the end of the last century, of Marx’s definitive disappearance, he has reappeared on the stage of history. Freed from the function of instrumentum regni and from the chains of Marxism-Leninism, his work has been handed over to free thinkers” (2011: 36). 8  On this point see, among others: Fineschi (2008), Fineschi and Bellofiore (2009), Musto (2010), Kurz (2018), Cuyvers (2020). 9  It may be useful, in this regard, to look at Éric Gilles’s survey on the recurrence of references to Marx in Bourdieu’s work (Gilles 2014). 10  In his Collège de France lectures on Classification Struggles, Bourdieu said on this score: “We might call for a sociological analysis of the part played in the intellectual education of all intellectuals by the required initiation, however different in depth, commitment, or passion, into Marxism. In fact, we need a sociology of knowledge to study the impression we may have in our twenties that we know perfectly well how to think about what there is to know perfectly well on the subject of social class: this is a collective experience shared by almost everyone, and is so completely institutionalized that it renders formidably difficult something that should be routine, that is, to approach the issue of classes in general virtually from scratch, and reconsider what it means to classify” (Bourdieu 2018: 5).

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distance both from the “dogmatism of a fossilised Marxism” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967), and from the neo-Hegelian interpretations that spread in France after World War II.  In that period, the discussion of Marx’s youthful writings, and in particular of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1975b), took on such importance as to become a decisive philosophical event. This was noted by a distinguished witness of the time, Henri Lefebvre (1957), who was moreover responsible for one of the first translations of this work (Lefebvre and Guterman 1934). These were the years in which the myth of the “young Marx” was created—whether this was a positive or negative myth. This provides an example of how the institution of an inheritance can be used as symbolic capital, constituting the stakes of the battles being fought in the intellectual field. These are, however, battles arbitrated, as Bourdieu would say, by external sanctions, in this case ones coming from the political field. The emergence, across the whole of Marx’s work, of a problematic very different from that of the evolutionary and economistic Marxism of the Second International and Stalinist mechanicism, in fact transformed these writings into an eminently political object of contention. The discovery of the themes of alienation, dialectics and history—made possible by reading the early writings—provided the cue for an all-encompassing critique of “official” Marxism. Thus a new Marx was born11—different and opposed to the one that France had known up to that point—and imposed itself on the debate of the time. And new heirs were born, too. Overturning and thus redeeming the Marxian inheritance, they came forth to characterise themselves as his inheritors. In the new space of possibilities that thus emerged, this redeemed inheritance was deployed as a distinctive value, resulting from the negative relation that inevitably linked their practice to the other, coexisting inheritance-practices. For many years the only texts available in French were the Communist Manifesto and Capital. It was not until the late 1930s that translations of The Holy Family, The German Ideology and the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right appeared. And it was only in the 1960s that the full-length Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Grundrisse were published. The former was published in 1962, while the latter—which highlighted elements of continuity between the early works and the late 11  Mutatis mutandis, this is also what is happening in our own time, with the historicalcritical edition of Marx’s writings in the MEGA 2. It provides not only a large amount of original materials that were until recently inaccessible but also very different renderings of texts known for decades in versions very distant from the original manuscripts.

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Marx—only came out in 1967, when Althusser, who had not yet read them, formulated the singular thesis that “we cannot say absolutely that Marx’s youth is part of Marxism” (Althusser 2005: 82).12 Bourdieu thus began to give shape to his reading of Marx in a climate imbued with the idea that there were two Marxes: on the one hand, the mature scientist investigating the immanent laws of capital, and, on the other, the philosopher of alienation and philosophical praxis. This scene saw two sectors of the field lined up against each other: those who saw in the youthful texts the highest expression of Marxian humanism and the essence of all his critical theory (among others, Mounier, Sartre, Bigo, Hyppolite and Merleau-Ponty); and those who regarded them only as an error of youth, later transcended with the elaboration of the critique of political economy (alongside “Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy” there was Althusser, who was the most influential figure representing this current). Whichever side one took in this dispute, Marx’s work came out dichotomised—artificially split in two. There were few who tried to maintain a balanced position between the two interpretations (among them, in part, Henri Lefebvre). The effervescent debate of those years was followed by the so-called crisis of Marxism. In France, as elsewhere, this saw the expulsion of Marx from the intellectual and political field, except insofar as he could be tamed. Bourdieu always portrayed himself as an outsider with respect to this debate—probably believing that he could exercise an inheritance-practice that would allow him to lay claim to an autonomous and original reading, free from the games taking place on the field (Yacine 2003). However, one can reasonably assume that the ways in which he constructed his own dialogue with Marx were inevitably affected by the atmosphere of an intellectual field dominated by the dichotomous reading of Marx’s work and the stakes that helped determine its contours. 12  First published in Russian by Ryazanov in 1927, but still in partial form, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were made available in France in the 1930s, but only in an abridged form, with the translation from the 1934 German edition first by Lefebvre and Guterman, and subsequently, in 1937, by Jules Molitor. The French edition in fact presents many omissions (the parts on alienated labour are missing) and errors. For the first complete edition, French-language readers had to wait for Émile Bottigelli’s translation, published by Éditions Sociales only in 1962 (Marx 1962). The Grundrisse were published in French only in 1967 (Marx 1967, 1986). The literature on the reception of the young Marx in the post-1945 French intellectual field is quite extensive. For a general survey, the reader can consult, among others: Burkhard (1994), Ferry and Renaut (1990), Musto (2010: 225–272), Pompeo Faracovi (1972), Poster (1975).

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Inheriting Critical Practice If we have devoted this volume to the practice of critique that the two authors fiercely exercised throughout their career, it is because we believe that this is the terrain on which we can best illuminate the debt that Bourdieu wished to acknowledge to Marx. This is the same debt that we, too, would like to be able to honour and respond to with our own scientific and political responsibilities. Dialogue with the system of Marxian critique is a constant in Bourdieu’s work. This is most clearly evidenced by the repeated references to the Trier philosopher that the sociologist scatters throughout his works, and by the adoption of a critical perspective that denotes a massive Marxian presence. From the 1950s Bourdieu developed an empirically grounded theory of the social world and its institutions, the critical impetus of which derived largely from his experience of the processes of domination in French-colonised Algeria—in the analysis of which, he extensively employed Marx’s model and conceptual instrumentation.13 From this, Bourdieu draws the themes which were to inform a far-reaching project for the critical analysis of contemporary capitalist society—of “political practice in the name of science”—and makes significant epistemological breaks with the traditional way of doing social science. In the concatenated set of critiques underpinning the architecture of his work,14 in the plethora of questions he raises, and in the scientific practice he adopts, Bourdieu attaches himself to the Marxian system—notwithstanding his polemical remarks and deviations from this system (we might even say, by virtue of them). The framework of this system is constituted by a unitary

13  Among the most significant Algerian texts see: Bourdieu (1962, 1979, 2004, 2012) and the book edited by Yacine (Bourdieu 2008). On the closeness of Bourdieu’s Algerian studies to a Marxian paradigm, it is useful to consult some recent texts, including Denunzio (2017) and Schultheis (2003, 2007). Bourdieu often combined his research work in Algeria with photographic practice. In this regard, see Bourdieu (2012). 14  The critical disposition that permeates the Bourdieusian edifice has been little examined by literature. If it has remained somewhat on the margins of commentaries and glossaries, this probably also derives from the fact that the systematic critique of the scholastic universe and of the position from which intellectuals speak—one of the fundamental themes of Bourdieusian epistemology—can create a certain discomfort in some fields of reception of his work. Not to mention the fact that a sociologist who claims to want to “contribute to providing tools for liberation” through his scholarly work may not be a very welcome guest in the forums of the current academic field.

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set of critiques:15 the critique of religion, philosophy, ideology, politics, the State, and, finally, political economy, with which Marx opens up an entirely new epistemic field, subverting the very idea of science—as many have pointed out, starting with Blanchot.16 This order of considerations can serve as a guide to an investigation delving into the modalities of the practices adopted by Bourdieu as he took up the task of inheriting Marx’s legacy. And it may support the hypothesis—the main theme of this volume—that the exercise of critique, which both Bourdieu and Marx practised in a radical way, constitutes a strong connective tissue binding their projects. This might seem a bold thesis. And yet, if we look at Bourdieu’s desertion of the discipline du couronnement, we can grasp a trait that Bourdieu’s critical gesture towards philosophy shares with the one Marx matured in the years when he wrote his Theses on Feuerbach (1976), Introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1975a) and The German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1976). Moreover, Bourdieu himself on more than one occasion linked himself to the reasons that had driven the Marxian break. Starting from the identity between philosophy and critique, Marx makes the exit from philosophy a necessary effect of his project: Criticism is hand-to-hand combat, and in such a fight the point is not whether the opponent is a noble, equal, interesting opponent, the point is to strike him. […] The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. (Marx 1975a: 178, 182)

15  The different objects of Marxian critique that succeeded one another and stratified over time have also responded to and interpenetrated one another, thus going on to constitute a coherent and unitary theoretical arrangement—a “criticism.” This topic is addressed by a vast literature and continues to be so today. See, among others, Benhabib (1984), Bensaïd (1995), Renault (1995), Musto (2011), Celikates (2012), Burgio (2018), Fineschi (2020). 16  Maurice Blanchot writes: “Capital is an essentially subversive work. It is so less because it would lead, by ways of scientific objectivity, to the necessary consequence of revolution than because it includes, without formulating it too much, a mode of theoretical thinking that overturns the very idea of science. Actually, neither science nor thought emerges from Marx’s work intact. This must be taken in the stronger sense, insofar as science designates itself there as a radical transformation of itself, as a theory of a mutation always in play in practice, just as in this practice the mutation is always theoretical” (Blanchot 1997: 99).

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This formulation of the relationship between theoretical and practical critique implies an overcoming of the view previously shared with Bauer (the need to give critique a philosophical form) and especially with Cieszkowki (philosophy is only realised by giving it a critical form). Theoretical critique  cannot be seen as the adequate form for political struggle, since history develops on the level of real struggles, irreducible to the level of theoretical struggles. Here, we are still in the middle of the 1840s, but this is a definitive acquisition. For the author of the Theses on Feuerbach, philosophy must transcend itself, transform itself into “practical critique,” open itself up to history and, in this way, realise itself: it fulfils itself by transcending itself and abolishes itself by realising itself. The becoming-philosophy of the world gives way to the becoming-world of philosophy: revolutionary realisation and the transcendence of philosophy as such. To transcend means simultaneously both to abolish and to elevate—to bring to a higher level, the level of history.17 And this certainly does not mean, as he would specify years later in the Afterword to the second German edition of the Volume I of Capital, “writing receipts (Comtist?) for the cook-shops of the future” (Marx 1996: 17). The error that philosophy commits is not to think of its own critical gesture in relation to the situation that conditions it, leaving it in the dark. The historicity of thought, its historically determinate determination, requires, on the contrary, that the critique of reality be accompanied by an interrogation of the historical conditions of its exercise. This shows how closely Marxian reflection on critique is linked to envisioning the relationship between thought and history: critique is always a critique of the historical world and a theory of its contradictions, upon which “practical critique” is called to act. This is one of the fundamental theses of the Marxian system: the critique of reality must be accompanied by the questioning of one’s own historicity. In his fierce battle against philosophy and “scholastic reason” Bourdieu links himself to this plexus of Marxian questions. It is a battle that motivates and underpins his abandonment of the philosophical field, from which he himself has come. What kind of rupture does Bourdieu make with the field that he has betrayed—the field of which he considers himself a deserter? In what name does this betrayal take place? And what is its object? In reality, just as in Marx, Bourdieu conducts a close critique of 17  Henri Lefebvre devoted enlightening words to this subject in a book that did not receive the recognition it deserved at the time (Lefebvre 2016).

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philosophy—embarking on his sociological adventure—in the name of an exquisitely philosophical demand. But it is a demand radically opposed to the posture put into the field by the scholé—the sphere in which philosophy lives and thrives. The Bourdieusian abandonment and betrayal translate into a research-­ practice directed towards the social world and a vision of scientific knowledge which, in reality, find the tools for a critique of philosophy within philosophy itself (Macherey 2014). Among the authors that serve as references for this change of perspective we find, along with Bachelard, Canguilhem, Spinoza and Pascal, also Marx. Bourdieu expresses his debt towards him through both implicit and explicit references, especially in the writings in which he begins to systematise his epistemology. The intention of Bourdieu’s defection is clear. It is to promote a “negative philosophy”—as the subtitle of Pascalian Meditations (2000) states— that addresses the ordinary things of life and offers the tools to make contact with social practices. And to denounce the errors to which the scholastic illusion leads, as it fosters ignorance both of what happens in the order of the polis and politics, and of “what it is to exist, quite simply, in the world. It also and especially implies more or less triumphant ignorance of that ignorance and of the economic and social conditions that make it possible” (2000: 15). Here we find a decisive element of consonance between the Bourdieusian critique of the “philosophical mind” and the Marxian critique of “critical criticism,” as stated in the subtitle of The Holy Family (Marx and Engels 1975), to which Bourdieu makes explicit reference. If for Marx the idealist thinkers’ error is that they do not think about their own link with German reality and do not place their own critical activity in relation to the crisis situation that conditions it, for Bourdieu the fallacy into which philosophers fall consists in failing to grasp the need for a reflexive return, in failing to assume their own unthought, thus leaving them prey to the amnesia of genesis. For both, the social determinations of thought and practice must be brought to light, in a gesture of epistemic reflexivity that comes to “objectify the subject of objectification,” according to Bourdieu’s well-known adage. It is worth quoting in full at least one of the many passages in which, with his usual irony, he clarifies his position: Only a critique aiming to make explicit the social conditions of possibility of what is defined, at each moment, as “philosophical” would be able to make visible the sources of the philosophical effects that are implied in those con-

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ditions. This alone would fulfil the intention of liberating philosophical thought from presuppositions inscribed in the position and dispositions of those who are able to indulge in the intellectual activity designated by the term “philosophy”. For, while it has to be pointed out that the philosopher, who likes to think of himself as atopos, placeless, unclassifiable, is, like everyone, comprehended in the space he seeks to comprehend, this is not done in order to debase him. On the contrary, it is to try to offer him the possibility of some freedom with respect to the constraints and limitations that are inscribed in the fact that he is situated, first, in a place in social place and also in a place in one of its subspaces, the scholastic fields. (Bourdieu 2000: 28–29)

Marx and Bourdieu’s common critical gesture towards philosophy, however, has divergent outcomes. While for Marx the realisation of philosophy is concretised in “practical criticism”—in the leap that takes praxis right into the contradictions inherent in the historical process, which theory sees but cannot alter—for Bourdieu critical practice is anchored in the plane of scientific rationality. It is this plane that he entrusts the unveiling of the mechanisms of domination, indispensable to their subversion.18 This means “to engage, armed only with the weapons of rational discourse, in a struggle that was perhaps lost in advance against enormous social forces, such as the weight of habits of thought, cognitive interests and cultural beliefs bequeathed by several centuries of literary, artistic or philosophical worship” (Bourdieu 2000: 7). In his appeal to the unveiling function of reason, Bourdieu associates himself with the radical desire for illumination that the author of Capital put to work in his own efforts to unmask the essentialism and naturalism of classical economics. This happens partly through the use of categories borrowed from the Marxian framework—the notion of fetishism and capital, and the very definition of his own theory as a “general economy of practices,” well illustrated by the contributions collected in the second part of this volume. But so, too, with Bourdieu’s very way of proceeding in the practice of a social science that sets up an open conflict with the apparent solidity of the real and with scientific doxa—namely, with those discursive productions that seem to describe a social order, while in reality they prescribe it. This is essentially the same conflict that Capital engages against the dual plane of the economic reality of capitalism and the discourses that legitimise it, through which classical economics naturalises  On this theme, see also the highly stimulating analysis offered by Bruno Karsenti (2013).

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what is produced by history. It is thus a critique of unfounded attempts to justify capitalism—claims that inform classical economic doctrines and have a specific political function. In this respect, the Marxian critique of political economy is the daughter of the critique of political power and its institutions, first and foremost meaning the State, whose social foundation lies in the economy, as Marx writes in one of his most important texts on the critique of ideology, On the Jewish Question (1994). Bourdieu puts the perspective adopted by Marx to the test in his analysis concerning the figure of the fetish—that is, those “things” that men believe to possess superhuman powers, such as capital and the commodity. He does this in his work of unmasking the naturalising effects that act upon the social world: from the masculine domination (Bourdieu 2001) to the “spectacle of the universal” that the State seeks to give of itself, spreading the belief that the State’s view of the social world is an impartial viewpoint without viewpoints (Bourdieu 2014). These naturalising effects constitute one of the most powerful dispositifs of scientific discourses that hypostatize the existing (such as the phenomenological approach, the scientifically erroneous ultra-empiricism complicit in the naturalised order, or Gary Becker’s Rational Action Theory). On the terrain of this systematic work of dismantling the doxa—which, we should remember, is not only a set of discursive productions but is above all the opaque consistency of the social world—Bourdieu constructs what he terms a “materialist theory of the economy of symbolic goods,” founded on the connection between the material and symbolic, the objective and subjective dimensions. If Marx, with his analysis of commodity fetishism, shows the real inversion of phenomenal forms—which conceal the essential forms instead of revealing them, since they are nothing more than appearances— Bourdieu shows how the dominant economic thought operates a denial of practices that seem to be situated only on the symbolic level, when in reality they also possess an exquisitely material, economic nature. Uncovering this connection—and this reversal—is one of the most significant moves that Bourdieusian sociology makes (Fowler 2020). It thus constitutes striking proof of the fallacy of those readings that assert that the symbolic dimension is Bourdieu’s sole analytical terrain. In reality, he never ceases to claim, as the objective of the clarification provided by scientific reason, the unveiling of the forms in which the symbolic and the material, the objective and the subjective, mutually support each other. Forms that resist those scientific approaches which, believing they

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understand the social world simply by duplicating it, end up legitimising it as it is. Bourdieu devoted a great deal of attention to this terrain, returning to it repeatedly: the union between the power of the symbolic and the power of the material pervades the entire social world, and it is only through the power of this interweaving that the specific form of violence that is symbolic violence can be exercised. In order to reveal its hidden effects—that is, fulfil science’s task—it is necessary to accomplish a work of double objectification: The double objectification that science needs to accomplish: the objectification of objective structures (those relations that are not reducible to their manifestations and interactions) and the objectification of incorporated structures (those mental structures that are produced by the social, and through which we think the social)”. (Bourdieu 2020: 15)

But this is also the level on which the sociologist engages in one of his fiercest battles with the author of Capital. He accuses Marx not only of adopting an intellectualist approach but also of not sufficiently considering the subjective dimension of social relations, in the last analysis meaning that he has conducted an economistic analysis of capitalism. Yet, a careful reading of the critique of political economy shows that for Marx the economic sphere is not only the objective, material one, but also encompasses symbolic and subjective dimensions that contribute to constituting the real.19 So, we might ask ourselves what drives Bourdieu’s polemical ardour. We could advance the hypothesis that it stems from a fundamentally ambivalent disposition towards the Trier philosopher: on the one hand, the propensity to acknowledge one’s debt to an immanent science of the contradictions of social reality; on the other, the desire to push the power of Marx’s critical gesture beyond the limits that this same gesture could not—or only partially—surpass. Proof of this comes in Bourdieu’s numerous and heartfelt “appeals” addressed to Marx, in which the sociologist calls on the author of Capital and the theorist of the

19  Alberto Burgio invites us to reflect on the fact that even the notion of production, “against all the economistic interpretations of his thought, contains a great complexity and critical power, since different dimensions and levels of action converge therein. Production always embraces […] material and immaterial, objective and subjective, factual and ‘spiritual’ dimensions, in a dynamic only partly inherent to the economic” (Burgio 2018: 161–162; 423–426).

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class struggle to stick more closely to his theoretical and programmatic premises.20 On the same wavelength is Bourdieu’s invitation, in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, addressed towards those who profess faith in Marxism: Only a social history of the workers’ movement and its relations with its theorists both inside and out would enable us to understand why those who profess to be Marxists have never really submitted Marx’s thought and especially the social uses made of it to the test of the sociology of knowledge, which Marx initiated: and yet, without hoping that a historical and sociological critique will ever be able completely to discourage the theological or terrorist use of the canonical writings, one might at least expect it to determine the more lucid and resolute to stir themselves out of their dogmatic slumber and to put into action, in other words, to put to the test, in a scientific practice, theories and concepts which, thanks to the magic of ever-­ renewed exegesis, are assured of the false eternity of the mausoleums. (Bourdieu 1990b: 179)

This is a testament to how a self-styled heir can take on the onerous task of inheriting an intellectual legacy, by practising selection and criticism, without thereby transforming it into a reified “inheritance”—that is, a symbolic capital to be spent on his own personal prestige.

20  This passage from the Lectures on Classification Struggles at the Collège de France, in which Bourdieu “calls on” Marx to show greater coherence in class theory, aptly highlights the double dimension of the Bourdieusian critique which we mentioned above: “Going beyond these alternatives [objectivity or subjectivity] would require integrating objective classification with the conflict over classifications, rather than simply juxtaposing the two. In the case of social class, we cannot avoid the encounter with Marx, and we cannot help but think that it was he himself who achieved this fusion, for it was he who gave us both an objectivist notion of social class and a theory of class struggle. Yet it seems to me that this integration is superficial, and I fear that the weakness of Marx’s thought lies in the fact that he did not integrate a scientific theory that aims to describe social classes according to their objective properties with a theory of the struggle between different class systems that can transform or modify this objective structure. It seems to me that he failed to achieve this integration and allowed Marxist theory to oscillate successively or simultaneously between, on the one hand, a theory of a physicalist, mechanistic, and determinist kind-with, for example, the theory of the final catastrophe that was much discussed in the interwar period-and, on the other hand, a theory of revolution as a kind of engine in which compression leads to explosion” (Bourdieu 2018: 64–65).

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———. 2001 [1998] Masculine Domination. Translated by R.  Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2004. Algerian Landing. Translated by R.  Nice and L.  Wacquant. Ethnography 5(4): 415–443. ———. 2008. Esquisses algériennes. Edited by Tassadit Yacine. Paris: Seuil. ———, 2012. Picturing Algeria. Edited by Franz Schultheis and Christine Frisinghelli. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2014 [2012]. On the State. Lectures at the College de France, 1989–1992. Translated by D. Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2018 [2015] Classification Struggles. General Sociology, Vol. 1. Lectures at the Collège de France (1981–82). Translated by P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2020 [2016]. Habitus and Field. General Sociology, Vol. 2. Lectures at the Collège de France (1982–83). Translated by P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1967. Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945. Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject. Social Research 34 (1): 162–212. Bourdieu, Pierre et al. 1999 [1993] The Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Translated by P. P. Ferguson, S. Emanuel J. Johnson and S. T. Waryn. Stanford University Press: Stanford. Brubaker, Rogers. 1985. Rethinking Classical Theory: The Sociological Vision of Pierre Bourdieu. Theory and Society 6: 745–775. Burgio, Alberto. 2018. Il sogno di una cosa. Per Marx. Roma, DeriveApprodi. Burkhard, Fred Bud. 1994. The ‘Revue Marxiste’ Affair: French Marxism and Communism in Transition Between the Wars. Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 20 (1): 141–164. Celikates, Robin. 2012. Karl Marx: Critique as Emancipatory Practice. In Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Karin de Boer and Ruth Sonderegger. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cuyvers, Ludo. 2020. Why Did Marx’s Capital Remain Unfinished? On Some Old and New Arguments. Science & Society 84: 13–41. Denunzio, Fabrizio. 2017. Le due Algerie di Pierre Bourdieu. Colonialismo, sottoproletariato e azione comunicativa. Democrazia e diritto LIV (1): 92–106. Derrida, Jacques. 2006 [1993]. Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by P.  Kamuf. New-York: Routledge. Ferry, Luc, and Alain Renaut. 1990. French Marxism. Society 27: 75–82. Fineschi, Roberto. 2008. Filologia e interpretazione dopo la nuova edizione storico-­ critica (MEGA-2). Roma: Carocci. ———. 2020. Real Abstraction: Philological Issues. In Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory. The Philosophy of Real Abstraction, ed. Antonio Oliva, Oliva Ángel, and Novara Iván, 61–78. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Fineschi, Roberto, and Riccardo Bellofiore. 2009. Introduction. In Re-reading Marx. New Perspective after the Critical Edition, ed. Roberto Fineschi and Riccardo Bellofiore. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fowler, Bridget. 2011. Pierre Bourdieu: Unorthodox Marxist? In The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays, ed. Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, 33–59. London: Anthem Press. ———. 2020. Pierre Bourdieu on Social Transformation, with Particular Reference to Political and Symbolic Revolutions. Theory and Society 49: 439–463. Gilles, Éric. 2014. Marx dans l’œuvre de Bourdieu. Approbations fréquentes, oppositions radicales. Actuel Marx 56 (2): 147–163. Granjon, Fabien. 2016. Bourdieu et le matérialisme marxien. In Matérialismes, culture et communication, Tome 1, Marxismes, Théorie et sociologies critiques, ed. Fabien Granjon. Paris: Presses des Mines. Karsenti, Bruno. 2011. From Marx to Bourdieu: the Limits of the Structuralism of Practice. In The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, 33–58. London: Anthem. ———. 2013. D’une philosophie à l’autre. Les sciences sociales et la politique des modernes. Paris: Gallimard. Koch, Max. 2018. The Naturalization of Growth: Marx, the Regulation Approach and Bourdieu. Environmental Values 27 (1): 9–27. Kurz, Heinz D. 2018. Will the MEGA2 Edition be a Watershed in Interpreting Marx? The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 5 (25): 783–807. Lefebvre, Henri. 1957. Le marxisme et la pensée française. Les temps modernes 137–138: 104–137. ———. 2016 [1965]. Metaphilosophy. Translated by D. Fernbach. London: Verso. Lefebvre, Henri, and Norbert Guterman. 1934. Morceaux choisis de Karl Marx. Paris: NRF. Macherey, Pierre. 2014. Geometria dello spazio sociale. Pierre Bourdieu e la filosofia. Verona: Ombre corte. Marx, Karl. 1962 [1844]. Manuscrits de 1844. Translated by É. Bottigelli. Paris: Editions Sociales. ———. 1967 [1939]. Fondements de la critique de l’économie politique. 2 vols. Translated by R. Daugeville. Paris: Anthropos. ———. 1975a [1844]. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction. Translated by M.  Milligan, B.  Ruhemann. In MECW, vol. 3: 175–187. ———. 1975b [1844]. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1944. Translated by M. Milligan and D. J. Struik. In MECW, vol. 3: 229–347. ———. 1976 [1845]. Theses on Feuerbach. Translated by W. Lough. In MECW, vol. 5: 3–5. ———. 1986 [1939]. Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy. Rough Draft of 1857–58. (Grundrisse). Translated by E.  Wangermann. In MECW, vol. 28: 49–537.

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———. 1994 [1843]. On the Jewish Question. Translated by R. A. Davis. In Id. Early Political Writings: 28–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996 [1873]. Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital vol. I. In MECW, vol. 35: 12–20. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1975 [1845]. The Holy Family: or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company. Translated by R. Dixon and C. Dutt. In MECW, vol. 4: 3–235. ———. 1976 [1932]. The German Ideology. Trans. C.  Dutt. In MECW, vol. 5: 19–539. Mauger, Gérard. 2012. Bourdieu et Marx. In Lectures de Bourdieu, ed. Frédéric Lebaron and Gérard Mauger, 25–40. Paris: Ellipses Editions. ———. 2010. Marx is Back: The Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) Project. Rethinking Marxism 22 (2): 290–291. ———. 2011. Ripensare Marx e i marxismi. Roma: Carocci. Pompeo Faracovi, Ornella. 1972. Il marxismo francese contemporaneo fra dialettica e struttura (1949–1968). Milano: Feltrinelli. Poster, Mark. 1975. Existential Marxism in Postwar France. From Sartre to Althusser. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Renault, Émmanuel. 1995. Marx et l’idée de critique. Paris: Puf. Robbins, Derek. 2006. On Bourdieu. Education and Society. Oxford: Bardwell Press. Santoro, Marco. 2010. Con Marx, senza Marx. Sul capitale di Pierre Bourdieu. In Bourdieu dopo Bourdieu, ed. Gabriella Paolucci, 144–172. Torino: Utet. Sapiro, Gisèle. 2020. From Social Theorist to Global Intellectual: The International Reception of Bourdieu’s Work and Its Effect on the Author. In Ideas on the Move in the Social Sciences and Humanities, eds. Gisèle Sapiro, Marco Santoro and Patrick Baert, 299–32. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schultheis, Franz. 2003. Algerien 1960—ein soziologisches Laboratorium. In Pierre Bourdieus Theorie des Sozialen. Probleme und Perspektiven, ed. Boike Rehbein, Gernot Saalmann, and Hermann Schwengel, 25–40. Konstanz: UVK. ———, ed. 2007. Bourdieus Wege in die Soziologie. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag. Tomba, Massimiliano. 2007. Preface to Italian edition of Daniel Bensaïd. Marx l’intempestif. Grandeurs et misères d’une aventure critique [1995]. Roma: Edizioni Alegre. ———. 2013 [2011]. Marx’s Temporalities. Leiden: Brill. Wacquant, Loïc J.D. 1996. Culture, classe et conscience chez Marx et chez Bourdieu. Actuel Marx 20: 25–42. ———. 2002. De l’idéologie à la violence symbolique: culture, classe et conscience chez Marx et Bourdieu. In Les sociologies critiques du capitalisme en hommage à Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Jean Lojkine, 25–40. Paris: Puf. Yacine, Tassadit. 2003. On n’avait jamais vu le ‘Monde’; Nous étions une petite frange découche entre les communistes et les socialistes [Interview of Lucien Bianco]. Awal. Cahiers d’études berbères 27–28.

PART I

Domination: Practising Critique

CHAPTER 2

Bourdieu with Marx, from Economy to Ecology Jacques Bidet

This “Bourdieu with Marx” is written in the same spirit as my book Foucault with Marx (Bidet 2016). While Bourdieu’s work is liable to feed criticisms of Marxism, it also provides essential elements for its recasting on a broader basis. I have already tackled this vast subject elsewhere (Bidet 2005). Here, I will focus on one central point: class structure in modern society and, more precisely, the question of the “bipolarity” of modern class domination. Like Foucault, although in very different terms, Bourdieu brings out the duality of what Marx designated as the “dominant class.” The former investigates a “knowledgepower”—a power of knowledge, distinct from the power of capital—whereas the latter deals with a cleavage between economic capital and “cultural capital.” In these terms, the two more or less adequately evoke concepts necessary for understanding the class structure in modern society, but which remain in the background of the Marxian schema. The complex set of questions to be reconsidered here, both in Bourdieu

J. Bidet (*) University of Paris-Nanterre, Nanterre, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_2

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and in Marx, especially concerns culture, reproduction and social domination. But what about this duality of domination? And how is this to be understood in the era of ecological disaster?

Foucault and Bourdieu: A Dominant Class with Two Poles With Bourdieu, this bipolarity is given in sociological terms. A concrete presentation is provided to us in Distinction (Bourdieu 1984: 128–9). We can take the graph entitled “Space of social positions, Space of lifestyles.” Vertically, this crosstab presents differences of “volumes” of capital, according to a hierarchical distribution; and, horizontally, the distribution between cultural capital and economic capital. In the upper part, there is a contrast between its left side, which features the academics, rich in cultural capital, and its right side, which brings together the bosses and the senior executives of industry, endowed with economic capital. Similarly, in the lower part, where the volumes of capital are lower, the world of employees, better endowed with culture, is contrasted with that of artisans, better endowed economically. All of this may seem trivial, if we read it as a table of stratification, of superimposed social layers, each dividing into one fraction which draws its position from its culture and the other from its wealth. But, from Bourdieu’s perspective, this is not a descriptive diagram of the distribution of various social functions, giving rise to complementarity and hierarchy, but rather a general picture of class “domination” in a modern society. And this centrality of domination opens up a wider research programme, in affinity with Marx’s. Foucault proposes a debatable concept of knowledge-power. There is indeed knowledge in society at large, in all its strata and fractions. There are knowledges of different content, quality and potentiality: but it is not this gradation that determines the class divide. Foucault reveals the distancing mechanisms through which knowledge-power is exercised. He strongly emphasizes the ability of senior management or the medical profession to reserve for themselves the information and the knowledge they possess so as to protect themselves from inquisition and disturbance from below. Bourdieu is interested not only in the exercise of power but also in the social process by which it is constituted and reproduced as the privilege of a fraction of the dominant class. He analyses the way in which some agents happen to be endowed with such a “capital” according to a mechanism which is both that of its production and that of its reproduction

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because it is a structural mechanism. At the centre of his investigation is the fact that what is thus produced and reproduced is not knowledge properly speaking but a cultural-political “competence,” socially instituted as such in this fraction of the social body that attributes it to itself. Foucault tackles this knowledge-power as a matter of fact, a social pathology that must be resisted and pushed back. He shows how this process is self-­ sustaining. Bourdieu takes things quite differently. He speaks not of “knowledge” but of “competence”: he analyses the structural conditions in which the power of a “competent authority” occurs through state processes. By comparison, the Marxian picture of the so-called capitalist society appears incomplete, unfinished: unipolar. With Bourdieu, the economically dominant and the culturally dominant appear as constituting two “fractions” of the dominant class, of which the first, in his eyes, “dominates” the second. With Marx, and in the tradition which refers to him, there would be no room for such a bipolarity in the dominant class: the “culturally dominant” would not appear as such on the screen, and nor would the agents of “organization.” Certainly, it is assumed that there are powers other than that of the shareholders. But it is generally located in the “bureaucracy” of the companies or the state, or in a “technostructure.” Marx, it is well known, referred to executives as the representatives of the capitalists, as their “officers,” with their “petty officers,” and to state representatives as forming the political “staff” of capitalist power—a rash formula, this, which cannot of course be taken for a concentrate of his political theory. Marx thus tends to reduce them to their functions in the “capitalist” class relation. This does not prevent him from working out sophisticated analyses of the divisions within what he also refers to as “bourgeois” society, a more all-encompassing term, which evokes the part played by a cultural social force. But this approach does not yet tell us anything about the nature of its specific power, nor of its constituent sources, nor of what constitutes its unity and its identity as an element of the dominant body. For Marx, therefore, the modern ruling class is that of capital, which establishes its power in the whole of society through the functional elements that it presupposes. What Marx lacks here are the concepts that would allow him to conceive this structural duality of modern domination. From this would follow, among the post-Marx Marxists, the custom of designating modern societies as “capitalist” societies. This category of “capitalism”—admittedly called for in terms of the primordial role that capital plays in this type

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of society, on a national and global scale—in reality constitutes an epistemological obstacle, which weighs on both Marxism’s socio-economic analysis and its political strategy. That is, at least, what I would like to show.

How Bourdieu Builds the Second Pole In both of these authors, there is, beyond economic antagonism, another battleground which is ideological-cultural in character. Marx approaches it in terms of a clash between ideas: “The thoughts of the dominant class are also, at all times, the dominant thoughts, (…) the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, (…) the expression of the relations which make a class the dominant class, (…) the ideas of its domination” (Marx 1998: 67). One could thus speak of “neoliberal ideology” and of a “critique of ideology.” Bourdieu, for his part, refuses to reduce cultural domination to its content in terms of ideas. He does not ignore the question of “ideology.” On the contrary, he is particularly effective in demystifying it: his analysis of the school system is a remarkable contribution to the critique of the ideology of “gifts,” “vocations” and so on. But by advancing the concept of “cultural capital,” he operates an epistemological break, leading us from a theory of ideology to a theory of culture, which is a critique of culture. In the communist movement, which has always considered itself the heir to the Enlightenment, the theme of the alliance between the proletariat and the “forces of culture” would be a classic question. Bourdieu, by contrast, situates scholarly culture in the context of “culture,” taken in the sociological sense, as including all the cultural forms (language, lifestyles, goods and practices) specific to a given society or to some of its fractions. Bourdieu’s approach unfolds along two lines. On the one hand, he shows that, through family and educational mechanisms, the ruling class reserves for itself the most complex forms of scholarly, scientific, literary or artistic culture, supplying its members the “habituses” required for mastering them. On the other hand, he introduces into ideological-cultural analysis a quite different and more innovative consideration. This early acquisition of knowledge potential is linked to that of purely distinctive codes: forms of language, postures, customs. Thus, in the hierarchy of the educational structure, agents endowed with the habitus required for higher functions, by virtue of their social origins, are also offered the acquisition of cultural discriminants. In times past this meant Latin, and today mathematics, even with regard to jobs for which it hardly seems

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necessary. In terms of artistic activities, “properly aesthetic delight” is similarly associated with “the effect of distinction” (Bourdieu 1991: 34–36). The selection mechanism of appropriating the “highest” forms of culture (in scientific, literary, administrative and artistic fields) thus contributes to the reproduction of a system that articulates a dominant/dominated relationship. But it is all the more “violent” because it relies on the excellence attributed to the modes of existence, conduct, language, practices, which are specific to the dominant. Academic excellence, which determines “competence” as affirmed in the titles which are conferred, is built on the relationship between these two aspects of “distinction.” A certain cultural arbitrariness designates in advance the elected, those who can be credited with superior capacities, because they demonstrate it by their distinction. There is no calculation in this: the masters themselves share the same common sense of what is “distinguished.” The question of content, ideology or knowledge, without losing its sociological significance, is thus relayed by that of the role of symbolic forms in social relations. This is a horizon that Marx had not opened up. And it is from here that the difference between two ways of conceiving the reproduction of domination would appear.

Structural Reproduction According to Marx The concept of “mode of production” is to be understood as that of a coherent and stable socio-economic system, that is to say, one provided with the conditions for its renewal. Marx starts its construction from its most elementary formulation under the name of “simple reproduction,” inherent in the “process of capitalist production” as such. This is the subject of chapter 23 (Marx 1976: 711–724). The employee transfers the value of the means of production (input) into a commodity product (output), producing—at the same time as the value of his own wages, ensuring his own reproduction—a surplus value, which ensures the reproduction of the capitalist, and, in “extended reproduction,” an additional value, which allows for investment. In this process, here reduced to its most elementary figure, consists the stability of the system, as competition entails some capitalists falling into the condition of an employee and the rise of some employees to the rank of capitalists. The capitalist production process sends some upwards and others downwards with a regularity which ensures the stability of the structure.

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This model, which concerns capitalism specifically, fits into the context of historical materialism. Supposedly, such a configuration defines a determinate stage along the chain of social forms which class societies successively take. This sequence of transformations, from one to the other, is intelligible only on condition that they are connected to a schema that is common to all of them. As we know, Marx defined such a schema in his short preface to A Critique of Political Economy, constituting, he writes, his “guiding thread.” The economic “base” of society is to be understood as the articulation of “productive forces,” that is to say, of techniques and skills specific to a period, and of “social relations of production,” that is, division, control and direction of labour, as well as ownership of the means of production, appropriation and distribution of the product. The “mode of production” specific to a type of society is the mode of connection of such an economic “base,” or “infrastructure,” and a political, economic and legal “superstructure.” It implies the existence of a form of state endowed with the power necessary for implementing the juridical provisions involved in these social relations of production. Such configurations give rise to ideological constructions which illustrate and legitimize them. To borrow an expression from Marcel Mauss, this model tends to define a “total social fact,” un fait social total. More precisely, it means that one can understand technique only in its connection to social relations, and economics only in connection to the juridico-political. It constitutes a functional model, an articulation of technical, social, cultural and political elements in mutual presupposition. This is no more, one could say, than the banal idea of a certain correspondence between an economical and a political order. The peculiarity of Marx’s approach is that he understands this couple in terms of class, that is, of social “contradictions” between a ruling class and a dominated class. A mode of production is therefore a social structure comprising not only the conditions of its reproduction but also its transformation. It is “developing” as long as the relations of production and the productive forces remain in line with one another, stimulating each other. But, at a certain point, the development of the productive forces happens to upset the relations of production, thus opening onto a “new era.” This is how, in the penultimate chapter of Capital Volume I, which in reality represents the final chord of this long symphony, Marx argues that the development of the large industrial enterprise under the impetus of technique and science gradually provides employees with an organizational configuration they eventually prove able to master for

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themselves, thus paving the way to socialism (Marx 1976: 927–931). Paradoxically, the relevance of this analysis would find its confirmation precisely in the error of the diagnosis to which it gave rise. From the 1970s to 1980s, the rise of digital technology—a revolutionary “productive force”—would in fact make a contribution in the opposite direction, providing the capitalist entrepreneur with the means to break this trend, and thereby also the industrial wage labour system, by introducing market relations within the large company. But, a priori, there is nothing to say the wheel could not turn in the opposite direction, since the digital is itself endowed with an immense organizational capacity. Be that as it may, let us retain the essential point here: the programme of “historical materialism” includes not only the question of “social relations” but also that of their relation to “productive forces.” This materialism is about the structural trends which generate transformation or mutation. It therefore includes a theory of history. This is precisely what makes the difference with a sociological programme.

Reproduction According to Bourdieu When Bourdieu and Passeron published La reproduction in 1970, they might have seemed to be working on a field opened up by Marx, whose Capital is a theory of modern social structure and its reproduction (Bourdieu 1977). They propose to show how the educational institution “contributes” to such a reproduction. The same goes for Durkheim, who defines the “social fact” on the basis of a certain “constraint on the individual,” a linguistic, legal, religious or moral constraint, by which a coherent social order is reproduced. It is easy to see how they broaden this perspective. Regarding the relationship with Marx, by contrast, the problem is that we never arrive at the point where this “contribution” would actually appear as a contribution, that is to say, would combine conceptually with the Marxian concept of reproduction. The gap between the two perspectives is obscured by the importance of Marxian references in Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus, at the centre of which the notion of “reproduction” is understood as that of class relations and class fractions, class institutions, the class state, as well as the reproduction and accumulation of “capitals.” Even if these notions do not have the same contours as in Marxism, they imply certain essential presuppositions insofar as they both refer to a relation of class domination. If one wants to explain and appreciate the distortions between the “results” that the two programmes can respectively

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claim and, equally, what one can expect from the one and the other, one needs to discern the difference between their respective programmatic purposes. Bourdieu, too, considers the fact of a structure and the problem of its reproduction. There is, as we have seen, a vertical axis, according to the volume of capital, and a horizontal axis, according to the nature of this capital. This is the “class structure” whose “reproduction” Bourdieu deals with. The social totality, understood as a set of “fields,” analysed as providing as many “games” that everybody practises according to her/his predispositions (habituses), that is, her/his place in the class structure. But in the Weberian sociological tradition, where society is analysed in terms of different “spheres,” representing different “stakes,” the problematic of “fields” is not oriented towards the consideration of the system as such, as relation between its parts, in its functionality, its logic, its contradictions. Bourdieu deals with the interrelationships between the different “fields,” rather than with the whole. He stresses, certainly, that the hierarchies which prevail within the various fields corroborate each other, so that this scattering in various fields does not eliminate a general cleavage between a dominant class and a dominated class. Because of this homology between fields, he can speak of a “class habitus.” However, what draws his attention is the peculiarity of each field. In this context, the category of “practice,” which makes the link between the various fields, constitutes the central operator. Clearly, we are faced with two different programmes. Bourdieu’s sociology leaves it to historians to study how the conjunctures in which agents will exercise their habits are changing. Marx’s “historical materialism” is a theory of the history of societies, including the passage from one form of society to another, and, more specifically in Capital, a theory of the modern capitalist form of society and its possible overcoming. Marx thus outlines a theory of modern society, or at least of what he judges to be its central core. Bourdieu’s subject, by contrast, is both a general theory of social practice, which considers the various practices, for example, economics, as special cases, and, on the other hand, a general theory of sociology, which goes beyond and reconciles the contrary requirements of “objectivism” and “subjectivism” (at the time, respectively, represented by structuralism and phenomenology), associating the point of view of the structure and that of the individuals, the rules of the institutions and the quite different rules of concrete practice (Bourdieu 1990: 139–142). In this regard, Bourdieu tends to reduce Marx to structuralism: according to

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him, the structural relations that Marx describes prescribe agents’ practices. In reality, Marx takes the greatest care to show that, while the capitalists cannot act other than according to the logic implied in the competitive relationship—that is, if they are not to disappear outright— the wage-earners occupy a subaltern position from which they can distance themselves by engaging in the class struggle. Bourdieu certainly pushes this analysis of the subjective moment much further than Marx, through the categories of a “praxeology,” a general theory of practice. But this, being general, cannot produce a theory of modern society as such. Bourdieu’s approach pertains to a programme which is that of “sociology,” as it was invented in the nineteenth century, in its historical emergence, by its separation from philosophy of history, and also from economics, whose specific subject is the production, distribution, circulation and consumption of wealth. Marx’s programme shows some kind of resistance to this epistemic rupture. The key concepts of Capital, such as “value,” “surplus value,” “exploitation” and “ capital,” are both economic and political categories. His respective consideration of materialism, of the productive forces, and of history—the consideration of the sequence of modes of production—are strongly correlated, since this relationship between social relations of production and productive forces is fundamentally unstable, subject as it is to an oscillation between reproduction and transformation. And this is the point on which Marx fixes his attention: the point from which one can explore the horizon of modernity. It is in this sense that Marx promotes “historical materialism.” It is clear that Bourdieu’s structural approach does not nurture the same ambitions. In other words, the term “reproduction” does not really have the same meaning in Marx and in Bourdieu. For both of them, of course, structure is primary. And, consequently, they must explain how the structures happen to be reproduced. With Bourdieu, this only occurs through the strategies by which agents reproduce in their original position. Such a reproduction of agents in their position is relatively random; it is linked to their strategic capacity and to more or less favourable circumstances. Jumping from one class to another remains an exceptional fact. The field thus necessarily reproduces itself, generally leading children of a social class to arrive at the same position as their parents. This approach is not unrelated to Marx’s: the economic structure reproduces itself, although the dominant do not all self-reproduce just as they are, because their reproduction as the dominant presupposes the success of their competitive strategy. But, at Bourdieu’s level of analysis, where the dominant and the

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dominated supposedly return to their position, we remain in a social “static,” incapable of opening up to a “dynamic,” that is, to a historical interpretation. As we shall see, this is in fact only possible through the analysis of the interactions between productive forces and relations of production.

Capital Endowment: Where Marx and Bourdieu Split Off Clearly, when Bourdieu speaks of “capital endowment,” he is giving the word “capital” a meaning which is not Marx’s own. But this does not mean that he is using this concept in a purely metaphorical sense. So, it is worth considering how this interferes with Marx’s problematic. By advancing this concept, Bourdieu actually brings a new element to the Marxian approach, a new element which can tend either to neutralize or to stimulate it. This distinction between two kinds of “endowment,” one economic, the other cultural, challenges the belief that modern societies could be defined by their “capitalist” character. In fact, it heralds a two-fold dominant power: a property-power and a competence-power. This duality governs two social logics of domination, which rely on two distinct kinds of “endowment,” that is to say, two forms of “capital,” which are appropriable by individuals, thus associated in a dominant class.1 “Cultural capital,” as the endowment of a particular person, is guaranteed by a cultural power which is exercised not only within the school and university system, but through all the institutions, public or private, which have a mandate and authority to distinguish, recognize, crown, include, exclude—in short, to define “competences.” It is through this institutional analysis that, in comparison with Foucault, Bourdieu shifts from “knowledge” to “competence,” defining this second power as a state power. The idea of such a “second power” is not unknown to the Marxist tradition, where the state is conceived as the political relationship between classes. In Gramsci one can see these cultural institutions, even if they are private (schools, churches) referred to as “state apparatuses.” As for Althusser, he discerns an “ideological” power, that of the “ideological state apparatus,” which reinforces an economic power. But by taking the 1  The term “competence,” it should be remembered, does not refer to knowledge as such (to a “knowledge-power”) but to a social competence-power: that of those who are designated as “enjoying competency,” where a juridical power is included.

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economic and the cultural as two kinds of “endowment,” which individuals are unequally endowed with, Bourdieu tackles this issue quite differently: he is interested in a “cultural” power, which is to be considered as such, for it-self, as the other power, responding to another logic of power. However, for Bourdieu, this claim of a duality is only the prerequisite for reunification. In both cases, “capital” is supposedly guaranteed by a “title,” that is, as the property of specific persons. If “property” means socially recognized as legitimate power of using a thing, in modern society this recognition is guaranteed by the state, which validates and asserts property titles. Therefore, the two kinds of “endowment” similarly come under state recognition. On the one hand, recognition of private property. On the other, recognition of competence. Private property governs market relations. Competence regulates organized relationships, giving everyone their place in organizational charts. This attribution of titles in both cases confers on people a capacity for action and, therefore, for the use of things, recognized in a more or less determinate area of social life. In modern society, this recognition is guaranteed by the State (and its “apparatuses”), which constitutes and validates the titles of “competence.” This endowment approach has received a Marxist reception in an “analytical Marxism” that distinguishes various kinds of “assets” which individuals are endowed with (Wright 1988, 1997)2. It seems clear, however, that the concept of “capital endowment” presents certain limits regarding the conceptual tasks that Marx assigned to “capital.” As for Bourdieu, he considers both (a) the reproduction of a system of differences in “endowment,” that is to say, of a structure of domination, and (b) the reproduction of family lines in their endowment, through educational, family, school, and process. It is in this sense that he studies “reproductive strategies” (Bourdieu 1996: 263–289). In his approach, these are the two sides of the same social process: according to the various volumes and forms of endowment which you inherit, you will be provided with habituses which give

2  Wright’s approach, despite its merits, seems to me to come up against a difficulty inherent to an “analytical” philosophy, which expresses “social relations” in terms of “inter-individual relations.” It will be noted that, for the needs of a Marxist analysis, the French language has at its disposal two distinct terms, that of “relations sociales,” appropriate to relations between individuals, and that of “rapports sociaux,” appropriate to class, gender or race, that is to say, structural relations, where English has only one term, that of “relations.” This obviously presents no insuperable semantic difficulty, but it is significant in terms of different philosophical traditions, which it is important to be aware of.

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rise to practices that reproduce the “structure,” in the sense Bourdieu gave to this term, and determine your position within it. Marx similarly distinguishes (a) the reproduction of the capitalist structure from (b) the reproduction of endowment among the particular capitalists. But he adds a third consideration: (c) the reproduction of capital. For him, the capitalists certainly reproduce “as capitalists” by the reproduction of their own capital. But these are two separate things. There is an autonomy of capital, relative to its holder. The problem of reproducing a particular capital is conceptually distinct from that of reproducing its owner: see the process of the “extended reproduction,” studied in Volume I, running from small to large enterprises, which results from an interaction between (competitive) relations of production and (technological) developments of the productive forces. The analysis of the conditions for the reproduction of the capitalist structure as a whole is the subject of Volume 2, while Volume 3 examines the circumstances in which the very mechanism of capitalism, its extended reproduction, leads eventually to the ruin of the system. It was by considering this interaction between relations of production and productive forces that Marx would propose a theory of modern society which was at the same time a theory of modern history. The “contribution” to Marxism that Bourdieu brings here through his concepts of “cultural capital,” “reproduction” and “endowment” concerns this “other pole” of class domination which makes it impossible to adequately define modern society as a “capitalist” society. But to be able to integrate this “contribution” into the edifice of Marxism, it is still necessary to cross some epistemological obstacles and build some conceptual bridges.

Domination Versus Exploitation A symptom of the chasm that separates these two authors is the fact that where the one deals with “exploitation,” the other chooses to speak of “domination.” This term certainly makes it possible to embrace economic domination and cultural domination in a single concept. But at what cost? Let us briefly examine how Marx constructed this concept. In Capital, whose specific object is the study of the “capitalist mode of production,” some general concepts, valid for any “mode of production,” are necessarily presupposed. As we have seen, this is particularly the case with the concept of “mode of production” but also that of “exploitation,” which

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constitutes its core. Marx thus distinguishes slavery, where all the product seems to go to the master (we forget that the slave receives something for his reproduction as a slave), serfdom, where the division is visible between what the serf gives to the owner and what remains for himself, and capitalism where, with labour being supposedly paid at its “value,” exploitation has supposedly disappeared (Marx 1976: 680). What is common to all three cases is “exploitation,” rigorously understood as the fact that some people work longer and others less than the time necessary to produce what they consume. In the case of capitalism, this can only appear through a “labor theory of value,” which is the condition for a theory of surplus value: it makes it possible to distinguish, beyond the wage (relatable to the working time necessary for the production of the goods that the employee consumes) an additional working time whose product goes to the capitalist owner (this is what transpires from the first five chapters of Volume 3). Value and surplus value are not categories of economic practice: capitalists do not need them. These are concepts of the critique of economics, and it is as such that they have economic significance. They allow us to understand capitalism in its relationship both to exploitation and accumulation, and more generally in terms of its structure and its history. It might be said that all this is well known. Known, perhaps, but not recognized. We “see without seeing,” as Althusser says. In reality, his phenomenon gives rise to a repression which is of the same type as that of sexuality brought to light by Freud. If Marx’s analysis is correct, there is no inequality, but only processes of exploitation. This is the fact which radically escapes consciousness. The idea that, when you work less time than what is necessary to produce what you consume, you are an exploiter, is truly untenable. It is, for this reason, absent from ordinary language. And the very term “exploitation,” in its common usage, carries the most diverse denotations and connotations which both broaden and weaken it. Marx gives it its conceptual edge. This can only appear via recourse to a theoretical construct, which exists as such only on a double condition of consistency and relevance: namely, that from the outset it remains consistent with its own conceptual unfolding, and that it effectively reveals or makes visible something of the real which without it would remain invisible or unknown. And these are the points on which Marx’s theory must be questioned: in its relevance regarding the data of the various social sciences (history, sociology, law, psychopathology, etc.), and in its coherence, starting from the concepts to be formulated first. It is on this last point that my criticism will focus, which will attempt to push the theory of exploitation

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further. By instituting “domination” rather than “exploitation” as the key concept, Bourdieu condemns himself to remain in a grey zone where domination itself is obscured by an original repression. What the Marxian theory of surplus value reveals is the “abstract” character of the logic of exploitation: its fundamental indifference to the fate of humans and nature. This is the essential point that Marx sets out in a decisive paragraph which deals with the difference between the “production of use value” and the “production of surplus value.”3 Capitalist production certainly has to do with use values, since it aims at the production of commodities. But it is indifferent to the fact that some “commodities” can be destructive. It aims, in the last analysis, only at maximizing surplus value, the only way to survive in the competitive struggle. Capital flourishes on misery, deforestation and pollution. It thrives all too well in conditions of global warming. This is the landscape that only the Marxian theory of exploitation can reveal, in all its social and ecological dimensions.

The Duality of the Domination-­Exploitation-Destruction Process This Marxian theory of exploitation, however, cannot be taken as an objection against Bourdieu’s contribution (or similar approaches) insisting upon the duality of the dominant class, that Marx identifies only obliquely. But, to account for this duality, it is necessary to approach things from above. American institutionalism constitutes a first point of reference here, when it argues that economic theory must start from the fact that there are only two rational forms of work coordination on a social scale, namely, the market and the organization. This view is already central in Marx since the Grundrisse (Marx 1973: 171–2). It governs his entire 3  It will be noted that, in the French edition (which, as he has underlined, corrects the earlier German text), Marx modifies the title of this chapter 7, which he entitles “The production of use values and the production of surplus value,” and not “The Labor Process and the Process of producing Surplus Value.” This title, which refers to the “production of use values,” and not to the “labor process,” is more congruent with the argument he is developing and more essential to it. It is also the most significant regarding the current situation: we need only think of the ongoing debates about what is “productive,” “production,” GDP and so on, where profit contrasts with use value, and nature as the supreme use value to be protected for itself.

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theoretical construct, which is based on these two modes of the “division of labor.” However, his hypothesis is that, with the development of the large industrial enterprise, it is ultimately the rationality of organization, gradually extended to an entire society, that will prevail, in the form of socialism. As we know, in the course of real modern and contemporary history, the reign of the “organized whole” has been shown to constitute a catastrophic outcome. Only a certain market/organization duality is economically “rational.” But we have to confront this inescapable reality: in modern times these two forms of “coordination at the social scale” interpenetrate and confront each other as two class factors, giving rise to a conflict between the two privileged social forces, one endowed with capitalist property, which dominates the market, and the other with “competence.” One could argue that, over the centuries of modernity and in a time of ecological decline, it is capital that constitutes the determining element. Indeed, modern destructiveness is most clearly manifested in the capitalist concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few, whose only compass is profit. However, we cannot stop at this unilateral perspective. What Bourdieu’s analysis allows us to better understand—even if he does not argue this point—is the parallel between competition in the market and competition within organization.4 That is, the parallel between the thirst for profit, proper to the shareholder-champion of extractivism, and the thirst for greatness, proper to generals and administrators, agents of big projects, national and colonial. On this other pole of domination, one will thus find, at the height of competence, the search for “glory,” and, throughout its hierarchy, the obsession with “distinction,” which also involves a certain lifestyle. Which is to say, a certain level of consumption, which constitutes the vector, from top to bottom, of the process of ostentatious expenditure, the absolute ferment of consumerism. Crossing this vector with the abstract logic of capital commits the human species to disaster.

4  It will be noted, here again, that the French language specifically uses “concurrence” in the case of the market and “competition” with regard to organization—where English has only one term, “competition,” at its disposal for two different concepts—underlining a conceptual distinction.

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Bourdieu with Marx in an Ecological Perspective As against the privileged, we can now better consider the other class, which I call “le commun du peuple” (the common of the people), that is, the great mass of the unprivileged, which does not mean to say powerless: they count in history (Bidet 2022). But how? We may seem to be stuck in a double impasse. With Bourdieu, we are locked into a problematic of the continuous reproduction of dominations. With Marx, we will only succeed in an illusory outcome, in the passage from the reign of the market to the reign of organization. Neither of them seems to open up to a strategy of emancipation. In my view, it is necessary to confront this aporia without regressing conceptually even further, below this duality. The institutionalist adage that “there are only two modes of rational work coordination on a social scale, the market and the organization” only makes sense if it is anchored in a point of origin. There is actually an earlier, primary possibility, which is not “the gift and the counter-gift.” Polanyi puts this idea forward but as part of a historical approach. But here, with regard to modern structural logic, what we find below market and organization is the discursive coordination between associated partners, as defined by Elinor Ostrom in the concept of the “common” or by Habermas in the concept of “communicative action.” A rigorous critical reference to these two authors would naturally require long explanations.5 To stick to a strict conceptual space, I will say that the modern structure of society, as a class structure, supposes a “metastructure,” which is not its “foundation,” but rather the necessary reference for the actors involved. This presupposition of the modern social order, this “common sense” which both Rawls and Marx speak of (deriving very different elaborations from this, it is true), is the conviction that we are “free and equal,” and then committed to governing ourselves by the “discourse,” equally shared by all. This has nothing to do with idealism: this fact of such a “common sense” is remembered, from below, in all modern class struggles (and indeed, also gender struggles, though this consideration exceeds the limits of the present article6). This assumption is not the “foundation” of modern society. It is not a matter of the “values” upon which “modern society” is purportedly based. To put it in Hegel’s language, it is a “posed presupposition”: it is the 5  See Théorie générale (Bidet 1999). Section 72, pp. 323–343 is devoted to Rawls. Section 91, pp. 401–430, to Habermas. 6  See L’État-monde (Bidet 2011), chapitre 5, Sexe, classe, “race”: Rapports sociaux consubstantiels.

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product of the modern class struggle. And it is an open presupposition. In the complexity of modern society, beyond what the discussion between supposedly free and equal humans can directly establish (by rules or regulations in the various fields of social life), this is the alternative they face: as for the rest, which exceeds immediate discourse interaction, the question is, what will be handed respectively to the market or to organization? Critical thought, which adopts the perspective of emancipation, that is, the abolition of class and gender domination, cannot do away with this modern fact of a duality of class factors. In this sense, I have designated the modern class structure as that of a “triangular duel”: two classes are facing each other, but the one above includes two components, opening up to problems of alliance as well as conflict. It is only on this ground that the modern struggle for emancipation from class and gender relations can be understood. Capital-power is an essentially mute or deceptive power. Competence-power, by contrast, can only be exercised, can only assert itself, by explaining, in some regard by exposing itself. And thus, formidable as it is, it remains more vulnerable, potentially subject to some control by the common people, to some kind of alliance in the context of capitalist domination. It is in this sense that we can question Bourdieu when he evokes the figure of the “man of science,” scientist or intellectual, whose interest is truth, the “universal” (Bidet 2011). From a metastructural ecological perspective, the question must be taken quite differently. Marx explains, at the end of Volume 1, that in the large industrial enterprise, as it takes the form of a unified technical-scientific process, the workers are more and more numerous, “formed, united and organized” by the very process of production, so that they eventually become capable of taking the lead of the entire organization (Marx 1976: 927–931). In reality, we arrive now at a situation that is both analogical and opposite. The process of the disaster has started to “educate” and “unite” us. As for this “universality,” which is supposed to bring us together, faced with an enduring bipolar dominant class it can only proceed from the strengthening of a discursive framework common to humanity. At this ultimate stage of modernity, when the “old” modern class structure, far from disappearing, becomes gradually established on a world scale, the way to the universal can still be conceived only within the triangular duel, in the form of a struggle-­alliance between the common of the people and the “competent.” Once scientists have explained about global warming, the disappearance of species, pollution and rising waters, things become simpler, and humans more educated. The common of the people is beginning to be able to take the

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initiative, not in order to master or control natural processes but to protect the planet from the evils of class (gender, national) domination. Its political axiom can only be “controlling the market by the organization, and controlling organization by the free and equal discourse shared between associated producers-consumers,” and not coming together under the aegis of the Enlightenment, of scientists or intellectuals—that is, of an order whose apogee, in Bourdieu, ironically takes the figure of the great sociologist. The common people face the competence-power as the other class power. The question is how to act universally to free the competent from their connection to the blind power of capital, and to hegemonize them in a last class struggle-alliance. This, at least, is the only conceivable perspective for thinking about the emancipation of the human community and the defence of the natural order.

References Bidet, Jacques. 1999. Théorie générale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 2005 [2001]. Bourdieu and Historical Materialism. Translated by Gregory Eliot. In Contemporary Marxism: A Critical Reader, eds. Bidet Jacques and Stathis Kouvelak, 567–604. Leiden: Brill ———. 2011 [1996]. L’universel comme fin et comme commencement. Actuel Marx, 20, Autour de Pierre Bourdieu, 135–148. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France: Bidet, Jacques. 2011. L’État-monde. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 2016 [2015]. Foucault with Marx. Translated by S. Corcoran. London. Zed Books. ———. 2022. L’Écologie Politique du Commun du Peuple. Paris: Le Croquant. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977 [1971]. Reproduction. Translated by R. Nice. London: Sage. ———. 1984 [1979]. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1990 [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 1991 [1969]. The Love of Art. Cambridge. Polity. ———. 1996 [1989]. State Nobility, Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Translated by L. C. Clough. Cambridge: Polity. Marx, Karl. 1973 [1939]. Grundrisse. Translated by M.  Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1976. Capital, Volume 1. Translated by B. Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1998 [1845]. The German Ideology. Amherst, N. Y.: Prometheus Books. Wright, Erik Olin. 1988. Classes. London: Verso. ———. 1997. Class Counts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Violence, Symbolic Violence and the Decivilizing Process: Approaches from Marx, Elias and Bourdieu Bridget Fowler

Introduction: Bourdieu as Marx’s Heir The founding sociologists agreed that capitalist modernity is premised on production for peaceful profit-making. Marx, of course, fully recognized that the primitive accumulation of capital had been via the seizure of first nations’ lands, slavery and the breaching by gunboats of the “Chinese walls” against trade.1 Nevertheless, his general law of capital accumulation A version of this chapter has appeared in German, see Fowler (2008): the present version is substantially revised. 1  Federici (2014) has argued persuasively that imperialist and neo-imperialist relations continue to provoke similar forms of primitive accumulation, noting twentieth and twenty-first century enclosures in Africa and Southern Asia.

B. Fowler (*) Department of Sociology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_3

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was predicated on peaceful production (1976: 873–6, 925, 2007: 3–47). Moreover, he insisted on the contrast between the truly “revolutionary” pursuit of productivity through the extraction of “relative surplus value” by means of the detail division of labour, science and technology, as against the extraction of “absolute surplus value” via the discipline of the whip or extended hours (1976: 5–3, 507; 643–663). Bourdieu writes very little about domination by the direct threat of violence, as in feudalism or absolutism. Certainly, he had witnessed in person the Algerians’ anti-imperialist struggle. He fully realized how French power, maintained from the onset of Algerian colonization (1830) by superior military force, had also become the pedestal for the highly mechanized capitalist agriculture of the settlers’ lands (2003: 34). Yet his own sociology of power focuses less on coercive domination than on symbolic violence, encompassing various forms. It is this that is at stake in the gentle violence perpetrated by the Kabylian “great families” who, from the pre-colonial period, had benefitted from the doxic naturalizing of their own privileged position by means of their rural gift economy so as to acquire symbolic capital (1990a: 119–21, 148; 2008a: 70, 103–4). It is, of course, at stake in the reproduction of the French dominant class by means of universal education and national examinations (cf. 1996b: 261). Here the art of symbolic violence consists in inculcating shame in the subordinate classes for their “lack of culture” whilst perpetuating the meritocratic myth that the culture in which the dominant class has been educated and tested is equally available to all.2 For these reasons, structural transformations are rare3: The force of the social world resides in this orchestration of unconscious minds, mental structures. Now there is nothing more difficult to revolutionize than mental structures. This is why revolutions often fail in the project of making a new man. (2014: 145)

In this chapter, I aim, first, to justify the argument that Bourdieu’s sociology is in the same Enlightenment scientific tradition as that of Marx (cf. Fowler 2011). Secondly, given this common line of descent, I shall address the work of Norbert Elias, who was also deeply influenced by 2  For an influential critique of “meritocratic illusions” citing Bourdieu, see Piketty 2020: 709–713, 716. 3  Nevertheless, against the received view that Bourdieu is simply a theorist of reproduction, I argue that his sociology does offer a theory of social transformation (see Fowler 2020).

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Marx, as well as by Freud. Thirdly, I shall argue that Bourdieu’s sociology has certain telling affinities with Elias’s theory of the civilizing process and its historical vicissitudes. Marx’s fundamental concern was demystification, particularly of economic ideology. Paradoxically, he undertakes this destruction of secular scholarly myths by frequently deploying a religious or magical language, as, for example: “For modern society, gold is its Holy Grail” (1976: 230), or his perception that the commodity form possesses “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (1976: 163). Indeed, the drive to create exchange-value (M—C—M′) rather than use-value is characterized by Marx as a mystery, equivalent to that of the Holy Trinity: It [capital] differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus value just as God the Father differentiates himself from God the Son, although both are of the same age and form, in fact, one single person…. (1976: 256)

We note, again, that the national debt is said to produce, for the “bankocracy,” “capital fallen from heaven” (1976: 919). Further, as we shall see, Bourdieu deploys a similarly ironic, defamiliarizing language that serves to unveil social reality.4 Marx’s method is to show the deeper structural forces and relations that exist beneath appearances. For example, colonialists in Australia, possessing money and machines but lacking wage-labourers, discovered quickly that “capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things” (1976: 932, my emphasis); for “capital ceases to be capital without wage-labour” (1973b: 278). Relational theories are necessary but not sufficient: such analyses must also be historically situated. Thus Marx honours Adam Smith and David Ricardo who stand on the shoulders of the “eighteenth century prophets.” He notes, however, that although Smith and Ricardo grasp the profound rupture with feudal relations in the bourgeois economy, they are hamstrung by their ahistorical idealization of the new forces of production (1973b: 83). In not dissimilar terms, Bourdieu satirizes the “(John Stuart) Millian” utilitarianism that fails to grasp the epoch-making changes in historical 4  Although less focused on economic capital alone, Bourdieu shares with Marx a fundamental division between the production for production’s sake of modern capitalism and pre-capitalist societies’ logic of the philia (community) (Marx 1976: 742, Bourdieu 2008a: 246–250).

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conditions, such as those creating the emergence of insurance societies— money, printing, law, capitalist ethos—that led to changes in habitus. It is this habitus, for example, that impelled British schoolboys in 1950s’ Lowestoft to form a club to insure themselves financially against being beaten by teachers (2008a: 87, 246–8). Habitus is not a concept used by Marx, but his emphasis on a historical framework to understand practice is certainly fundamental. More specifically, like Marx, Bourdieu retains throughout his life a notion of “prophetic” agents of transformation, religious and secular.5 As is well known, Marx ridicules those nineteenth-century vulgar economists who view the key to capitalists’ profits as due to their ascetic abstinence: their “martyrdom” (1976: 745) or their “genius” (1976: 485). For Marx’s break with methodological individualism allows him to see that personal asceticism is nothing without what he terms the real “magic”: the social relations of wage-labour in which workers daily perform surplus-­ labour, working longer hours than they are paid for in wages. Such “magic” creates the surplus value which “brings forth living offspring or at least lays golden eggs” (1976: 255). Similarly, yet in relation to the very different field of cultural production, Bourdieu emphasizes that art historians are too prone to resort to magical or quasi-religious interpretations of creation. They invoke “genius,” a term that originally carried a connotation of divine inspiration; alternatively, they adopt simplistic explanations in terms of “innate” talent (1971: 1359, 1991: 110). Bourdieu counters these transcendental or eugenic conceptions by uncovering the real determinants of artistic creativity: long years of education, availability of free time and a collective belief in art permitting artists’ production of “art for art’s sake” (1996a). Similarly, he defamiliarizes the exchanges through which modernist works find a market, stressing the concealed role of the gallerist in the “alchemical” “transmutation” of art into money. Note, on this, that Marx had emphasized in the Grundrisse (1857–1858) that contemporary artists may have to create their own demand or produce their own consumers: The object of art—like every other product—creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object. (1973b: 92, also 93)

5

 I have developed this argument elsewhere (Fowler 2011, 2020).

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Bourdieu takes this on but frames it in terms of Marx’s notion of “mediation.” He elaborates on it with his concept of cultural fields—artistic, legal and so on: key mediating institutions that have achieved significant degrees of autonomy from the market’s profit constraints (1996a). Further, it is Marx who first initiated the concept of reproduction, with his insistence that the social relations of modernity are not natural but are those of individuals in mutual relationships: “which they equally reproduce and produce anew” … “even as they renew the world of wealth they create” (1973b: 712). Bourdieu elaborates on Marx’s notion of reproduction as requiring the “transmission and accumulation of skills from one generation to another” (Marx 1976: 719), which for the most part requires no outlay of capital since “the capitalist may safely leave this to the worker’s drives for self-preservation and propagation” (1976: 718). Thus Bourdieu and Passeron contend (1990: 55) that the educational system certainly performs the relatively autonomous work of schooling by inculcating legitimate culture. But attention is often displaced—due to “the happy unconsciousness of elective affinities”—from the fact that “the conditions for acquiring [distinction] are monopolized by the dominant classes” (1990: 198; see also Bourdieu 1990a: 160–161). It is telling, too, that although, Bourdieu avowed his specific debt to both Husserl and Heidegger on the phenomenology of time, Marx had earlier addressed time, too (1973b: 172–3, 711,712, cf. Postone 1996). Thus, for example, Marx notes that the “problem of time” in capitalism— production time and circulation time—is “the ultimate question to which all economy reduces itself” (1973b: 29). When Bourdieu emphasizes that the analysis of dispositions towards time is fundamental for a critical political economy of the different social classes, he may be thinking of Marx as well as the German phenomenologists (1984: 350–357, 2008a: 75–111).6 Yet Bourdieu’s conception of time is also crucial for his divergence from the Marx of 1848 and particularly from Marx’s and Engels’s hopeful assertion of the proletariat as historically predestined to act as the grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie. He writes of the tension in Marx between sociological realism and utopia: a tension evident in his own sociology too. For Bourdieu had seen in Algeria a mass of ex-peasants, on the roads and in the cities, who were experiencing absolute poverty. All too aware of their 6  In a different context, it is also important for understanding the nature of gift exchange (Bourdieu 1977, 2017). He refers particularly to the exchange of equivalents in gift exchange which is misrecognized by the gap in time between gift and counter-gift.

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own suffering, many of them, nevertheless, failed to identify their economic alienation with a specific social system. This, Bourdieu adds, is an extra dimension of alienation which is often left unexplored by Marxists. Instead, in what Bourdieu calls an “essentialist miserabilism” (2008a: 211), displaced peasants see their misery as caused by their own failings, by an unfortunate fate, or by the absence of a string-pulling patron, whilst their indignation becoming wasted in the search for immediate sustenance (2008a: 212, 215). Hence in his Algerian stay (1955–1960), Bourdieu anticipates a better-placed Algerian urban working-class, with greater security in the present, whose sense of time would permit them to forge a “rational revolutionary consciousness” (2008a: 120). In France, in contrast, in the post-war “trentes glorieuses” (glorious thirty years) where such conditions, in terms of time, were present, unionization as well as nominally anti-capitalist parties had become increasingly powerful. But the dominants’ mechanisms of control served ultimately to defuse workers’ radical opposition, resulting in a working-class “world” of social housing and of State benefits as an armour against absolute poverty. In the period of writing Distinction (1984 [1979]), wage increases secured enough for the “velvet glove” of the market (1984: 154) to distract workers to some degree from deep structural inequalities; in turn, their perception of their own cultural intimidation undermined any mounting challenge to the dominants’ class reproduction (1984: 251). Yet, beginning from the late 1970s, there was another “end of a world”— not the peasant world, but that of the unionized, municipally housed, working-class world (Bourdieu 2005: 11–12; Bourdieu et al. 1999: 6–13, 317–337). Then the tragic issue of time re-emerged. “Temporary” and other casualized workers, so precarious that the collectivist responses of trade unions had become difficult, became reduced to the condition of those Algerian ex-peasants he had studied earlier (354–6). Increasingly, their anger at inequality and injustice was split between anti-immigrant Le Front Nationale politics on the one hand; social democratic welfarism, and left-wing unionism on the other (187–8). We shall argue in this chapter that Bourdieu’s method—his historical or genetic constructivism—has ultimately the same objective as that posited by Marx for materialism in relation to Hegel: that of discovering the “rational kernel within the mystical shell” (1976: 20). Indeed, Bourdieu’s inheritance from Marx is explicitly reaffirmed late in his life when he endorses the labour theory of value (Bourdieu 2000: 202–5). But, unlike many of Marx’s heirs, he always regarded his heritage from Marx as

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enhanced by an indebtedness to other thinkers, too, including other canonical social theorists: “[Y]ou can think with Marx against Marx or with Durkheim against Durkheim, and also, of course, with Marx and Durkheim against Weber, and vice versa” (1990b: 49; cf. Bourdieu and Passeron 1990: 4–5). My major focus here, then, is on Bourdieu’s further debt, to the Marxist-Freudian, Norbert Elias (1897–1990), educated in Wroclaw and Frankfurt.

Elias: Civilization, Culture and Counter-Civilizing Spurts Elias strikingly clarifies the sociogenesis of the transition from military to symbolic violence. Crucially, he analyses in detail the emergence of the stable, centralized state-formations that Marx had presupposed as one of the required conditions for continuous capitalist production. He focuses his greatest works—The Court Society (2006), The Civilizing Process (2000) and The Germans (1996)—on the civilizing process itself: most notably, the emergence of, first, a pacified nobility, then, a bourgeoisie—and, subsequently, a working class—with a greater shame threshold. But he also addressed decivilizing processes, as bourgeois democratic societies proved vulnerable to eruptions of open violence, even to State-engineered genocide.7 Bourdieu and Elias possessed major points of agreement, as was clearly acknowledged in Bourdieu’s tribute at Elias’s 90th birthday (Mennell 1992: 25). Elias’s fascinating account of the sublimation of drives provides a detailed socio-historical supplement to Freud’s undifferentiated notion of “civilization.” Elias shows how inhibition occurs gradually through the repression and discipline of physical expressions of aggression and sexuality. But whilst, in our post-Freudian societies, we are vividly aware of the instilling of toilet training and manners in each individual child, we are less aware of the historical sequence in the suppression of specific desires, Elias’s “sociogenetic” process of civilization. Bourdieu accepts crucial elements of this process, not least the controls over purely physical 7  Imperial administration often revealed the naked coercive power behind the rule of law (Arendt 2017). In this sense decivilizing actions behind the scenes often accompanied the theatrical staging of the colonial powers’ peaceful rule as the gift of civilization. For a brilliant account of the superseding of class conflict by ethnosocial conflict, leading, in specified circumstances, to genocide, see Mann (2005).

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demonstrations of noble honour, and the increasing relegation of such prowess to hegemonic working-class masculinity (Bourdieu 1993b, 2001; Hadas 2019). In all these areas, the two sociologists seek to develop a relational (Bourdieu) or “figurational” (Elias) analysis which extends beyond Marx to show how relations of domination and subordination are reproduced, yet the direct and ubiquitous resort to violence—as in slave society—is ruled out. Both commented on the high degree of repression in the capitalism of their time yet saw the potential beyond it for the future inhibition of human drives to be “less damaging to […] chances of enjoyment” (Elias 2000: 446). Notably, Elias saw the imposition of inhibitions as occurring to a much greater degree than is necessary for social cooperation due to struggles for power between the major classes (2000: 446–7). Similarly, Bourdieu observes how rigorously ascetic is the work discipline of grandes écoles’ students, due especially to their competitive ethos (1996b: 110). But we need first to read Elias more closely in order to fully evaluate Bourdieu’s debt to him.

The Court Society Elias’s first book, The Court Society (2006 [1933]), is a fascinating analysis of the new social “figuration” of absolutism. Elias shows how a series of changes came together at the end of medieval society to create a political transformation parallel to the economic transformation from feudalism to capitalism. In turn, the absolutist power of the monarchy—particularly from Henri IV to Louis XIV—forced a reordering of the class structure (2006: 47). Elias scrutinizes the economic and political structures that generated the “competitive hothouse” of the new court society, not least the absolutist monarch’s monopolization of the means of violence. He focuses especially on the unification of the French nation-state, the unprecedented levy of taxes on the peasantry to finance monarchical rule, and the expensive sequestration of the aristocracy at court. The former warlords, commanded to dissolve their militias, lost along with them the reproductive practices training them for warfare: drilling, jousting, duelling. Instead, the imposition of an elaborate, time-consuming dress and etiquette kept the aristocracy themselves subjugated, their “weapons reduced to words” (Elias 2006: 231). Within this courtly world, superiority was demonstrated via the enactment of non-violent but elaborate rituals, permitting the pursuit of

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sublimated class interests in the form of aristocratic status honour. The peasantry fed a leisure class dedicated to conspicuous luxury, dispossessed of its earlier political and material autonomy: It [luxury] is an indispensable instrument in maintaining their social position, especially when—as is the case in this court society—all members of the society are involved in a ceaseless struggle for status and prestige. (Elias 2006: 70)

The nobility’s social life, close, physically, to the charismatic king, had established a widening gulf between the court and the common people, thus further facilitating their oppression (2006: 53). The “people,” remarks Elias, strikingly, now existed like another race (sic). An aristocratic woman, appearing in front of her male servant naked, might reprimand him for pouring her a scalding bath: he did not count for her as a full sexual subject (2006: 53, see also 1996: 35). In not dissimilar terms, Bourdieu alludes throughout his works to “class racism” (see, for example, 1984: 179, 2008c). Yet court society permitted the upward mobility of one new class fraction: the most affluent of the bourgeoisie, the lawyers or noblesse de robe (2006: 68). This cultural and bureaucratic elite created a decisive break with the older warrior aristocracy (the noblesse d’épée) (2006: 69). Flourishing, due to their specialist occupational skills, they were free of the costly sociability of the older nobility. Elias broaches here a number of themes that appear later as key concepts in Bourdieu’s sociology. First, we note the insistence on agents’ strategies of distinction, especially through obligatory high expenditure (Elias 2006: 75–7, cf. Bourdieu (citing Elias) 1984: 374–5, 468–70; 1998: 69–71). Nobody can be outside this game, comments Bourdieu, even the King is forced to maintain the ceremonies characteristic of this microcosm (Elias 2006: 151, Bourdieu 1980: 7, cf. Bourdieu 1984: 54). Elias’s absolutist king is an actor who accumulates social energies (Elias 2006: 143). Similarly, this materialist conception of the accumulation of others’ social energies appears in Bourdieu (1983). Second, where Elias shows the mounting power of the noblesse de robe, Bourdieu also notes that this legal group moved from the King’s private household to become public servants within the increasingly autonomous state (Bourdieu 2014). Emphasizing the centrality of law to modern capitalist societies, he focuses on the specific contradictions of the

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legal nobility, not least, their professional adoption of a universalist ethos combined with the narrow reproduction of their privileges within their own families (2014: 342). Third, the whole microcosm of “court society” revolves on its axis through consumption (Elias 2006: 75). Yet amongst the “symbolic goods” prized at court are those that graphically lay bare the aristocracy’s hidden spiritual “point d’honneur.” In particular, Poussin’s oil painting, with its pastoral nostalgia, is interpreted as an expression of covert resistance to stifling court conventions (2006: 231, 278). Indeed, Elias’s phrase, spiritual “point d’honneur”—whilst unattributed, may well come from Marx’s well-known description of religion as humanity’s “spiritualistic point d’honneur”: [Religion] is the general theory of this world […] its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general ground of consolation and justification. (Marx 1973a: 244)

In turn, this Marxist/Eliasian insight may have prompted Bourdieu’s broader formulation: The cult of art and the artist… is one of the necessary components of the bourgeois art of living, to which it brings a “supplément d’âme”, its spiritualistic point of honour. (1993a: 44)8

Crucially, for Elias, secularized art forms offer aristocrats an inner self-­ justification. Similarly, for Bourdieu (quoting Elias 2006), the back-stage function of consecrated art is to bind cohesively its cultivated consumers, however democratic its front-stage presentation (1984: 227 see also 229). Fourth, and even more important, there are parallels between Elias’s and Bourdieu’s conceptual language. In particular, there appears in Elias’s Court Society a straightforward use of the Latin term “habitus,” as when he observes that the entire habitus (life-style) of the nobility changes when they are sequestered at court (2006: 262 cf. also Elias 1991b). Bourdieu, for his part, elaborates on the concept of habitus throughout his life, ending notably with the crystallization of the term “habitus clivé” or fragmented habitus (2000: 64, 160, 2004: 111). 8

 I have developed these points earlier: see Fowler (2011).

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Elias’s The Civilizing Process (2000 [1936]) Norbert Elias was to take up these themes again when he emphasizes the underlying control of drives, by way of three linked processes: courtesy, civility and civilization (2000). Mining Erasmus’s De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (1530) and subsequent etiquette manuals, The Civilizing Process argues that the particular mode of Western civilization is far from being socially necessary. In particular, it has its excesses, deriving from interpersonal tensions and inner fears (2000: 445–7). Yet he does not want simply to revisit the “end of happiness” in modernity which had been Freud’s subject (1930). Rather, he wants to elucidate how civilization came into being, pinpointing the aristocracy as the first class to introduce an accentuated control over drives. In particular, Erasmus’s code of courtly manners (courtesy) contained explicit rules forbidding acts such as spitting on the table, looking at a person who is defecating, passing a knife with the blade uppermost and putting chewed food back into the common dish. A whole range of everyday practices removes commonplace acts into the category of “polluting,” such as appearing in the street in one’s nightgown or speaking about prostitutes. Later, the bourgeoisie also took over these prohibitions, as a new code of morals. Elias’s analysis throughout The Civilizing Process is weakened methodologically by being derived from textual evidence alone and, substantively, by his greater attention to masculine subjects.9 Nevertheless, his central theme is compelling. The bearers of these manners or moral codes managed to pass them down, including to the more rebellious lower classes. Tellingly, they come to be seen as marks of a national habitus—as in “British self-restraint” (Elias 2000: 428)—or even the marks of humanity. For example—until the 1960s and the availability of contraception—the rule requiring abstinence from sexual relations before marriage was viewed as civilized human behaviour, especially for women (cf. Federici 2014: 85–117). Indeed, an amnesia develops which obscures the fact that the rules of social life had ever been different. Elias notes perceptively that 9  For example, the taboo on women being seen breast-feeding in public goes unmentioned, although paintings would suggest that the prohibition dated only from the eighteenth century. The segregation of menstruation and childbirth within an inner sanctum is also unmentioned: this may have predated courtly prohibitions. The “civilized” denial of women’s capacity to make legal contracts or to speak in public also go unnoticed, although Elias partly compensated for this silence with his fascinating essay on The Changing Balance of Power between the Sexes (1998: 187–214).

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habits, such as teeth-cleaning, become literally incorporated, exerting obedience via bodily compulsions (2000: 118–121, 415–7). Nor should these codes be understood as simply negative: they have profound unanticipated consequences. Most remarkably, the inhibition of drives creates greater depth of character or “psychologization” (2000: 397–414, see also Bourdieu 1996b: 35–6). Such repression opens up time: it facilitates the use of time for personal investment in competitive professional fields or for the rigorous discipline of petty-bourgeois capital accumulation (Elias 2000: 425–6; cf. Bourdieu 1974, 1984: 164–5, 183, 253–4). Elias’s sociology makes a fundamental division between worldly “civilization,” characteristic of the French aristocracy, in which the noble virtues of wit, charm and fashion are prized, and the “culture” (kultur) of the progressive German bourgeoisie, more inward and intellectual. Elias notes in The Civilizing Process that German kultur flourished in the eighteenth century (2000: 16–18). However, with the nineteenth-century reassertion of the authoritarian political power of the military Prussian nobility, kultur was shunted into a mandarin siding, menaced even within the universities (Elias 1996, 2000: especially 19–20, 24–26; Ringer 1969). So it was to be Count Bismarck and his Junker nobility who instigated German industrialization. The process has been aptly described by Gramsci and others as a “passive revolution”: a revolution from above rather than below (Thomas 2010: 145–7; Davidson 2012: 308–24). It is this conflict between the different stakes of cultural capital—inherent in civilization and kultur—that Bourdieu addresses brilliantly in Distinction (1984: 73–4; 492–4, cf. Loyal 2004: 138) and The State Nobility (1996). For what is at issue in the “new mode of reproduction of class,” examined by Bourdieu, post-1968, is precisely the decline of the old mode: the French protagonists of mandarin kultur—autonomous Republican philosophers, like Sartre and de Beauvoir, or earlier, in the nineteenth century, those modernist writers prepared to go to prison, such as Baudelaire, Flaubert and Zola. Instead, the new agents,10 whilst still the bearers of an aesthetic attitude prioritizing style, now embody a cult of luxurious consumption (1984: 54, 77 and 371). Bourdieu is emphatic that he drew on Elias’s Court Society to point to the unexpected renewal of elements of seventeenth-century courtly civilization within twentieth-­ century market-colonized societies (1984). Indeed, when Bourdieu 10  The new agents are the heirs of a similar Grand Ecole-based reproduction but with a greater family component in their inheritance.

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invokes Elias’s celebrated contrast between kultur and civilization (1984, 1991), he usually alludes—like Elias on late nineteenth-century Germany— to the decline of Kantian-type kultur. It is this that is at stake in the dangerous erosion, post-1960s, of the “restricted field” of cultural production (1996a: 344–5, 2008b), as well as in the changed hierarchical positions between the grandes écoles, not least the eclipse of L’École Normale Supérieure (established 1794–1795) by the later L’École Nationale d’Administration (established 1945) (1996b: 331–335, 338–9). Elias’s last great work was The Germans (1996). Until that point, Elias might have been justifiably criticized for underplaying the “dark side of civilization.” For his “dialectic of modernity” neglects the historical evidence that self-restraint in one area can be accompanied by barbarism in another (Krieken 1998). This reproach cannot be made after The Germans (1996). Elias’s main argument here is that State unification occurred in Germany by means of a military aristocracy. Far from blending with the peaceful “kultur” of the German urban middle classes, that nobility succeeded in “brutalizing” the bourgeoisie, even within the universities. In particular, it sustained its own secret cult of duelling, together with the honorific imperatives of requiring “satisfaction”—or “making men”11—characteristic of student fraternities. Driven by a German “habitus of national humiliation” from the seventeenth-­century Thirty Years’ War onwards, the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) and its vicissitudes are well-documented by Elias (1996: 6,178,183). In particular, the bitter aftermath of the First World War defeat, together with the intense class polarization of the new German Republic, led disciplined but disaffected workers in their millions to turn to an ultimately unsuccessful German revolution (1917–1924) (Broué 2006). But the defeat also precipitated the violence of the Freikorps, the deracinated militias beyond the control of the State (Elias 1996, Broué 2006). The aristocratic strand of this Freikorps counter-revolution was later to turn to the Nazis. In Elias’s view, the German State was caught in class contradictions so profound that the Germans’ national habitus was 11  Bourdieu also analyses masculine domination (2001). However, as Hadas has argued (2019), he needs to distinguish different forms of feudal masculinity. The masculinity that Bourdieu mainly writes about—associated with violence and warfare—relates more to the medieval knightly ethos; the masculinity of the clergy—often from the same aristocratic class—is more peaceful and intellectual. It is this clerical masculinity that is more often passed down at a later period to the bourgeois male.

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affected, notably in the policy of the extermination camps. It is within these circumstances—not all of their own choosing—that Elias contextualizes the “break with civilization.” For him, this rupture was provoked by the oscillation between the Germans’ “collective narcissism” and their deep-rooted “collective self-hate” (Elias 1996: 320–22). Importantly, Nazism represented two forms of thought combined together: ideology, but also utopia, heightening for many its allure (Elias 1996: 286, 288). How adequate is this Eliasian account of the decivilizing process? Elias represents a mid-way position between Ernst Nolte—or the argument for German exceptionalism—and Zymunt Bauman, whose powerful account of the Holocaust roots it in the amorality of bureaucratic rationality, a structural characteristic of modernity itself. Yet although historically illuminating, Elias ultimately fails to anchor class contradictions sufficiently within the unstable character of the German capitalist economy. Of course, he mentions high unemployment, but he underplays the structural origins of this crisis within the increased concentration and rationalization of production, the deflation following earlier inflation, together with the collapse of stock market credit (Broué 2006; Varoufakis 2017). These processes accentuated the forebodings of the threatened lower middle class: the electoral heartland of National Socialism (Callinicos 2001: 395). Further, the greatest capitalist enterprises initially distanced themselves, then turned to support the Nazis (Callinicos 2001: 396–7; Kershaw 1989: 42–50). Indeed, large companies continued to give sustained psychological support to the Nazi political leadership even in 1941, when the Nazi inner circle adopted a politics of exterminism beyond the call of corporate economic interests (Callinicos 2001: 397). Casting Nazism simply as a version of resurrected absolutism, Elias’s explanation fails to capture the Nazis’ specific political interests in the maintenance of State power. Moreover, such underlying political interests also became converted into distinctive economic/managerial interests as the Party apparatus took over directly certain key areas of administration and production: the WVHA Economic-Administrative Main Office as well as the bureaucratic empire of the SS (Callinicos 2001: 399; Kershaw 1989: 50–54). Elias trenchantly expounds the Nazis’ ideological stance, especially the background to the “cumulative spiral of radicalization” that was implemented in 1941, setting in motion the Final Solution (Callinicos 2001: 399–400). Elias is particularly telling in foregrounding one crucial prerequisite to this: the illusory belief that Western civilization would prohibit

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such a course of action. His constructivist uncovering of a fatal essentialism inherent in Western 1930s’ ethics should be memorable for us now: Many Europeans seem to be of the opinion that it is part of their nature to behave in a civilized manner […] sometimes they even characterize themselves as part of the “civilized races” in contrast to “uncivilized races”, as if civilized behaviour were a genetic attribute of specific human groups and not of others. (Elias 1996: 308)

How acceptable is Elias’s general civilizing thesis? The Germans adds vital conditional statements: civilization is identified as a historical process, perpetually in danger of being sidelined. Moreover, [Western] “Civilization” is emphatically not to be contrasted with a hypothetical zero-state, attributable to supposedly uncivilized pre-capitalist societies (Mennell 1992: 228–34). Yet haven’t anthropological studies, such as Lévi-Strauss’s structural analyses of myths, finally put paid to the notion that “we” have civilization and they do not? Lévi-Strauss’s book on manners (1978) ends with a powerful concluding indictment of “civilized” societies’ impending ecological catastrophe that makes the civilizing process more ambivalent than even Elias himself had realized (1978: 507–8). Lévi-Strauss’s warnings re climate crisis seem even more timely now. Yet, despite these, we can still speak of modernity as qualitatively different. For Elias is following the sociological tradition not just of Marx and Weber, but also of Simmel, Lukács, Adorno, Horkheimer and Mannheim (cf Krieken 1998: 125). For these thinkers, pre-capitalist societies exert more physical controls and fewer internalized controls in inculcating discipline. Moreover, pre-capitalist actors possess a different sense of the economy from the modern ethos in which “business is business” and “time is money”, as in the “so-called advanced societies” (cf Bourdieu 1977: 195). For these reasons, Elias was surely right in viewing medieval societies (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) as possessing a class of raiding warlords less prone to controls over impulsive violent action than the dominant classes in later Western societies. (Elias 2000: 164)

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Pierre Bourdieu: State Monopolization of Violence and Symbolic Violence In 1960, Bourdieu described the Algerian War as bringing about “the end of a world”—the peasant world—whilst also revealing a “conflict of civilizations” (2003: 64, 116). Yet his studies of Kabylia which sought to reconstruct that traditional social order before the full imposition of the colonial economy can be seen as divergent in crucial respects from Elias. Whereas Elias stresses violence and the spontaneous expression of the drives in pre-capitalist formations, Bourdieu emphasizes the Lévi-­ Straussian (and earlier, Durkheimian) point: that the maturity of social organization compensates for the absence of major technological advances (1962: 6). The Kabylians have an extraordinary mastery of social integration (or civilization), underpinned by subsistence agriculture, part-time artisanal trades and collective belief in their clan chiefs. Here gentle violence takes the form of paternalist domination, “misrecognised” in gift exchange. Thus, on the one hand, in the anthropological longue durée of pre-colonial Kabylia, the absence of any State monopoly of violence means that each male peasant is obliged to use force to retain his honour (1977: 61). On the other hand—against Elias’s image of simple societies as devoid of drive-inhibitions or against the image of the French colonial mission as the bearer of Saint-Simonian civilization—Bourdieu stresses the Algerians’ orderly arbitration of disputes. Such social “technology” is reinforced by the doxic teachings of myths and rituals (cf. Elias 1991a). Despite this additional complexity, Bourdieu’s debts to Elias are ubiquitous, not just in Distinction but in his seminal article, Le Mort Saisit le Vif (1980). Here he initially invokes Marx’s image of the link between the living and the dead. Within any given class, the “inheritor” is himself “inherited”: moulded and transformed by his very heritage (Bourdieu 1980: 7, 1990a: 147–152). Bourdieu then draws on Elias’s The Court Society to reveal the complex nature of hereditary domination. For as Elias had shown, not only are absolute monarchs (such as Louis XIV) constrained by the rituals of the courtly game they have themselves initiated but court society itself is a field (1980: 7). In other words, the habitus of all the court’s agents ensures that they are orchestrated together, even without a conductor, irreducible to each agent’s subjective wills, or to material circumstances (1980: 7–8; cf. 1990a: 53). The most mature exposition of Bourdieu’s understanding of how symbolic violence operates in the post-Enlightenment capitalist order is

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undoubtedly The State Nobility, with its sophisticated reprise of the educational theories of Reproduction and The Inheritors. The State Nobility can be read as having a parallel project to that of Marx, aimed at demystifying the deep structures concealed beneath the surface of the contemporary social order. In Marx, this proceeds by analysing the underlying value form of capital. When Marx writes—as we have noted above—that it is labour-­ power that “brings forth living offspring or at least lays golden eggs” (1976: 255), he is revealing what he calls a hidden, or “occult,” process, which is not immediately perceptible to the everyday observer. The casual gaze is blinkered by the legal rhetoric of fair contracts governing exchanges that leave unseen the inequalities of power between capitalist employer and workers. Bourdieu accepts—as do Marx and Weber—that modernity witnesses a distinctive form of production and hence domination based on reproduction mediated more by the school than the family’s economic inheritance. Thus increased technical competence (understood broadly) is a prerequisite for domination. To some degree, this is a real development of “rationalization,” “democratization” and universalism, judgements that are, in Kantian terms, “valid for everyone” (1996b: 453, footnote 6). Yet, Bourdieu argues, this competence is still compatible with the transmission of a family “inheritance” of cultural capital and with it, material advantages. Inheritance here should be understood in a very specific way: it is a non-genetic inheritance “misrecognised” as a process conferred by blood or birth (1996b: ch. 2). Thus, the transmission of a cultural stock through family mechanisms is falsely explained by an essentialism—or what Bourdieu calls a class racism—in which a biologically innate essence is held to be productive of nobility of thought, inherent talent, inborn artistic sense and so on. Bourdieu’s evidence for this takes various forms: his quantitative assessment of linkages between grades and social origins (see below), and his qualitative analysis of discourse. The qualitative basis derives from the autobiographies and obituaries of graduates from the Ecole Normal Supérieure and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (the famous “énarques”): the ENA graduates are often described, he notes, as “like hereditary princes,” while the competitive selection for entry is a knightly “dubbing” (1996b: 103). This is the magical veiling of a socially constructed essence. Bourdieu’s dissection (1996b: 32) of the forms through which this “machine for cognitive misunderstanding” functions offers a valuable extension to Marx’s demystification of political economy. The precise

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pedagogic mechanism is brought to light when the sociologist scrutinizes empirically the marks and comments given to philosophy essays at the highest levels of the lycée preparatory classes for the Ecole Normale Supérieure. In practice, the teachers assess the students’ work in such a way as to unwittingly conflate their judgement about the students’ social class with their strictly academic assessments of each essay’s philosophical merits. Essays tend to be judged “distinguished” or “brilliant” when the student comes from the haute bourgeoisie, as against “mediocre” or “pedestrian” for students from the subordinate class. Statistically, a mirroring of the social hierarchy occurs within the marking hierarchy; yet each teacher would be shocked at the suggestion that they had illegitimately imported social criteria into a pure assessment of merit (1996b: 38, 40). Moreover, Bourdieu contends that alongside this first basis of concealment, there is a second, twentieth-century concealment: domination by a State Nobility (especially a cultural elite). This culturally dominant fraction starts out as a segregated student group. It is separated from others by its distinctive style of life (communal eating and sleeping) and, crucially, by various “rites of institution” (1996b: 73), such as the agony of the demanding exams to enter the highest ranking grandes écoles. Indeed, the type of self-denial encouraged in the intellectual “hothouses” of the select lycées and grandes écoles resembles not just Durkheim’s earlier description of the Jesuits’ educational rigour but also Elias’s court society (Durkheim 1977). There would have been a resonance for Bourdieu of Elias’s descriptions of the competitive assessments of the members of the court aristocracy, at once united and forced apart by the verdicts of fashion and their forced dependence. Specifically, Bourdieu’s analysis of academic discipline illuminates a strategic asceticism that leaves its mark on the “Elect” of the grandes écoles, forever fearful of their professors’ verdicts. Bourdieu’s subject is thus the veiled transmission of dominant class positions, the presence of an “aristocracy of culture” at the heart of Republican modernity, further legitimated by “State magic” (1996b: 374). As such, this is a form of fateful predestination (1996b: 79, 109–115), analogous to Milton’s assessment of the predestination doctrine as God’s “terrible decree.” It sets apart those certified to possess “knowledge” or “intelligence,” but it leaves even the chosen few with inner doubts. This brings me to Bourdieu’s notable analysis of the interwar German philosophical field, where a powerful element of his theoretical critique is

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the need to avoid sociological short-circuits, or economically reductive argument (1991, Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 151–5). His study of the “symbolic revolution” produced by Martin Heidegger is of particular interest: it is Bourdieu’s closest equivalent to Elias’s The Germans with its analysis of counter-civilizing spurts. Bourdieu’s contribution is of a more limited scope. It principally focuses on the transformation of the philosophical field which occurred with the “prophetic” intervention of Heidegger. Heidegger, of course, established his point of greatest public prominence as the Rector of Freiburg University, giving his inaugural lecture (27 May 1933) just after the Nazis had triumphed electorally (March 1933). Bourdieu’s short book was written with knowledge of this Rectoral address, in which Heidegger infamously pledged loyalty to National Socialism. But it was written before the recent publication (2017) of the philosopher’s Black Notebooks. These are incontrovertible records of Heidegger’s exclusion of Jews from the dignity of “Being”—indeed of their criminalization and desirable annihilation in his eyes—writings which decisively “overturn the schemas by which Heidegger has been interpreted up to now” (Di Cesare 2018: vii, see also 171–2). Bourdieu outlines an internalist reading of the “Heidegger revolution” in terms of the innovative forms and meanings in his revival of ontology. Heidegger’s rupture with Ernst Cassirer’s neo-Kantian thought12 is analysed in terms of the former’s erudite rehabilitation of ancient philosophy (particularly Aristotle),13 an epoch-making “imposition of form” against the scholarly tropes of cosmopolitan modernity and Kantian metaphysics (1991: 1–6, 61). But Bourdieu also rejects a purely internalist explanation for Heidegger’s success. Instead, he has the wider ambition of showing how a mystical, anti-Enlightenment irrationalism became dominant in Germany, as Heidegger sublimated philosophically the ideological 12  It should be added that Cassirer, who was Jewish, had to subsequently take exile in New York. 13  Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle is divergent from current readings of Aristotle as a theorist of community, heir to Marx—see, for example, Meikle (1995). I should add that there has been a predominantly positive assessment in recent literature of both Heideggerian philosophy and Bourdieu’s perceived regard for his innovation (see, e.g. Atkinson (2016) and Robbins (2019)). This stems from Bourdieu’s memory of his youthful fascination with Heidegger’s Being and Time (Bourdieu 1990b: 10). Yet by the time Bourdieu published his book on Heidegger’s symbolic revolution (1991 [1988]), he had become highly disenchanted with the latter’s antisemitism, antagonism to the Welfare State and repudiation of empirical social science. All these stances are laid bare through Bourdieu’s close reading (1991, see especially vii–viii).

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discourses of certain best-selling novels, such as those by Ernst Junger, and also competed successfully with his academic position-taking (1991: 69). Thus Adorno’s materialist or externalist interpretation of Heidegger’s plebeian class determinants has only a limited validity because it short-­ circuits these struggles within the philosophical field itself. It neglects the dangerously prophetic (charismatic) stance of Heidegger as a champion of the Ancients, who offers a dehistoricized ontology as against the established academic power of the neo-Kantians (1991: 70–72). Heidegger’s rise to pre-eminence, for Bourdieu, was important precisely because it weakened the German universities’ attempts to withstand Nazi attacks on their independence. In opting for Husserl’s conceptual approach to temporality against Heidegger’s, Bourdieu’s position-takings are perceptive (see e.g. 1991; 4–5, 33). But Bourdieu also orders this brief—yet dazzling—book in terms of a defence of Marx’s economic alienation versus Heidegger’s “ontological alienation” (1991: 68), as well as  offering further support for Elias’s culture/civilization opposition, elaborated more closely within the German academic field (1991: 113–4 fn. 37).14 On a higher level of generality, numerous features of Bourdieu’s and Elias’s conceptions of sociology link them together. Both advance a profoundly anti-substantialist approach. Following Marx, Bourdieu emphasizes, as we have seen, that the “real is the relational” (1987: 3) whilst Elias stresses the historical structuring of action within “figurations”: networks or chains. Both are critical of the orthodox binary divisions of Western thought (individual/society; body/mind, structure and agency). Both develop a notion of habitus, against the concept of the subject conceived by methodological individualism: that of a self-contained “homo clausus” (Elias 2000: 472; Bourdieu 1990a: 52–62). Both rework the concepts of class and Weberian Stände (status) (e.g. Elias 2000; Bourdieu 1984: xii), stressing shifting power relations and the dialectics of qualification and devaluation (1984: 143–4, 163). Both, at their best, break with 14  The influence of Elias on Bourdieu is further evident in their respective sociologies of the body and sport. Crucially, for example, given Elias’s civilizing theme, both he and Bourdieu depict the sociogenesis of the modern game of football as one that moved from the bloody struggles of parish teams in folk football to the contemporary, exciting, internationally regulated “beautiful game” (Elias, 1971, Elias and Dunning, 1971, Bourdieu 1978, 1993b: 120). Bourdieu, in particular, notes the rise, historically, of an amateur ethos of sport, a “physical art for art’s sake,” attracting particularly those with sufficient economic means and leisure (Bourdieu, 1978: 823).

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reified conceptions of classes as “things” by introducing a richer, culturalist dynamic, similar to that of E.P. Thompson.15 Did they occasionally concede too much to hegemonic stratification theory, straying too far from Marx? Sadly, Elias’s very late work (1991a, b) seems to me to lose that deep understanding of the affinities between material interests and cultural movements that distinguishes his greatest work. With Bourdieu (1987, 2019), matters stand differently. He vividly explores the positions that people share with some others in social space, in terms of the actual number and volume of their capitals. He rejects, as mechanical materialism, the view that shared space, bounded by these objectively founded classes, entails identical practices. This is to err by making realities out of abstractions, things out of logic (1987: 7; 1990a: 136). For classes to play out their differences in the historical arena as corporate bodies, they must, first, acquire spokespersons and, second, compete successfully with rival world-views—specifically, combating competing visions and divisions of the world in terms of national or gender struggles (1987: 11, 2019). This valuably reaffirms—as E.P. Thompson emphasized earlier—the need for the active work of creating classes, despite the fact that classes are at their most solidaristic when their actors share objective similarities of position (1990a: 136). These had been early concerns for Bourdieu, from Algeria onwards (2008a: 75–99, 120–121). In his last empirical project, The Weight of the World, he explores again these competing group formations: especially fantasized constructions of national communities, and weak solidarities formed around whiteness or other forms of racialization (see e.g. Bourdieu et  al. 1999: 187–8, 536–548).

Bourdieu’s “On the State” A rich source for new views of Bourdieu has been the posthumous publication, On the State, which could be seen as a prolonged riff on Elias. Focusing especially on The Civilizing Process and The Court Society but with numerous references to Marx and Marxists, Bourdieu draws attention to Elias’s “great originality.” But Elias, he argues, lacks an adequate political dimension in his analysis of the absolutist unification of the nation-state. Thus, he agrees with Elias (2000) that the kings’ monopoly of taxation permitted their monopoly of the standing army and thus of the  Here I accept an argument first formulated incisively by Steven Loyal (2004: 135)

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means of violence. Although Elias sees the state as a legitimate “racket,” “Elias, in fact, lets the symbolic dimension of state power disappear” (2014: 128). Fundamental for symbolic legitimacy is the emergence of royal lawyers—the noblesse de robe—and their codification of State rules, and, subsequently, a public bureaucracy forged by such lawyers (in France, as early as 1700). It is this continuity of administration that he sees as telling in the State’s representation of the supreme form of social solidarity (or “meta-capital”). For lawyers, the State is the geometric point of all perspectives—rather as Leibniz had attributed this geometric point to the divine. Consequently, under the protocols of lawyers, the State comes to embody the universal: “[t]he State effects a unification of codes” (2014: 142, see also Bourdieu 1989). It took a “cultural revolution” to create the State (ibid.). But once created, it possesses extraordinary functions in terms of hegemony that have been best expressed by Gramsci. We should not reject Marx, he emphasizes, but should add to Marxism another dimension: to understand that the state is not just what Marx said about it, it is also something that succeeds in gaining recognition, to which very many things are granted, obedience among others […] The State accordingly is the instance of legitimation par excellence which consecrates, solemnizes, ratifies, records. (2014: 145)

The State “consecrates” a national culture—particularly when it is a nation-state rather than a stateless nation, like Scotland. Consequently, the State is central for an expanded materialism possessing a theory of symbolic capital: that which governs the recognition of a group, its sense of being “justified” in its existence. Such a theory of the State, with its Weberian-Durkheimian heritage, has certain key omissions when it comes to the role of relations of production (Loyal 2017: 140–141; Fowler 2020: 448–50). But, as Loyal has argued, it is highly illuminating when used to understand struggles over the classification of groups, such as migrants or asylum-seekers and their life-chances, including access to State facilities and student loans (Loyal 2017: 142). Yet more akin to Marx than Durkheim, Bourdieu does recognize that “all these state games serve some people more than others and serve the dominants more than the dominated” (2014: 113). Tellingly, against Elias’s view of the disciplinary State, he reminds us of the “philanthropy of the State” (the “welfare state”), especially in France, from the mid-1940s

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to the late 1970s. For the State as a mechanism for “domesticating the dominated” is unparalleled, as Weber and Gramsci had both recognized (2014: 142). In particular, where capitalism had, through the nineteenth century progressively disembedded economic relations from social solidarities, it was in the interests of the dominants that certain public benefits be provided by the State—to keep “the people” “in the game.” This, in Bourdieu’s view, is why the Welfare State (l’État Provident) was invented— it includes the People (minimally), yet it also controls them (2014: 358–60, 368–70). But within the United States, and especially in areas such as the Chicago ghetto, he notes also the emergence of a popular “state within a state” (2014: 359) (e.g. African American churches), alongside the reduction of public institutions linked organically to the Welfare State, such as hospitals and clinics (cf. Bourdieu et al. 1999: 181–8). This signals the “retraction of the state” which—in his view—ultimately weakens not just the State as such but even the dominants, who are left without the ramparts and moats protecting their property and privilege (2014: 360–1). Bourdieu’s theoretical perspective along with Elias’s analyses of decivilizing periods together has been taken up very memorably by Loic Wacquant. This allows us to characterize the contemporary realities of the African American and Latino “hypergettoes” in deindustrialized cities such as Chicago, particularly with the post-1970s’ rolling back of public welfare. The consequence? Wacquant (2004) cites as many as 96 murders per 100,000 inhabitants being perpetrated in the Wentworth district of Chicago’s South side. A murder takes place every 10 hours in this setting. In 1984, in the United States, there were 400 arrests for violent crime per 100,000; by 1992, these had increased four-fold (Wacquant 2004: 98). Indeed: young black men from Harlem, for instance, have a higher chance of dying from violence than did soldiers sent to the frontlines at the height of the Vietnam War—and the crushing poverty that pervades this urban enclave shorn of economic activities from which the government has virtually withdrawn, save for its repressive arm [increases this precarity]. (Wacquant, in Bourdieu et al. 1999: 146)

Such violent deaths are often at the hands of the police themselves, as James Baldwin delineated in the 1960s. Indeed, from 2014 to 2019,

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police officers in the United States killed over a thousand people a year, predominantly young African Americans (Wikipedia 2021).16

Conclusion Bourdieu’s sociology of culture (1993a, 1996a) brilliantly interprets a field of practice that has too often been dominated by an undersocialized conception of artistic actors.17 Distinction, Reproduction and The State Nobility produced an important renaissance of class theory. In his late work, Bourdieu uses his array of distinctive concepts to theorize—amongst other subjects—the rising spirals of violence in the migrant and second-­ generation banlieues. He links these popular protests, on the one hand, to the arbitrariness of State controls over violence and, on the other hand, to the reduction of the Welfare State and the resort to temporary work contracts 18 (Bourdieu et  al. 1999: Section 4, 255–419; Bourdieu 2005, 2014: 359). Elias’s three major works, The Civilizing Process, The Court Society and The Germans, illuminate the mechanics of the State monopolization of violence which created the absolutist court societies, their bourgeois descendants, and the “decivilizing” counter-movement of Nazism. In these he explored various sources of the “civilized” self, showing how drive-inhibition was closely linked to the struggles over hierarchical position. Elias contributed much to Bourdieu, as we can now see even more vividly from Bourdieu’s lectures on the state (2014).19 Elias and Bourdieu together have added to our inheritance from Marx. They reveal the nuanced interplay of violence and symbolic violence so essential for grasping the changing figurations of the modern capitalist world order.

16  A Black Lives Matter report (2021) states that, in the first eight months of 2020, police in the United States killed 164 black people. But this may be an underestimate: the Washington Post and The Guardian statistics for 2019 stated that over 1000 had been killed by police, disproportionately African Americans (Wikipedia 2021). 17  An earlier exception to this is Howard Becker’s Art Worlds (1986). 18  He also offers evidence that second-generation migrants still partly “misrecognize” their situation (Bourdieu 1996b: 30–41) yet are also becoming disenchanted with their parents’ meritocratic illusions. They demand that schools in their areas should have better-educated teachers and improved facilities (Bourdieu in Bourdieu et al. 1999: 422–3). 19  Bourdieu’s sociology is not, to my knowledge, referred to in Elias’s texts: Elias, on the other hand, is frequently invoked in Bourdieu’s works.

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References Arendt, Hannah. 2017. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Atkinson, Will. 2016. Beyond Bourdieu. Cambridge: Polity. Becker, Howard. 1986. Art Worlds. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1962 [1958]. The Algerians. Translated by A.C.M.  Ross. Boston: Beacon. ———. 1971. Disposition Ésthetique et la Compétence Artistique. Les Temps Modernes Fév 295: 1345–1378. ———. 1974. Avenir de class et causalité du probable. Revue de Sociologie Française XV: 3–42. ———. 1977 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by R.Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1978. Sport and Social Class. Social Science Information 17 (6): 819–840. ———. 1980. Le Mort Saisit le Vif. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 32/33: 3–14. ———. 1983. The Forms of Capital. In Handbook of Theory and Research in the Sociology of Education, ed. J.G.  Richardson, 241–258. New  York: Greenwood Press. ———. 1984 [1979]. Distinction. Translated by R. Nice. London: RKP. ———. 1987. What Makes a Social Class? Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32: 1–18. ———. 1989. The Corporatism of the Universal. Telos 81 (Fall): 88–110. ———. 1990a [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Translated by R.  Nice. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 1990b [1987]. In Other Words. Translated by M.  Adamson. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 1991 [1988]. The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Translated by P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 1993a. In The Field of Cultural Production, ed. R.  Johnson. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 1993b [1984]. Sociology in Question. Translated by R. Nice. London: Sage. ———. 1996a [1992]. The Rules of Art. Translated by S.  Emanuel. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 1996b [1989]. The State Nobility. Translated by L.C.  Clough. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 1998 [1994]. Practical Reason. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2000 [1997]. Pascalian Meditations. Translated by R.  Nice. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2001 [1998]. Masculine Domination. Translated by R.  Nice. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2002. Le Bal des Célibataires. Paris: Seuil.

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———. 2003. Images d’Algérie. Graz: Actes Sud. ———. 2004 [2001]. Science of Science and Reflexivity. Translated by R.  Nice. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2005 [2000]. The Social Structures of the Economy. Translated by C. Turner. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2008a. Esquisses Algériennes. Ed. T. Yacine, Paris: Seuil. ———. 2008b. A Conservative Revolution in Publishing. Translation Studies 1 (2): 123–153. ———. 2008c. The Bachelors’ Ball. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2014 [2012]. On the State. Lectures at the College de France, 1989–1992. Translated by D. Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2017. Anthropologie Economique. Paris: Raisons d’agir, Seuil. ———. 2019 [2015]. Classification Struggles. General Sociology, Vol. 1. Lectures at the Collège de France (1981–1982). Translated by P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1990 [1970]. Reproduction in Society, Education and Culture. Translated by R. Nice. London: Sage. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loic Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre et  al. 1999 [1993]. The Weight of the World. Translated by P.P. Ferguson et al. Cambridge: Polity. Brenner, Robert. 1985. Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe; The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism. In The Brenner Debate, eds. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, 10–63, 213–327. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Broué, Pierre. 2006 [1971]. The German Revolution. Translated by J.  Archer. Chicago: Haymarket. Callinicos, Alex. 2001. Plumbing the Depths: Marxism and the Holocaust. The Yale Journal of Criticism 14 (2) Fall: 385–414. Davidson, Neil. 2012. How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions? Chicago: Haymarket. Di Cesare, Donatella. 2018 [2014]. Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks. Translated by M. Baca. Cambridge: Polity. Durkheim, Emile. 1977 [1938]. The Evolution of Educational Thought. Translated by P. Collins. London: Routledge. Elias, Norbert. 1971. The Genesis of Sport as a Sociological Problem. In The Sociology of Sport, ed. Eric Dunning, 88–115. London: Frank Cass. ———. 1991a. The Symbol Theory. London: Sage. ———. 1991b. The Society of Individuals. Translated by E. Jephcott. New York: Continuum. ———. 1996 [1989]. The Germans. Translated by E. Dunning and S. Mennell. Cambridge: Polity.

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———. 1998. On Civilization, Power and Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2000 [1937]. The Civilizing Process. Translated by E. Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2006 [1983]. The Court Society. Translated by E.  Jephcott. Dublin: University College, Dublin Press. Elias, Norbert, and Eric Dunning. 1971. Folk Football in Medieval and Early Modern Britain. In The Sociology of Sport, ed. Eric Dunning, 116–132. London: Frank Cass. Federici, Sylvia. 2014. Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia. Fowler, Bridget. 2008. Pierre Bourdieu und Norbert Elias uber symbolische und Physische Gewalt. In Symbolische Gewalt: Herrschaftsanalyse nach Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Robert Schmidt and Volker Woltersdorff, 75–102. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH. ———. 2011. Bourdieu, Unorthodox Marxist. In The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, 33–58. London: Anthem. ———. 2020. Pierre Bourdieu and Social Transformation. Theory and Society 49 (3): 439–463. Freud, Sigmund. 1930. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by J. Rivière. London: Hogarth. Hadas, Michel. 2019. Taming the Volcano: Hegemonic and Counter-Hegemonic Masculinities in the Middle Ages. Masculinities and Social Change 8 (3): 251–275. Kershaw, Ian. 1989. The Nazi Dictatorship. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Krieken, Robert van. 1998. Norbert Elias. London: Routledge. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1978 [1968]. The Origin of Table Manners. Translated by D. and J. Weightman. London: Jonathan Cape. Loyal, Steven. 2004. Elias on Class and Stratification. In The Sociology of Norbert Elias, ed. Steven Loyal and Stephen Quilley, 122–141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2017. Bourdieu’s Theory of the State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mann, Michael. 2005. The Dark Side of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl. 1973a. Early Writings. Translated by R. Livingstone and G. Benton. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1973b [1939]. Grundrisse. Translated by M.  Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1976 [1867]. Capital, Volume 1. Translated by B.  Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 2007. Dispatches for the New York Tribune. London: Penguin. Meikle, Scott. 1995. Aristotle’s Economic Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mennell, Stephen. 1992. Norbert Elias: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Piketty, Thomas. 2020 [2019]. Capital and Ideology. Translated by A. Goldhammer. Harvard: The Belknap Press. Postone, Moishe. 1996. Time, Labour and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ringer, Fritz. 1969. The Decline of the German Mandarins. Hanover, NH: Harvard University Press. Robbins, Derek. 2019. The Bourdieu Paradigm. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thomas, Peter. 2010. The Gramscian Moment. Chicago: Haymarket. Varoufakis, Yanis. 2017. And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability. London: Vintage. Wacquant, Loic. 1999. Inside ‘The Zone’. In The Weight of the World, ed. P. Bourdieu et al., 140–167. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2004. Decivilizing and Demonising: The Remaking of the Black American Ghetto. In The Sociology of Norbert Elias, ed. Steven Loyal and Stephen Quilley, 95–121. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Online References Black Lives Matter. 2021. https://blacklivesmatter.com/wp-­content/ uploads/2021/02/blm-­2020-­impact-­report.pdf (consulted 13.4.2021). Wikipedia. 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_ enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States (consulted 8.4.2021).

CHAPTER 4

Putting Marx in the Dock: Practice of Logic and Logic of the Practice Gabriella Paolucci

Embodied Domination and the Discursive Order A constant theme throughout Bourdieu’s work is a polemical engagement with the intellectualism and mentalism1 of scholastic reason. He argues that the way of philosophising which these latter deploy does not provide the necessary means for getting to grips with man’s social being, in all its grandeur and its poverty. Hence the need to embark upon constructing what the subtitle of the first edition of his Pascalian Meditations (Bourdieu 2000) calls a new, “negative” philosophy,2 namely, one which does not 1  “The ‘mentalist’ vision, which is inseparable from belief in the dualism of mind and body, spirit and matter, originates from an almost anatomical and therefore typically scholastic viewpoint on the body from outside. […] Intellectualism, the scholastic spectator’s theory of knowledge, is thus led to ask of the body, or about the body, problems of knowledge” (Bourdieu 2000: 133). 2  The subtitle of the 1997 first edition speaks of Éléments pour une philosophie negative. We could be inclined to see it also as a reference to Adorno’s negative philosophy.

G. Paolucci (*) Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_4

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separate itself from worldly things, and which is aware of the conditions of possibility of its own operation. Some of the most significant themes of Bourdieusian epistemology derive from this systematic critique of the position from which intellectuals speak. These include his tension towards transcending the dichotomous vision of subject and object; the imperative of epistemic reflexivity; and the need for a praxeological-type knowledge that goes beyond the—opposed but complementary—limits of phenomenology and structuralism and finally gains access to knowledge of the mode of generation of practices. These are all pre-conditions for a science of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, or, more precisely, of the dialectic between the “internalisation of externality” and the “externalisation of internality”—and this is the definition Bourdieu gives of habitus, the figure par excellence of the codification of domination. The battle against intellectualism takes the form of a vigorous assertion of bodily reason: We learn bodily. The social order inscribes itself in bodies through this permanent confrontation, which may be more or less dramatic but is always largely marked by affectivity and, more precisely, by affective transactions with the environment. But it would be wrong to underestimate the pressure or oppression, continuous and often unnoticed, of the ordinary order of things, the conditionings imposed by the material conditions of existence, by the insidious injunctions and ‘inert violence’ (as Sartre puts it) of economic and social structures and of the mechanisms through which they arc reproduced. The most serious social injunctions are addressed not to the intellect but to the body, treated as a “memory pad”. (Bourdieu 2000: 141)

Practical knowledge is a knowledge of the body and through the body, which allows for action in the social world, without this being the result of consciously learned rules or rational calculations. Incidentally, this is also where the link with Pascal—to whom Bourdieu dedicates his Meditations— appears in its fullest significance. In both of their thinking, social order has no foundation other than habit, firmly anchored in the body. However, if for Pascal order is to be carefully safeguarded, for Bourdieu it is an imposture that ought to be unmasked and, if possible, subverted. It is in this perspective that we should read the central importance that the question of domination takes on in Bourdieu’s sociology—that is, the science of the persistence of forms of subjection and their reproduction.3 3  In this regard, some have sought—not without foundation—to identify a significant similarity with the classical phase of Frankfurt School critical philosophy. See, among others, Bauer et al. (2014).

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So, if Bourdieu mainly concerns himself with the persistence of domination and its way of embedding itself in bodies, this does not mean that he avoids venturing onto the territories of emancipation. Indeed, he does so in at least two circumstances: when, touching on the theme of the relationship between political and cognitive subversion, he attributes an indisputable primacy to the latter; and when he entrusts sociological reason with a primary role in the process of liberation from domination. Yet, in both cases, we find ourselves faced with a model that consigns Bourdieusian sociology to an aporetic outcome. For at the heart of a theoretical construct that is programmatically opposed to any intellectualist perspective, and which hinges on the idea that domination does not rely on the discursive order but rather takes bodily form, Bourdieu ends up entrusting liberation to the heretical discourse of the prophet and the liberating word of the sociologist. With an unexpected switch of perspective, the spirit thus ends up “triumphing over the body and its implacable logic,” as Macherey notes (2014: 70). This is a significant incongruency, for it affects the whole of Bourdieusian domination theory, which thus risks running aground precisely where we would have expected the greatest advantages from a stance which purports to be anti-mentalist and materialist. And it is precisely with regard to the question of liberation from domination that, against all expectation, Bourdieu puts the materialist Marx in the dock, accusing him of adopting an intellectualist perspective. Reconstructing this polemic will allow us, in the arguments that follow, to highlight the basic underpinnings of Bourdieu’s thought and the salient points of a dispute that still has great theoretical and political relevance today.

Domination Takes Bodily Form Bourdieu challenges intellectualism by centring on an ontology of social relations that presupposes a radical break with the substantialism typical of philosophies of the subject. With habitus—which is the real key to the relational way of thinking about social objectivity—Bourdieu critically addresses both the objectivism of the notion of the “individual” and the transcendental posture of the “subject.” The Bourdieusian “function of the habitus […] restores to the agent a generating, unifying, constructing, classifying power, while recalling that this capacity to construct social reality, itself socially constructed, is not that of a transcendental subject but of a socialized body, investing in its practice socially constructed organizing principles that are acquired in the course of a situated and dated social

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experience” (Bourdieu 2000: 136–7). In this, the idea of a human essence is overturned into its opposite, finding its resolution in relations. But this is not sufficient to defining Bourdieu’s stance: for the centrality of relations finds explicit manifestation only in practice, and it is everyday practices that bring this relational dimension to light. This vision is highly reminiscent of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (Marx 1976), to which Bourdieu frequently refers in positive terms,4 though he then fails to recognise its radicality when the focus is no longer on subjugation itself, but rather on the conditions of possibility for overcoming it. But we will return to this point later on. Social relations are not simply learned, perceived or understood through thought. Rather, they are deposited in the bodies of individuals; they are somatised. Knowledge of the world is practical knowledge, as opposed to conscious, intellectual comprehension. In Bourdieu’s vision, this is made possible by two concomitant phenomena: that is, the fact that cognitive structures are produced by the incorporation of the objective social structures in which the agent is immersed and that the instruments of cognition for grasping the world are constructed by and through this world. The socialised body is the real agent of practical knowledge of the world. It is, therefore, both object and subject of the constitution of the dispositions of habitus, which, “as the indelible inscriptions of tattooing” (2000: 141), penetrate the subject, giving it a form. The habitus is a state of the body; it is “history incarnated in bodies.” The practices it induces—or prevents— are the outcome of social structures’ slow process of penetration into the living flesh of subjects. The Bourdieusian ego is thus the fruit of the continuous osmosis between the body and the social world: “The body is in the social world but the social world is in the body, in a relationship of belonging and possession in which the body possessed by history immediately appropriates the things inhabited by the same history” (ibid.: 152). Corporeality is a constant theme in Bourdieu, even if it takes on different accents and emphases in the various phases of his thought. Already 4  For instance, in Pascalian Meditations: “One has to construct a materialist theory which (in accordance with the wish that Marx expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach) is capable of taking back from idealism the ‘active side’ of practical knowledge that the materialist tradition has abandoned to it. This is precisely the function of the notion of habitus which restores to the agent a generating, unifying, constructing, classifying power” (Bourdieu 2000: 136). References to these Theses of Marx’s are scattered across many of Bourdieu’s writings: see, for instance, Bourdieu (1977: vi; 1992: 52). On this question, see Macherey (2008) and Denunzio (2013).

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present in his youthful engagement with Leibniz, Heidegger and Merleau-­ Ponty, it found its real systematisation in his mature works—Masculine Domination (2001) and Pascalian Meditations (2000)—in which Bourdieu focuses on corporeality as the cipher of the relationship with the world, and subjectivity as a certain way of being in the world of the body. And it is here that he launches his sharpest attacks on the mind/body dualism and on the intellectualism of those who, as spectators remote from the social world and indifferent to bodies and their practices, remain trapped in a scholastic vision: The relation to the world is a relation of presence in the world, of being in the world, in the sense of belonging to the world, possessed by it, in which neither the agent nor the object is posited as such. The degree to which the body is invested in this relation is no doubt one of the main determinants of the interest and attention that arc involved in it and of the importance— measurable by their duration, intensity, etc. of the bodily modifications that result from it. This is what is forgotten by the intellectualist vision, a vision directly linked to the fact that scholastic universes treat the body and every-­ connected with it, in particular the urgency of the satisfaction of needs and physical violence, actual or potential, in such a way that the body is in a sense excluded from the game. (Bourdieu 2000: 141)

One can detect in these words echoes of Merleau-Ponty’s perspective,5 which sets the phenomenological experience of the corps propre at the centre of an anthropology that seeks to emancipate itself from dualism. Yet, unlike in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, in Bourdieu the structuring of practice is not the result of the transcendental activity of a moi or a pure consciousness, but rather the experience of a structured and structuring socialised body. For the sociologist, this means attributing the inhabited and forgotten body—experienced from within as an opening, impulse, tension or desire—the dimension of a product of the social determination of existence, an essential correlate of its engagement in a structured space of social positions and meanings. Consequently, social determination often does not intervene as an external training of the body, as an imposition of norms from the outside. The habitus qualifies the impulse, the 5  As highlighted by Iordanis Marcoulatos: “They both see embodied significance—in the form of the multifaceted actuality of the lived body—as the mediating ground between these theoretical divisions; the experience of the lived body is the de facto dissolution of the subject/object dichotomy which is the key target in the work of both thinkers” (Marcoulatos 2001:1).

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tension or the desire of the inhabited body, since there is no natural subject pre-existing its socialisation, nor a pre-constituted biological nature that orients an openness to the world that precedes social structuring. The relationship to the properties of the self, which passes through bodily experience, has no meaning except as a relation to a socialised self. Although in Bourdieu we can detect a form of naturalism, which takes into account the fact that some universal characteristics of bodies do exist, these aspects do not imply any given response: the practices of the subject are always mediated by the incorporation of specific social dispositions. The structuralist idea that the relative indeterminacy of natural experiences constitutes the basis on which social determinations are fixed is very explicit in Pascalian Meditations: To speak of dispositions is simply to take note of a natural predisposition of human bodies, the only one, according to Hume—as read by Deleuze—that a rigorous anthropology is entitled to assume, a conditionability in the sense of a natural capacity to acquire non-natural, arbitrary capacities. To deny existence of acquired dispositions, in the case of living beings, is to deny the existence of learning in the sense of a selective, durable transformation of the body through the reinforcement or weakening of synaptic connections. (Bourdieu 2000: 136)

The condition of the biological body imposes the areas of intervention in which the work of social structuring is to take place. And nothing else. The naturalist attitude is thus always an illusion (and often an imposture, when it naturalises the results of socialisation), for the social world has always already carried out its work of symbolic transposition, as in the cases of masculine domination or class domination. Embodied determinations are historically constituted dispositions, organised into a coherent and socially shared ensemble. The natural experience of the body is underdetermined, whereas the original experience is that of the relationship of habit to a social world in which the bodily dialectic of the habitus never ceases its double movement of internalising exteriority and externalising interiority. Such a construction is fully realised in the conception of the body as the depository of relations of domination, outside of which no constitution of the subject is thinkable. To the conception of a sovereign will that imposes itself on the individual from the outside, with law and prohibition, placed in the order of discourse, Bourdieu contrasts the vision of an immanent domination that acts on the “always-already-subject.” This latter has never

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experienced a “first nature” but is thrown into the symbolic (and material) order of a “second nature” that installs itself in bodies. Subjectification and subjugation are mutually constituted by means of the body.6 Bourdieu does emphasise the productive aspects—à la Foucault, we could say—of symbolic domination: the dominated form of the subject’s body is not so much the result of repressive or coercive practices, but the product of dispositions that are kneaded into the body in a long and slow positive training process (Sabot 2013). The body is the site on which all the potential of domination is offloaded—from the injunctions of the order of things to cognitive structures, largely produced by the State (Paolucci 2014) and embodied in the brain.7 Consistent with his anti-intellectualist stance, Bourdieu repeatedly emphasises how the effect of domination finds its conditions of possibility not in the logic of discourse—in “consent to reasons”—but in the practical sense inscribed in the body: “The most serious social injunctions are addressed not to the intellect but to the body, treated as a ‘memory pad’” (2000: 141). Domination inscribes itself in the depths of the dispositions of the habitus, producing a bodily hexis that conforms to the social order. Adherence to this order is not based on conscious obedience to laws or imperative forms of power, but on practical dispositions to act in conformity with the reproduction of society as it is. Habitus and doxa intervene to give effectiveness to the most insidious form of coercion, namely, symbolic violence8—a concept with which Bourdieu links the phenomena of domination in the symbolic sphere and 6  On this aspect, little addressed by the critical literature on Bourdieu, I take the liberty of referring the reader to my own, Paolucci (2017). 7  Bourdieu dedicated his lectures at the Collège de France from 1989 to 1992 to an analysis of the state (Bourdieu 2014). 8  One of the most exhaustive definitions of the concept of “symbolic violence” appears in Pascalian Meditations: “Symbolic violence is the coercion which is set up only through the consent that the dominated cannot fail to give to the dominator (and therefore to the domination) when their understanding of the situation and relation can only use instruments of knowledge that they have in common with the dominator, which, being merely the incorporated form of the structure of the relation of domination, make this relation appear as natural; or, in other words, when the schemes they implement in order to perceive and evaluate themselves or to perceive and evaluate the dominators (high/low, male/female, white/ black, etc.) are the product of the incorporation of the (thus naturalized) classifications which their social being is the product” (Bourdieu 2000: 170). For an analysis of this notion—one of Bourdieu’s most original and striking—I take the liberty of referring the reader to my own, Paolucci (2010). See also: Addi (2001); Bauer et  al. [eds.] (2014); Mauger (2005); Terray (2002); Weininger (2002).

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in bodies. Whether we are talking about class relations, gender relations or the encounter between educators and pupils, an identical mechanism is at work. The belief in the legitimacy of domination and misrecognition as “recognition of an order which is also established in the mind” (Bourdieu 1984: 182) combine to render opaque the knowledge which is available to the subjects to objectify their position in the social space and thus access the truth of domination. Neither the conditions of possibility of subjugation, nor the mechanisms it deploys, are fully accessible to the consciousness: The effect of symbolic domination (sexual, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, etc.) is exerted not in the pure logic of knowing consciousnesses but in the obscurity of the dispositions of habitus, in which are embedded the schemes of perception and appreciation which, below the level of the decisions of the conscious mind and the controls of will, are the basis of a relationship of practical knowledge and recognition that is profoundly obscure to itself. (Bourdieu 2000: 170–71)

The bodily knowledge that makes possible the practical understanding necessary to act in the world is quite different from the intentional acts of conscious decoding that are indispensable for a conscious appropriation of one’s own practice and of the world. While domination is embodied without any need to interpellate the order of discourse, the subjugated body sanctions its own subjugation with the unconscious abdication of any concern to question the order of things.

Naming the Unnameable: Heretical Discourse If the embodiment of domination and the difficulty of accessing its cognitive objectification are the salient aspects of subjugation, what are the conditions of possibility for emancipation? If there is an ontological complicity between social and cognitive structures, what allows for what Bourdieu in Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’, calls “the breaking out of the circle of symbolic reproduction” (Bourdieu 1991c: 245)? Bourdieu does not shy from attempting to resolve this dilemma. He poses the question repeatedly, drawing on schemas honed in different contexts, from the examination of the dynamics that regulate the religious field to reflection on the constitutive power of language, and from the exploration of the figures of representation in the political field to the definition of sociology’s own mission.

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The theoretical schema that he develops in a first phase fundamentally proceeds from the conception of the performativity of linguistic acts: the linguistic act bears the capacity to realise what it enunciates, by the mere fact of authoritatively enunciating it.9 Hence the conviction that only the structuring of a “heretical” discourse—that is, one that never exactly coincides with the injunctions of the given symbolic order—can introduce an interruption in the chain of symbolic and social reproduction. The subject of such a discourse is the “prophet,” radically distinct from the ordinary social agent. Language constitutes a powerful tool for constructing reality. As such, it contributes to the creation of the social world, the transformation of which necessarily depends on a change in social actors’ representation of this world. Overcoming the ontological complicity between mental structures and the structures of social space—a complicity which provides the basis for the exercise of domination—is thus only possible by engaging a struggle that has, as one of its stakes, the transformation of representations, which are indelibly embedded in bodies and indissolubly linked to the cognitive structures inscribed in the habitus. Here we find the theme of the asymmetry between cognitive subversion and political subversion, addressed in Bourdieu’s extraordinary essay on the religious field (1991a). In different ways and with different emphases, this theme would again recur on several occasions through Bourdieu’s writings. Already in this originally 1971 text, the theoretical framework orienting his approach to the problem is solidly established: The relation that obtains between political revolution and symbolic revolution is not symmetrical. If there is doubtless no symbolic revolution that does not presuppose a political revolution, political revolution does not in itself suffice to produce the symbolic revolution necessary to give it an adequate language, a condition of a complete accomplishment. … So long as the crisis has not found its prophet, the schemes with which one thinks the world overturned are still the product of the world to be overturned. The prophet is the one who can contribute to realising the coincidence of the revolution with itself by operating the symbolic revolution that is called political revolution. (Bourdieu 1991a: 37) 9  Here the reference to John Austin is explicit. In fact, the English linguist is a constant presence in Bourdieu’s work, though the sociologist also notes that one of Austin’s limits is his failure to consider the social conditions in which performative utterances take place. See Austin (1962).

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The conviction that “political revolution finds its fulfilment only in the symbolic revolution that makes it exist fully, in giving it the means to think itself in its truth, that is, as unprecedented, unthinkable, and unnameable according to all the previous grids of classification or interpretation” (ibid.), is developed and deepened further in other essays collected in Language and Symbolic Power (1991d). In these writings, Bourdieu focuses on the dynamics of the political field, the site par excellence for the manifestation of the constitutive power of language, providing tools to form and transform worldviews. In other words, the political field is one of the spheres in which the performativity of language is most effective— “words make things, because they make the consensus on the existence and the meaning of things” (1998: 67)—and where the symbolic character of power becomes apparent in its full breadth. In his essay Description and Prescription: The Conditions of Possibility and the Limits of Political Effectiveness (1991b), the idea that the symbolic enjoys ontological priority over the political finds a complete systematisation. The social and economic world in which agents are immersed, and which is the object of their cognitive apprehension, exerts an action that takes the form of a “knowledge effect.” From this Bourdieu derives the conviction that the level of representation assumes a central role in initiating the process that leads to political subversion and that the discursive dimension is ultimately the decisive terrain of intervention: Heretical discourse must not only help to sever the adherence to the world of common sense by publicly proclaiming a break with the ordinary order, it must also produce a new common sense and integrate within it the previously tacit or repressed practices and experiences of an entire group, investing them with the legitimacy conferred by public expression and collective recognition. (Bourdieu 1991b: 129)

And again: Politics begins, strictly speaking, with the denunciation of this tacit contract of adherence to the established order which defines the original doxa; in other words, political subversion presupposes cognitive subversion, a conversion of the vision of the world. […] Heretical subversion exploits the possibility of changing the social world by changing the representation of this world. (ivi: 128)

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Since the political struggle is inseparably a struggle for the power to preserve or transform a vision of the social world, the stakes par excellence of the political field are the categories that make this vision possible, as Bourdieu argues in Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’ (1991c). True to his materialist leanings, he recalls that if the objective structures of the social world tend to reproduce themselves in visions of the social world which contribute to the permanence of those relations, it is because the structuring principles of the world view are rooted in the objective structures of the social world and because relations of power are also present in people’s minds in the form of the categories of perception of those relations […], the political struggle, [is] a struggle which is inseparably theoretical and practical”. (1991c: 235–6)

However, the transformation of the social world remains entirely bound to the transformation of the categories of perception of this same world— the only condition of possibility which would allow the dominated to constitute themselves as autonomous identities, mobilise themselves and mobilise their own strength. The levels of representation and of the discursive order thus prove to be the terrains par excellence on which a struggle plays out whose crucial stakes—Bourdieu does not forget—are the material structures that motivate and found the symbolic domain.

The Heresiarch Sociologist Even in those of his works in which, as we have seen, the somatisation of domination takes on crucial importance, the Bourdieusian gesture remains anchored to a similar theoretical schema. The priority given to the discursive dimension as a condition of possibility for emancipation appears even more problematic here. But let us follow Bourdieu’s line of reasoning as he elaborated it in the two works in which this question is addressed: Masculine Domination and Pascalian Meditations. Since the symbolic force of performative discourse is a form of power exercised over bodies, it is then necessary to conduct a sharp critique of those intellectualist approaches which, rather than conceive cognitive structures as bodily dispositions—as practical schemas—instead interpret them as forms of consciousness. Ignoring the extraordinary inertia that results from the inscription of social structures in bodies, the scholastic illusion fails to understand that the submission produced by symbolic violence

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is not an act of consciousness aiming at a mental correlate, a simple mental representation (the ideas that one ‘forms’) capable of being combated by the sheer ‘intrinsic force’ of true ideas, or even what is ordinarily put under the heading of ‘ideology’, but a tacit and practical belief made possible by the habituation which arises from the training of the body. […] It is quite illusory to think that symbolic violence can be overcome solely with the weapons of consciousness and will. [...] Hence also the ‘foolishness’ of all religious, ethical or political stances consisting in expecting a genuine transformation of relations of domination (or of the dispositions which are, partly at least, a pro duct of them) from a simple ‘conversion of minds’ (of the dominant or the dominated), produced by rational preaching and education, or, as mâitres à penser sometimes like to think, from a vast collective logotherapy which it falls to the intellectuals to organise. (Bourdieu 2000: 172; 180)

Here we find the central topics of Bourdieu’s critique of intellectualism. These are themes that we know well, but which seem to be eclipsed when it comes to addressing the question of liberation from domination. Here, Bourdieu seems to change register. He argues that if sociology does not want to be the handmaiden of domination—as sought by those apologists of the existing order who “place their rational instruments of knowledge at the service of ever more rationalized domination” (ibid.: 83–84)—then it cannot limit itself to photographing the social world. Rather, it must turn its instruments to unmasking appearances and unveiling the dispositifs of power. And if “unveiling” means using the arms of critique, then sociological work constitutes a formidable contribution to liberation from domination. Social science is thus configured as a kind of “symbolic counter-­violence” (Pinto 2014: 206): in other words, a science that has an unveiling effect, simply because it brings into question the appearances under which the exercise of domination is hidden. Sweeping away the incrustations of doxa, deconstructing common sense and unmasking the relations of domination that symbolic violence establishes—these are tasks that sociology can take on insofar as the researcher, unlike ordinary social agents, has the necessary tools of expression and critique. Just as Marx called for philosophy “to be made a reality” (Marx 1975c), Bourdieu attributes sociological knowledge a crucial function in the subversion of the established order. Here, however, the link between Marx and Bourdieu is broken. For if for Marx the “making-reality” of philosophy is entrusted to praxis, Bourdieu remains anchored to the order of discourse: the heretical word constitutes the privileged, if not

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sole, instrument of action directed at transforming the present state of things. The unveiling carried out by social science exercises a function that appears in some ways to replace the practices of the dominated social agents themselves: a “professional practitioner of the work of making explicit,” the sociologist, a modern heresiarch, operates that “transfer of which enables the dominated to achieve a collective mobilisation and subversive action against the established order” (2000: 188). Thus, at the heart of a theory that binds social agents to the efficacy of a somatised domination that undermines the possibility “to formulate and name […] the unformulated or unnameable” (Bourdieu 1991a: 34), and hinders access to discursive knowledge, the task of producing the mobilisation of the victims is entrusted to discourse—which in this case becomes “scientific” (Nordmann 2006). Yet the reader will find that such a presentation of the sociologist’s mission leaves many blind spots. If “cognitive structures are not forms of consciousness, but dispositions of the body, practical schemes” (Bourdieu 2000: 176), and if submission to domination is realised in the body, and “is not an act of consciousness aiming at a mental correlate, a simple mental representation (the ideas that one ‘forms’) capable of being combated by the sheer ‘intrinsic force’ of true ideas” (ibid.: 172), then what strange alchemy allows the sociologist to have a liberating influence through the “truth-effect” of unveiling alone? Moreover, where would be the difference between the enlightenment brought by the sociologist and “the weapons of consciousness and will” (ibid.: 180)—typical tools of the “rational preaching” and “logotherapy” of the intellectuals against whom Bourdieu constantly polemicises? We might wonder, in other words, whether Bourdieu’s choice to emphasise the liberating word of the sociologist does not itself entail the same distance of which he accuses the scholastic disposition.10 Whether it is the prophet or the sociologist who names the unnameable, it seems that Bourdieu does not manage to 10  Pierre Macherey highlights this blind spot of Bourdieusian theory when he observes: “Does the sociologist […] not perhaps run the risk of returning to the position of the scholastic spectator, who looks at the world from the other side of the glass, as if he too were in another world—a world without burdens and constraints in which the pure reflexive consciousness of necessity reigns? […] It is hard to see how sociology, which disposes of the means to tell the world as it is, can, beyond this observation, contribute to its transformation and thus have—a point which Bourdieu never desists from—an authentically liberating vocation simply by linking the explanation of the world to its transformation” (Macherey 2014: 63–64).

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conceive of political subversion as the outcome of practices that are not situated on the linguistic-discursive level or else entrusted to some deus ex machina.11 The recourse to figures who take on the burden of solving the enigma of emancipation, and who conflict with the theoretical architecture of praxeology, is not limited to the heretic and the sociologist. It is not uncommon for Bourdieu to appeal also to other figures, also characterised by a kind of “extraterritoriality” with respect to the actions of the dominated agents. Such is the case, for instance, of the recourse to objective historical conditions that might make heretical discourse more effective, and thus realise the conditions of possibility of mobilisation. But whether we are dealing with a radical transformation of social conditions, or with “an objective crisis, capable of disrupting the close correspondence between the incorporated structures and the objective structures which produce them, and of instituting a kind of practical epochè, a suspension of the initial adherence to the established order” (Bourdieu 1991b: 128), it always means bringing in something external to the dominated subjects themselves. Even aside from the circular character of this kind of argument—without an objectively revolutionary situation, no praxis has a revolutionary character—we cannot but note the fragility of a construction that, after having shown with rare rigour and splendid analytical originality the effect that domination exerts on the body of the dominated, itself ends up delegating responsibility to objective historical conditions that operate wholly independently of agents’ own practices. Both the belief in the demiurge-function of the heretic and the sociologist, and the appeal to objective historical circumstances, would seem to shine a particularly powerful light on a certain aspect of the weakness of Bourdieu’s scheme—namely, that it does not adopt the same praxeological approach that informs his analysis of domination. As a science that aims to recompose the separation between subjectivity and objectivity, the social world and knowledge, Bourdieu’s theory of practice is a rare and effective contribution to the understanding of social reproduction and domination. Indeed, it constitutes an inescapable reference point in the history of twentieth-century critical thought, providing a rigorous image of the way in which the subject is subjugated through the  For a critical reflection on this aspect of Bourdieu’s thought, see Butler (1997).

11

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incorporation of the objective structures of the social world, without being totally determined by them. Yet, the coherence of such a theoretical model seems to break down when Bourdieu speaks about tools for liberation from domination. And it is paradoxically at this juncture that Bourdieu puts Marx in the dock, accusing him of adopting an intellectualistic and scholastic perspective when he sets out to outline the process of liberation from domination.

The Logic of Practice and the Order of Ideas Bourdieu’s criticisms of Marx are on the same level as his more general polemic against the mentalism and intellectualism of scholastic reason. The sociologist accuses the Trier philosopher of using notions linked to the dimension of consciousness and representation to account, on the one hand, for the effects of domination and, on the other, for the propulsive force of the liberation-process. In general, Bourdieu considers that, on this ground, “Marxist thought is more of a hindrance than a help” (2000: 177).12 One of the harshest passages of Bourdieu’s polemic can be found in Masculine Domination. It is worth quoting in full: Although it is true that, even when it seems to be based on the brute force of weapons or money, recognition of domination always presupposes an act of knowledge, this does not imply that one is entitled to describe it in the language of consciousness, in an intellectualist and scholastic fallacy which, as in Marx (and above all, those who, from Lukács onwards, have spoken of ‘false consciousness’), leads one to expect the liberation of women to come through the immediate effect of the ‘raising of consciousness’, forgetting for lack of a dispositional theory of practices—the opacity and inertia that stem from the embedding of social structures in bodies. (2001: 40)

In Pascalian Meditations we find similar themes: And another effect of the scholastic illusion is seen when people describe resistance to domination in the language of consciousness—as does the whole Marxist tradition … who, giving way to habits of thought, expect 12  The fact that Bourdieu’s polemic does not tell us which Marxian sources he is referring to, and indeed often refers to Marx and Marxism indiscriminately, makes it rather difficult to reply to this.

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political liberation to come from the ‘raising consciousness’—ignoring the extraordinary inertia which results from the inscription of social structures in bodies, for lack of a dispositional theory of practices. While making things explicit can help, only a thoroughgoing process of counter training, involving repeated exercises, can, like an athlete’s training, durably transform habitus. (2000: 172) The doxic submission of the dominated to the objective structures of a social order of which their cognitive structures are the product—a real mystery so long as one remains enclosed in the intellectualist tradition of philosophies of mind—is thus clarified. In the notion of ‘false consciousness’ which some Marxists invoke to explain the effect of symbolic domination, it is the word ‘consciousness’ which is excessive; and to speak of ‘ideology’ is to place in the order of representations, capable of being transformed by the intellectual conversion that is called the ‘awakening of consciousness’, what belongs to the order of beliefs, that is, at the deepest level of bodily dispositions. (ibid.: 177)13 13  These are not the only passages in which Bourdieu polemicises with Marx on the subject of consciousness (and “becoming-conscious”), for there are also others. See, for example, the essay “Culture and Politics” (included in Sociology in Question), where Bourdieu accuses Marx of having addressed the problem of class consciousness as a theory of knowledge, and not as a question pertaining to the deep dispositions of the body: “From the very beginning, in Marx himself, the problem of the awakening of class consciousness has been posed rather as philosophers pose the problem of the theory of knowledge. I think that what I’ve said this evening helps to pose the problem rather more realistically in the form of the problem of the shift from the deep-seated, corporeal dispositions in which a class lives without articulating itself as such, to modes of expression both verbal and non-verbal (such as demonstrations)” (Bourdieu 1993a: 167). In another essay included in this same volume, “Strikes and Political Action,” Bourdieu writes “The notion of the awakening of consciousness may be defined in maximalist or minimalist terms: is it a question of sufficient consciousness to be able to think and express the situation (the problem of the dispossession and reappropriation of the means of expression) and to organize and direct the struggle, or merely of sufficient consciousness to delegate these functions to apparatuses capable of fulfilling them in the best interests of the delegators (fides implicita)? In fact, this way of posing the problem is typically intellectualist: it’s the approach that comes most naturally to intellectuals and also the one that most conforms to the interests of intellectuals, since it makes them the indispensable mediation between the proletariat and its revolutionary truth. In fact, as Thompson has often shown, class consciousness and revolt can spring from processes that have nothing to do with the kind of revolutionary cogito that intellectuals imagine […]. If one accepts, as some texts by Marx suggest, that language can be identified with consciousness, then raising the question of class consciousness amounts to asking what apparatus of perception and expression the working class has in order to understand and speak of its condition” (1993b: 175–176).

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Such accusations spark a certain perplexity. Before examining their validity, it might be observed that the criticisms here levelled at Marx could rightly be directed at Bourdieu himself, when he entrusts the task of changing the world to a transformation of representations. If the notions of consciousness and raising-consciousness are to be banished because they supposedly evoke “the order of ideas” (2000: 181),14 is this not exactly the order that Bourdieu turns to when he evokes the liberating power of the subversive word of the prophet and the sociologist? We may even go further and observe that when Bourdieu appeals to the order of representation (which, in the passages quoted above, Bourdieu imputes to Marx), and sees the liberating word of the “professional practitioners of the work of making explicit” as an instrument for the liberation from the spell of domination, he seems to assume a stance not dissimilar to the one Marx railed against in his bitter polemic against German idealism (both old and new). Bourdieu’s suggestion that access to emancipation can be brought forth by intellectuals transferring cultural capital to the dominated seems to have features in common with the intellectualism of the young Hegelians against whom the Trier philosopher polemicised in The German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1976). Indeed, in Bourdieu’s remarks on Marx, it seems possible to detect, as we will try to show, an interpretation of Marx’s theory of praxis far from what Marx’s own texts provide us with.

To Return to Marx The Battle Against the “Critical Redeemers of the World” As is well known, for Marx’s workings to arrive at a mature definition of the concept of praxis,15 it had to proceed via a break with the Hegelian 14  In a well-known passage in the Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu made explicit the reasons why he had dropped the notion of ideology: “If I have little by little come to shun the use of the word ‘ideology’, is not only because of its polysemy and the resulting ambiguities. It is above all because, by evoking the order of ideas, and of action by ideas and on ideas, it inclines one to forget one of the most powerful mechanisms of the maintenance of the symbolic order, the two fold naturalization which results from the inscription of the social in things and in bodies […] with the resulting effects of symbolic violence” (Bourdieu 2000: 181). 15  It is worth pointing out that the Marxian term “die Praxis” simply means “practice,” and not in the sense of putting theory into practice, or its application. When Marx juxtaposes “die Theorie” and “die Praxis,” as he does in his Theses on Feuerbach, he does so in order to give meaning to practice conceived in a new way (as we shall see further on).

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left, which marked a point of no return in the Trier philosopher’s intellectual itinerary. Equally well known is the harshness with which he shredded the central postulates of his erstwhile allies, starting with the theoretical constructs of Bruno Bauer, “the critical redeemer of the world” (Marx and Engels 1975: 143). At the heart of the polemic against Bauer is a critique of his illusion “that a modified consciousness, a new turn given to the interpretation of existing relations, could overturn the whole hitherto existing world” (Marx and Engels 1976: 100–101), that is, the idea that the act of transforming society can be reduced to the cerebral activity of criticism, to fighting sentences with other sentences. For the idealist— writes Marx—“every movement designed to transform the world exists only in the head of some chosen being, and the fate of the world depends on whether this head, which is endowed with all wisdom as its own private property, is or is not morally wounded by some realistic stone before it has had time to make its revelation” (Marx and Engels 1976: 532). Against the idealism of the young Hegelians, Marx argued that given the connection that exists between all the real phenomena of bourgeois society, conceived as a totality, the forms of consciousness cannot be changed sic et simpliciter in thought but only through the process of the practical overthrow of social relations. This formulation would take on absolute centrality in the Theses on Feuerbach (1976). If we consider how Marx expressed himself with regard to the relationship between consciousness and reality—looking beyond the different tenor of his various formulations, depending on whether they are directed against Hegelian idealism or the “ordinary, essentially metaphysical method” of Feuerbachian materialism—we find a constant rejection of those intellectualist, dualist and naively realist conceptions which draw a clear line demarcating consciousness from its object. Consciousness is, for Marx, only a particular component of being. The coincidence of consciousness with reality—which, on closer inspection, characterises every dialectic, and thus also the Marxian dialectic—is such that the material relations of capitalist society are as they are because they are embodied in the forms of consciousness in which they are reflected. Without them, these relations could not exist. A critique of political economy which lacked the idea of a coincidence between subjective consciousness and objective reality could not have become the essential element of a theory

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of praxis capable of transforming capitalist society.16 This is one of the substantial differences between Marx’s materialist dialectics and Hegel’s idealist dialectics. If in Hegel the theoretical consciousness of the individual cannot “jump beyond” his time and his world, nevertheless the world is still placed within philosophy, and not philosophy in the world. For the materialist Marx, since bourgeois society is a totality whose phenomena are inextricably linked together, its characteristic forms of consciousness are also intertwined with the objective world. Therefore, these forms can be abolished only in the course of practical activity: But these mass-minded, communist workers, employed, for instance, in the Manchester or Lyons workshops, do not believe that by “pure thinking” they will be able to argue away their industrial masters and their own practical debasement. They are most painfully aware of the difference between being and thinking, between consciousness and life. They know that property, capital, money, wage-labour and the like are no ideal figments of the brain but very practical, very objective products of their self-estrangement and that therefore they must be abolished in a practical, objective way for man to become man not only in thinking, in consciousness, but in mass being, in life. Critical Criticism, on the contrary, teaches them that they cease in reality to be wage-workers if in thinking they abolish the thought of wage-­labour; if in thinking they cease to regard themselves as wage-workers and, in accordance with that extravagant notion, no longer let themselves be paid for their person. (Marx and Engels 1975: 53)

From Philosophical Praxis to the Praxis of Non-philosophy: The Practical Reversal Marx did not immediately arrive at a clear delineation of the dialectical relation between being and consciousness, between thought and life. He did so only after he had proceeded along a certain passage, the first steps of which are already partly detectable in his doctoral dissertation on the 16  “The critique of political economy,” Emmanuel Renault notes, “is the fulfilment of the Marxian historicisation of critique. It presupposes the historicisation of the theme of critique (it is not an external critique, but an internal critique that exposes the contradictions of capitalism), the historicisation of the form of the critique (Capital exposes the truth of its object, while also proceeding to examine the historical conditions of the validity of this exposition), and the historicisation of its object (which is no longer religion or politics, but the level of real history: the economy)” (Renault 1995).

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Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, which he defended in 1841 (Marx 1975a).17 Although here Marx still thought about praxis within the philosophical dimension of critique,18 and thus did not substantially detach himself from the young Hegelians, already in these pages we find the first emergence of a plexus of questions—the relation between philosophy and the world, and the idea of the “overthrow” (Umschlagen) of philosophy—which would a few years later, in a profoundly modified framework, play an essential role in the development of the theory of praxis.19 Although Marx’s focus here was still on the destiny of the Hegelian system and on post-Hegelian philosophy, the way in which the theme of the “overthrowing” of philosophical theory was posed already heralded the capital importance that the notion of 17  The same volume of MECW also includes the seven notebooks (Marx 1975b). Here it is not my intention to enter into the merits of the debate that has arisen around Marx’s doctoral dissertation and its relationship with his later works. We need only mention the fact that one part of the critical debate (today in the minority) has advocated an interpretation according to which the materialist conception of history is already present in nuce in this youthful text. Among those who have fed the discussion, it is worth mentioning: Löwith (1964), Dal Pra (1965), Cornu (1955–58), Rossi (1963, 1977), Cingoli (1981), Löwy (2002) and, more recently, Tomba (2011) and Musto (2011). 18  Massimiliano Tomba points out that at this point, Marx fully subscribed to Bauer’s perspective, according to whom, as he wrote to Marx on March 31, 1841, “theory is the strongest praxis.” Different is the perspective of Karl Löwith; he believes he can discern, already in this early text, the affirmation of “a new kind of philosophy” according to which “the liberation of the world from non-philosophy is at the same time the liberation of non-philosophy from philosophy. […] Through the realization of reason in the real world, philosophy as such is suspended, enters into the practice of existing non-philosophy. Philosophy has become Marxism, an immediately practical theory. Therefore, Marx is forced to attack in two directions: against the real world, and against existing philosophy. This is so because he seeks to unite both in an all-inclusive totality of theory and practice. His theory can become practical as criticism of what exists, as a critical differentiation between reality and idea, between essence and existence. In the form of such criticism, his theory prepares the way for practical changes” (Löwith 1964: 95). 19  Mario Rossi does not believe that we can observe the materialist conception of history in nuce already in these early texts. Indeed, he openly polemicises against those who lean towards such an interpretation (such as the aforementioned Cornu and Löwith). Above all examining the texts that accompanied the Dissertation, Rossi instead highlights that here we have “a body of critical observations and reflections in which … the young philosopher documents his position, which—contrary to what it would appear from the Dissertation—is a position of crisis and intense problematicity” (Rossi 1963: 561).

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“overthrow” would take on in the theoretical scheme of revolutionary praxis. The concept appears in the fifth notebook on Epicurean philosophy, when, outlining the framework of a history of philosophy, Marx speaks of the way in which the theoretical structure of a philosophy affects the “destiny” of its own “overthrow.” This “turn-about of philosophy, its transubstantiation into flesh and blood, varies according to the determination which a philosophy total and concrete in itself bears as its birthmark. […] From the philosophical point of view it is important to bring out this aspect, because, reasoning back from the determinate character of this turn-about, we can form a conclusion concerning the immanent determination and the world-historical character of the process of development of a philosophy” (Marx 1975b: 492–93). The underlining of the decisive conditionality of philosophy on the world—and not vice versa—serves to highlight the distance that still had to be covered before Marx could arrive at the conception of a philosophy that turns outwards and comes into contact with the world: a philosophy that, transcending itself, enters into the praxis of non-philosophy.20 And yet, already in this suggestion, even posed in such general terms, we can see the onset of the path that would a few years later lead to the full unfolding of a theory of praxis that dialectically interweaves consciousness and the practical overthrow of existing social relations: This conception of history […] does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice, and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into “self-consciousness or transformation into “apparitions”, “spectres”, “whimsies”, etc., but only by practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; … not the criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other kinds of theory. (Marx and Engels 1976: 53–54)

The break with the internal conception of philosophical critique and the onset of a thought aimed at defining the contours of the practical transformation of the world began to take shape in the articles which Marx 20  According to Löwith (1964), conversely, this perspective is already fully developed in these early pages.

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published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in the mid-1840s.21 Already in the Introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, he posed the question of the relationship in a completely new way: “In the struggle against those conditions criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exterminate […]. Criticism appears no longer as an end in itself, but only as a means” (Marx 1975c: 177). Marx himself describes the rupture that he had to go through, when he notes in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that we see how subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and materiality, activity and suffering, lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence as such antitheses only within the framework of society; (we see how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of man. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of understanding, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one. (Marx 1975d: 302)

It has been amply highlighted22 that this change of perspective was not the effect of an evolution entirely internal to philosophical speculation, but rather a result of Marx’s political experiences during his stay in Paris, during which he met proletarians in the flesh as well as French worker-­ communism. It was above all the revolt of the Silesian weavers, of whose theoretical and conscious character he is firmly convinced, that marked the decisive turning point in the itinerary that led Marx to the definition of a theory of praxis. The ripening process of this turning point is attested not only by the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law but also by Marx’s correspondence with Arnold Ruge, 21  Henri Lefebvre observes, in this regard: “The works of Marx’s youth, which have too often been taken, and are still taken, as ‘philosophical works’, contain precisely this radical critique. Philosophy must be superseded. It realizes itself by superseding itself and abolishes itself by realizing itself. The becoming-philosophy of the world gives way to the becomingworld of philosophy, revolutionary realization and superseding of philosophy as such. Each philosophical notion, inasmuch as it enters into the ‘real’ (into praxis), becomes world, it is accomplished. Inasmuch as it is accomplished, every philosophy is superseded” (Lefebvre 2000: 62–63). 22  See among others, on this score, Lukács (1954); Löwy (2002); Tomba (2011); Musto (2011).

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also published in the only issue of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher;23 by the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; and by the Critical Marginal Notes on the Article “The King of Prussia and Social Reform” (1975e), a critique of Ruge’s reductive reading of the Silesian movement. The themes in these pages—which are heterogeneous, in terms of the distance between theorising that remained entirely internal to the philosophical field of the preceding years and the completeness of the elaboration of the notion of praxis—reached their synthesis in the Theses on Feuerbach. Marx destroyed “under these eleven purposeful hammer blows all the supporting beams of the hitherto bourgeois philosophy” (Korsch 1993: 135),24 and reduced to dust both Feuerbachian materialism—which conceives perceptible reality not as a product of perceptible human activity, of praxis, but solely in the form of intuition (theoria), as a ready-made object—and idealism, which, though valorising the productive activity of the subject, considers it in an abstract way, as a position of the spirit. Each is unable to understand activity as objective and “practical-critical,” that is, the only activity capable of modifying the human world. Because of their unilateralism, both the old materialism and idealism fail to recognise that praxis has a double face: the former because it conceives of the given conditions as independent of activity, and the latter because it contrasts the given conditions with an activity considered to be unconditioned. The former privileges the perceptible objectivity of the pre-given, whereas the latter valorises a subject conceived as self-conscious. Marx transcends this

23  In the context of a discussion on the contents and aims of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx affirms the need for philosophy to shift the terrain of intervention, and to descend—in a Feuerbachian manner—from heaven to earth and grapple with the real world: “Now philosophy has become mundane, and the most striking proof of this is that philosophical consciousness itself has been drawn into the torment of the struggle, not only externally but also internally. But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be” (Marx 1975f: 142). It would not be out of place to see, in these words, an anticipation of the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. On this theme, see D. Bensaïd (1995). 24  Quotation translated from German by the author. The Korsch’s text Der Standpunkt der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung (1922), published in Marxismus und Philosophie. Schriften zur Theorie der Arbeiterbewegung 1920-1923 (Amsterdam: Stichting beheer IISG 1993), is not included in the English version [Marxism and Philosophy. Partial Trans. F. Halliday. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971].

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dualism of the acting subject and the given object by removing practical activity from the scheme of self-consciousness. This aspect is especially interesting for our discussion of the Bourdieusian critique of the Marxian vision of the relationship between consciousness and revolutionary praxis: from Marx’s double critique of Feuerbach and idealism springs a notion of praxis that produces the perceptible object at the same time as it produces the subject of this production. Thus praxis’s status as an “objective activity” resides in the fact that it is not the activity of a subject constituted prior to the perceptible activity, but the activity through which individuals produce both the world in which they are located and themselves as subjects belonging to this world.25 Hence, the vision of revolutionary praxis as a dialectical relationship between the “changing of men and the changing of circumstances.” At this turning point, the “raising of consciousness”—the target of Bourdieu’s polemics—does not appear as a dispositif situated at the order of representations, disconnected from the concreteness of practices, as his reading would tell us. On the contrary, it is a mediation between the objective misery of proletarian life, and action. It is this function that explains Marx’s emphasis on the revolutionary capacity of the working masses, which does not postulate any help from outside. Inextricably linked to praxis—“practical-critical activity”—the awareness of being subjected to absolute injustice (das Unrecht schlechthin) develops in the course of the process of social transformation in which the proletarians directly participate. In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it; which can no longer invoke a historical but only a human title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in an all-round antithesis to the premises of the German State; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete rewinning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat. (Marx 1975c: 186)  For an interpretation along these lines, see Dardot (2015) and Macherey (2008).

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In this process, praxis can effectively become “revolutionary,” in the dual movement of transforming nature and society, only insofar as it gains a unity of consciousness and action. But not only that. As the dialectical overcoming of subject and object, of thought and being, consciousness and action, praxis is the only instrument of self-emancipation. And it is here, in the conception of proletarian self-emancipation as a coincidence between the change of circumstances and the transformation of men, that Marx’s most significant move is to be found—and indeed, the most blatant refutation of Bourdieu’s reading of it. The vision of praxis as the self-­ liberation and self-transformation of the proletariat, as opposed to the Feuerbachian doctrine of materialism—which is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society (Marx 1976:7)—is elaborated as a theory of transformative action by the dominated subjects themselves. As against the postulates of idealism and mechanistic materialism, Marx asserts that the change of circumstances external to the subject is co-extensive with the transformation of the subject itself: “In revolutionary activity the changing of oneself coincides with the changing of circumstances” (Marx and Engels 1976:214). In doing so, praxis not only destroys the ancien régime, that is, the barriers external to the subject, but also consciousness, the internal barriers. In this movement, consciousness is therefore not a dimension external to praxis, a discursive appendage mechanically applied to action, as Bourdieu’s reading would have it, and as he himself contradictorily goes so far as to argue when he hands the heresiarch the keys to breaking out of the spell of domination. Consciousness is dialectically intertwined with the practical movement that subjects enact in the process of transforming the social world: Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution. The revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because this class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself off all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew. (Marx and Engels 1976: 52–53)

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The overcoming of alienation can thus only be realised in a non-­ alienated way, that is, by bringing praxis to the living flesh of the dominated. There can be no other way, for the character of the new order that the practical overthrow is called on to construct is closely linked by the quality of the process that leads to this transformation, in the course of which the proletariat “rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in the society” (ibid.: 88). No deus ex machina is thus able to replace the collective action of the dominated against the capitalist mode of production—a mode that produces and reproduces an absolute injustice indelibly built into an order that determines the isolation of the worker from the true human community. Against this, praxis is the site of the actual opposition between the ersatz community which establishes itself under the dominion of the separation of individual and totality, and the new community that springs from a union “which again has association as its end” (ibid.: 313).26

Logic of Practice or Practice of Logic? Bourdieu always asserted the need for sociology to unveil the mechanisms that underlie the reproduction of the social order, considering this to be an indispensable task much more important than the analysis of social change. The fact that “the objectivity of the subjective experience of relations of domination” (Bourdieu 2001: 34) is placed at the centre of his research fully responded to this aim, which he pursued with great rigour and originality. This allowed him to develop a research orientation focused on dimensions of subjection that the social sciences have otherwise mostly neglected. From this point of view, not only is the Bourdieusian theory of 26  This is a well-known passage from the Manuscripts, but given its relevance to the argument that we are advancing it is worth citing it at length: “In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is quite sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. […] When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together. Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies” (Marx 1975d: 313).

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symbolic power in no way opposed to the Marxian theory of class domination, but it constitutes a considerable enrichment of it.27 As we have tried to show, it is only when Bourdieu seeks a concrete (or, if you will, practical) political outlet for his critique of domination that the picture breaks down, giving rise to results that are not entirely convincing. These outcomes cannot be ascribed—as a conspicuous critical literature would have it—to a supposed determinism of the theoretical framework itself. As Bourdieu never tired of repeating, social determinations are not in the eye of the beholder, but in things.28 In other words, the vision of the process of liberation from domination is not already inscribed in the theory of habitus, as some claim.29 When Bourdieu thinks of habitus as “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu 1992: 53), he recognises that the agent has a generative and constructive power, which—despite all the limits imposed by social conditions and subjection to domination—nevertheless enables a structuring dimension able to mould the world. It is only when he sets out to construct a theoretical scheme aimed at solving the dilemma of liberation that the osmosis between the two dimensions vanishes and the scene becomes that of a closed, static—indeed, not very materialist—system. Inexplicably absent from this scene are practices and the body—a crucial topos, as we have seen, of the theoretical scheme used in the analysis of domination. If the dialectic between the ego and the world is established in the materiality of the body and in practical knowledge; and if this is the materialist theory capable of recovering, as Bourdieu repeatedly asserts, the active side of consciousness that the materialist tradition has abandoned;30 then why put out them out of the play at the very 27  For this reading, see among others, Wacquant (2002); Fowler (2011, 2020), a version of which is published in Paolucci (2018). Of a totally different opinion is Fabiani, who considers that Bourdieu’s project consists in replacing Marxism with another general theory (Fabiani 2016). For a critique of this interpretation and of the overall perspective adopted by Fabiani, see Joly (2018) and Fowler’s review of Joly’s book (Fowler 2018). 28  “The degree to which the social world seems to us to be determined depends on the knowledge we have of it. On the other hand, the degree to which the world is really determined is not a question of opinion; as a sociologist, it’s not for me to be ‘for determinism’ or ‘for freedom’, but to discover necessity, if it exists, in the places where it is. Because all progress in the knowledge of the laws of the social world increases the degree of perceived necessity, it is natural that social science is increasingly accused of ‘determinism’ the further it advances” (Bourdieu 1993c: 25). 29  For this reading see, among others, Jenkins (1992). 30  See also Bourdieu (1990), first essay on the field of philosophy.

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moment when they could be fundamental dimensions for a theory of a political practice for transforming the social world?31 This absence, which is also a self-disavowal, constitutes one of the main aspects of the difficulties we find in Bourdieu’s thought on subversion. They derive from the failure to carry out the programme of “negative philosophy” that led him to side with Pascal against Descartes and to adopt one of the central themes of anti-philosophy: namely, the denunciation of the errors to which the “half-learned” are led, when they believe they can see the world by putting it at a distance, while excluding themselves from it. By proclaiming his intention to transcend the privileges of scientific thought; and by pursuing a knowledge of social space that includes the subject of knowledge itself, with a critical reflection on the self; Bourdieu manages to think practice without erasing its object. It is in the need to be both inside and outside at the same time that we should see the sense of Bourdieu’s long and complex work to drive intellectualism and scholastic fallacy from his horizons, and thus give life to a fully concrete knowing subject that can critically self-reflect. Here we find a significant link with the Marx who wanted to bring thought back from heaven to earth, leaving behind once and for all the illusion that philosophical critique can intervene in the human world without transcending the sphere of its own operation. However, for Marx it was also very clear that to overcome the contradiction inherent in the social conditions of the exercise of critical thought, it is not enough simply to bring it out into the open. It is necessary to stop considering intellectual critique as the (only) instrument of social transformation and to transform it into a “practical movement,” making it practical. This is where the gap lies. The two paths that Bourdieu sketched out— the elaboration of a practical logic and the development of a critique of the conditions of theoretical detachment (Karsenti 2013)—complement and support each other in the architecture of the theory of domination. But when it comes to thinking about the space of politics, they become detached from one another, leaving in the shade the practical process of liberation from domination. The logic of practice thus gives way to the practice of logic, as if the former were not allowed to lay its hands on the terrain of social transformation. 31  The reference obviously only concerns the theoretical level and not Pierre Bourdieu’s political activity, which, as we know, was very intensive, especially from the early 1990s onward (cf. Bourdieu 2002, 2003, 2008).

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———. 2002 [1998]. Counterfire: Against the Tyranny of the Market 1. Translated by C. Turner. London: Verso. ——— 2003 [2002]. Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2. Translated by L. Wacquant. London: Verso. ———. 2008 [2002]. Political Interventions. Social Science and Political Action. Texts selected and introduced by Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo. Translated by D. Fernbach. London: Verso. ———. 2014 [2012]. On the State. Lectures at the College de France, 1989–1992. Translated by D. Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Cingoli, Mario. 1981. Studi sul primo Marx. Milano: Unicopli. Cornu, Auguste. 1955–58. Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels. Leur Vie Et Leur Œvre. 2 vols. Paris: Puf. Dal Pra, Mario. 1965. La dialettica in Marx. Bari: Laterza. Dardot, Pierre. 2015. De la praxis aux les pratiques. In Marx & Foucault. Lectures, Usages, Confrontations, ed. Christian Laval, Luca Paltrinieri, and Ferhat Taylan, 184–198. Paris: Éditions de La Découverte. Denunzio, Fabrizio. 2013. Soggetto, prassi e lavoro astratto. Bourdieu lettore della prima Tesi su Feuerbach. Critica Marxista 6: 74–78. Fabiani, Jean-Louis. 2016. Pierre Bourdieu. Un structuralisme héroïque. Paris: Seuil. Fowler, Bridget. 2011. Pierre Bourdieu: Unorthodox Marxist? In The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays, ed. Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, 33–59. London: Anthem. ———. 2018. Is Bourdieu’s Too Deterministic? Books and Ideas 20 September. ———. 2020. Pierre Bourdieu on Social Transformation, with Particular Reference to Political and Symbolic Revolutions. Theory and Society 49: 439–463. Jenkins, Richard. 1992. Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge. Joly, Marc. 2018. Pour Bourdieu. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Karsenti, Bruno. 2013. D’une philosophie à l’autre. Les sciences sociales et la politique des modernes. Paris: Gallimard. Korsch, Karl. 1993 [1922]. Der Standpunkt der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung. In Marxismus und Philosophie. Schriften zur Theorie der Arbeiterbewegung 1920–1923. Amsterdam: Stichting beheer IISG (Marxism and Philosophy. Partial Trans. F.  Halliday. New  York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). Lefebvre, Henri. 2000 [1965]. Metaphilosophy. Translated by D.  Fernbach. London: Verso. Löwith, Karl. 1964 [1941]. From Hegel to Nietzsche. The Revolution in Nineteenth-­ Century Thought. Translated by D.  E. Green. New  York: Columbia University Press. Löwy, Michael. 2002 [1970]. The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx. Translated by B. Pearce. Leiden: Brill.

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———, ed. 2018. Bourdieu e Marx: Pratiche della critica. Milano: Mimesis. Pinto, Louis. 2014. Sociologie et philosophie: libres échanges. Bourdieu, Derrida, Durkheim, Foucault, Sartre. Montreuil-sous-Bois: Éditions d’Ithaque. Renault, Émmanuel. 1995. Marx et l’idée de critique. Paris: Puf. Rossi, Mario. 1963. La prima idea del “rovesciamento pratico” in alcuni scritti giovanili di Marx. Rivista critica di storia della filosofia 18 (4): 561–591. ———. 1977. Da Hegel a Marx. III. La Scuola hegeliana. Il giovane Marx. Milano: Feltrinelli. Sabot, Philippe. 2013. Sujet, pouvoir et normes: de Foucault à Butler. In Michel Foucault. À l’épreuve du pouvoir, eds. Edouard Jolly and Philippe Sabot, 59–75. Villeneuve d’Ascq,: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Terray, Émmanuel. 2002. Réflexions sur la violence symbolique. In Les sociologies critiques du capitalisme. En hommage à Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Jean Lojkine, 11–23. Paris: Puf. Tomba, Massimiliano. 2013 [2011]. Marx’s Temporalities. Leiden: Brill. Wacquant, Loïc J.D. 2002. De l’idéologie à la violence symbolique : culture, classe et conscience chez Marx et Bourdieu. In Les sociologies critiques du capitalisme en hommage à Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Jean Lojkine, 25–40. Paris: Puf. Weininger, Elliot B. 2002. Pierre Bourdieu on Social Class and Symbolic Violence. Alternative Foundations of Class Analysis, 4.

CHAPTER 5

The Poverty of Philosophy: Marx Meets Bourdieu Michael Burawoy

Economic conditions first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle —(Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 1847) The historical success of Marxist theory, the first social theory to claim scientific status that has so completely realized its potential in the social world, thus contributes to ensuring that the theory of the social world which is the least capable of integrating the theory effect—that it, more than any other, has created—is doubtless, today, the most powerful obstacle to the progress of the adequate theory of the social world to which it has, in times gone by, more than any other contributed —(Pierre Bourdieu, Social Spaces and the Genesis of “Classes,” 1984)

M. Burawoy (*) University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_5

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What is Bourdieu saying here? The historical success of Marxism is to have constituted the idea of class out of a bundle of attributes shared by an arbitrary assemblage of people, what he calls “class on paper.” Aided by parties, trade unions, the media and propaganda—an “immense historical labor of theoretical and practical invention, starting with Marx himself” (Bourdieu  1991: 251)—Marxism effectively called forth the representation and, through representation, the belief in the existence of the “working class” as a real “social fiction” that otherwise would have had only potential existence. However, this representation of and belief in the working class is a far cry from “class as action, a real and really mobilized group,” let alone a revolutionary actor as imagined by the Marxist tradition, which suffers from a self-misunderstanding. It does not see itself as constituting the idea and representation of the working class but as a scientific theory discovering and then expressing the historical emergence of an objective “class-in-­ itself” that was destined to become a “class-for-itself” making history in its own image. Marx’s claim is summarized in the quotation above from the Poverty of Philosophy where Marx excoriates Proudhon for confusing reality and economic categories, for making the intellectualist error of seeing history as the emanation of ideas rather than ideas as the expression of reality. Bourdieu is now turning the tables back against Marxism. Marxism, Bourdieu argues, did not have the tools to understand its own effect—“theory effect”—without which, according to Bourdieu, there would be no “working class.” In short, Marxism could not comprehend its own power—the power of its symbols and its political interventions—because it did not possess a theory of symbolic power. In the beginning this lacuna did not matter as the economy still constituted the only autonomous field in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the symbolic world was still underdeveloped. However, with the elaboration of separate cultural, scientific, educational, legal and bureaucratic fields in the late nineteenth-century, Marxism lost its grip on reality and its theory became retrograde, becoming a “powerful obstacle to the progress of the adequate theory of the social world” (Bourdieu 1991: 251). These fields of symbolic production engendered their own domination effects, overriding and countering Marxism’s symbolic power that had depended on the predominance of the economy. Disarmed both as science and ideology, Marxism is unable to compete with other theories that place symbolic power at the centre of analysis. As

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science Marxism does not understand that a classification or representational struggle has to precede class struggle, that is, classes have to be constituted symbolically before they can engage in struggle. This requires a theory of cultural production that it fails to elaborate. As ideology, without such a theory, Marxism can no longer compete in the classification struggle over the visions and divisions of society. Marxism loses its symbolic power, and the working class retreats back to a class on paper— merely an analytical category of an academic theory. Marxism becomes regressive, an obstacle to the development of social theory. Bourdieu mounts a powerful indictment of Marx and Engels, but pointedly misses the significance of Western Marxism—from Korsch to Lukács, from Gramsci to the Frankfurt School—whose raison d’être was to wrestle with the problem of cultural domination. Many of their ideas are congruent with Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic domination.1 To understand what the Marxist tradition has accomplished in this regard it is necessary to first concentrate on the real limitations of Marx and Engels. Against Bourdieu’s sweeping dismissal I restore the voices of the founding figures, repressed in Bourdieu’s writings, to create a more balanced exchange. The imaginary conversation that follows, therefore, is neither a combat sport nor a higher synthesis but rather aims at mutual clarification. By posing each theory as a challenge to the other, we can better appreciate their distinctiveness—their defining anomalies and contradictions as well as their divergent problematiques. Since Marx and Engels predate Bourdieu, it is they who set the terms of the conversation, but the framing will be most favourable to Bourdieu’s critique, namely, the postulates of historical materialism. First, history is seen as a succession of modes of production, arranged in ascending order according to the development of the forces of production. Second, each mode of production has a dynamics of its own within which reproduction gives rise to transformation and finally self-destruction. Third, ideological domination is secured through the superstructures of society as well as in the relations of production. Fourth, class struggle arches forward, dissolving mystification to guarantee the transition to communism. Each postulate raises as many questions for Bourdieu as it does for Marx and Engels.

1  Indeed, some, such as Perry Anderson (1976), regarded Western Marxism as an idealistic betrayal of classical Marxism.

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To begin a conversation, there needs to be a point of departure that is also a point of agreement. That point of agreement is their common critique of philosophy that Marx2 calls “ideology” and Bourdieu calls “scholastic reason.” They both repudiate the illusory ideas of intellectuals and turn to the logic of practice—labour in the case of Marx, bodily practice in the case of Bourdieu. This leads Marx to the working class and its revolutionary potential, while Bourdieu moves in the opposite direction—from the dominated back to the dominant classes who exercise symbolic violence. I show how Marx ends up in a materialist cul-de-sac, while Bourdieu ends up in an idealist cul-de-sac. No less than Marx, but for different reasons, Bourdieu cannot grasp his own “theory effect.” They each break out of their respective dead ends in ad hoc ways that contradict the premises of their theories—paradoxes that lay the foundations for the elaboration of two opposed traditions.

Divergent Paths from the Critique of Philosophy Uncanny parallels join Marx and Engels’s critique of the “German ideology” (Tucker 1978: 146–200) and Bourdieu’s critique of “scholastic reason” in Pascalian Meditations (2000). In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels settle accounts with Hegel and the Young Hegelians, just as in Pascalian Meditations Bourdieu settles his scores with his own philosophical rivals. Both condemn philosophy’s disposition to dismiss practical engagement with the world. As Marx writes in the first thesis on Feuerbach, the German philosophers elevate the theoretical attitude as the “only genuinely human attitude,” while practice is only conceived in “its dirty-­ judaical manifestation.” Bourdieu’s immersion in the Algerian war of independence and his experience of the raw violence of colonialism call into question the relevance of his philosophical training at the École Normale Supérieure just as, for Marx, the horrors of the industrial

 Throughout this essay I will be referring to Marx except where he is a joint author with Engels. This is not to belittle the contribution of Engels but to reflect Bourdieu’s focus on Marx whenever he is not making blanket statements about Marxism. 2

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revolution in Britain made nonsense of the lofty pretensions of German idealism.3 Still, Pascalian Meditations is Bourdieu’s culminating theoretical work in which Pascal is presented as an inspirational philosophical break with philosophy, centring the importance of the practice of ordinary people, emphasizing symbolic power exercised over the body and refusing the emanation of pure philosophy from the heads of philosophers. The German Ideology is not a culminating work, but an originating work that clears the foundations for Marx’s theory of historical materialism and materialist history. Although they appear at different stages in their careers, the argument against philosophy is, nonetheless, surprisingly similar. Let us begin with Marx and Engels scoffing at the Young Hegelians who think they are making history, when they are but counter-poising one phrase to another: As we hear from German ideologists, Germany has in the last few years gone through an unparalleled revolution. The decomposition of the Hegelian philosophy … has developed into a universal ferment into which all the ‘powers of the past’ are swept. … It was a revolution besides which the French Revolution was child’s play, a world struggle beside which the struggles of the Diadochi appear insignificant. Principles ousted one another, heroes of the mind overthrew each other with unheard-of rapidity and in the three years 1842–45 more of the past was swept away in Germany than at other times in three centuries. All this is supposed to have taken place in the realm of pure thought. (Tucker 1978: 147)

Here is Bourdieu’s parallel attack on modern and postmodern philosophers: Now, if there is one thing that our ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ philosophers have in common, beyond the conflicts that divide them, it is this excessive confidence in the powers of language. It is the typical illusion of the lector, who can regard an academic commentary as a political act or the critique of

3  Here is how Marx and Engels berate Feuerbach: “Thus if millions of proletarians feel by no means contented with their living conditions, if their ‘existence’ does not in the least correspond to their ‘essence’ then … this is an unavoidable misfortune, which must be borne quietly. The millions of proletarians and communists, however, think differently and will prove this in time, when they bring their ‘existence’ into harmony with their ‘essence’ in a practical way, by means of revolution” (Tucker 1978: 168).

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texts as a feat of resistance, and experience revolutions in the order of words as radical revolutions in the order of things. (Bourdieu 2000: 2)

The argument is the same: we must not confuse a war of words with the transformation of the real world, things of logic with the logic of things. But how is it that philosophers mistake their own world for the real world? The answer lies in their oblivion to the social and economic conditions under which they produce knowledge. For Marx, it is simply the division between mental and manual labour that permits the illusion that ideas or consciousness drives history: Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of ‘pure’ theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. (Tucker 1978: 159; emphasis added)

Emancipated from manual labour, upon which their existence nevertheless rests, philosophers imagine that history is moved by their thought. “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers,” Marx and Engels (Tucker  1978: 149) write, “to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.” In identical fashion, Bourdieu argues that philosophers fail to understand the peculiarity of the conditions that make it possible to produce “pure” theory: But there is no doubt nothing more difficult to apprehend, for those who are immersed in universes in which it goes without saying, than the scholastic disposition demanded by those universes. There is nothing that ‘pure’ thought finds it harder to think than skholè, the first and most determinant of all the social conditions of possibility of ‘pure’ thought, and also the scholastic disposition which inclines its possessors to suspend the demands of the situation, the constraints of economic and social necessity. (Bourdieu 2000: 12)

The scholastic disposition calls forth the illusion that knowledge is freely produced and that it is not the product of specific conditions very

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different from the dominated classes who are driven by material necessity. Bourdieu does not limit his critique of the scholastic fallacy—that is, repression of the conditions peculiar to intellectual life—to philosophers but broadens it to other disciplines. He criticizes anthropologists, such as Lévi-Strauss, and economists for universalizing their own particular experience, foisting their abstract models onto the recalcitrant practice of ordinary mortals. Much as Marx is contemptuous of the Young Hegelians, Bourdieu satirizes Sartre’s existentialist renditions of everyday life—the waiter who contemplates the heavy decision of whether to get up in the morning or not. For most people most of the time, argues Bourdieu, mundane tasks are accomplished without reflection. Only sociologists— reflexively applying sociology to themselves and, more generally, to the production of knowledge—can potentially appreciate the limitations of scholastic reason, and the necessary distinction between the logic of theory and the logic of practice. If both Marx and Bourdieu are critical of intellectuals who think ideas drive history, their corresponding turns to practice are very different. For Marx, it is a turn to the conditions of labour that produce the means of existence. The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. (Tucker 1978: 149)

It is from these material conditions of production that Marx derives the dynamics of capitalism and deepening class struggle. For Bourdieu this is a mythology—albeit a powerful one at certain points in history—created by intellectuals unable to comprehend the inurement of workers to their conditions of existence because, as intellectuals, they misrecognize the peculiarity of their own conditions of existence. Or as he pithily puts it: “Populism is never anything other than an inverted ethnocentrism” (Bourdieu 1984: 374). Instead of the transformative power of working class, Bourdieu turns to the generative power of habitus implanted in a socialized body. In other words, one has to construct a materialist theory which (in accordance with the wish that Marx expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach) is capa-

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ble of taking from idealism the ‘active side’ of practical knowledge that the materialist tradition has abandoned to it. This is precisely the notion of the function of habitus, which restores to the agent a generating, unifying, constructing, classifying power, while recalling that this capacity to construct social reality, itself socially constructed, is not that of a transcendental subject but of a socialized body, investing in its practice socially constructed organizing principles that are acquired in the course of a situated and dated social experience. (Bourdieu 2000: 136–7)

As the unconscious incorporation of social structure, habitus leads Bourdieu not only to abandon the working class as “transcendental subject” but the very possibility that the dominated can grasp the conditions of their subjugation, something only the sociologist can apprehend. The sociologist, and more broadly the “International of Intellectuals,” thereby becomes Bourdieu’s putative “transcendental subject.” In short, after breaking with ideology/scholastic reason and arriving at the logic of practice, Marx and Bourdieu then take diametrically opposed paths—the one focuses on the dominated embedded in production relations, whereas the other turns his back on the dominated in order to return to the dominant producing symbolic relations. The remainder of this chapter explores these two roads—how they diverge and create their own distinctive sets of paradoxes and dilemmas.

History: From Modes of Productions to Differentiated Fields Out of their common critiques of philosophy arise divergent conceptions of history. For Marx the logic of practice is embedded in the concrete social relations into which men and women enter as they transform nature. These social relations form the mode of production with two components: the forces of production (relations through which men and women collaborate in producing the means of existence, including the mode of cooperation and the technology it deploys) and the relations of production (the relations of exploitation through which surplus is produced by a class of direct producers and appropriated by a dominant class). Modes of production succeed each other in a sequence measured by the expansion of the forces of production. As the final mode of production, capitalism gives way to communism, which, being without classes and thus without exploitation, allows for the realization of human talents and needs. It is only

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with capitalism that the direct producers, that is, the working class, through their struggles against capital, come to recognize their role as agents of human emancipation. Bourdieu rejects Marx’s teleology as an intellectual fantasy of history, leaving himself without any explicit theory of history and, therefore, no conception of an alternative future. Still, his work describes a movement from traditional to modern marked, first and foremost, by different conception of time—the one in which the future is the repetition of the past, cyclical time, and the other in which the future is indefinite, full of possibilities and susceptible to rational planning. Additionally, along Durkheimian lines, Bourdieu (1979) distinguishes traditional society in Algeria from the modern society in France by the emergence and differentiation of fields (autonomous spheres of action) and by the pluralization of “capitals”—resources accumulated within fields and convertible across fields. Where Marx has a succession of modes of production that govern human behaviour, Bourdieu has multiple coexisting “fields.” They appear as elaborations of Marx’s “superstructures”—“legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical forms in which men become conscious of this [class] conflict and fight it out.” Thus, Bourdieu has written extended essays on the legal, the political, the bureaucratic, the religious, the philosophical, the journalistic, the scientific, the artistic and the educational fields. The notion of field draws on and generalizes certain features of Marx’s concept of the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, underlining that association, Bourdieu refers to cultural fields as the political economy of symbolic goods. As with the capitalist mode of production, so with the notion of field, individuals enter into relations of competition to accumulate field-specific capital according to field-specific rules. Competition among actors takes place alongside struggles for domination of the field—struggles whose objects are the very rules and stakes that define the field and its capital. In his analysis of the scientific field (Bourdieu 1975), for example, competition leads to the concentration of academic capital, so that challenges from below can either follow a pattern of succession, holding onto the coat-tails of a powerful figure, or the more risky subversive strategies that change the rules of the game and, if successful, can generate far more capital in the long run. When capital is diffused and competition intense, dominant groups can be overthrown in a “revolution,” but when capital is more

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heavily concentrated, then change is more continuous, what he calls a “permanent revolution.” The analogy to Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production is clear, except that there is no mention of exploitation. It is as if capitalism were confined to competition and domination among capitalists, with workers removed from the field. As Mathieu Desan (2013) has argued at length, Bourdieu’s conception of field rests on a notion of capital that is far from Marx’s—the accumulation of resources rather than a relation of exploitation.4 Indeed, Bourdieu’s only book devoted to the economy as such, The Social Structures of the Economy (2005), concerns the social underpinning of the housing market. Here Bourdieu focuses on the role of habitus and taste in the matching of supply and demand for different types of housing. There is no attempt to study housing from the standpoint of its production process—from the standpoint of construction workers, for example. When he turns to the firm as a field again he focuses on the managers and directors who make decisions rather than workers who produce the goods without which there would be no decisions. Fields are confined to the dominant classes, whereas the dominated classes only inhabit the structures of social space. Bourdieu replaces Marx’s diachronic succession of modes of production, which pays little attention to the superstructures, with a synchronic account of the functioning and coexistence of fields. This poses the question of the relations among fields, marked by the recognition of autonomous and heteronomous poles within each field. In Rules of Art (Bourdieu 1996a) Bourdieu describes the genesis of the literary field in nineteenth-­ century France. At its core was Flaubert’s drive for literature for literature’s sake, which required a break, on the one hand, from art sponsored by the bourgeoisie, and, on the other hand, from social realism connected to everyday life. Bourdieu builds into each field a struggle for autonomy against the heteronomous influence of external fields—a struggle that is complicated by challenges to the consecrated elites from the avant-garde. In his later writings he was particularly concerned with the economic field’s subversion of the autonomy of other fields. Thus, in his book on television, Bourdieu (1999) describes the subjugation of the journalistic field to the economic field through advertising revenue that demands the 4  As Jacques Bidet (2008) emphasizes the dynamics of Bourdieu’s fields relies on the struggle and competition among its agents rather than an underlying structure equivalent to the interaction of the forces and relations of production.

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widest appeal through banalities, sensationalism and fabrication. This, in turn, distorted the dissemination of knowledge and accomplishments of other fields, not least the field of social science, through amateurish intermediaries he calls doxosophers who neutralize any critical message. No less than other fields, the political field is also subject to controlling intervention from economic actors. Although he gives dominance to the economic field, Bourdieu has no theory of the economy and its expansive tendencies. In addition to the domination of the economic field, Bourdieu describes a field of power that traverses different fields, bringing together their elites into a shared competition for power. This rather amorphous arrangement reminds one of Weber’s separate value spheres with a realm of power that oversees society, but again there is no analysis of its dynamics. Still, what is notably missing is any theory of the relations of interdependence and domination among fields. As Gil Eyal (2013) has noted, it is curious that someone so concerned about relations within fields pays so little attention to the relations among fields. Just as there is no theory of history, there is no theory of the totality, just an arbitrary assemblage of supposedly “homologous” fields.5

Dynamics: From Self-Transformation to Hysteresis We have seen the contrast between Marx’s history as the succession of modes of production and Bourdieu’s vision of coexisting fields, but Marx also has a notion of history as the dynamics of a mode of production, namely, the way the reproduction of capitalism is simultaneously its transformation. Indeed, the capitalist mode of production distinguishes itself by reproducing itself of itself, very different from the feudal mode of production that requires extra-economic coercion. Under capitalism the worker arrives at work each day to produce value that contributes to her wage on the one side and capitalist profit on the other. Needing to survive 5  While Talcott Parsons and Pierre Bourdieu share a commitment to a general theory of action, Parsons develops four analytical subsystems (analogous to fields) whose functions— adaptive, goal attainment, integrative and latency—contribute to society as a whole and whose interdependence is orchestrated through universal media of interchange (money, power, influence and value commitment) that are parallel to Bourdieu’s “capitals.” From here Parsons develops a theory of history as differentiation, governed by evolutionary universals. Bourdieu makes no attempt to advance such a grand account of history and totality. Indeed, he recoils from any such project. He systematically refuses systematicity.

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she comes to work and does the same the next day. But as capitalism reproduces itself in this way, so it also transforms itself. As capitalists compete with one another, they innovate by reducing the proportion of the worker’s day contributing to the wage (necessary labour) and increasing the proportion contributing to profit (surplus labour)—through the intensification of work, deskilling, new technology and so on—which leads to class polarization and crises of overproduction. Is there an equivalent in Bourdieu whereby reproduction becomes the basis of social change? At the heart of Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction is the notion of “habitus,” a concept first developed in relation to the traditional Kabyle society. The habitus, the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations, produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus. (Bourdieu 1977: 78)

So structures generate practices that reproduce structures through the mediation of habitus that is itself the product of structures, but such reproduction allows room for innovation within limits defined by structures. It is parallel to Marx’s formula: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” From Bourdieu’s point of view what is missing here is the way individuals carry the past within themselves so that their innovative power is limited as well as facilitated not just by external but also internal structures. Through the habitus, the structure of which it is the product governs practice, not along the paths of a mechanical determinism, but within the constraints and limits initially set on its inventions… Because the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products—thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions—whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning. (Bourdieu 1990: 55)

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Just as moves in a game are improvisations limited by and, thereby, reproducing the rules of the game, so is habitus the generative principle of practices that are innovative but only within limits defined by the social structures they reproduce. Bourdieu often uses the game metaphor to illustrate the spontaneous and unthinking responses of players. He is thinking of tennis or rugby where players develop a sense of the game and there’s no time to reflect, but of course there are games like American football where reflection plays its part or games like chess where it is key. Still, the point stands, habitus is the development of skills to improvise within limits defined by the rules. The social order inscribes itself in the largely unconscious habitus though regularized participation in successive social structures. The development of habitus proceeds in phases with each phase the basis of subsequent formations. Thus, the primary habitus formed in childhood through parenting lays the foundation for the secondary habitus formed in school, which, in turn, lays the foundations for a tertiary habitus formed at work, so that habitus is subject to continual revision but within limits defined by its past, largely repressed and unconscious.6 Armed with habitus Bourdieu’s individual has much greater weight and depth than Marx’s individual who is the effect and support of the social relations into which they enter. For Bourdieu social relations become lodged in a durable, transposable and irreversible habitus which has an autonomous effect through participation in different social structures. Marx, on the other hand, gives priority to social relations that impose themselves on individuals as “indispensable and independent of their will” without leaving any permanent psychic trace. Capitalist relations impose themselves on individuals inexorably, irrespective of their experience in different institutions in society. Marx does not consider the effects of schools or family on the way people work or invest—he is solely interested in the logic of social relations independent of the distinctive features of individuals who support them. Bourdieu, by contrast, makes spheres beyond the economy key to understanding a given social order and here 6  There is a curious parallel between Bourdieu’s conception of “habitus” and Marx’s conception of “forces of production.” Both are durable, transposable and irreversible—the one a measure of the development of the individual, the other of society. Both come into conflict with wider structures within which they develop. For Marx, however, the structures (relations of production) ultimately give way to the expansion of the forces of production, whereas for Bourdieu, it is the opposite, habitus tends to give way to structures.

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lies both the secret of continuity and social change, or social change through continuity. Habitus is durable; it has a tendency to persist when it confronts new social structures, a phenomenon he calls “hysteresis.” The resulting clash between habitus and structure can come about in many ways. First, it arises from the mobility of individuals, who carry a habitus cultivated in one set of structures and come up against the imperatives of another. Students from lower classes who enter a middle-class school find it difficult to adapt and either withdraw or rebel. When Algerian peasants with a traditional habitus migrate to an urban context, they suffer from anomie, leading to resignation or revolt. The disjuncture of structure and habitus can also come about through the mobility of social structures. Bourdieu (1979) describes the imposition of a colonial order on a traditional Kabyle society, disrupting accepted patterns of behaviour and leading to anti-colonial revolution. In that revolution, however, Algerians develop a habitus, more in keeping with modernity, a habitus that embraces nationalist aspirations, what Bourdieu calls the “revolution in the revolution.” Or back in Southern France in the Béarn where Bourdieu grew up, modernization of agriculture disinherit the peasant farmer who can no longer find a marriage partner with whom to produce the next generation of inheritors (Bourdieu 2008). The farmer retreats into morose resignation while young women are no longer prepared to put up with drudgery of rural life and they exit for the city—the one exhibiting an enduring habitus unable to adapt, the other endowed with a more flexible habitus generative of innovative response. The divergent responses of men and women are captured in the “bachelors’ ball” where the degradation of the inheritors expresses itself in bodily discomfort and embarrassment as they ring the dance floor, watching the young women freely dancing with men from the town. Bourdieu’s most often-cited example of hysteresis is the devaluation of educational credentials that, in his view, explains the student protest of May 1968. In Homo Academicus, Bourdieu (1988) describes how the expansion of higher education created an oversupply of assistant lecturers whose upward mobility was consequently blocked. The ensuing tension between aspirations and opportunities affected not only the young assistants but students more generally, who found that their degrees did not translate into expected jobs. The discordance between class habitus and the labour market appeared simultaneously in a number of fields so that their normally disparate temporal rhythms merged into a general crisis

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conducted in a singular public time and producing an historical drama that suspended common sense. In this view we might say that history is succession of unanticipated “conjunctures,” unpredictable clashes that punctuate equilibria. Bourdieu’s account of the dynamics of higher education is analogous to Marx’s account of the expansion of capitalism through competition among capitalists inherently leading to the degradation of the working class, with two provisos. First, where Bourdieu has to take the expansion of education as an unexplained given, an exogenous variable, Marx shows how the internal dynamics of capitalism leads to the immiseration of the working class and the concentration of capital. He has a theory of the rise and fall of capitalism. Second, where Bourdieu explains student revolt in terms of the mismatch of expectation and opportunity, disposition and position, Marx stresses the formation of a working class as a response to changing social relations. The fact that people move among a plurality of structures implies the ever-present possibility of social change. But this is not a theory of social change which would require a far deeper understanding of the durability of the habitus—how it develops, how new layers of the habitus affect existing layers, leading to a dynamic psychology. But equally, it would require a theory of the resilience of social structures in the face of collective challenge from an unwavering habitus. In other words we need to theorize the consequences as well as the origins of the inevitable clashes between habitus and structure: when it leads to rebellion or revolution, when it leads to resignation or innovation, when it leads to exit or voice. Change is ubiquitous but why and how is very unclear. While the idea of habitus can be deployed to interpret social change and social protest, its main purpose is to explain continuity and underline how difficult social change is to accomplish. Like the French Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s—Althusser, Balibar, Godeslier, Poulantzas with whom he shares so much, leading him to stage exaggerated critiques—Bourdieu’s functionalism was not necessarily an expression of conservatism that all is well in society but an attempt to understand the resilience of social structures in the face of contestation, which brings us to the heart of his theory—symbolic domination.

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Symbolic Domination: From Mystification to Misrecognition Bourdieu developed a set of generative concepts—habitus, capital and field—but without a theory of history, totality or even agency. What he does have, however, is a theory of symbolic domination. Once again we would do well to begin with Marx and Engels who famously write of the way ideology is both appealing and obscuring. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. (Tucker 1978: 172; emphasis added)

Having broken with ideology in order to make material relations the foundation of history, here Marx and Engels temporarily break back to ideology, namely, to the power of illusory ideas in sustaining the domination of the dominant class. We should note that, like Bourdieu, Marx and Engels privilege intellectuals in the production of representations of society. There is ambiguity, however, in the meaning to be imputed to Marx and Engels’s notion of ideological subjugation. What does it mean to “subject” the dominated to the ideas of the ruling class? Bourdieu elaborates Marx and Engels’s ideological subjection as follows: Symbolic violence is the coercion which is set up only through the consent that the dominated cannot fail to give to the dominator (and therefore to the domination) when their understanding of the situation and relation can only use instruments of knowledge that they have in common with the dominator, which, being merely the incorporated form of the structure of the relation of domination, make this relation appear as natural; or, in other words, when the schemes they implement in order to perceive and evaluate themselves or to perceive and evaluate the dominators (high/low, male/ female, white/black, etc.) are the product of the incorporation of the (thus neutralized) classifications of which their social being is the product. (Bourdieu 2000: 170)

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Bourdieu’s symbolic violence is irreversible and irrevocable. Subjugation inhabits the habitus, deep and unconscious. Bourdieu invokes the notion of “misrecognition” to convey the depth of subjugation. There is a recognition but it is false inasmuch as it is based on the repression of the conditions of its production. We are like fish in water unable to recognize the classifications we take for granted as the basis of an arbitrary domination. Marx takes the idea of subjugation to ruling ideas in a different direction, arguing that the effectiveness of ruling ideology depends on their resonance with lived experience of economic relations. Instead of misrecognition with its implied depth psychology, Marx writes of mystification that affects anyone who enters capitalist relations. It is an attribute of relations rather than the individual habitus. Thus, under capitalism, exploitation is not experienced as such because it is hidden by the very character of production, which obscures the distinction between necessary and surplus labour, since workers appear to be paid for the entire work day. Similarly, participation in market exchange leads to “commodity fetishism,” whereby objects, which are bought and sold, are disconnected from their production—the social relations and human labour necessary to produce them. Again, capitalist relations of production are obscured not through an incorporated habitus but through the relations of exchange. For Marx, however, such mystification is dissolved through class struggle, leading the working class to see the truth of capitalism, on the one hand, and their role in transforming it, on the other: It is not a matter of what this or that proletarian or even the proletariat as a whole pictures at present as its goal. It is a matter of what the proletariat is in actuality, and what in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its goal and its historical action are prefigured in the most clear and ineluctable way in its own life-situation as well as in the whole organization of contemporary bourgeois society. There is no need to harp on the fact that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is continually working to bring this consciousness to full clarity. (Tucker 1978: 134–35)

However, as Bourdieu insists, for the proletariat to rid itself of the “the muck of ages,” as Marx and Engels put it in The Germany Ideology (1978: 193), is not easy. Only under unusual circumstances—and to some extent they pertained in nineteenth-century Europe—does class struggle assume an ascendant path, intensifying itself as it expands, demystifying relations

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of exploitation as described in The Manifesto of the Communist Party. There Marx and Engels support their claim by reference to class formation in nineteenth-century England—from scattered struggles to the advance of trade unions and finally to the formation of a national party that would seize state power. In Class Struggles in France Marx argues that the extension of suffrage would unchain class struggle, although Engels some 50 years later and 50 years wiser would be more cautious in proclaiming the immanent victory of the German working class. This period of history corresponds to Bourdieu’s positive assessment of Marxism when it realized its potential in the social world. But subsequently through its victories, through the concessions, the working class wins, its revolutionary temper is domesticated and its struggles come to be organized, increasingly within the framework of capitalism. From then on Bourdieu can say that the symbolic violence incorporated in the lived experience prevails over the cathartic effect of struggle. Having tarred the whole Marxist tradition with Marx’s revolutionary optimism, labelling it a scholastic illusion, Bourdieu then bends the stick in the opposite direction: And another effect of the scholastic illusion is seen when people describe resistance to domination in the language of consciousness—as does the whole Marxist tradition and also the feminist theorists who, giving way to habits of thought, expect political liberation to come from the ‘raising of consciousness’—ignoring the extraordinary inertia which results from the inscription of social structures in bodies, for lack of a dispositional theory of practices. While making things explicit can help, only a thoroughgoing process of countertraining, involving repeated exercises, can, like an athlete’s training, durably transform habitus. (Bourdieu 2000: 172)

What this “countertraining” might look like is never elaborated but it has to dislodge the internalized and embodied habitus. Whether class struggle might be a form of “countertraining” is especially unclear as Bourdieu never entertains the idea of class struggle or even allows for “collective resistance” to the dominant culture. The working classes are driven by the exigencies of material necessity, leading them to make a virtue out of a necessity. They embrace their functional lifestyle rather than reject the dominant culture. An alternative culture remains beyond their

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grasp, because they have neither the tools nor the leisure to create it (Bourdieu 1984: chap. 7).7 Still, Bourdieu does say that “making things explicit,” that is, critical reflection, can help. Yet we know little about the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. Can critical reflection change the habitus and if so how? There is no theory of habitus to even make sense of the question. Indeed, Bourdieu sometimes seem to banish the very vocabulary of consciousness and with it the idea of ideology: In the notion of ‘false consciousness’ which some Marxists invoke to explain the effect of symbolic domination, it is the word ‘consciousness’ which is excessive; and to speak of ‘ideology’ is to place in the order of representations, capable of being transformed by the intellectual conversion that is called the ‘awakening of consciousness’, what belongs to the order of beliefs, that is, at the deepest level of bodily dispositions. (Bourdieu 2000: 177)

Here Bourdieu misconstrues Marx who tries to grapple with the relationship between ideology as representation and ideology as belief—representations are only effective insofar as they resonate with beliefs. The issue between Marx and Bourdieu is not the distinction between ideology and bodily knowledge but the character of beliefs themselves, whether they are immanent to particular social relations or whether they inhabit the habitus, the cumulative effect of embodied history. Having written off the working classes as incapable of grasping the conditions of their oppression, Bourdieu is compelled to look elsewhere for ways of contesting symbolic domination. Having broken from scholastic reason to the logic of practice and having discovered that the logic of practice is impervious to truth, he breaks back to the logic of theory, this time 7  In writing about Algeria, however, Bourdieu (1979: 62–63) argues that it is the relative stability and the “privilege” of experiencing “permanent, rational exploitation” that gives the working class revolutionary potential, very different from the dispossessed peasantry and subproletariat who live from hand to mouth and are, therefore, unable to plan for an alternative future. It is the distinction between a genuine “revolutionary force” and a spontaneous “force for revolution.” This is a very different portrait that the one of the French working class weighed down by necessity, accepting the legitimacy of the dominant classes. While Bourdieu makes no effort to reconcile these opposed visions of the working class, he might argue that it revolves around the symbolic violence in France and the physical violence of colonialism. Alternatively, these may be strategic positions taken up in two different political fields: against the FLN who favoured the peasantry as a revolutionary class in Algeria, and against the Marxists who regarded the working class as inherently revolutionary in France.

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to the emancipatory science of sociology and to symbolic struggles within the dominant class. Let us follow his argument.

From Class Struggle to Classification Struggle While Marx does, indeed, endow the working with a historic mission of securing emancipation for all, it is also true that he pays as much, if not more, historical attention to the driving force of capitalism, namely, the dominant class and its fractions. His crowning achievement—the theory of capitalism in Capital—focuses on the economic activities of dominant class, the competition and interdependence among capitalists, as well as their creative destruction. When writing of politics in mid-nineteenth-­ century France, he dissects the relationship among different elites; when writing of the factory acts in England, he recognizes the different interests of fractions of capital as well as the landed classes; and when writing of colonialism, it is the interests of the bourgeoisie that concern him. His correspondence about politics was almost solely devoted to the strategies of different national ruling classes and their states. Throughout he was acutely aware of the relationship between bourgeoisie and its ideologists. As he and Engels write in The German Ideology The division of labour … manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and manual labour, so that inside this class one part appears as thinkers of the class (its active conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of the class and have less time to make up the illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts. (Tucker 1978: 173)

Here Marx and Engels prefigure Bourdieu’s division of the dominant class into those high in economic capital (and lower in cultural capital) and those high in cultural capital (and lower in economic capital). Bourdieu, too, recognizes the conflict between these two fractions, but casts that conflict in terms of struggles over categories of representation—so-called classification struggles. The classifications generated through struggles within the dominant class between its dominant and dominated fractions shape the way of life

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of different classes. Distinction works with a simple Marxian schema of class: dominant class, petty bourgeoisie and working class. Each class has a distinctive set of patterns of consumption: the working class is driven by necessity, extending legitimacy to the dominant class’s sense of taste even if it appears remote; the petty bourgeoisie, depending on the fraction, seeks to become part of the grande bourgeoisie by adopting its standards and imitating the latter’s style of life; the dominant class is located in different fields within which they compete to impose their vision and division on society. This is a sophisticated elaboration of Marx’s idea of the ruling ideology being the ideology of the ruling classes in which a system of classifications creates standards through which individuals from different classes evaluate themselves. The taste of the dominant class is seen as an attribute of the innate refinement rather than a function of a habitus, cultivated through the attributes of domination, including access to wealth and leisure, just as the dominated classes regard their own culture as a product of their own inferiority rather than a force of necessity. The result is a belief in the legitimacy of the hierarchy of tastes resulting in their enactment that obscures their class conditioning. Active participation in patterns of life—the food we eat, the music we listen to, the films we watch, the sports we play, the photographs we take and so on—draw us into a hierarchy of legitimate consumption that obscures the underlying class determinants. The same goes for education which by virtue of its relative autonomy appears as neutral vis-à-vis class drawing students from dominated classes into the pursuit of performance that would lead to upward mobility (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). Failure to excel is blamed on inadequacies of the self rather than the class character of the school which privileges those with cultural capital. Education has, therefore, two functions: a technical function of slotting people into the labour market and a social function of masking the class determinants of educational outcomes. In State Nobility Bourdieu (1996b) describes the struggles within the dominant class that determines the relative importance of educational credentials as well as the structure of access to and content of education, thereby ensuring the misrecognition of class domination. Having closed off the dominated as a source of social change, Bourdieu nevertheless regards the classification struggles within the dominant class as potential instigators of “symbolic” revolutions capable of shaking the “deepest structures of the social order”:

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Likewise, the arts and literature can no doubt offer the dominant agents some very powerful instruments of legitimation, either directly, through the celebration they confer, or indirectly, especially through the cult they enjoy, which also consecrates its celebrants. But it can also happen that artists or writers are, directly or indirectly, at the origin of large-scale symbolic revolutions (like the bohemian lifestyle in the nineteenth century, or, nowadays, the subversive provocations of the feminist or homosexual movements), capable of shaking the deepest structures of the social order, such as family structures, through transformation of the fundamental principles of division of the vision of the world (such as male/female opposition) and the corresponding challenges to the self-evidences of common sense. (Bourdieu 2000: 105)

How does this “shaking” affect the sturdy structures of society let alone threaten the symbolic domination of the dominant class? At one point he acknowledges the possibility that authors of such symbolic revolutions, through the transfer of cultural capital and in certain moments, can instigate subversive action from the dominated. The symbolic work needed in order to break out of the silent self-evidence of doxa and to state and denounce the arbitrariness that it conceals presupposes instruments of expression and criticism which, like other forms of capital, are unequally distributed. As a consequence, there is every reason to think that it would not be possible without the intervention of professional practitioners of the working of making explicit, who, in certain historical conjunctures, may make themselves the spokespersons of the dominated on the basis of partial solidarities and de facto alliances springing from the homology between a dominated position in this or that field of cultural production and the position of the dominated in the social space. A solidarity of this kind, which is not without ambiguity, can bring about …. the transfer of cultural capital which enables the dominated to achieve collective mobilization and subversive action against the established order; with, in return, the risk of hijacking which is contained in the imperfect correspondence between the interests of the dominated and those of the dominated-­ dominant who makes themselves the spokespersons of their demands or their revolts, on the basis of a partial analogy between different experiences of domination. (Bourdieu 2000: 188. Italics in the original)

This is one of the rare places where Bourdieu allows for the possibility of collective mobilization of the dominated through recognition rather than misrecognition of domination. Still the initiatives always come from

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above, from the dominated fractions of the dominant class whose experience of domination allows for a tendentious alliance with the dominated classes. More typically, Bourdieu relies on the inner logic of fields to move society towards a greater universalism, what he calls the realpolitik of reason that is wired into the character of the state: Those who, like Marx, reverse the official image that the State bureaucracy seeks to give of itself and describe the bureaucrats as usurpers of the universal, acting like private proprietors of public resources, are not wrong. But they ignore the very real effects of the obligatory reference to the values of neutrality and disinterested devotion to the public good which becomes more and more incumbent on state functionaries in the successive stages of the long labor of symbolic construction which leads to the invention and imposition of the official representation of the State as the site of universality and the service of the general interest. (Bourdieu 2000: 124)

In this remarkable passage, written at the very time he is attacking the French state for continuing to violate its public function, in which the right hand of the state is displacing the left hand, when the state is openly assaulting the working class, Bourdieu is also appealing to its “disinterested devotion to the public good” that will eventually assert itself against the state’s usurpers. In the long run, therefore, the state will become the carrier of the general interest, but how? The idea of universality will not prevail simply because it is an attractive ideal—that would be the worst form of idealism—but because there are certain fields that by their very functioning, by virtue of their internal struggles, give rise to a commitment to the universal: In reality, if one is not, at best, to indulge in an irresponsible utopianism, which often has no other effect than to procure the short-lived euphoria of humanist hopes, almost always as brief as adolescence, and which produces effects quite as malign in the life of research as in political life, it is necessary I think to return to a ‘realistic’ vision of the universes in which the universal is generated. To be content, as one might be tempted, with giving the universal the status of a ‘regulatory idea’, capable of suggesting principles of action, would be to forget that there are universes in which it becomes a ‘constitutive’ immanent principle of regulation, such as the scientific field, and to a lesser extent the bureaucratic field and the judicial field; and that, more generally, as soon as the principles claiming universal validity (those of

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democracy, for example) are stated and officially professed, there is no longer any social situation in which they cannot serve at least as symbolic weapons in struggles of interests or as instruments of critique for those who have a self-interest in truth and virtue (like, nowadays, all those, especially in the minor state nobility, whose interests are bound up with universal advances associated with the State and with law). (Bourdieu 2000: 127)

Let us recall that Bourdieu sets out on his journey with a critique of scholastic reason that misses the ways in which theoretical models, such as those of “rational choice” or “deliberative democracy,” are but projections of the very specific conditions under which knowledge is produced. After turning from this fallacious logic of theory to the logic of practice and finding there only misrecognition, Bourdieu returns to the same universalities produced in the scientific, legal and bureaucratic fields, universalities that he had earlier called into question as scholastic fallacies—the product of the peculiar circumstances of their production. But now he turns to them as the source of hope for humanity. We are back with the Enlightenment, with Hegel’s view of the state, so trenchantly criticized not just by Marx but by Bourdieu who defines the state as having the monopoly of symbolic as well as material violence. The state is Janus faced, on one side masking the interests of the dominant class as the general interest, but thereby setting in motion an imminent critique, demanding that the state live up to its claims. We can see a similar Enlightenment faith in Bourdieu’s proposals for an International of Intellectuals—the organic intellectual of humanity—recognizing that they are a corporate body with their own interests, but regarding those interests as the carriers of universalism and, thus, forming a corporatism of the universal.8 Towards the end of his life Bourdieu was not only organizing intellectuals but was also to be found on the picket lines of striking workers, haranguing them about the evils of neoliberalism—even as he claimed they could not understand the conditions of their own oppression. No different from the people he criticized, he too succumbed to a gap between his theory and his practice, especially when his theory led him into a political cul-de-sac. 8  They are what Alvin Gouldner (1979) calls a flawed universal class, only he was more realistic about the corporatism of intellectuals. Antonio Gramsci would see Bourdieu’s intellectuals as a traditional, and the defence of their autonomy as serving their role in presenting the interests of the dominant class as the interests of all, as the universal interests.

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Conclusion Marx and Bourdieu set out from similar positions, but they end up in divergent places. They both start out as critics of intellectualist illusions or scholastic fallacies that privilege the role of ideas in the making of history. They both move to the logic of practice. Marx remains wedded to this logic, seeing in it a future emancipation realized through working-class revolution, but when the working class lets him down, he sets about demonstrating the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Bourdieu, by contrast, sees the logic of practice as deeply mired in domination inculcated in the habitus. So he breaks from the logic of practice back to the practice of logic and to a faith in reason, whether through symbolic revolutions organized by intellectuals or via the immanent logic of the state. Just as Marx revealed and relied on the inner contradictions of the economy, Bourdieu relied on the inner contradictions of the symbolic order. If Bourdieu starts out as a critic of philosophy and ends up as a Hegelian, believing in the universality of reason, Marx also starts out as a critic of philosophy, but ends up with material production, putting his faith in the universality of the working class through its realization of communism. Each would criticize the other as delusional. We are on the horns of a dilemma: intellectuals without the subaltern or the subaltern without intellectuals. Each recognizes the dilemma, and in their practice each breaks with their theory. Bourdieu devotes the last years of his life appealing to social movements, challenging the turn to neoliberalism. However, for his theory to catch up with his practice, Bourdieu needs a far better account of the dynamics of the habitus, the way it changes and, in particular, how it can be reshaped by critical reflection—how the habitus of consent becomes a habitus of defiance. Without such a move forward, we are left wondering how intellectuals can penetrate their own habitus, how they can escape symbolic domination. How is the habitus of intellectuals different from the habitus of the dominated? Bourdieu suffers from a duality: an optimistic faith in reason and critical reflection on one side and a pessimistic account of durable bodily knowledge unaware of itself. After distinguishing between the logic of theory and the logic of practice, he needs to bring them into a dynamic relation. Equally Marx, despairing of the working class that carries the burden of revolution, throws himself into the world of theory and devotes himself to demonstrating that capitalism must inherently destroy itself. Like the Young Hegelians he criticizes, Marx battles with intellectuals as though

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the fate of the world depended on it. As Bourdieu says in the opening epigraph, Marx failed to grasp the power of his own theory in moving people, but, in the final analysis, Bourdieu equally failed to understand how critical reflection or symbolic revolutions can have real effects. It would take another Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, to transcend the separation of theory and practice. In a world defined by cultural domination, what he called hegemony, Gramsci develops a more balanced conception of class struggle, organized on the terrain of dominant ideology. In so doing he distinguishes between traditional intellectuals like Bourdieu, protecting their autonomy in order to project themselves as carrying some universal truth, and organic intellectuals like Marx who sought a closer alliance with the dominated, elaborating their kernel of good sense, obtained through the collective transformation of nature.

References Anderson, Perry. 1976. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: New Left Books. Bidet, Jacques. 2008. Bourdieu and Historical Materialism. In Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, ed. Jacques Bidet and Eustache Kouvélakis, 587–605. Leiden, NL: Brill. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1975. The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason. Social Science Information 14 (6): 19–47. ———. 1977 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by R.  Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1979 [1963]. Algeria, 1960. Translated by R.  Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1984 [1979]. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1988 [1984]. Homo Academicus. Translated by P.  Collier. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1990 [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1991 [1984]. Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’. In Language and Symbolic Power, trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson, 229–251. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1996a [1992]. Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated S. Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1996b [1989]. State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Translated by L. C. Clough. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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———. 1999 [1996]. On Television. Translated by P.P.  Ferguson. New  York: New Press. ———. 2000 [1997]. Pascalian Meditations. Translated by R.  Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. The Social Structures of the Economy. Translated by C.  Turner. Cambridge: Polity Press. _______. 2008 [2002]. The Bachelors’ Ball. Translated by R.  Nice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Desan, Mathieu Hikaru. 2013. Bourdieu, Marx, and Capital: A Critique of the Extension Model. Sociological Theory 31 (4): 318–342. Eyal, Gil. 2013. Spaces between Fields. In Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, ed. Philip Gorski, 158–182. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gouldner, Alvin. 1979. The Future of the Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. New York: Seabury Press. Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: Norton.

CHAPTER 6

Marx/Bourdieu: Convergences and Tensions, Between Critical Sociology and Philosophy of Emancipation Philippe Corcuff

Introduction: Towards a Renewed Hermeneutics of Critical Texts Dealing with the theoretical relations between the works of Karl Marx and those of Pierre Bourdieu firstly means coming to grips with the question of ideas and their routine treatment,1 at least if one wishes to avoid the beaten tracks and therefore better control one’s own point of view. For there are habits in the discussion of ideas, whether it be in the traditional history of ideas, the history of philosophy or activist history, with 1  I thank Keith Dixon (who was active in the Marxist ranks and who collaborated with Pierre Bourdieu in Association Raisons d’Agir) for his translation of this chapter, an example of his generosity in friendship. The quotations from Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault are translated from the French editions and the pagination of the books by Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière also refers to the French editions.

P. Corcuff (*) Political Studies Institute of Lyon, Lyon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_6

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indeed some convergence between the academic universe and activist circles. Thus we can observe an evolutionist tendency which is well illustrated by the classical notion of influence. For Michel Foucault, this notion involves the “thoughtless continuities by which the discourse one intends to analyse is in fact organized beforehand” (Foucault 1969: 36). Moreover, among these “thoughtless continuities” (like “tradition,” “works,” “author,” etc.), “influence” is one of those that Foucault invites us to abandon, because it “provides a support—too magical to be properly analysed—for the facts of transmission and communication” and it refers “phenomena of resemblance and repetition to a process that looks like one of causality (but lacks rigorous limits and theoretical definition)” (ivi: 32). The evolutionist approach to ideas could reveal a twofold movement in the relations between Marx and Bourdieu: Marx influencing Bourdieu and Bourdieu developing Marx. This evolutionist logic could accentuate its normative implications in a progressive direction with the presupposition of a progression from Marx to Bourdieu. Bourdieu himself hinted at this by presenting his work as the integration/surpassing of the work of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, in a dialectical reading of Hegelian inspiration. A second major tendency in the more classical version of the history of ideas is to take an “author” and their “works” as a single block with its own coherence. This approach was also criticized by Foucault for laying down a priori “readymade syntheses” (ivi: 32).2 The Foucauldian critique consists in an invitation to be more aware of the composite nature of texts which are gathered together under the name of an author and their works. This does not mean necessarily abandoning the categories of “author” and “works” nor denying the possible existence of relative or partial coherencies: “Not to refuse them completely but to undermine their easy acceptance […] ; to define under what conditions and in view of what analyses some are indeed legitimate” (ivi: 37). Faced with these two traditional tendencies, we propose a redefined hermeneutics which does not invalidate the heuristic dimension of the most commonly employed hermeneutics but offers an alternative viewpoint. In opposition to the evolutionist approach, we envisage several figures: Bourdieu will be seen as developing some insights of Marx; we will pinpoint the shifting of some Marxian resources by sian sociology but also the retreat operated by Bourdieu from certain elements of the Marxian critique. This analysis of Marx and Bourdieu will not be seen in the light 2  See also, as a further contribution to this critique, once again in 1969, the conference entitled “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (Foucault 2001).

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of the socio-historic context of their intellectual production, as would legitimately be the case in a historical sociology of ideas, but from a present-­day perspective in the early twenty-first century. We will be relating our discussion to topical issues in order to cast some heuristic light on them and seek for answers. These present-day issues do not come out of the blue but will be examined at the crossroads between two academic disciplines: sociology (in its critical dimension)3 and political philosophy (situated within the galaxy of theories of emancipation).4 They will also be filtered by the anarchist activism, outside academia, of the author of this text. Concerning the presupposition of coherency of authors and their works, we propose on the contrary to dissociate the concepts and methods from the works from which they are extracted. This is one possible trajectory for greater intelligibility, outside the beaten tracks of academia and political activism. This will enable us to rub together a flint borrowed from Marx and a flint taken from Bourdieu and, in so doing, create, hopefully, some unusual “sparks of knowledge.” This also enables us to move on from analyses in terms of the proximity of—or tension between—Marx and Bourdieu in general and to look more attentively at convergences and tensions at a lower level. In order to do so we will therefore steer clear of systematic reconstructions in terms of “Marxism” or “Bourdieusianism.” We have chosen four fields for this exploratory and partial research. The first one concerns the methodology of the social sciences, the second the sociology of class, the third the question of praxis and the fourth the political philosophy of emancipation. This comes in the wake of previous research work on Marx (notably Corcuff 2012b) and on Bourdieu (among others, Corcuff 2003).

First Field: The Methodology of the Social Sciences Marx can be considered to have been one of the pioneers in formulating a methodological framework for the social sciences, at a time when these latter were only just emerging and had not yet become autonomous in relation to philosophy, and the logic of sociological enquiry did not yet clearly represent one of their two foundational elements alongside theoretical logic. Bourdieu was one of those who helped to stabilize the 3  On the concept of critical sociology which underlies the analyses presented in this text, see Corcuff (2012a). 4  On the political philosophy of emancipation used here, see Corcuff (2015).

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methodological framework of autonomous social sciences based on a toand-fro movement between the theoretical and empirical spheres. An unfortunately little-read text by Marx attempts to clarify the links between the theoretical and empirical components of socio-historical knowledge through the method of “thought derived from the concrete.” This text is the Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1857 (Marx 1971). The text itself and more particularly the passage entitled “The Method of Political Economy” can be read as an attempt to identify the twofold dangers of empiricism and theoreticism. It is firstly the empiricism of facts believed to emerge spontaneously outside any theoretical construction that comes under scrutiny: It would seem to be the proper thing to start with the real and concrete elements, with the actual preconditions, e.g., to start in the sphere of economy with population, which forms the basis and the subject of the whole social process of production. Closer consideration shows, however, that this is wrong. Population is an abstraction if, for instance, one disregards the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn remain empty terms if one does not know the factors on which they depend, e.g., wage-labour, capital, and so on. (ibid.)

Unanalysed concrete facts thus carry abstractions which mislead the onlooker into over-simplification. Only conceptual assistance makes it possible to translate concrete facts into the logic of scientific intelligibility. Thus, paradoxically, it is through conceptual abstraction that we can free ourselves from the false evidence of empirical abstraction. Concerning the discovery, through analysis, “of a few decisive abstract, general relations, such as division of labour, money, and value” (ibid.) Marx continues: When these separate factors were more or less clearly deduced and established, economic systems were evolved which from simple concepts, such as labour, division of labour, demand, exchange-value, advanced to categories like State, international exchange and world market. The latter is obviously the correct scientific method. (ibid.)

Concrete facts do not give up their secrets automatically. Thus, Marx adds: The concrete concept is concrete because it is a synthesis of many definitions, thus representing the unity of diverse aspects. It appears therefore in reasoning as a summing-up, a result, and not as the starting point. (ibid.)

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Thus the explanation of what might be called the method of “thought derived from the concrete”: Whereas the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete is simply the way in which thinking assimilates the concrete and reproduces it as a concrete mental category. (ibid.)

There is an echo of this in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, in a context in which the social sciences had now been fully constituted and in a process of consolidation. Firstly, a long extract from Marx’s 1857 text is reproduced in Le Métier de sociologue, co-authored with Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron (Bourdieu et  al. 1983: 193–195). Moreover, the first methodological rule given in Le Métier de sociologue could be seen as a synthetic reformulation of the analysis we have just discussed: The fact is conquered against the illusion of immediate knowledge. (ivi: 28)

For “concrete facts” do not speak for themselves, contrary to the claims of empiricism: We must not forget that the real is never on the initiative, as it can only reply if it is questioned. (ivi: 54)

Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron thus take Marx one step forward, notably by insisting on the critique of language: If common language is not […] submitted to a methodological critique, then the risk is that we will take as data objects that have in fact been pre-­ constituted in and by common language. (ivi: 37)

Moreover, to free ourselves from empiricism without abandoning the empirical, the three sociologists argue for a reformulation, beyond the Marxian lexicon, of the use of concepts. They should be seen “as tools which, when taken out of their original context, can be put to other uses” (ivi: 15). This results in “a definition of the scientific approach as a dialogue between hypothesis and experience” or the “dialectic between theory and verification” (ivi: 87). However, like Marx—although not exactly in the same form, a point to which we will return later—they insist on the primacy of the theoretical.

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However, the critique of empiricism would be incomplete without the critique of a symmetrical pitfall, that of theoreticism. Marx calls it into question with regard to Hegel: Hegel accordingly conceived the illusory idea that the real world is the result of thinking which causes its own synthesis, its own deepening and its own movement. (Marx 1971)

Thus Marx questions the approach that takes the real as “a product of the idea which evolves spontaneously and whose thinking proceeds outside and above perception and imagination,” in the name of a scientific method which makes it “the result of the assimilation and transformation of perceptions and images into concepts” (ibid.). Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron similarly warn of the dangers of “pure theorists” (1983: 23). This is the theoreticist temptation that Bourdieu will later uncover in his analysis of the Marxism of Etienne Balibar: “the claim to deduce the event from the essence, the historical given from the theoretical model” (Bourdieu 2001d: 395). Implicitly, the Marxian model of thought derived from the concrete offers the possibility of a critique of the realist fetishization of concepts, that is, the belief that concepts exist in reality, that there is a sort of merger between the concept and the real. However, the concept is not the real but rather offers a means of rendering the real intelligible, reproducing it “as a concrete mental category.” This realist fetishization of concepts, which is one of the paths leading to the dogmatization of theory, can be seen to operate in Marxists’ uses of Marx. This is at least the case for those who believe that “capitalism” and “class” actually exist, whereas they are in fact “concrete mental categories” which provide a theoretical account of the real. Bourdieu is himself explicitly critical of the risk of a realist fetishizing of concepts: this is what he calls “the realism of the intelligible” or “the reification of concepts” (Bourdieu 2001c: 297). He adopts a similar, reflexive, stance concerning his own concepts, for example, habitus, which he says “is of value perhaps above all for the false problems and false solutions it eliminates, for the questions that it makes it possible to better articulate or resolve, and the properly so-called scientific issues it reveals” (Bourdieu 1980a: 89, note 2). However, at the same time, the formulations of Marx of 1857 do seem more flexible, open and dynamic—and therefore of more heuristic value, in some ways, for present-day research in the social sciences—than those

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employed in Le Métier de sociologue, concerning the relations between the theoretical and the empirical. In several instances Marx insists that the real is to some extent a starting point in the thought derived from the concrete: “the real and concrete elements” are seen as “the actual preconditions,” or “the real point of origin, and thus the point of origin of perception and imagination” (Marx 1971). This is why “the subject, society, must always be envisaged therefore as the pre-condition of comprehension even when the theoretical method is employed” (ibid.). The starting point could therefore be seen to be the theoretical dimension, thus the expression “the theoretical method,” and the real seen as “a result,” but the link with the real is “the real point of origin.” The theoretical dimension would therefore be first in chronological order, but at the same time comes under the control of the empirical dimension that the investigations must deal with, these investigations being in their turn framed by the theory. Here we have a productive tension, both irreducible and infinite, between two poles. This is more reminiscent of the primacy granted to “antinomy” and “the balancing of contraries” which we find in the work of the anarchist adversary of Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1997: 206), than of the privilege given to the “superseding” of contradictions to be found in the Hegelian dialectic which was of course a major source of inspiration for Marx. In Le métier de sociologue there is a chronological anteriority and a logical superiority of the theoretical over the empirical, expressed in a “hierarchy of epistemological acts”: “The fact is conquered, constructed, observed” (Bourdieu et al. 1983: 81). This tends to rigidify the methodological markers in a compulsory three-phase process, whatever the characteristics of the empirical investigations or their practical circumstances, rather than accepting a permanent tension with continual risks of imbalance (either empiricist or theoreticist). The resolution of the tensions between empirical enquiry and conceptualization tends here to give precedence to theoretical control. This at least is the case in the epistemological model which Le métier de sociologue suggests can be transposed to all sociological research work. Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron most often develop and prolong Marx’s thinking, although he himself had only sketched out certain possible orientations of a methodology of the social sciences. Marx is perhaps a better methodological guide, thanks to certain formulations, and more adaptable to the variety of research work in this field.

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Second Field: The Sociology of Class The analyses of social classes in Marx’s writings vary in content, depending on when the texts were written and which texts we examine. Only Marxist reductionism could possibly postulate a unified theory of class in Marx’s work. This is much less the case in the writing of Pierre Bourdieu, but there are real shifts in his thinking. Here we will go in the opposite direction to our initial approach, from a discussion of Bourdieu in order to arrive at Marx. Once again we will be discussing a specific aspect of Bourdieu and Marx: texts from the late 1970s and early 1980s for Bourdieu, embedded in what he later called “constructivist structuralism” or “structuralist constructivism” (Bourdieu 1987: 147), and the widest read book by Marx, which Friedrich Engels contributed to, The Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848. The most routine forms of Marxism have suggested a tendentially objectivist and economistic vision of social classes; the latter existing “objectively” as they are situated in the “economic infrastructure” of society. It was notably in opposition to this reading that the so-called constructivist approaches—in the sense of the model of “social and historical construction of reality”—developed, including Bourdieu’s own work. In Bourdieu’s case we are talking about a constructivism of social objectivation, that is, the exploration of historical processes of materialization and stabilization of mechanisms and institutions through discursive and non-­ discursive practice, and not an idealist constructivism focusing solely on representations and discourse. Bourdieu began to look in this direction in the late 1970s and early 1980s, trying to escape from the burden of objectivism (in the sense that objectivity is seen as a given) in his treatment of social class, via two types of socio-historical reconstruction: 1. The importance of social classification struggles (les luttes des classements sociaux), that is, the battles waged around the definition of classes, their delimitations, their respective positions in relation to each other, and the place occupied by various individuals, which represent one of the expressions of the class struggle—in what are effectively class differences in a given society (Bourdieu 1979). This is the symbolic component of class. 2. The contribution of political representation—the action of representatives, of spokespersons, speaking for the group in the public sphere—to the existence of social groups (Bourdieu 2001a, 2001b). This is the political component of class.

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Bourdieu went on to take on board the major constructivist elements provided by the important theoretical and empirical contribution of one of his close associates at the time, Luc Boltanski, in his book entitled Les cadres. La formation d’un groupe social (1982). Bourdieu developed, in 1984, a more systematic and original approach to social class around the related notions of “probable classes” and “mobilized classes” by associating more clearly the level of classification struggles with that of political representation (Bourdieu 2001c). The expression “probable classes” refers to “groups of agents occupying similar positions who, in similar circumstances and submitted to similar conditioning, are likely to have similar dispositions and interests, and therefore to develop similar practices” (ivi: 296–297). These classes only exist potentially, outlined by the critical theorist or sociologist “on paper” on the basis of a series of indicators. Depending on the indicators that are chosen, there are several types of possible class differentiation at a given moment. For example, in La distinction (1979), Bourdieu constructed a vision of French society in the period from 1960 to 1970 taking into account both the volume of economic capital and that of cultural capital, and criticizing Marxists for their economistic emphasis on economic capital alone. And since there are always several possible class constructions at a given moment in time, there is nothing inevitable about the shift from “probable class” to “mobilized class.” This plurality and this non-necessary probability clearly set apart the Bourdieusian pair of “probable” and “mobilized” classes from the Hegel-inspired contrast between “class in itself” (objective) and “class for itself” (subjective) stressed by certain Marxists, in a voluntaristic logic which is not that of the sociologist.5 The “probable” classes are not only in competition in the social sciences: the various ways of representing what are seen to be meaningful class differentiations are also mobilized in the public sphere of our societies, where academic criteria of classification may be used by various 5  The pair “class in itself”/“class for itself” is of marginal importance in the work of Marx, and appears only in six sentences of The Poverty of Philosophy, a polemical text written against Proudhon and published in 1847: “Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.” [Marx 1955: Chapter Two-Part 5].

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categories of social protagonists—be they from the university system, professional politicians, trade unionists, journalists, etc.—but together with other, vaguer and more indeterminate, positions. Let us take two examples of the political competition between different ways of differentiating class in French society since the late 1970s: 1. Are there two main classes—wage-workers and capitalists—or three: the class of the wealthy, the class of the poor and the “immense middle class”? 2. Is French society divided into socio-economic classes (wage-earning class/capitalist class) or does it split along the lines of nationals versus foreigners? The “mobilized class” has common spokespersons, institutions and visions of the world. It is a class that is objectivated by a twofold and interlinked political and symbolic process. This is largely collective, impersonal, involuntary and unconscious. What can we say about the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels 1888) in terms of a sociology of class informed by the constructivist critique of class objectivism expressed by Bourdieu? We can see that two opposite threads are juxtaposed and intermingled here without any theoretical consistency: an objectivist thread and a constructivist one. The objectivist thread? Class dynamics appear to be carried by the economic movement of society, independently of the practices and representations of those involved But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses […] The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. (ivi: Chapter I)

What we have here is, so to speak, a mechanics of class which is essentially seen from an objective standpoint. And if class relations do seem to be constitutive of their movement, it is once again in an almost exclusively objective form:

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In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. (ibid.)

A constructivist thread? The struggle seems logically prior—in class struggle it is the struggle that makes it possible to define the classes—and chronologically for the proletariat—“with its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie” (ibid.)—in the construction of class. The unification of the class thus appears as a movement allowing a shift from local fragmentation to national linkage, that is, a move “to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes” (ibid.). This quotation suggests that we can only properly talk of “class struggle” at a certain level of national unification of the struggle. To sum up, although proletarians may factually exist in a society, there is no spontaneous construction of the proletariat as a class. And this national struggle is above all a political one in the confrontation with the modern-­ day Nation-state. In this sense “every class struggle is a political struggle” (ibid.). However, there is a significant difference between the political and symbolic construction of class in Bourdieu’s writing and the political construction of class in Marx and Engels. The construction is above all voluntaristic in the work of Marx and Engels, driven by a political will: The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: the formation of the proletariat into a class. (ivi: Chapter II)

The process of social construction is largely involuntary in Bourdieu’s view, as seen in the unforeseen effects of a variety of different wills, as well as in the influence of the non-conscious or indeed the social unconscious (habitus). We can advance the hypothesis that the mainly voluntaristic dimension of Marx and Engels is consistent with the dominant tone of the Manifesto of the Communist Party: this is an activist tone as it is, after all, a political manifesto whose primary objective is to mobilize support. In this second field Bourdieu has helped us retrospectively to clarify a text written by Marx and Engels through a tension. This has revealed a degree of convergence between the two approaches but also differences.

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Third Field: Practice, Between the Sociology of Action and Revolutionary Politics The question of practice will also constitute a point of intersection between the writing of Marx and Bourdieu, with once again differences and tensions. In the Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845, Marx’s notion of praxis was to influence his very conception of knowledge: The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the Object, actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice (Praxis), not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism—but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, differentiated from thought-­ objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. (Marx 2002, First Thesis)

The oppositions between the objective and the subjective are traditional in the philosophies of knowledge and action, and are often associated with the polar opposites of materialism and idealism. Aware of the shortcomings of both approaches, Marx tries to sidestep them. Both materialist objectivism and idealist subjectivism are seen as blind alleys. Materialist objectivism contemplates the world as if it were a motionless object. It does have the advantage of taking “sensuousness” on board but “not as human sensuous activity,” tending to eliminate any trace of subjectivity. Idealist subjectivism takes an interest in subjectivities from the standpoint of ideas. It has the advantage of developing “the active side” but in an abstract, disembodied and intellectualist manner. According to Marx, to shift away from these two poles, which are both unsatisfactory, entails examining the matter that has been shaped practically by subjectivities in a social framework, therefore in a logic of social objectivation, that is, the twofold movement of social creation of objects by subjectivities and the construction of subjectivities through creative practice. Marx calls “objective activity” these interactive social logics between subjects and objects through the movement of practice. Thus a practical materialism or an objectivating praxis emerges. This implies first and foremost a radical modification of our relationship with our knowledge of the world. Bourdieu will build on these initial insights of Marx in his own radical critique of objectivism, associated with intellectualism, in particular

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in Le sens pratique (Bourdieu 1980a). As well as Marx, he will refer to the work of the other major figures of the philosophical critique of intellectualism, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice MerleauPonty. The main take of Bourdieu on objectivist intellectualism is the idea of a spectator seeing things from above and who therefore forgets the logics and practical urgencies of what they are seeing, which is not intended as a spectacle: Objectivism constitutes the social world as a spectacle played out for an observer who adopts a “point of view” on the action. He then imports into the action the principles of his relationship with the object. He then believes that it was solely intended for knowledge and as if all the interactions can be reduced to symbolic exchanges. This is a point of view taken from the summit of the social structure where the world is seen in terms of representation—in the sense used by idealist philosophy, but also in painting and theatre. Practices are only understood as theatre roles, executions of scores or applications of plans. (Bourdieu 1980a: 87)

There is a projection onto the object of knowledge of intellectualist prejudices unaware of the “practical sense”: Intellectualism is inscribed in the fact of introducing into the object the intellectual relationship with the object, substituting for the practical relationship for practice the observer’s relationship to the object. (ivi: 58)

This approach introduces errors into the sociological knowledge of action by essentializing in fixed objects (for instance, “classes” for the Marxist sociologist or “individuals” for liberal sociologists) what is in fact processed in historically situated practices. It is as if, in order to analyse what is happening on a football field, we gave special attention to the account of a journalist who is commentating on the match, but forgetting the game itself as it is being played on the ground, which cannot be said to be a spectacle in which the players have constantly a comprehensive overview. In these two texts, both Marx and Bourdieu call into question the intellectualist tendencies of scholarly knowledge when it claims to give an account of reality impregnated with practical issues.6 6  “Resuscitating the possibles, Marx, despite his vigorous cleansing, does not entirely escape from traces of the scientific, historial and progressive religiosity, that was so characteristic of his century,” admits the heretical Marxist philosopher, Daniel Bensaïd (1990: 153).

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From this point on, Bourdieu will paradoxically re-establish a certain primacy of scholarly knowledge, in what might be called a “nostalgia for totality” (Corcuff 2012a: 176–182). A superior form of sociological knowledge, it is argued, emerges from a twofold break made possible by a “participatory objectivation”: “a break with indigenous experience and the indigenous representation of that experience” and then “through a second break, calling into question the presuppositions inherent in the position of the “objective” observer” (ibid.: 46). The Theses on Feuerbach are not tempted by this form of scientistic arrogance. Let us not forget, however, that this is one of Marx’s texts in which praxis is seen as primordial, whereas the rest of his work is often irrigated by a tension between scientism and revolutionary action, as Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2012) have shown. However, in the Theses, it is not knowledge but practice which has the final word: Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking, in practice. (Marx 2002, Second Thesis)

There is some room for knowledge as an understanding of practice, but it is of secondary importance: All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice. (ivi: Eighth Thesis)

Hence the famous lines: Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. (ivi: Eleventh Thesis)

Practice is infinitely open-ended and will not submit to the pretensions of totality to which Marx still seems attached, in other ways, in this nineteenth century so heavily impregnated with scientism. In practice, there is no final end. Thus, Merleau-Ponty noted, against Marxist dogmatisms, that “the great revolutionaries, Marx in particular, know that universal history is not to be contemplated but made.” From which he argues in favour of a “keen intelligence of events.” This is why “the authentic revolutionary, each day, faced with each new problem rediscovers what is to be done , knowing that s/he has no map and no prior knowledge of where exactly s/he is heading” (Merleau-Ponty 2000: 12).

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Final primacy of praxis aided by rational knowledge for the Marx of the Theses on Feuerbach; final primacy of scholarly knowledge informed by practice for the Bourdieu of Le sens pratique: this epistemological tension is also a social tension between the activist and the scholar. Bourdieu helps us to understand the gains in terms of knowledge that can be had from the “practical relationship with practice.” Marx, however, warns of the dangers of a scientific knowledge with such a wide grasp, insisting on its incomplete coverage of practice.

Fourth Field: The Political Philosophy of Emancipation The first two fields we have explored are situated in the mainly analytical logic of the social sciences (the analysis of what is or what has been). The third field identified the intersections and tensions between the sociology of action and the philosophy of revolutionary praxis. The fourth field opens on to political philosophy, leaving greater space for a directly normative philosophy (reflection on what should be). In Marx’s writing, the science-based critique of capitalism is clearly associated with revolutionary class struggle, with a horizon of social emancipation. Admittedly, as Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval have stressed (2012), there are tensions throughout Marx’s work between the scientific register, with scientistic temptations, and the register of emancipatory (and even self-emancipatory) praxis, with voluntaristic temptations. However, for Marx, as for many later Marxists, structural social critique and emancipation go hand in hand, although there may be differences and distortions from one text to another. It is something worth noting that, in this early twenty-first century, the links have been weakened between social critique and emancipation for a variety of reasons. In the academic field this has been caused by ultra-specialization of scholarly work, a lack of dialogue, sometimes erupting into conflict, between social sciences and philosophy, the relative withdrawal of academics from social and political debates with the exception of highly specialized expertise or a reductionist and scientistic vision of necessary scientific distancing, through the corporatist and often poorly argued (epistemologically speaking) filter of “axiological neutrality.” In society more generally this has resulted from the collapse of the communist mythology born with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 after the authoritarian and totalitarian experiences of the twentieth century, the massive conversion of social democrats to economic

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neo-­liberalism, the blurring of the ideological and political markers defining the “left” and the “right,” as well as the rise in importance of ultra conservative or even “post-fascist” groups operating between social critique, discrimination and nationalism.7 This is why it has become more important today to recreate the links more clearly, in scholarly work as well as in socio-political debate, between structural social critique and emancipation.8 The linkage between emancipation and social critique is often present in Marx’s writing although the characteristics of that emancipation are hardly developed. The General Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association, set up in 1864, which were written by Marx himself, give some indications. Social emancipation is seen here as self-emancipation: “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves,” on the basis of equality, meaning “equal rights and duties” within a perspective of “the abolition of all class rule” (Marx 1864). Emancipation from what? Three forms of servitude are designated: “social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence,” of which “the economical subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor […] lies at the bottom.” The ethical dimension is humanist as emancipation addresses “all men, without regard to color, creed, or nationality” (ibid.). This emancipation will be internationalist, supposing “a fraternal bond of union between the working classes of different countries.” Within the General Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association, emancipation is seen essentially as collective in nature. However, a series of texts by Marx stress that the aim is to create the social conditions for an emancipation of humans’ individuality.9 The individualist component of Marx’s writing has most often been side-lined by Marxist readings, thus 7  On the tendency to dissociate structural social critique and emancipation in the early twenty-first century, facilitating the development of “post-fascist” uses of hypercritical conspiracy theories which provide justifications for xenophobic, sexist and homophobic discrimination in a nationalist theoretical framework, see my study of the French case (Corcuff 2021). 8  With a view to re-associating structural social critique and emancipation, see the political philosophy of Miguel Abensour (1939–2017), now sadly no longer with us; cf. the interesting synthesis provided by Manuel Cervera-Marzal (2013). See also the sociological work of Luc Boltanski (2009) and, on the crossroads between sociology and political philosophy, our own exploration of these issues (Corcuff 2012a). 9  From his youthful to his late writing, we provide a sample illustrating Marx’s major preoccupation with individuality in the second part of our Marx XXIe siècle, entitled “From the wounded individual to the “total man”” (Corcuff 2012b: 59–98).

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contributing to the hegemony of a “collectivist software” in the working-­ class and socialist movement (Corcuff 2006, 2014). Thus, in The German Ideology, co-authored with Engels in 1845–1846, communism, rapidly sketched by the authors, takes on the colours of the liberation of polyphonic individualities: in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. (Marx and Engels 1968: Part I-A)

In another text, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, individual and collective emancipation go together in the form of an association, the former being the pre-condition for the latter: In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. (Marx and Engels 1888: Chapter II)

The question of emancipation is of less importance in Bourdieu’s critical sociology than in Marx. It is in this sense that the tension between the sociological critique of Bourdieu and the philosophy of emancipation in the writing of Jacques Rancière provides an interesting angle to observe the present-day dislocation between social critique and emancipation (see Corcuff 2012a: chapters 1 and 2). Emancipation does not, however, altogether disappear from the analysis of Bourdieu, who remains a man of the Enlightenment, but it does remain peripheral in the successive formulations of his theoretical approach. It emerges mainly in a form inspired by Baruch Spinoza: the acquisition of a relative freedom through the understanding of social determinisms. This emancipation has both an individual and a collective dimension. An individual level, for instance, in the preface to Le sens pratique: Sociology […] offers a possibility, perhaps the only one, of contributing, if only through the awareness of determinations, to the construction of something like a subject, otherwise abandoned to the forces of the world. (Bourdieu 1980a: 41)

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A collective level, for instance, in the post-scriptum to La misère du monde: What the social world has done can, armed with this knowledge, be undone. (Bourdieu Ed. 1993: 944)

This led him to trace, at one point in time, a “rational utopianism capable of making use of the knowledge of the probable in order to hasten the emergence of the possible” (Bourdieu 1980b: 78). Here we have an interesting contribution to an emancipatory logic, but which has its limitations, and cannot be given the main role in the space of emancipatory practices as Bourdieu tends to suggest. In this respect, certain criticisms of Jacques Rancière (1983: 239–288), if we tone down their unilateral character, are on target. For this form of emancipation is once again too much under the supervision of the scholar, modern-day equivalent of Plato’s philosopher-king, who appears as an obstacle to self-­ emancipation. It is mainly scholarly resources that are emphasized by Bourdieu in the process of emancipation. The move from Marx to Bourdieu thus includes both progress and regression in terms of emancipation, even if Marx’s scientistic leanings make him ambivalent in terms of self-emancipation for Jacques Rancière (ivi: 87–184), but also clearly more reluctant than Bourdieu to give precedence to scholarly knowledge. It might be argued that the incomplete journey we have embarked on, through zones of the continent Marx and other zones of the continent Bourdieu, could enrich indirectly our sociological and political imagination here and now. That at least is our hope.

References Bensaïd, Daniel. 1990. Walter Benjamin. Sentinelle messianique. Á la gauche du possible. Paris: Plon. Boltanski, Luc. 1982. Les cadres. La formation d’un groupe social. Paris: Minuit. English Edition: Boltanski, Luc. 1987. The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society. Trans. A. Goldhammer. Cambridge–Paris: Cambridge University Press and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. ———. 2009. De la critique. Précis de sociologie de l’émancipation. Paris: Gallimard. English Edition: 2011. On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation. Trans. G. Elliott. Oxford: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Minuit. English Edition: Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987. Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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———. 1980a. Le sens pratique. Paris: Minuit. English Edition: Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1980b. Comment libérer les intellectuels libres ? [Interview with D. Eribon published in May 1980]. In Questions de sociologies. Paris: Minuit: 67–78. English Edition: Bourdieu, Pierre. 1994. How Can “Free-Floating Intellectuals” Be Set Free?. In Sociology in Question. Trans. R. Nice. London: SAGE. ———. 1987. Espace social et pouvoir symbolique [Conference at the University of San Diego in March 1986]. In Choses dites. Paris: Minuit: 147–166. English Edition: Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. Social space and symbolic power. In In Other Words: Essays toward a Reflective Sociology. Trans. M. Adamson. Standford: Standford University Press. ———. Ed. 1993. La misère du monde. Paris: Seuil. English Edition: Bourdieu, Pierre and al. 2000. Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Trans. P.  Parkhurst Ferguson and Others. Standford: Standford University Press. ———. 2001a [1981]. La représentation politique. In Langage et pouvoir symbolique. Paris: Seuil: 213–258. English Edition: Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field. In Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. G.  Raymond and M.  Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2001b [1984]. La délégation et le fétichisme politique. In Langage et pouvoir symbolique. Paris: Seuil: 259–279. English Edition: Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Delegation and Political Fetishism. In Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. G.  Raymond and M.  Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2001c [1984]. Espace social et genes des “classes”. In Langage et pouvoir symbolique. Paris: Seuil: 293–323. English Edition: Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Social Space and the Genesis of “Classes”. In Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. G.  Raymond and M.  Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2001d [1975]. Le discours d’importance. Quelques remarques critiques sur “Quelques remarques critiques” à propos de “Lire Le Capital”. In Langage et pouvoir symbolique. Paris: Seuil: 379–396. Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1983 [1968]. Le métier de sociologue. Préalables épistémologiques. Paris: EHESS/ Mouton (4th ed.). English Edition: Bourdieu, Pierre, Chamboredon, Jean-­ Claude and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1991. The craft of sociology: Epistemological preliminaries. Trans. R. Nice. Berlin: De Gruyter. Cervera-Marzal, Manuel. 2013. Miguel Abensour, critique de la domination, pensée de l’émancipation. Paris: Sens & Tonka. Corcuff, Philippe. 2003. Bourdieu autrement. Fragilités d’un sociologue de combat. Paris: Textuel.

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———. 2006. Individualité et contradictions du néocapitalisme. Sociologies. https://doi.org/10.4000/sociologies.462. English Edition: Corcuff, Philippe. 2021. Individuality and the Contradictions of Neocapitalism. In V.  Stanković Pejnović. Ed. Beyond Neoliberalism and Capitalism. Belgrade: Institute for Political Studies. https://www.academia.edu/45676553/. ———. 2012a. Où est passée la critique sociale ? Penser le global au croisement des savoirs. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2012b. Marx XXIe siècle. Textes commentés. Paris: Textuel. ———. 2014. Le Marx hérétique de Michel Henry: fulgurances et écueils d’une lecture philosophique. Actuel Marx 55: 132–143. https://doi.org/10.3917/ amx.055.0132. ———. 2015. Enjeux libertaires pour le XXIe siècle par un anarchiste néophyte. Paris: Éditions du Monde libertaire. ———. 2021. La grande confusion. Comment l’extrême droite gagne la bataille des idées. Paris: Textuel. Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. 2012. Marx, prénom : Karl. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel. 1969. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. English Edition: Foucault, Michel. 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge. ———. 2001. Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur? [Lecture of 1969]. In Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975. Paris: Gallimard: 817–849. English Edition: Foucault, Michel. 1998. What Is an Author? In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, trans. R. Hurlet and others. New York: The New York Press. Marx, Karl. 1864. General Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association. Marxists.org Website. Accessed 21 November 2021. https://www.marxists. org/history/international/iwma/documents/1864/rules.htm. ———. 1955 [1847]. The Poverty of Philosophy. Translated by Institute of Marxism Leninism. Marxists.org Website. Accessed 20 November 2021. https://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-­philosophy/index.htm. ———. 1971 [1857]. Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S.W. Ryazanskaya. Marxists.org Website. Accessed 20 November 2021. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/ critique-­pol-­economy/appx1.htm. ———. 2002 [1845]. Theses On Feuerbach. Translated by C. Smith. Marxists.org Website. Accessed 20 November 2021. https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1845/theses/index.htm. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. 1888 [1848]. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Translated by S. Moore, in collaboration with F. Engels. Marxists.org Website. Accessed 20 November 2021. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1848/communist-­manifesto/index.htm.

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———. 1968 [1856–1846]. The German Ideology. Translated by T.  Delaney, B.  Schwartz and B.  Baggins. Marxists.org Website. Accessed 20 November 2021. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-­ ideology/ch01.htm. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2000 [1955]. Les aventures de la dialectique. Paris: Gallimard. English Edition: Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1973. Adventures of the Dialectic. Trans. J. Bien. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. 1997 [1866]. Théorie de la propriété. Paris: L’Harmattan. Rancière, Jacques. 1983. [2004]. Le philosophe et ses pauvres. Paris: Fayard. (English Edition: Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Philosopher and His Poor. Trans. J. Drury, C. Oster and Parker). Durham: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Bourdieu on the State: Beyond Marx? David L. Swartz

Pierre Bourdieu theorized the modern State relatively late in his highly productive career in which he addressed a very broad range of topics. His battery of concepts and methods for sociological analysis reflect an extensive array of influences that he knitted together in remarkably original ways. His thinking on the State is no exception. This chapter compares Bourdieu to Karl Marx in thinking about the State.

Marx in the Background Bourdieu does not work within just one of the classical sociological traditions but draws selectively and dialectically across the three main ones: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, and in the case of the State, Norbert Elias as well. Indeed, Bourdieu eschews association with any one of the three classical theorists; he pursues a sort of “dialectical eclecticism” in which he critically juxtaposes Marx, Weber, and Durkheim by highlighting what he views as their respective contributions and limitations for the study of symbolic power (Bourdieu 1977, 1991; Bourdieu and

D. L. Swartz (*) Boston University, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_7

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Passeron 1977: 4–5). Regarding symbolic systems, Bourdieu draws from Durkheim the idea that any social order requires logical and moral conformity. From Marx comes the ideas that social order is conflictual and serves principally dominant groups (Bourdieu 2014: 145). And from Weber comes the idea that successful domination requires legitimation (Bourdieu 2014: 173). Regarding the State in particular, Bourdieu (2014: 201) sees all three—Marx, Durkheim and Weber—sharing the view that there has been a broad historical process in most societies—certainly in modern ones—of increasing differentiation into separate autonomous spheres. Whether it is Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation, Durkheim on the division of labour, or Weber on the processes of rationalization, Bourdieu (2014: 70–71) suggests that all three describe general processes that ­contribute to a global history of the State. But they also offer distinctive contributions to understanding the modern State. Bourdieu (1990: 36) writes: Against the illusion of the ‘state as arbitrator’ [our translation], Marx constructed the notion of the state as an instrument of domination. But, against the disenchantment effected by the Marxist critique, you have to ask, with Weber, how the state, being what it is, manages to impose the recognition of its domination and whether it isn’t necessary to include in the model that against which you constructed the model, namely the spontaneous representation of the state as legitimate. (See also Bourdieu 2014: 149)

This broad synthesizing method has not been fully appreciated by certain critics of Bourdieu’s work. Some early British and American interpretations of Bourdieu wrongly identify him as a Marxist (notably, Inglis 1979), but subsequent more in-depth analyses rightfully recognize the relatively stronger influence of Durkheim and, especially, Weber (Brubaker 1985; DiMaggio 1979; Swartz 1997, 2013). These critics notwithstanding, Bourdieu clearly appropriates a number of key themes from Marx, which I identify below. Honneth (1986: 55) and Garnham and Williams (1980: 129) see a significant Marxist lineage in Bourdieu’s emphasis on the role of class struggle in shaping contemporary culture. But Bourdieu’s concept of class is hardly Marxist (Joppke 1986; Weininger 2005); his emphasis on struggle stems more from an anthropological premise that a search for distinction constitutes a fundamental dynamic of social identity than it does from dynamics specific to capitalism. Marxist critics (e.g. Burawoy and Von Holdt 2012) point out in particular the Durkheimian

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lineage. And some efforts to classify Bourdieu as Marxist reflect more the political strategy of assigning stigmatizing labels than serious scholarly undertakings to identify the intellectual influences on Bourdieu’s work. One such example is Ferry and Renault (1990) who classify Bourdieu as a May 68 thinker; another is Alexander’s (1995) attempt to marginalize Bourdieu’s influence in the sociology of culture in order to legitimate Alexander’s own “cultural sociology.”1 Bourdieu (1990: 3–33) himself resisted being classified within any single intellectual tradition, especially Marxism. For at least three reasons. First, in his view such classifications serve more like stigmatizing labels designed to differentiate insiders from outsiders than helpful theoretical clarifications.2 Clearly calling one a Marxist in the United States today marginalizes their work irrespective of its quality. Second, such classifications reflect a scholastic mode of thinking—a preoccupation with correct categorizations—rather than a research orientation aiming to come to grips with empirical realities. A third reason, and one Bourdieu does not mention, is that resisting theoretical self-identification can be a strategy of intellectual distinction, whereby the individual highlights the originality of their own position by downplaying the extent and significance of their intellectual borrowings. Intellectual debts are downplayed or passed over in silence to emphasize originality! Though Bourdieu is not a Marxist, many key ideas of Marx resonate in Bourdieu’s sociology.3 On the State (2014) assembles Pierre Bourdieu’s 1990–1991 Collège de France lectures that offer the most comprehensive collection of his reflections on the nature of the modern State. Weber is by far the most 1  See (Wacquant 2001) and (Mauger 2012) for devastating critiques of Alexander’s polemical enterprise. Mauger (2012: 39) argues that Bourdieu can no more be classified as a Marxist, a Weberian, or a Durkheimian, since he draws significantly from all three. Nonetheless, we are of the view that in terms of conceptualizing the State Bourdieu draws more substantially from Weber without being a Weberian. 2  Bourdieu (1990: 27) notes that labeling one a Marxist, a Weberian, or a Durkheimian, is “almost always with a polemical, classificatory intention.” To say “‘Bourdieu, basically, is a Durkheimian.’ From the point of view of the speaker, this is performative; it means: he isn’t a Marxist, and that’s bad. Or else ‘Bourdieu is a Marxist,’ and that is bad. It’s almost always a way of reducing or destroying, you.” Mauger (2012: 25) perceptively notes that this is similar for the “Bourdieusian” label today! 3  See Mauger (2012: 26) and Bourdieu (1990: 3–7) for testimony by Bourdieu that he read seriously the writings of Marx when a student at the École Normale Supérieure as well as their structuralist rendering by Louis Althusser but did not join or affiliate with the French Communist Party as many of his peers did.

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frequently referenced followed by Durkheim, Elias, and then Marx, though in the English translation there are separate entries for “Marxism,” the “Marxist tradition,” and “Marxists.” One does not find in these lectures, or elsewhere in Bourdieu’s writings, a sustained and systematic discussion of Marx’s view of the State or of the social order more generally. Fewer than two pages are devoted to a brief section labelled “The Marxist tradition.” There are just four references to Engels, and his famous paper “The Origins of Family, Private Property, and the State” is not discussed. In The State Nobility, Bourdieu’s (1996) other book where the State receives consideration, there are only four references to Marx and Marxism and most of these have nothing to do with the State. By contrast, Bourdieu (1987) does give more conceptual attention to portions of Weber’s work, in particular his sociology of religion. In general, one finds passing allusions to Marx, brief remarks, largely critical, an occasional quote (often without textual reference), but no systematic and sustained discussion.4 Nor do important heirs and elaborators of Marx’s thinking receive more than passing attention. On the State has only four references to Antonio Gramsci (1971) none of which really engage his thinking. Nicos Poulantzas is referenced only twice. Bourdieu (2014: 77–83) does offer some discussion of two of Perry Anderson’s works, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974b) and Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974a), and does discuss briefly Barrington Moore’s (1966) The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which are situated within the Marxist tradition. Most of the Marxist-informed analyses cited in the lectures are categorized as structural Marxists who are centrally preoccupied with the degree of autonomy of the State relative to civil society—the dominant classes in particular—and with the legacy of the French Revolution for understanding the origins of modern capitalist societies, such as England and Japan. As grouped, they draw sharp criticism from Bourdieu, as we point out below. That said, Marx stirs in the background of Bourdieu’s thinking often as the straw man for Bourdieu to sharpen his own emphasis on the symbolic dimension of State power.

4  By contrast, in an earlier work, The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu 1990), that elaborates Bourdieu’s theory or practice, Marx is cited more than Durkheim or Weber.

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Marx’s View of the State As Ralph Miliband (1973: 128) points out, “Marx himself never attempted to set out a comprehensive and systematic theory of the State,” though he did entertain a long-term project of doing so.5 But in review of all of the relevant texts, Miliband concludes that two general perspectives emerge from Marx’s writings. The “primary view” is expressed in the famous formulation of the Communist Manifesto of the Communist Party: “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Moreover, political power is “merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another” (quoted in Miliband 1973). Here Marx and Engels portray the State as class based and as a centre for coordination and control of capitalist class property interests. This is an instrumental view of State function. It is also a unitary view of State action. A “secondary view” is to be found in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” There, Marx depicts the State as being relatively independent of all social classes and the dominant force in society, the extreme case of this being Louis Bonaparte’s authoritarian personal rule, its bureaucratic despotism, or Bonapartism. Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état created an executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million, this appalling parasitic body which enmeshed the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores. (Quoted in Miliband 1973: 136)

But the Bonapartiste State nonetheless remained the protector of the dominant class as Marx noted: And yet the state power is not suspended in mid-air. Bonaparte represents a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-­ holding peasants. (Quoted in Miliband 1973: 137)

5  Burawoy (Burawoy and Von Holdt 2012: 41) notes in passing that the State is undertheorized by Marx even though it plays a key role in understanding the relations of the working class to the capitalist class, most notably in the numerous failures by the working class to mount a successful revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system.

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Much has been made of the secondary view among certain Marxist scholars. It provoked sharp debate that pitted those (e.g. Ralph Miliband) who saw Marx taking an instrumental view of class control of the State versus those (e.g. Nicos Poulantzas) who stressed more the structural dependency of the State largely for financial reasons on the bourgeoisie. Bourdieu did not participate in that debate. His writing on the State would come years later. But in retrospect Bourdieu dismisses that debate as fundamentally flawed as both sides are wedded to the idea of class rule of the State, the only difference being in the modality of class rule. He (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 113) refers to them as “armchair Marxists,” “those materialists without materials,” such as Nicos Poulantzas (1973) and Theda Skocpol (1979), who engage in “scholastic” debate over the relative autonomy or dependence of the State on the dominant classes. Whether stressing an instrumental or structural view of State power, both sides tend to think of the State as “a well-defined, clearly bounded and unitary reality which stands in a relation of externality with outside forces that are themselves clearly identified and defined” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 111). By contrast, Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 111) says that what we encounter, concretely, is an ensemble of administrative or bureaucratic fields (they often take the empirical form of commissions, bureaus, and boards) within which agents and categories of agents, governmental and nongovernmental, struggle over this peculiar form of authority consisting of the power to rule via legislation, regulations.

Rather than speculating on dependency or autonomy one needs to “examine the historical genesis of a policy, how this happened, how a regulation, a decision or a measure was arrived at, etc.” (Bourdieu 2014: 112). One cannot give a once-and-for-all answer to the question.

State Development and Ideology in Historical Materialism The central argument of Marx is that social orders are best understood in terms of their mode of production, the economic base of society, of which there are two key features: the ongoing increase in the forces of production, and the conflicting social class relations that pit those profiting from their control over the means of production and the surplus thus generated

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versus those who simply labour in the productive process. All politics, law, religion, cultural, and institutions like the State emerge out of that fundamental conflict between those who own the means of production and those who do not. The State, in other words, forms part of the superstructure of society. Of key concern to Marx is the movement of history as the forces of production increase, and the social relations of production need to adjust to the new realities of productivity. Engels argues, in the few passages in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State where he addresses this issue, that the State emerged out of class conflict over economic interests. The State emerged out of civil society to moderate class conflict. It shifted the organization of social affiliation from blood line to territory and developed the coercive forces (army and police), economic resources (through taxation and public debt), and a corps of officials that stand above civil society. The State develops first from the need to moderate class antagonisms but then becomes the instrument of the dominant group; it becomes a “machine for the oppression of one class by another.” Out of this dynamic of class struggle over periods of history and civilizations eventually emerges capitalist society in which Marx believes that the working class will ultimately triumph over the capitalist class and bring to a final resolution a full socialization of the forces of production that private property never permitted. The State is a key institutional force in this historical struggle, first as a formidable obstacle to working-class mobilization and then as a working-class instrument in making the transition to a socialized organization of the economy. Once the fetters of private appropriation of the productive forces and their surplus are broken, the traditional function of the State will no longer be needed and will wither away in the new communist society. The working class, however, faces formidable obstacles in its effort to enact this historical outcome, most notably from the State that protects disproportionally the interests of the capitalist class against the working class. The State does this by deploying the means of violence against working-­class mobilization, by generating legal measures to protect private property interests, and by producing an ideology to justify all of this in the name of the common interest. Marx clearly saw ideology as a forceful means by which the capitalist State imposed dominant class ideas onto subordinate groups. And Marx saw his historical materialism as an alternative way for the working class to view the real functions of the State and to mobilize in opposition accordingly. However, Marx did not explore

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extensively just how this ideology is imposed. In this famous passage often quoted from The German Ideology, Marx and Engels (Tucker 1978: 172) point to class control over the means of intellectual production: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time of the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. (Quoted from Tucker 1978: 172)

Yet, just how ruling ideas make their way into the everyday practices and understandings of workings received little attention from Marx. Material control over the production and dissemination of ideas needed to be fleshed out. He was clearly aware that workers did not always and spontaneously respond to their conditions of exploitation or to the historical materialist explanation of them. In The Poverty of Philosophy Marx (see Tucker 1978: 218) noted that class-in-itself does not always translate into class-for-itself. In other words, workers sharing common conditions of exploitation do not always see their common condition and mobilize accordingly. There is a problem of false consciousness. Marx, of course, argued that the transition to socialism required a certain level of productive forces, but he was also centrally concerned with working-class consciousness and mobilization. Indeed, why in the most affluent centres of capitalist development did workers not rise up successfully to bring on the transition to socialism? The problem of working-class consciousness, or false consciousness, has been a gnawing problem for Marxists since Marx. Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) view of hegemony is perhaps one of the must fruitful contributions in Marxist thinking to address this issue. And it is to this question that Bourdieu’s view of the state offers a provocative challenge to Marxist thought.

Bourdieu’s View of the State Though later in his conceptual development, Bourdieu’s view of the modern State follows themes present in much of his earlier work: the importance of symbolic power, the concentration of different types of capital, the struggle over those capitals in fields, and the interest in disinterested

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pursuits.6 Bourdieu conceptualizes the modern State as an elaboration of Weber’s classic and widely used institutional definition of the State as holding the monopoly of physical violence over a specific territory. Bourdieu (1994: 3) defines the State as that institution that “successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence over a definite territory and over the totality of the corresponding population (emphasis added).” This definition points to Bourdieu’s understanding of power, one clearly influenced by Weber and Elias in that power must be legitimated in order to be exercised in any enduring and effective way. An emphasis, Bourdieu argues, is insufficiently grasped by Marx’s view of ideology. Bourdieu’s analysis of the State, therefore, focuses on the symbolic dimension of the State, but he understands that in terms of positions, interests, beliefs, and strategies of agents in fields. The State is also a field of ideological production. Bourdieu (1994: 16) speaks of the “effect of the universality” as the “symbolic dimension of the effect of the State.” This results from the interests and strategies of civil servants producing a “performative discourse” that both legitimates and constitutes the State as the guardian of the public interests and therefore the wielder of considerable symbolic power in the struggle to dominate the social order. Thus, appeals to civic-mindedness, public order and the public good are seen as flowing from the interests and strategies of agents of the State as they struggle to enhance the administrative reach of their governing agencies. This illustrates Bourdieu’s way of thinking about ideology by focusing on the producers of ideology and their field positions and interests. Their most immediate ideological interests do not trace back to location in the social relations of production (as theorized in Marxism) but to location in the social relations of symbolic production (Bourdieu 1994). Hence, the State becomes a field of ideological production and develops relative autonomy from both civil society and the economy; the actions of State actors need to be understood primarily in terms of their positions and capital holdings and strategies within the array of bureaucratic fields Bourdieu considers as the State. This relative autonomy theme shares some similarity to the “second view” of the State mentioned above. The theme was made popular in France by Louis Althusser (1977). As a young scholar at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Bourdieu was influenced by Althusser’s teaching as well as the 6

 See Swartz (2013: chap. 5) for a more complete analysis of Bourdieu’s view of the State.

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tremendous influence of Althusserian Marxism in France during the 1960s and 1970s. However, Bourdieu sharply criticized the structural Marxism elaborated by many followers of Althusser.7 Bourdieu took to task Althusserian structuralism for lacking an adequate theory of agency. He rejects the implication that agents are merely acting out the logic of structures (Bourdieu 1990: 20; 2014: 96). Bourdieu wants a view of action in which social agents are shaped by their historical structures (their habitus) but are not totally dependent on them. It is the intersection of habitus and structures (fields) that generates practices. But the conceptual language of “relative autonomy” of the State nonetheless illustrates some Althusserian influence.8 Thus, Bourdieu offers an expansive view of the State power, similar to Michel Foucault (2008) in this respect, and to Althusser’s (1977) idea of “ideological State apparati” that shapes our most fundamental everyday ways of thinking and ordering our lives. But in comparison to Foucault, Bourdieu still insists on the concentration of State power within certain fields of struggle. It is a diffused power but also a concentrated one. Relative to Althusser, Bourdieu rejects the Althusserian conceptual language of “apparati” arguing that they are too static and scholastic in orientation. Bourdieu sees his language of fields of struggle as more dynamic and open to a broader array of possible historical forces that can come into play in any given period.9 The concept of field invites empirical investigation rather than conceptual foreclosure as the Althusserian language suggests. In the Marxist tradition, this emphasis on the symbolic power of the

 See the scathing criticism that Bourdieu (1975) fires at the Althusserians.  Batou and Keucheyan (2014) come to this conclusion as well. Though Bourdieu’s idea of the relative autonomy of fields bears the imprint of Althusser’s thought, the idea of relative autonomy can also be found in Weber’s concept of spheres from which Bourdieu elaborates more directly his concept of field. 9  As arenas of struggle, the concept of fields is more open to resistance to the dominant powers than Althusser’s concept of “ideological status apparatus” suggests. Moreover, Bourdieu sees his concept of field to be more attentive to historical variation. He (Bourdieu 1990: 88) stresses that “as a game structured in a loose and weakly formalized fashion, a field is not an apparatus obeying the quasi-mechanical logic of a discipline capable of converting all action into mere execution.” But “under certain historical conditions, which must be examined empirically, Bourdieu (1992: 102) [admits that] a field may start to function as an apparatus.” In Bourdieu’s thinking, certain dictatorial regimes can take on apparatus-like characteristics. 7 8

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State comes closest to Gramsci’s (1971) view of hegemony.10 A view not lost on an astute Marxist thinker like Burawoy (Burawoy and Von Holdt 2012: 51–67). Indeed, both hegemony and symbolic power serve to answer the same question: why do subordinate groups not rise up and contest their subordinate positions within the social order?

Bourdieu’s “Genetic History” of Modern States In the 1989–1991 Collège de France lectures, Bourdieu (2014) offers a “genetic history” of modern States that stands in sharp contrast to Marx’s understanding of modern State development. It is a social history of the State emerging as a field of conflict among various contenders for power to legitimate rule over a given territory and that privileges the contingent and arbitrary nature of its institutional origins rather than functional necessity or some unfolding historical logic as Bourdieu finds in Marxism. In the lectures, Bourdieu reviews a considerable body of theoretical writings and historical investigations relative to modern State formation. He devotes particular attention to the models of Max Weber (1978), Norbert Elias (1982), Charles Tilly (1992), and Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer (1985) as he formulates his own model. But no systematic attention is given to the argument by Engels. In a 1993 paper, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Bourdieu (1994: 4) 10  This chapter will not address the important comparison to be made between Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power and violence and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Burawoy (Burawoy and Von Holdt 2012: 51–67) notes a number of common themes in their work that are not pursued by Bourdieu, such as the importance of class struggle, their common criticisms of positivism and determinism, and the importance accorded to culture. Even Gramsci’s key notion of “hegemony,” despite its clear overlap with Bourdieu’s focus on symbolic domination and violence, receives little attention from Bourdieu. Bourdieu occasionally makes sharply critical references to Gramsci, but he appears to have in mind more the concept of “organic intellectuals” than the idea of hegemony. Bourdieu is largely dismissive of the idea of organic intellectuals, categorizing it as but a variation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea of the “fellow traveler” of the French Communist Party [see (Swartz 2013: 169–170) on this]. That said, Bourdieu tends to depict his emphasis on the struggle for symbolic power as more dynamic than the concept of hegemony. But in other parts of his work, Bourdieu stresses the omnipresence of the State monopoly over symbolic classifications that is very difficult to break through just as the pervasiveness of hegemony is difficult to undercut. As Batou and Keucheyan (2014) suggest, there was probably good intellectual field reasons for Bourdieu not engaging seriously Gramsci. During the 1960s and 1970s, Gramsci was largely being discussed by the Althusserian camp of French intellectuals, and Bourdieu was clearly hostile to the philosophical style of structural Marxism they propagated.

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proposes a “model of the emergence of the State.” The modern State emerges from the culmination of a process of concentration of different species of capital: capital of physical force or instruments of coercion (army, police), economic capital, cultural capital or (better) informational capital, and symbolic capital. It is this concentration as such which constitutes the state as the holder of a sort of metacapital granting power over other species of capital and over their holders.

In describing the logic of modern State development, Bourdieu sees progressive concentrations of physical capital (physical coercion), economic capital, informational (or cultural) capital, and symbolic capital. From these concentrations emerges statist capital, a special type of capital, a kind of metacapital that “enables the State to exercise power over the different fields and over the different particular species of capital, and especially over the rates of conversion between them (and thereby over the relations of force between their respective holders)” (Bourdieu 1994: 4). Statist capital represents an emergent metacapital, a regulatory power over the field of power and the broader society. It is State authority. Thus, Bourdieu follows Weber and Elias in conceptualizing the modern State as fundamentally concerned with monopolizing the means of violence over a particular territory and corresponding population. This stance overlaps to some extent with Marx’s view of State origins: the need to control the violence generated by private appropriation of the means of production. But Bourdieu extends the monopolizing function to the means of symbolic violence, an emphasis Bourdieu sees as distinct from that of Weber and Elias, as well as that of Marx. Mobilization of forces of order (warriors, army, police) also requires justification, building solidarity, and obtaining social recognition, which in Bourdieu’s view validates his emphasis on the importance of legitimation as symbolic power and capital. The State emerges as there develops a specialized corps (e.g. police, army) of agents who wield violence. The concentration of physical capital in the hands of a few is paralleled by the concentration of economic capital through taxation. Bourdieu (1998b) sees these processes as occurring simultaneously or “dialectically” rather than sequentially. They are “interdependent.” By contrast, Marx focuses on the rise of private property as the first causal force. Bourdieu stresses how the processes of unification of

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a territory and people through a concentration of the means of violence and through a national economic market are paralleled by a concentration of “symbolic capital” (i.e., the authority to exercise symbolic power). The processes of assembling police, military, and economic resources become operative only as they obtain social recognition and hence legitimacy. Taxation, for example, which must develop to pay for armed forces, raises the issue of legitimation. Indeed, the thrust of Bourdieu’s (1994: 4–8) argument suggests that in order for the State to monopolize physical violence it must have already captured considerable symbolic capital, that is, considerable legitimacy in order to do that. The modern bureaucratic State emerges initially out of the transition from medieval family dynasties to royal households and to the emergence of legal and administrative authorities that represent independent fields of conflict with their own specific forms of power (capitals) (Bourdieu 2005: 34–48). The emergence and consolidation of power by legal authorities are key to this process in which jurists play a leading role (Bourdieu 1994; 2004, 43–48). Clerks and jurists attached to the dynastic State create a social space for themselves through their writings laying claim to authoritative nomination and classification (Bourdieu 1994b). Ideas such as sovereignty and kingship eventually come to be understood as something above and beyond the person of the king (Bourdieu 2005). The problems of hereditary succession, palace wars, and so on lead to the development of forms of authority independent of kinship and the royal household. This is the beginning of the “impersonal” character of bureaucracy. Bourdieu (2005: 48–51) describes this process of “progressive dissociation” of dynastic authority. Bureaucratic authority occurs as a differentiation process through the increasing creation of new links of delegation of authority and responsibility. Here he elaborates directly from Elias. As this occurs the locus of power shifts from the person to that of the field. This lengthening of the chain of authorities and responsibilities creates a “veritable public order.” Each link becomes a centre of relatively autonomous power, or a new power field. There is a shift from power vested in persons to power vested in positions and fields. The State then becomes that metafield that attempts to regulate all the other emergent fields.

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Origins of the State Nobility and Ideology of Public Service A State nobility emerges with the development of the modern State (Bourdieu 1996: 379). The rise of the State is connected to the ascent of a corps of civil servants. The ascent of the State nobility is also linked to the emergence of public educational institutions and particularly to the development of an elite track within French public education leading to top positions within the State. Bourdieu thus sees the origins of the modern State rooted in a gradual shift in type of mode of succession, from one founded on hereditary and bloodline to one founded on individual merit (education). The transition from the dynasty to the modern State is also a change from a family to an education mode of reproduction (Bourdieu 2005: 40). Bourdieu also emphasizes the ideological dimension of the rise of the modern State. The ascent of the modern State nobility is described in terms of the transformation of the culture of the old aristocracy of “service to the king” to the new ideology of “public service” (Bourdieu 1996: 379). With the State nobility appears a disinterested ideology toward universal ends. The State nobility is a new form of nobility with a new form of ideology (“sociodocy,” to use Weber’s term) to justify its privileged existence, that of public service. Thus, Bourdieu describes the cultural and social production of modern French administrative elites, the modern French technocracy, with the historical analogy in mind of the production of the aristocracy under the Old Regime. The technocratic elite (members of the grands corps emanating from École Polytechnique and, especially, École Nationale d’Administration are the highest expressions) are the contemporary structural and functional equivalents of the old aristocratic nobility.

Field of Power and the State Bourdieu’s conception of the State is linked to his concept of the field of power, which represents the upper reaches of the social class structure where individuals and groups bring considerable amounts of various kinds of capital into their struggles for distinction and power. This contrasts with Marx’s capitalist class centred on ownership of the means of production. Struggles within the field of power are polarized between holders of economic capital and cultural capital. The State, however, is an arena of

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struggle for statist capital, which is power over other types of capital, including economic capital and cultural capital, over their ratio of exchange and their reproduction (Bourdieu 1994: 4). The State functions as a kind of metafield, with statist capital representing the capacity to regulate relations among other types of capital. Thus, compared to Marx and Engels, the State for Bourdieu plays a regulatory role, but the sources of conflict do not reduce to private property. The field of power and the State appear to overlap conceptually. The field of power is “defined as the space of play within which holders of capital (of different species) struggle in particular for power over the State, i.e., over the statist capital granting power over the different species of capital and over their reproduction (particularly through the school system)” (Bourdieu 1994: 5). The State is a particular set of agencies and organizations—an ensemble of bureaucratic fields—within the broader arena of the field of power. On the one hand, Bourdieu (1994: 4; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 114) says that the development of the State parallels the development of the field of power (they emerge together) as an arena of struggle where holders of different kinds of capital struggle for control over the State (struggle for statist capital). The struggle in the field of power is, in fact, struggle for control of the State. On the other hand, Bourdieu sees the State as an arena of struggle for control over the field of power when he (1994: 4) writes that “the State as the holder of a sort of meta-capital granting power over other species of capital and over their holders.” This is the struggle to gain statist capital for power over other forms of capital and their reproduction. It is in the State where the struggle for power is, in fact, a struggle for control over relations of other fields in the field of power. Thus, the State functions to regulate the rate of exchange among the various forms of capital in the field of power. The State as a distinct field generates its own particular sets of interests. Thus, Bourdieu thinks of the State as a kind of metafield, with its own relative autonomy that mediates the struggle for the dominate principle of legitimation among the various power fields, such as the cultural field, the economic field, and the scientific field. An important implication from this analysis of the State in terms of capitals and fields is, as Wacquant (2005) points out, that Bourdieu does not see political conflict directly linked to class interests, as Marx tends to do, but more differentiated and mediated in that it involves conflicts among elites with different kinds of capitals (cultural as well as economic), and different modes of capital reproduction (through education as well as through property ownership).

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Bourdieu (2000: 127) therefore sees the State “marked by a profound ambiguity.” On the one hand, the modern State functions as “a relay … of economic and political powers which have little interest in universal interests” represented by the ideology of public service. Here one sees the influence of dominant groups, particularly those strong in economic capital, shaping activities of the State. This is consistent with the “primary view” of State power set forth by Marx and Engels. On the other hand, the State functions as a kind of neutral “referee” (Bourdieu 1990: 137) that enforces the rules of the game in the field of power; that is, it adjudicates power relations between competing groups. Those rules reflect, in part, the historical struggles leading to the welfare provisions of the State. This orientation of the State is more favourable to the ideals of justice and dominated groups than would be the free reign of economic interests (Bourdieu 2000: 127). Later in his career Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1998a, 1999) comes to see this latter function more and more threatened by neoliberalism and he becomes a staunch defender of the Welfare State against globalization. For Bourdieu (2014: 97–101), Marx and Marxists miss the real significance of universal values embodied by the State. They miss the Janus character of the State (both positive and negative, progressive and regressive) by focusing one-sidedly on the vested interest of State actors. By contrast, Bourdieu understands the development of the modern State as forging an ideology for the common good, for the universal (hence the positive, the progressive), whilst simultaneously creating a corpus of particular agents whose actions attempt to monopolize this universal value as their own vested interest. Thus, the State embodies a fundamental ambiguity: it is neither prisoner of dominant class rule, as Marxists charge, nor the neutral referee, as pluralism would have; rather, it embodies both as State managers who pursue their own interests in defending and advancing the ideals of disinterested public service. Bourdieu argues that Marxists, including structural Marxists drawing inspiration from Althusser’s idea of “ideological state apparati,” accord insufficient importance to the “symbolic effects” of this public service ideology. It is the distinguishing emphasis on the role of symbolic power that sets Bourdieu apart from a Marxist view of the State. Marx’s emphasis on the vested interests of State bureaucrats who usurp the public interest in pursuit of their own private interests ignores “the very real effects of the obligatory reference to the values of neutrality and disinterested loyalty to the public good. Such values impose themselves with increasing force upon the functionaries of the State” (Bourdieu

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1994: 17). Marx only sees one side, that of agents driven by interests, whereas there is a dual reality. Finally, both Marx and Bourdieu looked upon their scholarship as a form of political engagement. While Marx worked toward the abolition of the bourgeois State and its replacement with working-class political organization, Bourdieu, though a sharp critic of the aristocratic State technocracy, sought to preserve the gains in social inclusion and protection embedded in the State from previous class struggles rather than reversing the entire capitalist order. Though Bourdieu follows Durkheim in seeing an increasing division of labour in modern societies, he rejects any unilateral evolutionary schema for historical development that one finds in Marx. Thus, Bourdieu gives no reason to think that the State might eventually wither away as Marx speculates for a communist society.

Thematic and Methodological Similarities Though we do not find in Bourdieu’s writings a sustained discussion of Marx, the founder of historical materialism is a critical reference for Bourdieu. The significance of Bourdieu’s relationship to Marx lies less in an attempt to appropriate particular concepts and to give them specific Marxist applications than in an effort to elaborate upon certain themes that resonate in Marx by drawing more directly from the work of Durkheim and, especially, Weber (Brubaker 1985) and from Elias (1982) in the case of the State.11 Though we have stressed what sets Bourdieu apart from key ideas in Marx’s thinking, it is worth noting some key similarities between Marx and Bourdieu that are particularly relevant for thinking about the State. The spirit of critique that one finds in the young Marx’s letter to Arnold Ruge, the “ruthless criticism of everything existing” (Tucker 1978: 13), certainly animates Bourdieu’s approach to exposing power relations of existing institutional arrangements, including the State. We see this in texts where Bourdieu points up the difficulty in adopting a critical posture vis-à-vis the State since State legitimated classifications pervade most all aspects of our lives (Bourdieu 1994). Bourdieu (2014: 367) finds in Marx’s theory a powerful “symbolic revolution” that elicited hostile reactions because it challenged fundamental taken-for-granted assumptions, 11  See Desan’s (2013) analysis that, from a Marxist perspective, Bourdieu’s use of the language of capital does not extend Marx’s concept but offers something quite different.

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categories of perception, and principles of vision and division of the social world. It breaks with social contract theory and liberal pluralism. Bourdieu (1990: 17) also claims that one can find elements in Marx’s writing, particularly in The German Ideology, for a critical sociology of sociology though Marx himself never applied a critical history to Marxism itself nor have most Marxists subsequently. Like Marx, Bourdieu rejects pure theorizing or philosophizing without any empirical referents. Bourdieu denounces scholastic reasoning (Wacquant 2001: 105). Hence Bourdieu’s criticism of many followers of Althusser’s structural Marxism. By referencing Marx’s use of the case of England in developing his model of the capitalist mode of production, Bourdieu (2014: 87) justifies his method of looking at particular exemplary cases (France and England) as illustrative of the universe of possible cases (as opposed to the comparative historical method)—a methodological theme running throughout much of Bourdieu’s work. Bourdieu shares with Marx the methodological focus on structures that undergird consciousness and the relations that link individuals and groups “independently of individual consciousness and will,” as Marx put it (quotation in Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 97). Like Marx, Bourdieu is fundamentally a relational thinker. The concept of field links actors through structured relations rather than focusing on the intrinsic qualities of individual units or their conscious strategizing. Thus, Bourdieu’s view of the State is fundamentally relational (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 97; Wacquant 2001: 106). Finally, similar to Marx, but Weber as well, Bourdieu looks on the social world as fundamentally agonistic (Wacquant 2001: 106). The State is not a unitary actor but a site of competing interests, just as certain texts of Marx project the dynamics of class struggle within the boundaries of the State.

Conclusion The great virtue of Marx’s understanding of the State is to call attention to its function of protecting private property despite official claims to be a neutral referee adjudicating conflicting claims and advancing the cause of the common interest. Marx was, of course, not the first to say this; Adam Smith (1981: 715), prior to Marx, put it succinctly:

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Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

But it was Marx and his followers who mobilized a political movement around this insight, an insight that remains true today even if property interests of government have taken on new forms and Marxist-informed politics has not successfully reversed this pattern. In recent years research on new social movements points up the significance of identity politics in struggles over the State resources and access to positions within the State. Racial, ethnic, and gender issues provide powerful mobilizing forces, and these do not always reduce to underlying economic interests. Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the State as an ensemble of bureaucratic fields of struggle to monopolize legitimate definitions and classifications as well as control over economic and coercive resources would seem like a useful elaboration of some of Marx’s insights. Marxists will no doubt disagree and see Bourdieu’s thinking as a retreat from the capitalist class character of the State. Marxists would consider that there is only one relevant field and that is the capitalist mode of production in modern societies. Agents act out the imperatives of this one field in which they are embedded. By contrast, Bourdieu’s analysis is more complex as he is concerned with how individuals move across multiple fields, how individuals socialized in one behave in another, how fields themselves pit different configurations of actors in struggle with different kinds of power resources, and how actors misperceive these special interest struggles for the common interest. Though he sees contributions in Bourdieu’s thinking that provide helpful additions to Gramsci’s important concept of State hegemony, Burawoy (Burawoy and Von Holdt 2012: 45), inspired by Gramsci, ends up concluding that Bourdieu retreats to a Hegelian idealist position. The Bourdieusian emphasis on symbolic power in stressing classification struggles can, if pursued dogmatically, lose sight of the continuing role that economic interests and their defence through means of coercion play in modern States. Exclusive emphasis on the symbolic dimension of State power tends to downplay the coercive and economic features of modern States that are omnipresent despite the extraordinary efforts made to legitimate them. Bourdieu would regret this unintended consequence were it to occur.

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Still, Bourdieu’s original contribution is to call attention to the significance of the multiple classification struggles within the State that Marx and his followers tend to neglect. His State as a field framework opens the investigation to the variety of possible types of power resources (capitals) that actors (individuals, organizations, and institutions) employ in their struggle for domination. Economic capital is one key resource in modern societies but not the only one, and it too requires legitimation to be effective. Moreover, States are seldom unitary actors. As the field perspective suggests, State actions often stem from conflicts and struggles within and across bureaucratic fields. Bourdieu does not negate class analysis of the State but offers the possibility of going beyond it when historical conditions warrant. Herein lies the contributions of Bourdieu to understanding the character of modern States. If Bourdieu’s framework is not employed as a rigid model but as a framing device that is attentive to the particularities of historical situations, then it would seem to be as Bourdieu claims: a useful elaboration of Weber’s thinking that offers a more intricate understanding of ideal as well as material interests and their respective carriers than Marx imagined.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1995. Fin de Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason. London/New York: Verso. Althusser, Louis. 1977 [1971]. Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses. in Education: Structure and Society, ed. B. R. Cosin. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Anderson, Perry. 1974a. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: New Left Books. ———. 1974b. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: New Left Books. Batou, Jean, and Razmig Keucheyan. 2014. Pierre Bourdieu et le marxisme de son temps: une reoncontre manquée? Swiss Political Science Review 20 (1): 19–24. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1975 [1975]. The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason. Trans. R. Nice. Social Science Information 14(6): 19–47. ———. 1977. Symbolic Power. In Identity and Structure, ed. D.  Gleeson, 112–119. Driffield: Nafferton Books. ———. 1987. Legitimation and Structured Interests in Weber’s Sociology of Religion. In Max Weber, Rationality and Irrationality, ed. Scott Lash and Sam Whimster, 119–136. Boston: Allen & Unwin. ———. 1990 [1987]. In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology. Trans. M. Adamson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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———. 1991 [1971]. Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field. Comparative Social Research 13: 1–44. Trans. Jenny B.  Burnside, Craig Calhoun and Leah Florence. ———. 1992. Les règles de L’art: Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Les Editions du Seuil. ———. 1994 [1993]. Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field. Trans. L.J.D. Wacquant and S. Farage. Sociological Theory 12(1): 1–18. ———. 1996 [1989]. The State Nobility. Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Trans. L.C. Clough. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 1998a. Acts of Resistance. Against the Tyranny of the Market. Trans. R. Nice. New York: The New Press. ———. 1998b. On the Fundamental Ambivalence of the State. Polygraph 10: 21–32. ———. 1999 [1993]. The Abdication of the State. In The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Trans. P.P. Ferguson et al., 181–188. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2000 [1997]. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2004 [1997]. From the King’s House to the Reason of State: A Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic Field. Constellations 11(1): 16–36. ———. 2005 [1997]. From the King’s House to the Reason of State: A Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic Field. In Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics, ed. Loïc Wacquant, 29–54. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2014 [2012]. On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992. Trans. D. Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1977 [1970]. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Trans. R. Nice. London: Sage. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J.D.  Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Trans. P.P. Ferguson et al. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Brubaker, Rogers. 1985. Rethinking Classical Sociology: The Sociological Vision of Pierre Bourdieu. Theory and Society 14 (6): 745–775. Burawoy, Michael, and Karl Von Holdt. 2012. Conversations with Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Corrigan, Philip, and Derek Sayer. 1985. The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. New York: Blackwell. Desan, Mathieu Hikaru. 2013. Bourdieu, Marx, and Capital: A Critique of the Extension Model. Sociological Theory 31 (4): 318–342. DiMaggio, Paul. 1979. Review Essay on Pierre Bourdieu. American Journal of Sociology 84 (6): 1460–1474. Elias, Norbert. 1982. State Formation and Civilization. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Ferry, Luc, and Alain Renault. 1990. French Marxism (Pierre Bourdieu). In French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Anti-Humanism, 153–184. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Foucault, Michel. 2008. Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. Translated by G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Garnham, Nicholas, and Raymond Williams. 1980. Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Culture. Media, Culture, and Society 2 (3): 297–313. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Eds. and Trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith. New York: International Publishers. Honneth, Axel. 1986. The Fragmented World of Symbolic Forms: Reflections on Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture. Theory, Culture & Society 3 (3): 55–66. Inglis, Roy. 1979. Good and Bad Habitus: Bourdieu, Habermas and the Condition of England. The Sociological Review 27 (2): 353–369. Joppke, Christian. 1986. The Cultural Dimension of Class Formation and Class Struggle: On the Social Theory of Pierre Bourdieu. Berkeley Journal of Sociology 31: 53–78. Mauger, Gérard. 2012. Bourdieu et Marx. In Lectures de Bourdieu, ed. Frédéric Lebaron and Gérard Mauger, 25–39. Paris: Ellipses. Miliband, Ralph. 1973. Marx and the State. Karl Marx, ed. Tom Bottomore. Englewood Cliffs, 128–150. NJ: Prentice-Hall. Also can be found in The Socialist Register 1965: 278–296. Moore, Barrington Jr. 1966. The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1973. Political Power and Social Classes. Trans. T. O’Hagan. London: New Left Books. Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China. New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Adam. 1981 [1776]. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Swartz, David. 1997. Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Swartz, David L. 2013. Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals: The Political Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Tilly, Charles. 1992. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992. Cambridge: Blackwell. Tucker, Robert C. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New  York: W.W. Norton & Co. Wacquant, Loic. 2001. Further Notes on Bourdieu’s ‘Marxism’. International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 20–28, 38(1): 103–109. Wacquant, Loïc. 2005. Pointers on Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics. In Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics, ed. Loic Wacquant. Cambridge: Polity.

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Weber, Max. 1978 [1922]. Economy and Society. Trans. E. Fischoff et al. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weininger, Elliot. 2005. Foundations of Pierre Bourdieu’s Class Analysis. In Approaches to Class Analysis, ed. Erik Olin Wright, 82–118. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

PART II

Inheriting Critique of Economic Practices and Theories

CHAPTER 8

Practice and Form: Economic Critique with Marx and Bourdieu Peter Streckeisen

The rapid succession of economic crises since the turn of the millennium is generating a renewed interest in the work of Karl Marx and in the critique of economic science. According to a widespread view, economists have failed: they were not able to foresee the crises, let alone to design solutions. On the contrary, leading representatives of the profession are summoned to be responsible for the crisis because of their publications and recommendations. Even self-criticism can be heard in isolated cases: German economist Straubhaar (2012),1 for example, calls for the “end of economic imperialism, […] this belief that we are above the other sciences.” He confesses he accepted economic beliefs for too long “even Chapter translated from Streckeisen 2013. For a more in-depth argument, see Streckeisen 2014. The term “economic critique” refers to “Ökonomiekritik” in German. 1

 Quotation translated by the author.

P. Streckeisen (*) Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_8

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though they did not correspond to empirical data.” If they did not want to become useless for policymakers, economists should work more with historians, psychologists, and sociologists. But a glance at the media or at the members of government commissions shows that economists still are experts in demand despite their collective failure. Economic orthodoxy has not really been overthrown. The challenge has been less strong than at Keynes’s time, when the crisis of the economists coincided not only with a deep economic crisis, but also with fascism and world war. Nevertheless, the new interest in Marx and in economic critique is good news. But what are the promises of this critical thinking today? This contribution deals with that question. I start from the premise that Marx was not only a critic of economic science, but also a critical economist, a political theorist, and a revolutionary activist. Which one of these perspectives we adopt reading his texts is of crucial importance. Today it is important to move away from a primarily economic reading of Capital and to lay out the social theory foundations in Marx’s work. In addition, we must consider that we are no longer dealing with the same economy as Marx did. Both as a social system and as a science, the capitalist economy has changed in many ways. Finally, I am convinced of the need to mobilize different sources of critique. Using Marx and Bourdieu as examples, I demonstrate how different approaches can both complement and challenge each other with the aim of advancing the cause of economic critique. The paper is structured as follows: First, I specify what is meant by economic critique. Second, I highlight some key concepts of the Marxian critique of political economy. Third, I outline Bourdieu’s theory of praxis as an original approach to economic critique. Fourth, I discuss Bourdieu’s attitude to Marx and to Marxism. Fifth, I challenge Bourdieu’s capital theory with Marx as an example of a problematic replication of capital concepts. Sixth, I conclude the article with an argument on the articulation of different sources of economic critique.

Economic Critique At no point did Marx clearly define what exactly he meant by his critique of political economy. We can, however, try to reconstruct his critical intentions. In my view, Marx’s critique works at three different levels: It is, first, a systematic analysis of capitalist economy; second, Marx criticizes the categories of economic theory; and third, he develops a theory regarding the interrelations between the economy as a social system and the economy as

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an academic discipline. His economic critique is essentially characterized by the fact that it criticizes not only “this or that aspect of economic theory” but the “very principles of the economic construction” (Bourdieu 1997, 48).2 In a sense, it goes the whole hog and analyses the social processes that produce a capitalist economy as a reality on its own, as well as the theoretical premises that tacitly underlie economic science. Heinrich (2009, 32) insists on this point too: “Critique aims to dissolve the theoretical field (i.e., the quite self-evidently resulting notions) to which the categories of political economy owe their apparent plausibility.” Economic critique is not the same as critical or heterodox economics— a bundle of different approaches that also include Marxist economic theory (Lee 2009; Kapeller and Springholz 2016). Critical economics is a critique of economic orthodoxy from within the field, whereas economic critique questions economic science as such, from the outside of the field. For the theoretical field referred to by Heinrich (2004) is connected to the social field of economic scholarship, comprising social institutions such as research institutes, journals, university departments, professional associations, and academic conferences at which economists present their research. Like any field (Bourdieu 1993, 72–77), it is determined by power relations and rules of the game, which are permanently being fought over. Even if they are irreconcilably opposed to orthodoxy, heterodox economists share with their counterparts an interest in the existence of economic science as an academic discipline, which usually leads them not to ask certain questions that outsiders are inclined to raise. Heterodox economists are actors in the economic field who, from a dominated position attack those colleagues who, by virtue of their position and reputation, are able to shape the basic tenets of economic orthodoxy. However, orthodox and heterodox economists usually share the belief that the economy must be studied from an economic perspective because it is a world in itself. Sometimes they even share the belief that the social world as a whole works out according to economic laws, and that human behaviour in general is best understood from an economic point of view. Economic critique and critical economics are not always clearly separated: they can merge , and Marx’s Capital certainly is an interesting example of the intertwining of the two perspectives. On the one hand, Marx engages in fundamental economic critique in his magnum opus, but he also sometimes enters the terrain of economists in order to improve 2

 Quotation translated by the author.

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economic theories. And Capital even contains paragraphs where Marx succumbs to economistic views (Vincent 2001, 95–109; Hai Hac 2003). According to Heinrich (2009, 90), two different discourses run through Marx’s major work: a substantialist and naturalist theory of value, which thinks in terms of economic labour theory of value, and a social theory of value, which brings about a fundamental break with economic theory. Those who want to pursue economic critique with Marx will turn to the second discourse. But it is also necessary to keep an eye on his economistic temptations, because they are an expression of the power of economic thinking to which all of us are always exposed. Today, the Marxian formulation critique of political economy is outdated insofar as political economy has been marginalized in the field of economics. It has become a heterodox economic theory. Milonakis and Fine (2009) describe the emergence and consolidation of neoclassical orthodoxy since the end of the nineteenth century as a historical process by which society and history are expelled from economic science: Political Economy is displaced by Economics, a rationalist behavioural science based on mathematical models that studies human action as a relationship between goals and scarce resources with alternative uses (Robbins 1932). The neoclassical revolution has not only replaced the labour theory of value with the marginal utility theorem. It is a theoretical purification of economic sciences that forgets all reference to social realities and historical processes. The price initially paid by economists is a narrowing of the field as well as a cutting off from other social sciences and humanities. But in the Cold War period the pendulum swung in the other direction and economists began to apply their theory to all areas of social, political, and cultural life. The affirmation of economics as the superior social science, or even as the only real social science, is called economic imperialism (Fine and Milonakis 2009), a concept first promoted by self-conscious economists like Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker. The economic conquest of the social science and humanities academic fields is supported by non-­ economist scholars who introduce economic concepts into their own disciplines by adapting or translating them. An example in sociology and political science is the social capital theory by Coleman (1988) and Putnam (1993). Because neoclassical economics presents itself today as the science of rational human behaviour, it is even more important for economic critique than in Marx’s time to build on a theory of practice that systematically contradicts the concept of homo economicus. It therefore makes sense to combine Marx’s form theory with Bourdieu’s theory of practice.

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Form and Fetish (Marx I) There is no doubt that Marx remains important today mostly as an economic critic. As a critical economist, he discussed the theories that prevailed at his time, which is primarily of historical interest today. The same holds for his analysis of economic phenomena of his time. But what we can pick up from him today are concepts that challenge economic science as such, regardless of individual theories and historical events. And it turns out that Marx’s form theory and his fetish theory are of a high topicality and can still be used to criticize economic orthodoxy today. To make good use of Marx for economic critique, however, means to read him differently than it was, and in some cases still is, usual in Marxism. In the Marxist tradition Capital was read as a book of economics that directly proves the necessity of overcoming capitalism. This perspective ignores the radical rupture with the theoretical field of economic theory and subjects the analysis to political imperatives and to a constant prophetic temptation to prophecy, which can produce a certain myopia and even true mental barriers. Reading Marx neither through an economic nor a political lens, but interpreting his writings in terms of social theory, is not a completely distinctive proposition but in line with new Marx readings in the German-­ speaking world (that are not so new anymore) as well as at the global level (Elbe 2008; Hoff 2009). Those who think that such an interpretation produces an apolitical Marx ignore the political significance of economic critique in the age of economic imperialism. According to the social theory perspective proposed here, some traditional Marxist topics like labour theory of value, crisis theory, or the famous transformation problem, lose their centrality in favour of the form and fetish theory. I mention four arguments in Capital that are of primordial importance for economic critique today: the critique of naturalization, the theory of social value forms, the fetish theorem, and the concept of the vulgar economy. 1. Marx confronted economic theories that had not yet lost all reference to history and society as did the neoclassicism that developed after his death. Still, he criticized the economists because they took social conditions for natural conditions and regarded capitalism as the necessary end point of human history. This critique of the naturalization of social conditions runs like a thread through his writings. From the comparison of economists with theologians in the

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Poverty of philosophy (Marx 1973, 105) to the deconstruction of the economic theory of the original sin in the context of primitive accumulation (Marx 1974a, 667–668) to the statement that the ground rent does not grow out of the soil, but out of society (Marx 1974a, 86), to give only three examples: Marx’s argument always emphasizes the historical specificity of capitalism and traces economic phenomena back to social contexts. Social and cultural studies are always confronted with the problem of naturalization, but Marx’s pioneering work on this topic is still underestimated or ignored today. 2. Anyone who sees only an economic labour-value theory at work in Capital will not get very far in terms of economic critique. The radical departure from the theoretical field of economics has its roots in the paragraphs where Marx describes value, the commodity, money, or capital as social forms that shape people’s actions and thoughts in a way that makes the production of capital and the reproduction of capitalist relations possible in the first place and, indeed, probable. Thus, Marx’s theory of value is not in theoretical continuity with Ricardo’s, it rather represents a turn from economic theory to social theory (Vincent 2001, 237–238). There are only a few sections where Marx directly addresses the form theory foundations of his critique, for example, in the fetish chapter of the first Capital I: “It is one of the chief failings of classical economy that is has never succeeded […] in discovering that form under which value becomes exchange value. […] The reason for this is not solely because their attention is entirely absorbed in the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value form of the product of labour is not only the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the product in bourgeois production, and stamps that production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as one eternally fixed by Nature for every state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value form, and consequently of the commodity form, and of its further developments, money form, capital form etc.” (Marx 1974a, 85). The discovery of social value forms makes it possible to examine capital as a social force of socialization that dominates everyday practice. Capitalist socialization is first and foremost a determination by form: human thought and action are transformed into value form or into value-producing form, for instance, when concrete labour is turned

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into abstract labour, or when knowledge and skills are turned into educational degrees of different value. 3. The link between form theory and the fetish theorem derives from the fact that Marx also examined the phenomenology of capitalist relations. In capitalism, social relations are represented in tangible things, for example, in commodities, in money or in machines. In this material appearance, however, they are invisible, while the things that represent them seem to have a magic power that expresses the social forces emerging out of the relations represented in them. Marx uses the term fetish to name these peculiar things in whose magic powers people believe. The most powerful fetish is not the commodity, but capital. It is no accident that Marx repeatedly employs religious metaphors in Capital: His economic critique is inspired by a critique of religion. When he writes about an “enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world” and mentions a true “religion of everyday life” towards the end of Capital III (Marx 1974b, 830), we certainly should take this literally. The same applies to the recurring comparison of economists and theologians, which leads to the following point. 4. Marx distinguishes time and again between scientific economic theory and vulgar economy. At the same time, he stresses that even the best theorists of political economy, such as David Ricardo, “remain more or less in the grip of the world of illusion which their criticism had dissolved,” whereas vulgar economics “is no more than a didactic, more or less dogmatic translation of everyday conceptions of the actual agents of production, and […] arranges them in a certain rational order” (Marx 1974b, 830). The distinction between scientific theory and vulgar economics must not obscure the more important argument: The capitalist “forms of thought” express the existing conditions and relations of production in an “absurd form” but with “social validity” (Marx 1974a, 80). They do not only shape everyday understanding of the economy by lay persons but also influence economic theory in academia. Economic critique attempts to dissolve the theoretical field of the capitalist everyday life religion, while economists always also act as high priests of capital. The effectiveness of the categories of capitalist economy lies in the fact that they are “correct in the practical sense” for individual actors, as Marx points out referring to the necessary illusion of the entrepreneur that s/he is a worker who is remunerated for their activity.

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They provide orientation and motivation for action in everyday life. If, on the other hand, they are taken as the foundations of a scientific theory of economy, this is “of course, preposterous” (Marx 1974b, 377). Marx’s analysis of the vulgar economy is reminiscent of Durkheim’s (1982, 60) critique of prenotions, these “products of common experience […] formed by and for experience” that are the building blocks of a “spontaneous sociology” (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 20) that every serious scientific investigation must challenge.

Economy of Practice (Bourdieu I) Bourdieu’s critique of economic science was for a long time overshadowed by his sociology of culture. When he acted in the last years of his life as a critic of neoliberalism, it was often ignored that the investigation of economic phenomena and theories runs through his entire work and must be seen as a necessary counterpart to his sociology of culture. His critique of the notion of a pure culture and of the illusion of disinterestedness characteristic of artists and intellectuals, and his critique of the notion of a pure economy were ultimately two sides of the same coin. The emergence of the capitalist economy as a social field where economic interests can be openly and brutally articulated goes hand in hand in human history with the emergence of increasingly autonomous fields of cultural production. Therefore a complicity exists between the interests of economists and those of cultural producers: “Interest, in the restricted sense it is given in economic theory, cannot be produced without producing its negative counterpart, disinterestedness. […] [T]he world of bourgeois man, with his double-entry accounting, cannot be invented without producing the pure, perfect universe of the artist and the intellectual and the gratuitous activities of art-for-art’s sake and pure theory” (Bourdieu 1986, 242). Bourdieu never had any reserve about economics and worked early on with economists and statisticians at the French statistics and economics institute INSEE (Lebaron 2003). His writings are characterized by a strategy aimed at beating his opponents with their own weapons. Thus, he criticizes economists for a one-sided and incomplete understanding of the economy that prevents them from detecting its hidden mechanisms and from perceiving economic facts that do not look economic at first glance. In his early study of Algerian society under French colonial rule (Bourdieu 1958), he describes an economy that does not show itself as an economic reality and is not perceived as such by Western economists: It is as if this

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society did not want to face its economic reality. Where economic acts are practised as honorary transactions, Bourdieu discovers an economy of concealment, an “anti-economic economy,” and thus invents a concept that he will use in France to analyse cultural fields. The Algerian studies served as a starting point for the formulation of a general theory of practice, which Bourdieu (1977) also calls an economy of practice. His approach is based on the idea that everyday action is guided by unconscious or semi-conscious orientations towards practical interests inscribed in the internalized dispositions of the habitus. This economy is practical “in the dual sense of implicit—i.e. non-theoretical—and expedient, i.e. adapted to the exigencies and urgent pressures of action” (Bourdieu 2005, 9). And this practice is economic at the same time not only because it obeys material interest, but also because it saves people from the necessity to permanently think about what to do at any given moment. While Bourdieu (1996) draws on economic concepts in The Rules of Art to make visible the hidden economy of the literary field, his critique of economy works on two levels. First, he questions economists’ view of the social world, this “illusory anthropology” (Bourdieu 1997, 64–66) of rationally calculating subjects whose apparent plausibility is based on the hidden homology between the social structures of society and the mental structures of habitus. Even in the field of economics, the picture of calculating action propagated by rational choice theory is deceptive: “It is not decisions of the rational will and consciousness or mechanical determinations resulting from external powers that underlie the economy of economic practices—that reason immanent in practices—but the dispositions acquired through learning processes associated with protracted dealings with the regularities of the field; apart from any conscious calculation, these dispositions are capable of generating behaviours and even anticipations which would be better termed reasonable than rational, even if their conformity with calculative evaluation tends to make us think of them, and treat them, as products of calculating reason” (Bourdieu 2005, 8–9). Similar to Marx, the French sociologist deploys a constant effort in his writings not only to criticize economic theories, but to explain their social plausibility and efficacy by the same argument. Second, Bourdieu counters economic orthodoxy with his own concepts, among them, first of all, the notions of habitus, field, and practice, which can be used to investigate economic processes and phenomena. In Algeria, he experienced almost tangibly that the forms of economic thought and action we are familiar with today are not natural at all: They

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presuppose an economic habitus that the Kabyle merchants and peasants were forced to internalize only by the colonial system. The French sociologist had pains at first to understand this pre-capitalist economy: “I remember spending many an hour peppering with questions a Kabyle peasant who was trying to explain a traditional form of the loan of livestock, because it had not occurred to me that, contrary to all economic reason, the lender might feel an obligation to the borrower on the grounds that the borrower was providing for the upkeep of an animal that would have had to have been fed in any case” (Bourdieu 2005, 3). Much later he described the economy as a field characterized by “the fact that here sanctions are particularly brutal and the blatant pursuit of maximizing individual material profit can be publicly made the target of behavior” (Bourdieu 1997, 51).3 The structure of the field depends on the unequal distribution of different forms of capital, on the basis of which large corporations can emerge as dominant actors and influence the rules of the game of economic competition. However, for Bourdieu, even in the economic field the importance of non-economic forces is central. Thus, against the image of the free market, he highlights the key role of the state: “[T]he economic field is, more than any other, inhabited by the state, which contributes at every moment to its existence and persistence, and also to the structure of the relations of force that characterize it” (Bourdieu 2005, 12).

With Marx Against Marxism (Bourdieu II) Bourdieu’s theory of practice is an original approach to economic critique that strikes at the heart of neoclassical economics as a rationalist behavioural science. But how does this approach relate to Marx? Obviously, Marx’s early writings were a source of inspiration for the French sociologist. For instance, we find strategic quotations of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach in both books where Bourdieu presents his theory of practice in detail. In the original edition of Outline of a Theory of Practice, the theoretical section is preceded by a quotation from the first thesis (whereas in the English edition, it has been placed in the foreword: Bourdieu (1977, vi), and in The Logic of Practice Bourdieu (1990, 145) starts his argument on “practical logics” referring to Marx’s notion of the “concrete human activity,” into which we must mentally dive if we want to be able to  Quotation translated by the author.

3

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understand people’s practical relationship to the world. In these sections devoted to analysing the relationships between social structure, habitus, and praxis, the French sociologist is concerned to break out of the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism and all other associated kinds of opposition. This idea, which runs through the entire work, is reminiscent of the young Marx’s search for the real human being and real practice, struggling with the abstractions of both idealist and materialist philosophy. If the early Marxian writings left strong traces in Bourdieu’s work, the same cannot be said of Marx’s later work, in which the critique of political economy reaches its highest expression. It seems that the French sociologist did not read Capital, or at least did not include it in his own work. But it is easy to see that some of Bourdieu’s concepts can be linked to Marxian concepts. For example, the mental structures of the habitus (Bourdieu) and the objective thought forms of capital (Marx) possess an analogy. Marx’s concept could be enriched by Bourdieu’s theory on the relationship between internalization and externalization which produces a probabilistic determination of thought and action. And whereas Bourdieu’s investigations into everyday practice and habitus focus on class-specific forms of thought and action, Marx reminds us of the existence of cross-­ class forms of thought. In a similar way, the concepts of vulgar economy (Marx) and spontaneous sociology (Bourdieu) can be brought together: They both highlight the necessity of an epistemological break with everyday thinking that scholars cannot accomplish once and for all but must think of as a permanent task. Throughout his work, Bourdieu maintained critical relations to Marxism. Just as he challenged economists using economic notions, he criticized Marxists quoting Marx. In What makes a Social Class he advances an argument from Marx’s critique of Hegel against the Marxist illusion of class realism: “In fact, the Marxist tradition commits the very same theoreticist fallacy of which Marx himself accused Hegel: By equating constructed classes, which only exist as such on paper, with real classes constituted in the form of mobilized groups possessing absolute and relational self-consciousness, the Marxist tradition confuses the things of logic with the logic of things” (Bourdieu 1987, 7). In the text, Bourdieu stresses the importance of a political work of class production through forms of representation (cognitive, political, theatrical), without which social classes cannot exist in people’s minds. In his eyes, the protagonists of Marxism have most often invested in this kind of political work without any critical self-reflection, and they have been neither able nor inclined to understand

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what they themselves have contributed to the making of the working class, and what price the workers had to pay for representations without which they could not have exist as a social class. In Ce que parler veut dire Bourdieu (1982, 207–226) takes aim at the pompous discourse (“discours d’importance”) of Etienne Balibar by showing a cartoon character Marx laughing at this all to diligent Marxist disciple using quotations from German Ideology. Bourdieu wants to point out the conservative effect of the intellectual superiority staged by this kind of Marxist philosophy that thinks of itself as very important, and he provocatively states: “Since equal causes have equal effects, it is not surprising that analyses can be found in Marx’s polemic against Stirner that apply word for word to French readings of Marx; or that particularly typical stylistic devices of the discourse of importance can be found in philosophers as theoretically far apart as Althusser and Heidegger, who, after all, share the sense of high theory that is fundamental to the status of philosopher” (Bourdieu 1982, 166).4 By speaking in the name of revolution and workers’ interests, Marxist philosophers, for Bourdieu, unconsciously do their part to exclude the working class from the world of intellectuals. Bourdieu’s polemic against Balibar shows that his critique of Marxism also aims at the self-image of left-wing intellectuals. If someone calls himself a Marxist, this does not automatically mean that his intellectual practice is socially and culturally progressive, even if he thinks and intends so. “The scholarly world is full of people who behave like revolutionaries when they deal with things that do not concern them directly and like conservatives when they have a personal stake in the matter,” he notes in a conversation about Max Weber, adding, “often one is called right-wing when one says the truth about the left” (Bourdieu et  al. 2011, 122). Undoubtedly, there are many sections in the French sociologist’s writings where Marxists might have a personal stake in the matter. In any case, Bourdieu has done something different with the young Marx than Marxism in its prevailing varieties: he has transferred key ideas of Marx’s philosophical critique from the fields of political and philosophical discussion to the field of empirical social research. If we understand Marx’s Feuerbach theses as a call for a research programme, leave philosophical abstractions behind and going in search of real people, then Bourdieu has systematically followed this call. A book like Distinction (Bourdieu 2010), which examines the cultural practices of the members of different social 4

 Quotations translated by the author.

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classes, is like a rich treasure box for anyone who, regardless of political orientation, is really interested in how real people live. It is beyond the scope of this paper to compare Bourdieu’s theory of praxis to various strands of Marxism. But there is no doubt that in Bourdieu’s eyes Marxism hardly ever succeeds in breaking out of the traditional oppositions between subjectivism and objectivism—or idealism and materialism—which Lenin (1977) glorifies as the supreme principles of thought in a particularly crude and politically disastrous way. Thus, for Bourdieu, Marxist thinkers remain doomed to vacillate between the two views, epitomized in postwar France, for example, by Sartre on the one hand and Althusser on the other. In an interview with Terry Eagleton, he justifies his practice of refusing the concept of ideology by his concern to stay away from the Cartesian philosophy of consciousness characteristic of Marxism (Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992). Even Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, which clearly represents a rupture with the dominant Marxism of his time and according to Michael Burawoy shows a certain affinity with Bourdieu’s approach (Burawoy and von Holdt 2012, 51–67), no doubt only stops halfway as viewed through the lens of the French sociologist. For example, when Gramsci writes that the popular common sense “cannot constitute an intellectual order” (Gramsci 1999, 631), he thinks of it as an incoherent reality and overlooks precisely what Bourdieu wants to capture with the concept of habitus as a structured system of incorporated dispositions. And when Gramsci (1999, 640) proclaims that, in contrast to the Church, “the philosophy of praxis does not tend to leave the ‘simple’ in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life,” the philosopher’s sense of superiority, which has not simply vanished into thin air through the beautiful sentence according to which “all people are ‘philosophers’” (Gramsci 1999, 626), comes to light again.

Fictitious Capital and Capital Mimesis (Marx II) But Bourdieu, for his part, pays a price for ignoring Marx’s mature writings and Capital in particular. The shortcomings of his capital theory, which features the trios of economic, social and cultural capital, is an illustration of that ignorance. In a famous contribution on the forms of capital, Bourdieu uses many terms and formulations reminiscent of Marx. For example, he refers to capital as “accumulated labor […] which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of

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agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor” (Bourdieu 1986, 241). This sentence seems to be very close to Marx’s concept of exploitation. Further on in this text, Bourdieu (1986, 253) sketches a classical labour theory of value: In accordance with a principle which is the equivalent of the principle of the conservation of energy, profits in one area are necessarily paid for by costs in another […]. The universal equivalent, the measure of all equivalences, is nothing other than labor-time (in the widest sense); and the conservation of social energy through all its conversions is verified if, in each case, one takes into account both the labor-time accumulated in the form of capital and the labor-time needed to transform it from one type into another.

By arguing this way, however, he overlooks an important insight of the Marxian critique of political economy: labour produces capital only under very specific conditions. It must take on a determined form for that purpose, that is, it must turn to abstract labour and be performed under the conditions of socially necessary labour-time. If Bourdieu overlooks the importance of social forms in this paragraph, this is not by simple accident. Rather, his theory of capital, which is based on the analogy between social capital and cultural capital on the one side and economic capital on the other, completely ignores the value form. From a form theory perspective inspired by Marx one must inevitably criticize such analogies. For example, labour accomplished to produce social capital—that is, social relations and groups—is not abstract labour in the Marxian sense of the term. And cultural capital such as educational degrees cannot be bought and sold on the market. Neither social relations nor education accumulate in a self-referential valorization process detached from individual action. They cannot be described like capital in the Marxian sense as a thing with an “automatically active character” that “brings forth living offspring or, at the least, lays golden eggs” (Marx 1974a, 152). Attempting to further clarify the analogies between the different forms of capital, Bourdieu should have turned economic capital into an object of his investigations, since he postulates that it underlies the other types of capital. However, he deliberately abstained from this endeavour. For instance, in Sociology in Question he states: “As regards economic capital, I leave that to others; it’s not my area. What concerns me is what is abandoned by others, because they lack the interest or the

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theoretical tools for these things, cultural capital and social capital” (Bourdieu 1993, 32). Bourdieu’s silence on economic capital leaves a void at the core of his capital theory that plays into the hands of economic imperialism. Because the power of capital and its economy—as a social system, but also as an academic discipline—also relies on mimetic reproduction and dissemination of its social value forms. Marx (1974b, 464) grasped this phenomenon in a section of Capital III devoted to the analysis of fictitious capital: “The form of interest-bearing capital is responsible for the fact that every definite and regular money revenue appears as interest on some capital, whether it arises from some capital or not. The money income is first converted into interest, and from the interest one can determine the capital from which it arises.” In this paragraph Marx describes mental processes that turn various things into capital and are responsible for the fact that in the mind of actors “all connection with the actual expansion process of capital is thus completely lost, and the conception of capital as something with automatic self-expansion properties is thereby strengthened” (Marx 1974b, 466). According to his analysis, the domination of capital gives rise to specific modes of thought that produce not only a naturalization but also a multiplication of capital forms: “With the development of interest-­bearing capital and the credit system, all capital seems to double itself, and sometimes treble itself, by the various modes in which the same capital, or perhaps even the same claim on a debt, appears in different forms in different hands” (Marx 1974b, 470). As examples for this fictitious capital, Marx (1974b, 464–465) mentions stock options and government debt as well as labour power. Through Marxian lens it is perhaps no coincidence that the triumph of human capital theory—which holds that human labour is a form of capital—and the reassertion of the agency and power of international finance capital—or interest-bearing capital in Marx’s terminology—occurred simultaneously during the last third of the twentieth century. At the same period, Bourdieu drafted his capital theory, which has been widely echoed in sociology and related disciplines. In my view, this is rather troublesome from the point of view of economic critique. To conceive of human capacities and social relations as capital—and of oneself as a human capitalist or as an entrepreneur of oneself—is completely in line with the zeitgeist of contemporary capitalism. Therefore, Bourdieu’s critical note on “some particularly intrepid economists, like Gary Becker,” the American Nobel Laureate human capital theorist, might also be said to strike a chord in

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relation to himself: insofar as it multiplies the forms of capital without analysing the social value forms making capital possible, Bourdieu’s theory reproduces current trends of the capitalist economy and can be considered as its “unreflected product” (Bourdieu 2005, 6–7) just like Becker’s. No doubt in this respect Bourdieu should be criticized with Bourdieu because his analogy between the forms of capital omitting a deeper analysis of economic capital turns out to be a “mimetic model” that confuses similarity and analogy, whereas it is necessary to construct “analogical models aimed at apprehending the hidden principles of the realities they interpret” (Bourdieu et al. 1991, 53).

Reflexive Eclecticism In an interview on Max Weber, Bourdieu describes his sociology as an engagement in “reflexive eclecticism” and he adds: “For me, it is not necessarily a contradiction to ‘borrow’ stuff from everywhere: from Marx to Durkheim via Weber, as long as all this leads to a certain theoretical coherence, which nowadays is castigated as ‘totalitarian’ by the postmodernists” (Bourdieu et  al. 2011, 118). Bourdieu’s posture towards classical texts also inspires my own approach to economic critique. It regards not only the combining of various sources of inspiration but also about the attitude towards each one of them. I believe that it is possible to think with a thinker and to think, at the same time, against him or her. This means that, in a radical way, we have to challenge the classificatory, and hence political, logic in which—almost everywhere—relations with the thoughts of the past are established. ‘For Marx’, as Althusser wanted it to be, or ‘against Marx’. I am convinced that it is possible to think with Marx against Marx, or with Durkheim against Durkheim; and surely also with Marx and Durkheim against Weber and vice versa. (Bourdieu et al. 2011, 114)

Bourdieu’s writings show that theoretical work does not become apolitical when it refuses naive submission to political logic. And, yes of course, we shall also think with Bourdieu against Bourdieu: For instance, we can pick up his theory of praxis and criticize his capital theory in the meantime. There is no need to either align completely with Bourdieu or to reject his approach altogether.

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This contribution holds that Marx and Bourdieu invented two original approaches to economic critique. Both operate on all three levels of critique: They develop an analysis of the economy as a social system, establish a categorical critique of economic theory, and carry forward a broader reflection on the relationship between the economy as a social system on one side and as an academic discipline on the other. These two approaches can be combined for the purpose of further advancing economic critique. Bourdieu has taken up and refined the young Marx’s theory of practice, which, given the fact that economic orthodoxy today is a behavioural science in the first place, might be the best that could be developed starting with Marx’s early writings in terms of economic critique. But Marx and Bourdieu must not and cannot be harmoniously united, as I have indicated referring to capital theory. Reflexive eclecticism does not produce theoretical reconciliation, it aims at inspiration and critique instead. It has nothing to do with the “architectonic reason” that expresses itself, for example, in the vast collections produced by medieval theologians compiling all the important arguments developed by the Church Fathers during the ages. (Functional equivalents can easily be found in the Marxist tradition). Contrary to that, reflexive eclecticism is guided by the principle of “polemical reason.” It excludes theoretical concessions and retains from its sources only “that which it has criticized” according to the French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard quoted by Bourdieu et  al. (1991, 27–28). Of course, Marx and Bourdieu are not the only two theoretical inspirations for today’s economic critique. All available sources of critique can be mobilized against economic imperialism, without giving up the claim to theoretical coherence. At the same time, there is no reason to think that critical economics and economic critique are unable to inspire each other: For critical economics, economic critique can act as a thorn in the flesh that spurs it on in its critique of orthodoxy, as well as an opportunity for alliances beyond the economic field that might influence the balance of power in the field. For economic critique on the other hand, critical economics can be inspiring because it is more familiar with the economic field and can help formulate the relevant questions instead of missing the mark. Undoubtedly, however, a fruitful collaboration presupposes that both sides recognize the difference between their social positions—inside versus outside the field of economic science, respectively—and are willing to discuss the inevitable theoretical divergences with this awareness always in mind.

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References Bourdieu, Pierre. 1962 [1958]. The Algerians. Trans. A.C.M.  Ross. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1977 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1982. Ce que parler veut dire. L’économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard. ———. 1986. The Forms of Capital. In Handbook of Theory and Research für the Sociology of Education, ed. John G.J.  Richardson, 241–258. Trans. R.  Nice. New York: Greenwood. ———. 1987. What Makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups. Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32: 1–17. ———. 1990 [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Trans. R.  Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1993 [1984]. Sociology in Question. Trans. R.  Nice. London: SAGE Publications. ———. 1996 [1992]. The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. S. Emanuel. Stanford University Press. ———. 1997. Le Champ économique. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 119: 48–66. ———. 2005 [2000]. The Social Structures of the Economy. Trans C.  Turner. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2010 [1982]. Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Terry Eagleton. 1992. Doxa and Common Life. New Left Review I/191. Accessed 26 November 2021. http://newleftreview. org/I/191/terry-­eagleton-­pierre-­bourdieu-­doxa-­and-­common-­life. Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1991 [1968]. The Craft of Sociology. Trans. R. Nice. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Bourdieu, Pierre, Franz Schultheis, and Andreas Pfeuffer. 2011. With Weber against Weber. In Conversation with Pierre Bourdieu. In The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Simon Susan and Bryan S.  Turner, 111–124. Trans. S.  Susen. London: Anthem Press. Burawoy, Michael, and Karl von Holdt. 2012. Conversations with Bourdieu. The Johannesburg Moment. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Coleman, James S. 1988. Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital. American Journal of Sociology 94 (Supplement): S95–S120. Durkheim, Émile. 1982 [1901]. The Rules of the Sociological Method. Trans. S. A. Solovay. London: Macmillan. Elbe, Ingo. 2008. Marx im Westen. Die neue Marx-Lektüre in der Bundesrepublik seit 1965. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

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Fine, Ben, and Dimitris Milonakis. 2009. From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics. The Shifting Boundaries between Economics and Other Social Sciences. London: Routledge. Gramsci, Antonio. 1999 [1971]. Selection from the Prison Notebooks. Trans. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith. London: The Electric Book Company. Hai Hac, Tran. 2003. Relire Le Capital. Marx, critique de l’économie politique et objet de la critique de l’économie politique. Lausanne: Page deux. Heinrich, Michael. 2004. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag. ———. 2009. Reconstruction or Deconstruction? Methodological Controversies about Value and Capital, and New Insights from the Critical Edition. In Re-Reading Marx. New Perspectives after the Critical Edition, ed. Riccardo Bellofiore and Roberto Fineschi, 71–98. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hoff, Jan. 2009. Marx Global. Zur Entwicklung des internationalen Marx-­ Diskurses seit 1965. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Kapeller, Jacob, and Florian Springholz. 2016. Heterodox Economics Directory (6th ed.). Accessed 26 November 2021. heteredoxnews.com/hed/web.html. Lebaron, Frédéric. 2003. Pierre Bourdieu. Economic Models against Economism. Theory and Society 32: 551–565. Lee, Frederic. 2009. A History of Heterodox Economics: Challenging the Mainstream in the 20th Century. London: Routledge. Lenin, Vladimir I. 1977 [1909]. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy. Trans. A. Fineberg. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl. 1973 [1847]. The Poverty of Philosophy. Trans. Institute of Marxism Leninism. Moscow: Progress Publishers. ———. 1974a [1973]. Capital. A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Vol. I. Trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling. Moscow: Progress Publishers. ———. 1974b [1894]. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. III. Trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Milonakis, Dimitris, and Ben Fine. 2009. From Political Economy to Economics. Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Theory. London: Routledge. Putnam, Robert D. 1993. Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Robbins, Lionel. 1932. An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan St. Martin’s Press. Straubhaar, Thomas. 2012. Schluss mit dem Imperialismus der Ökonomen. Financial Times Deutschland. (May 3). Streckeisen, Peter. 2013. Praxis und Form. Ökonomiekritik mit Marx und Bourdieu. Prokla 43 (3): 435–451. ———. 2014. Soziologische Kapitaltheorie. Marx, Bourdieu und der ökonomische Imperialismus. Bielefeld: transcript. Vincent, Jean-Marie. 2001. Un autre Marx. Après les marxismes. Lausanne: Page deux.

CHAPTER 9

Does Bourdieu “Extend” Marx’s Concept of Capital? Mathieu Hikaru Desan

Introduction Although Bourdieu was clearly a close and appreciative reader of Marx, his relationship to Marxism  was fraught and ambivalent.1 In this chapter, I consider one particularly common interpretation of Bourdieu’s relationship to Marxism: that he transcends Marxism’s narrow economism by extending its critical problematic beyond the economic sphere and into the cultural and symbolic spheres. I look specifically at the concept of capital, which is central to both Bourdieu and Marx, and whose cultural and symbolic forms in Bourdieusian theory mark that theory’s originality and constitute the basis for the perception that Bourdieu extends Marxism. I argue that this model of extension must ultimately be rejected. Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and symbolic capital are not extensions of an 1

 This chapter is an edited version of Desan (2013).

M. H. Desan (*) University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_9

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economic capital conceived in a Marxist sense, and the concept of economic capital of which the other capitals are extended forms is not Marxist. I end with a discussion of Bourdieu’s treatment of the economic sphere, which constitutes a kind of empty referent in his theory of capital. I show how, inconsistent with the critical epistemology that characterizes his sociology of culture, Bourdieu has a tendency to treat economic phenomena, including economic capital, as self-evident. I compare this unfavourably to Marx’s concept of capital, the point of which was to theoretically reconstruct the social and historical relations of exploitation that fetishized economic practices concealed. I conclude that we must not only reject the idea that Bourdieu extended Marx’s analysis of capital into non-economic spheres of practice, but also the notion that through this extension Bourdieu transcended the economism that Marxism is (falsely) thought to represent.

The Extension Model A particularly persistent interpretation of Bourdieu’s relation to Marxism is that he extends Marxism’s critical problematic to the cultural and symbolic spheres, thereby transcending its narrow economism. So, for example, according to Swartz, “the first way Bourdieu distances himself from Marxism is by extending the notion of economic interest to ostensibly noneconomic goods and services” (1997: 66). The second way, Swartz goes on, “is by extending the idea of capital to all forms of power, whether they be material, cultural, social, or symbolic” (p. 73). More recently, Joas and Knöbl have written that the particular way in which Bourdieu develops his theory does not entail a complete break with utilitarian or Marxian notions … Bourdieu deploys the term ‘capital’, which originates in ‘bourgeois’ and Marxian economics, but he extends its meaning and distinguishes between different forms of capital. (2009: 385)

In the same vein, Paulle, van Heerikhuizen, and Emirbayer have claimed that Bourdieu “tried to escape from … Marxist ‘economism’ by adding to the classical concept of economic capital other types of capital: cultural, social, and symbolic types of assets being the most noteworthy” (2011: 161). Fowler goes so far as to argue that Bourdieu “effectively operates within the Marxist tradition” and that he “neither abandons the Marxist

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method of historical materialism ... nor repudiates Marx’s own texts” (2011: 33–5). She claims that Bourdieu “provides his most powerful critique of orthodox Marxism ... by taking up and extending Marx’s own analytical instruments to great sociological effect” (p.  36). Indeed, she praises Bourdieu for drawing attention to “misrecognized or misunderstood features of social action, particularly those that function analogously to the extraction of surplus value in the labour process” (p. 34). To be fair, these interpretations roughly correspond with how Bourdieu understood his own relation to Marxism. His frequent use of Weber, for example, was not meant to negate Marxism entirely, but rather to “close one of the gaps in Marxism” by elaborating a “materialist theory of the ‘symbolic’” (Bourdieu, Schultheis, and Pfeuffer 2011: 115–116). In evaluating the claim that Bourdieu’s “general theory of the economy of practices” extends or generalizes the Marxist problematic and thereby transcends its economistic distortions, it is helpful to examine Marx’s and Bourdieu’s concepts of capital. Not only is capital the conceptual glue holding Bourdieu’s “general theory of the economy of practices” together, it is also an obvious point of terminological convergence between Marxism and Bourdieu. If Bourdieu does in fact extend Marxism, then one might expect this to be especially the case in his theory of the different forms of capital. Indeed, this extension is precisely what Bourdieu seems to suggest, albeit in an ultimately problematic way.

The Marxian Concept of Capital It is easy to forget that Marx himself conceived of his project as a critique of political economy. This seems to have eluded even Bourdieu, who, although sympathetic to Marx in some ways, often criticized Marxism for its supposed economism (e.g. 1987, 1998, 2015). Bourdieu even claimed that Marxism was “the most economistic tradition that we know” (Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992: 114). But how fair is this charge? In fact, it was Marx’s project to criticize the self-evidence of political economy’s fetishized categories and to demonstrate how “a world’s history” was implicated in them (1977: 274). Indeed, the theoretical impasse presented by capitalist circulation, which appears as “the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham,” is precisely what Marx’s concept of capital was meant to overcome (p.  280). The main contours of Marx’s theory of capital are well known. The fetishized experience of economic production and exchange conceals capital’s essence as a social

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relation of exploitation. Only by constructing a theoretical concept of capital that broke from this fetishized experience was Marx able to show, first, that the valorization process only exists in and through the concrete labour process and, second, that the production of surplus-value is a historically specific form of extracting surplus-labour from direct producers. Moreover, for Marx capital is doubly social in that it entails in the first instance a social relation of exploitation, and in the second instance the totality of social relations that reproduce this fundamental relation’s conditions of possibility. Class struggles are not struggles over capital but struggles within it. What this indicates is that the relation of exploitation that capital denotes is overdetermined by the various instances in the social structure as a whole. The concept of capital thus does not refer exclusively to the “economic” sphere. In fact, Marx’s point is to demonstrate how even apparently straightforwardly “economic” phenomena are constitutively social, political, and historical. So whereas capital may appear here as money and there as means of production, Marx’s concept of capital allows us to pierce this fetishized form and to see capital not as a thing, but as a process; and not just a process, but a process of exploitation; and, finally, not only a process of exploitation, but also a social totality.

Bourdieu’s New Capitals Bourdieu rejects the philosophical-anthropological foundations of economism while at the same time demonstrating the interestedness of supposedly disinterested fields of practice. The dynamics of power are not, according to Bourdieu, limited to the economic sphere but pervade the cultural and symbolic spheres as well. The theory of economic practices is thus only “a particular case of a general theory of the economy of practices” (1990: 122). It is as part of this general theory that Bourdieu develops his notion of the different forms of capital. Bourdieu attempts to break from the common-sense experience of capital as “economic” and demonstrate instead how the power dynamics designated by the term capital are also operative in non-economic spheres of social life, albeit in misrecognized forms. As Lebaron (2003) and Heilbron (2011) point out, Bourdieu’s importation of economistic language in extending the concept of capital to culture, far from implying a kind of economic reductionism, was intended as a sort of epistemological shock challenging both the enchanted view of culture as disinterested and the economistic view that sees all power and interest as ultimately economic. Like Marx, then,

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Bourdieu seems to be sharply critical of economism’s fetishized conceptions of capital, and fully committed to an understanding of it that highlights its social and historical quality. A close reading of his concept of capital, however, reveals a more ambiguous picture. Consider the concept of cultural capital. Used for the first time in 1966 (Bourdieu 1966), the concept was developed by Bourdieu (with various collaborators) during his research in the 1960s on the relationship between education, cultural reproduction, and social reproduction, which resulted in the publication of Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1977), co-written with Jean-Claude Passeron. In this work, the concept of cultural capital is not conceived as an objective principle of stratification. It is not a resource that confers power upon its holder. Rather, it is an effect of power, a sort of shorthand for the set of competencies specific to the dominant class which become misrecognized as objective resources. There are two moments of misrecognition in the process of reproduction. The first is that the unequal distribution of cultural capital is misrecognized as unequal merit, objectified in academic credentials. The second, which actually precedes the first and without which cultural reproduction could not contribute to social reproduction, is that the concept of cultural capital itself is already a class power misrecognized as a bundle of objective properties. Cultural capital is the name given to the dominant class habitus when it is apprehended symbolically within the context of a relation of class power. Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is here far from being a fetishized category. It implies, as a condition of its own existence, an understanding of the production and reproduction of class relations. Consequently, if conceived as a theory of ideology and legitimation, it is compatible with—if not an extension of—a Marxist theory of class exploitation and the reproduction of the relations of production.2 But why call it cultural capital? Reproduction suggests a more or less metaphorical usage of the term. Cultural capital is profitable in the sense that it is a kind of self-expanding cultural recognition. But there is not yet a notion of capital as such, or economic capital, to which cultural capital is conceptually linked. What process is denoted by the term capital, and why the set of cultural privileges designated as cultural capital should specifically be considered capital, remains largely unspecified. This changes with Distinction (1984). There Bourdieu’s understanding of the social order and the places of class and capital within it changes 2

 Jacques Bidet and Anne Bailey (1979) make a similar point.

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significantly. Cultural and economic capital are now construed as objective categories of analysis that, rather than presupposing a theory of class, constitute it.3 Capital becomes a principle of differentiation within a scientifically constructed social space, and classes refer above all to proximities in this space effected by similar endowments of capital. The difference with Reproduction is clear. Earlier, the entire analysis presupposed an unspecified relation of class power. The concept of cultural capital did not really belong to the social space as an objective principle of differentiation. Rather, it was the symbolically misrecognized habitus of the dominant class. Following Distinction, Bourdieu recasts the social space as a “multi-dimensional space that can be constructed empirically by discovering the main factors of differentiation which account for the differences observed in a given social universe, or, in other words, by discovering the powers or forms of capital which are or can become efficient...in this particular universe” (Bourdieu 1987: 3–4). Capital steps forward as a foundational concept. As a concept pertaining to the objectivist moment of analysis that seeks to scientifically construct the space of socially determinant positions, capital becomes the principal explanatory factor in Distinction, determining both class and habitus and, through them, agents’ position-takings in the symbolic space. These changes are problematic from the point of view of Bourdieu’s relationship to Marxism. The concept of capital remains undertheorized. In Distinction unlike in Reproduction, Bourdieu relates economic and cultural capital as two commensurable forms of something common such that one can intelligibly speak of a total volume of capital. But what generic understanding of capital authorizes this move? Bourdieu defines capital in Distinction as “actually usable resources and powers” (Bourdieu 1984: 114). It seems, then, that capital is deployed in a rather capacious and banal, or fetishized, sense, as a power-conferring or profit-generating resource—hardly an “extension” of the Marxist concept of capital. The conceptualization of class is also problematic from a Marxist point of view. For Bourdieu, objective classes and their fractions are determined by volume and composition of capital, and as such are essentially quantitatively defined constructs. But such a definition of class is analytically limited. The only relationship one can construct between classes so defined is one between dominant and dominated. Such a notion of class gives no 3  This is not to suggest that cultural capital is “objective” in an essentialist or substantialist way for Bourdieu.

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indication of its historical conditions of possibility. One might wonder what determines the distribution of effective capitals in the social space. Answering this question requires a concept of class that goes beyond simply describing a given state of the distribution of effective resources. Moreover, by redefining class broadly as a particular distribution of all forms of capital effective within a social space, Bourdieu loses any theoretical traction for accounting for exploitation as a mode of power distinct from domination or exclusion.4 In the social space, there are only “continuous distributions” (Bourdieu 1984: 175). It is hard to see how a social space constructed in this way can render exploitation theoretically legible. In Distinction and subsequent works, Bourdieu thus seems to limit the points of possible convergence with a Marxist theory of class exploitation and social reproduction that existed in Reproduction. The conceptual commensuration of economic and cultural capital within a newly developed theory of the social space raises the question of the fundamental social processes or relations that capital as such, whatever its form, denotes. But far from even attempting to extend a Marxist problematic that would define capital in terms of a socio-historical relation of class exploitation, Bourdieu instead puts forth an undertheorized and fetishized notion of capital.

Towards a Definition: The Forms of Capital In “The Forms of Capital” (1986), Bourdieu attempts a rare systematic formulation of his theory of the different forms of capital. I have already noted how the common conceptual designation of cultural, social, and economic capital as capital raises the question of their relation to each other as different manifestations of the same social process. Here Bourdieu explicitly addresses this question. But the way in which he does so is far from satisfying, especially if one is expecting to find there a solid basis for the claim that he extends or generalizes a Marxist theory of capital. In the section on “conversions,” Bourdieu argues that “economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital” and that these other capitals are “transformed, disguised forms of economic capital” (p. 252). So what is it that is common to the different forms of capital and that underlies their theoretical commensurability? Bourdieu defines the substance of capital as “accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its 4

 See Erik Olin Wright (2009) for this distinction.

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‘incorporated,’ embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor” (p. 241). As for the measure of this substance, Bourdieu argues that “the universal equivalent, the measure of all equivalences, is nothing other than labor-time” (p. 253). These passages of course evoke the labour theory of value and imply an affinity between Bourdieu’s concept of capital and Marx’s. But a closer reading suggests otherwise. For example, while Marx posits the theory of value as a premise for establishing a condition of equal exchange between commodities, it is not in itself a theory of capital. In fact, Marx shows how the production of surplus-value is possible despite the fact that commodities exchange at their values. That labour is accumulated in things and that those things become exchangeable according to the amount of labour accumulated is merely descriptive of commodities. Capital entails a relation of exploitation that is not reducible to the circuit of commodity production and exchange. Consider also Bourdieu’s conception of profit. He says, capital, in the sense of the means of appropriating the product of accumulated labor in the objectified state which is held by a given agent, depends for its real efficacy on the form of the distribution of the means of appropriating the accumulated and objectively available resources; and the relationship of appropriation between an agent and the resources objectively available, and hence the profits they produce, is mediated by the relationship of (objective and/or subjective) competition between himself and the other possessors of capital competing for the same goods, in which scarcity—and through it social value—is generated. The structure of the field, i.e., the unequal distribution of capital, is the source of the specific effects of capital, i.e., the appropriation of profits and the power to impose the laws of functioning of the field most favorable to capital and its reproduction. (pp. 245–246)

There are two competing principles of value here. On the one hand, labour-time is the “measure of all equivalences” and is the principle that determines the exchangeability of the different capitals. But on the other hand, inasmuch as Bourdieu is interested in accounting for the profitability of capital, its value is determined by its scarcity. Bourdieu here seems to

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be confronted by the same problem that confronted classical political economy: namely, how to account for profits when assuming that things exchange at their equivalents? Marx’s solution to this problem was to develop a concept of the relations of production as relations of exploitation. But Bourdieu, like those political economists criticized by Marx, assimilates profits entirely to the sphere of circulation, which forces him to either abandon the assumption of equal exchange or to accept a notion of self-valorizing value. For Bourdieu, insofar as the different forms of capital are considered only in their dimension as embodiments of accumulated labour, they are commodities. But what defines capital as capital for Bourdieu is not its nature as accumulated labour, but its exclusive appropriation and subsequent investment as a weapon and a stake within a field. In other words, commodities become capital insofar as they are put to profitable use. But profit, for Bourdieu, has little to do with production. It is a closure effect, that is, a consequence of the leverage entailed by exclusive appropriation. As such, it belongs entirely to the sphere of circulation. From a Marxist perspective, while Bourdieu’s concept of profit might account for the struggle over the distribution of the available surplus-­ value, it cannot account for its production in the first place. Bourdieu’s invocation of a marxisant theory of value thus does not actually shed any light on his theory of profit. For Bourdieu, the profitability of any given commodity is completely independent of both the relations of production and the concrete labour process within which it is produced. So whereas for Marx capital denotes the social relation of exploitation—that is, the extraction of surplus-labour—in the production of commodities, for Bourdieu capital designates an object that, due to its unequal distribution within a field, is capable of accruing benefits to its owner. Hence Bourdieu often speaks of the exploitation of capital, and not the social relation of exploitation denoted by capital. Following Craig Calhoun (1993) we could say that what Bourdieu’s theory ultimately lacks is an idea of capitalism. Bourdieu’s generic concept of capital is transhistorical. As Calhoun notes, by capital Bourdieu seems to mean simply any resource insofar as it yields power (p. 69). In the end, what Bourdieu’s notion of capital lacks is not only an idea of capitalism as a particular historical formation, but more fundamentally an idea of exploitation as a particular form of power.

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Capital, Exploitation, and the Economic Field: The Limits of Bourdieu’s Critical Sociology Bourdieu’s theory of the different forms of capital has as its reference point a concept of economic capital, just as the economic field of interested action is the reference point for his “general science of the economy of practices.” It would thus seem necessary to understand the role that capital plays in the economic field. But Bourdieu rarely attempted to define economic capital, saying that he did not want to “dwell on the notion of economic capital,” and suggesting that “it’s not [his] area” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 119; Bourdieu 1993: 32). This abdication of conceptual definition is surprising. A Marxist conception of capital has sometimes been projected into this void, but as I have suggested, this is a dubious assumption. Rather, this absence is indicative of a critical weakness in Bourdieu: he sometimes takes the economic field at face value, and as such grasps capital only in the fetishized form in which it appears in this field. Marx constructed a concept of capital precisely to demonstrate its constitutively historical and social character and to render legible the relations of exploitation presupposed yet concealed  by its reified form. Bourdieu’s theory of capital has been praised for extending the scope of the concept beyond the economic field, but what it extends is not a Marxist concept of capital, but only capital’s appearance as a power resource. Bourdieu insists on calling these different power resources “capital” without developing a concept of capital as such, and thereby obscures the relations of exploitation which Marx revealed. How does Bourdieu conceptualize the “economic” sphere? According to Bourdieu, “archaic” societies euphemize the objective facts of interest, competition, and exploitation by transmuting these practices into a symbolic “good faith” economy. But the necessity for such symbolic dissimulation is, Bourdieu suggests, historically specific: If it be true that symbolic violence is the gentle, hidden form which violence takes when overt violence is impossible, it is understandable why symbolic forms of domination should have progressively withered away as objective mechanisms came to be constituted which, in rendering superfluous the work of euphemization, tended to produce the “disenchanted” dispositions their development demanded. (1977: 196)

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This process of disenchantment corresponds to the historical constitution of the economy as an economy, free from the work of euphemization and dissimulation. Indeed, Bourdieu argues that “only at the end of a slow evolution tending to strip away the specifically symbolic aspect of the acts and relations of production was the economy able to constitute itself as such, in the objectivity of a separate universe, governed by its own rules, those of self-interested calculation, competition, and exploitation” (2000: 19). A universe is thus established “in which the law of exchange of exact equivalents becomes the explicit rule and can be expressed publicly, in an almost cynical manner” (1998: 105). There “one can call a spade a spade, an interest an interest, a profit a profit. Gone is the work of euphemization which, among the Kabyle, was imposed even on the market” (p.  105). The emergence of the economic field thus: marks the appearance of a universe in which social agents can admit to themselves and admit publicly that they have interests and can tear themselves away from collective misrecognition; a universe in which they not only can do business, but can also admit to themselves that they are there to do business, that is, to conduct themselves in a self-interested manner, to calculate, make a profit, accumulate, and exploit. (pp. 105–106)

Bourdieu here seems content to take the economic field at face value. While the symbolic order dissimulates the economic field, the economic field is supposedly an arena free from any misrecognition. Marx, of course, showed that it was precisely the fetishized experience of the economy as such that was, in the first place, ideological. The whole point of Marx’s concept of capital was to give the lie to the notion that in the economic field of circulation everything appears as it really is, that profit and exploitation are immediately available to experience. In the passages above, Bourdieu, unlike Marx, locates equal exchange, profits, and exploitation on the same experiential plane and refuses to recognize the truth of these in a different analytical space. While the economic field is conceived in some sense as the truth of the cultural and symbolic fields, the truth of the economic field is apparently found within itself, on its surface. This is not to argue that Bourdieu always took the economic field at face value (e.g. Bourdieu 2005). Yet Bourdieu was rather inconsistent in his characterization of the economic field. So while his study of the housing market is exemplary of what a critical sociology of the economy might

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look like, when it comes to theorizing the place of interests, profit, exploitation, and hence capital, in the economic field, Bourdieu too readily suspends his critical epistemology. Whereas the importation of terms such as capital from the economic to the cultural sphere was meant to provoke an epistemological break with an enchanted view of culture, in elaborating a critique of economic reason Bourdieu is often content only to historicize economic practices whose disenchanted nature he accepts. Telling in this regard have been the responses to the critique of Bourdieu as a closet utilitarian and economic reductionist (Caillé 1981; Favereau 2001). Bourdieu’s defenders, including Bourdieu himself, have responded to this charge by rejecting any foundationalist anthropology and pointing out that interests and practices are the socio-historical products of specific fields (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Boyer 2003; Convert 2003; Lebaron 2003). But even if we accept that Bourdieu was neither essentialist nor reductionist, it remains the case that within advanced societies the economic sphere is held up as a space wherein the logic of power is uniquely transparent. So while in pre-capitalist or symbolic worlds the (economic) truth of practices and the experience of those practices do not coincide, the “instituted cynicism” of the economic economy “means that in this case the boundary between the native representation and the scientific description is less marked” (Bourdieu 2005: 200). The kinds of critique to which Bourdieu subjects the non-economic and economic spheres are thus subtly different. Whereas his critical sociology generally consists in theoretically unmasking the hidden logic of power within cultural fields, Bourdieu implies that for the economy, where science and native experience coincide, critique consists only in historicizing its already transparent logic. Power being transparent in the economy, critical sociology is left without an object and gives way to economic anthropology. Consequently, phenomena such as exploitation are conceived not as the dissimulated structural relations of capitalist production, but rather as dispositional features, albeit historically contingent, of economic actors. Consider the more programmatic sections of The Social Structures of the Economy. In the introduction Bourdieu writes that, “against the ahistorical vision of economics,” we must reconstitute the history of the genesis of economic dispositions on the one hand and the economic field on the other (2005: 5). But once this economic field is constituted:

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in a kind of confession to itself, capitalist society stops ‘deluding itself with dreams of disinterestedness and generosity’: registering an awareness, as it were, that it has an economy, it constitutes the acts of production, exchange or exploitation as ‘economic’, recognizing explicitly as such the economic ends by which these things have been guided. (p. 7)

The “economy” is here equated with economic “ends.” The question of exploitation is reduced to one of intention, that is, of the genesis of a disposition to exploit. Bourdieu may historicize this disposition to exploit, but the objective relation of exploitation is not in itself considered a theoretical object, presumably because it is transparent in the economic field. Bourdieu assimilates all “economic” phenomena—profit, exploitation, accumulation—to an economic field considered only in its dimension as a sphere of circulation and exchange, and wherein the truth of these phenomena is immediately given to experience. Where exploitation is transparent, capital has no secrets to betray. For Bourdieu, economic capital has an objective existence in the social space and serves as a reference point for all other capitals—that is, as a universal equivalent. But Bourdieu does not consider, as Marx did, that this objective economic capital is itself symbolic in that it denotes a social relation of exploitation. Capital is taken for granted within a taken-for-granted economic field. Whereas capital in the cultural and symbolic orders is dissimulated, in the economic field capital, like profits and exploitation, can be admitted as such and hence does not require a conceptual definition separate from the way in which it appears to native experience. In Bourdieu’s rendering, economic capital as such denotes only a commodity or a resource insofar as it is struggled over within a transparent economic field. He has little to say about the appropriation of surplus-labour and the social and historical relations that make it possible. And although Bourdieu is sensitive to class conflict, this conflict is typically treated as a conflict over the distribution of capital, or as a conflict between the holders of different capitals. Whatever the virtues of Bourdieu’s (1987, 2013) reconceptualization of class, its capaciousness in including within the category any and all potential processes of group-formation based on the distribution of multiple capitals is in this instance a liability. Bourdieu is off the mark in criticizing the Marxist concept of class for restricting itself to the relations of production (1985: 736). The particularity of the Marxist concept lies not in some economistic bias that dismisses all other collectivities and forms of

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power; rather, it lies in the particularity of the form of power, that is, exploitation as the historically variable form of appropriating surplus-­ labour from the direct producers, that it seeks to render legible. This is lost on Bourdieu, who in broadening the concept of class loses sight of the qualitatively different relations of power that characterize the relations between differently constructed groups. For Bourdieu, exploitation has no distinct conceptual content. In the end, Bourdieu’s notions of capital and class remain firmly within a Weberian problematic of social closure and its distributional effects. Marx is not even met, much less transcended.

Conclusion The merits of Bourdieusian sociology are clear. I do not claim that any rapprochement between Bourdieusian theory and Marxism is doomed from the start, nor do I claim that it is impossible for one to build off the other. Indeed, for Marxism to have a future it must recognize its explanatory limits and open itself up to the best that sociology has to offer. Likewise, for Bourdieusian sociology to be true to its critical vocation it must take Marxism more seriously than it has in the past. Any future rapprochement between Bourdieusian theory and Marxism will have to think through the nature of their relation. My goal in this chapter has been to evaluate one particular understanding of this relation: that Bourdieu extends Marx’s critical analysis beyond the economy and thereby transcends Marxism’s economism. I did this by looking at the concept of capital, which has been the most obvious point of potential convergence between Marx and Bourdieu. Two conclusions impose themselves. First, if the different forms of capital are but extended forms of economic capital, the notion of economic capital that they extend is not a Marxist one. Nowhere does Bourdieu define capital as a historically specific mode of extracting and appropriating surplus-labour, nor is it clear what extending such a notion of capital to the disparate phenomena designated by cultural, social, and symbolic capital would mean. Second, the claim that Bourdieu transcends Marxism’s economism by extending a concept of capital is dubious for the reasons that Marx’s concept of capital was never economistic in that it always denoted an overdetermined socio-historical relation of exploitation, and that what Bourdieu supposedly extends is a conception of economic

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capital that, because grasped only in its fetishized form, is itself marked by an economistic belief in the transparency of economic experience. It is possible, however, to think of the relation between Marx and Bourdieu differently. Rather than positing a relation of extension, the search for possible points of articulation between Bourdieusian sociology and Marxism seems a more fruitful approach. In the spirit of theoretical pluralism, the question should not be about who transcends or surpasses whom, but about what processes each approach can uniquely render legible and how these theories can be used together in such ways that better explain concrete social phenomena. Still, a commitment to pluralism should not gloss over problems in compatibility where they do exist. Bourdieu’s notion of capital became less compatible with Marx’s precisely as it sought to subsume different principles of power under a single concept. In order to bring Marx and Bourdieu together, then, it might be necessary to loosen the screws a bit on the totalizing project of a “general theory of the economy of practices.”

References Bidet, Jacques, and Anne Bailey. 1979. Questions to Pierre Bourdieu. Critique of Anthropology 4 (13–14): 203–208. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1966. La transmission de l’héritage culturel. In Le Partage des bénéfices. Expansion et inégalités en France, ed. DARRAS, 383–421. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. ———. 1977 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1984 [1979]. Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1985. The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups. Theory and Society 14: 723–744. ———. 1986. The Forms of Capital. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J.G.  Richardson, 241–258. New  York: Greenwood Press. ———. 1987. What Makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups. Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32: 1–18. ———. 1990 [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Trans. R.  Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1993 [1980]. Sociology in Question. Trans. R. Nice. London: Sage. ———. 1998 [1994]. Practical Reason. Trans. R.  Johnson. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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———. 2000 [1997]. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005 [2000]. The Social Structures of the Economy. Trans. C.  Turner. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2013. Symbolic Capital and Social Classes. Journal of Classical Sociology 13: 291–302. ———. 2015 [2012]. On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992. Trans. D. Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Terry Eagleton. 1992. Doxa and Common Life. New Left Review 191: 111–121. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Passeron Jean-Claude. 1977 [1970]. Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture. Trans. R. Nice. London: Sage. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, Franz Schultheis, and Andreas Pfeuffer. 2011. With Weber Against Weber: In Conversation With Pierre Bourdieu. In The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays, ed. Simon Susen and Bryan S.  Turner, 111–125. London: Anthem Press. Boyer, Robert. 2003. L’anthropologie économique de Pierre Bourdieu. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 150: 65–78. Caillé, Alain. 1981. La sociologie de l’intérêt, est-elle intéressante? Sociologie du Travail 23: 251–274. Calhoun, Craig. 1993. Habitus, Field, and Capital: The Question of Historical Specificity. In Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone, 61–89. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Convert, Bernard. 2003. Bourdieu: Gary Becker’s Critic. Economic Sociology. European Newsletter 4: 6–9. Desan, Mathieu Hikaru. 2013. Bourdieu, Marx, and Capital: A Critique of the Extension Model. Sociological Theory 31: 318–342. Favereau, Olivier. 2001. L’économie du sociologue ou: Penser (l’orthodoxie) à partir de Pierre Bourdieu. In Le travail sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Bernard Lahire, 255–314. Paris: La Découverte. Fowler, Bridget. 2011. Pierre Bourdieu: Unorthodox Marxist? In The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays, ed. Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, 33–59. London: Anthem Press. Heilbron, Johan. 2011. Practical Foundations of Theorizing in Sociology: The Case of Pierre Bourdieu. In Social Knowledge in the Making, ed. Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michèle Lamont, 181–209. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joas, Hans, and Wolfgang Knöbl. 2009 [2004]. Social Theory. Twenty Introductory Lectures. Trans. A. Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lebaron, Frédéric. 2003. Pierre Bourdieu: Economic Models against Economism. Theory and Society 32: 551–565. Marx, Karl. 1977 [1867]. Capital. Volume One. Trans. B.  Fowkes. New  York: Vintage Books. Paulle, Bowen, Bart van Heerikhuizen, and Mustafa Emirbayer. 2011. Elias and Bourdieu. In The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays, ed. Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, 145–173. London: Anthem Press. Swartz, David. 1997. Culture & Power. The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wright, Erik Olin. 2009. Understanding Class: Towards and Integrated Analytical Approach. New Left Review 60: 101–116.

CHAPTER 10

Reassessing Bourdieu’s Use of the Marxian Concept of Capital Miriam Aiello

Introduction The aim of this chapter is to analyse the significance of Bourdieu’s concept of capital and discuss whether this concept is coherent with the Marxian notion of capital or not. Even though in this regard most interpreters subscribe to the “extension model” (Desan 2013: 319; see also Desan’s chapter in this book)— that is, to the idea that Bourdieu simply extended the Marxian notion of capital with the aim either of generalising Marxism to non-economic dimensions (Fowler 2011: 34-35; Joas and Knöbl 2011: 15) or of criticising Marxian economism (Brubaker 1985: 748; Swartz 1997: 66; Paulle et al. 2011: 161)—there are indeed four main objections raised by several scholars who claim that Bourdieu’s notion of capital is far from being genuinely Marxian: (1) the ‘substantialist’ objection (Krais and Gebauer 2002; Bidet 2008: 589; Desan 2013) according to which Bourdieusian capital fails to be a process; (2) the ‘circulationist’ objection (Desan 2013:

M. Aiello (*) Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_10

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332; Beasley-Murray 2000) according to which Bourdieu not only mistakes the labour theory of value for that of the capital as a value in process but also places capital on the ground of the circulation of commodities rather than on the ground of production; (3) the ‘missing exploitation’ objection (Desan 2013; Beasley-Murray 2000: 101) according to which Bourdieusian capital does not encompass the exploitation that necessarily qualifies the Marxian concept (cf. Swartz 1997: 75; Santoro 2016: 71); (4) the ‘trans-historical’ objection (Calhoun 1993) according to which, unlike Marx’s use of capital as a historically determined social relationship, Bourdieusian capital displays a trans-historical nature. Against these critiques that deem Bourdieu’s capital almost entirely inconsistent with Marx’s capital, claiming it falls under a generic non-­ Marxian conception of capital, I defend the thesis of a partial congruence. The demonstration of this thesis requires a comparison between Bourdieu’s and Marx’s concepts of capital based not only on volume I but also on volumes II and III of Das Kapital and on the 1857 Introduction [Einleitung] to Grundrisse (Marx 1973). Taking into account Bourdieu’s ‘holistic’ tenet, and thus considering the interrelations between habitus, field, and capital I begin by providing a conceptual reconstruction of capital in Bourdieu’s Forms of Capital, and in Marx’s Das Kapital. I then illustrate the twofold theoretical operation that justifies Bourdieu’s appropriation of the notion of capital within a “general economy of practices” and I reassess the conditions under which Bourdieu’s capital is—on its specific ground—comparable to Marx’s capital. Here I argue that Bourdieu’s concept of capital occupies an intermediate place between Marx’s account of capital as a social relation and a generic economic definition of capital as produced means of production and as accumulated amount of money that yields or can yield profit (cf. Lunghini 1991; Grenfell 2014: 145). Then, I illustrate the four main objections mentioned above and put forward four corresponding counter-objections aimed at supporting the thesis of a partial congruence. I suggest (1) that the ‘holistic’ tenet neutralises the ‘substantialist’ objection; (2) that extending the analysis to volume II of Das Kapital weakens the ‘circulationist’ objection; (3) that the theory of symbolic violence—insofar as it implies the cognitive exploitation of dominated agents—is a surrogate for the exploitation of labour-power at issue in the ‘missing exploitation’ objection; and finally 4) that, against the ‘trans-historical’ objection, the Marxian analysis of “production in general” as a “rational abstraction [verständige Abstraktion]” (Marx

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1973: 85) sets a conceptual ground for a synergy between Bourdieu’s trans-historical economy of practices and Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production.

Preliminary Remarks It is well known that the Bourdieusian triad of habitus, field and capital is made up entirely of notions borrowed, at least in their nominalistic shell, from pre-existing traditions. Just as the habitus is borrowed from Aristotelian-Thomistic ethics and the field is defined in the wake of Kurt Lewin’s homologous psychosocial notion, so the capital theorised by Bourdieu no doubt draws inspiration, in many fundamental respects, from Karl Marx’s critique of political economy. Of course, it is also well known that none of these notions reworked by Bourdieu are conceptually reducible to their “ancestor,” precisely because of their renovated structural and explanatory function: in fact, in Bourdieu’s framework, the habitus no longer performs the function of practical-moral balancing that qualifies the Aristotelian hexis or Aquinas’s concept of habitus, the same way the notion of field no longer coincides with the Lewinian one, that is, the relationship of interdependence between the needs of the individual and his or her physical and psychological environment. In much the same way, the Bourdieusian concept of capital no longer denotes only a reality of a strictly economic nature. In addition to having to take into account the eccentricity of these concepts with respect to their ancestry, any investigation into any of these tools should also firmly bear in mind that Bourdieu always claimed both their synergy and their empirically contextualised use (which I will hereafter call the “holistic tenet”): although each expresses, with their own focus and slant, the objective and subjective objectivity of social phenomena, only together are they able to fully restore social reality in its relational form (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Habitus, field and capital in fact constitute an integrated conceptual system, wherein each term expresses, from a specific point of view—the corporeal-psychic internalisation of experience (habitus), the structural exteriority of the space of experience (field) and the cumulative acquisition (reified or incorporated) of experience as labour (capital)—the entire globality of the social whole and its order. Moreover, quite interestingly Bourdieu seems to reserve to capital a different methodological treatment from that given to habitus and field:

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possessed in a certain quantitative volume and qualitative configuration by every agent and always presented in its manifold typologies (cultural, social, symbolic, etc.), it seems the notion of capital is destined to conceptual fragmentation, essentially lacking the intrinsic cohesion and covariance which qualify the notions of habitus and field, which are defined as systems, respectively, of interdependent dispositions and positions. And yet, despite such an irreducible plurality, capital, whether understood as a substantive plurality or as a plurality of species, also exhibits a set of characteristics that justifies the use of a common notion to denote it. Thus there is an obvious lexical ambiguity: when one refers to ‘forms of capital’ one is referring to ‘forms’ of a form, or we could say, going beyond the pun, that forms of capital are—typological—instances of a functional form that is present in each one of them, below their particularity, and that precisely this is the form of capital. In other words, an overemphasis on plurality risks overlooking the fact that capitals can figure as a plurality only because they perform the same function and exhibit the same cluster of salient features. As we shall see, Bourdieu’s conception of capital oscillates between two fundamental meanings: according to the first one, which is a nonspecific and asocial account, capital is only a produced means of production; for the second one, which is the Marxian concept, capital is a historically determined social relation of production, and is at once the means, the end and the subject of the economic cycle.

“The Forms of Capital” and Capital as a Form Even though Bourdieu employs the concept of capital already in his earlier works (Bourdieu 1966), it is only in The Forms of Capital that he provides (i) a justification for the use of the notion of capital in his social theory, (ii) an analysis of the modes of existence of capital conducted through the typification of its forms and states, and (iii) a theoretical-empirical outline of capital conversion strategies. For Bourdieu, capital is a function shared by all properties that have a social existence and efficacy within a field of practice. Insofar as all social properties have a historical nature—that is, insofar as their specific efficacy and meaning are the product of an accumulation, within which the social relations underlying this accumulation are implied—they function as capital; moreover, since in order to bring into existence their efficacy they need to be invested in a field, they also constitute the means of accumulation and of further valorisation.

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A first good reason to borrow the concept of capital is therefore that it is able to restore the character of historicity to social reality, allowing to grasp beneath the immediately perceived surface of an object—or of a competence—its hidden history of production and attribution, a history that always has a foundation in concrete social relations. In this framework, “capital is accumulated labor, (in its materialized form or its “incorporated,” embodied form)” (Bourdieu 1986: 241): capital is a crystallisation of social energy and of the social relations that underpin its accumulation which, once privately acquired or inherited, allows its owner to appropriate further social labour through its investment in a field. This voracious mobilising efficacy consists of two components: in fact, capital is both “a vis insita, a force inscribed in objective or subjective structures” and “a lex insita, the principle underlying the immanent regularities of the social world” (Bourdieu 1986: 241). Thus capital has both i) a physical character, as it is immanent energy capable of performing work (and of putting to work what it subsumes), ii) and a nomological character, because its quantitative being, extensive and intensive, governs the possibilities and impossibilities of its bearer. By virtue of the first aspect, capital “contains a tendency to persist in its being” (Bourdieu 1986: 241).1 This momentum, the “claim to exist” (Bourdieu 1988b: 11) of a past history, is shared with the habitus, which is enlivened by the tendency to survive the conditions of its own production—as the effect of hysteresis makes evident. It would seem, therefore, that this appetitive component of capital is the objective counterpart to the appetitiveness of habitus, and of agents and groups as they are constructed in terms of habitus and classes of habitus. By virtue of the second aspect, the restoration of the historicity of the social world conveyed by capital forces us to recognise that not everything is equally possible or impossible, probable or improbable, nor for everyone: in every property that functions as capital there are social relations at the basis of its acquisition, signification and evaluation, so that capital already contains a relationship of force and domination that binds the possibilities of the bearer of capital in a particular way. For this reason, “the structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social 1  Sometimes Bourdieu describes the class trajectories in terms of conatus and nisus perseverandi. See for example Bourdieu (1988a: 176) and Bourdieu (1984: 333). See also Fuller (2008).

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world, i.e., the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices” (Bourdieu 1986: 242). To look at social reality without the idea of capital implies falling into the fiction of a universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything. (Bourdieu 1986: 241)

On closer inspection, the critical disclosure of the gap between the sphere of appearance and the sphere of essence is a key feature of Marx’s critique of political economy. Indeed, Marx clearly showed the ambivalence of capitalism as a product of Modernity: on the one hand, he stresses how the capitalist market has become the scene of the peaceful encounter among equal and free economic agents which are empowered to enter into consensual acts and contracts of exchange according to the modern principles of freedom and equality (“a very Eden of the innate rights of man,” Marx 1976: 280). On the other hand, Marx points out that Modernity has also brought forth that particular figure, unprecedented in history and produced in a tragic and violent way by history itself, which is the bearer of labour-power, the seller who has nothing to sell except his own capacity to work, contained in his body and in his nerves. On the commodity market, the buying and selling of labour-power appears fair and free, while instead, in the process of production—wherein the labour-­ power is legitimately consumed—it gives birth to a surplus that exceeds the amount of value exchanged in the buying and selling of that same labour-power. The symmetry conceals an asymmetry: this is the critical core of the Marxian critique of political economy. A further fundamental point of Bourdieusian theory on capital is that affirming the coextension of capital to all the properties that have a social existence and efficacy in historically determined ways implies including in the notion of capital a massive quantity of properties that do not have an economic nature and do not appear as (immediately) convertible into money. By virtue of this, recognising that not only economic properties but also non-economic properties function as capital means affirming that precisely those practices that present themselves as maximally disinterested

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are expressions of investment and, therefore, animated by specific forms of non-economic interest.2 Indeed, Bourdieu says: Interest, in the restricted sense it is given in economic theory, cannot be produced without producing its negative counterpart, disinterestedness. […] The world of bourgeois man, with his double-entry accounting, cannot be invented without producing the pure, perfect universe of the artist and the intellectual and the gratuitous activities of art-for-art’s sake and pure theory. (Bourdieu 1986: 242)

If Marx identified the juridical conditions of possibility—the principles of equality and freedom—and the historical conditions of possibility—the violence of primitive accumulation—of capitalism, Bourdieu identifies in the constitution of the bourgeois market, and in the theoretical codification of its functioning, the condition of possibility of the autonomisation of the fields of disinterestedness (Bourdieu 2005: 7-10). As for the issue of interest (Bourdieu 1988b),3 it is enough here to recall that two fundamental principles lay at the basis of Bourdieu’s social theory understood as a theory of action and knowledge: first, the classical principle of sufficient reason, for which nothing happens without reason and no action is carried out without a motivation; second, the principle of opacity of knowledge, which underlies practical sense and the reasonable, rather than rational, nature of action, for which such ‘motivations’ do not require to be known transparently and successful action is most often not guided either by rationality or by an explicit position of ends. The use of the category of interest—and the close category of illusio as well—fits into this epistemological framework: interest is opposed both to gratuitousness and disinterestedness—that is, to what is without reason, unmotivated, arbitrary—and to indifference—that is, the inability to detect differences and to generate movement or differential activation states towards something. Interest or illusio consists in being caught up in a social game, “to participate, to admit that the game is worth playing and that the stakes created in and through the fact of playing are worth pursuing; it is to recognize the game and to recognize the stakes” (Bourdieu 1998: 77). Moreover, there are social contexts in which the masking of economic interest is quintessential to defining non-economic interest. This is the  Cf. Bourdieu (2013, 2017).  See also Grenfell (2008) and, for a critical perspective, Caillé (1981, 1994).

2 3

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case for either the precapitalist economy of symbolic exchanges or the fields of disinterestedness in modern societies (art, culture, etc.), which are driven by specific forms of “interest in disinterestedness” (Bourdieu 1998: 85), at the basis of which “denial (Verneinung)” and “euphemization” (Bourdieu 1986: 242–243) of any economic interest are brought into play. Whereas these considerations just count as general theoretical outlines, perhaps Bourdieu’s best-known reflection on capital concerns the “forms” it takes in social reality. Bourdieu maps out the different modes of existence of the properties that function as capital within two transversal distinctions: a typological distinction and a ‘topological’ one. The first states that the multiple realities and properties capable of functioning as a capital nexus can be grouped into three proper types—economic, cultural, and social capital, and in a fourth meta-type—the symbolic capital. According to the second distinction, these realities can be either objectified—enclosed within the material boundaries of concrete objects or assets, or incorporated—included in the biological limits of the bearer in the form of cognitive contents and postures –, or institutionalised—expressed by symbols, credentials, guarantees and any kind of certifications capable of being valid intersubjectively. It is worth noting that Marx is not unconcerned with these distinctions (when, for example, he distinguishes between constant and variable capital, and when he illustrates the ways in which the multiple forms of capital circulate and change into one another). By virtue of these two specifications, capital—as social energy, as crystallised physical or cognitive social labour that expresses the social relations of production and reproduction of the economic and symbolic order in which it operates—can be: • economic capital: in the objectified state when it consists of all material, monetary and financial, movable and immovable assets; in the institutionalised state when it consists of “property rights” (Bourdieu 1986: 243), and any other kind of contractual and institutional protection of an objectified economic capital;4 • cultural capital: in the embodied state when it consists of skills, knowledge incorporated through family upbringing, education and 4  While not appearing explicitly, it would not be improper to also speak of embodied economic capital to denote those organic and aesthetic states of the body that are directly related to the availability of economic capital, to the possibility of presenting and preserving it in certain ways through the investment of economic capital.

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the exercise of cultural curiosity; in the objectified state when it consists of the cultural goods possessed; in the institutionalised state when it consists of educational qualifications and cultural credentials; • social capital: consisting of an agent’s network of current or potential relationships, the related web of material and symbolic exchanges, as well as the patterns of relationships and socialisation acquired through the membership of one or more social groups. Capital in all of these forms and states is in a close relationship with field, as Bourdieu clearly explains when he says that the “guises” (Bourdieu 1986: 243) capital takes strictly depend “on the field in which it functions” as well as on “the cost of the more or less expensive transformations which are the precondition for its efficacy in the field in question.” Symbolic capital as meta-form of capital deserves to be discussed separately; indeed, this notion designates the effects that any form of capital exerts on a given social agent when it is not perceived according to its own form. This capital is, on closer inspection, a cognitive effect “which rests on cognition and recognition” (Bourdieu 1998: 85), or rather on “recognition without knowledge” (Bourdieu 1984: 369), and coincides with a form of misrecognition of the ultimately arbitrary character of the relation of domination conveyed in the field by means of the specific capitals. Clearly all forms of capital—especially when they are considered in their incorporated state, that is, when they cohabit in the same substratum, the living and cognitive body of its bearer—tend to blur into one another to the point that it becomes difficult both to tell them apart and to isolate them from the habitus. I want to suggest that the framework depicted in The Forms of Capital can be better understood if placed within the fundamental Bourdieusian distinction between first- and second-order objectivity. Habitus, field and forms of capital are operators whose task is to shape the relationship that arises between an “objective objectivity” given by “the distribution of material resources and means of appropriation of socially scarce goods and values,” and a “subjective objectivity” that exists instead “in the form of systems of classification, the mental and bodily schemata that function as symbolic templates for the practical activities— conduct, thoughts, feelings and judgements—of social agents” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 7). The paired integration of these two heterogeneous and yet isomorphic objectivities is realised within the ‘median’ order of bodies and social practices and becomes investigable precisely through the concepts of habitus, field and forms of capital, whose hybrid

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conceptual structure—at once subjective and objective—has been designed exactly to be sensitive to the subjective and objective sides of social reality. If this interpretive framework is valid, some consequences can be drawn: a) through the claim that cultural and social forms of capital are convertible under certain conditions into economic capital, Bourdieu—far from stating an economistic theorem—is simply suggesting that they are ready to be converted into the most rigid core of first-order objectivity and thus to be able, among other things, to define their bearer with respect to the position it occupies in historically given relations of production; b) since forms of capital are also always convertible into symbolic capital, they are therefore capable of functioning even on the ground of second-order objectivity, as symbolic and immaterial marks which nevertheless exert material effects, invisible to a purely economistic consideration of social reality. And considering a) and b), it follows c) that economic capital and symbolic capital constitute the two polarities within which proper forms of capital are susceptible to being translated. In conclusion, the notion of capital in general serves to denote all those objective aspects, effective and binding for the bearer and for other agents as well, in which the relationship between first-order objectivity and second-­order objectivity is articulated at various levels of reality. From this admittedly generic definition, we will see how once capital is found embedded in the field a polarisation between dominant and dominated bearers emerges: in this situation, the quantity and quality of capital of the latter is radically subordinated to that of the former and thereby rendered negligible. Just as the theory of practice has the dual nature of a theory of action and a theory of knowledge, the theory of forms of capital is a fundamental, yet not exclusive, component of a broader theory of power and domination.

Capital or the “animated monster which begins to work, ‘as if its body were by love possessed’” An evaluation of the greater or lesser degree of coherence of the Bourdieusian notion of capital with the Marxian one cannot be made without also making a comparison, albeit a schematic one, with the ‘mature’ work of the German thinker.

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“What I have to examine in this work is the capitalist mode of production and the relations of production and forms of intercourse that correspond to it” (Marx 1976: 90): with these words Marx defines the scientific object of Das Kapital in the preface to the first German edition. As many interpreters have emphasised—albeit with a diversity of accents and interpretative nuances—in the first book of Das Kapital Marx conducts a “phenomenological” investigation5 which, from the analysis of the “elementary form” (Marx 1976: 125) acquired by wealth in societies where the capitalist mode of production prevails, that is, the commodity form, and of its “dual character” (Marx 1976: 131) (use value/exchange value), proceeds to explicate a theory of value as the average working time socially necessary for the production of the commodity and to emphasise the monetary form assumed by value. Hence, Marx proceeds to outline a sphere of “simple circulation” (Marx 1976: 248), the theatre of mercantile acts of exchange of equivalents, of goods with money and of money with goods: acts of buying (M-C) and selling (C-M) between holders of commodities that are exchanged, without fraud or cunning, at their value. As is well known, Marx argues that a capitalist economy, aimed at the accumulation of abstract monetary quantities, cannot have as its ultimate goal the accumulation of ‘concrete’ commodities, and cannot, therefore, be properly understood on the basis of the cycle C-M-C, which begins and ends with the commodity (first with its sale, and then with the purchase of an equivalent commodity, aimed at fruition and consumption, and therefore at the ‘exit’ from circulation). Capitalist circulation must instead be seen as a process that begins and ends with money (M-C-M). Apparently, however, if we hold firm the dynamic of a pure exchange of equivalents, we obtain the paradoxical picture of a capitalist economy in which no one can become rich. The ‘correct’ cycle must therefore start with a given amount of money, and end with a greater amount of money (M-C-M’). This ‘increase’ is possible only if, among the commodities purchased, there is one endowed with the particular virtue of producing a value 5  In the sense of the Hegelian exposition of categories: cf. Finelli (1987, 2015), Bellofiore (2013); Fineschi (2006); Micaloni (2017b); see also the now classical Rosdolsky (1977) and, for what concerns the Grundrisse, Uchida (1988) and Meaney (2002). For a different reconstruction of the critique of political economy, which modifies some crucial points of the Marxian exposition, see Arthur (2002).

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greater than the value that was necessary to produce it (and to purchase it): such is the case of labour-power. That is to say, the capitalist must meet, as a buyer, a seller who is so poor that he has nothing to sell as a commodity other than his own bare labour-power, the capacity to work “which exists only in his living body” (Marx 1976: 272). This labour-­ power is susceptible to being sold as a commodity only in compliance with two conditions: that the seller is the “free proprietor” of it (Marx 1976: 271), and that he “must always sell it for a limited period only” (Marx 1976: 271). Only under the first condition, in fact, can the seller really be the owner of goods, as well as relate as equal to the buyer and share with him the status of a legal person. For the second, it is necessary that the seller does not sell the commodity labour-power “in a lump, once and for all” (Marx 1976: 271), a circumstance that would equate him with a slave. As in the case of other commodities, the value of labour-power is equal to the average socially necessary labour time required to produce it, which in this case is equivalent to a quantum of means of subsistence necessary to keep its living bearer alive and in sufficient strength to work.6 Through the anticipation of a salary, corresponding to the value of these means of subsistence, the owner of money (the “capitalist in larval form,” Marx 1976: 269) acquires the right to use and consume the purchased commodity. By dispensing labour for the capitalist during the working day, the purchased labour-power not only works for the time necessary to reproduce its value (corresponding to the time necessary to produce the means of subsistence: the “necessary labour”), but also provides a share of additional work (“surplus labour”) which the capitalist appropriates without paying an equivalent value in return. Insofar as wages are equal to the labour necessary to produce the means of subsistence and not to the labour actually provided during the working day, there is a share of unpaid labour time (exploitation), a surplus labour that is the basis of the surplus value that allows the invested capital to expand its value, In this crucial distinction between labour and labour-power lies the “secret” (Marx 1976: 280) of capitalist production, the condition of possibility of the M-C-M cycle. In this scheme, Marx argues, monetary value becomes the “subject” of a process in which it alternately assumes the form of 6  It should be said that the issue of the value of labour-power, at least in connection with the ‘transformation problem’, is much debated in the Marxist literature: see, for example, Foley (1982), Starosta and Caligaris (2016).

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commodity and money. The transformation of money into capital takes place ‘inside and outside’ the sphere of circulation7: inside, because it presupposes and never breaks the juridical and economic rules of the exchange of equivalents; outside, because it equally demands the use of labourpower in a process of production that does not belong to the circulation of commodities, but rather represents its suspension. The scene of the exchange of equivalents between legally free and equal persons constitutes at once the surface, the form of manifestation and the necessary (but not sufficient) condition of capitalist production. If we stop at the surface, however, the necessary manifestation is nothing other than illusory appearance, a sleight of hand whereby a quantity of money seems to possess the mystical capacity to generate more money, and conceals its origin.8 In the egalitarian scene of the exchange of equivalents, both the radical inequality between classes or economic functions—determined by the different relationship (ownership or deprivation) that the members of the classes have with the means of production—and the social relationship of domination and exploitation that exists between the owners of capital and those who, possessing nothing but their own capacity to work, are forced to sell it as a commodity, are erased. When, at the end of the first book of Capital, the violence of “primitive accumulation” is pinpointed as the historical condition of possibility of the production of capital as the immanent logic of capitalistic economy, Marx has only illustrated in which ways capital is produced synchronically in its logic and diachronically as a historical function. He has not yet explained what it does once it has been produced: this discussion will in fact be the subject of the second and third books of Capital, devoted respectively to the circulation of capital and to the overall process of production and circulation of capital. 7  “His [of the capitalist] emergence as a butterfly must, and yet must not, take place in the sphere of circulation” (Marx 1976: 269); and: “this whole course of events, the transformation of money into capital, both takes place and does not take place in the sphere of circulation. It takes place through the mediation of circulation because it is conditioned by the purchase of the labour-power in the market; it does not take place in circulation because what happens there is only an introduction to the valorization process, which is entirely confined to the sphere of production” (Marx 1976: 302). 8  With regard to a later stage of the exposition, see also Marx (1993b: 516): “in interest-­ bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish is elaborated into its pure form, self-­valorizing value, money breeding money, and in this form it no longer bears any marks of its origin [Entstehung].”

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As we will see later, both the processual character of capital and its character of social relation, as well as the necessity of an exploitation aimed at the extraction of surplus value, are at the basis of many objections to Bourdieu’s use of the concept of capital as presumptively congruent with the Marxian concept. According to these readings, Bourdieu’s capital is a set of goods and resources rather than a process, it does not define a social relationship insofar as all agents are connoted as possessors of capital; and it remains, moreover, confined to a theory of value belonging to the sphere of circulation, whereas Marx investigates the genesis and production of capital as dependent on a nexus of exploitation between classes. These objections will be discussed below in greater detail.

To What Extent Are Bourdieu and Marx’s Concepts of Capital Compatible? So far, I have argued that Bourdieu’s concept of capital is based on the idea that the social properties active in the disparate domains of practice function analogously to how the capital nexus functions in the economic domain. In other words, all properties that have social efficacy by virtue of their efficacy function as a capital nexus. However, we still need to explain how, in general, we justify the use of a single notion to denote them (which amounts to questioning the core commensurability of forms of capital) and, more specifically, how we justify the use of the category of capital. In order to answer both sides of this question, it is necessary to render explicit the nature and the theoretical significance of Bourdieu’s appropriation of Marx’s capital. This operation can be split into two distinct sub-operations. Bourdieu achieves a double relativisation, synchronic and diachronic, of the economic domain. Economic practices are not only historically determined; they are also mere subspecies of practices in the context of a more general economy of practices. As we have seen above, the theory of a general economy of practices assesses that a more general “economic” character pervades all social practices—their immanent ratio, their interest—and that the strictly economic practices, in that they are subspecies of practices, are ruled by a particular and not generalisable logic.9 It is worth 9  “The science called ‘economics’ is based on an initial act of abstraction that consists in dissociating a particular category of practices, or a particular dimension of all practice, from the social order in which all human practice is immersed” (Bourdieu 2005: 1).

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noting that, despite the many accusations of economism addressed to Marx and Marxism, Bourdieu’s operation is mostly in line with the de-­ naturalisation of the categories of bourgeois classical economics promoted by Marx’s critique of political economy. Against the classical economists’ attempts to derive universal economic laws from the functioning of a capitalist economy, Marx argues that since the capitalist mode of production is only the current and historically determined mode of production its modalities of functioning cannot be universalised and passed off as eternal laws, already existing and valid from time immemorial, as the bourgeois economists claim to do with their “Robinsonades” (Marx 1973: 83). Indeed, in the 1857 Introduction of his Grundrisse, Marx condemns the eternalisation of historically determined relations promoted, for example, when the single and isolated individual is placed at the beginning of the production process. Both “the individual and isolated hunter and fisherman with whom Smith and Ricardo begin” and “Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract,” turn out to be backward projections of the individual of civil society which, says Marx, was “in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth” (Marx 1973: 83). This individual is falsely presented “not as a historic result, but as history’s point of departure” (Marx 1973: 83). Against this illusion, Marx argues that “the more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole” (Marx 1973: 84). A similar distortion affects the theorisation of “production in general,” that is, that enunciation of the “general preconditions of all production” (Marx 1973: 88) to be found in the first economics textbooks: such production in general ends up being “encased in eternal laws of nature independent of history” on which to graft “bourgeois relations […] quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded” (Marx 1973: 87). This happens, for example, when we go from the tautology according to which “all production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual, within and through a certain form of society” (Marx 1973: 87) to the universalisation of a historically determined form of appropriation, for example, private property. This seems to be exactly the direction Bourdieu takes when he states that:

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the constitution of a science of mercantile relationships which, inasmuch as it takes for granted the very foundations of the order it claims to analyze— private property, profit, wage labour, etc.—is not even a science of the field of property –, is not even a science of the field of economic production, has prevented the constitution of a general science of the economy of practices, which would treat mercantile exchange as a particular case of exchange in all its forms. (Bourdieu 1986: 242)

2) Bourdieu’s theory of forms of capital and his thesis of a general economy of practices allow capital, a category of economic nature, to spill out of its legitimate domain (which has been relativised and made peripheral in the previous passage) and into other dimensions of social experience. Such a borrowing is justified by the fact that this category is able to express with greater clarity aspects common to all social practices that the multiplicity and particularism of not strictly economic practices evidently conceal or do not express with sufficient clarity. These aspects can be enclosed under the following headings: • all socially effective properties are the outcome of a historically determined accumulation achieved through labour. This first trait, albeit fundamental, is non-specific, as it can be found both in Marx and in the tradition of classical political economy; • all practices, economic and non-economic, are animated by some interest that underlies their investment in a field of practice: this point is a specific innovation of Bourdieu’s thought and has been widely discussed in the literature devoted to Bourdieu’s economic anthropology;10 • at a first glance, each agent simply owns a determined and variously configured volume of capital; but considering a concrete social field, the distribution of the possessors of capitals gives rise to a polarization between dominant possessors and dominated possessors, which ultimately functions analogously to the distinction between possessors and non-possessors of capital: this polarisation is fundamental to the functioning of fields and underlies the entire symbolic economy of distinction. This third point introduces a discontinuity: the capital thematised by Bourdieu does not have an asocial nature, it is not a pure means of appropriating surplus: instead it contains an intrinsic reference to the specific relation of domination that runs through the field of practice.  For an updated review, see Girometti (2020).

10

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Thus, a methodological tenet for evaluating the relationship between Bourdieu and Marx’s uses of the concept of capital follows: the congruence between the two notions a) is necessarily partial, b) must be evaluated and tested on the ground of shared aspects, and c) does not imply, in principle, the incompatibility between the validity of one theory and the validity of the other—on the contrary, we defend the thesis that each theory contributes to shed light on the other in a specific way. On the basis of this methodological framework, a more fine-grained account of the issue can be provided. First, against the idea that Bourdieu simply extends Marx’s capital, it would be more correct to speak of a selective generalisation: extension is in fact a monolithic operation, which takes place—problematically—on a 1:1 scale, while in Bourdieu’s capital only some aspects of Marx’s capital seem to act. Secondly, the partial congruence between Marxian and Bourdieusian capital is effective and consistent if and only if some transformation coordinates are specified. Which are the following: The holistic tenet. The use of the notion of capital makes sense only if referring to habitus and field. The latter constitute an integrated system of analytical tools, each containing a reference to the others and moreover presupposing them: it is this approach that should eventually be criticised. Capital in its forms and states helps to denote the more objective component of the median and reciprocal space of expression between first- and second-order objectivities constituted by the order of bodies and practices. The multiplication of agents who enact the nexus of capital, and its limit. Reading social practices and access to fields through capital renders visible the following dynamic: each social agent—not only the two main “characters” in the Marxian sense (Marx 1976, 179)—accesses a field and invests its capital. Capital comes back in a constant or increased form (reproducing the conditions of its own valorisation), after having or not having undergone qualitative transformations according to the modes of convertibility. Because of this implication, all social agents are problematically constructed in analogy to the capitalist one. However, for the principles that define the field (in which every position exercises and undergoes forces), in every social agent both the logical role of the capitalist and its opposite is inscribed. Thus multiplication finds its limit as soon as we consider a field of practice in its totality: according to the first principle of homology among fields of practice (Bourdieu 1984: 242–247; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 75), all fields share the property of having their own

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dominants and their own dominated. Those who dominate the field are those who value their capital the most and the best, who somehow hold the monopoly of legitimate capital by driving the dominated capital holders into irrelevance and subalternity. The picture that emerges from the intersection of the notion of capital with that of field shows that capital coincides neither with the nonspecific, instrumental, and asocial conception of capital as a produced means of production, nor with the Marxian conception of capital that underlies a specific type of social relation between classes. It is a “third” and somewhat median position between the two conceptions, because on the one hand it constitutively alludes to a polarisation of social relations, and on the other hand these social relations are not exhausted or completely superimposed on the relation between bourgeois class and proletariat. The multiplication of the spheres of reality in which the capital nexus is exercised. This is the plurality of social fields. The multiplication of the socially effective properties conveying the capital nexus. This is the configuration of the forms and states of capital. These are the coordinates within which the cluster of properties shared by the two notions of capital must be placed. On the one hand, the Bourdieusian notion stretches out across the “non-specific” semantic ground given by its being accumulated labour, on the other hand it contains an essential reference, although not always explicit, to a distinction between possessors and non-possessors.

Objections It is possible now to review the main arguments according to which Bourdieu’s use of the notion of capital is not adequately or is only apparently Marxian. Before presenting these criticisms, two circumstances that hinder any discussion on this subject should be made explicit. First, Bourdieu’s texts—his mentions of economic capital—do not allow us to clearly infer if and to what extent he subscribes to or presupposes, even in principle, the Marxian conception of capital and the related vision of capitalism. Secondly, Bourdieu does not offer a pure economic sociology, nor does he specifically address the concept of labour. These circumstances impose an enormous hermeneutic constraint on the evaluation of the relationship between Bourdieu’s theorisation of capital and the Marxian one.

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1. Objection to substantialism. This type of criticism (Krais and Gebauer 2002; Bidet 2008; Desan 2013: 335) suggests that Bourdieusian capital—far from denoting a social relationship as in Marx—only designates things, resources and endowments. The substantialist attitude underlying capital –revealed for example by the inflationary multiplication of subspecies of capital—seems objectively incongruent with the Bourdieusian relational method. 2. Objection to circulation. Beasley-Murray (2000) and Desan (2013) have shown how the passages in which Bourdieu most explicitly expounds the substance of value common to all forms of capital, while manifestly echoing the labour theory of value expounded at the beginning of Capital, conceal nonetheless a profound misunderstanding of Marx. In fact, Bourdieu says that “capital is accumulated labour (in its materialized form or its “incorporated”, embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e. exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labour” (Bourdieu 1986: 241). Or again, The universal equivalent, the measure of all equivalences, is nothing other than labour time (in the widest sense); the conservation of social energy through all its conversions is verified if, in each case, one takes into account both the labour-time accumulated in the form of capital and the labour-time needed to transform it from one type into another. (Bourdieu 1986: 253)

Beasley-Murray (2000: 105) notes how such a “proximity to orthodoxy is misleading,” insofar as defining capital as accumulated labour-­ value does not yet mean defining it in the Marxian sense of “value in process.” In the same vein, Desan (2013: 330) suggests that since Marx’s exposition of the labour theory of value serves the sole purpose of making possible the exchangeability of commodities and does not yet define a full-­ fledged theory of capital, to the extent that Bourdieu refers to the labour theory of value to define capital, he condemns himself to conceive his own notion of capital only in terms of commodity and to place his theory of capital on the mere terrain of circulation. Therefore, Bourdieu’s concept of capital has a commodity-like nature and is nothing but a commodity.

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3. Objection to the missing exploitation (Beasley-Murray 2000: 101; Desan 2013: 332, 335). This objection certainly seems decisive. Indeed, it seems it is not possible to identify a logic resembling the exploitation of labour-power in the capital investment within fields of practice. Here, capitals are accumulated by agents without the extraction of surplus value from surplus labour. Moreover, to make matters worse, precisely because exploitation of labour-power is missing, it follows that also all contradictions between realisation and valorisation of capital are missing. 4. Objection to trans-historicity (Calhoun 1993: 66–68). Whereas for Marx capital is a social relation of production specific to the capitalist mode of production, for Bourdieu capital takes on a trans-­ historical descriptive and explanatory quality.

Counter-objections All these objections emphasise evident discontinuities between the two theorisations of capital: however, we should examine whether more accurate research into the corpus of the two authors is able to provide a more fine-grained account of the issues raised by critics. Re 1). As a thinker of social totality, Bourdieu warns against considering capital in a substantive and isolated way. Only taking the link between capital and field seriously can we understand Bourdieu when he says that “capital is a social relation, that is, a social energy that exists and produces its effects only in the field in which it is generated and regenerated.” The field plays a determining role, since: each of the properties attached to class is given its value and efficacy by the specific laws of each field. In practice, that is, in a particular field, the properties, internalized in dispositions or objectified in economic or cultural goods, which are attached to agents are not all simultaneously operative; the specific logic of the field determines those which are valid in this market, which are pertinent and active in the game in question, and which, in the relationship with this field, function as specific capital and, consequently, as a factor explaining practices. (Bourdieu 1984: 113)

Moreover, far from being mere things and resources, for Bourdieu capitals subtend the social conditions of their production and appropriation as well as the social relations underlying their production and appropriation

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that are transferred to the habitus of the bearer: indeed, the “conditions of acquisition [of the properties that social actors possess at a given time] persist in the habitus (the hysteresis effect)” (Bourdieu 1984: 109). However, the very reflection on the hysteresis of habitus highlights how “although they are always perpetuated in the dispositions constituting the habitus, the conditions of acquisition of the properties synchronically observed only make themselves visible in cases of discordance between the conditions of acquisition and the conditions of use” (Bourdieu 1984: 109). Tackling the substantialist objection from this perspective leads us to acknowledge that, by virtue of the holistic tenet, the study of the social relations underlying the acquisition and accumulation of capital must be supplemented with the study of the habitus of the possessors, as well as the determination of the specific forces that traverse the field. In any case, in Marx’s Capital too, fully developed and circulating capital, though being a social relationship, never ceases to be embodied in concrete capitals (a business’s stocks, shares and constant capital in the form of means of production, etc.) and individual capitalists who fulfil its logic: they constitute, respectively, objectifications and personifications of the only true subject, depositary of the utmost causal efficacy, of the economic process. If this were not so, that is, if the circuit of capital did not dispose of a material and plural base to graft onto, Marx would have described a purely spiritual and disembodied dynamic. Compared to classical political economy, Marx’s contribution consisted in highlighting how capital as a generic means of production grafts onto a specific social relationship of production typical of the Modern Age, namely the exploitation of wage-labour by the capitalist class, and that the extraction of living labour from the labour-power subsumed under capital is the only source of the surplus value. However, capital does not cease to be, amongst other things, means of production. It becomes capable of producing in a specific way—more money from money—within a specific social relation of production which presupposes a historically determined relation between classes: so that, from being a bare means, it also becomes the end of the economic process, and finally the automatic subject of the mode of production itself. Re 2). This objection claims that Bourdieusian capital has a purely circulatory and “commodity-like” character. However, the objection may be objected to in turn, since it betrays some potential misunderstandings of the Marxian text. The labour theory of value is not merely a premise of commodity exchange, but rather a necessary though not sufficient

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condition of the whole process of production and circulation of capital. And even the theory of exploitation of labour-power presupposes the labour theory of value. Moreover, for Marx circulation is not only (simple) circulation of commodities. There is a specific process of circulation of capital, to which the entire second book is devoted—which by no coincidence is subtitled ‘The Process of Circulation of Capital’. Here Marx (1993a: 109) assesses that “the circuit of capital comprises three stages.” In the first, “the capitalist appears on the commodity and labour market as a buyer” (M-C). In the second stage, there is the “productive consumption” of the commodities purchased (means and labour-power), from which “commodities of greater value than those of its elements of production” result. In the third, “the capitalist returns to the market as a seller,” again converting his commodity into money (C-M). When capital is produced it does not circulate, when it circulates it cannot—clearly—be produced: capital needs both movements to achieve its own valorisation and realisation. In order to optimise the process, it becomes all the more urgent to reduce the time of both production (increased productivity, automation, etc.) and circulation (optimisation of distribution and consumption). Circulating capital changes form and is implemented in different segments of reality and of the economic process: these three stages correspond to three distinct forms of capital, the “different forms with which capital clothes itself in its different stages, alternately assuming them and casting them aside” (Marx 1993a: 109). Depending on whether we start from the first, the second or the third stage, we have the specific cycle of monetary capital, productive capital and trade-capital, analysed in the first section of book II, appropriately entitled ‘The Metamorphoses of Capital and their Circuit’. Moreover, in book II the image of an internally composite (industrial) capital emerges, divided into quota-parts (advance money, reserve money fund, labour and means of production, stock of goods, etc.), which are then divided into different parts. Nor, for that matter, is industrial capital the only existing form or type of capital, since commercial capital and, later, credit are still to be considered. Finally, limiting our consideration of industrial capital and its three cycles, Marx crucially introduces the time-factor into his investigation, and provides a complex articulation of synchrony and diachrony between forms. Each individual industrial capital, Marx argues, is simultaneously found in all three forms:

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The three circuits, the forms of reproduction of the three varieties of capital, are continuously executed alongside one another. One part of the capital value, for example, which for the moment functions as commodity capital, is transformed into money capital, while at the same time another part passes out of the production process into circulation as new commodity capital. Thus the circular form of C′…C′ is constantly described, and the same is the case with the two other forms. The reproduction of the capital in each of its forms and at each of its stages is just as continuous as is the metamorphosis of these forms and their successive passage through the three stages. Here, therefore, the entire circuit is the real unity of its three forms. (Marx 1993a: 181)

Synchrony and diachrony, then. While on the one hand “the real circuit of industrial capital in its continuity” can only be “unity of all three of its circuits,” on the other hand “it can only be such unity insofar as each different part of the capital runs in succession through the successive phases of the circuit, can pass over from one phase and one functional form into the other” (Marx 1993b: 183), and thus capital “exists simultaneously in its various phases and functions, and thus describes all three circuits at once.” It is a succession and contemporaneity of the forms (and parts) of capital which imply and condition each other: if “the succession [Nacheinander] of the various parts is (…) determined by their coexistence [Nebeneinander],” it is equally true that the contemporaneity of the phases and parts “exists only through the movement in which the portions of capital successively describe the various stages. The coexistence is itself only the result of the succession” (Marx 1993a: 183). Marx insists firmly both on the mutual conditioning between the parts of capital, and on the temporal determinations of synchrony and diachrony that qualify the relationship between the parts caught in their own cycle: the circular course of one functional form determines that of the others. […] Different fractions of the capital successively pass through the different stages and functional forms. […] As a whole, then, the capital is simultaneously present, and spatially coexistent, in its various phases. But each part is constantly passing from one phase or functional form into another, and thus functions in all of them in turn. The forms are therefore fluid forms, and their simultaneity is mediated by their succession. Each form both follows and precedes the others, so that the return of one part of the capital to one form is determined by the return of another part to another form. (Marx 1993a: 184)

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This brief overview of the fundamental features of the Marxian concept is aimed at emphasising those aspects that undermine an overly schematic conception of capital. Firstly, ‘circulation’ must not be intended as the simple circulation of commodities: the first book illustrates the phenomenological development of an economic formation that has already been empirically constituted, that already pervades the functioning of the economy; the second and third books have the task of describing this functioning as a whole and its reproduction. Secondly, the idea that various forms of already constituted (economic) capital coexist, underlying different sectors of reality, converting one into the other and defining each other synchronically and diachronically, is an idea certainly present in Marx’s thought and in many ways—without it being philologically possible to verify Bourdieu’s thorough knowledge of the entire Capital—it is expanded and reintroduced by the French sociologist. Therefore, at least in these respects, we may say that the way Bourdieu configures capital is grounded in Marx’s work. Re 3). This third objection is virtually fatal, because it illuminates the most significant discrepancy in the context of the partial congruence I have tried to describe between Bourdieu and Marx’s concepts of capital. However, perhaps going a little beyond what Bourdieu states explicitly, it is possible to undermine its main argument, demonstrating that also in the economy of practices something like a secret of production (and of reproduction) is active, and namely that i) there is a subsumption11 of the non-­ possessor of capital under capital; ii) that in this subsumption a counterpart of surplus value is extracted, which can be said to be at the basis of an analogous increase in the initial capital. I would like to suggest here that i) such subsumption is constituted by symbolic violence, ii) and the homologue of surplus value in the economy of practices is a symbolic surplus recognition (a “recognition without knowledge”) extracted from the cognitive labour of the dominated by the dominants; and that such valorisation can best be understood in the sense of an intensification of a symbolic credit. In other words, the form of capital 11  In this context the term ‘exploitation’ should be intended as ‘exploitation of labour-­ power’ or more exactly as ‘subsumption of labour-power’. Indeed, as Beasley-Murray (2000: 116) also notes, the phenomenon of the exploitation of labour per se does not quintessentially define the capitalist mode of production. There are non-capitalist forms of labour exploitation both in non-capitalist societies (serfdom, slavery, khammessa) and in capitalist societies (unpaid domestic labour).

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most similar to Marxian capital, which subsumes labour-power, is symbolic capital—that is, the particular state, objective and cognitive at once, that all forms of capital can acquire—when accompanied by some degree of symbolic violence. It has been noted that the theory of the forms of capital is a contribution to the general theory of power and domination, whose fulcrum is the concept of symbolic violence. According to Bourdieu domination is not a relationship of pure activity on the part of the dominant and of pure passivity on the part of the dominated. The strongest domination—that is, the domination whose possibility of being questioned has been reduced to a minimum—is the effect of a symbolic violence, that is, a violence that, far from arising from the exercise of physical force, is realised only through the “complicity” of the dominated, that is, through all the cognitive activities of the dominated that implicitly legitimate the order in which they are dominated, which is produced when they perceive this order as natural and not problematic. This immaterial effect, which exists only in minds and brains in the form of cognitive patterns of perception, evaluation and classification, turns out to have a very material implication: it guarantees the prolongation of the temporal existence of that given order of symbolic and power relations. Thus symbolic violence is a soft, invisible, and intangible imposition of legitimacy that takes place when those who undergo such imposition do not have any other categories of perception and evaluation other than those conveyed by the relation of domination itself, which “being merely the incorporated form of the structure of the relation of domination, make this relation appear as natural” (Bourdieu 2000: 170). This cognitive commonality conceals a more subtle form of cognitive alienation: the dominated do not have other means of representation— and hence of production—of reality other than those that are instilled in concrete social experience and therefore already pervaded by a relationship of domination. In other words, under symbolic violence they have no means of production other than their “naked” cognitive capacity to “work” and elaborate experience: in fact, the categories with which the dominated shape experience do not belong to them, except insofar as they have incorporated them without determining them in the first place. This “extraneous interiority” of the social categories with which the dominated think of themselves and others is at the basis of the deep-rooted illusion of naturalness that pervades all the representations they produce: among these representations—crystallisations of cognitive work—the most valuable is the legitimacy, or rather the symbolic legitimation, of the order that

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dominates them, which corresponds to a symbolic surplus recognition in favour of this same order. In Bourdieu’s terms it is a paradoxical recognition that takes place without knowledge, that is, it is a misrecognition of the arbitrary character of what is recognised. The extraneous inwardness of cognitive categories, as well as the inadequate knowledge of the social conditions of possibility of cognitive acts,12 is therefore at the basis of the “paradoxical subjection” (Paolucci 2010) conveyed in symbolic violence. I mean to suggest that symbolic violence functions as a homologue of surplus-value extraction; in fact, in the regime of symbolic violence, the dominated perform cognitive labour that makes use of categories—which literally play the role of means of production—that do not belong to them (except insofar as they have incorporated them) and that have an arbitrary basis of production and application. Through this cognitive labour they produce more legitimacy and legitimation than the dominants had previously produced upon encountering the dominated, and the substance of value of this symbolic surplus recognition corresponds to an extension of the temporal existence of the recognised order. If we consider the case of intellectuals, defined as a dominated fraction of the dominant class, the condition in which intellectuals pursue the valorisation of their cultural capital can be compared to the condition of contradiction between realisation and valorisation of capital that Marx (1993b: 355 ff.) describes in book III of Capital. In fact, in the capitalist mode of production, the bearer of labour-power has two modes of existence: the wage-labourer who, in the sphere of production, has a productive role— the more productive of value the more exploited the wage-labourer is— and the consumer, whose acts of purchasing commodities are a condition of realisation of the surplus value produced. This double role means that the more surplus value he produces, that is, the more the share of necessary work is reduced, the less the wage he receives can buy commodities and realise the surplus value contained therein. It follows that in the long run capital is self-contradictory, because its valorisation—forced both to contract the share of necessary labour and to expel from the production processes the same agents who are then called upon to be buyers of commodities in the circulation—hinders its realisation. The cultural and symbolic capital of intellectuals is inversely subjected to the same contradiction between valorisation and realisation: 12  According to Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), symbolic violence unleashes a power that enhances, as a further force, the power relationship in which it is generated precisely insofar as it masks it.

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Intellectuals and artists are thus divided between their interest in cultural proselytism, that is, winning a market by widening their audience, which inclines them to favour popularization, and concern for cultural distinction, the only objective basis of their rarity; and their relationship to everything concerned with the ‘democratization of culture’ is marked by a deep ambivalence which may be manifested in a dual, or rather doubled discourse [dans un discours double ou, mieux, dédoublé] on the relations between the institutions of cultural diffusion and the public. (Bourdieu 1984: 229, transl. mod.)

Setting aside the lexicon of scarcity which has the fault of disguising the historical and accumulated character of cultural mastery, as well as the related social conditions of possibility, what is really at stake in this passage is the valorisation of a “profit in distinction,” achievable only by extracting “recognition without knowledge” from an audience. However, an authentic captivation of that same public also entails the serious possibility of neutralising its own distinction: the discourse addressed to the public, Bourdieu notes, is “doubled [dedoublé],” just as is the public itself, which is asked to be both consumer and producer of legitimacy. And insofar as making oneself known also presupposes providing tools to be understood and decoded, self-disclosure entails a double effect: that is, it reduces the share of the surplus labour of recognition without knowledge, in favour of the share of genuine knowledge labour. This internal rearrangement of the shares of cognitive labour implies a contraction of the margins of symbolic surplus recognition. Therefore, similarly to the contradiction to be found in the overall process of capital production and circulation, whereby the valorisation of capital hinders its realisation, inversely, in the search for the audience necessary for the valorisation of one’s capital, popularisation symbolically hinders distinction. In the case of intellectuals and artists, the “profit in distinction” and the “profit in legitimacy,” which is “the profit par excellence, which consists in the fact of feeling justified in being (what one is), being what it is right to be” (Bourdieu 1984: 228)13 contradict each other. 13  It is worth noting that behind the search for a profit in legitimacy a specific psychodynamic instance is at play. According to Bourdieu there is “a necessary link between three indisputable and inseparable anthropological facts: man is and knows he is mortal, the thought that he is going to die is unbearable or impossible for him, and, condemned to death, an end […] he is a being without a reason for being, haunted by the need for justification, legitimation, recognition. And, as Pascal suggests, in this quest for justifications for existing, what he calls ‘the world’, or ‘society’, is the only recourse other than God” (Bourdieu 2000: 239). It is this kind of search that ultimately underlies investment, illusio and forms of distinction.

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This kind of reading, centred on the economy of symbolic profit, suggest that symbolic capital plays the role of true capital, which moves other forms of capital to the advantage of its own valorisation and intensification. This notion—“which rests on cognition”—has been pinpointed as “denied [denié] capital, recognized as legitimate, that is, misrecognized as capital” and “is perhaps the only possible form of accumulation, when economic capital is not recognized” (Bourdieu 1990: 118). Between symbolic capital and symbolic violence there is a relationship of complementarity: while the former is the outcome of a cognitive labour of recognition and misrecognition, the latter is the bilateral act denoting the extraction and production of such labour. Re 4). Finally, let us consider the inconvenient trans-historical nature of the Bourdieusian forms of capital, where what is meant is that for Marx capital is the social ‘form’ of a historically determined mode of production. The Introduction of 185714 opens with a discussion of production. When we speak of production, Marx notes, we always speak of a concrete production, defined by a specific degree of development of the social productive forces. However, it is also true that “all epochs of production have certain common traits” (Marx 1973: 85). It is for this reason that “production in general,” the expression with which economists usually begin their treatises, turns out to be a useful, sensible, “rational [verständige] abstraction,” “insofar as it really brings out and fixes the common element, and saves us repetition” (Marx 1973: 85). So on the one hand, production in general is an abstraction that does not explain any concrete mode of production, on the other hand, however, it defines the most general traits that are common to all production and without which no concrete production is given, for example, tools and hands as instruments. It is essential to identify the traits common to the productions of all eras so as to isolate more precisely the traits that instead constitute the specific difference of the modes of production. Marx writes: No production will be thinkable without them [the determinations common to all epochs]; however, even though the most developed languages have laws and characteristics in common with the least developed, nevertheless just those things which determine their development, i.e. the elements which are not general and common, must be separated out from the determinations valid for production as such, so that in their unity—which arises already from the identity of the subject, humanity, and of the object,  For an updated account of this text, see Micaloni (2017a).

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nature—their essential difference is not forgotten. The whole profundity of those modern economists who demonstrate the eternity and harmoniousness of the existing social relations lies in this forgetting. For example. No production possible without an instrument of production, even if this instrument is only the hand; no production without stored-up, past labour, even if it is only the facility gathered together and concentrated in the hand of the savage by repeated practice. Capital is, among other things, also an instrument of production, also objectified, past labour. Therefore capital is a general, eternal relation of nature. That is, if I leave out just the specific quality which alone makes “instrument of production” and “stored-up labour” into a capital. (Marx 1973: 85–86)

I suggest that this Marxian passage allows to view Bourdieu’s concept of capital in terms analogous to those underlying the logic of production in general. The capital theorised and pluralised by Bourdieu in many spheres of practice contains only those traits without which no social practice endowed with objective and binding value can be obtained: the cumulative nature of experience, whether incorporated or objectified, the fact that at the basis of the necessary investment there is a form of interest, the distinction between dominant possessors and dominated possessors which functions as a distinction between possessors and non-possessors. Moreover, one could try to argue that in the general economy of social practices of all times a latent logic of productive and reproductive functioning can be found and that only at a certain point in history—that is, only when the economic has disembedded itself from the tangle of personal-­ feudal and communitarian ties—has it “become true in practice” (Marx 1973: 105), embodying itself in a specific sphere of reality, the economic one, and in a specific relationship between historically determined social classes. When socio-economic conditions became the most favourable to the enhancement of the polarising logic that characterises the domination of a field by means of capital, that is, when the most complete separation of a class of free individuals from the means of production occurred, this logic began to totally inform the economic sphere and acquire the traits that provide the capitalist mode of production with its specific difference: the exploitation of wage-labour in the fractions of the working day. Hence, when the capitalist mode of production becomes dominant,15 it also ends 15  That is, to the extent to which the reproduction of the conditions of existence of the dominated is increasingly bound to earning a wage and production essentially becomes the production of more money by means of money.

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up subsuming, of course in a mediated way, the other spheres of practice, which, however, keep functioning according to the principles of a general economy of practices. So, the issues raised by the objection to the trans-historicity of Bourdieu’s theory of capital provide the opportunity to outline an “interlaced” account of the relationship between Marx and Bourdieu’s concepts of capital: on the one hand, the concept of production in general in Marx provides a key to access some of the most valuable core elements of Bourdieu’s notion of capital; on the other hand, Bourdieu provides Marx with those general requirements of domination that the capitalist economy and its social order fulfil in the purest form.

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CHAPTER 11

Bourdieu, Marx, and the Economy Frédéric Lebaron

Pierre Bourdieu was long perceived as a “Weberian” sociologist because of his early texts and his close relationship with Raymond Aron. His reference to Marx nonetheless remained constant throughout his work: in the first edition in French of The Algerians, entitled Sociologie de l’Algérie (Bourdieu 1962), references to Marx are implicit, as revealed in the use of concepts such as “sous-prolétariat” (“sub-proletariat”), “prolétariat” (“proletariat”) (p. 121), “salariat” (“salariat”) (p. 121) and “conscience de classe” (“class consciousness”) (p. 123). In one of his last works, entitled in French Les structures sociales de l’Économie (in English The Social Structures of the Economy) (Bourdieu 2005 [2000]), he refers even more explicitly—a citation that has become an almost ritual reference for criticizing scholastic bias—to a famous phrase used by Marx when referring to Hegel (arguing that Hegel confused “the things of logic with the logic of things,” p.19) and, in a more normative postscript, to the processes of capitalist “concentration” and “monopolization” (p. 273). The decision to focus part of his early Algerian studies on “work and workers” (Quijoux 2015) reveals what may be referred to as a strand of

F. Lebaron (*) IDHES, ENS Paris-Saclay, Université Paris-Saclay, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_11

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Marxism in Bourdieu’s work. Indeed, he emphasizes the division of society into objectively differentiated groups sharing hierarchical and conflictual relationships. He refers to these groups as social classes and argues that they cannot be dissociated from the spheres in which they are produced, even if they amount to more than merely the sum of those spheres. From an empirical point of view, he therefore views classes in a way that closely resembles Marx’s socio-historical analyses but avoids being caught up in the theoretical apparatus that the latter associated with them. As a result, concepts such as “exploitation,” “surplus value,” or even “class struggle,” which structure the Marxist theory of value by basing it on an analysis of the productive process, are absent from Bourdieu’s1 theoretical model. This chapter seeks to show that Bourdieu draws on an in-depth and quite unique interpretation of Marx, and of certain Marxists, and that he always distances himself from Marxist economic theorization. Similarly, he distances himself from the theories developed by two other major economic “models,” namely neoclassical economics (which he discusses, in particular Becker and Boudon) and Keynesian economics (on which he does a comparative analysis during the conference, and then in the book, entitled in French Le partage des bénéfices (Sharing Benefits, untranslated)). This strategy leads Bourdieu to some form of avoidance and to a highly ambivalent relationship, which is accentuated by two historical contexts (the “Marxist moment” of May 1968 and subsequent years, then the decline of Marxism in the intellectual and political field at the turn of the 1970s), before its revival and more direct intellectual confrontation after 1993.

A “remote” Use of Marxism Bourdieu’s initial references to Marxist concepts, in particular the concept of the “proletariat” (which gave rise to the development of the “sub-­ proletariat” concept, i.e. one of his most famous illustrations of his conception of economic rationality (Bourdieu 1977a)), reveal the instrumental, or even practical, relationship that he maintains with what he believes is, above all, a set of intellectual tools, that is, scientific capital. Consequently, none of Bourdieu’s studies propose a systematic discussion of Marxist theory (nor of Marxist works, even though he cites many 1  This text is based on numerous discussions and readings, in particular Mauger (2012), Wacquant (2002), Gilles (2014).

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Marxists such as Lukács, and especially Thompson and Hobsbawm2). However, during his most inventive theoretical discussions, he attempts to incorporate Marxian elements into new constructions centred on the concept of symbolic power. A brief and non-exhaustive inventory of Bourdieu’s use of Marxist concepts and references reveals: • Concepts designating classes: proletariat, sub-proletariat, bourgeoisie, petty-bourgeoisie. • Marxist texts, notably in the first edition of Le Métier de sociologue (The Craft of Sociology) (but some argue also in the second), and in the references to a conception of Marxian social science that also converges with that of Durkheim and Weber (around the “presupposition of non-awareness”), which we find, for example, in Invitation to A Reflexive Sociology in 1992 (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 72). • Regular references to the Theses on Feuerbach in Trois Études d’ethnologie kabyle (Anthropological Study of Kabylia, which is the last part of Outline of a Theory of Practice) (p. 100 of the French text in particular), but especially highlighted in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977c), which was drawn directly from the Theses on Feuerbach. These same references are cited again in 1992  in Invitation to a Reflexive Sociology where they are used to develop the concept of the habitus. • Several references to Marx’s analyses of labour and to the notion of capital, first in the conclusion of Outline of a Theory of Practice (see below) and in various later texts. • The concept of “classification struggles,” developed in particular in Distinction (Bourdieu 2010). • Marx’s and Engels’s texts on culture cited in Distinction. • The critical analysis of the “dominant ideology” and of the division of labour of domination, in particular in 1976 in the article “La production de l’idéologie dominante” (The Production of the Dominant Ideology) (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1976). • A social and historical analysis of the State from a Marxist perspective, in the published course given at the Collège de France (Bourdieu 2012). 2

 Bourdieu was a close friend of Eric Hobsbawm from the 1960s until the early 2000s.

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The last pages of Outline of a Theory of Practice revolve around a confrontation, not with Marx but with what characterizes his views on pre-­ capitalist economies. Put differently, it focuses on economism, first when it gives a biased representation of societies in which the differentiation between fields fails to lead to the constitution of an autonomous economic order; this would justify largely leaving aside a set of “purely” symbolic issues. The error here has nothing to do with the objective description of the relationships of production proposed by Marx and, above all by “Marxists” (a term he usually introduces with negative connotations). Rather, it is due to the illusion that involves presenting these relationships that are standard elements of the economic analysis of developed societies…economic analysis as though they exist autonomously in traditional society, whereas—on the contrary—the two components (economic rationality and symbolic practice) must be grasped continuously and interdependently. Second, the critical discussion reflects on the relationships between symbolic capital and economic capital, notably in terms of their ambivalence and duality, thus building on certain analyses developed in La reproduction (Bourdieu, and Passeron 1970), then in the article entitled in French Le pouvoir symbolique (Symbolic Power) published in Les Annales in 1977 (Bourdieu 1977b), and in various texts dealing, in particular, with the “double nature of work” or with the concept of capital. In these works, Bourdieu proposes a general science of the economy of practices that is capable of integrating the gains of economic or “materialist” analyses (which may be referred to as “à la Marx” or even “à la Becker” in a different context). This general science is centred on strictly economic capital, and on the anthropological and sociological analyses which give symbolic capital its rightful place (considered as primarily based on the logic of honour). The relationship between the two is extremely complex in “pre-­ capitalist” societies insofar as it is mediated by practical relationships with the social world. Symbolic capital produces its own effect, notably one that conceals economic power relations, but its functioning depends on the existence of other types of capital, especially economic capital. The originality of the theory of symbolic capital (or symbolic power) is such that associating it with economic theories, notably Marxist theories, raises a number of challenges. One of the solutions proposed by Bourdieu “in reality” suggests that the objectification process driven by the

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empirical economic analysis3 should be viewed as a moment—necessarily partial—within a general analysis. This analysis consists, in particular, of determining the state of forces in the strictly economic sector, with the sociological analysis, centring on symbolic relationships, playing the role of completing and connecting the whole. Ultimately, it is not a question of mobilizing an economic theory, strictly speaking, as though this concept were not in itself problematic, a view shared by the Durkheimian tradition which replaces it with economic sociology (regarding these studies undertaken in the 1960s, Bourdieu speaks of economic anthropology). This sheds light on Bourdieu’s obvious interest in legitimizing discourses (“sociodicy”) in all their forms and their contribution to the study of social relationships. Thus, from the 1970s, Bourdieu attempts to integrate symbolic relationships into the analysis of class structures, in terms of their diversity and historical variability. Luc Boltanski’s work on managerial executives is a perfect illustration of the socio-historical inventiveness required for this historico-constructivist undertaking, which Bourdieu formalizes in his article entitled in French Espace social et genèse des classes (Bourdieu 1991) by drawing, among others, on the studies of E. P. Thompson (Bourdieu, 1984). In a way, this article proposes a new connection: the social space is characterized by objective distributions (where one may find the “objective conditions”) of capital (economic, cultural, and social) and, at the same time, by incessant symbolic construction, notably discursive, based on these conditions. Thus, the group—as a class (“a class for itself,” in the Marxist tradition)—is not constructed from nothing; rather, it is partially “open” and permanently at stake in symbolic struggles subjected to specific variations, according to a practical logic. The analysis can also be broken down according to the particular field considered, which always provides an opportunity to combine objective inequalities and symbolic issues. This re-interpretation of the theories of stratification makes it possible to overcome the opposition between objectivism and constructivism, which continues to structure the field. The concept of “class struggle” is also reviewed in this perspective: the “class struggle” and “symbolic struggle” concepts derived/adapted from 3  Bourdieu has never ceased to soak himself in empirical economics texts, such as the studies undertaken by various French institutes, the work of François Morin, the studies carried out by a research group on savings, the Marxist studies of François Chesnais on globalization in the 1990s, and so on. There are very explicit traces of his readings in the references of Distinction or of The Social structures of the economy.

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Marx allow Bourdieu to posit that there is a conflict inherent in the ordinary functioning of the social world, all the while maintaining a “dialectical” link with the objective data and regularities highlighted by economic and social statistics. The “representation” of dominated groups (in the double sense: to represent them, stand for them, reveal them, etc.) is therefore a fundamental issue. While the issue has been neglected, it has continued to divide theoreticians and historians of the labour movement, notably Marxists and anarchists, to whom Bourdieu seems to implicitly attach himself in his analysis of labour parties (see below). In each field, the struggles become, above all, competitive struggles between individuals, but they can also be transformed into collective struggles. This complex theoretical construction—which is, strictly speaking, without an economic theory—therefore largely ignores the classic Marxist theory question of value, to which Durkheimians provide, in certain respects, a “sociological solution” consistent with Bourdieu’s views: value is not simply the result of objective data, even if these data are always present in the background, but is also the product of a process of social valuation which, as Bourdieu argues, is essentially based on symbolic activities (and is thus partly socio-linguistic).

Changing Contexts That Reveal Persistent Ambivalence Bourdieu’s scientific trajectory is located between the field of the social sciences and the wider intellectual field, an area that has been undergoing considerable transformation. This may largely explain what may be perceived as fluctuations in his relationship to Marx and, perhaps even more so, to Marxists. Rather than simple opportunistic or cyclical oscillations, the changing positions revealed by several “points of contact” between Bourdieu and Marx/Marxism/Marxists reveal a form of structural ambivalence reflected in an attachment—one that is both close and distant— which takes various forms depending on the period. A Social and Political Trajectory Bourdieu’s relationship to Marx may have something to do with his social and political trajectory: the son of a provincial postmaster who was a leftist and socially committed activist, Bourdieu would pursue his studies at the

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École normale supérieure in an anti-communist left-wing environment. Later, in Algeria, he is close to the so-called liberal intellectuals who reject an exclusive engagement with the armed struggle (supported by the French “porteurs de valisae”—literally “suitcase carriers,” “fellow-­ travelers,” behind the “Jeanson network”). In his first articles, he challenges the romantic-revolutionary analyses by Sartre and Fanon on the Algerian revolution and supports what may be referred to as a sociological realism committed to revolution (Bourdieu 2002). In the context of the protests of the 1960s, both Bourdieu and Passeron play an essential role insofar as their analyses in the book Les Héritiers (The Inheritors) leads to the denunciation of social inequalities in the school system. They encourage/lead to many Marxist protesters embracing sociological studies and mobilizing them in the public space. From the second half of the 1970s, when Marxism comes under violent attack in the intellectual field, as shown in particular in Christofferson (2009), Bourdieu is relatively in tune with the evolution of the Socialist Party, which has maintained a pragmatic relationship with Marxism; some of its members refer to it very explicitly, others much less directly, and others are much more critical (in particular, Michel Rocard, whom Bourdieu knows personally). In the 1980s, he works on two occasions with the socialist government, resulting in a shift away from any radical changes from 1982 to 1983 and its breaking off its alliance with the French Communist Party in 1984. This proximity is forged after he criticizes, alongside Foucault and the Confédération française démocratique des travailleurs (the predominantly non-Marxist workers’ union), the government’s overly conciliatory positions regarding the events in Poland. This is primarily reflected in an adherence to “pro-European” theses, albeit subtly, particularly during the 1992 Maastricht Treaty referendum. The disappointment arising from this cooperation also leads to the questioning of the results of the economic and social policies implemented between 1988 and 1993. Published in 1993  in French, La misère du monde (The Weight of the World) is the first book in which Bourdieu’s sociological analyses begin to focus on neoliberal policies and on the transformations of world capitalism. This leads him to revert to his earlier studies undertaken in the 1960s and to adopt a viewpoint that more clearly supports the “social movement,” thus leading to a new dialogue that is more peaceful but also more complex, with Marxist trends within the social sciences.

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Key Moments of “confrontation” The first phase of intense confrontation takes place between 1964 and 1975. Althusser invites Bourdieu to present the analyses of Les Héritiers at the École normale supérieure de la rue d’Ulm (ENS), an occasion that leads to a cordial, albeit relatively distant, relationship. The publication of an article by Althusser in Bourdieu’s first edition in French of Le Métier de sociologue (The Craft of Sociology) in 1968 clearly reflects this relationship. Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, students of Althusser at ENS, are “converted to sociology” primarily by Bourdieu himself, and act as a link between the two men. However, they denounce the “petty-bourgeois” nature of the work undertaken by Bourdieu and Passeron in their 1971 book L’École capitaliste en France (The Capitalist School in France). Indeed, this book explicitly claims to adopt the Marxism–Leninism– Maoism philosophy. During this period, the rapprochement between the two is therefore accompanied by an intense controversy, reflected in the disappearance of Althusser’s text and of other “Marxist” texts from the second French edition of Le Métier de sociologue (The Craft of Sociology) in 1972. Within the span of four years, therefore, there is a shift from the development of closer ties to a fierce rivalry, and this is all the more significant because Marxist discourse and activism are at their peak in universities (see also Bourdieu 1975); this is clearly illustrated by the case of the University of Vincennes and, in particular, by the undergraduate programmes in philosophy and human sciences (Soulié et al. 2012). Until 1975, Bourdieu is primarily occupied by the collective study on what is then called the “Taste survey,” which is the basis of Distinction, and by the launch of the Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales journal. In one of the first articles published in this journal, he levels harsh criticism at Etienne Balibar, Althusser’s co-author, using a Marxist lens and a provocative comic strip. This clearly reflects the rejection of any form of scholastic philosophy with a profound contempt for empirical social sciences, and shows, already, a penchant for sociological and critical discourse analysis (philosophical in this case). It must be noted, however, that Bourdieu draws on Marx to criticize Balibar, which is also revealing of a concealed struggle for ownership: the Marx chosen here is a pamphleteer and polemicist, and it is from him that Bourdieu frequently draws his inspiration in his texts, especially when he plays around with wording and attacks

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opponents or rivals.4 Similarly, Bourdieu never ceases to refer to certain Marxist historians, notably Thompson and Hobsbawm, in whom he sees allies in the face of Philosopher-King contenders and of the abstraction of “ideological state apparatuses.” At the same time, the confrontation with Althusser’s theoretical architecture does not imply a pure and simple rejection. In an interview with Michel Simon and Antoine Casanova, published in October 1975 in La nouvelle critique, that is, the theoretical journal of the communist party, Bourdieu evokes the concept of the “field of class struggle” as some sort of “final resort” of a social space which he views as multidimensional.5 When field theory was undergoing further formalization at the turn of the 1970s, several sources of inspiration—naturally, Weber’s Sociology of Religions, as well as the geometric analysis of data—thus coexist. A second phase of the relationship between Bourdieu and Marxism develops between 1976 and the beginning of the 1990s. Far from disappearing, the discussions focus on issues that have long mattered for Marxist theorization, notably the reproduction and legitimation of the dominant classes and the globalization of economies.6 In the article “La production de l’idéologie dominante” (The Production of Dominant Ideology), written by Bourdieu and Boltanski in 1976 (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1976), there is a clear Marxian inspiration which is reflected, beyond the very notion of “dominant ideology,” by an objectification of certain discursive techniques aimed at legitimizing the new ruling elites. This article reveals 4  A specific study should be devoted to these controversial attacks, which appear primarily in the footnotes, and to the preliminary rebuttals of adverse positions, which are quite frequent in Bourdieu’s work and which, in certain respects, link this work to a tradition of lively intellectual debate revolving around intellectual Marxism, as illustrated, for instance, by Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-criticism. This explains in part why researchers who are more or less right-wingers tend repeatedly to equate Bourdieu purely and simply with Marxism, or even with Marxism-Leninism, and to replace scientific discussion with ideological condemnation. Indeed, these researchers forget the close ties between the Bourdieu of the 1960s and Raymond Aron, a symbolic figure of a form of anti-Marxism (on this point, see Joly 2012). 5  See the publication of this interview in Questions de sociologie (Sociological Questions) (Bourdieu 1980). There is a relatively close formulation at the very end of Outline of a Theory of Practice, where the “final resort” becomes a “final analysis,” which leads to the admission that symbolic capital ultimately depends on economic capital. This was in 1972. 6  The globalization issue is at the centre of Marxist economics, as is that of financialization. In The Social Structures of the Economy, Bourdieu refers to François Chesnais, a Marxist economist with Trotskyist training, who worked for the OECD. One of Chesnais’s works is published in the Raisons d’Agir collection founded by Bourdieu after 1995.

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a perspective that is close to French discourse analysis, which was itself originally inspired by the Althusserian variant of Marxism as well as by Foucault (for research on this: see Temmar et  al. 2013). Similarly, the article on “employers” written with Monique de Saint-Martin, goes straight to the heart of the discussion on the nature of French capitalism and incites dialogue with non-Marxist economic historians such as Maurice Lévy-Leboyer. In addition to the studies on the dominant economic classes, which provide empirical analyses that draw the reflections on the transformations of French capitalism (which during this period shifts away from strict state capitalism and associates itself with an increasingly global and financial dynamic), there are more theoretical analyses. These analyses initiate a dialogue with the theoreticians of socialism on the structuring of the workers’ movement, “real socialism,” and so on. The results are published, in particular, in the journals Actes de la recherche, or in Liber, revue européenne des livres. This allows Bourdieu to develop an “independent left” position, fully in line with the collapse of “real socialism” in Eastern Europe and with the hopes of democratic reconstruction that this collapse arouses on the left as well.7 Claiming to reconnect with the “libertarian tradition of the left,” he thus keeps his distance from “organic” intellectuals and from Marxist political parties. In a 1992 interview with Loïc Wacquant, which would later lead to the work Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (in French Réponses), he nevertheless remarks that he “has never quoted Marx as much as I do today, meaning at a time when he has become the scapegoat for all the misfortunes of the social world—no doubt a manifestation of the reluctant dispositions which led me to quote Weber at a time when Marxist orthodoxy was trying to ostracize him” (p. 102). A final, more peaceful, period of confrontation with the Marxist and post-Marxist left clearly begins in December 1995, following the success of The Weight of the World in France in 1993 (Bourdieu et al. 1999). The ideological shifts following the fall of the “Soviet bloc” profoundly modify the French and European political and activist landscape and there is a marked decline in “Party intellectuals.” There are also various internal transformations within the Communist and Trotskyist left, a renewal 7  In particular, the postscript to the Rules of Art, in 1992 for the French edition, sets out Bourdieu’s position with regard to the defence of social conquests: particularly in the most autonomous fields and in the context of the globalization of economic power: Bourdieu (2018).

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of critical economics outside party frameworks, and perhaps, most importantly, the emergence of new social movements (protest unions from the left, such as Confédération française démocratique des travailleurs, movements of those “without,” such as homeless, asylum-seekers or unemployed, farmers’ confederations, and anti-World Trade Organization coordination, etc.) which desire a radical and pragmatic transformation of the economic system from an international perspective. This period is made more complex because of Bourdieu’s position as a central figure in the nascent “alter-globalization” protest, at least in Europe, and because of the diversification of political and intellectual forces which later come together under the “alter-globalization movement” (see Sommier 2008). There are, however, growing exchanges between researchers in social sciences, and these are marked by their links with Marxism in very different ways. Marxism, in this period, is undergoing a process of secularization and transformation associated with the decline or internal evolution of the organizations that had adopted its doctrine (in France, the French Communist Party is the best example). As a result, many Marxist writers move closer to other social science trends, thus contributing to the development of a secondary space of journals, networks, and groups located between the academic field and the political field in the broad sense. Among these are the Actuel Marx journal, edited in particular by Jacques Bidet, and the “Marx International” congresses at the University of Nanterre. During this period, a new space, with new reference points, has been progressively established within the social sciences, notably within the field of sociology. While Marxist sociology continues to be dynamic in the English-speaking world, and especially in the United States  (Burawoy 2010), it is clear that Bourdieu’s influence is everywhere, including in the fields of social stratification, economic sociology, and even the sociology of work, where Marxist trends are always very much present.

References Bourdieu, Pierre. 1962 [1958]. Trans. Alan C.M. Ross. Boston : Beacon. ———. 1975. La lecture de Marx. Ou quelques remarques critiques à propos de “Quelques critiques à propos de Lire le capital”. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 5 (6): 65–79.

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Bourdieu, Pierre, and Luc Boltanski. 1976. La production de l’idéologie dominante. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 2-3: 3–73. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977a. Algérie 60. Structures temporelles et structures économiques. Paris: Minuit. ———. 1977b. Sur le pouvoir symbolique. Annales 32-33: 405–411. ———. 1977c [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. ———. 1980. Questions de sociologie. Paris: Minuit. ———. 1991 [1984]. Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’. Trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson. In Language and Symbolic Power: 229-251. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2002. Interventions. Marseille: Agone. ———. 2005 [2000]. The Social Structures of the Economy. Trans. C.  Turner. London: Polity. ———. 2010 [1979]. Distinction, London: Routledge. ———. 2018 [1992]. The Rules of Art. Trans. S. Emanuel. Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J.D.  Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, Pierre et al. 1999 [1993]. The Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Trans. P. P. Ferguson. London: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2012. Sur l’État. Cours au collège de France 1989-1992. Paris: Raisons d’agir/Seuil. Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude, Chamboredon and Jean-Claude, Passeron. 1991 [1968]. The Craft of Sociology. Trans. R.  Nice. Berlin and New  York: Walter de Gruyter. Burawoy, Michael. 2010. Conversations with Pierre Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment. http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Bourdieu.htm Christofferson, M.S. 2009. Les intellectuels contre la gauche. L’idéologie antitotalitaire en France. Marseille: Agone. Gilles, Eric. 2014. Marx dans l’œuvre de Bourdieu. Approbations fréquentes, oppositions radicales. Actuel Marx 2 (56): 147–163. Joly, Marc. 2012. Devenir Norbert Elias. Histoire croisée d’un processus de reconnaissance scientifique: la réception française. Paris: Fayard. Mauger, Gérard. 2012. Bourdieu et Marx. In Lectures de Bourdieu, ed. Frédéric Lebaron and Gérard Mauger, 25–39. Paris: Ellipses. Quijoux, Maxime, ed. 2015. Bourdieu et le travail. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Sommier, Isabelle. 2008. Sur la généalogie de l’altermondialisme en France. In Généalogie des mouvements altermondialistes en Europe. Une perspective comparée, ed. Isabelle Sommier, Fillieule Olivier, and Eric Agrikoliansky, 87–114. Paris: Karthala / IEP Aix.

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Soulié, Charles, et  al. 2012. Un Mythe à détruire ? Origines et destin du Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes. Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes. Temmar, Malika, Angermuller Johannes, and Lebaron Frédéric, eds. 2013. Les Discours sur l’économie. Paris: PUF. Wacquant, Loïc J.D. 2002. De l’idéologie à la violence symbolique : culture, classe et conscience chez Marx et Bourdieu. In Les sociologies critiques du capitalisme en hommage à Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Jean Lojkine, 25–40. Paris: PUF.

CHAPTER 12

Marx and Bourdieu: From the Economy to the Economies Alicia B. Gutiérrez

The economic is never absent from any field however autonomous— whether the field is religious, juridical or literary. It is present, but it cannot appear in its in own name. This is important: in religion, they don’t speak of the salary of the priest but of ‘offering’. —Bourdieu (2021: 48)

Introduction The analogies with economics and, further, the idea that there is a homology between the different social fields and the market, has generated several criticisms to Bourdieu’s perspective. With more or less harshness, many authors believe that Bourdieu’s position entails some form of economic determinism and/or an economistic vision of the social world, whose source of inspiration would be neoclassical economics (Jenkins 1982; Honneth 1986; Caillé 1992, 1994; Alexander 1995). Frédéric Lebaron (2004a) systematizes the objections to Bourdieu’s theory of practice, subdividing them into three groups. Some authors accuse the

A. B. Gutiérrez (*) CONICET-National University of Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_12

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Bourdieusian perspective of being “economistic,” and that neoclassical economics influenced Bourdieu. Others argue that the economic analogy constitutes a mechanical transposition of the deterministic metaphor, as in the Marxist tradition. Finally, others positively value some empirical application, although they note the need for limitations of its use. But beyond the qualifier of “economistic,” there is another aspect in question. It is about the relationship between Marx and Bourdieu, which has occupied a certain space among the debates of different fields of intellectual production. Wacquant (1996), for example, argues that Bourdieu’s alternation between respect and critique in his approach to Marx, hides the depth and breadth of the common base shared by all critical sociologies. Taking Marx and Bourdieu, but also Durkheim and Weber, Wacquant points out three major points of agreement: the rejection of pure theory, the relational conception, and the agonistic conception of the social. Within this framework, I have expanded the analysis of these dimensions, where possible, to find links between the Bourdieusian and Marxist perspectives. Finding these links implies simultaneously approaching and in some cases, breaking with the Durkheimian and Weberian perspectives (Gutiérrez 2003). This interpretation is also predominant among certain Latin American authors, who are proponents of Bourdieu’s work. First of all, the Argentine Néstor García Canclini, who lives in Mexico, stands out as one of the most important promoters of Bourdieusian work in Latin America. His extensive introduction entitled “La sociología de la cultura de Pierre Bourdieu” (The Sociology of Culture of Pierre Bourdieu) (1990), preceded an edited collection of Bourdieu’s texts that has become well known in the intellectual circuits of the region.1 García Canclini considers Bourdieu’s relationship with Marxism controversial on at least four issues: (a) the links between production, circulation and consumption; (b) the labour theory of value; (c) the articulation of the economic and the symbolic and (d) the ultimately determining economic element and social class concepts. While addressing them, he proposes in his introduction two very suggestive premises from the section titles of the article: “¿Un marxismo weberiano?” [A Weberian Marxism?] (García Canclini 1990: 12–17) and “Recordar a Marx por sus olvidos” [Remembering Marx by his omissions] (García Canclini 1990: 43–50), to conclude:

1  It is about Sociología y Cultura (Bourdieu 1990f) that, with certain modification, includes texts from Questions de sociologie (1984).

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Perhaps, one of Bourdieu’s key merits was to remember Marx by the things he forgot, extending Capital’s method to the areas of European society that this book omitted. (García Canclini 1990: 47)

The Bolivian academic Álvaro García Linera is undoubtedly another key reference-point in this debate. In a classic book for those who study his work, García Linera (2000) mentions the Marx-Bourdieu relation to raise the Bourdieusian problem of social space and symbolic structures. In this text, he analyses a central notion: the concept of capital and its different forms. Much as in Marx’s theory, capital in Bourdieu is a social relationship, but he extends the classic interpretation of economic capital to other kinds of goods and social life spheres.2 He warns: To avoid falling into paradoxes such as that all people should be considered ‘capitalist’, or that ‘capitalism’ was a transhistorical social regime, we must not forget that in Bourdieu’s view capital is not abstract labor (value) that valorizes itself (as Marx contends); but a social good whose property can confer some type of benefit in the most general sense of terms. (García Linera 2000: 55)

In addition, García Linera points out that understanding the complexity of Bourdieusian propositions requires remembering the following definitions of Weber: the consideration of perceived monetary income and its structure as indicators of economic capital; the conceptualization of cultural capital and its place in the definition of class, and the symbolic capital (social honour) as another indicator of social inequality. Finally, Denis Baranger, Argentinian sociologist and author of Epistemología y metodología en la obra de Pierre Bourdieu [Epistemology and methodology in the work of Pierre Bourdieu] (2004), points out that the “economistic” accusation of Bourdieu’s theory also comes from a reading of his work as Althusserian. Jeffery Alexander is the main protagonist of this portrayal with his argument that Bourdieu is “economistic and his work highlights the continuity of Marx’s line of thought, specially under Althusser’s interpretation” (Baranger 2004: 21–22). Baranger suggests that certain words and expressions used by Bourdieu can be traced to Althusserian language. But he points out that actually, those are expressions “from a certain intellectual atmosphere where 2

 This is also the interpretation made by Gutiérrez (1995). (Cf. Specially in pp. 26–30).

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Althusser belonged” and not “the indicator of an authentic theoretical convergence with him” (Baranger 2004: 26). Furthermore, he adds the need to remember that much of Althusser’s work clearly comes from other sources: for example, from Bachelard and Canguilhem, both of whom were Bourdieu’s teachers. At the same time, as this essay will point out later, Baranger proposes that in the Bourdieusian notion of “field” it is possible to observe simultaneously the footprints of Weberian and Marxist thinking. In agreement with these lines of argument, this chapter assumes that Pierre Bourdieu’s perspective is strongly inspired by historic materialism but at the same time shows the importance of other intellectual debts. Under this premise, this essay will pose the main traits of the Bourdieusian concept of “economy of practices,” pointing out the links with the Marxist perspective and the contribution of other sources.

A Double Historicized Objectivity Bourdieu argues about the possibility of sociology as an objective science “because of the existence of external relationships which are necessary and independent of individual wills” (Bourdieu 1990a: 2). He used almost the same words that Marx used in the Preface to the A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, when he asserted that: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. (Marx 1977)

Indeed, when Bourdieu defines his approach as that of a “constructivist structuralism or of structuralist constructivism” (Bourdieu 1990c: 123), he proposes a vision of “economy of practices” that has many points in common with the Marxist perspective. First of all, it implies the recognition of objective relations that have a social genesis. Secondly, he poses an interpretation of social processes within their historic dimensions and the dialectic relation between objectivity and subjectivity: as “externalization of internality” and as “internalization of externality” (Bourdieu 1990a: 5). In a well-known passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx specifically refers to the weight that the past exerts on men’s present. Even though it is true “men make their own history,” it is

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also accurate they cannot choose the circumstances in which they act since they are the result of the past weighing on the present “as a nightmare.”3 He also wrote it in the Preface to the First German Edition of Capital Volume 1, when he pointed out: Alongside the modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif! (Marx 1887: 7)

Bourdieu explicitly appeals to this last phrase (in French, the rest of the original is in German) to title one of his articles in 1980. In this text, and in the same direction as Marx, Bourdieu’s talk about the several ways in which historical forces affect the present. He points out that the original relation with the social world is a: “possessive relation, which implies the possession of the possessor by his possessions. When the heritage appropriates the inheritor, just as Marx says, the inheritor can appropriate the heritage”4 (Bourdieu 1980: 7). In 1997 he resumes this idea in Pascalian Meditations: The doxic relation to the native world is a relationship of belonging and possession in which the body possessed by history appropriates immediately the things inhabited by the same history. Only when the heritage has taken over the inheritor can the inheritor take over the heritage. And this appropriation of the inheritor by the heritage, the precondition for the appropriation of the heritage by the inheritor (which has nothing inevitable about it), takes place under the combined effect of the conditionings inscribed in the position of inheritor and the pedagogic action of his predecessors, themselves possessed possessors. (Bourdieu 2000: 152)

For both Marx and Bourdieu, social life shows as a double historicized objectivity that translates into relations and things that are external to agents. However, at the same time, these relations are incorporated into biological individuals. 3  “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (Marx 1937: 5). 4  Translated from the original French by the author.

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Marx, as it is well known, shows the close relation between the existence of social conditions and feelings, illusions, and ways of thinking: Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his activity. (Marx 1937: 22)

In the same vein, Bourdieu opposes what he calls “a Machiavellian vision of history,”5 characterized by a teleological illusion. This vision assumes all actions are a by-product of conscious calculations, as in the goal-oriented strategies pursued by great figures or, even worse, by institutions that are personified as historical subjects. On that basis, the Bourdieusian perspective proposes that history is a consequence of: “an almost miraculous encounter” between objective external structures (the field or the history as a material thing) and biological individuals’ incorporated structures (the habitus or history as body). Ultimately, social life is the result of “ontological complicity” between a field and habitus (Bourdieu 1980).

The Struggle: The Engine of Social Life As Wacquant (1996) observed, Marx and Bourdieu share an agonistic conception of the social world: the capitalist world in Marx and the relatively autonomous social spaces (fields) in Bourdieu. Marx and Engels start The Communist Manifesto with a startling thesis: class struggles are the engine of history: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx and Engels 1969: 14). In the same way, Bourdieu affirms that “the principle of the perpetual motion that agitates the field does not lie in some first motionless motor,— here the Sun King-, but in the very struggle” (Bourdieu 1980: 7). The game traps the different agents, they have an illusio. This illusio is at the same time the beginning of the game and the consequence of their 5  This and other aspects related to a Bourdieusian analysis of history is considered in Gutiérrez (2016).

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development. Even more, once they are immersed in the game, there is no way out but to get out of the game, which would take them to ataraxia (indifference) and sentence them to a type of social death. However, while the historic materialism framework identifies environments of social differentiation and their relative autonomy, the ultimately determining economic element subordinates these processes. This leads to such claims as: Where there is division of labour on a social scale there is also mutual independence among the different sections of work. In the last instance production is the decisive factor. (Engels 1968)

Neither intentionalist nor utilitarian, Bourdieu’s approach overcomes the false dichotomy between the economic and the non-economic. He thus shows what economism cannot see: that the different domains of practice have “an economy in itself and not for itself” (Bourdieu 1990b: 113). The origin of each of the relatively autonomous universes of Bourdieu comes from the historical differentiation of powers and the circuits of legitimacy. Indeed, in the basis of the field theory, we find the phenomenon that Spencer, Durkheim, and Weber had already pointed out: “the social world is the site of a process of progressive differentiation” (Bourdieu 1998: 83): The evolution of societies tends to make universes (which I call fields) emerge which are autonomous and have their own laws. (…) Thus, we have social universes which have a fundamental law, a nomos which is independent from the laws of other universes, which are auto-nomes, which evaluate what is done in them, the stakes at play, according to principles and criteria that are irreducible to those of other universes. (Bourdieu 1998: 83–84)

Even the economic field6 derives from the same processes. The problem of falling into economism comes up when we pretend to transfer the 6  In the case of the economic field, Lebaron points out two fundamental issues: first, that it is the historical result of an autonomization process of a social order (the economic one) and of a specific illusion, a particular belief in the value of that game. Second, that economic domination “imposes the very legitimacy of domination” and the dominant is not content with appropriating most of the wealth produced (surplus value, in the Marxist case) but rather “imposes on the dominated the vision of himself and his own reality that is his own gaze” (Lebaron 2004b: 133).

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nomos, particular of the field (“business is business”) to the diverse social universes. Even more, Bourdieu points out: the constitution of a science of mercantile relationships which, inasmuch as it takes for granted the very foundations of the order it claims to analyze— private property, profit, wage labor, etc.—is not even a science of the field of economic production, has prevented the constitution of a general science of the economy of practices, which would treat mercantile exchange as a particular case of exchange in all its forms. (Bourdieu 1986: 242)

In other words, the Bourdieusian economy of practices distinguishes itself from historical materialism by extending the concepts of interest and capital to other social fields rather than the economic (Gutiérrez 1995). As forms of capital diversify and autonomous fields multiply; tensions and power relations grow, and threaten conflicts: diverse forms of capital play the game of domination and their carriers struggle to impose the legitimacy of their resources, especially in the field of power. The capital-field dynamic historicization is fundamental, and its simultaneous differentiation constitutes the most important principles of distinction among the different forms of society (Bourdieu 2021).

Capital and Capitals A characteristic of the Bourdieusian notion of capital that helps to link his concept to the Marxist tradition is the idea that all capital is accumulated work. However, as Garcia Quesada points out, for Bourdieu, “work is not merely an activity that produces goods and services—that is, [it] produces surplus value” but he “widens the concept to include aspects beyond those traditionally studied by political economy” (García Quesada 2009: 60). Indeed, Bourdieu points out: Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its ‘incorporated’, embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor. (Bourdieu 1986: 241)

The acquisition of any form of capital, as much as its reconversion in other different forms, assumes a certain waste of energy and the availability of time to do that work. This process, that seems more evident in economic capital accumulation, is also present in cultural capital accumulation:

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for example, in its form of incorporated capital, it demands time and bodily exposure, as tanning (Bourdieu 1979). The same happens with social capital that requires an unceasing effort of sociability, a continuous series of exchanges, with the consequent expenditure of time and energy (Bourdieu 1986). Also, symbolic capital (although in part it is transmitted symbolically, as the name suggests) is a form of capital acquired over time and specially with a personal input of time (Bourdieu 2021). On the other hand, this accumulated energy is social energy, is registered in objective structures, and the logic of its production guarantees the immanence of the social order: The universal equivalent, the measure of all equivalences, is nothing other than labor-time (in the widest sense); and the conservation of social energy through all its conversions is verified if, in each case, one takes into account both the labor-time accumulated in the form of capital and the labor-time needed to transform it from one type into another. (Bourdieu 1986: 153)

Yet Bourdieu’s capitals have homologous logics and while their ways of functioning could be interconnected in different moments, they never lose their relative autonomy. As Alonso reminds us, talking about “counterpart” logics does not imply reducing them to only one: and “meanwhile, economic capital logic is that of material benefit; the symbolic capital logic is that of distinction” (2002: 20).

The Denial of the Economy and “Interest in Disinterestedness” A fundamental aspect of the Bourdieusian economy of practices is the apparent paradox of thinking that it is possible to have an “interest in disinterestedness.” Indeed, when Bourdieu talks about “the economy of symbolic goods,” he refers to certain social spaces, as in the world of art, religion, science and politics, that reject or censure economic interest, demanding the collective denial (or rejection) of economic values (Bourdieu 2000). In these spheres, the provision of other benefits—especially symbolic ones—reward or compensate for “disinterest”—in the strictly economic sense. These universes actively or passively hide economic truths, and rest upon the taboo of making things explicit. Because of that, practices and discourses are ambiguous, “double sided”: although they are not

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hypocrites: they are based on denial. And the work of denial is successful because it is collective and founded in the orchestration of the habitus of agents who participate in those games and share what is at stake. Agents who participate in these universes have an illusio: they believe in the value of what is at stake and in the legitimacy of the stakes. As a consequence, as Bourdieu points out in Forms of Capital. General Sociology (2021), economic interest is just a particular case: Interest as operated by societies that are rational (for Weber) or capitalist (for Marx), that is, the calculating societies where economics is established as an autonomous field with its own laws, is one particular case in a universe of possible interest, within which may be found scientific, literary, political or charitable interest among others. (Bourdieu 2021: 100–101)

It is not possible to reduce all interests to economic interest stricto sensu, but interests mobilize agents as much as material interest. In this regard, Bourdieu observes that: The most striking example is that of the artistic field which is constituted in the nineteenth century by taking the reverse of economic law as its fundamental law. (Bourdieu 2000: 84)

Indeed, in the context of a process that started with European Renaissance and ended in the second half of the nineteenth century with what is known as “art for art’s sake,” lucrative and specifically artistic ends of the artistic universe are dissociated. One example of that process is the opposition between “commercial art” and “pure art.” And the only form of true art, according to the specific laws of these autonomous fields, completely rejects commercial ends. That is to say, the field opposes the subordination of the artist and his production to any external demands (economical, political and religious) and their sanctions: It is constituted on the basis of a fundamental law which is the negation (or disavowal) of the economy: let no one enter here if he or she has commercial concerns. (Bourdieu 2000: 84)

What circulates as specific power in the artistic field—as in any other market of symbolic goods, that is to say, any other social universe founded in the taboo of making things explicit in their economic truth, and in the

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collective denial of what the misrecognition implies and the recognition of the supporting mechanisms—is symbolic capital: Symbolic capital is an ordinary property (physicals strength, wealth, warlike valor, etc.) which, perceived by social agents endowed with the categories of perception and appreciation permitting them to perceive, know and recognize it, becomes symbolically efficient, like a veritable magical power; a property which, because it responds to socially constituted “collective expectations” and beliefs, exercises a sort of action from a distance, without physical contact. (Bourdieu 1998: 102)

The Legitimacy of Domination: Symbolic Violence According to Bourdieu, symbolic capital is recognition, consecration, legitimacy. Symbolic capital is also symbolic power; it is the particular force that certain agents who exercise symbolic violence have as their disposition. It is about a form of violence that operates on an agent or a group of agents with their complicity. It is soft, euphemized, violence and because of that it is socially acceptable. As their mechanism of exercises are misrecognized, it is not seen as arbitrary, and because of that it is recognized. Empirically identified at first with the school environment (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), the: symbolic violence accomplishes itself through an act of cognition and of misrecognition that lies beyond—or beneath—the controls of consciousness and will, in the obscurities of the schemata of habitus. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 171–172)

It is based on symbolic power, as the power to constitute what is given by the enunciation of making agents see, making them believe, of confirming or transforming their world vision and in this way the action upon the world, then the world. This achieves the equivalent of what can be obtained by physical or economic force, thanks to the specific effect of mobilization (Bourdieu 1977b). Symbolic violence, based on the recognition-misrecognition of external and interiorized social relations, constitutes the path that allows the reproduction and reinforcement of the constitutive and constituted social relations of power between classes at the symbolic level. We can observe this same process in other analytical spheres: when we particularly study each

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of the socially specific universes, for example, the political field, the artistic, the religious or the scientific. In this way, we concur with Wacquant when he points out: Indeed, the whole of Bourdieu’s work may be interpreted as a materialist anthropology of the specific contribution that various forms of symbolic violence make to the reproduction and transformation of structures of domination. (Wacquant 1992: 14–15)

In these universes where symbolic capital is at stake, Bourdieu identifies a group of general properties they all share. First of all, the practices involved are symbolic exchanges. They always have a “double truth,” a sort of contradiction between subjective truth and objective reality which is possible because of a kind of self-deception and sustained self-­ mystification; not because of hypocrisy, but because of collective self-­ deception (and collective misrecognition) (Bourdieu 2000). Another property that characterizes them is the “the taboo of making things explicit (whose form par excellence is the price)” (Bourdieu 2000: 96): we could say that, as “price” works as a kind of consensus over change rates during economic exchanges, each economy of symbolic exchanges also has its own “price.” But the terms and conditions remain in an implicit state. A kind of “everything occurs as if …” (Bourdieu 2000: 96) and “silence about the truth of the exchange is a shared silence” (ivi: 97). In addition, through a kind of “symbolic alchemy” (ivi: 99), these economies allow a transfiguration of domination and exploitation into affective and power relations, into charisma or “charm.” All of this is possible (including exercising symbolic violence) because it is collective and is based on the involved agents’ orchestration of dispositions and on the “miraculous encounter” among the habitus and objective structures where they function. Finally, because the economy(ies) of symbolic goods are based on belief, it is necessary to recognize that its reproduction or its crisis depend on the reproduction of beliefs or its specific crisis. That is to say the “continuity or rupture with the adjustment between mental structures (categories of perception and appreciation, systems of preference) and objective structures” (ivi: 122).

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The Field as a Space for the Game Each of the social universes, with their own economy, capitals at stake, interest and bets, constitute fields. Bourdieu defines these as: historically constituted areas of activity with their specific institutions and their own laws of functioning. The existence of a specialized and relatively autonomous field is correlative with the existence of specific stakes and interest. (Bourdieu 1990e: 87)

It is the preoccupation with thinking about those social universes with an economy irreducible to economic interest, that brings Bourdieu to propose his concept of field. Indeed, with this notion Bourdieu distances himself both from the formalism that offers total autonomy to areas of production of meaning, and the reductionism that directly relates artistic forms to social forms. Formalism assumes explanations that resort to analysis of the internal evolution of ideas—or artistic forms—in themselves: a kind of “pure” universe far removed from the social world that produces them. Reductionism, on the other hand, adheres to explanations that— without further analysis—identify an aesthetic production with the producer’s (or consumer’s) social class, thus making “the short-circuit mistake” (Bourdieu 1987: 113). These views have something in common: both ignore the fact that artistic practices are inserted into a specific social universe, an autonomous field of production (with its own nómos), defined by its objective relationships. Thus, as early as 1966 and inspired by Max Weber’s sociology of religions, Bourdieu proposed a first formulation of the intellectual field as a relatively autonomous universe (Bourdieu 1966). And also on this occasion he expresses his debt not only to Weber, but also to the Marxist perspective: It isn’t out of any love of paradox that I would say that Weber carried out the Marxist intention (in the best sense of the term) in areas where Marx had not managed to do so. I’m thinking in particular of religious sociology, which is far from being Marx’s forte. Weber built up a veritable political economy of religion; more precisely, he brought out the full potential of the materialist analysis of religion without destroying the properly symbolic character of the phenomenon. (Bourdieu 1990d: 36)

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In a text dedicated to the study of the State (Bourdieu 1998) and marking the “decisive contribution” of Weberian sociology of religion for the formulation of the theory of symbolic systems, Bourdieu points out that: Indeed, if he shares with Marx an interest in the function—rather than the structure—of symbolic systems, Weber nonetheless has the merit of calling attention to the producers of these particular products (religious agents, in the case that concerns him) and to their interactions (conflict, competition, etc.). In opposition to the Marxists, who have overlooked the existence of specialized agents of production (…) Weber reminds us that, to understand religion, it does not suffice to study symbolic forms of the religious type, as Cassirer or Durkheim did, or even the immanent structure of the religious message or of the mythological corpus, as with the structuralists. Weber focuses specifically on the producers of the religious message, on the specific interests that move them and on the strategies they use in their struggle. (Bourdieu 1998: 57)

Building his notion of the (religious) field, Bourdieu draws on Weber’s analysis of the strategies and interactions between priests, prophets and magicians in ancient Christianity (Bourdieu 1971, 1991). And, by defining it as a structure of objective relationships that underpin practices and representations, he moves from the interactions of Weberian analysis to structural relationships (that is, “both against Weber and with Weber”— Bourdieu 1990d: 49). In this sense, Baranger (2004) suggests that Bourdieu’s field theory can be presented as a continuation of the Weberian project, but only on the condition of bringing into play the idea of the field as an objective network or configuration between positions, which recalls the Marxian idea of relations as independent from individual consciences and wills. Furthermore, it is Bourdieu himself who recognizes the need to intertwine Weber with Marx: my reading of Max Weber—who, far from opposing Marx, as is generally thought, with a spiritualist theory of history, in fact carries the materialist mode of thought into areas which Marxist materialism effectively abandons to spiritualism—helped me greatly in arriving at this kind of generalized materialism; this will be a paradox only to those who have an over-simple view of Weber’s thought, owing to the combined effect of the rarity of translations, the one-sidedness of the early French and American interpretations, and the perfunctory anathemas pronounced by ‘Marxist’ orthodoxy. (Bourdieu 1990b: 17)

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Following the same lines about the relationship between Marx and Weber in a Bourdieusian perspective, Brubaker (1985) points out that Bourdieu has been concerned with completing Marx’s programme, integrating Durkheimian contributions on the sociology of symbolic forms, together with Weber’s conceptual tools on practices and other symbolic dimensions of material life. Swartz (1996), meanwhile, positively values the attempt to find an intermediate way between the classical opposition of idealism and materialism, offering Bourdieu’s as a materialist explanation, although without being reductionist about cultural life.

Final Reflection: A Toolbox Offering a brief final reflection, I return to Bourdieu’s early text concerned with the central intention of his concept of economy of practice: Thus the theory of strictly economic practice is simply a particular case of a general theory of the economics of practice. The only way to escape from the ethnocentric naiveties of economism, without falling into populist exaltation of the generous naivety of earlier forms of society, is to carry out in full what economism does only partially, and to extend economic calculation to all the goods, material and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social formation—which may be “fair words” or smiles, handshakes or shrugs, compliments or attention, challenges or insults, honour or honours, powers or pleasures, gossip or scientific information, distinction or distinctions, etc. Economic calculation has hitherto managed to appropriate the territory objectively surrendered to the remorseless logic of what Marx calls “naked self-interest” only by setting aside a “sacred” island miraculously spared by the “icy water of egoistical calculation” and left as a sanctuary for the priceless or worthless things it cannot assess. (Bourdieu 1977a: 177–178)

He extends the economic logic to all goods, material and non-material and with it, to all the domains of practices. This leads us to argue that the work of Pierre Bourdieu goes from the “economy” to the “economies.” And this step is possible because, as the author recognizes, his strong Marxist mark adds to the contribution of other sources of inspiration. In this regard, Corcuff points out that “social criticism oriented in a post-­ Marxist sense” (2009: 9) is one of Bourdieu’s most important contributions. This means putting aside the conspiracy schema, assuming “the challenge of complexity” (2009: 12) and thinking rather, as we have

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mentioned above, in terms of ontological complicity and orchestration without an orchestral conductor. In other words, this social critique abandons the notion of “system” and takes up the challenge as to the existence of a plurality of relatively autonomous social fields; that is to say, a plurality of forms of domination, each one with their own and specific mechanisms of “capitalization of resources” (2009: 15). In other words, the same set of analytical categories allows us to explain and understand the different areas of social reality and enables us to scientifically and methodically conceptualize diverse problems. Putting this set into operation in the construction of a sociology of the various economies allows us to break with the naïve glance. For example, with a certain common vision of art and literature as a “creative project,” as an expression of pure freedom, or with the methodological attitude that erroneously and directly—without mediation—relates artistic and literary works with the producer’s position in the social class. This also reminds us that the apparently purer, more sublime things, less subject to the social world, such as art, science, religion, even politics, are not different from other social and sociological objects. Their “purification,” “sublimation,” and “removal” from the everyday world are the result of the specific social relationships that constitute the specific market where they are produced, distributed, consumed, and where the belief around their value is generated. Being able to explain and understand all these phenomena also implies remembering the importance of the construction of the research object in this analytical proposal, and the need “to treat theory as a modus operandi” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 161). In other words, this is possible on the condition of considering the Bourdieusian economy of practices as “a conceptual toolbox,” in the same sense as Alonso, Martín Criado, and Moreno Pestaña: “that it needs to be constantly mounted and traced, activated and readjusted, arranged and discussed so that it does not lose the ability to explain and understand the concrete social [experience]”7 (2004: 38). Undoubtedly, this is the greatest challenge to those of us who do research from the Bourdieusian perspective: to introduce these analytical tools into our own theoretical-methodological debates and to put them into operation in our own specific problems.

7

 Translated from the original Spanish by the author.

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———. 1990e [1987]. The Interest of Sociologist. In In Other Words. Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, ed. Pierre Bourdieu, 87–93. Translated by M. Adamsom. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1990f [1984]. Sociología y Cultura. Translated by M. Pou. México: Grijalbo. ———. 1991 [1971]. Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field. Comparative Social Research, 13, 1–44. ———. 1998 [1994]. Practical Reason. On the Theory of Action. Translated by R. Johnson and Others. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000 [1997]. Pascalian Meditations. Translated by R.  Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2021 [2016]. Forms of Capital. General Sociology, Volume 3: Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984. Translated by P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1977 [1970]. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Translated by R.  Nice. London: Sage Publications Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Brubaker, Rogers. 1985. Rethinking Classical Theory: The Sociological Vision of Pierre Bourdieu. Theory and Society 6: 745–775. Caillé, Alain. 1992. Esquisse d’une critique de l’économie générale de la pratique. Cahiers du LASA 12–13: 109–219. ———. 1994. Don, intérêt et désintéressement. Bourdieu, Mauss, Platon et quelques autres. Paris: La Découverte. Corcuff, Phillippe. 2009. Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) leído de otra manera. Crítica social post-marxista y el problema de la singularidad individual. Cultura y Representaciones Sociales 7: 9–26. Engels, Frederick. 1968 [1890]. Engels to Conrad Schmidt in Berlin. In Marx and Engels Correspondence. Translated by D.  Torr. New  York: International Publishers. Accessed November 30, 2021. https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1890/letters/90_10_27.htm. García Canclini, Néstor. 1990. Introducción: la sociología de la cultura de Pierre Bourdieu. In Pierre Bourdieu, Sociología y cultura: 9–50 [Translated by Martha Pou of Bourdieu, Pierre. Questions de Sociologie], 9–50. Mexico D.  F.: Editorial Grijalbo. García Linera, Álvaro. 2000. Espacio social y estructuras simbólicas. Clase, dominación simbólica y etnicidad en la obra de Pierre Bourdieu. In Bourdieu leído desde el Sur, 51–127. La Paz: Plural Editores. García Quesada, George. 2009. Tiempo, trabajo y capital en Marx y Bourdieu: un metacomentario. Abra 37–38: 59–70. Gutiérrez, Alicia. 1995. Pierre Bourdieu. Las prácticas sociales. Posadas: Editorial Universidad Nacional de Misiones. ———. 2003. “Con Marx y contra Marx”: el materialismo en Pierre Bourdieu. Revista Complutense de Educación 2: 453–482.

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———. 2016. El sociólogo y el historiador: el rol del intelectual en la propuesta bourdieusiana. Estudios Sociológicos 102: 477–502. Honneth, Axel. 1986. The Fragmented World of Symbolic Forms: Reflections on Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture. Theory and Society 3: 55–66. Jenkins, Richard. 1982. Pierre Bourdieu and the Reproduction of Determinism. Sociology 2: 270–281. Lebaron, Frédéric. 2004a. Les modèles économiques face à l’économisme. In Pierre Bourdieu, sociologue, ed. Patrick Champagne, Louis Pinto, and Gisèle Sapiro, 117–132. Paris: Fayard. ———. 2004b. La sociología de Pierre Bourdieu frente a las ciencias económicas. In Pierre Bourdieu, las herramientas del sociólogo, ed. Luis Enrique Alonso, Enrique Martín Criado, and José Luis Moreno Pestaña, 131–140. Madrid: Fundamentos. Marx, Karl. 1887 [1867]. Preface to the First German Edition. In Capital Volume 1. A Critical of Politic Economy. Translated by S.  Moore and E.  Aveling. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Accessed November 30, 2021. https://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-­Volume-­I.pdf. ———. 1937 [1869]. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Translated by S.  K. Padover. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Accessed November 30, 2021. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-­ Brumaire.pdf. ———. 1977 [1859]. Preface. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S.  W. Ryazanskaya. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Accessed November 30, 2021. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1859/critique-­pol-­economy/preface.htm. Marx, Karl, and Frederic Engels. 1969 [1848]. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Selected Works. Vol. One, 98–137. Translated by S. Moore and F. Engels. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Accessed November 30, 2021. https://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf. Swartz, David. 1996. Bridging the Study of Culture and Religion: Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Symbolic Power. Sociology of Religion 57: 71–85. Wacquant, Loïc. 1992. Toward a Social Praxeology: The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu’s Sociology. In An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, ed. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, 1–59. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. Notes tardives sur le “marxisme” de Bourdieu. Actuel Marx 20: 83–90.

PART III

Intellectual Field: Interpreting Critique of Ideology

CHAPTER 13

Bourdieu, Marxism and Law: Between Radical Criticism and Political Responsibility Gianvito Brindisi

While Marx’s influence on Bourdieu is well-known, an analysis of how they relate to one another with regard to law requires that we confront a whole array of problems. These include Bourdieu’s interpretative violence; the absence of a theory of law in both thinkers and the diversity of their objects of analysis; the multiplicity of perspectives on law found in Marx and in those reflections which take him as a starting point; and the distance between Bourdieu and Marx regarding what is usually defined as the politics of law. Added to these is the fact that Bourdieu delved into law after the important period of Marxist-inflected legal studies in the 1960s and 1970s, without ever himself really engaging with Marx, and instead made clear his intention to distance himself from Marxism—as illustrated by the opening part of his most significant article on this theme, in which he took a stance against Althusser and, in lesser measure, Thompson I’m grateful to Bridget Fowler for reading this paper and for her valuable suggestions.

G. Brindisi (*) University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Caserta, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_13

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(Bourdieu 1987: 814–815).1 Yet it is surely no distortion to maintain that Bourdieu’s theory did not entirely break away from the Marxian problematic horizon, and that it can be understood as a Marxist-oriented theory that addresses the symbolic dimension of law. As is well known, for Marx, law finds both its conditions of possibility and its function in society, since each form of production generates its own juridical relations and each political authority does no more than translate into law a determinate state of the relations of production (Marx 1986–1987: 26). In this sense, law is but a system of representation that expresses the interests of the ruling class, although it disguises these interests by idealizing them. These key theses of Marxian discourse on law can, undeniably, easily be found in Bourdieu: after all, the sociologist: (1) accuses the producers of juridical discourse of exchanging the logic of things for the things of logic (Bourdieu 1992: 49); (2) denounces the illusions of a law autonomous from the social, and of an abstract subject of law (Bourdieu 1987: 814); (3) speaks of the symbolic force of law as a function of practical denial of the content of action (Bourdieu 1992: 126); (4) attributes to law the quality of apparent universality, as well as the function of dissimulating conflict and the interests of the dominant. Hence the symbolic effectiveness of the juridical work of rationalization resides in its attribution of universal value to a viewpoint belonging to a specific region of social space, thus entailing its practical universalization, such that subjects imagine themselves to be free and do not perceive their own subjection (Bourdieu 1987: 844; 1990a: 84–86). Yet, at the same time, Bourdieu criticizes any conception of law as a false representation or false consciousness—that is, as a mere reflection of the material and a mere instrument of domination. Moreover—and this is particularly significant—notions of capital in the Marxian sense, of modes and relations of production, or of exploitation, never appear in Bourdieu’s texts on law. Moreover, Bourdieu does not deal specifically with the relationship between the form of modern law and capitalism. Finally, he never captures the specific moments in which Marx also attributes a performative value to law and its hegemonic impact on society (De Fiores 2019).

1  Bourdieu was familiar with Marxist studies in the juridical field thanks to S.  Spitzer (1983). My analysis will not consider the specificities of Bourdieusian sociology outside of its relationship with Marx or Marxism, nor the Marxist authors who concerned themselves with law but whom Bourdieu does not discuss (e.g. Gramsci, Pashukanis, Poulantzas).

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Since it is impossible to conduct an exhaustive comparison of a relationship that is, moreover, fraught with interpretative difficulties, I will use an exemplary case of misinterpretation to highlight some of their points of convergence and opposition. Namely, the question of obedience to the law (understood as sovereign command) and to customary law, central to the legal debate of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marx was formed by this debate and elaborated his early thinking in response to it (Marx 1975). Yet, here I am not referring to the young Marx, but to the Marx of the Ethnological Notebooks, as misinterpreted by Bourdieu. In a conversation with Tetsuji Yamamoto reproduced in one of the appendices to the French edition of Practical Reason—unfortunately not reprinted in the English translation—the sociologist, not without a certain gratification, judges it “worth noting that Marx came close to the concept of habitus while studying customary law” (Bourdieu 1994: 171). He thus recalls a textual reference where Marx expounded a notion of obedience to customary law as instinctive and unconscious, on a par with the movements of the body: “Customary law … is not obeyed, as enacted law is obeyed. When it obtains over small areas and in small natural groups, the penal sanctions on which it depends are partly opinion, partly superstition, but to a far greater extent an instinct almost as blind and unconscious as that which produces some of the movements of our bodies” (Bourdieu 1994: 171). However, one small detail renders this representation of Marx as coming close to the concept of habitus rather problematic. For the passage to which Bourdieu refers does not, in fact, belong to Marx; rather, it is a quotation from Sumner Maine’s Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (Maine 1875: 392) which Marx does not even comment upon (Marx 1974: 335). Bourdieu thus mistakes Maine’s conception of obedience for a comment of Marx’s. Yet on this very point, Marx held that obedience to customary law is not instinctual at all, but merely the product of economic determination. This can be understood by reading a note that Marx dedicates to another passage by Maine, in which the jurist attacks the Austinian-­ derived concept of the sovereign—understood as a social superior endowed with an effective force of command—on account of its liability to degenerate into arbitrary decision. This conception, according to Maine, is incompatible with the facts, because the “actual direction of the forces of society by its sovereign” is limited by a “vast mass of influences, which we call for shortness moral”—that is, by the aggregate opinions, sentiments,

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customary practices and beliefs produced by institutions or proper to human nature itself (Marx 1974: 329). In this respect, Marx thinks not only that the Austinian conception of law is infantile, but that Maine’s conception is ideological and conservative: Maine passes off as moral a set of influences that are primarily economic. If these latter do have a moral mode of existence, it is always a secondary, derivative mode, and never a primary one. But above all, Marx argues, Maine disregards the most important fact, namely, the fact that the supreme existence of the state is only apparent and that it is, in all its forms, an excrescence of society, destined to disappear when society reaches a new stage of development (Marx 1974: 329). All this is perfectly consistent with what Marx had already observed when he criticized the “illusion that law is based on will […] divorced from its real basis—on free will” (Marx and Engels 1976: 90), and when he argued that “Legislation, whether political or civil, never does more than proclaim, express in words, the will of economic relations” (Marx 1976: 147). Now, it being understood that Bourdieu, unlike Maine, denied that customary law is something natural and non-arbitrary—non-­politicizable— his misinterpretation of Marx is revealing not so much because of the sociologist’s evident interest in fitting himself within what he presumes to be Marxian thought on habitus. Rather, this is above all telling because Bourdieu intends to direct an implicit additional criticism against this thought—that is, it has not understood that the role of habitus in obedience to law has to be extended beyond customary law, even to highly differentiated societies endowed with juridical codes. Of course, for Bourdieu state law and customary law are not equivalents. Although both are constructed by acts of classification—some small or even infinitesimal—they are not constructed in the same way.2 But they are nevertheless observed, because they impose the categories and cognitive structures with which they are thought (Bourdieu 2014: 168). Obedience is, in this sense, an act of practical belief. On this point, Bourdieu could have found a terrain of engagement not so much with the late Marx, but rather with the young Marx, who clearly thematizes the relationship between instinct and customary law in order to politicize juridical technicism and to lay the foundations for the 2  Bourdieu (1987: 849): “the movement from statistical regularity to legal rule represents a true social modification.”

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universality of the law of the popular classes (Xifaras 2002). But this is not Bourdieu’s own perspective. To hypothesize an analysis that Bourdieu could have made, if he had read the Ethnological Notebooks correctly, it can be said that for the sociologist, the moral moments which Maine conceived as natural and spontaneous are not a form of ideological representation that conceals an economic determination, but rather a form of practical knowledge derived from the incorporation of the social structure, functional to allowing its reproduction or transformation. On this level, we can understand the distance that Bourdieu establishes between his own perspective and Marx’s. According to Bourdieu, it is not possible to distinguish between the world and its representation (Bourdieu 2018: 77), for a vision of the world has its own materiality that is fully part of effective reality. The political effectiveness of a symbolic system like the (state or customary) legal system lies precisely in it being an instrument of knowledge and not a mere reflection of the materiality of existence. Indeed, law, like any order, becomes effective through the subjective dispositions which are prepared in advance to recognize it practically (Bourdieu 1996: 455, n. 30). For this reason, law is for Bourdieu the form par excellence of symbolic violence, exactly insofar as it is able to impose “universal principles that direct … vision and the action and the representation that it entails” (Bourdieu 2018: 75). The conditions for the effectiveness of law reside in a form of symbolic violence, which does not belong to the field of ideas and does not act by way of ideology, but rather results from the fact that “agents apply to the objective structures of the social world structures of perception and appreciation that have emerged from these objective structures and tend therefore to see the world and self-evident” (Bourdieu 1990a: 135). This is not to say that law is not interwoven with social struggles. If Marx holds that law is determined by the relations of production, and that, in its correspondence with the interests of the ruling class, it always records a certain state of the class struggle, for Bourdieu it is the social structure and the complex set of struggles for classification in the field of power that determine the contents of law. For Bourdieu, the impact of social struggle on the construction of reality cannot be reduced to class struggle alone, but to a multiplicity of struggles between agents who aspire to impose a representation of the world that conforms to their own respective interests (Bourdieu 2016: 798).

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Bourdieu certainly does maintain, together with Marx, that the way in which men objectify their existence through a specific mode of production determines their being.3 However, he holds that the objectification of existence relates not just to the sphere of production, but also to the struggles and relations of domination between groups within a social space who compete for the objective representation of the social world. These relations constitute an order that proves effective because, in passing by way of subjects’ habitus, it is simultaneously both recognized and misrecognized. In the relationship between legal concepts and their material habitat (Marx and Engels 1976: 31) therefore, it is necessary to give space to agents’ habitus, which depends on the position they occupy in the objective structure of social space and on their properties. The habitat does not mechanically determine the agents but does influence their frameworks of perception (Croce 2015). The understanding of law must overcome a purely objectivist or subjectivist view. More specifically, the juridical field is a space structured by the relations of force engaged between the agents within it, on the basis of the unequal resources at their disposal. This inequality owes to the diversity of their positions and their respective capitals, which are often homologous to other positions and capitals in other social fields. The juridical field is thus an unstable system, susceptible to transformations which derive from the internal relations among the agents in the field and the relations with other fields in the more general field of power. Given these presuppositions, if we are to understand a symbolic system like the legal system it is necessary to study the agents who produce it, “how they are influenced, what interests they have, what is their space of competition, how they struggle among themselves” (Bourdieu 2014: 174).4 Jurists are not simply those whom the division of labour tasks with keeping up the worship of concepts, locating therein the foundation of the real relations (Marx and Engels 1976: 29 and 92–93)—that is, they are not mere ideologists. Rather, they themselves constitute the consensus on the meaning of the world, and Bourdieu often reminds that Engels’s letter

3  Marx and Engels (1976: 31–32): “As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.” 4  As has been observed, on this point Bourdieu stands very close to the work of historians such as Robert W. Gordon. See Coombe (1989).

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to Conrad Schmidt of October 27, 1890, is an exception in this regard (Bourdieu 2000: 177). It can be understood, from this, in place of the Marxian thesis that frames modern law as a social or superstructural form of the capitalist relations of production, Bourdieu substitutes a conception of modern law as a product of a cultural revolution, of a new distribution of cultural capital and its symbolic value in the space of struggles for legitimate classification (Bourdieu 1996: 371–389). In his reading, these are struggles that have determined specific forms of habitus and a juridical perception of the world that is irreducible to relations of production.

Bourdieu Between Althusser and Thompson As we anticipated at the outset of this chapter, Bourdieu argues these theses are not so much with a view to differentiating himself from Marx— with whom he never really engages with regard to law—but rather to differentiate himself from Althusser and, to a lesser degree, from Thompson. These latter represented two competitors in the intellectual field from whom he sought to distance himself methodologically. When Bourdieu criticizes Marx for supposedly not allowing us to think of law and the state as capable of establishing themselves in minds and constituting a consensus on the meaning of the world, Bourdieu’s real polemical target is not Marx but Althusser. For as is well known, the thesis regarding the state as “this institution that has the extraordinary power of producing a socially ordered world without necessarily giving orders, without exerting a constant coercion”—that is, without putting a policeman behind every individual (Bourdieu 2014: 166)—is essentially the redefinition of Althusser’s famous thesis on the function of the ideological state apparatuses (Althusser 2014: 67). Bourdieu shares with Althusser the thesis that the law cannot be characterized solely in terms of repressive violence. For its normal practices are based precisely on the ideological state apparatuses or on symbolic violence. These have similar characteristics and functions: they allow law to function without recourse to force by operating a naturalization of relations; they allow the everyday functioning of relations of production or the reproduction of domination; and they are constitutive of subjects and not repressive. But before saying anything about law, it is important to understand that for Bourdieu the polemical confrontation with Althusser has stakes

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amounting to nothing less than the understanding of power and the processes of subjectification. Although it may seem strange to many, I would argue that Bourdieu seeks to attribute himself a more productive use of psychoanalysis in the analysis of subjectification processes and the political and social dimensions of the unconscious. Ideology and symbolic violence perform a function of recognition and misrecognition, and play a role of ideological pre-assignment or practical predisposition with respect to the unconscious. For Althusser, the individual is always ideologically pre-assigned to an identity—the unborn child is a future-subject who must become what he was already before being born—because the subject is always-already interpellated by ideology and his conduct is regulated by the ideological state apparatuses (Althusser 2014: 187). As for Bourdieu, he sees the individual as always pre-adapted to “obey” his social position within the structure. Yet while it is well known that for Althusser this pre-assignment has an important relationship with the formation of the unconscious in the Freudian sense (Althusser 2014: 182), it is less well known that an analogous relationship also pertains to Bourdieu’s pre-adaptation. The symbolic structure of society, by inscribing itself in the unconscious, founds the relationship that Bourdieu defines as one of doxic submission to the established order, in the sense that subjectivities always structure themselves in relation to the place they occupy in the network of symbolic exchanges, believing that they freely decide what has, in fact, been reserved for them by the social space. It follows that for Bourdieu it is necessary to historicize the symbolic function—that is, the Other as the subject of experience. Such historicization, however, must be done in such a way as to demonstrate the dynamism of symbolic systems and the possibilities of structural transformations on the basis of struggles for classification. For Bourdieu, the social agent is guided by an alienated unconscious and accepts being the imaginary subject of actions that in reality have as their subject the structure (Bourdieu 1996: 29), which exercises a primary normativity on subjectivities in a manner corresponding to the distribution of capital in the social space. Therefore, the study of mythopoetic agents, the sociologist insists, cannot be conducted without reference to structures. However, agents do not merely function as passive supports for structures—as in the reading which Bourdieu imputes to Althusser—but engage in their own games within the boundaries of that field. The concept of field, understood as the articulation of agents and structures, serves to show the co-extensiveness between subjectivity and the

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social. It was chosen, says Bourdieu, because of its greater perversion compared to the concept of apparatus, as well as compared to Pierre Legendre’s concept of dogmatic order (Bourdieu and Maître 1994: X–XII; Legendre 1974) and to the Foucauldian concept of network (Bourdieu 1989: 35). These critiques are particularly significant. For Bourdieu, if the notions of apparatus and dogmatic order denote a superficial use of psychoanalysis, the notion of network is guilty of being too broad to be able to explain the processes of incorporation of power, notably, the production of mental structures and beliefs (Wacquant 1993: 34; Bourdieu 1989: 35). The attentive reader will notice that the sociologist considers a “perverse” attitude advantageous for himself when he compares himself with Althusser (and Legendre), but simultaneously considers disadvantageous for Foucault what is in fact the same attitude. My hypothesis is that Bourdieu projects onto Foucault the critiques that a psychoanalytical perspective could make of his own attempt to understand the formation of frameworks of perception and evaluation, which fall short in terms of explaining psychic reality. The projection, in a psychoanalytic sense, onto Foucault, and the accusation levelled against Althusser and Legendre, were functional to Bourdieu’s move to credit himself with a serious use of psychoanalysis—a work that he had, moreover, only just begun (Brindisi 2018). Having shed light on what is at stake, here, we can better understand Bourdieu’s critique of Althusserian instrumentalism with regard to law. For the sociologist—unlike for Althusser—it is reductive to explain law as an instrument of a ruling class (Bidet 2014: XXII–XXIII). To Bourdieu, the logic of the apparatus appears overly generalizing and essentializing (Bourdieu 1987: 818; 1990b: 88), because it does not allow us to grasp the history beyond the structures—that is, the degree of indeterminacy of agents’ strategies and the plurality of subjectification processes within a field—nor the way in which the subject, even though acted upon, nevertheless transforms the structure by constructing social reality through conflict. Bourdieu thus accuses Althusser of not thinking about the historical conditions that allowed the juridical field to be constituted as an autonomous field, relatively independent of external constraints (Bourdieu 1987: 815). That is, he accuses him of not understanding the constitution of the juridical universe on the basis of the struggles for classification that take place within the field of power. Bourdieu’s thesis is that in periods of equilibrium—that is, when the habitus of juridical agents is spontaneously

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orchestrated by a hierarchical disciplinary framework—the juridical field tends “to operate like an ‘apparatus’” (Bourdieu 1987: 818), but that not even in an apparatus such as total institutions can every action be thought of as mere execution (Bourdieu 1990b: 88). In any case, the unanimity of the body of jurists breaks down when the modes of the reproduction of the dominant positions in society are redefined, as in the case of an economic crisis. In these moments of internal struggle within the juridical field, there becomes evident the removed foundation that had previously kept the body united, namely “the nonaggression pact that links the magistracy to dominant power” (Bourdieu 1987: 843). Thus, other norms of functioning for this field can be established. This critique entails a different understanding of law: unlike the notion of apparatus, the notion of field allows a better recognition not only of the phenomena of obedience in their relation to the normativity of the social structure, but also of the strategies of reproduction and transformation of the juridical field with respect to the field of power. It moreover has the advantage of explaining in a more refined way the subjectification processes that take place in a practical space of struggles and regularities, on the basis of the different types of capital which happen to be possessed. In conclusion, unlike Althusser, Bourdieu believes that the juridical field, insofar as it is both a relatively autonomous field and a field of struggle, can be critically engaged with and even subverted. Consequently, to modify the uses of law at the infinitesimal level is also to act on the relations of domination of which law is the medium. It is precisely on this point that Bourdieu had strong similarities with E.P.  Thompson, starting with their common concern to avoid making social agents into passive supports for structures. As is well known, Thompson’s culturalist Marxism was strongly critical of what he considered to be Marx’s main silence, namely human experience understood as a class’s “affective and moral consciousness” (Thompson 1978: 174), dependent on historical processes, social struggles and customs. This consciousness extends beyond structures and is the basis of the transformations within them; properly taking it into account would render useless any notion of creating a socialist society on the basis of an Althusserian Science of Marxism. Individuals are certainly not “free individuals” but “persons experiencing their determinate productive situations and relationships, as needs and interests and as antagonisms,” who re-appropriate this experience “within their consciousness and their culture” (Thompson 1978: 164) and act on

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their determinate situation. This is how “structure is transmuted into process, and the subject re-enters into history” (Thompson 1978: 170). Certainly “‘Experience’ (we have found) has, in the last instance, been generated in ‘material life’, has been structured in class ways, and hence ‘social being’ has determined ‘social consciousness’.” But if “La Structure still dominates experience,” nevertheless “her determinate influence is weak. For any living generation, in any ‘now’, the ways in which they ‘handle’ experience defies prediction and escapes from any narrow definition of determination” (Thompson 1978: 171). Thompson thus contrasts Althusser’s “idealist delirium,” as he called it, with the concreteness of Bourdieusian analyses of inertia and the creative capacity of habitus, believing that French Marxists should re-educate themselves by drawing on Bourdieu (Thompson 1978: 174). Since experience is structured according to class modalities, values—the English historian maintains—are obviously coloured by ideology but are not reducible to it. On the contrary, they are constitutive of the “norms, rules, expectations, & c, learned (and ‘learned’ within feeling) within the ‘habitus’ of living” (Thompson 1978: 175). On this point it is interesting to observe that, unlike Bourdieu, Thompson read the Ethnological Notebooks correctly, and criticized Marx precisely because, even though he had the opportunity to engage with a field of anthropological investigation irreducible to the categories of political economy (affectively invested positive norms, customary law, kinship relations, rules, etc.), he did nothing more than forcibly reduce it to the framework of economic thought. It was Marx who failed to understand that the moral influences of which Maine spoke—precisely as specific modes of existence—ought to be analysed in relation to the plane of affective consciousness experienced within the context of social struggles, and not reduced to the economic sphere alone (Thompson 1978: 172). Thompson vehemently renewed this same accusation, now levelling it against Althusser, as he argued that the French philosopher had subjected this field of investigation to an ideological policing operation, while instead it was necessary to use historical studies to valorize lived experience and the way it is politically constructed. Thompson does not think, as Maine does, that these norms are natural, but that they can be historically reworked and re-appropriated. Seeking to valorize lived thought—that is, how men experience dominant social norms and how they act upon them—Thompson then refers back to his own Whigs and Hunters to show that the universe of juridical

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signs is constitutive of any human practice and that juridical phenomena are intertwined with economic ones (Thompson 1976: 137). As against Althusser, Thompson holds that relations of production acquire meaning, validity and efficacy only in the terms of their juridical definitions. Bourdieu shares this framework, but, unfortunately, this is not the level on which he engages with Thompson, whom he accuses of not understanding the social universe of law as a relatively autonomous field (Bourdieu 1987: 815). But beyond this accusation, other theses of his do seem directly related to Thompson’s thinking, concerning the theatricalization of the official, the ideology and the neutrality of law. In Whigs and Hunters, the English historian argued that the ideological effectiveness of the norms, procedures and values that legitimize class power lies in their being (at least sometimes)—and in any case appearing—substantially just (Thompson 1975: 262–263). It is reductive to characterize “the rhetoric and the rules of a society” as fictitious, as “in the same moment they may modify, in profound ways, the behaviour of the powerful, and mystify the powerless” (Thompson 1975: 265). Law consolidates class relations and offers them legitimacy, but it also has an “independent history and logic of evolution,” inspired by “logical criteria” and “standards of universality and equity” (Thompson 1975: 262). It is true that the reality of law does not correspond to the rhetoric of justice, although not to the extent that it becomes counterproductive for the dominant. These latter are prisoners of their own rhetoric, and consequently, when the people appropriate the dominant language—in the terms Thompson describes, the language of the “‘free-born Englishman’ with his inviolable privacy, his habeas corpus, and his equality before the law” (Thompson 1975: 264)—and create tensions within the social structure, they are faced with the alternative of imposing themselves by force or else accepting a modification of the structure of domination. Law, as an arena for struggle, is not merely an instrument but also a brake on power. These theses are not so far from those expounded by Bourdieu, for instance, in his article on jurists as guardians of collective hypocrisy, in which he argues that even if law is not what it claims to be, that is, something pure and autonomous, the fact that it is believed (and makes itself believed) to be so does nonetheless produce real social effects, first of all on those who practise law (Bourdieu 1991). Nor are they far from the thesis which maintains that the “rhetoric of autonomy, neutrality, and universality,” “far from being a simple ideological mask,” can be “the basis of a real autonomy of thought and practice” (Bourdieu 1987: 820). Or,

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indeed, from the thesis that “the representations that constitute what might be termed ‘the law as it is lived’ owe a great deal to the more or less distorted effect of codified law,” and the officialization effect of law “makes it possible to speak about, think about, and admit conduct which has previously been tabooed” (Bourdieu 1987: 846). Bourdieu will provide an anthropological foundation for these reflections, basing them on the argument that every group rewards those who pay homage to it; that interest in the universal is the motor force behind the advancement of the universal; and that the claim to the universal involves an at least apparent submission to it (Bourdieu 1996: 388–389; 1998b: 59–60). It is worth remembering that although these theses would be the origin of the accusation that Bourdieu distanced himself from Marx in the 1990s, they were also developed in relation to Thompson. With the difference that, while Thompson carefully separates the sphere of value from that of interest, in Bourdieu an ambiguous relationship with utilitarianism persists.

State, Social Law and Neoliberalism Starting in the late 1980s, in parallel with the crisis of the welfare state and its agents, Bourdieu moved away from Marxism, instead turning his commitment as a scholar and an engagé intellectual to a re-evaluation of the universal and public service. Some have observed that this change of course represents a step back from his critical sociology (Fabiani 2016: 217), or in any case a strongly aporetic position (Supiot 2017: 75), but this is not entirely certain. Bourdieu was perfectly well-aware, along with Corrigan and Sayer, that historically welfare has not just been an institution of service but also an institution for controlling and integrating the dominated (Bourdieu 2014: 142), not free from important forms of domination and exclusion. But as against a capitalism turning back to the violence of its origins (Bourdieu 1998a: 85)—that is, as against the conservative neoliberal revolution and the weakening of juridical controls on the market—Bourdieu took a stand in favour of welfare, indeed of a European welfare relatively autonomous from international economic forces and national-level political forces. He emphasized the role the social sciences and jurists had played in the construction of welfare (Bourdieu 2014: 364), labour law and social rights as realized in the French state, whose strength he contrasted with England’s Thatcherization and the weakness of common law.

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So, alongside the study of the state and state nobility, Bourdieu makes the case for a realpolitik of reason in order to defend the universes capable, in a Durkheimian way, “of practically imposing the norms of ethical and cognitive universality and really obtaining the sublimated behaviours corresponding to the logical and moral ideal” (Bourdieu 2000: 123). The advent of such universes is realized historically on the basis of an interest in the universal which is “inseparable from the progressive autonomization of social microcosms based on privilege” (Bourdieu 2000: 77). This is true of agents in the scientific field but also of jurists, who have made the state by making themselves, that is, having an interest in disinterestedness on account of the specific logic that regulates their field. This genetic corruption does not invalidate its universality (Bourdieu 2014: 160). Undeniably, with this valorization of the juridical field and of the state as sites for the construction of the universal, Bourdieu distances himself from Marx, for whom the state and law are not really the site of emancipation. Bourdieu, moreover, gives no credence to the utopian dimension of overcoming the heteronomy of political command, that is, the withering away of law and the state (Marx 1976: 212; Marx and Engels 2017), and does not recognize any subject (plebs or proletariat) as the bearer of the universal. Consequently, for Bourdieu, it is not even a question of conquering the state apparatus, or of “[dispossessing the] ‘monopolizers’” (Bourdieu 2014: 100) and changing the structure of social reproduction from above. Quite the contrary: the sociologist argues that bureaucracy and the state are not (only) the site of class oppression, that the holders of the monopoly of the universal are not (only) those who privately appropriate public resources, insofar as the universal is not appropriated with impunity, according to an anthropological principle by which the recognition of the universal is in every society honoured, and favours “the appearance of disinterested dispositions” (Bourdieu 2000: 125). The accusation Bourdieu levels against Kelsenian formalism and Marxist instrumentalism in his articles on law, as well as his valorization of welfare in his work on the state and in his 1990s political writings, might suggest—as indeed it did—a Hegelian bent or Bourdieu’s adherence to the field of social law. But I think it is possible to advance a different interpretative hypothesis, which keeps distinct the specificity of the sociology of the juridical field and then Bourdieu’s preferences regarding the forces acting in that field. What is often seen as a change in Bourdieu’s perspective seems to me rather more a change in the emphasis placed on issues that the sociologist

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had already earlier recognized. The reason could be identified in the fact that the strategic configuration of the juridical field is itself changing rapidly, and Bourdieu feared a real anthropological shift due to the imposition of neoliberalism. Its advance, which Bourdieu and some of his students or collaborators had begun to study since the 1970s,5 led him to champion certain elements of the juridical field—labour law, social law, universality—that he had already identified in The Force of Law, albeit reserving a marginal space for them, or in the recently published course of 1977–1988 (Bourdieu 2022). If this is indeed the case, then the contradiction between his scholarly writings and political writings would be only very relative. I will try to show this by analysing the relationship between social law, social rights and neoliberalism—which Bourdieu often symbolizes through the metaphor of the right (neoliberal) hand and the left (social) hand of the state—discussing the positions taken in this regard by Julien Pallotta, Jean-Louis Fabiani and Christian Laval, who chalk Bourdieu up to Hegelianism or to the Durkheimian juridical inheritance. In an interesting article on the relationship between Althusser and Bourdieu with regard to the state, Pallotta argued that there is no more radical divergence between the philosopher and the sociologist than there is over the question of social rights. On the one hand, Althusser has an anti-Hegelian perspective, for which social rights are a tactical concession made by the ruling classes aimed at ensuring the reproduction of their domination, that is, the maintenance of capitalist relations of production; on the other, Bourdieu conceives the struggles that advance the universal as integrative struggles, that is, as conquests of rights within the framework of the state, in a compromise position in between the Marxian class struggle and the Hegelian state (Pallotta 2015). Fabiani has argued that Bourdieu’s political interventions have nothing to do with Marxism. As an example of this, he cites the sociologist’s famous speech at Lyon station, in which he declared that he wanted to defend a civilization linked to the existence of public service and republican equality of rights, but without his call for mobilization thereby making any reference to the working class. On this reading, these interventions 5  Jean-Yves Caro was one of the first economists to deal with neoliberalism in France from a Bourdieusian perspective. See Caro (1981 and 1983). Yves Dezalay has analysed in numerous works the neoliberal transformations of law. See Dezalay (1992). Among his work with Brian Garth, see at least Dezalay and Garth (1998, 2021).

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expressed bitterness at the disappearance of the sociologist’s doxic world, as represented by public service, and his almost affective proximity to Durkheim, with whom he was in agreement that the state is the embodiment of the collective. These two theses are not unrelated, for the Durkheimian sociologist perceives himself as a sociologist of the state, and sociology was one of welfare’s conditions of possibility (Fabiani 2016: 216–218). Fabiani’s interpretation was taken up by Laval, who convincingly added that Bourdieu’s defence of the state is part of a sociological and political tradition that seeks to defend the state from its enemies—the Church and capitalism—and to democratize public services. On this reading, therefore, Bourdieu’s orientation is comparable to Léon Duguit and his notion of public service based on solidarity (Laval 2018: 243).6 Although these interpretative choices are each well founded, in my judgement they do not help to understand the specificity of Bourdieu’s sociology of the juridical field, nor the fact that his political positions do not necessarily represent a step backwards from his critical sociology. I am going to deal simultaneously with both social rights and the Durkhemian legacy in Bourdieu. But before that, it is important to note that the question of social law and the question of social rights guaranteed by state provision do not express the same order of problems, even though in Bourdieu they do overlap. In fact, while social rights have established themselves in the same time frame independently of the given legal architectures and political regimes—and are often conceived as dependent on a state granting these rights because of class struggles—social law instead represents a juridical rationality, an (at least outwardly) anti-statist way of understanding law, which desacralizes the state and intends to achieve a sociologically based legal revolution in order to impose limits on capitalism’s social fallout. For Bourdieu, social law, as the law of the (some) dominated, has historically affirmed itself through a movement that can be found in every field. It is through reference to the scientific and political fields that social law jurists have constructed a critical argument aimed at making law “a ‘science’ possessing its own methodology and rooted in historical reality.” Through sociology and the analysis of jurisprudence, they have defended their socio-legal science—against statism and exegesis—as capable of 6  On the other dimensions of political struggle (redefinition of the macroeconomic calculus, internationalism, etc.) that Laval recognizes in Bourdieu, see Laval (2018: 243–245).

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adapting “the law to social evolution” (Bourdieu 1987: 851–852). But Bourdieu, attached to the positions of Alain Bancaud and Yves Dezalay,7 with whom he had held the 1986 seminar on law at the Collège de France, always puts the notion of science in inverted commas when he is speaking of social law. Indeed, he accuses social law jurists of seeking to preserve the monopoly of legal science, since they do not break with the mythical representation of neutrality which jurists give to their work. In short, even if Bourdieu acknowledges that social law has been the subversive action carried out by a vanguard, he argues that it contributes to the maintenance of the symbolic order, since it determines “the adaptation of the law and the juridical field to new states of social relations, and thereby insure[s] the legitimation of the established order of such relations” (Bourdieu 1987: 852). From a certain point of view, this thesis is even more radical than Althusser’s, which argued that jurisprudence was relative to a “law’s outside […] more or less threatening” “from the standpoint of the security of the law” (Althusser 2014: 58). For Bourdieu, in fact, even the most subversive jurists—for instance, ones who valorize jurisprudence as outside of the law—perform a legitimizing function for the apparatus of reproduction of the symbolic domain, which Althusser would have defined as ideological. After all, even subversive jurists, as a dominated fraction of the ruling class, try to impose a legitimate functioning of the law by attributing to themselves a power that they do not currently have, by fighting against the dominant fraction of the ruling class and through an alliance with certain fractions of the dominated classes (the middle classes and popular classes). Bourdieu recognizes a dual character in this strategy of symbolic subversion: on the one hand, it tends to attribute a dominant position to itself, and on the other hand it tends to deny itself as such ideologically. However, by virtue of the logic of the field, the sociologist acknowledges that social law has been a factor in the progress of the universal. It is not Bourdieu’s position that is contradictory, but the object he analyses: the legal agents who promote social law allow for the conquests 7  Bourdieu (1987: 844): “Alain Bancaud and Yves Dezalay have demonstrated that even the most heretical of dissident legal scholars in France, those who associate themselves with sociological or Marxist methodologies to advance the rights of specialists working in the most disadvantaged areas of the law (such as social welfare law, droit social),” continue to claim a monopoly of the science of jurisprudence. See Bancaud and Dezalay (1984).

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won by the dominated, but at the same time, through their insistence that law is a science, they also enable the reproduction of the structure of the juridical field and the belief in the neutrality of law. The invocation of this neutrality, the ascetic posture of the jurist with respect to politics, is not so much an explicit strategy of jurists, but a pervasive attitude that defines professional legal subjectivities as they have been structured across the long history of struggles for power. This neutrality is not a real neutrality, because it can be and often is conservative (uncritical valorization of existing power relations). But it can also be the basis of an anthropological transformation in the direction of disinterestedness. Such a position is certainly not Marxian, even if Bourdieu developed it also in relation to Thompson, as mentioned earlier. If it is true that social rights impose themselves by virtue of the social forces underpinning them and the jurists who sanction them, then they will disappear when those social forces disappear, in the same way that they first established themselves. Bourdieu is no stranger to this realist approach, because he holds that even if the juridical field is relatively autonomous, it is linked and somehow subordinate to historical-political factors. However, for Bourdieu, social law has nevertheless represented a legal epistemology clearly superior to the liberal one, as it adheres more closely to the complexity of reality. Thus, Bourdieu does not so much promote an integrative order of the state—understood in the Hegelian sense—but rather seeks to guarantee the conditions of possibility for the reactivation of a form of social law, now that the historical-political situation that allowed for Welfare is under attack. As a result, he does not develop a social epistemology to be counterposed to neoliberalism from a normative point of view, but prefers to maintain close attention to the exercise of symbolic violence. All this can be better explained by analysing the relationship between Bourdieu’s sociology of the juridical field and Durkheimian theories of social law. In my view, there is no possibility of juxtaposing them, as I will try to demonstrate. There are certainly cues in Bourdieu that point in this direction, such as when the sociologist argues that “the official definition of state office— and of officials, who are mandated to serve, not serve themselves—is an extraordinary historical invention, an advance for humanity” (Bourdieu 2008: 197), which does indeed recall Duguit’s thesis that the governing are the managers of public service (Duguit 1913: 33–70). But in the quoted passage Bourdieu is valorizing a juridical form that, in its

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constitutive ambiguity, has historically allowed for the advance of the dominated—a form that is not typically French. With regard to the official definition of the figures who hold office, Bourdieu also often refers to Thompson (Bourdieu 2014: 64), for whom the English constitutionalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries invented a genuine autonomy of law that represents a qualitative leap in human societies (Thompson 1975: 259). In any case, it remains difficult to inscribe Bourdieu in the Durkhemian tradition of legal studies, such as would render him a sociologist of the state or a philosopher of public service. It is thus worth turning to his analysis of social law, to see the way in which he departs from it, and whether he retains any traits of Marxist orientation. Bourdieu does not believe that social law is an objective science. He even goes so far as to accuse those who try to ground law in the social (such as Eugen Ehrlich) of merely overturning the idealistic scheme of pure theory (Bourdieu 1987: 841, n. 58),8 which can easily be extended to the legal objectification of social solidarity. If he nonetheless valorizes social law, this is because he is clear, as he states in The Force of Law, that it was a way to break from the outside, through sociology, the monopoly of legal theory, which in fact tended to perceive social law as intrinsically linked to socialism. But this does not allow us to say that Bourdieu takes up a position in the tradition of social law; if he had, then he would have reactivated it on his own account. While in his course on the state he valorizes the performative work of social law jurists as historical agents who prepared welfare, he does not even make reference to Duguit or—to stick with jurists of Durkheimian orientation—Emmanuel Lévy or Georges Davy (Bourdieu 2014: 364). Because of the importance Bourdieu attached to the methodological overcoming of the partition between subjectivism and objectivism, he would have appreciated Duguit’s critical, anti-subjectivist side (Sfez 1976)9 but not his sociological objectivism. The sociologist did not have an integrative, organicist, objectivist position like Duguit’s, and he argued theses incompatible with the social declension of law. Bourdieu’s analysis 8  The quotation in this note belongs to Eugen Ehrlich, but the translator did not indicate this. 9  For an appreciation of the pars destruens and a critique of the pars construens of Duguit’s work, see Chevallier (1979).

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of the juridical field is not aimed at adapting law to life, nor at showing what law actually exists, nor finally at promoting a social foundation of law by identifying a social rule according to the function that each figure plays in the system of social interdependence. Unlike Duguit, for example, for Bourdieu the legal norm is not the recognition of a social norm based on solidarity, itself revealed by a widespread social sentiment, whose claims allow Duguit (rightly so, from his point of view) to deduce a posteriori the existence of a right. Unlike Duguit, Bourdieu does not concern himself with the gap between social normativity, the expression of the solidaristic bond and its juridical formalization. For the sociologist, social normativity does not represent a spontaneous and natural order of phenomena, but is the product of a social field and of the struggle for the classification of reality that plays out within this field. To put it bluntly: Bourdieu’s sociology privileges the dimension of struggle over that of solidarity and does not think about social ties independently of the relations of domination that characterize them. Social normativity is not the nature of things that is to be transformed into a juridical imperative, but an empirically ascertained regularity patterned by relations of power. Since for Bourdieu there is no non-conflictual social bond, or nomos, social normativity and juridical norms must themselves be critiqued with regard to their formation-­ processes, and problematized starting from the relations of force that establish them. This stance is much closer to the external history of law of the young Hauriou (1884)10 than to a Saint-Simonian solidarism like Duguit’s. Certainly, Bourdieu considers desirable the formation within the juridical field of an economic-juridical and social epistemology that is “faithful to the complexity of reality” (Bourdieu 2008: 194), such as could be contrasted with neoliberalism in its normative function and in service of the state. For the economization of legal rationality undermines the possibility of a public space in which the fight for emancipation can take place. Bourdieu states this rather explicitly when he argues that neoliberal technocracy must be fought on the level of science (Bourdieu 1998a: 27), or 10  On this point, I have tried to interpret Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s methodological innovations in the juridical field as an extension of the external history of law, in the direction of a critique of the articulation of legal practices with phenomena of heterogeneous social normativity (Brindisi 2019). On the relationship between Bourdieu and Foucault see Brindisi and Irrera (2017), Laval (2018).

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that we must demand of the state that “it exercise a regulatory action able to counteract the ‘fatality’ of economic and social mechanisms that are immanent to the social order” (Bourdieu 2008: 194). The conservative neoliberal revolution, as he defines it, aimed to relegate progressive thought and action to the sphere of archaism. But it differed from the other and more famous conservative revolution, that is, the one in the Weimar Republic, in the role attributed to economic science rather than the exaltation of blood and soil. Consequently, Bourdieu urges the social sciences to mobilize, taking this for an effective condition of democracy. This is the reason why in the 1990s the sociologist took a tactical position in favour of welfare, with a view to building a supranational welfare state capable of operating at the transnational level now taken by the new forms of domination (Bourdieu 1998a: 1–44). However, if the theoretical direction which Bourdieu wanted the juridical field to develop in is one thing, the specificity of his sociology of the juridical field—which remains external and critical—is quite another. An author such as Alain Supiot could even judge this latter completely useless from the juridical point of view, arguing that nothing is to be gained from lamenting the end of welfare without then equipping oneself with a legal epistemology able to grapple with its institutional dimension (Supiot 2017: 75). Laval’s and Supiot’s interpretations can be integrated. With respect to Laval, it can be added that Bourdieu did not belong to the juridical tradition of Durkheimian origins, although he hoped for its reaffirmation in the juridical field. With respect to Supiot, it can be added that it is not true that one should share the sociologist’s indignation but take a distance from his theory, for the value of Bourdieu’s scientific project resides precisely in its being external to the juridical field—in its being a critical theory of domination functional to social struggles. This provides grounds to insist that the externality of Bourdieu’s critique to the juridical field and its relationship to emancipatory practices retain a Marxian lineage. Now, from what has been said, one might think that although Bourdieu does not believe in the scientific autonomy of social law, he does believe in the relative autonomy of the juridical field with respect to the field of power. However, can a relatively autonomous space in which a regulated game takes place be a promoter of universality without being accompanied by a social force that tends to socially advance the universal? Moreover, Bourdieu himself argued that it is not enough to fight neoliberalism on an exclusively epistemological level. Referring to

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neomarginalist analyses in economics, he stated that their epistemological weakness is hidden by their socio-political effectiveness. Therefore “We cannot then be satisfied with a theoretical criticism that is bound to lose because it comes up against social forces. We must also try to understand the social forces that make the strength of very weak theories. When you work in and on the social world there is no scientific opponent more difficult than one who is theoretically weak and socially strong” (Bourdieu 2020: 99).

Concluding Remarks on the Marxian Ancestry of the Sociology of the Juridical Field Before answering the question I have posed, it is necessary to unravel some problematic nodes regarding the specificity of Bourdieu’s sociology of the juridical field. We shall do so by proceeding with a brief discussion of its insidious relationship with Durkhemian legal sociology, so as to bring out its Marxian lineage. If Bourdieu rejects both an idealistic autonomy of law (formalism), and any reductionist dependence of the juridical upon the economic (instrumentalism), it is because the true legislator is the ensemble of social agents in their struggles and alliances, on the basis of their own determinations related to the position they occupy in the field. We could therefore consider that law is to be found in these relations, and that a hypothetical legislator, for example, merely acknowledges a rule that is imposed on him. But if we did that, we would be led to identify the juridical with the practical legality proper to a social game and with its immanent necessities, thus rendering Bourdieu’s sociology a sociology of law tout court, in relation to the nomos of each field. It would thus be easy to venture to identify the object of Bourdieusian sociology in the unwritten constitution of society that lives in the concrete reality of the social group—that is, in a vision close to the theories of living law, social law and legal pluralism. However, Bourdieu would consider (although not always rightly) this reduction of law to society a mere reversal of the idealistic scheme, as well as an affirmation of naturalism (Bourdieu 1987: 841). It should be added that Bourdieu does not have an organicist theory of society, nor does he identify in the state an operative subjective will. Rather, in both he recognizes a field of struggle. His realist nominalism induces him to consider law, as well as institutions and customs, as a

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historically instituted and naturalized arbitrary. If there is an objectivity of law—as there is—this cannot disguise the power relations of which it is an expression and the principles of classification that constitute it, and nor can it be considered independently of either. Therefore, constructing an autonomous science around law—and social law, according to Bourdieu is no different—is tantamount to freeing it from any political problematization of the epistemic background of the dominant social norms that law reproduces. Yet such a problematization is precisely what Bourdieu sets out to do with his epistemological model, which is aimed at objectifying the strategies of agents who use theory or norms according to the position they take on in the social field, that is, at objectifying the struggle for the classification of reality. Bourdieu does not recognize law as a natural order of things (which would amount to a legal doxa). He sees the juridical field as relatively autonomous and at the same time as somehow subordinate to historical-­ political factors, since the general rule of the structure of the juridical field is that the hierarchies within it vary in relation to the changing place, in the social field, of the groups whose interests are linked to the corresponding forms of law (Bourdieu 1987: 850–851). Thus, in each moment the law records a given state of the relation of forces—as the history of social law or the neoliberal recodification of law since the 1970s demonstrate. Bourdieu’s theory remains analytical and not normative: it does not aspire to impose itself or to be recognized in order to enter the juridical field and to be functional to a social or state power. Its scientific function is a critical analysis of the relationship between the juridical field and the field of power, and this analysis is itself functional to emancipation. In this Bourdieu retains a Marxian orientation. For both Marx and Bourdieu, it can be argued against Durkheim that normative facts are not things, but social relations already always discriminated by relations of production or power. Jacques Commaille reproached Bourdieu precisely because his Marxian preoccupation with the relationship between law and the ruling classes led him to underestimate the capacity of social actors and movements outside the juridical field to mobilize law and redefine it (Commaille 2008). This accusation is hard to deny, and one that could not be levelled, for instance, at Thompson, for whom the appropriation of a dominant rule bent to a new use can change the structure of domination. But at the same time, it is also an unfair accusation, when we consider that it is precisely an analysis of the juridical field such as Bourdieu’s that can (from a different point of

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view) be functional to social consciousness-raising, and that it is not hostile to the mobilization or entry of new actors into the juridical field. Moreover, Bourdieu argued that law, although subordinate to the field of power, constitutes a reason endowed with an objectivity that can be actualized by virtue of the memory of past struggles (Bourdieu 2000: 127). I can now try to answer the question which I posed at the end of the previous section, reformulating and specifying it: if, realistically, the transformation of the world through new words to name it presupposes that these words are adequate to what they announce—“new practices, new mores or especially new social groupings” (Bourdieu 1987: 839)—how is it possible to think that the juridical field can, by virtue of its mere regulation, guarantee universal access to the universal? If the juridical field is open to the transformations of the field of power, how can universality be realized in a monopolized space, without this being accompanied by a social force that tends to advance the universal socially? This is where the function of critique comes in. A focus on the relative autonomy of the juridical field must not obscure the need to question the value-positions, the order of classifications that jurists impose on the social world and that the social world imposes on them. The relative autonomy of law never makes it fully autonomous from the social processes of valorization, from the tendencies immanent in institutions that are the product of a social struggle for the classification of reality. Therefore, the struggle for the universal in the juridical field cannot but correspond—on pain of losing its status—to an effective universality in the process of affirmation, to a tendency towards the immanent universal of practices. The critique of the field and of juridical classifications is functional to this end. A field in which the universal is given primacy is the condition of possibility for a social claim to the universal. But it also needs to be inhabited by a social force that tends towards the universal, which in turn needs to be animated by a critique capable of unmasking the social classifications that pass themselves off as universal. Ultimately, it is in a same text that Bourdieu reaffirms the role of the state and argues that a socio-economic epistemology of happiness is inconceivable without the invention of “new forms of delegation and representation,” which must in turn be founded on the critique of symbolic violence. His sociology of the juridical field is functional to what he recognizes as the “top priority,” namely “raising critical awareness of the mechanisms of symbolic violence that act in and through politics; and this means broadly distributing the symbolic weapons able to ensure all citizens the

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means of defending themselves against symbolic violence—liberating themselves, if need be, of their ‘liberators’” (Bourdieu 2008: 195–196). The critique of the legal field does not intend to propose reforms but to problematize the practical belief in a certain state of legal and social norms, in order to encourage a possible transformation on the part of the dominated. These elements relating to social struggle and the performative role of critique in the direction of emancipatory practices represent the reworking of the Marxian legacy in Bourdieu, whose precise intention is that his critique should encourage “new practices, new mores or especially new social groupings.” It could be argued that Bourdieu’s is an attitude of radical critique and political responsibility, which are not necessarily contradictory, and of which the latter does not necessarily represent a step backwards with respect to the former, if one is willing to accept that, in the awareness of the actual state of power relations, one can and must maintain a conservative position (in relation to social rights under attack) in order not to turn out to be truly conservative (in relation to status quo). At the same time, the critique of symbolic violence has the task of politically problematizing law, juridical science and, in general, those scientific classifications that obstruct democratic processes aimed at creating new institutions and new forms of real equality. Yet, this was itself the hardest thing to achieve. For it meant having to reckon with forms of subjectivity which have fallen under the cognitive and affective influence of neoliberal frames for the representation and perception of the world; forms which, over the years, have retreated into a protection of the material and symbolic boundaries of the nation-state.

References Althusser, Louis. 2014 [1995]. On the Reproduction of Capitalism. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Ed. G.M.  Goshgarian. London and New York: Verso. Bancaud, Alain, and Yves Dezalay. 1984. La sociologie juridique comme enjeu social et professionnel. Revue interdisciplinaire d’études juridiques 12 (1): 1–29. Bidet, Jacques. 2014. Introduction: An Invitation to Reread Althusser. In On the Reproduction of Capitalism. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, ed. Louis Althusser, XIX–XXVIII. London and New York: Verso.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987 [1986]. The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field. Trans. R. Terdinam. The Hastings Law Journal 38: 814–815. ———. 1989. Reproduction interdite. La dimension symbolique de la domination économique. Etudes rurales 113–114: 15–36. ———. 1990a [1987]. In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology. Trans. M. Adamson. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1990b. Droit et passe-droit. Le champ des pouvoirs territoriaux et la mise en œuvre des réglements. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 81–82: 86–96. ———. 1991. Les juristes, gardiens de l’hypocrisie collective. In Normes juridiques et régulation sociale, ed. François Chazel and Jacques Comaille, 95–99. Paris: LGDJ. ———. 1992 [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Trans. R.  Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1994. Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. ———. 1996 [1989]. The State Nobility. Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Trans. L.C. Clough. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1998a [1998]. Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time. Trans. R. Nice. New York: The New Press. ———. 1998b [1994]. Practical Reason. On the Theory of Action. Trans. R. Johnson. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000 [1997]. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2008 [2002]. Political Interventions. Social Science and Political Action. Trans. D. Fernbach. London and New York: Verso. ———. 2014 [2012]. On the State. Lectures at the College de France, 1989–1992. Trans. D. Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2016. Sociologie générale. Cours au Collège de France 1983–1986, Volume 2. Paris: Raisons d’agir/Seuil. ———. 2018 [2015]. Classification Struggles. General Sociology. Volume 1. Lectures at the College de France (1981–1982). Trans. P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2020 [2015]. Habitus and Field. General Sociology, Volume 2. Lectures at the College de France (1982–1983). Trans. P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2022. L’Intérêt au désintéressement. Cours au Collège de France 1983–1986. Paris: Raisons d’agir/Seuil. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jacques Maître. 1994. Avant-propos dialogué avec Pierre Bourdieu. In L’autobiographie d’un paranoïaqu, ed. Jacques Maître, V– XXII. Paris: Anthropos. Brindisi, Gianvito. 2018. Violenza simbolica e soggettivazione. Sul rapporto tra psicoanalisi e sociologia in Pierre Bourdieu. In Dimensione simbolica. Attualità e prospettive di ricerca, ed. Vincenzo Rapone, 55–79. Milano: Mimesis. ———. 2019. La storia esterna del giudiziario tra Bourdieu e Foucault. Teoria e critica della regolazione sociale 2: 183–205.

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Brindisi, Gianvito, and Orazio Irrera, eds. 2017. Bourdieu/Foucault: un rendez-­ vous mancato? Cartografie sociali. Rivista di sociologia e scienze umane 4: 7–244. Caro, Jean-Yves. 1981. La théorie économique du crime. Sociologie du travail 23 (1): 122–128. ———. 1983. Les économistes distingués. Logique sociale d’un champ scientifique. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques. Chevallier, Jacques. 1979. Les fondements idéologiques du droit administratif français. In Variations autour de l’idéologie de l’intérêt général, ed. Jacques Chevallier, vol. 2, 3–57. Paris: PUF. Commaille, Jacques. 2008. Droit et sociologie. Des rapports au risque de l’histoire. Académie de sciences morales et politiques. Available online https://academiesciencesmoralesetpolitiques.fr/2008/06/09/sociologie-­et-­droit/ Coombe, Rosemary J. 1989. Room for Manoeuver: Toward a Theory of Practice in Critical Legal Studies. Law & Social Inquiry 14 (1): 69–121. Croce, Mariano. 2015. The Habitus and the Critique of the Present: A Wittgensteinian Reading of Bourdieu’s Social Theory. Sociological Theory 33 (4): 327–346. De Fiores, Claudio. 2019. Tra diritto e rivoluzione. La questione costituzionale in Karl Marx. Democrazia e diritto 2: 32–90. Dezalay, Yves. 1992. Marchands de droit. La restructuration de l’ordre juridique international par les multinationals du droit. Paris: Fayard. Dezalay, Yves, and Garth Bryant. 1998. Le «Washington consensus». Contribution à une sociologie de l’hégémonie du néolibéralisme. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 121–122: 3–22. Dezalay, Yves, and Bryant Garth. 2021. Law as Reproduction and Revolution: An Interconnected History. Stanford: University of California Press. Duguit, Léon. 1913. Les transformations du droit public. Paris: Armand Colin. Fabiani, Jean-Louis. 2016. Pierre Bourdieu. Un structuralisme héroique. Paris: Seuil. Hauriou, Maurice. 1884. L’histoire externe du droit. Paris: Cotillon. Laval, Christian. 2018. Foucault, Bourdieu et la question néolibérale. Paris: Éditions la Découverte. Legendre, Pierre. 1974. L’Amour du censeur. Essai sur l’ordre dogmatique. Paris: Seuil. Maine, Henry Sumner. 1875. Lectures on the Early History of Institutions. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Marx, Karl. 1974 [1880–1882]. The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. Ed. L. Krader. Assen: Van Gorkum. ———. 1975 [1842]. Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood. Trans. C. Dutt. In MECW, vol. 1: 224–263. ———. 1976 [1847]. The Poverty of Philosophy. Trans. F. Knight. In MECW, vol. 6: 105–212.

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———. 1986–1987 [1857–1858]. Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58. Trans. E. Wangermann. In MECW, vol. 28. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1976 [1932]. The German Ideology. Trans. C. Dutt. In MECW, vol. 5: 19–539. ———. 2017 [1848]. The Communist Manifesto. Trans. S.  Moore. London: Pluto Press. Pallotta, Julien. 2015. Bourdieu face au marxisme althussérien: la question de l’état. Actuel Marx 58: 130–143. Sfez, Lucien. 1976. Duguit et la théorie de l’état (représentation et communication). Archives de Philosophie du droit 21: 111–130. Spitzer, Steven. 1983. Marxist Perspectives in the Sociology of Law. Annual Review of Sociology 9: 103–124. Supiot, Alain. 2017 [2005]. Homo juridicus. On the Anthropological Function of the Law. Trans. S. Brown. London and New York: Verso. Thompson, Edward Palmer. 1975. Whigs and Hunters. The Origins of the Black Act. London: Allen Lane. ———. 1976. Modes de domination et révolutions en Angleterre. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 2 (2–3): 133–151. ———. 1978. The Poverty of Theory & Others Essays. London: Merlin. Wacquant, Loïc. 1993. From Ruling Class to Field of Power: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu on La Noblesse d’État. Theory, Culture & Society 10: 19–44. Xifaras, Mikhail. 2002. Marx, justice et jurisprudence une lecture des ‘vols de bois’. Revue Française d’Histoire des Idées Politiques 15: 63–112.

CHAPTER 14

If Theodicy is Always Sociodicy: Bourdieu and the Marxian Critique of Religion Roberto Alciati

Bourdieu’s engagement with religion is profound, even if his own publications on the subject were not very frequent.1 Nevertheless, here and there in his vast production it is possible to join the dots of a ‘Bourdieuan theory of religious practice’ (Maduro 2007: viii), which can be summarized as such: ‘Bourdieu’s critique of religion is aimed, almost exclusively, at religion’s function in the creation and consecration of social distinctions and inequalities, or in the reproduction of social domination’ (Rey 2007: 8). This becomes clear when looking at his frequent use of religious metaphors to speak of almost everything (education, politics, art…). Moreover, as Erwan Dianteill pointed out, the meaning and the use of some Bourdieu’s keywords, such as ‘field’ or ‘habitus’, is so indebted to the study of religion that ‘Bourdieu’s work is almost a “generalized” sociology of religion (with religion representing in paradigmatic fashion properties  I am grateful to Bridget Fowler and Emiliano R.  Urciuoli for helpful comments on a previous draft. 1

R. Alciati (*) University of Florence, Florence, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_14

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common to all spheres of symbolic activity)’ (Dianteill 2004: 66; see also Swartz 1996). This interest is demonstrated both by the not insignificant literature on the subject and the growing influence of Bourdieu’s work on the academic study of religion (Rey 2018; Saalmann 2020: 139–149; Suaud 2020). Nonetheless, among Bourdieu’s many concepts which are now widely circulated in the social sciences, one is decidedly neglected. I refer to the term ‘sociodicy’ and a quotation from ‘Genèse et structure du champ religieux’ (1971), which is rightly considered ‘Bourdieu’s most important and most widely cited direct consideration of religion’ (Rey 2007: 75). Bourdieu expressed this precisely, in the following terms: ‘theodicies are always sociodicies’ (Bourdieu 1991: 16). So far—apart from a brief entry in the Dictionnaire International Bourdieu (Denord 2020)—nobody has paid proper attention to this statement. The aim of this contribution is to try to fill this gap. The first step in this direction will be the analysis of some—but certainly not all—Bourdieusian loci where theodicy and sociodicy are at stake (§ 1). The second movement will be aimed at showing how this terminological pair becomes salient only by granting Karl Marx the primacy in the triad that he composes with Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, and which represents Bourdieu’s constant dialectical reference (§ 2.). Once these two aspects are foregrounded, religion will appear not just as an essential element in the definition of the concept of field, but also as an object of permanent critique, not least because it is the foundation of every critique of society and its structures (§ 3.).

Theodicy and Sociodicy Theodicy is a classic term of Christian theology (and its history); sociodicy, on the other hand, is a Bourdieusian neologism.2 As François Denord puts it, the concept of sociodicy was coined by Bourdieu by analogy with theodicy, a term that was itself coined by Gottfried Leibniz in a book of the same name in 1710. As has been argued tellingly by Christopher AdairToteff, the problem of theodicy is ‘the age-old difficulty of attempting to 2  Actually, as far as I know, the very first attestation of the term is found in an article’s title published by Daniel Bell (1966). However, the author does not develop the concept further, taking its meaning for granted. It is therefore difficult to argue that Bell produced the seminal essay on sociodicy that the title seemed to announce (Giner 2014: 292). I am grateful to Vincenzo Romania for drawing my attention to Bell’s article.

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reconcile the fact that there is evil and suffering in this world with the idea of a supremely benevolent and omnipotent God’ (Adair-Toteff 2013: 88). Leibniz, however, is not Bourdieu’s only point of reference on the subject. The problem of theodicy, in fact, appears in Bourdieu’s writings in relation to Max Weber, and more precisely to the ‘Religiöse Gemeinschaften’ section of Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen, in which Weber writes that the theological problem of theodicy must be considered as an ‘unsolvable problem’ (Weber 2001: 296–297). Yet Weber does not tackle this issue from a theological or ethical point of view, ‘but rather, he appropriates it and discusses it primarily from a sociological perspective’ (Adair-­ Toteff 2013: 89). According to Weber, in fact, ‘the fortunate is seldom satisfied with the fact of possession of his fortunateness’ (Weber 1989: 89). This person also wanted the ‘right’ to justify their fortune: ‘he also has the need to have a right to it’ (Weber 1989: 89). In other words, ‘if the world’s poor masses needed a ‘theodicy of suffering’, the fortunate few also required a ‘theodicy of fortune” (Adair-Toteff 2013: 102). To claim this right is to be convinced that this privileged condition is deserved, and above all, to possess a more deserving claim than others. Religion, therefore, operates as the instrument to enact this claim through a theodicy whose effects in the life of society are—and must be—widely visible. It is mainly on this level that the affinities between Weber and Bourdieu are most evident. As we have already said, according to Bourdieu theodicies are always sociodicies, that is, they have the sole twofold function of naturalizing the privileges of the dominant classes and providing the dominated classes with compensatory rewards, in short: granting ‘justifications for existing in a determinate social position and existing as they exist, that is, with all the properties that are socially attached to them’ (Bourdieu 1991: 16). This applies both to religion and, analogically, to much else. Thus we have the sociodicy of the scholastic (and intellectual) field—extending historically to the wider field of power—that consecrates the dominant class in the form of ‘IQ racism’3 as well as the sociodicy 3  ‘IQ racism is a racism of the dominant class that differs in a host of ways from what is generally called racism, that’s to say the petit-bourgeois racism which is the central target of most classic critiques of racism, including the most vigorous of them, such as that by Sartre. This racism is characteristic of a dominant class whose reproduction depends to a large extent on the transmission of cultural capital, an inherited capital that has the property of being an embodied, and therefore apparently natural, innate, capital. […] It is what causes the dominant class to feel justified in being dominant: they feel themselves to be essentially superior’ (Bourdieu 1993: 177).

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of contemporary society, based on the alleged objectivity of neo-liberal economies,4 the male sociodicy derived from the androcentric vision of the world, which legitimizes a relationship of domination by inscribing it in a social construction disguised as biology.5 Some of these references to Bourdieu’s writings are mentioned in the ‘Sociodicée’ entry by Denord (2020). However, some more considerations can be added. In the lectures published posthumously under the title Sociologie générale, for example, the interest in the theodicy-sociodicy pair is neither ephemeral nor limited to Bourdieu’s research on the religious field. The reference to sociodicy becomes relevant whenever attention is focused on the tendency of each dominant class to strive—if not to fight—for its own existence, which is guaranteed only by reproduction. This incessant work is not aimed at realizing an unprecedented hegemonic project, but rather at simply ensuring ‘the imposition of the legitimate point of view on the social world’ (Bourdieu 2016: 1056) by the dominants, who wants nothing more than ‘to freeze the field in the state it was in at the moment of their domination’ (Bourdieu 2020: 224). It is at this precise moment, Weber would say, that the dominant claim to have a theodicy of their own privileges. The purpose of any theodicy is therefore naturalization, or to put it in Marxian language, the universalization of interests.

Weber, Durkheim, but Especially Marx In his lecture at the Collège de France on 30 May 1985, Bourdieu says that his way of doing sociology is the sum of a number of theoretical contributions that are commonly regarded as incompatible: the explicit reference is to the perspectives of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. These three théoriciens—as Bourdieu calls them—are very important for understanding what religion is and how it works, but above all their way of dealing with the subject is logically linked and therefore they can be put in dialogue with one another. Moreover, Bourdieu makes clear that materialism, 4  ‘It is by arming itself with mathematics (and media power) that neo-liberalism has become the supreme form of the conservative sociodicy that has been announcing itself, for the past 30 years, under the name of ‘the end of ideologies’, or, more recently, of ‘the end of history’ (Bourdieu 1998: 1; translation is mine). 5  ‘The particular strength of the masculine sociodicy comes from the fact that it combines and condenses two operations: it legitimates a relationship of domination by embedding it in a biological nature that is itself a naturalized social construction’ (Bourdieu 2001: 23).

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when it comes to religion, is not a prerogative of Marx only. Weber, indeed, can be said to be particularly effective in bringing the materialist mode of thought into the area where it was particularly weak, namely the domain of the symbolic. Precisely through his history of religions, Weber brought out the full logical consequences of a materialist theory of symbolic forms.6 Even though Durkheim and Weber are still considered indispensable readings for both the scholarly study of religion and the understanding of Bourdieu’s sociological enterprise, more than 35 years after Bourdieu’s lecture Marx has no longer the importance he had in those days. This is undoubtedly true at least for the study of religions, but a progressive lack of interest in Marx is also perceived among Bourdieu scholars, who, with a few exceptions,7 have tended to ignore how Bourdieu, despite the ­originality and innovativeness of his conceptual apparatus, ought also to be fully considered within the Marxist tradition. In what follows I would like to foreground three aspects of Bourdieu’s theory of religion that are particularly resonant with Marx’s historical materialism. The most conspicuous source of this heritage is the active and passive conception of religion that can be read in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) and in the materials, written with Friedrich Engels, known under the title of The German Ideology (1845–1846). Here, religion is understood not only as an alienated product, but above all as an instrument producing alienation. This twofold performance enacted by religion can be related to  ‘One could say—without forcing the issue, I think—that Weber very consciously took historical materialism to the areas where historical materialism was particularly weak, that is, to the area of the symbolic. Where, in Marx, we had a sentence that was both fundamental and a bit simple (‘Religion is the opium of the people’), and a few analyses of the superstructure, Weber did the whole construction of the theory of religion and of the priesthood, which—it seems to me—consisted in pushing to its last consequences a materialist theory of symbolic forms’ (Bourdieu 2016: 771; translation is mine). But the relationship between Marx and Weber had already come into focus a few years earlier, for example: ‘I must say that, on this decisive point, my reading of Max Weber—who, far from opposing Marx, as is generally thought, with a spiritualist theory of history, in fact carries the materialist mode of thought into areas which Marxist materialism effectively abandons to spiritualism—helped me greatly in arriving at this kind of generalized materialism; this will be a paradox only to those who have an over-simple view of Weber’s thought, owing to the combined effect of the rarity of translations, the one-sidedness of the early French and American interpretations, and the perfunctory anathemas pronounced by ‘Marxist’ orthodoxy’ (Bourdieu 1990: 17). 7  According to Bridget Fowler, for example, the tools Bourdieu forged to understand how domination works and how it reproduces itself are a clear sign of this theoretical approach (Fowler 2011, 2018). 6

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the Bourdieusian conception of ‘structured structures’ and ‘structuring structures’. In this respect, the study of religion cannot be separated from the study of the society, because the ‘analysis of the internal structure of the religious message cannot ignore with impunity the sociologically constructed functions that it fulfills first for the groups that produce it and then for the groups that consume it’ (Bourdieu 1991: 11–12, emphasis is mine). Moreover, in order to avoid an incomplete interpretation, Bourdieu adds that religion should be regarded as a language, ‘that is both an instrument of communication and an instrument of knowledge or, more precisely, as a symbolic medium at once structured (therefore receptive to structural analysis) and structuring, as a condition of possibility of the primordial form of consensus that is the agreement on the meaning of signs and on the meaning of the world that they permit one to construct’ (Bourdieu 1991: 2). To structure a (new) consensus on the signs and meaning of the world implies that we recognize the existence of an ideological demand from a certain moment onwards and in certain social classes, that is, the expectation of a systematic message capable of giving a unitary meaning to life. ‘Such a message would propose a coherent vision of the world and human existence to its privileged addressees and give them the means to achieve the more or less systematic regulation of their everyday behaviour. It would, therefore, at the same time be capable of providing them with justifications of their existence in its specific form, that is, their existence as occupants of a determinate social position’ (Bourdieu 1987: 124). The ideological demand to which Bourdieu refers constitutes the second clear link with Marx. Although it is generally believed that Bourdieu rejects the Marxian concept of ideology (Hauchecorne 2020), the above-­ mentioned passage shows that a robust similarity is detectable instead, at least when ideology is related to religion or similar strategies of universalizing particular interests.8 On one point, however, Bourdieu tends to strongly emphasize his distance from Marx—or probably from the Marxist orthodoxy originating from Marx. Bourdieu rejects the widespread misunderstanding that the word ‘ideology’ is always associated with a discourse

8  ‘To understand how ideologies dominate, the process of universalization is very important. It consists in transforming a discourse valid for a few into a universal discourse, valid for all’ (Bourdieu 2016: 795; translation is mine).

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(or discourses) and never with a practice.9 The school system, for example, represents an impressive ideology in practice, that is, a practice that embodies the ideology of the gift, according to which the most gifted are the best and the best are the most gifted (Bourdieu 2016: 1057). Understood in this way, every theodicy is and works as an ideology, a discourse consistent with the claim of systematicity and intended to justify (and not to judge) the domination of particular social groups by naturalizing their very existence as dominant groups (Bourdieu 2016: 1056). As in Marx, therefore, religion (i.e. theodicy) becomes synonymous with ideology, that is, with an autonomous form of knowledge capable of producing reality. Ideology belongs to the world of ideas, but in particular to the world of dominant ideas, which are both bearers of partisan interests and instruments of control and class domination. In fact, both for Marx and Bourdieu, ideology is not the same as culture. Ideology, unlike culture, ‘denotes those values and symbolic practices which at any given time are caught up in the business of maintaining political power’ (Eagleton 2016: 53). Insofar as the ruling class has every interest in reproducing itself, ideology—as well as being a major representation of the alienated world—also presents itself as an alienating tool, that is, as an instrument of conservation and reproduction of that kind of world. The twofold function is carried out by religion, here understood as an ideology. As two historians of religions—who, still in the late 1990s, considered it important to return to Marx’s thought for a new study of religions—wrote: ‘Ideologies—especially religious ideologies—are powerful largely because they are shared systems of belief, and because those classes and groups who benefit from them profess them as wholeheartedly as do the others’ (Grottanelli and Lincoln 1998: 322). One last observation on this point. As is well known, for Marx religion is an ideology necessarily resulting from historical life-processes, that is, from the human beings’ experiences of political and social reality: ‘it is not religion that creates man but man who creates religion’ (Marx 1972: 30). The Marxian motto finds an echo in Bourdieu’s argument that, in order to think about the world, the human beings often only have access to thought that is the product of that same world: ‘[the] doxic comprehension is a possession possessed or, you could say, an alienated appropriation’ 9  Indeed, Marx also maintains something similar, when he writes that ‘the production of the ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men—the language of real life’ (Marx and Engels 1998: 42).

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(Bourdieu 2014: 107). Moreover, once again, from this anti-intellectualist posture it follows that domination must be considered inscribed in bodies and not in the logic of discourses (Paolucci 2018b: 95). A third and final element of the comparison between Marx and Bourdieu can be found in the former’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Here Marx directly addresses the problem of private property and points out that the ultimate cause of social inequality is the division of labour. The division of labour is a decidedly neglected hermeneutic category—at least in the study of religion. Yet it could be particularly useful in the analysis of religious beliefs. According to Bourdieu, competition for religious power takes place, as in any field, through objective relations between and among agents and institutions. On the one hand, this system of interests and this religious authority derive from the agent’s or institution’s position in the division of labour currently pertaining within the sphere of the symbolic manipulation of the laity. On the other, they result from the respective position of each in the objective structure of the relations of specifically religious authority which define the religious field. (Bourdieu 1987: 126)

Here Bourdieu alludes, almost verbatim, to what Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology: ‘Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears’ (Marx and Engels 1998: 50). Only from this moment consciousness thinks of itself as something distinct and really able to conceive of something other without conceiving something real, out there. Bourdieu starts exactly from here to elaborate his theory of the religious field. In other words, every organized complexity is a complexity that has arisen at some point, and every complexity that has arisen has ‘violent’ origins. Violence is all the greater as a more radical level of complexity is achieved; every symbolic violence has material beginnings.

The Relentless Critique of Religion If the structuring-structured couple—ideology and the division of labour—can be considered points of alignment between Marx and Bourdieu, then Bourdieu’s two 1971 articles on the religious field might have the intention of going beyond Weber without rejecting his theoretical foundations, whilst also recovering what Marx had said about religion, and in particular about the symbolic violence of religion. For Bourdieu, as

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for Marx, the mere awareness of this condition is not enough. That is, the mere critical and materialist interpretation of religion is insufficient. Hence Bourdieu’s methodological invitation is to proceed from the critique of religion to the dispute on the ground of politics and economics. Insofar as the religious field, like any field, can be only quasi autonomous, the critical study of religion cannot be separated from the (equally critical) study of politics and economics. For Bourdieu, what is needed is a ‘practical’ critique, which, as Marx would say, makes use of the weapon of criticism, without renouncing the criticism of the weapon. This probably explains why the theme of religion not being a direct object of ‘struggle’ is not investigated continuously and in depth. In fact, Bourdieu’s references to the historical aspects of religions are scanty, whilst the relationship between religion and politics are also not developed as an autonomous theme. However, this reticence does not imply that Bourdieu considers it to be an insignificant issue. So much so that he proposes categories and methods of the critique of religion as a model for other critiques. Without saying it explicitly, Bourdieu pursues the Marxian dictum according to which ‘the critique of religion is the prerequisite of every critique’ (Marx 1972: 131). Thus, in fact, the term ‘field’ can pass from the context of the critique of religion to that of critique of politics, economics, art, literature, and so on. It therefore follows that Bourdieu sees a very close homology between the relatively autonomous mechanisms of the exchange of symbolic goods, where the religious field operates as a master code. It could be tentatively said that, in political life, the state is to society as, in religion, ‘heaven’ is to earth. This continuous mirroring, and the consequent doubling of man’s life into ‘heavenly’ and ‘earthly’, has not only an epistemological foundation but also bears aetiological implications: it is the same process taking place in the religious and in the political field. Marx puts things differently, but the bottom line is the same: That is to say, not of setting out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh; but setting out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. […] Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. (Marx and Engels 1998: 42)

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Once again, Bourdieu agrees with Marx (and Engels) that both the transcendental deduction of categories and the thought process that moves from abstract ideas to social practices to account for reality are two wrong paths, or better, are a form of illusion created by the very material conditions of existence. On this, Marx and Bourdieu totally agree. In this sense, the two 1971 essays on the religious field can be read as an example of a critique of religion. Since Bourdieu’s political subversion presupposes a cognitive subversion ultimately leading to a different view of the world and its representation, religion itself, as a possible worldview inherent to belonging to that field is the perfect, quintessential target. Religion (and its effects) in fact proves to be persistent in human history. Today, just as yesterday, religious figures function as an ideological cover for the dominant mode of production, and therefore the critique of religion also offers critical theory the possibility of unmasking other alienated ideological forms. Think of the comparison between divinity and money or the correspondence between the Catholic belief in the objective efficacy (ex opere operato) of the sacraments and the belief that persists in the political economy of the capitalist system in the total objectivity of the monetary system. This, once again, applies to both Marx and Bourdieu. Marx dwells on it in the Manuscripts of 1844, while Bourdieu trades on the same analogy in his General Sociology, where, in order to summarize his discourse on the state—in a paragraph entitled ‘The State and God’—he says that what underlies the central discourse on power might be called the ‘myth of the central bank’, that is to say the myth of that place where all acts of guarantee are guaranteed. The ‘hidden god’ of the state is, like the central bank, the only entity capable of acting as lender of last resort (Bourdieu 2016: 806–807).

Conclusion All things considered we could conclude by saying that, once Bourdieu’s fruitful and profound relationship with Marx recovered, the centrality of religion and its critique would be rediscovered too. In a very recent article, Bridget Fowler tried to challenge what she called ‘the orthodoxy concerning the heritage of Pierre Bourdieu’, according to which Bourdieu failed to provide a theory of social change (Fowler 2020). Fowler argued that this is a superficial judgement, since Bourdieu’s sociology offers a theory of social transformation, thus allowing for emancipatory action. Yet to trace this theory one must read the rich sub-text of his writings, which

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constantly allude to the possibility of resorting to heterodox beliefs promoted by prophets who try to dispel the current doxa. Whether Bourdieu presented a critical sociology or is even he is a ‘critical theorist’ himself is still extremely controversial (see, e.g. Honneth 1984). He was surely critical of the social order and therefore at least suggested being placed himself in the tradition of a critical theory (Bauer and Bittlingmayer 2014: 58). In this regard, religion seems to play a key role in his theory of practice and in the ‘concatenated set of critiques’ (Paolucci 2018a: 21) proposed by Bourdieu. We would call this centrality the Bourdieusian critique of religion, the fundamental motifs of which are all already present in his early writings, while receiving explication and elaboration at different times. Reading Bourdieu as an interpreter, albeit a very acute one, of what exists, and therefore as a passive observer of the reproductive power of the dominant power relations, is decidedly easier. But also hasty.

References Adair-Toteff, Christopher. 2013. ‘Sinn der Welt’: Max Weber and the Problem of Theodicy. Max Weber Studies 13: 87–107. Bauer, Ullrich, and Uwe H.  Bittlingmayer. 2014. Pierre Bourdieu und die Frankfurter Schule: Eine Fortsetzung der Kritischen Theorie mit anderen Mitteln? In Bourdieu und die Frankfurter Schule: Kritische Gesellschaftstheorie im Zeitalter des Neoliberalismus, ed. Ullrich Bauer, Uwe H.  Bittlingmayer, Carsten Keller, and Franz Schultheis, 43–82. Bielefeld: Transcript. Bell, Daniel. 1966. Sociodicy: A Guide to Modern Usage. The American Scholar 35: 696–714. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991 [1971]. Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field. Comparative Social Research 13, 1–44. Trans. Jenny B.  Burnside, Craig Calhoun and Leah Florence. ———. 1987 [1971]. Legitimation and Structured Interests in Weber’s Sociology of Religion. Trans. Chris Turner. In Max Weber, Rationality, and Modernity, ed. Scott Lash and Sam Whimster, 119–136. London: Allen and Unwin. ———. 1990 [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 1993 [1984]. The Racism of ‘Intelligence’. In Sociology in Question, 177–180. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Sage. ———. 1998. Contre-feux. Propos pour servir à la résistance contre l’invasion néo-­ libérale. Paris: Raisons d’agir. ———. 2001 [1990]. Masculine Domination. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity.

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———. 2014 [2012]. On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1992. Ed. Patrick Champagne, Remi Lenoir, Franck Poupeau and Marie-Christine Rivière. Trans. David Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2016. Sociologie générale, Volume 2: Cours au Collège de France (1983–1986). Ed. Patrick Champagne, Franck Poupeau, and Marie-Christine Rivère. Paris: Raisons d’agir. ———. 2020 [2016]. Habitus and Field: General Sociology, Volume 2. Lectures at the Collège del France (1982–1983). Ed. Patrick Champagne, Julien Duval, Franck Poupeau, and Marie-Christine Rivière. Trans. Peter Collier. Cambridge: Polity. Denord, François. 2020. Sociodicée. In Dictionnaire International Bourdieu, ed. Gisèle Sapiro, 796. Paris: CNRS Editions. Dianteill, Erwan. 2004. Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Religion: A Central and Peripheral Concern. In After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration, ed. David L. Swartz and Vera L. Zolberg, 65–85. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Eagleton, Terry. 2016. Materialism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Fowler, Bridget. 2011. Pierre Bourdieu: Unorthodox Marxist? In The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays, ed. Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, 33–59. London: Anthem Press. ———. 2018. Meditazioni marxiste: riconsiderare il debito di Bourdieu nei confronti di Marx. In Bourdieu e Marx: Pratiche della critica, ed. Gabriella Paolucci, 361–390. Udine-Milan: Mimesis. ———. 2020. Pierre Bourdieu on Social Transformation, with Particular Reference to Political and Symbolic Revolutions. Theory and Society 49: 439–463. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-­019-­09375-­z. Giner, Salvador. 2014. Sociodicea. Revista Internacional de Sociología 72: 287–302. Grottanelli, Cristiano, and Bruce Lincoln. 1998. A Brief Note on (Future) Research in the History of Religions. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 10: 311–325. Hauchecorne, Mathieu. 2020. Idéologie. In Dictionnaire International Bourdieu, ed. Gisèle Sapiro, 433–434. Paris: CNRS Editions. Honneth, Axel. 1984. Die zerrissene Welt der symbolischen Formen. Zum kultursoziologischen Werk Pierre Bourdieus. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 36: 127–164. Maduro, Otto. 2007. Preface. In Terry Rey, Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy, vii–viii. Abingdon: Routledge. Marx, Karl. 1972 [1927]. Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’. Ed. and trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1998 [1932]. The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. Amherst: Prometheus Books.

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Paolucci, Gabriella. 2018a. L’enigma dell’affrancamento dal dominio. In Bourdieu e Marx: Pratiche della critica, ed. Gabriella Paolucci, 89–122. Udine-­ Milan: Mimesis. ———. 2018b. Introduzione: Eredi, Bourdieu, Marx e noi. In Bourdieu e Marx: Pratiche della critica, ed. Gabriella Paolucci, 9–32. Udine-Milan: Mimesis. Rey, Terry. 2007. Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2018. Pierre Bourdieu and the Study of Religion: Recent Developments, Directions, and Departures. In The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J.  Sallaz. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfor dhb/9780199357192.013.13. Saalmann, Gernot. 2020. Rationalisierung und säkulare Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur Religionssoziologie. Baden-Baden: Ergon. Suaud, Charles. 2020. Religion. In Dictionnaire International Bourdieu, ed. Gisèle Sapiro, 734–736. Paris: CNRS Editions. Swartz, David. 1996. Bridging the Study of Culture and Religion: Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Symbolic Power. Sociology of Religion 57: 71–85. Weber, Max. 1989. Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. Konfuzianismus und Taoismus. Schriften 1915–1920. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Band 1/19, eds. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer Together with Petra Kolonko. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). ———. 2001. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Religiöse Gemeinschaften. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Band 1/22-2, eds. Hans G. Kippenberg together with Petra Schilm and also Jutta Niemeier. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).

CHAPTER 15

Bourdieu’s Lesson: Marx vs. Althusser? Fabio Raimondi

De te fabula narratur1 Bourdieu’s and Althusser’s writings bear all the signs of a theoretical and political conflict that goes beyond personal relationships. There are numerous traces of this battle in Bourdieu’s texts, where we can find explicit and implicit criticisms of Althusser.2 Yet, Althusser on the other hand, seems to extend a deathly silence over Bourdieu’s works. I say he “seems” because, even though Bourdieu is rarely (if ever) mentioned, he is sometimes evoked. However, the similarity of the issues and problems faced by the  The story is about you. Many thanks to S., as usual, for her help and support.  Althusser is mentioned by Bourdieu, perhaps for the first time, in an essay written with Passeron in 1967, where his anti-humanism is stigmatized (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967: 166). I then recall, for example, and without pretence of being exhaustive, both the critical references contained in In Other Words, in which his detachment from structuralism of Althusser and Foucault is motivated by their tendency to abolish “agents”—as Lévi-Strauss had already done—considering them “mere epiphenomena of the structure” (cf. Bourdieu 1990: 4, 8, 20–21); he also affirms that his Algerian experience, lived alongside workers and the unemployed underclass, including peasants without land, had led him to break with the Althusserian discourse on “Workers, Proletarians and the Party” (cf. Bourdieu 2008a: 26). 1 2

F. Raimondi (*) University of Udine, Udine, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_15

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two authors is striking, so as to lead one to hypothesize the existence of a sort of remote duel. A duel that Bourdieu clarifies at certain points whilst Althusser, instead, fights against the social sciences in general, because they are, in his opinion—and it is a constantly reiterated judgement—only an expression of bourgeois ideology. Since I cannot reconstruct the duel in its entirety and complexity here, so as to measure its extent and to understand its scope, I shall limit my analysis to a specific episode, through which my only purpose is to outline some initial and provisional lines of reasoning. In an essay written in 1975, Bourdieu examines the “paralogism” (a false reasoning that seems true) or “fallacy”—a “very particular form of abuse of power”—which consists in “speaking the false […] with all the logical appearances of the truth” (Bourdieu 2001a: 327).3 Here, Bourdieu attacks Althusser by criticizing an essay written by Balibar (1973). Bourdieu’s intention is to show that Balibar’s essay is structured rhetorically by “scholastic reason” (for a complete definition, see: Bourdieu 1998, 2000), and that paralogism is a dangerous and difficult practice to unmask, especially if “it comes out of the mouth of an ‘authorized person’,” that is a person who is “endowed with the power of legitimate nomination” (Bourdieu 2001a: 328). Since the meaning of every discourse depends on the “social conditions of its production [and] of its reception […], all forms of discourse analysis that put in parentheses, often without knowing it, everything that concerns the conditions of production and reception, often invisible, of these discourses, are an obstacle to the constitution of a true science of discourse” (Bourdieu 2001a: 328–329). To justify this position, Bourdieu involves Marx. “Discursive strategies and formal processes betray the intentions objectively inscribed in the structural necessities inherent in a position,” Bourdieu writes, “and it is the institution that expresses itself through a certain institutional rhetoric” (Bourdieu 2001a: 329). Marx was the one who discovered, “behind the rhetorical effect, the School that produced it by producing the position and dispositions of its author” (Bourdieu 2001a: 329). As a confirmation of this, Bourdieu cites a passage from The German Ideology which he uses to read Balibar’s essay: “one cannot of course blame a petty bourgeois of 3  The original title of the Bourdieu’s text is La lecture de Marx ou quelques remarques critiques à propos de «Quelques remarques critiques à propos de “Lire Le Capital”» (The reading of Marx or some critical remarks about “Some critical remarks about ‘Reading Capital’”), in which the sarcastic reference to the Althusserian reading of Capital is evident.

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Berlin who attended ‘the Schools’ [i.e. Stirner] in order to transform the interested subject into an interesting object by a literary sleight of hand” (Bourdieu 2001b: 381, drawing).4 Replacing Berlin with Paris and exploiting the similarity between the Schools [les Écoles] and the Parisian École par excellence (École Normale Supérieure), the game seems to be done, because the meaning of the citation is that Balibar, that is, Althusser, has transformed himself (the “interested subject”) into an “interesting object” like a petty bourgeois who studied at the École: exactly as Marx and Engels (who Bourdieu never mentions, although The German Ideology is constantly quoted) reproached Stirner who had studied in Berlin schools. Apart some venial inaccuracies, which Bourdieu certainly cannot be reproached with—Althusser was not from Paris (and neither was Balibar), but also Stirner was not from Berlin—because some literary licence must be granted if the aim is to forge a good analogy, the trick would have been successful if we did not remember—and I should not be reproached for this fact—that Bourdieu had also studied at the École and that, therefore, even though he was not from Paris, he finds himself, by reason of his own analogy, in the role of Stirner. The joke could obviously continue, making Marx and Engels wear Sancho’s clothes and then even myself, although no one is from Paris and had studied at the École: Marx, in fact, was not from Berlin, but had studied there (even though he graduated in Jena). Engels, on the other hand, only spent his military service in Berlin, during which he followed Schelling’s lectures with interest. And if Marx had undoubtedly attended “the schools,” this cannot be entirely said of the latter.5 Perhaps it is a secondary reason, but that Marx and Engels preferred to leave The German Ideology to the “gnawing criticism of the mice,” after knowing that due “to changed circumstances it could not be printed” (Marx 1987: 264), rather than trying to publish it elsewhere, could also be linked to their knowledge that they could easily have been reproached 4  In this passage, the French translation used by Bourdieu deviates from the German text. Without going into philological details, here are the references useful to find the quotation from the text of Marx and Engels: French, see Marx and Engels 1968: 488. German, see Marx and Engels 1973: 431. English, see Marx and Engels 1975: 445. 5  Engels never graduated and was withdrawn from the Elberfeld Gymnasium before the end of the final year. At the age of seventeen, in fact, his pious father put him to work in the commercial office of his factory in Barmen and the following year (1838) sent him to Bremen to gain experience in the linen export company of the Saxon consul Heinrich Leupold (cf. Hunt 2009).

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for having performed the same “literary sleight of hand” with which they charged Stirner. This aspect may not be negligible in the “self-­clarification” that Marx says they had themselves undertaken, after the publication of the Holy Family.

The Irresistible Attraction of the Role of the “King” Since Bourdieu’s criticism of Althusser takes place on a rhetorical level, I’ll place myself within this field without raising issues of content which, although underlying, are clearly visible in Bourdieu’s arguments. Bourdieu’s text is composed by articulating four different levels of discourse, even if he explicitly names only three (cf. Bourdieu 2001b: 379, n. **—the note is marked with two asterisks, rather than a number as usually): his own text (P),6 which comments on the style of Balibar’s text (E or pre-text), some excerpts of which, framed in special windows, are reproduced inside P.  To carry out this operation, Bourdieu uses, by contrast, some passages taken from The German Ideology attributed only to Marx (K or super text, in the sense of Freudian Super-Ego), reported in P, all inside special windows and accompanied by drawings. The fourth discourse, openly evoked but invisible, because never mentioned, is the Althusserian one—L or (s)ur-text—because it is, at the same time, both the original-­text (“ur”), that is the true source of Bourdieu’s reasoning, and the text that sur-determines P (“sur”: over). It could be said that P reads E through K to hit L, but this is the mere appearance. From a topological point of view, a different rhetorical structure emerges from Bourdieu’s essay: P reads L through E to appropriate K, as to get K (the signifier “Marx” and, I repeat, Marx-without-Engels) out of the monopoly (real or imaginary it does not matter) exercised by Althusser’s reading of Marx with the intention of neutralizing it. K is the signifier that commands the operation and, therefore, is the real theoretical and political stake in Bourdieu’s discourse, which, only by appropriating K, can think of neutralizing L and acquiring in this way the symbolic capital (real or imaginary it does not matter, but certainly existing for Bourdieu) represented by L. The rhetorical artifice of including excerpts from E and K inside P, isolating them from their contexts by means of boxes and vignettes, is by no means without meaning.  The letters correspond to the initials of the first names of the authors involved.

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The silence about Engels and Althusser is not accidental: and if the silence about the first is perhaps involuntary, that silence about the second is certainly intentional. Engels represents, in fact, among many other things, the attempt, clearly undertaken starting from the Anti-Dühring and with the approval of Marx (cf. Engels 1987a: 9), to construct a philosophy that expounded in the clearest way the principles of their theoretical and political positions. Apart from the fact that Althusser almost always refers to this operation with the name in use among Marxists, “dialectical materialism,” what is at stake, in addition to the anti-Stalinist controversy, is the status and the role of philosophy in the communist field,7 so much so that Althusser never lost the reference to Engels even in his latest writings. Therefore, the object of Bourdieu’s essay is the style that philosophy uses to construct its own symbolic capital and its own theoretical and political authority. Bourdieu, in fact, despite his departure from philosophy, did not want to expel it from the set of disciplines indispensable to construct a theoretical discourse, but he wishes to undergo it to the scrutiny of “practices” and to the procedure of “reflexivity” for identifying its conditions of existence (cf. Bourdieu 1998: 130–131, 2000). Perhaps in the case of Engels, certainly in that of Althusser, Bourdieu saw—incorrectly in my opinion—the lack of interest in knowing these conditions; a detachment from which derived, according to Bourdieu, the haughty and aristocratic pose of the philosopher-king held by Althusser and imitated by his young students. But let’s get to something less hypothetical. What does it mean, rhetorically, to criticize Althusser by referring to Marx? Also here, different plans are intertwined. First, it is evident that Bourdieu uses The German Ideology as a principle of authority which should hold true for Balibar/Althusser and which he recognizes as such 7  I dealt with this topic in Raimondi, 2011a, to which I’ll take the liberty of referring. For a different interpretation, which however captures only some aspects of the Althusserian operation, see Aron 1970 (who, by the way, was from Paris and had studied at the École), where he said that the essay was written, essentially, between August 1967 and August 1968. I believe that Aron’s text is one of the undeclared sources of Bourdieu’s reasoning, although when it was published the two had already broken off their relationship both as result of Bourdieu’s early works on the school system and because of their dissent about the French May. We must not in fact forget that Bourdieu was Aron’s assistant at the Sorbonne, and Aron had appointed him co-director of the Centre de sociologie européenne (Center for European Sociology), which was founded in cooperation with the Ford foundation (cf. Paolucci 2011: 135–136).

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for himself too. The words of Marx-without-Engels, in fact, should serve as a call to greater attention to the social conditions (political, historical, biographical, cultural, etc.) that generate the specific habitus from which every discourse springs. There is no doubt, moreover, that these words should be valid as a warning to anyone who declares himself a Marxist but disregards the methodological indications of Marx (and Engels), although he claims to want to continue and complete their work. The German Ideology is not chosen by chance, given the watershed role it plays in the Althusserian periodization that distinguishes the “young” and the “old” Marx, and given the importance it has for the definition of the set of problems in which Althusser places its own philosophical practice. Bourdieu’s intent is to highlight the contradiction in which Althusser and his pupils fall when they adopt an exclusively logical style—which is ridiculed by the author to whom they refer, that is, Marx—to define their own theoretical and political identity. Therefore, even though they call themselves Marxists, they are not. But using a principle of authority to criticize and dismiss his own opponents (theorists and politicians) is a contradiction in the operation that Bourdieu would like to carry out. In fact, invoking an authority is not the same as producing a scientific critique, which Bourdieu aspires to, of behaviours considered deplorable. On the contrary, this procedure means investing himself with the role of “guardian of the authenticity of the message” and therefore with the “authority of whom proposes himself to possess the truth (autorité sacerdotale)” carrying with it “the right of correction,” thus delimiting “what is ‘truly Marxist’”: exactly a procedure Bourdieu ascribes to Althusser (Bourdieu 2001b: 383, 385–386). And just as he had accused Althusser of having studied at the École, as if he had not studied there too, so now he reproaches Althusser for a behaviour that he himself has engaged in. Even if Bourdieu’s intention had only been to highlight the abuse of the philosophical practice of (pro)posing criteria to distinguish true from false (or what is correct from what is not, orthodoxy from heterodoxy, etc.), it is impossible not to highlight that, trying to obtain this result through the reference to the Authority “Marx-without-­Engels,” Bourdieu comes to play the same deplorable role that he attributes to Althusser. Moreover, he does not grasp at all the heterodoxy of the Althusserian reading of Marx and Marxism (cf. Raimondi 2011b: 329–331), thus becoming, despite himself, the supporter of orthodoxy.

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The use of the principle of authority encounters also other and greater difficulties. First, it entails the same religious and prophetic register that is attributed to the adversaries. After all, for many Marxists, even if not for all (and sometimes not even for Althusser), Marx and Engels are not the Bible, and only by applying their teachings to their own texts is it possible to continue their work and convey their style. Is it, therefore, more coherent to think of being able to continue and complete the work of the ‘fathers’ of Marxism in the name of the principles of their political theory and practice, even at the cost of moving away from their specific analyses, rather than to refer to them as if they were indisputable authorities? And that’s not all. According to Bourdieu, “the usurpation of symbolic power” (legitimately held by whom or by what?) is the result of an “authority [which] asserts itself […] affirming itself” (Bourdieu 2001b: 390–391) through a series of stylistic tricks—but for an author who recognizes and praises the performative nature of language this should not be a scandal. Among these tricks there is the “debanalization (débanalisation),” which implies the idea of ​​an “integrity [and of an] authenticity of the message” that offers the paradigm of any possible “deviation”; consequently, the real Althusserian purpose is mirrored by the fact that he does not only seek to understand Marx better than Marx, to surpass the (young) Marx in the name of the (old) Marx, to correct the “pre-Marxist” Marx, who survives in Marx, in the name of the truly Marxist Marx, who produces a more Marxist “reading” of Marx, [but that he seeks also to] accumulate in this way the benefits of identification with the original prophet—that is, the intellectual and political authority associated with membership—and the benefits of the distinction. (Bourdieu 2001b: 382–383)

From the point of view proposed by Bourdieu, referring to the “young” Marx against the “old” Marx (or to humanism against determinism or structuralism—as Bourdieu himself points out in 1990: 4), as some were doing, even within the French Communist Party (cf. Geerlandt 1978), it is not much different from doing the opposite—that is, referring to the “old” against the “young,” and Althusser was not doing this (cf. Resnick and Wolff 1987)—since in this case the stakes would still have been the imposition of an Authority and, therefore, of an orthodoxy. Furthermore, how do we combine the following statement by Bourdieu with his reproach in 1975 of Althusser’s intention to overcome Marx?

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I have often pointed out, especially with regard to my relation to Max Weber, that you can think with a thinker against that thinker. […] To say that you can think at the same time with and against a thinker means radically contradicting the classificatory logic in accordance with which people are accustomed—almost everywhere, alas, but especially in France—to think of the relation you have with the thought of the past. For Marx, as Althusser said, or against Marx. I think you can think with Marx against Marx. (Bourdieu 1990: 49)8

At first Bourdieu reproaches Althusser for wanting to go beyond Marx and then for placing an either-or: “with Marx” or “against Marx.” Are we facing heterogeneous speculative ends or, as Bourdieu might have preferred to call them, reflexive ends? The point is that Bourdieu’s critical operation has principally a political purpose rather than a theoretical tenor. The recourse to the “young” Marx, in fact, is the tool with which, in France and beyond, many were trying to escape the influence of Stalinism (even after Stalin’s death), in which many Communist parties were still immersed, including the French one. Hence the unbridgeable gap between Bourdieu and Althusser: while Althusser tried to free the Party from Stalinism without relinquishing the thought of Marx and Engels, and remained, until 1980—despite many contradictions—within the Party, which he spared any severe criticism, Bourdieu believed that this was possible only by refusing to join the Party, and above all by recovering the “young” Marx’s thought that seemed less compromised with the official Soviet doctrine. Actually, the Althusserian cutting remarks against humanism have nothing to do with the lack of interest in the emancipation of the proletariat because they aim at two very specific targets. The first is the concept of “man,” which Marx already said should be abandoned as a bourgeois concept, because the man who acts as the foundation and myth of capitalism is the man of “civil society,” the “egoistic” man (cf. Marx 1975a: 317, 1975b: 166), whose idea is obtained speculatively, that is, idealistically, as shown in the Holy Family and in The German Ideology (especially in the long chapter on “Saint Max” used by Bourdieu to attack Althusser). The second target is the USSR, where Stalin’s proclamation of “the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat” in 1936 had consequently put an end (by 8  Even the use of “the self of he who claims to possess the truth (le je sacerdotale)” with which Bourdieu reproached Althusser does not seem to have a different function here, “modesty” included (cf. Bourdieu 2001b: 382).

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decree!) to the class struggle and proclaimed that the Soviet State was “no longer a class State but the State of the whole people (of everyone),” with the effect of welcoming, albeit with doping doses of cynicism and cunning, precisely the social-democratic perspective of the “(bourgeois) personal ‘humanism’” and preparing the dowry for Communists to get married to “Christian or bourgeois liberal humanism” (Althusser 2005: 222).

“King: I Fill a Place, I Know’t”9 Fortunately, Althusser explicitly answered Bourdieu’s essay of 1975 in a text written in 1976. Les vaches noires [The Black Cows] (a long “imaginary interview” about the Party) remained buried for forty years within the archive of the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) and has only recently been published. Althusser first reiterates that “psychology, […] sociology [and] psychosociology” belong to bourgeois ideology (as Comte’s and Durkheim’s theories demonstrate), and then he adds that the same must be said of Weber, the authority of the most “audacious”, of the most “advanced” […], of the most “free” (at least in the eyes of his own self-awareness) among the schools of French sociology; [the school] which mulls over the concept of habitus, as [it were] the solution to all the problems it does not pose; [the school which], very rhetorically, gives lessons in rhetoric to those who try to get involved in politics, and which has the kindness to remind those who try to fight within the School the outcome of its own great empirical researches (to [show that] they are not afraid [of facing] the concrete!). Research that proves by interposed “reproduction” that, in any case, [it is] useless to mobilize since nothing changes nothing. In terms of social democratic sociology, i.e., in terms of class collaboration posing as a “leftist” no one can do better. (Althusser 2016: 178–179)

The contemptuous tone of the answer shows open hostility. By reducing sociology to rhetoric and, therefore, to a political weapon (albeit of a moderate and reformist politics), Althusser demands that Bourdieu answer the same accusation that Bourdieu had formulated against him. Bourdieu wrote that

9

 Shakespeare 1956, a. I, sc. II.

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the struggle for the monopoly of the legitimate commentary on Capital (see Reading Capital) would not be so fierce if it did not have as its stake, in reality, the immense symbolic capital represented by Marxism, the only theory of the social world which is effective both in the political field and in the intellectual field (hence what could be called the Lenin syndrome—see Lenin and philosophy—one of the forms that the dream of the philosopher-­ king takes among intellectuals). (Bourdieu 2001b: 385)10

In the face of these words, it is not clear how Bourdieu could think of evading the same accusation, since with all his reasoning he has positioned himself, by objectifying himself, in the same playing field and with a symmetrical purpose of that of his opponent: to put sociology, that is, the sociologist-king, in the place of the philosopher-king, and therefore to deliver the lesson, as he was reproached by someone who is not from Paris but had studied at the École (cf. Rancière 1984).11 The only possibility that Bourdieu had to escape the contradiction and occupy the place usurped by philosophy and philosophers without assuming the role of “king” was to build a science, that is, the rigorous study of “a relatively autonomous intellectual field.” Philosophy, on the contrary, has done (and does) nothing other than “bring properly political strategies onto the ground of intellectual struggles,” thus coming to “suspend […], in the name of the need for ‘struggle’, all written and unwritten rules which regulate” scientific knowledge (Bourdieu 2001b: 385). It must be acknowledged that Bourdieu spent his entire life building this science, just as it must be recognized that it offers many interesting ideas for those who still want to think and act following the path traced by Marxism. Behind the skirmishes of rhetoric there is not only the relationship between philosophy and sociology, but, in Marxist terms, the relationship 10  That after 1965 Althusser had revised his own idea of philosophy is irrelevant for Bourdieu, who could have read at least Althusser, 1976: 67–70, where self-criticism is not “the supreme form of self-celebration” (Bourdieu 2001b: 393), nor evocative of the Stalinists mock trials, nor of the psychodrama of many self-styled alternative groups of the extraparliamentary left, but is rather a correction which, whilst not being completely misunderstood, must be read in the light of the philosophy of the approximation, developed by Bachelard 1927: a text that Bourdieu knew well, given the importance that French historical epistemology has for his sociology. 11  Rancière is a master in this type of operation because he cut his teeth on Althusser (cf. Rancière 2011).

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between historical materialism and dialectical materialism, between science (of history and social formations) and philosophy. And if for Bourdieu, Marx-without-Engels is only one of the components of the sociology (as science) that he would have liked to build, for Althusser, however, Marx and Engels are the fundamental components of his philosophy, although also not the only ones. This was the battlefield where the duellists challenged each other, and I believe that we should start from here to begin to trace the relationship between their works with more precision. The science, which Bourdieu and Althusser aimed at, albeit in different and irreconcilable ways, is the attempt to know not only an object, but also the subject which, by defining and constructing it, finds itself, in some way, contained in it. Objectifying the subject, as Bourdieu wanted, or thinking about its presuppositions, as Althusser wanted, are two different ways of achieving the goal and, as such, they are not necessarily incompatible with each other. However, they are incompatible in these two authors for reasons that essentially concern their political positions, and for these reasons they cannot be combined in a synthesis that saves them, understands them, and overcomes them. It is not enough to objectify the construction of the subject-king nor is it enough to know its theoretical and political presuppositions to get rid of it, just as it is not enough to be aware of one’s own role and of the fact that one is only “filling a place,” as Shakespeare said, to be good kings. For example, why did Bourdieu not analyse scientifically—rather than simply reproach Althusser for a continuity with the pose of the Sartrean philosopher—and why did he not research the influence that the attitude and the arguments of Althusser and his companions had over a certain public or audience, of which he himself was a part? Perhaps it is too much an Althusserian question, but it has the merit, I believe, of taking us out from the shallows of the philosopher-king’s speech, and from that one of the sociologist-king. It’s not just about understanding why someone poses himself as king—an irreducible problem both on an individual dimension, perhaps vitiated by an incurable narcissism, and as a structural necessity— but why someone, who accepts becoming king, takes seriously the idea of “filling a place,” and, at the same time, why someone takes the play seriously (perhaps hoping that it will be a comedy). Otherwise, it seems

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that a bit of rhetoric, perhaps with an esoteric aura, is enough to explain the conquest of influential positions, whether imaginary or real.12 And why Althusser, for example, if he believed that the social sciences produced only a bourgeois ideology, did not study them specifically, instead of simply repudiating them or tracing them back (as he seems to implicitly do in his course of 1967—Althusser 1990, 1997) to the process that vitiates the natural sciences ideologically? Is this sort of ostentatious denial—Althusser never attenuated it—perhaps an index of the difficulty of detaching oneself from the spectre of religion as heuristic model of the ideology that Marx and Engels had proposed borrowing it from Feuerbach13? Or it is a way of sticking to the judgement of Marx and Engels when they reproached the first socialist and communist theorists (utopians) for going “in search [of a] social science […] to create [the] conditions […] for the emancipation of the proletariat,” a science that, however, was resolved “into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans” (Marx and Engles 1976: 515; Engels 1987a: 246) or in a form of humanism (and paternalism) which would have liked “to emancipate [not] a particular class, but all humanity” (Engels 1987a: 20). Or perhaps, since “social science” was justified in its utopianism by the then less advanced state of “capitalist production,” does Althusser believe that the sociology of his time, although different from the first, failed to acknowledge that historical changes are produced by a “social act”—the struggle among classes—as opposed to the elaboration of an individual theory, such as that with which Engels (and Marx) reproached Dühring (cf. Engels 1987a: 253–254, 301)? Or, finally, is the refusal of sociology a way of reaffirming the autonomy of the empirical and theoretical field, as Engels had argued (cf. Engels 1987b: 338)? 12  In 1975 Althusser was a philosopher famous for the following books: For Marx and Reading Capital both published in 1965. At the École he was still tutor and administrative secretary of the prestigious École littéraire (Literary School): cf. Moulier-Boutang 1992: 460. Within the Party he was a simple militant. In 1975 he successfully submitted his PhD thesis, but then his candidacy for professor was rejected (cf. Althusser 1998: 199–200). And although the Althusserians had the pose of devotees to a cult (cf. Bourdieu 2001b: 386) and Althusser “liked to exercise his talents as a political strategist” within the École (cf. Bourdieu 2008b: 87), this certainly did not make them unique in the political panorama of the left French movements. If Bourdieu’s problem was to replace their prophetic irrationalism with a science, he would have to ask himself not only what habitus they possessed, but also why others (few or many) believed them, rather than hastily analysing the phenomenon as he did. And above all, he should have wondered why he gave them so much credit? 13  See, for example, how it is still very present in Engels 1987a: 300–302.

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Regardless, however, of these still immature hypotheses, which require considerable supplementary investigation, I think that at the centre of their dispute there was certainly a different way of understanding and responding to the solicitations posed by Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach and, specifically, by the problem of “praxis.”14 On the one hand, in fact, it cannot be understood only in a gnoseological way: if the “critical question [were] the only way to escape the systematic principle of error represented by the temptation of the sovereign vision” (Bourdieu 1982: 12), how can we explain that nothing changes politically, even if we do possess a true knowledge? On the other hand, the problem of “praxis” cannot be understood only politically, because this would imply its reduction to a mere voluntaristic exercise. Therefore, the social sciences, like the natural ones, although different from each other and perfectible, are indispensable for the knowledge and transformation of reality but, above all, for not falling into the delirium of omnipotence of one or many, kings, or sovereigns whatever they are. Therefore, going into the specifics of the duel between Bourdieu and Althusser requires that, going beyond rhetoric, the “weapons” have to be crossed in a field formed by the relationships between sciences and politics.

References Althusser, Louis. 1976 [1973]. Reply to John Lewis. Trans. G. Lock. In Essay in Self-Criticism: 33–99. London: NLB. ———. 1990 [1967–1974]. Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. In Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays: 69–166. Ed. G. Elliott. London; New York: Verso. ———. 1997 [1967–1968]. Du côté de la philosophie (cinquième Cours de philosophie pour scientifiques). In Écrits philosophiques et politiques, tome 2, ed. François Matheron, 265–310. Paris: Stock/Imec. ———. 1998 [1975]. Soutenance d’Amiens. In Solitude de Machiavel, ed. Yves Sintomer, 199–236. Paris: Puf. ———. 2005 [1965]. For Marx. Translated by B.  Brewster. London; New York: Verso. ———. 2016 [1976]. Les vaches noires. Interview imaginaire (le malaise du XXIIe Congrès), ed. G.M. Goshgarian. Paris: Puf.

 For a first analysis of this topic in Althusser, let me refer to Raimondi 2016.

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